Years ago Mark Rosewater talked about parasitic design. This was the situation where a set or block (remember those?) worked well mechanically on its own, but not really with other sets. I think the go-to example was the original Kamigawa block.
What is Big Score? A year ago, they tried the Aftermath. It was a small set of 50 cards that was sold in booster packs of 4. However, those packs were priced similarly to regular packs. Of course, the consumers are not stupid and there was an immediate backlash. So, they decided to scrap the similar product that was planned for this year and 30 of those cards were rolled into Outlaws of Thunder Junction.
I haven’t done these in a long while, because making these always takes a horribly long time. So, I chose something that’s actually easy to cover, because there isn’t that many of these cards.
There’s some good ones, there’s some failures. Let’s go through all 47 of them. And maybe some other cards that mention detectives as well.
Three sets and four colors. That’s not very consistent.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Also, the information I’m basing this on is somewhat dubious. Also, I’m in Finland, where class-actions don’t exist. Any mention of manipulating the probabilities of winning games is just alleged.
One of the problems with cubes I’ve seen over the years is that in a way they are often very ambitious, but in other ways they are creatively bankrupt. People just follow the Vintage Cube model way too much, but you don’t need to do that. Your cube doesn’t have to cost as much or more than your car.
So, yesterday my YouTube recommendations were inundated by various content creators, who wanted to have their say on the “leaked” B&R announcement for next Monday. Yes, it turned out to be a fake, but at the same time, the creators acknowledged that this was possible or even probable, but they still decided to talk about it? Why?
This might be a good idea, but Wizards kind of messed it up already.