Spiderman;282900 said:
True dat. Although cynically, if I was a new person coming here and saw that a handful of people were trying to set up a "Hall of Fame/Shame" thing, I'd laugh. Maybe look a bit closer to the reasons and stuff, but laugh because how can "five" (picked a number at random) know what should go into a Hall of Fame/Shame?
Yeah, I could see that. If someone were to consider the tiny group we have here doing a hall of fame/shame rather silly, I make no argument against that. It's all in good fun anyway, though. I mean, no one's losing sleep over this or anything.
Sorry, I meant unsure of the concept that a handful of people cabn decide what goes into a Hall of Shame. I don't "want" it to be a small group of cards, I'm just pretty sure that it ends up being a small group of cards.
Well, that's all in where the standard is set. It could be set so high (low) that nothing gets in at all. Or it could be set to where the majority of the cards ever printed go in. I think most people here would want it to be somewhere in between, but there's no way to even properly quantify the power level of a card, let alone do more advanced stuff like set a meaningful numerical standard. It's bound to be a subjective process and that's that.
<shrug> I guess I misunderstood what you were trying to say. I guess I'm looking at it from the "Magic players universe" where the majority of Magic players, if they voted, might agree on what cards belong to a Hall of Shame.
Well yeah, that goes back to the issue of sample size. I fully agree that a larger sample size would be desirable. It also seems pretty unlikely given the fact that this is something of a niche site and not even everyone who participates in other things on these boards is going to participate in a hall of shame.
So certainly out of the thousands of Magic players, I'm thinking some are going to agree with what I think: that a card has to be *really* bad, as in unworkable except in the one or two decks specifically built around it yet *still* loses, to go into the Hall of Shame.
Sure. But firstly, it's only going to be some. With a large enough group, it's very likely that some will think that cards you think are bad aren't that bad and that some will think cards you think aren't that bad are abysmal. I'm sure there would be consensus about a lot of things, but there'd also be variation. Even with this small group, there's been stuff like that. I don't remember all of the details, but I think both Su-Chi and the Urza's lands were discussed as candidates back when we did Antiquities. But I consider those to be very good cards. I nominated City in a Bottle for Arabian Nights, but someone pointed out its potential in Arabian Nights draft or something, which I wasn't really "counting" in my analysis. I have no doubt that things like this would only happen more with a larger, more diverse group. And maybe that's a good thing. I don't know.
Secondly, the notion of a card having to be so bad that even decks built around it lose is still pretty poorly defined and open to interpretation. Not to Malignant Growth up yet again, but I thought that any deck using Malignant Growth well was purely a fantasy scenario and would be crap in real life. Others (or BigBlue at least) disagreed. No one bothered to actually test it and testing would be cumbersome and probably wrought with its own problems anyway.
Even without testing anything, one problem I see is that decks can be built that let you take control of the game in order to utilize your bad card. Mogg Squad was meant to be a two-drop and fails miserably at least most of the time (and, I'd contend, a lot more than that even). But clear the board and get four Pandemoniums and four Copy Enchantments into play, then drop Mogg Squad and it deals 24 damage directly to your opponent. Or you can lock your opponent down with Mishra's Helix and whatever, then beat your opponent to death with Mogg Squad the old-fashioned way. It doesn't need to be that extreme, but when do we move out of the realm of the absurd and into legitimate uses for cards? Use enough good cards strategically to support it, and there's no card in the game I can think of that doesn't work. But some otherwise bad (or at least mediocre) cards have been used very successfully because of synergy (like Illusions of Grandeur). I certainly don't have a systematic approach to saying whether a given card falls into the "useful because of synergies" category or the "bad and you're just using good cards to make it work" category.
To me, that's whole concept of a "Hall" - to showcase the baddest of the bad. You don't include the "semi-bad" or "bad because I hate it personally" or "bad because it's blue", etc.
We may already have seen this. Some have noted the artwork as at least part of the reason they chose a card. I also remember someone pointing out how annoying it was to find Rakalite in Chronicles booster packs. I suspect these things aren't being given much weight, but that's just things people are putting on the board in writing. We all have biases and we're bound to be oblivious to some of them.
I suspect as far as the two of us are concerned, our methods for determining whether a card is bad are more similar than they are dissimilar, but there might still be plenty of cases where one man's trash is another man's treasure. Or not. I don't know.
yeah, but most were with the caveat that the ones I thought were really bad from that particular expansion were already nominated and/or I was just giving more options, because only one or two cards were nominated, which means one of them will win by default because of how the voting works (the "None of the Above" option was just started). With Tempest, I'll reiterate once again that I don't think any are truly bad enough to be nominated.
I guess I really just think the whole "none of the above" thing is at odds with the rest of the structure for this process. It doesn't fit. There were lots of bad cards in Legends, easily several that were worse than every card in Alliances, but we only chose one from each in the end. That indicates that the idea is to have the worst card from each set. We don't choose ten cards from Legends and only one from Alliances. Would we potentially choose zero from Tempest? It seems bizarre and if we go so far as to say that the bar should be set somewhere in the region that no card from Tempest can make it in because none of them are bad enough (which, by the way, is completely arbitrary), there are some past "winners" that I would cut, as they don't seem any worse than Mogg Squad.
