Looking Back at 2014

I remember going into ivory with so much excitement. There where so many positive changes being made to the game. It was almost a clean slate, a perfect chance to get things right and grow the game, but here we stand now going into 2015 and nothing has actually changed. The game still has little hope for growth, either within the greater ccg market or within our local community. In other words, Ivory has been a failure.

This arc has been plagued with so many obvious issues which we are well framiliar with. Issues such as the power level of transition sets, lack of compensation for going second, purge of fudo, etc. Looking back now though, I thinl there is an even bigger issue which we haven't really talked about. Ivory wasn't fun.

When we ere going into ivory, brian reese said that he was going to tone down the power level of the game, comparing it to gold edition. Just like gold edition, ivory has fallen into the same trap. The majority of the better cards are from ivory base or the transition sets. With each expansion I've looked forward to a shift in the environment, but there hasn't been one. Each expansion has added so little to the environment that the game has become extremely stale. 

We moved to strict hoping to avoid the problems of early ivory but the format runs into all sorts of other problems, the primary one being that's its boring. The restricted card pool compounds the issue of cards not doing anything. There are so few viable cards, themes and arctypes that the game becomes monotonous and eventually tedious to play.

I want to take a break until 20F goes live, but that's so far away.. 3-4 more months? I've been bored of the new order envorenment since november. Thats 5-6 months of not wanting to play and hoping that things will change. I've come to realize that with each expansion I'm not enjoying the game and hoping the next set will fix things... ill probably stick it out to 20f but I have few illusions as to the design teams ability to fix the game.

So they have already all but said that next kotei season will have a few koteis before 20f comes out