※ 引述《EEK (水纹上的双子舞)》之铭言： : 这个故事是有寓意的, 它告诉我们wotc自己常常也不知道自己设计出了什麽东西. 好吧我记错结局了... 以下附上原文 其实看完上面那些讨论老实说我很犹豫要不要贴, 因为一些不一而足的原因... 但想想还是贴好了, 这种事情不应该跟一些讨论板上面的风风雨雨扯上关系. PS:文章有点长且全英文, 早年有人翻译但已经遗失了 如果有兴趣的人可以自己翻... - Several months ago, somewhere near Seattle, WA It's 3 a.m. and you're still at work. You know you should have gone home hours ago but deadlines are approaching. The designs for the new set are due to the playtesters several days before the release, and you keep coming up with Green cards that make mono-Green tourney viable--so the head of the design team has rejected all of them. You're at wits end, staring at a blank sheet of paper for a couple hours now. You sigh, frustrated, and get up to get a cup of coffee. You get to the coffee room and pour yourself a cup, and in walks your boss, head of the design team. What's he doing here this late? You're cornered. He speaks: "So, how's it going? Come up with anything good for me?" Oh no. Another totally unproductive day, and now the pressure's on. Your mind races. There has to be a way out. Nothing. Your answer is taking too long, you can feel it. You have to generate some kind of diversion. In desperation, you say the first thing that comes to mind: "I bet I can come up with a worse card than you." What? Where'd that come from? Your boss laughs. "Oh, really? Of course you know I designed both the Laces. Oh, and Jump. And Cooperation. And snow-covered land. And.." You feel sweat on your palms as he drones on--there's nothing you can do, you've offered the challenge. You feel your cushy job flash before your eyes. "Yes, uhh, I can design a worse card than you." Your boss laughs again. "OK, you're on. How's this: If you win, we print the card in the next set--as a rare." This is too good! A rare! This isn't a stand-alone expansion, so there aren't that many rares in the set. Think of what you could do to sealed deck players! A rare, and still the last card passed around in a booster draft! You're enticed. "Sounds great," you hear yourself say, trying to contain your excitement. "I thought you might like that. Now, what happens if you lose..." You cringe. What's the worst, most thankless job in the company? You can't imagine. "I know!" your boss booms. "We'll give you Tom Wylie's job. You'll have to try to make the rules both consistent and comprehensible, as well as keeping up with all the new rules introduced with new expansion." NOOOO!!! The impossible job! One small slip and thousands of Magic players all over the world will flood you with irate email about some obscure ruling you made about Time Vault, or some other card nobody actually plays. The stakes, wow, the stakes are huge. You MUST win this bet! "Uhh, OK, I guess," you say, too tired to try to fight for a less horrible fate. "Great bet!" your boss beams. "OK, then, in one week, you bring me your card design, and I'll bring mine. We'll need a judge, though, of the cards." Again, your mind races. Who? Who would make a good judge? Who can separate the truly bad from the merely mediocre? They have to know the game, and understand something about how it works. Well, that rules out all the other members of the design team, and all the playtesters. Who could do it? A name prods into your consciousness. "Bethmo," you blurt out. "Ahh, interesting choice," your boss responds. "Bethmo it is. See you in a week, chump!" Well, you're off the hook for seven days. But what card to make? It has to be bad, really bad. You decide to go home and sleep on it. You spend the next several days trying to figure out what makes a card truly bad. You come up with nothing truly awful--the buyback blue -1/+1 on creatures you control and the Plainswalking Sliver just aren't quite bad enough. It's judgment day, and you're really sweating. What, what really makes a card bad? Combos, you decide. The card has to have literally zero value on its own--something that could only be used in a combo. It should, you decide, also be an artifact. After all, that way it can't be used with a pitch spell. OK, so an artifact that only works in combination. But with what? A specific card that's not in print? No, that wouldn't work, that'd be too obvious--has to be a class of cards. Other artifacts? No, Type 2 players use artifacts all the time--too bad they printed Cursed Scroll and Winter Orb. OK, something that combos with an enchantment. No, that won't work, either, with all those Propaganda and COP:Red players out there. And it can't be creatures, either, since we've actually printed some decent creatures of late. Hmm. OK, well, what is it that makes combos bad? Well, first, they're fragile--so it can't be anything that actually protects whatever it's combined with. That's pretty good. What else makes combos difficult? Ahh, let's see, you have to have both cards around at the same time, which makes it harder to draw them. But even still, if you have four of each piece of a two-card combo in your deck, the chance of drawing at least one of each on seven cards in a 60-card deck is still more than 10%. Hmm. So it has to be a combo with something that you wouldn't put 4 of in a deck. Preferably something most people wouldn't even play at all, because of prohibitive casting cost or uselessness. Some really big creature, since creatures are pretty kill-able. Hmm, something expensive, usually not very useful, that people wouldn't put more than one or two of in a deck. That's it--Legends! Something that combines with Legends. You're on a roll now, you can't be stopped. Something only useful in combination with a legend. But how to be sure it isn't useful? If there were some way to make sure people wouldn't put more than one or two of these in the deck, too, well, it'd be almost impossible to draw both. A brainstorm--make it a legend, too! A Legendary Artifact! This has to be the most useless card you've ever come up with. Think of all the flak you got for Taniwha! They haven't seen anything yet. OK, now, a legendary artifact that combines with a legend. That alone is pretty much entirely a waste of space. It has to do something minor. Can't grant the Legend any special abilities, those can be useful. We wouldn't want to make the legend any harder to kill with targeted removal spells like Terror. Oh, and it has to be a "tap" ability so it isn't always in effect and gets shut down by Null Rod. Oh, and it should target the legend, too, since that won't always work, either. Let's see, tap to give target legend... Well, it can't be anything TOO big, but these are Legends. OK, Legendary Artifact, Tap to give target legend +2/+2. And hey, there are legends in this set--I bet we can even work it in to the backstory! You walk in to the room on the moment of truth confident, but still slightly afraid. After all, you are up against the master here--the man who brought us cards in the last set like Excavator and Mogg Cannon and thought they were too good to be commons. What would he think was bad? Bethmo looks depressed--she doesn't want to be here any more than you do. Finally, your boss walks in, grinning from ear to ear. Your heart sinks. "Let's see what you've got!" he booms. You hand the piece of paper to Bethmo. "Are you serious?" You look confused. She can't actually think this is good, can she? "This is terrible! Good lord, it's even Legendary itself! That's horrendous." Whew! Your boss looks displeased, and hands a piece of paper to Bethmo. She ponders it for a moment... "Uhh, you're kidding, right? This is a 3/3 for 2, and it's red!" Your boss's smile drops. "Well, yes, but look at the drawback!" She reads: "'Can only attack or block when other creatures you control are attacking or blocking.' So?" "You need other creatures! Without them, it's worse than a Wall!" "Well, sure," she says "but think of Sligh. If Ironclaw Orcs are 2/2 for 2 and people play those, what do you think will happen here?" "Sligh?" your boss asks. "What's that?" "You don't know what Sligh is? Ugh, never mind. Look, I'm sorry, but this Legendary Artifact thing is just SO bad..." You've won! You're saved! Your boss is incensed. "Let me see that card of his. Hmm, target Legend gets +2/+2. I don't see what's so bad about that--I think mine is much worse than this." You're astonished, but he really doesn't seem to be kidding. Bethmo does not falter. "Well, you asked for my opinion. I think that 'Sword of the Chosen' is horrible." Your boss grumbles. "Well, OK, we'll print it as a rare, then, just like I promised. But we're printing my card, too, but I guess since you don't think it's so bad, we'll just make it an uncommon." It's over. You got your rare, and you got your boss off your back at least until Exodus. As you're walking back to your office, you can hear your boss mumbling to himself. "Gonna have to get even with that Bethmo. Hmm, maybe I could give *her* Tom's job..." - 多年之後出了神河这个block... -- 如果不想mark这篇文章, 可以只把这段原文收起来 poster header统统砍掉我没有任何意见 能在网路上找到纯粹有点运气 (还好以前跑的讨论板够多...XD) 以後要是有人想看找不到, 能不能再找到也很难说了. -- The measure of a man is what he does with power. - Plato (Ancient Greek Philosopher, 428 BC-348 BC) --

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