Why is the Rabiah Scale Biased Toward Newer Planes?
General forum
Posted on March 10, 2020, 10:17 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
Mark Rosewater maintains a scale known as the Rabiah scale, which measures how likely the game is to return to a certain plane in a standard-legal set, with a lower rating meaning that a return to that plane is more likely. I have noticed that, with the exception of Dominaria, all the planes with a low rating (meaning that returning to them is likely) are new planes, with “new” in this case meaning since Eighth Edition, when the new card frames were introduced; any planes before that set, other than Dominaria, are higher on the scale, which suggests to me that WotC has a bias toward newer planes, but I am wondering why that is; is that because the older planes are from before the game was popular, and, therefore, they are not as well-known by the players?
What does everyone else say about this? Why is the Rabiah scale biased toward newer planes?
1/ no one cares about the old planes - they were quite boring.
2/ most of the old planes are destroyed and/or have no more stories to tell.
March 12, 2020 10:15 a.m.
I think it's due to the stories were not as well crafted and that the majority of players when asked if they like a plane the old ones are just unknown to the majority of players. It also doesn't help that many of the older sets like Fallen Empires and Homelands were just bad sets regardless of how good (or not good) the story was. Think if Ravnica had been designed poorly from a gameplay stand point, it would be much lower on the Rabiah scale.
March 12, 2020 10:34 a.m.
TriusMalarky says... #5
All the planes that we're not going back to either got the life beat out of them by a ton of sets and had many, many wars, or they're momentarily seen planes that nobody knows much about.
Newer planes that we've gone to, on the other hand, are now built so that we can go back to them without jumping straight back into a war.
Speaking of which, I'm a little excited for Innistrad but I don't want to see Ravnica or Dominaria again. We need new worlds with interesting mechanics, like Ikoria, but less rule-bending and less absurdity.
April 29, 2020 5:58 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #6
TriusMalarky, I actually wish that WotC Would develop each plane more thoroughly, rather than simply creating a new plane for nearly every set, especially when each plane feels limited to a specific gimmick; eventually, they shall run out of ideas, so I would rather that they refine their existing ideas, instead.
April 29, 2020 6:20 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #7
That's why they're using new planes -- they're using the cliffhanger tactic. Make sure there's enough to come back to, so if and when you need it you can come back. Most of the planes with high scores were either fully obliterated by war, had a really bad reception(people still think Kamigawa sucks. It just came out right after Mirrodin and it's mechanics couldn't beat affinity.) or are weird one-off planes that weren't built well enough for us to go back to.
They create new planes so that they can keep the flavor rolling, but now they're building them so that for most of them, we can go back in the future. You don't really want to be stuck on one plane for a few years, and really, it takes ~5 years between each return anyways, which I feel is good for the game because we don't want to burn out a plane.
shadow63 says... #2
Part of it is because people wont be as familiar with the setting and characters. Part of it is that it's easier to fit newer planes into the continuity.
March 10, 2020 10:32 p.m.