General Fixing Mulligans, Improving Games

[DreamPaint]

Taking mulligans sucks. It's not fun to mulligan to five or to stomp an opponent who mulligans to five. I understand mulligans are part of the game, but so are Black Lotus, A-Call etc. and we don't cube with those. So with that in mind I started thinking of ways to improve the quality of games in my cube. One idea that seemed promising is giving everyone this at the beginning of each draft:



It seems like doing this can only improve games. Now of course this change is something that I'm only advocating for cube. In constructed I understand it would be impossible, even if through a mulligan rules tweak due to cheating, abuse, etc. Anyways, thoughts on this change for cube? Seems simple enough as the rules are laid out on a physical card for everyone. I can only think this will be a net gain in fun and eliminate shitty non-games that occur when players mulligan to four-five.

 

[Jason Waddell]

What if you dealt yourself a 7-card hand and a 6-card hand?

 

[Goldenpineapple]

I know what the card is supposed to do but one of my drafters decided to argue that if this card was a thing then that player had two separate "hand" zones, one of them just got shuffled away, so he would reveal his "empty" hand to his opponent for those types of abilities. Hurr.

A local rule here is to use the "big deck mulligan," or part of it. If your first hand has 0, 1, 6, or 7 lands you can reveal it and immediately draw the next seven, but from there you mulligan normally. We nix the "if your opponent uses this mulligan you get a free mulligan" rule since meta-mulls are a thing when the match is blind.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Or you could do partial mulligans plus first mulligan is free. Works pretty well in commander

 

[Lucre]

Who plays first can be incredibly influential and kinda unfun aspect to the game. Is there anything to be said about that?

 

[Diakonov]

What about using Hearthstone mulligan rules? Choose X cards and throw them back for new ones one time.

There used to be a thread about dealing with "who goes first," and I remember someone suggested using Hearthstone rules there as well: the player going second always starts with a bonus Lotus Petal in hand. The only problem I see is the fixing bonus. Maybe a custom rule in which you have to choose what color the petal will produce before you see your hand. Starting to get complex.

 

[Goldenpineapple]

http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/fixing-the-die-roll.522/
Long thread is long

Or it can be a colorless petal.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Or a colorless lotus.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Or, what if the player going second gets to scry 1 after keeping his or her hand?

 

[CML]

I'm not convinced being on the draw in (high-powered) Cube is a big enough disadvantage that it needs to be fixed. It would be clearly much better with a colorless Petal, for example.

One thought I had was that my system of mulligans (6 scry 1 -> 6 -> 5 scry 1) is pretty great, because nobody in practice ever goes past 6, but it also makes being on the play better because being on the draw deals with mulls so much better. So that's a flaw and maybe it needs a counterweight.

 

[ahadabans]

Who plays first can be incredibly influential and kinda unfun aspect to the game. Is there anything to be said about that?

Slow your meta down so it matters less.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I'm not convinced being on the draw in (high-powered) Cube is a big enough disadvantage that it needs to be fixed. It would be clearly much better with a colorless Petal, for example.

I played someone else's cube a while back and ended up with a sweet blue white control deck. In the finals I played a mono red aggro deck. We played something like seven games, and the player who went first won every single time. Either I could mount defenses quick enough, or I got slaughtered the turn before I could stabilize.

 

[CML]

I played someone else's cube a while back and ended up with a sweet blue white control deck. In the finals I played a mono red aggro deck. We played something like seven games, and the player who went first won every single time. Either I could mount defenses quick enough, or I got slaughtered the turn before I could stabilize.

yeah, come to think of it the stupid go-first conspiracy had to be insta-cut in the middle of a draft because it was such bullshit

anyway let's keep this thread going because i don't have any ideas and you guys might

 

[Eric Chan]

We errata'ed Power Play so that it would only affect Game 1 of every match, and it was still a littttle too good for my tastes. As anyone who read the other thread might be aware, I'm of the opinion that the draw/go problem is real, especially in faster environments like most of the lists on here.

I never actually tried the Lotus Petal fix, because Calvin convinced me that turn three Wrath of God is a Bad Thing, to which I agree. After all, one 'mana' in Hearthstone is worth less than its equivalent in Magic, because of their guaranteed land drop system. I need to figure out some way to award half a mana to the player on the draw.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Other games have you bidding resources for starting.

Maybe being on the draw could grant you a slightly higher life total. Something in the 21-22 range.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

It might be weird, but what if we abolished the rule that the starting player skips his or her first draw step? What if instead the non-starting player gets a gold token and gets to scry 2 after keeping an opener?

What is so bad about Wrath on turn 3 anyway? That means you're playing a 2 for 1 instead of a 3 for 1. If the player on the play gets a draw he can more easily recover as well.

 

[Jason Waddell]

It might be weird, but what if we abolished the rule that the starting player skips his or her first draw step? What if instead the non-starting player gets a gold token and gets to scry 2 after keeping an opener?

What is so bad about Wrath on turn 3 anyway? That means you're playing a 2 for 1 instead of a 3 for 1. If the player on the play gets a draw he can more easily recover as well.

There are lots of things that are dangerous to power out early for free. Early Gideon into anything is pretty backbreaking.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Yes it is, but essentially you're just casting it on your normal turn, had you been on the play. I.e., when you power out Gideon on t4, you make your 5-drop before your opponent can make his 5-drop, exactly as if you had been on the play. The turn after that you still have to make do with 5 mana though, so no Titan followup for you mister!

 

[CML]

It can't be a Petal and I don't know if life is the right solution, but I'm damned if I can do better. Maybe life is good because being on the draw control vs. control won't really be affected and control will still hate being on the draw vs. aggro.

 

[Calvin Chan]

After all, one 'mana' in Hearthstone is worth less than its equivalent in Magic, because of their guaranteed land drop system. I need to figure out some way to award half a mana to the player on the draw.

The biggest argument with the free lotus is that it allows slower decks to jump the curve to play their wrath or blocker one turn earlier, but in comparison aggro usually doesn't improve much with a free mana.

Anyways the posts have derailed from OP's discussion of reducing the number of mulls leading to non-games.
I think there's a fairly large grey area in what can actually be improved since there are arguably more games where you just can't beat what your opponent's draws or can't get the second colour regardless of how many cards you've kept.

If you're just trying to reduce mulls to 5 (or lower), then the free mulls or partial mulls might be the simplest to implement. But these fixes (and the guarenteed backup plans) are fairly exploitable, allowing players to dig pretty deep for a hand that can interact in the specific matchup. The free mulls for 0-1 land hands are also fairly common in casual games, but it can also be exploited by playing fewer lands. So I would try some combination of partial mulls and free mulls, but it really depends on how your playgroup thinks. I would rather have more variance then affect deckbuilding intuition through mulligans.

 

[Diakonov]

Yes it is, but essentially you're just casting it on your normal turn, had you been on the play. I.e., when you power out Gideon on t4, you make your 5-drop before your opponent can make his 5-drop, exactly as if you had been on the play. The turn after that you still have to make do with 5 mana though, so no Titan followup for you mister!

I think this is the correct way to look at it. The person on the draw basically gets to be the person on the play for one turn of their choice.

 

[Diakonov]

If you're just trying to reduce mulls to 5 (or lower), then the free mulls or partial mulls might be the simplest to implement. But these fixes (and the guarenteed backup plans) are fairly exploitable, allowing players to dig pretty deep for a hand that can interact in the specific matchup. The free mulls for 0-1 land hands are also fairly common in casual games, but it can also be exploited by playing fewer lands. So I would try some combination of partial mulls and free mulls, but it really depends on how your playgroup thinks. I would rather have more variance then affect deckbuilding intuition through mulligans.

This is why I think "throw back X of your choice" would work best. It's only a one-shot deal so it's difficult to exploit, and likely has a better chance of correctly proportioning your hand than most other mulligan systems. It would probably make for better games, too, since you can choose to keep your opening Llanowar Elves, etc.

EDIT: the only exploitable thing I see is two-card-combos/synergies and so forth, since you can keep one card in hand that specifically works well with something else and throw back the others hoping to get the other piece. Though this seems like a minor problem to me.

 

[Tyrole]

One thought I had was that my system of mulligans (6 scry 1 -> 6 -> 5 scry 1) is pretty great, because nobody in practice ever goes past 6, but it also makes being on the play better because being on the draw deals with mulls so much better. So that's a flaw and maybe it needs a counterweight.

I've been using a free mulligan followed by your scry system, and it seems to have worked very well for eliminating non-games.

 

[Eric Chan]

I wonder if one free mull per match is the easiest way to go about this

 

[MCMcEmcee]

I'm not entirely sure that mulligans need to be fixed. Same with play/draw. That said we don't really have any rules here, both players just agree on how they want to handle mulligans each time.