General Magic Tweaks

[spicewitch]

In an article that's unusually self-indulgent and full of rambling, fillery nonsense even for MaRo, he mentioned some things that can't be changed now, but could have been done "right" from the start. Link

The interesting bit for me was his desire to remove the unintuitive and randomly punishing rule of "if any part of a spell loses its target, the whole spell is countered". How much does it suck when cone of flame is countered because the 1/1 token gets sacced or bounced? I am gonna try to sell my people on changing it to work more like "resolve whatever parts of the spell can still be resolved despite the missing target".

A lot of Cubers and EDH folk seem to play with highly permissive Mulligan rules that amount to "you can basically mulligan a lot, but stop when you have a decent hand and don't abuse the rule like a dick". Something more elegant might be something like "draw 9 or 10 at the start, shuffle 2 or 3 back into your library". Or even put the extras on the bottom of your deck. Either way, seeing more cards at once, and then trimming a couple, is a lot more likely to result in a reasonable hand on the first try than just mulligan-ing over and over and over'n'over again.

How do you feel about the above two tweaks? What minor tweaks has your group tried out? What other tweaks do you wish you could play with?

 

[Laz]

The interesting bit for me was his desire to remove the unintuitive and randomly punishing rule of "if any part of a spell loses its target, the whole spell is countered". How much does it suck when cone of flame is countered because the 1/1 token gets sacced or bounced? I am gonna try to sell my people on changing it to work more like "resolve whatever parts of the spell can still be resolved despite the missing target".

Er. Spells are only countered if they have no valid targets (Comprehensive Rules, 608.2b). Cone of flame still deals 2 and 3 damage in that case. With most spells, it is pretty intuitive, since they are exclusively effecting their targets. Where it gets tricky is targeted cards with riders that don't target, such as Electrolyze, where removing the target/s fizzles the spell and prevents the 'draw a card' from resolving. Your tweak does make the spell more intuitive.

 

[James Stevenson]

A lot of Cubers and EDH folk seem to play with highly permissive Mulligan rules that amount to "you can basically mulligan a lot, but stop when you have a decent hand and don't abuse the rule like a dick". Something more elegant might be something like "draw 9 or 10 at the start, shuffle 2 or 3 back into your library". Or even put the extras on the bottom of your deck. Either way, seeing more cards at once, and then trimming a couple, is a lot more likely to result in a reasonable hand on the first try than just mulligan-ing over and over and over'n'over again.?

I like this.

 

[Diakonov]

Adding to what Laz wrote: the spell-fizzles-because-it-lost-one-target rule DID used be a rule a long time ago, but no longer. Each and every target needs to disappear in order for the spell to fizzle.

I totally support messing around with mulligan rules.

 

[spicewitch]

Er. Spells are only countered if they have no valid targets (Comprehensive Rules, 608.2b). Cone of flame still deals 2 and 3 damage in that case. With most spells, it is pretty intuitive, since they are exclusively effecting their targets. Where it gets tricky is targeted cards with riders that don't target, such as Electrolyze, where removing the target/s fizzles the spell and prevents the 'draw a card' from resolving. Your tweak does make the spell more intuitive.

Wellp. Case in point, I have been mis-playing that rule for some time now, it would seem.

That's way less annoying than the way we've been playing it - only because that comes up way less often. But maybe that's only because the cube we use most is lowish on cantrips.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I think CML has a soft mulligan rule that goes like: 7 > 6 + scry 1 > 6 > 5 + scry 1 > 5 > etc.?

Shuffling is a hassle though. Maybe something like "draw 9, then choose 2 cards from your hand. Put any number of them on the bottom of your library, then put the rest on top of your library in any order."?

 

[spicewitch]

Yeah, bottom of library is technically a little more powerful than shuffling in, because it's a free scry, but meh. 3+ mulligans is even more powerful. BoL is nice and quick.

 

[Modin]

I think CML has a soft mulligan rule that goes like: 7 > 6 + scry 1 > 6 > 5 + scry 1 > 5 > etc.?

I've been using that rule too and its quite nice to go from 7 to 6 + scry, most of the time people don't go below 6 though.

 

[ahadabans]

We play a really casual mulligan rule that basically says you can mulligan as many times as you need, but each time you do you have to reveal your hand before you shuffle. So there's a tiny penalty in that you have to give information about what deck you are playing to your opponent.

Guys in my group hate non-games of Magic, so as far as we are concerned, mulligan until you feel like that won't happen. Because we don't want to goldfish to a win.

Honestly though, I think making adjustments to the mulligan rule is treating the symptom not the disease. The problem is the game of Magic is slightly too random. Even if you have a great starting hand, if the next 3 or 4 cards are the wrong colors, not enough land, too much land, it can really put you behind in the game. Many times in a way to where the game is basically over before you can really do anything about it.

To combat that problem, I tested at idea I call Exile/Draw. I think I posted it awhile ago, but it's worth mentioning again since it fits with the topic of this thread. What this is is essentially an additional draw step but with a few caveats. First, it's optional - you don't have to take it. Second, you must use it before you normal draw step and obviously only once per turn. Third, you must take a card from your hand and exile it from the game BEFORE you draw (hence Exile/Draw).

What that effectively does is let you see twice as many cards in your deck in the same amount of game time. And that REALLY helps to fight color screw, mana screw, mana flood, etc. It adds an additional element of strategy to the game too. While it is usually the right move to take an Exile/Draw step (filtering is powerful), sometimes it can make your hand worse because you typically have to give something up before you get something new (and whose to say that trade helps you necessarily?).

Couple problems with this of course. One, it helps some arch types more than others. Combo in particular. Not really an issue in cube since there is typically very little combo presence, this this rule would probably break constructed formats in half. Another issue, it really favors deck manipulation cards. If you know what is on top of your library, then you pretty much always know how to use Exile/Draw to your benefit. But while that sounds like a major balancing issue (hi brainstorm and friends), in practice I don't really think it's that big of a deal. A third problem that will invariable impact many groups is a resistance to making fundamental changes to the game out of fear of what it will do to the game. My group is a prime example. While I continue to pitch this idea, I have yet to get full buy in on even trying it. For whatever reason, Magic players find changing fundamental rules of the game sacrilegious. They have no problem playing Uno with a modified rule set, but not Magic. Go figure.

Last thing I'll mention on Exile/Draw… a nice side effect of the rule is that it enables you to run more narrow card choices (say a narrow removal card or something) and if the card is useless in the match-up you can just pitch it to exile/draw. That's really nice because it sucks not having an answer to something in one matchup so you want to play things like disenchant. But then it sucks playing at 1 card disadvantage should you happen to play a matchup where your opponent didn't draw an enchantment/artifact or didn't run any. Granted, that is not a common scenario (especially for disenchant), but it can happen and it's sort of lame. Also, during my own testing, I found that you have much better access to answers - which is both good and bad. It's good because the game's outcome is decided more on play decision versus luck of the draw. You will probably get the cards you need a lot more often. It's bad because fragile strategies get more fragile (auras, etc.) and in my testing more games go to decking because of said increase in answer availability. So some tweaking is likely needed to maximize Exile/Draw to it's full potential.

I hope someone tries it or the one standout in my group stops coming so I can actually run the house rule.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Wat if you simply replaced the draw step with Sleight of Hand or Opt?

 

[ahadabans]

Wat if you simply replaced the draw step with Sleight of Hand or Opt?

That's a good idea as well. It would again I think favor combo (things like tinker/natural order REALLY benefit from a free opt/sleight each turn). Other than that, I think it would net the same card quality improvement which I think the game needs honestly.

Also, adding a card quality mechanic for all decks would also help to bridge the gap between the best color in Magic and all the other colors. Because a good portion of that gap has to do with draw (and some fraction of that is simply the card quality benefits).

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I wonder what would happen if you stapled "when you cast this, scry 1" to each creature.

 

[ahadabans]

I wonder what would happen if you stapled "when you cast this, scry 1" to each creature.

It would really help aggro/midrange and really hurt control. So if your environment needs that, it could work.

I think you'd be better off adding a rule that everyone benefits from and that is largely arch type agnostic though.

 

[Eric Chan]

I'm all in favour of relaxed mulligan rules, but my playgroup isn't even comfortable with the idea I've floated of "one free mull per match," let alone anything more elaborate. If both players mulligan, though, we sometimes reach a friendly agreement to both mull back up to 7.

On a somewhat related note, I've always felt - but never had conclusive proof - that being on the play gives a player a slight but nontrivial advantage. Not as much as, say, serving in tennis, but not something I'd be happy ignoring, either. I've brainstormed ways of evening the odds, as I like how Hearthstone has both recognized and tackled this exact problem - by allowing the player on the draw to see their extra card before their mulligan, and giving them a 'Lotus Petal'. Maybe porting over just the extra peek for the player on the draw would smooth over that slight edge.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

We run relaxed mulligan rules as well. Your first mulligan is without penalty, that after than you go down to 6, than 5, and so forth. Very rarely do we have people go past 6.

I think having a lot of cheap cantriping effects (and not all monopolized by blue) in your cube goes a long way to preventing non-games as well.

 

[Eric Chan]

I would tend to agree with Grillo. A lot of the discussion on this thread--aside from the mulligan talk--has been on how to reduce variance within the game of Magic. Luckily, Magic comes with a lot of built-in tools to address this particular problem, and, as cube designers - and really, game designers - it's on us to take advantage of every tool we're given.

A large portion of the non-games in retail limited games come about because of colour screw. This is something that's fairly easy to rectify in our own lists, by making use of additional high-quality fixing, and at the right proportion to our cube size. A smaller portion of non-games are because someone hit a mana flood. But again, with the fantastic mana sinks that Wizards has printed over the last few years - your lands with game-breaking abilities, manland activations, monstrosity creatures, level up creatures, flashback spells, scaling spells, optional costs, and the list goes on - we now have the means to mitigate this issue, as well. That leaves only pure mana screw as something that isn't easily addressed by the card pool, and where we rely on mulligans to lend us a helping hand. But hitting two out of the three non-game categories, simply by adding or doubling some cards in your environment, isn't too shabby.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I actually haven't thought of that but I like it as a design tenet, trying to combat the non-game factor inherit in the game. We've had some talk about interaction and making sure that there are tools available for all archetypes to be participant in the game at all stages. Like, making sure aggro have some reach, giving control fun things to do early game (ie ludevic's test subject). Making sure all colors have access to scry, cycling and cantrips like mentioned earlier. Since I'm the total babby of this forum and haven't assembled the cube yet (getting there, some more cards in the postage) it would be very sweet to try and see how many cards that actively rectifies the drawbacks of the game, where mana sinks definitely are one of them (ludevic being one of those as well).

Been playing some kitchen table constructed with my brother and we've noticed a lack of mana sinks there as well. The temple cycle was so underrated in this regard, even if they ctp.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I cut transform cards because they complicate the draft for the inexperienced players in my group, but Ludevic's Test Subject is super fun!

 

[VibeBox]

making adjustments to the mulligan rule is treating the symptom not the disease.

i can fully understand people getting sick of mulligan rules. sadly however i've never seen an alternative presented that doesn't inherently disadvantage aggro strategies.

the lands system in general is mostly shitty, but one of the major things aggro decks have going for them is that they can operate on fewer resources and are positioned to take advantage of opponents' stumbling on development.

i don't think there's really a good fix tbh

 

[VibeBox]

i miss vs system every time i think of magic's ruleset in general

 

[ahadabans]

i can fully understand people getting sick of mulligan rules. sadly however i've never seen an alternative presented that doesn't inherently disadvantage aggro strategies.

the lands system in general is mostly shitty, but one of the major things aggro decks have going for them is that they can operate on fewer resources and are positioned to take advantage of opponents' stumbling on development.

i don't think there's really a good fix tbh

I think it depends on what you are trying to do. I agree that consistency (which is ultimately what we are adding with these rules) helps control more than aggro. That's not necessarily a bad thing. If you don't really care about aggro as a theatre (like say in a multi-player dominant cube where it flat out doesn't work anyway) and you've taken steps to even the playing field in the late game (so control doesn't auto-win against more aggressive midrange strategies), smoothing draws seems like pure upside to me.

The fact remains, the biggest buzz kill in Magic are games that are non-games because you didn't draw what you needed. It's feel bad all around. Winning feels cheap and losing feels like you had no options.

Again, I've done minimal testing with the exile/draw idea and no testing with the free opt as part of draw step idea. But I'm pretty sure they would make slower meta's better overall with few negatives (and those negatives could be reduced/eliminated through excluding specific cards from the pool that cause problems).

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

The problem that I always have with a lot of house mulligan rules/draw step scry and so forth, is that it rewards bad deck building.

Any of you that have/have had a "little kid" deck drafter in your group knows what I mean: the guy who ignores the curve and goes with a deck of 4-6 drop fatties, maybe some ramp, and is largely oblivious to the idea of early game interaction.

Those guys build bad decks, naturally get terrible, do-nothing hands, and make everyone miserable. The only way for them to learn is with gentle advice and horrible crushing defeats. Too many house rules/mulligan fixes and they can just mulligan/scry their way to winning hands, negating the consequences of their horrible deck building, and actively rewarding them as they stumble into whatever early game interaction they need. This allows them to play out a glut of expensive haymakers that should be choking their hand.

 

[ahadabans]

Well, I hear what you're saying but I don't really think this is true. If you built a stupid deck with nothing but fatties and no way to interact with the board for 5 turns, no amount of mulliganing is going to make a difference unless the other guy just gets shafted and can't do anything for 5 turns (which is what a house rule of this nature would reduce).

Those bad players only win games when YOU (the good Magic player) gets unlucky and rips 3 forests off the top of your deck when you already had 2 of them in your hand and a bunch of cards that needed 1 swamp. I know guys want to write that off as their own mistake (I should have mulliganed more aggressively, etc.). But really it's just that Magic has a lot of luck in the game. Sometimes you get what you need and other times you are just hosed and have no way to dig yourself out. Having access to more of your deck makes the game more skill dependent not less.

That kid with the dragon deck can mulligan all he wants. If I get an exile/draw step and my normal draw step, he isn't going to beat a competently built deck manned by a competent player. But that kid's odds go up with less consistency.

Moreover, having access to more cards in a game means you can be more experimental. This was the biggest issue with the early iterations of my cube. They were power cubes and so there are tried and true strategies that just worked really well. Deviating from them just meant you were going to end up with a less efficient deck and just lose. So where was the incentive in trying new things? That led to flatter power curves, nerfing certain powerful strategies that were easy to assemble. Fixing curves so you always had something to do even if it wasn't textbook value. All that made drafts better and guys had more fun. My thought is you can take it farther by making the game play more consistently with a small rule tweak to the draw. I know most are not on board with this kind of game change, but I think it's a great idea.

On a related note (and I think I mentioned this once before too), a friend and I used to play a rule that allowed you to play non-land cards face down as resource lands (colorless lands). If that land left play, it was exiled (to prevent abuses). It helped with mana screw (though not color screw or flood). But it prevented more games from being non-games, so we played that rule for a couple years. That never caught on with my larger group. I like the draw rule change better anyway as I think it's more elegant and solves more issues. It also adds additional depth and decision points to the game, which again I find to be pure upside in theory.

 

[Eric Chan]

I'm 100% in agreement with Grillo. We have players over here who have problems with all of the aforementioned categories of non-games: mana screw, colour screw, and mana flood. We also have players in our group that almost never run into problems across any of the three categories, week in and week out. How is that possible, in the same cube environment?

As Grillo mentions, it all comes down to discipline in deckbuilding. Players may want to run all of their fatties, and cut lands in order to squeeze in a 24th or even a 25th (!) spell, so it's important for the game to naturally punish this kind of bad deckbuilding tendency. Without a proper feedback mechanism, it's difficult for players to understand that they're making fundamental mistakes, let alone to take some lessons home. It's only when players start losing to their own decks that folks can come to their aid, and make suggestions on how to avoid falling for the same traps and bad habits for next week.

The other thing I'll mention is that by not modifying the core rules of the game, players can take what they've learned from playing cube, and apply it to any other places they might play Magic - in prereleases, at FNM, over kitchen table EDH, or online, via Duels of the Planeswalkers or MTGO. It's rare that your playgroup's only outlet for Magic is your cube, so by sticking to the Magic ruleset, you make it easier for them to transfer their deckbuilding knowledge from one context to the next.

 

[ahadabans]

I don't think making small changes to the draw step alters the game so much that deck building lessons are suddenly moot or experience playing the game suddenly doesn't carry over to other formats. If you have a bad mana base, you are going to run into problems no matter what.

And you said "almost never". So some games do get decided by color screw or mana screw even with skilled players. And that's just one type of non-game. There are also other games that you just lose because your opponent curves out perfectly into something you can't answer. And maybe that game would have been more competitive if you had seen a few extra cards and gotten your hands on a response?

Again, I understand very well the resistance with Magic players to changing the core rules of the game. I've started a couple of these conversations and they always go this way. So I don't expect very many here will be open to the idea. And that's totally cool. It's interesting discussion nonetheless. Cheers.