Archive for: September 2013

Bottom Eight: Worst Modern Cards By Price

Sep. 26 CML 8 comments

You ever do a Facebook search for an old schoolmate, find that they’re successful above and beyond their brains, and wonder, ‘Gee, I wonder how the hell he snagged her and the six-figure job?’ This often happens to Magic players — since ours is a hobby where there’s about as much opportunity for economic advancement as polo or luge — and it happens within the game itself, too. Who hasn’t thought to himself, when Googling bad cards, ‘Why is this terrible card worth more than my entire bank account?’ Usually the answer is EDH, a format based on the hypocrisy of pretending to not care much about ‘power,’ but today I’ll explore yet another underpowered format for durdly brewers: Modern. I’ll identify eight different price strata and roast the worst cards you can find at that price. Starting at the bottom:

$0-$1: Delver of Secrets

‘Remember that time I played a Delver t1 and I was going to win, except there’s no Wasteland or Daze to protect it and pressure their resources, and everyone’s playing a fair deck, so my counterspells sucked, and when I tried to flip it, I couldn’t for five turns in a row, because there’s no card selection, so I had a 1/1 for 1 that matched up poorly against his Lightning Bolts and Tarmogoyfs, so I lost with this deck, as I always do, but I continued to play it anyway because it’s a blue deck and BLUE DECKS CAN’T POSSIBLY BE BAD???’

(Honorable mention: Skullcrack, Tempest of Light / Back to Nature, Treasure Mage)

$1-$3: Serum Visions

In Magic writing, there are lies, damned lies, and Zac Hill on Serum Visions:

The only card that isn’t obviously absurd is Serum Visions, but I’ll go ahead and remind you that if you simply reverse the order of the abilities on the card, it’s good enough to get banned. Over the last three or so years, it has become more and more increasingly evident that Ponder / Preordain / Serum Visions / Sleight of Hand and their ilk are all just really, really powerful and only get better the more we play with them.

It’s not ‘obviously’ absurd — it’s just absurd to true connoisseurs of the game! Ah, MtG — if hipsters didn’t have Blue cantrips, what else could they feel superior about? In other news, it’s possibly correct to take p1p1 Fortify over Primeval Bounty, and Michael Olowokandi over Michael Jordan. (You say that’s wrong? You just don’t get it, man — mythic bombs are so mainstream these days.) Hey, Mr. Draper: you’ve quit the job, stop trying to sell me Mystic Snake Oil!

Moving away from corporate communiqués and back to reality, one’s experience with casting this ostensible Serum Visions ‘card’ is more like:

Needless to say, Serum Visions is so expensive because it’s bad. Ponder and Preordain are banned, and Serum Visions has crossed the picket line into playability; it commands the self-loathing, mercenary price-tag of a scab. But anyone who watched the start of the NFL last year knows what a dire price that really is …

(Honorable mention: Sleight of Hand, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle)

$3-$5: Foil Past in Flames

Storm (not dead from the bannings, merely mutilated to the point of living in a leprosarium) is the kind of strategy that’s always powerful, and always way worse than it should be, because every meta ever is biased towards fair Blue decks, even when they’re bad (see: all the above cards), because that’s the way it had always been in Magic and, let’s face it, with all the old players owning all the Legacy cards, the only way to make a living from this game involving kissing up to WotC employees, and with WotC being way more preoccupied with the game not fizzling out like a fad than growing it beyond a nearly-saturated subculture, inertia and stagnation motivate MtG players way more than anyone would like to admit. Also: woe unto he who blingeth out his Storm deck.

$5-$10: Watery Grave

The other day my playgroup was trying to figure out which was worse: Plateau in Legacy, or Watery Grave in Modern? Though Plateau’s price has, so to speak, leveled off at a fairly high mesa, and has plenty of room to grow — you can Chain stuff to it, Chain Lightning off of it, etc. — Watery Grave just reminds me of “what happened to my weed when I was home from college for the summer and my parents started walking up to my bathroom.” Sadly, the card is too expensive to be used as toilet paper …

(Honorable mention: Scapeshift, Shadow of Doubt, Restoration Angel)

$10-$15: Aven Mindcensor

I like to play W/b Martyr in Modern, and its bad matchups these days are mainly decks that do degenerate stuff like searching their library for a whatever-card combo (MPod, KPod, RG Tron, Titan Scapeshift), so I proudly packed three Aven Mindcensors in my sideboard and thought that nothing bad could happen again. In theory, I ate a fetchland, forced a blind Pod activation, fizzled a Kiki-Pod combo, had them fail to find off Eye of Ugin activation after activation, and Ajani Vengeant-ed their lands when they tried to go for the kill. In practice, they killed my 2/1 and I lost a bunch of matches. (Quick aside: how the f does the stupid Scapeshift deck ALWAYS HAVE SCAPESHIFT???)

$15-$20: Sphinx’s Revelation

A ‘Standard-only’ mythic in playable guise, Sphinx’s mimics the MtG mindset by perpetuating itself at its best — what are you hoping to hit off a Revelation, but another Revelation? Then you can kill all their guys and gain a bunch of life and render whatever they’re doing irrelevant — interaction, sure, in the sense of Big Brother ‘interacting’ with Winston Smith through the telescreen. Good thing it’s 2013 and not 1984! Modern games tend to start on turn one and playing enough Revelations to chain them consistently is asking to get killed by the small child with Burn, so you can go off and complain to your friends about the misfortune when in fact you were just playing a worse deck than the guy with the Shard Volleys.

$20-$30: Glimpse the Unthinkable

The other day, I was playing my Martyr deck and lost to U/B Burn. ‘Lost to Burn with a lifegain deck, CML?’ you might ask. ‘How did that happen?’ Because they went after my library, and not my life! It was basically like the Scopes Monkey trial, I guess — and with a similar outcome: the secularist was Martyred. The deck might very well be good, but I just put this card on here as a jibe at EDH players and casuals because I’m pretentious like that.

$30+: Chord of Calling

Paying $35 for this card would be like paying $120 million over six years for a mediocre quarterback, when the only reason anyone else has ever heard of your city is from watching The Wire. Good thing nobody in sports is dumb enough to do that! And if you thought $35 for Chord was a ripoff, check out its mana cost …

Thanks for reading!

CML

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Live Big, Live Heroic

Sep. 17 FlowerSunRain Comments Off

By: FlowerSunRain

If you are like me, you like casting Giant Growth. Unfortunately in most cubes, there are a lot of reasons not to cast Giant Growth. Value creatures say, “Why not just play more dudes with etb abilities?” Efficient removal says, “Who needs to be tricky when you can just kill their guy?” Instant speed removal says, “Get 2-for-1’d, n00blord.” Slotting in Giant Growth can be a depressing proposition.

Well, good news. Theros has introduced a mechanic that rewards you for casting Giant Growth (and many other spells) on your creatures: Heroic. Heroic creatures love to be targeted by friendly effects and pay dividends when you do. But, is this good enough? Should you include the heroic creatures in your cube? What cards that trigger heroic are worth playing? What design considerations need to be examined to ensure casting Giant Growth can be a rewarding experience? This guide might be able to give some ideas.

The Heroic Creatures

Like any type of card, not every creature with the word heroic on it is created equal. First, let’s examine what we’re working with.

White

Fabled Hero: Let’s start with a bang. Fabled Hero is an amazing creature and has amazing synergy with everything you want to do. His heroic ability is not unlike that of most white creatures: he gets a +1/+1 counter, but double strike makes this extra enticing. Beyond this, many of the cards you will use to trigger heroic will be more valuable on your Fabled Hero. This card has little subtlety in his role: he kills your opponent very quickly. Connecting with a Giant Growth on him will take a cool 12 life from your opponent. Putting an Armadillo Cloak on him and swinging even once can make racing absolutely impossible. I don’t know why I’m even typing this, it’s all pretty obvious. This guy is decent without heroic, with heroic and in a cube designed around Giant Growth, he’s a centerpiece.

Favored Hoplite: This is a solid one drop, if you trigger him. He builds value, dodges burn and puts down pressure. Unfortunately, a lot of the cards that trigger heroic are reactive in nature. Until you make him heroic, Favored Hoplite isn’t doing much of anything. If the heroic trigger you drew is Rancor or Unstable Mutation, you really don’t care, just cast it and start swinging. If the heroic trigger you drew is Shelter or Vines of Vastwood, your opponent probably isn’t going to block or target the Favored Hoplite to allow you to cast these favorably. This certainly isn’t the best one drop ever printed, but decent one drops are scarce enough and it is useful and in theme, so it’s a win.

Phalanx Leader: This guy is a heroic anthem. The bad news is that he starts well below the curve and that even triggering his heroic doesn’t get him onto the curve. You absolutely need to trigger him with people on the board. Unfortunately, he dies to every removal spell ever printed outside of Sunlance, Reprisal and Seize the Soul which aren’t even in the removal suites of most cubes. You would need to run an obscenely low curve with lots of token makers and little removal to make this guy pay dividends with frequency.

Setessan Battle Priest: I love Seacoast Drake with a passion few will ever understand. That said, this card doublestuffs aggro without remorse. The decks that want this card probably don’t want heroic enablers. This is pretty much a lose-lose. I wouldn’t go near this.

Wingsteed Rider: It’s a got evasion and gets on curve with one activation. Not interesting, but can certainly play a budget filler role if you want to go deep on heroic.

Blue

Artisan of Forms: An adjustable clone for two mana is pretty great. Getting value out of this card will take a little work, but the playmaking potential here is high. The problem is the card is basically useless until you trigger the heroic, but being able to invest your turn two to preemptively trump an opponent’s fatty is mean. It can’t copy ETB abilities, though. This is a reasonable addition.

Triton Fortune Hunter: If you can stomach playing a Gray Ogre, you can ensure that you don’t get doubled up on your enchantments and pumps. With enough tempo disruption, this could be a winning proposition, but have to cast your spells on a Gray Ogre. This is an option if you want to go deep.

Wavecrash Triton: Another mediocre choice. There are plenty of cards that do a similar effect and more aggressive bodies that don’t require a heroic trigger. I wouldn’t go near this, even if it is hilarious with Hidden Strings.

Black

Agent of the Fates: This is an absolute beating of a card. The base body is certainly not amazing, but it gets work done. The heroic trigger, however, is stellar. Diabolic Edict is already a good card, now you can have other cards do double duty as diabolic edicts while putting pressure on the opponent’s life total. This is a hands down amazing card that is worth playing if you pay any attention to heroic triggers.

Tormented Hero: This is a generic beatdown tool. His heroic grants you a little reach and a little life that black decks love converting into advantages. People stuffing aggro creatures will run this without heroic, even if he is below the curve. You should definitely run it because your heroic minded cube might get more value out of this, though he is a nonbo with Grave Servitude and Funeral Charm which are two of black’s most reliable heroic triggers.

Red

Akroan Crusader: We love one drops. Like Favored Hoplite, this card is well below the curve if you don’t trigger heroic. One trigger makes him equal to a Dragon Fodder, but there will be many times you don’t want to use a card on his awful base stats just to get another card with awful base stats. There is certainly some silliness that can arise of this guy, but most of it is far-fetched. This card is good by virtue of its spot on the mana curve, but certainly expendable.

Arena Athlete: There are cards that do similar things without heroic. This is really bad.

Labyrinth Champion: Absolutely terrible base stats. Don’t go near.

Green

Anthousa, Setessan Hero: This is a tough one. She clearly has huge impact if you trigger her, but in terms of raw power, she doesn’t hold up in a post-Kalonian Hydra world unless you have an anthem on the table. I personally think Kalonian Hydra is one of the worst cards ever printed and that Anthousa is a much better example of what I want out of a raw power five drop (see also Archangel of Thune vs. Baneslayer Angel). Anthousa is a game ending powerhouse that can easily find a home if you don’t like the Hydra or need two cards with that sort of function for some reason.

Centaur Battlemaster: Unfortunately this has terrible base stats and an uninteresting heroic ability. You’d have to go extremely deep to play this.

Staunch-Hearted Warrior: You can repeat the above comments here.

Multicolor

Anax and Cymede: Unlike many of the other cards we’ve seen, Anax and Cymede start with good combat stats. Their heroic trigger pumps up your whole team and adds an ability that is potentially relevant even without a single other creature on the board. While it lacks Fabled Hero’s potential to solowin you the game, Anex and Cymede gives you a tool for applying lots of pressure and reach over chump blockers. This pair is exactly what you want in a heroic creature.

Battlewise Hoplite: Let’s face the sad truth: a 2/2 for 2 colored mana is below the curve. After one activation, Battlewise Hoplite is on curve and has scryed one card, which may or may not have helped you and can do it again later. This card is absolutely nothing special and is only good for going deep on the theme.

Heroic Enablers

Now that we have a few heroes, we need cards to trigger them. There are obviously a lot of cards in Magic’s history that can do this, so this is not comprehensive.

White Notable Cards

Emerge Unscathed: This triggers heroic twice, which is a significant advantage. At one mana, this card counters removal, gets creatures unblocked and messes up combats. Like its unappreciated sibling Shelter (and to some extent Cho-Manno’s Blessing), most people don’t cube this, but it consistently makes an impact.

Angelic Destiny: It’s not rancor, but rancor is just nuts. Making the creature more survivable helps make up for the casting cost difference. This card is very underrated.

Shelter, Harm’s Way, Embolden, Hopeful Eidolon, Gift of Immortality, Guided Strike, Griffin Guide, Hyena Umbra, Empyrial Armor

Blue Notable Cards

Hidden Strings: Due to the way Cipher works, this card can trigger heroic every single time cipher is triggered. The tap ability also helps get your creature in the first time.

Curiosity, Spectral Flight, Unstable Mutation, Piracy Charm, Distortion Strike, Fate Foretold, False Demise

Other Considerations

Obviously there aren’t very many strong heroic cards. Only seven would I qualify as good and only a few more are playable if you want to go deep. However, we must remember that our goal is not to push heroic as a cube concept. Rather, we are using heroic to help push cards like Giant Growth and the gameplay including such cards entails. Doing so requires not just trying to slot in some enablers and calling it a day, but also ensuring your environment supports this type of gameplay. Here are some areas to focus on.

Redundancy in Value Slots: If you have so many high value creatures that everyone has access to as many as they can feasibly jam into their decks, auras and combat tricks look a lot less attractive. Reducing the redundancy in these slots makes combat tricks look more attractive. Furthermore, reducing the number of high value three to five drops and replacing them with low cost auras and instants has the extremely desirable side effect of dropping down your mana curve. This redundancy is problematic in its own right already and fuel for the fire that is “midrange beats aggro”. Basically, make sure there aren’t enough mid-cost, all upside value cards to go around so that people actually have to fight for them, then fill out their decks with more situational picks. Another nice upside of this approach is that aggro decks will actually have a fighting chance against control decks without having to rely on cards that remove the opponent’s ability to play the game.

In summary, aggressively lower your curve by taking out redundant value cards!

Your Removal: Apparently Searing Spear is a good, playable, cubeworthy piece of removal. And yet, people still run Lightning Bolt. Efficient instant speed removal makes a lot of these cards losing propositions, particularly when the removal lacks restrictions. While undesirable, getting in one hit with a Gift of Orzhovaed Markov Blademaster might cause an acceptable life swing that can help recover from the card loss. When it gets bolted mid-flight it is totally backbreaking in terms of tempo and card advantage, plus it requires basically zero risk on the part of the reacting player. Replacing some of this extremely good removal with more narrow, more costly or slower options will really help. Cards like Diabolic Edict (can be played around), Tragic Slip (potentially narrow) and Hero’s Downfall (high cost) are all extremely good removal cards that still let auras and combat tricks play the game while keeping problematic creatures in check.

Avoiding the Poison Principle in Design: One thing we don’t want to end up is only one deck type wanting these cards. As such, we need overlapping value. While pure control decks won’t want most of this stuff, basically everyone else can get value from it. A couple of card types benefit a little more and create synergies for competition.

Double Strikers love a lot of these cards. Look to Silverblade Paladin, Mirran Crusader, Fencing Ace, Markov Blademaster, Ajani, Caller of the Pride, Armed // Dangerous, Hound of Griselbrand, Savageborn Hydra, Viashino Slaughtermaster, Wrecking Ogre and Kruin Outlaw. Red and White have basically all the support here.

Hexproof loves these cards too. Although some hate it, hexproof without a doubt is a huge boon to auras and combat tricks. Look to Slippery Bogle, Troll Ascetic, Thrun, the Last Troll, Geist of Saint Traft, Invisible Stalker, Witchstalker, Silhana Ledgewalker, Swiftfoot Boots, Lazav, Dimir Mastermind, Sigarda, Host of Herons and Lumberknot. Green and Blue have basically all the support here.

Black? Black probably has the best heroic card (at least tied with Fabled Hero), but it has very few enablers or other cards that work well with auras and combat tricks. It also has many of the better cards for blowing out these situations, putting them in role of the spoiler.

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Rogue Legacy Review: A Skill Grind

Sep. 15 Jason Waddell 2 comments

By: Jason Waddell

I don’t have time for bullshit.

Games with superfluous filler to be disrespectful to me, the player. It didn’t used to be this way. Back in the day you found yourself in World 1 – 1 and ran to the right, and didn’t stop running. The industry has changed. 22 years after the release of Super Mario Bros. came Super Paper Mario, a game that effectively served as a bad marriage simulator: packed to the brim with vacuous dialogue and errands, and mostly devoid of action.

Thankfully, there’s one genre I can always count on to treat my time with the respect it deserves: roguelikes. For the unaware, the defining feature of a roguelike game is that the player is given only a single life. Lose it, and all progress is lost. Back to square one. Life after life, you gain literal experience: you learn more about the game’s systems, its tricks, and gradually you gain the skill to make deeper and deeper inroads into a game’s (typically) fiendishly-difficult dungeons.

Roguelike’s come in all shapes and sizes, and Rogue Legacy combines the typical roguelike construct (one life to live) with Metroidvania-style gameplay: platform based castle exploration. However, Rogue Legacy shakes up the formula with one very pivotal alteration: when you die, you don’t actually lose everything. After each life, you can spend whatever hard-earned coins you collected to purchase upgrades that will permanently affect all future heroes you send into the dungeon.

To reenter the castle, you must sacrifice all (or, after some upgrades, nearly all) of your gold to the castle’s Gatekeeper.

The result is that you must acquire a minimum threshold of gold during a run for that run to be of any use. If I need a 1200 coin upgrade, a run that yields 800 coins will be all for naught, as I have to surrender those coins to the gatekeeper before reentering the castle. Naturally, the upgrades become increasingly expensive, requiring increasingly successful runs to continue your purchasing progression.

Eventually you’ll encounter one of the castle’s five bosses…

…and you’ll get shitwrecked.

Your stats aren’t there. Bob and weave all you like, the bosses’ damage output will simply outclass yours. True, you may need more skill (and you will quite noticeably improve), but mostly you need more time. You need to grind. After the game’s honeymoon phase wears off (for me, somewhere around the 7 or 8 hour mark), you’ll start to see the grind for what it is. Each life becomes less about exploration and discovery, and more about putting in the time required to earn sufficient upgrades.

At their best, roguelikes offer an unparalleled emotional thrill. Runs of Binding of Isaac have me tensely teetering on the edge of my seat while holding on to that last life point. They capture my emotions, leave lasting impressions.

Runs of Rogue Legacy bleed into one another, and have me looking at my watch. Ultimately no single run is all that meaningful or emotionally satisfying. Just another stamp on the time sheet. Although skill affects the efficiency of your grind, the fundamental nature of the activity doesn’t change. It’s still a grind.

It’s a shame, because the game does a lot of things well. The gameplay is tight and skill-testing, and maneuvering your character is truly a joy once air dashes and double-jumps enter the mix.

Rogue Legacy does many things well, but leaves me yearning for a game where skill, not time, is the primary currency.

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We need to talk about the Crush

Sep. 09 Jason Waddell Comments Off

We need to talk about the Crush: A Candy Crush Saga Review

by: Jason Waddell

My untested mental image of obscenely popular freemium Facebook games is intrinsically linked with the consumer exploitation: addictive systems with restrictive content access mechanics and a pay-to-progress business model. Creating an addicting progressed-based experience is relatively trivial in the gaming world. Even the game Cookie Clicker, whose sole mechanics include clicking on a digital cookie and purchasing items, has managed to get its addictive hooks into even the savviest of gamers, but is thankfully truly free to play.

Not so with Candy Crush Saga. Countless ink has already been spilled on the supposed evils of Candy Crush and its infamous Facebook predecessor, Farmville. Like its predecessor, I had been content to ignore Candy Crush Saga entirely. That is, until a coworker with respectable taste in games recommended it to me. We’ve played games like Set, Hive and Starcraft II together, and he’s far too busy to make time in his life for shallow time-wasting fluff.

With my curiosity piqued, I decided to discover first-hand what all the hype was about.

Gameplay

Match-three style games have never been my forte. I first discovered Bejeweled as a way to pass the time in a high-school computer science course, but found the gameplay rather shallow and unsatisfying. I’ll stick to Tetris on the TI-83, thank you very much. Years later I gave the genre another look based on Penny-Arcade’s Puzzle Quest recommendation, but even with a layer of RPG mechanics slapped on top, the gameplay soon became repetitive and tedious.

Candy Crush’s gameplay surpasses both of these.

Firstly, Candy Crush is surprisingly tactical. Rather than simply reward the player with extra points for combining four or more candies together, the combined candies leave behind one of four different special candies based on how the original candies were combined (a horizontally striped candy, a vertically striped candy, a wrapped candy or a color bomb).

When removed from the board, each of these special candies unleashes a unique but precise pattern of destruction on the board. Further, combining two special candies causes a devastating display. Progressing in Candy Crush requires skillfully and tactically setting up special candy effects to achieve each stage’s objective.

Secondly, with few exceptions, Candy Crush levels are restricted in the number of moves that they allot to the player, as opposed to a time-based restriction like the ones used in Bejeweled. This change fundamentally overhauls the experience. Bejeweled was a test of how well I could maintain my peripheral vision over the board while frantically executing matches. Candy Crush allows me to lay in bed and mentally mull over each move and its consequences at a relaxed pace.

Combined with the tactical play and we have the formula for an extremely satisfying experience. Although the game is wrapped from head-to-toe with colorful child-friendly graphics, the underlying gameplay engine is exceptionally skill-testing. Going deep into the tank to find a sequence of plays that completes the stage before your supply of moves runs dry can be a genuine rush, and taps into the same emotional feedback that hallmarks the best board games and card games.

Lastly, in addition to the core special candy mechanics, the game designers at King have packed the levels with interesting mechanics and obstacles: bombs that will end the level if not cleared within a certain number of moves, squares that must be unlocked by making matches in adjacent spaces, restrictive chocolate that slowly spreads over the level like Zerg creep, and so on. Beyond adding difficulty, these mechanics serve to keep the gameplay fresh and force the player to prioritize their actions differently from stage to stage.

As far as pure gameplay goes, Candy Crush passes with flying colors. I’ve never considered myself a fan of the genre, but the game’s designers have packed Candy Crush with innovative and intelligently designed systems that can keep even the most hardcore gamer satisfied. Of course, the age of evaluating games purely by their gameplay is rapidly disappearing. Free-to-pay games, however fun, are intrinsically linked to their monetization models.

Monetization

On the surface, Candy Crush is well and truly free to play. There is no download cost, and so thus far it has been fully possible to progress through the game without ever paying a cent. In two-weeks I have beaten 160 levels without once paying money to beat a stage. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t paying. According to a ThinkGaming analysis, at the time of writing, Candy Crush is hauling in an estimated $850,000 in revenue per day. Regardless of the precision of that estimate, it seems apparent that consumers are paying in droves to get their fix.

The game itself is constantly poking and prodding the player to spend money. Let’s count the ways.

0) Difficulty Spikes (and luck-based levels)

Although not strictly a monetization scheme, Candy Crush’s inconsistent difficulty curve is the bedrock that enables all of the other methods. Every handful of levels the player will face a stage that is considerably harder than the ones that precede or follow it. This is obviously devious but also a little clever from the psychological perspective. Candy Crush is generally fun, and after a really hard level the player is rewarded with a series of entertaining and satisfying levels. Several times I have been stuck on a level for a dozen attempts, finally beaten it, then proceeded to clear the following five levels without losing a single life.

If the game only got harder, players would give once the game’s difficulty surpassed their skill level. But with these difficulty spikes, the promise of fun is always just one level away. Perhaps, in a bout of frustration, you’ll plop down some cash to increase your odds of progressing past this level. And if you do, you may even feel good about it. Look at all these fun levels you get to play now! This pattern is baked into the level progression, and soon enough it becomes readily apparent which ones are the “hard ones” and which are not. That’s fine, but my biggest gripe comes with the fact that progressing past some levels has very little to do with skill and a lot to do with luck.

Some levels, like the level above, have restricted board space, and offer the player little in the way of meaningful choices. Here we see the starting configuration for a level that only has one possible move, occurring in an irrelevant corner of the board. On this level, often my first dozen or so moves offered no real choices, and winning required getting a fortune opening from the Random Number Generator.

Make no mistake, there was still skill involved eventually, but whether the level was even viable or not felt like taking pulls from a slot machine. Eventually you will get lucky, but the grind can feel pointless and frustrating.

1) Limited number of lives

The player is given a maximum of five lives. Every time you lose a level you lose a life, and lives are gained naturally every 30 minutes. If you’ve been away for at least two and a half hours, you’ll come back to a full set of lives. Personally, I like this mechanic because it forces me to make the most out of each level attempt and places some weight, however trivial, on the gameplay. Aside from rogue-likes, single-player games often struggle to create meaningful failure states, as you can often just reload from the last checkpoint and have another go. Restricting my number of allowed attempts forces me to take things more seriously, and makes the victories seem somehow more meaningful.

Secondly, it provides a natural limit that tells me to stop playing and go do something else. I will never pay for lives, and certainly don’t want to spend all day crushing candy. Running out of lives provides the gentle push to get off my rear and do something worthwhile with my time.

For those who don’t want to wait, however…

2) Limited number of moves

Although each level technically has a fixed move limit, the limit can be negotiated at any time by greasing some palms. As soon as you start to run low on moves, Candy Crush will pop up the following gentle reminder in the corner of the screen:

Perhaps the most impressive part is just how well calibrated Candy Crush’s levels are. I can’t count the number of times I’ve lost a stage when sitting one move away from victory. Even more devious is the fact that, on stages where extra moves can be purchased, the screen will hover for a full second on the board after defeat to let the player see just how close they were. “Two more moves and I can get there!”. For losses where moves can’t be purchased, such as losing to a bomb detonating, the player is immediately whisked away to the defeat screen.

3) Extra Items

Stuck in a jam that extra moves won’t fix? Visit the Yeti Shop at any time to buy your way out of it.

4) Crossing Bridges

After every fifteen levels or so, you will encounter a bridge that restricts further access to the game. To cross it, you can either pay 3 Facebook credits ($0.30 total), or pester friends until three of them give you a ticket to cross.

This is the only monetization scheme I have supported. I don’t mind paying for content, and certainly don’t want to pester friends and relatives and panhandling for dimes. Mobile users have the additional option of completing special challenge stages to cross the bridges in lieu of payment. Thus far I have crossed about ten bridges, racking up a $3.00 tab. This feels like a reasonable rate to me, and the transaction doesn’t compromise the integrity of the skill-based gameplay.

The Geometry Wars Effect

If you play Candy Crush on Facebook, you’ll soon discover that you’re not the only one. Your aunt from New York? The loser who always tried to copy your Chemistry homework in high school? You’re old flames? They’re all on there, and the game constantly checks in to show you how you rank against your friends on each level and in the game as a whole. Chemistry cheater made it to level 120? You can beat that moron. Well, maybe. If you could just get past level 79. Maybe you could use a Lollipop Hammer after all..

Best of all, there’s no way to tell if your Facebook friends shelled out cash to beat the preceding levels. You may have your suspicions about the homework hustler, but Candy Crush doesn’t kiss and tell. So if you decide to Paypal your way through the next stage, your friends will be none-the-wiser.

Conclusion

Candy Crush Saga is a highly polished product with legitimate gameplay merit that is coated and dripping with monetization hooks. The game is as free as you want it to be, so long as you possess the discipline and emotional fortitude to resist its addictive elements and block out the pay-to-win temptations. If you don’t have those qualities, consider Gizmodo writer Ashley Feinberg’s story of spending $236 on Candy Crush in one month to be a cautionary tale.