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Channel Cube Cast: Black

By: Jason Waddell

The fifth installment of ChannelFireball’s “Channel Cube Cast” is online, and it’s of special interest to me as it discusses a pair of articles I wrote about remodelling my cube, with a focus on bringing black aggro up to par. As of this moment, I haven’t had time to listen to it, but look forward to their comments. Listening to the Channel Cube Cast always reminds me that cube design, like any design, is a very cultural thing, shaped by your experiences. I can imagine that cubing in a Magic hotbed like San Jose is significantly different than cubing in Antwerp, Belgium.

When I wrote the articles, I got an email back from editor Andy Cooperfauss with a message along the lines of “thank goodness you wrote these, I was about to have to write them so that we could discuss them on the podcast”. Of all the cube writers, Andy’s design approach is the closest fit to mine philosophically. He is very environmentally concerned, and will disregard traditional “cube design rules” to create a better experience. His cube plays not only Rebel errata, but also errata on things like Cursed Scroll (activation cost of two).

It’s also pure conjecture, but I imagine they might take issue with some of my card choices. Something like Reins of Power is super unconventional, and I’ve left out some “obvious” archetype cards like Graveborn Muse. I stand by the approach of design not always giving players exactly the best tool, opting for cards that have a bit higher fun and splash factor (Disciple of Bolas).

All said, I’m really looking forward to listening to the podcast later today, and as a designer there’s nothing more flattering or useful than having other players take the time to really dissect your design elements. This is the third time they’ve discussed one of my articles, and it’s always a joy to listen to.

I’ll post more detailed thoughts in the forums later on, but for now, feel free to share your opinions in this thread.

Update, 12:44 – After giving the podcast a lunchtime listen, I realize this podcast was structured a little differently than the previous ones. The conversation focused more on Andy’s ventures into his black section renovation, and less on the actual articles referenced. I agreed with many of Andy’s conclusions, and although he mentioned in the podcast that he doesn’t find breaking singleton necessary for the archetype to work, he is running 2 copies of Bloodghast and 3 copies of Gravecrawler in his current cube list.

If there is one critique to be made, it’s that I get the impression that the cubes in that region have very isolated archetypes. There was an entire podcast about whether mono-color or multicolor aggro was better, for example, which I found hard to relate to. Perhaps the better question is, from a design standpoint, which works better in a draft environment? This is an item I touched on in The Poison Principle, and I think that having the strength of your cube being in monocolored archetypes leads to more problematic drafting dynamics.

I left the following comment:

If I were to pick one bone, it’d be with the notion that the black cards are creating just another “mono red” or “mono white” deck. Like any set design, it depends on what you do with the rest of the set. It can be pigeonholed if you only include one player’s worth of sacrifice cards, but if you increase the critical mass and make it a more central part of your cube-wide design, you end up with multiple players fighting for the same materials to use in decks that have very different texture.

To take a ridiculous example, you could make a Metalcraft archetype in cube (or any other set) and fill it with only cards that a single deck wants, or make artifacts a more critical part of your design (ala Scars of Mirrodin) without that same sort of mechanical isolation.

The “pigeonholing” of archetypes is one of the worst elements of MTGO Cube design, and with real sets there’s a much greater emphasis on finding ways for the various parts to fit together rather than just making “the ___ deck” work.

There was also a nice comment left by Frodie Brancis:

tl;dr – hypothesis: cubes need to be redesigned from the perspective of giving each colour some identity thing to actually do, as opposed to just the best cards from each colour, as black will always be on the bottom of that barrel.

Cube design is definitely shifting from its roots of jamming the best context-independent cards, and as was pointed out in the podcast, this approach lets you dig deep into Wizards’ cardpool and pull out fun cards like Pawn of Ulamog for inclusion. They also mentioned Puppeteer Clique, which is a card that had been suggested to me that I simply never got around to finding a copy of. I’ve put it on my list for my next order, and look forward to trying it out.

Last of all, Andy touched on a really important aspect of these aggro-sacrifice decks. They’re fun to draft! They’re fun to play! They work as “aggro-combo” decks, without the baggage of problems that are typically associated with cube combo archetypes. It’s really entertaining to play an attacking deck with so many lines, so much versatility, and the ability to play beatdown and board control at the same time. When we’re looking for updates to our cubes, this is what I think we should be striving for. Not just balance of colors and archetypes, but introducing strategies that are exciting and splashy at the same time.

Parnell’s Aggro: Subtractive Design

By: Jason Waddell

Last week, Justin Parnell wrote a nice article on supporting aggro in cube. I must confess, I was prepared not to like this article. The cube community long been over-saturated with articles that emphasize the importance of supporting aggro while simultaneously kind of missing the point.

While there are many tools at a cube designer’s disposal, at an abstract level most of the ways to bolster aggro boil down to:

  1.   Making aggro stronger
  2.   Making anti-aggro weaker

Under many cubers constraints, item 1 isn’t even an option. If you build your cube under the constraints of singleton power-maximization, you’ve likely already hit aggro’s power ceiling, or come close to it. Of course, if you ignore those restrictions other options open up. Andy Cooperfauss famously included a Rebel creature type errata to his cube, and my own approach has been to turn the aggro dial up to 11 (or more) by breaking singleton.

Parnell’s article primarily focuses on the second option, and he identifies well the types of cards that can disrupt the balance of your environment.
parnell

He then states:

I’m not suggesting you specifically cut these types of cards from your cube; rather, I want you to learn to manage their numbers so you don’t choke out aggro decks before they can even get off of their feet.

This is a good point. Hard design rules are rarely optimal. In my own cube, I run some of his identified cards, and omit others. Gideon Jura currently sits on my chopping block.

All in all, his article made me feel very optimistic. It was positively received on StarCityGames, and there doesn’t appear to be a vocal backlash against the suggestion that cards like Wurmcoil Engine or Thragtusk could be cut for balance concerns. Simply “pushing aggro” isn’t enough. I’ve played many cubes where all the best aggro cards were there, but the aggro decks simply couldn’t fight through a field of Moats and Walls of Reverence.

At the same time, it’s a little disappointing that it’s taken so long to get to this point. Imagine you were designing a brand-new Magic-like game, and for years playtest information reported that aggro was underpowered. This would be unthinkable. You’d either make aggro stronger, make anti-aggro weaker, or both. Achieving a balanced environment isn’t terribly difficult. Once you get past the basics of how to balance an environment, you can turn your attention towards finding the most fun ways to balance your environment.

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An Off-Color Joke: Fixing, DGR, Cube, and You

By: CML

famous scene in the hilarious TV show I’m Alan Partridge involves the titular jackass-of-all-trades pitching terrible ideas for new ‘programs’ to the guy who’s about to fire him:

ALAN: Shoestring, Taggart, Spender, Bergerac, Morse. What does that say to you … about, regional detective series?

HAYERS: ‘There’s too many of them?’

ALAN: That’s one way of looking at it … another way of looking at it is: ‘People like them, let’s make some more of them.’

I imagine a similar genesis for new Magic sets:

FORSYTHE: InvasionApocalypseGuildpactDissensionReborn. What does that say to you … about, multi-colored Magic blocks?

MARO: ‘People like them, let’s make some more of them.’

These sets have had a huge impact on Magic history for a number of reasons — R&D is more comfortable pushing power level on gold cards, and I remember the buzz when Apocalypse was released; it’s still one of the greatest sets of all time. The draft formats have also aged well; IPA (Invasion, Planeshift, Apocalypse) was the first block designed specifically with drafting in mind, RGD (Ravnica, Guildpact, Dissension) is inexhaustibly, everlastingly, and overwhelmingly the best draft format of all time, and SCR (Shards of Alara, Conflux, Alara Reborn) was also a blast.

And so we come to RTR block (or ‘DGR’). Triple-RTR was a decent enough format, though I had plenty of time to grow sick of it, and triple-GTC was so terrible I didn’t need time to grow sick of it. These formats will never be played again; good riddance to them; bring on the full block.

I went to two Dragon’s Maze pre-releases. In the first, I won three matches due to color-screw and lost one. Having played precious few games of actual Magic, I felt queasy about the format. The second pre-release went better; my opponents and I both hit our colors with improbable regularity, and I had the privilege of not only winning all four matches, but winning them how I wanted to win them.

This got my hopes up for the full-block draft format, but I’m fairly confident that it’s just terrible.

The primary reason is simple: there’s not enough fixing. In his excellent preview of DGR draft, Ari Lax wrote:

You can expect around sixteen Guildgates per draft, or two per player

— not very many for a three-color format, and anyone who’s drafted before knows how inconsistent evenly split three-color mana-bases are.

The secondary reason is that what fixing there is has too steep a power curve. Gates are terrific, but beyond them you get the frustrating Cluestones. Cluestones are weak cards, as are the Keyrunes at uncommon.

The tertiary reason is a corollary of the first two, viz. you have to prioritize fixing to the point where you’re passing the bombs that you’d splash for with the fixing.

Let me try to relate these assertions to what I see as common Cube design fallacy. In his article on Cube design, Andy Cooperfauss made the following image: 

FixersCoop-1024x6141

The calculations aren’t precise — Cooperfauss writes, “[I] don’t count green fixers [because RGD and SCR] only have one green fixer between them,” when in RGD alone there’s Farseek and Utopia Sprawl — but they’re accurate enough to draw conclusions from. RGD was a ‘durdler’ format, and its fixing — bouncelands and signets — was very powerful. SCR was a ‘beater’ format, and its fixing — Panoramas and Obelisks on one end; Shard-lands and Borderposts on the other — was either quite bad or quite good.

DGR is like SCR in both that it’s a fast format and that the quality of its fixing is polarized, but like RGD in that the density of its fixing is lighter. As a result of this, lots of the fixing doesn’t even get played; as a result of this, everyone gets color-screwed a ton. In other words, my first impression was correct; my second impression was incorrect, but Wizards’ whole marketing scheme nowadays seems to be geared towards making a positive second impression on players, and at least DGR succeeds at that.

I played seven games against a good friend at the last FNM, and only in one of them did we hit our colors; the game was fun and interactive and full of tough decisions. Given that it would have been easy for Wizards to bring about more of these games — simply add one to two Guildgates per drafter, cutting some chaff (like the numerous unplayables in Gatecrash) — why instead is the block this way? I have a handful of conclusions:

-People don’t think they like environments with ‘too much fixing.’ Zac Hill, who ostensibly left Wizards to stop lying in public all the time, nevertheless penned a whopper a few weeks ago:

The thing is, a lot of gold environment trend toward “good-stuff” decks that just aren’t very fun to play.

What, you mean like RGD? What could be more false than that sentence?

-And yet, as false as it is that these formats are not fun, it’s quite true that the perception of them is this way. In other words, people don’t know what they like, and would rather hate what they think they like and like what they think they hate. Contemporary Magic design is based heavily on truckling to this cognitive bias; think of it as a microcosm of how the culture of the game encourages the very same cognitive biases that playing the game should expunge. Zac’s statement is false, but he’s not deliberately lying — he’s somehow convinced himself that he’s telling the truth.

-All of these criticisms apply to the Modo Cube (especially the last one: somehow the Wizards employees have risen to the top of the Magic world to become its only true professionals, and yet they are unaware of what an abortion it is). In its first few iterations, there wasn’t enough fixing because of the ‘good-stuff fallacy’ — never mind that it’d be impossible to make a Cube deck with as good of mana as there is in Standard, that the ‘4c midrange’ decks in Standard are bad anyway, and that trying to draft these decks in Limited is really fun — and splashing was ambitious and stupid as it was in triple-Gatecrash. In the most recent iteration, they added a ton of fixing, but all of it was so low in power-level (Mirage fetches? Bouncelands?) that it wasn’t heavily played; this is comparable to how the DGM Cluestones don’t matter much. Therefore, though over a hundred cards were switched out, it is unsurprising that the decks from August 2012’s Players’ Championship look more or less exactly like the decks from March’s MOCS Championship.

-Another parallel between the Modo Cube and DGR is the steep power curve of the spells; when Tibalt faces off against Jace, it’s as absurd as Catacomb Slug staring down a Blood Baron of Vizkopa.

-The failure of DGR as a draft format is thus mainly a function of Wizards’ self-imposed constraints making it impossible to create a good multi-colored format under NWO. The Modo Cube is the same way: you can give people what they want and have a great Cube, but you cannot give people what they think they want and have a great Cube. Consequently, you get color-screwed and bombed out in both, and the good games are few and far between.

DGR is not the successor to RGD, but the stepchild of SCR. In order to rediscover the complexity and consistency and skill-testing nature of old draft formats, it’s necessary to recognize these flaws of Modern design and eliminate them in your own Cube.

-I therefore suggest adding much, much more fixing to your Cube, and making that fixing both high and flat in power level. Eight lands per drafter is a good number, and in a Cube of size 360 to 450 this is possible with just ONS/ZEN fetches, ABU duals, RGD shocks, M10 buddy-lands, SOM fast-lands, SHM and EVE filters, WWK man-lands, AP and IA pain-lands, FUT ‘future’ lands, and ALA shard-lands. In a larger Cube, you’ll need to start doubling up on fetches, then duals, then shocks — in a 720 it is much better to triple up on fetches than it is to start including trash like Jwar Isle Refuge.

-My recommendations will solve the problems of ‘aggro is terrible,’ ‘there’s not enough archetypes,’ and ‘I get color-screwed too often’ — which are the very same problems that one finds in SOMGTC/AVR, and DGR, respectively, or the failed Limited formats since the inception of NWO. Ironically, color-screw was the main flaw with IPA, the first multi-colored draft format ever — ‘… And thus the whirligig of bad design brings in his revenges.

Inline image 1

‘People like fixing lands, there’s too many of them?’

Next week, I’ll go into more detail about the business arm of Wizards, how it directs R&D more than vice versa, how multi-layer thinking explains the universe, and how these all explain the failures of the Modo Cube.

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In a Strange Land: Anthrocon

By: Jason Waddell

The summer of 2006 was my first summer living away from home. I had taken an internship at a Carnegie Mellon engineering lab, and lived in a ratty sublet house with three friends just off-campus. Aside from working a scant 24 hours a week in the lab, I spent my days exploring Pittsburgh, playing Super Smash Bros. Melee with my roomates and consuming endless gifs of Zidane headbutting Materazzi in  what must have been the most remixed footage since Star Wars Kid.

Very few of our university’s students were Pittsburgh natives, and the area surrounding campus was a bit of a ghost-town during the summer. I eagerly sought out any and all diversions, and found one in the form of a flier advertising an upcoming Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament.

Sunday, June 18th, 3:00, Anthrocon.

I relished the idea of live competition. While working at Major League Gaming I had battled with the best in the world, but always from the comfort of a hotel room, never on the tournament stage. We redoubled our practice efforts, excited to put our best foot forward.

Tournament day rolled around, and I rode in a friend’s car to downtown Pittsburgh. We parked towards the Strip District, and walked past the Westin Hotel on our way to the Convention Center. A group of strangely costumed people loitered in front of the hotel. It was my first convention, and as far as I knew cosplay was par the course for these sorts of events.

We enter the convention center, which was strangely cavernous and vacant. Bustling sounds can be heard, but the halls are virtually empty. It was the last day of the convention, and most of the festivities appeared to have died down. We make our way to the door of the room advertised on the flier.

We had trained for weeks, but simply were not prepared for what was waiting for us on the other side of the door.

anthrocon1

The room was packed wall to wall with furries. I felt like a Hitchcock protagonist. Had I missed some obvious clues? What life choices has led me to, inadvertently or not, attend a furry convention? My mind swirled. Did I misread the sign? Could this all have been avoided if I had taken a second year of Latin in high school? Worse yet, I had dragged two friends into this mess. Did they think I knew?

A squirrel suit directed us to a sign-in sheet. The sheet had three columns:

Name, Animal, Anthrocon Badge Number

I hesitated, but my friend Johnny forged ahead.

Johnny, Duck, 608271

We of course had no badge numbers, but Johnny hadn’t driven all this way for nothing. I scribbled down an animal and random 6-digit ID number and sat down beside him. We turned our attention to a TV where 4 players were warming up. It was a free-for-all, between Kirby, Jigglypuff, Pikachu and Pichu. Naturally none of them had selected a human character. On the next TV were 4 Yoshis, endlessly swallowing and excreting each other. ssbm-yoshi3

In the face of overwhelming evidence, Johnny was forced to concede that this was not, in fact, the tournament for us. We drove home a little dismayed, and a little bewildered.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should learn your Latin roots. You never know when they might help you avoid attending the world’s largest furry convention.

Anthrocon: “Fur, Fun, and So Much More”

anthrocon

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Designing Competitive Games

By: Jason Waddell

Before I got involved in the Magic scene, I worked as a writer for Major League Gaming. One of MLG’s primary contributions, beyond organizing the logistics of an annual competitive video game Pro Circuit, was to tweak the rule sets of games to make them more enjoyable when played at a high level. Out of the box, the gameplay of games like Halo 2 and Super Smash Bros. Melee crumbled when played by players with sufficiently high skill. The strategic depth of the default developer settings was low, and the games became increasingly frustrating as your personal skill level increased.

So MLG changed the settings, removing the sources of frustration.

Naturally, this caused a great deal of tension within each game’s community. Casual players viewed MLG’s actions as “stripping away the fun” and going against “developer intent”, and competitive players saw a game that was inherently broken.

Of course, this divide doesn’t have to exist.

sirlinHandout
The above image is from David Sirlin’s handout ‘Balancing Competitive Multiplayer Games‘, and touches on a lesson that I feel is generally well understood within the halls of Wizards R&D. In Magic’s design, there’s a systematic push to make any given format’s Tier 1 strategies interactive, keeping the hardcore satisfied. Quirkier strategies, like drafting a mill deck, are still available, but kept in check at a notably lower power level.

Regrettably, this understanding does not appear to have been applied to Wizard’s cube design. I frequently read posts by pro players lamenting the quality of Wizards’ cube design and the fact that such a design is used in high-stakes tournament environments like the MOCS and Players Championship. The same sort of community divide plays out once again, with some players calling for the removal of frustrating design elements and another contingency that views the exclusion of cards like Channel and Tinker as “stripping away the fun”.

Perhaps the worst assumption one can make is that the two are mutually exclusive. There’s room in the community for both schools of design to coexist.

That said, I do agree with David Sirlin’s sentiment that Blizzard’s handling of game design captures the best of both worlds. Starcraft 2 can be played by seasoned professionals with a hundred thousand dollars on the line, or by a couple amateurs slinging goofy strategies in Bronze League. There’s no divide because the game works for everyone, with no need for an organization like Major League Gaming to tweak the various strategies.

For a more thorough exploration of the subject, check out this article I wrote for MLG.

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