landofMordor
Administrator
What does a successful game share in common with a catchy song, an arresting painting, or a delicious gourmet dish?
Hm, that's an ill-defined question. Let's try another: Which of the four following cards is most appealing to you?
Shock One
: Instant -- Deal 2 damage to target planeswalker. Flavor text
Shock Two: Instant -- Deal 2 damage to any target. Flavor text
Shock Three: Instant -- Kicker ; Deal 2 to any target; if it was kicked deal 4 instead. Flavor text
Shock Four: Sorcery -- Flash; Kicker and/or ; Select target opponent and up to one other target. That opponent mills 20 cards, then gains 6 life, then puts the top 20 cards of their graveyard on top of their library. If you chose a second target, that opponent loses 6 life and you deal 2 damage to that target; otherwise, that opponent loses 4 life. Note all untapped permanents you control, then tap and untap them. Empty your mana pool. Shuffle all the cards in your library that you haven't looked at this game. Put up to three cards from outside the game into your graveyard, then phase them out until the game ends. Exile all World Enchantments. Flavor text
... Let's talk complexity.
A game is "a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" (Suits' definition). Unlike other areas of human life where we are faced with unnecessary obstacles (e.g. participating in the democratic process, or flying internationally), a game is fun, and no small part of that comes from the interesting decisions we make during gameplay.
Sid Meier has done a decent job of summarizing what an interesting decision entails:
- Player has sufficient information about the choice and its effects
- Decisions have persistence, cost-benefit tradeoffs, or clear causality
- Decisions incentivize players to choose differently under different circumstances
To borrow from another philosopher of games, C. Thi Nguyen: games are the art form of agency. Games distill human agency, the act of doing, in the same way that a painting distills the act of seeing or a song the act of hearing. Just like the subtle, complex textures of Van Gogh's impasto technique lend his "Sunflowers" a heightened visual weight and grandeur, complexity in a game can yield a more compelling agential landscape.
There are several kinds of complexity, some of which I owe to a LPR episode (which itself derives from MaRo, as all Magic theory does):
- Visual complexity (difficulty for the brain to parse what it's seeing, be it rules text or graphic elements)
- Comprehension complexity (difficulty to correctly use a game piece)
- Interaction complexity (MaRo calls this "board complexity")
- Tracking complexity (difficulty of mental math, assessing the game state, etc)
- Strategic complexity (difficulty of making strategically sound choices)
- Metagame complexity (amount of meta-game needs like: tokens, dice, Companion-like deckbuilding restrictions, dexterity requirements, etc)
These types of complexity are all somewhat convoluted -- to return to my toy examples at the top, "Shock Four" offers a lot more strategic complexity than the alternatives, but also has more of all the other kinds of complexity! Even weirder, these latter complexities are partly what generate the strategic complexity in the first place! Complexity is extremely... well, complex, but it's still possible to sketch the contours of the tool using a few heuristics.
However, if the amount of interesting decisions remains identical between two designs, complexity cannot add mechanical value. If you only have one land in play, there is no longer a meaningful mechanical difference between "Shock Two" and "Shock Three". Though this example is highly specific and somewhat unlikely, it illustrates two further properties of ludic complexity: 1) the additional decision-making that a complex game piece offers over a simpler one is contextual, and 2) if two designs offer identical decisions, additional complexity can't be a value-add. I'll return to the former point in much greater detail later on, but the latter property begs the question -- what's the harm in complexity, even if it adds only marginal value?
Complexity that adds negligible value should generally be avoided, because complexity can spoil decisions which are usually fun. As a toy example, consider why Wizards doesn't print reminder text on every French Vanilla they print -- it adds visual and comprehension complexity that isn't necessary for gameplay. As another example, I loved Skaab Wrangler's play patterns in MID along with decayed Zombie tokens, but occasionally I found myself with too many Zombies and the decisions became drudgery. "Shock Four" suffers from this same over-saturated decision tree to resolve what is usually "just" 2 damage. Eventually, one's appetite for making an initially interesting decision is satiated, and the novelty fades into tax-season tedium. To return to C. Thi Nguyen's definition of games as the "medium of agency," this "complexity satiation" is the same kind of tipping point as when an overplayed pop song's catchy hook starts to annoy the listener, or when the third slice of pizza isn't as satisfying as the first two.
Even though complexity adds a lot of fun to art (including games), there is value in moderation.
Much of this threshold depends strongly on the player's familiarity with Magic. For greenhorns, even cards with full reminder text prove difficult to comprehend, much less play properly. And even with a decade of Magic under my belt, I still get fatigued more quickly during my first draft of a new set, since I have to pause and read every card slowly to avoid misplays. (It's also why I rarely accept invitations to fully-custom cubes, chaos drafts, or cubes with a high density of illegible old-border cards.) Repetition breeds familiarity. Uniqueness breeds complexity.
Even among players with equal exposure to Magic's rules and game pieces, their motivations will shape the complexities they find most interesting. My friend who built a "Dinos Driving Cars" commander deck may be less interested in comprehending or tracking my game pieces than fiddling with Crew costs on his own playmat. Tammy may be more interested in growing the stats of their 100/100 creature; Jenny may prefer the interaction complexity of a build-around; Spike may desire the strategic complexity of a hard-to-master interactive card; Vorthos may draft with stipulations to pair Tourach with his Hymn (true story!). Unless you know your group very well, assume that you'll have a wide set of motivations among your players.
Luckily, many well-established Cube design heuristics already accommodate a lot of this diversity: divergent macro- and micro-archetypes that will naturally have different decision trees, build-arounds and bombs to widen or simplify decision trees; deck customization through Draft... Most importantly, the cube's drafters have agency to opt in to the style of deck that appeals most to them. But, when practical, Cube designers can also incorporate complexity into their cube design process.
Terror: I still run Terror over several strictly-stronger options. Terror comes with a nonzero cost to complexity -- it has extraneous rules text which tracks card attributes (I don't run any regeneration, and run very few artifact creatures). I don't care, because I adore Adam Rex's 10th Edition art, such that a decision to pick this card is made more "interesting" by the aesthetic pleasure of the object itself. Moreover, Terror has a readily available heuristic in my audience's minds, which shortcuts the comprehension complexity of the game piece. I don't think I can completely saturate my format with meaningless lines of rules text like Terror's, but as an exception, it's a-okay.
Fury: This Elemental comes with a lot of strategic complexity. Do I Evoke? if so, what card to pitch? what things to target? There's some rules complexity, too, as Fury doesn't have reminder text for its fairly rare keyword. And Fury may interact in new ways with a huge variety of other cards. However, the strategic and interaction complexity map neatly onto the traits identified by Sid Meier -- Fury's effect is high-agency, persistent, dynamic, and costly -- which is exactly what I want from a power outlier in my Red section. Fury's complexity is precisely the benefit of including it! (As an aside, the card's high rate of Constructed play will do a lot to minimize the comprehension complexity.)
Duress: I'm currently on two versions of Duress, the Urza's Saga version and the Japanese alt-art from the Mystical Archive. The effect is grokkable and simple, relatively speaking, and the card is very well-known. My English copy alleviates some burden on the Japanese one. And the strategic complexity of Duress is really nice, even compared to other hand-hate effects: the "noncreature" rider limits any analysis paralysis, the choice I make will depend dynamically on the game state, and the choice is persistent. There's one other advantage my JPN Duress has: running a second copy of it means I don't need to run the much-less-elegant Dread Fugue. Fugue offers some real mechanical upside, but it's lesser-known, and so that mechanical upside has to be weighed against the cost of the additional complexity. In my case, in a cube where many important spells sit at 3 MV and/or are noncreature, Fugue doesn't offer enough upside to be worth removing a well-known, perfectly functional, simple design like Duress.
At the risk of being too reductive, here's what I learned in this exercise:
- All the types of complexity can matter.
- Repetition breeds familiarity. Uniqueness breeds complexity.
- For complex designs, find what they offer to your design over against alternatives.
- If the marginal utility of a complex design is small in your context, then the most salient feature of the card is its complexity, not its utility.
- Non-singleton designs have a natural complexity advantage over singleton cubes of the same size.
- Hidden or one-time complexity is more beginner-friendly than the alternatives.
Please post below with thoughts and feedback! Are there types of complexity that I missed? What's the tipping point for your complexity threshold? What cards are worth the complexity in your cube formats? Thanks for reading, and cheers.
Hm, that's an ill-defined question. Let's try another: Which of the four following cards is most appealing to you?
Shock One
: Instant -- Deal 2 damage to target planeswalker. Flavor textShock Two
: Instant -- Deal 2 damage to any target. Flavor textShock Three
: Instant -- Kicker ; Deal 2 to any target; if it was kicked deal 4 instead. Flavor textShock Four
: Sorcery -- Flash; Kicker and/or ; Select target opponent and up to one other target. That opponent mills 20 cards, then gains 6 life, then puts the top 20 cards of their graveyard on top of their library. If you chose a second target, that opponent loses 6 life and you deal 2 damage to that target; otherwise, that opponent loses 4 life. Note all untapped permanents you control, then tap and untap them. Empty your mana pool. Shuffle all the cards in your library that you haven't looked at this game. Put up to three cards from outside the game into your graveyard, then phase them out until the game ends. Exile all World Enchantments. Flavor text... Let's talk complexity.
What makes a decision interesting?
A game is "a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" (Suits' definition). Unlike other areas of human life where we are faced with unnecessary obstacles (e.g. participating in the democratic process, or flying internationally), a game is fun, and no small part of that comes from the interesting decisions we make during gameplay.
Sid Meier has done a decent job of summarizing what an interesting decision entails:
- Player has sufficient information about the choice and its effects
- Decisions have persistence, cost-benefit tradeoffs, or clear causality
- Decisions incentivize players to choose differently under different circumstances
To borrow from another philosopher of games, C. Thi Nguyen: games are the art form of agency. Games distill human agency, the act of doing, in the same way that a painting distills the act of seeing or a song the act of hearing. Just like the subtle, complex textures of Van Gogh's impasto technique lend his "Sunflowers" a heightened visual weight and grandeur, complexity in a game can yield a more compelling agential landscape.
Not all complexity is created equal.
There are several kinds of complexity, some of which I owe to a LPR episode (which itself derives from MaRo, as all Magic theory does
):- Visual complexity (difficulty for the brain to parse what it's seeing, be it rules text or graphic elements)
- Comprehension complexity (difficulty to correctly use a game piece)
- Interaction complexity (MaRo calls this "board complexity")
- Tracking complexity (difficulty of mental math, assessing the game state, etc)
- Strategic complexity (difficulty of making strategically sound choices)
- Metagame complexity (amount of meta-game needs like: tokens, dice, Companion-like deckbuilding restrictions, dexterity requirements, etc)
These types of complexity are all somewhat convoluted -- to return to my toy examples at the top, "Shock Four" offers a lot more strategic complexity than the alternatives, but also has more of all the other kinds of complexity! Even weirder, these latter complexities are partly what generate the strategic complexity in the first place! Complexity is extremely... well, complex, but it's still possible to sketch the contours of the tool using a few heuristics.
Heuristic 1: Complexity facilitates and hinders interesting decisions
Complexity exists to permit more interesting decisions. "Shock Two" above usually offers more decisions than "Shock One" -- its rules text will interact with more cards, and the card itself offers a larger decision tree. This is a primary reason why complex cards exist. Complex cards just do more stuff, which will create emergent interesting decisions without needing to be designed explicitly. A related use of complexity is to clearly establish the decision space of the players (e.g., unambiguous rules/reminder text, a systematic rule set, or game pieces like tokens & counters to track stat changes). This kind of complexity aids in the clarity of rules, adding to players' decision-making capabilities.However, if the amount of interesting decisions remains identical between two designs, complexity cannot add mechanical value. If you only have one land in play, there is no longer a meaningful mechanical difference between "Shock Two" and "Shock Three". Though this example is highly specific and somewhat unlikely, it illustrates two further properties of ludic complexity: 1) the additional decision-making that a complex game piece offers over a simpler one is contextual, and 2) if two designs offer identical decisions, additional complexity can't be a value-add. I'll return to the former point in much greater detail later on, but the latter property begs the question -- what's the harm in complexity, even if it adds only marginal value?
Complexity that adds negligible value should generally be avoided, because complexity can spoil decisions which are usually fun. As a toy example, consider why Wizards doesn't print reminder text on every French Vanilla they print -- it adds visual and comprehension complexity that isn't necessary for gameplay. As another example, I loved Skaab Wrangler's play patterns in MID along with decayed Zombie tokens, but occasionally I found myself with too many Zombies and the decisions became drudgery. "Shock Four" suffers from this same over-saturated decision tree to resolve what is usually "just" 2 damage. Eventually, one's appetite for making an initially interesting decision is satiated, and the novelty fades into tax-season tedium. To return to C. Thi Nguyen's definition of games as the "medium of agency," this "complexity satiation" is the same kind of tipping point as when an overplayed pop song's catchy hook starts to annoy the listener, or when the third slice of pizza isn't as satisfying as the first two.
Even though complexity adds a lot of fun to art (including games), there is value in moderation.
Heuristic 2: Complexity depends on audience.
Just like two people will have different tolerances for prog metal or Impressionist paintings, different players will have unique thresholds for complexity in a game.Much of this threshold depends strongly on the player's familiarity with Magic. For greenhorns, even cards with full reminder text prove difficult to comprehend, much less play properly. And even with a decade of Magic under my belt, I still get fatigued more quickly during my first draft of a new set, since I have to pause and read every card slowly to avoid misplays. (It's also why I rarely accept invitations to fully-custom cubes, chaos drafts, or cubes with a high density of illegible old-border
cards.) Repetition breeds familiarity. Uniqueness breeds complexity.Even among players with equal exposure to Magic's rules and game pieces, their motivations will shape the complexities they find most interesting. My friend who built a "Dinos Driving Cars" commander deck may be less interested in comprehending or tracking my game pieces than fiddling with Crew costs on his own playmat. Tammy may be more interested in growing the stats of their 100/100 creature; Jenny may prefer the interaction complexity of a build-around; Spike may desire the strategic complexity of a hard-to-master interactive card; Vorthos may draft with stipulations to pair Tourach with his Hymn (true story!). Unless you know your group very well, assume that you'll have a wide set of motivations among your players.
Luckily, many well-established Cube design heuristics already accommodate a lot of this diversity: divergent macro- and micro-archetypes that will naturally have different decision trees, build-arounds and bombs to widen or simplify decision trees; deck customization through Draft... Most importantly, the cube's drafters have agency to opt in to the style of deck that appeals most to them. But, when practical, Cube designers can also incorporate complexity into their cube design process.
Heuristic 3: Cube complexity is a design resource.
Selecting a card for a cube is a balancing act between (at least) flavor, mechanics, power, and all the kinds of complexity. This is a very context-sensitive process, so to illustrate, I'll choose some case studies from my main cube (whose names definitely did not describe my mental state while writing this article).Terror: I still run Terror over several strictly-stronger options. Terror comes with a nonzero cost to complexity -- it has extraneous rules text which tracks card attributes (I don't run any regeneration, and run very few artifact creatures). I don't care, because I adore Adam Rex's 10th Edition art, such that a decision to pick this card is made more "interesting" by the aesthetic pleasure of the object itself. Moreover, Terror has a readily available heuristic in my audience's minds, which shortcuts the comprehension complexity of the game piece. I don't think I can completely saturate my format with meaningless lines of rules text like Terror's, but as an exception, it's a-okay.
Fury: This Elemental comes with a lot of strategic complexity. Do I Evoke? if so, what card to pitch? what things to target? There's some rules complexity, too, as Fury doesn't have reminder text for its fairly rare keyword. And Fury may interact in new ways with a huge variety of other cards. However, the strategic and interaction complexity map neatly onto the traits identified by Sid Meier -- Fury's effect is high-agency, persistent, dynamic, and costly -- which is exactly what I want from a power outlier in my Red section. Fury's complexity is precisely the benefit of including it! (As an aside, the card's high rate of Constructed play will do a lot to minimize the comprehension complexity.)
Duress: I'm currently on two versions of Duress, the Urza's Saga version and the Japanese alt-art from the Mystical Archive. The effect is grokkable and simple, relatively speaking, and the card is very well-known. My English copy alleviates some burden on the Japanese one. And the strategic complexity of Duress is really nice, even compared to other hand-hate effects: the "noncreature" rider limits any analysis paralysis, the choice I make will depend dynamically on the game state, and the choice is persistent. There's one other advantage my JPN Duress has: running a second copy of it means I don't need to run the much-less-elegant Dread Fugue. Fugue offers some real mechanical upside, but it's lesser-known, and so that mechanical upside has to be weighed against the cost of the additional complexity. In my case, in a cube where many important spells sit at 3 MV and/or are noncreature, Fugue doesn't offer enough upside to be worth removing a well-known, perfectly functional, simple design like Duress.
At the risk of being too reductive, here's what I learned in this exercise:
- All the types of complexity can matter.
- Repetition breeds familiarity. Uniqueness breeds complexity.
- For complex designs, find what they offer to your design over against alternatives.
- If the marginal utility of a complex design is small in your context, then the most salient feature of the card is its complexity, not its utility.
- Non-singleton designs have a natural complexity advantage over singleton cubes of the same size.
- Hidden or one-time complexity is more beginner-friendly than the alternatives.
Please post below with thoughts and feedback! Are there types of complexity that I missed? What's the tipping point for your complexity threshold? What cards are worth the complexity in your cube formats? Thanks for reading, and cheers.
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