General Format Appeal Crossover: Why do you play magic?

[Chris Taylor]

While the title sounds too big picture to glean anything meaningful from, I'd like to ask you a question:

What about magic (or other games) do you find fun?

I've heard a few common answers for magic specifically. There's a handful of people who love exploring the new sets and learning about new cards for the novelty, there's a LARGE contingent of players who love the mastery they can express with the game, there's a few people who would be drilling nails in their ears if it meant they could hang out with their friends, some view magic as a creative outlet, etc.

This is important because the reasons for engagement can help you make your experience more engaging, if understood properly. We are game designers, after all. Well, we're metagame designers, Richard Garfield is a game designer. But a lot of the same wisdom can apply.

Exploration (I think) in draft is usually expressed VIA nonlinear combo: think storm more than volt charge. Winning some way conventionally thought impossible or at least inconsistent. We recognize doomsday and brain freeze as powerful magic cards, but by conventional limited thinking they're awful; they don't impact the board at all, they don't generate mana or card advantage, etc etc. This is specifically very hard for cube designers to engineer, as typically cards are there for a reason. Nobody thought to add Dampen thought because blue was too strong and needed one more unplayable common to bring it in line with the other colors, just like nobody adds an alluren to their cube in the hopes that it gets picked 15th each time. As such, this tends to have you designing trying to fool yourself: You add cards in the hopes that your drafters surprise you, and create decks...using the cards you specifically added to surprise you.

hopefully this is coherrent, and hopefully still I'll remember tomorrow my thoughts on:

-Weather there is anything to be gained from the understanding the fighting community has gleaned about the roles of defensive vs offensive characters, possibly how this can be also seen in the differences between bloodbourne vs the dark souls series prior to it, and how to design for the aggro v control matchup with this in mind, given the added dimension of time (mana) and the wrenches this throws in to our borrowed understanding.

-Do you even need to design for your social players in a game specifically designed to involve 5+ hours of gaming with your friends? Do social players tend to favor control decks because it allows them more opportunity to interact with their opponent, rather than aggro decks which can favor typically level 1 style thinking?

-Fighting games tend to have a scale of body/mind/heart, or (with a little more explanation) Execution Ability, Practice and Reads/Prediction. While magic has little in the ways of raw execution to practice (if any), the difference in preference to either A) Practice until most of the games situations become familiar to you and finding out the best course of action in each, or B) forcing your opponent into unfamiliar situations to disrupt the above is interesting to look at, and possibly design for. Is it possible to keep this dichotomy in our naturally changing metagames, as familiarity becomes an increasingly unrealistic goal?

I'd better post this before I delete it all and it becomes brain crack.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Alright, can't sleep, brain taken over by point 1 (the aggro v control one)

Here's a link to an obscenely long video of why bloodborne is so great, by a thoughtful youtuber whose content I enjoy about 20% of. The TLDR of that video is that the souls games (and games similar to them gameplay wise) are more interesting with less defensive options available.

<Begin Summary>

He specifically cites the Shield as the key piece of this puzzle, identifying it as an early conservative strategy enforced by the game psychologically. While not realistically any stronger than dodging or the parry mechanic, it's (in his opinion) provably less fun. Usually this ends up with newer players playing for a long time not having any fun, hitting a wall, starting to experiment, finding the fun way to play the game, and eventually enjoying themselves.
Bloodborne has no shields, and a few other mechanics in place to get players into more aggressive mindsets, encouraging them to participate in the more active, fun style of playing.
This ended up not only with bloodborne being more friendly to the newer audience, but also with those players going back and playing other souls games, and enjoying them more, having played bloodborne.

So by removing a core mechanic, and making the game harder, bloodborne became more accessible, and technically made the series as a whole more accessible.

<End summary>

Getting on with my opinion: lets make some pithy comparisons to magic. While we can see some parallels in the defensive and agressive control and aggro decks, we run into a bit of a stumbling block drawing parallels in that magic's rules heavily favor the defender, so "Eliminating shields" is probably impossible or actively harmful.

Drat, we actually have to think about this don't we.

Most of the reason I started thinking about this was the discussion among my playgroup that Seeker of the Way was quietly becoming the best white card in my cube, ahead of such hits as restoration angel, Path to Exile, and various planeswalkers, something which puzzled me initially.

I can see a few factors in this. At the moment prowess is one of the few well connected archetypes in my cube, so while first picking a green card essentially locked you into Green/Black Midrange because GW, GR and GU were so poorly tied together, White could play aggro or control, and paired well with both blue, red and black in a pinch. What's more, seeker fits well as both an aggro card (as an above curve creature) and a control card (what with the lifelink and all), so that pick kept you incredibly open.

None of this had ever really occurred to me because it was never just a 3/3 lifelink for 2 (Games just weren't that short), so it was never overpowered (the focus of most of my changes). But it was those things when you needed it to be, and didn't ask much of you to accomplish this: very rarely is a limited deck 100% creatures.

Seeker of the way is the best kind of "overpowered card": it's interesting. It's skill testing. It even encourages active, decision based gameplay. It is the bloodborne of cube design to oversimplify.

Spoiler: Fuck I love prowess

Prowess on the whole has been excellent for this sort of thing: unlike most mechanics where you get rewarded for making your deck almost entirely of one, extremely niche thing and being rewarded from it (See Tribal, Storm, Control, Traditional Aggro, Pod, etc) prowess encourages a delicate mix of resources. Too many creatures and suddenly your creatures are seeking glory more than the way, but too few creatures and you end up looking like legacy delver lists: hoping desperately your single threat is enough to finish off your opponent before you get run over. As well, token producing spells like battle screech overlap between these two needs, so you aren't paralyzed during deckbuilding trying to balance those two conflicting wants (as much).

And since your resources are constrained (the stamina bar in this metaphor, I guess?) you can't just hammer away casting brainstorm before combat each turn and hoping your opponent falls over. Firstly, you're unlikely to have that many brainstorms (There's only so many, and it's not like other drafters don't want these cards), your quickly going to run out of noncreature spells with your opponent at 5 or so life, wishing you'd done something differently.

Seeker goes the extra mile by also going along perfectly with the control gameplan: Creatures are for chumps, I only need 1 threat to win the game anyways, and boy do I love not dying.

While seeker of the way is rarely the morphling style control threat to singlehandedly win the game (Though it can be), it is instead more akin to maze of ith: a removal spell that gets stronger the more removal spells you play. (Icy manipulator also works like this). Where icy/maze were stopping you from dying and essentially being regrown when you eventually cast wrath of god, seeker is gaining you life early, which has the effect of putting whatever random creature that gets drawn in a topdeck war on suspend for a while, or eliminating the stronger, game ending, player targeted mode of burn spells. Let's also not forget that seeker is swinging for 3, and when combined with the damage a manabase can do to you, the aggro player is also confronted with their own life total, something usually absent from the traditional control v aggro matchup.

But again, who cares. We know lifegain has been great for control decks, all the way from necropotence through to baneslayer angel. What really makes seeker of the way so much better for an environment than say, Pristine Talisman or Aerial Responder?

Firstly is that it involves attacking, in a way that Aerial Responder really doesn't. Flying makes the calculation easy, and vigilance makes the decision of weather or not to commit brainless. Being on the ground here is key because aggro decks inherently understand blocking, and are capable of it, even if it's "that thing that I can do with my non haste creatures I guess". This way you can basically guarantee that the opponent can interact with seeker, even if they're running a full 23 creatures.

Secondly, it's a creature, and a small one at that. Pristine Talisman is an artifact, and so a lot of traditional, highly prized removal (the second most common thing to see in your opponent's deck, remember) isn't going to be able to stop it. Cards like Baneslayer Angel or Nyx-Fleece Ram work better, but their size kinda says that they have protection from lightning bolt, further limiting the possibility of answers.

Lastly, with the way prowess works, typically it's active more on your turn than your opponent's turn with 1 (instant) instead of 4 (sorcery, enchantment, planeswalker, artifact) card types that matter to it letting you have a lifelinking blocker.

In terms of actually saying something that's not just gushing about prowess, I think what I love about the mechanic is that you make a small number of decisions that matter. Traditionally skill testing cards like Sensi's Divining Top, merfolk looter and brainstorm will let you make all the decisions in the world, but the difference between each of those outcomes are so slight that I can't help but feel that cube might be better off without them. I get that edging out fractions of a percent is what makes poker players good, and by extension what make magic players good, but we're not professionals here, I'm essentially designing a board game I play Monday nights, 3 drinks in at my friends house. (Side note: my drafts start at 7:30, and I regularly find myself leaving at 1am. ANYTHING I can do to expedite this process is appreciated)

Remember all the controversy a while back around the "Should you loot" discussion? (TLDR: You have the second best card in your deck in your hand and nothing else. You deck has one upgrade and aprox 22 downgrades, do you loot? Yes, you do.)
Despite the consensus, that example was about the simplest case possible. What if you have 4 cards in your hand instead of one? What if the cards are more unclear in value? (I think his example involved control magic, lightning blast, and a whole bunch of c- limited cards. Think hill giant. Not cards we describe as being like hill giant, but actual hill giant)

What if you have to weigh looting at the end of your opponent's turn for more information against looting now because sudden shock could be in their deck? Just think about how one specific card could change your line, then repeat for the other 358 cards in your average cube. If even 10 of those cards have a bearing on the actual situation, this is overwhelmingly complex. Not in the hyperbolic holy fucking shit look at how good at magic I am sense, but more in the most people aren't going to think about this sense.

These are interesting discussions to have, but I've never seen a game where they amounted to more than a percent or two either way.

On the other hand, we have looter il-kor, who minimizes on this immensely. You can only ever loot at one time, and you probably should be looting every turn because he can't block for the most part anyways.

Gah rambling again. Maybe there's something useful in here. It's 4am local, and I'm not sure I've actually said anything helpful. Maybe when I inevitably return to this sometime this afternoon I'll have a point, or you folks will have figured out one.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

You are indeed rambling, but it was enjoyable to read I don't think I can answer every line of thought, so I'll just stick with your opening question.

What about magic (or other games) do you find fun?

I like crafting an environment. I've sank countless hours into (the old) Sim City's, building sprawling cities. When I'm the DM with D&D, I write my own adventure, taking place in a world of my own. In Magic this drive led me to building and rebuilding (multiple times) my own cube.

I like planning ahead. Deck building games like Dominion, Ascension, 7 Wonders, and yes, Magic (when drafting and when playing) let you do that.

I like getting creative. One of the great joys of Magic is that there are (for all intents and purposes) an infinite number of different strategies and combinations to make, and I've built countless different decks.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Getting on with my opinion: lets make some pithy comparisons to magic. While we can see some parallels in the defensive and agressive control and aggro decks, we run into a bit of a stumbling block drawing parallels in that magic's rules heavily favor the defender, so "Eliminating shields" is probably impossible or actively harmful.

Is this true though? The NWO era seems much more about making the game pressure focused. When we draw the shield analogy, is there room for calibrating how we draw the equivalence to MTG--what is the "shield"? If we are thinking of a "shield" as a sort of "security blanket" mechanic, it might not even be best attributable to the idea of defensive plays.

The only souls game I played was Demon souls (which I loved and sunk hours upon hours into). I was a big ninja gaiden black player before that, and just ran demon souls like NGB: treating it like a fighting engine that happened to have stumbled into an adventure/role playing context. Neither NGB nor Demon souls were ever hard games, they just required you to memorize attack patterns, chaining reactive plays into proactive plays. Rolling and dodging were--generally-- the best ways to do that. This was the play style that all players I encountered online in demon souls had adapted.

It just was initially very difficult for a lot of players to learn this, and even when they did they would insist on playing the game in the manner it did not wish to be played, resulting in frustration. Having the shield in Demon Souls was really important because it made the game much more accessible to new players, who were experiencing a type of game philosophy most of them were entirely unfamiliar with.

You have to remember, when Demon Souls was released, it was a title that by conventional game design standards should have either failed or been a niche success. Bloodborne is coming after approaching a decade of refinement and--more importantly--player familiarity with these mechanics. Its a lot less bold in 2015 to take the shield away, than it would have been in 2009.

 

[ahadabans]

Nice read. I'll answer the "What do find fun about Magic and other games?" question as well.

I'll be specific here with Magic - I like cube and it brought me back to the game because Magic is ultimately flawed IMO. It's a cool game but it has a host of balance issues, mainly from having an ever growing list of cards but also due to the inherently random nature of drawing cards from a deck. Cube is a custom format essentially that offers the potential to fix Magic (via exclusion essentially) what doesn't work well in the game. Reality is, that's been much harder to do that I expected (only part of that is due to the random nature of card draw). But it has certainly been a lot of fun trying.

Shifting gears to other games...

Like Onderzeebot, when I DM I also create my own story and sometimes my own world (though lately I've been exploring interesting worlds and crafting my own stories in them - like Warhammer and Dragon Age). What I always do though is create my own gaming system (or at least modify existing ones). I generally never play the same system twice and if I use a commercial system I almost never run them vanilla. Been doing that my whole life since I was first introduced to table top RPG's as a young kid by an older neighbor kid. He would buy all these systems and use me as his guinea pig, so I was introduced to literally dozens of systems very early and that made me curious and experimental.

Ultimately, I'm a tinkerer. My main drive behind wanting to DM and manage a cube is in exploring game mechanics. Telling a story is fun, but it's not the main reason I do it. I've created dozens of original games. Some good some not so good. My designs though tend to favor elegance over pretty anything else. Simply put, I prefer a weaker mechanic that is clean, simple and easy to use over one that may be technically better but is complicated, time consuming to use and/or is confusing. And I've tended more in that direction as I've gotten older too. For example, some roleplaying games manage hit location wounds and armor and have very detailed combat rules. It's more realistic but it's a management nightmare and drags combat encounters out even if you get comfortable with everything. D&D has just the one health total, a much simpler D20 mechanic but it's too simple. So I've gravitated towards systems that use a single health total and limited options in combat (keeping thing moving) but manage wounds (some of which will have similar effects as if you'd tracked locations - like a gammy leg or whatever) as well as options that open up if you score higher degrees of success.

Long story less long, I tend to apply that same mentality to cube design, but without using custom cards it's much harder to effectively do.

 

[Diakonov]

So I went a little crazy over the last year and acquired something like 40 board games. I've been completely obsessed. Every time I read about a new type of game mechanism that sounds interesting, I have trouble not thinking about it until I've explored it for myself.

People often tend to categorize modern board games on a spectrum of "multiplayer solitaire" vs. "highly interactive." As you might expect, multiplayer solitaire is considered pejorative, but I've come to realize that this is misguided. Let me explain.

Most of my favorite board games (but not all) are highly interactive in a very specific way: games where I can proactively do something to take advantage of future decisions that I predict my opponents will make. This doesn't translate well to magic, or really any two player game, since it is zero-sum. Examples: Keyflower, Food Chain Magnate, Dominant Species, etc.

Now, this doesn't mean that multiplayer solitaire games are bad. They simply scratch a different itch. Dominion is often considered multiplayer solitaire (for the record, multiplayer solitaire is almost always a bit of an exaggeration, especially by those who are less experienced in a game and feel unfairly powerless to stop the winner) but I liken it to a model airplane competition. You are competing to see who can build the sleekest, most efficient, and most beautiful engine possible.

This is how I look at aggro and combo deckbuilding. Sometimes I'm more in the mood for drafting a slower, more interactive build, but I also get a kick out of building a terrifying killing machine. Sure, it tends to autopilot a bit harder, but there's still a lot of satisfaction to be found from winding up your creation and watching it fly. As much as I love playing games of magic, I have to admit, drafting and deckbuilding is my favorite part of the game.

I should add that in an ideal world, my cube would generate aggro decks that at least require some sequencing decisions and interesting tactical input toward the final stages of the game.

EDIT: There should be a separate prize awarded at the end of a draft for "most beautiful deck," art exhibit-style.

 

[shamizy]

I've been a sucker for strategy games since I was a kid, Magic scratches that itch for me with constantly changing game being reinvented every year. Magic games are like a puzzle to solve with the various factors of resource management, sequencing and formulating a plan to reach your endgame. I enjoy the process of having to read, react and predict what will happen over the course of the game. This is something I didn't appreciate as much when I first played the game on my school bus back in 5th/6th grade where we basically just ran monsters into eachother all game long (Heartwood Treefolk is pretty busted against casual green decks). It wasn't until I was reintroduced to it around 4 years ago by a classmate after a Physics class that I saw the depth and strategic nuance to the game.

Around a year after that, I discovered Cube and that let me delve deeper into the game design aspects of it. I didn't know that it was something that I'd love initially, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. I loved creating decks and working out synergies on my own and Cube gave me the chance to craft my own environment and put my experiments out there for testing. I love that I can make a few swaps here and there in my list and completely change the draft process and deck possibilities. I love playing Limited because it's constantly challenging you to make decisions on the fly and absorb information with every new pack/pick. Having a Cube that would allow me to do this whenever I wanted with my friends was awesome. Even if I only get to fire 8 man drafts a few times a year, I'm still having a ton of fun collecting the cards and updating my cube with foils when possible, figuring out ways to support new archetypes, and every spoiler season I'm browsing the latest news to see if there are any cool new entries.

On Magic as a whole, I just think it's one of the best games around all things considered. There's constant innovation with new sets, a ton of flexibility when it comes to deckbuilding, and there are formats to scratch just about any itch you might have. If I want to play competitively I've got some Modern staples and two decks on hand or my friends and I pool our Standard collections (mostly from Limited and Prereleases) and borrow pieces for decks. If I want to play a more casual game trying to do cool shit, I've got EDH decks on hand. If I want to play a Limited format, I can draft the latest set at a store or my own cube if I want a higher powered setting. If I want to tinker and work on what I've built, I've got decks across multiple formats on hand AND my Cube to go back to.

There's just so much to do and so many different ways to explore Magic as a game, that's the biggest appeal of it to me.