Was it really about that for everyone though? That might be why we all shouted past each other and this felt like a really bad exchange.
I'm not at all convinced that maximizing variance reduction leads to the best version of this game. Didn't the mothership even write an article about how much luck plays a vital role in the appeal and success of the game?
My criticism of Magic still stands. I've watched competitive matches before and if you can see both sides of the table the outcome of the game is often pretty predictable. That's not to say surprises don't happen or bad play won't decide a close match, but games of Magic quickly turn into 20 point leads with 5 minutes left in the 4th quarter. This is especially true in constructed where matchups are lopsided.
And you know what helps with that? More variance. It's a big reason cube is so sweet because singleton automatically increases variance.
One of the interesting things experimenting with my combo list is having really high powered cards in the pool and seeing how a larger power gap in cards can alter the game. Sometimes you toss a few of those broken cards in an otherwise clunky deck and they can win you games. I don't think that sort of meta is the best version of Magic (sticking to the "what would a tight competitive cube look like"), but I also think we tend to go too far in a lot of these hypotheticals. Like low powered cubing is cool and all but just cutting everything that's above curve and forcing people to make
Masked Admirers your deck allstar is a really tedious way to play this game. ETB creatures warp your meta. This is true. But genocide on your cube and removing every single ETB creature from it is going to make for some suboptimal game play.
So again, maybe there's some place in the middle of all this? Everything in moderation. Where the best/most competitive version of this game is not hellbent of getting to a chess level of negative variance but instead embracing some of the benefits from the games natural variance and accepting that there can be upsides to it. Back to thoughtseize, I think the card is powerful but also very skill intensive. And I think it can have a positive impact on your meta. While I don't like mass discard (or heinous shit like Mind Twist), single card targeted removal is a really great mechanic in black and I think most cubes should have a healthy amount of it. It keeps super unfair decks honest and it gives black something valuable to bring to the disruptive/aggro archetype.
Thank you. To put the problem a little bit more into context, and get your input on it, one of the problems with the game is that you can put down a lot of time and money, travel half-way across the world to a tournament, and be eliminated very early by factors that aren't really in your control. This is especially a factor as tournament size grows, and became longer: variance that doesn't effect a small tournament significantly, becomes more impactful the longer the tournament continues--it has more opportunities to manifest itself.
This is a problem with the way that prizes are distributed, and making enough money to be a professional player, because obviously its the top finishes--that are so hard to consistently place--that award the most winnings.
Magic's e-sport scene is really bad compared to other real e-sports, and its extremely hard to make a living off of it exclusively. Top players like Owen Turtenwald end up living at home with their parents, because the pay is so bad. This is bad, because in order for the competitive scene to continue to thrive, and a vibrant competitive scene is a tool to drive sales, you need to be able to attract a continuous pool of young talent.
Now, there are a number of different factors that contribute to this, but one of those is the basic structure of the game itself, which often times finds itself having to serve two masters: casual and competitive--variance and low variance. If I have to dig up the Owen video where he talks about the standard bans from a few months ago I can, but the crux of the issue is that you have simultaneous printings in a standard pool that undermine each of those respective preferences: e.g.
reflector mage and
woodland wanderer.
Real e-sports are very consistent, and if they aren't (say hearthstone) they at least have the benefit of not requiring the expense and time of RL travel, while also being much easier to cast and watch. To put this in perspective for you, an e-sport that I enjoy watching, Gears of War, has been dominated by Optic Gaming for about a year now. If you have a good enough team in GOW, you can consistently place first at events, which means you can consistently money, which means you can earn 6 figures. Your best players that you want to show off to the world, aren't living at home with mommy and daddy, and if I'm a young player looking for a competitive outlet, GOW or CS or a number other e-sports are much better options than, say, MTG, which is dominated by older players making poor money. This in turn impacts the portion of the youth market that MTG can compete in.
Its about a question of the future of the game, where its going, and if it can compete in this new world. These last standard formats have been particularly frustrating. The repeated bannings, the terrible formats, the creation of their new
play design team, you can tell that there is some realization of a disconnect, an understanding that their current system is not working. And the community does itself no favors, a year or so ago the player base (including some of its competitive elements) were so off-kilter that they were advocating for
modern being a valid pro tour format.
One thing that we
might do is look at some of the successful e-sports, and note that their approach is not to simultaneously appeal to casual players and competitive players--variance and non-variance. They understand the value of both to their brand, and their competitive formats are engineered to reduce variance and encourage teamwork by nerfing the power level of effects across the board. I want to emphasis that this type of format is not intended to appeal to the broad player base, its intended to appeal to a minority of players, and isn't particularly enjoyable outside of that minority. You would probably hate any iteration of a competitive focused format. It wouldn't be based on loud haymakers, sweet, or encourage creativity--it would be
repetitive,
reliable, and
consistent. A lot of the CS maps have been played for over two decades now, and the weapon lineup is essentially unchanged.
To put this in perspective, at high levels of GOW competitive play, the shotgun with its random spread is a source of controversy, and has been the subject of several patches, to make it more predictable. But than GOW is a 6 figure game for its best players, and MTG is a live with your parents game for its best players. What do you expect.
Now, I do want to plant a flag here, and acknowledge that that level of variance reduction is probably not possible in this game, however, some level of core variance reduction has to occur, and it has to occur even if we never reach those heights of player prizes. The critical thing is that the gap be closed by some reasonable percentage. It can occur in conjunction with a number of other tweaks, but it
has to occur. Its BS to expect people to put down money and time to travel, play well, and than not money due to factors beyond their control, built into the game's intentional card design.
This hasn't been a focus of R&Ds design, which didn't really have e-sport competition for their target demographic until relatively recently, and their focus for the pro tour (and competitive magic) was essentially a giant toy advertisement, with kids making sums of money that seemed astronomical to them then. Thats entire world is gone or going, and if recent format problems are any indication, R&D is really struggling to adapt. You can't print a card like marvel and tell me you're capable of identifying variance issues, which isn't a huge surprise, because its not really mattered before to them. Similarly, its not really mattered for the player base. Its kind of alarming when we've having this discussion, and we can't even acknowledge the reality that
a mechanic that disrupts the mulligan rules we put into effect to address our game's inherient consistency issues at the competitive level, might be a problem. Remember, these are typically marathon tournaments running over 10 rounds, spread across several days. The way you experience variance here is
not the same as your three round FNM or kitchen table session.
This is whats frustrating about this, you guys keep on wanting me to compromise on this point for whatever reason, and I really can't, at least not if I'm being remotely honest. We're playing a game of issue spotting, and its critical that we're able to acknowledge this type of mechanic is an issue. This is a hard enough needle to thread as it is, but now we're deliberately giving up easy percentage points.
Thats not say one can't come up with a compelling argument against, but it has to be a
compelling argument. It has to be put under some form of strict scrutiny, because consistency is such a high ideal for such a project,
possibly the highest: there should be a critical format need, and it shouldn't be possible to be replaced by any other card. Otherwise, we aren't really doing anything here.
If you don't have that specific set of problems (and none of us do in the real world), it doesn't really matter.
