General The evolution of Magic...

ahadabans

ahadabans

MCMcEmcee said:
I mean I like anything that lets me see more cards, that's why I run so many looters.
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I've been making games and modifying existing games for 25+ years. It's actually pretty hard to straight up break a game no matter what rule you change or introduce. Trust me. The game changes, sure, but almost never to the point where the game just stops working.

What you have to ask yourself when you start down this path is whether you are OK with messing with the game you are changing. Because Magic has both a tournament and online component to it, I think the rules are held in higher regard than most other games (board games or whatever). Coming from a roleplaying background (where most rules are nothing more than suggestions), I do not revere rule sets at all. In fact, I think they are there to be broken because they almost always can be improved.

For me, Magic often has too much variance. I've been fighting that for as long as I've played the game. Many deck ideas I've hatched fell apart because I couldn't get it consistent enough. Cube has helped a lot because all the cards are impactful and because the mana base is so solid. But there are still too many times when games devolve into one guy just losing because he just didn't draw what he needed (not always due to bad deck building). I personally dislike it. I think it can be improved.

We all revere scry. Why? Because it's an amazing ability for increasing card quality. Well, why not take that idea farther? What if you had a weaker version of scry available every turn to you and it wasn't dependent on being an ability printed on a card? That's what I was going for with the exile/draw step. Yes, it will change the game. But it doesn't have to completely turn it on it's head. Maybe you could get a group of elite magic players together, give them this rule and they could break the game to the point where it collapsed on itself. Maybe, but I doubt it. I'm not convinced the game can't already be broken. If the current game was unbreakable, there wouldn't be banned lists.
 
CML

CML

Contributor
An old parlor game among friends of mine has been to rank sports and games by the amount of variance. For example, soccer > football ≈ baseball > basketball, the simple heuristic is "how continuous is the scoring"? Magic has much less variance than poker and it is much less likely a terrible Magic player will beat a good one to the point where a scrub winning a big tournament, which happens all the time in poker, would be a statistical anomaly. On the other side of things, a Starcraft game is far more sensitive to variations in skill and with a similar skill discrepancy one might win 65% of Magic games and 95% of SC games vs. a given opponent. Chess is somewhere around Starcraft, I don't know where the sports are.

Personally I like the amount of variance in Magic, playing other card games where the decks do the same thing every time (as is true, fundamentally, for most new deckbuilding games) gets old quickly, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with disliking MTG's variance. However, I'm not sure how much sense it makes to complain about its being too high without being a strong enough player to "really know"
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I think it's pretty valid from a player perspective to complain about just about anything. You play games to enjoy them, and if something is limiting that, certainly voice your opinion. From a design perspective you have to consider whether fixing such a complaint actually makes the game more enjoyable. There are loads of ways to reduce variance in Magic, but I don't know that fundamental rule changes will necessarily be for the better. People always propose WoW's resource system (play cards face down as lands), and maybe Eric can chime in there. I imagine it reduces tension and makes for a dryer experience, despite delivering the requested variance reduction.
 
Changling Bob

Changling Bob

Jonas said:
The mana flood and screw has been handled well in newer games like the CoC game, where you can't screw or flood in a neat way, since all of your cards are also lands.
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I don't actually like this mechanic, because it means that eh, whatever, I'm sure it'll be fine.

I should put 'ask me about netrunner' in my sig.
 
Changling Bob

Changling Bob

I think there's two types of variance, which, because I'm lazy, I will call good variance and bad variance.

Good variance is the games are different each time, because people's decks are different and the lines they take are different, so playing a dude with a scars/ISD standard delver deck you don't quite know what's going to happen as there's a bunch of variance in decks, play lines depend heavily on card order, gitaxian probe for information is super useful. On the other end of the spectrum is Theros standard where you played mono-U devotion by going 'does this have devotion to blue or lots of blue symbols' and ramming your boats repeatedly into their boats, or rather, not doing that because Thassa makes them unblockable. This is lack of good variance.

Bad variance is mana screw and mana flood, where the game mechanics prevent you from playing the game. When people say magic has too much variance, this is what they're usually talking about, because people stop playing the game when there's not enough good variance, not when there's too much bad variance, as bad variance has stayed more or less constant for the game's lifespan. This isn't quite true, but compared to how much the good variance has swung back and forth, it might as well me.

Unfortunately, bad variance is baked into the mechanics: you have to use lands and you have to have cards in your deck (really!). Good variance is a product of the card pool. And while things like exile-looting and play cards face down as lands help, I think most attempts to do this sort of thing do one of two things: boost good variance enough that it papers over the bad variance enough that people don't notice it (I'd say exile looting falls into this category: mana screw is still there if you don't draw lands and exile stuff and still don't get lands, and is probably more painful when it happens); or it just removes mana variance from the game entirely.

'But cbob!' I hear you cry, 'that removes the bad variance!'

Well yes, it does remove the bad variance, but the bad variance is only bad because it stops you from playing the game at random. Ask me about netrunner! No really! Netrunner primer: mana comes in permanent tokens (credits), and you get four actions per turn. One action you can always take is to gain a credit. This is not enough credits! There are cards you play to earn you more than the going rate of 1 credit per action; getting 2 credits per action is pretty good going. But if you don't get those cards, you can still just mash the default single credit. You can't be mana screwed, you can't be flooded, you just have varying degrees of having enough money or not. This is what is bad variance in magic turned good variance, which is better than just going 'you have enough to do what you want', as I alluded to in my previous post.

(aside: you can get agenda flooded as corp in netrunner; you can lose on the first turn due to unlucky top of your deck being all agendas. This is bafflingly unlikely compared to how often a game is decided by mana flood/screw, and if you play well as corp, the runner might not notice.)

A conclusion goes here: I think it's that people throw the term variance around and say there's too much of it without knowing how much variance there actually is or that it actually makes a game. If you don't like variance, go play RoShamBo and play with no variance at all (as I posted in the original hijacked thread because I'm a monster).
 
Changling Bob

Changling Bob

Jonas said:
It's mostly just there to have an early game, I guess, and not plop Cthulhu down on T2.
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I mean it just lets you go 'I will always curve out barring some bizarre draws I should've mulliganed'. If you have early game plays, you're solid and there's no real decisions to be made.

I once had someone try to explain to me at a prerelease that magic should have a rule where either you draw a card or you tutor for a land, and refused to listen to my argument that that would mean every deck would probably be mad aggro and top it's curve at 4 because there'd be no risks associated with going so low as you literally couldn't flood. I think he'd just lost 4 games in a row to screw, so I suspect he was running like 12 lands or something.
 
Jonas

Jonas

Changling Bob said:
I mean it just lets you go 'I will always curve out barring some bizarre draws I should've mulliganed'. If you have early game plays, you're solid and there's no real decisions to be made.
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It does, but with the conflict resolution being quite different in magic and CoC, it doesn't matter as much, as you can misplay horribly while curving out out CoC as well. The way that game plays, if you didn't have a play basically every turn, it would end very fast.
 
Jonas

Jonas

Changling Bob said:
Sure, I'm looking from a magic perspective. I totally respect it can work elsewhere.
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I agree that I don't think it would work great in magic, even though the choices for what to put down for mana could be pretty interesting. Depending on how much junk you pick in your draft.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

I tried playing cards face down as mana and one friend of mine really liked it. But it wasn't something I could sell to my whole group because the ramifications on how you build decks was too obvious (by that I mean the tried and true 40% mana rule no longer applied so guys felt like they had to relearn how to build mana bases). That was back when we all built constructed decks too and just played. No one was going to go back and modify their decks for a house rule.

This is also possibility true of exile/draw, but it seems more subtle to me. Even after running 10+ games, I'm still not sure if my decks would be better or worse with a different mana distribution. I knew right away with the face down resource land rule that less lands was going to make better decks (though how much less I never spent time figuring out).

I liked Changling Bob's post on variance. Spot on IMO. And I also agree with whoever said no one has found a great way to remove bad variance from Magic (could have also been Bob in the other thread). I have yet to see a perfect solution to the issue in Magic. Most just accept it as part of the game, but I'll always keep looking for a way to make it better because I think it's a real flaw.

UPDATE ON TESTING...

While my first few matches were really great, my last one was not. Both decks ended up drawing too many answers if you can believe that. The match was my tried and true WW deck versus a WU control deck (pretty standard fair - wrath effects, control magic, card draw, big finishers, etc). Now this matchup is usually pretty bad for the WW deck. This WU deck just has too many ways to shaft the WW deck, although it is't as bad as the Tinker matchup. Still, WW usually loses.

WW won this match 2-1, but HOW it won is what bothers me. WU decked itself twice. Now, the "why" is harder to pin down. I really didn't get crazy with exile/draw. If anything, I used it more in the WW deck because it was always behind the 8 ball. But the extra digging just kept popping up ways to slow the game down and buy time. WW really lost all three games, but it was able to stall the game so long that WU simply ran out of cards before it could go lethal.

Now part of that was some really cool use of Armageddon. With the WU deck ready to drop a dragon and win, WW armageddons the board with no way to win but knowing WU had very few cards in it's library. Cool scenario to be sure and I would have chalked it up to a smart play decision if the same basic thing didn't happen again in game 3 (WW armageddons with some dudes out but WU was able to dig to enough land to stabilize and then it again ran out of cards because of how much stalling WW did).

A challenge here is determining how much of this is due to overpowered cards. WU was running Maze of Ith, which really hurts WW. Either you can't attack or you overextend into the Wrath. There's just no way to get around that combination. Not sure how guys rate Kor Haven, but I find it extremely effective at just dragging games out.

Anyway, I probably need to update these decks with cards from my current list to see how much of this is bad cards and how much is related to exile/draw. Reducing bad variance is the goal, but not if it doubles the number of games that last an hour and wind up with one guy decking himself. That's a cool story once in great while, but that's where it ends IMO.
 
CML

CML

Contributor
Players can complain about everything, but it's a little disconcerting when they make judgments that are ill-informed, maybe fundamentally wrong, and are not interested in the idea they could be wrong, much less figuring out why. The conversation with the local singleton grim mongo grognard illustrates that, and Wizards' attempts to truckle to this ("the customer is always right") have resulted in the worst of the NWO ideas. It is a complicated topic, like Magic itself, because it involves notions of subjectivity and judgment and taste, but it's been disappointing over the last couple of years to see WotC shirk its duty to address this complexity and come out with products like triple-Theros draft or the Modo Cube when they are clearly capable of better, all the time.
 
Lucre

Lucre

I like the idea of lands being more of interesting choice than a concession, but I feel like it breaks a lot of unspoken assumptions to have this area interacted with too often and turn it into a loaded choice in the game. Maybe it would work in a stand alone product, or a cube. I can't help but feel like lands would be a lot more comfortable to attack or otherwise disrupt if it was more common that they were targeted etc and there were sufficient versatile cards that interacted with them in various zones (more land grave diggers etc). It's something I really want to make work some day.

I think the all lands cycle idea is a neat concept but I find games where you have such unbridled access to your character's abilities / deck / resources to be kinda stressful and sorta dull. Consider adding versatile permanents who give these sort of abilities to the colours who most benefit from them, or who are most inconvenienced by the lameness of land. A red / green hybrid thing that lets you tap to pitch a land and draw a card sounds sweet to me. White could certainly used more access to it's library.

Also cards that can be boosted by pitching lands from hand or battlefield make lands feel much closer to spells.
 
Changling Bob

Changling Bob

Dumb redesign thought:
  • mana pools don't empty
  • everything is cheap(er)
  • lands can be interacted with way more (attacked or whatever)
Still doesn't solve flood, screw gets mitigated as you can cast every other turn rather than lol, you lose, LD is more allowed as everything(?) is LD and besides we mitigated for screw.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Make a Magic / Netrunner hybrid where everything can be attacked the way Planeswalkers can.

I will put no energy into testing / tuning / designing for such a change.
 
Changling Bob

Changling Bob

There were people whispering messages to one player that STRANGELY COINCIDED with the other player putting out some secrets. It was played with no delay, so no shit people are going to try and cheat it like that.
 
MCMcEmcee

MCMcEmcee

The cheating accusations aren't really confirmed, some of it was just random people going "hi mom" at various points. Somebody messaged something to the effect of "his last card is Hunter's Mark" but it was after the player getting messaged had already made his play that would have been affected by that information. Badly handled by the admins and such but it's not 100% that the player had anything to do with random people on his internet game friends list deciding to screw with the finals.
 
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