MTG thread

I do kind of like the idea of decks operating like Diablo 2 trades. You're unlikely to ever get a perfect unless it's duped, but you can try to hunt down a "close enough" through trade. But the likelihood of that actually happening/working out is basically nil

Playing Arena just reminds me how infuriatingly stupid mtg is design wise. Properly tuned deck, got interesting cards vs net decks, then you constantly lose to no land/flood.

This resource system is just awful game design.

Genjiro said:

Playing Arena just reminds me how infuriatingly stupid mtg is design wise. Properly tuned deck, got interesting cards vs net decks, then you constantly lose to no land/flood.

This resource system is just awful game design.

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That's actually one of the things that makes the game popular though. Anyone can win a game against anyone in a given game even if in the long term they would rarely win. Give that much of a gap between people in a game with little to no randommess and the less experienced/good player basically never wins. It's closer to Poker in that way than Chess or Go, but like Poker the best players still tend to win a lot more than they lose. I actually feel like it's an amazing design in general with the 1 land per turn and 1 card drawn per turn limitations cooked into it you have to balance early and late game in your decks.

Sterling said:

That's actually one of the things that makes the game popular though. Anyone can win a game against anyone in a given game even if in the long term they would rarely win. Give that much of a gap between people in a game with little to no randommess and the less experienced/good player basically never wins. It's closer to Poker in that way than Chess or Go, but like Poker the best players still tend to win a lot more than they lose. I actually feel like it's an amazing design in general with the 1 land per turn and 1 card drawn per turn limitations cooked into it you have to balance early and late game in your decks.

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For me it's way, way worse to get fucked by the computer than to get fucked by the cards you shuffled yourself.

Honestly, I do have a problem with their shuffler. Not that it isn't random, it is, but that's exactly the problem. It's TOO random. When we shuffle cards physically, everyone subconsciously mana weaves a bit. You do it a little before you shuffle, and then you only shuffle like 4-5 times, so it reduces large clumps a bit. It's not a big deal, the deck is still randomized (you don't know what cards are coming) and everyone does basically the same thing, so there isn't a large edge.

However, when you go into digital, truly random means you will get 7+ lands in a row sometimes or vice versa. They already tried to mitigate this slightly with opening hands. The computer draws two hands and discards the worst one in terms of mana/spells. i.e. if you get a 1 land and a 3 land hand, it discards the 1 land hand. 2, 3, 4 and 5 lands overrides 0, 1, 6, and 7 land hands.


But, I've noticed I get 2 land hands quite often in limited and subsequently don't draw a 3rd one in a lot of them. I think they are prioritizing 2 lands over 5 lands, too much. The average should be somewhere around 3 to 3.5 lands, but over a few dozen games I was getting an average under 3. Too small of a sample size to prove anything, but it's showing a trend that I don't like.

I would much rather they added some stop gaps to the randomizer for the super extreme scenarios. Such as, you can't have more then 6/7 lands in a row in the starting deck order. If you shuffle, it could still happen that you draw that many in a row, but it's just to cut down on some of the most extreme examples. Mana screw/flood would still happen, but you'd have a fighting chance a little more often.

Sterling said:

That's actually one of the things that makes the game popular though. Anyone can win a game against anyone in a given game even if in the long term they would rarely win. Give that much of a gap between people in a game with little to no randommess and the less experienced/good player basically never wins. It's closer to Poker in that way than Chess or Go, but like Poker the best players still tend to win a lot more than they lose. I actually feel like it's an amazing design in general with the 1 land per turn and 1 card drawn per turn limitations cooked into it you have to balance early and late game in your decks.

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And thats exactly why its terrible design. Random guy with a pile of random trash could win over a well designed deck because well, rng

Theres not the ability to bluff etc like poker either

Genjiro said:

And thats exactly why its terrible design. Random guy with a pile of random trash could win over a well designed deck because well, rng

Theres not the ability to bluff etc like poker either

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People bluff in Magic all the time. You represent removal/counters/combat tricks even without them all the time. You've never attacked with your 2/2 when your opponent has a 4/4 in play? Versus was a game that had very little randomness to it and they really tried hard to push it, but with almost no randomness there ended up being virtually no casual play. The best players still tend to win a lot more than other players, the HoF players almost all have extended runs of 70+ percent win rates at the professional level over hundreds of matches. At a macro level it's very much a skill game, again like poker, but an individual game basis there's a lot of variance obviously. Or do you feel any game that uses randomly drawn cards or dice as bad design?

I haven't played MTG in a while but I saw the price of a lot of vintage/legacy stuff has almost tripled since I bought mine maybe 5-8 years ago. What's the consensus here, do you guys think prices will continue to rise or are we approaching a ceiling or even a decline?

Oh come on. You can bluff, but nothing in the same universe like poker. If you're chucking cards in the yard because youre sitting on land screw, your opponent is going to know youre not bluffing some trick unless its a format where specific colors and decks do this.

Its just not good game design. You are trying to compare random games that dont REQUIRE you to have some other resource to play the game.

And guess what, if you remove that randomness of mtg in the land screw/flood area you will still have the same pros who will dominate through superior building, play, mechanics etc, ie, the stuff people like to see. Some mechanic where you could trade a card for land in opening hand, or play out of 2 decks and choose land or non land would just be far superior.

The problem with your position, is the WoW tcg did exactly that, and failed as a result. You could play any card face down as your 'land'. The best players won too much, so it drove off the casual base. They learned their lesson and added rng cards/effects when they turned it into hearthstone (it shares a lot of the base mechanics).

I used to hold the same opinion until i saw what happened with that game. As much as i personally hate it, its better for the overall game.

Mana issues as a means of giving less experienced players a chance at victory is a horrible argument for that mechanic and I'm surprised to see anyone put it forward. It's the worst part of the game and in today's gaming climate it would hold back the entire property. Watching someone get fucked by their deck in the finals of a SCG event makes the entire game look like a joke. It's doubly ridiculous looking on the Pro Tour stream given how incredibly serious they are trying to take things. Everyone's in a suit, the commentary style imitates professional golf, the play area and lighting is super serious, etc. Then someone doesn't draw a third land. Nice game you've got here fellas.

BUT

Perfect mana development just puts all the weight on curving out. Do you have a baller one drop on turn one? Do you have a baller two drop on turn two? Did you get to play on curve Mysterious Challenger / Dr. Boom / Tirion on turns 6/7/8? Your just the best player ever then. Playing shit off curve is often just as fatal as missing land drops. You just got to play a little more, do a few more things, etc. before the game ended. Maybe it feels better but watching pros play it doesn't seem like it. They know when they're boned.

Watching Teferi's end step double untap ramp into Nexus of Fate is mildly humorous.

If the deck makes the cut, sell them nexii into the hype bubble. You can basically staple anything to the Karn+Teferi control shell and look impressive on camera.

Arbitrary said:

Mana issues as a means of giving less experienced players a chance at victory is a horrible argument for that mechanic and I'm surprised to see anyone put it forward.

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We're not saying it has to specifically be 'mana issues' but there has to be a random element to the game. If you removed mana screw/flood from MAGIC, specifically, then it wouldn't have enough randomness. Other games that have succeeded, while eliminating land draws, chose different random effects to replace it.

As much as the vocal HS fans complained about 'RNG', the crazy RNG moments were always the most viewed twitch clips, youtube vids, etc.. What people say and what they do are often quite different.

Yogg-Saron highlights and lowlights generated massive amounts of clicks and did nothing positive for the game. Viral clips and good gameplay are in entirely different hemispheres.

At it's release Hearthstone had some RNG with cards like Ragnaros, Sylvanas, Thoughtsteal, Mind Vision, Arcane Missiles, Cleave, Yysera and a bunch others. That stuff was mostly fine. It's the cards like Web Spinner, Swashburgler, Babbling Book, and Barnes that get people to complain and complain loudly. Shredded popping out a Doomsayer at a big event is definitely going to get some clicks but it's just not all that great of a time to have to use and play against constantly super good cards that have that much variance baked in to them.

But I do get what you are saying. Chess and Starcraft 2 are so skill based as to make entry into the competitive sphere of those games a Herculean task. I just think that draw RNG and match up RNG is being underestimated as a source of variance. As far as MtG goes there's maybe a little room to make mulligans less punishing in Standard and in Limited and that's it. The game is as the game is.

Yea, there's a sliding scale and a sweet point of RNG, of course. Vanilla HS had some, and it wasn't too bad from a competitive standpoint. But, the game itself got more popular as they added some more. So, they kept adding more, but it had diminishing returns and hit a wall eventually where the complaints outweighed the interest.

Enzee said:

We're not saying it has to specifically be 'mana issues' but there has to be a random element to the game. If you removed mana screw/flood from MAGIC, specifically, then it wouldn't have enough randomness. Other games that have succeeded, while eliminating land draws, chose different random effects to replace it.

As much as the vocal HS fans complained about 'RNG', the crazy RNG moments were always the most viewed twitch clips, youtube vids, etc.. What people say and what they do are often quite different.

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Randomness in the resource sense does not = good, there is nothing that it adds to the game except shit rng which makes it unenjoyable on every level: playing, watching etc

Speaking of, in an 18 land draft deck I just started 0-2 getting stuck on 2 lands early on every time....shit that never even happens in real life. Drafted several bombs with kicker (Verix skizzik etc), add plenty of mana, somehow get fucked. Its a lot of fun losing to that shit.

Imagine if they added this shit mechanic to any esport game, like dota LoL etc, oops your last hits didnt net any gold because of some rng factor and the the lane got steamrolled......sorry fans, but it adds so much!

err.. besides the fact that they aren't even comparable genres, the closest analogy between them would be your teammates in solo queue. You can get a shit teammate or a disconnect and you lose despite winning your lane. There's always some element that is at least somewhat out of your control. It lets players who are in denial about their skill have an excuse, which lets them enjoy the game more and contributes to the overall popularity.

Look, I hate the mechanic as well. Mana screw/flood games tilt me super hard, but I at least understand why they exist and the designers haven't tried to eliminate them for 25 years. I've been trying to find a card game that has lower variance, good strategy options and still appeals to a large enough audience, but I haven't found one better than mtg arena yet. Gwent was close when I first started playing it, but then they made some huge changes that kinda ruined that. I'll check it out again in a few months, when they launch the big 'back to the drawing board' update they've been working on for awhile.