an underrated thing that Garfield did was get MTG into the hands of tons of players as quickly as possible. You can think things through until you're a pretzel, but until you put your game in people's hands, you still have a lot to learn about how it works.
Imho, one positive aspect from MtG land-based resource system that is often overlooked is player progression. I learned MtG from my older cousin when I was 9 years old (currently 34). Of course I did not like when I got mana screwed or mana flooded, but it did not take me long to realize my cousin did not suffer from this as often as I did, so there had to be something wrong on how I was building my deck. I was only really introduced to the concept of mana curve reading an online article when I was 14 and I remember vividly how it opened my mind. One or two years later I was already playing significantly better than most of my friends. In fact, we play together to this day, and when we play commander I still find myself noticing mistakes in their land count and/or mana base in general. My point is, the fact your resources are in sharp dispute with your action cards provides a very fertile soil for growing your strategic thinking. A player mildly into the game can check a championship-winning deck and figure out its goal and why most of the cards are there, but only real pros will understand how and why that deck's mana base is the way it is. I highly doubt 1% of players can build a top-tier mana base even if you provide all the cards they could wish for. This is a sharp contrast to systems like Heartstone. Sure, you do not get the occasional bad feeling of mana screw or mana flood, but in exchange you basically renounced an entire axis of strategy, decision-making and deck building expertise progression. And building the decks is a great part of the fun in a TCG, if not the biggest part. If you make deck building resource management something so easy a child could do well, sure you can appeal to a larger player base in the beginning. But as your player base ages, they are more likely to get bored and go search for a richer TCG to play. And most likely that TCG will be Magic. There is virtually no ceiling on how good you can be in building mana bases, each deck and metagame has its nuances and slight adjustments can make or break a deck. If you plan to remove this axis of strategy, you better plan for something equally as challenging and consequential to replace it, or you risk making a children game in disguise.
Well, I disagree. Building a deck is a great part of why CCG's are fun... for you. People enjoy things for different reasons and most people have no time or willingness or even cards to test and build their own decks so they will netdeck so they can spend time on what they really enjoy: playing the game. I usually prefer my own decks because I do not enjoy playing decks that might be better but less fun for me. I realize however that other people might disagree.
I don't think there's that much of a barrier to creating a very good manabase, Frank Karsten has had (and continues to have) a huge impact on the improvement of them. A few heuristics and a hypergeometric calculator gets you 90+% of the way to an optimal mana base and lots of testing does the rest. With that said, you're hitting on one of the very strategically good consequences of Magic's mana system. Because of colored mana costs and the opportunity cost of branching into extra colors while deckbuilding, you get a nice gradient of what is playable within a single deck. As an easy example, Hearthstone imposes a hard limit here in the form of class cards, whereas in Magic, you can splash colors in pretty much any deck, and the calculus of how much to splash changes with what is available in the card pool. In older formats, splashing is easier and gets you much more powerful cards, but you open yourself up to things that punish greedy manabases. It's a fantastic strategic dynamic that a lot of players and designers don't fully grasp when trying to "fix" mana/screw flood.
@@Amazementss Yes, HS is a casual game in that respect too. Deck building is not only limited by a very small card pool but even stronger limitation is classes.
@@sathrielsatanson666 Actually, @thomasvconti is on point here. The biggest MtG's asset mechanically is the fact that it mixes strategy and tactics so well. And I'm sorry to break it to you, but what you call "playing the game" is only the game's tactics dimension (deck-building being the strategy one).
I think there’s a flawed assumption underlying this discussion: Magic is the biggest TCG because it’s the best game mechanically and its many competitors fail because they aren’t as good mechanically and fail to successfully innovate on Magic’s core mechanics. Perhaps that was true at some point in Magic’s decades of existence, but the most important aspect of its dominance now is the size of its player base. TCG’s are, by their nature, lifestyle games. Even casually, building decks and keeping up with new releases is a huge commitment of time and money. If you’re going to invest so much into a game, you better be sure there are other people to play with. You can pretty well guarantee a store is hosting Magic somewhere in town on any given night. No other game, no matter how good, has reached that critical mass. It doesn’t matter if One Piece is a 10/10 game. If you can’t find anyone to play with, you’ll settle for 7/10 Magic.
Agreed. I VASTLY prefer Vampire The Eternal Struggle to Magic, it's not even a competition. But I just can not find a group of 4-5 players to play with these days, I feel lucky that I ever had the opportunity at all since the game is so good. Magic feels like the stuff you play since there's nothing else around to play, not the game I prefer to actually play.
I always wondered why MtG didn't split the deck into two, one for lands and one for spells. Whenever you draw, you decide whether to draw a land or a spell, and you have to have minimum 40 (or 35 or 38 or whatever) spells in your spell deck. Yes this would change the strategic balance between deck archetypes, but they adjust that constantly with card strengths anyway. To me it'd be worth it to remove the large percentage of games that aren't competitive due to mana screw. A nice bonus is it'd speed things up a bit -- less shuffling for stuff like fetch lands.
@@distractionmakers jokes aside I'd personally like to see more non-magic-specific content. The deep dives on other TCGs are great and I'd love to see that for other types of games
This is pretty much the reason I didn't get into the new TCGs for the last decade or so. The majority of them were "Magic but X" where they copied the core of Magic and just "fixed" a few core mechanics. Besides not being very interesting, it did throw off a lot of the nuance that Magic brought to the table. It "solved" one problem and caused new ones, which usually meant the game didn't feel as diverse and interesting. (it also had the side effect of people having to sell their game based on the single feature that is different, which isn't that exciting) Which is why I love games like Flesh and Blood. Its not built from a foundation of "Magic but different", its built off a completely different set of ideas (Closer to Kung Fu or En Guard if you've played those) The game has its own set of difficulties, but they aren't caused by trying to "fix" something from magic. As for the complexity points and card speed, there is an interesting middle ground that I have seen a few games use. Where basically the entire game is sorcery speed with no interactions, but during a specific phase of the game reactions can be played. The first that comes to my mind is the new Ace cards in the digimon TCG. They allow for an interesting reaction of creating higher level monsters suddenly that your opponent wasn't expecting. But, these cards can only be played during a very specific window of time. And that window is part of the core rules, not a window based on how/when a card is resolving, its a specific phase of combat. This does feel like a good solution to the "problem" of speed. You can get the high intensity of instants and traps and reactions, but it is limited in when it takes place. It makes those phases very intense! And doesn't make it feel like you are not able to play the game due to an instant removal spell as soon as your card hits the table.
Another thing that people may not appreciate about Magic is that its rule/card text is so well-written and codified. This is especially apparent if you come from a Computer Science background (i.e. the Stack). Keywords, standardized templates, triggered abilities vs replacement effects, etc. Magic has hundreds of pages of ruling for all kinds of edge cases, but most players don't really need to understand anything beyond Layer 3 to play the game. Contrast this to Yu-Gi-Oh - so many individual cards had errata/exception texts, and card text didn't have standardized templates until past the Synchro/XYZ era.
I totally agree. Yugioh erratas A LOT! They tried to make a template later to fix this problem but an article about Wind-Up Zenmaines from an english writer contradicted the way it played in the OCG and the way it played versus the templating so the judges just went with that. It is literally written in the templating for a delayed effect on it's first english printing. Also Formula Synchron has had it's text changed 7 times! Konami also erratas to "Fix" cards so they can push sales of those cards by breaking them and then, oops we "Fixed" them again to work how the text says because a new set came out and we want to sell that now!
"Another thing that people may not appreciate about Magic is that its rule/card text is so well-written and codified." Well, it is now... Took a number of years to get there though. "This is especially apparent if you come from a Computer Science background (i.e. the Stack)." They actually treat it like it is a computer program, every card has to fit within the rules and if it doesn't it's not allowed in black border Magic. Makes sense with MtGO and now Arena.
@@Khyrberos pockets should be a lot of words when describing cargo shorts, they are basically a three dimensional array of pockets sown together into the form of shorts.
I think mana flood/screw is properly identified as a problem, but the fixes generally overestimate the scope of the problem. Fixes for it generally completely remove the possibility of flood/screw at all instead of just mitigating the worst experiences it causes. My group has homebrewed lots of solutions over the years, and the one that has worked best is letting everyone have 2 basic lands in the command zone, and any time you could draw a card, you can instead draw those basics. Nearly all decks still need to have lands and consider the ratio of lands to action in their decks, it tends a little more toward action than baseline MTG, but not drastically so in most cases. In 60 card, most decks will swap out like 4 lands for additional action. In play, its kind of like swapping out rolling a d12 for how many lands you get in a game for rolling 1d8+2 for how many lands you get. There is still variance, but the times when that variance creates non-games is drastically lower. The expected number of lands in a game ends up balancing out to roughly the same, but there are less extreme cases, and always having at least 2 mana even in the worst cases means you have the option of building plans into your deck that either can effectively bootstrap off of just those 2 lands, or survive on just the two until you can eventually draw more.
I already see the problem with this idea. As soon as I read the "2 basic lands in the command zone", I immediately know why this idea would never ever work, because the base line has to always be competitive Magic. From what I am reading, players still start out with the same number of cards in hand. This idea is reminiscent of the "Companion" mechanic, except it is lands. And that idea was a mistake. Because Commander is a "casual" format. you can mostly forgive the Commander Zone. But this idea would never fix Magic as a whole, because zero land decks would exist. 9 Land Stompy would no longer need lands. RDW would only be gas. Goblin Charbelcher anyone? The idea to have the option of guaranteed land drops seems nifty. Until it isn't.
@@ArcDragoon The places where zero land decks could feasibly exist do not noticeably change with this rule. As you mention, zero land (or very low land) decks ALREADY EXIST and are largely not problems for the formats where they happen. These are usually wild formats with tons of other very powerful things happening where such decks are just a slice of what is going on. And when they are a problem, they are usually trivially easy to address. We've been playing this way for about a year and its only been positive. We aren't playing legacy, but neither are most people. Finally, just like the content of the video this was commented on, this is more about the discussion of the concepts than suggesting anything that "should" be done for the game across the board. I was bringing up for discussion that there are options for mitigating mana flood/screw beyond the things we have seen in other games which tend to aim to completely remove it. If something was done for the game as a whole, I would trust that the people that are paid to develop the game would you know, develop whatever idea to work out kinks before implementing it (like deciding to scale down to only 1 land if needed, banning specific problem cards, modify mulligan rules alongside it that are less needed, etc).
This is a neat idea. Having said that, it seems like it would significantly decrease the number of lands you need to play. Like a typical 60 card deck is as likely to see 3 lands in the top 10 with 24 lands as a 10 land deck with the homebrew rule would. Depending on the power level you play at it seems like this would heavily favor aggro decks, especially since they tend not to need as much (or any) fixing.
@@margaram78 Aggro decks get the most benefit, but at the same time, with recent card development, often aggro as an archetype has real issues already. With the rise of commander, big splashy effects are often the most pushed, and those tend to start at 4 mana. The glut of "free" spells counteracts that a bit, but most of those are tools against aggro, not in favor of it. And thats just talking magic in an overall meta sense. If we were to tunnel in to magic's most popular format, Commander is drastically skewed against aggro, so there being a change that gives an edge to aggro is more upside than downside. For the people I am playing with (we play multiple formats so no this is not just related to EDH), 2 lands have been what we feel is the sweet spot, but anyone interested but cautious of the idea in their groups has the freedom to start with just a single land, and then gauge the effects and decide what works best for them. Its also worth considering that once a group finds the level that they prefer, there is also room for dialing in the mulligan rule the group uses. At the 2 land level once decks have acclimated to the implications, having any hand that is so unworkable that you need to mulligan is pretty rare and tends to point more to a deckbuilding problem than a game problem. Our 60 card decks are averaging a number of lands in the high teens, so it is possible to get 5+land openers but they are quite rare (like 1% by hypergeometric calculations). And mana screw failures are basically unheard of unless you are explicitly pushing your expected land count well below what the cards you want to play demand. So there is room to discuss scaling back or removing the mulligan rule.
The no instant speed option is a death blow to me. If I can walk away from the table during my opponents turn without losing any strategic advantage something has gone very wrong.
This is something that really annoys me about all the "Our turn, comrade" memes is (aside from the fact that my background is in political philosophy and that is inaccurate in so many ways...) not only does it obscure all sorts of ways in which turn player is still extremely important (such as, in YGO, ignition effects or turn player priority at the start of any open game state), but it's also deeply hypocritical, because the same people complain when their opponent plays uninterrupted. They just don't like when their opponent plays cards.
@@minabasejderha5972which is why I think a lot of card games allow players to use cards in their hand to protect them from attacks and some have disruption during combat exclusively. Vanguard and One Piece utilize this and Dragon Ball furthers this with letting you use those cards in hand to support offensive pushes as well.
Well I guess we're opposites. I always miss my window to play instants/reactions/whatever. Totally fine with interaction, but it has to be prompted(e.g. choosing what to block with).
10,000% this. If I can't do anything during my opponent's turn/action, it isn't us playing against each other, it's just two players both playing solitaire.
The best example I find are companies that move into new buildings every few years, because statistically companies that do this are growing faster compared to the competitors. What they don’t understand is that moving is bad but the growth leaves successful companies no choice.
Yeah, imitation without real understanding is a huge part of why I'm low on stuff like Elestrals or any of the Bandai games. Bandai games just often look like different flavors of Duel Masters, and therefore different flavors of MtG. Elestrals is basically just YGO without an Extra Deck and is looking to have all the same fundamental problems Old Yugioh has when it isn't a game about constantly cheating out boss monsters. (Also this is why I like Flesh and Blood. Totally diff)
Something I never really got with Elestrals is what problems with yugioh they were trying to solve with it. The game's biggest problem is that its extremely complex and hard to approach for new players, other card game experience also isn't particularly transferable either. Which to a large extent, is an issue every long running card game has, and making a simpler game isn't going to exactly appeal to the more enfranchised players. Its pretty well positioned as the fastest game and most complex on average, and notable it really does have some of the lowest amount of luck determining games around. Its still a card game at the end of the day, but variance largely comes from the sheer amount of options players have in a single turn, largely because the extra deck is an option. I don't think the market cap for people who liked old school yugioh but not the modern game is really big enough for a new tcg to develop in. It can work until the developer makes one giant design failure and then it goes to hell.
@@shawnjavery I think the only real thing Elestral addresses, other than power reset, is mixable attributes. Yugioh had to make arbitrary lines via named archetypes to prevent the game from just devolving to "the best 40 cards". The spirit deck adds some limit, but I think it fails to a degree. 20 slots for colors is a lot and as long as you're playing low cost stuff like the 1 drops, it's not hard to have access to everything you need.
I mean Digimon uses a different mana system which from my experience is fairly unique to Bandai. One Piece separates itself from Duel Masters with its DON!! deck and deck construction being based on the color(s) of the leader, tightening applicable cards in a deck.
@@otterfire4712 For One Piece (and Lorcana), I think artificial color constraints misses the point of MtG's color system and how modular it is. I do respect Digimon's game systems much more though.
I think that Legend of the Five Rings was one of the best card games for a very long time. Wholly different from any other game, and one of the best storylines in gaming. Hands down a phenomenal design space
i've attempted to do amateur deep dives on this topic multiple times i find there isn't a very satisfying overarching clean answer the first thing to understand is that it's not just Magic that stands over everything else - it is Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. These games are all roughly, major fluctuations aside, roughly the same size and radically different in terms of their mechanics. if one is going to cite game systems (like mana) as the reason Magic succeeds, that explanation is going to immediately run into the problem of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon the next to understand is that the reason for the success of those 3 games isn't static. after achieving a critical mass of popularity, the publishers for these games have been able to print their way out of problems (MtG's recent product line sprint is an excellent example of that) and rely on a secondary market to drive customer interest. the lack of a robust secondary market is almost certainly why games like Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra were not able to break out into evergreen products and join the big three, despite their initial popularity - they lack a scene of collectors and speculators that buy product with the sole intent of interacting with the secondary market there's also just the branding / sign value of MtG, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! as 'the CCG'. when people talk about CCGs, those games will populate their thoughts, and that's a pretty massive marketing advantage but there's also this absolute snarl of little things and bits of cultural chaos the line-up to support these games while others faltered at different times
This video made me realize how much Flesh and Blood understood magic, and how they made the move away from it. I believe they have made a very interesting fix to the mana problem.
What's not remembered about MtG is that it was designed to be marketed as a card form of D&D. By that I mean that cards and their rarity was supposed to be similar to D&D's Player's Handbook against the Dungeon Master's Guide. You only need one copy of the DMG, but you need multiple copies of the PHB for everyone else. The intention was to have only a few copies of powerful cards like Black Lotus shared among a group of friends. But the failure to understand that players will min-max decks like they do with character sheets was the mistake. Because competitive players will do anything, and pay for anything to min-max deck lists. And this is actually the original sin of MtG. It's original design philosophy did not anticipate competitive Magic.
@@hircenedaelen Richard didn't expect the game to be anywhere near as popular as it became. He assumed people would spend about as much on Magic as they would any board game (a starter deck and some boosters, ~120 cards). So in a play group of a handful of friends there would only be one of any rare. So, some cards being over powered was o.k.. That's also the root of ante being a thing. It was a way to force change and card flow assuming people wouldn't being acquiring new cards. The fact people would go out and buy as many copies of a card as the wanted to put in their deck wasn't even a consideration.
Personally I think Shadowverse Evolve has the best understanding of both Magic and their own original digital Shadowverse's flaws and strengths. It's not really trying to be Magic but it's learned enough from it to use what really works within the systems they wanted to create to make a game that's criminally underrated. They seemed to be designing around the fact that people really love having big game ending bombs alongside their value pieces but still liked navigating value trades. The turn tick mana system they use is smartly offset by decks being really inconsistent and your opening draw being four instead of five-seven unlike other games. Card draw and tutoring is rare and has a huge design budget cost which enforces a lot of the inconsistency lands do without having the pain points lands have for casual players. Since you're likely seeing less cards the mana curve is super important. Higher cost cards actually have a place unlike in Magic where you can drop a 2 cost and have it be your main beater for the whole game. I just wish it hadn't been the HD DVD to One Piece's Bluray in the 2023 Yugioh exodus format wars.
Great discussion! It would be great to have an episode where you talk about Yugioh’s smaller main deck size being smaller than most MTG formats and having an extra deck, if that amount of consistency is more or less fun
I feel like yugioh always gets forgotten in these circles and i keep seeing references to dead or dying digital only games like hearthstone or runeterra or even gwent even though half of them are shuting down, and not yugioh even though they recently beat mtg in popularity world wide
I have played TCG's all my life - MTG, yugioh, pokemon and hearthstone as well as a few smaller ones here and there. Personally I think MTG has the best mana system of them, and I think the issue of being "mana screwed" can be fixed fairly easily. Permit a small (I am thinking between 1 and 3 cards total) basic land side deck that you can opt to draw from in your draw step instead of drawing from your main deck. The exact size of the mana side deck, the times that you can access it, and the penalty for accessing it should all be adjusted depending on the format of the game you are playing. I would place some sort of restriction on the mana side deck like you cant use it for the first 3 turns (or some similar restriction so aggro players cant just skip lands in their deck all together). Having access to even just 1 emergency land would clear up most instances of being mana screwed.
@@freddiesimmons1394 so make it so that you cant use the mana side deck for the first 3 turns (that's what mulligans are for anyway) or force lands from the mana side deck to enter tapped
@@arcon980 yes, and at that point you're increasing the barrier to entry for learning your game. Also either case might still be good enough for decks that want to run 0 lands to perform some unknown chicanery
@@freddiesimmons1394 I dont see the barrier to entry as a valid argument, a mana side deck is simpler than many mechanics already in the game so if that is confusing someone that much, then MTG probably isn't the right TCG for them. Any change you make to the game comes with the risk of making something broken, this is no exception. I would prefer to correct a core problem with the game and risk unbalancing a couple decks that can be corrected by further alterations to the mana side deck's cost or with banning a couple more cards.
only 10 seconds in but that reminds me of a thing Casey Yano, one of the lead developers for sts said. it was something like "I'm a very opinionated person, I think you kinda have to be in order to be a game designer. So a lot of the time I see sts inspired games look for a different way of doing something and I think man, we already solved that problem! If I thought that your solution was better, that would've been the solution I used in the first place!"
YGO ended up creating a new offshoot of the game called Rush Duel, which is way lower on mid-turn interaction, in an attempt to make the game more accessible to kids. It makes sense, because the current version of YGO is really obsessively complex and involves a huge amount of interaction on the first turn, but it does mean Rush feels like it lacks something sometimes. It basically just pushes you back to having to set traps and use them at defined times, which isn't really bad necessarily, but I'm curious where they're going to go with it. Unfortunately the game is Japan-only at the minute and thus difficult to experience.
Great points! Every TCG and even a lot of other table top games lead back to magic. And playing the old Xbox games with the different puzzles really helped to learn the game and become a lot more skilled. It lets you know when you can actually interact and play things and how interactions will actually play out.
I watched your video on Jaquays dungeons and later wrote a dungeon for my tabletop players to participate in using the basic principles outlined in the video - it went very well! Just wanted to leave a comment since I felt like it was one of the more practically relevant game design videos and I would love to view more similar content.
The points about resources in your deck are a good point. That's why the Ressource System in Lorcana feels so good to me since you can play most cards as Ressource but some cards can't be used as a Ressource und are a little overstated in comparison.
I've been playing MTG for a long time, but I think one that gets overlooked considering it gave magic a run for its money until the license got pulled was the Decipher Star wars game, it would be interesting to see you take on that game
I've only seen a few videos so far but yall are quickly becoming my favorite channel. Sorry you can't talk about more than tcgs, but tcgs brought me to you guys 😂
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a common misconception that Magic is the first ever TCG, and also another misconception is that this was Richard Garfield's first ever card game he came up with. If I recall, there were other TCGs around during that time, and Richard Garfield had experimented with different systems before settling in and expanding on Magic with his fellow college classmates. Edit: Corrected to Richard 😂
Really depends on how you'd define a game as "the first". From what I understand, MtG is the first genuine TCG as we would define it now. Other pre-MtG games had some aspects that would fit the definition but ultimately couldn't truly be called a TCG, or just flat out were never released. If it weren't the case, we'd probably be seeing a lot more evidence of the contrary.
the mana curve provides an invisible stability that HEAVILY dictates your play. You think you have so many options, but if you dont play the 4 mana wipe on turn 4, you lose. If you dont curve out in Aggro, it's bad. It's difficult to shoot your wad too early. Also, 7 cards and mana to do stuff make things pretty linear.
Why other tcgs can't reach popularity of MTG would be a better question... The idea that Magic is the best game is absurd considering there are games that are way too different or are improvements over base Magic for the most part (like Runeterra)
@@distractionmakersThe ruleset is great and it seems like newer games like the last Star Wars also feature similarities to it. And no development doesn't mean it is "dead", as long as servers are up. Chess and classic card games are certainly not dead. Btw, after this comment I reinstalled it on my phone and it instantly matches vs opponents, so it is definitely playable and probably will be for a long time since it has large casual playerbase that spends money on PvE mode after PvP development abandonment.
12:47 I'd urge you to check out Dune: Imperium - that really solves the problem of instants while still keeping the interactino (to an extent), in combat. The issue with Instants is really that online there are just too many points of interaction. For MtG to be a 'modern' online game you would have to have a 'non-interactive' main phase, and just have maximum interaction for the Combat phase.
There is a lot of smart design in Lorcana that balances cards that seem extremely powerful but always have a measurable opportunity cost. They have a 0 cost Wheel of Fortune that only 1 deck really plays and another is 50/50 on it. I would like to see them do more conditional interaction like "whenever an opponent does X then do Y With the exception of 1 errata they've managed to make a pretty tight game with a diversity of viable decks. Starting from scratch also afforded them the opportunity to limit the types of removal available. Magic sort of clumsily added Ward 2 to everything so that the 20 or so efficient removal pieces wouldn't trade up. Lorcana fixed this by basically having no removal that trades up. Just something to think about in card games. I've done similar things in my cube.
It just occurred to me (probably because it's been ages since I played Yu-Gi-Oh!), but Setting Trap Cards and Monsters in Defense Mode fills a cery similar niche as ending your turn with a few Islands untapped, doesn't it? It's forcing one player to give the other player information about their capability to do something off turn.
If someone wants to “beat” Magic, they need to stop trying to make a game that’s “better” than Magic. Players don’t like it when people talk down to their fav game. Instead a game needs to come from having a truly unique game design with no direct effort to improve on current popular designs. This has a lot of nuance
@@MrRayRockstarthe "XYZ killer" never succeeds lol. It took 20 years for an MMO to be a "WoW killer", and in the end, the game that got that highest playercount (and only for a short while) was old-school Runescape, the least similar MMO to WoW in the genre.
@7:50 They totally did NOT think about it. It is a "bad system" that has evolved and adapted to be "better". There are much better systems, specially thise that haven't been designed yet.. but Lands existing as cards allow for certain interactions and mechanics (Landfall). Still, I wished this channel covered other things besides Magic.. even hypotheticals! While still keeping it in the back if their mind. You get to a point where you are just repeating yourselves.. You haven't even covered SMUGGLE in the new Star Wars Unlimited. I don't know what your end goal is.. but are you achieving it this way?
It’s tough because magic isn’t just one game. I think the high point was standard format 10 years ago, but I’m biased haha. I’d give it a 90/100 at that point with its biggest downside being complexity.
@@distractionmakers ok I appreciate that analysis of the game and I do agree that the level of complexity is high and only getting higher as new mechanics get added and you have to track more permanents or emblems. Standard 10 years ago what was that innistrad/theros times?
A better and slightly more fantasy adjacent term might be a “nonexistent knight.” It is from a Calvino story of the same name, about a sentient suit of armor in a kind of, existential crisis.
One interesting difference, Magic's creatures don't typically come with protection abilities and are a nice power boost if they do have shroud or something Games where you can attack creatures directly, it becomes more standard for bigger or more important cards to come with protection. A big card with no protection is a bad card. Choosing blockers vs attack directly effects the fundamental strategy flavor immensely.
the insight about mtg creatures sticking around a lot longer and therefore being able to have more longterm effects is interesting. I remember playing Hearthstone years ago and realizing that any creature that doesnt have some kind of immediate value (aka an etb or death trigger) is usually unlikely to get to do anything, because tempo is so strong and you cant do much of anything to protect other creatures. This is compounded by the lack of any defensive instants.This results in a game where more creatures need to do something immediately, with the only good repeated effects being end of turn triggers, aka "i get value immediately and if you dont kill this right now I will snowball a win." in comparison, pokemon basically lets you choose which creature your opponent can attack, making longterm backrow effects a lot easier to get value out of.
It gives me a new respect for Pokemon's system. You can choose what to block with, but you gotta block with /something/. I wonder if Magic ever came up with Escape Rope...
Whenever someone says "we´ve trained the algorithm that we are a X TH-camr" I wonder how much it is that you trained the algorithm, or your audience. Do you have any evidence that it is the algorithms doing and not simply a silent majority?
Oh you can probably interchange algorithm with audience. TH-cam’s role in it is that they gage a videos performance on how well it does with your audience first. If it underperforms they don’t show the video outside your audience. It creates a feedback loop that keeps your channel niche. Good for TH-cam, not great for content creators who want to talk about a variety of topics.
This is one of the reasons that I liked the LOTR card game from Decipher. That company has a pretty good history of making "not Magic" games, and the win condition in that game is pretty radically different from any other game. Sure, one of the win conditions is to kill one specific character, but that character is just as weak as your other characters and it's hard to force them to fight a battle not in their favor without overwhelming numbers, whereas most games the character to kill would have far more health than any other character. And of course I don't think any game had anything like "Win the game if you survive site 9". It also really eschewed any idea of card advantage being important, because you refilled your hand every turn. Too bad the rest of the game was a mess.
Mechanically, I just can't enjoy any TCG as much as I enjoy Yugioh. However, Konami is dead set on making every wrong decision possible with its management 😂
I don't think fixes that create new problems are a bad thing. It's not like the system they'rd fixing isn't broken; the only upside to the mana system is versatile deckbuilding options, and the popularity of Commander shows that most players don't even want that. All we have left is flood/screw (and I don't think players getting random unearned wins makes a game more fun for either player), and a rocky price curve that squeezes everything important into the first 2-4 cost brackets and leaves everything else out. Even noncompetitive decks need to be 90% 1-3 drops just to function; there's no space for the rest. 4+ drops might not even get to be cast and 1-3 drops are boosted because they comprise almost the entire game.
11:26 Very interesting point. The wargames community has been having an argument for years about whether Turn based system or 'Alternative activation' systems are better. A lot of the innovators claim Alternative activation, as in I go then you go, is better, but as you said there are so many unintended consequenses that people don't even realise. As an example in alternative activation you cannot really have the two opposing forces be of different sizes, as activating on big monster first has more of an impact that activating 20 goblins each individually.
That is really interesting. I haven’t played a war game in years. It was 40k when I did. Playing it with alternating activations would feel totally new.
@@distractionmakers Rick Priestly, original designer of 40k, Warhammer etc, also says that there are unrecognised benefits to a turn based system. For example in WFB having a structured Turn makes it so much easier to teach the game, as players can sort through their turn in their head and don't 'forget' to do stuff. Similar with magic I think having a seperate combat phase.
First of all, that Jaquayzing video was *fantastic*. Making Magic videos may be first order optimal, but making game design vids about more than Magic gives you a much broader audience! It both brings new game designers into Magic and exposes Magic players to new ideas! Second, this gets me curious about something. What do you thing the consequences would be if you removed creatures / combat from Magic? What would you have to change?
Funny you bring that up. A game that I’ve just wrapped up does essentially this. It really makes for a great survival game. Nothing is permanent and you’re trying to pull together just enough resources to survive.
This is why I couldn't enjoy hearthstone. Sure I'd never get mana screwed/flooded but my Lightning Bolt will never accidentally kill my own creature like Arcane Missiles. I want to strategize around the cards in my hand and factor in how much mana I might have not "if my removal kills my own creature then I'll do X." "X" becomes "quit the game."
@@distractionmakers what data where? I tried to get my cousin into magic but he loves yugioh. Did they poll yugioh players asking them if they think magic is better? Pokémon fans, yugioh fans will give pros and cons but they ain’t gonna come out and say magic is the better overall game.
@@distractionmakers I don’t know what the numbers were but when yugioh came out, everybody was playing that. I did. At that point in time yugioh was “beating” magic. That doesn’t mean yugioh is better than magic. There’s no objective way to say any card game is better than the other. Popularity doesn’t equal quality of product. That’s in any industry in the world.
@@stevendefeo8424 classic TCG player elitist ideology. Not an argument you were gonna win dog. Neither of you. No point in saying any tcg is better than another one unless a game is just that bad
while I'm just one datapoint, I'm interested in Jaquaysing but I didn't watch your video on it because I feel like I already know it well, so I doubt I'd get much out of anything on the topic short of a deep dive.
One thing I find magic does really well that non-magic TCGs seem to never understand is that in magic, a booter pack is a game. You can do draft, sealed, mini-master, all sorts of stuff. Magic is super malleable which is why there are so many formats from everything from standard, to limited, to commander, to dan-dan. Just about every other TCG the game is desinged from the ground up for 1v1 constructed and can do nothing else. Some non-magic TCGs let you do limited, but its obvious that was never an intended goal. They requre big changes to the rules likeignoring color restrictions or changing the game objective.
I think you two should look into a game called shadow fist, the cards are kind of hard to get a hold of but the rules are out in the open and they just have better mutiplayer rules.
@@distractionmakers Also in shadow fist card advantage is not really a thing. Not only in the fact there weren't many card draw card but the way you drew cards and resource system would have mitigated drawing extra cards.
MtG succeeds because of how it handles decision load. You can mostly just play your lands without having to think about it. As opposed to having to agonize over which card you have to essentially throw away to be able to cast stuff. (and having to repeat this process every turn for the rest of the game)
Mtg is so lack luster and simple compared to other tcgs. Plenty of others beat magic on various fronts. Ygo beats mtg on complexity, skill ceiling, consistency, and deck building. FaB beats it on litterlly everything. Tournaments? Check. Balance? Check. Forbidden limited lists? Check. Deck building? Check. Complexity? Check. Skill ceiling? Check. Im starting to get into digimon and damn does it put mtg to shame with its resource system and draw mechanics. Feels so much more fast, fun, and engaging.
Unrelated to my other point, but I actually find the Stack incredibly intuitive. But perhaps thats because (a) I have some experience with programming, and (b) I also play Yugioh, and its equivalent (the chain) is *way* less intuitive.
This for some reason reminds me of HEX TCG that got sued by Wizards for being too similar to MTG and promptly died afterwards. Was a game with quite unique PvE that I have not seen recreated anywhere. I guess another reason you can't recreate something without understanding is copyright law.
Google says that Hex ended up settling, agreeing to license some of the IP from Magic to use. It was not sued out of existence. It died because it was effectively the same game as Magic. I remember thinking when first playing, "Is this going to just be another game like Magic where you summon creatures and attack your opponent?", only for me to eventually realize it had much, much more in common than is really reasonable from a new game.
@stevenglowacki8576 Sure! They weren't sued out of existence, they just received an additional upkeep cost. And that's the cost of trying to compete with MTG at being MTG. If you want to iterate over Magic's rules, to make it a product, you start with both an established competitor and an upkeep to maintain. I imagine there were many reasons it didn't have enough success to overcome that upkeep, but I believe that's why the game is fully shut down, instead of being in "maintenance mode". I might agree if you say it was justified, but I can't help but find the conclusion to the story a little disheartening.
I enioy the discussion but it is dumbing down the subject a bit. Yes, there are no CCGs as popular as MtG. But what are the reasons for MtG success is hard to evaluate. Was it because Richard Garfield was a genius designer? Well, Netrunner and V:TES would be disproving that. Was it because of MtG using the zeitgeist? Possibly. Or maybe they are like D&D: lucky enough to be the first and growing so large that they are unable to fail? Strong contender. My point is that sure, meddling with game systems might be a cargo cult mentality and the reason for failure of a game. More often however the issue is much more coomplucated than that and the reason for one game's success over another is much harder to pin point than that.
Going to second another comment that if you guys are going to talk about Magic again in the near future, you consider discussing Archenemy. And/or Two-Headed Giant.
Magic is amazingly well-designed, but I believe its continued success comes mostly from network externality just like D&D, not the design. Sorry game designers!
I think that MTG is as close to perfect as you can get to the point that any changes you make are trade offs and not improvements. I'm not talking about individual metas or mechanics, but the overall core design. Every once in a while a stale meta comes around or a bad mechanic will make it past QA, but MTG's rock solid platform will let it shake it off eventually.
You should look into Legends of the Five Rings. It was more popular than Magic at a certain time and then it went away overnight. At it’s peak popularity. Not sure if you guys were born when this happened.
This is the topic I wanted, I've been seing soo many tcgs in Argentina that try so hard to "not be magic" and always ending the same crappy way and I'm talking about Indommus and their succesors, f your resource pile.
Bruh, you know that Magic is only popular in North America and some parts of Europe, don't you? Yugioh is the most popular TCG in the world. In Latin America and Asia, it's common for people not to play Magic or know what Magic is, but they know Yugioh. In Asia, the same thing happens, and you have Duel Masters, which is more popular than Yugioh. Other TCGs have been beating Magic for a long time. Not that the game is bad, but it's very Americanized, and speaks more to North Americans and those who have ties to American culture. Even in sets like Ixalan and Kamigawa, which aim to communicate with Latin American and Japanese culture, respectively, they have nothing to do with Latin American and Japanese culture. They're pure American stereotype juice.
@@seifyk Do you have a problem with interpretation? Are you illiterate by chance? The point is clear, they said that other TCGs don't beat Magic, when that is false, after all Magic can't beat other TCGs outside the US.
Why do you think those TCGs are Cargo Culting? While I love hearing your views and analysis, I don't get why you think the changes other TCGs have made are bad. Not all painpoints affect the game equally. Mana screws & mana death are high impact painpoints that's mentioned when you ask why someone didn't enjoy playing Magic and didn't stick with the game. Duelmaster / Lorcana / Altered allow to play any card as mana, which means that all cards in your hand are active cards and that the removal of mana screw & mana full introduces a cognitive load issue, as you mentioned. An ideal solution would fix the issue without introducing a new one, but you could argue that the cognitive load problem doesn't affect the player base's satisfaction as strongly as the mana screw / mana death problem. In all formats you see mana issues that make players say that "they didn't get to play Magic this game" and lead them to frustration. Of course it's especially the case when trying to welcome new players to the game, but it also plagues satisfaction in competitive formats. Even in Legacy, players will use wasteland, stifle, blood moon, magus of the moon, trinisphere or harbinger of the seas to prevent the other player from being able to cast their spells. When that happens, I don't hear player say "Good game, your suite of interaction was really efficient", I hear them say "Well, I hope I'll actually get to play Magic next game". While you do need to have low lows and high highs to make for an exciting game, if you go too low, it turns into a painpoint and a reason to drop the game. At the best Disney resorts, they have a satisfaction optimization process. The waiting lines are long. While it's annoying, they don't have to actually do something about it until it negatively affects satisfaction. They use all sorts of User Research techniques to monitor satisfaction. Once it starts becoming a problem, they first try to make the waiting line less boring with a more interesting visual design, a view towards members of the casts, the ability to take photos with the cast or a cardboard background while waiting in the queue and so on. During the peak of the Frozen 1 hype, they tried to implement a photo booth where people could wait in line to be able to take a photo with Anna & Elsa. So many people wanted a photo that the waiting line was already full with just the annual pass members (who get to enter the parc earlier). People were insanely upset and it heavily impacted satisfaction. So they replaced that with Anna & Elsa slowly going around the parc in their carriage so that most people could see them and take pictures of them in front of the carriage. It was a lower high, but a higher low that didn't impact negatively impact satisfaction anymore. MtG gives the advantage to the blocker which is a struggle for the designers, which leads to the turtling you mentioned. If you go at prerelease events, you will see casual players scoring draw after draw after draw because both players pile up a huge board of creatures and everybody is too afraid of attacking. MtG designers make constant articles, podcasts and videos about how they try to give back the advantage to the attacking player with combat tricks (you used all your mana during your turn, I still havent revealed any of my intentions during my turn), abilities that trigger when you attack (sun titan type effects) or that boost your creatures during your turn (combat trick + prowess / heroism, initiative during your turn...). They are getting better every year at managing this issue and it's definitely work. Should a new TCG game designers team really take the risk of starting with the same basic issue and taking a while to learn to design around it? Hearthstone gives the advantage to the attacker, all games are fast and always moving forward. From an audience strategy standpoint, you need to differenciate yourself from Magic. Trying to compete with the same mana system is dangerous: players who love that system are probably already playing Magic and not moving away any time soon. On the other hand, targetting non-Magic players with an IP like Disney and players who are frustrated by the mana system with the ability to play any card as a land is probably a good move. To reduce the cognitive load system, they just made simpler cards : most cards have a 1-2 sentence ability and that's it. As you mentioned, the stack is hard and most players, especially casual players, don't understand it. If you go to the commander night of your LGS and play with random players, you will likely see people saying absolute nonsense about the stack or ruling in absurd ways because they actually have no idea what they are doing. You will also witness that they actually hate instant speed interactions. They don't like keeping mana and not having proper targets to use their mana for. They end up either tapping out, keeping mana and being frustrated or keeping their mana and wasting their removal on some crap to avoid losing it. Many players constantly play their instants at sorcery speed. Only the most enfranchised Magic players really make use of the instant speed aspect of the game and enjoy it. The same players you shouldn't target with your new game because they will be too hard to convert. I think leaning into how casual players actually play and enjoy the game makes sense for a new game that aims at a mainstream audience. I summary, I think many of these TCGs are aware of the issues you mentioned, made those choices in full awareness, and that these choices make sense in terms of audience strategy.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree, and we stated in the video, that the designers of those games were likely aware of the choices they made. The games are still made in Magic’s image and attempt to remove pain points without maintaining what those systems are actually doing.
an underrated thing that Garfield did was get MTG into the hands of tons of players as quickly as possible. You can think things through until you're a pretzel, but until you put your game in people's hands, you still have a lot to learn about how it works.
Imho, one positive aspect from MtG land-based resource system that is often overlooked is player progression. I learned MtG from my older cousin when I was 9 years old (currently 34). Of course I did not like when I got mana screwed or mana flooded, but it did not take me long to realize my cousin did not suffer from this as often as I did, so there had to be something wrong on how I was building my deck. I was only really introduced to the concept of mana curve reading an online article when I was 14 and I remember vividly how it opened my mind. One or two years later I was already playing significantly better than most of my friends. In fact, we play together to this day, and when we play commander I still find myself noticing mistakes in their land count and/or mana base in general.
My point is, the fact your resources are in sharp dispute with your action cards provides a very fertile soil for growing your strategic thinking. A player mildly into the game can check a championship-winning deck and figure out its goal and why most of the cards are there, but only real pros will understand how and why that deck's mana base is the way it is. I highly doubt 1% of players can build a top-tier mana base even if you provide all the cards they could wish for.
This is a sharp contrast to systems like Heartstone. Sure, you do not get the occasional bad feeling of mana screw or mana flood, but in exchange you basically renounced an entire axis of strategy, decision-making and deck building expertise progression. And building the decks is a great part of the fun in a TCG, if not the biggest part. If you make deck building resource management something so easy a child could do well, sure you can appeal to a larger player base in the beginning. But as your player base ages, they are more likely to get bored and go search for a richer TCG to play. And most likely that TCG will be Magic. There is virtually no ceiling on how good you can be in building mana bases, each deck and metagame has its nuances and slight adjustments can make or break a deck. If you plan to remove this axis of strategy, you better plan for something equally as challenging and consequential to replace it, or you risk making a children game in disguise.
Well, I disagree. Building a deck is a great part of why CCG's are fun... for you. People enjoy things for different reasons and most people have no time or willingness or even cards to test and build their own decks so they will netdeck so they can spend time on what they really enjoy: playing the game.
I usually prefer my own decks because I do not enjoy playing decks that might be better but less fun for me. I realize however that other people might disagree.
I don't think there's that much of a barrier to creating a very good manabase, Frank Karsten has had (and continues to have) a huge impact on the improvement of them. A few heuristics and a hypergeometric calculator gets you 90+% of the way to an optimal mana base and lots of testing does the rest.
With that said, you're hitting on one of the very strategically good consequences of Magic's mana system. Because of colored mana costs and the opportunity cost of branching into extra colors while deckbuilding, you get a nice gradient of what is playable within a single deck. As an easy example, Hearthstone imposes a hard limit here in the form of class cards, whereas in Magic, you can splash colors in pretty much any deck, and the calculus of how much to splash changes with what is available in the card pool. In older formats, splashing is easier and gets you much more powerful cards, but you open yourself up to things that punish greedy manabases.
It's a fantastic strategic dynamic that a lot of players and designers don't fully grasp when trying to "fix" mana/screw flood.
@@Amazementss Yes, HS is a casual game in that respect too. Deck building is not only limited by a very small card pool but even stronger limitation is classes.
@@sathrielsatanson666 Actually, @thomasvconti is on point here. The biggest MtG's asset mechanically is the fact that it mixes strategy and tactics so well. And I'm sorry to break it to you, but what you call "playing the game" is only the game's tactics dimension (deck-building being the strategy one).
I think there’s a flawed assumption underlying this discussion: Magic is the biggest TCG because it’s the best game mechanically and its many competitors fail because they aren’t as good mechanically and fail to successfully innovate on Magic’s core mechanics.
Perhaps that was true at some point in Magic’s decades of existence, but the most important aspect of its dominance now is the size of its player base.
TCG’s are, by their nature, lifestyle games. Even casually, building decks and keeping up with new releases is a huge commitment of time and money. If you’re going to invest so much into a game, you better be sure there are other people to play with. You can pretty well guarantee a store is hosting Magic somewhere in town on any given night. No other game, no matter how good, has reached that critical mass.
It doesn’t matter if One Piece is a 10/10 game. If you can’t find anyone to play with, you’ll settle for 7/10 Magic.
Yeah, I'd play paper Netrunner every week if I could find players. Instead, I'm playing monthly EDH Magic.
Agreed. I VASTLY prefer Vampire The Eternal Struggle to Magic, it's not even a competition. But I just can not find a group of 4-5 players to play with these days, I feel lucky that I ever had the opportunity at all since the game is so good. Magic feels like the stuff you play since there's nothing else around to play, not the game I prefer to actually play.
I always wondered why MtG didn't split the deck into two, one for lands and one for spells. Whenever you draw, you decide whether to draw a land or a spell, and you have to have minimum 40 (or 35 or 38 or whatever) spells in your spell deck.
Yes this would change the strategic balance between deck archetypes, but they adjust that constantly with card strengths anyway. To me it'd be worth it to remove the large percentage of games that aren't competitive due to mana screw. A nice bonus is it'd speed things up a bit -- less shuffling for stuff like fetch lands.
YEAH LIKE HOLY SHIT that would fix so many issues
I've always heard the saying "Don't tear down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place."
If you're curious, the concept's called "chesterton's fence", after the guy the quote is attributed to.
"I only make videos about magic - why does my audience only want to watch videos about magic?" 😢
It’s a vicious cycle. 😆
@@distractionmakers jokes aside I'd personally like to see more non-magic-specific content. The deep dives on other TCGs are great and I'd love to see that for other types of games
We are all slaves to the algorithm 😢
@@distractionmakers make sure to make a community post when you post things that arnt normal content for ypu
"Today we are finally going to talk about something that isn't magic." 20 minute video comparing topic to commander...
This is pretty much the reason I didn't get into the new TCGs for the last decade or so. The majority of them were "Magic but X" where they copied the core of Magic and just "fixed" a few core mechanics. Besides not being very interesting, it did throw off a lot of the nuance that Magic brought to the table. It "solved" one problem and caused new ones, which usually meant the game didn't feel as diverse and interesting. (it also had the side effect of people having to sell their game based on the single feature that is different, which isn't that exciting)
Which is why I love games like Flesh and Blood. Its not built from a foundation of "Magic but different", its built off a completely different set of ideas (Closer to Kung Fu or En Guard if you've played those) The game has its own set of difficulties, but they aren't caused by trying to "fix" something from magic.
As for the complexity points and card speed, there is an interesting middle ground that I have seen a few games use. Where basically the entire game is sorcery speed with no interactions, but during a specific phase of the game reactions can be played. The first that comes to my mind is the new Ace cards in the digimon TCG. They allow for an interesting reaction of creating higher level monsters suddenly that your opponent wasn't expecting. But, these cards can only be played during a very specific window of time. And that window is part of the core rules, not a window based on how/when a card is resolving, its a specific phase of combat.
This does feel like a good solution to the "problem" of speed. You can get the high intensity of instants and traps and reactions, but it is limited in when it takes place. It makes those phases very intense! And doesn't make it feel like you are not able to play the game due to an instant removal spell as soon as your card hits the table.
Another thing that people may not appreciate about Magic is that its rule/card text is so well-written and codified.
This is especially apparent if you come from a Computer Science background (i.e. the Stack).
Keywords, standardized templates, triggered abilities vs replacement effects, etc.
Magic has hundreds of pages of ruling for all kinds of edge cases, but most players don't really need to understand anything beyond Layer 3 to play the game.
Contrast this to Yu-Gi-Oh - so many individual cards had errata/exception texts, and card text didn't have standardized templates until past the Synchro/XYZ era.
I totally agree. Yugioh erratas A LOT! They tried to make a template later to fix this problem but an article about Wind-Up Zenmaines from an english writer contradicted the way it played in the OCG and the way it played versus the templating so the judges just went with that. It is literally written in the templating for a delayed effect on it's first english printing. Also Formula Synchron has had it's text changed 7 times! Konami also erratas to "Fix" cards so they can push sales of those cards by breaking them and then, oops we "Fixed" them again to work how the text says because a new set came out and we want to sell that now!
"Another thing that people may not appreciate about Magic is that its rule/card text is so well-written and codified."
Well, it is now...
Took a number of years to get there though.
"This is especially apparent if you come from a Computer Science background (i.e. the Stack)."
They actually treat it like it is a computer program, every card has to fit within the rules and if it doesn't it's not allowed in black border Magic. Makes sense with MtGO and now Arena.
I'm excited to see how this video approaches how magic players use a lot of cargo shorts
😆
We like them because they're comfy and easy to wear.
Ups, wrong franchise.
One word: POCKETS
@@Khyrberos pockets should be a lot of words when describing cargo shorts, they are basically a three dimensional array of pockets sown together into the form of shorts.
Generally kneeling behind them in a praying pose, IIRC
I think mana flood/screw is properly identified as a problem, but the fixes generally overestimate the scope of the problem. Fixes for it generally completely remove the possibility of flood/screw at all instead of just mitigating the worst experiences it causes.
My group has homebrewed lots of solutions over the years, and the one that has worked best is letting everyone have 2 basic lands in the command zone, and any time you could draw a card, you can instead draw those basics. Nearly all decks still need to have lands and consider the ratio of lands to action in their decks, it tends a little more toward action than baseline MTG, but not drastically so in most cases. In 60 card, most decks will swap out like 4 lands for additional action. In play, its kind of like swapping out rolling a d12 for how many lands you get in a game for rolling 1d8+2 for how many lands you get. There is still variance, but the times when that variance creates non-games is drastically lower. The expected number of lands in a game ends up balancing out to roughly the same, but there are less extreme cases, and always having at least 2 mana even in the worst cases means you have the option of building plans into your deck that either can effectively bootstrap off of just those 2 lands, or survive on just the two until you can eventually draw more.
Oh that’s a cool idea
I already see the problem with this idea. As soon as I read the "2 basic lands in the command zone", I immediately know why this idea would never ever work, because the base line has to always be competitive Magic. From what I am reading, players still start out with the same number of cards in hand. This idea is reminiscent of the "Companion" mechanic, except it is lands. And that idea was a mistake. Because Commander is a "casual" format. you can mostly forgive the Commander Zone. But this idea would never fix Magic as a whole, because zero land decks would exist. 9 Land Stompy would no longer need lands. RDW would only be gas. Goblin Charbelcher anyone? The idea to have the option of guaranteed land drops seems nifty. Until it isn't.
@@ArcDragoon The places where zero land decks could feasibly exist do not noticeably change with this rule. As you mention, zero land (or very low land) decks ALREADY EXIST and are largely not problems for the formats where they happen. These are usually wild formats with tons of other very powerful things happening where such decks are just a slice of what is going on. And when they are a problem, they are usually trivially easy to address.
We've been playing this way for about a year and its only been positive. We aren't playing legacy, but neither are most people.
Finally, just like the content of the video this was commented on, this is more about the discussion of the concepts than suggesting anything that "should" be done for the game across the board. I was bringing up for discussion that there are options for mitigating mana flood/screw beyond the things we have seen in other games which tend to aim to completely remove it. If something was done for the game as a whole, I would trust that the people that are paid to develop the game would you know, develop whatever idea to work out kinks before implementing it (like deciding to scale down to only 1 land if needed, banning specific problem cards, modify mulligan rules alongside it that are less needed, etc).
This is a neat idea. Having said that, it seems like it would significantly decrease the number of lands you need to play. Like a typical 60 card deck is as likely to see 3 lands in the top 10 with 24 lands as a 10 land deck with the homebrew rule would. Depending on the power level you play at it seems like this would heavily favor aggro decks, especially since they tend not to need as much (or any) fixing.
@@margaram78 Aggro decks get the most benefit, but at the same time, with recent card development, often aggro as an archetype has real issues already. With the rise of commander, big splashy effects are often the most pushed, and those tend to start at 4 mana. The glut of "free" spells counteracts that a bit, but most of those are tools against aggro, not in favor of it.
And thats just talking magic in an overall meta sense. If we were to tunnel in to magic's most popular format, Commander is drastically skewed against aggro, so there being a change that gives an edge to aggro is more upside than downside.
For the people I am playing with (we play multiple formats so no this is not just related to EDH), 2 lands have been what we feel is the sweet spot, but anyone interested but cautious of the idea in their groups has the freedom to start with just a single land, and then gauge the effects and decide what works best for them.
Its also worth considering that once a group finds the level that they prefer, there is also room for dialing in the mulligan rule the group uses. At the 2 land level once decks have acclimated to the implications, having any hand that is so unworkable that you need to mulligan is pretty rare and tends to point more to a deckbuilding problem than a game problem. Our 60 card decks are averaging a number of lands in the high teens, so it is possible to get 5+land openers but they are quite rare (like 1% by hypergeometric calculations). And mana screw failures are basically unheard of unless you are explicitly pushing your expected land count well below what the cards you want to play demand. So there is room to discuss scaling back or removing the mulligan rule.
The no instant speed option is a death blow to me. If I can walk away from the table during my opponents turn without losing any strategic advantage something has gone very wrong.
This is something that really annoys me about all the "Our turn, comrade" memes is (aside from the fact that my background is in political philosophy and that is inaccurate in so many ways...) not only does it obscure all sorts of ways in which turn player is still extremely important (such as, in YGO, ignition effects or turn player priority at the start of any open game state), but it's also deeply hypocritical, because the same people complain when their opponent plays uninterrupted. They just don't like when their opponent plays cards.
@@minabasejderha5972which is why I think a lot of card games allow players to use cards in their hand to protect them from attacks and some have disruption during combat exclusively. Vanguard and One Piece utilize this and Dragon Ball furthers this with letting you use those cards in hand to support offensive pushes as well.
@@minabasejderha5972its accuracy is irrelevant, because it’s a meme with no analogues in the world.
Well I guess we're opposites. I always miss my window to play instants/reactions/whatever. Totally fine with interaction, but it has to be prompted(e.g. choosing what to block with).
10,000% this. If I can't do anything during my opponent's turn/action, it isn't us playing against each other, it's just two players both playing solitaire.
The best example I find are companies that move into new buildings every few years, because statistically companies that do this are growing faster compared to the competitors.
What they don’t understand is that moving is bad but the growth leaves successful companies no choice.
Haha that’s an amazing example
Stupendous example of confusing cause and consequence
Yet another example of the mythical drowning by ice cream.
Yeah, imitation without real understanding is a huge part of why I'm low on stuff like Elestrals or any of the Bandai games. Bandai games just often look like different flavors of Duel Masters, and therefore different flavors of MtG. Elestrals is basically just YGO without an Extra Deck and is looking to have all the same fundamental problems Old Yugioh has when it isn't a game about constantly cheating out boss monsters.
(Also this is why I like Flesh and Blood. Totally diff)
Flesh and Blood mentioned! Yeah!
Something I never really got with Elestrals is what problems with yugioh they were trying to solve with it. The game's biggest problem is that its extremely complex and hard to approach for new players, other card game experience also isn't particularly transferable either. Which to a large extent, is an issue every long running card game has, and making a simpler game isn't going to exactly appeal to the more enfranchised players.
Its pretty well positioned as the fastest game and most complex on average, and notable it really does have some of the lowest amount of luck determining games around. Its still a card game at the end of the day, but variance largely comes from the sheer amount of options players have in a single turn, largely because the extra deck is an option.
I don't think the market cap for people who liked old school yugioh but not the modern game is really big enough for a new tcg to develop in. It can work until the developer makes one giant design failure and then it goes to hell.
@@shawnjavery I think the only real thing Elestral addresses, other than power reset, is mixable attributes. Yugioh had to make arbitrary lines via named archetypes to prevent the game from just devolving to "the best 40 cards". The spirit deck adds some limit, but I think it fails to a degree. 20 slots for colors is a lot and as long as you're playing low cost stuff like the 1 drops, it's not hard to have access to everything you need.
I mean Digimon uses a different mana system which from my experience is fairly unique to Bandai.
One Piece separates itself from Duel Masters with its DON!! deck and deck construction being based on the color(s) of the leader, tightening applicable cards in a deck.
@@otterfire4712 For One Piece (and Lorcana), I think artificial color constraints misses the point of MtG's color system and how modular it is. I do respect Digimon's game systems much more though.
Flesh and blood's mana system feels like an improvement over other TCGs I've played
I think that Legend of the Five Rings was one of the best card games for a very long time. Wholly different from any other game, and one of the best storylines in gaming. Hands down a phenomenal design space
i've attempted to do amateur deep dives on this topic multiple times
i find there isn't a very satisfying overarching clean answer
the first thing to understand is that it's not just Magic that stands over everything else - it is Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. These games are all roughly, major fluctuations aside, roughly the same size and radically different in terms of their mechanics. if one is going to cite game systems (like mana) as the reason Magic succeeds, that explanation is going to immediately run into the problem of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon
the next to understand is that the reason for the success of those 3 games isn't static. after achieving a critical mass of popularity, the publishers for these games have been able to print their way out of problems (MtG's recent product line sprint is an excellent example of that) and rely on a secondary market to drive customer interest. the lack of a robust secondary market is almost certainly why games like Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra were not able to break out into evergreen products and join the big three, despite their initial popularity - they lack a scene of collectors and speculators that buy product with the sole intent of interacting with the secondary market
there's also just the branding / sign value of MtG, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! as 'the CCG'. when people talk about CCGs, those games will populate their thoughts, and that's a pretty massive marketing advantage
but there's also this absolute snarl of little things and bits of cultural chaos the line-up to support these games while others faltered at different times
This video made me realize how much Flesh and Blood understood magic, and how they made the move away from it. I believe they have made a very interesting fix to the mana problem.
Great point!
What's not remembered about MtG is that it was designed to be marketed as a card form of D&D. By that I mean that cards and their rarity was supposed to be similar to D&D's Player's Handbook against the Dungeon Master's Guide. You only need one copy of the DMG, but you need multiple copies of the PHB for everyone else. The intention was to have only a few copies of powerful cards like Black Lotus shared among a group of friends. But the failure to understand that players will min-max decks like they do with character sheets was the mistake. Because competitive players will do anything, and pay for anything to min-max deck lists. And this is actually the original sin of MtG. It's original design philosophy did not anticipate competitive Magic.
WTF?
@@MrRayRockstar yeah, originally they didn't anticipate that competitive magic would exist
@@MrRayRockstar compare the 2 what, what is magic being compared to?
@@hircenedaelen Richard didn't expect the game to be anywhere near as popular as it became. He assumed people would spend about as much on Magic as they would any board game (a starter deck and some boosters, ~120 cards). So in a play group of a handful of friends there would only be one of any rare. So, some cards being over powered was o.k..
That's also the root of ante being a thing. It was a way to force change and card flow assuming people wouldn't being acquiring new cards.
The fact people would go out and buy as many copies of a card as the wanted to put in their deck wasn't even a consideration.
Personally I think Shadowverse Evolve has the best understanding of both Magic and their own original digital Shadowverse's flaws and strengths. It's not really trying to be Magic but it's learned enough from it to use what really works within the systems they wanted to create to make a game that's criminally underrated. They seemed to be designing around the fact that people really love having big game ending bombs alongside their value pieces but still liked navigating value trades. The turn tick mana system they use is smartly offset by decks being really inconsistent and your opening draw being four instead of five-seven unlike other games. Card draw and tutoring is rare and has a huge design budget cost which enforces a lot of the inconsistency lands do without having the pain points lands have for casual players. Since you're likely seeing less cards the mana curve is super important. Higher cost cards actually have a place unlike in Magic where you can drop a 2 cost and have it be your main beater for the whole game. I just wish it hadn't been the HD DVD to One Piece's Bluray in the 2023 Yugioh exodus format wars.
Great discussion! It would be great to have an episode where you talk about Yugioh’s smaller main deck size being smaller than most MTG formats and having an extra deck, if that amount of consistency is more or less fun
I feel like yugioh always gets forgotten in these circles and i keep seeing references to dead or dying digital only games like hearthstone or runeterra or even gwent even though half of them are shuting down, and not yugioh even though they recently beat mtg in popularity world wide
I have played TCG's all my life - MTG, yugioh, pokemon and hearthstone as well as a few smaller ones here and there. Personally I think MTG has the best mana system of them, and I think the issue of being "mana screwed" can be fixed fairly easily. Permit a small (I am thinking between 1 and 3 cards total) basic land side deck that you can opt to draw from in your draw step instead of drawing from your main deck. The exact size of the mana side deck, the times that you can access it, and the penalty for accessing it should all be adjusted depending on the format of the game you are playing. I would place some sort of restriction on the mana side deck like you cant use it for the first 3 turns (or some similar restriction so aggro players cant just skip lands in their deck all together). Having access to even just 1 emergency land would clear up most instances of being mana screwed.
Someone said this would be too easy to exploit with the way magic exists now. Because you could run rdw with basically no lands
@@freddiesimmons1394 so make it so that you cant use the mana side deck for the first 3 turns (that's what mulligans are for anyway) or force lands from the mana side deck to enter tapped
@@arcon980 yes, and at that point you're increasing the barrier to entry for learning your game. Also either case might still be good enough for decks that want to run 0 lands to perform some unknown chicanery
@@freddiesimmons1394 I dont see the barrier to entry as a valid argument, a mana side deck is simpler than many mechanics already in the game so if that is confusing someone that much, then MTG probably isn't the right TCG for them. Any change you make to the game comes with the risk of making something broken, this is no exception. I would prefer to correct a core problem with the game and risk unbalancing a couple decks that can be corrected by further alterations to the mana side deck's cost or with banning a couple more cards.
@@arcon980 "i dont see barrier to entry as a valid argument"
LOL explains how you'll never be in charge of any game design
I thought the episodes not about tcgs were more interesting personally, either way pod kicks ass keep it up boys!
only 10 seconds in but that reminds me of a thing Casey Yano, one of the lead developers for sts said. it was something like "I'm a very opinionated person, I think you kinda have to be in order to be a game designer. So a lot of the time I see sts inspired games look for a different way of doing something and I think man, we already solved that problem! If I thought that your solution was better, that would've been the solution I used in the first place!"
YGO ended up creating a new offshoot of the game called Rush Duel, which is way lower on mid-turn interaction, in an attempt to make the game more accessible to kids. It makes sense, because the current version of YGO is really obsessively complex and involves a huge amount of interaction on the first turn, but it does mean Rush feels like it lacks something sometimes. It basically just pushes you back to having to set traps and use them at defined times, which isn't really bad necessarily, but I'm curious where they're going to go with it. Unfortunately the game is Japan-only at the minute and thus difficult to experience.
"Instant speed and the stack is the most complex part of magic"
Laughs in layers.
Good point 😆
Great points! Every TCG and even a lot of other table top games lead back to magic. And playing the old Xbox games with the different puzzles really helped to learn the game and become a lot more skilled. It lets you know when you can actually interact and play things and how interactions will actually play out.
I watched your video on Jaquays dungeons and later wrote a dungeon for my tabletop players to participate in using the basic principles outlined in the video - it went very well! Just wanted to leave a comment since I felt like it was one of the more practically relevant game design videos and I would love to view more similar content.
That's awesome!
The points about resources in your deck are a good point. That's why the Ressource System in Lorcana feels so good to me since you can play most cards as Ressource but some cards can't be used as a Ressource und are a little overstated in comparison.
I've been playing MTG for a long time, but I think one that gets overlooked considering it gave magic a run for its money until the license got pulled was the Decipher Star wars game, it would be interesting to see you take on that game
I've only seen a few videos so far but yall are quickly becoming my favorite channel. Sorry you can't talk about more than tcgs, but tcgs brought me to you guys 😂
Haha we laid it on a little thick. We love talking about TCGs.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a common misconception that Magic is the first ever TCG, and also another misconception is that this was Richard Garfield's first ever card game he came up with. If I recall, there were other TCGs around during that time, and Richard Garfield had experimented with different systems before settling in and expanding on Magic with his fellow college classmates.
Edit: Corrected to Richard 😂
You mean Richard Garfield
Spiderman made magic
First ever relevant one
Hahaha, yes, Richard! 😂
Really depends on how you'd define a game as "the first". From what I understand, MtG is the first genuine TCG as we would define it now. Other pre-MtG games had some aspects that would fit the definition but ultimately couldn't truly be called a TCG, or just flat out were never released. If it weren't the case, we'd probably be seeing a lot more evidence of the contrary.
Every LGS in my area has magic product in storage or collecting dust on the shelf. It ain't moving in my area and hasn't been for the last few years.
L5R and the LOTR TCG were excellent TCGs that, as a magic player, i really enjoyed different design
I really enjoyed the tquaising video but entering this level of game design on another game for the average audience is kinda hard.
the mana curve provides an invisible stability that HEAVILY dictates your play. You think you have so many options, but if you dont play the 4 mana wipe on turn 4, you lose. If you dont curve out in Aggro, it's bad. It's difficult to shoot your wad too early. Also, 7 cards and mana to do stuff make things pretty linear.
Its a great feeling to find that my project avoids these issues.
Why other tcgs can't reach popularity of MTG would be a better question... The idea that Magic is the best game is absurd considering there are games that are way too different or are improvements over base Magic for the most part (like Runeterra)
Was runeterra an improvement? It’s dead.
@@distractionmakersThe ruleset is great and it seems like newer games like the last Star Wars also feature similarities to it. And no development doesn't mean it is "dead", as long as servers are up. Chess and classic card games are certainly not dead. Btw, after this comment I reinstalled it on my phone and it instantly matches vs opponents, so it is definitely playable and probably will be for a long time since it has large casual playerbase that spends money on PvE mode after PvP development abandonment.
I'd like to see you guys talk about Altered.
Sucks that your dungeon design video wasn't more popular, it was really good
You guys know lor also has instant speed right? Cause it kinda sounded like you didnt 14:34
I love how Vampire: The Eternal Struggle functioned.
12:47 I'd urge you to check out Dune: Imperium - that really solves the problem of instants while still keeping the interactino (to an extent), in combat.
The issue with Instants is really that online there are just too many points of interaction. For MtG to be a 'modern' online game you would have to have a 'non-interactive' main phase, and just have maximum interaction for the Combat phase.
There is a lot of smart design in Lorcana that balances cards that seem extremely powerful but always have a measurable opportunity cost. They have a 0 cost Wheel of Fortune that only 1 deck really plays and another is 50/50 on it. I would like to see them do more conditional interaction like "whenever an opponent does X then do Y
With the exception of 1 errata they've managed to make a pretty tight game with a diversity of viable decks. Starting from scratch also afforded them the opportunity to limit the types of removal available. Magic sort of clumsily added Ward 2 to everything so that the 20 or so efficient removal pieces wouldn't trade up. Lorcana fixed this by basically having no removal that trades up. Just something to think about in card games. I've done similar things in my cube.
6:40 ...and that's why Price of Progress goes in ALL of my red decks.
14:00 oh absolutely! There have been countless times where I've gone 'wait...why did that happen?'
It just occurred to me (probably because it's been ages since I played Yu-Gi-Oh!), but Setting Trap Cards and Monsters in Defense Mode fills a cery similar niche as ending your turn with a few Islands untapped, doesn't it? It's forcing one player to give the other player information about their capability to do something off turn.
Great video. I would have loved more examples.
If someone wants to “beat” Magic, they need to stop trying to make a game that’s “better” than Magic.
Players don’t like it when people talk down to their fav game.
Instead a game needs to come from having a truly unique game design with no direct effort to improve on current popular designs.
This has a lot of nuance
This is why I hate Sorcery. "The magic killer....."
@@MrRayRockstarthe "XYZ killer" never succeeds lol. It took 20 years for an MMO to be a "WoW killer", and in the end, the game that got that highest playercount (and only for a short while) was old-school Runescape, the least similar MMO to WoW in the genre.
@7:50 They totally did NOT think about it. It is a "bad system" that has evolved and adapted to be "better". There are much better systems, specially thise that haven't been designed yet.. but Lands existing as cards allow for certain interactions and mechanics (Landfall).
Still, I wished this channel covered other things besides Magic.. even hypotheticals! While still keeping it in the back if their mind. You get to a point where you are just repeating yourselves..
You haven't even covered SMUGGLE in the new Star Wars Unlimited.
I don't know what your end goal is.. but are you achieving it this way?
the theory of mana in mtg is really cool, but now because of all the different types of lands the system kinda feels really bad now.
where does magic rank in games then if it's not the closest to perfect? 1-100, where do you think magic lands?
It’s tough because magic isn’t just one game. I think the high point was standard format 10 years ago, but I’m biased haha. I’d give it a 90/100 at that point with its biggest downside being complexity.
@@distractionmakers ok I appreciate that analysis of the game and I do agree that the level of complexity is high and only getting higher as new mechanics get added and you have to track more permanents or emblems. Standard 10 years ago what was that innistrad/theros times?
A better and slightly more fantasy adjacent term might be a “nonexistent knight.” It is from a Calvino story of the same name, about a sentient suit of armor in a kind of, existential crisis.
I watch all the distraction makers videos, magic or not. Please do what makes you happy, guys!
"Cargo cult mentality is where you try to recreate a thing without understanding how it works" (side eyes Eternal's lack of countermagic)
One interesting difference,
Magic's creatures don't typically come with protection abilities and are a nice power boost if they do have shroud or something
Games where you can attack creatures directly, it becomes more standard for bigger or more important cards to come with protection. A big card with no protection is a bad card.
Choosing blockers vs attack directly effects the fundamental strategy flavor immensely.
the insight about mtg creatures sticking around a lot longer and therefore being able to have more longterm effects is interesting. I remember playing Hearthstone years ago and realizing that any creature that doesnt have some kind of immediate value (aka an etb or death trigger) is usually unlikely to get to do anything, because tempo is so strong and you cant do much of anything to protect other creatures. This is compounded by the lack of any defensive instants.This results in a game where more creatures need to do something immediately, with the only good repeated effects being end of turn triggers, aka "i get value immediately and if you dont kill this right now I will snowball a win."
in comparison, pokemon basically lets you choose which creature your opponent can attack, making longterm backrow effects a lot easier to get value out of.
It gives me a new respect for Pokemon's system. You can choose what to block with, but you gotta block with /something/. I wonder if Magic ever came up with Escape Rope...
Whenever someone says "we´ve trained the algorithm that we are a X TH-camr" I wonder how much it is that you trained the algorithm, or your audience. Do you have any evidence that it is the algorithms doing and not simply a silent majority?
Oh you can probably interchange algorithm with audience. TH-cam’s role in it is that they gage a videos performance on how well it does with your audience first. If it underperforms they don’t show the video outside your audience. It creates a feedback loop that keeps your channel niche. Good for TH-cam, not great for content creators who want to talk about a variety of topics.
This is one of the reasons that I liked the LOTR card game from Decipher. That company has a pretty good history of making "not Magic" games, and the win condition in that game is pretty radically different from any other game. Sure, one of the win conditions is to kill one specific character, but that character is just as weak as your other characters and it's hard to force them to fight a battle not in their favor without overwhelming numbers, whereas most games the character to kill would have far more health than any other character. And of course I don't think any game had anything like "Win the game if you survive site 9". It also really eschewed any idea of card advantage being important, because you refilled your hand every turn. Too bad the rest of the game was a mess.
I really enjoyed the video fting Jaquaysing!
I think Duel Masters was pretty cool/good for allowing a card to be played as mana or as a card.
Mechanically, I just can't enjoy any TCG as much as I enjoy Yugioh. However, Konami is dead set on making every wrong decision possible with its management 😂
I don't think fixes that create new problems are a bad thing. It's not like the system they'rd fixing isn't broken; the only upside to the mana system is versatile deckbuilding options, and the popularity of Commander shows that most players don't even want that. All we have left is flood/screw (and I don't think players getting random unearned wins makes a game more fun for either player), and a rocky price curve that squeezes everything important into the first 2-4 cost brackets and leaves everything else out. Even noncompetitive decks need to be 90% 1-3 drops just to function; there's no space for the rest. 4+ drops might not even get to be cast and 1-3 drops are boosted because they comprise almost the entire game.
6:40 well it's not a recent thing, utility lands are quite old as a concept
11:26 Very interesting point. The wargames community has been having an argument for years about whether Turn based system or 'Alternative activation' systems are better. A lot of the innovators claim Alternative activation, as in I go then you go, is better, but as you said there are so many unintended consequenses that people don't even realise.
As an example in alternative activation you cannot really have the two opposing forces be of different sizes, as activating on big monster first has more of an impact that activating 20 goblins each individually.
That is really interesting. I haven’t played a war game in years. It was 40k when I did. Playing it with alternating activations would feel totally new.
@@distractionmakers Rick Priestly, original designer of 40k, Warhammer etc, also says that there are unrecognised benefits to a turn based system. For example in WFB having a structured Turn makes it so much easier to teach the game, as players can sort through their turn in their head and don't 'forget' to do stuff.
Similar with magic I think having a seperate combat phase.
First of all, that Jaquayzing video was *fantastic*. Making Magic videos may be first order optimal, but making game design vids about more than Magic gives you a much broader audience! It both brings new game designers into Magic and exposes Magic players to new ideas!
Second, this gets me curious about something. What do you thing the consequences would be if you removed creatures / combat from Magic? What would you have to change?
Funny you bring that up. A game that I’ve just wrapped up does essentially this. It really makes for a great survival game. Nothing is permanent and you’re trying to pull together just enough resources to survive.
Should have discussed Altered TCG design principles!
We will!
Ahahahaha that thousand yard stare from Gavin "Lands are lands!!" Like from the incredibles hahaha
This is why I couldn't enjoy hearthstone. Sure I'd never get mana screwed/flooded but my Lightning Bolt will never accidentally kill my own creature like Arcane Missiles. I want to strategize around the cards in my hand and factor in how much mana I might have not "if my removal kills my own creature then I'll do X." "X" becomes "quit the game."
So you came up with a title to a video that is wrong. Yugioh players aren’t gonna say magic is better than yugioh. Absolute terrible video.
I mean… the data says otherwise. I could see someone try to argue for Pokémon.
@@distractionmakers what data where? I tried to get my cousin into magic but he loves yugioh. Did they poll yugioh players asking them if they think magic is better? Pokémon fans, yugioh fans will give pros and cons but they ain’t gonna come out and say magic is the better overall game.
Player data. Mtg is more popular than ever. Yugioh is not.
@@distractionmakers I don’t know what the numbers were but when yugioh came out, everybody was playing that. I did. At that point in time yugioh was “beating” magic. That doesn’t mean yugioh is better than magic. There’s no objective way to say any card game is better than the other. Popularity doesn’t equal quality of product. That’s in any industry in the world.
@@stevendefeo8424 classic TCG player elitist ideology. Not an argument you were gonna win dog. Neither of you. No point in saying any tcg is better than another one unless a game is just that bad
while I'm just one datapoint, I'm interested in Jaquaysing but I didn't watch your video on it because I feel like I already know it well, so I doubt I'd get much out of anything on the topic short of a deep dive.
One thing I find magic does really well that non-magic TCGs seem to never understand is that in magic, a booter pack is a game. You can do draft, sealed, mini-master, all sorts of stuff. Magic is super malleable which is why there are so many formats from everything from standard, to limited, to commander, to dan-dan.
Just about every other TCG the game is desinged from the ground up for 1v1 constructed and can do nothing else. Some non-magic TCGs let you do limited, but its obvious that was never an intended goal. They requre big changes to the rules likeignoring color restrictions or changing the game objective.
Great point. Its flexibility extends even to the mana system. You can do just about anything you want as long as the mana works.
I'd argue that today-Wizards doesn't really understand it either
I think you two should look into a game called shadow fist, the cards are kind of hard to get a hold of but the rules are out in the open and they just have better mutiplayer rules.
We’ll check it out!
@@distractionmakers Also in shadow fist card advantage is not really a thing. Not only in the fact there weren't many card draw card but the way you drew cards and resource system would have mitigated drawing extra cards.
MtG succeeds because of how it handles decision load. You can mostly just play your lands without having to think about it. As opposed to having to agonize over which card you have to essentially throw away to be able to cast stuff. (and having to repeat this process every turn for the rest of the game)
Agreed. It’s a great feature of the mana system.
Mtg is so lack luster and simple compared to other tcgs. Plenty of others beat magic on various fronts. Ygo beats mtg on complexity, skill ceiling, consistency, and deck building. FaB beats it on litterlly everything. Tournaments? Check. Balance? Check. Forbidden limited lists? Check. Deck building? Check. Complexity? Check. Skill ceiling? Check. Im starting to get into digimon and damn does it put mtg to shame with its resource system and draw mechanics. Feels so much more fast, fun, and engaging.
Unrelated to my other point, but I actually find the Stack incredibly intuitive. But perhaps thats because (a) I have some experience with programming, and (b) I also play Yugioh, and its equivalent (the chain) is *way* less intuitive.
This for some reason reminds me of HEX TCG that got sued by Wizards for being too similar to MTG and promptly died afterwards. Was a game with quite unique PvE that I have not seen recreated anywhere.
I guess another reason you can't recreate something without understanding is copyright law.
Google says that Hex ended up settling, agreeing to license some of the IP from Magic to use. It was not sued out of existence. It died because it was effectively the same game as Magic. I remember thinking when first playing, "Is this going to just be another game like Magic where you summon creatures and attack your opponent?", only for me to eventually realize it had much, much more in common than is really reasonable from a new game.
@stevenglowacki8576 Sure! They weren't sued out of existence, they just received an additional upkeep cost. And that's the cost of trying to compete with MTG at being MTG. If you want to iterate over Magic's rules, to make it a product, you start with both an established competitor and an upkeep to maintain.
I imagine there were many reasons it didn't have enough success to overcome that upkeep, but I believe that's why the game is fully shut down, instead of being in "maintenance mode". I might agree if you say it was justified, but I can't help but find the conclusion to the story a little disheartening.
I enioy the discussion but it is dumbing down the subject a bit. Yes, there are no CCGs as popular as MtG. But what are the reasons for MtG success is hard to evaluate. Was it because Richard Garfield was a genius designer? Well, Netrunner and V:TES would be disproving that. Was it because of MtG using the zeitgeist? Possibly. Or maybe they are like D&D: lucky enough to be the first and growing so large that they are unable to fail? Strong contender.
My point is that sure, meddling with game systems might be a cargo cult mentality and the reason for failure of a game. More often however the issue is much more coomplucated than that and the reason for one game's success over another is much harder to pin point than that.
Going to second another comment that if you guys are going to talk about Magic again in the near future, you consider discussing Archenemy. And/or Two-Headed Giant.
Pokemon, who just sells crazy well because it's just Pokemon:
Am i a joke to you?
Magic is amazingly well-designed, but I believe its continued success comes mostly from network externality just like D&D, not the design. Sorry game designers!
MTG is so complex that if you try to make another TCG but different it always comes of as MTG but for kids.
I think that MTG is as close to perfect as you can get to the point that any changes you make are trade offs and not improvements. I'm not talking about individual metas or mechanics, but the overall core design. Every once in a while a stale meta comes around or a bad mechanic will make it past QA, but MTG's rock solid platform will let it shake it off eventually.
You should look into Legends of the Five Rings. It was more popular than Magic at a certain time and then it went away overnight. At it’s peak popularity. Not sure if you guys were born when this happened.
Haha yes we were. I’m aware of the game but haven’t done extensive research.
This is the topic I wanted, I've been seing soo many tcgs in Argentina that try so hard to "not be magic" and always ending the same crappy way and I'm talking about Indommus and their succesors, f your resource pile.
Chesterton's Fence is the other half of what you're discussing
Bruh, you know that Magic is only popular in North America and some parts of Europe, don't you? Yugioh is the most popular TCG in the world. In Latin America and Asia, it's common for people not to play Magic or know what Magic is, but they know Yugioh. In Asia, the same thing happens, and you have Duel Masters, which is more popular than Yugioh. Other TCGs have been beating Magic for a long time. Not that the game is bad, but it's very Americanized, and speaks more to North Americans and those who have ties to American culture. Even in sets like Ixalan and Kamigawa, which aim to communicate with Latin American and Japanese culture, respectively, they have nothing to do with Latin American and Japanese culture. They're pure American stereotype juice.
Who is the audience for this podcast? Southeast Asia? Brazil?
@@seifyk Do you have a problem with interpretation? Are you illiterate by chance? The point is clear, they said that other TCGs don't beat Magic, when that is false, after all Magic can't beat other TCGs outside the US.
Why do you think those TCGs are Cargo Culting? While I love hearing your views and analysis, I don't get why you think the changes other TCGs have made are bad.
Not all painpoints affect the game equally. Mana screws & mana death are high impact painpoints that's mentioned when you ask why someone didn't enjoy playing Magic and didn't stick with the game. Duelmaster / Lorcana / Altered allow to play any card as mana, which means that all cards in your hand are active cards and that the removal of mana screw & mana full introduces a cognitive load issue, as you mentioned. An ideal solution would fix the issue without introducing a new one, but you could argue that the cognitive load problem doesn't affect the player base's satisfaction as strongly as the mana screw / mana death problem.
In all formats you see mana issues that make players say that "they didn't get to play Magic this game" and lead them to frustration. Of course it's especially the case when trying to welcome new players to the game, but it also plagues satisfaction in competitive formats.
Even in Legacy, players will use wasteland, stifle, blood moon, magus of the moon, trinisphere or harbinger of the seas to prevent the other player from being able to cast their spells.
When that happens, I don't hear player say "Good game, your suite of interaction was really efficient", I hear them say "Well, I hope I'll actually get to play Magic next game".
While you do need to have low lows and high highs to make for an exciting game, if you go too low, it turns into a painpoint and a reason to drop the game.
At the best Disney resorts, they have a satisfaction optimization process. The waiting lines are long. While it's annoying, they don't have to actually do something about it until it negatively affects satisfaction. They use all sorts of User Research techniques to monitor satisfaction. Once it starts becoming a problem, they first try to make the waiting line less boring with a more interesting visual design, a view towards members of the casts, the ability to take photos with the cast or a cardboard background while waiting in the queue and so on.
During the peak of the Frozen 1 hype, they tried to implement a photo booth where people could wait in line to be able to take a photo with Anna & Elsa. So many people wanted a photo that the waiting line was already full with just the annual pass members (who get to enter the parc earlier). People were insanely upset and it heavily impacted satisfaction. So they replaced that with Anna & Elsa slowly going around the parc in their carriage so that most people could see them and take pictures of them in front of the carriage. It was a lower high, but a higher low that didn't impact negatively impact satisfaction anymore.
MtG gives the advantage to the blocker which is a struggle for the designers, which leads to the turtling you mentioned. If you go at prerelease events, you will see casual players scoring draw after draw after draw because both players pile up a huge board of creatures and everybody is too afraid of attacking. MtG designers make constant articles, podcasts and videos about how they try to give back the advantage to the attacking player with combat tricks (you used all your mana during your turn, I still havent revealed any of my intentions during my turn), abilities that trigger when you attack (sun titan type effects) or that boost your creatures during your turn (combat trick + prowess / heroism, initiative during your turn...). They are getting better every year at managing this issue and it's definitely work. Should a new TCG game designers team really take the risk of starting with the same basic issue and taking a while to learn to design around it? Hearthstone gives the advantage to the attacker, all games are fast and always moving forward.
From an audience strategy standpoint, you need to differenciate yourself from Magic. Trying to compete with the same mana system is dangerous: players who love that system are probably already playing Magic and not moving away any time soon. On the other hand, targetting non-Magic players with an IP like Disney and players who are frustrated by the mana system with the ability to play any card as a land is probably a good move. To reduce the cognitive load system, they just made simpler cards : most cards have a 1-2 sentence ability and that's it.
As you mentioned, the stack is hard and most players, especially casual players, don't understand it. If you go to the commander night of your LGS and play with random players, you will likely see people saying absolute nonsense about the stack or ruling in absurd ways because they actually have no idea what they are doing. You will also witness that they actually hate instant speed interactions. They don't like keeping mana and not having proper targets to use their mana for. They end up either tapping out, keeping mana and being frustrated or keeping their mana and wasting their removal on some crap to avoid losing it. Many players constantly play their instants at sorcery speed. Only the most enfranchised Magic players really make use of the instant speed aspect of the game and enjoy it. The same players you shouldn't target with your new game because they will be too hard to convert. I think leaning into how casual players actually play and enjoy the game makes sense for a new game that aims at a mainstream audience.
I summary, I think many of these TCGs are aware of the issues you mentioned, made those choices in full awareness, and that these choices make sense in terms of audience strategy.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree, and we stated in the video, that the designers of those games were likely aware of the choices they made. The games are still made in Magic’s image and attempt to remove pain points without maintaining what those systems are actually doing.
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The fact that this is true for so many people makes me so angry. Filthy casuals make it so we can't have nice things.
🥺 But I liked the Dungeon video... I was kinda hoping you'd lean more into ttrpg stuff because of it...
We’ll keep trying 😆
hey i liked the jaquaysing video
Many mtg fans are too far gone to play anything else so they'll keep the game on top forever.
the trinity of TCGs have been around so long and have such a large fanbase that it's hard to break them. MTG, Poke and YGO.
i’m sorry but if you’re defending the land system in MTG in the year 2024 you’re arguing the wrong point.
This is my weekly anti-commander comment
If you solve all the problems you gets non game
If you build it, they will come.
Meta Zoo was SOOOO close to.success. Just needed more artificial soeculation, hype and shilling by a shady investor
Seems timely given concord
Nice
Yugioh doesnt get enough credit even if its a fucking mess of a game its supper successful and its not just magic but with auto mana lol
Great point. It is a very different game and has taken some big risks. Some have paid off.