It seems to me that what people really want, whether they realize it or not, is a relatively close game. Winning or losing by a landslide is ultimately less interesting because, if the game wasn't even close, there was never much tension established. The stakes of any given action or decision are just too low if there's no realistic chance that it impacts the outcome of a game. The skill vs. variance balance is so hard to get right because both skill and variance have the potential to lead to a game where who wins and who loses becomes far too obvious far too early.
Exactly. Even if I get to pop off and do "the cool thing" with my deck, if my opponent was sitting on one or two lands for the past three turns (or they hit every land drop but only played one card) it feels like a "So what?" kinda moment.
I agree they feel like the best games. But I'm not sure that's 100% correct. I think we want some variance to make things interesting and not guarantee the best player will win, some element of skill so there is a sense that your decisions matter, but more importantly I think people want to be able to play the game. Having to mulligan to 5 sucks, or keeping a statistically good hand but then not drawing land 3 and getting screwed, or colour screwed, sucks. I'd rather lose cause my opponent made better decisions than because I made the right decision but got punished for it and couldn't do anything. I love MTG, but the amount of non-games can be frustrating sometimes, even if the mana system does make for a bunch of interesting decisions before and during the game.
The best games truly are the close ones. That's where all the memories come from. I also think due to this being a traditionally physical game there is more of a respect and appreciation for your opponent. That also accents how much of a shared experience the game is. Vs card games online where you could honestly care less about how your opponent feels and the empathy is severed. On MTGA I get a kick out of watching someone struggle. In real life I just feel bad for them.
One of the spects rarely discussed when talking about the design of mana in MTG is how it's colored system is self balancing when it comes to mixing attributes. Many of the games that ditched colored mana system either for no mana system. or one where you have a resource that pays for any card have strong limits in deckbuilding, where you either can't or very limited in what kind of cards you can mix. Partly it's also done so designers have easier time designing cards, so you don't need to look for busted 3 card combinations with 3 different factions. This for me feels very limited, and Magic very elegantly designs around that. You can play 2,3,4,5 colored decks provided that your mana base can pay for it. So in theory a 3 colored deck might be more powerful that a 2 color equivalent, but you have to deal with your mana being potentially less consistent. And the color nature of magics mana is great for expression, Red/Black deck and Red/Green deck have different vibes, even though they both might be just aggro decks.
i'd recommend you look into flesh and blood more. their pitch system on the surface looks like the lorcana and similar "fixed" resource system, but in reality its somewhere between magic and dual masters, while being completely different was well. you still have to make very important decisions about what cards you add to your deck because each card is either 100% card and 30% land, 65/65, or 30/100. you can easily get screwed if you need 3 resources on a turn and you dont draw blues. also, the fact that your pitch goes to the bottom of the deck is an inspired rule. another huge difference is that each turn rarely has the capability of impacting every other turn for the rest of the game. there's little to no board state in most games, so each turn is about maximizing your current hand and trying to set yourself up for the best outcome 1-2 turns from now.
11:15 - "The complexity of the mana system is something they wanted to trim down" --- Looks at hybrid and phyrexian mana and snow mana and colorless mana (a la Oath of the Gatewatch)... "Yeah, the complexity of the system is trimmed way down"
@@logansanchez7998Snow-covered lands have been around since Ice Age, and it was good to see it finally being mechanically impactful for more than just breaking symmetry for a specific mana doubler. That said, the fact that you can specifically tailor your manabase to gain advantages, usually at the cost of limiting the scope of what you can impactfully play, without completely stripping you of options.
One of the great things Magic’s land system provides that I didn’t realize until playing other games is that it slows down the pace of the game so cards can stay relevant for longer. For example, my 2 drop creature is still relevant for at least two turns before opposing 3-4 drops outclass it. In other games where mana is guaranteed every turn, your cards get outclassed the following turn so it radically speeds up the game. 1 drops become useless and the game usually revolves around 3-5 costed cards. As the costs get higher, the power difference gets wider. So 6 drops become useless as 7-8 drops are game ending power just the following turn. It also heavily prioritizes ETB effects and good stuff decks. Slower or passive abilities get instantly power crept and combo decks are much harder to work effectively.
I don't agree with you. You say that 3-5 costs are the most important in non-mana system card games, how is this different than 0-3 cost cards in constructed Magic? (Currently in Standard people in non-ramp/non-control shells people may run something like 2 Sheoldreds as top of their curves, the rest of the deck is cheaper than that.) And Magic's mana system leads to too many non-games where you draw too many resources or too many payoffs without being able to use them, and leads to rng losses when players are in top deck mode.
@azraksash if you keep getting mana screwed then that’s a skill issue honestly. Build your mana base better. Add more lands, add better lands, your color ratio might be off, make sure you have smooth mana curve for non land cards, etc. By getting better at deck building and mulligans, you vastly reduce your chance to mana screw. It will inevitably happen but YOU can reduce the chances by getter better as a player. Magics land system hurts newer and casual players the most since their skill level and knowledge is generally low so that is one of the big down sides of it
I don't think it's about mana system.. Compare to Heartstone for example... It may be true that low drops become irrelevant in the late game - but that's more about there not being blocking, everything being able to "fight" etc rather than the mana system being non-random. Mana screws/flood being a "skill issue".. Well partly it is.. Obviously even if you have the "correct" amount of mana you sometimes draw too few or too many lands... But there's way to reduce the likelihood of that happening. Scry/surveil/"looting" can help a lot - landcyclers are even surer way.. Of course those are not "free" - a landcycler is generally somewhat weaker than a card with same mana cost but no landcycling and same is true for cards with scry/surveil - though those abilities tend to come relatively cheap nowadays. But that kind of shows that the mana system was problematic to begin with and they had to correct that with card design and rules like mulligan.. Now say we played a version of magic where you can choose to draw from land deck or non land deck or if you draw one from both deck each turn.. Would that make high mana cost cards OP? I don't think so -- well maybe some of them. Yeah ETB effects are strong - but it's not because of mana variance -- it's because of removal being there - you wan't to outvalue the opponent..
@@PoorproplayerWtf, not only get mana screwed, but you can easily get flooded. You can easily find videos from pro tours where players lose to their lands, because they don't get to PLAY the game... You won't get this problem in other card games.
@@JawzahTry Legends of Runeterra to see what happens when we get a mana per turn in a very similar to Magic game. The only major factor that may lead to difference in outcome is that everything has vigilance and haste, so you can get potentially 100 to 0-ed in one turn.
I can’t speak for Yu-Gi-Oh now, but back when I was a player it wasn’t all that uncommon to see archetypes have some mixing, or for there to be staple cards from certain archetypes that managed to find their way into a lot of decks. There were also Monster Type decks and archetypes sometimes had support for those, so there was also some interplay there. Although I did notice that the Monster Type decks were fading by the time I stopped playing. There were often cards that offered benefits to strategies that weren’t exclusive to one archetype. A good example of that is black Luster Soldier Envoy of the beginning. It was a card that could only be summoned by banishing (Yu-Gi-Oh’s version of exile) a LIGHT monster and a DARK monster from your graveyard. Now most of the time, archetypes would share either a Monster type or and Attribute (LIGHT, DARK, FIRE, WATER, WIND, EARTH). The best way to get cards in your graveyard was an archetype at the time that had LIGHT monsters with pretty powerful effects with the “drawback” of milling you. So one of the best ways to be able to play BLS was to use this archetype in conjunction with archetypes that had DARK monsters. And BLS was a powerful card. It was on the limited list which meant that instead of being allowed to play 3 in your deck you could only play 1. It was still super common, showing up in 83 lists at its peak in September 2014. So while the current meta might heavily revolve around archetypes (I haven’t played in 10 years so I really don’t know), they aren’t inherently restrictive and aren’t guaranteed to reduce variance. It really depends on how Konami chooses to design them. The lack of a resource system really does make the game a lot more consistent though.
Its very much archtype driven design now. They do a good job of keeping a healthy amount of variance though. The two main things they do is require lower power level cards in the deck to enable higher power level ones and making the different starter cards to their engine have other beneficial effects that make them not completely interchangeable with each other, even if they are in a lot of situations.
Yugioh spiraled out of contorl. Pretty much all of modern decks play like archetype decks. To compare it to MTG most playable yugioh creatures have an ETB Demonic tutor effect, AND the card you tutored for can be cast for free if it was added to hand. Also yugioh has a always active side board " Ecktradeck" of creatures who read like: sacrifice two creatures, cast this card without paying its mana cost. And pretty much all " side board" cards are ETB demonic tutors as well
YGO is the wild west of card games right now. Honestly it is the shining pillar of what power creep looks like when it spirals out of control and the game is no longer what it used to be. I don't know if there is a way to fix the problem of mana flooding or the lack there of without breaking the game completely.
MTG is just an illusion of balance, Mana has never been balanced. Power Creep exists in MTG in different ways. Standard is dead and Commander is the main format that is not designed to be taken seriously, it's more of a social interactive game.
It feels like they are trying to kill commander at this point as well. To many groups and pods fall apart because of the issue of it being an arms race at the end of the day.
I'd like to add to the paradigm that is Skill vs. Variance: Diplomacy. It's high skill, low variance in rules (every game starts in the same state, the only concealed information is player plans, and there's no randomness to the outcome of any interaction) but in output, because there are seven players interacting (as you mentioned when discussing sports, more players=more variance) the gameplay itself is highly variable.
The problem is not mana screw or mana flood but the power level of MTG being pushed so far on the creature front. What this does is drastically increase the chance of "non-games" sure in the old days you could miss a land drop or get a little flooded it would be fine. If you do now you are regularly losing. The early turns matter A lot.
My son and I play that we have 2 basic lands in the command zone, anytime you would draw a card, you can draw one of those instead. Mana Screw and Mana Flood are still things, but they are both softened. There are certainly ways this could break down, as you mention in the podcast, too much reductions in variance have gameplay costs too. We hold this off a bit by making library searching very rare in our decks. We are allowing ourselves this extra consistency in manabases, so we do not afford ourselves free open access to the other mode of consistency. Library searching is a pain anyway both from homogenizing games and just the mechanics of deciding from tons of options, finding that thing, and shuffling, so we like making it a rare thing anyway. We also build our decks specifically to make a gauntlet of options that play well against each other, not an arms race trying to make the most powerful deck.
@@lumioak3260 Then mono colored commanders would be at a disadvantage as they would get less lands. But yeah, there are lots of adjustments that can be made to tweak the experience. I honestly think that even 3 lands is not an absurd thing for a group to agree on. If color balance is a concern for your group, I would probably say to use Command Tower and City of Brass. We're currently working on a non-commander 60 card gauntlet. We are starting with each deck having the two basics, but we plan to use those slots as an additional balance mechanism. The best decks may remain on their basics, or even get downgraded to wastes, while the worst decks can get non-basics in those slots. The wildest thing we tried while tinkering with Commander was just letting everyone start with Command Tower, Path of Ancestry, Arcane Signet, and Sol Ring in play. It was fun, but it started needing additional rules like the each player only getting to start with [player position] number of them untapped on their first turn, or making signet/ring indestructible lest everyone pack their decks with artifact destruction to imbalance things again. Fun, but it started getting too complicated for its own good.
Honestly, this is a pretty great rule, I might adopt this when playing with my family. I ran into a similar issue once, it was my sister's first game and she got completely mana-screwed. We're talking 3 lands on turn 8, and she was playing the Tyrranid Warhammer 40k precon, which is full of expensive cards and cards that benefit from being cast with a high X value. We let her put three lands onto the battlefield, and suddenly she started sitting just a bit more upright and her frown fade a little. She even took out my dad and was very close to killing me too. What I'm trying to say is: she looked like she was having more fun. For kitchen table magic, fun is the most important thing and I feel like your rule makes it a lot easier to have fun consistently. So, again, thanks for the idea!
@ermsen how about giving everyone the ability to put the companion ability to conjure 3 basic lands, this'd work like the original companion ability. it's a card out side the game that you can put into your hand as a sorcery? or maybe 3 land slots, but non-basic lands ETB tapped. and no legendary lands
I came in here hating mana screw, but walk away realizing that yes, they are one of the things that make deck building matter more, and deck building is what I love with MTG.
Just found the channel, and I'm eating up the content! Love hearing a more development side of games and all the technical jargon is cool! That being said, I despise the mtg land system. Like despite all the power creep and monetization going on, the thing I'm still endlessly complaining about while playing mtg is the lands. Although its an anecdote, I just did an mtga draft, played 8 games, and I determined that 5 of those games was EXCLUSIVELY decided by who drew enough lands. And while I don't know what kind of hands my opponents kept, the two times I land screwed I kept 3 land hands, and proceeded to not draw a single land for 6 draw steps. This also happened 3 times to my opponents, where on turn 6 they only had 3 or even 2 lands out. It sucks that the MAJORITY of the games I played today were decided not by skill, but by luck: plain. dumb. luck. Even when I won because of it I felt empty and sad. I think I speak for most people when I say, I'd rather lose a close game then win a non-game where the opponent didn't even get the chance to play. Kinda for that reason, I've been getting more and more into Lorcana.
Magic's land are cool, but it's something only Magic can have. It's like YGO's freeform bullshit combo in turn 1 type of design. It's cool that it exists and it fills a important niche in the gaming world but no new game that comes out today can do THAT.
how in the fuck am I only learning about this channel now? I'm gonne binge these videos so hard. Please keep making these. I'm so ready for that parasocial relationship. 😬
One minor point about the thing towards the end about Pokemon having more variance, I'd say that it has way less despite the system of prize cards etc. There's such an abundance of tutoring effects nad card draw that most decks can simply always "Do their thing"
I think my personal preference for a resource system for MTG would be playing your cards as lands, but certain cards play as tapped lands for X turns. So your crappy commons could be played untapped as lands, but your better cards would come in as tapped lands (essentially what modal double faced land cards are in MTG nowadays). Spells with multicolours or with higher CMC might even come in tapped and with a stun counter (but not a stun counter, you wouldnt want proliferate to affect it... Just something akin to a stun counter) so you would be disencentivised to just play your highest cmc card as a land, or to fill your deck with multicoloured cards. Obviously this doesnt "fix" the mana system, it would trade one complexity for another, would shift what decks are viable and how decks played out, and introduces the emotional damage of having to trade your precious cards in as resources. But, it would add more decisions into the game (which is the part i love of MTG), and would add better consistency (i.e. you have more interesting games and less dud games). I think it might make it actually harder to get into magic but would make better, more competitive games, while still retaining lots of variance.
One aspect I love about Magic's mana system is that you can justify having cards at different power levels at the same mana value. Cards like steel leaf champion and necropotence are vastly more powerful than similar cards at 3 mana but you can't just run them in every deck because of mana pip requirements. Not only do you have to juggle your land count and mana curve, but you also have to decide whether or not to splash another color or strain your mana base for a double or triple pip card for a powerful effect at the cost of consistency.
You mentioned your favorite game of magic being a no lander, I did something similar last year in an RCQ and this hand won my semi finals match. Sadly I didn't win grands but I was on living end against the Amulet titan player I lost to in Swiss, and just beat Amulet titan first round of top 8. I won game one, and going into game 2 I kept a hand with leyline of sanctity, oliphant, generous ent, subtlety, force of negation, and 2 shardless agent. I knew that if I drew a single land I could win this game. The wild part is I never drew a land and I still won the game. My opponent cast a summoner's pact to grab their titan, cast their titan, and I evoked subtlety to stop him from getting the lands he needed to pay for pact on the next turn.
I think the trick is that risk management is a form of skill. For MTG purposes you have to decide the tradeoffs of including a certain amount of lands, the colors of lands, the costs, etc. and from moment to moment you need to make decisions whenever you scry, cycle cards, decide which cards to play, etc. It's technically random but you're using your skill to manage it.
Just one point, moderm pokemon has very veyr little variance. You are almost ceetain to see every card you need to see every game because of the ammount of draw powerr ect
One thing that really spoke to me here is that I played F&B and bounced off of it *hard* the first time I played it because I just felt like... nothing I did mattered. I just got absolutely crushed four times in a row with me not really able to do much of anything. And I think that's sort of emblematic of how much more skill-based/deterministic it is (although it's likely also because it's so different from magic and legends of runeterra and other games of that ilk where I don't have this problem quite so much)
I very much like how Decipher did resources in their Wars TCG. It's funcitonally the system they used in their Star Wars TCG, but they balanced it differently and added colours... except the Energy (mana) isn't coloured, the 'colours' are a seperate resource. Essentially, where a MtG card would cost you six mana and three of them would be blue, Wars would make you pay six energy, and require that you had 3 faction symbols in play. If you were playing single colour, getting three symbols out was really easy to do. To do the same in a two colour deck required more effort. Three... I'm not sure if anyone even came up with a good three colour deck before Decipher cancled the thing (and yanked the tabletop RPG license for some nonsensical reason. they'd licensed someone else to make the RPG, and the books were selling really well with Huge anticipation for the ones that were still upcoming... ) The other thing about how they handled resources in that game is that your deck was your life was your mana supply. Cards in your hand were still life, but they weren't mana anymore. It all worked very well actually. It was a long game though, a tournament round was an hour... and was also only a single game. fifty fifty as to whether that one game would be Finished or not (though, fortunately, a winner could be determined by having the judge come over and count both players' remaining cards... which they had to do even if you finshed the game because the difference was used when determining the matchups for the next round).
I have a half formed idea at this point so this may need further elaboration but i think Lorcana is the most interesting alternative to the mana system of magic. For those that arent aware, as the boys didnt fully explain it, Disney Lorcana has two broad types of cards, inkable and uninkable. All creatures, spells, etc are all one of those categories. Inkable cards can be turned into resources, you reveal the card to the opponent and turn it face down in your "inkwell" and it becomes 1 ink. Those inked cards are used as the mana to cast your other spells. The uninkable cards are just cards that cannot be put into your inkwell. Its a good way of getting around the resource vs spells deck building restriction, while also ensuring that you dont just turn all your most powerful spells into ink and never get the chance to cast it. I dont necessarily know if its better than Magic but I definitely think they have the two best options (at least of the games ive played)
I think the biggest strength of magic's land system isn't the variance in how much mana you have, but the variance in which colors you have. Putting colored mana cards into your deck allows for way more deckbuilding freedom and many combinations of colors to work. Hearthstone or LoR for example where you pick a single class or combination and get all the cards from it is a lot less interesting for deckbuilding and causes decks to more often have access to the same exact pool of cards to include. Being locked out of colors or quantity of mana causing you to improvise is nice too, but the way magic punishes you for inconsistency specifically I think is the problem. If you are missing a color, you simply can't play your cards. If you miss your early land drops, it's a non game. -1 or 2 cards in mulligan to search for your lands is a huge setback. I think for example doing something like each color pip you are missing = +1 cost could be better, since then pips could be pushed beyond just 1 or 2 as it almost always is with magic, and being 1 short isn't a complete disaster, just a tempo setback your opponent can still capitalize on. That principle could probably be applied more broadly to consistency related issues, having the punish be more gradual/analog than a true/false u are fucked or you aren't. The information aspect is something I've also been experimenting with, but to explain the details of the system I was trying would take a bit so I won't bother xd
Also if you want a board game that proves the point about team sports, Decrypto is one i recommend. Technically nothing random in it (other than set up) yet depending on the number of people involved, highly variant (and challenging).one of my fave group games and I'm counting secret identity ones (werewolf, mafia, etc)
55:00 Pokemon does have rotating, though it doesn't matter much for the actual pokemon, those would be the equivalent to creatures, but for the trainer cards, so basically everything except creatures and lands, as some of those are absurdly strong and having access to all of them would make it possible to build a deck that for example allowes you to draw through your entire deck twice on turn one while bouncing all opponents pokemon to the hand which winns you the game (in Pokemon it is an alternative loose condition to not have any pokemon in play.
8:25 Gain variance? Absolutely not. You either play roughly on curve, like hearthstone or games that use the facedown card method OR you can't play the game due to flood/screw. Thats it, that's all. Lines of play? BS, your deck either roughly gets on curve or you don't get to play. Specific cards for a base resource reduces lines of play.
Games that have very consistent decks only provide average experiences, and if you ask players if they had fun, they would answer yes, even though it wasn't exiting. We need mana screw because it gives the Oh! Its Lightning Helix! Oh my God! moments.
Agreed, variance is king! Card games aren't about executing the same strategy over and over again, they're about navigating to a win with what you're given.
One more thought as the video ends, Magic also noticeably experiences power creep even in its standard sets, I don't understand that Pokemon comment questioning why it even has a rotation?
You mentioned DnD and MTG as two of the main sources of inspiration for many board game designers. What do you think about a pen&paper role playing card game? Two good things = too much?
26:40 Don't know if you are going to mention it, but in a linear progression resource system you can still have a "resource deck" which you shuffle and get the top of every turn to allow for colors and/or special resource cards.
Fair, though the same is true for keyword granting counters, which is probably why no established game has or would ever introduce them in a physical release. But with those obviously already not trying to be (easily) trackable in paper I am somewhat surprised that they haven't yet introduced color specific shield counters, like they did with color specific protection.
I dont know if anyone mentioned it, but the One Piece Don!! solution is an interesting approach. You cant mana screw, it has an interesting choice pattern who should start the match, (the starting player have odd nomber of dons (mana) the second has even) and all of your mana can be used to buff your characters on your turn. It has depths and basically eradicated all of the non games, that a mana system could cause.
I dont think Force of Will is really played any more, but that game had a cool compromise with Magic's sustem whete the land cards (crystals?) Were in a seperate deck, and you played the top card each turn. Duals made it pretty boring, but it added some interesting varience in casual games, where what color you got each turn could create some interesting lines.
The reason I and all of my friends stopped playing magic is because of how poorly it handles it’s variability, you make a fantastic point about how variability is key to a game staying fun, and how a lot of skill in magic is how well you can navigate luck, but the particulars of magics mana base don’t just create variable games, they create NON-games. It IS interesting and fun to have to consider color-consistency when building a deck, it is NOT fun to sit there and unable to perform game actions because I drew no red mana in my red black deck. Yes those things can be mitigated by building decks better, but no amount of mitigation stops it from happening without changing the core design of the game somewhere along the way.
I think you make a good point that "inaction" isn't the best trade off for having variance that allows lower skilled players to potentially get ahead. I do think there are better alternatives. One game that I think does a good job of mitigating the "do nothing" feeling is actually Inscryption. Regardless of what your hand is, if you can't play anything, you can always get a squirrel card that can be used as fodder, a sacrifice to summon something stronger, or even be used to attack with if set up with any sort of buffs.
This comment feels a lot like complaining that if I'm never roll more than 5 in 10 d20 rolls in DnD then I lose. Like, yeah, that's the point of randomness. Sometimes you are so unlucky that you never had a chance no matter what you did, usually it's not going to be that. The entire point in being able to mitigate randomness is that randomness still exists.
@@NinjamanhammerThe flipside in DnD is you can also roll high. You can crit, you can wildly outshine your normal damage rolls, or you can dodge brutal attacks or crippling status conditions by the skin of your teeth. For the land system the highest roll is the expected outcome. The “high roll” is a normal game of magic and any deviation is pain and suffering. A gambling game where you can only lose. It’s basically the worst way to implement necessary variance, where it only makes itself known when it cripples you. You’re already drawing cards from a deck. This really wasn’t necessary.
@@rockyhankin8679 You can high roll in magic. You can miss every roll by 1 in DnD, in magic when you draw poorly you can at least plan ahead. The high roll is only the default if you're really bad at the game. It's kind of incredible that you watched an entire video about the land system and still somehow missed every point.
@@Ninjamanhammer The high roll in magic isn't based on lands though. That was my point. A well constructed deck has a good number of lands most of the time. Have you ever looked at your hand of magic cards and gone "fuck yeah! I have four lands! Finally, the correct number of lands!"? I certainly haven't. A high roll in magic is something like drawing the perfect card at the perfect time, which is equally possible in the games without lands. The rest of your comment doesn't have any substance. It's just "git gud retard" and there's no reason to engage with it. I've watched enough livestreams by players much better than me to know it stays a problem. If that's all you have left to say, please don't reply again.
26:10 That sounds like Force of Will since you have a linear mana with different colors. Because you have a mana deck and every turn, you can tap your Leader/Commander to get a random mana/land into the field.
Let’s not forget the design and deckbuilding spaces that lands occupy as well. Dual lands and lands that have other abilities have been around since the beginning. Not only are the lands variance-influenced resources, they are also in themselves deep components of strategy that influence that very same variance! The different art and border styles also make lands a way for Magic players to express their own style and personality even further. Full-art or alternate/showcase play sets of lands end up costing as almost much as the rest of the deck sometimes. Signed, someone who loves MTG and lands
I think the other thing people dont consider when comparing sports and games is the skill ceiling. Like theoretically perfect chess is possible for a person to play, while theoretically perfect sports isnt something a human can achieve, when performing physically there will always be mistakes, and I think variance in games is a perfect alagory for this. Like a player missing a last-minute field goal to win the game and a player missing the one extra red land off the top to cast a bolt to win, give me almost the same emotional experience
I'm not sure where I was recommend your videos but I have been watching all of them the past week. Very insightful and thoughtful stuff! I'd be curious what you think of the TCG Grotto Beasts, that I designed. I tried to thread the needle between a mana mechanic that let you pay for costs with your cards in hand, but you always would get them back based on what your opponent summoned.
I see a similarity to people in video games complaining about wanting a smarter AI opponent. If the AI is too smart or consistent, then the game isn't really fun. Even Dark Souls and games that have a rep for being difficult are not Smart AI. They just punish you more. The best AI is another human, and not everyone enjoys multiplayer. You get cheesers, cheaters, spammers, quitters, laggers, etc. And dealing with all of that is not fun. But that is what a human would do because it leads to higher chances of victory. So a smart AI would do the same things. Variance leads to diversity of outcome, including bad outcomes. But without the bad, you can't have the good. Just like in order to have good cards, you need to have bad cards (relatively), which is another issue that some people don't understand. It's that old saying that some players will optimize the fun out of games. I also say that those complaints come from a very niche group of highly invested people, who are not the total or even target audience. Smash bros is not intended for competitive, but people play it competitively. I'd argue that competitive people will find a reason to compete, of which gambling is the most degenerate. So it is better to make games geared towards your target audience, and let the competitives take what they get. I think the ideal target is beginner friendly, with room to grow into mid complexity. This gives an incentive to improve, but also puts a cap on power so that when you inevitably miss high, it doesn't wreck the game.
Love this channel y'all! Discussing games and game design is so interesting and a welcome change from otherwise brainless content on youtube. Thank you!... I unabashedly tell people Magic: The Gathering is the best game ever made any chance I have to share it. The game play and game systems are amazing. It can be made fairly simple for new players but is infinitely complex if you want to dive deep into it. Not to mention how many different ways it can be played, standard, draft, commander, etc. And that's just the gameplay. Then you have the art, the storylines and lore, the collectability, the characters. There is a reason for it's staying power.
Ironically, a lot of the recent steps taken by WoTC has been to turn more spells into lands and vice-versa, especially in Eternal formats. MH3 introduced more MDFC spell lands, some of which can even enter the battlefield untapped in exchange for a relatively trivial life cost. Before that we've seen an increase in landcycling tacked on to spells with mana value 5 or more, and before that we had the Kamigawa channel lands. So it looks like WoTC is acknowledging that mana development variance is a balance issue in faster formats. It's also opening up an interesting avenue for future design: as the game ages, there's less and less incentive to play basic lands, which both makes cards such as Blood Moon more powerful, but also opens the opportunity to make cards that reward playing basic lands over other land types.
Mana flood and mana screw is a problem to be solved. You have to be careful when you say card games rely on variance. Variance is important (a card game without variance will immediately turn into an algorithm, which will kill the fun), but it's also important how that variance manifests in the game. If the variance manifests as 20% of the time I don't get to play the game, that's a problem. If it's about creating more varied and interesting board states, decisions, and situations, that's something to be encouraged. You're still going to have variance in a card game based on which cards you get in which order even if you consistently have access to resources. One way to increase this variance is to decrease the number of copies you can have of each individual card. To me, the thing that Magic did really well was mana costs. Magic has a ton of texture just based on how mana costs work. What Magic did really poorly is resource generation, and access to resources. The way that many games have attempted to solve the resource generation issue flattens out the mana costs, and they lost a lot of texture there (Hearthstone). There are 2 ways that I am aware of to solve the resource access issue while maintaining the general progression structure and the mana cost texture of Magic: You can put resources in a separate deck (Sorcery Contested Realm), or you can allow people to play any card as a resource (Alpha Clash). You can also opt to change the progression system (Epic, Summoner Wars) or flatten out the mana texture and find your nuances elsewhere (Codex). To be fair, if you started with a few resources in play (like Spoils TCG), I would be more forgiving of a system where you need to draw into your resources to expand your resource base. As for solvability, one way to prevent a game from being solvable is to use simultaneous reveals of hidden decisions. Yomi and BattleCON are good examples of this. If what I should do depends on what you do, but we pick simultaneously, then a dominant strategy is necessarily a mixed strategy. Sirlin talks a lot about this. Optimal strategies that are mixed strategies are extremely different from optimal strategies for more deterministic games.
So much of this has to do with the audience you’re designing the game for. Systemic random variance (mana in deck) is a double edged sword in terms of new players. You’re bringing the ceiling down so that more players can have meaningful games, but you’re creating a mana screw/flood scenario that cuts both ways. I think the subtly in mtgs system is most interesting. At higher levels of play mana screw/flood happens much less often as players have learned what hands are mulligans and deck building is solid. What this means is that in any given game one player is starting from a handicap, not from a non-game. The variance that Sirlin often talks about is choice variance (things can be used in lots of ways) and that is something, if used alone, that keeps newer players out of a competitive space. Looking at the fighting game metas that he is a part of is a good example of how inaccessible that space is to new players. This is something really noticeable in the ccg duelyst and likely led to its downfall. High level players love it, but once that race to the top starts your player base shrinks more and more as time goes on.
I both like and dislike the mana system. I like the way, in theory, how using more colors in your deck makes your deck harder to "work smoothly", however, with the plethora of dual/tri/multicolor lands being made and the lack of resource control makes that weakness less and less impactful as the game goes on. I played a Call of Cthulu card game that had an interesting system (at least in my head. It has been a while since I played it). It had "resource" cards that you could play each turn, but you could also "attach" normal cards in your hand as resource cards, still giving you an option out of being "mana screwed" so to speak. Although it still had resource control as well, meaning that piling resources on a "land" so to speak could open you up to being screwed if that land got destroyed. It made me think that Magic would be made better with a similar sort of system, honestly. It still allows for variance within the game, as well as choosing to sacrifice one eesource for another (card options in your hand for use as mana instead).
Disclaimer: haven’t seen the whole video yet That aside, I personally love the DBS card game’s “mana” system. You have a charge phase where you can put up to 1 card from your hand in your energy zone. That card essentially is rendered a land and “taps” for “mana” of it’s color. Cards do still have a “colored cost” where anywhere from nothing to whatever HAS to be the same color as the card. I love the DBSCG’s system, but I do see how using your big card as a resource instead of the big bombastic badass can be kind underwhelming, but energy systems imply a slow burn. Also you probably have 1 or 2 more of that big badass card in your deck, cause they make really good energy. As long as you’ve still got that one you’ve still got a chance to search or draw it, but I do have tcg experience so maybe I’m giving new players a bit too much credit. If I picked up my first cardboard, and someone told me to throw away what to me looked like my boss monster, I’d probably be weirded out or turned off a little bit.
In my case I feel bad when I win or lose because of mana screw/flood on either side. And this is why I don't find MagicTGs randomness to be very fun. Bad allocation of resources is a far more fun experience which is far more common in EDH. Now I have played games where one has been mana-screwed but they manage to stall until they get a mana that cements a win, those games are fun, but they are few and far in between. So as a personal thing, I despise MTGs kind of randomness.
I find that Android Netrunner has solved this problem the best out of any other TCG. That being said, I find that I still prefer the mana system of Magic, despite its very obvious flaws. I'm sure that's mostly due to familiarity, but I also primarily play Cube, a format where mana screw doesn't seem to have quite as much of an impact on games as it would in more traditional formats. I think the idea of people wanting an experience that has a certain amount of variance is an interesting point. So many of my favorite games of Magic have come down to me being 2-3 mana behind and then top-decking the exact card I needed to find a path to victory. I wouldn't want to give that up.
Woah, this is blowing my mind. I never knew they came out with a new Digimon card game! I played the original way back in 2000 as a kid since I loved the show, but it was not a very well-designed game so I was very confused when you guys started talking about it and describing it. That certainly sounds more interesting and competitive. As for the mana problem...First of all, I think it is overall a design that causes more problems and headaches than it adds to the game in the ways you guys mentioned. That's obviously subjective, but I feel like having the resource system be individual cards in your deck just isn't worth it, and the only reason Magic can get away with it is that they were first and sorta exploring unknown territory. Other card games since then have come up with much better systems. I like Hearthstone's basic system for instance, no resource headaches, and what you lose in variability is more than made up for elsewhere in the game itself since the digital only nature allows them to explore spaces that purely physical card games can't. I probably don't need to harp too much on the RNG of Hearthstone because it's variable enough to get lots of complaints from certain people. There is no linear, obviously, clearly better solution though. There are always tradeoffs. I think a lot of other systems make a decision for resources that is superior, but again, it sort of always depends on how much you value certain aspects between deck construction, consistency, how badly you feel mana screw/flood impacts the player, etc At least it isn't Yu-Gi-Oh! I think it's a miracle that game has been as succesful as it has because the resource management system of it is SPECTACULARLY poorly designed in my opinion, to the point that it is a fundamental problem that has hobbled the game from the start. Probably because of the origin in Manga and the fact that the creator was trying to tell a dramatic story, not really design a game, and so put little thought into how things should work. Having all spells, no matter how powerful, be fundamentally the same in cost (Just having the card in your hand) is brutal.
@@distractionmakersI’d love to go on your podcast and share a game design solution to all this with my new game coming out called Secrets of Alchemy. 😎
I think your comments about the mana system are not very good. Particularly ignoring all the advantages it adds when mentioning Hearthstone. In Hearthstone you cannot mix colors/classes, that is a massive downside compared to magic where people can mix the cards they want to, they just have to be a aware of the downsides of doing so. Guaranteeing a land every turn doesn't just reduce game variance, it reduces deck variance. On top of that I think the way Hearthstone adds in more randomness is really bad. The RNG in a card game should be the cards, not dice. Biggest reason for that is that output randomness, where you make your decision and then randomness happens, inherently feels worse than input randomness, where you get your randomness and then you make your decision, because with input randomness you get more agency. There's some really good videos on input vs output randomness on TH-cam.
I definitely agree the resource system for any game trying to 'fix' MTGs mana system is going to trade off something for something else. That mix of variance, deck building, skill, the emotional feeling of drawing a land when you need a spell or vice versa (compared to that emotional feeling in other games of having to sacrifice your fav card just to cast the less exciting cards). That being said, there is a painful amount of non-games due to excessive mulligans, mana flood, or mana screw. So i do still see it as enough of a problem that i think if they could make MTG from scratch nowadays they would make a different decision for it. Certainly the fact that so many people complain about it probably is telling in its own right. I agree that i want variance in games, i want to blame the luck when i lose and praise my skill when i win 😅 but its equally not really fun to play a game where one person didnt get to play much (sure, they made some decisions, like whether to mulligan or not, but not many). I have no doubt MTGs mana system could be redesigned in a way that would lose some of the things that we love about Magic (because we've all been playing it for ages and dont want it to change now), but would probably be more welcoming to newer players and/or would produce a higher frequency of playable/close games.
The variance introduced by MTG's mana system is not what I would consider healthy variance, as it is completely binary in nature. The standard card draw at the start of the turn is what I'd consider "healthy variance", because it gives the player a random tool which they have to find the best use case for. The "Discover" mechanic from Hearthstone is also a form of healthy variance. There are better and worse draws, sure, but every card you get is a tool that has its use case. If you draw 3 copies of a removal card in your opening hand, it might be optimal to use it on an enemy creature that you would otherwise never consider "wasting" your removal on. Card generation in digital card games goes a step further and creates completely unique situations each game, forcing the player to determine on the spot how randomly generated tools synergize with their deck. This is both exciting and also rewards game knowledge. A highly situational card that is usually not worth including in your deck might be exactly what you need when it is randomly offered to you. Mana Screw and Mana Flood do not create these situations. There is no way to "take advantage" of a game state created by Mana Flood/Screw, there is exclusively damage control. They do not enable different playstyles for the same deck, they just occasionally force you to play a strictly worse version of your deck. Furthermore, mana issues reduce skill expression by reducing the possible decisions the player can make at any given moment. The more options a player has, the more skill it takes to find the correct move. A weaker player with a strong opening hand of 7 has more opportunities to play the wrong card and vice versa. Having dead lands in your hand or having too little mana for the cards in your hand effectively just means you have fewer cards in your hand than your opponent, removing agency. If you win despite mana issues, it's likely because your opponent messed up and not because you played well (it doesn't take much skill to find the correct move when you only have 1 playable card in your hand). While there are advantages to the MTG mana system that others in the comments have pointed out, the variance it introduces is (in my opinion) not one of them as it is a rather unhealthy and unfun kind of variance. It does not provide different experiences every game as healthy variance does, it just occasionally provides a lesser version of the same experience.
Though the system can lead to some unlucky games, I think so so many interesting cards exist that interact with lands. I understand why other games don't do it anymore. It's not because it's better that way but Magic thoroughly explored that system already (probably).
10:29 another solution is like what Inscryption did: have mana in a separate deck, and when you draw a card, you can choose to draw either from your main deck or your mana deck.
This does solve quite a few problems, but still has the problem something like hearthstone does where there’s no tension in your deck between drawing resources and drawing gas.
@@distractionmakers if that "tension" can result in you not being able to play the game for 5 turns, then i think it's ok that this solution doesnt have that tension
i see your point, that MtG's system adds variance, but my main problem with it is that it results in autolosses. One time I build a 60-card deck with 20 lands in MtG Arena, and got mana flooded, and then the very next game, got mana screwed, without changing the deck at all. I balanced my deck perfectly and still encountered both types of mana problems. I don't think it's ok for your deck to just randomly decide, "eh, you just auto-lose this game." that's the main reason i dont like MtG's mana system, bc it results in auto-losses, which aren't fun. maybe adding a separate draw deck for mana is too much, that could be. i think i would be happy if I was at least able to choose how many lands i get in my starting hand. Then I could guarantee at least 3 lands every game, and 4 non-lands every game. i think that would solve my issue without losing the variance elements that you talked about.
Inscryption spoilers: Yes and no. In the roguelite deckbuilder version of the game from the first and third act, Inscryption handles it that way. In the constructed TCG version of the game, during act 2, your resource cards are still shuffled into your deck. The deckbuilder versions of the game, in particular, needs that resource system as a separate deck because your main deck size varies so much. Most deckbuilding games don't use a resource system outside of the resource needed to buy new cards because of the inconsistent deck size issue. The deckbuilder portions only have the resource system still because they're building on the base TCG that's already there and preserving most of its mechanics.
th conversation in the end is why yugioh in partciular is entirely broken. There is very little skill expression as a result. Everything is constrained to lines of play that are dictated by the game designers, everything happens in 2-3 turns and theres only a couple of critical moments of decision. Modern yugioh players will argue with you endlessly about this but it is undeniably true
As someone who plays two weeks of Master Duel every three months, I agree for the most part. I see skill expression in Yugioh as learning the deck in the first place. The best players know the most "constrained" lines of play and their weaknesses. Their win rates are high because they can maximize their hand traps and board breakers because they know the chink in every kind of armor. I find this unique despite its imperfections.
Sadly, it is. And as much as I've enjoyed Lorcana thus far, it's got that "feel" at the moment as well. It isn't that you can't build decks outside the norm and do well. But it is very clear that cards are being designed to work with each other and make deckbuilding easier for new players to card games. It's got its pros and cons. Overall, though, I'm not a fan. To be fair to Ravensburger and Lorcana, they just released their third set yesterday. If the game still feels like this two years from now, then I'll worry. Anyway, I totally agree with you about YGO! and I feel as though Magic has gotten that way as well with the insane consistency that keeps getting released, set after set. It's almost like the designers are more worried about selling a product than making a great game. 🤔💭😏
Undeniably true? Hardly. Instead of a game with 40 to 50 card actions and decision points over 8 to 9 turns its a game with 40 to 50 card actions over 2 to 3 turns. Large sequencing chains let you hedge against options your opponent could have by doing lines one way or another, and while performing an otk is relatively easy its not so easy that decks can reliable do it through interaction. Knowing when to pivot from trying to go for game or trying to gain control of the board position is a very important skill in yugioh, as you do end up in contested game states that can drag out games for several turns. Lower turn counts objectively increases variance and how much luck is in the game yes. But skill? Hardly.
Duel masters DOES have resource variance, just in another way. You can choose to not play mana in some turns in order to play those cards. You also don't know how many cards you start your turn with, since the opponent can destroy one of your shields, so you can play that as a land. If they don't destroy a shield then you still don't play the card in your hand cause no mana for it, just like not drawing a land in Magic.
You guys almost mentioned Mage Noir… a system very similar to the shared colored mana system you described. It’s a great game, check it out. Paper and digital.
Yeah so the problem is, with Monopoly, costs don't actually stop you from playing queens quickly. You could draw a card that teleports you to park place after rolling double, buy it with starting cash, roll a 2, buy boardwalk with starting cash, and then pass go, buying 2 houses on each with $50 left over to deal with card effects and rent. On turn 1.
This was very interesting and I agree with a lot that is said here, but as someone who prefers Yu-Gi-Oh to magic, there's a couple things that I disagree with. I think the comments on Yu-Gi-Oh are mostly wrong, but moreso I find lands as a system more frustrating than anything else. There is depth and interesting decision making, but I like the more freeform way the lack of a resource system allows for better. It's not perfect, but it works better for me.
It's interesting to me that there are games that are almost entirely skill-based but do *not* look at all like chess: fighting games. Not really comparable to tabletop games, but like poker and magic they are all about trying to read what your opponent does. There is luck in guessing what your opponent will do, but you can mitigate some of that by using moves that beat multiple things (called 'option selects'), and in addition reading your opponent is a skill you can train. It's "luck" insofar as rock/paper/scissors is luck but mostly it's entirely skill, but the real-time aspect of it and the fact that offense is unreactable keeps it from becoming solved.
We haven’t done much deep analysis on fighting games. We should. Yomi is a big part of all games, but you’re correct that the real time pressure is what keeps them unsolvable. Much more like a physical sport honestly.
How is **taking away variance** a bad thing? Variance by its very nature rewards luck over skill and arguing that needing to accept resource management as a random variable is **insane**. A much better system is to fix the mana base at 10, no color system, and allow mana to regenerate by 1 each turn. Spells cost what they cost and if you want to play a 10-cost card go nuts, but you then expose yourself for the next 10 rounds as you wait for your mana to regenerate. You’re no longer fucked by drawing the right “land” at the right time and instead the focus is shifted to the skill of knowing what to play and when.
The issue is that it removes the tension for aggro of having to run enough resources to play your cards and not running too many to make sure you can draw enough cards that win the game. If only need 1 red mana to win the game you could cut down to like 15 and still have an 88% chance to have one in your opening hand.
I think you're not being cynical enough. What I think competitive-minded players want is: - If I'm better than my opponent, I want to win pretty much 100% of the time. - If I'm worse than my opponent, I want to win something like 30% of the time. Obviously you can't have both. But this is why you have these competitive magic players who say that Magic is too random, but then refuse to go play chess.
I think every person who plays MTG seriously has to go on this journey 😂 I love the game, but the impact of variance can just be soul crushing at times. It really takes a lot of mental health/maturity to see past it, say “that’s magic, baby”, figure out where you could have played better, and move on. I’d like to think I’m at a healthy place with that now but I’ve nearly quit playing entirely several times out of frustration with variance.
1) I do have to fail you guys for in your entire discussion of skill vs variance, you never once brought up backgammon as the obvious comparison to chess. (Backgammon is probably my fave classic.) 2) You guys are of course totally right. Probably the best adaption of it ever was Force of Will. (mana went into its own randomized side deck - you had to tap your commander to draw from it) By far the biggest issue with MTG's mana is that in a truly randomized deck, it is very possible to get an unwinnable state. (as I've had happen to me at prereleases - more than once - and yes I mulligan) And to me if there's a chance that a player can just lose before the game even begins due to pure random luck regardless of any other player efforts, that's a bad game. (I mean why play? I can just do coin flips if I want that experience.) Of course things have progressed over the years any solution MTG might apply would be quickly abused. But I have thought about stuff like letting players start with 1 basic land (or maybe a color-specific treasure token) vs letting players convert spells in their hand to colorless "waste" land if you needed. It's an interesting debate. And some things you've said in here have made me consider that we may have tamped down variance a bit too much in our game. For that I am appreciative.
Check out Richard Garfield’s book “Characteristics of Games” for a more in depth analysis of variance. What we’re talking about here is basically a simplified version of his book.
"Unwinnable" is a tricky term here. Deterministic perfect information games like chess or tic tac toe are always "unwinnable" for one or both players in any game state, assuming perfect play from their opponent. These games remain fun as long as perfect play is too hard to define. In mahjong for example, a lot of information is hidden and random, but we make up for it by playing many hands per game and many games in a league setting. Oftentimes it is literally impossible to complete a hand with the tiles you're given, but over the long term you are rewarded for playing to your outs, and in individual hands you still work towards other objectives like defense and limiting your opponents. TCGs sit in the middle. The game trees get complex, but there is a lot of randomness too. Each game matters a lot. BO1/BO3 are common, and single night tournaments will have just enough games to determine a winner (who gets a meaningful prize!). The context makes non-games much more problematic, but it's not easy to significantly change that context. Playing Pokemon standard has given me more perspective on randomness. Some decks can churn through 20+ cards per turn, and 0 cost tutors are the norm. The experience is shifted towards fighting with the resources and tempo in the entirety of your deck, rather than fighting with a probability distribution. Synergy and backup plans are less important when you can just power out your main combo. It makes me miss the old back-and-forth kitchen table games. MTG limited satisfies this for me too. It feels much more like a battle of decks than of players, for better and worse.
@@cheeseitup1971 - "Unwinnable" here I mean a hand with no mana - you literally can't play the game. And yeah, I was in a sealed tournament, last best of 3, game two, and I mulligan down to 4 and still see no lands. (the new mulligan system is much improved)
@@simplegarakhaving 22 looks at cards and not finding lands in a 40 card deck is either rare enough to be discounted or a sign of questionable shuffling/ deck building
tl;dr: I love logic and arguing, but hate chess. How? Rhetoric, argumentation, and "debate" are also kind of games, would you not agree? It satisfies a lot of the same itches you guys mention. But is (logically sound) arguing closer to chess, or closer to poker/Magic/sports? Because for me, arguing is a discipline that is entirely dependent on logical arguments. (This **can** be framed in terms of actual formal logical arguing as used in philosophy, but doesn't have to be, as long as we acknowledge that everyday common sense "logic" does not differ from philosophical "logic"). *Here's the thing*: chess bores me to tears. I dislike the game. I love games like Magic with low-to-moderate variance (instead of 0 variance). How can that be explained? As I initially stated, to me, arguing is a pure "battle" between logically valid statements. There's no variance -- a statement like (X **AND** notX) will _never_ be true. There is zero variance in logic, by extension arguing. So this suggests arguing is a close-knit brother of chess. I wonder. Ideas?
The one thing they didn't touch on, likely since its all mostly in the Japanese world of TCG and odds are nether has run into it fully is consumable resources. Admittedly you have things like netrunner and amusingly Flesh and Blood, which they mention but never go into its resources system. They seem to view it as the same as linear system like Duel Masters. But of the big three only Pokemon has a consumable, and only partially. Not all attacks a Pokemon does means you have to discard energy, but some do and of course you lose all the energy attached to a Pokemon when its defeated. But some TCG go all in on you using up their land equivalent to do things. which moves away from simple linear system and can easily add up to not having enough to do what you want to do and such. And certainly has a fair amount of variance. Japan has a much larger and bit more varied landscape of TCG that are often taking more form Duel Masters (given its often a top seller over there to this day, not too shocking) then taking form MTG and its lead to some interesting places.
It looks to me like players are prone to look for less and less variance as their own skill at the given game improves, thus minimizing the effect of luck when their own skills can bring them far on its own. New players might enjoy variance to minimize the effect of skill that their opponents can bring to their match. Just a thought.
That's literally it in a nutshell. The more experienced (not necessarily "better") player will always have an advantage over someone who isn't experienced with that card game, or card games in general. That player knows less about the game system, less about the cards, doesn't know what a meta is, and/or has zero understanding of things like statistics. The variance is built in such that the player with a turn 4 combo win in their deck won't always have that combo available, no matter how much they build said deck for consistency. Their less experienced opponent could easily draw into several cards that disrupts that combo as well. The end result is that, all of a sudden, you have a game that either player COULD win, even though the odds are still in favor of the more experienced player.
I agree, but it also works for the experienced player. In a consistent game, if you lose, it's because you played worse. Whereas in Magic, the variance lets you say, "I could have won if I wasn't mana flooded/screwed." And that acts as a social lubricant to allow for more games and rematches. It's like when fans and players of actual sports teams complain about the referees. If we could have perfect AI calling games perfectly, human nature would still complain about the officiating, because we need to protect our own ego. We might internally admit that we lost fair and square, but we need to be able to defend our ego in public. Another example is in video games. People often say they want smarter AI to provide more of a challenge. But perfect or even greatly skilled AI would not be fun to play against. We want the illusion of challenge, but we want to win. Aimbots in an FPS aren't more fun.
For context my experience with Magic is mainly with drafting, where decks inherently are less consistent and you have limited access to mana fixing. I think the way magic implements mana colours and costs are incredibly well designed, but land cards in the main deck feels too clunky of a mechanic to me. The total binary of drawing either lands or spells isn't interesting, and the game is significantly more fun when you both draw a health balance of both. In particular I dislike drawing lands during late game top deck battles. It's so anti-climactic and feels like it really breaks the emotional flow of the game. I love almost everything else about Magic, but lands keep putting me off the game. On the point about variance allowing players of different skill levels to have meaningful games, handicap systems are another way you can achieve this. Also, in the age of online matchmaking it feels like it might not be quite as relevant anymore? I'd be interested in a TCG that takes a sort of RTS approach to resource generation. Where you start with a set rate of resource generation (eg. 3 lands that untap each turn) and you must spend resources to increase your resource generation rate (eg. tap all lands to add one land). I think the short term / long term tradeoffs could be interesting, and there could be greater variance in game states depending on how aggressive either player is.
One thing you didn't mention is the high rate of games you lose because your deck doesn't deliver. I agree that the high variance un Magic is important but, maybe, it´s too high. For example, if you coul scry once before your draw step, you could have a bit more control over what you draw without losing the variance. Another thin, when you criticize games based on memory it seems to me that you are speaking about mono red decks. They always play the same, with very little variance and very little skill, and that is part of it's advantage.
Moreso than playing Flesh and Blood, I would recommend you guys watch some commentated pro play to see it really come to its rights. Ever since I started playing it, I virtually can't play Magic anymore because it has become so obvious to me just how deeply flawed the concept of lands is. The argument for why lands are good is essentially always some form of "having them adds variance", but I feel like almost everyone making this argument misses *what kind of variance* is actually being created - as it is mainly one of non-games. Think about the sheer amount of Magic games you've seen where players were going neck and neck and things came down to top-decking, and then one player got a land and lost a huge lead because they knew what they needed to do *but were functionally locked out of playing the game at all*. The variance is "you just don't get to play this turn". That isn't interesting variance. In some games (and this is really not that irregular), the variance is "you functionally don't get to play a game of Magic this game", where you take a slight risk with, say, a 2-land opening hand and your opponent draws the nuts while you draw get mana starved. Taking a slight risk should not be punished by essentially locking you out of the game with no decisions to be made until you lose. That is a design problem, I can't see it any other way. "Usually, 1 hour after I turn on my washing machine, it's done and my laundry is clean. It would be way more exciting if there was a 10% chance for my washing machine to just not function on any given day so I'm forced to improvise!" just isn't a sensible take, and that's what defenses of MTG's lands almost always boil down to. "Magic is played BO3" also doesn't really counter this argument either: having to play more of the game just to account for the fact that one player may win almost entirely of the back of essential randomness doesn't mean that this randomness is a good thing. It means you've put a band-aid over the issue that is 'our game has such bad and weirdly impactful variance that you can't always just play 1 game of it and have a fair and enjoyable experience'. I would also argue lands don't exactly make deckbuilding that much more interesting. There's an optimal amount of lands for every deck that can be mathematically calculated. There are actual websites for it. And so you are essentially forced to say "slightly less than half the cards in my deck is going to be this uninteresting bulk of things I absolutely cannot play without". Given how most Magic games end with players seeing only half or even just 1/3rd of their total deck, this just means you won't be playing what you built on a regular basis. Compare again to FaB, where you routinely see your entire deck for the average (CC) game and there are no lands, meaning there are way, WAY more choices to make when building any deck. Considering playing a yellow of a card in addition to a red is the equivalent of saying something like "In addition to 4 Llanowar Elves, I am also playing 4 'Shreddowar Elves', which are 2 mana 2/2s that tap for 2". It doesn't translate perfectly because ramping/tempo work differently in Magic, but wouldn't having those kinds of decisions open up so many more different decks? FaB's resource system does the exact same 3 things as mentioned in the video: more lines of play, adding variance, and deck construction mastery. Except it does a better job in all 3 departments. You have more lines of play because not only does it present the same 'work with what you got' conundrum Magic has, but also your 'mana cards' are pitched (put on the bottom of your deck) and show up again later in the game, meaning you can keep an eye on how you are stacking your deck for the second cycle and increasing the skill ceiling accordingly. You have variance in the same way Magic has it, except the variance is WAY less likely to just lock a player out of making any decision entirely. And even if something like this were to happen, FaB's 'cards can also block'-design means that even hands that are unplayable in terms of resources can be used to just block out and stall, which is still an interesting decision. On top of that, using triple colors for most cards makes deck-building wildly more interesting than in Magic. Unless you specifically build a deck around lands (scapeshift or such), virtually all that lands add to deckbuilding in Magic is a short one-time puzzle of 'how many lands should I play, of which colour, and which type of conditionally untapped dual lands should I use?', whereas in FaB that is essentially only the first step: figuring out how many reds, yellows and blues you want to play to ensure your average hand will have the resources you need based on your average cost-per-hand. THEN, you get to do the whole dance of figuring out what cards you actually want to play, and consider if a card your deck wants is so good you want to have it in multiple colours. End of the day, there are reasons the FaB meta is notably more diverse than Magic's, and this would be one of them.
We will dig further into FaB, but it’s fatal flaw for me is that cards double as resources. As an advanced player this likely feels like a feature to you, but put yourself in the shoes of a new player to card games trying to wrap your head around what to do. There is no clear indication of a cards function, everything requires you to understand the situation you’re in. This creates analysis paralysis and makes the player feel bad when they make the wrong decision. Mtg lands aren’t perfect, but they have features other games are ignoring while they’re thinking they’re solving their flaws.
@@distractionmakersFair! I do see where you're coming from and FaB is absolutely more complex for new players when it comes to resources. I've been playing for over half a year now and I still sometimes make 'dumb' mistakes where I block with something I needed to keep to pitch, and then my entire turn falls apart because I can't afford the play I wanted to make. However, I will say that a lot of this also comes down to the decks you use. This problem specifically happens to me when I play Ranger, which can get very complex in terms of resources, and virtually never on Brute, which has straightforward resource usage. I reckon FaB's problem is more that it's not obvious what classes are easier for new players, as some classes in FaB are far more straightforward than others - at least for new players. Guardians, for example, have a solid amount of cards that cost 4-6 or even more energy. This means some hands play themselves: if you want to play the big attack (and 'playing the big thing' is a pretty obvious decision), you have to pitch everything else. The main consideration there then comes from "but I won't be able to AFFORD the big attack if I use the cards I need to pitch for it to block my enemy's attack", which is where skill comes in (knowing when to block). Ninja's are the opposite: their deck is basically almost only red cards, but all of their stuff costs 0 so you have to spend way less time thinking about what you pitch - you will be able to swing anyway. If you ever draw a blue, it's sort of a no-brainer that you will pitch that to sustain everything you want to do for the turn. And as a general rule of thumb, since red cards are usually stronger when played but weaker when pitched and blue cards are the reverse, going into your first 10 games considering little else than "I will pitch blues (or maybe yellows) in order to play reds" will work. You won't beat veteran players with that strategy, but you'll get a feeling for the game's pace quite quickly, and it's a concept that holds true even at high level play for some classes. The indication of how cards function is still there, it's just a lot more subtle and the better you get, the more you will understand when to deviate from base-level decision making. I am with you that some card games try to fix MTG's issues with lands but fail in other departments. Hearthstone is such a classic example here, where - since mana is guaranteed - every game is always about being able to play on curve. And drawing the right cards to make use of all your mana on each turn is generally a winning 'strategy'. It kind of illustrates why the problems MTG has with lands cannot just be 'fixed' by doing something like a "you just get to play 1 basic land from your collection for free each turn"-type rule anymore. Which, ironically, also 'confirms' to me that Magic will forever deal with the problems caused by its lands. Unless the amount of MDFC's printed is upped significantly, anyway, but that doesn't really seem to be where the game is going? One thing I also do like about lands (and what I think is a small argument in favour of them) is the flavour they can add to a deck (or 'used to like', anyway - I haven't liked Magic's art direction for several years anymore). If you play a Golgari saproling deck, you can find forests with swamp-like art and swamps with decaying forest-like art to reinforce the overarching theme of the deck. It's a cool little touch that lets you add some identity to a deck. But then... I could also argue that I can give my deck a far better identity in FaB by having 18-24 more *cards I can functionally play*, so yeah.
I think cards doubling as mana resources is still a preferable option as every card can have some relative utility in the deck. Dragon Ball Super uses a similar system to Duel Masters (if I am understanding what was discussed in the video), though cards have an additional utility in that they can be used to temporarily buff up your cards in a battle. They've also experimented with archetypes that make further use of their resource pool so that you can effectively make full use of your resource pile. Blue Boujack Brigade is the pinnacle of this, using cards from the energy (resource pool) to help power up a defense or attack and then play the used card after the battle. The deck was a solid deck for a good while and could occasionally pop up in events well after its debut.
The only game that made a substantial improvement over Magic's casting cost system was Yugioh, by essentially not having any. Because an additional resource really isn't necessary if you consider that the number of cards in hand you have access to *already is* a resource, that also by itself provides variance. Some people don't like that it's a fast paced game because of this, with a lot of counterspells and interaction on the opponent's turn, but that's mostly because every other card game conditions you to expect a slower pace because they usually copy from Magic, or rather what Magic used to be, since high level eternal format play has turn 0 interaction regardless of a resource system or not. You could argue that additional artificial resource systems add another thing to learn and keep track of to a game just to perform the most basic actions which is not exactly fun, as well as the possibility to add denial or artificial inflation of the resource to the game which feels generally unfun and unfair.
You can always count on a YuGiOh player to bring the worst take to any discussion about card game design. This is not a slight against YuGiOh, it's a cool game that does cool things, but there is a reason magic's design is the one that is copied the most. There is a reason most RPGs balance spells by having something similar to a mana system, and a reason so many strategy games both real time and turn based function around building up your strength over time. Calling not having any system "a substantial improvement" is just flat out ignoring every reason laid out in the video.
Yugioh does have a cost system though. The only time it didn't was early on in the digital games and early on in the manga. The manga lacking a resource system was a utility decision. A resource system takes more pages of the manga to explain and show for a component of the game that is not interesting for the story. The creator is in control of what the players are playing and can force them to throw out progressively stronger monsters as the chapter goes on to simulate a resource system without having one. When the card game got popular enough to consume the manga, and thus popular enough to become an actual game, actual designers had to sit down and figure out how to take simplified magic the gathering and make it a real game. They landed on using monsters as the resource system so that they wouldn't have to make new cards. You can play one a turn and tribute/sacrifice them to play stronger ones. Giving a utility to the weaker monsters and a cost to the stronger ones. This was serviceable but ultimately very shallow so they inevitably had to create ways to cheat this system a little bit and through power creep, and only having an eternal format, they've cheated on it more and more until the game is in the current state of Turbo Legacy. The thing is, Magic is not actually all that different. Magic has been around for a long time and though they try to combat power creep with formats it still exists to a degree. Even without power creep, the longer the game goes the more the developers look to create interesting mechanics that feel unique. This has lead to tons and tons of ways to cheat magic's resource system and have the same experience as modern yugioh where most of the game's interactions are condensed to a single turn or two turns and victory is decided by knowing when to break your opponents combo. The key difference is that these things are primarily limited to Magic's eternal formats, notably Legacy, and so the vast majority of players, who don't enjoy that kind of gameplay, are free to opt out by not playing that format.
counterpoint don't buy the newest preconstructed deck if you're new buy a slightly older one decent amount of the older ones you can buy for $30-40 if you want to go even cheaper the starter commander deck first flight is available for around $20
Sorcery: Contested Realm has solved this issue, reducing mana screw / mana flood by giving each player a spellbook for spells and an atlas for land cards. Players can choose to draw from their spellbook or atlas. This reduction of variance makes room for the added complexity of the 2D 4x5 board on which players play their lands. Sorcery: Contested Realm is even more like chess than Magic, leading to great games with interesting board states.
This video I feel made a bit of a mistake in focusing on other card games resource systems to "prove" Magic's resource system is already perfect. I've never paid attention to Digimon before, but you made it sound incredibly interesting, that didn't make me think Magic sounds better. Additionally, these games have many differences beyond just their primary resource system from Magic, a game is more than just one of it's parts. I feel like for this argument, it would be much better to focus on the mana system in the context of Magic rather than looking at where you personally think other card games stumbled.
I respectfully disagree with some of what's being said here; mainly with regards to variance. 1) I don't think having a very high-skill, low-variance game will turn away new players. Chess gets lots of new players all the time despite it having almost no variance at all and being entirely skill-based. 2) I would say almost all competitive players (especially in yugioh) prefer it when the game is less luck-based and sacky. 3) Having less decisions to make during a game makes it less interesting and interactive imo. If a land can only be a land and nothing else, that takes away from skill expression by essentially making decisions for the player instead of letting the player make decisions. 4) Games that are very luck-based can still be solved and this isn't really a problem I would say. Of course given enough time, players will be able to "solve" any game. I don't think that's an issue though. To give an example, Edison format is a retro yugioh format that has exploded in popularity over the past few years. There is a decent amount of variance in the format I would say, but still a lot of skill involved and the format is overall very balanced despite it being high-variance. The format is still seeing growth despite being like 90% solved and heavily skill-based purely because the gameplay itself is just fun
A lot of these points feel like they're technically true, but intentionally or unintentionally ignores a lot of the nuance that exists. 1) But Chess doesn't have that many players compared to how well known it is. Ask someone you know, "wanna play chess?" or "wanna play backgammon?" Chess only works if you are at a similar skill level, backgammon does not. Making something highly skill-based objectively heavily gates new players. 2) Games aren't just made for competitive players, they are made for everyone. Does the average player thing UNO is more fun if you remove draw fours to make the game less random? Should DnD switch to 3d6 instead of 1d20 because it's less random. During Zendikar - Scars standard in MTG, the height of Caw Blade, the game being too skill intensive was a common complain. 3) Decision bloat and decision paralysis are both real things, especially to new players. The biggest problem arises when the amount of thinking about a decision doesn't reflect the importance of the decision. This also ignores that not allowing some decisions enables others. MTG doesn't have the decision about which card you play down as land, but as a tradeoff for that it makes the decision about what cards you put in your deck more meaningful, as does it effect stuff like looting and scrying. Generally the more different two options are the more meaningful the decision between them is. Lands and spells by definition being very different makes the decisions more meaningful. 4) Solved games can still be fun, but a game being solved inherently reduces innovation, which is one of the things that pulls interest to a game.
@@Ninjamanhammer 1) What do you mean chess doesn't have that many players? A quarter million people watch worlds every year. The game is growing too, so your statement that skill gatekeeps players is obviously false. Even young kids get into chess and they hate losing more than anyone. 2) There's a big difference between random and sacky. Edison is a very variance-heavy format for example, but games are rarely ever determined by luck and more often come down to skill. Also if games are too determined by luck, the competitive scene will die since there is no reason to practice, improve, or compete seriously. 3) This doesn't have the effect you think it does. Deck building would still be just as important. It is in yugioh and we don't have lands.
@@yuseifido57061) Read my comment again then get back to me when you realize what it actually says. Addendum: Chess already exists, there really is only one chess and you can't really make a new one, because people would just play chess instead. 2) Everyone can bring up a game someone has never heard off to make a point, but I googled it and I think the game you mention has 4.5/10 on boardgame geek so go off my guy. And since magic is so heavily dependent on luck there is no competitive scene... Oh wait. 3) If you're going to miss my arguments this hard why even bother commenting?
@@Ninjamanhammer You're the one completely missing what I'm saying. 1) I read what you wrote. I completely dissagree with your statement that a game being highly skill-based gates new players. Chess is a perfect example of the exact opposite. League of Legends is another. The list goes on. What I would agree with is saying that a high skill floor can gatekeep new players since this is can be a difficult barrier to entry 2) Go look up edison format and try again because you googled the wrong thing. You're also conflating "variance-heavy" with being "luck-based". Those are not the same thing. 3) I guess i'll just say it again since you didn't understand. Your assertion that lands make deck building choices more meaningful is provably false. Deck building is still just as meaningful in games without lands (pokemon,yugioh). Often every single card you include in your deck can drastically alter how it plays. Every card is very important in decks in these games. So adding lands does not equate to deck building decisions being more meaningful
@@yuseifido5706 1) There isn't a lot of casual chess players is the thing, same with league of legends. You're either committed or you're not. Obviously not every game is aiming for that, especially not when it's meant to be played with your friends. That's why most board games you'll play with 3+ people are lot less skill intensive than competitive games. 2) What are you even saying? "Thing I like good, thing you like bad." Is all I'm reading. Why is Edison format any more skill intensive variance than anything else? 3) Lands is a meaningful deck building decision, you are talking out of your ass. If you can play spells as lands then you just get rid of cards you don't need by playing them as lands, that makes inclusion for a lot of narrower and more specific cards cheaper.
1% of the time a new player might beat a pro player, true, but not in a meaningful game. A game with mana flood or mana screw is not a meaningful game. You can't claim that the complexity of the system is good even though it screws up new players and claim that mana screw is good so a new player can randomly beat a pro player. That makes no sense.
It’s not about a newb beating a pro. It’s about more buckets of player, close-ish in skill, having meaningful games. When mana doesn’t work, it REALLY doesn’t work. But we’re less likely to notice the times when we stumble on a land drop for a turn. The little inconsistencies add up to more dynamic gameplay.
Mulligans are tough. The issue with hearthstone and Lorcana mulligans is that the consistency leads to games playing out very similarly each time. That added consistency advantages aggro, allowing them to play further up the mana curve and look a bit more like midrange. So you end up with a bunch of midrange decks that are build around a couple cards and can do the thing they’re trying to do the same way nearly every game. I’m not saying mana screw is great, but the trade off is games that play out very similarly with less decision points.
The London Mulligan is the strongest Mulligan we've seen in Magic, and has changed the landscape in terms of allowing certain decks to flourish. I'm not familiar with the rules for mulligans in Lorcana - in what ways do you find it improves on Magic's?
@@NinjamanhammerSo I mainly play draft and Commander and in draft, getting mana screw in your opening hand and having a binary choice feels really bad. It just create a lot of non game where my opponent and I just win just because the other person got mana screw. Also going to down 5 in draft will almost gurantee you a lost . The muligan system just feels really binary and clunky. In my commander pod, we dont even make people go down to 6 (unless we playing cedh) just because it just feels bad a lot of the time
@@anhvu6824 If it happens a lot you need to build better mana bases. Draft and commander are some of the formats where stumbling matters the least. Commander even has a free mulligan. If you consistently screw that's on you.
The problem with magics mana system is the 'Land' card and the inevitable randomness of drawing your resources from the same deck you draw the things which consume thouse resources. This is why nearly every newer game system seperates the resources from the deck, but they do the simplest dumbest thing possible with linear mana per turn like HearthStone. I personally think that Magic completly failed to explore and inovate the Land concept. Imagine if MTG just allowed you to have a deck of land cards that you can choose to draw from instead of your main deck, or if you could put any card face down as colorless land. Now you have the needed consistency to not be mana-screwed but you have MORE choices and more strategy to engage in durring the game itself. It also means that deck design dosn't need to so slavishly bend to MAKING consistency come out of the deck, which makes playing competetive magic so UNinteresting and UNresponsive to the oponent. Alternativly what if lands were something that actually interacted with creatures and blocking as if they were actually a territory you were defending from incursion. When you play lands they go into groupings and creatures you play are played to thouse groups and are actually defending them. The size and number of groupings just needs to have a trade off between small/large groupings.
It seems to me that what people really want, whether they realize it or not, is a relatively close game. Winning or losing by a landslide is ultimately less interesting because, if the game wasn't even close, there was never much tension established. The stakes of any given action or decision are just too low if there's no realistic chance that it impacts the outcome of a game. The skill vs. variance balance is so hard to get right because both skill and variance have the potential to lead to a game where who wins and who loses becomes far too obvious far too early.
Agreed!
Exactly. Even if I get to pop off and do "the cool thing" with my deck, if my opponent was sitting on one or two lands for the past three turns (or they hit every land drop but only played one card) it feels like a "So what?" kinda moment.
100%. Even wins where the enemy wins by a lucky draw feel better than me putting my core 2-3 cards while the enemy gets flooded/screwed
I agree they feel like the best games. But I'm not sure that's 100% correct. I think we want some variance to make things interesting and not guarantee the best player will win, some element of skill so there is a sense that your decisions matter, but more importantly I think people want to be able to play the game. Having to mulligan to 5 sucks, or keeping a statistically good hand but then not drawing land 3 and getting screwed, or colour screwed, sucks. I'd rather lose cause my opponent made better decisions than because I made the right decision but got punished for it and couldn't do anything. I love MTG, but the amount of non-games can be frustrating sometimes, even if the mana system does make for a bunch of interesting decisions before and during the game.
The best games truly are the close ones. That's where all the memories come from. I also think due to this being a traditionally physical game there is more of a respect and appreciation for your opponent. That also accents how much of a shared experience the game is. Vs card games online where you could honestly care less about how your opponent feels and the empathy is severed. On MTGA I get a kick out of watching someone struggle. In real life I just feel bad for them.
These videos are so great, nobody really talks about these things, and getting 2 different views is so interesting.
Thank you for the kind words!
Any chance of getting these made into a podcast?
I've always preferred the opinion-based discussion format as opposed to the "10 cards you should play" videos.
Didn’t realize I was signing up for a 5min discussion on mechanical keyboards… im here for it.
hell yeah
One of the spects rarely discussed when talking about the design of mana in MTG is how it's colored system is self balancing when it comes to mixing attributes. Many of the games that ditched colored mana system either for no mana system. or one where you have a resource that pays for any card have strong limits in deckbuilding, where you either can't or very limited in what kind of cards you can mix. Partly it's also done so designers have easier time designing cards, so you don't need to look for busted 3 card combinations with 3 different factions. This for me feels very limited, and Magic very elegantly designs around that. You can play 2,3,4,5 colored decks provided that your mana base can pay for it. So in theory a 3 colored deck might be more powerful that a 2 color equivalent, but you have to deal with your mana being potentially less consistent. And the color nature of magics mana is great for expression, Red/Black deck and Red/Green deck have different vibes, even though they both might be just aggro decks.
i'd recommend you look into flesh and blood more. their pitch system on the surface looks like the lorcana and similar "fixed" resource system, but in reality its somewhere between magic and dual masters, while being completely different was well. you still have to make very important decisions about what cards you add to your deck because each card is either 100% card and 30% land, 65/65, or 30/100. you can easily get screwed if you need 3 resources on a turn and you dont draw blues. also, the fact that your pitch goes to the bottom of the deck is an inspired rule.
another huge difference is that each turn rarely has the capability of impacting every other turn for the rest of the game. there's little to no board state in most games, so each turn is about maximizing your current hand and trying to set yourself up for the best outcome 1-2 turns from now.
We’ll have to give flesh and blood another try. We played with a couple precons a couple times.
11:15 - "The complexity of the mana system is something they wanted to trim down" --- Looks at hybrid and phyrexian mana and snow mana and colorless mana (a la Oath of the Gatewatch)... "Yeah, the complexity of the system is trimmed way down"
Yeah you're right. Thats why they were talking about wotc trying to trim complexity in duelmasters/kaijudo which is a different game
yeah, you should rewatch that part of the video ahahah
Arguable hybrid amd phyrexian mana don't need to add complexity to or can simplify building a mana base.
Snow I cannot defend
@@logansanchez7998Snow-covered lands have been around since Ice Age, and it was good to see it finally being mechanically impactful for more than just breaking symmetry for a specific mana doubler. That said, the fact that you can specifically tailor your manabase to gain advantages, usually at the cost of limiting the scope of what you can impactfully play, without completely stripping you of options.
One of the great things Magic’s land system provides that I didn’t realize until playing other games is that it slows down the pace of the game so cards can stay relevant for longer. For example, my 2 drop creature is still relevant for at least two turns before opposing 3-4 drops outclass it. In other games where mana is guaranteed every turn, your cards get outclassed the following turn so it radically speeds up the game. 1 drops become useless and the game usually revolves around 3-5 costed cards. As the costs get higher, the power difference gets wider. So 6 drops become useless as 7-8 drops are game ending power just the following turn.
It also heavily prioritizes ETB effects and good stuff decks. Slower or passive abilities get instantly power crept and combo decks are much harder to work effectively.
I don't agree with you. You say that 3-5 costs are the most important in non-mana system card games, how is this different than 0-3 cost cards in constructed Magic? (Currently in Standard people in non-ramp/non-control shells people may run something like 2 Sheoldreds as top of their curves, the rest of the deck is cheaper than that.)
And Magic's mana system leads to too many non-games where you draw too many resources or too many payoffs without being able to use them, and leads to rng losses when players are in top deck mode.
@azraksash if you keep getting mana screwed then that’s a skill issue honestly. Build your mana base better. Add more lands, add better lands, your color ratio might be off, make sure you have smooth mana curve for non land cards, etc. By getting better at deck building and mulligans, you vastly reduce your chance to mana screw. It will inevitably happen but YOU can reduce the chances by getter better as a player. Magics land system hurts newer and casual players the most since their skill level and knowledge is generally low so that is one of the big down sides of it
I don't think it's about mana system.. Compare to Heartstone for example... It may be true that low drops become irrelevant in the late game - but that's more about there not being blocking, everything being able to "fight" etc rather than the mana system being non-random.
Mana screws/flood being a "skill issue".. Well partly it is.. Obviously even if you have the "correct" amount of mana you sometimes draw too few or too many lands... But there's way to reduce the likelihood of that happening. Scry/surveil/"looting" can help a lot - landcyclers are even surer way.. Of course those are not "free" - a landcycler is generally somewhat weaker than a card with same mana cost but no landcycling and same is true for cards with scry/surveil - though those abilities tend to come relatively cheap nowadays. But that kind of shows that the mana system was problematic to begin with and they had to correct that with card design and rules like mulligan..
Now say we played a version of magic where you can choose to draw from land deck or non land deck or if you draw one from both deck each turn.. Would that make high mana cost cards OP? I don't think so -- well maybe some of them. Yeah ETB effects are strong - but it's not because of mana variance -- it's because of removal being there - you wan't to outvalue the opponent..
@@PoorproplayerWtf, not only get mana screwed, but you can easily get flooded. You can easily find videos from pro tours where players lose to their lands, because they don't get to PLAY the game... You won't get this problem in other card games.
@@JawzahTry Legends of Runeterra to see what happens when we get a mana per turn in a very similar to Magic game. The only major factor that may lead to difference in outcome is that everything has vigilance and haste, so you can get potentially 100 to 0-ed in one turn.
I can’t speak for Yu-Gi-Oh now, but back when I was a player it wasn’t all that uncommon to see archetypes have some mixing, or for there to be staple cards from certain archetypes that managed to find their way into a lot of decks. There were also Monster Type decks and archetypes sometimes had support for those, so there was also some interplay there. Although I did notice that the Monster Type decks were fading by the time I stopped playing. There were often cards that offered benefits to strategies that weren’t exclusive to one archetype.
A good example of that is black Luster Soldier Envoy of the beginning. It was a card that could only be summoned by banishing (Yu-Gi-Oh’s version of exile) a LIGHT monster and a DARK monster from your graveyard. Now most of the time, archetypes would share either a Monster type or and Attribute (LIGHT, DARK, FIRE, WATER, WIND, EARTH). The best way to get cards in your graveyard was an archetype at the time that had LIGHT monsters with pretty powerful effects with the “drawback” of milling you. So one of the best ways to be able to play BLS was to use this archetype in conjunction with archetypes that had DARK monsters. And BLS was a powerful card. It was on the limited list which meant that instead of being allowed to play 3 in your deck you could only play 1. It was still super common, showing up in 83 lists at its peak in September 2014.
So while the current meta might heavily revolve around archetypes (I haven’t played in 10 years so I really don’t know), they aren’t inherently restrictive and aren’t guaranteed to reduce variance. It really depends on how Konami chooses to design them. The lack of a resource system really does make the game a lot more consistent though.
Its very much archtype driven design now. They do a good job of keeping a healthy amount of variance though. The two main things they do is require lower power level cards in the deck to enable higher power level ones and making the different starter cards to their engine have other beneficial effects that make them not completely interchangeable with each other, even if they are in a lot of situations.
Yugioh spiraled out of contorl. Pretty much all of modern decks play like archetype decks. To compare it to MTG most playable yugioh creatures have an ETB Demonic tutor effect, AND the card you tutored for can be cast for free if it was added to hand. Also yugioh has a always active side board " Ecktradeck" of creatures who read like: sacrifice two creatures, cast this card without paying its mana cost. And pretty much all " side board" cards are ETB demonic tutors as well
YGO is the wild west of card games right now. Honestly it is the shining pillar of what power creep looks like when it spirals out of control and the game is no longer what it used to be. I don't know if there is a way to fix the problem of mana flooding or the lack there of without breaking the game completely.
MTG is just an illusion of balance, Mana has never been balanced. Power Creep exists in MTG in different ways. Standard is dead and Commander is the main format that is not designed to be taken seriously, it's more of a social interactive game.
It feels like they are trying to kill commander at this point as well. To many groups and pods fall apart because of the issue of it being an arms race at the end of the day.
Look at grief in old formats where pitch casting is dominated. That is what it is like.
@@acetraker1988Fr their first set had cards that have you 3 mana for free 💀
I'd like to add to the paradigm that is Skill vs. Variance: Diplomacy. It's high skill, low variance in rules (every game starts in the same state, the only concealed information is player plans, and there's no randomness to the outcome of any interaction) but in output, because there are seven players interacting (as you mentioned when discussing sports, more players=more variance) the gameplay itself is highly variable.
The problem is not mana screw or mana flood but the power level of MTG being pushed so far on the creature front. What this does is drastically increase the chance of "non-games" sure in the old days you could miss a land drop or get a little flooded it would be fine. If you do now you are regularly losing. The early turns matter A lot.
That is a very good point. The cost of stumbling has been pushed higher and higher.
My son and I play that we have 2 basic lands in the command zone, anytime you would draw a card, you can draw one of those instead. Mana Screw and Mana Flood are still things, but they are both softened.
There are certainly ways this could break down, as you mention in the podcast, too much reductions in variance have gameplay costs too. We hold this off a bit by making library searching very rare in our decks. We are allowing ourselves this extra consistency in manabases, so we do not afford ourselves free open access to the other mode of consistency. Library searching is a pain anyway both from homogenizing games and just the mechanics of deciding from tons of options, finding that thing, and shuffling, so we like making it a rare thing anyway. We also build our decks specifically to make a gauntlet of options that play well against each other, not an arms race trying to make the most powerful deck.
Good solutions for sure. On an individual level tailoring the game to fit your needs works well.
i really like this, but can i get your thoughts an a change to one basic land of each of the commander's colors?
@@lumioak3260 Then mono colored commanders would be at a disadvantage as they would get less lands. But yeah, there are lots of adjustments that can be made to tweak the experience. I honestly think that even 3 lands is not an absurd thing for a group to agree on. If color balance is a concern for your group, I would probably say to use Command Tower and City of Brass.
We're currently working on a non-commander 60 card gauntlet. We are starting with each deck having the two basics, but we plan to use those slots as an additional balance mechanism. The best decks may remain on their basics, or even get downgraded to wastes, while the worst decks can get non-basics in those slots.
The wildest thing we tried while tinkering with Commander was just letting everyone start with Command Tower, Path of Ancestry, Arcane Signet, and Sol Ring in play. It was fun, but it started needing additional rules like the each player only getting to start with [player position] number of them untapped on their first turn, or making signet/ring indestructible lest everyone pack their decks with artifact destruction to imbalance things again. Fun, but it started getting too complicated for its own good.
Honestly, this is a pretty great rule, I might adopt this when playing with my family.
I ran into a similar issue once, it was my sister's first game and she got completely mana-screwed. We're talking 3 lands on turn 8, and she was playing the Tyrranid Warhammer 40k precon, which is full of expensive cards and cards that benefit from being cast with a high X value. We let her put three lands onto the battlefield, and suddenly she started sitting just a bit more upright and her frown fade a little. She even took out my dad and was very close to killing me too. What I'm trying to say is: she looked like she was having more fun.
For kitchen table magic, fun is the most important thing and I feel like your rule makes it a lot easier to have fun consistently. So, again, thanks for the idea!
@ermsen how about giving everyone the ability to put the companion ability to conjure 3 basic lands, this'd work like the original companion ability. it's a card out side the game that you can put into your hand as a sorcery?
or maybe 3 land slots, but non-basic lands ETB tapped. and no legendary lands
i just got introduced to your guy's videos, gotta say, i absolutely love them. this is probably the 6th video of yours that ive watched today
I came in here hating mana screw, but walk away realizing that yes, they are one of the things that make deck building matter more, and deck building is what I love with MTG.
Just found the channel, and I'm eating up the content! Love hearing a more development side of games and all the technical jargon is cool!
That being said, I despise the mtg land system. Like despite all the power creep and monetization going on, the thing I'm still endlessly complaining about while playing mtg is the lands.
Although its an anecdote, I just did an mtga draft, played 8 games, and I determined that 5 of those games was EXCLUSIVELY decided by who drew enough lands. And while I don't know what kind of hands my opponents kept, the two times I land screwed I kept 3 land hands, and proceeded to not draw a single land for 6 draw steps. This also happened 3 times to my opponents, where on turn 6 they only had 3 or even 2 lands out.
It sucks that the MAJORITY of the games I played today were decided not by skill, but by luck: plain. dumb. luck. Even when I won because of it I felt empty and sad. I think I speak for most people when I say, I'd rather lose a close game then win a non-game where the opponent didn't even get the chance to play. Kinda for that reason, I've been getting more and more into Lorcana.
Magic's land are cool, but it's something only Magic can have. It's like YGO's freeform bullshit combo in turn 1 type of design. It's cool that it exists and it fills a important niche in the gaming world but no new game that comes out today can do THAT.
how in the fuck am I only learning about this channel now? I'm gonne binge these videos so hard.
Please keep making these. I'm so ready for that parasocial relationship. 😬
Haha aye aye! 🫡
One minor point about the thing towards the end about Pokemon having more variance, I'd say that it has way less despite the system of prize cards etc. There's such an abundance of tutoring effects nad card draw that most decks can simply always "Do their thing"
I think my personal preference for a resource system for MTG would be playing your cards as lands, but certain cards play as tapped lands for X turns. So your crappy commons could be played untapped as lands, but your better cards would come in as tapped lands (essentially what modal double faced land cards are in MTG nowadays). Spells with multicolours or with higher CMC might even come in tapped and with a stun counter (but not a stun counter, you wouldnt want proliferate to affect it... Just something akin to a stun counter) so you would be disencentivised to just play your highest cmc card as a land, or to fill your deck with multicoloured cards. Obviously this doesnt "fix" the mana system, it would trade one complexity for another, would shift what decks are viable and how decks played out, and introduces the emotional damage of having to trade your precious cards in as resources. But, it would add more decisions into the game (which is the part i love of MTG), and would add better consistency (i.e. you have more interesting games and less dud games). I think it might make it actually harder to get into magic but would make better, more competitive games, while still retaining lots of variance.
One aspect I love about Magic's mana system is that you can justify having cards at different power levels at the same mana value. Cards like steel leaf champion and necropotence are vastly more powerful than similar cards at 3 mana but you can't just run them in every deck because of mana pip requirements. Not only do you have to juggle your land count and mana curve, but you also have to decide whether or not to splash another color or strain your mana base for a double or triple pip card for a powerful effect at the cost of consistency.
You mentioned your favorite game of magic being a no lander, I did something similar last year in an RCQ and this hand won my semi finals match. Sadly I didn't win grands but I was on living end against the Amulet titan player I lost to in Swiss, and just beat Amulet titan first round of top 8. I won game one, and going into game 2 I kept a hand with leyline of sanctity, oliphant, generous ent, subtlety, force of negation, and 2 shardless agent. I knew that if I drew a single land I could win this game. The wild part is I never drew a land and I still won the game. My opponent cast a summoner's pact to grab their titan, cast their titan, and I evoked subtlety to stop him from getting the lands he needed to pay for pact on the next turn.
Haha amazing!
I think the trick is that risk management is a form of skill. For MTG purposes you have to decide the tradeoffs of including a certain amount of lands, the colors of lands, the costs, etc. and from moment to moment you need to make decisions whenever you scry, cycle cards, decide which cards to play, etc. It's technically random but you're using your skill to manage it.
Risk management is a great way to put it.
Ive been binging these videos. I love hearing about design philosophies and game mechanics.
Same here every vid is interesting
Just one point, moderm pokemon has very veyr little variance. You are almost ceetain to see every card you need to see every game because of the ammount of draw powerr ect
One thing that really spoke to me here is that I played F&B and bounced off of it *hard* the first time I played it because I just felt like... nothing I did mattered. I just got absolutely crushed four times in a row with me not really able to do much of anything. And I think that's sort of emblematic of how much more skill-based/deterministic it is (although it's likely also because it's so different from magic and legends of runeterra and other games of that ilk where I don't have this problem quite so much)
I just found this channel yesterday. Your videos are so interesting. I've been playing magic about two years.
Thanks! Glad you're enjoying them and we hope they deepen your experience with MTG!
@@distractionmakers Absolutely. I love this additional perspective and knowledge. MTG is such a deep topic.
Definitely underrated Channel
I very much like how Decipher did resources in their Wars TCG. It's funcitonally the system they used in their Star Wars TCG, but they balanced it differently and added colours... except the Energy (mana) isn't coloured, the 'colours' are a seperate resource. Essentially, where a MtG card would cost you six mana and three of them would be blue, Wars would make you pay six energy, and require that you had 3 faction symbols in play. If you were playing single colour, getting three symbols out was really easy to do. To do the same in a two colour deck required more effort. Three... I'm not sure if anyone even came up with a good three colour deck before Decipher cancled the thing (and yanked the tabletop RPG license for some nonsensical reason. they'd licensed someone else to make the RPG, and the books were selling really well with Huge anticipation for the ones that were still upcoming... )
The other thing about how they handled resources in that game is that your deck was your life was your mana supply. Cards in your hand were still life, but they weren't mana anymore. It all worked very well actually.
It was a long game though, a tournament round was an hour... and was also only a single game. fifty fifty as to whether that one game would be Finished or not (though, fortunately, a winner could be determined by having the judge come over and count both players' remaining cards... which they had to do even if you finshed the game because the difference was used when determining the matchups for the next round).
That does sound interesting. We will have to check it out!
I have a half formed idea at this point so this may need further elaboration but i think Lorcana is the most interesting alternative to the mana system of magic. For those that arent aware, as the boys didnt fully explain it, Disney Lorcana has two broad types of cards, inkable and uninkable. All creatures, spells, etc are all one of those categories. Inkable cards can be turned into resources, you reveal the card to the opponent and turn it face down in your "inkwell" and it becomes 1 ink. Those inked cards are used as the mana to cast your other spells. The uninkable cards are just cards that cannot be put into your inkwell. Its a good way of getting around the resource vs spells deck building restriction, while also ensuring that you dont just turn all your most powerful spells into ink and never get the chance to cast it. I dont necessarily know if its better than Magic but I definitely think they have the two best options (at least of the games ive played)
I think the biggest strength of magic's land system isn't the variance in how much mana you have, but the variance in which colors you have. Putting colored mana cards into your deck allows for way more deckbuilding freedom and many combinations of colors to work. Hearthstone or LoR for example where you pick a single class or combination and get all the cards from it is a lot less interesting for deckbuilding and causes decks to more often have access to the same exact pool of cards to include. Being locked out of colors or quantity of mana causing you to improvise is nice too, but the way magic punishes you for inconsistency specifically I think is the problem. If you are missing a color, you simply can't play your cards. If you miss your early land drops, it's a non game. -1 or 2 cards in mulligan to search for your lands is a huge setback. I think for example doing something like each color pip you are missing = +1 cost could be better, since then pips could be pushed beyond just 1 or 2 as it almost always is with magic, and being 1 short isn't a complete disaster, just a tempo setback your opponent can still capitalize on. That principle could probably be applied more broadly to consistency related issues, having the punish be more gradual/analog than a true/false u are fucked or you aren't. The information aspect is something I've also been experimenting with, but to explain the details of the system I was trying would take a bit so I won't bother xd
Also if you want a board game that proves the point about team sports, Decrypto is one i recommend. Technically nothing random in it (other than set up) yet depending on the number of people involved, highly variant (and challenging).one of my fave group games and I'm counting secret identity ones (werewolf, mafia, etc)
Sounds interesting, we’ll check it out!
55:00 Pokemon does have rotating, though it doesn't matter much for the actual pokemon, those would be the equivalent to creatures, but for the trainer cards, so basically everything except creatures and lands, as some of those are absurdly strong and having access to all of them would make it possible to build a deck that for example allowes you to draw through your entire deck twice on turn one while bouncing all opponents pokemon to the hand which winns you the game (in Pokemon it is an alternative loose condition to not have any pokemon in play.
8:25 Gain variance? Absolutely not. You either play roughly on curve, like hearthstone or games that use the facedown card method OR you can't play the game due to flood/screw. Thats it, that's all.
Lines of play? BS, your deck either roughly gets on curve or you don't get to play. Specific cards for a base resource reduces lines of play.
Games that have very consistent decks only provide average experiences, and if you ask players if they had fun, they would answer yes, even though it wasn't exiting.
We need mana screw because it gives the Oh! Its Lightning Helix! Oh my God! moments.
Agreed, variance is king! Card games aren't about executing the same strategy over and over again, they're about navigating to a win with what you're given.
Everyone loves an underdog, and mana screw provides that.
One more thought as the video ends, Magic also noticeably experiences power creep even in its standard sets, I don't understand that Pokemon comment questioning why it even has a rotation?
You mentioned DnD and MTG as two of the main sources of inspiration for many board game designers. What do you think about a pen&paper role playing card game? Two good things = too much?
There are a few games that have tried this to varying degrees of success. There is even a DnD card game. 😄
26:40 Don't know if you are going to mention it, but in a linear progression resource system you can still have a "resource deck" which you shuffle and get the top of every turn to allow for colors and/or special resource cards.
Good point. I feel like this works best in a digital game so you don’t have to shuffle two decks. Inscryption comes to mind.
Fair, though the same is true for keyword granting counters, which is probably why no established game has or would ever introduce them in a physical release.
But with those obviously already not trying to be (easily) trackable in paper I am somewhat surprised that they haven't yet introduced color specific shield counters, like they did with color specific protection.
@@younasdar5572 MTG does have keyword counters though. See [Arwen, Mortal Queen] for one of many examples.
Yo... That Digimon "Memory" system sounds amazing.
I dont know if anyone mentioned it, but the One Piece Don!! solution is an interesting approach. You cant mana screw, it has an interesting choice pattern who should start the match, (the starting player have odd nomber of dons (mana) the second has even) and all of your mana can be used to buff your characters on your turn. It has depths and basically eradicated all of the non games, that a mana system could cause.
We’ll check it out! Sounds interesting for sure.
I dont think Force of Will is really played any more, but that game had a cool compromise with Magic's sustem whete the land cards (crystals?) Were in a seperate deck, and you played the top card each turn. Duals made it pretty boring, but it added some interesting varience in casual games, where what color you got each turn could create some interesting lines.
The reason I and all of my friends stopped playing magic is because of how poorly it handles it’s variability, you make a fantastic point about how variability is key to a game staying fun, and how a lot of skill in magic is how well you can navigate luck, but the particulars of magics mana base don’t just create variable games, they create NON-games. It IS interesting and fun to have to consider color-consistency when building a deck, it is NOT fun to sit there and unable to perform game actions because I drew no red mana in my red black deck. Yes those things can be mitigated by building decks better, but no amount of mitigation stops it from happening without changing the core design of the game somewhere along the way.
I think you make a good point that "inaction" isn't the best trade off for having variance that allows lower skilled players to potentially get ahead. I do think there are better alternatives. One game that I think does a good job of mitigating the "do nothing" feeling is actually Inscryption. Regardless of what your hand is, if you can't play anything, you can always get a squirrel card that can be used as fodder, a sacrifice to summon something stronger, or even be used to attack with if set up with any sort of buffs.
This comment feels a lot like complaining that if I'm never roll more than 5 in 10 d20 rolls in DnD then I lose.
Like, yeah, that's the point of randomness. Sometimes you are so unlucky that you never had a chance no matter what you did, usually it's not going to be that. The entire point in being able to mitigate randomness is that randomness still exists.
@@NinjamanhammerThe flipside in DnD is you can also roll high. You can crit, you can wildly outshine your normal damage rolls, or you can dodge brutal attacks or crippling status conditions by the skin of your teeth. For the land system the highest roll is the expected outcome. The “high roll” is a normal game of magic and any deviation is pain and suffering. A gambling game where you can only lose. It’s basically the worst way to implement necessary variance, where it only makes itself known when it cripples you. You’re already drawing cards from a deck. This really wasn’t necessary.
@@rockyhankin8679 You can high roll in magic. You can miss every roll by 1 in DnD, in magic when you draw poorly you can at least plan ahead.
The high roll is only the default if you're really bad at the game.
It's kind of incredible that you watched an entire video about the land system and still somehow missed every point.
@@Ninjamanhammer The high roll in magic isn't based on lands though. That was my point. A well constructed deck has a good number of lands most of the time. Have you ever looked at your hand of magic cards and gone "fuck yeah! I have four lands! Finally, the correct number of lands!"? I certainly haven't. A high roll in magic is something like drawing the perfect card at the perfect time, which is equally possible in the games without lands.
The rest of your comment doesn't have any substance. It's just "git gud retard" and there's no reason to engage with it. I've watched enough livestreams by players much better than me to know it stays a problem. If that's all you have left to say, please don't reply again.
a couple of years ago I 3D printed and hand soldered my own mechanical keyboard. which opened my mind about keyboard
26:10 That sounds like Force of Will since you have a linear mana with different colors.
Because you have a mana deck and every turn, you can tap your Leader/Commander to get a random mana/land into the field.
Let’s not forget the design and deckbuilding spaces that lands occupy as well. Dual lands and lands that have other abilities have been around since the beginning.
Not only are the lands variance-influenced resources, they are also in themselves deep components of strategy that influence that very same variance!
The different art and border styles also make lands a way for Magic players to express their own style and personality even further. Full-art or alternate/showcase play sets of lands end up costing as almost much as the rest of the deck sometimes.
Signed, someone who loves MTG and lands
Great points!
I think the other thing people dont consider when comparing sports and games is the skill ceiling. Like theoretically perfect chess is possible for a person to play, while theoretically perfect sports isnt something a human can achieve, when performing physically there will always be mistakes, and I think variance in games is a perfect alagory for this. Like a player missing a last-minute field goal to win the game and a player missing the one extra red land off the top to cast a bolt to win, give me almost the same emotional experience
I'm not sure where I was recommend your videos but I have been watching all of them the past week. Very insightful and thoughtful stuff! I'd be curious what you think of the TCG Grotto Beasts, that I designed. I tried to thread the needle between a mana mechanic that let you pay for costs with your cards in hand, but you always would get them back based on what your opponent summoned.
I see a similarity to people in video games complaining about wanting a smarter AI opponent. If the AI is too smart or consistent, then the game isn't really fun. Even Dark Souls and games that have a rep for being difficult are not Smart AI. They just punish you more.
The best AI is another human, and not everyone enjoys multiplayer. You get cheesers, cheaters, spammers, quitters, laggers, etc. And dealing with all of that is not fun. But that is what a human would do because it leads to higher chances of victory. So a smart AI would do the same things.
Variance leads to diversity of outcome, including bad outcomes. But without the bad, you can't have the good. Just like in order to have good cards, you need to have bad cards (relatively), which is another issue that some people don't understand.
It's that old saying that some players will optimize the fun out of games. I also say that those complaints come from a very niche group of highly invested people, who are not the total or even target audience. Smash bros is not intended for competitive, but people play it competitively.
I'd argue that competitive people will find a reason to compete, of which gambling is the most degenerate. So it is better to make games geared towards your target audience, and let the competitives take what they get.
I think the ideal target is beginner friendly, with room to grow into mid complexity. This gives an incentive to improve, but also puts a cap on power so that when you inevitably miss high, it doesn't wreck the game.
Good points!
Love this channel y'all! Discussing games and game design is so interesting and a welcome change from otherwise brainless content on youtube. Thank you!... I unabashedly tell people Magic: The Gathering is the best game ever made any chance I have to share it. The game play and game systems are amazing. It can be made fairly simple for new players but is infinitely complex if you want to dive deep into it. Not to mention how many different ways it can be played, standard, draft, commander, etc. And that's just the gameplay. Then you have the art, the storylines and lore, the collectability, the characters. There is a reason for it's staying power.
It is a modern masterpiece for sure!
One of the best games made by one of the worst companies in many of the worst ways, which is sad, heh.
Ironically, a lot of the recent steps taken by WoTC has been to turn more spells into lands and vice-versa, especially in Eternal formats. MH3 introduced more MDFC spell lands, some of which can even enter the battlefield untapped in exchange for a relatively trivial life cost. Before that we've seen an increase in landcycling tacked on to spells with mana value 5 or more, and before that we had the Kamigawa channel lands. So it looks like WoTC is acknowledging that mana development variance is a balance issue in faster formats.
It's also opening up an interesting avenue for future design: as the game ages, there's less and less incentive to play basic lands, which both makes cards such as Blood Moon more powerful, but also opens the opportunity to make cards that reward playing basic lands over other land types.
I’m also curious if it has to do with game time. As MTG has moved to being more of a digital game 45 minute games become less desirable.
Mana flood and mana screw is a problem to be solved. You have to be careful when you say card games rely on variance. Variance is important (a card game without variance will immediately turn into an algorithm, which will kill the fun), but it's also important how that variance manifests in the game. If the variance manifests as 20% of the time I don't get to play the game, that's a problem. If it's about creating more varied and interesting board states, decisions, and situations, that's something to be encouraged. You're still going to have variance in a card game based on which cards you get in which order even if you consistently have access to resources. One way to increase this variance is to decrease the number of copies you can have of each individual card.
To me, the thing that Magic did really well was mana costs. Magic has a ton of texture just based on how mana costs work. What Magic did really poorly is resource generation, and access to resources. The way that many games have attempted to solve the resource generation issue flattens out the mana costs, and they lost a lot of texture there (Hearthstone). There are 2 ways that I am aware of to solve the resource access issue while maintaining the general progression structure and the mana cost texture of Magic: You can put resources in a separate deck (Sorcery Contested Realm), or you can allow people to play any card as a resource (Alpha Clash). You can also opt to change the progression system (Epic, Summoner Wars) or flatten out the mana texture and find your nuances elsewhere (Codex). To be fair, if you started with a few resources in play (like Spoils TCG), I would be more forgiving of a system where you need to draw into your resources to expand your resource base.
As for solvability, one way to prevent a game from being solvable is to use simultaneous reveals of hidden decisions. Yomi and BattleCON are good examples of this. If what I should do depends on what you do, but we pick simultaneously, then a dominant strategy is necessarily a mixed strategy. Sirlin talks a lot about this. Optimal strategies that are mixed strategies are extremely different from optimal strategies for more deterministic games.
So much of this has to do with the audience you’re designing the game for. Systemic random variance (mana in deck) is a double edged sword in terms of new players. You’re bringing the ceiling down so that more players can have meaningful games, but you’re creating a mana screw/flood scenario that cuts both ways. I think the subtly in mtgs system is most interesting. At higher levels of play mana screw/flood happens much less often as players have learned what hands are mulligans and deck building is solid. What this means is that in any given game one player is starting from a handicap, not from a non-game.
The variance that Sirlin often talks about is choice variance (things can be used in lots of ways) and that is something, if used alone, that keeps newer players out of a competitive space. Looking at the fighting game metas that he is a part of is a good example of how inaccessible that space is to new players. This is something really noticeable in the ccg duelyst and likely led to its downfall. High level players love it, but once that race to the top starts your player base shrinks more and more as time goes on.
I both like and dislike the mana system. I like the way, in theory, how using more colors in your deck makes your deck harder to "work smoothly", however, with the plethora of dual/tri/multicolor lands being made and the lack of resource control makes that weakness less and less impactful as the game goes on.
I played a Call of Cthulu card game that had an interesting system (at least in my head. It has been a while since I played it). It had "resource" cards that you could play each turn, but you could also "attach" normal cards in your hand as resource cards, still giving you an option out of being "mana screwed" so to speak. Although it still had resource control as well, meaning that piling resources on a "land" so to speak could open you up to being screwed if that land got destroyed.
It made me think that Magic would be made better with a similar sort of system, honestly. It still allows for variance within the game, as well as choosing to sacrifice one eesource for another (card options in your hand for use as mana instead).
Disclaimer: haven’t seen the whole video yet
That aside, I personally love the DBS card game’s “mana” system. You have a charge phase where you can put up to 1 card from your hand in your energy zone. That card essentially is rendered a land and “taps” for “mana” of it’s color. Cards do still have a “colored cost” where anywhere from nothing to whatever HAS to be the same color as the card. I love the DBSCG’s system, but I do see how using your big card as a resource instead of the big bombastic badass can be kind underwhelming, but energy systems imply a slow burn. Also you probably have 1 or 2 more of that big badass card in your deck, cause they make really good energy. As long as you’ve still got that one you’ve still got a chance to search or draw it, but I do have tcg experience so maybe I’m giving new players a bit too much credit. If I picked up my first cardboard, and someone told me to throw away what to me looked like my boss monster, I’d probably be weirded out or turned off a little bit.
In my case I feel bad when I win or lose because of mana screw/flood on either side. And this is why I don't find MagicTGs randomness to be very fun.
Bad allocation of resources is a far more fun experience which is far more common in EDH.
Now I have played games where one has been mana-screwed but they manage to stall until they get a mana that cements a win, those games are fun, but they are few and far in between.
So as a personal thing, I despise MTGs kind of randomness.
40:54 wow, that was closer than I thought, too
I find that Android Netrunner has solved this problem the best out of any other TCG.
That being said, I find that I still prefer the mana system of Magic, despite its very obvious flaws. I'm sure that's mostly due to familiarity, but I also primarily play Cube, a format where mana screw doesn't seem to have quite as much of an impact on games as it would in more traditional formats.
I think the idea of people wanting an experience that has a certain amount of variance is an interesting point. So many of my favorite games of Magic have come down to me being 2-3 mana behind and then top-decking the exact card I needed to find a path to victory.
I wouldn't want to give that up.
Woah, this is blowing my mind. I never knew they came out with a new Digimon card game! I played the original way back in 2000 as a kid since I loved the show, but it was not a very well-designed game so I was very confused when you guys started talking about it and describing it. That certainly sounds more interesting and competitive.
As for the mana problem...First of all, I think it is overall a design that causes more problems and headaches than it adds to the game in the ways you guys mentioned. That's obviously subjective, but I feel like having the resource system be individual cards in your deck just isn't worth it, and the only reason Magic can get away with it is that they were first and sorta exploring unknown territory. Other card games since then have come up with much better systems. I like Hearthstone's basic system for instance, no resource headaches, and what you lose in variability is more than made up for elsewhere in the game itself since the digital only nature allows them to explore spaces that purely physical card games can't. I probably don't need to harp too much on the RNG of Hearthstone because it's variable enough to get lots of complaints from certain people.
There is no linear, obviously, clearly better solution though. There are always tradeoffs. I think a lot of other systems make a decision for resources that is superior, but again, it sort of always depends on how much you value certain aspects between deck construction, consistency, how badly you feel mana screw/flood impacts the player, etc
At least it isn't Yu-Gi-Oh! I think it's a miracle that game has been as succesful as it has because the resource management system of it is SPECTACULARLY poorly designed in my opinion, to the point that it is a fundamental problem that has hobbled the game from the start. Probably because of the origin in Manga and the fact that the creator was trying to tell a dramatic story, not really design a game, and so put little thought into how things should work. Having all spells, no matter how powerful, be fundamentally the same in cost (Just having the card in your hand) is brutal.
Good points! Game design is about understanding trade offs and navigating to the best solutions for your game.
@@distractionmakersI’d love to go on your podcast and share a game design solution to all this with my new game coming out called Secrets of Alchemy. 😎
I think your comments about the mana system are not very good.
Particularly ignoring all the advantages it adds when mentioning Hearthstone. In Hearthstone you cannot mix colors/classes, that is a massive downside compared to magic where people can mix the cards they want to, they just have to be a aware of the downsides of doing so.
Guaranteeing a land every turn doesn't just reduce game variance, it reduces deck variance.
On top of that I think the way Hearthstone adds in more randomness is really bad. The RNG in a card game should be the cards, not dice. Biggest reason for that is that output randomness, where you make your decision and then randomness happens, inherently feels worse than input randomness, where you get your randomness and then you make your decision, because with input randomness you get more agency. There's some really good videos on input vs output randomness on TH-cam.
I definitely agree the resource system for any game trying to 'fix' MTGs mana system is going to trade off something for something else. That mix of variance, deck building, skill, the emotional feeling of drawing a land when you need a spell or vice versa (compared to that emotional feeling in other games of having to sacrifice your fav card just to cast the less exciting cards).
That being said, there is a painful amount of non-games due to excessive mulligans, mana flood, or mana screw. So i do still see it as enough of a problem that i think if they could make MTG from scratch nowadays they would make a different decision for it. Certainly the fact that so many people complain about it probably is telling in its own right. I agree that i want variance in games, i want to blame the luck when i lose and praise my skill when i win 😅 but its equally not really fun to play a game where one person didnt get to play much (sure, they made some decisions, like whether to mulligan or not, but not many). I have no doubt MTGs mana system could be redesigned in a way that would lose some of the things that we love about Magic (because we've all been playing it for ages and dont want it to change now), but would probably be more welcoming to newer players and/or would produce a higher frequency of playable/close games.
The variance introduced by MTG's mana system is not what I would consider healthy variance, as it is completely binary in nature. The standard card draw at the start of the turn is what I'd consider "healthy variance", because it gives the player a random tool which they have to find the best use case for. The "Discover" mechanic from Hearthstone is also a form of healthy variance. There are better and worse draws, sure, but every card you get is a tool that has its use case. If you draw 3 copies of a removal card in your opening hand, it might be optimal to use it on an enemy creature that you would otherwise never consider "wasting" your removal on. Card generation in digital card games goes a step further and creates completely unique situations each game, forcing the player to determine on the spot how randomly generated tools synergize with their deck. This is both exciting and also rewards game knowledge. A highly situational card that is usually not worth including in your deck might be exactly what you need when it is randomly offered to you.
Mana Screw and Mana Flood do not create these situations. There is no way to "take advantage" of a game state created by Mana Flood/Screw, there is exclusively damage control. They do not enable different playstyles for the same deck, they just occasionally force you to play a strictly worse version of your deck. Furthermore, mana issues reduce skill expression by reducing the possible decisions the player can make at any given moment. The more options a player has, the more skill it takes to find the correct move. A weaker player with a strong opening hand of 7 has more opportunities to play the wrong card and vice versa. Having dead lands in your hand or having too little mana for the cards in your hand effectively just means you have fewer cards in your hand than your opponent, removing agency. If you win despite mana issues, it's likely because your opponent messed up and not because you played well (it doesn't take much skill to find the correct move when you only have 1 playable card in your hand).
While there are advantages to the MTG mana system that others in the comments have pointed out, the variance it introduces is (in my opinion) not one of them as it is a rather unhealthy and unfun kind of variance. It does not provide different experiences every game as healthy variance does, it just occasionally provides a lesser version of the same experience.
Though the system can lead to some unlucky games, I think so so many interesting cards exist that interact with lands. I understand why other games don't do it anymore. It's not because it's better that way but Magic thoroughly explored that system already (probably).
The gambler reference noted.
10:29 another solution is like what Inscryption did: have mana in a separate deck, and when you draw a card, you can choose to draw either from your main deck or your mana deck.
This does solve quite a few problems, but still has the problem something like hearthstone does where there’s no tension in your deck between drawing resources and drawing gas.
@@distractionmakers if that "tension" can result in you not being able to play the game for 5 turns, then i think it's ok that this solution doesnt have that tension
i see your point, that MtG's system adds variance, but my main problem with it is that it results in autolosses. One time I build a 60-card deck with 20 lands in MtG Arena, and got mana flooded, and then the very next game, got mana screwed, without changing the deck at all. I balanced my deck perfectly and still encountered both types of mana problems. I don't think it's ok for your deck to just randomly decide, "eh, you just auto-lose this game."
that's the main reason i dont like MtG's mana system, bc it results in auto-losses, which aren't fun.
maybe adding a separate draw deck for mana is too much, that could be.
i think i would be happy if I was at least able to choose how many lands i get in my starting hand. Then I could guarantee at least 3 lands every game, and 4 non-lands every game. i think that would solve my issue without losing the variance elements that you talked about.
Inscryption spoilers:
Yes and no. In the roguelite deckbuilder version of the game from the first and third act, Inscryption handles it that way. In the constructed TCG version of the game, during act 2, your resource cards are still shuffled into your deck.
The deckbuilder versions of the game, in particular, needs that resource system as a separate deck because your main deck size varies so much. Most deckbuilding games don't use a resource system outside of the resource needed to buy new cards because of the inconsistent deck size issue.
The deckbuilder portions only have the resource system still because they're building on the base TCG that's already there and preserving most of its mechanics.
@@RedOphiuchus thats a good point. i forgot about the 2nd act being different in that way
th conversation in the end is why yugioh in partciular is entirely broken. There is very little skill expression as a result. Everything is constrained to lines of play that are dictated by the game designers, everything happens in 2-3 turns and theres only a couple of critical moments of decision.
Modern yugioh players will argue with you endlessly about this but it is undeniably true
As someone who plays two weeks of Master Duel every three months, I agree for the most part. I see skill expression in Yugioh as learning the deck in the first place. The best players know the most "constrained" lines of play and their weaknesses. Their win rates are high because they can maximize their hand traps and board breakers because they know the chink in every kind of armor. I find this unique despite its imperfections.
Sadly, it is. And as much as I've enjoyed Lorcana thus far, it's got that "feel" at the moment as well. It isn't that you can't build decks outside the norm and do well. But it is very clear that cards are being designed to work with each other and make deckbuilding easier for new players to card games. It's got its pros and cons. Overall, though, I'm not a fan.
To be fair to Ravensburger and Lorcana, they just released their third set yesterday. If the game still feels like this two years from now, then I'll worry. Anyway, I totally agree with you about YGO! and I feel as though Magic has gotten that way as well with the insane consistency that keeps getting released, set after set. It's almost like the designers are more worried about selling a product than making a great game. 🤔💭😏
Undeniably true? Hardly. Instead of a game with 40 to 50 card actions and decision points over 8 to 9 turns its a game with 40 to 50 card actions over 2 to 3 turns. Large sequencing chains let you hedge against options your opponent could have by doing lines one way or another, and while performing an otk is relatively easy its not so easy that decks can reliable do it through interaction. Knowing when to pivot from trying to go for game or trying to gain control of the board position is a very important skill in yugioh, as you do end up in contested game states that can drag out games for several turns.
Lower turn counts objectively increases variance and how much luck is in the game yes. But skill? Hardly.
@@shawnjavery this whole post is massive cope I’m sorry
@@random135246 that just screams I don't play the game but think I have a better grasp of it than people who do.
Duel masters DOES have resource variance, just in another way. You can choose to not play mana in some turns in order to play those cards. You also don't know how many cards you start your turn with, since the opponent can destroy one of your shields, so you can play that as a land. If they don't destroy a shield then you still don't play the card in your hand cause no mana for it, just like not drawing a land in Magic.
You guys almost mentioned Mage Noir… a system very similar to the shared colored mana system you described. It’s a great game, check it out. Paper and digital.
We’ll look into it!
Tell me you played him some kenny rogers after the episode.
Haha right?
Yeah so the problem is, with Monopoly, costs don't actually stop you from playing queens quickly. You could draw a card that teleports you to park place after rolling double, buy it with starting cash, roll a 2, buy boardwalk with starting cash, and then pass go, buying 2 houses on each with $50 left over to deal with card effects and rent. On turn 1.
I think I would rather play with really low or no money, with a system for taking out loans, and tracking a credit rating, than the normal $1500?
This was very interesting and I agree with a lot that is said here, but as someone who prefers Yu-Gi-Oh to magic, there's a couple things that I disagree with. I think the comments on Yu-Gi-Oh are mostly wrong, but moreso I find lands as a system more frustrating than anything else. There is depth and interesting decision making, but I like the more freeform way the lack of a resource system allows for better. It's not perfect, but it works better for me.
Variance in TCG's (I mainly play MTG so probably a bias) are a feature, not a bug.
It's interesting to me that there are games that are almost entirely skill-based but do *not* look at all like chess: fighting games.
Not really comparable to tabletop games, but like poker and magic they are all about trying to read what your opponent does. There is luck in guessing what your opponent will do, but you can mitigate some of that by using moves that beat multiple things (called 'option selects'), and in addition reading your opponent is a skill you can train. It's "luck" insofar as rock/paper/scissors is luck but mostly it's entirely skill, but the real-time aspect of it and the fact that offense is unreactable keeps it from becoming solved.
We haven’t done much deep analysis on fighting games. We should. Yomi is a big part of all games, but you’re correct that the real time pressure is what keeps them unsolvable. Much more like a physical sport honestly.
How is **taking away variance** a bad thing? Variance by its very nature rewards luck over skill and arguing that needing to accept resource management as a random variable is **insane**.
A much better system is to fix the mana base at 10, no color system, and allow mana to regenerate by 1 each turn. Spells cost what they cost and if you want to play a 10-cost card go nuts, but you then expose yourself for the next 10 rounds as you wait for your mana to regenerate.
You’re no longer fucked by drawing the right “land” at the right time and instead the focus is shifted to the skill of knowing what to play and when.
...did you listen to the video at all?
What do you think about all players innately having 1 colorless Mana per turn. Not increasing just always 1 in addition to their lands
The issue is that it removes the tension for aggro of having to run enough resources to play your cards and not running too many to make sure you can draw enough cards that win the game. If only need 1 red mana to win the game you could cut down to like 15 and still have an 88% chance to have one in your opening hand.
I think you're not being cynical enough. What I think competitive-minded players want is:
- If I'm better than my opponent, I want to win pretty much 100% of the time.
- If I'm worse than my opponent, I want to win something like 30% of the time.
Obviously you can't have both. But this is why you have these competitive magic players who say that Magic is too random, but then refuse to go play chess.
I think every person who plays MTG seriously has to go on this journey 😂
I love the game, but the impact of variance can just be soul crushing at times. It really takes a lot of mental health/maturity to see past it, say “that’s magic, baby”, figure out where you could have played better, and move on.
I’d like to think I’m at a healthy place with that now but I’ve nearly quit playing entirely several times out of frustration with variance.
I want to get one of those beam spring keyboards
Changed my life haha
1) I do have to fail you guys for in your entire discussion of skill vs variance, you never once brought up backgammon as the obvious comparison to chess. (Backgammon is probably my fave classic.)
2) You guys are of course totally right. Probably the best adaption of it ever was Force of Will. (mana went into its own randomized side deck - you had to tap your commander to draw from it) By far the biggest issue with MTG's mana is that in a truly randomized deck, it is very possible to get an unwinnable state. (as I've had happen to me at prereleases - more than once - and yes I mulligan) And to me if there's a chance that a player can just lose before the game even begins due to pure random luck regardless of any other player efforts, that's a bad game. (I mean why play? I can just do coin flips if I want that experience.)
Of course things have progressed over the years any solution MTG might apply would be quickly abused. But I have thought about stuff like letting players start with 1 basic land (or maybe a color-specific treasure token) vs letting players convert spells in their hand to colorless "waste" land if you needed.
It's an interesting debate. And some things you've said in here have made me consider that we may have tamped down variance a bit too much in our game. For that I am appreciative.
Check out Richard Garfield’s book “Characteristics of Games” for a more in depth analysis of variance. What we’re talking about here is basically a simplified version of his book.
@@distractionmakers Thanks! Definitely adding it to my list. (wow, not a cheap one)
"Unwinnable" is a tricky term here. Deterministic perfect information games like chess or tic tac toe are always "unwinnable" for one or both players in any game state, assuming perfect play from their opponent. These games remain fun as long as perfect play is too hard to define.
In mahjong for example, a lot of information is hidden and random, but we make up for it by playing many hands per game and many games in a league setting. Oftentimes it is literally impossible to complete a hand with the tiles you're given, but over the long term you are rewarded for playing to your outs, and in individual hands you still work towards other objectives like defense and limiting your opponents.
TCGs sit in the middle. The game trees get complex, but there is a lot of randomness too. Each game matters a lot. BO1/BO3 are common, and single night tournaments will have just enough games to determine a winner (who gets a meaningful prize!). The context makes non-games much more problematic, but it's not easy to significantly change that context.
Playing Pokemon standard has given me more perspective on randomness. Some decks can churn through 20+ cards per turn, and 0 cost tutors are the norm. The experience is shifted towards fighting with the resources and tempo in the entirety of your deck, rather than fighting with a probability distribution. Synergy and backup plans are less important when you can just power out your main combo. It makes me miss the old back-and-forth kitchen table games. MTG limited satisfies this for me too. It feels much more like a battle of decks than of players, for better and worse.
@@cheeseitup1971 - "Unwinnable" here I mean a hand with no mana - you literally can't play the game.
And yeah, I was in a sealed tournament, last best of 3, game two, and I mulligan down to 4 and still see no lands. (the new mulligan system is much improved)
@@simplegarakhaving 22 looks at cards and not finding lands in a 40 card deck is either rare enough to be discounted or a sign of questionable shuffling/ deck building
tl;dr: I love logic and arguing, but hate chess. How?
Rhetoric, argumentation, and "debate" are also kind of games, would you not agree? It satisfies a lot of the same itches you guys mention.
But is (logically sound) arguing closer to chess, or closer to poker/Magic/sports? Because for me, arguing is a discipline that is entirely dependent on logical arguments. (This **can** be framed in terms of actual formal logical arguing as used in philosophy, but doesn't have to be, as long as we acknowledge that everyday common sense "logic" does not differ from philosophical "logic").
*Here's the thing*: chess bores me to tears. I dislike the game. I love games like Magic with low-to-moderate variance (instead of 0 variance).
How can that be explained? As I initially stated, to me, arguing is a pure "battle" between logically valid statements. There's no variance -- a statement like (X **AND** notX) will _never_ be true. There is zero variance in logic, by extension arguing. So this suggests arguing is a close-knit brother of chess.
I wonder. Ideas?
The one thing they didn't touch on, likely since its all mostly in the Japanese world of TCG and odds are nether has run into it fully is consumable resources. Admittedly you have things like netrunner and amusingly Flesh and Blood, which they mention but never go into its resources system. They seem to view it as the same as linear system like Duel Masters. But of the big three only Pokemon has a consumable, and only partially. Not all attacks a Pokemon does means you have to discard energy, but some do and of course you lose all the energy attached to a Pokemon when its defeated. But some TCG go all in on you using up their land equivalent to do things. which moves away from simple linear system and can easily add up to not having enough to do what you want to do and such. And certainly has a fair amount of variance.
Japan has a much larger and bit more varied landscape of TCG that are often taking more form Duel Masters (given its often a top seller over there to this day, not too shocking) then taking form MTG and its lead to some interesting places.
feels like you should credit the DTW episode on the same topic. lots of repeated points from that
We haven’t seen that video, what is DTW?
mark rosewater's podcast@@distractionmakers
It looks to me like players are prone to look for less and less variance as their own skill at the given game improves, thus minimizing the effect of luck when their own skills can bring them far on its own. New players might enjoy variance to minimize the effect of skill that their opponents can bring to their match. Just a thought.
That's literally it in a nutshell. The more experienced (not necessarily "better") player will always have an advantage over someone who isn't experienced with that card game, or card games in general. That player knows less about the game system, less about the cards, doesn't know what a meta is, and/or has zero understanding of things like statistics.
The variance is built in such that the player with a turn 4 combo win in their deck won't always have that combo available, no matter how much they build said deck for consistency. Their less experienced opponent could easily draw into several cards that disrupts that combo as well. The end result is that, all of a sudden, you have a game that either player COULD win, even though the odds are still in favor of the more experienced player.
I agree, but it also works for the experienced player. In a consistent game, if you lose, it's because you played worse. Whereas in Magic, the variance lets you say, "I could have won if I wasn't mana flooded/screwed." And that acts as a social lubricant to allow for more games and rematches.
It's like when fans and players of actual sports teams complain about the referees. If we could have perfect AI calling games perfectly, human nature would still complain about the officiating, because we need to protect our own ego. We might internally admit that we lost fair and square, but we need to be able to defend our ego in public.
Another example is in video games. People often say they want smarter AI to provide more of a challenge. But perfect or even greatly skilled AI would not be fun to play against. We want the illusion of challenge, but we want to win. Aimbots in an FPS aren't more fun.
@@shorewall I completely agree. I think Mark Rosewater once described many of these mechanics as "ego protection" for the exact reasons you gave 😁
I want magic to have more variance. That's why I play Commander where its singleton.
For context my experience with Magic is mainly with drafting, where decks inherently are less consistent and you have limited access to mana fixing. I think the way magic implements mana colours and costs are incredibly well designed, but land cards in the main deck feels too clunky of a mechanic to me. The total binary of drawing either lands or spells isn't interesting, and the game is significantly more fun when you both draw a health balance of both. In particular I dislike drawing lands during late game top deck battles. It's so anti-climactic and feels like it really breaks the emotional flow of the game. I love almost everything else about Magic, but lands keep putting me off the game.
On the point about variance allowing players of different skill levels to have meaningful games, handicap systems are another way you can achieve this. Also, in the age of online matchmaking it feels like it might not be quite as relevant anymore?
I'd be interested in a TCG that takes a sort of RTS approach to resource generation. Where you start with a set rate of resource generation (eg. 3 lands that untap each turn) and you must spend resources to increase your resource generation rate (eg. tap all lands to add one land). I think the short term / long term tradeoffs could be interesting, and there could be greater variance in game states depending on how aggressive either player is.
The top players win 60% of the time vs other top level pros! Vs me they would win 95%+ of the time
One thing you didn't mention is the high rate of games you lose because your deck doesn't deliver. I agree that the high variance un Magic is important but, maybe, it´s too high. For example, if you coul scry once before your draw step, you could have a bit more control over what you draw without losing the variance.
Another thin, when you criticize games based on memory it seems to me that you are speaking about mono red decks. They always play the same, with very little variance and very little skill, and that is part of it's advantage.
"thok" is onomatopoeia I think you are saying the literal sound.
Mtg has cards which are lands on one side already
Pokemon does have rotation and has for a decade at least.
Moreso than playing Flesh and Blood, I would recommend you guys watch some commentated pro play to see it really come to its rights.
Ever since I started playing it, I virtually can't play Magic anymore because it has become so obvious to me just how deeply flawed the concept of lands is. The argument for why lands are good is essentially always some form of "having them adds variance", but I feel like almost everyone making this argument misses *what kind of variance* is actually being created - as it is mainly one of non-games.
Think about the sheer amount of Magic games you've seen where players were going neck and neck and things came down to top-decking, and then one player got a land and lost a huge lead because they knew what they needed to do *but were functionally locked out of playing the game at all*. The variance is "you just don't get to play this turn". That isn't interesting variance. In some games (and this is really not that irregular), the variance is "you functionally don't get to play a game of Magic this game", where you take a slight risk with, say, a 2-land opening hand and your opponent draws the nuts while you draw get mana starved. Taking a slight risk should not be punished by essentially locking you out of the game with no decisions to be made until you lose. That is a design problem, I can't see it any other way. "Usually, 1 hour after I turn on my washing machine, it's done and my laundry is clean. It would be way more exciting if there was a 10% chance for my washing machine to just not function on any given day so I'm forced to improvise!" just isn't a sensible take, and that's what defenses of MTG's lands almost always boil down to. "Magic is played BO3" also doesn't really counter this argument either: having to play more of the game just to account for the fact that one player may win almost entirely of the back of essential randomness doesn't mean that this randomness is a good thing. It means you've put a band-aid over the issue that is 'our game has such bad and weirdly impactful variance that you can't always just play 1 game of it and have a fair and enjoyable experience'.
I would also argue lands don't exactly make deckbuilding that much more interesting. There's an optimal amount of lands for every deck that can be mathematically calculated. There are actual websites for it. And so you are essentially forced to say "slightly less than half the cards in my deck is going to be this uninteresting bulk of things I absolutely cannot play without". Given how most Magic games end with players seeing only half or even just 1/3rd of their total deck, this just means you won't be playing what you built on a regular basis. Compare again to FaB, where you routinely see your entire deck for the average (CC) game and there are no lands, meaning there are way, WAY more choices to make when building any deck. Considering playing a yellow of a card in addition to a red is the equivalent of saying something like "In addition to 4 Llanowar Elves, I am also playing 4 'Shreddowar Elves', which are 2 mana 2/2s that tap for 2". It doesn't translate perfectly because ramping/tempo work differently in Magic, but wouldn't having those kinds of decisions open up so many more different decks?
FaB's resource system does the exact same 3 things as mentioned in the video: more lines of play, adding variance, and deck construction mastery. Except it does a better job in all 3 departments. You have more lines of play because not only does it present the same 'work with what you got' conundrum Magic has, but also your 'mana cards' are pitched (put on the bottom of your deck) and show up again later in the game, meaning you can keep an eye on how you are stacking your deck for the second cycle and increasing the skill ceiling accordingly. You have variance in the same way Magic has it, except the variance is WAY less likely to just lock a player out of making any decision entirely. And even if something like this were to happen, FaB's 'cards can also block'-design means that even hands that are unplayable in terms of resources can be used to just block out and stall, which is still an interesting decision.
On top of that, using triple colors for most cards makes deck-building wildly more interesting than in Magic. Unless you specifically build a deck around lands (scapeshift or such), virtually all that lands add to deckbuilding in Magic is a short one-time puzzle of 'how many lands should I play, of which colour, and which type of conditionally untapped dual lands should I use?', whereas in FaB that is essentially only the first step: figuring out how many reds, yellows and blues you want to play to ensure your average hand will have the resources you need based on your average cost-per-hand. THEN, you get to do the whole dance of figuring out what cards you actually want to play, and consider if a card your deck wants is so good you want to have it in multiple colours. End of the day, there are reasons the FaB meta is notably more diverse than Magic's, and this would be one of them.
We will dig further into FaB, but it’s fatal flaw for me is that cards double as resources. As an advanced player this likely feels like a feature to you, but put yourself in the shoes of a new player to card games trying to wrap your head around what to do. There is no clear indication of a cards function, everything requires you to understand the situation you’re in. This creates analysis paralysis and makes the player feel bad when they make the wrong decision. Mtg lands aren’t perfect, but they have features other games are ignoring while they’re thinking they’re solving their flaws.
@@distractionmakersFair!
I do see where you're coming from and FaB is absolutely more complex for new players when it comes to resources. I've been playing for over half a year now and I still sometimes make 'dumb' mistakes where I block with something I needed to keep to pitch, and then my entire turn falls apart because I can't afford the play I wanted to make. However, I will say that a lot of this also comes down to the decks you use. This problem specifically happens to me when I play Ranger, which can get very complex in terms of resources, and virtually never on Brute, which has straightforward resource usage. I reckon FaB's problem is more that it's not obvious what classes are easier for new players, as some classes in FaB are far more straightforward than others - at least for new players.
Guardians, for example, have a solid amount of cards that cost 4-6 or even more energy. This means some hands play themselves: if you want to play the big attack (and 'playing the big thing' is a pretty obvious decision), you have to pitch everything else. The main consideration there then comes from "but I won't be able to AFFORD the big attack if I use the cards I need to pitch for it to block my enemy's attack", which is where skill comes in (knowing when to block). Ninja's are the opposite: their deck is basically almost only red cards, but all of their stuff costs 0 so you have to spend way less time thinking about what you pitch - you will be able to swing anyway. If you ever draw a blue, it's sort of a no-brainer that you will pitch that to sustain everything you want to do for the turn.
And as a general rule of thumb, since red cards are usually stronger when played but weaker when pitched and blue cards are the reverse, going into your first 10 games considering little else than "I will pitch blues (or maybe yellows) in order to play reds" will work. You won't beat veteran players with that strategy, but you'll get a feeling for the game's pace quite quickly, and it's a concept that holds true even at high level play for some classes. The indication of how cards function is still there, it's just a lot more subtle and the better you get, the more you will understand when to deviate from base-level decision making.
I am with you that some card games try to fix MTG's issues with lands but fail in other departments. Hearthstone is such a classic example here, where - since mana is guaranteed - every game is always about being able to play on curve. And drawing the right cards to make use of all your mana on each turn is generally a winning 'strategy'. It kind of illustrates why the problems MTG has with lands cannot just be 'fixed' by doing something like a "you just get to play 1 basic land from your collection for free each turn"-type rule anymore. Which, ironically, also 'confirms' to me that Magic will forever deal with the problems caused by its lands. Unless the amount of MDFC's printed is upped significantly, anyway, but that doesn't really seem to be where the game is going?
One thing I also do like about lands (and what I think is a small argument in favour of them) is the flavour they can add to a deck (or 'used to like', anyway - I haven't liked Magic's art direction for several years anymore). If you play a Golgari saproling deck, you can find forests with swamp-like art and swamps with decaying forest-like art to reinforce the overarching theme of the deck. It's a cool little touch that lets you add some identity to a deck. But then... I could also argue that I can give my deck a far better identity in FaB by having 18-24 more *cards I can functionally play*, so yeah.
that intro about keyboards actually made me forget I was watching a video about MTG for a minute
37:45 bro… idk how anyone doesn’t know the Gambler by Kenny Rogers…
Haha right?
I think cards doubling as mana resources is still a preferable option as every card can have some relative utility in the deck. Dragon Ball Super uses a similar system to Duel Masters (if I am understanding what was discussed in the video), though cards have an additional utility in that they can be used to temporarily buff up your cards in a battle. They've also experimented with archetypes that make further use of their resource pool so that you can effectively make full use of your resource pile. Blue Boujack Brigade is the pinnacle of this, using cards from the energy (resource pool) to help power up a defense or attack and then play the used card after the battle. The deck was a solid deck for a good while and could occasionally pop up in events well after its debut.
The only game that made a substantial improvement over Magic's casting cost system was Yugioh, by essentially not having any. Because an additional resource really isn't necessary if you consider that the number of cards in hand you have access to *already is* a resource, that also by itself provides variance. Some people don't like that it's a fast paced game because of this, with a lot of counterspells and interaction on the opponent's turn, but that's mostly because every other card game conditions you to expect a slower pace because they usually copy from Magic, or rather what Magic used to be, since high level eternal format play has turn 0 interaction regardless of a resource system or not. You could argue that additional artificial resource systems add another thing to learn and keep track of to a game just to perform the most basic actions which is not exactly fun, as well as the possibility to add denial or artificial inflation of the resource to the game which feels generally unfun and unfair.
You can always count on a YuGiOh player to bring the worst take to any discussion about card game design.
This is not a slight against YuGiOh, it's a cool game that does cool things, but there is a reason magic's design is the one that is copied the most. There is a reason most RPGs balance spells by having something similar to a mana system, and a reason so many strategy games both real time and turn based function around building up your strength over time.
Calling not having any system "a substantial improvement" is just flat out ignoring every reason laid out in the video.
Yugioh does have a cost system though. The only time it didn't was early on in the digital games and early on in the manga.
The manga lacking a resource system was a utility decision. A resource system takes more pages of the manga to explain and show for a component of the game that is not interesting for the story. The creator is in control of what the players are playing and can force them to throw out progressively stronger monsters as the chapter goes on to simulate a resource system without having one.
When the card game got popular enough to consume the manga, and thus popular enough to become an actual game, actual designers had to sit down and figure out how to take simplified magic the gathering and make it a real game. They landed on using monsters as the resource system so that they wouldn't have to make new cards. You can play one a turn and tribute/sacrifice them to play stronger ones. Giving a utility to the weaker monsters and a cost to the stronger ones.
This was serviceable but ultimately very shallow so they inevitably had to create ways to cheat this system a little bit and through power creep, and only having an eternal format, they've cheated on it more and more until the game is in the current state of Turbo Legacy.
The thing is, Magic is not actually all that different. Magic has been around for a long time and though they try to combat power creep with formats it still exists to a degree. Even without power creep, the longer the game goes the more the developers look to create interesting mechanics that feel unique. This has lead to tons and tons of ways to cheat magic's resource system and have the same experience as modern yugioh where most of the game's interactions are condensed to a single turn or two turns and victory is decided by knowing when to break your opponents combo. The key difference is that these things are primarily limited to Magic's eternal formats, notably Legacy, and so the vast majority of players, who don't enjoy that kind of gameplay, are free to opt out by not playing that format.
counterpoint don't buy the newest preconstructed deck if you're new buy a slightly older one decent amount of the older ones you can buy for $30-40 if you want to go even cheaper the starter commander deck first flight is available for around $20
Great point!
Sorcery: Contested Realm has solved this issue, reducing mana screw / mana flood by giving each player a spellbook for spells and an atlas for land cards. Players can choose to draw from their spellbook or atlas. This reduction of variance makes room for the added complexity of the 2D 4x5 board on which players play their lands. Sorcery: Contested Realm is even more like chess than Magic, leading to great games with interesting board states.
We’ll check it out!
This video I feel made a bit of a mistake in focusing on other card games resource systems to "prove" Magic's resource system is already perfect. I've never paid attention to Digimon before, but you made it sound incredibly interesting, that didn't make me think Magic sounds better. Additionally, these games have many differences beyond just their primary resource system from Magic, a game is more than just one of it's parts. I feel like for this argument, it would be much better to focus on the mana system in the context of Magic rather than looking at where you personally think other card games stumbled.
Love
I respectfully disagree with some of what's being said here; mainly with regards to variance.
1) I don't think having a very high-skill, low-variance game will turn away new players. Chess gets lots of new players all the time despite it having almost no variance at all and being entirely skill-based.
2) I would say almost all competitive players (especially in yugioh) prefer it when the game is less luck-based and sacky.
3) Having less decisions to make during a game makes it less interesting and interactive imo. If a land can only be a land and nothing else, that takes away from skill expression by essentially making decisions for the player instead of letting the player make decisions.
4) Games that are very luck-based can still be solved and this isn't really a problem I would say. Of course given enough time, players will be able to "solve" any game. I don't think that's an issue though. To give an example, Edison format is a retro yugioh format that has exploded in popularity over the past few years. There is a decent amount of variance in the format I would say, but still a lot of skill involved and the format is overall very balanced despite it being high-variance. The format is still seeing growth despite being like 90% solved and heavily skill-based purely because the gameplay itself is just fun
A lot of these points feel like they're technically true, but intentionally or unintentionally ignores a lot of the nuance that exists.
1) But Chess doesn't have that many players compared to how well known it is. Ask someone you know, "wanna play chess?" or "wanna play backgammon?" Chess only works if you are at a similar skill level, backgammon does not. Making something highly skill-based objectively heavily gates new players.
2) Games aren't just made for competitive players, they are made for everyone. Does the average player thing UNO is more fun if you remove draw fours to make the game less random? Should DnD switch to 3d6 instead of 1d20 because it's less random.
During Zendikar - Scars standard in MTG, the height of Caw Blade, the game being too skill intensive was a common complain.
3) Decision bloat and decision paralysis are both real things, especially to new players. The biggest problem arises when the amount of thinking about a decision doesn't reflect the importance of the decision.
This also ignores that not allowing some decisions enables others. MTG doesn't have the decision about which card you play down as land, but as a tradeoff for that it makes the decision about what cards you put in your deck more meaningful, as does it effect stuff like looting and scrying.
Generally the more different two options are the more meaningful the decision between them is. Lands and spells by definition being very different makes the decisions more meaningful.
4) Solved games can still be fun, but a game being solved inherently reduces innovation, which is one of the things that pulls interest to a game.
@@Ninjamanhammer 1) What do you mean chess doesn't have that many players? A quarter million people watch worlds every year. The game is growing too, so your statement that skill gatekeeps players is obviously false. Even young kids get into chess and they hate losing more than anyone.
2) There's a big difference between random and sacky. Edison is a very variance-heavy format for example, but games are rarely ever determined by luck and more often come down to skill. Also if games are too determined by luck, the competitive scene will die since there is no reason to practice, improve, or compete seriously.
3) This doesn't have the effect you think it does. Deck building would still be just as important. It is in yugioh and we don't have lands.
@@yuseifido57061) Read my comment again then get back to me when you realize what it actually says.
Addendum: Chess already exists, there really is only one chess and you can't really make a new one, because people would just play chess instead.
2) Everyone can bring up a game someone has never heard off to make a point, but I googled it and I think the game you mention has 4.5/10 on boardgame geek so go off my guy.
And since magic is so heavily dependent on luck there is no competitive scene... Oh wait.
3) If you're going to miss my arguments this hard why even bother commenting?
@@Ninjamanhammer You're the one completely missing what I'm saying.
1) I read what you wrote. I completely dissagree with your statement that a game being highly skill-based gates new players. Chess is a perfect example of the exact opposite. League of Legends is another. The list goes on. What I would agree with is saying that a high skill floor can gatekeep new players since this is can be a difficult barrier to entry
2) Go look up edison format and try again because you googled the wrong thing. You're also conflating "variance-heavy" with being "luck-based". Those are not the same thing.
3) I guess i'll just say it again since you didn't understand. Your assertion that lands make deck building choices more meaningful is provably false. Deck building is still just as meaningful in games without lands (pokemon,yugioh). Often every single card you include in your deck can drastically alter how it plays. Every card is very important in decks in these games. So adding lands does not equate to deck building decisions being more meaningful
@@yuseifido5706
1) There isn't a lot of casual chess players is the thing, same with league of legends. You're either committed or you're not. Obviously not every game is aiming for that, especially not when it's meant to be played with your friends. That's why most board games you'll play with 3+ people are lot less skill intensive than competitive games.
2) What are you even saying?
"Thing I like good, thing you like bad." Is all I'm reading. Why is Edison format any more skill intensive variance than anything else?
3) Lands is a meaningful deck building decision, you are talking out of your ass.
If you can play spells as lands then you just get rid of cards you don't need by playing them as lands, that makes inclusion for a lot of narrower and more specific cards cheaper.
1% of the time a new player might beat a pro player, true, but not in a meaningful game. A game with mana flood or mana screw is not a meaningful game.
You can't claim that the complexity of the system is good even though it screws up new players and claim that mana screw is good so a new player can randomly beat a pro player. That makes no sense.
It’s not about a newb beating a pro. It’s about more buckets of player, close-ish in skill, having meaningful games. When mana doesn’t work, it REALLY doesn’t work. But we’re less likely to notice the times when we stumble on a land drop for a turn. The little inconsistencies add up to more dynamic gameplay.
I hate the Thock noise
MTG's mana system is janky af.
Can we just fix the god damn muligan system. The mana wouldnt be that bad if they just do a muligan like Hearthstone or Lorcana
Mulligans are tough. The issue with hearthstone and Lorcana mulligans is that the consistency leads to games playing out very similarly each time. That added consistency advantages aggro, allowing them to play further up the mana curve and look a bit more like midrange. So you end up with a bunch of midrange decks that are build around a couple cards and can do the thing they’re trying to do the same way nearly every game. I’m not saying mana screw is great, but the trade off is games that play out very similarly with less decision points.
The London Mulligan is the strongest Mulligan we've seen in Magic, and has changed the landscape in terms of allowing certain decks to flourish. I'm not familiar with the rules for mulligans in Lorcana - in what ways do you find it improves on Magic's?
If you're just arguing that less variance = better. I feel like you missed the entire point of the video.
@@NinjamanhammerSo I mainly play draft and Commander and in draft, getting mana screw in your opening hand and having a binary choice feels really bad. It just create a lot of non game where my opponent and I just win just because the other person got mana screw. Also going to down 5 in draft will almost gurantee you a lost . The muligan system just feels really binary and clunky. In my commander pod, we dont even make people go down to 6 (unless we playing cedh) just because it just feels bad a lot of the time
@@anhvu6824 If it happens a lot you need to build better mana bases.
Draft and commander are some of the formats where stumbling matters the least. Commander even has a free mulligan. If you consistently screw that's on you.
The problem with magics mana system is the 'Land' card and the inevitable randomness of drawing your resources from the same deck you draw the things which consume thouse resources. This is why nearly every newer game system seperates the resources from the deck, but they do the simplest dumbest thing possible with linear mana per turn like HearthStone. I personally think that Magic completly failed to explore and inovate the Land concept.
Imagine if MTG just allowed you to have a deck of land cards that you can choose to draw from instead of your main deck, or if you could put any card face down as colorless land. Now you have the needed consistency to not be mana-screwed but you have MORE choices and more strategy to engage in durring the game itself. It also means that deck design dosn't need to so slavishly bend to MAKING consistency come out of the deck, which makes playing competetive magic so UNinteresting and UNresponsive to the oponent.
Alternativly what if lands were something that actually interacted with creatures and blocking as if they were actually a territory you were defending from incursion. When you play lands they go into groupings and creatures you play are played to thouse groups and are actually defending them. The size and number of groupings just needs to have a trade off between small/large groupings.