Why Reading The Card Doesn't Explain The Card Anymore
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- An Indie Dev and a AAA Dev discuss cruft, or unnecessary components, and it's impact on game design.
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Gavin Valentine www.gavinvalen...
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Thumbnail Artwork: Sauron, The Dark Lord by Kieran Yanner - เกม
I can’t believe you made it through this whole video without mentioning stickers
Haha I know! We realized it a couple days later.
gonna say this ahead of watching the video but the thing that annoys me the most about the added components is how insular many of them are. If wotc introduced a new gamepiece and really explored it across many sets it would be fine. when youre constantly jumping between new gamepieces and playing environments where multiple new game pieces are being juggled at once, it becomes multiplicatively more of a headache.
in a slower paced release schedule, this would be easier to do. if mtg was just doing one block of sets in one year, into another block of sets that builds on the gamepiece introduced in the previous one, it wouldn't be too bad. but what wotc is currently doing, i.e. adding new gamepieces for what are ultimately one offs like lotr, really exacerbates the issue.
💯
3:00 Mark Rosewater has said the Kruft was an intentional effort on his part to try and explore new design space. I honestly think they didn't need to add dungeons or tempt if they wanted to avoid kruft.
As for video games, video games can introduce an immense amount of new mechanics like the ring tempts you without explaining any of it to the player. Its interesting that card games are in this space where the players have to have a full understanding of each mechanic in order to run the game properly. Video games can straight up lie to the player and things will still run fine.
Video games can lie to the player because it's doing its own calculations behind the scene that the player will never, ever see. Almost all video games use systems the player never once interacts with because they don't have to. In board games or card games, any physical, non-digital game, you are manually doing *every single thing* to advance the game state with your physical body
Most video games are beatable without fully interacting with all of it(whether that's a good thing or not is a different discussion). You get a choice on if you want to use it or not. Your opponent pulling out stickers doesn't give you a choice to ignore the matter
I think you can see this in Magic too - day/night is an absolute pain to track in paper magic, but a computer can do so effortlessly with like 3 "if-then" statements.
I half way agree with you. A video game can get away with a lot more busywork, but cruft is another step above that and complexity creep is an issue in video games as well as tabletop. Artifact is a good example of how the logic of “it’s a video game so it can be more complex” didn’t land well.
Though I do think a lot of video games under explain. When I play a video game and see a skill description like "increases your chance of making a critical hit" that makes it hard to grok how good it is, and sometimes it's written like that because the calculation is so complicated they can't explain it more specific.
For all its faults with powercreep, Yugioh has done a good job keeping cruft down. Outside of a game mat with the card zones marked (which comes with starter and structure decks) and a life point tracker, it's just the cards.
In the eternal words of MBTYuhioh "Magic has too many keywords, Yugioh needs more keywords"
Magic does have a serious amount of set up, it's just hidden by being called deck building.
But it's a form of setup you can get out of the way ahead of time at your own convenience. It doesn't eat into the shared game time.
But you only have to do it once.
If I want to play Catan, I have to get the board out, set everything up, lay out the resources cards, segregate the coloured pieces and dole them out. If I want to play again after a game, we still have to do most of the process.
For magic, it's literally "shuffle up and play" and the time you spend making your deck is pro-rata'd out over those games to eventually become negligible.
@@Gahanun you can host or show up "early" so game set up doesn't eat into shared time.
@Maskerade Certainly open to counter examples, but my quick play board games also reset quickly, the ones that require time consuming set up take 2-4 hours so repeated play rarely happens.
My partner is slowly picking up commander. They don't deck build or study cards, so when they sit down to play, it's clunky. It made me realize how much back end set up time I spend on the hobby.
That's partly why my playgroup plays Magic more frequently than D&D or other table top games, because there's little prep or setup time at the time of us trying to play, it's all done outside that and done at our own convenience.
@@barryhatchel Showing up early to set up the game still eats up time in a way Magic doesn't
Wizards knew this 20 years ago when they made the tcg duel masters(failed in the us but top 3 most popular in japan). 5 cards off the top of your deck for life total so you don't need to record it separately. Every card can be played normally or used as a land. Kept it creatures and sorcery/instant. Wizards knows this already and most tcgs makers know that cruft is bad for player experience. 1 or 2 is fine that can be a unique mechanic of a card game but to many and it leads to confusion and slowing of the game.
I am of the opinion that these stuff like monarch and dungeons are not inherently bad.
The big problem that I have with them is that they all are coded differently.
What I mean is, Monarch triggers on End Step but the Initiative triggers during Combat. They are so close that I have to specifically tell myself that Initiative is in Combat.
Additionally, there is incongruity within these mechanics, like how Venture into the dungeon lets you pick any dungeon except the Initiative one to start, but if you are already in the Initiative one you can just progress through it like any other dungeon.
Little stuff like that just makes everything needlessly complex for what amounts to a Treasure token.
Like, at least just let my brain shortcut this stuff. By having all the Statics trigger on End Step and all the Dungeons work the same.
Also Day/Night sucks and was unnecessary.
Great points! It’s actually very similar to the problem mtg had with chroma vs devotion. Once the idea was normalized it worked much better.
Initiative should just have been: become the monarch, at your end step, if you're the monarch, venture. No new tokens, two neat mechanics, nice and clean.
Dungeons have tokens but they are a bit specific. So, in an initiative deck, you can bring an undercity token for everyone to use
My biggest gripes about some of the cruft (Day/Night especially and The Ring Tempts You kind of) is less about the extra stuff, and more about how they’re presented.
The phrase “the ring tempts you” is a little misleading: you would think that something would happen to YOU, the player, whenever the ring tempts YOU. Instead one of your little guys becomes legendary? Maybe if it said “the ring tempts a creature you control,” then it would make more sense. Thankfully the phrase is vague enough that you are motivated to find the extra card to help explain.
With Day/Night, it was so much more annoying to figure out. For me, it isn’t that you have to track day/night constantly, even if there’s no permanents that care about the mechanic currently on the battlefield, it’s that this extra cruft is/was NOT referenced well enough on the day/nightbound cards themselves. The REMINDER text (I’ll explain why this is weird soon) for the single(ish) word mechanic daybound/night bound says “If a player casts no spells during their own turn, it becomes night next turn,” and “If a player casts at least two spells during their own turn, it becomes day next turn” respectively. That seems like enough information, right? That’s more or less what the original werewolf mechanic says (the first two Innistrad blocks have the werewolves transform on your upkeep, and two/no spells from any player triggers the transformation, but I digress), so you would think that there isn’t any cruft, right? WRONG.
The reminder text implies full and complete knowledge and information that doesn’t necessarily need to be on every instance of the card, if the mechanic is well known enough. A simpler mechanic, let’s say Trample, for example, can have its reminder text there if the set is designed more for beginners, or a mechanic like Phasing can have its reminder text on even higher rarity cards in any set due to how uncommon Phasing is. But, ultimately, the reminder text can be absent for uncruftable mechanics, because the card only deals with other regular cards. There is no cruft in trample. You know what trample does, and you attack with the creature (Technically every keyword is cruft because it means you might not be able to read the card to explain the card but it’s definitely less cruft than the modern examples).
With most actual cruft cards, there is no reminder text. The implication (as I mentioned with the ring temptations) of there not being reminder text is that you have to deal with a reminder CARD. Even in venture into the dungeon, the reminder text (which probably could’ve been removed) is pointing you to the reminder card. “What is the first room? Do I need another card for this? I think I do?” These type of questions did not enter my mind when I say the day/night bound, which made it harder to get into it, all because the wording both explained too much and not enough of how the mechanic works.
Again, I like the day/night mechanic, for the most part. It definitely works better on Arena, sure, and commander has too many problems with being overwhelming that the cruft makes even more difficult (just talked to a friend today who didn’t get into magic because their first game was commander. Sad! Many such cases!), but in a 1v1 environment the flavor of the sun rising and setting helps in keeping track of the mechanic. It’s just that it’s worded and presented so differently from all the other cruft, that it was more confusing to understand than the Initiative, or the Ring Tempting You, because most of the information you need is on the card, but the important parts of keeping track of day/night for the rest of the game and night letting permanents enter transformed is on the cruft card. Such an awkward split of explanations. Shoutout to my girl Graveyard Trespasser
Great talk! Loved learning about the word "cruft", excited to use it.
One ask though, consider getting a reusable mug so it doesn't feel like you're promoting single use cups - cheers!
The problem isn’t a game having 1 Cruft. Or 2. Or 3. The problem is when it has 10. When a board state has Monarch, Initiative, Venture, Miracle, Infect, Counters, Energy, Foretell, Morph, Curses, Planeswalkers, Transforming, Night/Day, Battles, Mutate, Emblem, * for card types in graveyards, do you pay the 1.. I could go on.. but you get it. 😅
Plot twist: It never did
We as a community could just create a rotating commander format like standard and that would eliminate most of these extra mechs by only using the recent ones but we haven't. So is this a problem we care to solve?. alternatively I just leave out most things from my decks that require extra pieces and then its a non issue. if you find people to play with who agree you can also rule 0 these things into your game. there are a ton of solutions to this that take like 5 minutes lol
😂 it's not the old mechanics that are the problem it's the mechanics within mechanics that are a problem and bs that takes waaaaay to long to explain and has to be done by both people but the person who used it isn't keeping track of
@@williamgoddard-i7r right so you rule 0 those out, and if none of your friends agree, you find a table that does
@@williamgoddard-i7r we as a community are responsible for how we play the game and can change that however we wish. If you dont like certain mechs just rule 0 them out, its literally a 5 minute conversation with your pod. If its a better way to play the game and people agree, they will naturally move towards it
Well that's kinda the thing isn't it? There's only going to be as much cruft in a deck as you choose to put in. If someone wants to build and bring a crufty deck, then you're always welcome to say yes or no, depending on your mood.
Counters are content, dungeons are cruft. Hearing the professor explains why I don’t listen to the professor
As someone who plays with a lot of newer players cruft is actively pushing us toward other games. We've been playing commander because the deck building and personal expression really appeals to the group but the games themselves are very hard to follow for the newer players. They're learning how dungeons and ring tempting works mid-game on top of the already complicated board state. It gets to an uncomfortable place where the experienced players are almost playing the game for the new players to help them parse the board state.
I've built a cube to offer a different way to play but even then I have to be very careful to pick cards with minimal cruft so that they can actually understand the card when looking at it in the draft. Even small things like a card with "partner" I won't include just so they never encounter a card with irrelevant rules text.
Meanwhile I taught them the game "Challengers!" the other night which simulates a card game tournament using very simple auto-battling style gameplay. And it was a hit! Super easy to explain, everyone knew how the game worked, and was eager to play again. While I agree that some boardgames have a lot of set-up and rules explaining there are many (like Carcassonne) that cut through the BS and get as quickly to the interesting decision space as possible. And in an adult game group with limited free time these games get to the table more frequently with more success.
Great discussion as always! Love the content
I feel this too. It's part of what is driving me crazy with all the "copy" effects in the game too. It's part of why I refuse to put shelob in my B/G food deck because her "make copies into food" is just too much of a headache.
Thx for the challengers recommend. I'll keep an eye out.
The complex board states that commander can get to is why I no longer play it. Plus I only get to be involved in a game 25% of the time, vs when playing 1v1 where it's 50%.
Now I only play draft and sealed at my LGS. Very occasionally will I play 1v1 commander decks with a friend.
Yeah, I'm really in two minds about Commander specifically. The deckbuilding is hands-down my favourite thing in all of Magic, because any power level is doable. I can make a bad deck centred on a certain theme or aesthetic and it will fit in with a low power table. There's a scene for low power Commander. But I find it pretty awful to play. Even with pretty casual decks there's 3 opponents playing all these cards I've never heard of before and after they explain them I have to remember that as well as everything else on the board. 60 card is a lot more fun and focused to play, but in the deckbuilding I don't like it at all, it's always full speed ahead with high-power decks, there's very little room to just chill out with bad cards the way Commander allows for.
I love drafts and cubes for this though. Your deck will be a lot more unrefined and low power than some meta constructed brew, it captures that feeling of just making do with whatever dumbass cards you get and maybe some good stuff if you can find any. I like when an on-rate creature with a keyword is enough to play a card.
Yeah, good adult games definitely need to value the players' time, it's probably the most precious resource for this hobby.
Back then, we used to play Settlers of Catan at a friend's place or even in a bar, then someone discovered this website where you could play it for free, and we tried that for a while, since we could play a whole round there before we would even be able to meet up in person (talking about setup). Well, turned out playing a relatively simple game too much can ruin the fun pretty fast, and using voicechat is way different than talking face to face for gaming and for social aspects, but this made us think about time economy and why we do certain things.
With Magic, I quit like 20 years ago and just recently found my old cards, and tried to catch up a little... well, yeah, seems impossible to do so, S O M A N Y C A R D S!! Also, so many new sets in such a short time, it almost seems HARDER to play casual standard now than it was back then as a teen with pocket money...
Guess I should build some kind of cube and keep to limited formats.
The problem with the dungeons is that other people have to play with it as well even if they have not chosen to. Ring tempts you, if you play it then only you need a card to track it. Other people don’t need to bring their own tracker and start caring about it.
100%. The designs that force other players to have tokens or additional game actions like stickers or day/night are the worst offenders.
Unless I missed something, which is possible, no one but the person using the dungeon has to play with it. Unless you're talking about Gaining the Initiative, where everyone playing has to deal with it as they gain the initiative. I only saw the one dungeon in the D&D precon with Firkraag that played that way. The other like four that were released with the D&D sets could only be entered by the Enter the Dungeon effect, which was on a lot of the cards from the set, but only affected the player using those cards.
I think you mean initiative, not dungeons in general.
I think you do need to interact with entering into the dungeon, and the ring tempts you, even if you aren't playing it, because you need to make sure your opponent isn't cheating.
So you need to understand the mechanic, and keep tabs of what your opponent is doing with it. Because if you don't pay attention, and don't understand, then your opponent could be scamming you.
Yes sorry, I meant the initiative, not dungeon
Hearing your mention of Drive to Work solidified my opinion that the one ring could just have been Monarch, and "the ring tempts you" is unnecessary bookkeeping that slows the game and causes memory issues.
Yeah, it could have been similar at least. I think monarch doesn’t quite capture the flavor of the ring in its entirety. Gotta have that corruption of power aspect. But honesty the ring temps you doesn’t really capture that well either.
@@distractionmakers I think that the "corruption of power" thing could be well represented by the way it incentivises other players to attack you to gain control of it, while it also makes you warp your deck around it to keep hold of it.
Although since I'm in favour of not doing sets like LOTR and instead giving cards the Godzilla treatment, Avarice Amulet or Jinxed Ring would have been the perfect card.
@@IVIaskerade The One Ring but its a Coveted Jewel alter
Seriously, this. I haven't really played much Magic since the world shut down in 2020 and after recently trying to update some commander decks a whole lot of newer cards just make me scratch my head after reading them. Even ones that don't have some bizzare term with unwritten rules baggage are often so wordy I can barely be bothered to read them.
This. I started making decks for each set to showcase whatever mechins are prominent. But, i dent enjoy playing em
Yeah. Horrible design.
its funny cause they learned this lesson with old cards like chains of M where peoples eyes glaze over trying to read and comprehend it. and then for YEARS we had like none of that. everything was clean and not overly wordy and they had seemingly written off any and all ideas that would make the card too long for people to want to read. and then something changed
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 yes it reminds me a lot of cards printed in the first few years of the game with tiny font and super convoluted mechanics. I feel like they must have lost some talent and institutional knowledge over the years.
@@PM-xc8oo probably a change of the guard. music games movies same story wherever you look.
at the start you had passionate people wanting to make something they thought was cool or fun or meaningful. and then it makes money, and then those people retire and the money men take over. and they squeeze because they have no passion for the product only the profits that can be made off of it.
Patrick Sullivan was talking on The Resleeveables about Licids in Stronghold; they're weird creatures that turn into auras, and the rules text is cumbersome.
"Nowadays they would just say 'Licid target creature'... The problem with Licids isn't that they're too complicated, it's that they're too long. So what if we just don't explain what the cards do?"
Haha problem solved
Found the yugioh designer
shifting focus to eternal format vs the traditionally dominating rotating ones was the root of all evil, but also the introductions of other IPs in MtG. the 2 examples of cruft given, the ring temps and dungeons, are just translating things from the other IP.
grab your pitchforks and torches people! rise up against the commander and universes beyond!
Haha don’t get too hasty. Stickers, day/night, experience tokens, planeswalkers emblems, etc are also cruft.
@@distractionmakers i can forgive day/night. but i would love to be in the room when stickers were introduced as a non jest set mechanic. that has got to have been a fun and funny meeting.
@@00101001000000110011 how can you forgive day night? like thats actually just by far the worst one. it's the only one that's genuinely annoying no matter how many times you've seen it
so gavin's ideal level of prep is "shuffle up and play"? well...
10000% 😆
Dungeons are probably the worst mechanics for physical card games, second only to that one Un set WotC decided to make an officially playable set. Having to collect all of these different dungeons to properly interact with the mechanic. Tempting and Monarch are annoying, but they only need a single extra card (not much different to tokens).
One Piece has no extraneous pieces. The only debatable part of this is the DON!! cards though they have been a foundational part of the game since release date.
Reading the card explains the card has been a lie since keywords were invented. You have to read the card and then read what the keyword means smh.
smh ur rite smh smh
I cut the kruft off my sandwiches
One piece of kruft is fine, even exciting, in limited formats. Drafting midnight hunt and having to think about day/night was quite fun.
The idea of drafting a set which has day/night, monarch, ring tempts you, and dungeon sounds kinda nightmarish.
My impression was that outside of 1 or 2 cards these mechanics didnt make too much of a splash in standard format which is probably for the best. For a more casual format like commander... i try not to think about
Ok so this might not be what you had in mind, but you've inspired me to make a maximum cruft deck for MTG. I'll be entering dungeons as a monarch with the city's blessing day and night while taking the initiative to harvest energy as the ring tempts me, and all shall despair at my token box bigger than my deck box. If only stickers were still legal.
There’s always rule 0 for stickers 😆
This speaks to me on such a deep level. When we were designing our first set there was a period I would play solo matches with perfect knowledge just to test balance. And a lot of matches didn't really have much in the way of game impact with player decisions. I became much happier when these solo tests became "impossible" because decisions came up far more often that had no obvious answer even with perfect knowledge.
Now we're working on variations and the KRUFT (love that term) is a real temptation. Like trying to design a solo add-on that you can playtest against. Trying to design an analog NPC is pretty challenging, especially when you need to make and explain decision trees to players. It's a real tight balance between being OP and too easy. (It's part of why I love Unmatched so much - they have really done an excellent job keeping the Kruft low - even in their co-op.)
It is interesting too watching players teach some games. Some will prioritize explaining the kruft to you (when you don't even have context to half the terms they're using) while others will build up from the basics and may or may not bring up the kruft before it appears.
(I did like flamecraft, but the guy who taught us I swear explained it backwards.)
If this keeps up, cruft is going to become one of those things you'll have to talk to your play group about beforehand. Ultimately, there's only as much cruft as people are willing to build into their deck, and cruft tolerance, like you said, varies from person to person. Personally, I dont usually mind, so long as tracking a mechanic is simple and easily visible to all players. I always keep extra bits n bobs in my game box for that reason specifically.
On a somewhat less related note, I can't wait to start describing cluttered things as "cruffed up" or "crufty"
Most things from infinity are kruft up to and including the acorn system
Can you guys cover devorsed dad court of chaos
the ai generated slop card game?
Too many cards printed without reminder text that really annoys me because sometimes all these mechanics are hard to remember. Especially when the mechanic is super similar to a previous mechanic with the exception of one word which ends up mattering because MTG is sometimes glorified lawyer card game.
carcassone strategy can get a little too much. my husband and i have to play without scoring fields when we want to play to relax lol
Optional cruft is fine, so long as it expands on the lore of set. The Ring Tempts You is a good example of lore-based cruft (Lord of the Rings) implemented as an optional mechanic. If you don't care to make use of that mechanic in your own decks, you will be only minimally affected when playing against an opponent who makes use of it. Rad counters (Fallout) are an example of a clumsy implementation of lore-based cruft. Players who have no interest in the Fallout set must nevertheless adopt Rad counters into their own gameplay when playing against Fallout-based decks. Cruft like The Monarch likewise require only minimal adaptation to such decks on the part of opponents. The Initiative, however, required opponents to adopt additional Dungeon mechanics into their gameplay, making it a much bigger pill to swallow.
Re Carcassonne, the base game is compact and elegant. If you add in all the expansions it becomes unwieldy.
There are few games that adding an additional expansion actually can make the game better. The one that comes to mind for me is Lords of Waterdeep + Scoundrels of Skullport. Those corruption counters are a great mechanic.
Late reply, but another that comes to mind is Talisman. The base game is both too long and arguably too simple-- the expansions design for this by providing more varied strategic options (will you spend your time trying to buy your way to victory in the City, or travel through the Dungeon for powerful magic items at greater risk?) and either making it faster/safer to reach the victory conditions (such as via the movement options introduced in Highlands, or Dragon's teleportation altars) or accelerating the scaling of player power (such as with the Woodlands' Destiny cards).
I've grown to dislike anything outside of the deck: monarch, venture into dungeon, dice rolling, stickers, counters, coin flipping... even tokens. For example, we used to just have the 2/2 black Zombie token and they would find ways to make that fit, and artists could give it a cool flavor. Slaves on Tarkir, townsfolk on Innistrad, abominations on Grixis... but now every token has to be a totally different thing, there's over 10 different zombie tokens now not even including Embalm.
Same for counters, it used to be like +1/+1 counters... then -1/-1 counters which was fine... but now just about every freakin ability has counters.
Many Fantasy Flight games have so much "cruft". There's always so many tokens and markers that signifiy something different. I get why they do it -> the target audience is nerds like me who like deep and complex games, but as someone who is also playing magic and also just board games in general, the Fantasy Flight Games....games always stood out to me as needlessly fiddly. They're by far not the only ones but at that level of fiddlyness and complexity I'd much rather just play the video game version of that.
With magic, I can tolerate the increasing amounts of "cruft" only because I'm already so invested in the game. But I do not want to teach new players the game and I don't expect anyone to want to. And if they do, feel free to learn the game by playing on Arena. But since magic is such a money syphon... it's best to just never start in the first place.
Thankfully I can decide which cards to include in my decks. There may be day/night cards, that would fit well, but I can't be bothered to track that. Or Cathars Crusade: Great card, terrible game experience.
I played magic back in 2019 a little, but only recently got back into it with friends. Im gonna be honest, 90% of the time I have 0 clue whats going on, and if I were to stop the gamestate to fully understand what is going on, it would quadruple the gametime, and I would have to do that multiple times in future games. Its frustrating! I want to play and have fun with friends or others, and magic is such a big game, that I cant just consume random content, in the hopes I can understand every intricate infinite combo and how its piloted, or even basic interactions which are hard to wrap your head around. Sure that comes with experience, but its hard to have those instances where you can do that when youre still learning seemingly basic aspects of the game every time you play. There are so many mechanics over the years which have niche popularity, but requires pretty nuanced knowledge to be able to play with / against it. Last week? Never heard of entering the dungeon. Do I understand it now? Kind of? I had to learn about the ring, taking initiative, and vote casting(?), among other keywords, that I had no clue existed until that play session, during that session. Its hard
Cruft killed Middle Earth the Wizards CCG.
It's pretty bad in magic right now.
I'm looking forward to Bloomburroe because it looks like simpler funnier magic.
I originally learnt to play in time spiral ish era, and haven't really played since. I recently tried to get back into mtg, and this crap was a massive turn off. I saw some gameplay with initiative, found some cards on arena that mentioned dungeons, then was massively confused about why I had comepletely different dungeons and didn't move down it each turn. I try to follow a stream where they play a new card, but then not only do I have to figure out what this card does does, I also have to figure out how the ring tempting mechanic works. I was excited about making a deck and getting back into it, but all this crap just piled up and the idea of actually making a deck is just... unappealing.
I think there are some quite cool things they have done, but they need to actually stick to them. Things like treasures seem like great additions. Seems like they are showing up in multiple sets, doing interesting things in different contexts, cards from previous sets are able to interact in interesting ways with new cards, etc. But there's this ring mechanic, and these dungeons (who had a sequel that worked completely different), and these stickers, and a whole new card type battle; and it all feels orphaned.
Also feels like they could do some good SOE on these terms and have a nice description of all these mechanics show up on an official source as the first search result. It feels extra insulting that I have to read through a wiki which talks about the history of the set before explaining the mechanic in order to understand how a card works.
Watching this after watching the YuGiOh vid and finding out about the channel. Really like the discussions and quality of videos! Definitely subbing!
In fallout with rads when they could have probably just used poison and not just a whole new mechanic
I am so glad stickers and opening booths are out of magic. Side decks should not be added to magic.
I'm the like number 420! Yay wheres my trophie ??
😂 suspect gives something menace
Infect gives poison 😢
Mechanics within mechanics
At least you can explain poison and menace in a single sentence.
Infect, toxic, poisonous, poison counters. It doesn't even explain what happens to a poisoned player. Horrible design
@errrzarrr Mutate is horrible design. Those things might not necessarily tell you outright, but it's simple once you know it. And I can't speak for Toxic, but the vast majority of Infect creatures have reminder text. It's about as complicated to explain as Flying. If you guys are going to complain about bad mechanics or keywords, can you at least pick ones that can't be summed up in less than 10 words?
Where do you think Twilight Imperium falls between cruft and interactivity?
Honestly… haven’t played it haha. Maybe that answers the question.
Kruft: components and rules that extend beyond the core promise of the game
IMO commander is so separated from constructed MTG that they have almost become different games. I agree that it's becoming almost board game like, with vast differences of rules being used, but if falters with a lack of easily translatelable expectations.
If the craft of design is reducing as much as possible to get to the core promise, the kruft is its biggest enemy
The problem is that constructed MTG has been warped heavily by Commander focused sets.
people do realize you contrsuct commander decks right?
it is a constructed format. idk why people try to draw that line.
@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 Constructed is a hold over term from early magic. Constructed being formal formats within Constructed blocks of usable cards, in contrast to kitchen table where there is not formal restrictions but informal. I know that commander has become Constructed in some circles, but to large swaths of players it is not, it's kitchen table.
10:30 i cant help but imagine a bowl of flamecraft with milk
Hahaha exactly
Commander has too much cruft for me . For example: having more than 1 friend
Whoa what's it like having 1 friend to play magic with?
Wow you guys were sponsored by Starbucks!
You forget to change cups one time…😆
Y'all know accretion is a term right?
Accretion is a neutral term. Cruft captures the detrimental effects better. All of cruft is accretion, but not all accretion is cruft.
I made a card game series, Crazier Eights, with six decks. I avoided cruft, but keeping things simple with all new components has been an interesting challenge. Tokens and counters were in magic since the beginning, and I've gotten a bad feeling for needed so many components. I love Magic, but it's always had more cruft than necessary
Wingspan can show how counters can help make engines easier to design, and Crazier Eights didn't focus on that as much as I'd like.
Cruft is something I consider and build out of all my decks. It a certain strategy or commander (mtg) looks like it will require a lot of cruft then I just don’t build it. I have no issues with other people playing with those cards against me, I just HATE all the extra BS.
The venture into the dungeon, ring tempts you, etc. piss me off because the flavor doesn't make any sense and doesn't work as flavor either. The Ring and D&D dungeons are complex concepts that they turned into something somehow both too abstract and too complicated.
"...abstract the experience so far that it doesn't evoke the feeling you're trying to achieve..." That explains my gripe with so many eurogames: it takes forever to understand the mechanics enough to do better than random play because all the decisions are these obtuse things.
Can’t deck building be considered cruft?
It could be. I’d say though that most games that have deckbuilding make sure that it is a meaningful exercise.
@@distractionmakers I share your dislike of board games because of the setting up portion of it all, that’s why I asked about deck building.
Yu-Gi-Oh: "First time?"
The issue with Yugioh is that they simply break all of the game's rules to make cards work the way they want them to as a way to push their archetypes. The cruft isn't even readable as flavor until it clicks since the cards are written in a programming language, and most of the time the flavor is indistinguishable since the cards are probably trying to fit specific gameplay needs.
But I guess in that way Yugioh has the most cruft of any game ever made. It's impossible for a player to parse what the opponent is doing with their cards if you aren't intimately aware of a deck's gameplan. You might be prepared for Branded, Purrely, Kashtira, Voiceless, Tenpai, and Snake-Eyes but if your opponents are playing Blackwings, PUNK, Dracoslayer, Shining Sarcophagus, and Ninjas you probably have only the vaguest idea of what game they're playing.
@@geek593 It's actually the opposite. Yugioh's card text perfectly explains what the card does mechanically. You're confusing that with _why_ the *player* wants to do it. One card could do the same thing in different decks, but actually be in them for different reasons.
You mention the 30 min setup vs 3 min shuffle, but that's not counting the time you've already sunk into M:tG. How much time have you spent learning rules over the years, building decks, organizing your collection, etc.?
I don’t think I would have an issue with a boardgame’s setup if it was as fun as deck building in mtg. The rules of magic are hard to learn, but you get way more play time to learn time when compared to most board games.
To me, Monarch is an excellent example of something that *isn't* Cruft for two main reasons:
1) It only "exists" if the players make it exist by having someone include Monarchy cards. This means that, for 99% of mtg games played, the mechanic is as real as Banding.
2) It's easy to track, and only utilizes simple, baseline system mechanics. Because (barring some mtg rules weirdness) there can only be *one* Monarch at a time, it's as simple as knowing "Who's it right now?", which can be tracked with literally any token, legit or improvised. In addition, it only comes with 2 rules that players need to remember: The Monarch draws at card at their end step, and you can steal the crown by dealing any combat damage to them. Drawing cards and dealing combat damage are so simple and baseline, that 99.99% of mtg games *will* include both of them. This makes them incredibly easy to memorize for newer players, while leaving design space for Monarchy-specific cards (ie, "This creature says that while I'm the Monarch, I get X benefit.")
If The Ring Tempts You was designed like Monarchy, I wouldn't have a single issue with it. Imagine if every time The Ring Tempted You, you lost 1 life and created a treasure/drew a card/put a +1/+1 counter on a creature or something equally simple. Instead, we have a rules card with four distinct, sequential, cumulative stages that provide different static effects to a creature that *may or may not change* every time the Ring Tempts your opponent.
I'm not fond of over-swearing, but it's a fucking headache. And it's the worst example of unnecessary cruft.
Isn't "the Ring Tempts you" also a card, like Dungeons? If it requires an additional element (reminder), it's Kruft that is not as problematic.
I've recently saw a Commander game where "gain the Initiative" came out.. and I still don't know what it did.
I think such introductions work as long as they become evergreen and quite present! Things that make sense. But there has to be a limit to it.. and the issue in eternal formats is too problematic.
Ask yourself why Elven Foresight looks at the top card of your library and, if it is a creature card, you “draw” it, but if you use the Explore mechanic and the top card is a land, you “put it into your hand”. The rules have jumped the shark a long time ago and it will be the eventual downfall of Magic.
How is some minor redundancy going to lead the downfall of magic? Seems pretty benign to me
Would you consider Meld a type of cruft? I could go either way on it...
While it adds complexity I think a few choices keep it elegant. Requiring both cards to be in play together keeps additional game time down, instead of searching for the other half, and having the transformed version on the backs of the cards doesn’t add game pieces. I think Meld is pretty good.
I think if you only need your deck and some dice, it’s not cruft. Extra decks, rules cards, double-sided tokens, ways to track multiple types of counters on the same card - those are cruft.
It’s Cruft. For sure. The problem isn’t a game having 1 Cruft. Or 2. Or 3. The problem is when it has 10. When a board state Monarch, Initiative, Venture, Miracle, Infect, Counters, Energy, Foretell, Morph, Curses, Planeswalkers, Transforming, Night/Day, Battles, Mutate, Emblem…. I could go on.. but you get it. 😅
The ring tempting you having a whole card dedicated to it and then feeling so little like the actual ring from LotR tempting you is so weird
edit: well you just touched on that right at the end. What you said it makes sense, yeah. It still feels strange that the ring ends up being so different and there can be multiple. That in particular I can't really get behind. Like monarch or initiative is something that passes around, maybe they consider it too clunky and wanted to reeeeally move away from it?
Have you played guillotine? Thats a nice shuffle up and play game.