The Overlooked Influence of Mana In Magic:The Gathering
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ส.ค. 2024
- In this episode we discuss how a games resource system impacts the story the game creates.
Hosts:
Forrest Imel forrestimel.com/
Gavin Valentine www.gavinvalen...
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I've grown a completely newfound love for MTG and really gaming in general since discovering this channel.
Thank you for these discussions, i can now accurately tell my friends why I like/dislike a mechanic and you even gave me voice as to why I don't really enjoy commander as a format.
And it's a shame that Commander essentially hijacked the game and ran any interest into every other format into the ground. Welcome to the Commander Master Race.
My frustration with Commander, as opposed to just why it doesn’t appeal to me, is that for so many players now it IS casual Magic. Its popularity has largely squeezed out the other casual game variants as much if not more than it has the (primarily) tournament/competitive ones.
@@jacobd1984yep. The Commander Master Race sucks. No disagreement there.
@@user-rw5zw9wi2q i feel like there are plenty of ways to complain about commander suffocating other casual play modes' space without invoking the term 'master race'
@@violetto3219 facts are facts 💁
I've always liked the idea of it being how wizards cast their spells, for instance in D&D which sort of fueled Magic in the beginning years, each casting class had their difference sources of power, Sorcerers channeled it from within, Wizards use knowledge and artifacts to cast powerful spells, Druids rely on Nature and her gifts, Warlocks have to attain power through another source or persons mean, Clerics called upon their deity to cast miracles and well intentioning spells. I think you can really see that in the early days of magic and since then has developed into their own thing of you being basically a demigod doing whatever.
Something I miss with every other card game I've tried other than Magic are the games where everything is going wrong and it's just a low resource slapfight. Your third land enters tapped, you play your cards off-curve, both players' hands get ripped apart by discard spells, etc. Most other games aren't much willing to make cards that lead to weird, ugly looking games, but that's what keeps me playing Magic. The best stories come from the messy games where you're hanging on by a thread and beating the odds.
One of my most memorable games of Magic I've ever played was a cube draft circa 2013. It was a huge war of attrition, and we were both down to about ten cards in our decks. I draw Jace, The Mind Sculptor, which is normally a huge bomb that would pull me ahead by bouncing creatures and drawing tons of extra cards, but there was no time for that. So what ended up happening was using Jace's worst ability (Scry 1 either player's library) and using the ultimate ability on MYSELF just so my opponent would run out of cards before I did.
Also shout out to Vintage decks that are hyper powerful but more often get ripped apart by Force of Wills and Wastelands and Null Rods, and end up winning with a 1/1 creature attacking ten times. Love me some Vintage.
Chess vs Shogi is one of my favorite examples where a couple extra rules completely warp the kind of story being told by the mechanics (on top of the pieces being somewhat different ofc).
So Gavin has been making a consistent effort to create the illusion of separate episodes whereas Forest has been making a consistent effort not to create the illusion.
I love how much this simple detail says so much about each others personalities and it all boils down to a T-Shirt. And all this is perfectly tied to the theme of story telling. Was this on purpose? because if it is well that's just genius.
😆
If I were to guess I'd say because it's filmed at Gavin's house Forrest doesn't have spare shirts there.
@Black-cq7cm this doesn't sound like a guess at all, sounds more like you have very specific information on the subject hahaha
You guys should take a look at the resource system from Flesh and Blood TCG. It is also a game of attrition where you start at your most powerful, but cards can fulfill many roles (attack, defend, give resources) depending on how you want to use them.
Just wish the game was actually good tho.
The talk about losing some of your pieces in chess just made me picture trying to do a "no-hit run" in chess.
This is the best episode of the podcast by far
I will say that as I’ve got better at the game, I experience fewer and fewer non games because of mana scew/flood. I’m so much better at assessing a manabase for decks. And I’m also better at constructing decks that have the proper card velocity to stay on curve. I will say that sometimes i have to sacrifice other areas of tactics to dig for that land drop. But my decks typically have the flexibility to pivot to that if i need it
This is the state most players should arrive at. At higher levels of play non-games because of mana screw/flood are pretty rare. Mulligans, card draw, etc, off set the issues of resources being in the deck.
Part of the reason new players struggle with this is that they want to put fun cards in their deck, not boring lands - being a good Magic player means taking your medicine and having 40% of your deck be pretty bland cards. Mark Rosewater talks about making sure the fun thing to do is the right thing, but it apparently doesn't apply in this case.
@@kylekonop4801Part of becoming a good mage is learning to appreciate the land
Put basic lands in your deck that make you smile when you draw them, perhaps from your favorite plane or maybe you just think its pretty
I think the true level up moment for Magic players is the day they realize the entire game is about mana. All of it. The original name of "Mana Clash" might have helped with players discovering that on their own earlier into their journey to Magic. It's why when people criticize the mana system, it sounds as dumb as saying "Basketball shouldn't be about scoring points" or "Baseball should shouldn't have bases." Fundamentally, it is the game. It's ok to not like that but to suggest it change or be different is literally saying that you think the whole game should be redesigned and reimagined; it wouldn't be the same at all if that were done.
An interesting comparison to make would be the energy system in Decipher's Star Wars TCG (...err, might not have been called that in the Star Wars one, but that's what they called it when they later reused it in their much better designed, but otherwise badly mishandled, propritary Wars TCG (and yes, the NAME was one of the things they mishandled), which was basically designed from the ground up to be a reskin and upgrade for the system used in Star Wars).
You have location cards, which function Sort Of like land, in that they're how you get your resources... except they usually give your opponent resources too (usually less than they give you, and not always, but the 'default' in Wars is to give yourself two and your opponent one). They're also serving a whole other function because Star Wars and Wars are games where your guys actually move around rather than just being nebulously 'in play', but that's not really relevant to this.
Now, Star Wars you either played light side or dark side and your entire deck was that and so all energy was undifferentiated. Wars went with a five colour system... but the energy was Still undiffirentiated, instead there was a seperate system called support icons. Again, you would get Most of these from locations, but not all. Any given location either had one or didn't, and only for the person who played it. So each of your cards had a cost in energy you had to pay, and also demanded that you have one, two, or three of it's faction's support icons... if you didn't have enough, you couldn't play it no matter how much energy you had to hand, but support icons weren't used up in the process. If you had three, you would keep right on having three (unless one of them was provided by a temporary effect that wore off, anyway) no matter how many cards you played.
Where things get a bit interesting with this system is that your energy is your deck is your life. And every legal deck is Exactly 60 cards. (of course, Decipher's preconstructed/starter decks came in boxes that held exactly 60 cards... but that meant the only way to fit the Rule Book in the box was to have the decks be undersize, so you had to buy a booster or two...)
You had four piles: Deck, Active, Used, and Lost.
Your deck is exactly what it sounds like.
Your active pile was how much energy you had to spend... every turn you would count up all the things that gave you energy and transfer cards, one at a time, from your deck to your active pile. However many you moved it was a single action, functionally the equivalent to untapping in Magic. You were not required to activate the full amount you theoretically could (and there were reasons not to, at least later in the game). Also, your 'draw' step was at the end of the turn, and you would draw as many cards as you liked (I THINK each card was a seperate action?) from the Active pile... which of course meant you then didn't have energy to pay for the game's instant equivalents or activate abilities in your opponent's turn... and your active pile persisted from turn to turn, so that was also energy you didn't have next turn... AND, while cards in your deck, active, and used piles were 'life', cards in your hand... weren't... sort of. You lost when you had no cards in your deck+active pile+used pile, cards in your hand aren't in any of those piles... but for most incoming damage you could choose to expend cards from your hand instead of from your 'life' to cover some or all of it... but of course then your Hand is smaller with all the effects That has...
Your used pile was where cards from your active pile went when you paid for things. Once again, the number of cards needed to pay for whatever you were doing would be moved, one at a time (though with the entire process being a single action) from your active pile to your used pile. Also, many (most) of the game's 'instant' equivalents would put themselves onto your 'used' pile after they resolved, so it acted as a sort of 'lesser discard pile'. This was really important, because at the end of each turn, you would pick up your deck, put it down on top of your used pile, and then move the resulting stack back to being your deck.... and it wasn't shuffled (unless a card said to). ... the game used random number effects, where the random number was a fixed value on each card. (Star Wars was routinely won and lost on card counting at the higher levels. Wars kept that, but included a lot more ways to get the card you wanted where you wanted even if you were no good at card counting... though if you could do it you could still save some card slots.)
Your Lost pile was somewhere between Magic's 'discard' pile and being Exiled. When you took damage, you moved cards from one of the other three piles, or your hand, to this pile (face up). When your guys died they also went here. The instant equivalents that didn't go to the used pile after resolving would go here instead (neither game had a sorcery equivalent).
When your guys fought your opponents guys, depending on how the battle went, you would lose some combination of the guys involved in the fight and cards from your hand/piles. But this is where the whole Location system comes into play... if you had guys at a location, and your opponent did Not, in the relevant phase (which came Before the combat phase, so you couldn't double dip), you could do damage to your opponant equal to the amount of energy that location would allow them to generate. So you wanted to spread out to cover as many places where you could 'drain' them as possible... and also to block them from doing the same... except if you spread out and they concentrated an overwhelming win in battle could do just as much damage as the drain, and then they could leave a guy there to drain you and move Most of their guys to the next place and repeat...
The end result was that in the early game you're both working with very limited resources but not to worried about taking a hit, and then over the course of the game you have more and more resources to work with, but get progressively more worried about incoming damage, and then in the End game your available resources starting going Down (not only can you not actually generate your theoretical energy maximum if you don't have enough cards in your deck, every card you draw makes this problem worse And (sort of) costs you 'life'!) and you're even More worried about taking hits, so you're scrambling to do what you can with the stuff you still have in play and your remaining hand...
It's noteworthy that a tournament round for Wars was an hour... and consisted of a single game. Said rounds would routinely end with the game unfinished and a judge coming over and counting the cards left in each player's deck to determine a winner (the Other reason you didn't want to draw a bunch of extra cards unneccessarily, cards in hand didn't count for determining the winner, nor for the 'differential' (difference between remaining 'life' of each player), which was used for determining matchups even if you did finish the game).
Seriously, the game was great, but the company did pretty much set themselves up to fail (and then doubled down on failing) with pretty much everything else about Wars. And, of course, Star Wars was a licensed product that ended when the license was pulled.
ppl, ur content is awesome!
A negative effect of the mana system that doesn't get mentioned much is the pressure it puts on designing cards at the top end. Anything that costs more than 3 (or 2, really) has to have a huge immediate board impact, and anything above 4 is basically a blank card for 80% of decks. When something like, say, Ilharg the Raze-Boar at 5 still isn't strong enough, clearly the system just doesn't allow for a reasonable power curve past turn 3.
A game that adds one mana per turn can get around this by slowing down the first few turns and letting players curve out more smoothly, but the mana system forces so much more emphasis on the first few land drops that Magic can't do that. Or rather, it does do that, but only for the turns where players can reasonably expect to hit their land drops. So all that curve has to be packed into turns 1-4 (if we're generous). The risk of not being on curve just results in players condensing the game into a curve they can actually hit. Magic isn't really playing a different game to Hearthstone in terms of resource management, it's just squeezing it into fewer turns.
3/4 of the way through waiting to hear them talk about the elegance of Lorcana’s resource system
The land/mana system of MtG is such an interesting system when talking about other games that use a different system. I can definitely understand why people don't really like the mana system, because it's a system that requires more brain power than the payoff gives. Mostly in deck building.
When I'm building a deck in a game like Hearthstone, my only thought is how the cards are going to do cool things and advance my strategy. When deck building in MtG I have to put a bunch of brain power into figuring out how many lands to play, and how to mitigate mana screw, all just to get myself to a consistent mana curve. It's a lot of brain power, just to keep my resources steady. It's a lot of work for not much payoff.
So I can see why it feels bad, and why games like Hearthstone feel so much better. Even though MtG has more potential for how to play the game, and I would say it's better for higher level play, it's less beginner friendly because it feels like there's this whole other system you have to understand that at first doesn't feel like you're getting much out of it.
That is a good take.
That digimon system sounds really cool, i need to check it out. I guess it wouldnt work with MTG though due to the dirferent colours of mana being an integral part of the game.
So I have some questions: -
-What aspects from TCG's OTHER than MtG do you guys think are good and why? Could you do a mini series going through some of the other interesting ones (Flesh and Blood, new star wars game)?
-What do you think are some of the best POTENTIAL game mechanics that we havn't seen in TCGs yet?
I really like the comment on Chess v magic being opposite in the start of the game state in terms of power. I don't think it's quite accurate as in Chess you need to move the pieces to good positions to make them more powerful, but I get what you're saying.
A Tcg that had Chess's power structure would be very interesting.
Magic is fascinating to talk about because not only was it the first TCG, but because it is a master class in systems design.
When we’re looking at other TCGs we often find that they have tried to improve on the MTG formula, by removing mana screw or whatever, and usually fail to address what that aspect of MTG is attempting to solve.
So, usually we’re looking for innovations in the space that create a compelling experience. There isn’t really a right or wrong or good and bad per se. It really comes down to if your systems are achieving your design goals.
We plan to mix in talks about other TCGs and games, but MTG is what gets us the most views currently. Hopefully in the future we can broaden the audience.
As Digimon has gone on the wheelslam your lvl5 or 6 mon on the table became basically admitting defeat turn one.
But there's still opportunities later in the game where dropping one decides it, especially with Ace Digimon (can evolve into them on opposing turns).
Shoutout to Sekiro on the wall
I know it’s not technically necessary, but I always add mana to my mana pool first, then cast the spell. I’m sure there’s are reasons rules-wise that it needed to be casting comes first then payment second, but it always feels counterintuitive to me to cast the spell before I have the “fuel” for the spell.
That is a really interesting distinction that doesn’t come up in most games of paper magic.
If you needed the resources to pay for the spell prior to "announcing" the spell, you couldn't, for example, discard a card from your hand as part of casting something like Lightning Axe. I mean, at the kitchen table it would still work, it isn't a complex situation to figure out how it's "supposed" to work, but I think it's more clean overall to show what you are casting, then collect all the payments for the spell, so it doesn't look like you're arbitrarily discarding cards and paying life.
I also tap my lands first, it's how I was raised, and I think easier to follow for the opponent. It does get you into a bit of trouble with things like Affinity for Artifacts though, where depending on your habits you may not be able to play a Thoughtcast you otherwise could have legally played if you were more careful (though it is not intuitive at all that a spell has it's casting cost "locked in" at a certain point if you never read the comprehensive rules).
"Um akshually"
You had to first add the mana before adding the spell to the stack since the beginning of the game, the reason being that you couldn't activate mana abilities during the paying of the cost I guess. There was a famous event were a player was used to do it the other way around, announcing the spell and tgen tapping, and got multiple warnings from judges until he was in the finals and lost due to a game loss Penalty for that Exactly reason. The players were all outraged at that and Afterwards the rules were changed to allow both to work.
I’d love to know what you guys think of Dominion
Probably one of the most away from your circle questions someone could do, but have you seen the Genshin Impact in-game Card Game? Is called "Genious Invokation TCG", I suggest you look some videos on youtube, because the game exploit a ton of mechanics that are very weird lmao, your resource system is dices, and you roll them to get "mana" (elements) but you can interact with them in many ways to fix them or increase them, and you divide your resources between play cards and use the activated abilities of your 3 characters on borad that are like commanders of magic, very funny stuff.
We’ll check it out!
if you do an episode on future shifted i will literally explode with happiness
I feel like the resource system in Yugioh wasn't really talked about here. It used to be the normal summon, but so many things cheat the normal summon that they eventually had to find something else.
Essentially, any time-bounded action can be your resource system, because the final resource in both life and in any game, is time. So anything you can only do once per turn becomes a resource, even if it is not the primary resource.
It *could* have been the draw at the beginning of the turn, which is the solution they came to in Rush Duels (the super simplistic reboot of the game that had never been published in the west). But because the original game has *so* much tutoring, this became as flimsy a clock as the normal summon.
Ultimately, the resource in Yugioh became what we call a hard-once-per-turn. Essentially, it says you can only do this thing once, no matter how many copies of the card you have. This had its own while host of problems, but that is the resource now.
That "could" be a ressource system.
Yu-Gi-Oh now has so many once per Turns and such and so long Turns that you can just do once per Turn effects and even multiple normal summons in the same Turn because so much happened since the first time that your opponent will forget.
Things like this occasionally get caught on camera with multiple judges around and sommetimes the opponent catches it and in others it is only discovered in the vor later.
And with it Happening even in streamed matches you have to assume it happens a lot more often outside of stream where no one catches it ever.
YGO would need something Like a field center that has "normal summon" and an Icon in it and another one for every hard once per Turn that you place in your playmat and maybe some counter temporarily Put on soft once per Turns to lessen the amount of things you just need to remember. It's supposed to be a TCG Not a Game of memory.
Me ceating in a green ramp deck
Lol 1 per turn limitation lmao
Except magic is printing infinite free cards and broken 1 and 2 mana spells to the point where its just turning into yugioh
me watching your videos making a game that make 100millions, do I owe you coins?
Haha all yours my friend. Keep us in your heart 😆
Yeah, I don't think just being unable to play the game 5% of the time "creates an interesting tension". You could replicate this by rolling a d20 and resigning on turn one if it came up "20". There's a reason all later TCGs decided not to make 1/3 of your deck bland resource cards.
Sounds like you need to learn when to mulligan
Games being decided by mana screw/flood is much less of an issue when decks are 60 cards, players understand how to deck build and mulligan, and matches are decided best 2 out of 3. I think the biggest drawback is that most magic these days isn’t played that way.
@@user-ud5tk4oc6r I watch high level players all the time, and the mana screw non-games are about 5%. This is, indeed, not often, but happens 100% than in any comparably popular game.
@@distractionmakers So it's a design flaw that players compensated for with about a decade's worth of tinkering. And the overhead those fixes necessitated is something players don't want to bother with after seeing other games where it's not necessary.
Well, the Pokemon TCG kind of doubled down on it instead...
Guys know only 2 games - MTG and Chess
Second.
idk about a story, doesn't seem that significant unless the cards used have a shared lore where its prevalent
The story is you’re a planeswalker dipping into the leylines around you to fight each other through giant battlefields. It’s “one” per turn lore wise in the ice age books as you imagining a place you’ve been to that you know will imbue you with power and then tapping into that place which is why you tap the land to cast spells. You draw that available power and then some time later the power comes back (untapping)
The cards you play tell a story of your battlefield/dance between you and the other player on this giant battlefield. Drawing is going through your knowledge, milling is a person ripping your knowledge from your mind. Every card you play has a lore perspective behind it if you think of it like the board game mage wars. Which is essentially magic the gathering but with real stand ins you can see and act with.
@@A-Saturnalia I appreciate the breakdown of it, but it doesn't really chance my view on it. It doesn't feel like they do a good job of underlining what the player does with "lore" unfortunately, almost as if it was tacked on after they came up with the system itself. Besides, something like "casting creature spells" sounds more mundane than "summoning a creature." Doesn't even sound like it fits in with dnd, but rather like they're jamming its influence into every nook and crevice they can and it results in a weird term for a simply mechanic for playing cards. If Magic players like to use terms based off of food, then the flavor here would be dirt, water, and bread. Its more of a justification of the mechanics for the pretense of flare, something that doesn't need to be justified.
Not to mention the "lore perspective" behind the cards fall apart _because_ of the planeswalker thing. It doesn't feel like a story is being told here, it feels like a story is being told on the cards that get mashed together from different blocks and formats which ruins most cohesion. There's too much dissonance between what they claim you as the player is doing and the story being told through the cardboard. Its like overselling an 8oz lobster tail: its nice, but not the most life changing thing like its being hyped up to be. Even the flavor of Wizardy itself is dull and bland, something that you can almost directly attribute to wotc themselves, funnily enough
Hmm maybe we weren’t clear enough and should probably do an episode on the story gameplay creates or the ludonarrative. We have one discussing Magic’s adherence to this design philosophy, but not describing it at length. When we say story, we don’t mean lore, exposition, or written prose. We’re talking about the narrative that the system of gameplay puts you in. How the rules, acting as a simulation of some kind of reality, put you in a particular situation. You are the protagonist of a game of magic, not Jace, your commander, or whoever. That’s the story we’re talking about.
@@distractionmakers no, I understand. That's the point I'm talking to in addition to the lore if the game- the "flavor" of the actions the player are taking feel tacked on after the fact to make justification for simple gameplay mechanics. Mechanics that Magic did revolutionize, granted. But it feels like a middling justification for doing said actions, and doesnt actually provide anything to the actions themselves. The actual story of the game being disjointed from the mechanics is just a side tangent. Basically: it comes off as a mid larp to me, and the dissonance of the game's lore and the "lore" of the player's actions/game mechanics does it no favors
First of all, if I drew my 7 cards and I had one or two mana, I would definitely mulligan. You need 3 mana in your opening hand.
Second, you guys talk a lot and use big words, but you really aren't saying much. Most of the videos you do, you are just regurgitating the obvious.
Lastly, Why do you talk so much junk about COMMANDER? I think you struggle with the format so you put it down to make yourselves feel better.