Why Magic: The Gathering Is The Most Complex Game Ever Made
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 มิ.ย. 2024
- An Indie Dev and a AAA Dev discuss board state and how Magic The Gathering's management of it creates the most complex game ever created.
Hosts:
Forrest Imel forrestimel.com/
Gavin Valentine www.gavinvalentinedesign.com/
Join the Distraction Makers Discord: / discord
Thumbnail Artwork: Urza's Rage by Dominik Mayer
MIT article: www.technologyreview.com/2019...
Magic: The Gathering is a collectable card game created by Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. It has over 30,000 cards published over 30 years and is still one of the most popular tabletop games ever created. - เกม
On the note of sideboarding and information hiding: A friend of mine was once playing Elves in a tournament. Game 1 he mulligans to 4 and decides he can't win. On turn 1 he plays Cavern of Souls (a land that obliges you to name a creature type) and names Merfolk. His opponent completely mis-sideboards and my friend absolutely rolls them in game 2.
Hahaha amazing!
We're gaming, folks
That's a spectacular move. Talk about using a tool in a creative way
Superb move
Similar story. I was at a GP with a friend, and later on in the day he got paired against an opponent I had played against earlier in the day, so he knew what he was up against. He went turn 1 Underground Sea, Ponder, and when he looked at the top three cards of his library he accidentally touched the corner of one of them against the cards that were in his hand. That is technically a rules violation, and his opponent snapped called a judge on him. The judge issued him a game loss. He then proceeded to sideboard against the Reanimator deck he knew his opponent was playing and utterly destroyed him games 2 and 3. 🤣
Ah that legend. Blink him to reset the ability on each creature. With ghostly flicker, flicker him and E.witness, get back gostly flicker with the witness, draw 16 with shuko for 0 mana, produce more than 3 mana, do it again.
Boil him, mash him, put him in a stew...
Nah, you don't sound like grumps, I've been playing for 25 years, Cathars' Crusade is already a pain to track, Nadu is eye roll inducing.
Nadu is so freaking awful as a card
I hadn't seen Nadu before this video. As someone who used to be in the custom magic community this hits "bad custom design" even harder than Questing Beast and Ragavan.
Ya know. Yeah. I've seen a lot of cards from those and Nadu would be heavily critiques for how clunky it'd be. Really feels like an Alchemy card. Which if it was limited to digital might not be as big of a deal.
Biggest reason is that the field is literally infinite
You can loop your deck
You can create tokens
Even Yu gi oh is probably having an uncalculable amount of combinations of game states... But there is a number you can't get past
Magic is actually infinite
You're still limited by the number of cards in the deck, and to a large extent there's a point where added cards on field doesn't really change interactions. Like there's not much of a difference between 1000 tokens on the field or 1001.
I always found this argument a bit pedantic because in yugioh on average you play more cards with more effects in a single turn. The game is also designed to get to more complicated game states on average than something like MtG, which often has games end in a combo that goes infinite or otherwise closes the game up then and there.
I think Arena has numbed me to complex boardstate cards like Nadu. The client will fade out the text if the trigger has been used up. But, I don't think that's an excuse for cards like Nadu to exist without better ways to track the abilities and triggers. Finality counters are such an elegant way to track one time reanimation effects and I really love that solution.
But seeing Nadu get printed when WotC is scared of printing Forsaken Crossroads in paper, for fear of forcing players to track who's on the play/draw, seems silly to me. Nadu is infinitely more complex to track than Forsaken Crossroads.
It's funny you guys talk about keeping track of "once per turn" abilities, because this was an issue Magic addressed from its inception with "tapping". I feel like a lot of these abilities could be simplified by reworking them to tap abilities. Double faced cards could also help deal with this problem in a way that makes it more trackable.
That is a great point! What the heck are with these once per turn triggers!?
I think you're into something there, but it is worth considering that tapping can functionally be a balancing thing, not just a tracking thing. Plus, anything you make a tap ability can be futzed around with tap triggers and untapping abilities.
@@PhoenicopterusR I'm not necessarily saying 1 for 1 but make them tap, or that no "once per turn" abilities can exist, but rather if you see you have a "once per turn" ability, perhaps think if it can be reworked into a tap ability with the same goal.
Also, flicker effects reset once per turn abilities, so while untap abilities are more numerous, I don't think the balance difference between the two is that different.
@kwagmeijer26 the other distinction between once per turn and tapping, and once per turn can be used the same turn, tapping can't, unless you also give the creature haste.
Once per turn effects are also almost aways triggers, and giving a creature a trigger that requires it to tap as part of the trigger feels... weird.
@@distractionmakers It's simple power creep. The ability no longer requires a tap, so the creature can attack and block etc. Creature would be unplayable if it tapped to do its thing.
Oh wow i didn't even think about that, commander players might not know what a sideboard is.
We do. Most of us didn’t start with commander. We migrated to commander for various reasons.
@@AgentMurphy286
I know because I like game design. Never actually played another format outside of arena
I only know from TH-cam, I've never built one
Arena has a lot of formats and for most of them you can choose to play Best of 3.
The topic of "extra things to track that the game doesn't give you a way to track" is absolutely fascinating to me given my Yugioh background.
Yugioh is chock-full of those once-per-turn effects, and has various ways to denote whether it's once per turn for this card name or for this instance of the card being on the field; You have to track whether you've used your Normal Summon for the turn, whether a Trap card was set this turn or last turn, whether each monster has attacked or not... There's just a lot you're expected to keep track of in your head, and while it does occasionally get confusing, it's usually pretty natural once you've played the game long enough. Also, graveyard order matters, so you have to keep things nice and tidy even when looking through it for information.
Even so, there are more unusual things that are usually tracked in their own nonsanctioned ways - Things like spinning a Swords of Revealing Light to count how long it's been in play.
Magic has plenty of this stuff baked into the game, but players mostly just get used to it. Things like summoning sickness, whether you've used your land drop for the turn, whether it was this turn or last that you foretold or plotted a card, whether it's this turn or next that your exiled cards with whatever effect are still playable - Usually these things aren't explicitly tracked, and we just get used to remembering them.
It will be fascinating to see whether community reception to effects like these tends toward mental or physical tracking.
Nadu just misses the "by an ability or spell an opponent controls" term
I like the complexity and like how you can introduce people to the game and slow drip it to them
Weirdly enough I've found (in my own limited experience) that generally the stronger decks have the complexity vanish from the boardstate and into the interaction, I have two Chatterfang deck, one is a combo deck that I am making increasingly stronger, the other is a token overrun deck
The combo deck will reliably only work towards 2-3 cards from the deck and win, with a lot of the deck protecting those cards or being backups/redundancies, the most complex things I've done with it have been fighting removal and counters
The token deck simply wants to make and buff tokens, but the board gets out of control at times, I've had a turn where depending on what my opponents did I could either kill a half dozen creatures, make a variable number of tokens or draw a bunch of cards, the combo deck usually doesn't have that many options because it is so focused
On Sideboards, I kind of like Wish effects that don’t reveal, like Mastermind’s Acquisition or the final chapter of The Raven’s Warning. I have a deck where half of the sideboard is Wish targets and half are regular sideboard cards, and those effects add an additional layer of hidden information. It’s often the case that if you wish for a card you’re going to play it right away, but sometimes if it’s a more expensive card that you plan to use a turn or two later, there’s always the possibility that plans will change and you won’t use it, and that can throw off an opponent who’s expected to see the card you pulled.
You have to reveal conditional wish cards.
God, Nadu is going to be so dumb in my "Circumvent the Legend Rule and make a bunch of copies of Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief" deck. I go back and forth on whether it's going to be more or less dumb than Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios in that deck. Right now, I'm leaning towards more dumb because at least Jadzi is a pseudo-"may" trigger: When I get sick of the trigger, I can just not cast the revealed spell and the rest of the triggers will, for all intents and purposes, fizzle. No such release valve for Nadu.
"What's the Storm... I mean 'Nadu trigger' count at?"
As someone who's played Sidisi, Brood Tyrant as my commander with the Path of Discovery combo with other cards like Sakashima, Snarling Gorehound, Chatterfang, I've figured out how to deal with complicated board states... And its really difficult. I've already used up all my brain cells on MTG I can't figure out another card game.
Haha that’s how they’ll keep us around. Make us think so hard about magic we can’t think about other games.
Talking about complexity, I'm really surprised that you didn't mention how MtG in a lot of ways just works a lot more smoothly on Arena. I know some people complain about loops and combos, but 95% of stuff works more smoothly and easier on Arena than irl. Like Scute Swarm, which feels like an Alchemy card before Alchemy was invented. Or Innistrads Day/Night cycle, which is miserable to track. Or Nadu. Even something relatively simple like grixis set mechanic in New Capenna that cared about have 5 different mana values in your grave is just really annoying to track irl. Any sort of passive buff, like from an anthem effect. Having to manually keep track of counters and all sorts of stuff. Both sides needing to know the rules intimately while doing their best to not miss any triggers.
It's funny to me that, while many digital card games do have effects that wouldn't work well irl, many of them also take steps to reduce complexity by having limited board space/types of permanents/grave/exile, etc. In a lot of ways, as much as i love magic, and I do unabashedly love magic, it's also an incredibly complex beast that's wrapped back in on itself. All twisted up and gnarled as an unapproachable machine.
Shoulda had an on-screen "chunk" counter lol
Love this show so much 😭 Always a treat when I’m stuck at work on a slow day
You guys are my favourite commander content creators!
Love these videos love the channel, please keep it up. 🎉❤
Spark Double is a more viable clone for Nadu. It's probably even in consideration to play a single copy if your Modern Nadu decks ends up being on Chord of Calling.
You didn't mention Arena! MH3 is coming to Arena, and there Nadu can be tracked in game automatically. Arena's Alchemy format has been a testing ground for a bunch of cards and effects that couldn't/shouldn't exist in paper, and I wonder if that's helped push the boat a lil in terms of what's being made for MH3.
On tracking effects in other games, Yugioh has pretty radical approach. In Yugioh you can't put a die or a counter on a card, unless something in-game has specifically told you to. There are Yugioh cards which may trigger thrice (three times) per turn, but players can only track this through written notes. Yugioh's particular strictness on notes and on counters is frankly kinda annoying at times, but I do like that both players are responsible for maintaining a legal board state.
Also pretty cool is what you described as a "complexity budget" I've encountered elsewhere as "cognitive load" it's always cool to learn a new phrase for a thing cos it opens a door to more cool stuff to read.
If anyone tells you that magic isn’t complex, resolve a temur analyst Nissa combo on paper
just have to goldfish it
I love it, complexity budget and complexity upkeep.
Basically in my own words:
Budget is how much complexity your game can have or add before you turn people off from learning the game or new mechanics
Upkeep is how much the player has to track and follow before starting to glaze over or miss important triggers even after internalizing everything (Yugioh's primary issue is here)
Great summary!
Nadu reminds me a lot of Hakbal of the Surging Soul - the Lost Caverns of Ixalan merfolk commander that makes all your merfolk explore at the beginning of combat. When you have a big enough board, you can sometimes forget which of your creatures have explored, and that only happens once on your turn all at the same time.
Hakbal's trigger is probably worse, though, because every explore gives you a choice if it's a nonland card, and you also need to choose which creatures explore in what order, because once you hit a nonland card, you can leave it on top to have the rest of your creatures automatically get +1/+1 counters. Often times you'll want to continue to put cards in the graveyard to dig down until you hit a card you're looking for, so each explore finds a new card and gives you another choice you have to make about whether or not to leave that card on top or put it in the graveyard, and which creature to explore with next.
At least there's no actual choice with Nadu, and the order doesn't matter (assuming you can target all your creatures at once)... what you do with each card is prescribed - lands onto the battlefield, everything else to hand, and there's no actual effect on the creature, so order doesn't matter.
Nadu is complicated to track mostly because decks with it will contain landfall synergies where you're making new creatures when the lands come into play, so you constantly have a new supply of creatures that haven't been targetted yet.
On the up side, once a Nadu deck has a landfall card in play and a 0 cost targetter... they basically just win and you don't have to wait for them to actually resolve things.
I run a Hakbal Deck and honestly is not that bad. Definitely complex for someone who is starting at magic but you just have to organize your board state so you know which creatures have been triggered and which not. I always start with the left most, or commander fist, then left most creature. Same with other effects. I understand the criticism that Magic itself doesn't have a way to track certain effects directly, but the solution would be having WOTC including dice or tokens for each unique effect? you can use dice, coins or similiar to mark down what has been activated, what has triggered, and then remove them once you're done.
@@ArgenCR I've been playing magic for 30 years, I know the game inside and out :)
It probably depends a lot on how you play. I don't start with my commander because you usually don't know what's on top, and I want to ensure my commander gets a counter. So I choose something I don't care about first so if it misses a counter, I'm not annoyed by it.
If you try to play it optimally, there's a ton of complexity. One of the big benefits of Hakbal is digging through your deck for answers. If you have 3 creatures left and you reveal a mediocre card for the first, do you keep it on top so you get the counters or do you keep digging for an answer. Maybe you graveyard it and reveal the next, now it's a good card but not *the* good card, keep digging or stop?
That's what I think about as I'm exploring like 8+ times on my turn. It just takes a while
Board state? Youre tapped out
Hold priority
Destroy all artifacts and enchantments
Destroy all planeswalkers and creatures
Destroy all lands
*Teferi's protection*
Great content guys, have you looked at Sorcery: Contested Realm? Is similar to MtG but add new aspects to the board state that's makes it very interesting.
I've become much more of a Magic grump too. Maybe it's the nostalgia, but I most liked the game maybe around Ice Age up thru early combo winter (I do like combos), so late '90s. Past the point of trading off creatures with no text, but before everything had giant blocks. I have a harder time getting into modern Magic when everything has so many triggers that live play is hard to track, but Arena play is constantly pressing Next to accept triggers. I've been really into Star Wars Unlimited recently for just this reason of wanting medium complexity. Near every card has 1 ability and that's it. Though I'm seeing the previews of the new set adding more and more text blocks, so will see how long that lasts. If I'm going to play some super complex state-tracking game, I prefer it in my 2-4 hour board games with far lower luck and some bits/tokens to track state built in to the design.
The point made about planeswalkers is not only true in a meta sense, but also felt in game. Anyone who has or plays against a planeswalkers deck knows the long turns that player must take, beacuse sequencing all the activated abilities is a fractal of complexity micro decissions.
It really was just a way to make an at least interesting version of Coiling Oracle for the command zone, and a viable version for modern.
In terms of commander, "Thrasios, Triton Hero" served that role, but ended up being both too powerful, and generic. Nadu at least forces the player to do interesting things in order to get the benefit, which is especially important for a simic card like this. In the past few years, WotC has tried to push more aggressive and weird options onto simic due to the color combo being inherently strong in commander and needing another identity. Ramp scales with card draw and card draw scales with ramp, so your advantage engine is built directly into your colors. Magic players love to meme about a deck being a "simic value engine with no win-con," even if those two colors aren't present. You really can just build your own Euro board game as a deck, but without the victory points to end things.
In terms of modern, (I can't speak to this with as much confidence) decks like infect are the main ways to utilize pumps spells and combat tricks. This card gives another avenue for that archetype, or could be added to modern infect alongside Venerated Rotpriest.
You both hit the nail on the head in that its legendary due to commander AND having two in play would make things wacky since they scale with each other. On the matter of the twice per turn ability, that is mostly blamed on "Risen Reef." The card that does a similar thing and provides an insane engine that can end games across multiple formats. Risen Reef is another Coiling Oracle, but they accidentally added in Chemical X.
Its a word soupy card with weird triggers to keep track of, and you're right to be annoyed. I think that the only reason they didn't axe the card is due to the fact that Coiling Oracle-like abilites are close to ubiquitous, so that shaves off just enough mental load to justify its existence.....maybe?
Thanks for your insight! The simic problem in commander is very interesting. We’ll likely have a video about it soon.
@@distractionmakers Its a strange topic for sure. The simic problem really only applies to power levels that are not CEDH. Once you get into the highest level things get a bit more inverted. Green goes from one of the best colors, to the worst, and grixis becomes the best color combo.
I think we need to differentiate between technical complexity and strategic complexity. Magic has many moving parts and is more difficult to keep track of (in paper), so it is technically complex. Yet it is a game without full information and with a significant luck factor. More importantly, at its core it is rock-paper-scissors (or maybe rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock). Aggro, combo and control. So strategically it’s MUCH less complex than chess or Go, which allow you to CHANGE your strategy on the go.
Fuck yeah off work and here to watch!
Do they have a podcast somewhere?
Currently we’re only on TH-cam.
This is the big interesting thing about Altered for me, a breath of fresh air compared to the mix of complexity and power creep we're getting in magic right now. In particular, I think two lanes, less durable creatures, and boolean win progress (Did you win in this lane? Y/N) produces increased complexity with basic inputs (bears or whatever), but reduced complexity with advanced inputs, like the double Ganesha infinite (that's sure a sentence) that was recently spoiled. The infinite, with available cards, progresses the game the same way a vanilla creature does. So while you lose complexity from not having a stack and immediately winnable core gameplay system, you get back a lot of actually impactful decision making in terms of how that simplicity bounds outputs, emphasizing precise sequencing and allowing basic cards to compete against more convoluted value generation.
Great points! We will be talking about altered soon.
Do you think Altered's approach to clearing (most) of the board every round is something that will benefit or hurt it in the long run?
That’s a great question. My major concern would be in depth of interaction. I think they try to hedge against it with the double dipping on some units, but I’m not sure it will be enough. We have only played it once, so we will revisit it when we make a video for it.
Also for Nadu clone effects:
Have sixth doctor in play (matching colors).
Play nadu, get a copy that's non legendary.
Start playing "populate" effects - you can get extra copies of your non legendary copy.
Have "fun."
As someone who likes making stupid board states: thanks for the idea
@@TheLuckySpades You MONSTER!
Take pictures, I wanna see it. 😁
I enjoy premodern because the card pool is fixed and there is still innovative deckbuilding. Not so many complicated mechanics.
I’m very curious to see how this format evolves over time. It’s a really interesting case study in what mtg might look like post WOTC.
My favourite T1 - T2 sequence is T1 Jespara Sentinel into T2 Magda, Brazen Outlaw into T2 Kalain, reclusive painter!
Have you ever played with Cathars' Crusade? fun card and VERY powerful if you play it in the right deck ... my cube has a token creature theme in W&G so I thought why not try it out .. so first draft I actualy have it P1 or P2 and because I usualy build decks with the new cards I'm trying out to see how they play I take it and build a sweet Selesnia go wide deck.. I had creatures that create tokens on landfall, tokens for tapping, tokens when attacking and even one that created tokens during upkeep (only the attacking ones are still in the cube^^) .. I even had the insane luck to have both on colour moxen ..
so first game turn4 I play the crusade .. tap, create a token and buff everything.. attack create token and buff again .. instant win .. insane card .. in the next game I won the 3rd turn it was out .. and let me tell you it's the worst card ever .. it's worse than one with nothing .. at least you just lose the game but with cathars crusade .. so much tracking, so many counters .. the more your deck takes advantage of crusade the more complicated it becomes
“This can only happen once each turn” is so awful to me, i would rather design cards that use the tapping mechanic because its so deeply baked into the game… and then its potentially exploitable if you can pull off an untapping combo, which won’t come up that often in limited
Tap-effects were literally unplayable unless they won the game on the spot lile mercenaries. There's a reason the game moved away from them.
Spark double is one of my absolute favorite cards, just so broken
I see Urza’s Rage, I click Like.
As a longtime magic player, I'm already at the point of not wanting to play commander because of the complexity of board state after turn 4. I'm currently working on making pre modern decks to play.
Same here. I used to love researching decks and commanders for EDH, but now it's all so crazy that I just want to play block or extended. :D
Complexity is a challenge what people want to make of it. Inoften think back to the original dnd classic edition where how that game was basically math problems and less forgiving hahaha, but hey people loves it and eventually it was refined and fine tuned to be a bit easier and a lot more forgiving to play.
I actually didn't even think about the complexity problem with Nadu (I'm one of the lifelong players you mentioned, lol). I think that part of the reason they're more willing to go into this kind of design space is the fact that so many players are now online, on platforms that automate things to a significant degree. In that circumstance, Nadu is not really problematic.
Because its so congested with similar mechanics that are somewhat different.
Theres another card from mh3 that i am currently working on a fundamentally unplayable deck built around.
The new eldrazi legend, ulalek, fused atrocity has a trigger that essentially copies your entire stack. Combine this with a flash enabler like leyline of anticipation and you get an insane combo deck that will attempt to create a stack with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of spells and triggers.
I had to confirm this with a judge because all my experiences as a magic player are telling me wizards would never allow this to happen, yet here it is.
I intend to test on mtgo but im worried about crashing the client. In order to play in paper, i intend to develop an app that is designed specially to help track my ulalek stacks because i think its fundamentally too complex to actually do by hand
Hey! I had a saproling token deck once!
Heh, now i want to see you guys play/discuss Knightmare chess. (game where you add a customized deck of cards to chess) 🤭
I think there was a thing a looong time ago where some people put games through a computer program and it turns out magic the gathering is THE hardest game ever made.
I don't believe that planeswalkers are very complex because their abilities can't happen at instant speed. That's why I don't feel compelled to use then much.
I think the real crime of Nadus design is that his mechanics take a long time to complete and are often recursive without being game ending.
If I get Nadu into play and it’s not removed I am almost certainly GOING to win, but it’s likely going to take 2+ turns at 20+ minutes each while my opponent(s) twiddles their thumbs.
It creates long games with limited payoff in ways that I am not sure are healthy to the game.
So true! The non-deterministic combo he creates is just awful. I watched a player combo for 10 minutes and then pass the turn to just do it again on their next turn.
Where is the cat cam version of this talk?
Magic is not complex due to the fact of multiple limiting factors but the easy to say is mana cost and the different colored mana
No, you guys are right on this. The bird wizard absolutely sucks and shouldn’t have been printed like this.
I think that lot of coping cards now make a board state very complex. Especially the card's adding something to the copy like Astral Dragon.
Agreed. Tokens now having additional attributes also feels messy.
@@distractionmakers I think it's much easier to handle them in digital version. But the complexity of paper version should be much tighter at least from logistical stand point.
I could easily be one of the MTG oldheads saying 'what's the big deal about this complex card.' I've been playing the game off and on for 20 years, regularly go to my LGS commander night, and while I don't play 60-card formats, I enjoy watching gameplay.
FUCK THIS LEVEL OF COMPLEXITY. I've thought for a while there's a disconnect between perceived complexity of cards vs actual complexity on the board for really all players but especially new players. Take Blood Artist- it's not a complicated looking card, but if you've ever played it you know it's a bear to play 'correctly' even in a 1v1 game because it's *really* easy to miss triggers. Thankfully, I think most new players recognize that aristocrats decks are reasonably complicated (lot of moving pieces).
You know what decks don't look complicated to new players? Selesnya midrange. Enchantress. Elves. +1/+1 Counters. These are all decks that have a *ton* of bookkeeping, and most new players I've played with tend to tap out after a game or two- and I don't blame them. They're playing really labor intensive decks, it's exhausting. I wish there was a not dickish way to say 'you need to build a different deck' to a kid who just finished upgrading their first precon.
Thanks for sharing your insight. I agree. I think you’re kinda dead in the water if you have to tell a kid to build a different deck and that perfectly illustrates the issue.
@@distractionmakers I haven't actually told anyone to build a different deck or whatever, because I realize it sounds like I'm gatekeeping. I can recognize that they aren't having as much enjoyment as they could because they brought a deck that a seasoned player would be taxed by. I don't know how to walk the line between sounding like I'm saying 'you're too new to play this deck' or 'you need to be more enfranchised in this game (have more decks) to participate' which is exactly what I don't want to communicate.
I would offer to loan a deck, but I mostly play dumb restricted-deckbuilding combos which is going straight from 'your deck doesn't look complicated but is' to 'my deck looks very complicated but (probably) isn't' is going to be hard to communicate without looking like an asshole.
You brought up legacy, and it is such an amazing format. There is so much deck diversity that the first two turns are all about understanding what your opponent is playing, and what cards you want against their strategy. Simple lines could mean totally different things.
Island + Ponder means a different thing to Underground Sea + Ponder. Tropical Island into Bayou is a different deck to Wooded Foothills into Bayou. If your opponent casts Preordain, there's only a couple decks it could be.
Identifying the strategy is one of my favourite things in the format.
Me too!
"if it's an enchantment it has to go in the 99" - UNLESS it's a background. 😉
But yeah, Nadu is complete BS. I recall that L5R second edition (which... do a video on that one sometime) had a rule whereby card game text could only be used once a round unless otherwise marked.
A later tournament prize became special "markers" you could put on your cards to keep track of whether you had used them or not since 1) not every ability required tapping and 2) parts of the turn could go on for so long it was very easy to lose track of whether you had activated that +2 this turn or the previous turn....
It also wasn't helped that the turns in L5R2e were back and forth with the players - I do X then you do Y, etc - and this included attacking. So I attack you then you attack me, and this is all still within the same turn, but each attack feels like an entire mini turn/round so... yeah, we had to figure out ways to mark cards as "used" even though it wasn't in the official rules.
And later they did release cards which could be used "twice" per turn (and there were some unlimited per turn) so... I'm getting PTSD flashbacks from Nadu is all I'm saying.
I mean if you flicker Nadu so the game text on all your creatures leaves and returns, does it "reset" the 2T counter? Or is the card supposed to "remember" that it's used this ability so many times this turn? (until you flicker that card)
I have so much sympathy for judges.
Yiiiikes. We have been meaning to look into L5R. Sounds like this is a good time 😆
@@distractionmakers lol I' played both 1e and 2e - they each had their pluses and minuses.
If you need cards, let me know. 🍻
I remember L5R second edition! I totally understand what you're referring to.
@@waltercardcollector Oh yeah, I enjoyed it in a lot of ways but MAN were you mentally exhausted after a game. It is kind of funny that the community went on to create a much more stripped down version of it for faster play with less complex board states.
It would be tough but never say never, did you know that the amount of possible board states in a single game of chess quickly out numbers the amount of atoms in the universe, literally a number so large the human brain can barely understand what the number represents, yet some guy built an AI that out plays pro chess players, people in the 60s 70s said exactly what you claim about magic but for chess, yet here we are.
it is also interesting that Keyforge, in an effort to preempt some of MTG's issues has the "rule of 6."
(Basically if there's an infinite loop in the game, you can do it a max of 6 times.)
Oh wow I didn’t know this. That’s seems… arbitrary haha
@@distractionmakers KF does have a theme around 6. 6 card hands. 6 aember to forge a key. And the rule of 6.
Well the rule is technically "can't use a card more than 6 times." It wasn't really an issue except with loops because the most you could ever get in a deck was 5 copies of a common card. Then Winds of Exchange released where you can generate token creatures and now players have to remember that if they have more than 6 of them, they can't use those excess tokens.
MTG isn't even close to the complexity level of Yugioh, and I say that as someone who plays MTG and hates yugioh.
Anyone can learn MTG in a few hours, learning takes weeks just to fully learn the current meta, much less old decks and cards, and you have to learn the actual decks and cards in order to have any hope of playing, not like MTG where you can just learn the basics and then get going.
You can look at and read a MTG card and understand what it could do, but reading a yugioh card means NOTHING unless you know the lines of the deck and the 1000 other cards it could interact with.
I don’t think magic is a game anymore. It’s a platform like “PlayStation”.
Hear me out.
To me each deck is like a game of its own. It has its own set of rules and game design. Elf ball plays different to my dragons approach deck. Or mill strategy is so different to boros voltron.
I’ve been reflecting on this quite a lot since designing my game. It’s a huge component to deep understanding of design when you realize MTG is actually a system you can play lots of games on!
For sure! This is the difference between system level and mechanics level.
*This is my opinion isn't very interesting because the same is true for a whole hell of a lot of multiplayer games.* It's definitely true for basically any competitive deck builder in existence for one also true of any game where you actually have any kind of highly variable build. This just feels like some MIT magic nerds tongue bathing their favorite game lol
Most deck builders don’t have a persistent board state. Is there one that does?
Magic has infinite loops that are nondeterministic. Four Horsemen is a famous deck which is effectively banned in paper because the infinite loop requires your deck to get shuffled in the correct order, with no guarantee it will happen. If you don't get the right order, you keep looping until it happens. This is slow play in paper and you will get disqualified for doing it at a tournament.
Infinite complexities includes infinite loops within one board state.
It is also proven to be Turing complete. Ie, given enough time, you can create a computer to compute literally anything. Kyle hill did a great video on the topic
Nah it's easy. You play aggro and take the first turn. Win every time.
Math is for blockers. 😄
@distractionmakers there's only 2 mechanics in Magic. Turn your creatures sideways. And pray.
DnD
Guys... have you even seen what yugioh looks like now its to complicated for the fucking judges 😂
Hmm which is worse a nuclear meltdown or an atom bomb? 😆
Im 666th like :)
your starting premise is completely flawed, magic is NOT the most complex game but it very well could be the most complicated game, of course there's no algorithm that could solve magic because there's not even a problem to solve, the implication being that magic is like poker with known unknowns with calculable statistics but magic's board state changes with your opponents interactions, so no there isn't an algorithm to a non-existent formula, also who cares what MIT says. Here's what we do know, magic is extremely unbalanced game with an archaic desgin that suffers from completely unplayable states by the misuse of rng (mana flooded/mana screwed), Many games have made significantly better systems but Magic's success is due to being first to market and the logistical difficulties of getting new games into stores, not to mention tournament scenes and advertising.
magic is mucht less complex if you actually read your cards
Then balance that expectation with each individuals ability to comprehend the nuances of the legalistic language.
Lies
"Humility" is easy to read but think about consequences of it on board. Or look it up on YT :)
I mostly agree, with exceptions to “The Ring Tempts You”, “Venture Into The Dungeon” and other pseudo mini games that can be introduced
I’ve heard if you read the card it explains the card somewhere…..
if you want an example of a fairly complex cardgame with no real board state, there's slay the spire. Yes there are persistant effects like powers, or sometimes enemies summon more guys, but for the most part the board is set at the start of combat, wiped entirely at the end of combat, and then set again in the next combat. this works fine because, unlike magic, the complexity of building a deck is the main active component of gameplay in sts. You could build a roguelike deckbuilder that has mtg-tier complexity in its combat but you would either want to tone down some of the complexity in some other places or just accept ur making a game where one run takes like 5+ hours to play. a somewhat loosely related parallel to that would be xcom, which is basically two games you play concurrantly, a strategy layer and a tactics layer.
As someone who plays both magic and yugioh, i can say that magic is complex
Id argue yugiohs more complex with more, i feel lile magic has alot going on but the board state isnt as complex as yugioh has more complexites and things happeninf
more like bored state thats how i feel when im not playing magic haha
Hahaha