The early bit about alpha did not mention Ante as an intrinsic game mechanic. You were each supposed to set a random card aside as ante. The winner got all ante’d cards. The goal: a way to force deck changes over time, and balance. The most powerful deck would have most to lose. Turns out people really don’t like losing their cards, so it was dropped pretty quickly.
I don't like other people touching my cards because they handle them so roughly. I definitely wasn't on board with ante back in 97. 😂 Thankfully it had been removed from the game by then. I thought that the concept was interesting, as it's almost similar to an entry fee at a tournament, and it appeased my competitive nature. The issue of course was that it was random, it could be made to be more than one card, and it kind of became it's own game within a game. I played around with it a bit with cheap cards and friends, so I know that it added some intensity to each game that it was used in. So I'd have loved to see it implemented in some other way. But yeah, losing a $100 Sheoldred because it was the random ante card, and getting beaten by an out of nowhere infinite combo (which I despise to this day) would definitely not sit well with me.
Didn't play with antes but I imagine it introduces this thing where deciding who and if you will play is part of the game. You can't just say to a new guy or your friend," Hey want to play". If it's a bad match up why play? If you have something to lose and they just have a pile of crap why play?
We had an "Ante League" in Mirage... IIRIC the rules were that it was sealed to being with - a starter deck and some booster and you could not put cards outside of what you opened in your deck - the opened cards were listed.. You would ante 2 cards - one from the deck and one from the outside of the deck.. The winner would get the ante'd cards - but give 2 cards of his/her choice back to the loser - so the amount of cards in the pool would stay constant.. I think it worked OK tho we maybe did not get that much play as we would have liked but there were people playing that at least for a few games... It was not one sitting tournament but a continuing league - the won and returned cards would be listed.. The same system could be implemented as "shadow sealed" event in digital format and I think it would work just fine getting around problems with possible semi cheating like deliberately playing with an opponent you want to kind of arrange trades with -- though it could be thought of as "a feature not a bug" -- it was not that serious - no big prizes or entry fees beyond the cost of the starting cards in pool and you could just not play if/when you did not wan't to risk if you opened something you really want for a constructed outside - and I suppose if you're spending for competitive tournaments you could get the cards from elsewhere or bribe the opponent to give you back the card you lost tho that would be kind of against the spirit of the rules of Ante league which was intended to be kind of equal between players and not pay to win.. But a digitized event in something like the Arena would not have such issues at all - especially if it was "shadow" where you would not keep the cards anyway so there would not be an incentive to resign to not riksing losing some cards you'd really like to keep. One prob of Ante i of course that if player A and player B play ante and don't trade the cards back their deck going to get weaker on average and the one losing is getting their collection weakened while the one that keeps winning is perhaps getting slight boost so there's kind of a disincentive to play for ante at all.. I think we did play almost no ante games outside the league back then -- even tho there ere cards that were specifically for ante.
@@NotRegret but the strong deck should win right... except there's another flaw, the land mecanic is problematic, so you'll have a 20% chance of just getting screw by mana screw/mana flood. the best strategy would definitly to play a bunch of crap, but very aggro to punish player who get mana screw and take their good card once in a while giving garbage the rest of the time
@@gizel4376 The type of sharking you are talking about, which does sound like a sound strategy, sounds like it makes for a very hostile atmosphere. An ante league that lasts for only a few days might work but if it goes on indefinitely that hostility is going to really hurt the game culture. People looking for prey, waiting until they are vulnerable, all of that becomes part of the culture.
Something that I think leads to this perception of a stagnant meta is how ranked ladders work for most games. In a ranked ladder like MTGA or Hearthstone, there's a high cost to experimentation: you'll lose a lot of rank, and undo the progress you've made on the ladder. People are incentivized to use what's been proven to work if they want to gain rank, and it becomes a feedback loop of people using only proven decks, thus further proving to everybody that the same few decks are all that's viable.
Old tournament circuits used to handle this really well, in that you were often encouraged to angle shoot what you thought the best meta was going to be based on what was likely to be popular/available. And having multiple decks with different matchups in a loose "rochambeau" of Aggro beats control beats midrange beats aggro meant that there was metagaming even once the metagame was "solved". And the nature of sets coming out every 3 months meant that there was actually time to dig deep on these metagames in a way I think was really interesting. But they got rid of that to push more product, which I think will long-term kill the game because people can't keep up.
@@dhalden93 This is excatly how I used to play competitive tcgs in person. I knew the top players in my local region and what they would bring, so it was realistic for me to brew new decks that targeted the local meta and just rely on skill to outplay matchups that would less favorable but played by less people and of people that were lower skill since they weren't "meta".
21:25 "she's never done this; why is she doing this now?" She is obviously interested in a serious discussion of how to keep "the meta" fresh in CCG's. Kudos on following sound editing advice re: cats in the shot.
Coming from a fighting game perspective, we have kind of the opposite approach. Balance patches occur in yearly intervals to give the game time to breathe, let players figure out whether the top tiers are what they're cracked up to be, and make the right changes. As opposed to trying to patch all the time to induce churn in the meta game. Also fighting game characters tend to be built in such a way that players steadily master them and figure out more about them, which is how there are meta shakeups in 20 year old games.
That’s is interesting to hear! The legacy formats of Magic work this way where you get players who specialize in one type of deck and master it. Those decks receive a card or two maybe once a year. I wonder how a fighting game with more meta changes would fair 🤔 it would probably be more welcoming to novice players.
@@distractionmakers More frequent changes lower the skill levels of players you may face, but it also lowers your own level. If you play standard for a couple months every year or two, you have to learn a lot more than the one or two cards your legacy deck got. As a fighting game novice, I like knowing my foundations haven't become outdated, so I can learn more about the parts of the game that everyone talks about. Win or lose mostly depends on who I'm playing. I think that's a matter of taste: Many fighting games cater to players who like the novelty found over months. It sounds like MTG is catering to players who feel done with the new content in a few weeks. They've either perfected all the lines or they don't care about minor optimization. Either way, they'd rather play a new deck than a new game, because they're content with their system level skills.
@@distractionmakers It would likely be rejected outright by a large swath of players. It's just too contrary to what attracts people to fighting games. Fighting game players don't perceive patches as a means to shake up the meta. They see them as efforts to find the game's ideal form, where once the meta is widely understood, the game becomes a seamless interface for competition between two human beings. As far as players are concerned, a "stagnant" meta is completely fine, desirable even, as long as they enjoy the strategies that rise to the top. This is why so many 20+ year old games have active scenes. "Patch culture" discourse in the fgc is entirely centered around this topic.
You eliminate player churn by not treating your customers like a money printing machine, you make the game fun to play in both casual and competitive, you make product fun to open. So: 1. Stop releasing so many products 2. Spend more time playtesting and creating sets 3. Stop printing collector boosters, put those back into play boosters so they can have a "big hit" and bring some value back to foils
I think not being able to access all the cards is a fundamental feels bad for competitive games. The only thing worse to losing to the meta is losing to a meta you can't even opt into.
Yeah back in dragons of tarkir the standard decks at the time were nearing 4 digits. Impossible to justify joining standard at the time, it was like bringing a draft deck to a modern tournament.
I'd also say, the whole issue with meta and churn is very prevalent in board games right now. A decade ago you could pick a game on BGG and there would be pages and pages of strategy forum discussions by people who have played the game 100+ times. Now you can go to the strategy forum for the hottest, fastest selling games and there's like 2-3 posts like "I played this twice, red hero's ability is OP, this game is solved and done." And then ppl move to the next game. Is red OP? Maybe, but you don't know that from 2 games. The perception of stale meta combined with tons of choice means there is little push to try to shake up a "solved" meta for a game. TCGs at least have prize events with incentive to think outside the meta, but other games don't.
The normal booster pack was the watering hole that every magic player had to come to. Now that the game is divided into so many specialty sub products, magic has lost it’s appeal to me.
Netrunner had randomized booster packs. The Fantasy Flight remake of the game is Android: Netrunner. That is the game that used the living card game model. They were non-randomized expansions.
I am a card game designer, and my interest is mainly draft. I imagine having each set as a cube, and encouraging cube home brews to be the focus. Constructed is possible, but not the focus.
one sad thing about boosters that goes to actually quickening churn is the concept of a chase card. the studio is incentivised to print cards that are just a noch above the rest to sell more boosters. these cards then become the obvious focal point of the next meta decks, with little exploration required since their stats are just straight up better. i think pokemon moved into a good direction with this by making alternate arts the chase cards. but they still print a lot of bulk. i imagine if they pushed the numbers on the bulk a bit, there would be potentially tons of viable decks. but since they insist on printing one card with 330hp and 200 damage and then another with less hp that pays more energy to do less damage they needlessly pidgeonhole the meta to focus on the obviously superior cards.
Flesh and Blood's Living Legend system does a pretty interesting job with churn, at least now after some recent tweaking. When Lexi and Iyslander rotated out 2 months before HVY, the meta became incredibly wide and unsolved. Heroes rotating mid-season along with the armory deck precon serving as a mini set, we had a ProQuest season where Week 1 was different than Week 2-3 was different from Week 4/rest of month. Culling cards is important, and if you're going to do that, why not use it in a way to maintain interest in the game by letting non-meta strategies get a second appraisal before another set butts its head in. While MtG's set rotation could have a similar shaking up effect, the fact it's timed with a set release kind of nullifies its individual impact.
I've been playing since Ice Age competitive and casually, both sealed and constructed. The reasons my friends and I have switched to EDH exclusively and buying singles are too much product too fast and it's too expensive to draft and keep up with the various metas. We would much rather build our EDH decks that we can keep 90% the same for months or years and still be fun and viable with minimal changes.
Id be curious to see WOTC try experimenting with non booster sets. I Have to imagine they sell so much through commander precons that having something like a 300 card cube or Wizard Tower style box with 1x of every card (or maybe 2x of everything common) would be interesting to see. I know Conspiracy exists but those cards are mostly unusable outside of a draft environment. IDK. I can imagine a Universes Beyond set being released as like a big $200 LCG experiment set vs 4x commander precons
I am always chasing the dragon of playing card games as a kid/teen. Back when the only way to expand my collection was to top an event or get a few packs on a holiday. I went to every FNM ans prerelease because I wasnt going to miss a chance at booster packs and trading, the main ways I acquired cards I wanted.
The point about strategy vs. tactics is what made me quit Yugioh. When Ishizu Tearlaments was the undisputed only deck of the format for four months. I no longer felt like my favorite part of the game (deckbuilding) was supported even though talking heads were, and still are, raving about how amazing the format was because only good players were winning and the board states were extremely complicated to the point that if you weren't popping adderall you weren't competing. Konami knew this would happen since it had happened in Japan, let it happen here, and then let it happen again recently with Snake-Eyes. Then they banned cards around Snake-Eyes which removed even more unviable untiered strategies that weren't competing from the pool of stuff to build with. And then I gave up. My desire to play died and so did my locals scene.
That is what, in my opinion, hearthstone is doing much better nowadays. The cycle from 2014-2019 was expansion, 2 months later maybe balance changes, 2 months later expansion. The cycle now is big set, 1 month later big balance changes (maybe 1 smaller one in the middle), 1 month later mini set, 1 month later big balance changes, 1 month later big set again.
I was hoping you'd mention keyforge. In a competitive 1v1 card game, identity through deck building is largely a myth anymore. You mentioned how the meta gets solved by consensus. If you aren't part of that consensus or acknowledging it though gameplay, then you aren't competing. 99% of players arenrt deck building. They're meta decking and changing a card. Because keyforge decks are unique, the identity comes through in the selection of the deck for competition. There are still meta consensus, but often it's cards or combos and there's enough to go around really. And more things do get explored due to the nature of the game. My KF identity is closely tied to Gasoline Maximiliano for example, and the styles that go with it. Anecdotally, I was having somewhat of an identity crisis in legacy, and what deck I would want to build. Bouncing from deck to deck. Keyforge helped me sort out what type of player I am. In that sense I can express identity by choosing an already solved meta deck. And keeping up with the meta changes around it. I still wouldn't call it deck building though. I think games like magic would benefit greatly from keyforges distribution model, and I'm more surprised that hasn't been adopted yet. It would be easy to make a format of "one jumpstart style 40 card deck" standard, and then let edh be the expression format.
I always wait to see if Keyforge will get mentioned. I don't play it competitively, but I know there's a decent variety of representation in the competitive scene (houses, sets, players). It makes casual a blast (you get the feeling of a draft, where all of your parts make a unique/interesting whole you probably wouldn't put together on your own). I've also found a lot of identity in the houses I play well with (or that my brother-in-law plays well with). He's out there to stomp my Logos shenanigans before I get them online, and I'm desperate to protect my aember from his Shadows. Even if it doesn't allow deck construction (and I love me some construction), it's a good time.
I think the Keyforge format you referred to was Alliance, which imo strikes the perfect balance between what the game was intended to be while still allowing some customization/optimization. In essence, you combine 3 House pods from up to 3 different decks, but you have to take the *whole* pod. This means you still have to tangle with suboptimal deck compositions, but you can choose to combine ones based on synergy or shoring each other's weaknesses. Also, Flesh and Blood has their Living Legend status (in addition to a traditional banlist), which means that you *can't* play the same hero forever; they will eventually be retired, but stronger heroes will be retired faster. One major problem with Magic's solution of "release more product", is that more product costs more money, effectively raising the cost of keeping up with the game. So while players with deeper pockets will engage for longer due to the improved churn rate, you'll also be preventing poorer players from playing in the first place which is like the highest churn rate possible?
I think Pokemon handles this pretty well, and I mean VGC not the card game. A team is only 6 mons and each one is a specific bundle of stats and move but there are endless knobs you can turn to customize their gameplay. So the sheer number of permutations makes a meta easy to grasp but hard to solve, and there's a constant ebb and flow of rock-paper-scissors counters. Also the Pokemon company has a very hand-off approach to balance, which means that's it's on the players to figure out ways to beat or adapt to top meta threats. I think too often digital card games rely on patches to change the meta rather than wait for the players to become creative and that's a shame.
The thing that is interesting about patch balancing is that it prompts the player to come back to the game. If you’re hands off there is no signal that things have changed. You would only know if you’re a dedicated player.
@@distractionmakers true but you can also alienate casual players by changing things constantly. I think a major problem with games like Marvel Snap that aims to shift the meta every week (realisticaly it's closer to every month) is that a lot of what players learn can become obsolete over a few cycles.
If Keyforge gave you more than the minimum amount, say six more cards, and you cut down to your deck size, you’d have a sideboard and a little more sense of ownership over the deck without fundamentally changing the approach.
That's kinda similar almost to what Altered is attempting, except it tackles it from the opposite side. Instead of starting with "Keyforge" and adding in some MTG-like deckbuilding, it starts with "MTG" and adds in some Keyforge-like algorithmic randomness. You can read more about it, elsewhere, but I also wrote a comment explaining how it does this in this comment section, which shouldn't be too hard to find if you sort by New.
The first few months of Legend of Runeterra's beta did limit the amount of cards everybody could acquire: you could only use money to buy a set limit of wildcards per week, and every other way of earning cards was time gated in some way. It was a blast to play, a period of constant calculating how to both use the cards you had randomly unlocked alongside the few wildcards you could buy each week, it was probably the most fun I ever had in a TCG, but it only lasted a little while. Eventually, Riot realized the system wasn't sustainable, new players could never catch up, and when the first set came out it became obvious that players that had been saving up ingame currency would simply be able to buy the whole set, while newer players couldn't.
This whole episode keeps making me think of the upcoming Altered TCG, and how a large part of that game's design is meant to tackle this specific issue, since, as we've seen, the way MTG does it just doesn't really work anymore in the Information Age. (also, the way they tackle this issue is also used for tackling a couple other issues, too, but that's not important for this comment.) So, how Altered does it is that it uses boosters to distribute the cards, the same as MTG, but the actual cards themselves, and the rules of the game, are where the changes can be found. I'll split this up into "steps", since I think that is a good way to understand this unique system, since each step is necessary, and each step builds upon the ones that came before it. - Step 1: You have your regular "set" of between around 1-2 hundred unique cards. - Step 2: Altered takes those unique cards and divides them into the "rarities" like you can find in other TCGs, except that each "rarity" is just a slightly "Altered" version of that same unique card, with higher rarity cards being slightly-improved versions of the lower-rarity ones. - Step 3: in order for this to not cause the problem of "well, just spend a bunch of money to collect all the higher-rarity versions", Altered places a limit on the deckbuilding, making it so you can only have so many cards of each of the higher rarities in one deck, for tournaments specifically. (think of it like if MTG limited you to only having a maximum of 4 Mythic Rares & 20 Rares/Uncommons in each deck) - Step 4: In order for this to not cause the problem of "well, players can just cheat & ignore those numbers by fudging the numbers a bit for the deckbuilding, and it's fine as long as they don't get caught.", Altered tournaments have a system (connected to a very complex system that's outside the scope of this comment) that checks & registers decks for the tournament, not allowing players to easily get around the deckbuilding limits. - Step 5 (the important one): The highest rarity of cards, which are the strongest "Altered" versions of the middle and lower-rarity cards, and which are essentially MTG's Mythic Rare in terms of power level, are each 1/1 unique copies with no exact equal card owned by anyone else in the world, through a system of semi-balanced automatic algorithms, similar to how Keyforge decks were algorithmically generated. - Step 5.1: Since each of these 100% unique cards are "Altered" versions of the rare/uncommon/common cards, with some not-too-different mechanics and stats, players don't have to try to wrap their heads around completely unique, never-before-seen cards every time they look at one. - Step 5.2: Since each deck can only have a handful of these unique cards in them, their opponents know mostly what to expect from their opponent's deck, but are capable of being surprised by around 7% of the cards of their opponent, which (usually) have never seen by anyone else, except that they are mechanically similar to 3 of the cards that already exist (each common card has 2 non-unique higher-rarity versions, besides the unique rarity version) - Step 6: This step is too complicated to go into all of the details of in this comment, but they have basically set up a system that allows for players to not have to worry about losing their 1/1 unique cards. With all of these steps combined (and a few others that don't specifically matter to this), they have set up a system to tackle this meta-solving issue, as well as a couple other issues, and we'll just have to wait and see at how effective it truly is (but, it has been predicted by most to be _very_ effective)
After thinking about Altered again, I realized that I forgot one other important piece of info for Step 5.2, which is that, in addition to any deck only having about 7% chance at max of a 1/1 card being drawn, these cards are also limited in how much of an effect they can have on the game by another system with the gameplay, which basically means that any specific card can only really have an effect for 2 turns (sometimes 3, and sometimes 1 or 4+, depending) so even if you opponent has an "overpowered" unique card, it usually has a limit of how much of an effect it can have on the game. Also, in addition to each card usually only having an effect for around 2 turns, the amount of damage they can do on those turns is very limited, because of yet another unique gameplay system. Basically, if a card has the equivalent of 10/10 stats in MTG, it wouldn't be that much different if it had 99/99 stats, and it can only do as much potential "damage" as a 5/5 (or, maybe two 5/5s, depending on certain abilities). There's a limit on the effectiveness.
With booster packs, if i open a card I dont want. I can sell it to someone who does, and use that money to buy another pack. Maybe even make some money, or trade for a card I do want. When i open a loot box and get a skin I dont want. I have to keep it, and spend more money.
I liked Forrest's point about there being multiple games being played. We imagine deck construction, deck evaluation, and play refinement playing off each other and cycling around. However, deck creation and evaluation can be done for you. Not only do players spend less time making non-meta decks, they spend less time playing and refining specific strategies for these decks. The cycle is shortened significantly, and players "get through" the content quickly by avoiding most of it. It feels like a branching story game where everyone looks up a guide for the only ending they care about. A lot of content is being written for no one.
this is interesting, and relates to the episode before this one about "useless cards". maybe a game that has no "useless cards" would draw more players to be more creative about building and straying from meta. since effectively it would reduce the volume of both info and possibilities, getting strait to the meat and potatoes.
Boosters don't make sense with how anyone plays anymore. I don't get cards in boosters and trade them with other people. That's not how people acquire cards anymore. They buy singles. If you want a certain thing it's cheaper and less burdensome to just do that. And they already decided the common and uncommon slots are for draft shaft. So you are paying $4 for a single random card.
Yep, EXACTLY. Which is why for years, I've always been willing, without question, to drop $20 on a playset of R/M that I need. I get the specific cards that I want, without the crap that I'll likely never use. The only issue is that now with Mythics being powercrept to absurdity, we've got new cards that remain in the $50+ for a single card on a regular basis and for a long time. I've personally moved on to Lorcana for cracking packs and playing a new and exciting game.
@@LothreanI wouldn't say all along as the idea started as something extremely social. But yeah, boosters outside of limited turned out to be toxic af.
I think it's funny that we talk about metas becoming solved and stagnant, when the most popular meta is Commander. Commander is functionally infinite metas, thanks to rule Zero. This also applies to Kitchen Table magic, which is the real most popular format. And despite EDHrec, a big part of these formats is building your own personalized deck, not net-decking.
the fact that local metas / mini formats exist and are limited by player agreements or available cards does not mean the global format’s meta is any less solved.
There's an important difference between a meta being too complex to ever be solved and using rules changes, via rule zero, to create entirely new metas to be solved. The existence of one does not negate the other.
This seems to be how Wizards has solved the churn issue. I think around 5 years ago around the time Secret Lair launched they had finally realised that Commander was the true cash cow and really started pushing Commander designs through Standard. I’m sure Wizards knows now that 2-player Magic is always going to be a victim of its own success; the more games get played, the faster the meta reaches a steady-state and people feel that it’s stagnated. There really is no way around this in the post-Arena internet world.
@iwansmith1348 EDH was never the problem. Commander has its own product line that is neither Standard nor Modern legal. It was when WotC made their corporate knock-off, BRAWL, that hurt other formats. EDH gets a lot of hate that it doesn't deserve because nobody even knows that BRAWL was supposed to be a thing.
We're wanting to avoid boosters in our game (and go more LCG style) so this question has been one to keep me up at night. This is where I think Unmatched has done wonders as it has enough variance and strategy to it that, a bit like chess, the meta is never quite "solved" and the release of new fighters and formats do keep things from getting too stale. Also the "alliance" Keyforge format is not player driven, but was an official format created by the new owners of Keyforge.
Yeaaah… I hear ya. This really is the number one issue to workout and likely the biggest issue in TCGs, especially for small teams that can’t put a set out once a month. Oh interesting! Seems strange for the developers to undermine the signature system in keyforge haha.
LCGs have just as many flaws as TCGs, they're just different. LCGs can't play draft well, and underpowered cards that would normally work well in draft are just instantly ignored in fixed packs because there is something clearly better. There is no secondary market, so cards are basically worthless as soon as you open the pack. Coming in late to an LCG is a huge buy in for players with no secondary market available for most singles. This also means huge sku bloat for retailers and a larger amount of shelf space required.
@@Dstinct no secondary market is not a flaw? do you complain you can’t sell your catan pieces for profit? if you just want to speculate open a trading account. secondary market is a huge pain in the ass for everyone else.
1. Metagames are inherently dynamic, and rarely truly "solved". In Yugioh, some retro formats are named after what's now considered to be maybe the third best deck in that format, because the meta has continued to develop. 2. Having limited access to cards changes how you interact with those cards. A limited environment is different to a constructed one. In limited you have to make the most of the cards available to you, and you know your opponents are in the same boat. 3. The dynamism of a metagame is more apparent in limited environment, what colours are open in your pod, and what strategies are available to you, is something you have to learn to read and respond to 4. In a constructed environment, the barrier to trying new things is price. A deck that's competitive or otherwise interesting can simply be to expensive for you 5. Boredom, if you can't afford a deck that wins, or perhaps you can only afford one deck, how long will you keep playing? 6. Fatigue, if mtg has a set every month you absolutely can miss an entire set by accident. These days a new set arrives and we're already getting spoilers for two others. The marketing is trying for a state of perpetual hype for the next thing, it kinda becomes harder to enjoy the present (or indeed enjoy what we had a month ago) I honestly feel like fewer products with greater accessibility would reduce magic's churn. If you can feasibly build any deck, then you've always got something new to try without it being forced upon you. Old metagames see new developments when ppl have free access to the cards, and people can actually afford to experiment. If you're not priced out of competing, you have more incentive to learn both the strategy and tactics. If you don't want to compete, having cards means you can brew more jank. Obviously it's a business, we can't just all get all the cards for free all the time, and building a collection is a joy in itself, but id argue a more accessible game is more fun
Great points. I agree that when a meta is “solved” it’s probably not actually solved. This issue is player perception. There’s a fervor to solve a new meta and once things are established fewer and fewer players care to disrupt it. As for limited, it does remain interesting longer, but draft by numbers becomes pretty easy with access to data from sites like 17 lands. I think the best thing about limited is that it fixes the accessibility problem like you mentioned.
Not sold that variance is a strong method of reducing churn. The real mechanism is increased complexity. In the example of Snap - while the locations provide variance, its the increased complexity of interactions with your characters that can give off-meta decks an edge. If you had a pure variance adding system that gave a random player +1-3 points, the impact on churn would be zero as the best deck is still wins the most. The answer for keeping the meta unsolved longer is to add more complex tactics. This allows good players to find edges with less commonly played decks. The best example here is chess - no variance, highly complex, 100s of years of unsolved meta.
What you’re missing is that variance increases the number of games that need to be played until you reach consensus. Yes, eventually, the best players and cards will end up on top, but the time it takes to get there is what’s important.
@@distractionmakers I don't think the #s here will back this up. If all we are saying is that its a problem with sample size, the number of games played on digital platforms would require incredible variance to obscure which deck is best in statistical variance. Modern clients are extremely good at building sample size for low-complexity environments.
@@waglz I agree with you that a larger possibility space would require more games to reach consensus, but I think we disagree on how to get that larger space. Random chance will disrupt results, but over time the better players will still receive some gain from their skill, just less so. You're decreasing the delta of the returns from skill. If you only increase complexity you're hurting the ability of novice players to play against more skilled opponents. Richard Garfield has a great section on this in Characteristics of Games. I think the real goal should be to increase the possibility space with all tools available without alienating novice players. We have to look at both sides of churn rate. Incoming players and exiting players. If you focus solely on retention you've got a leaky bucket without any new water coming in.
I would argue that for the player base that engages with the game's broader community, in the present day, boosters have no effect on the rate the meta is solved, and actually increase player frustration for this player base. Because the players invested enough to solve the meta and share that information, will always have the resources and access to cards. So the top players solve the meta, and then players that want to play with decks that are meta, will see that the best decks cost upwards of $300 and are out of reach. And when the solution to this is to increase release frequency, that means that the 300+ dollar deck may have expensive cards that lose their value in a few months and need to be replaced, or a whole new deck needs to be built. This is a huge tangent, but I think it's the biggest barrier to entry to mtg for competitive players. I and several others I know are really competitive with gaming and love card games, but outside of draft, in order to play competitively I'd need to invest a large amount of money upfront just to get in the door. Where as something like LoL or Rocket League or Overwatch, if the players goal is to play competitively, they can just buy the game or a few characters and feel "competitive" even though they are a new player and are objectively bad. Then as they become more invested in the game they probably become more open to making larger investments buying more characters, or cosmetics, or tournament entry (like drafts or opens).
I'm sure Garfield initially wanted decks to have surprises for other Players (his ideal for an "infinitwly unknown" CCG). When Star Wars Unlimited came out, people claimed that the META was Solved with the AGGRO Savin deck within a week!! Set 2 is almost upon us, and ideas are still coming out! With Tournaments still showing different builds with all colors and leaders. Though, its probably the strong design of that first set. While Pay2Win is tied to it, I do think that a limiter is good for the game (money > getting the cards). Randomizing what you get as well (booster). I don't think I've ever seen a proposed system can fix this. The upcoming Altered TCG is going to be interesting.
In much the same way that Keyforge solves the churn problem with its fully randomized decks but in doing so removes deck construction and personalization, digital distribution can solve the problem, but in doing so removes the collectibility aspect of the game. Sure, some digital cards can still be harder to obtain than others, but that’s not the same thing as having a game whose pieces are literal collectors’ items. Also, maybe this is “boomer” of me, but the tactility of physical cards is an important aspect of my enjoyment of the game. Shuffling the cards, holding them in my hands, flipping through trade binders, those things create a visceral experience that a digital game just can’t reproduce. Moreover, the value of the FLGS as a “third space” can’t be overstated. I wouldn’t still be playing Magic weekly if it wasn’t for the social aspect of going to the game store, seeing my fellow regulars there, exchanging banter with them during the game, chatting between rounds, etc.
Love the channel and the cat! Availability of information is what it is and Magic players just need to live with it. Boosters don't work now beause of the market for singles and availability of information(solving the meta). MtG is an expensive hobby depending on the format/level you want to play at. For Commander and Standard to start you can buy Precons and soup them up for comparatively reasonable amounts, Modern, Vintage and Legacy are expensive due to the volume of cards that are legal. If you want to compete in a Pro Tour you have to spend/research, that's the price of entry. I play mainly on Arena, when a new set drops 1-2 weeks in I look up a few decks, find one I think I like/understand, have cards for and play a bit with it, sub in some things if I don't have the wildcards. I adapted to being a f2p player, I'm not fussing about you guys that have the $$ to spend on your hobby. Winning or losing it's whatever as long as I'm having fun. Short to meduim length games and decent back and forth is fun, not some dude spinning his wheels for 20 minutes. Yes I play mostly agro or creature decks, although mill is sometimes stupid fun. MtG is a paper product but Arena is digital learn what the do's and don'ts are in a digital space from Hearthstone (like how they fixed Shudderwock and Yogg) and Marvel Snap, hire Ben Brode as a consultant I hear he's good at these things. I like the tier system in Marvel Snap, it moves from simple and janky, to streamlined and possibly still janky depending on drops/locations, but importantly at some point in tiering up the player learns deckbuilding and how the deck should play out.
I think the question is more about how you control churn in 60 card competitive formats and in the age of the internet... I just don't know. Now I know you two aren't crazy about commander but by being a casual, eternal, singleton format I feel like it does a better job of answering the churn question because it is almost unsolvable and the card pool is so huge and constantly expanding that the experience stays very fresh. Regarding Warhammer, as an ex player I can tell you that the current model of constant rules and point changes is beyond infuriating when it is tied to a game that requires dozens of hours of work any time you have to change your list due to assembly and painting. At this point in my life I have much more extra income than free time so I just can't play a game that disrespects my time in that manner. Which is unfortunate since I think the core game experience is pretty awesome.
At what point do you just stop trying to control churn? Video games have the same issue where there's a small very dedicated portion of the community that chews through all the content as fast as possible then will ask "well, is there more?", and I genuinely believe that it can be harmful to cater to those people. Don't get me wrong, dedication should be rewarded, but not by cranking out more and more just for the sake of filling what's essentially a bottomless stomach.
@@PhoenicopterusR well I do think we've absolutely hit the point of "too much content". I can't even keep up with everything that comes out and I am a long time player who still plays regularly. And yet many formats get solved extremely fast anyhow. But I am sympathetic to the questions posed by the video. If there isn't some change to the game you're going to lose players and it'll be a small hardcore stagnant playbase pretty quickly. For the video game equivalent, see any fighting game that isn't actively supported.
We’ll have to do an episode on it, but essentially they gated the collection process into tiers with a best deck at the top of each tier. The issue is that it splits the player base at each tier.
In Marvel Snap, cards are sorted into a number of discrete "Tiers." Whenever you earn a card drop, you are given a random card you don't own from the lowest possible Tier. So, as you first start playing you'll earn exclusively Tier 1 cards in a random order until you collect them all, at which point the game will start giving you Tier 2 cards in a random order, and so on and so forth. Generally, the game will also try to matchmake you against opponents within the same Tier. The idea is that this creates multiple "formats" that a player shifts through naturally as they progress. There are certain decks that are good specifically within the context of Tier 1 or Tier 2, so you're encouraged to switch up decks as you progress through the Tiers. It's a unique way of creating the kind of "churn" associated with new card pack releases. What makes it cringey is that balance and card design in Marvel Snap is very... questionable. Sure, you have 4 or 5 different formats, but if they're all unbalanced solved-out formats then the experience still isn't fun. Moving to the next Tier feels miserable because the only people still playing in the higher Tiers are the people who were lucky enough to pull the format-definining meta threats early into that Tier. It's hard to express how awful it feels to promote to the next Tier and be forced to grind a week of unwinnable matches against opponents who are using busted cards you have never had any possibility of obtaining.
Booster packs are a form of progression now. It’s to make the experience satisfying and fun. They don’t do anything to control the meta anymore for sure
The trouble with solving meta cycles or anything with slower/pricier card acquisition is that even if it improves the variety of decks you play against, you will be stuck unable to try too many new things yourself. I think there's an argument to be made that especially for example magic arena is in a worst of both worlds situation where players can easily copy the perceived best deck very quickly and easily, but unless they pay money probably won't have enough cards to build more than that one deck. It's hard to try new decks and iterate on your deck when card acquisition is an issue, which is maybe the single thing that bothers me the most about most card games as someone who really enjoys deckbuilding and trying stuff. I think a much more worthwhile point to attack for this issue is rotation. If we rotate cards (especially cards out) far more often, the game will be fresh more. For example if cards go in and out every month (in smaller quantities than a magic set of course), there would likely be a pretty consistent cycle of trying things week 1, people mostly catching on in week 2, and the last couple weeks being more stable possibly with people coming up with random new things still. That would be a pretty even distribution if you ask me, but I think it's also worth asking if people even want an unstable meta all the time. Also I think it's worth noting that magic has kind of solved this churn problem to the greatest extent by just having many formats for people to switch between, something that is also made more difficult by cards costing a lot of money. Imo magic's biggest strength is the huge variety of formats that are always available when you get bored of one. I think the main utility of booster packs at this point (beyond making a bunch of money) is creating a secondary market where players are able to buy singles if they want. The living card games have problems with new player buy in because they lack this (also lack dedicated pre con decks that are actually good/meta, which is possibly the best way for players to buy in and play in fnm or equivalent if you ask me). I think it's somewhat worrying (for booster pack haters such as myself) that the only game to actually go the distance in recent years seems to have been flesh and blood, which uses booster packs and has extremely expensive decks/cards. Most of the games to attempt alternative distribution models don't seem to have made it very far, but maybe I am just unaware of those that have. Currently my best guess for what would be the best way to do paper distribution is to not have card rarity (could still have stuff like foil/alternate art), use booster packs or some non randomized equivalent, and also sell full sets of cards & pre cons. Having some mechanism to price cap cards would be ideal, although selling singles directly cuts out local game stores which could be a pretty big problem. Online idk just let people pay a subscription to have all the cards, this is a proven business model for games with constant expansion releases outside of card games. I think the only reason people accept the current card game distribution models is because it's how the games have always been (since mtg in the 90s) and the core audience for them is willing to just deal with it, and everyone else DOES avoid it.
@@distractionmakers Interesting, didn't know keyforge did well. Imo though keyforge is even worse for players as a business model than magic & similar. Personally for limited, I think cube and generally reusable draft environments are the way to go at least as a player (+ I like constructed too).
Loot boxes probably came from Studying gambling (and addiction) Gachas (which likely came from TCGs which were massive in Japan) Loot games like Diablo with randomized drops
Given modern magic, is there even a way to play that doesn't involve dumping 100 or more dollars to make a deck? There's got to be a cheap nerd hobby to get into, relatively speaking. I used to play 40k, and usually stick to tabletop wargames, so I know how it feels to put down half a grand to get a playable, competitive anything up and running.
I am guessing it was the sports card collection market that did it first. Also the secondary market is a stability. Since you can just buy the singles you need to play. How many gotcha games offer the top drops for like $20?
Is part of the problem of metas self-consistency? By having cards and mechanics that rely more on situations and what your opponent is doing, it's harder to make a meta, right?
I really think stopping spoilers is probably the answer to this meta extension. No more theory crafting till everybody can actually hold the cards in their hands.
Standard cycle to 2 years again. Then drop the price of boosters a bit so it doesnt burn so much when your cards cycle out. And reprint more of the pricey cards so wizards can swing to more booster purchases.
Two year Standard is awful. Its part of why the game became so stale. 3 year Standard looks great. I might actually bother to play Standard again. Well, if any card game near enough to me didn't do anything but fucking Commander.
Yup! I think they were experimenting with how small of a set would keep players interested. Turns out aftermath was too small haha. It’s a bit of a bummer because the smaller a set could be, theoretically, the more time they would have for design.
@@distractionmakers That is why I suggested they copy Vanguard’s Festival Collection model and fill the rest of the set with necessary reprints so the set doesn’t feel so empty.
I think the biggest issue is wizards went all in on commander and dropping revenue shows they need to re-emphasize standard. Once you get your commander decks, some people go on and on brewing (me), but many people stop after a few precons and assembled decks. But assembled decks are usually built from single sales which doesn't help wizards. They need to revive standard with the block system and boosters that are just a bit cheaper to increase pack sales. It will drive revenue.
@@FurrySpatula Add a common slot to the current packs and replace the foil curls with the normal cards, drop per-pack price to $4.50 (actual MSRP!) and move to 5 sets per year, 2x 2 set blocks and a fifth slot that has a Core Set in August every few years (when the previous Core rotates) and can accommodate the Remastered/Masters/Box Set for each year the other years. Also, reinstate Extended (at this point on a 6 year rotation). The Block Sets get Standard and Extended preconstructed decks and Cores get Starter Packs (which get re-released occasionally throughout their run), other sets get varying deck types. From a card design point of view the super-powerful-bomb rare/mythic and "draft only" commons should be phased out in order to allow a flatter power curve for deck types in any given metagame. That should solve most of their set issues. The control players moaning that they are loosing to "solved-meta" aggro decks without actually putting effort into brewing has been a thing since the 90s and should be completely ignored by both players and designers.
The problem you're describing is THEORETICALLY why commander exists. Its started as a casual format built to play the big splashy unplayable cards and give them a home. Competitive types have always trashed that, though. Not to mention it being an eternal format.
I dunno if it’s the fault of competitive types. As information becomes so available and new more powerful cards are printed you can only swim upstream for so long.
I just saw a similar debate over the launch of Star Wars Unlimited. 'Ugh, why is FFG doing it via boosters instead of LCG?' etc. And it seems the answer really is in psychology. No LCG has ever really caught on, even Netrunner. A set comes out, it's bought, and then it's instantly dead and quiet. The booster enables events beyond just meta constructed to keep the game in people's minds longer between sets. Even if the meta is stale, the events or seeing boosters on the shelf, or cards in the display keeps the game feeling current and played.
100%. The only drawback I see is that eternal formats are sticky, meaning, players who transition from standard to commander or legacy tend not to go back to standard.
@@distractionmakerswhy would anyone ever go back to Standard after having so much freedom to deck build? If the entire focus of churn is variance, then guess what? Modern, perhaps more than any other format, allows for massive spikes in variance while still remaining competitive. Even with the advent of the MH sets and pushing the power of cards in the format, the sets have given access to cards that have created entire archetypes of their own. But now that the format is not really supported in paper by WotC, we have a veery homogenized format being played on MTGO. So only the most hardcore are there playing to begin with, given the cost, and the hassle to do so. Hell, I'm hardcore and I'm not separating with my money just to play an inferior version of Modern, repurchasing or renting cards that I already own. Standard COULD be amazing again, but it would require Wizards to actually design better. Blocks gave reason to push mechanics that might not ever make sense outside of that block, and that's a great thing. Sure, it might slow down the rate of new cards hitting older formats, but it would also give Standard it's own unique feel. The problem is that Hasbro is far too focused on raw profit than actually making a good game.
@@Xoulrath_ Eternal formats can be very stagnant in terms of metagames. Yeah you may see ebb and flow with top decks, but unless there is a massive banning or a new keyword that is overpowered, very little changes. You can see this with vintage, modern and legacy when you flip between top decks of the last month and the last year. the decks may change positions, but its pretty much all the same decks. Standard, on the other hand, always has new decks every couple of years due to forced rotation. Some people don't like this, but I find playing against the same decks constantly boring after a while.
The implicit assumption in this video, which I don't think is valid, is that a "solved meta" is a bad thing. It's worth asking how so many other kinds of games (RTS, fighting games, certain shooters, board games, etc) approach this issue. Modern day Magic is fairly unique in the overall gaming space in this regard. Very few other developers worry much about keeping the game "fresh" or preventing it from being "solved". Why is that? As I see it, modern Magic *has* to adopt this attitude because of more fundamental design choices that Wizards has made in recent years. From around 2012 to 2016 Standard was a pretty healthy format. Smartphones had been in our pockets for years at this point and people had access to plenty of information about the metagame. Metagames were "solved" then just as they are now. But nobody complained about it then because those metas were *healthy*. Wizards had not yet begun to push chase rares and mythics the way they do now. There were good answers to threats. Multiple archetypes were supported, even if they might "feel bad" for some players. So when the best decks were figured out you were still left with a diverse metagame where you could pick a deck and have a solid chance at winning, especially with good sideboard decisions. A decade later and there are clearly pushed chase rares that exceed $50/copy and have virtually no risk or failure modes. Strong creatures at one point had risks associated with them, setup required, or serious deckbuilding constraints (which would increase diversity as specific decks were built around those threats). If Wizards printed Hypnotic Specter, Psychatog, Tarmogoyf, and Morphling into Standard tomorrow I'm not sure how much play they'd see. Those are all time great threats, but they just don't fit the modern mold of "cost efficient threat that does something right away without requiring big deckbuilding concessions". When threats had failure modes or constraints, the decks built around them had weaknesses. Those weaknesses could be exploited by other decks, leading to a healthy metagame. The ceiling was still high, but the floor was lower. When threats don't have weaknesses, the metagame is just about finding the best combination of threats and answers to overpower what everyone else is doing. When it's solved, it's uninteresting because there's nothing you can do against the best deck. The cards in it are the best at being designed not to fail. Interestingly, Wizards started pushing this new approach to card design around late 2016 and Standard Magic began its death spiral shortly after that. Wizards later blamed the internet and Covid, but the internet was already there and the problems began well before Covid.
Well, no, solved metas have been a problem for MTG since the very beginning. It's just simply that it "managed" and "fixed" that problem. This video you're commenting on already goes over this: the metagame being solved removes half of the "game" from the "game". Just because the recent metas have been worse, due to being unhealthy, doesn't mean that this hasn't always been an issue. Since the beginning, Standard always had rotation and new cards being added, in order to "fix" this "problem". A big contributor to the "solved metagame" issue in recent years can be traced back to a source that has only existed in recent years: Arena. Back when you actually had to go somewhere and meet people in order to play, it took a lot longer to get bored with the "meta" I'm not saying that what you're saying isn't also true, but it doesn't complete the "whole picture."
@@Deviknyte There are a LOT of factors that differentiate them... not least of which is that booster packs allow you to trade the stuff you got that wasn't what you were after with other people in order to get what you actually wanted, Loot boxes actively prevent this. Loot boxes are also almost universally rigged in ways that aim to actively and maliciously exploit the player, while tcg boosters (well, MTG's Draft boosters, at least) are rigged, in so far as they're riggerd at all, mostly in ways that make things Better for the players. Now, the more recent 'set' boosters, and the way other TCGs have handled their boosters (cost more per pack, less cards per pack, more grades of rarity which appear in one in every X packs with X being ever increasing numbers, etc.) are all significatn steps DOWN (and usually closer to loot boxes) in comparison to MTG draft boosters. Loot boxes exist to allow video game companies to gain all the benefits of running casino slot machines (from their POV, Additiction is a Positive) without having to follow any of the regulations (because they never 'pay out'... which actually makes things Worse). TCG booster packs? They have few or none of the elements that facilitate this.
Interest video. I enjoyed a lot of your points and really enjoyed the way you guys dissected this issue. I’d say check out Flawed TCG for a really fresh answer to this question. The concept of a codex and customizable units, brought to a TCG in a way.
Similar to the codex idea, I wonder if there is design-space to be used in a handicap mechanic, similar the KeyForge chains. Just off the top of my head: * Every card in a meta gets a win-rate value. * As a card wins more, its win-rate goes up. As a card wins less, its win-rate goes down. * Your starting life is adjusted based on the win-rate of your opponent's deck. This system encourages people to try to build and win in ways that are different from their opponents. Because the better your deck does, the harder it gets for an opponent to win with it. It would work well on a digital platform, but could also work in a physical system so long as decks and winrates could be tracked, which already happens for any official events.
A game that tends to get “solvable” is fundamentally flawed in gamedesign, because that means the game is more a set of rules than it is an actual game of decision-making. If the rules weight more than the players decisions the game is fundamentally bad.
@@shadogiant i dont think you understand what solvable means in this context. It means that there is a clear correct path to victory that beats every other possible path. In a case like this it is no longer a game, because every decision is set in stone, there is no interaction and no reason to play the game. Many games exist only as long as they aren't solved - for some that means a long life and for others it is short. Good games aren't solvable at all or only solvable in a timeframe greater than the existance of the universe.
Let's see if I got everything. -Variance in the game reduces churn. -Changing the codex refreshes the meta without changing the game pieces. Solution : Every format now has planechase decks. The planechase cards rotate regularly and are imposed by format. Rule 0 and kitchen table allow any planechase plane in casual. cEDH has its own mandated planechase deck.
Maybe there's a law against it? Can't gamble if you don't know the odds and content. Also, makes Limited formats harder to play (taking longer reading all the cards) and enjoy (someone that has drafted 10 times and you haven't).
So you dont know if theres anything good in the set? No one i know would ever just trust wizards to print quality stuff, especially for non-standard players. Every cardgame reveals the entire set because no one wants to be the sacrificial lamb
@@midnalight6419 yeah obviously that information would accumulate eventually but I think moving the information out of spoilers and into packs makes the value proposition of packs better for me. at least for a few weeks. If I see the entire set listed before it even drops I feel like that pushes me personally into avoiding packs and just ordering the singles i want.
To me, the only formats in MtG worth playing are draft, pauper, and legacy specifically due to their metas (or lack thereof for draft). The first is an exercise in deck building and is the game as i believe it was originally intended: play with what you get. Pauper and Legacy are the two eternal formats that are never solved. Pauper is low power, but with few good answers to threats; that makes games compelling. Plus, it's cheap. Legacy is high power with proper answers to threats and FTKs. Standard and EDH are unbearable because they are designed for the casual crowd, where people would rather complain and demand bans than actually figure out how to beat something. Anytime I'm in a queue for Bo3 Standard (because Bo1 promotes surprise strategies that immediately lose to sideboarding), the wait is significantly longer than Bo1. It's fine and good to have causal formats, but when they dominate the game as a whole, everything else goes downhill.
check out gatcha/gacha games. Basically the same thing (though usually less malicious), and I THINK they were around first. THe name is derived from a sort of vending machine where you'd put your money in, turn the handle that jumbled the plastic spheres inside around and dropped one down the shoot at random. You'd then open the sphere and whatever was inside was what you got. Usually designed so you could see what was still in the machine.
A explorable space, is to do like online games do it, with "seasons". "In 2025, all soldiers cost 1 less to cast, instants have cantrip and all defenders have annihilator"
The early bit about alpha did not mention Ante as an intrinsic game mechanic. You were each supposed to set a random card aside as ante. The winner got all ante’d cards. The goal: a way to force deck changes over time, and balance. The most powerful deck would have most to lose. Turns out people really don’t like losing their cards, so it was dropped pretty quickly.
I don't like other people touching my cards because they handle them so roughly. I definitely wasn't on board with ante back in 97. 😂
Thankfully it had been removed from the game by then. I thought that the concept was interesting, as it's almost similar to an entry fee at a tournament, and it appeased my competitive nature. The issue of course was that it was random, it could be made to be more than one card, and it kind of became it's own game within a game. I played around with it a bit with cheap cards and friends, so I know that it added some intensity to each game that it was used in. So I'd have loved to see it implemented in some other way. But yeah, losing a $100 Sheoldred because it was the random ante card, and getting beaten by an out of nowhere infinite combo (which I despise to this day) would definitely not sit well with me.
Didn't play with antes but I imagine it introduces this thing where deciding who and if you will play is part of the game. You can't just say to a new guy or your friend," Hey want to play". If it's a bad match up why play? If you have something to lose and they just have a pile of crap why play?
We had an "Ante League" in Mirage... IIRIC the rules were that it was sealed to being with - a starter deck and some booster and you could not put cards outside of what you opened in your deck - the opened cards were listed.. You would ante 2 cards - one from the deck and one from the outside of the deck.. The winner would get the ante'd cards - but give 2 cards of his/her choice back to the loser - so the amount of cards in the pool would stay constant.. I think it worked OK tho we maybe did not get that much play as we would have liked but there were people playing that at least for a few games... It was not one sitting tournament but a continuing league - the won and returned cards would be listed..
The same system could be implemented as "shadow sealed" event in digital format and I think it would work just fine getting around problems with possible semi cheating like deliberately playing with an opponent you want to kind of arrange trades with -- though it could be thought of as "a feature not a bug" -- it was not that serious - no big prizes or entry fees beyond the cost of the starting cards in pool and you could just not play if/when you did not wan't to risk if you opened something you really want for a constructed outside - and I suppose if you're spending for competitive tournaments you could get the cards from elsewhere or bribe the opponent to give you back the card you lost tho that would be kind of against the spirit of the rules of Ante league which was intended to be kind of equal between players and not pay to win.. But a digitized event in something like the Arena would not have such issues at all - especially if it was "shadow" where you would not keep the cards anyway so there would not be an incentive to resign to not riksing losing some cards you'd really like to keep.
One prob of Ante i of course that if player A and player B play ante and don't trade the cards back their deck going to get weaker on average and the one losing is getting their collection weakened while the one that keeps winning is perhaps getting slight boost so there's kind of a disincentive to play for ante at all.. I think we did play almost no ante games outside the league back then -- even tho there ere cards that were specifically for ante.
@@NotRegret but the strong deck should win right... except there's another flaw, the land mecanic is problematic, so you'll have a 20% chance of just getting screw by mana screw/mana flood. the best strategy would definitly to play a bunch of crap, but very aggro to punish player who get mana screw and take their good card once in a while giving garbage the rest of the time
@@gizel4376 The type of sharking you are talking about, which does sound like a sound strategy, sounds like it makes for a very hostile atmosphere. An ante league that lasts for only a few days might work but if it goes on indefinitely that hostility is going to really hurt the game culture. People looking for prey, waiting until they are vulnerable, all of that becomes part of the culture.
Something that I think leads to this perception of a stagnant meta is how ranked ladders work for most games. In a ranked ladder like MTGA or Hearthstone, there's a high cost to experimentation: you'll lose a lot of rank, and undo the progress you've made on the ladder. People are incentivized to use what's been proven to work if they want to gain rank, and it becomes a feedback loop of people using only proven decks, thus further proving to everybody that the same few decks are all that's viable.
Old tournament circuits used to handle this really well, in that you were often encouraged to angle shoot what you thought the best meta was going to be based on what was likely to be popular/available. And having multiple decks with different matchups in a loose "rochambeau" of Aggro beats control beats midrange beats aggro meant that there was metagaming even once the metagame was "solved".
And the nature of sets coming out every 3 months meant that there was actually time to dig deep on these metagames in a way I think was really interesting. But they got rid of that to push more product, which I think will long-term kill the game because people can't keep up.
@@dhalden93 This is excatly how I used to play competitive tcgs in person. I knew the top players in my local region and what they would bring, so it was realistic for me to brew new decks that targeted the local meta and just rely on skill to outplay matchups that would less favorable but played by less people and of people that were lower skill since they weren't "meta".
21:25 "she's never done this; why is she doing this now?" She is obviously interested in a serious discussion of how to keep "the meta" fresh in CCG's. Kudos on following sound editing advice re: cats in the shot.
Coming from a fighting game perspective, we have kind of the opposite approach. Balance patches occur in yearly intervals to give the game time to breathe, let players figure out whether the top tiers are what they're cracked up to be, and make the right changes. As opposed to trying to patch all the time to induce churn in the meta game.
Also fighting game characters tend to be built in such a way that players steadily master them and figure out more about them, which is how there are meta shakeups in 20 year old games.
That’s is interesting to hear! The legacy formats of Magic work this way where you get players who specialize in one type of deck and master it. Those decks receive a card or two maybe once a year. I wonder how a fighting game with more meta changes would fair 🤔 it would probably be more welcoming to novice players.
@@distractionmakers More frequent changes lower the skill levels of players you may face, but it also lowers your own level. If you play standard for a couple months every year or two, you have to learn a lot more than the one or two cards your legacy deck got.
As a fighting game novice, I like knowing my foundations haven't become outdated, so I can learn more about the parts of the game that everyone talks about. Win or lose mostly depends on who I'm playing.
I think that's a matter of taste: Many fighting games cater to players who like the novelty found over months. It sounds like MTG is catering to players who feel done with the new content in a few weeks. They've either perfected all the lines or they don't care about minor optimization. Either way, they'd rather play a new deck than a new game, because they're content with their system level skills.
@@distractionmakers It would likely be rejected outright by a large swath of players. It's just too contrary to what attracts people to fighting games. Fighting game players don't perceive patches as a means to shake up the meta. They see them as efforts to find the game's ideal form, where once the meta is widely understood, the game becomes a seamless interface for competition between two human beings. As far as players are concerned, a "stagnant" meta is completely fine, desirable even, as long as they enjoy the strategies that rise to the top. This is why so many 20+ year old games have active scenes. "Patch culture" discourse in the fgc is entirely centered around this topic.
You eliminate player churn by not treating your customers like a money printing machine, you make the game fun to play in both casual and competitive, you make product fun to open.
So:
1. Stop releasing so many products
2. Spend more time playtesting and creating sets
3. Stop printing collector boosters, put those back into play boosters so they can have a "big hit" and bring some value back to foils
I think not being able to access all the cards is a fundamental feels bad for competitive games. The only thing worse to losing to the meta is losing to a meta you can't even opt into.
Yeah back in dragons of tarkir the standard decks at the time were nearing 4 digits. Impossible to justify joining standard at the time, it was like bringing a draft deck to a modern tournament.
I'd also say, the whole issue with meta and churn is very prevalent in board games right now. A decade ago you could pick a game on BGG and there would be pages and pages of strategy forum discussions by people who have played the game 100+ times. Now you can go to the strategy forum for the hottest, fastest selling games and there's like 2-3 posts like "I played this twice, red hero's ability is OP, this game is solved and done." And then ppl move to the next game. Is red OP? Maybe, but you don't know that from 2 games. The perception of stale meta combined with tons of choice means there is little push to try to shake up a "solved" meta for a game. TCGs at least have prize events with incentive to think outside the meta, but other games don't.
The normal booster pack was the watering hole that every magic player had to come to.
Now that the game is divided into so many specialty sub products, magic has lost it’s appeal to me.
Buying singles took care of that before then. Bulk sellers open box after box of boosters, and you get exactly the card you want.
Netrunner had randomized booster packs. The Fantasy Flight remake of the game is Android: Netrunner. That is the game that used the living card game model. They were non-randomized expansions.
They were terrible and most stores didn't order beyond the first release when they realized they were collecting dust on the shelves.
@@DstinctI guess you mean the randomized boosters were terrible.
The game is most certainly not. 😂
I am a card game designer, and my interest is mainly draft. I imagine having each set as a cube, and encouraging cube home brews to be the focus. Constructed is possible, but not the focus.
very cool, I have the same idea for the game Im working on
one sad thing about boosters that goes to actually quickening churn is the concept of a chase card. the studio is incentivised to print cards that are just a noch above the rest to sell more boosters. these cards then become the obvious focal point of the next meta decks, with little exploration required since their stats are just straight up better.
i think pokemon moved into a good direction with this by making alternate arts the chase cards. but they still print a lot of bulk.
i imagine if they pushed the numbers on the bulk a bit, there would be potentially tons of viable decks. but since they insist on printing one card with 330hp and 200 damage and then another with less hp that pays more energy to do less damage they needlessly pidgeonhole the meta to focus on the obviously superior cards.
Flesh and Blood's Living Legend system does a pretty interesting job with churn, at least now after some recent tweaking. When Lexi and Iyslander rotated out 2 months before HVY, the meta became incredibly wide and unsolved. Heroes rotating mid-season along with the armory deck precon serving as a mini set, we had a ProQuest season where Week 1 was different than Week 2-3 was different from Week 4/rest of month. Culling cards is important, and if you're going to do that, why not use it in a way to maintain interest in the game by letting non-meta strategies get a second appraisal before another set butts its head in.
While MtG's set rotation could have a similar shaking up effect, the fact it's timed with a set release kind of nullifies its individual impact.
I've been playing since Ice Age competitive and casually, both sealed and constructed. The reasons my friends and I have switched to EDH exclusively and buying singles are too much product too fast and it's too expensive to draft and keep up with the various metas. We would much rather build our EDH decks that we can keep 90% the same for months or years and still be fun and viable with minimal changes.
Id be curious to see WOTC try experimenting with non booster sets. I Have to imagine they sell so much through commander precons that having something like a 300 card cube or Wizard Tower style box with 1x of every card (or maybe 2x of everything common) would be interesting to see. I know Conspiracy exists but those cards are mostly unusable outside of a draft environment. IDK. I can imagine a Universes Beyond set being released as like a big $200 LCG experiment set vs 4x commander precons
A precon cube, so what Double Feature should have been?
I am always chasing the dragon of playing card games as a kid/teen. Back when the only way to expand my collection was to top an event or get a few packs on a holiday.
I went to every FNM ans prerelease because I wasnt going to miss a chance at booster packs and trading, the main ways I acquired cards I wanted.
All you have to do is only buy packs on holidays
@mujigant35 a self-imposed restriction doesn't feel the same as a restriction of your environment
The point about strategy vs. tactics is what made me quit Yugioh. When Ishizu Tearlaments was the undisputed only deck of the format for four months. I no longer felt like my favorite part of the game (deckbuilding) was supported even though talking heads were, and still are, raving about how amazing the format was because only good players were winning and the board states were extremely complicated to the point that if you weren't popping adderall you weren't competing. Konami knew this would happen since it had happened in Japan, let it happen here, and then let it happen again recently with Snake-Eyes. Then they banned cards around Snake-Eyes which removed even more unviable untiered strategies that weren't competing from the pool of stuff to build with. And then I gave up. My desire to play died and so did my locals scene.
That is what, in my opinion, hearthstone is doing much better nowadays.
The cycle from 2014-2019 was expansion, 2 months later maybe balance changes, 2 months later expansion.
The cycle now is big set, 1 month later big balance changes (maybe 1 smaller one in the middle), 1 month later mini set, 1 month later big balance changes, 1 month later big set again.
Being 100% digital helps a ton. You can get an extended lifecycle with patches.
I was hoping you'd mention keyforge.
In a competitive 1v1 card game, identity through deck building is largely a myth anymore. You mentioned how the meta gets solved by consensus. If you aren't part of that consensus or acknowledging it though gameplay, then you aren't competing. 99% of players arenrt deck building. They're meta decking and changing a card.
Because keyforge decks are unique, the identity comes through in the selection of the deck for competition. There are still meta consensus, but often it's cards or combos and there's enough to go around really. And more things do get explored due to the nature of the game.
My KF identity is closely tied to Gasoline Maximiliano for example, and the styles that go with it.
Anecdotally, I was having somewhat of an identity crisis in legacy, and what deck I would want to build. Bouncing from deck to deck. Keyforge helped me sort out what type of player I am. In that sense I can express identity by choosing an already solved meta deck. And keeping up with the meta changes around it. I still wouldn't call it deck building though.
I think games like magic would benefit greatly from keyforges distribution model, and I'm more surprised that hasn't been adopted yet.
It would be easy to make a format of "one jumpstart style 40 card deck" standard, and then let edh be the expression format.
I always wait to see if Keyforge will get mentioned. I don't play it competitively, but I know there's a decent variety of representation in the competitive scene (houses, sets, players). It makes casual a blast (you get the feeling of a draft, where all of your parts make a unique/interesting whole you probably wouldn't put together on your own). I've also found a lot of identity in the houses I play well with (or that my brother-in-law plays well with). He's out there to stomp my Logos shenanigans before I get them online, and I'm desperate to protect my aember from his Shadows. Even if it doesn't allow deck construction (and I love me some construction), it's a good time.
I think the Keyforge format you referred to was Alliance, which imo strikes the perfect balance between what the game was intended to be while still allowing some customization/optimization. In essence, you combine 3 House pods from up to 3 different decks, but you have to take the *whole* pod. This means you still have to tangle with suboptimal deck compositions, but you can choose to combine ones based on synergy or shoring each other's weaknesses.
Also, Flesh and Blood has their Living Legend status (in addition to a traditional banlist), which means that you *can't* play the same hero forever; they will eventually be retired, but stronger heroes will be retired faster.
One major problem with Magic's solution of "release more product", is that more product costs more money, effectively raising the cost of keeping up with the game. So while players with deeper pockets will engage for longer due to the improved churn rate, you'll also be preventing poorer players from playing in the first place which is like the highest churn rate possible?
Living Legend is a horrible system. 😂
I think Pokemon handles this pretty well, and I mean VGC not the card game.
A team is only 6 mons and each one is a specific bundle of stats and move but there are endless knobs you can turn to customize their gameplay. So the sheer number of permutations makes a meta easy to grasp but hard to solve, and there's a constant ebb and flow of rock-paper-scissors counters.
Also the Pokemon company has a very hand-off approach to balance, which means that's it's on the players to figure out ways to beat or adapt to top meta threats. I think too often digital card games rely on patches to change the meta rather than wait for the players to become creative and that's a shame.
The thing that is interesting about patch balancing is that it prompts the player to come back to the game. If you’re hands off there is no signal that things have changed. You would only know if you’re a dedicated player.
@@distractionmakers true but you can also alienate casual players by changing things constantly. I think a major problem with games like Marvel Snap that aims to shift the meta every week (realisticaly it's closer to every month) is that a lot of what players learn can become obsolete over a few cycles.
If Keyforge gave you more than the minimum amount, say six more cards, and you cut down to your deck size, you’d have a sideboard and a little more sense of ownership over the deck without fundamentally changing the approach.
That’s an interesting idea!
That's kinda similar almost to what Altered is attempting, except it tackles it from the opposite side.
Instead of starting with "Keyforge" and adding in some MTG-like deckbuilding, it starts with "MTG" and adds in some Keyforge-like algorithmic randomness.
You can read more about it, elsewhere, but I also wrote a comment explaining how it does this in this comment section, which shouldn't be too hard to find if you sort by New.
This would be a ton of fun. I hope GG tries something like this!
Cat showed up, I've never felt more loyal to this channel before. Truly a blessed video!
The first few months of Legend of Runeterra's beta did limit the amount of cards everybody could acquire: you could only use money to buy a set limit of wildcards per week, and every other way of earning cards was time gated in some way. It was a blast to play, a period of constant calculating how to both use the cards you had randomly unlocked alongside the few wildcards you could buy each week, it was probably the most fun I ever had in a TCG, but it only lasted a little while. Eventually, Riot realized the system wasn't sustainable, new players could never catch up, and when the first set came out it became obvious that players that had been saving up ingame currency would simply be able to buy the whole set, while newer players couldn't.
That is interesting!
This whole episode keeps making me think of the upcoming Altered TCG, and how a large part of that game's design is meant to tackle this specific issue, since, as we've seen, the way MTG does it just doesn't really work anymore in the Information Age. (also, the way they tackle this issue is also used for tackling a couple other issues, too, but that's not important for this comment.)
So, how Altered does it is that it uses boosters to distribute the cards, the same as MTG, but the actual cards themselves, and the rules of the game, are where the changes can be found.
I'll split this up into "steps", since I think that is a good way to understand this unique system, since each step is necessary, and each step builds upon the ones that came before it.
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Step 1: You have your regular "set" of between around 1-2 hundred unique cards.
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Step 2: Altered takes those unique cards and divides them into the "rarities" like you can find in other TCGs, except that each "rarity" is just a slightly "Altered" version of that same unique card, with higher rarity cards being slightly-improved versions of the lower-rarity ones.
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Step 3: in order for this to not cause the problem of "well, just spend a bunch of money to collect all the higher-rarity versions", Altered places a limit on the deckbuilding, making it so you can only have so many cards of each of the higher rarities in one deck, for tournaments specifically. (think of it like if MTG limited you to only having a maximum of 4 Mythic Rares & 20 Rares/Uncommons in each deck)
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Step 4: In order for this to not cause the problem of "well, players can just cheat & ignore those numbers by fudging the numbers a bit for the deckbuilding, and it's fine as long as they don't get caught.", Altered tournaments have a system (connected to a very complex system that's outside the scope of this comment) that checks & registers decks for the tournament, not allowing players to easily get around the deckbuilding limits.
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Step 5 (the important one): The highest rarity of cards, which are the strongest "Altered" versions of the middle and lower-rarity cards, and which are essentially MTG's Mythic Rare in terms of power level, are each 1/1 unique copies with no exact equal card owned by anyone else in the world, through a system of semi-balanced automatic algorithms, similar to how Keyforge decks were algorithmically generated.
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Step 5.1: Since each of these 100% unique cards are "Altered" versions of the rare/uncommon/common cards, with some not-too-different mechanics and stats, players don't have to try to wrap their heads around completely unique, never-before-seen cards every time they look at one.
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Step 5.2: Since each deck can only have a handful of these unique cards in them, their opponents know mostly what to expect from their opponent's deck, but are capable of being surprised by around 7% of the cards of their opponent, which (usually) have never seen by anyone else, except that they are mechanically similar to 3 of the cards that already exist (each common card has 2 non-unique higher-rarity versions, besides the unique rarity version)
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Step 6: This step is too complicated to go into all of the details of in this comment, but they have basically set up a system that allows for players to not have to worry about losing their 1/1 unique cards.
With all of these steps combined (and a few others that don't specifically matter to this), they have set up a system to tackle this meta-solving issue, as well as a couple other issues, and we'll just have to wait and see at how effective it truly is (but, it has been predicted by most to be _very_ effective)
Altered is doing some really interesting stuff. We plan to do an episode on it in the future.
After thinking about Altered again, I realized that I forgot one other important piece of info for Step 5.2, which is that, in addition to any deck only having about 7% chance at max of a 1/1 card being drawn, these cards are also limited in how much of an effect they can have on the game by another system with the gameplay, which basically means that any specific card can only really have an effect for 2 turns (sometimes 3, and sometimes 1 or 4+, depending) so even if you opponent has an "overpowered" unique card, it usually has a limit of how much of an effect it can have on the game.
Also, in addition to each card usually only having an effect for around 2 turns, the amount of damage they can do on those turns is very limited, because of yet another unique gameplay system.
Basically, if a card has the equivalent of 10/10 stats in MTG, it wouldn't be that much different if it had 99/99 stats, and it can only do as much potential "damage" as a 5/5 (or, maybe two 5/5s, depending on certain abilities). There's a limit on the effectiveness.
With booster packs, if i open a card I dont want. I can sell it to someone who does, and use that money to buy another pack. Maybe even make some money, or trade for a card I do want.
When i open a loot box and get a skin I dont want. I have to keep it, and spend more money.
With booster packs, if you open a card you don't want, it's likely that nobody else wants that card either, and is worth thirty cents at most.
@Buugipopuu I don't play black. I pulled a Sheoldred, traded it for another box. Your so right
@@demoncushion9600Just reinvest your lottery winnings into more lottery tickets! How could you lose?
I liked Forrest's point about there being multiple games being played. We imagine deck construction, deck evaluation, and play refinement playing off each other and cycling around. However, deck creation and evaluation can be done for you. Not only do players spend less time making non-meta decks, they spend less time playing and refining specific strategies for these decks. The cycle is shortened significantly, and players "get through" the content quickly by avoiding most of it. It feels like a branching story game where everyone looks up a guide for the only ending they care about. A lot of content is being written for no one.
this is interesting, and relates to the episode before this one about "useless cards". maybe a game that has no "useless cards" would draw more players to be more creative about building and straying from meta. since effectively it would reduce the volume of both info and possibilities, getting strait to the meat and potatoes.
Boosters don't make sense with how anyone plays anymore. I don't get cards in boosters and trade them with other people. That's not how people acquire cards anymore. They buy singles. If you want a certain thing it's cheaper and less burdensome to just do that. And they already decided the common and uncommon slots are for draft shaft. So you are paying $4 for a single random card.
Yep, EXACTLY. Which is why for years, I've always been willing, without question, to drop $20 on a playset of R/M that I need. I get the specific cards that I want, without the crap that I'll likely never use. The only issue is that now with Mythics being powercrept to absurdity, we've got new cards that remain in the $50+ for a single card on a regular basis and for a long time.
I've personally moved on to Lorcana for cracking packs and playing a new and exciting game.
Boosters were toxic monetization all along anyway.
@@LothreanI wouldn't say all along as the idea started as something extremely social.
But yeah, boosters outside of limited turned out to be toxic af.
I think it's funny that we talk about metas becoming solved and stagnant, when the most popular meta is Commander. Commander is functionally infinite metas, thanks to rule Zero. This also applies to Kitchen Table magic, which is the real most popular format. And despite EDHrec, a big part of these formats is building your own personalized deck, not net-decking.
the fact that local metas / mini formats exist and are limited by player agreements or available cards does not mean the global format’s meta is any less solved.
There's an important difference between a meta being too complex to ever be solved and using rules changes, via rule zero, to create entirely new metas to be solved. The existence of one does not negate the other.
This seems to be how Wizards has solved the churn issue. I think around 5 years ago around the time Secret Lair launched they had finally realised that Commander was the true cash cow and really started pushing Commander designs through Standard. I’m sure Wizards knows now that 2-player Magic is always going to be a victim of its own success; the more games get played, the faster the meta reaches a steady-state and people feel that it’s stagnated. There really is no way around this in the post-Arena internet world.
@iwansmith1348 EDH was never the problem. Commander has its own product line that is neither Standard nor Modern legal. It was when WotC made their corporate knock-off, BRAWL, that hurt other formats. EDH gets a lot of hate that it doesn't deserve because nobody even knows that BRAWL was supposed to be a thing.
We're wanting to avoid boosters in our game (and go more LCG style) so this question has been one to keep me up at night.
This is where I think Unmatched has done wonders as it has enough variance and strategy to it that, a bit like chess, the meta is never quite "solved" and the release of new fighters and formats do keep things from getting too stale.
Also the "alliance" Keyforge format is not player driven, but was an official format created by the new owners of Keyforge.
Yeaaah… I hear ya. This really is the number one issue to workout and likely the biggest issue in TCGs, especially for small teams that can’t put a set out once a month.
Oh interesting! Seems strange for the developers to undermine the signature system in keyforge haha.
LCGs have just as many flaws as TCGs, they're just different. LCGs can't play draft well, and underpowered cards that would normally work well in draft are just instantly ignored in fixed packs because there is something clearly better. There is no secondary market, so cards are basically worthless as soon as you open the pack. Coming in late to an LCG is a huge buy in for players with no secondary market available for most singles. This also means huge sku bloat for retailers and a larger amount of shelf space required.
@@Dstinct yeah we're aware of those too and trying to figure out solutions
@@Dstinct no secondary market is not a flaw? do you complain you can’t sell your catan pieces for profit? if you just want to speculate open a trading account. secondary market is a huge pain in the ass for everyone else.
1. Metagames are inherently dynamic, and rarely truly "solved". In Yugioh, some retro formats are named after what's now considered to be maybe the third best deck in that format, because the meta has continued to develop.
2. Having limited access to cards changes how you interact with those cards. A limited environment is different to a constructed one. In limited you have to make the most of the cards available to you, and you know your opponents are in the same boat.
3. The dynamism of a metagame is more apparent in limited environment, what colours are open in your pod, and what strategies are available to you, is something you have to learn to read and respond to
4. In a constructed environment, the barrier to trying new things is price. A deck that's competitive or otherwise interesting can simply be to expensive for you
5. Boredom, if you can't afford a deck that wins, or perhaps you can only afford one deck, how long will you keep playing?
6. Fatigue, if mtg has a set every month you absolutely can miss an entire set by accident. These days a new set arrives and we're already getting spoilers for two others. The marketing is trying for a state of perpetual hype for the next thing, it kinda becomes harder to enjoy the present (or indeed enjoy what we had a month ago)
I honestly feel like fewer products with greater accessibility would reduce magic's churn. If you can feasibly build any deck, then you've always got something new to try without it being forced upon you. Old metagames see new developments when ppl have free access to the cards, and people can actually afford to experiment. If you're not priced out of competing, you have more incentive to learn both the strategy and tactics. If you don't want to compete, having cards means you can brew more jank.
Obviously it's a business, we can't just all get all the cards for free all the time, and building a collection is a joy in itself, but id argue a more accessible game is more fun
Great points. I agree that when a meta is “solved” it’s probably not actually solved. This issue is player perception. There’s a fervor to solve a new meta and once things are established fewer and fewer players care to disrupt it.
As for limited, it does remain interesting longer, but draft by numbers becomes pretty easy with access to data from sites like 17 lands. I think the best thing about limited is that it fixes the accessibility problem like you mentioned.
Not sold that variance is a strong method of reducing churn. The real mechanism is increased complexity.
In the example of Snap - while the locations provide variance, its the increased complexity of interactions with your characters that can give off-meta decks an edge. If you had a pure variance adding system that gave a random player +1-3 points, the impact on churn would be zero as the best deck is still wins the most.
The answer for keeping the meta unsolved longer is to add more complex tactics. This allows good players to find edges with less commonly played decks. The best example here is chess - no variance, highly complex, 100s of years of unsolved meta.
What you’re missing is that variance increases the number of games that need to be played until you reach consensus. Yes, eventually, the best players and cards will end up on top, but the time it takes to get there is what’s important.
@@distractionmakers I don't think the #s here will back this up. If all we are saying is that its a problem with sample size, the number of games played on digital platforms would require incredible variance to obscure which deck is best in statistical variance.
Modern clients are extremely good at building sample size for low-complexity environments.
@@waglz I agree with you that a larger possibility space would require more games to reach consensus, but I think we disagree on how to get that larger space.
Random chance will disrupt results, but over time the better players will still receive some gain from their skill, just less so. You're decreasing the delta of the returns from skill. If you only increase complexity you're hurting the ability of novice players to play against more skilled opponents. Richard Garfield has a great section on this in Characteristics of Games.
I think the real goal should be to increase the possibility space with all tools available without alienating novice players. We have to look at both sides of churn rate. Incoming players and exiting players. If you focus solely on retention you've got a leaky bucket without any new water coming in.
I would argue that for the player base that engages with the game's broader community, in the present day, boosters have no effect on the rate the meta is solved, and actually increase player frustration for this player base. Because the players invested enough to solve the meta and share that information, will always have the resources and access to cards. So the top players solve the meta, and then players that want to play with decks that are meta, will see that the best decks cost upwards of $300 and are out of reach. And when the solution to this is to increase release frequency, that means that the 300+ dollar deck may have expensive cards that lose their value in a few months and need to be replaced, or a whole new deck needs to be built.
This is a huge tangent, but I think it's the biggest barrier to entry to mtg for competitive players. I and several others I know are really competitive with gaming and love card games, but outside of draft, in order to play competitively I'd need to invest a large amount of money upfront just to get in the door. Where as something like LoL or Rocket League or Overwatch, if the players goal is to play competitively, they can just buy the game or a few characters and feel "competitive" even though they are a new player and are objectively bad. Then as they become more invested in the game they probably become more open to making larger investments buying more characters, or cosmetics, or tournament entry (like drafts or opens).
Anyone have a link to the skaf Elias video?
th-cam.com/video/cJtXYuSOe8g/w-d-xo.htmlsi=VVuWlB2AqSfmYRMg
I'm sure Garfield initially wanted decks to have surprises for other Players (his ideal for an "infinitwly unknown" CCG).
When Star Wars Unlimited came out, people claimed that the META was Solved with the AGGRO Savin deck within a week!!
Set 2 is almost upon us, and ideas are still coming out! With Tournaments still showing different builds with all colors and leaders. Though, its probably the strong design of that first set.
While Pay2Win is tied to it, I do think that a limiter is good for the game (money > getting the cards). Randomizing what you get as well (booster).
I don't think I've ever seen a proposed system can fix this. The upcoming Altered TCG is going to be interesting.
Haha yeaah Altered looks… interesting for sure.
In much the same way that Keyforge solves the churn problem with its fully randomized decks but in doing so removes deck construction and personalization, digital distribution can solve the problem, but in doing so removes the collectibility aspect of the game. Sure, some digital cards can still be harder to obtain than others, but that’s not the same thing as having a game whose pieces are literal collectors’ items. Also, maybe this is “boomer” of me, but the tactility of physical cards is an important aspect of my enjoyment of the game. Shuffling the cards, holding them in my hands, flipping through trade binders, those things create a visceral experience that a digital game just can’t reproduce. Moreover, the value of the FLGS as a “third space” can’t be overstated. I wouldn’t still be playing Magic weekly if it wasn’t for the social aspect of going to the game store, seeing my fellow regulars there, exchanging banter with them during the game, chatting between rounds, etc.
Love the channel and the cat!
Availability of information is what it is and Magic players just need to live with it. Boosters don't work now beause of the market for singles and availability of information(solving the meta).
MtG is an expensive hobby depending on the format/level you want to play at. For Commander and Standard to start you can buy Precons and soup them up for comparatively reasonable amounts, Modern, Vintage and Legacy are expensive due to the volume of cards that are legal.
If you want to compete in a Pro Tour you have to spend/research, that's the price of entry.
I play mainly on Arena, when a new set drops 1-2 weeks in I look up a few decks, find one I think I like/understand, have cards for and play a bit with it, sub in some things if I don't have the wildcards. I adapted to being a f2p player, I'm not fussing about you guys that have the $$ to spend on your hobby. Winning or losing it's whatever as long as I'm having fun. Short to meduim length games and decent back and forth is fun, not some dude spinning his wheels for 20 minutes. Yes I play mostly agro or creature decks, although mill is sometimes stupid fun.
MtG is a paper product but Arena is digital learn what the do's and don'ts are in a digital space from Hearthstone (like how they fixed Shudderwock and Yogg) and Marvel Snap, hire Ben Brode as a consultant I hear he's good at these things.
I like the tier system in Marvel Snap, it moves from simple and janky, to streamlined and possibly still janky depending on drops/locations, but importantly at some point in tiering up the player learns deckbuilding and how the deck should play out.
The meta being consensus rather than truth is something that has been recently discussed in the YGO community as well.
I think the question is more about how you control churn in 60 card competitive formats and in the age of the internet... I just don't know. Now I know you two aren't crazy about commander but by being a casual, eternal, singleton format I feel like it does a better job of answering the churn question because it is almost unsolvable and the card pool is so huge and constantly expanding that the experience stays very fresh.
Regarding Warhammer, as an ex player I can tell you that the current model of constant rules and point changes is beyond infuriating when it is tied to a game that requires dozens of hours of work any time you have to change your list due to assembly and painting. At this point in my life I have much more extra income than free time so I just can't play a game that disrespects my time in that manner. Which is unfortunate since I think the core game experience is pretty awesome.
At what point do you just stop trying to control churn? Video games have the same issue where there's a small very dedicated portion of the community that chews through all the content as fast as possible then will ask "well, is there more?", and I genuinely believe that it can be harmful to cater to those people. Don't get me wrong, dedication should be rewarded, but not by cranking out more and more just for the sake of filling what's essentially a bottomless stomach.
@@PhoenicopterusR well I do think we've absolutely hit the point of "too much content". I can't even keep up with everything that comes out and I am a long time player who still plays regularly. And yet many formats get solved extremely fast anyhow. But I am sympathetic to the questions posed by the video. If there isn't some change to the game you're going to lose players and it'll be a small hardcore stagnant playbase pretty quickly. For the video game equivalent, see any fighting game that isn't actively supported.
11:55 What did Marvel Snap do to extend the collection process? It was cringed at but not explained
We’ll have to do an episode on it, but essentially they gated the collection process into tiers with a best deck at the top of each tier. The issue is that it splits the player base at each tier.
In Marvel Snap, cards are sorted into a number of discrete "Tiers." Whenever you earn a card drop, you are given a random card you don't own from the lowest possible Tier. So, as you first start playing you'll earn exclusively Tier 1 cards in a random order until you collect them all, at which point the game will start giving you Tier 2 cards in a random order, and so on and so forth. Generally, the game will also try to matchmake you against opponents within the same Tier. The idea is that this creates multiple "formats" that a player shifts through naturally as they progress. There are certain decks that are good specifically within the context of Tier 1 or Tier 2, so you're encouraged to switch up decks as you progress through the Tiers. It's a unique way of creating the kind of "churn" associated with new card pack releases.
What makes it cringey is that balance and card design in Marvel Snap is very... questionable. Sure, you have 4 or 5 different formats, but if they're all unbalanced solved-out formats then the experience still isn't fun. Moving to the next Tier feels miserable because the only people still playing in the higher Tiers are the people who were lucky enough to pull the format-definining meta threats early into that Tier. It's hard to express how awful it feels to promote to the next Tier and be forced to grind a week of unwinnable matches against opponents who are using busted cards you have never had any possibility of obtaining.
@@nightblitz4226 yup
Booster packs are a form of progression now. It’s to make the experience satisfying and fun. They don’t do anything to control the meta anymore for sure
The trouble with solving meta cycles or anything with slower/pricier card acquisition is that even if it improves the variety of decks you play against, you will be stuck unable to try too many new things yourself. I think there's an argument to be made that especially for example magic arena is in a worst of both worlds situation where players can easily copy the perceived best deck very quickly and easily, but unless they pay money probably won't have enough cards to build more than that one deck. It's hard to try new decks and iterate on your deck when card acquisition is an issue, which is maybe the single thing that bothers me the most about most card games as someone who really enjoys deckbuilding and trying stuff.
I think a much more worthwhile point to attack for this issue is rotation. If we rotate cards (especially cards out) far more often, the game will be fresh more. For example if cards go in and out every month (in smaller quantities than a magic set of course), there would likely be a pretty consistent cycle of trying things week 1, people mostly catching on in week 2, and the last couple weeks being more stable possibly with people coming up with random new things still. That would be a pretty even distribution if you ask me, but I think it's also worth asking if people even want an unstable meta all the time.
Also I think it's worth noting that magic has kind of solved this churn problem to the greatest extent by just having many formats for people to switch between, something that is also made more difficult by cards costing a lot of money. Imo magic's biggest strength is the huge variety of formats that are always available when you get bored of one.
I think the main utility of booster packs at this point (beyond making a bunch of money) is creating a secondary market where players are able to buy singles if they want. The living card games have problems with new player buy in because they lack this (also lack dedicated pre con decks that are actually good/meta, which is possibly the best way for players to buy in and play in fnm or equivalent if you ask me). I think it's somewhat worrying (for booster pack haters such as myself) that the only game to actually go the distance in recent years seems to have been flesh and blood, which uses booster packs and has extremely expensive decks/cards. Most of the games to attempt alternative distribution models don't seem to have made it very far, but maybe I am just unaware of those that have. Currently my best guess for what would be the best way to do paper distribution is to not have card rarity (could still have stuff like foil/alternate art), use booster packs or some non randomized equivalent, and also sell full sets of cards & pre cons. Having some mechanism to price cap cards would be ideal, although selling singles directly cuts out local game stores which could be a pretty big problem. Online idk just let people pay a subscription to have all the cards, this is a proven business model for games with constant expansion releases outside of card games. I think the only reason people accept the current card game distribution models is because it's how the games have always been (since mtg in the 90s) and the core audience for them is willing to just deal with it, and everyone else DOES avoid it.
Keyforge has done pretty well. But their model is pretty weird and cuts out deck customization entirely.
@@distractionmakers Interesting, didn't know keyforge did well. Imo though keyforge is even worse for players as a business model than magic & similar. Personally for limited, I think cube and generally reusable draft environments are the way to go at least as a player (+ I like constructed too).
Loot boxes probably came from
Studying gambling (and addiction)
Gachas (which likely came from TCGs which were massive in Japan)
Loot games like Diablo with randomized drops
Gachas came from gachapon which predate TCGs.
Given modern magic, is there even a way to play that doesn't involve dumping 100 or more dollars to make a deck? There's got to be a cheap nerd hobby to get into, relatively speaking. I used to play 40k, and usually stick to tabletop wargames, so I know how it feels to put down half a grand to get a playable, competitive anything up and running.
I am guessing it was the sports card collection market that did it first. Also the secondary market is a stability. Since you can just buy the singles you need to play. How many gotcha games offer the top drops for like $20?
Is part of the problem of metas self-consistency? By having cards and mechanics that rely more on situations and what your opponent is doing, it's harder to make a meta, right?
10/10 conversation, 15/10 cat
I really think stopping spoilers is probably the answer to this meta extension. No more theory crafting till everybody can actually hold the cards in their hands.
but i bet spoilers also drive massive hype and purchasing upon release.
@@00101001000000110011 Yeah you are probably right :/ I don't see them ever doing it but it would probably make the game way more fun
i thought you were making good points right up until 21:20. all arguments completely demolished, excellent rebuttal by the feline.
It’s true, with a single maneuver all our points were unraveled. 😆
Standard cycle to 2 years again. Then drop the price of boosters a bit so it doesnt burn so much when your cards cycle out. And reprint more of the pricey cards so wizards can swing to more booster purchases.
Two year Standard is awful. Its part of why the game became so stale. 3 year Standard looks great. I might actually bother to play Standard again. Well, if any card game near enough to me didn't do anything but fucking Commander.
WotC doesn't care about Standard cycles because paper Standard is effectively dead. The real format is Cardboard Funko Pops.
is aftermath style sets a way to try and deal with churn? Also cat appeared Mission accomplished
Yes, 100%, it is a shame they failed.
But maybe they will come back with a redesign.
Yup! I think they were experimenting with how small of a set would keep players interested. Turns out aftermath was too small haha. It’s a bit of a bummer because the smaller a set could be, theoretically, the more time they would have for design.
@@distractionmakers That is why I suggested they copy Vanguard’s Festival Collection model and fill the rest of the set with necessary reprints so the set doesn’t feel so empty.
I think the biggest issue is wizards went all in on commander and dropping revenue shows they need to re-emphasize standard. Once you get your commander decks, some people go on and on brewing (me), but many people stop after a few precons and assembled decks. But assembled decks are usually built from single sales which doesn't help wizards.
They need to revive standard with the block system and boosters that are just a bit cheaper to increase pack sales. It will drive revenue.
@@FurrySpatula Add a common slot to the current packs and replace the foil curls with the normal cards, drop per-pack price to $4.50 (actual MSRP!) and move to 5 sets per year, 2x 2 set blocks and a fifth slot that has a Core Set in August every few years (when the previous Core rotates) and can accommodate the Remastered/Masters/Box Set for each year the other years. Also, reinstate Extended (at this point on a 6 year rotation). The Block Sets get Standard and Extended preconstructed decks and Cores get Starter Packs (which get re-released occasionally throughout their run), other sets get varying deck types.
From a card design point of view the super-powerful-bomb rare/mythic and "draft only" commons should be phased out in order to allow a flatter power curve for deck types in any given metagame.
That should solve most of their set issues. The control players moaning that they are loosing to "solved-meta" aggro decks without actually putting effort into brewing has been a thing since the 90s and should be completely ignored by both players and designers.
The problem you're describing is THEORETICALLY why commander exists. Its started as a casual format built to play the big splashy unplayable cards and give them a home.
Competitive types have always trashed that, though. Not to mention it being an eternal format.
I dunno if it’s the fault of competitive types. As information becomes so available and new more powerful cards are printed you can only swim upstream for so long.
I just saw a similar debate over the launch of Star Wars Unlimited. 'Ugh, why is FFG doing it via boosters instead of LCG?' etc. And it seems the answer really is in psychology. No LCG has ever really caught on, even Netrunner. A set comes out, it's bought, and then it's instantly dead and quiet. The booster enables events beyond just meta constructed to keep the game in people's minds longer between sets. Even if the meta is stale, the events or seeing boosters on the shelf, or cards in the display keeps the game feeling current and played.
do you think the multiple ways of playing Magic is a way to solve churn. so Magics Breath and variety should be used as a way to solve the problem?
100%. The only drawback I see is that eternal formats are sticky, meaning, players who transition from standard to commander or legacy tend not to go back to standard.
@@distractionmakers
Standard --->
Modern/Legacy/Pauper --->
Commander ---->
Cube
@@distractionmakerswhy would anyone ever go back to Standard after having so much freedom to deck build? If the entire focus of churn is variance, then guess what? Modern, perhaps more than any other format, allows for massive spikes in variance while still remaining competitive. Even with the advent of the MH sets and pushing the power of cards in the format, the sets have given access to cards that have created entire archetypes of their own.
But now that the format is not really supported in paper by WotC, we have a veery homogenized format being played on MTGO. So only the most hardcore are there playing to begin with, given the cost, and the hassle to do so. Hell, I'm hardcore and I'm not separating with my money just to play an inferior version of Modern, repurchasing or renting cards that I already own.
Standard COULD be amazing again, but it would require Wizards to actually design better. Blocks gave reason to push mechanics that might not ever make sense outside of that block, and that's a great thing. Sure, it might slow down the rate of new cards hitting older formats, but it would also give Standard it's own unique feel. The problem is that Hasbro is far too focused on raw profit than actually making a good game.
@@Xoulrath_ Eternal formats can be very stagnant in terms of metagames. Yeah you may see ebb and flow with top decks, but unless there is a massive banning or a new keyword that is overpowered, very little changes. You can see this with vintage, modern and legacy when you flip between top decks of the last month and the last year. the decks may change positions, but its pretty much all the same decks.
Standard, on the other hand, always has new decks every couple of years due to forced rotation. Some people don't like this, but I find playing against the same decks constantly boring after a while.
@@Dstinct Modern has the distinct advantage of having the ability to play plenty of new decks; players choose not to because they are lazy.
The implicit assumption in this video, which I don't think is valid, is that a "solved meta" is a bad thing. It's worth asking how so many other kinds of games (RTS, fighting games, certain shooters, board games, etc) approach this issue. Modern day Magic is fairly unique in the overall gaming space in this regard. Very few other developers worry much about keeping the game "fresh" or preventing it from being "solved". Why is that?
As I see it, modern Magic *has* to adopt this attitude because of more fundamental design choices that Wizards has made in recent years. From around 2012 to 2016 Standard was a pretty healthy format. Smartphones had been in our pockets for years at this point and people had access to plenty of information about the metagame. Metagames were "solved" then just as they are now. But nobody complained about it then because those metas were *healthy*. Wizards had not yet begun to push chase rares and mythics the way they do now. There were good answers to threats. Multiple archetypes were supported, even if they might "feel bad" for some players. So when the best decks were figured out you were still left with a diverse metagame where you could pick a deck and have a solid chance at winning, especially with good sideboard decisions.
A decade later and there are clearly pushed chase rares that exceed $50/copy and have virtually no risk or failure modes. Strong creatures at one point had risks associated with them, setup required, or serious deckbuilding constraints (which would increase diversity as specific decks were built around those threats). If Wizards printed Hypnotic Specter, Psychatog, Tarmogoyf, and Morphling into Standard tomorrow I'm not sure how much play they'd see. Those are all time great threats, but they just don't fit the modern mold of "cost efficient threat that does something right away without requiring big deckbuilding concessions".
When threats had failure modes or constraints, the decks built around them had weaknesses. Those weaknesses could be exploited by other decks, leading to a healthy metagame. The ceiling was still high, but the floor was lower.
When threats don't have weaknesses, the metagame is just about finding the best combination of threats and answers to overpower what everyone else is doing. When it's solved, it's uninteresting because there's nothing you can do against the best deck. The cards in it are the best at being designed not to fail.
Interestingly, Wizards started pushing this new approach to card design around late 2016 and Standard Magic began its death spiral shortly after that. Wizards later blamed the internet and Covid, but the internet was already there and the problems began well before Covid.
Well, no, solved metas have been a problem for MTG since the very beginning. It's just simply that it "managed" and "fixed" that problem.
This video you're commenting on already goes over this: the metagame being solved removes half of the "game" from the "game".
Just because the recent metas have been worse, due to being unhealthy, doesn't mean that this hasn't always been an issue. Since the beginning, Standard always had rotation and new cards being added, in order to "fix" this "problem".
A big contributor to the "solved metagame" issue in recent years can be traced back to a source that has only existed in recent years: Arena. Back when you actually had to go somewhere and meet people in order to play, it took a lot longer to get bored with the "meta"
I'm not saying that what you're saying isn't also true, but it doesn't complete the "whole picture."
Booster packs in a game like magic are fundamentally different than loot boxes because randomness is required to play draft and sealed.
All the same. Booster packs are just physical loot boxes.
Drafts and sealed could be implemented into Call of Duty or Fifa.
Didn’t they start making packs specifically for limited too?
Do you think booster packs are the only way to produce randomness? Be serious. They are literally just lootboxes.
@@Deviknyte There are a LOT of factors that differentiate them... not least of which is that booster packs allow you to trade the stuff you got that wasn't what you were after with other people in order to get what you actually wanted, Loot boxes actively prevent this.
Loot boxes are also almost universally rigged in ways that aim to actively and maliciously exploit the player, while tcg boosters (well, MTG's Draft boosters, at least) are rigged, in so far as they're riggerd at all, mostly in ways that make things Better for the players.
Now, the more recent 'set' boosters, and the way other TCGs have handled their boosters (cost more per pack, less cards per pack, more grades of rarity which appear in one in every X packs with X being ever increasing numbers, etc.) are all significatn steps DOWN (and usually closer to loot boxes) in comparison to MTG draft boosters.
Loot boxes exist to allow video game companies to gain all the benefits of running casino slot machines (from their POV, Additiction is a Positive) without having to follow any of the regulations (because they never 'pay out'... which actually makes things Worse). TCG booster packs? They have few or none of the elements that facilitate this.
There is also cube, but yeah, people saying booster is morally the same as the average loot box are going too far.
Interest video. I enjoyed a lot of your points and really enjoyed the way you guys dissected this issue.
I’d say check out Flawed TCG for a really fresh answer to this question. The concept of a codex and customizable units, brought to a TCG in a way.
A metagame is just playing the game with strategy in regard to deck building, not necessarily finding a first order optimization therein.
If you want to reduce churn, just add more cats.
Similar to the codex idea, I wonder if there is design-space to be used in a handicap mechanic, similar the KeyForge chains. Just off the top of my head:
* Every card in a meta gets a win-rate value.
* As a card wins more, its win-rate goes up. As a card wins less, its win-rate goes down.
* Your starting life is adjusted based on the win-rate of your opponent's deck.
This system encourages people to try to build and win in ways that are different from their opponents. Because the better your deck does, the harder it gets for an opponent to win with it. It would work well on a digital platform, but could also work in a physical system so long as decks and winrates could be tracked, which already happens for any official events.
Yea TCG booster packs were proto loot boxes.
A game that tends to get “solvable” is fundamentally flawed in gamedesign, because that means the game is more a set of rules than it is an actual game of decision-making. If the rules weight more than the players decisions the game is fundamentally bad.
Every game is solvable, even secret Hitler. If it weren't, no game would be endable.
@@shadogiant i dont think you understand what solvable means in this context.
It means that there is a clear correct path to victory that beats every other possible path.
In a case like this it is no longer a game, because every decision is set in stone, there is no interaction and no reason to play the game.
Many games exist only as long as they aren't solved - for some that means a long life and for others it is short.
Good games aren't solvable at all or only solvable in a timeframe greater than the existance of the universe.
If the goal was $40 while you're still doing good at pre-releases cuz that's the price of a kit
Saw cat, remembered to like the video
As a casual player: holy shit was Artfact unfun due to the randomness in the game play.
Let's see if I got everything.
-Variance in the game reduces churn.
-Changing the codex refreshes the meta without changing the game pieces.
Solution : Every format now has planechase decks. The planechase cards rotate regularly and are imposed by format.
Rule 0 and kitchen table allow any planechase plane in casual.
cEDH has its own mandated planechase deck.
Why not just stop spoiling entire sets before release? The booster model is so much cooler when you don't have that information.
Maybe there's a law against it? Can't gamble if you don't know the odds and content.
Also, makes Limited formats harder to play (taking longer reading all the cards) and enjoy (someone that has drafted 10 times and you haven't).
So you dont know if theres anything good in the set? No one i know would ever just trust wizards to print quality stuff, especially for non-standard players. Every cardgame reveals the entire set because no one wants to be the sacrificial lamb
Because communication is good. Scryfall will collect a database anyway.
@@kiraangle2823 Boosters aren't really a reliable way to get "good" cards anyway so IDK if that factors into it much for me personally.
@@midnalight6419 yeah obviously that information would accumulate eventually but I think moving the information out of spoilers and into packs makes the value proposition of packs better for me. at least for a few weeks. If I see the entire set listed before it even drops I feel like that pushes me personally into avoiding packs and just ordering the singles i want.
CAT!
...sorry what were you talking about?
To me, the only formats in MtG worth playing are draft, pauper, and legacy specifically due to their metas (or lack thereof for draft). The first is an exercise in deck building and is the game as i believe it was originally intended: play with what you get. Pauper and Legacy are the two eternal formats that are never solved. Pauper is low power, but with few good answers to threats; that makes games compelling. Plus, it's cheap. Legacy is high power with proper answers to threats and FTKs. Standard and EDH are unbearable because they are designed for the casual crowd, where people would rather complain and demand bans than actually figure out how to beat something. Anytime I'm in a queue for Bo3 Standard (because Bo1 promotes surprise strategies that immediately lose to sideboarding), the wait is significantly longer than Bo1. It's fine and good to have causal formats, but when they dominate the game as a whole, everything else goes downhill.
I think loot boxes started with csgo. Or TF2 idk which came first. Idk if csgo/tf2 were inspired by tcgs tho.
Horse armor in ESO.
@@benjaminloyd6056 ESO came out a few years after csgo tho didn't it?
@@flaminggorilla909 idk, would have to check. Ultimately, it's just a question of which company realized how to fleece us first.
@@benjaminloyd6056 lmao facts.
check out gatcha/gacha games. Basically the same thing (though usually less malicious), and I THINK they were around first. THe name is derived from a sort of vending machine where you'd put your money in, turn the handle that jumbled the plastic spheres inside around and dropped one down the shoot at random. You'd then open the sphere and whatever was inside was what you got. Usually designed so you could see what was still in the machine.
Abolish booster packs!
Make all formats singleton.
Came looking for copper and found gold(Chonky cat).
can we lead with the cat instead of waiting 20 minutes next time?
We operate on the cats schedule, she doesn’t operate on ours. 😆
@@distractionmakers Fair
Uhm cool, magic, booster packs. OMG A CAT. Sorry what youre saying?
Haha I totally had the same response while editing 😆
Booster packs are only acceptable because of draft. It's otherwise strictly illegal gambling for children.
KITTEH!!
Kitty! \o/
A explorable space, is to do like online games do it, with "seasons". "In 2025, all soldiers cost 1 less to cast, instants have cantrip and all defenders have annihilator"
5th
first!