I solved mana screw and created a handicap system for MTG
General forum
Posted on Oct. 2, 2022, 8:56 p.m. by estoner
Original idea, discarded: "Both players randomly mix in the same number of Wastes to their lands and put the combined pile in a zone called the Manabase. In the draw step, a player could choose between drawing from his library or from his own Manabase. Then instead of being screwed by having no lands at all, you would only be screwed off certain colors.
As an optional handicap system for casual play, the stronger player could be forced to have more Wastes in his manabase. A player's ELO would dictate how many Wastes are added to their manabase. A newcomer would be a zero Wastes player, while a pro may have a Ten Wastes handicap. Professionals would have to maindeck generic artifacts to counterbalance the fact that they may never even draw colored mana."
Newest update: What about making matches best 3/5 and removing mulligans? Instead, before the game, players can look at their opening hands and the person going second can either check, (match continues as normal), double down (game would count as two games in the match), fold (concede but continue with the set), or all-in (losing that game loses the match). The person on the play would have to agree to the same stakes dictated by the player on the draw or forfeit the round. There is probably a better way to codify exactly how this would work, but you get the idea.
Edit 2, putting lands back in deck and removing Wastes idea: Both players have to keep opening 7, but draw player starts with the doubling cube and during the game can double the stakes then turn player has to accept odds or concede the game then receives the cube himself. The all-in/call/fold poker stuff is too complex, it's easier to just use the cube and 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 like in backgammon.
I'm also an AP video poker player but that's only if comps can push me to +EV, it depends on the casino
October 3, 2022 5:19 p.m.
jethstriker says... #3
This concept is similar to something I have heard or red in an article a long time ago (can't really remember). It states that before the game, players remove all their lands and shuffles two deck, a land library and a non-land library. Then whenever a player will draw a card, they'll choose in which library to draw. One of the takes in that variant is, in older formats, it greatly helps combo decks that doesn't rely too much on land to operate.
Without thinking too much, I can imagine some of the consequences in eternal formats. This variant will greatly help stompy decks (those deck are mostly colorless anyway) and decks that uses moxen (warping vintage even more).
October 3, 2022 7:41 p.m.
Gidgetimer says... #4
It might be time to consider that maybe, just maybe, it isn't that people don't understand your system or are unwilling to give it a try. It is that they have honestly considered the proposition fully and just don't like it.
I would have 0 interest in ever playing a game under the rules you have laid out. Legacy as a whole would cease to function as every deck just becomes Mana-less dredge because you get to put 40 lands in a zone you will never interact with and get to just run the 20 cards you actually want for the deck.
I guess the same could be said for Reanimator, you need exactly 1 black for the majority of cards in it, so just run 40 swamps 12 reanimation spells and 8 targets and call it a day. You can't add enough shit lands to consistently keep them off a single black without completely hosing other people building their decks.
Ooh I have a fun idea 59 island, 1 thoracle. Turn 2 win every game. Hell, just to make sure I get my islands make it 200 island, 1 thoracle.
You are looking at this just from your perspective and how you like to have fun. Which is fine for a format for you and your friends to play if you can't figure out how to make functional decks. It isn't fine to act like you have come up with the greatest idea ever when you haven't given full consideration to the ramifications of how the proposed system would change the game.
Even if you address each and every thing I have brought up here, the fact remains that you didn't even consider them to begin with and there are thousands of other ways that you system falls short of the current one. You are trying to "solve" mana screw, but you are introducing another way to be screwed that I would find much more annoying. Then you are talking about an Elo, but the Elo won't be used a competitions, and you won't have to use it at casual if you don't want to track it. So who exactly is it for? The entire idea is just half baked.
You proposed a change, got told why it wouldn't work by a large number of users, and are now just completely ignoring feedback. At this point this thread is just a waste of storage space on a server.
October 3, 2022 7:50 p.m.
I heard of that variant as well. They had the right idea, but didn't realize that when they remove the variance of drawing spells versus lands, that variance has to be relocated somewhere else to prevent breaking the game. Adding colorless lands to randomly "brick" your manabase achieves this, and Wastes are not only perfect because they lack basic land types and don't affect domain, they're already a part of the game.
From a lore standpoint, why are lands in your "library" to begin with? And conceptually, a player should have to build up from Wastes to something like a Tropical Island or a Cabal Coffers. It means that the texture of the game changes as you progress to later and later turns instead of just watching the numbers increase. And it's not as though you have NO colored mana: you still have your original 24 lands, just mixed in with a number of colorless sources.
Even to a newcomer, the concept of starting with Wastes, ramping during the game, and ultimately achieving a board state of a bunch of Forest, Lair of the Hydra, and a Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx makes sense and is thematically resonant.
People are misunderstanding the handicap system. In a game like Go or Golf, you're never FORCED to let the other player have a handicap. It's just an optional rule to let players who are in different leagues still enjoy the game. The idea of manabase dilution ENABLES a handicap, but you are never required to give one to either yourself or your opponent.
Also, in my personal opinion, Thoracle should be banned in all formats and Gidgetimer is a WOTC employee
October 3, 2022 7:51 p.m. Edited.
No one is misunderstanding anything - you just lack reading comprehension and communication skills. It has been mentioned several times by several users that the handicap system has no place in the game. It wouldn’t be good for casual players, since they would need to track things they will never track. It would not be good for tournament players because it incentivises them for losing and punishes them for winning. It wouldn’t be good for the game generally, because it means you can’t pick up your deck that you love and go to another table without potentially needing to make massive changes to the deck itself because the other table does or does not use the system.
And, as you ignore every time it comes up (likely because you have no legitimate counterpoint), Magic is fundamentally different from your “but it works in these games” examples. Using your system would fundamentally change how the game is played based on handicaps - and not in a “the rules are the same basically, so I can use my same skill and strategy” kind of way. Go up or down and rank and you have to fundamentally change your deck and playstyle. That is horrible game design. Can you imagine if you were really good at Blackjack, so the dealer took out all your Aces and face cards to handicap you? Such would be equally nonsensical.
The fact that you are resorting to “lore” and personal attacks against a detractor, rather than responding to the detractor’s argument should also cause you to question the tenability of your position.
October 3, 2022 8:37 p.m.
That's like saying chess players don't have an Elo score just because they haven't recorded any games. Elo is an optional way to find players of the same skill level. I used to play in a chess club. Nobody held a gun to my head to sign match slips and keep a running total of my wins and losses. It was something you could do if you wanted to that would help you track your progress as a player.
Magic is not different than other card games. I said the standard rules would be to debase each player's manabase by the same number of Wastes. You COULD adjust this figure per player to make an unequal game more fair, but that was never a requirement, merely a suggestion.
If you really want to compare Magic to a card game, the default mulligan rules are like if you were playing Texas Hold'em and the dealer had a 33% chance to not deal you any cards, or maybe only one. Good luck bluffing with no hand
October 3, 2022 8:49 p.m. Edited.
Your most recent post does an exceptional job undermining your own idea - though I think you might be a bit to wed to your own thoughts to see why. I think it is very clear that you are not willing to look at the greater health of the game - despite the unanimous multitudes speaking with one voice against you (and if your idea is unpopular enough that the disparate voices on TappedOut all are in agreement, that should say something) - nor about the repercussions such an idea would have on fundamentally altering how the game was played.
That is the reality - you can play this at kitchen table if you want, but it simply cannot function as a mainstream rule, for the myriad reasons already addressed herein.
October 3, 2022 9:07 p.m.
Barring extreme cases like Manaless Dredge, Vintage ANT, a stack of Moxen and Timetwister, etc. this mana system is objectively superior to the default and produces better gameplay. Even Eldrazi get hit because their Sol Lands are diluted by Wastes, although they are not punished as severely as something like Yorion Control.
Any deck that is capable of winning without the use of lands should probably be banned anyway, although that's a matter of opinion. If your deck is broken by having an Abundance in play, the problem isn't Abundance, it's your deck. Note that drawing from the Manabase would not be considered a replacement effect, so you would not get to cheat Sylvan Library.
I highly suggest everyone take old Type 2 or draft decks and test this system to see if it's more fun than the regular rules. My sample size has only been a few games with four or five different decks, some in paper and some digital. Although I found the gameplay more interesting, obviously there are some decks like Burn or Ponza that may become too strong with these houserules.
October 3, 2022 9:20 p.m. Edited.
wallisface says... #10
This thread is now pretty dead/decided, but for fun i did some quick math on land odds.
In Modern, you generally want an opening hand with at least 2 relevant lands. If you’re running a 23 land deck, with normal magic rules your odds of failure (getting 1-or less lands) is 16.5%.
Comparably, with these suggested rules, you’d have to draw 5-of-your-7 cards from the land deck, and even then you’d have a 17.6% chance of failure (drawing 1-or less relavent land). For people to have any odds of starting the game with a usable landbase, the player basically has to draw almost no nonland cards at-all. That sounds like a complete disaster, where people are “almost topdecking” from the get-go.
The maths look very unfavourably on this concept, even more so than its reception, imo
October 3, 2022 9:29 p.m.
Gidgetimer says... #11
Caerwyn I'm not so sure that what was leveled "against" me was even an attack. "I think that this random guy on the internet knows enough about a card game that he must work for who makes it" is honestly rather flattering. I've played for 1/3 of the game's lifetime as one of a multitude of hobbies but apparently have good enough takes that I mustn't be someone who just plays casually a few hours a week, I obviously deal with it as a fulltime job to have such good analysis.
October 3, 2022 9:32 p.m.
Thank you for running the numbers on this. Like I said, I have not figured out the correct ratio of Wastes to your regular manabase. I concluded that your lands should be capped at 24 (not counting the added Wastes) because obviously if you could run any number, you could just outnumber the Wastes that are being added to debase it.
But the exact figure of how many Wastes to put in eludes me. Twelve is definitely too high. The good news is that adjusting the ratio would be very simple, and obviously you should use the same number for each player, barring the optional handicap rules like I said.
The good news is that it gives players a reason to play mono-color or mono-brown even if they're not running Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. Likewise, a clueless player with a pile of commons that are weak but easy to cast could theoretically defeat a good player with a Legacy deck whose spells have high color requirements.
On the other hand, the Legacy player may know the risks of running three- or four-color spells and purposely modify his list so that in the event he is color-screwed (note: not MANA screwed, we solved that) he still has cards that he can cast, like maybe a Sky Diamond or Burnished Hart. Suddenly there is counterplay that occurs before the match even takes place.
There is definitely something to this, I'll keep thinking about it.
October 3, 2022 9:34 p.m. Edited.
wallisface says... #13
estoner I really don’t think you’re listening to the overall conversation happening here. Nobody is buying-into your concept. That’s not going to change by repeating the same arguments over & over. It’s time to realise this isn’t going to go anywhere.
October 3, 2022 9:40 p.m.
Nobody is buying my concept? Nobody buys Magic cards, either
October 3, 2022 9:41 p.m.
wallisface says... #15
“Buy Into: (informal) to believe something, especially an idea that many other people believe in”
October 3, 2022 9:47 p.m.
Thank you! The preceding comment was a joke, but not really
October 3, 2022 9:49 p.m.
PookandPie says... #17
Listen, I wasn't really going to engage with this in any serious capacity. I've played Magic for over half of its existence, and am an enfranchised Legacy and now Commander player. I was legitimately going to just post a picture of Goblin Charbelcher and leave it at that, but I do have some things to offer.
Mulliganing is a core skill of Magic the Gathering. Mulliganing to get the balance of the right amount of mana sources with combo pieces, tempo, permission, etc., is a fundamental skill that the best players can execute in their games. Mulliganing is actually another way to express the skill ceiling of Magic.
Similarly, this proposed inherent mechanic change would effectively require you ban Storm decks because their capacity to fizzle is now basically gone, any permutation of decks like Eggs (decks that sequence in such a way that performing one action begets another, but non-deterministically, ie, that can fail should the deck draw too many lands in a row). It makes Lands an unplayable deck.
It fundamentally ruins Legacy, would substantially harm Commander, makes Burn the top deck in Modern, would be effectively impossible to track in a casual setting, and is largely only useful for decks that consist of getting creatures and turning them sideways. Giving any and all combo decks the effective capacity to turn any dead draws (lands, in this circumstance) into potential wins gives them an even smaller risk of variance, gives them a distinct advantage over control and aggro, which I think this mechanic change was intended more for the traditional Standard or Pioneer style "I turn creatures sideways" kinds of decks. Do you ban _all _combo? That'd be nonsense.
These issues have been brought up repeatedly with Burn (what is burn if not a combo deck where your combo pieces are layered, and the most important thing is the ability to count to 18-20?), et al, throughout this entire thread with very little reason given for why these decks would need to be banned to constitute "but I hate not top decking enough lands."
But hey, it could also create some ANT vs Charbelcher final rounds at Legacy events, which would be hilarious. So you take the good with the bad, I suppose. lol
October 3, 2022 10:08 p.m.
I played from 7th Edition to when they banned Crusade.
Nobody is saying this would replace mulligans: we would have to figure out how the existence of a manabase and a library simultaneously would impact starting hands and subsequent mulls, like if you are forced to draw all seven cards at the same time, or one after another in sequence, if you choose which decks to draw from or always get 3 from one deck and four from another, etc. Maybe starting hand size would be reduced and you get 3 cards from each pile. I don't know.
Storm, Eggs, and Dredge are not even decks. They are knowledge checks like repeatedly doing a Hellsweep in Tekken until your opponent dies. Do you have Leyline, RIP, Stony Silence, etc? Great, you win. If a player doesn't have those cards in his sideboard, he is probably lost and needs someone to escort him back to the retirement home.
Commander is not Magic: the Gathering. Commander is a game played with Magic: the Gathering cards. There is a difference.
Maybe the life totals would be increased to 30 like Duel Commander. Maybe Lightning Bolt would have to be banned. The point is that the fundamental assumptions of the game are bad. Why is it acceptable in a card game that you can lose before the game starts? People used to play Magic for ante. How can it possibly be acceptable that you lose a Black Lotus because you drew a couple of hands in a row with no mana sources or flooded for five turns in a row?
Charbelcher is not even a real Magic card; it's a joke that was written on cardboard.
Imagine for a moment that poker never existed. Instead, everyone played Sealed Magic with these manabase rules, for money. I promise you that you could not convince them to switch over to the current comp rules, where you can literally just not draw mana and lose a Pro Tour through no fault of your own.
And I'm not saying it because I'm salty: I play control decks with 26 lands. I'm just saying that if Magic were more like Chess or Dreamblade, games that require skill, you wouldn't even need WOTC for pro play, because the scene would form itself.
October 3, 2022 10:37 p.m. Edited.
“I played from 7th Edition, but have not played for over two years, with the implication being that I was upset about Wizards removing a card as part of their excising racism from the game” is hardly a glowing endorsement of your qualifications.
Following that up by dismissing decks and formats you don’t personally like makes it look like you are petty and want to play Magic how you want, damned to how anyone else wants to play - though I think this entire thread has been you saying that.
Coming up with “new” solutions to obvious problems indicates your idea was half baked at the time of posting.
Saying “if this was the rule from the beginning no one would want to change it” is a tacit acknowledgement of your detractor’s argument that there is utility in inertia and not fundamentally changing something that would upset the very core of the game.
Citing Alpha rules again - after you have already been told that Alpha was created under a different set of design parameters and is not relevant to modern R&D - shows you do not really understand the game’s history, but are willing to “argue” your ignorance as if it were face.
Repeating bad and already disproven arguments and ranting about decks, formats, and cards you do not like certainly sounds salty to me.
October 3, 2022 10:56 p.m. Edited.
PookandPie says... #20
Ah, yes, so the problem is that everything that doesn't fit the mold for this system is a mistake, isn't Magic (which, lol, Commander is the most popular format of Magic... so no one should really care about your preferences), not a deck, or not a real Magic card. I see, I see. Tons of other rules would need to be changed to accommodate, I see, again.
You really have nothing to answer criticism beyond No True Scotsman fallacies? As for drawing a few hands with no mana sources, you might need to check how you shuffle or perform your mulligans, but by all means, variance happens. What you're saying here, losing before the game even starts, would still happen in your proposed system by adding arbitrary numbers of Wastes, but now you need to remove or neuter tons of elements about the game that people enjoy to avoid said mechanics from giving pilots of those decks disproportionate advantages. The decks that don't warp themselves around the proposed mechanics would be slowed down by the need to include mana rocks when winning, and the decks that do warp themselves around the mechanics will get their 50/50 and storm off in the opponent's faces with abandon.
That's fundamentally why you're seeing people reject this: Not every deck is "turn creatures sideways to win" and if many avenues of how to enjoy the game have to be stripped away to satisfy the arbitrary inclusion of "the best idea ever."
Regardless: We had a Brainburst article that detailed, using the Monte Carlo problem, the rough amount of life that would be spent on fetch lands before you'd see a measurable increase in card quality and delineated the results. Similarly, if you don't spend that much time and effort into realizing this system, be fully aware that people smarter than you are going to break it.
Richard Garfield was surprised to find how far players were able to take his brainchild, and he's the one who purposefully injected elements of luck into the design of this card game. He has, explicitly, stated that his purpose for luck based elements was to avoid a situation where the game becomes solved, fundamentally (which is why I thought it was so funny you compared it to blackjack to me on page 1: A game that fundamentally has solved decision trees. That's why I was so dismissive- it was so serendipitous as to be hilarious).
All I'm reading from you is that you, somehow, seem to believe you understand how to do it better, which fair, you probably do as there's decades worth of game design resources to tap into nowadays. But the crux of this discussion is what would have to be removed to even satisfy the conditions for such an arbitrary ELO Wastes system to be included, and you strip away what makes Magic, Magic.
October 3, 2022 10:59 p.m.
I actually played Volrath the Fallen in EDH since the format was created (occasionally swapping to Commander Greven il-Vec), but I stopped playing seriously after Khans block, which I considered the last really good set. Eldraine and Kamigawa 2 were both well-designed, but the power levels were out-of-whack.
I just play a lot of Orzhov and Crusade being banned bummed me out. I'm not a Templar or something.
What I mean is that decks like Dredge and Oops! (and I'm not being judgmental, I love Dredge) were clearly not intended by the rules. In a tournament context, it makes sense that they would be either banned or severely restricted. I don't think they're overpowered, obviously, because they usually lose games two and three. But the actual card game Magic: the Gathering would probably be better if they didn't exist.
As for Storm, Mark Rosewater named the Storm Scale for a reason. Obviously it's fine in Cube and Pauper, but we probably don't want to live in a world where Storm is the best deck anyway.
My problem is that in game design, you want to limit RNG to one aspect. Look at wargames. For example, I enjoy Warhammer. Warhammer 40,000 is generally considered a bad game, justifiably so. But even 40k knows that you don't staple random effects to OTHER random effects.
That is what Magic's current mana system does. Not only can you get color screwed, you can get screwed off having any lands at all. The randomness escalates exponentially, with every missed land drop causing to stumble on mana further, creating a death spiral. First you miss a land drop, now you can't cast Cultivate, now you can't play your Titan, and pretty soon you lost the entire game. That's not fun, and it's barely a game.
In poker, you don't need the best hand to win. You can bluff. There is no comparable mechanic in MTG. I just think that the rules have some room for refinement. The actual design of 99% of Magic commons and uncommons is actually quite good. Design mistakes like Oko and Uro and Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer only come up in constructed formats, and usually just for brief periods of time.
The real problem is that focus shifted from limited and sealed to constructed, where poorly designed cards are allowed to pollute the environment for years until they're banned or eclipsed by even bigger mistakes.
October 3, 2022 11:15 p.m. Edited.
Caerwyn somewhere a hundred dogs started barking, amirite?
Gosh tho, this is fascinating and more proof folks need to get better at killing their darlings. Playing a suboptimal card isnt fun if it creates the same decision trees. Playing a 3/3 for 5 is similar to a 4/4 for 5 just it dies to one more piece of removal.
October 4, 2022 2:51 a.m.
SteelSentry says... #23
Actually, I have cut cards because of the number of pips; notably, in Pauper. Despite Counterspell being both legal and very powerful, your deck has to be one that can feasably hit UU on turn 2; which means it doesn't always meet the cut in Izzet Blitz if you're more heavily skewed red. Cuombajj Witches might also see more play if it weren't held back by the mana value. In potentially a more relatable example, I rarely run the Ultimatums in my commander decks unless there is enough green that I can guarantee colored ramp; and to a larger extent, a lot of Black bombs (Necropotence) impose a deck building restriction by being very high devotion.
October 4, 2022 3:26 a.m.
SteelSentry says... #24
(forgot to read page 2, whoops) the point is, color pips are a restriction that you might not see in gameplay because they are mostly a deck building restriction. There is as much skill involved in deck building as there is playing the game; and as for the 40k comparison, it's not that color screw and mana screw are two separate issues, they're potential problems that shift the one luck determinant: drawing the relevant card for the situation. It just so happens that the relevant card is different every time; a red land, any land, an threat, a removal, etc.
October 4, 2022 3:35 a.m.
It's an attempt to reverse the power creep in recent cards by making the act of casting spells itself more difficult through manabase debasement.
If you ever played Shandalar, one of the first things you do in that game is go to town and buy basic lands. Why is that? Why didn't they let you start with as many basic lands as you want? Because even having colored mana to begin with is supposed to be an achievement. If you had access to every card at the start of the game, it wouldn't be fun. The restrictions breed creativity.
Under the default rules, why do cards like Bronze Horse even exist? Any deck that wants colored mana either made its land drops and has its colors, or missed its land drops and has no lands at all. By adding Wastes, you can now play colorless cards as a form of variance mitigation in case you draw too many colorless sources.
October 4, 2022 9:09 a.m. Edited.
DeinoStinkus says... #26
Under the default rules, cards like Bronze Horse exist because creatures used to be much, MUCH weaker. Phyrexian Hulk is another example of this. But power creep has made creatures like Bronze Horse irrelevant, phased out by much more powerful 7-drops like Bane of Bala Ged, Ruin Processor, or a 6-drop like Wurmcoil Engine.
October 4, 2022 9:15 a.m.
Correct, what this is trying to do is enable players to run bad cards like Phyrexian Hulk as counterplay to being color-screwed, as opposed to the way things are now where being mana-screwed or flooded is just something that happens.
If we can create a workable form of manabase rules, you wouldn't even need to play best-of-three, because the amount of non-games would be severely reduced. What we should be aiming for with MTG is a ruleset so tight that it could be played as a table game like craps or poker. Instead, WOTC is going in the opposite direction, adding additional game pieces and extra decks and like fifteen kinds of tokens.
How many cards are you allowed to run in EDH right now, like 140? Attractions, multiple commanders, maybe a wishboard? That's nonsensical. MTG already appeals to math nerds and professional gamblers, and it could corner the market with minor alterations.
If you look at a game like Street Fighter, the skill ceiling is immense, but nobody is forcing players to go pro. You can still have fun playing casually. MTG should be more like that: support extremely high-level play while still allowing casual formats as a side thing
October 4, 2022 9:21 a.m. Edited.
DeinoStinkus says... #28
But here's the thing. Noone will run Phyrexian Hulk. If anything, the mana-screwing will just push already-powerful colorless cards further up into the mainstream. Why run Phyrexian Hulk when you can run Wurmcoil Engine?
On that note, Mystic Forge/The Reality Chip/Bolas's Citadel decks would accelerate and dominate the format if left unchecked.
October 4, 2022 9:28 a.m.
If you had a Boros deck but were forced to run some Wastes, it's not like you would cut the other colors. You might just add a couple of signets or equipment or something. We're just trying to replace flood and screw with colorless mana instead, so that the unlucky player is still allowed to take game actions instead of getting dunked on
October 4, 2022 9:50 a.m.
“Correct, what this is trying to do is enable players to run bad cards”.
“I want Magic players - a demographic that loves playing interesting, powerful, and unique cards - to play bad cards” is not the winning argument you think it is.
October 4, 2022 10:09 a.m.
They're not "bad cards." They exist for a situation that never occurs: having lands but not colored mana. Why do colorless artifacts even exist if you're allowed to play as many colored sources as you want?
We're trying to fix the core problems with the MTG ruleset by making the game more like other card games, like Duel Masters. Nobody has ever played Duel Masters and said, "Man, I wish I could have lost the game before it started because my opening hand was statistically anomalous."
Is there any serious argument against replacing land screw with color screw by adding Wastes to your manabase in a separate pile? Because unless people actually played games with this variant, as I did, their opinions probably aren't as informed as mine
Like I said, there are problems with cards that already exist like Charbelcher, but you could clean those up with a ban list
October 4, 2022 10:15 a.m. Edited.
DeinoStinkus says... #32
There is a serious problem with allowing your manabase to exist separately to your deck. It's the problem that everyone in this thread has brought up numerous times, in multiple different ways.
Caerwyn has focused on the handicap and casual play biases and how it would bring down tournament play.
I have focused on the incredibly busted ways it would push certain play strategies ahead, like Storm and Tempo.
These are all symptoms of the same problem. It may not seem like a massive, unbalanced change at first, but ultimately if you approach the idea from the stance that it is going to have flaws, then it does begin to unravel.
October 4, 2022 10:34 a.m.
“They're not "bad cards." They exist for a situation that never occurs: having lands but not colored mana. Why do colorless artifacts even exist if you're allowed to play as many colored sources as you want?”
Simply put, you are wrong about why they exist - you might want to learn more about Magic’s design and gameplay before advocating for design and gameplay changes.
Most of these bad cards exist because of one of two reasons. For older cards, they are from older sets, which over-costed creatures and under-estimated colour fixing. For modern cards, they are designed to be bad - they are filler to be used in Draft and Sealed and are not intended to ever see play in actual decks.
No one ever wants to play them - they have to play them in formats where they might have fewer creatures available due to bad pills or where colour fixing is less prevalent. Trying to make them “playable” in constructed both ignores the fact folks will still just play Wurmcoil Engine or other pushed artifacts, and would simply be disappointed and feel that options are being taken from them.
October 4, 2022 10:41 a.m.
First of all, I'm not suggesting a "format." I never mentioned a banlist or a list of legal sets. I'm saying we should solve mana screw/flood in the comp rules and then ban cards that are broken with an Abundance in play, which is a worthwhile trade.
Second of all, if your point is that Storm is a heckin' epic meme, we know. None of the good storm cards are costed properly because, spoiler alert, free spells are overpowered. It doesn't take a redditor and his pupperino to prove MTG is not a good game. That is why this topic exists.
It makes more sense to fix Magic as a game and ban design mistakes like storm and dredge than to warp the rules around maybe twenty cards at most that Mark Rosewater admits should never have existed to begin with.
If you could fix the mana screw/flood and mulligan system and add a workable Elo/handicap system in exchange for a slightly longer banlist and fewer Hearthstone PogChamp moments, I believe that's a good deal.
October 4, 2022 10:57 a.m. Edited.
DeinoStinkus says... #35
Format - "the way in which something is arranged or set out."
You are proposing a new way for lands to be arranged, therefore, it is by definition a format. Besides, it helps for me to be able to put this in context as a format for the time being, as it's easier to grapple with a custom format than bending the entire rules of Magic.
October 4, 2022 11:02 a.m.
DeinoStinkus says... #36
And my point wasn't necessarily that Storm is overpowered; I'm just saying that this new rules change unbalances many aspects of the game which had previously at least had the lag effect on them as a result of lands being a part of the deck. Storm was just my first example. I'm currently brewing a mono-blue tempo deck to prove the same thing.
Also, Balustrade Spy and friends have a few questions.
October 4, 2022 11:06 a.m. Edited.
TheOfficialCreator - You are incorrect. The dictionary definition of format is inapplicable because “format” is a specific term of art meaning the specific type of game being played (Modern, EDH, Sealed, etc.). If this was presented as “a new way to play a certain type of Magic game” that would be a format; OP is presenting this a a change to the fundamental rules which would influence the game as a whole.
Granted, OP is attacking a straw man in addressing the use of the wrong word; the underlying points you are making are valid.
estoner - You need to recognise that you are in the minority in thinking Magic is “not a good game”. You can look at the universal derision of your idea (including by the silent majority who is contributing with upvoting comments against you, but not really upvoting your comments). Or the fact that the game survived for thirty years. Or the fact that it is the dominant force in the trading card game market. Or the fact that it is more popular than ever, both in terms of sales figures and players.
I am inclined to take sales figures and Magic players’ word on this one - not the word of someone who quit not over the rules, but over a card’s banning (in the same thread where they advocate how great chances to play new cards would be, calling into question their true motives in leaving) and who says they have not played for two years.
October 4, 2022 11:22 a.m. Edited.
DeinoStinkus says... #38
Fair point. It was just easier to mark it as a new format than to have to lengthily explain what the idea was in the description of the deck. :P
October 4, 2022 11:23 a.m.
estoner i gotta give credit where credit is due. This is one of the best and most dedicated trollings I have ever seen. You got me good. Im.not mad I'm down right impressed
October 4, 2022 11:41 a.m.
I'll be more specific. The design and development of 99% of cards is very strong. When there are "mistakes," they were usually mythics that were pushed on purpose to sell packs, so that's not even a balance problem, that's a business decision.
In the formats that WOTC actually playtests, namely draft and Standard, a few broken rares are not a big deal. From my understanding, Wizards don't playtest Modern, Legacy, Pioneer, etc. unless there is an emergency. So the majority of Magic is fine.
How do we make it better? What are some problems with the game? Well, let's look at some reviews from BoardGameGeek:
- The game relies heavily on luck in that the draw of the card can make or break a game. Each turn, you can gain one piece of currency to spend on bringing out cards. So on turn one, you can spend one currency to bring out a card of cost one. On turn two, you can spend two currency to bring out a card or cost two or two cards of cost one each. etc. But what if on the first turn you've been unlucky and picked up no one cost cards? Or two cost cards, either. What if the shuffle of the deck means you get nothing out until turn 5 but your opponent has been getting things out every turn? Now I know a lot of fans of the game will be wanting to reply that my example is indicative of a badly designed deck but please bear in mind that this is an example of an wider problem. Is it really worth spending lots of money on a game so heavily based on luck?
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1891195/3-out-10-or-ian-takes-his-life-his-own-hands-posti
- In Android Netrunner, if you have very poor luck with the draw of your hand, you still can make decisions that are meaningful. They may still change the outcome of the state of the game. For example, if a corporation draws 4 agendas in their hand, they can decide on where to place the agendas. If a runner has no icebreakers, they can still run on servers to force the corporation to rez their ice and deplete their credit pool. In Magic the Gathering, there is a higher frequency that when there is a very poor draw, you have no meaningful choice. If you are mana screwed, you cannot play any spells. If you are mana flooded, you have no spells in your hand to play.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1063261/magic-gathering-vs-android-netrunner
- The rule-set is labyrinthine, has changed a great deal over time, and is fairly obnoxious to learn. It's not that hard to "get going' with basic rules, but playing correctly with anything but a carefully-chosen-to-be-trivial card set is difficult. Remembering interactions, card errata, special cases, etc. is a lot of work. Expect to have numerous Magic games where, unless you run to the computer and consult the hundreds of pages of rules or find a web page addressing your specific query, you will not be sure how something should have worked, and it affected the outcome of the game.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/398482/magic-euro-card-players-and-vice-versa
What have we learned? The comp rules are too long, full of technical debt and parasitic mechanics from 30 years of cards, some of which literally only exist to tell jokes (Attractions, Stickers, Dungeons, Treasure, tracking Day/Night, Initiative, etc). Second, people wish that there were more ways to control the variance other than playing more cycling lands/MDFCs or only playing burn 100% of the time.
Let's say that Magic reassessed its mana system and solved some of these problems. What would these people complain about then? The only argument left would be that the game is too expensive, and that is solved by playing draft and sealed. You could literally solve every problem people have with the game. It's not as though the mulligan rules and mana burn haven't been changed already. If you took someone who last played during Alpha and asked them to play Standard, they would have literally no clue what's going on.
The MTG rules are a sacred cow that is not actually good. People are just numbed to how bad they are from decades of play. What we should do is make the rules fit on an index card, like they did back during Revised, and put the complicated parts on the cards and keywords themselves. That is what Eurogames do, and it works well. Magic's designers, in their hubris, have decided that Magic is not a game but a product, and have stopped trying to improve it.
When editing a movie, the first thing you ask yourself is whether or not a scene is important to the overall story. If you delete the scene where Luke Skywalker goes to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters, does the plot still work? Apparently it does, because that sequence never made it into A New Hope. Does Magic still work without mana screw/flood? If so, why is it still in the game? Why are we giving people a reason NOT to play the game?
October 4, 2022 11:53 a.m. Edited.
DeinoStinkus says... #41
"What is the point of playing a game so heavily based on luck?"
...
...
...
...poker, for instance. Or Monopoly. Or Sorry. Or, hell, to bring some serious board games into this, Betrayal at House on the Hill. One of my favorite board games ever, and it revolves around luck.
October 4, 2022 12:02 p.m.
Anyone can cherry pick reviews to support their position. Let’s look at the numbers:
Magic is sitting at a healthy 7.8 overall ranking, purring it well above Pokémon (6.3) and Yu-Gi-Oh (6.1), in addition to putting it above other fan favourite games like Catan (7.1), Dominion (7.6), poker (generic) (6.3), and chess (7.2).
Just as a tip, don’t cite to anecdotes when the aggregate totals on the same citation prove you wrong.
October 4, 2022 12:03 p.m.
The "game" part of poker is knowing mathematics, blockers, counting your outs with the rule of 4 and 2, bet-sizing, range polarization, how to semi-bluff, whether the villain is loose or tight, bankroll management... The "game" part of Magic is hoping you don't flood and your opponent does. I think there's some room for improvement
October 4, 2022 12:11 p.m.
This is the second time you have implied that bluffing and other skills of that nature are not present in Magic. If you honestly think that, the problem isn’t the game - it is you.
But, hey, you’re a person who would rather ask the entire game to play than run a play set of Birds of Paradise and solve your mana problems that way. That’s the reality - solutions already exist in-game to your “problem”—be it adjusting the curve or running ramp and colour fixing. Does it solve every issue with flood/screw? No. Does it provide enough issues to mitigate the problem without creating a whole lot more problems? Yes.
October 4, 2022 12:17 p.m.
You can bluff to get some free points of damage by representing a combat trick, but you can't bluff your way out of having no lands
I'm not the person complaining about the mana system. I play control decks with more lands than spells. I'm saying that it's stupid to print new cards LITERALLY every day but never try to fix the rules themselves
October 4, 2022 12:20 p.m.
You are, in fact, the person complaining about the mana system and the rules on which it is based. You have been complaining in pretty much every post you have made - about a game you say you do not play.
And that’s really all there is to it - the rules are not a problem to the majority, and you are conflating your own opinion for that of the masses. Which makes sense - you are clearly the kind of person who lives in an echo chamber of their own thoughts, and is incapable of seeing issues from anyone else’s perspective.
Now, I don’t think you are trolling, as others have suggested - I just think you don’t like Magic and don’t want to admit that the right solution isn’t your nonsensical one, it’s you not playing and not obsessing about a game that you hate.
October 4, 2022 1:07 p.m.
I'm saying the components are good but the ruleset is bad. That is literally why Commander became successful, it used the components from Magic but not the rules. How hard is it to believe that there is a better version of the comp rules than what we're using? Even Yu-Gi-Oh! doesn't suffer from the variance problems Magic does, and that game has no mulligans
October 4, 2022 1:09 p.m.
Commander did, in fact, use the rules of Magic. The only thing it changed was deck construction - and deck construction is a secondary set of rules that change based on the format. Even within official rules, deck construction is protean, with different formats having different card counts and restrictions on multiple cards. They did not change something fundamental to the game itself, which is what you propose to do.
The rules are fine as they are - and they certainly are not so bad that you would have to break huge swaths of the game in order to fix it. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think you need to demolish a perfectly functional - and the sales and ratings show categorically that the game is functional - system to fix a few fringe cases that could mostly be solved by better deck building and better mulligans.
October 4, 2022 1:28 p.m.
Five card stud is "functional." People switched to Hold 'Em because it was better. I'm saying we could do the same with the mana system, whether adding colorless sources is a good idea or not
October 4, 2022 1:31 p.m.
You are quite apt at making posts you clearly think are clever, but undermine either your general position or positions stated in your other responses - such that maybe I will have to reevaluate my theory that you are mot trolling.
Surely no serious poster would argue by analogy “Magic is functional, but what if we made it a completely different game?” That would be such a silly argument, only a fool or a troll could make it with a straight face. Especially if they were using an example that was so fundamentally different - the 52 card deck is much easier build new game systems around than 24,839 unique Magic cards - as to be incomparable.
estoner says... #1
I'm using cards everyone knows as an example.
I just went 3/2 in a Pioneer event on MODO with a homebrew: the list is on T/O. Grim Parhelion
Usually when I lose it's because I'm purposely trying to force Grixis in every format or win with Empty the Pits because I think it's funny. I've cashed in Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments and stuff too. I just think netdecking is lame.
October 3, 2022 5:12 p.m. Edited.