Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40 • Hacker News Board

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#101

Post by lukifer » Sat, May 23, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #52

lukifer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest beef with Magic isn't the lands system, but that the game is fundamentally stingy with cards, leading to many non-games, and/or turns where you pray for the right top-deck and don't get it. (This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.) Given the huge cardpool, there's no real way to "fix" MtG that couldn'…

> (This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.) Is Netrunner something you can get into these days, or is it hopelessly OOP? I remember hearing good things about it.

It's alive and well, and the community is welcoming and happy to teach: https://nullsignal.games/players/around-the-world/

Cards release more slowly than the FFG era, but the current stewards (Null Signal) have been doing a great job for the last eight years.

There's a community app to play against an AI, which has a good tutorial if you want to dip your toes in: https://chiriboga.sifnt.net.au/

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#102

Post by lukifer » Sat, May 23, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

vikingerik wrote: post #64

lukifer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest beef with Magic isn't the lands system, but that the game is fundamentally stingy with cards, leading to many non-games, and/or turns where you pray for the right top-deck and don't get it. (This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.) Given the huge cardpool, there's no real way to "fix" MtG that couldn'…

Love that "land for turn", although I think it might shift the balance a little too much, in that you can make a deck with too much land and high cost spells and know you can cast them reliably. There needs to be a risk factor in building up to high mana to make low mana spells matter. Possible tweaks, maybe it has a cost (all lands have cycling 1 or 2 mana or life.) Or delay that draw until end of turn, which feels…

My thinking is that there's a tradeoff, that you slow your ramping in exchange for cycling (replacing your land for turn). You trade your acceleration towards big spells for more consistency (or just fewer dead draws).

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#103

Post by lukifer » Sat, May 23, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

ticulatedspline wrote: post #96

lukifer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest beef with Magic isn't the lands system, but that the game is fundamentally stingy with cards, leading to many non-games, and/or turns where you pray for the right top-deck and don't get it. (This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.) Given the huge cardpool, there's no real way to "fix" MtG that couldn'…

I don't play any IRL magic but I know it can be hard to "fix" and maybe isn't broken. Casually those rules would probably be good house rules to balance play, though even small changes like this could change balance and lean all decks towards exploiting the rule to point, your land for draw is kinda implemented with trade routes https://gatherer.wizards.com/9ED/en-us/108/trade-routes And that has an additional mana c…

> does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken"

exactly, that's why it probably isn't feasible other than casual/social play: there's no change to the fundamental rules that doesn't end up warping the meta-game. (Particularly if the fix relates to mitigating mana flood/screw with consistency: I suspect it rewards combo lists, whose win-cons are indistinguishable from "find three specific cards".)

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#104

Post by stevenicr » Sun, May 24, 2026, 6:10 AM UTC

drblast wrote: post #66

snikeris wrote: post #30

This is my favorite alternative form of Magic: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-danger-room/ "I have a feeling that roughly 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too few lands, 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too many lands, 25% of games are decided by a player having a legitimate bomb not get answered immediately, and the last 25% of games are the ones that everybody hopes for wher…

I haven't tried this because I haven't played Magic in over 20 years, but I always thought it would be more fun if you had two draw decks where the second was only allowed to include basic lands. Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games. Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw…

I've thought for a long time, two draw piles - one is lands only - and you draw from each of the two piles each turn.

this would be balanced for both players.

If course with magic the lands pile would have to have rules like no lands that turn into creatures or something.. maybe even just basic lands .

but each person gets a land each turn - been thinking that makes the game better.