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My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

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Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#111

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

rantwasp wrote: post #93
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #87

>> “One of the underlying premises of the game,” he said, “is that there’s supposed to be a very simple set of rules and all the cards are exceptions. Every card allows you to break the rules at some point. That’s how I think of it.” That's Garfield of course and it's his game, but I think it's more accurate to describe the game as an abstract machine and the text on the cards (the "ability text") as its inputs that…

yeah. the guy who invented it does not know. -5/-5 for you + you must suffle all of your library into your graveyard

If I have a library, I must be a player. In that case, how do I get -5/-5? Players don't have P/T.

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#112

Post by wyldfire »

falcrist wrote: post #67
wyldfire wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heartily second EDH, it's great. My friends and I would often play a hybrid of EDH and 2HG (Two headed Dragon?), it was a real good time.

"Two-Headed Giant" It's not even a hybrid really. It's just that 2HG is more of a format modifier than it's own format.

Yes, what I was going for is:

Elder Dragon Highlander + Two Headed Giant = "Two Headed Dragon"

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#113

Post by thaumasiotes »

Aeolun wrote: post #98
gbrown wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fun, but I HATE that it has such a strong pay to win component. If a video game let players spend thousands of dollars on high power abilities to completely dominate the lower paid tier players, they'd be ridiculed in many circles. There are certainly ways to play around this, but it's definitely a thing.

I thought it was interesting to see that at the start they explicitly tried to make the common cards just as powerful as the rare ones. That’s definitely changed for the worse, as well as making individual cards more powerful. I used to make fun of YuGiOh for being full of ‘this card wins you the game’ cards, but magic has very much transformed into exactly the same thing.

Mark Rosewater (the head designer) commented on this very issue in the most recent State of Design article:

> Two years ago in my "State of Design" articles, I said we'd let complexity get a little too high. Last year, I said we overcompensated and ended up with complexity a little too low. I'm happy to say that we've found the middle ground and have been producing sets that seem to be hitting the sweet spot.

> The key to this success seems to be us towing the line of complexity at common, but upping the amount of complexity we allow at uncommon. This allows us to take in-theme things for the set that would normally be rare and pull them down to uncommon to allow us to raise the as-fan of the theme. A good example of this would be the planeswalkers in War of the Spark. The uncommon planeswalkers, in a vacuum, would probably be rares in a normal set, but by allowing ourselves to lower their rarity, we were able to infuse War of the Spark (especially Limited) with the planeswalker theme.

> Another component that allowed us to pull this off is a willingness to be more aggressive with the power level of commons, especially answers, to help make them more relevant without having to up their complexity.

( https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/s... )

The power level of commons was long one of their primary defenses to the question "why do you print bad rares?". Combining the introduction of Mythic rarity with the axing of staple commons did terrible things to the balance of power across rarities. As alluded to in passing here, they seemed to believe that powerful commons made the game more confusing to play and/or less fun, hurting their potential market.

You can track the issue on Doom Blade ( https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive... ). In M12 (2011) it's a common. In M13, as part of their commitment to continuously rotate which cards fill which roles, Doom Blade is replaced by Murder ( https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive... ), which is also common. In M14 (2013), Doom Blade is back! But it's an uncommon, where it stays for the next several years while they publish articles about how their new philosophy of design means you shouldn't have broadly useful removal at common for under 5 mana. But between M19 and M20, Murder shifts from uncommon to common. Murder is still much weaker than Doom Blade. But the philosophy of "no common removal unless it's either intensely situational or too expensive to play" has disappeared.

They're trying to balance money extraction, player demand, and the broader health of the game ("after playing 20 games, do I still like this?"), and feedback on those three issues has very different patterns of immediacy and accuracy. (And, of course, money extraction and player demand are in direct conflict with each other.)

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#114

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Aeolun wrote: post #101
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #92

>> So, in Magic, the rare cards are often the more interesting cards, but the most powerful cards are meant to be common so that everybody can have a chance. It's funny but just today I was playing a match in M:tG Arena and I noticed that I used a card's rarity to make a decision. The card was Worthy Knight, a 2/2 creature and I was trying to decide whether to attack into it with my own creature, a Pelt Collector (at…

If he used it to block it clearly wasn’t so important to his strategy though?

I think they recognised Pelt Collector was important enough to my own strategy to be worth the trade. I did regret it later. I think I lost that game actually (too many bloody knights).

Edit: I mean, Pelt Collector is like the creature kill magnet. It seems players know it's a powerful card and do their best to get rid of it as early as possible.

Edit 2: Oh, I remember now. They just played another one next turn. They probably had it in hand from the start. I should have waited with the Collector.

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#115

Post by arkades »

rantwasp wrote: post #93
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #87

>> “One of the underlying premises of the game,” he said, “is that there’s supposed to be a very simple set of rules and all the cards are exceptions. Every card allows you to break the rules at some point. That’s how I think of it.” That's Garfield of course and it's his game, but I think it's more accurate to describe the game as an abstract machine and the text on the cards (the "ability text") as its inputs that…

yeah. the guy who invented it does not know. -5/-5 for you + you must suffle all of your library into your graveyard

The game is the game. People are allowed to have different metaphors for the game - the creator doesn’t have special ownership on that.

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#116

Post by klyrs »

jahlove wrote: post #77

Growing up in the suburbs south of Seattle, I got to visit the Wizards of the Coast headquarters once or twice. As a 14 year old, I approached Richard Garfield one day and asked him if he wanted to play. We played two or three games, I recall I won two. He signed one of my cards and continued playing other folks. For a 14 year old me this was a pretty big deal. Thank you Richard for doing that!

I grew up in south Seattle, and also got to visit the original WotC headquarters a few times. What an awesome opportunity that was. In addition to tables and tournaments for Magic players, they had a bank of networked computers where you could play multiplayer games on their LAN.

My favorite memory was when me and a friend tried a novel strategy in Warcraft 2 -- the "Peon Rush". Haven't heard of the strategy? That's because it's awful. We ganged up on another player, sending waves of peons as fast as we could spawn them. Our target crushed us both with, IIRC, a pair of ogres. One died.

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#117

Post by wbl »

foota wrote: post #29
wyldfire wrote: post #2

MtG is just a fantastic game. Somehow I think the detailed rules really appeals to those of us who simulate automata in our head. ;) > I had begun the interview with what I figured was an obvious, softball icebreaker: “Yes,” Garfield responded when asked if he was related to President James Garfield (1831-1881), “he was my great-great-grandfather.” Wow! > I think make-believe is a very important component of games; t…

I've begun to realize that the games I play for fun reflect the complexity of the work that I do. sigh

Ah, another Factorio addict.

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#118

Post by rantwasp »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111
rantwasp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah. the guy who invented it does not know. -5/-5 for you + you must suffle all of your library into your graveyard

If I have a library, I must be a player. In that case, how do I get -5/-5? Players don't have P/T.

it’s a metaphorical -5/-5

Re: My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art

#119

Post by Smithalicious »

alasdair_ wrote: post #100
Smithalicious wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another great innovation it has over chess is making people pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year to the creator. I'm only being half sarcastic here; monetization seems like a difficult aspect of game design for an "analog" game like this.

>Another great innovation it has over chess is making people pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year to the creator. I'm only being half sarcastic here; monetization seems like a difficult aspect of game design for an "analog" game like this. In the original rules of the game, players had to ante up a random card from their deck every game. There were other cards that added to this ante during the game itse…

Some parts of this are appealing but overall it seems like a bad design; new players and players with worse decks will have to give up cards far more often. Their cards will be cheaper on average, yes, but having to frequently replace a random card sounds like it would be very tedious. This also icentivizes people to pick on weaker players.
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