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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

#131

Post by city41 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #74

Magic may be the best game ever devised. Unlike chess, it’s stochastic and unlike backgammon, it has hidden information and bluffing. But it’s more than that - the cards change the rules of the game itself. On top of those layers, the fact that each player builds their own deck makes the game asymmetric and ultimately the meta-game of building the deck to beat the Keynsian beauty contest of optimal deck selection bec…

I really have no doubt at all that Magic is the greatest game ever devised. However, I do think it was a better game in the early days before strategy and meta was disseminated so broadly across the internet. Each local community had their own deck styles and approaches, and a big part of the game was in discovering new combos and decks on your own. I feel that part is a bit lost these days.

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

#132

Post by arvinsim »

city41 wrote: post #131
alasdair_ wrote: post #74

Magic may be the best game ever devised. Unlike chess, it’s stochastic and unlike backgammon, it has hidden information and bluffing. But it’s more than that - the cards change the rules of the game itself. On top of those layers, the fact that each player builds their own deck makes the game asymmetric and ultimately the meta-game of building the deck to beat the Keynsian beauty contest of optimal deck selection bec…

I really have no doubt at all that Magic is the greatest game ever devised. However, I do think it was a better game in the early days before strategy and meta was disseminated so broadly across the internet. Each local community had their own deck styles and approaches, and a big part of the game was in discovering new combos and decks on your own. I feel that part is a bit lost these days.

I don't think information availability affected the game so much as the economic barrier. I mean, if people have infinite access to cards, there would be a lot of experimenting going around.

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

#133

Post by otakucode »

I would love to hear the original audio from that game between a precoscious 6 year old and Garfield. It sounds like it would be totally adorable and also informative. I got the Magic bug in junior high school in the early 90s and it was a blast that definitely enhanced my life and expanded my friend circle throughout high school. I vividly remember going to a small local tournament, meeting a ton of people and very much having a feeling of 'these are my people'. It was amazing.

That was back in 4th edition days I think (I know it was during release of The Dark expansion, I bought a box of boosters for that... was a bit disappointed). It seems the rules have changed a bit since then and the game itself is quite a bit more complicated. Lots of counters and tokens and such that weren't so much of a thing back then.

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

#134

Post by alanfalcon »

Smithalicious wrote: post #119
alasdair_ wrote: post #100

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. 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.

There’s just enough luck involved that the risk-reward ratio was probably mostly right in those early days, especially as the game wasn’t designed with the expectation players would ever have perfect information about scarcity and relative power level of individual cards.

Even so, it wasn’t fun to play with ante, so most people didn’t do it; Magic smartly went with the flow rather than fight against it, and that’s a huge reason why the game persists successfully to this day.

(Details gleaned primarily from episodes of Mark Rosewater’s “Drive to Work” podcast, at least the best episodes of which are mandatory listening imo for any designer of any stripe, especially one who is also at all a fan of MtG. Yes, Garfield is the game’s creator, but Maro is the game’s central nervous system and has been for more than 15 years!)

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

#135

Post by alanfalcon »

arvinsim wrote: post #132
city41 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really have no doubt at all that Magic is the greatest game ever devised. However, I do think it was a better game in the early days before strategy and meta was disseminated so broadly across the internet. Each local community had their own deck styles and approaches, and a big part of the game was in discovering new combos and decks on your own. I feel that part is a bit lost these days.

I don't think information availability affected the game so much as the economic barrier. I mean, if people have infinite access to cards, there would be a lot of experimenting going around.

The tools exist for people to experiment as if they had infinite copies of every card ever printed, and the people who most enjoy that sort of thing definitely make use of those tools!

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

#136

Post by fcarraldo »

smabie wrote: post #73

I really enjoyed mtg as a kid but played a few games recently and discovered I don’t really like it. I feel the use of mana makes the game slow and clunky. Moreover, a deck of 60 cards is a lot . My favorite card game nowadays is Gwent. With the small deck size and single card mulligans you can mitigate almost all bad luck and chance and design a really tight and cohesive deck. Also I love the 3 round format, makes t…

Interesting - I recently tried to get into Gwent and it feels extremely shallow and underbaked compared to MtG. There’s so little interaction between me and my opponent that it feels like playing solitaire and comparing the results. CCGs as of late seem to want to minimize interaction (counterspells, instant speed responses, etc), and I’m not sure why. Does Gwent have more of this at higher level play, and it’s just not apparent in the starter decks?

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

#137

Post by rsrsrs86 »

meroes wrote: post #130
alasdair_ wrote: post #74

Magic may be the best game ever devised. Unlike chess, it’s stochastic and unlike backgammon, it has hidden information and bluffing. But it’s more than that - the cards change the rules of the game itself. On top of those layers, the fact that each player builds their own deck makes the game asymmetric and ultimately the meta-game of building the deck to beat the Keynsian beauty contest of optimal deck selection bec…

Can I take this opportunity to ask a stupid question? Is ML anything more than pattern recognition? If I could tally nearly every game state vs game state -> win %, then run a simple if [state], then {} program, then what do I miss out on vs an ML approach? Is the magic just in how we feed good data sets to an ML algorithm so it can efficiently mimic the above much quicker?

This is a very clever question.

If your problem's domain is not too big then you are basically right, but in practice things are more complicated, larger, noisier, etc. I am conflating many things here of course.

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

#138

Post by scubbo »

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.

Form of the Dragon begs to differ... /s

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

#139

Post by elif »

paulmd wrote: post #81
elif wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 4 versions of magic online: MtGO: old official version, you can buy and sell singles for similar costs to paper Cockatrice: Old unofficial free version. leaves a lot of rule/effect enforcement up to players manually. Duels: "new" official version, never implemented complete rulesets, abandoned by devs 2 years ago, leaving collectors who paid good money SOL Arena: new official version, but with hearthstone mod…

if only there was some kind of eXchange for MTG Online... (to ruin the joke: this is where the famed bitcoin exchange MtGOX came from. It was an exchange for MTG Online that was repurposed into a bitcoin exchange... with that kind of flawless pedigree who could have ever foreseen problems coming down the road? /s)

Indeed :) I am a mtgox asset recovery claimant. I have also bought plenty of "investment" paper magic, for instance, during zendikar, I tried to buy up a large swath of full frame foil lands.

But for real, the target demographics (nerds who want to speculate and also feel like they're doing something cool) made it the great fit it was.. especially when magic speculators themselves needed a better vehicle for peer-to-peer value exchange.

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

#140

Post by arvinsim »

alanfalcon wrote: post #135
arvinsim wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think information availability affected the game so much as the economic barrier. I mean, if people have infinite access to cards, there would be a lot of experimenting going around.

The tools exist for people to experiment as if they had infinite copies of every card ever printed, and the people who most enjoy that sort of thing definitely make use of those tools!

That’s right but they wouldn’t be able to test on real tournaments though.
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