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The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

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Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#41

Post by throwup238 »

ipqk wrote: post #25
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #12

The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.

Balancing a game is hard. You can hardly blame anyone for getting it wrong on their first attempt. But getting it wrong 30 years later…

I think the ruleset in MTG especially with all the mechanics introduced is way too complicated to balance at this point. It's got the card game equivalent of Turing completeness and the best they can do is ban cards that turn out to be too powerful from competitive games as their utility is discovered.

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#42

Post by empath75 »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #12

The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.

A few things.

1) In the original game, "balance" was meant to be achieved through the ante system, so if you loaded up your deck with good rares and managed to lose, you were risking more than your opponent was.

2) There was no competitive collectible card game scene so nobody was thinking about balance, it was just about having fun. Chaos orb was everyone's favorite card when the game first came out.

3) They didn't know that people would collect magic cards in any serious way, so they weren't thinking about resale value or getting people to buy a bunch of cards so they could have the rares. Baseball card and comic book dealers early on were completely uninterested in dealing with magic cards for quite a long while.

4) You're looking backwards with decades of experience of playing collectible card games. It was not at all immediately obvious that moxes and black lotus would be good, and people did not understand either "card-advantage" or "tempo" for many months after the game was released. The early meta was all people trying to get out big minions. It took quite a few months before people started figuring out degenerate decks, and even then, there wasn't a lot of communication between players early on unless you were on a few news groups, and not many people were. A lot of it was just word of mouth.

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#43

Post by lmm »

lupire wrote: post #24
alisonatwork wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic was monetized from the beginning. It was the precursor to loot boxes in modern computer gaming and used the same hooks that get people addicted to gambling to encourage sales of booster packs.

The article covers how this is not true and how the transition to loot boxes was how it went wrong. The start is meandering but the meat is that the end.

Boosters were in from the start, and that means the gambling and "skinnerisation" were already there, perhaps less optimised than today but fundamentally the same thing. Whales buying every booster they could get their hands on until they got the cards they wanted was something that happened as soon as it went on sale.

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#44

Post by empath75 »

rat87 wrote: post #19
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #12

The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.

Spells have mostly gotten slightly weaker. But creatures have only grown more and more powerful. As for rares I don't think Richard Garfield ever intended to make it an expensive game. Magic is one of if not the first trading card game they didn't really know what they were getting into. They thought people might buy a handful of random cards (not 4x best card) and everyone might use different cards (whatever they ha…

Early on my playgroup literally just mixed all their cards together. We didn't really think of it as being "my deck" or whatever when we were playing unlimited. It wasn't really until Legends came out that anybody in my group of game friends started taking collectability or competitiveness seriously.

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#45

Post by valbaca »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #36

> We send all the flattened Magic packaging and booster packs to the prison and the inmates do the product fulfillment. Was that a joke or serious? I was enjoying the article until that abrupt end and it just felt dark. A company forcing imprisoned humans to distribute their product?

Are you unfamiliar with the Prison Industrial Complex?

Are you unfamiliar that slavery is illegal in America except for prisoners?

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#46

Post by empath75 »

paulpauper wrote: post #32
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #12

The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.

The power 9 became so powerful when later on it became possible to make combo decks that could win within 5 turns

There was a black lotus first turn kill in the original set:

Black lotus, mountain, channel, fireball.

And you could make a deck with 10 of each of those if you wanted according to the original rules.

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#47

Post by empath75 »

threetonesun wrote: post #22
hibikir wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game Garfield envisioned was played with Ante, which is something the community ran away from real quick. His game also had no serious text templating, so it was a far harder game to play. He might not have envisioned play to win, but he designed some of the craziest cards printed in the history of the game, and basically every single one of them had the highest rarity: He knew that Ancestral Recall was much bett…

Was it harder to play? If you didn't understand the rules amongst friends you made them up. But the game also tended towards more battles like "my flying bear defends against your dragon, oh no a lightning bolt". I tried getting back into it a few years ago because I still love the idea of MTG and every card had a book of text and all the best combos were sorted out the second a set released. Which -- I understand wh…

one word: banding.

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#48

Post by empath75 »

preordained wrote: post #33
getwiththeprog wrote: post #4

Linked from the article are the pre release testing cards.. According to Garfield - it all went wrong after this! Magic with it's twice a year new sets and pay-to-win is not what he had envisioned. https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gam...

"pay-to-win" Yah, good luck with that. Anyone who has played competitively knows you will absolutely get stomped by a higher skill opponent even if your deck is more powerful on paper unless the discrepancy is ludicrous. Garfield made his game too well to fall to such trite criticisms...he outdid himself, its immune to his own potshots, lol

Yeah, there's basically a floor of how much you have to spend to get a competitive deck, but beyond that spending more doesn't help.

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#49

Post by edfletcher_t137 »

"This wasn't just nostalgia talking. There seems to be something objectively more magical, more infinite-seeming and treasurable about this smaller, more limited version of Magic."

Not that I ever had the chance to play the pre-release version of the game, but the explosion of complexity has made me yearn for exactly this, a "smaller, more limited version"... so much so that I wrote https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ to try and capture it (and also, admittedly, as a bit of a joke/dig)

Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

#50

Post by rodgerd »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #36

> We send all the flattened Magic packaging and booster packs to the prison and the inmates do the product fulfillment. Was that a joke or serious? I was enjoying the article until that abrupt end and it just felt dark. A company forcing imprisoned humans to distribute their product?

Prison labour underpins a great deal of the machinery of capitalism, even in nominally free countries. Serfdom never really left the building.
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