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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

#51

Post by jdknezek »

edfletcher_t137 wrote: post #49

"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 t…

You might look into Mindbug[1]. It uses a few, very streamlined mechanics. It plays quickly - 3 life, 10 cards. But there is a ton of card variety, and wildly powerful cards, because the mindbug mechanic makes each game self-balancing to a degree.

I believe Garfield also gave creative input during development.

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-con...

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

#52

Post by dccoolgai »

hobs wrote: post #27
mxwsn wrote: post #13

Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire. Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outs…

And I will never be unsad about dominion.isotropic.org shutting down with its dead simple and fast dominion implementation, they promised to take it down if the company ever did its own thing and they did and you had to buy every expansion and it generally sucked.

I was a big player on isotropic too. (I played Innovation after they shut down Dominion which was also fun).

The one at dominion.games really isn't too bad - not as good as isotropic IMHO but not bad either.

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

#53

Post by dccoolgai »

mxwsn wrote: post #13

Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire. Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outs…

Dominion is such an amazing game - the complexity that can arise from such a dead simple set of core rules is awesome.

It tends to break down with more than 4 or 5 players - I wish there was a version of it for larger groups to play online.

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

#54

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

throwup238 wrote: post #41
ipqk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[Turing complete you say?](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828)

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

#55

Post by barkbyte »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #29
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.

> 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 hate against arena isn't due to lack of polish or it not working well, it's about what it's trying to do. It's not about collecting or trading cards anymore it's about opening as many loot boxes (packs) as possible. MTGA let you purchase specific cards, Arena does not and likely never will. Th…

MTGA is Arena. Do you mean MTGO?

And you can buy individual cards in arena. You can buy wildcards in the store and redeem them for any card of the corresponding rarity. They’re stupid overpriced in many cases but you can’t say it’s not possible.

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

#56

Post by schrectacular »

johtso wrote: post #40
awithrow wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art. The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same wa…

I agree, I find so much of the art of modern magic cards completely uninspiring. They all look the same. Old magic cards had an element of the strange and the quirky. Sometimes the designs bordered on naive. Hand painted illustrations had a distinctly human touch. And the illustrations were punchy and had contrast. You knew exactly what a card was from a distance. A lot of the modern art is just polished, air brushed…

Note also that all those old cards were done on physical media, whereas today almost all the cards are done digitally. So the modern cards are much more _detailed_. Check out the Jesper Ewing cards like Frantic Scapegoat. He's notable for creating real paintings. To me they capture a bit of the old feel.

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

#57

Post by busterarm »

plorkyeran wrote: post #23
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…

I'd put the end of the golden age a few years past that, but I fully agree with the notion that the point where the game was at its best was long after he was in charge. He created a fun game, but not a game that people would continue to play for decades, and Magic R&D turned it into a game that I had far more fun with than anything he ever envisioned.

It's immediately obvious when you realize that despite all of the games he has invented, Magic, Robo Rally and King of Tokyo are his only real hits...

...and I think King of Tokyo/New York is absolute rubbish.

Some of his other games have their niche of players but very small by comparison. KeyForge was very flash-in-the-pan in terms of popularity.

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

#58

Post by scruple »

awithrow wrote: post #26
mxwsn wrote: post #13

Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire. Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outs…

Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art. The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same wa…

Nostalgia or not, I let myself get sucked back into MtG in 2021, after discovering the unofficial format Premodern [0], and a major component of that is the artwork on the cards in those sets with the black border. I'm sure it really is just nostalgia but I truly enjoy playing games in that format and looking at the artwork, especially cards which I've never really seen before because they weren't meta back in the day or cards that are just infrequent or that I'd forgotten.

[0]: https://premodernmagic.com/

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

#59

Post by evanelias »

empath75 wrote: post #42
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…

> 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.

Yeah, to echo this point exactly: as a kid I remember that it was distinctly disappointing to open a pack and get a boring mana-related card, such as a mox or dual land, in the rare slot. We all wanted cool big creatures instead!

Pretty soon, the usefulness of those mana cards became clearer. But I still recall finding it ridiculous that moxes were selling for a steep $15 at a gaming convention.

I stopped playing a few years later and sold all my good cards. I cringe seeing how much even a lowly Arabian Nights mountain sells for these days...

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

#60

Post by sebastos »

sshine wrote: post #35
awithrow wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art. The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same wa…

They have a lot more narrative control over the artwork now. A thing I disliked (as a kid) about the old cards, as they transitioned to these more homogenised styles, was how wildly different the cards looked. It didn’t feel like one game, and there were many artistic styles I simply didn’t like. But looking back now, the old cards artwork is so much more iconic; in part because of the nostalgia, but in part because…

I was going to write something similar: if I had been in creative control back in 1993, I definitely would have fallen for the trap of thinking that I was making things better by forcing the artwork to have a homogeneous, consistent feel to it. In retrospect, the idiosyncratic uniqueness of each card made it like a little piece of art that you could own. As a young kid, that made it so cool! I think a lot of young kids only bought a relatively small batch of cards and never even played the game much. I remember owning a scant few cards but that made me treasure my favorites that much more.
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