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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

#71

Post by indigochill »

gklitz wrote: post #69
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems like it went wrong when greed took iver and now there are so many cards that it doesn't make sense. I love all the 3 games you mentioned, but not mtg because card packs should be illegal from my perspective (I know it's a me problem). they can say whatever they want, it is legal gambling

I quite like magic the gathering online for this purpose. You can’t trade cards, so the gambling and trading aspect go away. And you get wild cards in packs so it’s easier to craft the specific decks you want. Also the rapid cycle of releases just feels more fitting here. I’la be away for some months now and again and come back to an entirely new challenge of cards and decks. I also paying is optional, you get enough…

Just a point here, you're talking about MTG Arena, which is the new online game. There's a much older game still called MTG Online which preserves the gambling aspect, where you buy packs and event entries for real money as well as trade cards with other users (and through a number of legitimate third parties, even buy and sell singles for real money). They even go one step further: if you can collect all the digital cards of a set while they have physical product available, you can exchange the digital set for a factory-sealed physical print run of the set (https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/redemption).

I kinda waffle between the two. Arena's my first love for the reasons you mention, but sometimes it's nice to simply buy some singles and throw together a (Pauper) deck for some fun on MTGO Online (especially since their set selection goes much farther back). I never play that one competitively, though. Feels like playing online poker against a community that's been refined down to 100% professional grinders or wannabes.

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

#72

Post by indigochill »

busterarm wrote: post #57
plorkyeran wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He also designed the Netrunner rules that Android: Netrunner was based on, and that had such a committed community that when Wizards pulled the license from FFG, the fans just kept developing the game.

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

#73

Post by chii »

throwup238 wrote: post #38
chii wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but physical card packs have had this "issue" since inception of magic the gathering. Understandably, the digital cards don't have the same physical manifestation and thus feel like it could be taken away at any time, but the loot box mechanic is no different to the random booster packs you'd buy.

You could still buy individual cards from people who opened physical packs which meant that the price of a booster box didn't hurt so bad. You could sell a bunch of cards in it and the whole system worked because everyone had 10-100x more cards than they could ever use, creating a great secondary economy.

That's true - i've not thought about the secondary market. This doesn't exist with digital goods - something i think is missing in the laws governing consumer rights today imho. It's not just trading cards, but everything.

I think it's high time that the first sale doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) be applied to digital goods.

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

#74

Post by rcxdude »

empath75 wrote: post #48
preordained wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That floor is pretty dang high though. It both has one of the highest costs of entry for pretty much any game (to be fair, it does change with format, but it's basically a choice between paying a lot upfront or effectively a subscription), and the advantage you have scales quite substantially with the amount that you spend (though not quite as much as some mobile games). 'pay-to-win' is a valid criticism, even if skill still matters to some extent.

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

#75

Post by rcxdude »

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

5 turns is slow for any constructed format which includes the original sets. (heck, I've pulled off faster combos in a vintage cube draft)

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

#76

Post by empath75 »

evanelias wrote: post #59
empath75 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i found some of my cards and just tossed them in the trash a few years ago because they were all revised and fallen empires and i was still thinking they weren't worth anything, including a full set of revised dual lands.

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

#78

Post by hobs »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #66
hobs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Board game companies make so little money, don’t begrudge them for asking for money in exchange for completely optional content

I begrudge no one their money, I would have paid 100 dollars for the good version of dominion, but I wont pay for a clearly inferior product that pushes out the good one, ever.

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

#79

Post by freediver »

scruple wrote: post #58
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…

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 da…

Thanks for the link. Do you play it offline only?

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

#80

Post by yownie »

dccoolgai wrote: post #53
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.

Do you know about www.dominion.games ?
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