As many of you are aware, Ixalan stirs quite strong opinions. I've done my fair share of Ixalan, finishing in the top 15 of all players on MTGO in Ixalan Competitive League Draft, and I've had the pleasure of engaging with other streamers, writers, and pros regarding the format, its virtues and its vices. One discussion I had, which can be found here, might be worth the read for those of you interested in custom set design because it explores different ways that formats can be fun. I wanted to copy a post I just made on reddit here in its entirety because the direct subject is desirable and undesirable complexity, using Ixalan and Innistrad draft formats as the backdrop to the discussion. There are probably some additional points that I would make here because this audience is more knowledgeable in card design, but the post is good and I'll be happy to delve further in the thread!
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I appreciate all the responses to my reflection on the drafting experiences of Ixalan and Innistrad a few weeks ago. Today I'd like to offer my reflection on what we Magic players are actually talking about when we say the word "depth". One ubiquitous complaint about Ixalan is that it is not a "deep" format, and I've been thinking a bit about why we think that, and even what it means for a card (or format) to "have depth". And since I do Magic card design as a hobby I'm deeply interested in this topic.
Judging by the many people I've spoken to and whose perspectives I've read, I sense that people don't think that Ixalan is "deep" for a variety of reasons. One common reason is that Ixalan has a fairly shallow level of strategic depth since it is so dominated by aggro strategies. The other common reason I hear is that, because Ixalan has a "dearth of playables," you're trying to cobble together 23 playable cards so you can play Magic, so designing a unique strategy for your deck is simply not feasible. The thinking seems to be that Ixalan renders us as third world citizens who can't deal with "first-world problems" like strategic deckbuilding and strategic depth.
I think, though, that there is another aspect of depth missing in Ixalan which is more impactful than the above, and which has been plaguing many recent Magic sets. I actually struggle to label it. I'd probably call it "individual card depth", but that's not descriptive enough. What I mean is that the cards appear designed in such a way that does not allow them to take on a life and utility beyond what the Wizards' design team intended. These cards are bequeathed no life; they are not animate. They lack a "world of possibility" that engages our creativity and imagination; they do not merely flash their breasts and entice us - instead they are simply placed before us in the nude, entirely exposed. Put in the language of art, they are kitsch, not masterpieces.
At issue is not merely a matter of complexity, but a certain type of desirable complexity, desirable because we value engaging with the elusive, the possible, the imaginative, the impossible. To see explicitly what I do not mean, let's take a look at Abattoir Ghoul, the 3/2 First Strike Zombie in Innistrad. That card is complex, but it is complex in a way that does not stir the imagination. It lacks a certain veiledness; it conceals nothing. Especially in a set without a lifegain subtheme or anything else that complements it, its complexity is entirely contained (and is therefore meaningless). It has a perfect analog in Ixalan in Ravenous Daggertooth.
As I look through Ixalan, there simply aren't many cards that don't appear to be entirely controlled by its creator, meaning that their creators successfully imagined the entirety of their possibility and delimited that possibility. Some of the non-rare cards that can be said to begin to have a certain independence and open-endedness and which call for us to imaginatively engage with them are Watertrap Weaver, Makeshift Munitions, and Raptor Hatchling. Possibility and unknowingness are more commonly features of Innistrad cards, and even more so cards in older sets.
A bit clumsily, I have called this type of complexity "rawness" in the past. What I believe has happened is that Wizards' design team takes a different relation to its creation than it did in the past, and willfully so. In the past Wizards took what I would call a "post-modern" approach to its cards. As Derrida might say, the text is given its own life independent of the author and independent of the intention of the author. Derrida believes that authors "let go" of their texts, and those texts take on new life as they encounter a reader's eyes. There is a creative interplay between text and reader. In our case, there is a creative interplay between the Magic card and the Magic player. Today, Wizards takes an essentialist view. I hesitate to call it medieval or classical, but I get the strong sense from the cards being created over the past several years that they are created with very specific goals (teloi) in mind, goals that they are supposed to accomplish, nothing more and nothing less. Each card is given an intellectually understandable and identifiable "essence", and that simply "is" what the card "is". A possibility for an independent life beyond the author's intent is seen as bad and thus excised.
I think that we Magic players crave the complexity of Selhoff Occultist, Skaab Goliath, Raptor Hatchling, Disciple of Griselbrand, and Curse of Stalked Prey. We want a card's purpose and utility to be someone open, somewhat veiled, somewhat hidden, somewhat beyond our grasp. It is my belief that good complexity resides primarily in this type of complexity - its analogs are human freedom, dramatic Balthasarian interpretations of existence, the roundness of the characters in a Dostoevsky novel. Complexity that merely makes things more difficult to understand or that makes (combat) interaction more tedious is not good complexity; but complexity that allows our minds to fashion new possibilities and interactions is not only good but absolutely essential. And when a high enough number of cards in a limited format have this type of complexity, we have a greater difficulty exhausting that particular limited format and enjoy drafting it more.
By and large, Ixalan cards lack this depth-quality. I and others have been satisfied by some particular qualities I noted in my last post. I've enjoyed Ixalan draft by and large. But I also sense something lacking in it, and I think some of what the community appreciates about formats like Innistrad resides in this depth-quality that I have tried to explicate as best as I can.
I have had this feeling for a few sets now. I feel like there was a conscious design decision to warp cards around a color pair or specific combo. This struck me as true of 3x Amonkhet drafting especially where you could so easily lose to a curve of Gust Walker into Ahn-Crop Crasher. Hour of Devastation helped alleviate this and I thought we might be back to a more interesting set feel, but Ixalan seemed to take a step backwards to the mono-Aggro lack of depth again. What's even more aggravating is that the mechanic that has, in my opinion, the most individual depth, Enrage, is subdued in its as-fan numbers and not really a build-around strategy that is viable in draft.
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Your post was very poetic, but I think there is a simpler way of understanding the complaints in relation to Ixalan as well as your enjoyment of Ixalan. Quite simply, Ixalan is a very skill intensive format and heavily rewards good decisions. You like this because competition and skill testing is one of the things you love about magic. However, you have totally missed the actual reasons why Ixalan is skill intensive. You are operating under the impression that it's just because signal reading is more important. I'm very confident you are wrong.
Ixalan lacks depth for the same reason you think it is skill intensive. Ixalan lacks archetypal diversity. Whenever you sit down to play a game in 3x Ixalan, you are effectively sitting down to play an aggro-midrange mirror. It is a general property of mirrors in mtg that they are very skill intensive and difficult to play. There are exceptions to this rule, but the rule holds true in general. This lack of archetype diversity is also why people claim Ixalan lacks depth.
In general, there are 3 ways to ruin a limited format.
Insufficient number of playables
bad color balance
low archetype diversity
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
What's even more aggravating is that the mechanic that has, in my opinion, the most individual depth, Enrage, is subdued in its as-fan numbers and not really a build-around strategy that is viable in draft.
I'm quite disappointed about Enrage too. It feels so tacked on - that's why I discussed Abattoir Ghoul and Ravenous Daggertooth. Regarding Ravenous Daggertooth, the enrage text is almost completely meaningless, and it compliments nothing. Enrage is not a weapon that can be utilized with the cards they gave us, and that eliminates the depth that those cards seem to have when you read them.
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You are operating under the impression that it's just because signal reading is more important. I'm very confident you are wrong.
I don't say that anywhere, in either post.
I was mostly responding to your original linked post, not so much to your discussion of complexity here. This is the quote which lead me to the impression that you like ixalan because signal reading is more important.
Ixalan's draft experience is one for the politician, the poker player, the army man, the competitive gamer. And I say that because when you sit down to draft Ixalan, what is going on is that each of you sits down together at a large Christmas feast, and your goal is to acquire the largest amount of food at that feast. To do that, you have to figure out what the other players are choosing - are they taking the stuffing or the yams? The turkey or the ham? The green bean casserole or the red velvet cake? And your goal is to choose your food preferences based upon what the preferences of the others at the table appear to be. And sometimes that involves anticipating Course Two or Course Three by recognizing that certain foods were brought out in the First Course that affected others' preferences. This takes a lot of skill and memory and puts you in direct competition with your fellow drafters to a degree rarely seen in draft formats. To me it makes it feel much more like a competitive skill-based board game or card game.
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
1) My statement you cite cannot be summarized or reduced to "signalling is more important". My claim is that Ixalan offers a fundamentally different experience which presents its own game and its own sets of challenges that I don't think people are appreciating.
2) I articulate ways in which gameplay in Ixalan draft is skill-intensive, fun, and rewarding. I don't place all of the goodness of the Ixalan draft experience into the draft portion of the draft.
I think you're using a bit of a one-sided representation of both Innistrad and Ixalan to make your comparison. You're only focusing on the good aspects of Ixalan, and only on the bad aspects of Innistrad. I'm not going to comment about the drafting part of your post, because I agree with a lot that you said there, and I don't have the necessary in-depth knowledge of Ixalan drafting to make a qualified response to it. I'm fine with accepting that there's a different skill set that Ixalan and Innistrad drafting cater to, and both are equally skill-intensive.
But I find it ludicrous to make the same claim regarding the gameplay.
First of all, the games that you described - the ones where you make hard, skill-based decisions about playing around tricks, the ones where you wonder why your opponent played their cards in the order that he did and not in a different order, the ones where you bluff a trick to keep your opponent from attacking - these are the extreme minority of games.
Most Ixalan games are completely non-interactive - not anymore interactive than the bad Innistrad games you described. If you count up the number of games that are decided by one player utterly outcurving and stomping the other player, and the games that devolve into simple mindless racing because you can't deal with your opponent's One with the Wind or other unblockable creature, you aren't left with room for much else. And even these games are often decided merely by topdecks, because after the dust has settled in an even match, there's no mana sinks or anything else to do but hope for good draws.
The last two drafts I did, I can think of maybe one or two games where I had interesting decisions to make. The other ones I lost to One with the Wind, by being mana screwed, or by flooding out after the initial exchange, or I won in a similar manner.
Compare that to Innistrad draft. You're again painting a very one-sided picture of the format. The lack of interactivity that you described is not a problem of Innistrad, but a problem in any match where the two decks operate on completely different axes. The same is true in most formats - aggro vs. aggro is interactive and skill-intensive, control vs. control is even more interactive and skill-intensive, and aggro vs. control isn't skill-intensive at all. So, you're right in so far that there are some games in Innistrad that aren't very interactive - Green-white humans vs. Burning Vengeance certainly isn't. But aggro vs. aggro surely isn't any less interactive than in Ixalan, and control mirrors can be the most interactive and skill-demanding games of all. Your description of these games as two players just doing their own thing is just completely wrong. You can interact with what your opponent is doing on many more levels - with counterspells, with creature removal, with graveyard hate etc. You have to protect your win condition and make a judgment call whether you use your removal on that filler creature or hold it for your opponent's win condition. You have to sometimes change gears completely and adapt to the situation. Your opponent gained 50 life from Gnaw to the Bone? Then you'll have to try and mill him out.
This way, Innistrad gameplay demands the same skills that Ixalan does, but then even more.
1) My statement you cite cannot be summarized or reduced to "signalling is more important". My claim is that Ixalan offers a fundamentally different experience which presents its own game and its own sets of challenges that I don't think people are appreciating.
You are using poetic language to describe how important finding an open archetype/colors is in ixalan (reading signals) and claim that this is less importaant in Innistrad as players can just kind of scramble and do whatever they want. I think "signalling is more important" is a totally fair way of summing up your statements about ixalan draft vs innistrad draft.
2) I articulate ways in which gameplay in Ixalan draft is skill-intensive, fun, and rewarding. I don't place all of the goodness of the Ixalan draft experience into the draft portion of the draft.
All of those articulations amount to my claim. Ixalan is skill intensive because you are always playing psuedo-mirror matches. Mirror matches are skill intensive. The reason we are always playing psuedo-mirror matches in Ixalan is because of its lack of archetype diversity. The thing you enjoy about Ixalan is the very thing other people dislike about it and find boring about Ixalan. There isn't much to do in this format other than keep playing psuedo mirrors.
I'm not claiming you are wrong to enjoy Ixalan. There is nothing wrong with enjoying skill-intensive matches. I personally haven't hated Ixalan, but I have found it boring for the same reason I think you enjoy it.
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
I've had a very different experience with Ixalan than you have, Apoq, I'll say that. The majority of games in Ixalan limited were interactive and involved me and my opponent making optional non-obvious decisions just as you would in poker. You, the player, have agency. The One with Wind plus Jade Guardian combo came up for me less total times in 120 Ixalan drafts than the Invisible Stalker + Butcher's Cleaver combo did in 15 Innistrad drafts. My experience is entirely formed by the Competitive Draft League on MTGO, but I played enough to know the general texture of what one can expect in the format, non-interactive busted combos is just not as dominant a part of the format at the highest levels of competition as you and others make it out to be. Maybe I got unlucky in the 15 Innistrad drafts, but it is true that Invisible Stalker is a card that sucks unless you break it, so your goal is to break it. The same isn't true for Jade Guardian or One with the Wind, so folks don't feel compelled to try to cheese their way to victory when they start drafting Merfolk or take One with the Winds.
And when you say "The lack of interactivity that you described is not a problem of Innistrad, but a problem in any match where the two decks operate on completely different axes", that very well may be true, but that still means that it is a problem with Innistrad Draft. Strategies in Innistrad Draft do operate on completely different axes, and that leads to a very high percentage of games in which you lack in-game agency to interact with the opponent and alter the outcome of the game. I find that boring; I found that boring; and for similar reasons I find Legacy and Standard much more interesting and enjoyable than Modern.
Too often games of Innistrad are determined by who does their broken strategy first, or is determined by which broken strategy trumps the other guy's broken strategy. I'd much rather both players were playing the same game, on the same battlefield, engaging with one another as you do in Risk or Poker.
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It seems that you had bad luck in Innistrad and I had bad luck in Ixalan. But I can't imagine that over a larger sample size you wouldn't find that non-interactive games involving One with the Wind are far more common than non-interactive games involving Invisible Stalker. The latter is an uncommon and requires another uncommon to be really broken. One with the Wind just requires any early creature - it doesn't have to be a Jade Guardian. The removal is so bad that every creature might as well have hexproof (exaggerating of course).
Regarding your second and third paragraphs, you're making it out to be as though "sweet-deck" mirrors in Innistrad are like combo mirrors in Eternal. What I was trying to say was that games with decks that occupy vastly different points on the aggro-control axis tend to be uninteractive. So, if you're drafting a tribal aggro or midrange deck more often than not, you might find that your games against control players are not very interactive. You can't deal with the opponent creating 10 spider tokens, so you just have to kill him before he does that and the game becomes very one-dimensional. But if you're playing any deck that can do powerful things in the late game, you can interact and deal with your opponent's army of spider tokens. Those games tend to be among the most interactive games in Magic.
"Too often games of Innistrad are determined [...] by which broken strategy trumps the other guy's broken strategy."
This sentence doesn't mean anything. Shouldn't Magic games be determined by which strategy trumps the other guy's strategy? If you include in-game strategy, not just deckbuilding strategy? I find the word broken also misplaced because what you're describing are just strategies that scale very well into the late-game, not one-turn kill combos or similar.
Again, I don't get where your notion comes from that control mirrors in Innistrad were uninteractive. Is this only specific to Innistrad or would you say that about any format where you can draft similar decks? Was, say, Rise of the Eldrazi interactive?
I only started drafting competitively with Khans, so I don't know Rise of the Eldrazi. I personally found that I had less agency in-game in my Innistrad drafts than in all but Kaladesh Block drafts. But, as you say, the sample size was small for me, which is why I wasn't trying to use the post as a "which format is better?" discussion and more a "What skill sets might these two formats reward and why?" discussion.
I think the problem we are discussing is something that I find problematic with Magic more broadly, but I like cards like Abrade and Deathgorge Scavenger that enable you to interact with game zones you can't normally interact with without resorting to special sideboard cards. Before we just had Daze and Force of Will, and I like that we're introducing multi-zone cards into Standard. It's really good for the game and for making games of Magic more fun and skill-intensive without sacrificing the depth and complexity that a format like Innistrad has.
Again, I don't get where your notion comes from that control mirrors in Innistrad were uninteractive.
I'm pretty sure what he meant to say was that mirrors aren't likely to happen on Innistrad. kjsharp enjoys skill intensive matches, which mirrors provide. Innistrad is a very deep format with a lot of decks so you are very unlikely to be in a mirror in any given match. Innistrad was less interactive because it was more diverse and interesting.
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
Innistrad was less interactive because it was more diverse and interesting.
I can partly agree with that statement. Naturally, if you have a mirror match of decks full with unblockable creatures, that wouldn't be interactive, so it's only a soft correlation.
As many of you are aware, Ixalan stirs quite strong opinions. I've done my fair share of Ixalan, finishing in the top 15 of all players on MTGO in Ixalan Competitive League Draft, and I've had the pleasure of engaging with other streamers, writers, and pros regarding the format, its virtues and its vices. One discussion I had, which can be found here, might be worth the read for those of you interested in custom set design because it explores different ways that formats can be fun. I wanted to copy a post I just made on reddit here in its entirety because the direct subject is desirable and undesirable complexity, using Ixalan and Innistrad draft formats as the backdrop to the discussion. There are probably some additional points that I would make here because this audience is more knowledgeable in card design, but the post is good and I'll be happy to delve further in the thread!
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I appreciate all the responses to my reflection on the drafting experiences of Ixalan and Innistrad a few weeks ago. Today I'd like to offer my reflection on what we Magic players are actually talking about when we say the word "depth". One ubiquitous complaint about Ixalan is that it is not a "deep" format, and I've been thinking a bit about why we think that, and even what it means for a card (or format) to "have depth". And since I do Magic card design as a hobby I'm deeply interested in this topic.
Judging by the many people I've spoken to and whose perspectives I've read, I sense that people don't think that Ixalan is "deep" for a variety of reasons. One common reason is that Ixalan has a fairly shallow level of strategic depth since it is so dominated by aggro strategies. The other common reason I hear is that, because Ixalan has a "dearth of playables," you're trying to cobble together 23 playable cards so you can play Magic, so designing a unique strategy for your deck is simply not feasible. The thinking seems to be that Ixalan renders us as third world citizens who can't deal with "first-world problems" like strategic deckbuilding and strategic depth.
I think, though, that there is another aspect of depth missing in Ixalan which is more impactful than the above, and which has been plaguing many recent Magic sets. I actually struggle to label it. I'd probably call it "individual card depth", but that's not descriptive enough. What I mean is that the cards appear designed in such a way that does not allow them to take on a life and utility beyond what the Wizards' design team intended. These cards are bequeathed no life; they are not animate. They lack a "world of possibility" that engages our creativity and imagination; they do not merely flash their breasts and entice us - instead they are simply placed before us in the nude, entirely exposed. Put in the language of art, they are kitsch, not masterpieces.
At issue is not merely a matter of complexity, but a certain type of desirable complexity, desirable because we value engaging with the elusive, the possible, the imaginative, the impossible. To see explicitly what I do not mean, let's take a look at Abattoir Ghoul, the 3/2 First Strike Zombie in Innistrad. That card is complex, but it is complex in a way that does not stir the imagination. It lacks a certain veiledness; it conceals nothing. Especially in a set without a lifegain subtheme or anything else that complements it, its complexity is entirely contained (and is therefore meaningless). It has a perfect analog in Ixalan in Ravenous Daggertooth.
As I look through Ixalan, there simply aren't many cards that don't appear to be entirely controlled by its creator, meaning that their creators successfully imagined the entirety of their possibility and delimited that possibility. Some of the non-rare cards that can be said to begin to have a certain independence and open-endedness and which call for us to imaginatively engage with them are Watertrap Weaver, Makeshift Munitions, and Raptor Hatchling. Possibility and unknowingness are more commonly features of Innistrad cards, and even more so cards in older sets.
A bit clumsily, I have called this type of complexity "rawness" in the past. What I believe has happened is that Wizards' design team takes a different relation to its creation than it did in the past, and willfully so. In the past Wizards took what I would call a "post-modern" approach to its cards. As Derrida might say, the text is given its own life independent of the author and independent of the intention of the author. Derrida believes that authors "let go" of their texts, and those texts take on new life as they encounter a reader's eyes. There is a creative interplay between text and reader. In our case, there is a creative interplay between the Magic card and the Magic player. Today, Wizards takes an essentialist view. I hesitate to call it medieval or classical, but I get the strong sense from the cards being created over the past several years that they are created with very specific goals (teloi) in mind, goals that they are supposed to accomplish, nothing more and nothing less. Each card is given an intellectually understandable and identifiable "essence", and that simply "is" what the card "is". A possibility for an independent life beyond the author's intent is seen as bad and thus excised.
I think that we Magic players crave the complexity of Selhoff Occultist, Skaab Goliath, Raptor Hatchling, Disciple of Griselbrand, and Curse of Stalked Prey. We want a card's purpose and utility to be someone open, somewhat veiled, somewhat hidden, somewhat beyond our grasp. It is my belief that good complexity resides primarily in this type of complexity - its analogs are human freedom, dramatic Balthasarian interpretations of existence, the roundness of the characters in a Dostoevsky novel. Complexity that merely makes things more difficult to understand or that makes (combat) interaction more tedious is not good complexity; but complexity that allows our minds to fashion new possibilities and interactions is not only good but absolutely essential. And when a high enough number of cards in a limited format have this type of complexity, we have a greater difficulty exhausting that particular limited format and enjoy drafting it more.
By and large, Ixalan cards lack this depth-quality. I and others have been satisfied by some particular qualities I noted in my last post. I've enjoyed Ixalan draft by and large. But I also sense something lacking in it, and I think some of what the community appreciates about formats like Innistrad resides in this depth-quality that I have tried to explicate as best as I can.
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Ixalan lacks depth for the same reason you think it is skill intensive. Ixalan lacks archetypal diversity. Whenever you sit down to play a game in 3x Ixalan, you are effectively sitting down to play an aggro-midrange mirror. It is a general property of mirrors in mtg that they are very skill intensive and difficult to play. There are exceptions to this rule, but the rule holds true in general. This lack of archetype diversity is also why people claim Ixalan lacks depth.
In general, there are 3 ways to ruin a limited format.
- Manite
I was mostly responding to your original linked post, not so much to your discussion of complexity here. This is the quote which lead me to the impression that you like ixalan because signal reading is more important.
- Manite
2) I articulate ways in which gameplay in Ixalan draft is skill-intensive, fun, and rewarding. I don't place all of the goodness of the Ixalan draft experience into the draft portion of the draft.
But I find it ludicrous to make the same claim regarding the gameplay.
First of all, the games that you described - the ones where you make hard, skill-based decisions about playing around tricks, the ones where you wonder why your opponent played their cards in the order that he did and not in a different order, the ones where you bluff a trick to keep your opponent from attacking - these are the extreme minority of games.
Most Ixalan games are completely non-interactive - not anymore interactive than the bad Innistrad games you described. If you count up the number of games that are decided by one player utterly outcurving and stomping the other player, and the games that devolve into simple mindless racing because you can't deal with your opponent's One with the Wind or other unblockable creature, you aren't left with room for much else. And even these games are often decided merely by topdecks, because after the dust has settled in an even match, there's no mana sinks or anything else to do but hope for good draws.
The last two drafts I did, I can think of maybe one or two games where I had interesting decisions to make. The other ones I lost to One with the Wind, by being mana screwed, or by flooding out after the initial exchange, or I won in a similar manner.
Compare that to Innistrad draft. You're again painting a very one-sided picture of the format. The lack of interactivity that you described is not a problem of Innistrad, but a problem in any match where the two decks operate on completely different axes. The same is true in most formats - aggro vs. aggro is interactive and skill-intensive, control vs. control is even more interactive and skill-intensive, and aggro vs. control isn't skill-intensive at all. So, you're right in so far that there are some games in Innistrad that aren't very interactive - Green-white humans vs. Burning Vengeance certainly isn't. But aggro vs. aggro surely isn't any less interactive than in Ixalan, and control mirrors can be the most interactive and skill-demanding games of all. Your description of these games as two players just doing their own thing is just completely wrong. You can interact with what your opponent is doing on many more levels - with counterspells, with creature removal, with graveyard hate etc. You have to protect your win condition and make a judgment call whether you use your removal on that filler creature or hold it for your opponent's win condition. You have to sometimes change gears completely and adapt to the situation. Your opponent gained 50 life from Gnaw to the Bone? Then you'll have to try and mill him out.
This way, Innistrad gameplay demands the same skills that Ixalan does, but then even more.
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You are using poetic language to describe how important finding an open archetype/colors is in ixalan (reading signals) and claim that this is less importaant in Innistrad as players can just kind of scramble and do whatever they want. I think "signalling is more important" is a totally fair way of summing up your statements about ixalan draft vs innistrad draft.
All of those articulations amount to my claim. Ixalan is skill intensive because you are always playing psuedo-mirror matches. Mirror matches are skill intensive. The reason we are always playing psuedo-mirror matches in Ixalan is because of its lack of archetype diversity. The thing you enjoy about Ixalan is the very thing other people dislike about it and find boring about Ixalan. There isn't much to do in this format other than keep playing psuedo mirrors.
I'm not claiming you are wrong to enjoy Ixalan. There is nothing wrong with enjoying skill-intensive matches. I personally haven't hated Ixalan, but I have found it boring for the same reason I think you enjoy it.
- Manite
And when you say "The lack of interactivity that you described is not a problem of Innistrad, but a problem in any match where the two decks operate on completely different axes", that very well may be true, but that still means that it is a problem with Innistrad Draft. Strategies in Innistrad Draft do operate on completely different axes, and that leads to a very high percentage of games in which you lack in-game agency to interact with the opponent and alter the outcome of the game. I find that boring; I found that boring; and for similar reasons I find Legacy and Standard much more interesting and enjoyable than Modern.
Too often games of Innistrad are determined by who does their broken strategy first, or is determined by which broken strategy trumps the other guy's broken strategy. I'd much rather both players were playing the same game, on the same battlefield, engaging with one another as you do in Risk or Poker.
Regarding your second and third paragraphs, you're making it out to be as though "sweet-deck" mirrors in Innistrad are like combo mirrors in Eternal. What I was trying to say was that games with decks that occupy vastly different points on the aggro-control axis tend to be uninteractive. So, if you're drafting a tribal aggro or midrange deck more often than not, you might find that your games against control players are not very interactive. You can't deal with the opponent creating 10 spider tokens, so you just have to kill him before he does that and the game becomes very one-dimensional. But if you're playing any deck that can do powerful things in the late game, you can interact and deal with your opponent's army of spider tokens. Those games tend to be among the most interactive games in Magic.
"Too often games of Innistrad are determined [...] by which broken strategy trumps the other guy's broken strategy."
This sentence doesn't mean anything. Shouldn't Magic games be determined by which strategy trumps the other guy's strategy? If you include in-game strategy, not just deckbuilding strategy? I find the word broken also misplaced because what you're describing are just strategies that scale very well into the late-game, not one-turn kill combos or similar.
Again, I don't get where your notion comes from that control mirrors in Innistrad were uninteractive. Is this only specific to Innistrad or would you say that about any format where you can draft similar decks? Was, say, Rise of the Eldrazi interactive?
Completed sets:
Iamur — The Underwater Set
Overworld — Pirates vs. Octopuses
Esparand — The Sands of Time
Unfinished Sets:
Siege of Ravnica — Eldrazi in Ravnica
Shandalar — The Mana Set
Iamur Reimagined — Iamur v2
You can find more creative projects on my page Antaresdesigns!
I think the problem we are discussing is something that I find problematic with Magic more broadly, but I like cards like Abrade and Deathgorge Scavenger that enable you to interact with game zones you can't normally interact with without resorting to special sideboard cards. Before we just had Daze and Force of Will, and I like that we're introducing multi-zone cards into Standard. It's really good for the game and for making games of Magic more fun and skill-intensive without sacrificing the depth and complexity that a format like Innistrad has.
I'm pretty sure what he meant to say was that mirrors aren't likely to happen on Innistrad. kjsharp enjoys skill intensive matches, which mirrors provide. Innistrad is a very deep format with a lot of decks so you are very unlikely to be in a mirror in any given match. Innistrad was less interactive because it was more diverse and interesting.
- Manite
This accurately describes my experience and thinking on the matter.
I can partly agree with that statement. Naturally, if you have a mirror match of decks full with unblockable creatures, that wouldn't be interactive, so it's only a soft correlation.
Completed sets:
Iamur — The Underwater Set
Overworld — Pirates vs. Octopuses
Esparand — The Sands of Time
Unfinished Sets:
Siege of Ravnica — Eldrazi in Ravnica
Shandalar — The Mana Set
Iamur Reimagined — Iamur v2
You can find more creative projects on my page Antaresdesigns!