I played Standard constructed only during the time of Kamigawa block, and I thought the Kamigawa cards created a pretty miserable experience. Standard was unplayable during the reign of Affinity of course, but even after the bannings the format set mainly contributed cards that were boring to play with and miserable to play against. Jitte, Yosei, Hokori and most other playable Kamigawa cards shared the attribute of putting games into a lame-duck state where one player was just about beaten but not quite. Players needed to play out these games because they still had some chance of winning, but mostly it was 7-10 turns of durdling followed by an eventual loss.
I'm not saying draw vs play. I'm saying it becomes more about who draws *insert card* first.
Same deal. Decks need to have a plan for that scenario. With low variance both players will draw the cards they need when they need them, so it all comes down to who played first. Maybe I need to answer the card. Maybe I need to accelerate into my copy. I think that's preferable to "hope the other guy doesn't get there".
If you make "perfect" mana, the "who draws ___ first" aspect becomes more of an issue.
All that means is that decks have to take both possibilities into consideration. It has to have a plan for being on the play and one for being on the draw. Right now this aspect is normally not taken into consideration outside of the highest levels of play. MtG's variance lets many players free-roll that aspect of play without dire consequences.
How many people actually change their sideboarding to take play/draw into account? Certainly a much lower percentage compared to the VS System players who had distinct plans for being on odd or even initiative. I remember winning a PCQ where my deck had a completely different curve of characters to play out depending on the archetype of my opponent's deck as well as whether I went first. In MtG at most I board out a land when I am on the draw with an aggro deck, and this is already much more thought put into this than most other players do.
On a broader scale, removing mana variance makes a lot of matches more one sided, which overall leads to higher variance for any given deck.
What you see as low variance making match-ups one-sided, I see as low variance revealing match-ups to be one-sided. I say this is a good thing. Variance is the rug under which many fundamental flaws of the game are swept. It's like dirty laundry in a messy room obscuring cracks on the floor tiles. Cleaning them out reveals the root problem so it can be fixed.
Those who dislike the current mana system do so because they consider this extra element of chance unnecessary while those who like the current system think that the added element of chance is worth the risk.
There are two kinds of people who make up most of this thread's posters. Those who can't imagine that a game with less variance than MtG could possibly be fun, and those who know that they can.
I don't agree with the people who say that increased variance is more fun, but I can understand their argument. It really depends on where you personally draw the line between "random enough to make the game exciting" and "random enough to make the game pointless". I can't understand the people arguing that this level of variance is a necessary evil. We're not arguing in a vacuum. Low-variance games have already existed, and achieved comparable success to MtG.
I don't like high variance, but I get that this is the direction WotC wants to go with. I understand why they made this decision, even though I do not agree with it. I also understand that this is 100% a design decision. It's not that WotC couldn't possibly make mana screw less of an issue without ruining the game. It's that they didn't want to do so because they see mana screw as a good thing.
I play quite a bit of commander and there's always this back and forth where you're trying to figure out what is good to play, but doesn't piss people off.
This wouldn't be a problem if the banned list wasn't a complete joke. I've said it once and I'll say it a million times. I play a ton of formats and the EDH is the single one I play where the community relishes in endless whining about people playing cards not on the banned list, combined with a staunch refusal to put on the big boy pants and actually fight to get those undesirable cards banned for real.
On Topic: This is just speculation on my part, but I think it's possible that WotC might print a better nonbasic destroyer soon. Strip Mine was too good. Wasteland was still too good. Tectonic Edge was still too good. Encroaching Wastes was unplayable. They might go for something between Tec Edge and Wastes next. They could go for it in the third Khans set, after printing Zendikar Fetches. That way Standard manabases would be resilient to it because fetches get basics anyway.
WotC has been slowly toning down land destruction for years, and it's only recently that they've gotten to the point where they're generally happy with its place in the game. It seems they want LD to be a kind of utility effect that players use to deal with troublesome non-basics. It's not meant to be a core strategy that locks the opponent out of the game.
Honestly man, the people who get happy and excited that they won because of their opponent getting mana screwed arent real people.
Of course they're real. I am with you on the whole "mana variance is unnecessary and creates for a worse competitive game overall" but most people just want to win. Most players don't care if they won because they could afford more expensive cards than their opponent. Why would they care if they won because they were lucky?
Basically, anyone who feels that the game should be redesigned to eliminate mana screw probably doesn't understand that you would be removing about half of the first step in the game, deck building.
Deck-building is not only still a factor in games without mana-screw, but in some ways it can be even more difficult. In MtG you can take certain liberties when you set up your deck because statistically, your opponent is unlikely to present the most powerful curve his deck can produce on any given game. As an example you can build a deck with no way of beating a Boss Sligh nut draw, and just hope to dodge Boss Sligh or hope that when you face it they stumble.
In a game with lower variance, you don't have this luxury. Your opponent will, more often than not, have access to the cards needed to implement his deck's strategy at a level close or equal to his best draw. So what does this mean in terms of challenge for deck-building in MtG versus other low variance games? Both are basically challenging, though the challenges are different. One of them produces a much higher number of one-sided blow-outs.
For example, if I always have 10 lands available that can, collectively, make every color, what incentive do I have to not just play a 5-color "goodstuff" deck?
Synergy, mostly. In other games that feature consistent mana-bases you necessarily become a "jack of all trades, master of none" when you run goodstuff. All your cards are great, but they are all over the place and you don't get to go deep into single strategy or mechanic. You also do not get to make use of powerful effects that key off from color (ie. five color decks cannot really break Thassa). For MtG in particular you could also use lands coming into play tapped as a pressure valve for multi-color goodstuff. So speed is a factor also.
Taking "VS System" as a real-world example that game had 0% mana screw because any card could be played face-down as a resource (land in MtG). There were two top tier aggressive decks, High Voltage and TnnB. High Voltage was an "aggro goodstuff" deck that used the hardest hitters and best burn spells across all affiliations (the colors of VS System) while TnnB was completely mono-affiliation (mono color) to take advantage of powerful global pumps like The New Brotherhood (similar to Honor of the Pure in MtG). Both decks were very popular and totally viable.
I don't think anyone in this thread has said "mana screw is great!" What people, like me, have been saying is "mana screw is an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise great system."
Mana screw is the intended outcome of a resource system that was deliberately designed to have a higher variance than it strictly needed. It has been already been demonstrated in the real world that games can be designed to have no resource screw issues at all while at the same time maintaining a varied selection of decks. The MtG design team deliberately incorporated these issues into MtG because they believe that players like getting occasional free wins over superior players more than they hate getting occasional random losses. This is straight from WotC's own MaRo in his podcast:
Quote from Mark Rosewater »
Now, a lot of games make the fault of giving the top players too much advantage. It is important in your game that the low-level player has the dream of beating the top-end player. They shouldn’t do that most of the time, but they can have the dream. And a game in which you don’t have the dream is a lot harder to get into. Because if everybody who’s better than you is going to always beat you, there’s no hope.
And games need hope. You, the player, need to feel like if things go right, if the stars align, I can beat the best Magic player in the world.
If Magic would have 0% randomness, everything would be the same all the time.
No one is pushing to eliminate variance completely. Variance is a sliding scale. Competitive card games can and have been created that completely eliminate the kind of "resource screw" that exists in MtG. They managed to keep a level of variance that was fun and interesting, with the drawback being that it became much harder to blame losses on dumb luck. A lot more things had to go wrong for a player to have no chance of winning, since at the very least he could never be reduced to a goldfish.
MtG is not a completely luck-based game, but as someone who has played many CCGs I would say it's pretty high up in that particular ranking. For better or worse, MtG is a game where a hall-of-famer like Jon Finkel is only a bad draw away from getting smoked by an FNM hero.
Magic has to have the randomness that it allows the weaker player to win (not often, but at least have a chance).
This is kinda backwards. Design and development aren't trying to keep variance just high enough that weaker players can randomly win a game against good players if they play a lot. They are trying to keep variance just low enough that great players can gradually pull ahead if they play a lot. Just listen to any of the pros and hall-of-famers during interviews or discussions. The margins between the best players and the mediocre ones are razor thin. This is also why even great players don't like to go to a GP with anything less than the full three byes.
Depends on what you mean by "worse". I've been playing battle box, which has no mana variance at all, and it's been pretty awesome. Everyone also has had experience playing in a casual setting where people get "free" mulligans back to seven cards when the opening hand has less than two lands. This can be abused of course, but the popularity of that house rule shows that when people play for fun, they try to eliminate mana screw as much as they can.
Expensive is all relative. Saying a playset of Battliefield Froge is expensive ($36) to me is cheap whenyou're spending $100-200 on single duals.
They're both MtG cards though. Comparing them to each other is useful to determine whether a specific card is overpriced compared to MtG norms, but OP was talking about MtG in general. To determine whether MtG as a whole is too expensive, we should compare it to alternative hobbies like other CCGs, video games, board games and such.
OP talked about money in MtG a lot, and his concerns are not unfounded. For standard in particular, most of the better decks cost quite a bit of money. Long-time players have grown desensitized to it, but the price of MtG cards is truly astronomical.
However, I do not agree that there is no room for casuals in FNM. There is room in FNM for casuals. It's just that the room is very tiny. A smaller budget doesn't so much constrain your potential to win as it does constrain your available deck choices. A reasonably skilled player who is not willing to spend too much money can still win as long as he picks a cheap deck. Boss Sligh has been brought up in this thread several times, and I'm sure that the mono-white weenie decks from Pro Tour M15 are still playable.
This isn't a fix for everybody of course. If you like playing a different style of deck you're out of luck. In particular, the "midrange" style of play that most beginners are familiar with and gravitate to tend to be among the most expensive decks in the format. That's really unfortunate IMHO but it is the direction that WotC has decided to go into.
It is as such that I realize something as 'casual' as FNM isn't really casual at all.
It's one of the more casual competitive formats, but even the most casual competitive format can be orders of magnitude more serious than your basic kitchen table metagame. FNM is meant to feed into more serious stuff like PTQs and Grand Prix, so it has that kind of dynamic.
I often think that WotC should create a true casual event series, where you pay an entrance fee and play matches but prizes are not given out based on standings. Just give out some promo cards and raffle off some prizes.
Mana screw is not GOOD for MTG, period. Anything you heard about it being it a good thing is borderline a lie, since a game where one player is playing and another isnt is just an awful experience typically for both parties.
I agree with you here, in so far as mana screw leaves MtG worse as a game than it otherwise would be. David Sirlin also talks about something like this in his excellent site. One-sided non-games are bad.
But WotC is not trying to make the best possible game. It is trying to make the most profitable game that is still somewhat competitive. If it will sell more cards now without harming their long-term prospects, they'll do it even if in strict terms the game itself is worse than it was before.
Is MTG really getting more popular because mana screw can help a bad player beat a good player? I seriously doubt that.
Whether you believe it or not, this is what WotC believes (according to MaRo). This is what design and development are shooting for, and they are good enough at their jobs that they generally hit the mark. If you are good and you play a ton, you will win more than you lose and do well in a general sense. If you are bad and you play a ton, you will lose more but you still get to steal a few wins here and there. Either way you need to play a ton, which is good for WotC.
No offense but you would have to be really stupid to genuinely believe that you deserved to win over your opponent since they got mana screwed and you didnt.
There is no "deserve to win". There is only "winning" and "losing". It's only been a couple of weeks since cheating in MtG was thrust into the limelight. If some people can feel good about winning through cheating, even more people can feel good about getting lucky. When Patrick Chapin topdecked an Elspeth to beat Andrea Mengucci at the Pro Tour, he had a smile on his face as he said "Better lucky than good.".
Its interesting how VS was a low variance game and how people think that is a bad thing.
Not all people. Just a lot of people. I loved it. I still write articles on it in my blog! At the end of the day though, you get more sales when you let people blame their wins on skill and their losses on luck.
If it were your deck, would you cut all of the PW's?
I would cut Kiora entirely unless I expected zero Jeskai aggro. It's too much of a risk that you'll play her, bubble something and then the other guy casts a Mantis and eats her. I might maybe leave Ashiok on the sideboard for midrange match-ups if I could afford the slots. I won't say that running a Nissa or two in place of some Prognostic Sphinx is wrong, but I personally don't like it. Nissa ends the game really fast, but I want stabilizers more than I want finishers.
i wonder, is the main purpose of ashiok to force weird attacks?
I wouldn't rely on this. A good player knows when to attack Ashiok and when to ignore him. In the early rounds though you can get free wins from inexperienced players who don't know how to make that distinction.
I'm noticing a few too many Temple of Deceit around. If you Re running Polluted Delta and some basics, you really need all your other lands to produce green for Courser (and hopefully Hornet Queen- as I believe there's no good reason not to run her- she just does everything you need.
I have been Advocating zero Polluted Deltas for a while now, actually. The deck wants GG, UU and BB. I feel that it needs real duals, not better Evolving Wilds. Another bonus is that when you scry dead cards away, they stay on the bottom of the deck. I also like Queen over Garruk, but I don't run either of them mostly because I wanted more early stabilizers over late-game finishers.
Same deal. Decks need to have a plan for that scenario. With low variance both players will draw the cards they need when they need them, so it all comes down to who played first. Maybe I need to answer the card. Maybe I need to accelerate into my copy. I think that's preferable to "hope the other guy doesn't get there".
All that means is that decks have to take both possibilities into consideration. It has to have a plan for being on the play and one for being on the draw. Right now this aspect is normally not taken into consideration outside of the highest levels of play. MtG's variance lets many players free-roll that aspect of play without dire consequences.
How many people actually change their sideboarding to take play/draw into account? Certainly a much lower percentage compared to the VS System players who had distinct plans for being on odd or even initiative. I remember winning a PCQ where my deck had a completely different curve of characters to play out depending on the archetype of my opponent's deck as well as whether I went first. In MtG at most I board out a land when I am on the draw with an aggro deck, and this is already much more thought put into this than most other players do.
What you see as low variance making match-ups one-sided, I see as low variance revealing match-ups to be one-sided. I say this is a good thing. Variance is the rug under which many fundamental flaws of the game are swept. It's like dirty laundry in a messy room obscuring cracks on the floor tiles. Cleaning them out reveals the root problem so it can be fixed.
There are two kinds of people who make up most of this thread's posters. Those who can't imagine that a game with less variance than MtG could possibly be fun, and those who know that they can.
I don't agree with the people who say that increased variance is more fun, but I can understand their argument. It really depends on where you personally draw the line between "random enough to make the game exciting" and "random enough to make the game pointless". I can't understand the people arguing that this level of variance is a necessary evil. We're not arguing in a vacuum. Low-variance games have already existed, and achieved comparable success to MtG.
I don't like high variance, but I get that this is the direction WotC wants to go with. I understand why they made this decision, even though I do not agree with it. I also understand that this is 100% a design decision. It's not that WotC couldn't possibly make mana screw less of an issue without ruining the game. It's that they didn't want to do so because they see mana screw as a good thing.
This wouldn't be a problem if the banned list wasn't a complete joke. I've said it once and I'll say it a million times. I play a ton of formats and the EDH is the single one I play where the community relishes in endless whining about people playing cards not on the banned list, combined with a staunch refusal to put on the big boy pants and actually fight to get those undesirable cards banned for real.
On Topic: This is just speculation on my part, but I think it's possible that WotC might print a better nonbasic destroyer soon. Strip Mine was too good. Wasteland was still too good. Tectonic Edge was still too good. Encroaching Wastes was unplayable. They might go for something between Tec Edge and Wastes next. They could go for it in the third Khans set, after printing Zendikar Fetches. That way Standard manabases would be resilient to it because fetches get basics anyway.
Of course they're real. I am with you on the whole "mana variance is unnecessary and creates for a worse competitive game overall" but most people just want to win. Most players don't care if they won because they could afford more expensive cards than their opponent. Why would they care if they won because they were lucky?
Deck-building is not only still a factor in games without mana-screw, but in some ways it can be even more difficult. In MtG you can take certain liberties when you set up your deck because statistically, your opponent is unlikely to present the most powerful curve his deck can produce on any given game. As an example you can build a deck with no way of beating a Boss Sligh nut draw, and just hope to dodge Boss Sligh or hope that when you face it they stumble.
In a game with lower variance, you don't have this luxury. Your opponent will, more often than not, have access to the cards needed to implement his deck's strategy at a level close or equal to his best draw. So what does this mean in terms of challenge for deck-building in MtG versus other low variance games? Both are basically challenging, though the challenges are different. One of them produces a much higher number of one-sided blow-outs.
Mana screw and flood cannot be "avoided". They can only be "minimized" to a certain degree.
Synergy, mostly. In other games that feature consistent mana-bases you necessarily become a "jack of all trades, master of none" when you run goodstuff. All your cards are great, but they are all over the place and you don't get to go deep into single strategy or mechanic. You also do not get to make use of powerful effects that key off from color (ie. five color decks cannot really break Thassa). For MtG in particular you could also use lands coming into play tapped as a pressure valve for multi-color goodstuff. So speed is a factor also.
Taking "VS System" as a real-world example that game had 0% mana screw because any card could be played face-down as a resource (land in MtG). There were two top tier aggressive decks, High Voltage and TnnB. High Voltage was an "aggro goodstuff" deck that used the hardest hitters and best burn spells across all affiliations (the colors of VS System) while TnnB was completely mono-affiliation (mono color) to take advantage of powerful global pumps like The New Brotherhood (similar to Honor of the Pure in MtG). Both decks were very popular and totally viable.
Mana screw is the intended outcome of a resource system that was deliberately designed to have a higher variance than it strictly needed. It has been already been demonstrated in the real world that games can be designed to have no resource screw issues at all while at the same time maintaining a varied selection of decks. The MtG design team deliberately incorporated these issues into MtG because they believe that players like getting occasional free wins over superior players more than they hate getting occasional random losses. This is straight from WotC's own MaRo in his podcast:
No one is pushing to eliminate variance completely. Variance is a sliding scale. Competitive card games can and have been created that completely eliminate the kind of "resource screw" that exists in MtG. They managed to keep a level of variance that was fun and interesting, with the drawback being that it became much harder to blame losses on dumb luck. A lot more things had to go wrong for a player to have no chance of winning, since at the very least he could never be reduced to a goldfish.
MtG is not a completely luck-based game, but as someone who has played many CCGs I would say it's pretty high up in that particular ranking. For better or worse, MtG is a game where a hall-of-famer like Jon Finkel is only a bad draw away from getting smoked by an FNM hero.
This is kinda backwards. Design and development aren't trying to keep variance just high enough that weaker players can randomly win a game against good players if they play a lot. They are trying to keep variance just low enough that great players can gradually pull ahead if they play a lot. Just listen to any of the pros and hall-of-famers during interviews or discussions. The margins between the best players and the mediocre ones are razor thin. This is also why even great players don't like to go to a GP with anything less than the full three byes.
Depends on what you mean by "worse". I've been playing battle box, which has no mana variance at all, and it's been pretty awesome. Everyone also has had experience playing in a casual setting where people get "free" mulligans back to seven cards when the opening hand has less than two lands. This can be abused of course, but the popularity of that house rule shows that when people play for fun, they try to eliminate mana screw as much as they can.
They're both MtG cards though. Comparing them to each other is useful to determine whether a specific card is overpriced compared to MtG norms, but OP was talking about MtG in general. To determine whether MtG as a whole is too expensive, we should compare it to alternative hobbies like other CCGs, video games, board games and such.
However, I do not agree that there is no room for casuals in FNM. There is room in FNM for casuals. It's just that the room is very tiny. A smaller budget doesn't so much constrain your potential to win as it does constrain your available deck choices. A reasonably skilled player who is not willing to spend too much money can still win as long as he picks a cheap deck. Boss Sligh has been brought up in this thread several times, and I'm sure that the mono-white weenie decks from Pro Tour M15 are still playable.
This isn't a fix for everybody of course. If you like playing a different style of deck you're out of luck. In particular, the "midrange" style of play that most beginners are familiar with and gravitate to tend to be among the most expensive decks in the format. That's really unfortunate IMHO but it is the direction that WotC has decided to go into.
It's one of the more casual competitive formats, but even the most casual competitive format can be orders of magnitude more serious than your basic kitchen table metagame. FNM is meant to feed into more serious stuff like PTQs and Grand Prix, so it has that kind of dynamic.
I often think that WotC should create a true casual event series, where you pay an entrance fee and play matches but prizes are not given out based on standings. Just give out some promo cards and raffle off some prizes.
I agree with you here, in so far as mana screw leaves MtG worse as a game than it otherwise would be. David Sirlin also talks about something like this in his excellent site. One-sided non-games are bad.
But WotC is not trying to make the best possible game. It is trying to make the most profitable game that is still somewhat competitive. If it will sell more cards now without harming their long-term prospects, they'll do it even if in strict terms the game itself is worse than it was before.
Whether you believe it or not, this is what WotC believes (according to MaRo). This is what design and development are shooting for, and they are good enough at their jobs that they generally hit the mark. If you are good and you play a ton, you will win more than you lose and do well in a general sense. If you are bad and you play a ton, you will lose more but you still get to steal a few wins here and there. Either way you need to play a ton, which is good for WotC.
There is no "deserve to win". There is only "winning" and "losing". It's only been a couple of weeks since cheating in MtG was thrust into the limelight. If some people can feel good about winning through cheating, even more people can feel good about getting lucky. When Patrick Chapin topdecked an Elspeth to beat Andrea Mengucci at the Pro Tour, he had a smile on his face as he said "Better lucky than good.".
Not all people. Just a lot of people. I loved it. I still write articles on it in my blog! At the end of the day though, you get more sales when you let people blame their wins on skill and their losses on luck.
I would cut Kiora entirely unless I expected zero Jeskai aggro. It's too much of a risk that you'll play her, bubble something and then the other guy casts a Mantis and eats her. I might maybe leave Ashiok on the sideboard for midrange match-ups if I could afford the slots. I won't say that running a Nissa or two in place of some Prognostic Sphinx is wrong, but I personally don't like it. Nissa ends the game really fast, but I want stabilizers more than I want finishers.
I wouldn't rely on this. A good player knows when to attack Ashiok and when to ignore him. In the early rounds though you can get free wins from inexperienced players who don't know how to make that distinction.
I have been Advocating zero Polluted Deltas for a while now, actually. The deck wants GG, UU and BB. I feel that it needs real duals, not better Evolving Wilds. Another bonus is that when you scry dead cards away, they stay on the bottom of the deck. I also like Queen over Garruk, but I don't run either of them mostly because I wanted more early stabilizers over late-game finishers.