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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 11 2015, @02:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the its-just-a-card-game dept.

The game originated in the early 1990s in the mind of Richard Garfield, at the time a graduate student working towards a PhD in combinatorial mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. A life-long tabletop gamer, he had approached a publisher to pitch an idea for a game about programming robots, only to be told that the company needed something more portable and cheaper to produce.

Magic was Garfield's response, and it involved one major innovation that set it apart from any game previously released.
...
Magic's latest set marks a turning point for the game. Magic Origins focuses on five of the game's most popular recurring characters – a move that provides a jumping-on point for new players intimidated by over two decades' worth of accumulated storylines.

I played D&D, Gamma World, Traveller, and many RPG's avidly into college, but when I first saw Magic and its $20 price for a single card I discovered there were lines I would not cross. As an adult I have a civil engineering friend whom I've watched over the last decade and a half disappear and then emerge, going cold turkey, only to re-submerge for another year. For those who took up Magic, why did you take it up and do you still play?


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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday July 11 2015, @11:20PM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday July 11 2015, @11:20PM (#208012)

    As much as I liked playing back in the day. It is a rather poorly designed game. The rarity of cards seems to have little to do with power and the casting costs can be ridiculous. And there are so many different combination that planning for the eventualities in rules for tournaments is nigh impossible.

    But like with monopoly many enjoy it despite the problems.

    Ultimately I stopped playing because they kept releasing edition after edition and rewired you to buy new cards each time.

  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Sunday July 12 2015, @12:37AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Sunday July 12 2015, @12:37AM (#208026)

    The rarity of cards has nothing to do with their power. It has to do with their complexity.

    There are two reasons for this. Beginners tend to buy cards through booster packs, while advanced players buy singles (they have two decades of data backing them up on this). So you want common cards to be easily understood and used by novice players, since they'll be seeing them a lot more often.

    This also has a major impact on limited formats (sealed and draft). In those formats, players need to be able to sort out their cards into useful concepts quickly, so most cards need to be quick to file away into some group. So common cards need to be quick for an advanced player to fully understand - and this also actually *requires* common cards be just as good as rare cards.

    For a quick example, look at these one-drop white creatures from the Tarkir block:
    Common: Aven Skirmisher - 1/1 flying
    Uncommon: Dragon Hunter - 2/1 protection from dragons, may block dragons as though it had reach
    Rare: Herald of Anafenza - 1/2 outlast 2W, whenever outlast ability activated, put a 1/1 white warrior token onto the battlefield

    The common card uses nothing but a standard keyword (one used in every set). The uncommon uses a semi-standard keyword ("protection", it's skipped in some sets but always comes back), and uses a standard keyword conditionally ("reach"). The rare card uses a set-specific keyword ("outlast X" is "tap, pay X: put a +1/+1 counter on this", only used in Tarkir), and then layers a card-specific effect on top of that keyword. And they did not even make a mythic rare in that cost.

    The game is actually extremely well-designed - Mark Rosewater's blog should be required reading for anyone interested in game design. However, they design mainly for block formats - limited or Standard - where the number of potential interactions is decreased. Modern (any post-2003 card) is basically an afterthought, and Legacy (any card ever) doesn't even get thought about anymore.

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:11AM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:11AM (#208032) Homepage

      Correction: The game is balanced well. That isn't the same as being designed well. Of course we would have to argue about what exactly constitutes good game design, but consider this:

      Two items with the exact same features, one consists of 1 million moving parts, the other consists of 4 moving parts. Which one is better designed? i believe one can fairly claim that the latter is better designed.

      Likewise, if we assume MTG and chess have the same complexity (how long does one take to master MTG vs chess, for example), but MTG consists of millions of cards, while chess only uses six different pieces, well, it should be clear which game has better design.

      --
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      • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Sunday July 12 2015, @02:05AM

        by vux984 (5045) on Sunday July 12 2015, @02:05AM (#208044)

        Likewise, if we assume MTG and chess have the same complexity

        Why would we ever assume something so ridiculously false? MtG is a FAR more complex.

        MTG consists of millions of cards, while chess only uses six different pieces, well, it should be clear which game has better design.

        First, MtG's appeal, in large part, exists precisely due to the variety of interactions possible. MtG's core rule set is actually remarkably simple (good design). (And it has been getting steadily simpler since release. The push to make MtgO really helped as well as they weeded out a lot of the stuff that was poorly defined in the process.)

        Then on top of the simple foundation, each card text of cards in play can add or alter the rules. Its a shockingly simple game given the extraordinary amount of complexity possible. And most popular formats limit it to recent expansions allowing the large majority of possible rules to be 'retired' at any given time. It only gets truly chaotic in casual or unrestricted formats where cards from anywhere or when can come out. (And that's brilliant fun too in its own way.)

        Then the formats dramatically alter your deck building strategy. Sealed deck vs constructed... are two completely different games in a lot of ways.

        I consider MtG to be pretty well designed. I think its only real flaw is that you can lose on a bad draw. But even that is offset by the fact that a game with a really bad draw tends to be over in 5 minutes; so you are on to the next one right away.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by gman003 on Sunday July 12 2015, @02:34AM

        by gman003 (4155) on Sunday July 12 2015, @02:34AM (#208048)

        Engineering and game design are different enough fields that your moving-parts metaphor holds no intrinsic value. The best games, at least according to current Western game-design theory and tastes, are those with simple mechanics but complex interactions. One needs to be able to fully understand how the game works, but one should actually be frequently surprised by how those rules interact.

        The rules to Magic are simple enough that I've been able to summarize them in five paragraphs. The rules are not significantly more complex than chess. There may be eight thousand different creature cards out there, but they all die to Wrath of God. There's two thousand enchantments - they all die to Naturalize. I'm not even sure the probability space is higher. Chess has 10^43 different positions. A quick Fermi estimate for the number of positions in a two-player, 60-card game comes out as only 10^18. I might be off by a few orders of magnitude but it's still far lower than chess.

        I think part of it is that you're conflating the deckbuilding with gameplay. You aren't facing all fifteen thousand cards at once, even when playing in a format where they're all legal. Even in Standard, you're not playing against all fourteen hundred cards at once - only a sixty-card subset. The deckbuilding itself has its own complexity space as a metagame, but that is a one-way interaction with the actual game.

        Chess, ironically enough, is actually considered to not be an exceptionally good game, from a design perspective. The rules have few enough interactions that it's just barely within human ability to trace through the decision tree for a meaningful distance. This, combined with the centuries of static design, have lead to an incredibly stale metagame. Moves are essentially prescribed for you - it's evolved now to a meta-metagame, where the winner is often the one who is best able to judge which metagame your opponent is worst at. Which is incredibly boring to watch, but the extreme competitiveness of the game means that there is essentially no "casual" scene - even my old high-school chess club was about memorizing openings.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @03:44AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @03:44AM (#208058)

          holds no intrinsic value

          Nothing holds intrinsic value, so that is obvious.

        • (Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday July 13 2015, @01:59PM

          by Alfred (4006) on Monday July 13 2015, @01:59PM (#208489) Journal
          Any idea the order of magnitude of 15000 choose 60?
          For my curiosity.
          • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:04AM

            by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:04AM (#208753)

            Question as stated, it's 10^189 for Standard, 10^237 for Modern, and 10^251 for Vintage.

            However, any remotely skilled deckbuilder will use more than one copy of each card. Particularly basic lands - they can be over a third of your deck with one card. Spitballing a number, I'd say an average of 3 is about right - four is the maximum allowed for anything except basic lands, but often people do three or two, and in some cases even one (it's a common trick to include an Emrakul just for the counter-mill effect it has by being in the deck). So it's 20 "cards" being chosen, not 60, just off that. That cuts it down to 10^63 for Standard, 10^79 for Modern, and 10^83 for Vintage.

            I could probably cut down those odds more by accounting for mana balance and color, but that's not going to have quite as dramatic an effect.