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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.
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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?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gman003 on Sunday July 12 2015, @02:34AM
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
holds no intrinsic value
Nothing holds intrinsic value, so that is obvious.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday July 13 2015, @01:59PM
For my curiosity.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:04AM
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.