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Comment by GarrisonPrime | Hacker News Reader

"The brainiest it's ever been" makes it sound like it's ramping up the intellect. I guess they're saying that because of the end of the "dumbed-down" core sets, but I doubt it's the case for the game as a whole.

I tried getting back into Magic after an 8-year hiatus, and so many of the rules had been changed and simplified that many of the subtleties I enjoyed from before were no longer options. Felt like I was paying hundreds of dollars to turn a dial on a deterministic mechanism...

I kept thinking "well, this is just because I've been out of the loop; with time, I'm sure I'll discover new nuances". But after chatting with power players and reading through forums for a few months, I never saw any evidence of that.

Still a great game. But a very different game from the one I fell in love with in 1997, and also a different game from when I last was really into it in 2007.

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I disagree. I've played MtG three times in my life: back in 1997, in 2004, and in 2016. I'm currently in a sealed league at work, and we're finding that Kaladesh is pretty rich with organic complexity. In my experience, it requires a lot more mental effort than I remember using a decade ago, and the people I'm playing with have expressed similar sentiments.

The set seems to be particularly sensitive to issues like timing, the order you play cards in, and the little choices you make. The cards don't have obvious drawbacks like Juzam Djinn or Jackal Pups, but they have lots of tradeoffs with the other cards in your deck. Choices like "what do I spend my energy on?" or "how should I fabricate?" or "do I hold on to the Cataclysmic Gearhulk to try and get more card advantage?" So many cards in the set force you to make little choices that add up to quite a bit of mental work.

That said, I'm only playing a sealed league so I know nothing about the state of the game in other formats.

My biggest problem from a couple years back was just one kid who's parents dropped like $600 on his deck and just played to be smug about his 30 damage turn 3 on friday nights. I've always loved trying to make competitive decks with as little money as possible though, maybe it's just me being silly.

From what I heard, it costs a lot of money to purchase a competitive Magic deck, but the cards tend to hold their value so you can just sell them once you're done playing it.

Compare to, say, Hearthstone, where the digital cards have zero resale value, but the up front cost is substantially lower.

Kind of.

Standard is the most popular format, and has the lowest power level of the major constructed formats. Cards are only legal in standard for about 1 year. Most cards that are played in standard aren't powerful enough for Modern, Legacy, or Vintage, so once they rotate out of standard, their value drops.

Siege Rhino, for instance, lost 80% of its peak value by the time it rotated out in April.

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Khans+of+Tarkir/Siege+Rhin...

Modern is funny. It's non-rotating, but has a fairly aggressive ban list. No big deal if you play casually, but it's possible to drop $1-2k on a T1 deck, only to have a key card banned a year or two later, or for the meta to shift and your deck to be hated out of the format.

Legacy, Vintage, and EDH are generally more stable.

It's 2 years for standard atm

Thanks. Obviously not a format I play.

What I typically do when a new set comes out is to buy 3 to 4 "boxes" of the set (around 100 booster packs). Over the next couple of months I'll draft the set with friends or we will do casual sealed tournaments etc. (You need 24 boosters for an 8 man draft or 6 booster per person to run a sealed tournament.). There is a group of us who get together every fortnight or so to play limited like this - usually over a few beers.

By the time I've opened all the product I generally have copies of most of the set's staple rares and I can trade or sell anything I do not need.

It is a sizeable chunk of cash upfront if you specifically want to play constructed you can acquire 'singles' in pieces and build towards a deck over the season that way. I do not play standard at all. I'm a big eternal format fan (especially Legacy). Once you acquire those cards you can play with them forever.

One thing I have noticed is a lot of eternal format cards are getting thrown into supplemental sets (i.e True Name Nemesis, Shardless Agent, Council's Judgement, Containment Priest, Dack Fayden) stuff like that. Which tends to spike the price.

I've always wanted to get in to some regular in person gaming like this with friends, my circles are just a little too small and disconnected to sustain it though.

I think I might start trying to be the organizer more, it might just be that everyone is waiting to be asked :)

Competitive Magic has a financial barrier to entry, yes, and always has. In that sense it's no different from any other hobby (and is cheaper than quite a few).

Also it's generally a very bad idea to try to build your own decks from scratch if you want to be competitive. Although things shift far more often (due to new sets and rotating formats), competitive Magic is similar to chess in that you're better off studying and mastering known-good decks, since very few people can reliably outperform the ruthlessly honed decks produced by the worldwide competitive community.

Competitive only in the sense of having interesting, non-standard games (that weren't a face roll) at nothing really higher than Friday meetups at the games shop, sorry if that wasn't clear. Anyone can fork out for the latest comp winning deck, read the overview to see how you play the cards and roll the local meetup, I was simply saying that isn't where the fun is for me.

And yes, we spent our fair share reading up and talking to other players about their meta decks, that in itself is great fun also, just of a different kind.

I've always loved trying to make competitive decks with as little money as possible though, maybe it's just me being silly.

I like to do this too

I agree with you that Wizards has figured out how to create a fun and rewarding limited environment.

I also agree with your parent comment that they have dumbed down constructed.

I suspect both you and your opponents have become more complex as players in the past 20 years, regardless of how Magic may or may not have changed.

I remember playing the game in the late 90s, and trying again in the early 2000's.

The strategy and game-play dynamics were awesome. Not so awesome: the fact that the amount of money a player spends acquiring rarer cards and assembling a deck dictates their success. It's a pay-to-win game and I fucking hate games like that. Not unlike paintball, he who spends the most on gear wins.

You can buy the vest type2 deck for maybe $400 a year. If you want a level playing field, you can have it... Not free but neither are most addictions.

$400 is about $350 more than I would have thought reasonable to spend on a card game when I was a teenager (15-16), and my parents would have thought $50 too much.

I spent about £25 on cards, and was probably given another £25 or so by a wealthy friend. The game was fine when played against others who had a similar investment, but the group stopped playing because of eBay: our friends with real money could buy what they wanted, and the rest of us could never beat them.

I think it was the first thing we did which showed who had money and who hadn't. We could take cheap plastic Warhammer figures, paint stars on them, and declare them to be powerful wizard-mages. Computer games were easily copied, it didn't matter who owned a board game. M:tG ruined the equality...

I looked into the game again about a year ago, but there were so many new rules (new abilities, new card types) -- I decided I didn't want to spend that much time on one game.

The last time I played Standard seriously was RTR/Theros and all the top decks were 1K+. I looked to buy in a few months ago, but 4 Jace's alone were over $400 (a new person would also be looking at several hundred for fetch lands). The only reason current standard is "cheap" is because everyone knows that most of the cards won't hold their value post rotation.

I think I'll be sticking with the eternal formats where cards don't lose 90% of their value in 2 years.

> It's a pay-to-win game

After selling my collection of cards, I find that I can still enjoy playing the game using the "draft" format: invest $9 or so for three packs, then have a pleasant evening of play. No more expensive than seeing a movie, and the playing field is more or less level.

It's a pay-to-be-competitive game. Nobody is spending absurd amounts of cash for a deck and expecting to win a competitive event strictly because of it.

I play EDH/commander. There a $50 budget deck can readily beat a $2000 deck. I have won and lost on both sides of that equation.

EDH started as a community driven format with no official support. The community decided that your deck must be exactly 100 cards with no duplicates except basic land. This slows the came down and forces more board interaction.

On top of that 1 of your hundred cards must be a Legendary creature. Everything in your deck can be of a color from that creature and you will always have access to that creature throughout the game. This constrains deck construction and makes it really hard to splash a color for one $50 that would be perfect. Always having access to commander is a comfort to new players and opens new strategies to veterans.

To further combat this I have a pool of 30 or decks that I build with my friends and we play mostly from this pool. No paying to win if we are paying together.

> There a $50 budget deck can readily beat a $2000 deck.

For more info on that, including what percentage each archetype makes up of the total Commander metagame and what each costs: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/commander/full#paper

In so far as there's a "right answer" for the pay-to-win parts of the game, this is it. EDH, in general, is much gentler on using cards that aren't the best and most expensive thing around.

I have a tourney-competitive EDH deck that, according to current prices, costs about $400. That's a good bit... but replacing 4 cards with cheaper counterparts brings it down to $63. And I have recently seen at 2 other good EDH decks under $40 from someone who decided he wasn't going to spend more than $50 on any deck.

Definitely doable.

So mister Dauthi, playing some mono black shadow?

Played paintball for fifteen years, competitively, traveling all over the country, also ran a large online forum. That is not true at all. Especially today, the differences between the high end, and low end guns are at this point, just looks, and luxuries.

It's a pay-to-win game

Except that it's not.

If you and I played a round of golf, where I used a standard set of golf clubs (not cheap) and you used a hand-whittled tree branch, it's highly likely that I would beat you regardless of our relative skill level. This does not mean golf is "pay-to-win", though; if you and I both played with the standard clubs, skill would determine the outcome. And even if you played with an average but acceptable set of clubs while I splurged on super-fancy clubs, you'd still beat me reliably if you were the more skilled player.

Magic is much the same way. There is certainly a financial barrier to entry, which must be cleared if you want to succeed in competitive play. And if you pit someone who has cleared that barrier against someone who has not, skill is much reduced as a factor in determining the outcome. But competitive Magic is like everyone having at least a basic decent set of golf clubs: everyone playing competitively has made the up-front investment in the game, and now they are distinguished by skill rather than further spending.

If you're looking for another way to scratch that itch, look into Netrunner. The game and the culture are both fun and creative, and it's possible to build competitive decks for about a hundred bucks (as an LCG, all cards come as full playsets, so you know exactly what you're getting).

It's more fun in person, but there's also a free community-made site where you can play online, and most players are happy to teach: http://jinteki.net

Seconding Netrunner.

Fun fact, jinteki.net is written in Clojurescript.

Are decks created before play? As opposed to Dominion or Ascension where you build decks as you play.

Yes.

I like Netrunner because I feel you're less constrained by your draws. You can run aggressively with an empty board, forcing the corp to spend money on their defenses. You can spend actions digging for cards you need.

Draws still matter, of course, but it's less common for me to feel like I'm trying to top-deck answers in Netrunner.

Can you be more specific ?

While teaching my children to play m:tg I had the same impression as you describe, but I wasn't exactly sure what aspects I was missing ...

For me, damage not going on the stack was a big change. That's probably better for the game, but eliminates a lot of tricks.

Also, the cards printed these days tend to not allow you to hose yourself. Take things like detention sphere, that say "exile a non land permanent you don't control." It used to be that those types of cards would exile any non land permanent, do a skilled opponent could, in certain situations, exile something you controlled by bouncing their only non land permanent in response.

See also the replacement of Shroud (can't be targeted) with Hexproof (can't be targeted by opponents). There's no longer an interesting trade-off where you're sacrificing flexibility by being unable to target your own creatures.

Removing damage from the stack actually makes the game more complex. Previously, it was always correct to stack damage first. There was zero penalty. If you knew the rules then you got to make the optimal choice.

Now you actually have to choose. Do I want this creature to deal damage or do I want to get the benefit of some effect due to sacrificing it or whatever. Sakura-Tribe Elder got worse but it got much more strategically interesting.

I stoped playing right around the time this change was implemented. What I felt back then was that while you are right in principle, in theory what happened was that the power level of a lot of interesting cards dropped so much they weren't playable anymore. So while my Mogg Fanatics got more complex, it didn't really matter because at that point I had to drop them from my deck, usually replacing them with something more dumb and mana efficient.

MaRo started a "New World Order" (http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/ne...) design approach in 2011, where they try to manage some of the complexity by making commons and uncommons have less and/or easier abilities. It sound reasonable, as casual players have a lot more commons and uncommons than rares and mythical rares, and it makes learning/enjoyment curve much less steep. Some experienced players associate NWO with "dumbing down the game".

I mean, that sounds infuriating to me, because it means to get complex effects you have to go and buy rares and shinies on the secondary market. I guess that was always the downside to playing a CCG rather than a straightforward tabletop RPG, though.

Generally speaking, the cheap decks people start the game with aren't very interesting to pilot. They don't have enough removal, which is one of the primary ways players interact with their opponent's board. They definitely don't have boardwipes, which means just playing the best creature in hand each turn is usually the right play. They typically don't have much card selection. And most complexity is concentrated at higher rarities, so these decks tend to have simple cards.

That's not to say that all cheap decks are boring, or all tournament decks are interesting, but cards like, say, Duskwatch Recruiter, Dromoka's Command, or Despise, for example, just offer more choices than Craw Wurms or Grizzly Bears.

Regarding what others have said:

Damage not going on the stack was a good change IMO. Sacrificing Mogg Fanatic was always the right play; now it's less obvious. I agree with akud on detention sphere vs. O-ring.

Hexproof over Shroud was a mistake; with that said, they seem to have figured that out, and we're getting cards like Pristine Skywise or Dragonlord Ojutai instead.

I'm sad to see Protection be replaced by Indestructible. Morph/Manifest and DFCs show that they're not entirely shying away from complex mechanics.

What about the spell stack ? I seem to remember a LIFO spell stack for all instants and abilities, but now it doesn't seem to work that way ... I can't really tell how instants vs. interrupts work anymore and if the spell stack actually works the way it did in the old (late 90s) way ?

Or is it still the same ?

The Stack was introduced in the 6th edition rules change (1999) and still works the same way today. The 6th edition rules also unified the instant and interrupt types, because the separate interrupt type was only necessary in the old "batch-based" system.

The modern stack is so much more sane than the old batch based system. You can still do plenty of interesting things with it, like casting Blessed Alliance during the end of combat step to get rid of Giest of Saint Traft, or casting Infernal Tutor, then holding priority and cracking a Lion's Eye Diamond, or responding to an O-ring trigger with another O-ring for a permanent exile, or burning somebody out in responding to a lethal mana-barbs trigger.

I've been playing magic competitively for a while now, and I have to say I agree that the recent sets after the so-called "new world order" are much more dumbed down. But you should play legacy or vintage (with proxies) just to see how crazy complex the game remains. Legacy remains extremely healthy and robust in my opinion, and has continued to tease my brain more than any other game.

That's why a lot of players are playing on Vanilka WoW servers. After the game became mainstream they had to dumb it down to fit a wider audience.

WoW as a whole may feel dumbed down, but the skill cap at the highest levels of play has certainly increased with the last expansion. Easy to learn, hard to master seems to be the paradigm with them.

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