The mathematics of Magic: the Gathering (1999) | Hacker News Reader

The mathematics of Magic: the Gathering (1999)

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Some time ago, I tried to recreate a few basic Powershell commands as MTG cards.[0] Try/Catch [1] is one of my favorites - it's designed to "pre-counter" counterspells.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/4sa6v

[1] Reveal 2 cards from your hand. Choose 1 and pay its casting cost, then cast it as normal. If it fails to resolve, reset the game state to before the card was cast, then cast the second card as normal. https://i.imgur.com/E2cbdEo.png

>reset the game state to before the card was cast, then cast the second card as normal. https://i.imgur.com/E2cbdEo.png

wouldn't that make the card useless?

play cardA -> get countered ->state reset -> play card B -> B gets countered (because your opponent recovers the counter and untapped cards, due to the reset).

State reset isn't the right term. You want something like "Reveal two cards from your hand. Pay the casting cost for one. If it successfully resolves, exile the second card. If it does not, put the second card into play as if it were cast."

As it turns out, that also doesn't work because you can't just put something into play or it would skip some triggers and activate others it wouldn't normally. So the code is statefully different if it's in the "catch" instead of the "try"

You'd probably want for a try catch: Try catch (0) Instant Split Second

Exile a card from your hand. You may cast a card from your hand with CMC greater than or equal to the exiled card as though it had flash. That spell gains "if this spell is countered, you may play the exiled card without paying it's cost".

... Of course, it's not perfect but it's closer. Doing things like "reset the game state" are not defined in the rules very well, especially since the state wouldn't be the same (there are ways to make it illegal to undo). So that would just be a mess.

Just add a new ability "uncounterable".

I played Magic briefly as a teen and the thing that bothered me the most was how mana worked and the tendency to either get mana flooded or mana screwed. I even played a custom format with friends where you separated your deck and your mana into two decks and drew one from each every turn. It made the game much more enjoyable and consistent.

But that affects both players equally, as in general the luck factor. My experience is that while you might lose a few games stupidly because of mana screw/flood, in the long run luck balances out and skill makes the difference.

It's secretly a feature, not a bug. Due to mana screw, even the best players lose 30-40% of the time.

You're being downvoted unfairly. Magic's lead designer, Mark Rosewater, has publicly discussed this exact thing. I'm not sure if it is in his GDC talk but he has 100% discussed it on his podcast.

It is my least favorite part of the game (really the only part of it that I dislike), but you're right. I don't know if it was quite what Richard Garfield had in mind, but at this point it's 100% an intentional part of the design philosophy.

I think it was unintentional but has played a crucial part in the game's appeal. When you get mana screwed, you feel the same emotional devastation as seeing the house win big in Blackjack. I think that low feeling drives players to try again and again.

Oh, I don't know about that. You really get used to how decks work. I've loset tournament games (Regionals and PTQs - though I never qualified :) to mana screw/flood and it didn't sting as much as when I made a stupid mistake that I immediately realised was a stupid mistake.

The problem with having to add lands to power up your deck for me is that it means I can't throw in the kitchen sink, as I'm wont to do if left to my own devices. A deck design must first of all work - and that's 50% getting the manabase down pat, which includes tough decisions (should I trim out a basic land for one more copy of OP sleeper rare I'm sure shreds the deck-to-beat to pieces? Hint: no). So you have to build a deck while respecting some constraints (minimum deck size, enough mana for your spells, sharp strategic focus etc). But that's like, all the fun in deckbuilding (which is all the fun in the game, for me :).

In fact, I know this will sound eminently silly but I believe that playing M:tG and in particular bulding decks has taught me important lessons that I took with me in my career as a programmer. The most important of which is: don't ever waste resources.

Perhaps a more esoteric lesson is this: you can still have infinite variety even without absolute freedom. Even with the burden of having to include land in your deck and risk mana screw/flood, you can still design any deck you want and have a lot of fun while at it.

Like with Blackjack, it allows for bluffing.

He actually wanted to decrease the consistency a bit. If the games are too consistent, you run into the problem of there just being a "best deck". Especially if you can count on your mana like in Hearthstone or with the suggestion of the "mana deck".

As it stands, it's something you have to consider and something you have to realize affects your opponents just as much as you. You can mitigate mana issues by playing a deck with low casting cost cards or by playing more land than normal, etc. There are also cards to search out land or can be used in a similar manner to land.

Yes, there is some variance, but poker has a ton of variance and no one would say that it detracts from the game.

Furthermore, good players can play with probabilities to lead to more consistent results.

For example, try not to play two colors equally. Instead, "skew" colors in one side. Play 75% green and 25% red for example, which tends to be more consistent than a 50/50 split. Furthermore, seeing an opening hand of say all reds (when you know its your "minor color") gives you the opportunity to mulligan for a better hand before the game even starts.

IMO, these sorts of decisions are what makes you a better player. Its a small probability with regards to mana-screw or mana-flooding, but these little things help over the long run.

I haven't played magic but this must be why Epic gives you one mana every turn, with every card costing 1 or 0 mana to play (or rather, put down)

Have you ever looked at Hearthstone? I tried it briefly, and I think it's got its share of problems but I thought that the way they designed around this was really cool.

https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mana covers it in detail, but the gist of it is that mana is generally an automatic thing, and it's granted per-turn at an increasing rate throughout the game, meaning that most games follow a natural power curve that is immune from flood/screw.

There are still actions that affect mana and strategies around those, and some neat concepts like The Coin, the special card always given to the player who goes second that gives you one extra mana for one turn, to help with the disadvantage. But overall it beats what I consider to be a really annoying flaw in MtG.

I've played daily since beta, and stopped about a year ago. The problem with Hearthstone is that they traded mana RNG for effect RNG. The fate of every match revolves around how well a card randomly targets an enemy. Far too much is decided by a coin toss in that game, because it makes for funny youtube videos.

I also liked in MTG how much more responsive the game was due to instants/interrupts & triggers - was far more complex and nuanced.

In HS it's simplified - with few exceptions, your stuff happens only on your turn, very little targeting of the player (ie, no discard). The strategies are limited. I still like it, but ... it's definitely not up to MTG richness.

They addressed the instants, far too difficult to direct flow of the game online like that. Look at MTG online, it flows like a pig. The game is constantly interrupted for each phase. Their answer was secrets basically.

The game is probably more "responsive" now. Instants and Interrupts were a mess. Batching and determining which had to be resolved LIFO and which FIFO and the various corner cases were an unnecessary labyrinth to navigate.

The stack is much better and I'd say more nuanced. Now you can target things on the stack specifically. There's more bluffing and playing with the fact that there is incomplete information.

I agree, though I still regret they ended up overpowering counterspells by allowing them to target any previous spell in the stack (interrupts could not do this - they had the interrupt stack).

However Hearthstone has no such interplay - likely because it allows an easier functioning AI and interplay in a normatively turn-based game online is difficult.

I think we agree?

Counterspells could target anything on the stack before. Interrupts could be cast in response to other Interrupts.

If anything, it nerfed them a bit as now Instants can be cast in response to cards that would have been Interrupts.

Interrupts used to work in a fashion similar to Split Second.

Scenario: 1) I cast Armageddon/Wrath of God, 2) in response (instant stack) you cast/trigger effect that allows you to sacrifice (or return to hand) your permanents affected, 3) in response (adding to stack) I counter my own 'geddon/WoG.

How would this be possible when interrupts existed?

Pretty much how you described.

You have the original Wrath of God spell.

The effect or spell that allows you to sacrifice or bounce those things would be in the Instant batch.

The counterspell would be in the Interrupt batch.

The big difference is that once that counterspell is on the stack, you can't cast any more Instants.

So let's say that instead of countering the Wrath, you counter the spell that's bouncing all of the things. With the old system, that's it. If I don't have any Interrupts, we need to resolve our batches. No one can cast an Instant until we resolve both the Interrupt batch, the Instant batch, then the original spell.

Counterspells were even better before. They were effectively the last word. The stack kind of depowered them, but it gave a lot more play to the game.

IIRC, you couldn't counter the wrath once the instant is played (at least as of say 1998-ish rules interpretation).

I play Wrath. I can counter now, or let it resolve. You play instant effect. I can counter, but can't counter the wrath anymore. I'm pretty sure that's how it worked.

This is how messy it was. That could have been correct at some point. Instants and Interrupts, batches and windows were all way too much of a mess.

More often than not the only randomness that affects the outcome of a game is card draw. There are random effects that can flip a game but that happens less frequently than just a bad draw.

They’ve gotten rid of most of the really rng effects and the worst offenders ever where in the game when it started (ragnaros and sylvannas).

For Hearthstone players who do like the mana problem there is shaman class with overload. Some warlock cards also destroy mana crystals, while druid plays around a lot with gaining these.

Hearthstone has too much RNG for my taste though, and I don't like the business model related to the RNG of packs.

Slay The Spire, which has a more fair business model IMO (even though the price is cheap at 16 EUR), allows you to have more strategy and play around the RNG via liberal deck building and a rogue-like game. It has a relatively stable mana/energy resource system which can be modified by game mechanics. But it is a PvE game with ladder system increasing difficulty.

I played a format that stated you could put creatures down as long as you had enough mana to cover their cost, but you couldn't attack with a creature unless you payed for their cost. You would have to pay their cost every time you attacked with them. This variant meant you would need to prioritize spells versus attacking. You wouldn't attack with all your creatures so you could save some mana for a counter spell.

Gotta go all in on Exulted creatures then.

This game mechanic (mana burn) was removed when the rules were refactored across the past 20 years. Mana (edit:) simply disappears at the end of each stage.

dusts off DCI card

Mana Burn is gone, yes, in terms of doing damage, but players' mana pools still empty after each phase.

He's not talking about mana burn, that was never really a problem except for extremely niche combo decks. He's talking about when you draw lands/mana producers for 5 turns in a row after starting with a heavy mana hand. That is "mana flooding".

Oh, that's either an issue of an unbalanced deck, or insufficient randomization.

My best decks started with the "rule of 1/3", and added/trimmed 1-2 lands to optimize. The "rule of 1/3" is that 1/3 of the deck should be lands, for best land draw. So a 60 card deck would start with 20 lands, and maybe swap 1-2 forests for elves in an elf deck.

And from a recent card randomizing thread, it takes 7 "riffles" to fully randomize a deck.

20 lands is a little low and is only appropriate if you have a very aggressive deck, with very few cards costing 3 or more mana.

Conventional wisdom suggests going for around 40% lands. So 24ish lands for 60 card decks, 17ish for a 40 card deck.

My "blue bertha" decks were 40% to 45% lands. They were usually 100+ cards and consisted almost exclusively of 6+ casting cost creatures. These were only used for fun, mostly for other players to test their new decks against, never in any competition.

Having more than 35% lands leads to the very mana flooding complained about in the root comment.

For a more detailed analysis on land percentages I'd refer to Frank Karsten (scroll down to the conclusion if you want just the numbers):

https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/how-many-lands-do-y...

With 35% lands (21/60) you are likely to end up mana-screwed (not enough lands) unless you build your deck to match the low land count. For a generic rule of thumb I think it is better to recommend a bit more lands than that.

That's for a 52 card deck. The numbers would be different for decks of smaller and larger sizes.

No, it's a fundamental part of the game which forces a high level of variance. That is what OP was complaining about. Even the best decks are prone to mana flooding or screwing. Your brilliant "1/3" strategy is literally the first thing beginners learn about deckbuilding, and doesn't change the high variance of each game.

>And from a recent card randomizing thread, it takes 7 "riffles" to fully randomize a deck.

I don't think you understand what "randomize" means. It doesn't mean "you get proportional hands", it means that the state isn't predictable. It is still subject to variation in the amount of mana you draw.

Seriously, you are reciting trivially basic concepts, that everyone is aware of, and completely ignoring and/or misunderstanding what is being said and the real situation.

No, mana still disappear at the end of every stage. What it doesn't do anymore is life loss (i.e. mana burn).

My friend and I used to play from 40 life rather 20, also seemed to even out the effect.

The more I play magic, the more I like the mana system, actually. It's very frustrating occasionally, but it usually is a message to me that I need to change my deckbuilding, add more filtering, card advantage, etc.

I agree I like that you have to take into account the manabase when you design a deck it adds an additional constraint. It also makes mana denial a valid strategy.

My favorite deck of all time (Goblins) is built around abusing Wasteland and Rishadan Port to lock down my opponents manabase.

This is generally seen as the main flaw with the games core design. Most other currently successful trading card game (mainly Hearthstone) with mana resources have gone the route of providing a consistent source of resources per turn. This approach does significantly reduce the variance match to match and leads to a lot less of the "feel bad" moments of getting flooded or screwed.

That being said I personally find the variance that Magic has when it comes to mana resources to be more interesting than the alternatives as most of the newer card games have abandoned the idea of having mana resources(lands) in your deck all together. I think the lands are one of the main things that makes Magic an interesting card game.

One interesting alternative to lands was from the World of Warcraft Card game (spiritual successor to Hearthstone) which allowed you to play any card from your hand face down as a mana resource. Although they completely did away with this in Hearthstone so they could limit the deck size and the reduce the number of duplicate cards that were needed in each deck.

That's why in most formats lands are considered staples and fairly expensive. Duallands, shocklands, and fetchlands can make your mana base much smoother.

That's more an issue with the design of your deck than with the game, or the design issue is that one may not know how to build a deck to avoid such issues.

MTG isn't built for a consistent (late) game natural Mana curve and being able to do what you suggest would fundamentally change the game. For worse imo.

For example with no Mana acceralation/mananipulation the optimal number distribution to have to maximize Mana spent through turn 5 is 29 lands and only 3 five drops.

After which you will quickly have more Mana than you need.

Very few decks run 30 lands.

You can't design a deck that satisfies the condition of natural ly dropping a land each turn and spending the most Mana.

The more consistently you want to say, have 5 lands on turn 5, the more lands you need, which means less space for other cards in your deck.

Similarly the more you want to be able to spend that 5 Mana past turn 5 the more higher cost cards you need, which means fewer cards of other cost. Which means your more likely to be Mana flooded early since your deck won't have the space to consistently play smaller stuff. Try to and will come at the cost of making it more difficult to curve at higher N.

The optimal turn 5 deck curve has no 1 drops. You can't have it both ways.

As for your suggestion, it would only be better for beginners who don't know how to build around a curve, as the cards are not designed for such rules and would break the game in other ways.

That's indeed a fundamental problem with Magic. Most modern TCGs have some form of mitigation.

You may look into "Force of Will" (the game, not the card). It plays a lot like Magic but mana is in a separate deck. Each turn, you have the option of playing a magic stone (same as a land in Magic) directly from that deck or do some other action instead.

For more recent Magic + math writing, see articles by Frank Karsten. Magic the Gathering Hall of Famer and PhD in game theory.

https://www.channelfireball.com/tag/frank-karstens-magic-mat...

Karsten made me better at this game, he's a gem.

Any discussion of Magic: the Gathering on Hacker News should come with an ObLink to how it's Turing complete

https://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html

For more accidentally Turing complete systems, see

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...

You should remove the angle brackets from your links, they're being included in the link and leading to 404s

I know this proof but I'm not happy with it. It goes out of its way to setup a Turing machine (though not a very obvious one) using M:tG cards- however, that doesn't prove that the M:tG _game_ is Turing-complete. It proves that the specific cards chosen can be used to create a Turing machine under a subset of the game's rules, which is not quite the same thing.

For a more complete proof one needs to take into account the fact that the text printed on existing cards is a derivation from some grammar - the grammar of the M:tG "ability text" (there is no official name for the game's language). In other words, the ability text on existing cards is no the whole ability text language. The complete language is a superset of the strings on existing cards. To prove the game as Turing complete, one needs to prove this language is Turing complete- not a subset of its strings.

To give an analogy, think of the game's rules as the JVM, the ability text grammar as the syntax of the Java language and the actually printed cards as some arbitrarily chosen set of Java programs. You can perhaps put together a Turing machine by stitching together those Java programs, but that will not tell you anything about the Turing completeness of the language itself. Instead, the straightforward proof is to use the Java syntax to write a Turing machine and run it on the JVM.

There is, of course a slight problem with taking this approach for M:tG; that the game's rules are very well defined (there's the Comprehensive Rules that go a long way towards resolving any ambiguity) but there is no full specification for the ability text language itself. So the M:tG machine is not well defined.

Then again, it's easy to derive at least a subset of the rules of ability text. For instance, if you see a card that says "Destroy target Elf creature", and you know that "Elf" is a "creature" type, you can substitute "Elf" for any creature type and generate any number of very probably correct ability text sentences- "Destroy target Goblin creature", "Destroy target Cat creature", "Destroy target Pirate creature" etc [1].

In this way it may be possible to generate the appropriate ability text expressions to construct a Turing machine- and prove that the M:tG game is Turing-complete.

________________

[1] Actually the ability to generate arbitrarily many well-formed expressions in a language is a hallmark of Turing-completeness. If we can't assume that the ability text on existing, printed cards is not the whole language, then Turing completeness becomes much harder to argue for.

> The complete language is a superset of the strings on existing cards. To prove the game as Turing complete, one needs to prove this language is Turing complete- not a subset of its strings.

It is not clear to me how a subset of a language could be Turing complete but not the whole language. Can you elaborate?

Bad turn of phrase. Indeed, a Turing machine programmed in Java is a Turing machine consisting of a subset of strings in the Java language. So you are correct to doubt my claim.

I'm sorry to not have a better turn of phrase. I'll keep working on it. At this point I think the best I can do is to insist on my analogy of constructing a Turing machine out of programs written in Java, rather than writing a new program implementing a Turing machine.

For most MtG players, the game rules are the sum of the game rules and the set of cards which are legal to play. Including other potential card text is not relevant, or at least at that point you are playing an unofficial variant of the game. Also, I think constructing a turing machine just under the comprehensive rules with only ability text is a very simple exercise (even exluding trivial cases like an ability text which simply instructs you to evaluate a turing machine as part of the execution). You could probably print a set of cards to make a usable assembly language, no need for any turing tarpits, which is another reason why no-one is particularly interested in this interpretation of the question.

>> For most MtG players, the game rules are the sum of the game rules and the set of cards which are legal to play. Including other potential card text is not relevant, or at least at that point you are playing an unofficial variant of the game.

I dont' think there is any other language for which we assume that the only strings that belong to it are the sum of its printed texts (which in the case of M:tG ability text are printed cards). I don't see why we should make this assumption for ability text. That's not how languages work, in general.

Note that all this has nothing to do with "official" status, or the acceptance of specific strings by players of the game, or anyone. Either ability text is some unique construct, the likes of which has never been seen before, or it's a language like any other and it can be analysed in the same way as any other language.

Because when you play mtg, you don't manipulate the words on the cards, you manipulate the cards (well, some cards can manipulate ability text, but not arbitrarily). They are the fundamental unit of the game, not the ability text language itself. This does not have a great analogue with other languages. Anyway, you can analyse the language used to create ability text itself, but I think this is a far less interesting question.

How is the MTG scene these days? I spent my childhood through high school obsessively playing the game, reading these sorts of breakdowns, and spending all my money. Then life got in the way and I haven't played in about 10 years. I remember Friday Night Magic used to be a wholesome way to spend a Friday evening, and you got a lot of entertainment for the $5 entry fee.

I dip my toes in every once in a while, I'd say the scene is a whole lot more vibrant I because of the ecosystem of online publications, youtube videos, and podcasts.

Power creep is real. If you remember the days when Savannah Lions was highly efficient, you're in for quite a shock.

> Power creep is real. If you remember the days when Savannah Lions was highly efficient, you're in for quite a shock.

Creatures have steadily grown in power while non-creature spells have fallen in power quite a bit. The designers of the game concluded that making the game more creature-centric lead to more interesting gameplay decisions. Power level overall has been trending downwards if anything.

It's led to the recent trend of stapling the effect you actually want onto a creature with appropriate-stats-for-effect-level. Crucible of Worlds is a 3 mana effect. As a creature, it should be green. It should therefore cost 2G. A 2G creature is reasonable at 2/3. Therefore, Ramunap Excavator is appropriate.

My modern deck plays entirely creatures, and entirely humans. It has duress, thorn of amethyst, nevermore, and into the roil main, with the option of getting disenchant, rule of law, and electroylze out of the side... as humans. It's effectively made spells obsolete, since the spell you want is probably a creature now.

Along with the radical power creep of creatures, Wizards has

- increased the cost of blue spells that counter creatures, because new players get sad when their monsters get countered

- started giving evasion abilities to many more creatures, since new players get sad when their monsters get blocked

Time to dust off the shadow deck. :-)

Standard currently has Essence Scatter, Divest, and Wizard's Retort. It's not that counterspells have gotten cheaper, but graveyard recursion is fairly prevalant and "Can't be countered" clauses are on some pretty beefy finishers right now.

Do you happen to have a deck list anywhere?

This article follows the evolution of the deck. The last one sounds close to what OP is running: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/deck-evolutions-modern-...

Still going strong, probably more popular than ever. There is now 2 distinct ways to play the game online Magic Arena, and MTGO (Magic The Gathering Online). Full rules enforcement, matchmaking, drafting, etc. etc.

"Paper" Magic is still very popular, with a big 1000+ tournament happening throughout the US (and the world) every weekend.

The cost has unfortunately gone up, its pretty rare to find a $5 entry fee anymore. A pack of cards is $3.99 (or $9.99 for special sets). A competitive deck of cards can run $150-350 for the "Standard" format (only cards from the past 1-2 years) or $700-1500+ for "Modern" (most every card from 2003 onward).

> The cost has unfortunately gone up, its pretty rare to find a $5 entry fee anymore.

The entry fees where I live for constructed formats are around $5 or not much higher, and that's for New York City.

Limited was around $20-25, last I checked, and the bulk of that is the cost of the cards you're purchasing as part of the event.

Where are you finding constructed events for $5 in NYC? Most places I know of are at least double that.

The game mechanics are streamlined/polished a bit to make it more accessible to newcomers, but otherwise, not much has changed. (aside from a lot of power creep)

Magic is still pretty expensive, though.

I haven't been played much for a few years now, but the game is doing well. I think the community is larger than ever.

The game itself is in a bit of an odd spot. Standard (aka type 2) has been very unbalanced in recent years with many cards being banned, and sometimes emergency banned. Many players are opting to play modern rather than standard, since standard has had it's problems. The sets themselves actually look really fun, but since so many ideas have already been explored, the mechanics are getting more unique, and that can lead to odd interactions between cards which makes it harder to balance. I might be a little off since I'm not very active in the scene right now though.

I'm still a huge fan though I don't really have time to play anymore. I do have a cube for drafting that I'll bring out with friends every once in a while though.

I would look into Hex: Shards of Fate, you can play in your underwear at home and so it doesn't require as big of a time investment. Unlike Magic Online, it actually has a great client that doesn't look like it's from the 90s and unlike MTG Arena, it's not overly Hearthstoneized and retains the TCG over the CCG model.

It's very, very similar to MTG in terms of mechanics and skill cap, and it is not bound by a paper-compatible limit on mechanics. It's all I play these days.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.

I've also played Duelyst, which is a hybrid card and board game. I like it, but I wish they would release it for mobile already. I'd usually pick another game if I'm sitting at a PC.

MTG Arena, a new online version of the game, is in closed beta and I like it quite a lot. If you want to see how Magic is like nowadays, joining when it goes into open beta may be a good idea.

What do you like about it?

The number one thing I like about it is that the UX when playing the game is very good. This is exactly why I didn't play MTGO. Other than the autotap sometimes making dumb decisions, it fells very good.

Other than that, my favorite game mode in MTG has always been drafting, and while drafting free to play is probably not possible right now unless you are amazing, you can draft a lot for little money. I have a win rate under 50% and I can play all the drafts I want to for about 20 dollars per month. If I was a better player, it would be even cheaper.

I've gotten into MTG three times, once around 1997, then 2003, and then 2017.

Differences today: FNM is still available, relatively inexpensive, and fun. EDH is now a common format, but I never enjoyed it. League is also a common format: you play three matches per week for four weeks. The first week you start with three booster packs, and then each week afterwards you open another pack, and you can rebuild your deck as much as you like. You're paying something like $20 for cards and you get four weeks of games out of it.

I don't care for constructed play but part of that might be the fact that 2003 and 2017 had problems with standard constructed.

Well, the "spending all my money" part hasn't changed at all, in fact depending on the format you're interested in, that may be the defining characteristic of your experience.

The wholesomeness of Friday Night Magic is highly dependent on what your LGS scene happens to be like though, that part hasn't changed too much.

Magic's player base is bigger and more vibrant than it's ever been, and I think by most metrics Limited (Draft, Sealed) and Casual (e.g. Commander) formats are more fun and accessible than they've ever been before. For older formats like Legacy and Vintage (even Modern to an extent), card availability can present an insurmountable financial obstacle to play, unfortunately.

Well, I've read that it's actually gone a bit down from it's peak (some sketchy estimates put the active player base at 12 million, down from a 20 million peak), as games such as Hearthstone and fatigue eroded the playerbase, but Dominaria did bring some people back and it's on the upswing again - and with the new Hearthstone-like client they might get back to 20 million again.

The latest set, Dominaria, is the best in years. Richard Garfield worked on it.

Magic: Online is slowly being bled out by Wizards in favor of their new Hearthstone-like digital client.

That said, the best way to play today is Vintage Cube drafts on Cockatrice. Free. High level of play. The best cards. There’s almost always a game going.

>> Vintage Cube drafts on Cockatrice

What/where can I find this? never heard of it and never had much fun/luck with magic online but would love to be able to play online

https://cockatrice.us/

Install. Log on. Make a deck and join a game or jump into a draft. There's two Dominaria drafts filling up right now. There's no rules engine and it's a bit janky at first, but you can play magic against a real human 24/7 for free.

Also, the cockatrice drafting community relies on opensource apps like http://dr4ft.info to run the actual drafts. There's always room for improvement and anyone can host a fork. It'd be great to get more HNers tinkering with them.

https://github.com/dr4fters/dr4ft

Is this basically the modern version of Apprentice? I spent a lot of time during tourney prep on Apprentice, it helped me figure out deck concepts really quickly and let me know what cards i needed to buy(as well as strategies to counter the most popular decks in the format). Apprentice was super basic, but the P2P gameplay really felt futuristic even on dial-up.

> High level of play.

On cockatrice...? I love doing a cockatrice cube but this is simply not true.

XMage is similar to Cockatrice but also has rules enforcement and drafting in-client. Just the Java download gets you the game, but you do have to scrape the images yourself (within their software) if you want those.

If you want a good deck, we're talking a lot more cash than 10 years ago.

Drafting will only cost you about $10 if you like Limited. Commander can be done on a reasonable budget too if you like wacky multiplayer.

I think it's mostly online. Magic stopped doing big convention at LA convention for new set release. They stop releasing or giving promo cards they only give foil token cards now. It doesn't seem like they supporting hobbyshop as much. Standard is not the most popular format. It seems like Modern is their most popular since cards are expensive now.

It also seem like they're pushing for online more they've release a new online client that only deal with current cards and beyond iirc Magic Arena but the card economy there suck for some reason. I only hear this from a twitch streamer Hoogland in term of what happening to Arena. Jeff Hoogland also talk about the tournament is getting bigger but they've never up the prizes.

A while back there were a few very very alt-right like personalities in the magic scene. It got pretty bad when one of them sic his fanbase against a cosplayer and she end up with threats and decided to quit. The cosplayer announced it via twitter or something saying she's selling everything. That dude got banned. Another dude also got banned cause he read Mien Komf (hitler book) and edgelord online.

Advent of twitch have made making side money with video games a thing so yeah. That's what sup with magic scene it went digital.

Magic stopped doing big convention at LA convention for new set release.

Prerelease events moved from regional events at huge convention centers, to store-level, in a bid to help stores.

They stop releasing or giving promo cards they only give foil token cards now.

FNM promos are back to being cards, not tokens, and you still get a promo at prerelease, promo cards as prizes or for participation at certain events, a promo for buying a box of the new set from your local shop, etc.

It doesn't seem like they supporting hobbyshop as much.

A number of changes, including prereleases, PPTQs, exclusive products, exclusive promos, all are geared toward getting people into their local game shop since that's the only place to get those things initially.

Pretty good. I played around 4th/Ice Age through Mirage when I was in grade school.

There's some neat new things. There's the Commander format, which is neat. I've got no idea what semi-pro/pro playing looks like these days, but they've managed to keep it fun and interesting. I've only played a dozen games in the past 2 years with friends decks, but I like where they've gone.

Mana burn is gone!

Before even worrying about what the game is like these days, I'd check out the local shops and see if you enjoy the company of the players in your area. The people you'll be spending your time with can make or break just about any hobby.

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