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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
How would this be possible when interrupts existed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My favorite deck of all time (Goblins) is built around abusing Wasteland and Rishadan Port to lock down my opponents manabase.
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.
Mana Burn is gone, yes, in terms of doing damage, but players' mana pools still empty after each phase.
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.
Conventional wisdom suggests going for around 40% lands. So 24ish lands for 60 card decks, 17ish for a 40 card deck.
Having more than 35% lands leads to the very mana flooding complained about in the root comment.
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.
>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.
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.