Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

I've been playing Magic for 22 years. I think this is a good idea, but I'm not as confident as you are about the timing. I think this would've been a much better idea pre-MTGA.

As you mention, MTG represents all of Hasbro's profits. I don't feel that there is a way for them to escape the allure of watering down the MTG market in pursuit of more money. I feel they will kill the golden goose. At some point the physical printing process has to become a liability, right?

I don't know what percent of MTG newcomers play paper-only. Perhaps it is a lot, but my gut says that MTGA is the on-ramp for newcomers. With the digital cards not being able to be traded - newcomers aren't building the expectations that your tool is appealing to. Your tool is more useful to those who are already entrenched in the physical game space.

A counterpoint to what I'm saying is that Flesh & Blood has been doing well enough and Disney just entered into the space with their own, paper only, card game. So perhaps I'm wildly off base and the physical market is experiencing a resurgence?

I actually think WotC has done a great job of stewarding the game. I’m not sure if that is because of Hasbro or not, although my inclination is that it is in spite of Hasbro’s ownership. Hasbro’s new CEO has a great understanding of MtG, though.

The best thing that WotC can do for the health of the game is grow the player-base. While they have had several initiatives that show them also trying to maximize the revenue they generate off their players, they have also done a great job attracting new player and providing products that help on-board players to become enfranchised.

I think that the closest corollary in the tech world is Apple under Tim Cook. They maximized revenue by expanding offerings and having a diversified suite of products, none of which were targeted at all consumers. For some reason, enfranchised MtG players think they have to buy everything WotC makes, and I think this leads to product fatigue. Players blame WotC, but they are just trying to offer something for everyone.

The WOTC CEO became Hasbro CEO last year FYI

Getting new players seems like a difficult problem at the moment because the top paper formats are either extremely expensive (Modern) or extremely difficult rules wise (Commander). I think they tried to simplify Commander/EDH with the introduction of Brawl which simplifies rules by:

1. Limiting cards to standard. 2. Making the game 1v1 instead of a 4-player deathmatch.

(1) is unpopular with existing players for obvious reasons, but it is great for new players because it makes it much easier to get cards (even cheap cards can be difficult to actually obtain if they were only printed once back in 2003) and because you limit the number of mechanics players need to know about. For example, there are plenty of confusing mechanics present in eternal formats not present in standard like reanimate, splice, and morph.

(2) simplifies the game immensely because you only need to deal with two boards. It's also a much better fit for tournaments and game store events. I'm so much of a more competent player in 1v1 because I can actually read the board.

Regarding formats: prior to the advent of straight-to-Modern sets triggered “rotations”, Modern was much cheaper to play than other formats. You could build a deck and keep it for years, with only marginal updates as new cards came out through Standard sets. High buy-in price, but low upkeep cost. This was opposed to Standard, where yearly rotations kept the format fresh, but was also a treadmill of having to buy new cards to be competitive.

In a large part, Pioneer has filled the void left by pre-“rotation” Modern, although it is arguable that from a gameplay perspective, Modern is much healthier after the Horizons sets.

I agree that EDH/Commander is problematic as the most popular format. It’s the “deep end” of the pool, per se. However, I think WotC has done a great job managing this with their balanced pre-constructed products, that have a decent upgrade path.

I don’t see Brawl as anything other than a digital-only format that is basically something else to do with cards you collect in MTGA.

Regarding acquiring new players, I think WotC has done a great job of this with Arena. It has resulted in the death of in-paper Standard, but is probably what has brought more players to the game than anything else, although it has its own set of issues.

But you are right that several things about the game are suboptimal.

> For some reason, enfranchised MtG players think they have to buy everything WotC makes, and I think this leads to product fatigue. Players blame WotC, but they are just trying to offer something for everyone.

For many enfranchised players, that’s because they keep printing chase rares that power creep their way into staple status in older formats. Meaning, if you play competitively or semi-competitive eternal formats like legacy or edh, what used to be a very slow trickle of relevant cards from every other standard set is now 2-3 additional major releases a year, with dozens of cards at or above your format’s power level.

In addition to printing more products that you must interface with to play it competitively, they also decide that more products should be allowed into those formats that previously would not be. As an example, the joke sets now are split between cards that are legal in legacy and commander and cards that aren’t, when before joke sets were entirely self contained and would never need to be considered by competitive players.

Beyond power creep, the pressure to continually design new things that aren’t obviously just better versions of old things has driven them to use more and more text with more and more new rules per year, to the point where they don’t fit on the cards anymore and they must make reference to other cards outside the game. Take the recent initiative ability that brings up a card of more abilities, the rules of how to travel through them aren’t explained on either the original card or the dungeon card! It was created for fans of D&D, but it was strong enough to have a card banned from the legacy format. Established players in that format could not ignore it and still play competitively.

Yep, I agree with this. The game’s complexity is an order of magnitude greater than the early days, and much of the issue is self-inflicted by WotC.

However, I’d argue that the only eternal format of significance is EDH, and it is very much not competitive. It’s popularity is just as much a curse as it is a blessing for the game, IMO.

> I actually think WotC has done a great job of stewarding the game.

I quit the game because I believe it's so far the opposite in the other direction. Secret lair sets with fomo limited time high cost mechanically unique cards. So much power creep, bans happening practically every set now, increasingly ridiculous monetization strategies, I could go on.

Even the OG golden goose TCG is dead to me now. I wish we could have a good card game but the TCG model is just doomed to head in this direction, I'll play all inclusive board games and card games now.

You should consider Pauper! It has all the archetypes of the big eternal formats (and some extras like affinity having artefact lands), at a fraction of the cost. Between me and a friend we basically own the whole meta.

There still really isn't a good option for playing the most popular format, Commander, on any sort of official app and I doubt there ever will be. It's an inherently social format (the banlist is a complete joke) and MTGA doesn't support Commander at all. The closest MTGA has to Commander is Historic Brawl which is a completely different format as it is 1v1 and Commander is really a 4 player deathmatch. Even playing Commander with 3 people has a completely different feel. They sort of support Commander on MTGO, but MTGO has an atrocious and difficult UI plus it doesn't support a ton of popular Commander cards (and always lags behind in support by months or even years for the Commander cards they do support). Again, it also cannot be understated how social of a format Commander is.

Another thing you're missing about TCGs in general is the satisfaction of playing and owning physical cards.

From the little testing I did, XMage supports commander and there were no unsupported cards in the 5 or 6 decks Ive tried. You do have to use the beta release though, the stable release is like 3 years old.

It's still a little clunky, but handling priority is generally a nightmare in a 4 person game. I think that's part of why Arena doesn't even bother trying. Waiting for 4 people to pass priority is annoyingly long when it happens like 12 times per turn. Games would take all day to complete.

I'm aware there are unofficial solutions like XMage which is why I mentioned "official". As for handling priority, they really need something like the "auto" option from Master Duel where there is some rules engine that tries to figure out when you would want to hold priority. For example, I'll generally only want to tap a mana dork on my turn or if I have some instant speed ability/card in hand to use that mana. There are exceptions, but the auto system just needs to be good enough that I can anticipate how it'll work so I can turn it off as needed. Master Duel also has a cool feature where you can press down your mouse to always ask for a response if you know your opponent will do something soon that you care about.

I have a theory about verticalizing the buy-side UX and communities.

If I were to make my outdoor app again, I would focus 100% on one sport and never branch until we had 85% of the community.

Come to discord to chat more.

MtG Arena might be under threat from the recently announced Unity's ransom-seppuku...

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