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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare.

(Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)

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That's usually balanced more by banning or restricting a card than by rarity. It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work (instead of limiting the cards it would limit the competitive players to those who can afford the cards). Instead there are multiple formats with different sets of permissible cards, from the most permissible (vintage, which gives access to any card that has ever been printed and is not banned or restricted to 1 copy per deck) to the least (standard, which only gives access to cards from the most recently-printed sets). The deeper the card pool, the more expensive the format as those cards are not reprinted due to their gamebreaking power.

>It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work

It works with how they imagined the game would sell: somebody in a game group convinced their friends to buy a few packs, they make decks, and play the game as a quick palette cleanser between longer board or roleplaying games. It's also the reason anteing cards was part of the original default ruleset: if people only made decks with a few packs of cards, the game would get stale. So ante meant the cards would rotate through the group and encourage them to alter their decks.

And then it was discovered that it is effective tactic to make money. You could sell all cards in the set for 50 or alternatively you could sell bunch of packs mostly filled with filler for 150 and get people buy quite lot of them to chase the limited set of strong and competitive cards.

Isn't this the "real world" equivalent of "Loot Boxes"? Shouldn't it be somehow regulated as gambling even?

It absolutely is and it absolutely should be. Secondary market is very real and some cards in certain products are expensive there. Something like the "The One Ring" one out of one unique card in MTG is clearly a type of lottery. That card had expected secondary market value in hundreds of thousands if not millions.

To me if we are going to regulate loot boxes, trading cards should be regulated as well. Or at least minors should be banned from buying them.

I thought this is governed by point-buy systems where you have a certain number of points to spend on your deck, and powerful cards just cost more points. Not an MtG player though, and I assume this also varies from play to play.

Now that people are having this discussion, I am remembering I have a family member that plays 40k, and they have both point buy systems and proxies, since the models are so damned expensive and change every four years.

Speaking of 40k, I'm curious if anyone has created a FOSS 40k-alike game, where every unit has a standard 3D-printable model that is itself a FOSS asset.

Not that that'd be too interesting on its own; but it'd almost certainly spawn a community of people creating and sharing derivative works of those standard models. Could be entire apps / package repositories / "character customization engines" built on snapping together standardized unit components like LEGOs and then printing the result.

Not sure about mainline 40k. But for Horus Heresy (official 40k spinoff of an earlier edition) there was an absurd amount of free or borderline free (think 5$ for a set of files to print an equivalent unit box that would have cost you $60 from GW, but you can print as many boxes as you want) community created content for resin printers. Not just units or vehicle models but also mix and match bits similar to what you're talking about (helmets, arms, legs, torsos, weapons, to customize both official and unofficial models). I remember being blown away by how many of the models were on par with or even better than what GW was offering for a fraction of the price. If you had or knew someone with a resin printer you could print 400-500$ armies for 20-30$ of resin. Most of the group I played with had at least half of their army printed out. And in a lot of ways it's "truer" from a hobbyist point of view because instead of buying a box of generic troops from GW and painting them according to their faction you could wildly customize beyond what the official troop boxes came with with printed bits and greebles. Some people came up with really creative and impressive stuff.

I always figured Lego was the way to go here. But Hasbro would never be dumb enough to license those properties.

It would be cool however if someone took a standard Lego set and rearranged the pieces into a number of units. So everyone knew if you wanted a DingleHopper you would buy this kit and get one DingleHopper and three Jiggamadoos, and trade those to your friend for a pair of Whatsits.

There are indeed formats which work this way (https://canadianhighlander.ca/points-list/), but unfortunately the most-played formats (Commander, Standard, Modern..) don't have any such restrictions which means the investment required for competitive play is prohibitively high.

On the other hand, the ridiculous costs mean it's very easy to find like-minded people to play casually with using bootleg cards.

Even canadian highlander is barely an example. That list is pretty small and for most decks it's only blocking a couple cards from being included. A typical deck is around 60% rares.

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