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Comment by snikeris | Hacker News Reader

This is my favorite alternative form of Magic:

https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-danger-room/

"I have a feeling that roughly 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too few lands, 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too many lands, 25% of games are decided by a player having a legitimate bomb not get answered immediately, and the last 25% of games are the ones that everybody hopes for where there is a ton of back-and-forth on both sides. I wanted to create a format that eliminated those unpleasant 75% of games that are unfulfilling and foster a format where ALL of the games were as interactive as possible."

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My biggest beef with Magic isn't the lands system, but that the game is fundamentally stingy with cards, leading to many non-games, and/or turns where you pray for the right top-deck and don't get it.

(This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.)

Given the huge cardpool, there's no real way to "fix" MtG that couldn't be exploited in the metagame (aside from limited, or social formats like Commander).

But that aside, I think there are two relatively minor fixes which would go a long way:

- You can spend your "land for turn" to exile the land instead, and draw a card.

- Before your starting draw, Scry 1.

> (This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.)

Is Netrunner something you can get into these days, or is it hopelessly OOP? I remember hearing good things about it.

There’s a community keeping it alive with fresh content: https://nullsignal.games/

I sadly haven’t convinced my MtG playgroup (or family or other friends) to try it with me.

It's alive and well, and the community is welcoming and happy to teach: https://nullsignal.games/players/around-the-world/

Cards release more slowly than the FFG era, but the current stewards (Null Signal) have been doing a great job for the last eight years.

There's a community app to play against an AI, which has a good tutorial if you want to dip your toes in: https://chiriboga.sifnt.net.au/

The "land for turn" concept is genius. I'd say only once though. If you draw another land, that's the nuts.

Well that's your "land for turn" not "replace playing a land". You can only play one land each turn, if other cards let you play extra lands...you can play extra lands!

I understand, I just meant it wouldn't be good to let the player cycle through their cards if they kept drawing a land with this rule specifically. You still play lands as normal if desired, and you can still play extra lands if other cards let you play extra lands.

Magic isn't really stingy with card draw, if I understand what you're saying. It might be a drawback in a specific strategy, but that's how the game balances itself. If weenie or burn decks had card draw (or selection) on par with control decks, they would be too good...

Love that "land for turn", although I think it might shift the balance a little too much, in that you can make a deck with too much land and high cost spells and know you can cast them reliably. There needs to be a risk factor in building up to high mana to make low mana spells matter.

Possible tweaks, maybe it has a cost (all lands have cycling 1 or 2 mana or life.) Or delay that draw until end of turn, which feels like about the right power level, but does have memory and execution issues.

My thinking is that there's a tradeoff, that you slow your ramping in exchange for cycling (replacing your land for turn). You trade your acceleration towards big spells for more consistency (or just fewer dead draws).

> the game is fundamentally stingy with cards

Just play blue, that's not a problem then.

I don't play any IRL magic but I know it can be hard to "fix" and maybe isn't broken. Casually those rules would probably be good house rules to balance play, though even small changes like this could change balance and lean all decks towards exploiting the rule

to point, your land for draw is kinda implemented with trade routes https://gatherer.wizards.com/9ED/en-us/108/trade-routes

And that has an additional mana cost to balance it (though it does have additional bonus). So you could kinda say "everyone gets trade-routes already in play" but like any "free card" fix does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken" ?

> does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken"

exactly, that's why it probably isn't feasible other than casual/social play: there's no change to the fundamental rules that doesn't end up warping the meta-game. (Particularly if the fix relates to mitigating mana flood/screw with consistency: I suspect it rewards combo lists, whose win-cons are indistinguishable from "find three specific cards".)

I haven't tried this because I haven't played Magic in over 20 years, but I always thought it would be more fun if you had two draw decks where the second was only allowed to include basic lands.

Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games.

Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw to one or two, I dunno.

This is similar to how VS system worked, it was a short lived superhero CCG in the mid 2000s, you could play up to one card per turn facedown as a “land”, but you still drew from one deck.

There’s a few modern TCGs who take this approach, like Riftbound (the League of Legends TCG that launched last year) and Sorcery Contested Realm.

Other attempts to fix the mana problem include games like Lorcana and Flesh and Blood, in which cards have dual modes where they can be played or used for resources.

Sorcery TCG

I've thought for a long time, two draw piles - one is lands only - and you draw from each of the two piles each turn.

this would be balanced for both players.

If course with magic the lands pile would have to have rules like no lands that turn into creatures or something.. maybe even just basic lands .

but each person gets a land each turn - been thinking that makes the game better.

Alternatively you give everyone a free mulligan and if they decide to start with <3 lands in their hand or no mana ramp that's on them.

My issue with guaranteed lands is that they remove the randomness of some lands. I am not guaranteed to get my "no maximum hand size" land and my rogue passage to make my creature unblockable in a typical game of commander. I have to plan for it by using stuff like expedition map.

Only allow certainty for basic lands?

Drafting last Friday, my first hand was zero lands, my second hand was one land, my third hand (bottoming two) had three lands. However, I then kept drawing four-drop spells and no more lands for 8 turns.

So is it "on me?" Or is it just that the game just is high variance?

Free mulligan means on your third hand you would only bottom 1, not 2.

Besides, with a 37 lands commander deck, the chances that in 4 hands (if your limit is bottoming 2, 5 cards in hand) starts getting low. Around 1 in 10 and that's ignoring mana rocks (2 lands + 1 mana rock) which probably brings it much closer to 1 in 14+.

If you add the chances of more than 4 lands (also fairly undesirable) your odds of a bad forced hand climb to 1 in 7, which is still pretty far from the 50% chance the original post is talking about.

Without the free mulligan you would be at 1 in 4, which is why I said free mulligan is the way to go.

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