How Success Almost Killed a Game, and How Its Creators Saved It | Hacker News Reader

How Success Almost Killed a Game, and How Its Creators Saved It

npr.org

66 pointsjonbaer27 comments

I really like the writing on this article. So simple and to the point. No attempt at doing some 'human interest' opening with an irrelevant story about how Richard Garfield grew up inventing trading games using sticks on the family farm. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn't have found it interesting if I didn't already know the game. And I wouldn't have minded if it had more content to it.

As noted in the comments though, there's a lot more than can be written.

There's no acknowledgement of the politics of the "reserved" list, the Power 9 (and why even to this day, they have never been reprinted). Or efforts such as "Modern Masters" where Wizards reprints rare cards from years ago that are still in use. (OMFG Tarmogoyf).

I already know a bit about the game (not a pro like some people...) but the article feels quite "empty" to me. So many issues were just not even addressed, and the article seems like a gross simplification of what is going on.

When I played back in the mid-90s, creatures were incredibly underpowered: easy to kill, and great for fun/munchkin play (Force of Nature! 8/8 for 6 mana!) Most of the "good" decks were creatureless.

The ridiculously powerful creatures and creature-strategies that came later (like Tarmogoyf and, to get really egregious, fucking affinity) seem to be overcorrections to the long-standing weakness of creatures. You could do a lot with your green growth decks (mana-generating elves and huge creatures on early turns) to beginning and intermediate players, but advanced players with reactive decks would shut those down handily.

On the broken cards that come out now and then, Type 2 is a necessary evil. It's not that the designers are bad. It's that Magic's metagame simply won't work if design flaws (which are inevitable with a game of such complexity, just because it's impossible to predict the exploits that thousands of players will discover) don't get scrubbed away a couple years after inception.

I also agree that the no-reprint policy around the Power 9 was politically motivated and wrong-headed. The way it should have been done is as follows:

    1. Art will be changed with every reprinting. This way, you aren't screwing 
       collectors by reprinting coveted cards. They have a guarantee that 
       the card, in that form, will never reprint. 
    2. Overpowered cards will be reprinted but "pointed", i.e. each Mox 
       might be 4 points 
       and Black Lotus might be 5 and Time Walk might be 7. Every tournament 
       sets a point limit (or no limit) that applies to all decks submitted. 
       That way, the constraint is still a deck-construction constraint rather 
       than which 13-year-old has a rich daddy.

For what it's worth, I know almost nothing about Magic aside from the fact that it exists, and I still found this style to be vastly preferable to long human interest stories that only occasionally discuss the actual point.

> It was a card game where, if you had enough money, you could effectively buy all the aces.

Wait, "was"? I stopped playing years ago when I realized the money I needed to stop losing was an order of magnitude higher than the money I had.

How much would I have to invest today in order to have a 50/50 chance of winning against a random opponent?

In which environment?

Many years ago, Wizards of the Coast realized that the game was unapproachable when all the cards are legal. So they created supported formats, and people just agree on which one to use before they play. For instance, we could play a deck where all cards have been printed in the last couple of years (the standard format), or we could play only with common cards, but from any expansion ever (pauper). The formats where you can play with pretty much every card ever printed are not those most, if anyone, play.

Owning four copies of the cards in Standard is pretty expensive: A refresh is about a grand a year. But even pro players don't do that. People aim for having a couple of decks per format, Which is a lot cheaper, especially if you trade your unused cards.

To play for cheap, people play draft. 8 people, 3 boosters per player ($15 or so), and you can have a little tournament for a few hours. And enough drafting will get you cards that you could save to use for standard decks.

It's still a pretty expensive hobby, but it's not like you need to buy the $1000 cards to play.

A similar story appeared a month or so ago. People recommend playing "draft" to avoid the money-sink.

The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192628

The subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9194357

(The Dominion recommendation is good!)

The limited formats (draft and sealed) remove the issue that your opponents' cards might just be better than your cards, but they make the cost problem much worse. It's several times more expensive to play limited (where you have to buy new product every time you want to play) than to play constructed, where you're allowed to reuse the cards you own.

Draft is O(N) and constructed is O(1), but the constant factors matter. You can draft once-a-week for a year and spend less than you would on a constructed deck. Better still you can cube draft (i.e. reuse the cards).

If a draft costs around $13, drafting once a week for a year is more expensive than almost any constructed deck. For $700 you could have two competitive decks, or do quite a lot of maintenance on one. Drafting only feels cheaper because it's spread out.

Looking purely at costs, the obviously correct thing to do is proxy your cards. Proxies are free.

If your net expense of drafting is $13/week then you're either getting ripped off or losing every game and going out of your way to avoid picking any valuable cards. It's been a few years since I last played, but when I did draft weekly I averaged well over $5 of cards per draft without explicitly money-drafting anything that didn't pay for the draft by itself. The median draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, but there's enough high outliers to pull the mean up quite a bit.

It's pretty dishonest to discount the cost of drafting because you get some high-value cards while refusing to discount the cost of constructed... the entire cost of constructed is obtaining high-value cards. If you buy a $400 deck, do $200 of maintenance on it over one year, and then sell your cards at a 50% loss, you're still way ahead of a drafter who averaged $6 of money cards per week. And on top of all that, you had the option of playing more than once a week if you wanted to, and you never deliberately sabotaged yourself in the attempt to cut costs on your hobby ("explicitly money-drafting anything that [paid] for the draft").

I might also note that on Magic Online, it's definitely not true that the median draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, as the residual value that bad rares used to have has been cannibalized by mythic rares. A bad rare in MTGO can be purchased for $0.10; obviously you can sell it for less than that. Are paper rares that much more valuable?

What's a random opponent? If you mean "choose one opponent from among everyone who currently plays M:tG with equal probability", ten bucks will get you a better than 50/50 chance. A lot of young children play without even knowing some important rules.

If you want a 50/50 chance against a random opponent at the pro tour, you probably couldn't get that just by investing in cards (although, if you get to know their deck in advance, you might do that well or better).

If you want a deck that people wouldn't laugh at you for playing in the pro tour, probably three to five hundred dollars. Red decks are often much cheaper than other decks.

You could always play booster or sealed deck drafts. They cost $10-15 each (for booster drafts) and you get nearly that value in cards, plus more if you place in the top 2 or 3. Your chance of winning against an opponent is entirely based on a combination of luck, your drafting skills, and your playing skills. Money put into the game is not a factor.

I recently played a few booster drafts and one a few of my matches, even though I hadn't played in about 10 years.

Besides drafting, EDH is a good format if you don't want to spend too much. When you have a 100 card deck with only unique cards (except for basic lands), people generally don't want to spend $10 on any single card.

My partner and I got in to a gold-card arms race but we decided to sell them all after it turned out we couldn't pay the rent or eat because we spent all our money trying to one-up each other.

Ever since then I've only ever played MTG with "common" cards.

Neat! We played 'Uno' where our decks consisted entirely of cards that cost 1 Mana (or zero) to play. My son won all year at school with one of his.

Anyone interested in MTG history should check out the Drive to Work podcast, where mark rosewater discusses why decisions were made and general game design theory http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg...

Thanks, probably the best thing I've read about game design!

Interesting. I wonder if there is anything relevant to pay-to-play mobile games here? I think I'd be a lot happier to pay in the typical mobile game if I thought the game was fairer.

Hearthstone, from the makers of World of Warcraft. It's quite fun. It's on most mobile devices.

Card Hunter is amazing and not greedy

That's where MTGOX started before Bitcoin. Magic The Gathering Online Exchange.

So if they had sticked they would have gone bust when card prices went down too. Sad fate.

s/Magic/Bitcoin/g.

Magic is a great game -> lots of people start playing it -> people start trading cards -> speculators buy the expensive cards -> game's no fun any more.

Bitcoin is a clever platform -> lots of people start using it -> speculators buy the currency -> too expensive and volatile to use for trade -> no use for trading any more.

I don't follow your analogy. The smallest tradeable unit of bitcoins (the satoshi) is currently well under a thousandth of a U.S. cent. This is "too expensive ... to use for trade"?

I'm showing my age here, but I played Magic back in the mid-90s and know a bit about its history.

Oddly enough, the feature intended to self-limit what destroyed the game is one of the most deprecated, disliked features that is almost never used: the ante. (For those unfamiliar with M:tG, the original rules stipulated that each player wagered one random card from his deck and the winner got the loser's ante. There were also spells that could increase or alter the ante.) There's enough volatility in Magic (i.e. the person with the better deck might win 75% of the time, but not 100%) that it created real risk in loading up on expensive cards, because you might still lose in spite of them to a guy playing a deck full of powerful commons like Kird Apes and Lightning Bolts (both now OOP).

The problem with the ante is that you're likely to get a card that isn't very useful to you. If you're playing a weenie deck, and you get a 5/5 Shivan Dragon (in its heyday, a card that was $20 because 5+ power creatures were still hard to come by, except for green vanillas with high casting costs) then, while you got a "good" card, it's not congruent with your strategy.

I think what saved Magic was the fact that most kids who played it had fathers who were collectors (from the era of baseball cards). Except in places like Atherton where $500 per week was a typical 13-year-old's allowance, no one of Magic's target age could actually afford to play unless he got a parent or uncle or much older brother into collecting and could grab the dupes. (Because of the rarity tiers, getting a complete set of any expansion involves buying lots of cards and generates a ton of dupes.) It was kids playing with their collector fathers' and uncles' dupes that saved Magic.

Relative to other hobbies like golf, skiing, or scuba diving, Magic isn't astronomically expensive. A couple thousand bucks per year for your hobby or sport, when you're in your 30s, isn't a big deal. The cruelty of it is that it has adult prices but is marketed toward 13-year-olds.

In tournament play, you have to choose between "Type I", which has enormous upfront costs because it's dominated by super-powerful cards that've been OOP for almost 2 decades and cost $1000 a pop, and "Type II", which requires you to buy a new set of cards (to the tune of about $1000 for a competitive deck) every year, and limited/sealed-deck varieties which are fun in their own right, but take out most of the planning and deck construction (which is, IMO, most of the game). I remember in 1997 when people complained that it "cost almost $100" to have a decent deck. Now, you'd have a hard time playing with one under $750.

What's also slightly offensive is that the game is explicitly programmed to favor people who spend more money. In golf, expensive clubs deliver an advantage over cheap ones, but that's not by explicit design. It's just how the physical world works. Moreover, a good golfer with crappy clubs will still beat the pants off of a shitty golfer with the best clubs in the world. In Magic, there is a skill of deck construction that money can't buy, although the Internet has taken that away because one can play already-constructed decks, but if you have a good and expensive deck, you've basically been delivered enough power to win most of the time (but, again and to its credit, Magic has enough volatility that you won't always win).

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