In Defense of Magic: The Gathering's Mana System

It seems to me that what people really want, whether they realize it or not, is a relatively close game. Winning or losing by a landslide is ultimately less interesting because, if the game wasn't even close, there was never much tension established. The stakes of any given action or decision are just too low if there's no realistic chance that it impacts the outcome of a game. The skill vs. variance balance is so hard to get right because both skill and variance have the potential to lead to a game where who wins and who loses becomes far too obvious far too early.

These videos are so great, nobody really talks about these things, and getting 2 different views is so interesting.

One of the spects rarely discussed when talking about the design of mana in MTG is how it's colored system is self balancing when it comes to mixing attributes. Many of the games that ditched colored mana system either for no mana system. or one where you have a resource that pays for any card have strong limits in deckbuilding, where you either can't or very limited in what kind of cards you can mix. Partly it's also done so designers have easier time designing cards, so you don't need to look for busted 3 card combinations with 3 different factions. This for me feels very limited, and Magic very elegantly designs around that. You can play 2,3,4,5 colored decks provided that your mana base can pay for it. So in theory a 3 colored deck might be more powerful that a 2 color equivalent, but you have to deal with your mana being potentially less consistent. And the color nature of magics mana is great for expression, Red/Black deck and Red/Green deck have different vibes, even though they both might be just aggro decks.

At some point over the years I realized a lot of what you said about variance and strategy and realized I do like Magic's system of needing to include dedicated resources in your deck. One of the things that saps my enthusiasm for a new card game is looking at the rules and seeing that their resource system is almost exactly an idea I've seen shot down in a thread ten years ago from someone saying that Magic will surely die without this rules change because you need to put lands in your deck. One thing I've seen a few examples of lately that I like is having your cards move to your resource pool after resolved. The Guilty Gear card game and a newer one I just demoed called Primal both forgo costs on cards, but as you use cards they fill your resource pool and can be discarded to pay costs later. I've found that's a system that makes me really interested an excited to play a game as opposed to "Every card is also a land" or "You always get mana every turn" to call out Lorcana and Hearthstone/Magic Spellslingers.

YGO is the wild west of card games right now. Honestly it is the shining pillar of what power creep looks like when it spirals out of control and the game is no longer what it used to be. I don't know if there is a way to fix the problem of mana flooding or the lack there of without breaking the game completely.

Didn’t realize I was signing up for a 5min discussion on mechanical keyboards… im here for it.

i'd recommend you look into flesh and blood more. their pitch system on the surface looks like the lorcana and similar "fixed" resource system, but in reality its somewhere between magic and dual masters, while being completely different was well. you still have to make very important decisions about what cards you add to your deck because each card is either 100% card and 30% land, 65/65, or 30/100. you can easily get screwed if you need 3 resources on a turn and you dont draw blues. also, the fact that your pitch goes to the bottom of the deck is an inspired rule. another huge difference is that each turn rarely has the capability of impacting every other turn for the rest of the game. there's little to no board state in most games, so each turn is about maximizing your current hand and trying to set yourself up for the best outcome 1-2 turns from now.

11:15 - "The complexity of the mana system is something they wanted to trim down" --- Looks at hybrid and phyrexian mana and snow mana and colorless mana (a la Oath of the Gatewatch)... "Yeah, the complexity of the system is trimmed way down"

One of the great things Magic’s land system provides that I didn’t realize until playing other games is that it slows down the pace of the game so cards can stay relevant for longer. For example, my 2 drop creature is still relevant for at least two turns before opposing 3-4 drops outclass it. In other games where mana is guaranteed every turn, your cards get outclassed the following turn so it radically speeds up the game. 1 drops become useless and the game usually revolves around 3-5 costed cards. As the costs get higher, the power difference gets wider. So 6 drops become useless as 7-8 drops are game ending power just the following turn. It also heavily prioritizes ETB effects and good stuff decks. Slower or passive abilities get instantly power crept and combo decks are much harder to work effectively.

My son and I play that we have 2 basic lands in the command zone, anytime you would draw a card, you can draw one of those instead. Mana Screw and Mana Flood are still things, but they are both softened. There are certainly ways this could break down, as you mention in the podcast, too much reductions in variance have gameplay costs too. We hold this off a bit by making library searching very rare in our decks. We are allowing ourselves this extra consistency in manabases, so we do not afford ourselves free open access to the other mode of consistency. Library searching is a pain anyway both from homogenizing games and just the mechanics of deciding from tons of options, finding that thing, and shuffling, so we like making it a rare thing anyway. We also build our decks specifically to make a gauntlet of options that play well against each other, not an arms race trying to make the most powerful deck.

I can’t speak for Yu-Gi-Oh now, but back when I was a player it wasn’t all that uncommon to see archetypes have some mixing, or for there to be staple cards from certain archetypes that managed to find their way into a lot of decks. There were also Monster Type decks and archetypes sometimes had support for those, so there was also some interplay there. Although I did notice that the Monster Type decks were fading by the time I stopped playing. There were often cards that offered benefits to strategies that weren’t exclusive to one archetype. A good example of that is black Luster Soldier Envoy of the beginning. It was a card that could only be summoned by banishing (Yu-Gi-Oh’s version of exile) a LIGHT monster and a DARK monster from your graveyard. Now most of the time, archetypes would share either a Monster type or and Attribute (LIGHT, DARK, FIRE, WATER, WIND, EARTH). The best way to get cards in your graveyard was an archetype at the time that had LIGHT monsters with pretty powerful effects with the “drawback” of milling you. So one of the best ways to be able to play BLS was to use this archetype in conjunction with archetypes that had DARK monsters. And BLS was a powerful card. It was on the limited list which meant that instead of being allowed to play 3 in your deck you could only play 1. It was still super common, showing up in 83 lists at its peak in September 2014. So while the current meta might heavily revolve around archetypes (I haven’t played in 10 years so I really don’t know), they aren’t inherently restrictive and aren’t guaranteed to reduce variance. It really depends on how Konami chooses to design them. The lack of a resource system really does make the game a lot more consistent though.

One minor point about the thing towards the end about Pokemon having more variance, I'd say that it has way less despite the system of prize cards etc. There's such an abundance of tutoring effects nad card draw that most decks can simply always "Do their thing"

Magic's land are cool, but it's something only Magic can have. It's like YGO's freeform bullshit combo in turn 1 type of design. It's cool that it exists and it fills a important niche in the gaming world but no new game that comes out today can do THAT.

i just got introduced to your guy's videos, gotta say, i absolutely love them. this is probably the 6th video of yours that ive watched today

I'd like to add to the paradigm that is Skill vs. Variance: Diplomacy. It's high skill, low variance in rules (every game starts in the same state, the only concealed information is player plans, and there's no randomness to the outcome of any interaction) but in output, because there are seven players interacting (as you mentioned when discussing sports, more players=more variance) the gameplay itself is highly variable.

I think my personal preference for a resource system for MTG would be playing your cards as lands, but certain cards play as tapped lands for X turns. So your crappy commons could be played untapped as lands, but your better cards would come in as tapped lands (essentially what modal double faced land cards are in MTG nowadays). Spells with multicolours or with higher CMC might even come in tapped and with a stun counter (but not a stun counter, you wouldnt want proliferate to affect it... Just something akin to a stun counter) so you would be disencentivised to just play your highest cmc card as a land, or to fill your deck with multicoloured cards. Obviously this doesnt "fix" the mana system, it would trade one complexity for another, would shift what decks are viable and how decks played out, and introduces the emotional damage of having to trade your precious cards in as resources. But, it would add more decisions into the game (which is the part i love of MTG), and would add better consistency (i.e. you have more interesting games and less dud games). I think it might make it actually harder to get into magic but would make better, more competitive games, while still retaining lots of variance.

I very much like how Decipher did resources in their Wars TCG. It's funcitonally the system they used in their Star Wars TCG, but they balanced it differently and added colours... except the Energy (mana) isn't coloured, the 'colours' are a seperate resource. Essentially, where a MtG card would cost you six mana and three of them would be blue, Wars would make you pay six energy, and require that you had 3 faction symbols in play. If you were playing single colour, getting three symbols out was really easy to do. To do the same in a two colour deck required more effort. Three... I'm not sure if anyone even came up with a good three colour deck before Decipher cancled the thing (and yanked the tabletop RPG license for some nonsensical reason. they'd licensed someone else to make the RPG, and the books were selling really well with Huge anticipation for the ones that were still upcoming... ) The other thing about how they handled resources in that game is that your deck was your life was your mana supply. Cards in your hand were still life, but they weren't mana anymore. It all worked very well actually. It was a long game though, a tournament round was an hour... and was also only a single game. fifty fifty as to whether that one game would be Finished or not (though, fortunately, a winner could be determined by having the judge come over and count both players' remaining cards... which they had to do even if you finshed the game because the difference was used when determining the matchups for the next round).

You mentioned DnD and MTG as two of the main sources of inspiration for many board game designers. What do you think about a pen&paper role playing card game? Two good things = too much?

Just found the channel, and I'm eating up the content! Love hearing a more development side of games and all the technical jargon is cool! That being said, I despise the mtg land system. Like despite all the power creep and monetization going on, the thing I'm still endlessly complaining about while playing mtg is the lands.   Although its an anecdote, I just did an mtga draft, played 8 games, and I determined that 5 of those games was EXCLUSIVELY decided by who drew enough lands. And while I don't know what kind of hands my opponents kept, the two times I land screwed I kept 3 land hands, and proceeded to not draw a single land for 6 draw steps. This also happened 3 times to my opponents, where on turn 6 they only had 3 or even 2 lands out. It sucks that the MAJORITY of the games I played today were decided not by skill, but by luck: plain. dumb. luck. Even when I won because of it I felt empty and sad. I think I speak for most people when I say, I'd rather lose a close game then win a non-game where the opponent didn't even get the chance to play. Kinda for that reason, I've been getting more and more into Lorcana.

Mana flood and mana screw is a problem to be solved. You have to be careful when you say card games rely on variance. Variance is important (a card game without variance will immediately turn into an algorithm, which will kill the fun), but it's also important how that variance manifests in the game. If the variance manifests as 20% of the time I don't get to play the game, that's a problem. If it's about creating more varied and interesting board states, decisions, and situations, that's something to be encouraged. You're still going to have variance in a card game based on which cards you get in which order even if you consistently have access to resources. One way to increase this variance is to decrease the number of copies you can have of each individual card. To me, the thing that Magic did really well was mana costs. Magic has a ton of texture just based on how mana costs work. What Magic did really poorly is resource generation, and access to resources. The way that many games have attempted to solve the resource generation issue flattens out the mana costs, and they lost a lot of texture there (Hearthstone). There are 2 ways that I am aware of to solve the resource access issue while maintaining the general progression structure and the mana cost texture of Magic: You can put resources in a separate deck (Sorcery Contested Realm), or you can allow people to play any card as a resource (Alpha Clash). You can also opt to change the progression system (Epic, Summoner Wars) or flatten out the mana texture and find your nuances elsewhere (Codex). To be fair, if you started with a few resources in play (like Spoils TCG), I would be more forgiving of a system where you need to draw into your resources to expand your resource base. As for solvability, one way to prevent a game from being solvable is to use simultaneous reveals of hidden decisions. Yomi and BattleCON are good examples of this. If what I should do depends on what you do, but we pick simultaneously, then a dominant strategy is necessarily a mixed strategy. Sirlin talks a lot about this. Optimal strategies that are mixed strategies are extremely different from optimal strategies for more deterministic games.