How Boosters Solved One Of Magic's Biggest Problems and Why They Don't Anymore

The early bit about alpha did not mention Ante as an intrinsic game mechanic. You were each supposed to set a random card aside as ante. The winner got all ante’d cards. The goal: a way to force deck changes over time, and balance. The most powerful deck would have most to lose. Turns out people really don’t like losing their cards, so it was dropped pretty quickly.

Something that I think leads to this perception of a stagnant meta is how ranked ladders work for most games. In a ranked ladder like MTGA or Hearthstone, there's a high cost to experimentation: you'll lose a lot of rank, and undo the progress you've made on the ladder. People are incentivized to use what's been proven to work if they want to gain rank, and it becomes a feedback loop of people using only proven decks, thus further proving to everybody that the same few decks are all that's viable.

I think not being able to access all the cards is a fundamental feels bad for competitive games. The only thing worse to losing to the meta is losing to a meta you can't even opt into.

You eliminate player churn by not treating your customers like a money printing machine, you make the game fun to play in both casual and competitive, you make product fun to open. So: 1. Stop releasing so many products 2. Spend more time playtesting and creating sets 3. Stop printing collector boosters, put those back into play boosters so they can have a "big hit" and bring some value back to foils

21:25 "she's never done this; why is she doing this now?" She is obviously interested in a serious discussion of how to keep "the meta" fresh in CCG's. Kudos on following sound editing advice re: cats in the shot.

Netrunner had randomized booster packs. The Fantasy Flight remake of the game is Android: Netrunner. That is the game that used the living card game model. They were non-randomized expansions.

Coming from a fighting game perspective, we have kind of the opposite approach. Balance patches occur in yearly intervals to give the game time to breathe, let players figure out whether the top tiers are what they're cracked up to be, and make the right changes. As opposed to trying to patch all the time to induce churn in the meta game. Also fighting game characters tend to be built in such a way that players steadily master them and figure out more about them, which is how there are meta shakeups in 20 year old games.

The normal booster pack was the watering hole that every magic player had to come to. Now that the game is divided into so many specialty sub products, magic has lost it’s appeal to me.

Flesh and Blood's Living Legend system does a pretty interesting job with churn, at least now after some recent tweaking. When Lexi and Iyslander rotated out 2 months before HVY, the meta became incredibly wide and unsolved. Heroes rotating mid-season along with the armory deck precon serving as a mini set, we had a ProQuest season where Week 1 was different than Week 2-3 was different from Week 4/rest of month. Culling cards is important, and if you're going to do that, why not use it in a way to maintain interest in the game by letting non-meta strategies get a second appraisal before another set butts its head in. While MtG's set rotation could have a similar shaking up effect, the fact it's timed with a set release kind of nullifies its individual impact.

one sad thing about boosters that goes to actually quickening churn is the concept of a chase card. the studio is incentivised to print cards that are just a noch above the rest to sell more boosters. these cards then become the obvious focal point of the next meta decks, with little exploration required since their stats are just straight up better. i think pokemon moved into a good direction with this by making alternate arts the chase cards. but they still print a lot of bulk. i imagine if they pushed the numbers on the bulk a bit, there would be potentially tons of viable decks. but since they insist on printing one card with 330hp and 200 damage and then another with less hp that pays more energy to do less damage they needlessly pidgeonhole the meta to focus on the obviously superior cards.

I'd also say, the whole issue with meta and churn is very prevalent in board games right now. A decade ago you could pick a game on BGG and there would be pages and pages of strategy forum discussions by people who have played the game 100+ times. Now you can go to the strategy forum for the hottest, fastest selling games and there's like 2-3 posts like "I played this twice, red hero's ability is OP, this game is solved and done." And then ppl move to the next game. Is red OP? Maybe, but you don't know that from 2 games. The perception of stale meta combined with tons of choice means there is little push to try to shake up a "solved" meta for a game. TCGs at least have prize events with incentive to think outside the meta, but other games don't.

Cat showed up, I've never felt more loyal to this channel before. Truly a blessed video!

I've been playing since Ice Age competitive and casually, both sealed and constructed. The reasons my friends and I have switched to EDH exclusively and buying singles are too much product too fast and it's too expensive to draft and keep up with the various metas. We would much rather build our EDH decks that we can keep 90% the same for months or years and still be fun and viable with minimal changes.

Id be curious to see WOTC try experimenting with non booster sets. I Have to imagine they sell so much through commander precons that having something like a 300 card cube or Wizard Tower style box with 1x of every card (or maybe 2x of everything common) would be interesting to see. I know Conspiracy exists but those cards are mostly unusable outside of a draft environment. IDK. I can imagine a Universes Beyond set being released as like a big $200 LCG experiment set vs 4x commander precons

I am a card game designer, and my interest is mainly draft. I imagine having each set as a cube, and encouraging cube home brews to be the focus. Conducted is possible, but not the focus.

Boosters don't make sense with how anyone plays anymore. I don't get cards in boosters and trade them with other people. That's not how people acquire cards anymore. They buy singles. If you want a certain thing it's cheaper and less burdensome to just do that. And they already decided the common and uncommon slots are for draft shaft. So you are paying $4 for a single random card.

I think Pokemon handles this pretty well, and I mean VGC not the card game. A team is only 6 mons and each one is a specific bundle of stats and move but there are endless knobs you can turn to customize their gameplay. So the sheer number of permutations makes a meta easy to grasp but hard to solve, and there's a constant ebb and flow of rock-paper-scissors counters. Also the Pokemon company has a very hand-off approach to balance, which means that's it's on the players to figure out ways to beat or adapt to top meta threats. I think too often digital card games rely on patches to change the meta rather than wait for the players to become creative and that's a shame.

That is what, in my opinion, hearthstone is doing much better nowadays. The cycle from 2014-2019 was expansion, 2 months later maybe balance changes, 2 months later expansion. The cycle now is big set, 1 month later big balance changes (maybe 1 smaller one in the middle), 1 month later mini set, 1 month later big balance changes, 1 month later big set again.

I am always chasing the dragon of playing card games as a kid/teen. Back when the only way to expand my collection was to top an event or get a few packs on a holiday. I went to every FNM ans prerelease because I wasnt going to miss a chance at booster packs and trading, the main ways I acquired cards I wanted.

The first few months of Legend of Runeterra's beta did limit the amount of cards everybody could acquire: you could only use money to buy a set limit of wildcards per week, and every other way of earning cards was time gated in some way. It was a blast to play, a period of constant calculating how to both use the cards you had randomly unlocked alongside the few wildcards you could buy each week, it was probably the most fun I ever had in a TCG, but it only lasted a little while. Eventually, Riot realized the system wasn't sustainable, new players could never catch up, and when the first set came out it became obvious that players that had been saving up ingame currency would simply be able to buy the whole set, while newer players couldn't.