6 ms·

I played Magic briefly as a teen and the thing that bothered me the most was how mana worked and the tendency to either get mana flooded or mana screwed. I even

• YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  But that affects both players equally, as in general the luck factor. My experience is that while you might lose a few games stupidly because of mana screw/flood, in the long run luck balances out and skill makes the difference.
  • brandnewlow 8y ago
    It's secretly a feature, not a bug. Due to mana screw, even the best players lose 30-40% of the time.
    • cease 8y ago
      You're being downvoted unfairly. Magic's lead designer, Mark Rosewater, has publicly discussed this exact thing. I'm not sure if it is in his GDC talk but he has 100% discussed it on his podcast.
    • mbunch 8y ago
      It is my least favorite part of the game (really the only part of it that I dislike), but you're right. I don't know if it was quite what Richard Garfield had in mind, but at this point it's 100% an intentional part of the design philosophy.
      • brandnewlow 8y ago
        I think it was unintentional but has played a crucial part in the game's appeal. When you get mana screwed, you feel the same emotional devastation as seeing the house win big in Blackjack. I think that low feeling drives players to try again and again.
        • YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
          Oh, I don't know about that. You really get used to how decks work. I've loset tournament games (Regionals and PTQs - though I never qualified :) to mana screw/flood and it didn't sting as much as when I made a stupid mistake that I immediately realised was a stupid mistake. The problem with having to add lands to power up your deck for me is that it means I can't throw in the kitchen sink, as I'm wont to do if left to my own devices. A deck design must first of all work - and that's 50% getting the manabase down pat, which includes tough decisions (should I trim out a basic land for one more copy of OP sleeper rare I'm sure shreds the deck-to-beat to pieces? Hint: no). So you have to build a deck while respecting some constraints (minimum deck size, enough mana for your spells, sharp strategic focus etc). But that's like, all the fun in deckbuilding (which is all the fun in the game, for me :). In fact, I know this will sound eminently silly but I believe that playing M:tG and in particular bulding decks has taught me important lessons that I took with me in my career as a programmer. The most important of which is: don't ever waste resources. Perhaps a more esoteric lesson is this: you can still have infinite variety even without absolute freedom. Even with the burden of having to include land in your deck and risk mana screw/flood, you can still design any deck you want and have a lot of fun while at it.
        • Fnoord 8y ago
          Like with Blackjack, it allows for bluffing.
      • bena 8y ago
        He actually wanted to decrease the consistency a bit. If the games are too consistent, you run into the problem of there just being a "best deck". Especially if you can count on your mana like in Hearthstone or with the suggestion of the "mana deck". As it stands, it's something you have to consider and something you have to realize affects your opponents just as much as you. You can mitigate mana issues by playing a deck with low casting cost cards or by playing more land than normal, etc. There are also cards to search out land or can be used in a similar manner to land. Yes, there is some variance, but poker has a ton of variance and no one would say that it detracts from the game.
    • dragontamer 8y ago
      Furthermore, good players can play with probabilities to lead to more consistent results. For example, try not to play two colors equally. Instead, "skew" colors in one side. Play 75% green and 25% red for example, which tends to be more consistent than a 50/50 split. Furthermore, seeing an opening hand of say all reds (when you know its your "minor color") gives you the opportunity to mulligan for a better hand before the game even starts. IMO, these sorts of decisions are what makes you a better player. Its a small probability with regards to mana-screw or mana-flooding, but these little things help over the long run.
• lozenge 8y ago
  I haven't played magic but this must be why Epic gives you one mana every turn, with every card costing 1 or 0 mana to play (or rather, put down)
• nlawalker 8y ago
  Have you ever looked at Hearthstone? I tried it briefly, and I think it's got its share of problems but I thought that the way they designed around this was really cool. https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mana https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mana covers it in detail, but the gist of it is that mana is generally an automatic thing, and it's granted per-turn at an increasing rate throughout the game, meaning that most games follow a natural power curve that is immune from flood/screw. There are still actions that affect mana and strategies around those, and some neat concepts like The Coin, the special card always given to the player who goes second that gives you one extra mana for one turn, to help with the disadvantage. But overall it beats what I consider to be a really annoying flaw in MtG.
  • overcast 8y ago
    I've played daily since beta, and stopped about a year ago. The problem with Hearthstone is that they traded mana RNG for effect RNG. The fate of every match revolves around how well a card randomly targets an enemy. Far too much is decided by a coin toss in that game, because it makes for funny youtube videos.
    • r00fus 8y ago
      I also liked in MTG how much more responsive the game was due to instants/interrupts & triggers - was far more complex and nuanced. In HS it's simplified - with few exceptions, your stuff happens only on your turn, very little targeting of the player (ie, no discard). The strategies are limited. I still like it, but ... it's definitely not up to MTG richness.
      • overcast 8y ago
        They addressed the instants, far too difficult to direct flow of the game online like that. Look at MTG online, it flows like a pig. The game is constantly interrupted for each phase. Their answer was secrets basically.
      • bena 8y ago
        The game is probably more "responsive" now. Instants and Interrupts were a mess. Batching and determining which had to be resolved LIFO and which FIFO and the various corner cases were an unnecessary labyrinth to navigate. The stack is much better and I'd say more nuanced. Now you can target things on the stack specifically. There's more bluffing and playing with the fact that there is incomplete information.
• rpowers 8y ago
  I played a format that stated you could put creatures down as long as you had enough mana to cover their cost, but you couldn't attack with a creature unless you payed for their cost. You would have to pay their cost every time you attacked with them. This variant meant you would need to prioritize spells versus attacking. You wouldn't attack with all your creatures so you could save some mana for a counter spell.
  • Tyr42 8y ago
    Gotta go all in on Exulted creatures then.
• stephengillie 8y ago
  This game mechanic (mana burn) was removed when the rules were refactored across the past 20 years. Mana (edit:) simply disappears at the end of each stage.
  • brandnewlow 8y ago
    dusts off DCI card Mana Burn is gone, yes, in terms of doing damage, but players' mana pools still empty after each phase.
  • BookmarkSaver 8y ago
    He's not talking about mana burn, that was never really a problem except for extremely niche combo decks. He's talking about when you draw lands/mana producers for 5 turns in a row after starting with a heavy mana hand. That is "mana flooding".
    • stephengillie 8y ago
      Oh, that's either an issue of an unbalanced deck, or insufficient randomization. My best decks started with the "rule of 1/3", and added/trimmed 1-2 lands to optimize. The "rule of 1/3" is that 1/3 of the deck should be lands, for best land draw. So a 60 card deck would start with 20 lands, and maybe swap 1-2 forests for elves in an elf deck. And from a recent card randomizing thread, it takes 7 "riffles" to fully randomize a deck.
      • ufo 8y ago
        20 lands is a little low and is only appropriate if you have a very aggressive deck, with very few cards costing 3 or more mana. Conventional wisdom suggests going for around 40% lands. So 24ish lands for 60 card decks, 17ish for a 40 card deck.
        • stephengillie 8y ago
          My "blue bertha" decks were 40% to 45% lands. They were usually 100+ cards and consisted almost exclusively of 6+ casting cost creatures. These were only used for fun, mostly for other players to test their new decks against, never in any competition. Having more than 35% lands leads to the very mana flooding complained about in the root comment.
• xedarius 8y ago
  My friend and I used to play from 40 life rather 20, also seemed to even out the effect.
• uxp100 8y ago
  The more I play magic, the more I like the mana system, actually. It's very frustrating occasionally, but it usually is a message to me that I need to change my deckbuilding, add more filtering, card advantage, etc.
  • bigger_cheese 8y ago
    I agree I like that you have to take into account the manabase when you design a deck it adds an additional constraint. It also makes mana denial a valid strategy. My favorite deck of all time (Goblins) is built around abusing Wasteland and Rishadan Port to lock down my opponents manabase.
• junctioniv 8y ago
  This is generally seen as the main flaw with the games core design. Most other currently successful trading card game (mainly Hearthstone) with mana resources have gone the route of providing a consistent source of resources per turn. This approach does significantly reduce the variance match to match and leads to a lot less of the "feel bad" moments of getting flooded or screwed. That being said I personally find the variance that Magic has when it comes to mana resources to be more interesting than the alternatives as most of the newer card games have abandoned the idea of having mana resources(lands) in your deck all together. I think the lands are one of the main things that makes Magic an interesting card game. One interesting alternative to lands was from the World of Warcraft Card game (spiritual successor to Hearthstone) which allowed you to play any card from your hand face down as a mana resource. Although they completely did away with this in Hearthstone so they could limit the deck size and the reduce the number of duplicate cards that were needed in each deck.
• jeeyoungk 8y ago
  That's why in most formats lands are considered staples and fairly expensive. Duallands, shocklands, and fetchlands can make your mana base much smoother.
• eswiire 8y ago
  That's more an issue with the design of your deck than with the game, or the design issue is that one may not know how to build a deck to avoid such issues. MTG isn't built for a consistent (late) game natural Mana curve and being able to do what you suggest would fundamentally change the game. For worse imo. For example with no Mana acceralation/mananipulation the optimal number distribution to have to maximize Mana spent through turn 5 is 29 lands and only 3 five drops. After which you will quickly have more Mana than you need. Very few decks run 30 lands. You can't design a deck that satisfies the condition of natural ly dropping a land each turn and spending the most Mana. The more consistently you want to say, have 5 lands on turn 5, the more lands you need, which means less space for other cards in your deck. Similarly the more you want to be able to spend that 5 Mana past turn 5 the more higher cost cards you need, which means fewer cards of other cost. Which means your more likely to be Mana flooded early since your deck won't have the space to consistently play smaller stuff. Try to and will come at the cost of making it more difficult to curve at higher N. The optimal turn 5 deck curve has no 1 drops. You can't have it both ways. As for your suggestion, it would only be better for beginners who don't know how to build around a curve, as the cards are not designed for such rules and would break the game in other ways.
• GuB-42 8y ago
  That's indeed a fundamental problem with Magic. Most modern TCGs have some form of mitigation. You may look into "Force of Will" (the game, not the card). It plays a lot like Magic but mana is in a separate deck. Each turn, you have the option of playing a magic stone (same as a land in Magic) directly from that deck or do some other action instead.