3 ms·

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you pla

by Fnoord 7y ago

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you play Type II every time a new expansion comes out, all your old cards are a goner. If you play something in between, its a hybrid between these two. Hearthstone successfully copied it. Total War: Warhammer II is a great game which you can play solo and coop. Same for Borderlands 3, a steampunkish FPS (on sale for 50% on Steam until the 20th).

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
A few of us have did successfully a Non-play2win format, called "Commoner decks". All cards have to be commons. Also, commander games in groups also defeat the P2W ideal - if one person grows too fast and is too big a threat, everybody else will smash them. I've played games with 11 people before. The nail that sticks high gets the hammer.
- Onawa 7y ago
  Isn't commons only an established format called Pauper?
  - bart_spoon 7y ago
    Yes, and its becoming extremely popular.
ddevault 7y ago
I don't play Magic much anymore, but the Commander format is a good balance. The decks stay competitive longer, and the format is mostly casual anyway so most players are there to have fun rather than to win. The format encourages a lot of jank and fun play styles that aren't possible in competitive games, and the cards needed are therefore a lot cheaper. Even outside of Commander, most players keep a few "casual" decks around which aren't especially competitive, but are designed to play with interesting ideas. If you ask someone to pull out a casual deck, they'll usually agree.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Sounds like a fun format. Yes, formats can (somewhat) work around the P2W issue. I've played various experimental formats (back then these were suggested in mags such as Inquest). There's also a format where you pay for packs. You open a pack, grab one card, and then pass it on to the player left of you. Repeat. Sealed deck or something it is called, but sealed deck itself involves too much around RNG. I had very expensive Type I decks, and could not be bothered with the hypes around Type II because I disliked how I suddenly wasn't allowed to use certain cards. Which sucks if you got them not right away but later in the game (hence the hype to "buy a box" in start). The most fun for me, with MtG, was trying to build decks, and win with them (or polish them, and then win with them). Unfortunately, we later found out that the competition was skewed: we had to pay 1 guilder (~half an EUR) to enroll, but the guy who ran it always opened the packs and replaced expensive rares with cheap ones something he previously denied doing. I had a faerie deck back in the days, with only one expensive card: Pendelhaven. It was a quick weenie deck, and I could add some more expensive cards if my opponent had these as well, such as Nevinyrral's Disk.
  - bart_spoon 7y ago
    > There's also a format where you pay for packs. You open a pack, grab one card, and then pass it on to the player left of you. Repeat. Sealed deck or something it is called, but sealed deck itself involves too much around RNG. Close. Sealed is when you get 6 packs yourelf, and construct the best deck you can out of the cards therein. You are thinking of limited, in which everyone gets 3 packs, and takes one card, and passes the rest along, until every person has 45 cards they use to construct a deck. These are both fun, but as you said, it adds additional RNG to the RNG already present in the gameplay. There are strategies that come with that additional RNG, but there are certainly players who simply find it a turn off. More importantly to me is that it requires buying 3/6 packs per person (~$12/$24) every time to play. Cube formats are becoming a popular alternative. Instead of opening a set of brand new packs to play, players construct their own card pools and simulate a limited or sealed event from it. This eliminates the need to rebuy new (and potentially already owned) cards, and also allows for players to create interesting card pools that aren't available from packs. But it requires significant upfront investment in terms of planning. Probably the best format these days for those not interested in the steep costs is Pauper. Its traditional Magic in that you construct your own deck from the pool of all existing cards, but it's unique in that only Common rarity cards are legal. This eliminates a lot of the flashier cards out there, but Magic has been around long enough that there is still lots of creative space in terms of designing unique strategies. There can still be expensive cards, as some are quite old, but because they are all common rarity, really expensive decks tend to cost in the tens of dollars rather than the hundreds.
Symbiote 7y ago
> The pinnacle of P2W I bought one deck, and maybe two booster packs, total. My friend's sister's boyfriend was very wealthy, and would buy several entire boxes of booster packs (like a shop would have on display) when a new expansion came out. In return for helping him open and sort these, he'd give anything he couldn't use or didn't want to my friend and me. This worked OK for a while, as we had fairly similar strength cards. The one day, the third player in the group bought 8 rare cards from eBay for about £20 (maybe even each?) and was unbeatable. That basically ruined the game for us.
CocaKoala 7y ago
You could play Limited, where everybody gets six booster packs. Everybody opens one pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their left. Once the first pack is all picked up, everybody opens their second pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their right. Repeat until you're out of booster packs. Now you have 6*15 cards, and you need to compose a deck of at least 40 cards out of them. You can add as many basic lands as you want. Play your deck against everybody else's. This avoids the idea that you can just buy strong cards to win, because you only get what's in the booster packs. And if you take only the strong cards from each booster, there's no guarantee that your deck will actually function as a deck - do you have a good mana curve? Are all of your cards the same colour? Even once you start drafting to put together a deck instead of just grabbing all the strong or rare cards, you have to figure out which colours the people upstream from you are drafting so that you can try to draft the colours they're passing over, otherwise you'll be competing for the cards they want.

by Fnoord 7y ago

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

A few of us have did successfully a Non-play2win format, called "Commoner decks". All cards have to be commons. Also, commander games in groups also defeat the P2W ideal - if one person grows too fast and is too big a threat, everybody else will smash them. I've played games with 11 people before. The nail that sticks high gets the hammer.

Onawa 7y ago
Isn't commons only an established format called Pauper?
- bart_spoon 7y ago
  Yes, and its becoming extremely popular.

ddevault 7y ago

I don't play Magic much anymore, but the Commander format is a good balance. The decks stay competitive longer, and the format is mostly casual anyway so most players are there to have fun rather than to win. The format encourages a lot of jank and fun play styles that aren't possible in competitive games, and the cards needed are therefore a lot cheaper. Even outside of Commander, most players keep a few "casual" decks around which aren't especially competitive, but are designed to play with interesting ideas. If you ask someone to pull out a casual deck, they'll usually agree.

Fnoord 7y ago
Sounds like a fun format. Yes, formats can (somewhat) work around the P2W issue. I've played various experimental formats (back then these were suggested in mags such as Inquest). There's also a format where you pay for packs. You open a pack, grab one card, and then pass it on to the player left of you. Repeat. Sealed deck or something it is called, but sealed deck itself involves too much around RNG. I had very expensive Type I decks, and could not be bothered with the hypes around Type II because I disliked how I suddenly wasn't allowed to use certain cards. Which sucks if you got them not right away but later in the game (hence the hype to "buy a box" in start). The most fun for me, with MtG, was trying to build decks, and win with them (or polish them, and then win with them). Unfortunately, we later found out that the competition was skewed: we had to pay 1 guilder (~half an EUR) to enroll, but the guy who ran it always opened the packs and replaced expensive rares with cheap ones something he previously denied doing. I had a faerie deck back in the days, with only one expensive card: Pendelhaven. It was a quick weenie deck, and I could add some more expensive cards if my opponent had these as well, such as Nevinyrral's Disk.
- bart_spoon 7y ago
  > There's also a format where you pay for packs. You open a pack, grab one card, and then pass it on to the player left of you. Repeat. Sealed deck or something it is called, but sealed deck itself involves too much around RNG. Close. Sealed is when you get 6 packs yourelf, and construct the best deck you can out of the cards therein. You are thinking of limited, in which everyone gets 3 packs, and takes one card, and passes the rest along, until every person has 45 cards they use to construct a deck. These are both fun, but as you said, it adds additional RNG to the RNG already present in the gameplay. There are strategies that come with that additional RNG, but there are certainly players who simply find it a turn off. More importantly to me is that it requires buying 3/6 packs per person (~$12/$24) every time to play. Cube formats are becoming a popular alternative. Instead of opening a set of brand new packs to play, players construct their own card pools and simulate a limited or sealed event from it. This eliminates the need to rebuy new (and potentially already owned) cards, and also allows for players to create interesting card pools that aren't available from packs. But it requires significant upfront investment in terms of planning. Probably the best format these days for those not interested in the steep costs is Pauper. Its traditional Magic in that you construct your own deck from the pool of all existing cards, but it's unique in that only Common rarity cards are legal. This eliminates a lot of the flashier cards out there, but Magic has been around long enough that there is still lots of creative space in terms of designing unique strategies. There can still be expensive cards, as some are quite old, but because they are all common rarity, really expensive decks tend to cost in the tens of dollars rather than the hundreds.

Symbiote 7y ago

> The pinnacle of P2W I bought one deck, and maybe two booster packs, total. My friend's sister's boyfriend was very wealthy, and would buy several entire boxes of booster packs (like a shop would have on display) when a new expansion came out. In return for helping him open and sort these, he'd give anything he couldn't use or didn't want to my friend and me. This worked OK for a while, as we had fairly similar strength cards. The one day, the third player in the group bought 8 rare cards from eBay for about £20 (maybe even each?) and was unbeatable. That basically ruined the game for us.

CocaKoala 7y ago

You could play Limited, where everybody gets six booster packs. Everybody opens one pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their left. Once the first pack is all picked up, everybody opens their second pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their right. Repeat until you're out of booster packs. Now you have 6*15 cards, and you need to compose a deck of at least 40 cards out of them. You can add as many basic lands as you want. Play your deck against everybody else's. This avoids the idea that you can just buy strong cards to win, because you only get what's in the booster packs. And if you take only the strong cards from each booster, there's no guarantee that your deck will actually function as a deck - do you have a good mana curve? Are all of your cards the same colour? Even once you start drafting to put together a deck instead of just grabbing all the strong or rare cards, you have to figure out which colours the people upstream from you are drafting so that you can try to draft the colours they're passing over, otherwise you'll be competing for the cards they want.