3 ms·

I play and love both Go and MtG, and I think your assessment of MtG is not fair. The thing about MtG is that the real fun is not as much in playing the game its

I play and love both Go and MtG, and I think your assessment of MtG is not fair. The thing about MtG is that the real fun is not as much in playing the game itself but in the deck building. When I'm playing a game of MtG, I'm not thinking only about the current game or how to win it, but rather which cards/combos are working well, which are not working, what cards I should use instead, etc. to improve my deck for the next game. Finding interesting combos among the thousands of existing MtG cards is also very fun and cannot be done in a minimalistic game with a very small number of components like Go. They are just games with different goals and scopes. What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules, e.g. "lifelink" for "damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life". Cards with that ability existed before the word was introduced, so the word is unnecessary, it just makes the text of the cards shorter... but the constant extensions of the vocabulary make the rules harder to understand and remember. The actual rules are still mostly like in the nineties... in fact most, if not all, of the actual rule changes have been simplifications rather than complications (mana burn removed, meh). But they just like to make up unnecessary words, it's a pity.

manifestsilence 12y ago
A lot of the "false complexity" in MtG comes from the wide variety of trivial differences between cards. Deckbuilding becomes an exercise in, depending on format, sifting through some 10,000 (probably more by now) cards to determine which are synergistic. I wish they would strip out the trivially different cards, particularly the ones that are strictly better or worse than another, such as two identical cards but one has a higher cost for no reason. Some of the cruft is due to rebalancing as the game evolved, but some is just part of the artificial scarcity model of making many of the common cards worse than the best rare ones. I agree, though, that MtG has a very broad and creative tree of possibilities. In the pure board game world, it is perhaps more similar to Arimaa.
- Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
  But, but... sifting through 10,000 cards to determine which are synergistic is half of the fun! I really love the feeling of seeing an interesting card in a new expansion, and thinking that it might go well with some obscure card that you remember from some obscure expansion from 15 years ago. And researching what that card actually did. It really feels like being a wizard and going to an ancient forgotten grimoire to see if you can find a use from a long-forgotten spell. I especially enjoy realizing that a card that was considered universally crappy and never saw serious use is suddenly useful. I agree that the cards that are strictly worse than others could have been avoided. But they don't really do that much anymore (they seldom release commons that do nothing like Hill Giant or Grizzly Bear, for example). And they can still be fun in formats like Type III, or Limited as new players call it.
john_b 12y ago
> "What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules" This is an odd criticism. It's the essence of DRY applied to a context with very limited space (the physical surface of the card). Would you really prefer to have something like this written out in 2pt font? http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html Having a named mechanic also enables rulings to apply to it, rather than just to individual cards with a particular wording. The keywords they introduce do create a learning curve for new players, but this is Magic we're talking about--not exactly a game for people afraid of learning curves.
everyone 12y ago
I never said false complex game werent fun! :) Go can be make you feel bad. Because it is so completely based on skill and judgement, the better player will invariably annihilate the worse one. So you either get annihilated and feel stupid, or annihilate your opponent and feel sadistic. Though a certain percentage of the time you have very close match which is really amazing.

manifestsilence 12y ago

A lot of the "false complexity" in MtG comes from the wide variety of trivial differences between cards. Deckbuilding becomes an exercise in, depending on format, sifting through some 10,000 (probably more by now) cards to determine which are synergistic. I wish they would strip out the trivially different cards, particularly the ones that are strictly better or worse than another, such as two identical cards but one has a higher cost for no reason. Some of the cruft is due to rebalancing as the game evolved, but some is just part of the artificial scarcity model of making many of the common cards worse than the best rare ones. I agree, though, that MtG has a very broad and creative tree of possibilities. In the pure board game world, it is perhaps more similar to Arimaa.

Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
But, but... sifting through 10,000 cards to determine which are synergistic is half of the fun! I really love the feeling of seeing an interesting card in a new expansion, and thinking that it might go well with some obscure card that you remember from some obscure expansion from 15 years ago. And researching what that card actually did. It really feels like being a wizard and going to an ancient forgotten grimoire to see if you can find a use from a long-forgotten spell. I especially enjoy realizing that a card that was considered universally crappy and never saw serious use is suddenly useful. I agree that the cards that are strictly worse than others could have been avoided. But they don't really do that much anymore (they seldom release commons that do nothing like Hill Giant or Grizzly Bear, for example). And they can still be fun in formats like Type III, or Limited as new players call it.

john_b 12y ago

> "What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules" This is an odd criticism. It's the essence of DRY applied to a context with very limited space (the physical surface of the card). Would you really prefer to have something like this written out in 2pt font? http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html Having a named mechanic also enables rulings to apply to it, rather than just to individual cards with a particular wording. The keywords they introduce do create a learning curve for new players, but this is Magic we're talking about--not exactly a game for people afraid of learning curves.

everyone 12y ago

I never said false complex game werent fun! :) Go can be make you feel bad. Because it is so completely based on skill and judgement, the better player will invariably annihilate the worse one. So you either get annihilated and feel stupid, or annihilate your opponent and feel sadistic. Though a certain percentage of the time you have very close match which is really amazing.