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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-10-31 22:38:27)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-10-31 22:38:27)
It can.. but some things are harder to bolt on than others. A while new combat mechanic would likely be either parasitic or require a LOT of reworking old stuff.
Not impossible, but difficult.
Magic is generic and open-ended enough that it can incorporate any idea. It's just that combat is not as exciting and deep as it could be.
As for designing a new TCG, a couple of ideas have floated in my mind. Actually surprised nobody has taken up on those genres. One of them is really popular as computer video games; the other is really popular in pop culture. Now that you spurred me on, I might try to come up with some basic rules and even test cards.
PS I have created a 5-suit poker game for Android and it's really addictive. Now I'm trying to force that idea onto a CCG.
I'm sorry that I missed seeing this! Congratulations!
From what I remember of my group's experience of L5R, it composed of nothing but giant ground stalls. I wasn't a fan. Maybe it got better over time, or we were just unlucky with the cards we chose to run. Maybe not.
I agree, it's a problem. That said, I think most of the problem disappears if you add "This creature can attack" and "This creature can block" as keywords, instead of assume that all creatures can do it... and infrequently include both keywords on the same creature. That way, if there's a groundstall, it's mostly the players' fault for building their decks with tons of defenders. If you went with this route, fight would probably pop up more often as a third choice, and 'hide' would probably start to creep on cards that actively avoided fighting.
Games would naturally be faster, which is what you want? Depends, I suppose. The truth is, Magic was never intended to be a multi-player game. The whole groundstall thing has more to do with taking a two-player game and opening it up to more players. Somethings going to give.
Honestly, it sounds more like you should be interested in designing a new TCG than trying to force all of your ideas into Magic.
L5R sounds like the Taunt mechanic I made for Magic. it's a minigame like clash.
other games have defense, but it's only magic where players complain about them being unfun. netrunner, the corporation can only build defense, not offense. guardians, shadowfist, units attack and defend the terrains/sites back and forth without any feeling of facing an insurmountable stalled state.
there needs to be more avenues of attack, not just "i attack you. block?". then on the opposite side, any blocker can block any attacker (notwithstanding abilities). that's why attacking is disadvantaged in Magic and hence defensive cards are unpopular.
yes spatial division and placement of units would be the most obvious idea. where and how you place units, and how to break through or find holes in such an arrangement of units.
another idea is ordering and pairing up combatants. this adds more elements of surprise, bluffing and reading opponents mind. guardians, each player chooses a unit from the stack, and compare the units. do this until one or both stacks have run out. (it should be noted that in guardians, units are always face down except revealed this way in combat. after combat they face down again. hence surprise and bluff and good memory.)
these are some of the things i want to do with Terrains. creatures fight over control of these terrains. there are benefits to controlling and destroying terrains, but not crucial to overall path to victory. that is, you can still go for the throat and attack the player directly. just like you can ignore planeswalkers.
L5R system is: Players secretly opt to add cards from their hand, to add to their combat value. Once someone declines, combat happens - high value wins, loser (or both if a draw) dies; cards bid in are discarded. There's instant-equivalent too; of course. It's not really that complex.
Players bemoan a stalled state because, well, it's a stall. They can look at the state, see it's not worth them attacking; and the opponent can see the same thing. Done well, it leads to tension - done badly it leads to repeated turns of doing nothing.
So there's maybe room to improve that.
Though - It tends to stall most other games too - that's kinda the point of a defence - you want to stop your opponent :)
The system as it is is kinda in the middle, complexity-wise.
One thing players usually want is a way to target which creature gets attacked. But then, they also want to b able to decide which creatures jump in the way and block.
Maybe explicit rows of creatures - with range? So you have to break through, and nearby creatures can come to defence but if you can catch a attacker on their own, you can smack them down?
Something like, umm, wyvern, maybe? (Which borrowed heavily from Stratego)
well they are unique playstyles. something like Wildfire would be interesting.
standard's continually unbalanced metagame can be attributed to a myriad issues:
I don't think the prison and land destruction are really archetypes you should aim to include.
Hmm. There are a few big challenges that occur. One is that Wizards are always telling us that their development team can't fully predict the metagame in Standard - and that's with 90% of the set being designed for Limited. I think it'll be impossible to have every card viable in constructed at the same time. But it might be just about possible to design a set of cards all of which have the potential to be seen in constructed.
I also think it'd be preferable if every colour was able to participate in multiple archetypes; all of them might be asking too much.
I'd also hazard a guess that one of the key things to manage will be the quality of the dual lands. Some of the most control-dominated metagames I recall were powered by shocklands, or Reflecting Pool plus Vivid lands. I think if the manafixing is too good, that usually enables control more than other archetypes.
You want to try to make a set where every card is viable in Standard Constructed? Am I understanding you correctly?
It's a difficult task to be sure.
What made me think this is possible is look at Modern right now. Overall all archetypes are seemingly balanced. And then think about the cardpool that is actually used. We all know 90% of new cards are limited fodder only, and 10%, maybe, are playable in constructed. Well, that 10% of all Modern cardpool is quite diverse at this point, which allows various archetypes to flourish. So we only focus on creating cards like the 10%.
Sure very few standards in history are more than aggro vs control/midrange. But there was such a point in time, namely Ravnica + Time Spiral when aggro, control, and combo were all viable and not discriminated. This makes me hopeful that a similar format may be designed even with such a small cardpool.
Even assuming such a task is feasible, we still have to decide the direction of each archetype. Combo is the main wildcard, since it could mean anything from storm to dredge to trix even. Aggro could be Zoo, RDW, WW, or more resilient like GB aggro during Innistrad era. Then how much control do we give control. Too much good stuff can yield to the RTR/Theros, but that also could be due to a weak cardpool overall and lack of diverse strategies provided by that cardpool. (Remember 90% of new cards are not meant for constructed.) Since generally tempo and combo threaten control and midrange, but those strategies are not present to balance the metagame.
With a 5-way matchup, it should be hard for any deck to dominate. Also since these are cards in the same block and tested as such, any broken and unwanted interactions can be fixed.
"Limited fodder" isn't new. You're kidding yourself if you think it is. It extends the life of the game, too, which can't be ignored.
if all you want is creature interaction, then magic is quite poor at it. there are much better CCGs for that. those CCGs are designed from the ground up to maximize combat strategies and creatures interaction. Magic's strength is pulling back and look at the bigger picture by abstracting all facets of the game. which includes embracing strategies around noncreatures. however, it trades deep combat for abstracted combat.
those were the good old days because Magic used to be so open-ended and full of possibilities. look, the last two blocks RTR and Theros were so tame and uncreative. Rehashing old mechanics, trite limited fodder that are repeated in every block. an enchantment block where very few of them are actually playable or even memorable, what a joke.
I swear by that game. Though, to be fair, it only started to get non-interactive in Dagobah, after I stopped playing. Before that, the game was incredibly interactive... at least in my group. The meta was crazy... but I think part of the problem was that you needed access to most of the cards for that to matter...
Mmm. The original StarWars CCG is another very good example of a game of that sort; where the two players pretty much rush to their own goal without interacting much.
And some people swear by that game. And keep making unofficial expansions for it. So there is an audience.
But, well, they stopped making it. There isn't a very BIG audience.
(Oh, it wouldn't be called 'Summoner Wars'; it's be called 'Lords of Chaos' and I wants it! And.. thinking about it; the rise of the terrible rush of clone CCG-battle monster crap on mobile suggests that yeah, there's a big market for a grossly simplified magic.)
I'll just join in on this one point:
> Even armchair designers here making custom sets for an imaginary playerbase follow this fear of noncreature interaction, or lack thereof.
I gave my full custom set Clockwork Wings a fair amount of playtesting. Most of the themes and mechanics playtested very well. Would you like to guess what the most problematic mechanic was? It was the "connectors" idea, which are "equipment for artifacts" like Calistronic Galvaniser and Ergetric Resonator. The big problem? It was uninteractive.
Sometimes the connector player could assemble a pretty powerful chain of connected artifacts, and there was very little the opponent could do to stop it; even given this was an artifact-heavy set and therefore had a greater than usual amount of artifact removal at common. Sometimes, by contrast, the connector player would spend a while fiddling with artifacts that didn't interact with what the opponent was doing, and so the opponent was able to stomp them. In both cases, the games felt uninteractive, and therefore less fun. If I ever go back and fix Clockwork Wings, the connector mechanic is definitely the one I need to pay the most attention to, and the one most likely to be junked, because it's hard to make it interactive and that means it's hard to make it fun. This isn't just ivory-tower theorycrafting; I've played games with it, and those games were less fun than the other games with that same custom set.
And of course, it's worth remembering the times in Magic's history when an uninteractive theme has been prominent. Shadow. Stasis. These are mechanics that have their place, but when they're too good and too prevalent, games become less fun.
The fact that you cite Stasis / Rising Waters / Winter Orb not just as notable enchantments/artifacts (which they clearly are) but as the "good old days" suggests that... well, the charitable interpretation is that you happen to find noninteractive mechanics more fun than most players. That's fine as far as it goes, but for those of us custom designers who do the standard "design like Wizards unless otherwise stated" thing, it's very important to identify which mechanics we have a much greater or much lesser tolerance for than most players. We need to not just design for players like ourselves.
So we are talked a block constructed format? FWIW, I'm not clear what you imply by "balanced" either, since certain deck types are naturally better at dealing with certain other types, and "imbalance" usually happens when this natural balance is upset (e.g.
- and 
-based control is currently very good vs. aggro).
i remember the "good ol' days" when artifact and enchantment hate was prevalent, including stuff like power leak and feedback (both were blue, but could move to black and red.) back then, Magic had a much stronger aura of mystique and broader realms of possibilities compared to today's safely-designed and easily-solved "summoner wars". there were a lot of cool build around cards like stasis/winter orb (and later the fairer version in rising waters), enduring renewal, seismic assault, etc.
I'm of the opinion that getting rid of enchantments and artifacts is bad, but not from a mechanical perspective. There would be a tremendous flavor vacuum in the game if both of them left. Wizards need their books, wands, summoning circles and mystic barriers. If you don't include those things, the theme of the game stops becoming Magic, and starts becoming 'Summoner Wars'.
And if we're to assume that enchantments and artifacts exist, then we've got to assume that good ones will be printed, because Magic isn't made by one guy. Some of the team will end up disagreeing with the 'artifact and enchantments can't be good' theory, and end up making good arts. and enchs.. It's kind of inevitable.
If that's the case, and it still really bothers people that Black and Red can't do anything in this environment, then I guess the correct response would be to change what black and red can do (It's kind of what they did to Green, anyway, and I haven't heard too many people complain.) I'd speculate as to ways black and red could handle arts and echs in this environment, but I get the feeling that discussion is outside the realm of this one...
You don't have to avoid making strong cards completely.
You do need to bear in mind "Is this sufficiently interactive? If not, is a high enough bar being set to warrant that?"
Creatures naturally interact with whatever it is the other player is doing. Enchantments; well... some do, some don't. And that's a finicky thing.
Creature-Enchantments is kinda Theros' thing. So many of those does kinda reduce the available space for non-creature enchantments.
In short - think of them as being at their best when they're spice. Occasional "Look ma, no creatures!" is fine, but you wouldn't enjoy games where it was the norm.
Actually this topic is in response to people who harp on the fact that red and black can't deal with enchantments and artifacts. so does that mean we shouldn't make any strong ones, or even at all? no more interesting noncreatures because players don't like to main noncreature removal, if at all because of color pie. it's a hassle for the majority who just likes to turn creatures sideway and send them into the red zone.
Well Theros is a good supporting evidence for this. Note that this was the long-awaited "enchantment" block. It had only five total noncreature nonAura enchantments in the first two sets. in comparison RTR Block average 9 per set. Part of the reason is flavor of Theros and partly because it makes wotc's job easier if they don't have to worry about strategies built around noncreatures breaking standard or limited. JOU finally gave us true enchantments, but too little too late.
So now we have both majority of players and designers who don't miss noncreatures that much. Even armchair designers here making custom sets for an imaginary playerbase follow this fear of noncreature interaction, or lack thereof.