MtG, Versus, and Good Game Design

I've been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering lately, and this has had me thinking about good and bad game design and the things that makes Magic almost maddening for me at times.  I figured I'd rant about it a bit, since learning from the mistakes and successes of others is important when designing a game.

My experiences with CCGs are mainly with three games:  Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Versus.  I did, at one point, have a Pokemon deck, but the game didn't really appeal to me (I learned the game to impress a girl, believe it or not).  I also briefly played a limited-run CCG called Wyvern that I recall I very much enjoyed, but I don't remember much about it so I won't talk about it here.  I remember only a little about Yu-Gi-Oh except that I always enjoyed hamming up the cards in my best Yugi voice when I played them.  So, instead I'll focus my comparison on Versus and MtG.

Of course, MtG came first; it is to CCGs what Dungeons and Dragons is to RPGs (how fitting that they're both owned by Wizards of the Coast these days).  Much of what we think of as "collectible card games" these days are essentially informed by the rules that MtG established for the genre back in 1993.  And to be fair, it got a lot of stuff right.  I'm going to slag on it pretty hard for a few things later on, but there's a lot to recommend the game.

Seriously.

For example, in an MtG game there's very little downtime.  By this I mean, you're constantly paying attention to the play environment even when it's not your turn, adjusting your strategies and decisions according to the things your opponent does.  This goes double if you have untapped mana and some cards in hand, because then you're looking for openings to actively change the play environment when your opponent is at his weakest - and if that happens to be on his turn, then so be it.

Really, that's pretty impressive.  Contrast that to, say, chess, where you can really just zone out until your opponent makes his move and then just reassess the board when you make yours, and you're looking at a much more involved game.

MtG also did emergent strategy really well.  Actually, in the early days it was kind of bad - winning was about getting some of the Power Nine cards and then just blasting through your opponent.  But before long they started designing the cards so that each individual card was okay, but they really shined when you figured out synergies between the cards and built a play strategy around supporting those synergies.

Now, for the bad things.  Well, there's a lot of them.  Most of them are minor, however - dumb decisions in design that took them forever to fix (like Necropotence, a vastly overpowered card that they just didn't want to ban from tournament play).  I'm not really going to talk about any of them.  No, I'm going to talk about what is, in my opinion, a singularly terrible design decision that is the basis of MtG gameplay.

Mana.

Now, in my mind a good game design is one which allows all the participants to not just have fun, but to do the activity that the game is purportedly about.  In a competitive game, you want both players to have all the resources they need to win (theoretically speaking, anyway).  If you were to play a game of chess where players have to roll randomly to see which pieces they get - if they get any at all - this would lead to some very uneven games.

Now, CCGs aren't about perfectly even battlefields.  Someone who's better at designing decks and strategies is going to have an advantage.  But should a match really be considered worthwhile if only one player's deck actually does what it was designed to do?  In these circumstances, this isn't exactly a battle of the minds.  It's just a battle of luck, and a frustrating one at that.

And yet, MtG depends on lands to provide mana to play the cards.  This is the core of gameplay.  If you don't get the mana you need, you don't get to play the cards, simple as that.

I don't know what the kids are calling it these days, but back in the day we used to have a term for mana-related problems.  We'd call it being "mana-screwed."  This could be when you have to spend the first six turns trying to play with a single land.  It could also mean drawing nothing but land for five turns in a row.  Both result in victory for your opponent, but in both cases it's a tainted victory.  I don't enjoy winning that way, and I especially don't enjoy losing that way, because in either case it's just dumb luck.

Pretty early on they introduced a mulligan rule, where you get to discard your opening hand and draw a new one if you didn't get any land to start off with, in order to minimize this mana-screwage.

Problem is, this is a rather awkward fix for a fundamental game flaw.  Frankly, there's no reason the game couldn't be designed differently so that such things don't happen.

When I started playing Versus, this is the main reason it was such a breath of fresh air for me - there was no mana.  Instead, there's a constant, steady progression of power available to either side.  You can play 3-cost heroes on turn three, or 8-cost creatures on turn 8.  It's not about whether you're lucky enough to get the resources to actually play the game, it's about whether or not you've played well enough to survive that long.

Versus was not a perfect game, of course.  It had all the same little problems that magic does in terms of bad individual card design, and I dislike the way it handles affiliations, but it solved what I felt was the biggest flaw in MtG.  I'd probably still play it if the community didn't dry up.

I try to keep this in mind as I work on Mistwardens.  If something isn't working as intended, instead of going for the easy fix, I try to determine in every case whether or not the problem needs tweaking of if I should just discard it entirely and start over.  In game design, it's super important to get the fundamentals down right, otherwise you may discover you've built your game house on a foundation of sand and it's too late to go back and do it over again.

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Wrote 1,440 words since last update.  Doesn't sound like a whole lot, but they were important, manly words that don't take no guff from anyone.