CCDD 060211—What If Magic Were Always Fun

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/2/2011 - Last week, Sam Stod wrote an excellent article on the importance of randomness and — more specifically — land screw in Magic. It's not the first article to take this position; Mark Rosewater and more than one developer have discussed this as well. I'm going to take a stand here and call them all wrong.

To summarize the major points supporting the other side: Randomness is necessary, land-screw allows players to beat better players occasionally, and the land system rewards better deck builders. All of those are true statements and important considerations for the game, but I claim that none of them depend on the system being as flawed as it is.

Randomness is necessary — A game with no randomness is not a game at all, it's a puzzle. Randomness takes many different forms in games: drawing cards from a shuffled deck, rolling dice, spinning spinners, and throwing balls or flicking discs. Note that I'm being lax in my terminology, by 'random' here I really mean 'unpredictable.' Diplomacy is a game with none of the elements we traditionally think of as random, but it remains massively interesting because of the challenge of predicting what other players will do. Chess is a game for the same reason, but to a lesser extent since you're only predicting what one other player will do.

Magic is not lacking for randomness. You could remove the randomness of card draw by handing each player the same deck in the same order and you'd still have a game just from the way those two play their decks (and who goes first). It wouldn't be a terribly good game, but I'm proposing something much less radical: Removing just the randomness of land-screw from the game. There are a few ways we could do this and I'll come back to those in a bit, but the key point is that the game would still contain all the unpredictability of player choice as well as the random order you would draw spells and possibly the random order you would draw land. That's plenty randomness to keep things interesting.

Less-skilled players should be able to beat more-skilled players — But to what extent? Not nearly as much as The Man has been telling you. How likely are you to beat Kasparov in a game of chess or Michael Jordan in a game of basketball? Barring an act of God, it's not going to happen. Likewise, we shouldn't be concerned with non-professional Magic players being able to beat the Finkels of the world. Still a player who's a 6 out of 10 in Magic skill should be able to beat a player who's a 7 out of 10 at least a quarter of the time. While playing and losing to players better than yourself is the best way to advance your own skills, few players can lose ten games in a row without being demoralized and these rare victories can push us to keep trying.

Unfortunately, Magic is so random that players — regardless of skill level — lose games through absolutely no fault of their own on a fairly regular basis. There is no joy or pride in winning a game in which your opponent mulligans to five and never draws another land so there's no emotional upside for the player who walks into the win. In addition, there is a great deal of frustration for the player who has to sit helplessly as his deck refuses to play nice. The four biggest reasons players quit Magic are the cost, the frustration of automatically losing 1 in 4 games, not having enough locals to play with, and the time commitment. I'm guessing, in that order.

Remove land-screw from the equation and players will only lose for one of three reasons, all of which are much more palatable: Playing a deck that is prey to your opponent's deck, drawing your spells in a less optimal order than your opponent, or being outplayed. This would reduce a player's reach in terms of how much better an opponent can be and still have a reasonable chance of beating them. I believe that gap is far too large currently and comparing Magic to any other game of skill will support that belief.

The land system rewards better players — There is definitely skill in knowing how many land to run in your deck, how to build an effective curve, when to mulligan, and when to run cards that are less powerful but will help you in the event of land-screw or flood. That's a good thing. Furthermore, the existence of land and the spells that help you accelerate or fix your mana are integral to Magic and removing them would result in a less sophisticated game. As you'll see in the next section, I'm not remotely interested in any solutions that involve removing or replacing land from Magic.

There are a number of solutions that don't mess with land but help mitigate or eliminate land-screw that require just as much understanding and reward skilled players appropriately. I can't really prove this point without covering a few so here they are:

Two decks — I've had this idea for a long time but I know that many others have as well. It's pretty straight-forward: you shuffle all your spells into one deck and your land into another. Whenever you would interact with a deck, you choose which. You can draw from either one each turn, Rampant Growthing from one and Mystic Tutoring from another, but your opponent can mill either one. This path has some eccentricities that would have to be addressed. Traumatize would need to affect both decks. Goblin Charbelcher is right out unless there are minimum sizes for each deck. We probably need minimums anyhow just so you can't run a seven-spell / 53-island combo deck.

For some reference, I've done something similar in Mini-Master and that works great. Rather than shuffle 3 of each basic land into the booster pack you open, you just shuffle up your pack and set three of each basic land aside. Whenever you draw a card, you can draw from your deck or you can draw a basic land of your choice. This is a very different scenario than 40 or 60-card Magic, so there's no direct correlation for success, but it does support the possibility.

This solution has a lot of potential, but many pitfalls. We totally eliminate land-screw while keeping most of the basic skill-testing concepts and replacing others, but how fiddly do the final rules have to be to keep the format from breaking because of a given card or strategy? I like the flavor of being able — as a planeswalker — to decide each turn whether you want to remember one of your spells or re-establish one of your mana bonds each turn, but I also see that this is a huge change to the game. It may be fun and is definitely worth trying, but good luck convincing tens of thousands of Magic players to convert to a new rule so fundamentally different.

Abundance — Another solution that I'd like to try tonight if my draft group is up for it is giving every player a one-off Abundance draw each game:


So if you're shy on land, you can pop this to make sure you get at least one land in your next draw. If you've made it unscathed into the middle game, you are rewarded for your good land skills with one guaranteed gas draw. If you're in the late game and you're down to your last chance to top-deck, this thing will at least make sure you don't draw a useless land (y'know, or that you do if you're playing Baloth Woodcrasher).

Now a player who knows she can Abundance her next draw may be more likely to keep the sketchy one land hand that would have been a toss-back otherwise. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing either. It sounds like it's just a different kind of evaluation.

Maybe each player should get an extra one of these things each time she mulligans. Taking a mulligan never feels good and it's very hard to convince less experienced players to take mulligans even when they only have one land or one spell, but knowing that you'll at least be able to draw spells or lands as needed for an extra turn helps level off the cost of a mulligan.

Testing may prove one or both of these versions bah-roken, insufficient or simply too alien but they're definitely worth trying out.

Something else — I'd be interested to hear any other solutions you might have that don't involve ditching or replacing land all-together. I'm confident that there is room to improve Magic by alleviating land-screw, but it may take a while to find a solution that fits. How many other games do you know that you just straight up lose 1 in 5 or so games regardless of how you play? Magic is such an amazing game, that it's great despite this flaw, but that doesn't mean this isn't a flaw. Don't let anyone tell you your soup wouldn't taste better without the fly in it.