Non-Games

Hey friend. I want to tell you about a game I'm really excited about. It's the most expensive game on the market, and the rulebook is so much bigger than all other games they don't even print it. But it's totally worth it because the theme and the art are fantastic and the gameplay is so deep and fun. I mean, when you get to play; Maybe a fifth of all games are decided by the luck of the draw, though you don't always know that until you've played it out.

Let's talk about game design, variance, and non-games for a bit. Non-Games are experiences that look like games but whose outcome is not influenced by choices the players make. Candyland is a non-game. Some games of Magic are close enough to being non-games that it's a problem worth discussing.

Non-games aren't Magic's biggest problem. A steep learning curve, overcoming the perception of a poor value ratio and appealing to the full potential market are #1, #2 and #3 in some order. I would put the frequency of games that are frustratingly decided by the draw at #4. I'm calling these non-games because they aren't decided by decisions players make after the game has begun (after deck-building and mulligans, which certainly factor heavily). While not the most important problem facing the game, it is important, and it's something we can address.

Dicey Spoony

Toy game is a term for a game you'd never actually play, but whose analysis is useful for studying Game Theory. The Prisoner's Dilemma is the best known toy game.

Consider this toy game. Every round, two players roll one six-sided die each. If either rolls a 6 and the other doesn't, that player wins. If either rolls a 1 and the other doesn't, that player loses. Otherwise, the game continues.

Thinking for 3 seconds or less, how often would you guess that roll ends the game? If you said one-third of the time, you'd be in the vast majority. A d6 will yield a 1 or a 6 two out of six times: 1:3. Let's map out the possibilities and see the exact answer.

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1		L	L	L	L	L
2	W					L
3	W					L
4	W					L
5	W					L
6	W	W	W	W	W

If I roll a 1 and you don't, I lose. If you roll a 1 and I don't, I win. If I roll a 6 and you don't, I win. If you roll a 6 and I don't, I lose. There are 18 results where the game ends. Out of 36 possible results, that's half the time. It doesn't look like half glancing at the chart, but it adds up.

We knew this game was bad, but it's worse than we thought. No matter what fun/engaging things you give players to do the rest of the time, having the outcome determined randomly half the time is awful. Players need to feel like they have agency and huge random effects hurt or destroy that feeling.

Let's talk mulligans 

Mulligans are difficult. There's a ton of thought and skill you can apply to the decision, but they're also emotionally taxing. As clearly correct as it is to mulligan your one-land starting hand, it still sucks to draw a new six-card hand with just one land… or no lands at all. Pro players try to vulcan up and avoid attaching any emotion to moments like that because it's out of their control and tilting will only hurt their chances even further. Here's the thing about Vulcans: Suppressing your emotions is bad for your health. And it's not fun. (Remember how Magic is a game?) It also takes real mental effort, and that comes out of the pool you're using to play your best game. Importantly, it's also not something you can ask of players who aren't pros—you know, the vast majority of the audience.

Let's forget about that concern and look more generally at mulligans now.

Consider another toy game: Dice Mulligan. Each player privately rolls a d12. If you don't like your result, you can roll a d10. If you don't like that, roll a d8, etc down to d4. Once all rolls are final, reveal your die. The player with the highest result wins.

This game is a simple analogy for mulliganing in Magic.

Draw Pairs

Here's a more complex toy game that models the first few rounds of a Magic game. Players each have a deck with 30 action cards and 30 resource cards. They draw 7 cards each and can Vancouver-mulligan. Then they'll draw 3 more cards each and reveal their hands. Whoever has the most pairs of action and resource cards wins (so if I have 4 actions and 6 resources, I've got 4 pairs).

The entire game is decided by the luck of the draw and how many times you choose to mulligan. Your only influence on the game's result is your choice whether or not to shuffle your hand away and draw another, smaller hand. You definitely keep a 3:4 hand and definitely pitch a 0:7 or 1:6 hand. You probably pitch a 2:5 hand. And those are all the possible 7-card scenarios. If you go to six cards, you still pitch a 0:6 or 1:5 hand and keep a 3:3 hand. Again, you're only thinking about a 2:4 hand. Being able to scry improves your chances of drawing 2 of the cards you need in your next 3 draws, and your best possible five-card hand is a measly 2:3, so you probably keep 2:4. If you don't go to six cards, you're hoping to draw as many of the cards you need as possible in your next 3.

The entire game comes down to your decision at the start. What if you had to play for 5-15 minutes before finding out who won at the outset? How many games of Magic are won or lost before the first turn in almost this exact way?

Most Magic games aren't decided so early, and those tend to be fun. Even some of the games that are can be fun because you get some good plays in and the game ends closer than it started. We rarely even know which games were pre-determined by our shuffle and which we could've changed with different choices. If we did know, we'd be frustrated more often. It's good for the game that we don't, but it's bad for the game's design because the problem is obscured, and so the drive to solve it is dampened.

A Designer's Responsibility

I was watching Shawn Main's talk at roguelike_con and the last question was from a game designer asking how to communicate that his game is balanced to players who get clobbered in their first game.

Imagine a game that's really fun, but where a player will lose due to randomness 1 in 100 times. If you print 5000 copies of that game, 50 players are going to lose this way in their first game. Even if you're okay selling that experience, those 50 players are all going to rate your game terribly online, where only the usual percentage will rate it 'fairly.' The players who watched their friend lose this way will also judge the game harshly. And the groups who didn't experience this catastrophe will play again, and 49 more will hate your game. And so on.

In fact, the better your game is, the more a flaw like this will hurt, because more people will play it more often and suffer from the flaw more frequently.

A game designer is responsible for the average experience their game creates, but they are also responsible for every experience their game creates. If your game is "balanced" so that it gives the intended experience more often than not, or even almost all the time, your game isn't ready for publication. It has to deliver every time. That means very different things for different games. I'm not saying you can't have luck or elimination. But if that's not the core experience, and it can happen and wreck someone's fun, you need to address that. And if you're blaming the players for making poor choices—nah. Nah, you put those choices in the game, dear designer. You failed to communicate the costs, the risks, and/or the consequences of those choices. Players don't play games wrong, they just play wrong games.

The point is, Magic creates far too many bad experiences. Even if it's only 1 in 10 games that suck, that's still many tens of thousands of bad games every day. Wizards of the Coast needs to do everything it reasonably can to mitigate this flaw.

What can't we do?

If we could order every deck before every game—remove all the variance of the shuffle—we could guarantee every game competitive. But we can't assign a game designer to every kitchen table to do that. We can't let players order their own decks, because that creates perfect information that kills the fun of the game (and they'd choose optimal draws that ruin the challenge). We can't let players order other players' decks because they're not all game designers with a complete understanding of how to create dramatic game experiences. Even if we wanted to program an algorithm into digital versions of Magic, how do you write logic that can analyze any matching of any decks and order them to create natural and meaningful experiences for humans? (Machine Learning might actually be able to, but that doesn't help with physical games, and so isn't sufficient here.)

We can't eliminate land flood or mana screw entirely. First, it's not possible without changing the game so fundamentally it's no longer Magic. Second, we don't want to do that because it's important to the game—see Mark Rosewater's excellent article Mana Action. We can't eliminate the factors that make misfires possible without removing the drama, the tactical adaptability, and the deck-building challenge that makes Magic Magic. There will always be non-games of Magic. But we can recognize a problem with our game and take a few small steps to mitigate it.

What has R&D already done?

Magic has employed some techniques that help considerably for many years.

As imperfect as the Vancouver mulligan is, it's better than the Paris mulligan before it, and that's better by miles than no mulligan.

Every new set is internally required to include a smoothing mechanic like explore, scry, or cycling. This is very much one of the reasons Magic is doing better now than it ever has. If you're somehow skeptical, go play Sealed with a set from the '90s.

R&D committed to making strong dual lands in every set about a decade ago, with the intent and result of reducing color screw.

You could even argue that the rapid increase in the power level of creature cards at common over the past several years reduces the relative impact of rares, and mitigates the difference between the games where you draw your rares and the ones where you don't. Or that it makes each individual play more impactful, and thus creates more dynamic play.

What are our options to address non-games of Magic?

The obvious solution then, is to double-down on what we've got now:

1. Make mulligans easier and more effective.

2. Make smoothing cheaper and more pervasive.

3. Make land flooding less frequent or less painful.

4. Make color screw less devastating.

5. Make automatic losses shorter or more fun.

6. Obscure automatic losses more or give players more hope to overcome bad shuffles.

The best solutions in Magic tend to be card-based. It's also possible to modify the existing rules in a way that achieves any of the above universally. Such changes need to be considered very carefully, however, because they can add more complexity when that's the last thing we need. Even when such changes are definitely positive (like fixing the stack, eliminating mana burn, or the Vancouver mulligan), disseminating that information to a player base numbering in the millions is a serious challenge and there will be resistance. So we can consider rules changes, but any time we can affect progress by designing cards and sets differently, that option is much preferable.

Share suggestions of cards/mechanics/rules to help prevent non-games, or observations of such that Magic or other games have used and how successful they were.