Eternal Analysis 004—Merchants

Eternal doesn't have sideboarding per se, but in June, the fourth set introduced the Market meant to act as a sort of live sideboard, via a cycle of five merchants.

Your Market consists of five cards that count against your 4x deck limit but are not part of your deck. (In that way, it's exactly like a sideboard but 1/3 the size.) Because Eternal only has single-game matches, though, the way you utilize the Market is different: When you play a merchant, you can draw a card from your Market by putting a card from your hand back in its place. You sideboard in the moment.

It's so neat that you can adjust your deck strategy for a match-up mid-game. I don't want to maindeck Infinite Hourglass, but having access to one when I face an opponent packing 4 Permafrost and 4 Ice Sprites is really nice. I don't always want Dispel or Passage of Eons, and being able to get one when I do is great.

All five merchants cost 3 and require a single influence of their faction. Except for Auralian Merchant's +1 Max Power ability, each has a keyword and stats to make it feel more like its faction. Finally, merchants can't go and grab just any card from your Market, it has to match their faction. You could put both Fire and Primal cards in the Market of your Fire+Primal deck, but your Jennev Merchant won't be able to get Great-Kiln Titan and your Ixtun Merchant won't be able to get Scourge of Frosthome (but either can get Molot & Nakova). Since you're already limited to just five cards, what that means is every deck really wants to choose one faction's merchant and put cards of that faction or both in its Market.

Are they any trends how players build their Markets? Yes. Because merchants are tutors, and the market is our clip of silver bullets, there is a correct form for all Markets.

If you're not a hyper-aggressive deck that tops out at 2-3 mana, you really want to have a power card in there to help you make your land drops. If your deck is more than one color, than you really want it to be a banner since you can expect you'll have a unit (the merchant itself) when you get it.

You want 1 or 2 counters to problematic strategies. Ideally, these aren't 1:1 answers, but sweepers or rules-setters that disable 4+ of your opponent's cards. These are the Infinite Hourglasses and Passages of Eons I mentioned above.

You want the single most expensive card in your deck, so you never draw it early. Finally, you want 1 or 2 key cards that really make your deck shine, preferably starting at 3-5 mana (because you know you'll have 3 power when you untap after playing a merchant, unless it was Auralian, in which case 4). Starting players might only have one legendary card relevant to their deck, and if you've got 2+ merchants, that vastly increases how often you'll get to draw it. That's great.

Invested players will always be playing 4x of their chosen merchant and will often be running 3x of their best cards main with the fourth in the Market, giving them essentially 7 chances to draw it. This combination of factors drastically reduces variance in deck-building and gameplay. That's a good thing, right? Because Eternal has too much variance? Well…

Yes and No. Reducing variance in deck-building is mono-bad, because it removes agency from players and reduces the excitement to discover each new opponent's deck. Mitigating the variance endemic from 75-card decks is definitely good. Mostly. It's a suboptimal form of mitigation because it's so predictable and creates repetitive gameplay patterns across the entire card game. Every deck is going to get to 4 power after it gets to 3, and find that one broken card, and have a killer closer.

In case you doubt how accurate my assessment is, I worked all this out, then googled and found the exact same sentiment here.

I can expect my opponent to play a merchant on turn 3 in Ranked mode exactly as often as one is likely to draw a copy from a playset in a 75-card deck… minus them drawing a stronger three-drop or missing their third land drop. When they do play a merchant, I can predict their entire Market with about 70% accuracy, and may or may not have a very strong idea what card they just grabbed based on the current game state. Early Time-Shadow deck? Xenan Banner. With 7+ power? Azindel. With an the Auralian Merchant, it's Disjunction, Decay or Passages of Eons if I've got relics and Sandstorm Titan or Alhed, Mount Breaker if not. If the merchant is Kerendon, and I've got a Justice creature, it's In Cold Blood; if it's another monofaction creature, it's Annihilate. Otherwise Vara, Vengeance-Seeker or a discard spell.

That's a problem. Players get tired of facing the same over-powered BS over and over again, but even more they hate predictability. We wouldn't be playing a game with a shuffled deck otherwise. Merchants are brand new relative to Eternal's life span and a lot of players are already sick of them. Things will improve: As more cards are introduced into the available pool, it'll be harder to predict exact Markets. They could also introduce new Merchants, so that at least we're not seeing the same five faces every match. But those improvements are marginal and will be slow in coming.

How else could we improve the situation? I'm not seeing a lot of obvious answers.

• If the goal is really just to allow sideboarding mid-game, we could errata Merchants so they don't also act as tutors: Have them change all copies of card X in your deck to card Y in your Market. Or even just choose a card in your Market and shuffle 4 copies into your deck.

• If the higher purpose is to reduce variance, we could forget the Market and have merchants move a card (or class of cards) of your choice closer to the top of your deck. Or we could forget merchants and tweak the algorithm to silently interfere with deck order to reduce non-games.

• We could split the difference by modeling Revenge: "Choose a card from your Market and shuffle a copy into the top 10 cards of your deck. It gains Destiny." I mean, we can't let you give The Witching Hour destiny, so we either omit that and put it in the top 5, or we only give it destiny if it costs 4 or less. "It costs 1 less for each card above it" might work, but is a bit inelegant for Eternal.

• We could reduce the ubiquity of merchants by reducing their power level. +1 cost without any benefit would dissuade a lot of players. Making them spells instead of units would greatly reduce their utility.

(One of the big benefits of an exclusively-digital game is that you can errata cards as much as you have to. Eternal smartly lets players unbuy copies of cards they've recently nerfed so this causes less backlash.)

Do you have other complaints or defenses of merchants or the Market? Other solutions?