Game design vs. Vintage
June 27th 2008 05:03
“The rules will be completely unfair!”
-- Q, in Star Trek: the Next Generation season 1
On June 1st, the DCI (the body that regulates Magic tournaments) restricted five highly-played cards in Vintage. Unless and until they are removed from the list, only one copy of a restricted card can be used in a tournament deck, compared to the usual maximum of four. The current restricted list is here. As you can see, there are a good number of restricted cards, mostly from the first two years of Magic (plus a couple of representatives from poorly-playtested later sets like Urza’s Saga and Mirrodin) and many of them have been banned in at least one other constructed format.
In a format where nearly every card ever printed is legal, this amounted to a generational change. Amid the mourning for the old format and the rush to find a new game-breaking deck, the official explanation was quickly swept aside. Some disagreed with its content, their position being that the format was adequately balanced beforehand. Others disagreed with it in principle, claiming some ideal of Vintage as a home for “broken” decks or strategies.
This last point is interesting because it implies a view of game design diametrically opposed to the view of most game designers. To understand this divide in opinion, we must understand something about designing game rules, and what it is that makes a rule set either fair or broken.
It is important to clarify that a game like Magic, whose components or rules sometimes override or contradict themselves, is not automatically unfair. In fact, most games provide this capability in some form. You only get one queen per game in chess – unless you advance a pawn to the opposing back row, in which case you can get one more. You have to rely on the luck of the dice to get you to Park Avenue in Monopoly – unless you happen to draw a Chance card that sends you directly there.
These kinds of exceptions are manageable in games (including Magic) because they are limited and they do not undermine the fundamental rules, the ones which keep the game running. Your extra queen has exactly the same movement rules as your normal queen. If you get sent directly to Park Avenue, you still have to have enough money to buy its deed. Magic has plenty of cards that mess with the rules in this way, but it also has others that break its fundamental rules. Restricted cards in Vintage tend to come from this latter group.
Let’s look at an example.
Lands (such as Plains) are the primary resource in Magic. They are the cards that allow you to play other cards. You can play one from your hand once per turn and only during your own turn. By contrast, the Moxes behave very much like lands in the way they let you play other cards, but they are not lands. That means you can play more than one per turn and you can also play a land in the same turn as a Mox. That in turn gives you a huge advantage over your opponent because you can play more cards and more expensive cards than he could in the same number turn – at no expenditure of resources other than playing the Mox. But the whole point of the way the land system was designed was to prevent one player from achieving this kind of advantage without paying a cost! Mox Pearl and its cousins undermine the fundamental rules of the game, and as such are restricted in Vintage and banned in every other format where they would otherwise be legal.
Now that we’ve established that, let’s take a look at one of the cards restricted in the last round of announcements: Brainstorm. This was possibly the most controversial announcement among Vintage enthusiasts, but there was in fact a good reason for it.
When you start a game of Magic, you shuffle your deck and draw seven cards as your opening hand. If you’ve shuffled adequately (and you should have, barring a desire to cheat or being some of my friends, who lack the manual dexterity to button their own shirt, much less shuffle a deck of cards), your hand is a random seven cards from your deck. But suppose your opening hand contains a Brainstorm and a resource to play it, like an Island – or, perhaps, since we’re already talking about restricted cards, a Mox Sapphire. You go first, you play it, and you draw three cards. Your starting hand is effectively nine cards, ten if you count the Brainstorm itself. In a game based on the flow and manipulation of cards, having access to even one more than your opponent can be the difference between winning and losing. Now imagine how much difference having an extra three makes.
Wait! you protest. That’s not all Brainstorm does! You don’t get to keep all of those cards! You have to put two of them back on top of your deck! Believe it or not, that actually makes it more broken. Remember all that shuffling you did before the game? Well, now it’s undone. You have basically stacked the top two cards of your deck – not a huge number, but since you usually get to draw one card per turn and decks in Vintage tend to be very fast, it might be enough for you to know exactly how the rest of the game will play for your deck. Magic deliberately includes elements intended to randomize the order of your deck and so diversify game experience, and Brainstorm does away with them. Most restricted cards undermine at most one of the game’s fundamental rules. Brainstorm undermines two, and as such I’m surprised it took so long to be restricted.
It is at this point that sound game design theory diverges from the interests of certain Vintage enthusiasts. Unrestricted use of cards like Brainstorm makes the Vintage format effectively a different game from the rest of Magic – a game whose rules are broken in the sense that the number of winning strategies approaches one. Just as a competent player should never lose a game of Tic-Tac-Toe (especially if he goes first), four-Brainstorm Vintage contained opening plays that were, if not unbeatable, extremely unlikely for your opponent to recover from. Games that contain plays like that tend to get boring very fast. After all, when was the last time you played Tic-Tac-Toe?
Broken games will always have fans – after all, there were a few people who liked playing with or even against Akuma in Street Fighter Alpha, when Ryu was the only character who even had a chance of beating him. Most of them, however, will never be growing products that attract new fans, much less be long-lived or commercially successful. If the vast card pool and unique mentality of Vintage must make it effectively a different game, then let it at least be a different fair game.
-- Q, in Star Trek: the Next Generation season 1
On June 1st, the DCI (the body that regulates Magic tournaments) restricted five highly-played cards in Vintage. Unless and until they are removed from the list, only one copy of a restricted card can be used in a tournament deck, compared to the usual maximum of four. The current restricted list is here. As you can see, there are a good number of restricted cards, mostly from the first two years of Magic (plus a couple of representatives from poorly-playtested later sets like Urza’s Saga and Mirrodin) and many of them have been banned in at least one other constructed format.
In a format where nearly every card ever printed is legal, this amounted to a generational change. Amid the mourning for the old format and the rush to find a new game-breaking deck, the official explanation was quickly swept aside. Some disagreed with its content, their position being that the format was adequately balanced beforehand. Others disagreed with it in principle, claiming some ideal of Vintage as a home for “broken” decks or strategies.
This last point is interesting because it implies a view of game design diametrically opposed to the view of most game designers. To understand this divide in opinion, we must understand something about designing game rules, and what it is that makes a rule set either fair or broken.
It is important to clarify that a game like Magic, whose components or rules sometimes override or contradict themselves, is not automatically unfair. In fact, most games provide this capability in some form. You only get one queen per game in chess – unless you advance a pawn to the opposing back row, in which case you can get one more. You have to rely on the luck of the dice to get you to Park Avenue in Monopoly – unless you happen to draw a Chance card that sends you directly there.
These kinds of exceptions are manageable in games (including Magic) because they are limited and they do not undermine the fundamental rules, the ones which keep the game running. Your extra queen has exactly the same movement rules as your normal queen. If you get sent directly to Park Avenue, you still have to have enough money to buy its deed. Magic has plenty of cards that mess with the rules in this way, but it also has others that break its fundamental rules. Restricted cards in Vintage tend to come from this latter group.
Let’s look at an example.
One of these things is not like the other
Lands (such as Plains) are the primary resource in Magic. They are the cards that allow you to play other cards. You can play one from your hand once per turn and only during your own turn. By contrast, the Moxes behave very much like lands in the way they let you play other cards, but they are not lands. That means you can play more than one per turn and you can also play a land in the same turn as a Mox. That in turn gives you a huge advantage over your opponent because you can play more cards and more expensive cards than he could in the same number turn – at no expenditure of resources other than playing the Mox. But the whole point of the way the land system was designed was to prevent one player from achieving this kind of advantage without paying a cost! Mox Pearl and its cousins undermine the fundamental rules of the game, and as such are restricted in Vintage and banned in every other format where they would otherwise be legal.
Now that we’ve established that, let’s take a look at one of the cards restricted in the last round of announcements: Brainstorm. This was possibly the most controversial announcement among Vintage enthusiasts, but there was in fact a good reason for it.
When you start a game of Magic, you shuffle your deck and draw seven cards as your opening hand. If you’ve shuffled adequately (and you should have, barring a desire to cheat or being some of my friends, who lack the manual dexterity to button their own shirt, much less shuffle a deck of cards), your hand is a random seven cards from your deck. But suppose your opening hand contains a Brainstorm and a resource to play it, like an Island – or, perhaps, since we’re already talking about restricted cards, a Mox Sapphire. You go first, you play it, and you draw three cards. Your starting hand is effectively nine cards, ten if you count the Brainstorm itself. In a game based on the flow and manipulation of cards, having access to even one more than your opponent can be the difference between winning and losing. Now imagine how much difference having an extra three makes.
Wait! you protest. That’s not all Brainstorm does! You don’t get to keep all of those cards! You have to put two of them back on top of your deck! Believe it or not, that actually makes it more broken. Remember all that shuffling you did before the game? Well, now it’s undone. You have basically stacked the top two cards of your deck – not a huge number, but since you usually get to draw one card per turn and decks in Vintage tend to be very fast, it might be enough for you to know exactly how the rest of the game will play for your deck. Magic deliberately includes elements intended to randomize the order of your deck and so diversify game experience, and Brainstorm does away with them. Most restricted cards undermine at most one of the game’s fundamental rules. Brainstorm undermines two, and as such I’m surprised it took so long to be restricted.
It is at this point that sound game design theory diverges from the interests of certain Vintage enthusiasts. Unrestricted use of cards like Brainstorm makes the Vintage format effectively a different game from the rest of Magic – a game whose rules are broken in the sense that the number of winning strategies approaches one. Just as a competent player should never lose a game of Tic-Tac-Toe (especially if he goes first), four-Brainstorm Vintage contained opening plays that were, if not unbeatable, extremely unlikely for your opponent to recover from. Games that contain plays like that tend to get boring very fast. After all, when was the last time you played Tic-Tac-Toe?
Broken games will always have fans – after all, there were a few people who liked playing with or even against Akuma in Street Fighter Alpha, when Ryu was the only character who even had a chance of beating him. Most of them, however, will never be growing products that attract new fans, much less be long-lived or commercially successful. If the vast card pool and unique mentality of Vintage must make it effectively a different game, then let it at least be a different fair game.
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