The endless road
September 21st 2011 23:38
“Better to be content in this life, than to aspire to it in the next.”
-- Ezio Auditore, in Assassin’s Creed 2
Ever since that “balance is not as important as fun” article, I’ve been thinking about Magic’s tendency to have iterations or variants of its famous cards, like lands that produce two colors of mana or red instants that deal damage. One of the supposed reasons there are so many iterations and variants is that they’re supposed to lead to interesting gameplay, by having weaknesses in certain gameplay situations or by creating game states that need to be analysed and navigated. Dual lands in particular are supposedly not allowed to be strictly better than basic lands, making them not an automatic choice.
This would be easy to believe if it had actually been true in recent sets.
Both the Scars of Mirrodin dual lands and the M10 dual lands play awfully similarly to the Alpha/Beta/Unlimited dual lands. Granted, the former are (slightly) more likely to do so early in the game and the latter are (slightly) more likely to do so later on; but it is possible and common to build a deck in such a way that they always do so, and you can get away with not putting one into play any time they wouldn’t. Since there aren’t even any “destroy target non-basic land” effects in new sets any more, the effect is basically the same as if the original dual lands were in Standard.
So the issue isn’t balance. It never has been, and it never will be. If it were, they wouldn’t need a new cycle of dual lands or red instants that deal damage in every set, because there would be a clear vision of what these cards were supposed to do and it would be applied consistently. The constant iteration can be interpreted in two possible ways.
Firstly, the design space for Magic may not actually be as big as we’ve always believed, suggesting that if every new set had actual significant innovation in it, the game could end within a year or two. This seems very unlikely, as Innistrad demonstrates with its double-faced cards: since there are areas of the card itself that haven’t been touched, the game rules themselves are child’s play by comparison. Second, and much more likely, it’s nothing more than a sales tactic. “You need these cards to keep playing sanctioned Standard events” seems to be a very strong sales pitch, despite the constant financial drain and emotional stress of “saying good-bye” to favorite cards and characters.
If it actually made a different game environment, with different decks, that was closer to some vision balance, it might come closer to being worth it. But every year, you have a blue control deck that plays much the same as comparable things from the Ravnica era did, and a red deck that uses this year’s crop of damage instants – because as far as design innovation goes, putting flashback on Shatter is already significantly more than we often get!
Maybe Wizards of the Coast feels it has to pretend this isn’t the way things are, and that there’s anything involved other than a sales tactic. Maybe the pressure of the strange current idea that making a profit is “wrong” and can’t be owned up to really is too much. But we don’t have to be taken in by it. We don’t have to play with what they’re claiming is balanced this year (and may end up getting banned the next), considering that there are already cards for every taste and none of them leave the planet just because Standard is rotating. Magic is, by all rights, our game, and it’s time we started acting like it.
-- Ezio Auditore, in Assassin’s Creed 2
Ever since that “balance is not as important as fun” article, I’ve been thinking about Magic’s tendency to have iterations or variants of its famous cards, like lands that produce two colors of mana or red instants that deal damage. One of the supposed reasons there are so many iterations and variants is that they’re supposed to lead to interesting gameplay, by having weaknesses in certain gameplay situations or by creating game states that need to be analysed and navigated. Dual lands in particular are supposedly not allowed to be strictly better than basic lands, making them not an automatic choice.
This would be easy to believe if it had actually been true in recent sets.
Both the Scars of Mirrodin dual lands and the M10 dual lands play awfully similarly to the Alpha/Beta/Unlimited dual lands. Granted, the former are (slightly) more likely to do so early in the game and the latter are (slightly) more likely to do so later on; but it is possible and common to build a deck in such a way that they always do so, and you can get away with not putting one into play any time they wouldn’t. Since there aren’t even any “destroy target non-basic land” effects in new sets any more, the effect is basically the same as if the original dual lands were in Standard.
Where are you when we need you?
So the issue isn’t balance. It never has been, and it never will be. If it were, they wouldn’t need a new cycle of dual lands or red instants that deal damage in every set, because there would be a clear vision of what these cards were supposed to do and it would be applied consistently. The constant iteration can be interpreted in two possible ways.
Firstly, the design space for Magic may not actually be as big as we’ve always believed, suggesting that if every new set had actual significant innovation in it, the game could end within a year or two. This seems very unlikely, as Innistrad demonstrates with its double-faced cards: since there are areas of the card itself that haven’t been touched, the game rules themselves are child’s play by comparison. Second, and much more likely, it’s nothing more than a sales tactic. “You need these cards to keep playing sanctioned Standard events” seems to be a very strong sales pitch, despite the constant financial drain and emotional stress of “saying good-bye” to favorite cards and characters.
If it actually made a different game environment, with different decks, that was closer to some vision balance, it might come closer to being worth it. But every year, you have a blue control deck that plays much the same as comparable things from the Ravnica era did, and a red deck that uses this year’s crop of damage instants – because as far as design innovation goes, putting flashback on Shatter is already significantly more than we often get!
Maybe Wizards of the Coast feels it has to pretend this isn’t the way things are, and that there’s anything involved other than a sales tactic. Maybe the pressure of the strange current idea that making a profit is “wrong” and can’t be owned up to really is too much. But we don’t have to be taken in by it. We don’t have to play with what they’re claiming is balanced this year (and may end up getting banned the next), considering that there are already cards for every taste and none of them leave the planet just because Standard is rotating. Magic is, by all rights, our game, and it’s time we started acting like it.
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