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How CCGs got killed and Magic survived

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04 Dec 2012 06:37 #138889 by QPCloudy
We also do 4 player plane chase with a single central plane deck. . . . With unglued and unhinged decks. Un-chase.

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04 Dec 2012 08:49 #138891 by tscook

dragonstout wrote: a bunch of fetid shit~


I'm not parroting anything you condescending fuck, and I am aware of the (few) ways to mitigate shitty draws. Your parallels between dice and land are terrible, and the point is ~fun and drama~ added by being fucked by draws isn't fun. There is absolutely nothing fun about drawing five lands. Where does this add ~fun and drama~? Mulliganing is having to throw away a hand and draw fewer. How is that fun? You're just mindlessly repeating ~fun and drama~ where there is none to be had.

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04 Dec 2012 09:40 #138892 by Erik Twice
Tell me, how is drawing five lands in a row different from rolling five ones in a row? Magic has randomness and you can get fucked by it, that's obvious. But if you are getting fucked over all the time, you are doing something wrong, be it poor deckbuilding, not mulliganing properly or shuffling like shit (Which is surprisingly common).
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04 Dec 2012 09:57 #138893 by mads b.
I don't play Magic, but thought I'd just chime in on the whole draw vs. dice thing. In many games the difference is that dice are used after you make your choices, whereas card draw happens prior to that. Also, in many games drawing cards is a hidden thing whereas rolling dice happens in the open for everybody to see. And in both of these cases there's a lot more fun and drama in rolling dice.

However, in Bacgammon for instance dice are more or less the equivalent of card draw since they give you certain options you can then choose - like when drawing a hand in Magic. But the dice roll in Backgammon is open information which, I believe, make it a much more dramatic thing than drawing a hand of hidden cards.

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04 Dec 2012 10:32 #138894 by tscook

Erik Twice wrote: Tell me, how is drawing five lands in a row different from rolling five ones in a row? Magic has randomness and you can get fucked by it, that's obvious. But if you are getting fucked over all the time, you are doing something wrong, be it poor deckbuilding, not mulliganing properly or shuffling like shit (Which is surprisingly common).


I won more games than I lost in draft before I stopped giving a fuck.

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04 Dec 2012 10:46 #138895 by dragonstout
"Condescending fuck", are you shitting me, says the guy whose initial post was "kinda sucks MtG survived"? There is no game, at all, I can think that I'd say it "sucks" that it survived, that I actually wish death upon.

Mads B has a couple good points on dice vs. draws. About choice-then-random vs. random-then-choice: certainly this is a key part of card games. However Magic, like all CCGs, complicates this via deckbuilding, so you're making plenty of choices to affect the randomness before the game even begins. About hidden vs. not-hidden: this is a good point, but believe me, when someone gets mana-screwed in Magic it's not exactly hidden. Really, mana-screw in Magic is just like any other shitty bad luck you can have in a game, and sure, sometimes you'll lose games to it; sometimes a pro will lose against an 8-year-old because of it, but if I wanted it any other way, I'd play Chess and Go and forget all these dumb hobby games.

I mean, sure, no one thinks it's fun to be mana-screwed, and no one thinks it's fun to mulligan. But it is way more satisfying to win from a triple-mulligan than from even; some of my most memorable games are glorious come-from-behind victories because of mana-screw or mulligans.

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04 Dec 2012 14:55 #138898 by Shellhead
The land card problem is aggravated by the slow card flow of Magic. One card per turn is too limiting.

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04 Dec 2012 17:16 #138905 by SaMoKo
Telling someone who doesn't like x game to go play y or z is retarded. Don't do this. Many people don't like Magic because of this, but rather than address the problem, the designers have just bleated about deck building and pr0 t1ps and happily shoved their heads in the sand because of this loser mentality.

The point isn't that randomness is bad. It's that disproportionately punishing a player for a random factor is bad. Rolling 1's in Space Hulk or Combat Commander is typically a missed shot. Not a huge deal, and hardly a game changer. In backgammon, rolling two 1's isn't a bad opening at all, and even a poor roll is advancing your game.

Being mana screwed (or flooded) is, far more often than not, the end of a game before it started. It's not drama. It's the absence of drama. Any kind of element that potentially forces a player to miss multiple turns in a fairly short game is kind of shit. And I've played enough Magic to know that things are pretty much settled by turn five or six.

Speaking of pr0 t1ps, there are, however, many ways to build a deck that further punishes a player who has been mana screwed. Not surprisingly, I saw these cards fairly often when I played.
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04 Dec 2012 17:36 #138907 by SaMoKo
Reason #6 why Magic survived: After having invested a several hundred dollars (often more), players are unwilling to admit their game has huge flaws and there may be better card games out there.
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04 Dec 2012 18:36 #138911 by bioball

SaMoKo wrote: Reason #6 why Magic survived: After having invested a several hundred dollars (often more), players are unwilling to admit their game has huge flaws and there may be better card games out there.


But what card game is that? Are there any true contenders that don't suffer from MTG's similar flaw? Even Pokemon still requires you to draw both energy cards and evolved forms of the creature so its a similar problem.

Also, what other CCG/LCG has an entire staff MTG's size devoted to its singular evolution and development? I've commented before that I think FFG has a contender in Call of Cthulhu but I question the company's ability to keep its, what, six LCGs going at the same time to the same degree as MTG.

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04 Dec 2012 18:46 #138913 by Shellhead
Shadowfist is a similar though better game than Magic. There are land cards (feng shui sites), but the point of the game is to fight over the land cards and take them from other players. The feng shui sites provide the equivalent of mana, only in a form that can be saved from turn to turn, so you normally only need to dedicate about 20% of your deck to feng shui sites, leaving more room for fun stuff like dudes, weapons, vehicles, events, etc.

It's true that Shadowfist was never as popular as Magic. It's also true that the Red Elvises were never as popular as Justin Bieber. Never confuse popularity with quality.
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04 Dec 2012 19:30 #138917 by SaMoKo

bioball wrote:

SaMoKo wrote: Reason #6 why Magic survived: After having invested a several hundred dollars (often more), players are unwilling to admit their game has huge flaws and there may be better card games out there.


But what card game is that? Are there any true contenders that don't suffer from MTG's similar flaw? Even Pokemon still requires you to draw both energy cards and evolved forms of the creature so its a similar problem.

Also, what other CCG/LCG has an entire staff MTG's size devoted to its singular evolution and development? I've commented before that I think FFG has a contender in Call of Cthulhu but I question the company's ability to keep its, what, six LCGs going at the same time to the same degree as MTG.


Off the top of my head, there's L5R, which became remarkably popular in my town. I don't know what's currently popular because I haven't bothered with CCGs in about a decade. The dual decks, the system of players starting with income, and the ability to sweep out crappy dynasty cards was a great improvement. This likely is because the game came after Magic, learned from it's problems, and adapted.

Magic can't exactly learn from itself, at least not as far as the fundamental concept of the game are concerned. A redesign would be required, and boy howdy would that would piss off the players invested in the game. Once the need for new players overwhelms the need to retain players, maybe then they'll reboot.

That's pretty much my biggest gripe with CCGs. The investment required to play prevents the company from saying 'Dammit, we gone fucked up. Let's put out a new edition that patches up the stupid'. The mana system, love it or hate it, is forever part of the game.

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04 Dec 2012 19:39 #138919 by bioball

Shellhead wrote: It's true that Shadowfist was never as popular as Magic. It's also true that the Red Elvises were never as popular as Justin Bieber. Never confuse popularity with quality.


I don't think my statement was that MTG was better solely because it popular; I wasn't confusing the two. Plus in your Red Elvises v. Justin Bieber analogy, given MTG's age, I think it would be more comparable to The Rolling Stones. MTG has something that has not been repeated, yet, in the CCG/LCG community.

Reading the comments in this thread, one would think its some bullshit-fly-by-night Kickstarter game with a flaw so obvious its amazing people backed the stupid thing. But obviously its ability to remain relevant in the market long after its inception (I got in during Fallen Kingdoms when you could get the box set with two decks, glass beads and a pouch), means something.

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04 Dec 2012 19:48 #138920 by SaMoKo
Yeah, the game has some really, really good stuff going on. It's one of the most groundbreaking games ever made, and it drew a huge following for a hobby game. But seriously, the ability to stay around this long has more to do with it's marketing than it's gameplay. That marketing leads to a larger dedicated dev team and better gameplay. I'd have loved to see a dev team that large working on Jyhad.

Anywhoo, the point is moot. Cosmic Encounter is better than all CCGs.

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04 Dec 2012 20:00 #138923 by Shellhead

bioball wrote:

Shellhead wrote: It's true that Shadowfist was never as popular as Magic. It's also true that the Red Elvises were never as popular as Justin Bieber. Never confuse popularity with quality.


I don't think my statement was that MTG was better solely because it popular; I wasn't confusing the two. Plus in your Red Elvises v. Justin Bieber analogy, given MTG's age, I think it would be more comparable to The Rolling Stones. MTG has something that has not been repeated, yet, in the CCG/LCG community.

Reading the comments in this thread, one would think its some bullshit-fly-by-night Kickstarter game with a flaw so obvious its amazing people backed the stupid thing. But obviously its ability to remain relevant in the market long after its inception (I got in during Fallen Kingdoms when you could get the box set with two decks, glass beads and a pouch), means something.


You are still confused about the difference between popularity and quality, because you are insisting that popularity is proof of quality.

It's ridiculous to insist that Magic is better than any other CCG ever made, because no game is perfect, and several games deliberately improved on the weaker aspects of Magic. Two of those better games were designed by Richard Garfield himself, and there is every reason to believe that he learned from mistakes that he made with Magic. No, sometimes a game stays popular out of nostalgia, and a certain momentum built up by being the first of a kind. Look at Risk, or Dungeons and Dragons. Few people would consider Risk to be the best boardgame ever, or even the best Ameritrash boardgame. And if D&D was truly the best role-playing game ever, how the hell did the edition wars ever happen?
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