Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of Sullivan’s Satchel. This column is changing for the foreseeable future, possibly forever —now it’s a vehicle for giving out store credit! That’s right, each and every week I’ll be wading through the muck that is your collective inquiries and finding the “best” one, and that person will receive $25 dollars in store credit, or roughly one fourth of the equity Cedric chiseled me out of by not giving me one of those sick Ultimate Guard backpacks when it would have been trivial for him to do so. (CEDitor’s Note: Not gonna get yourself that backpack that way pal!)
A few ground rules:
- This is at my sole discretion.
- If we’re friends, you’re disqualified from winning. My days of money laundering are mostly behind me, and you’ve received way more than $25 dollars worth of value from our relationship if I respond to your texts or like your Facebook photos of you with your dog or whatever.
- Doesn’t hurt your case if you show me something dope you want to buy. If it’s close, a few Homelands boosters will win over someone trying to buy a Breeding Pool, sorry.
- You need to have a SCG account. I’m going to assume that it’s the same email address if you email me; I’ll DM you on Twitter if you reached out that way. Can’t receive the prize until we can send it to you.
With that, Matt Sperling asks:
Hi Patrick,
Since the power level of the interactions in non-rotating formats grows in a somewhat non-linear way as more and more powerful cards come out, how do you feel about increasing the number of cards players are required to play in those formats, e.g. up to 80 cards in Modern, Legacy, and Vintage? (If this also becomes the cover we need to ban fetchlands, great, so please set that issue aside).
Thanks,
Matt touches on a great point, and something that gets lost in the shuffle of power level conversations — even though formats get more powerful overall as more cards get added, not every element of gameplay is likely to scale in relation. Imagine Lion’s Eye Diamond or Bazaar of Baghdad or Entomb or a myriad of other combo cards that define some of Magic’s most powerful formats. You would almost never play them in a present-day Draft or Sealed format. If they were suddenly legal in Standard, it would be extremely unlikely any of them would show up in great number; it would be a weird coincidence if the types of cards they required were legal alongside them. But add up almost 30 years of sets and the ability to cherry-pick the best dozen or so cards to surround them and there are issues.
This cuts the other way, too. The Shivan Dragon or Ob Nixilis Reignited that carries your Draft deck is a fringe player in Standard and then almost never shows up beyond that. The decks and interactions become so fast and powerful that cards like that have too high a bar to get over, and there are so many to choose from that in the unlikely event you want one, the odds of it being any specific one are very low.
Matt’s suggestion is novel because it alleviates some of these issues in a way that still lets people play with their cards. Decks built around Lion’s Eye Diamond or Entomb would have to fill out with a less powerful suite of cards. For the most extreme decks, built around a single enabler for which they’re willing to mulligan for it, their ability to reliably find it would go down. And a slower, choppier, less consistent ecosystem would give a bit more breathing space to some more expensive, clunkier cards, though I question how much this would emerge in practice.
I’m apprehensive about deckbuilding rules that are foundationally different in different formats; it would be very hard to talk me into keeping Standard at 60 if Modern and beyond went to 80. Too fourth-wall-breaking, too developed, too likely to trip up players who aren’t the most engaged. Increasing the deck size in Standard makes me nervous because of cost and acquisition concerns, so I’d call that a strike.
I also worry that the change is too destabilizing. Even if Wizards of the Coast (WotC) doesn’t devote a ton of playtesting resources to older formats, the cards that have been printed and the Banned List do represent efforts to get the formats to something resembling equilibrium. Decades of decklists would be thrown out the window. It’s likely things would be out of wack for a very long time and require additional rounds of bannings and ancillary product printings to get back into shape. And if part of the goal is to not have to ban things, soft-banning someone’s Modern Mono-Green Tron or Gifts Storm deck (or pick the deck built around key interactions that doesn’t have a deep well of reserves to call up) would be a painful consequence.
On the balance, I think the latter concerns outweigh what I think are real benefits of larger minimum deck requirements in older formats. The proposal does speak to the core issue of developing powerful formats, but I think it’s too dramatic of an overhaul for a game of this age and history. I don’t think it’s unreasonable though.
From Michael Stauffer:
Patrick as you’re a lifetime red player, why are you so much worse than Ryan Overturf at Magic?
Ryan is smart and plays a lot. He’s great. Not to compare myself to Ryan specifically (who is also mostly on the shelf but also does well for himself when he does show up) but I watch enough Magic to know I would obliterate the vast majority of you were I to be even vaguely motivated, but instead I’m going to focus on my family, jobs, and blossoming writing career, if it’s all the same.
From Mark Herberholz:
Sullivan’s Satchel Question: is it generally considered good game design to create build-around cards in a set and then ensure that said cards are in the opening hand but can’t be interacted with via discard?
I’m guessing this is supposed to be a beat on companion. In general, I’d say “no,” which means the burden of proof is awfully high, and is at least part of the reason Magic hasn’t dug into this design space until now. Mark’s question does talk about “interaction” and that’s an interesting adjacent topic here.
For better or worse, Magic is balanced around destructive interaction. You put stuff onto the battlefield and there’s often a burden on me to remove it before you accrue too large of an advantage. Interaction is a tricky thing to define in that context. If I Doom Blade your creature, is that interactive? What if that creature was part of some interlocking interaction you were trying to set up? It might feel “non-interactive,” since that piece was some part of an interaction you were trying to generate. It probably feels interactive to me, though, and definitely does if I’m killing a Thassa’s Oracle that you set up without producing any interaction points along the way. Is a Thoughtseize interactive? What about the third one? Does casting one Negate feel different than looping Cryptic Commands with Mystic Sanctuary? In these cases, I’m using a card of mine to stop one of yours, but the vibe is very different, and how “interactive” the game feels for one or both players, or for someone observing the game, is likely to change.
You can’t stop a companion with discard. You also can’t stop Blast Zone or Obstinate Baloth with most discard, so that doesn’t move the needle for me. In fact, I’d say that companions produce way more satisfying interaction than games without — first, even if they are “free,” they’re still creatures, with all the interactive benefits that come with it. More importantly, by publicly declaring my companion and associated deck restrictions, I’m providing the player a lot of information and context they otherwise wouldn’t have. Their early-game decisions can be informed by this knowledge (which, setting aside the companion itself, isn’t deterministic, as I still have to make educated guesses about what’s going on), and neither player has to say or do anything for this to emerge.
So, this feels like another conflation of “rate” against “design principles.” The takeaway from Ancestral Recall isn’t “you can’t balance card drawing,” it’s “Ancestral Recall is probably short by about four mana.” That isn’t to hand-wave parts of the companion that are dangerous or repetitive or anything else, but I think they do help in promoting satisfying interaction in the aggregate and would consider that to be a major bonus of the mechanic as it went out the door. Interaction is about the sum of everything, not just what can be done about each discrete game piece.
And last, our first winner of $25 dollars in store credit and our Question of the Week, from Peter Leja.
Hi Patrick,
Are there any mechanics you enjoy playing with that you don’t like from a game design standpoint or vice versa? Are there any mechanics you’ve changed your opinion on from your time as a player to your time, now, as a commentator and game designer?
Plenty. There is a common misconception that designers are all about promoting the stuff they like to play with; I saw plenty of “here comes Lightning Bolt in Standard” stuff when I took a position with Play Design. I do think a lot of the decks I play adhere to what could broadly be described as “good gameplay,” but not universally. I don’t think the All Lava Spike experience is particularly good, and I think WotC has wisely designed most recent Standard formats where the red creatures are the real payoffs, not a critical mass of good, cheap burn. That said, most of my Modern and Legacy red lists are very heavy on that, and I enjoy playing them just fine.
I enjoy sacrificing my own resources (land, life, cards in hand, whatever) for short-term benefits and dislike playing with expensive creatures. The former is okay in small doses and the latter should be a big part of the competitive game. Were I just making a game for myself, it would look very different from what I believe is correct for the game overall.
As far as the mechanic I’ve changed the most on, it’s definitely the graveyard being a live zone. It never bothered me when I played competitively because it was just one more thing for my opponent to mess up, but the games become inscrutable if you’re watching on your computer and foist a major tracking burden on the opposing player, who didn’t necessarily sign up for that sort of game. One key card with flashback or escape is one thing, but the cards and mechanics that turn the whole zone on, or decks like Dredge where half the cards in the graveyard are live, are pretty rough. It’s not like the gameplay benefits are there and it makes the game significantly less fun to watch.