
How Success Almost Killed a Game, and How Its Creators Saved It - jonbaer
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/04/16/400140583/how-success-almost-killed-a-game-and-how-its-creators-saved-it
======
tgb
I really like the writing on this article. So simple and to the point. No
attempt at doing some 'human interest' opening with an irrelevant story about
how Richard Garfield grew up inventing trading games using sticks on the
family farm. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn't have found it interesting if
I didn't already know the game. And I wouldn't have minded if it had more
content to it.

~~~
dragontamer
As noted in the comments though, there's a lot more than can be written.

There's no acknowledgement of the politics of the "reserved" list, the Power 9
(and why even to this day, they have never been reprinted). Or efforts such as
"Modern Masters" where Wizards reprints rare cards from years ago that are
still in use. (OMFG Tarmogoyf).

I already know a bit about the game (not a pro like some people...) but the
article feels quite "empty" to me. So many issues were just not even
addressed, and the article seems like a gross simplification of what is going
on.

~~~
michaelochurch
When I played back in the mid-90s, creatures were incredibly underpowered:
easy to kill, and great for fun/munchkin play (Force of Nature! 8/8 for 6
mana!) Most of the "good" decks were creatureless.

The ridiculously powerful creatures and creature-strategies that came later
(like Tarmogoyf and, to get really egregious, fucking _affinity_ ) seem to be
overcorrections to the long-standing weakness of creatures. You could do a lot
with your green growth decks (mana-generating elves and huge creatures on
early turns) to beginning and intermediate players, but advanced players with
reactive decks would shut those down handily.

On the broken cards that come out now and then, Type 2 is a necessary evil.
It's not that the designers are bad. It's that Magic's metagame simply won't
work if design flaws (which are inevitable with a game of such complexity,
just because it's impossible to predict the exploits that thousands of players
will discover) don't get scrubbed away a couple years after inception.

I also agree that the no-reprint policy around the Power 9 was politically
motivated and wrong-headed. The way it should have been done is as follows:

    
    
        1. Art will be changed with every reprinting. This way, you aren't screwing 
           collectors by reprinting coveted cards. They have a guarantee that 
           the card, in that form, will never reprint. 
        2. Overpowered cards will be reprinted but "pointed", i.e. each Mox 
           might be 4 points 
           and Black Lotus might be 5 and Time Walk might be 7. Every tournament 
           sets a point limit (or no limit) that applies to all decks submitted. 
           That way, the constraint is still a deck-construction constraint rather 
           than which 13-year-old has a rich daddy.

------
probably_wrong
> It was a card game where, if you had enough money, you could effectively buy
> all the aces.

Wait, "was"? I stopped playing years ago when I realized the money I needed to
stop losing was an order of magnitude higher than the money I had.

How much would I have to invest today in order to have a 50/50 chance of
winning against a random opponent?

~~~
DanBC
A similar story appeared a month or so ago. People recommend playing "draft"
to avoid the money-sink.

The thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192628)

The subthread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9194357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9194357)

(The Dominion recommendation is good!)

~~~
thaumasiotes
The limited formats (draft and sealed) remove the issue that your opponents'
cards might just be better than your cards, but they make the cost problem
much _worse_. It's several times more expensive to play limited (where you
have to buy new product every time you want to play) than to play constructed,
where you're allowed to reuse the cards you own.

~~~
lmm
Draft is O(N) and constructed is O(1), but the constant factors matter. You
can draft once-a-week for a year and spend less than you would on a
constructed deck. Better still you can cube draft (i.e. reuse the cards).

~~~
thaumasiotes
If a draft costs around $13, drafting once a week for a year is more expensive
than almost any constructed deck. For $700 you could have two competitive
decks, or do quite a lot of maintenance on one. Drafting only feels cheaper
because it's spread out.

Looking purely at costs, the obviously correct thing to do is proxy your
cards. Proxies are free.

~~~
plorkyeran
If your net expense of drafting is $13/week then you're either getting ripped
off or losing every game and going out of your way to avoid picking any
valuable cards. It's been a few years since I last played, but when I did
draft weekly I averaged well over $5 of cards per draft without explicitly
money-drafting anything that didn't pay for the draft by itself. The median
draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, but there's enough high outliers to pull
the mean up quite a bit.

~~~
thaumasiotes
It's pretty dishonest to discount the cost of drafting because you get some
high-value cards while refusing to discount the cost of constructed... the
_entire cost_ of constructed is obtaining high-value cards. If you buy a $400
deck, do $200 of maintenance on it over one year, and then sell your cards at
a 50% loss, you're still way ahead of a drafter who averaged $6 of money cards
per week. And on top of all that, you had the option of playing more than once
a week if you wanted to, and you never deliberately sabotaged yourself in the
attempt to cut costs on your hobby ("explicitly money-drafting anything that
[paid] for the draft").

I might also note that on Magic Online, it's definitely not true that the
median draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, as the residual value that bad
rares used to have has been cannibalized by mythic rares. A bad rare in MTGO
can be purchased for $0.10; obviously you can sell it for less than that. Are
paper rares that much more valuable?

------
empressplay
My partner and I got in to a gold-card arms race but we decided to sell them
all after it turned out we couldn't pay the rent or eat because we spent all
our money trying to one-up each other.

Ever since then I've only ever played MTG with "common" cards.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Neat! We played 'Uno' where our decks consisted entirely of cards that cost 1
Mana (or zero) to play. My son won all year at school with one of his.

------
bobbles
Anyone interested in MTG history should check out the Drive to Work podcast,
where mark rosewater discusses why decisions were made and general game design
theory
[http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg...](http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/drivetowork)

~~~
calibraxis
Thanks, probably the best thing I've read about game design!

------
noelwelsh
Interesting. I wonder if there is anything relevant to pay-to-play mobile
games here? I think I'd be a lot happier to pay in the typical mobile game if
I thought the game was fairer.

~~~
ericcholis
Hearthstone, from the makers of World of Warcraft. It's quite fun. It's on
most mobile devices.

------
cromulent
That's where MTGOX started before Bitcoin. Magic The Gathering Online
Exchange.

~~~
lnanek2
So if they had sticked they would have gone bust when card prices went down
too. Sad fate.

------
dash2
s/Magic/Bitcoin/g.

Magic is a great game -> lots of people start playing it -> people start
trading cards -> speculators buy the expensive cards -> game's no fun any
more.

Bitcoin is a clever platform -> lots of people start using it -> speculators
buy the currency -> too expensive and volatile to use for trade -> no use for
trading any more.

~~~
SEMW
I don't follow your analogy. The smallest tradeable unit of bitcoins (the
satoshi) is currently well under a thousandth of a U.S. cent. This is "too
expensive ... to use for trade"?

------
michaelochurch
I'm showing my age here, but I played Magic back in the mid-90s and know a bit
about its history.

Oddly enough, the feature intended to self-limit what destroyed the game is
one of the most deprecated, disliked features that is almost never used: the
ante. (For those unfamiliar with M:tG, the original rules stipulated that each
player wagered one random card from his deck and the winner got the loser's
ante. There were also spells that could increase or alter the ante.) There's
enough volatility in Magic (i.e. the person with the better deck might win 75%
of the time, but not 100%) that it created real risk in loading up on
expensive cards, because you might still lose in spite of them to a guy
playing a deck full of powerful commons like Kird Apes and Lightning Bolts
(both now OOP).

The problem with the ante is that you're likely to get a card that isn't very
useful to you. If you're playing a weenie deck, and you get a 5/5 Shivan
Dragon (in its heyday, a card that was $20 because 5+ power creatures were
still hard to come by, except for green vanillas with high casting costs)
then, while you got a "good" card, it's not congruent with your strategy.

I think what saved Magic was the fact that most kids who played it had fathers
who were collectors (from the era of baseball cards). Except in places like
Atherton where $500 per week was a typical 13-year-old's allowance, no one of
Magic's target age could actually afford to play unless he got a parent or
uncle or much older brother into collecting and could grab the dupes. (Because
of the rarity tiers, getting a complete set of any expansion involves buying
lots of cards and generates a ton of dupes.) It was kids playing with their
collector fathers' and uncles' dupes that saved Magic.

Relative to other hobbies like golf, skiing, or scuba diving, Magic isn't
astronomically expensive. A couple thousand bucks per year for your hobby or
sport, when you're in your 30s, isn't a big deal. The cruelty of it is that it
has adult prices but is marketed toward 13-year-olds.

In tournament play, you have to choose between "Type I", which has enormous
upfront costs because it's dominated by super-powerful cards that've been OOP
for almost 2 decades and cost $1000 a pop, and "Type II", which requires you
to buy a new set of cards (to the tune of about $1000 for a competitive deck)
every year, and limited/sealed-deck varieties which are fun in their own
right, but take out most of the planning and deck construction (which is, IMO,
most of the game). I remember in 1997 when people complained that it "cost
almost $100" to have a decent deck. Now, you'd have a hard time playing with
one under $750.

What's also slightly offensive is that the game is explicitly programmed to
favor people who spend more money. In golf, expensive clubs deliver an
advantage over cheap ones, but that's not by explicit design. It's just how
the physical world works. Moreover, a good golfer with crappy clubs will still
beat the pants off of a shitty golfer with the best clubs in the world. In
Magic, there is a skill of deck construction that money can't buy, although
the Internet has taken that away because one can play already-constructed
decks, but if you have a good and expensive deck, you've basically been
delivered enough power to win most of the time (but, again and to its credit,
Magic has enough volatility that you won't always win).

