I played Magic briefly as a teen and the thing that bothered me the most was how mana worked and the tendency to either get mana flooded or mana screwed. I even played a custom format with friends where you separated your deck and your mana into two decks and drew one from each every turn. It made the game much more enjoyable and consistent.
This is generally seen as the main flaw with the games core design. Most other currently successful trading card game (mainly Hearthstone) with mana resources have gone the route of providing a consistent source of resources per turn. This approach does significantly reduce the variance match to match and leads to a lot less of the "feel bad" moments of getting flooded or screwed.
That being said I personally find the variance that Magic has when it comes to mana resources to be more interesting than the alternatives as most of the newer card games have abandoned the idea of having mana resources(lands) in your deck all together. I think the lands are one of the main things that makes Magic an interesting card game.
One interesting alternative to lands was from the World of Warcraft Card game (spiritual successor to Hearthstone) which allowed you to play any card from your hand face down as a mana resource. Although they completely did away with this in Hearthstone so they could limit the deck size and the reduce the number of duplicate cards that were needed in each deck.
Have you ever looked at Hearthstone? I tried it briefly, and I think it's got its share of problems but I thought that the way they designed around this was really cool.
https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mana covers it in detail, but the gist of it is that mana is generally an automatic thing, and it's granted per-turn at an increasing rate throughout the game, meaning that most games follow a natural power curve that is immune from flood/screw.
There are still actions that affect mana and strategies around those, and some neat concepts like The Coin, the special card always given to the player who goes second that gives you one extra mana for one turn, to help with the disadvantage. But overall it beats what I consider to be a really annoying flaw in MtG.
I've played daily since beta, and stopped about a year ago. The problem with Hearthstone is that they traded mana RNG for effect RNG. The fate of every match revolves around how well a card randomly targets an enemy. Far too much is decided by a coin toss in that game, because it makes for funny youtube videos.
I also liked in MTG how much more responsive the game was due to instants/interrupts & triggers - was far more complex and nuanced.
In HS it's simplified - with few exceptions, your stuff happens only on your turn, very little targeting of the player (ie, no discard). The strategies are limited. I still like it, but ... it's definitely not up to MTG richness.
The game is probably more "responsive" now. Instants and Interrupts were a mess. Batching and determining which had to be resolved LIFO and which FIFO and the various corner cases were an unnecessary labyrinth to navigate.
The stack is much better and I'd say more nuanced. Now you can target things on the stack specifically. There's more bluffing and playing with the fact that there is incomplete information.
I agree, though I still regret they ended up overpowering counterspells by allowing them to target any previous spell in the stack (interrupts could not do this - they had the interrupt stack).
However Hearthstone has no such interplay - likely because it allows an easier functioning AI and interplay in a normatively turn-based game online is difficult.
Scenario: 1) I cast Armageddon/Wrath of God, 2) in response (instant stack) you cast/trigger effect that allows you to sacrifice (or return to hand) your permanents affected, 3) in response (adding to stack) I counter my own 'geddon/WoG.
How would this be possible when interrupts existed?
The effect or spell that allows you to sacrifice or bounce those things would be in the Instant batch.
The counterspell would be in the Interrupt batch.
The big difference is that once that counterspell is on the stack, you can't cast any more Instants.
So let's say that instead of countering the Wrath, you counter the spell that's bouncing all of the things. With the old system, that's it. If I don't have any Interrupts, we need to resolve our batches. No one can cast an Instant until we resolve both the Interrupt batch, the Instant batch, then the original spell.
Counterspells were even better before. They were effectively the last word. The stack kind of depowered them, but it gave a lot more play to the game.
IIRC, you couldn't counter the wrath once the instant is played (at least as of say 1998-ish rules interpretation).
I play Wrath. I can counter now, or let it resolve. You play instant effect. I can counter, but can't counter the wrath anymore. I'm pretty sure that's how it worked.
They addressed the instants, far too difficult to direct flow of the game online like that. Look at MTG online, it flows like a pig. The game is constantly interrupted for each phase. Their answer was secrets basically.
More often than not the only randomness that affects the outcome of a game is card draw. There are random effects that can flip a game but that happens less frequently than just a bad draw.
For Hearthstone players who do like the mana problem there is shaman class with overload. Some warlock cards also destroy mana crystals, while druid plays around a lot with gaining these.
Hearthstone has too much RNG for my taste though, and I don't like the business model related to the RNG of packs.
Slay The Spire, which has a more fair business model IMO (even though the price is cheap at 16 EUR), allows you to have more strategy and play around the RNG via liberal deck building and a rogue-like game. It has a relatively stable mana/energy resource system which can be modified by game mechanics. But it is a PvE game with ladder system increasing difficulty.
But that affects both players equally, as in general the luck factor. My experience is that while you might lose a few games stupidly because of mana screw/flood, in the long run luck balances out and skill makes the difference.
Furthermore, good players can play with probabilities to lead to more consistent results.
For example, try not to play two colors equally. Instead, "skew" colors in one side. Play 75% green and 25% red for example, which tends to be more consistent than a 50/50 split. Furthermore, seeing an opening hand of say all reds (when you know its your "minor color") gives you the opportunity to mulligan for a better hand before the game even starts.
IMO, these sorts of decisions are what makes you a better player. Its a small probability with regards to mana-screw or mana-flooding, but these little things help over the long run.
You're being downvoted unfairly. Magic's lead designer, Mark Rosewater, has publicly discussed this exact thing. I'm not sure if it is in his GDC talk but he has 100% discussed it on his podcast.
It is my least favorite part of the game (really the only part of it that I dislike), but you're right. I don't know if it was quite what Richard Garfield had in mind, but at this point it's 100% an intentional part of the design philosophy.
He actually wanted to decrease the consistency a bit. If the games are too consistent, you run into the problem of there just being a "best deck". Especially if you can count on your mana like in Hearthstone or with the suggestion of the "mana deck".
As it stands, it's something you have to consider and something you have to realize affects your opponents just as much as you. You can mitigate mana issues by playing a deck with low casting cost cards or by playing more land than normal, etc. There are also cards to search out land or can be used in a similar manner to land.
Yes, there is some variance, but poker has a ton of variance and no one would say that it detracts from the game.
I think it was unintentional but has played a crucial part in the game's appeal. When you get mana screwed, you feel the same emotional devastation as seeing the house win big in Blackjack. I think that low feeling drives players to try again and again.
Oh, I don't know about that. You really get used to how decks work. I've loset tournament games (Regionals and PTQs - though I never qualified :) to mana screw/flood and it didn't sting as much as when I made a stupid mistake that I immediately realised was a stupid mistake.
The problem with having to add lands to power up your deck for me is that it means I can't throw in the kitchen sink, as I'm wont to do if left to my own devices. A deck design must first of all work - and that's 50% getting the manabase down pat, which includes tough decisions (should I trim out a basic land for one more copy of OP sleeper rare I'm sure shreds the deck-to-beat to pieces? Hint: no). So you have to build a deck while respecting some constraints (minimum deck size, enough mana for your spells, sharp strategic focus etc). But that's like, all the fun in deckbuilding (which is all the fun in the game, for me :).
In fact, I know this will sound eminently silly but I believe that playing M:tG and in particular bulding decks has taught me important lessons that I took with me in my career as a programmer. The most important of which is: don't ever waste resources.
Perhaps a more esoteric lesson is this: you can still have infinite variety even without absolute freedom. Even with the burden of having to include land in your deck and risk mana screw/flood, you can still design any deck you want and have a lot of fun while at it.
The more I play magic, the more I like the mana system, actually. It's very frustrating occasionally, but it usually is a message to me that I need to change my deckbuilding, add more filtering, card advantage, etc.
I agree I like that you have to take into account the manabase when you design a deck it adds an additional constraint. It also makes mana denial a valid strategy.
My favorite deck of all time (Goblins) is built around abusing Wasteland and Rishadan Port to lock down my opponents manabase.
That's more an issue with the design of your deck than with the game, or the design issue is that one may not know how to build a deck to avoid such issues.
MTG isn't built for a consistent (late) game natural Mana curve and being able to do what you suggest would fundamentally change the game. For worse imo.
For example with no Mana acceralation/mananipulation the optimal number distribution to have to maximize Mana spent through turn 5 is 29 lands and only 3 five drops.
After which you will quickly have more Mana than you need.
Very few decks run 30 lands.
You can't design a deck that satisfies the condition of natural ly dropping a land each turn and spending the most Mana.
The more consistently you want to say, have 5 lands on turn 5, the more lands you need, which means less space for other cards in your deck.
Similarly the more you want to be able to spend that 5 Mana past turn 5 the more higher cost cards you need, which means fewer cards of other cost. Which means your more likely to be Mana flooded early since your deck won't have the space to consistently play smaller stuff. Try to and will come at the cost of making it more difficult to curve at higher N.
The optimal turn 5 deck curve has no 1 drops. You can't have it both ways.
As for your suggestion, it would only be better for beginners who don't know how to build around a curve, as the cards are not designed for such rules and would break the game in other ways.
I played a format that stated you could put creatures down as long as you had enough mana to cover their cost, but you couldn't attack with a creature unless you payed for their cost. You would have to pay their cost every time you attacked with them. This variant meant you would need to prioritize spells versus attacking. You wouldn't attack with all your creatures so you could save some mana for a counter spell.
This game mechanic (mana burn) was removed when the rules were refactored across the past 20 years. Mana (edit:) simply disappears at the end of each stage.
He's not talking about mana burn, that was never really a problem except for extremely niche combo decks. He's talking about when you draw lands/mana producers for 5 turns in a row after starting with a heavy mana hand. That is "mana flooding".
Oh, that's either an issue of an unbalanced deck, or insufficient randomization.
My best decks started with the "rule of 1/3", and added/trimmed 1-2 lands to optimize. The "rule of 1/3" is that 1/3 of the deck should be lands, for best land draw. So a 60 card deck would start with 20 lands, and maybe swap 1-2 forests for elves in an elf deck.
And from a recent card randomizing thread, it takes 7 "riffles" to fully randomize a deck.
My "blue bertha" decks were 40% to 45% lands. They were usually 100+ cards and consisted almost exclusively of 6+ casting cost creatures. These were only used for fun, mostly for other players to test their new decks against, never in any competition.
Having more than 35% lands leads to the very mana flooding complained about in the root comment.
With 35% lands (21/60) you are likely to end up mana-screwed (not enough lands) unless you build your deck to match the low land count. For a generic rule of thumb I think it is better to recommend a bit more lands than that.
No, it's a fundamental part of the game which forces a high level of variance. That is what OP was complaining about. Even the best decks are prone to mana flooding or screwing. Your brilliant "1/3" strategy is literally the first thing beginners learn about deckbuilding, and doesn't change the high variance of each game.
>And from a recent card randomizing thread, it takes 7 "riffles" to fully randomize a deck.
I don't think you understand what "randomize" means. It doesn't mean "you get proportional hands", it means that the state isn't predictable. It is still subject to variation in the amount of mana you draw.
Seriously, you are reciting trivially basic concepts, that everyone is aware of, and completely ignoring and/or misunderstanding what is being said and the real situation.
That's indeed a fundamental problem with Magic. Most modern TCGs have some form of mitigation.
You may look into "Force of Will" (the game, not the card). It plays a lot like Magic but mana is in a separate deck. Each turn, you have the option of playing a magic stone (same as a land in Magic) directly from that deck or do some other action instead.
That's why in most formats lands are considered staples and fairly expensive. Duallands, shocklands, and fetchlands can make your mana base much smoother.
