Hurloon Minotaurs Assemble
Enchantment (R)
When this enchantment enters the battlefield, search your library for a Hurloon Minotaur card, reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.
The first card you cast each turn with "Hurloon Minotaur" in it's name costs 0 to cast.

Imagine if Magic went that direction
Thank Richard Garfield for colors and natural synergy

As I've played more card games, I've really come to appreciate Magic's mana system. Yeah, we all bitch about screw/flood and the randomness that adds to the game but I've encountered few alternatives that feel as good at filling all the various roles mana does... and many that try and fail.

None of this is inherent to mana really. Hearthstone and Lorcana have mana in two different other ways and don't have this ****. Magic does mana very very very awkwardly.

Also, I used to think that yugioh was kinda terrible from the get-go due to not having any kind of resource for spells and traps at all, but honestly, it's yugioh's smallest problem. You can pace and balance a system like that just fine. Smash Up! does almost exactly the Yugioh thing and it's wonderful. A drafting game which name I forgot does too. Granted, neither are CCGs, but whatever.

Yugioh's combat system is worse than it's mana system, giving ludicrous edge to the attacker (they choose the targets with no restrictions AND everything has Haste AND everything has Trample AND everything has Vigilance), turning slightly bigger than average monsters into Moats, and making the whole defense stat and position mechanic basically relegated to desperation plays or incredibly nominal bluffing (Cursed Scroll type ****). And much, much worse than the absence of an innate resource system is an absence of an innate deckbuilding/faction system (colors, classes, etc) because this either turns the format into everyone running bland generic goodstuff or everyone running pre-build decks constructed from parasitic mechanics and artificial synergy.

Huh ... I always pointed to the lack of a fundamental resource mechanic as the main reason YGO plays the way it does, but given our debate in the Bar the Gate thread, the combat mechanics do play a greater role in how it plays:

YGO does kind of have a resource system in the form of trading cards in a zone for other cards in another zone, much like a black mana player that doesn't need mana. But, much like control needs time to stabilize in Magic, so does control in YGO. And, over the years, the time available for control to stabilize has gotten so ridiculously small that feels like a suicide aggro mirror.

Like UC said, the combat plays a big role in that regard: everything has hase, everything has Trample, and being a good attacker often also means being a good blocker due the position of a defending monster deciding whether it uses attack or defense to in damage calculations (or to refer to Magic again, everything is basically Doran but for power).

Actually makes me wonder how the fandmade Goat format plays in that regard.

Goat and Edison are the bees knees

This series is an interesting look at how old Yugioh formats played and evolved. Goat starts at video 25 and Edison is 51.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oHrbD_ ... IAfFjwtY0y

i like parasitic design and i think its one of yugioh's strengths (having only played it casually) but i understand its not necessarily for everyone, and there are different directions you can take it in.

i feel like most of the ccgs i've played have handled mana better than magic, although yugioh has not. There are pros and cons to different systems though. notably, magic's five colours with no deckbuilding restrictions makes creating a manabase an interesting part of deckbuilding, particularly in limited where you might have to make difficult choices regarding splashing.

You know what, on the second thought, after hearing the recent news and announcements, I think magic is going to be more ludicrous than yugioh.

The Foundations is really starting a new era, huh.

magic has always had a kitchen sink setting with a pretty wide diversity of tones so i don't think foundations is as out of place as some people do although it does feel weird

yugioh is very jump-sharky in terms of its setting though so i don't know that magic will overtake it even if they go full fortnite

I mean YGO is like nine different settings by now, plus something like every archetype having its own setting or being part of a small cluster that seem to inhabit the same universe.

Standard legal Universes Beyond, though...

Foundations is great, I have absolutely nothing against it. If anything, a non-rotating core set is an amazing idea to steal from early HS.

All-format-legal Universes Beyond, and not just any UB but the most not-Magic stuff possible, and not just a little bit but half of new releases, though...

And the original sets include a racing set. They allowed sensible multiversal travel (a great idea if you ask me, by the way!) and what are they doing with it? Glubbing cart racing across the planes. Tarkir Dragonstorm is another round of planar takesies-backsies after retconning Innistrad changes twice.

Magic always was a kitchen sink but a very particular and curated kitchen sink. It was 40K, not Fortnite.

Ultimately what a TCG is selling isn't cards, it's curation of cards. Cards are easy to make, anyone can do it.
Balanced, stylistically cohesive, mechanically elegant and novel and good-feeling cards the play for which is organized and coordinated and judged - this is the only thing that makes a deck of magic cards cost more than a deck of poker cards. These things cannot be viewed as incidental.

But we'll see.

the social aspect is probably the main thing that helps to sell cards i'd guess. the main people who will buy magic are people who have people they want to play magic with, and so its something of a self-sustaining system, especially in the paper (as opposed to digital) ecosystem where there are very few other games that maintain close to the same presence in terms of local events and clubs and such.

Its probably wise economically to focus more on pulling new players into the system via crossovers rather than try to keep the older players, who will probably accept a lot of abuse before they actually quit playing.

the creator of a board game i like (spirit island) said something to the effect of "spirit island players care more about a cohesive setting than mtg players do, where you can play as godzilla and gandalf" and i immediately imagined how all of the lore nerds here would react to that statement. I think the magic multiverse is an interesting setting with a fair amount of potential and its unfortunate what it has been reduced to but i think the car left that road a long time ago.

I think Hearthstone's mana system contributes to it being a less fun game. It makes games much more same-y, it makes curving out stronger/swingier, and it makes high-cost cards much less risky.

yeah, I agree. Hearthstone lacks a lot of the depth Magic has, and while that has to do with more than just mana systems, I've always found it pretty noticeable how every time a CCG tries to "fix" the mana system, the game seems to wind up less interesting for it. I haven't tried Lorcana so I can't speak to whether it falls into that pattern, but looking it up they seem to just be doing the WoW TCG system for mana, which, while certainly more interesting than Hearthstone's approach, does still reduce variance significantly (arguably moreso than Hearthstone does) and variance is a key component for mechanical depth.

Oh good I'm not the only one who thinks this.

In my mind, Magic's mana system is both strategic and tactical in great degrees. Strategic, in that you have more dials to turn when you're building your deck and tactical in that you need to know when to push your luck as opposed to mulling as well as how to sequence your plays around what you've got when. Guarantee systems like Hearthstone are neither, or the degree to which they're either is far less. The TCG Force of Will also hit this, but added some granularity to get good tactical choices back by giving an opportunity cost to doing your +land action, one you'd happily pay early in the game but really have to consider mid or late.

I've gushed about this game before, but I think the defunct TCG The Caster Chronicles hit a real sweet spot that may have actually improved on Magic's mana system. Essentially, all "lands" were Legendary by default, but any card could be played face-down as a Wastes equivalent. Which is terrible when you need colors (the game had seven to magic's five). There were also higher-level casters (lands) that were played as an upgrade over a level one -- either one with their same name or, if you didn't have a same name, you could use a face-down. Each caster typically had an ability (usually a tap ability) aside from mana production and the higher level ones would have abilities that required axing a same-named card, which could be the one they were played on top of (not costing you mana access) or a face-down that couldn't be face-up because legend rule. Because of the "play things facedown" option you'd rarely be truly screwed but if you balanced your deck poorly you'd still suffer due to lacking colors and extra abilities, so it was mostly mitigating that "everybody's legendary" pain point since you had something legit you could do with extras.

Back to magic, I think Razor hits the nail on the head identifying variance as a good thing. Aside from mechanical depth, I remember a very long talk on why a seemingly mediocre matchmaker is actually good for competitive online games: Being able to be tiered up or down both dangles the possibility of easy victories and removes their certitude. Translated to magic: the possibility of the other guy being mana screwed means even little Bobby newcomer could take down anybody, and that the gigaspike can't rest easy that the game's just going to play itself. This helps maintain engagement both for the side for whom it's more pity and the side who has to work and pay attention for their wins. And there's that strat level, where fighting the innate variance is a good experience for a player, in the layer of the game that's "played" before you even sit down at the table. Magic's mana system leads to a lot of interesting choices, and that's a good thing in a game.

I think this is exactly it: as a game designer, it's so easy to underestimate the value of friction, and to confuse "this is frustrating in the moment" with "this makes the game worse". it's obviously easy to overcorrect in the other direction too, but if you remove every barrier, you also remove the game's ability to make stories, and stories are what make games fun.

This is a good quality for a game to have, of course, but also, it's true even without lands - you can still draw only low drops or only top end or only payoffs. And you can still get color-screwed in the best mana setup (Duel Masters mana), as a punishment for actively getting ambitions with colors.

The things that make mana screw and flood egregious are that:
- They are not active punishments. You aren't paying the price of your decisions, whatever kind of deck you are playing you are always at significant risk of one or the other or usually both.
- They don't lead to an edge, they lead to nongames where one player often literally can't do anything at all. Is it really a novice beating a master if the only spell the master plays is a 2-drop on turn 2 and then nothing? To what extent is the master playing the game? If a deck is color-screwed, it can usually still play without one of it's colors at a significant disadvantage, but no spells is no spells and no mana is no mana. Variance is a good thing, but automatic nongames aren't. I am having trouble persuading some people that luck isn't magic's main decisive factor when I teach them the game and then one of the training games I or them get screwed.
- The reverberations of mana screw and flood existing reach deep and make the game worse in many subtle ways. Opt, a card which is entirely about having options, is a non-choice half of the time, because half of the time you are either keeping any and all lands or keeping any and all nonlands. Same with Cycling, rummaging, mdfcs... The choices provided by the mana system existing are precisely the opposite of interesting, optimizing the manabase is the most boring part of Magic. Mana denial wouldn't be nearly as feel-bad without the need to randomly draw lands. The player with a boardwipe would not get randomly locked at 1 land less than they need to resolve it, and the player who gets boardwiped would never randomly draw land after land after. And so on and so forth. All across the game, the presence of screw and flood looms over, making decisions less interesting and making gameplay more (!) one-sided.

variance is responsible for most of the gameplay in tcgs and so its a very important design point, but that also involves considering where your variance is coming from and what the impact of that is, and not just how much variance there is in the game, you don't want your game to feel like a dice roll with extra steps.

hearthstone's mana system strips a significant amount of variance from it but most of the variance in both mtg and hearthstone still come from the fact that you're drawing random cards, which is a good form of variance because you have to adjust your gameplan based on it. mana screw and flood in their extremes can be bad because they reduce gameplay options to the point where you can't do anything (although having somewhat less or somewhat more mana than is optimal are both good variance and more common outcomes). its good to have to think about how to play from behind, but that only applies if you have any options at all. Hearthstone has less of a problem than magic wrt this, because unless you're running a very high curve deck it might be impossible to draw nothing that you can play. Its still pretty uncommon to get flooded or screwed to this degree in mtg, but its more common than in hearthstone.

Hearthstone makes up for the variance removed by its mana system by introducing more variance on individual cards. hearthstone includes a lot of random effects so that players are constantly prompted to re-evaluate their gameplan as a result of an unexpected random outcome and so that the game is less predictable. As a result of this, hearthstone (at least when i played it many years ago) probably didn't have meaningfully less variance than magic. Its possible this isn't the case anymore if deisgn philosophy has shifted and the metagame has more consistent decks as a result. I do think hearthstone has less depth but this probably has more to do with cards being less interactive and less to do with variance.

I don't think hearthstone's mana system is great either, but its functional. Runeterra puts a simple spin on it that helps with making decisions on how to spend mana more nuanced and reduces the emphasis on curving out every turn. (they let you bank unspent mana each turn up to a cap of 3 that can be used to play only non-creature spells. which allows decks to decide to underplay in order to be able to remove a threat at a critical moment, and is relevant in a lot of other situations as well ona per-deck basis)

Yeah.
The strictly optimal amount of lands to have is 1 in the opener, 1 every turn for the next X turns where X is anywhere from 1 to 9 depending on the deck, and then none after. If you have more, you get less choices for spells and sometimes no spells at all; if you have less, you skip land drops and sometimes are gated from higher-costing cards.
The interesting thing here is that having fewer choices is often barely noticible but having no spells is devastating; and that missing land drops is on it's own often barely noticible (not always, more noticible in faster formats) but being gated from higher-cost cards is devastating, especially if the cost is 3 or 4. When it comes to flood and screw variance, the middle ground exists, but it's not very noticible, and I would say the impace of middle ground variance from the number of lands is less than the impact of middle ground variance from costs and effects of spells drawn.

HS Basic/Classic, arguably the peak of Hearthstone, didn't use that many random effects and there was still quite enough variance just from CMCs and having/not having the right cards and whatnot. Hearthstone's system has plenty of variance, and I'd say a bigger problem for it is that it still keeps Magic's card determinism (if you drew a card, your only options are playing it or ignoring it until you play it) and it introduced lots of mechanics trying to address the resulting lack of choices - Discover and Tradeable are now both evergreen, for one.

"You can play red cards as Mountains and blue cards as Islands" is so obviously the best choice for the mana system - it removes mana screw and flood while keeping slightly tamer color screw, it eliminates card determinsm in a way that turns every single card into a decision (but not an overbearingly complex one! it's binary and one of the halves is super consistent) and eliminates the need for the ugly hack of sideboarding, it keeps open the possibilities of rewarding people for comitting to monocolor or almost monocolor with multi-pip cards or wantonly mixing the colors; and finally, it opens up cool design space with lands and nonlands organically transforming into each other.
Obviously, when it comes to art and entertainment, "the best choice" is fundamentally subjective, but I'd say that here, it's about as subjective as "touching a hot stove is not a good choice". I honestly don't know why isn't almost every new game using this.

playing non-lands as lands is what the WoW TCG did, an i guess its what lorcana does? The main detriment compared to a system like magic is that you won't have as much variance in the amount of available mana, which puts more emphasis on curving out and makes decks more consistent in general, possibly to the point of it being problematic unless variance can be introduced somewhere else. Tevish talked about it, but deciding how many lands to play and in what combinations, as well as deciding on a mana curve add depth to deck-building that is lost in a system like the one you are describing.

hearthstone's database says 27 of 382 card use the word "random", which is probably a lot more than magic. a lot of these cards were also particularly swingy (knife juggler, mad bomber, MCT/Sylvanas, Ragnaros, etc.). I can believe that the variance present in individual card's effects has increased over time but it was very significant in classic hearthstone compared to in any magic environment, and that variance helped to make up for hearthstone's mana system.

Lorcana does this except without color and with a very noticible propotion of cards unplayable as lands. Which is fine and good but not as good as "You may play red cards as Mountains and blue cards as Islands."

The way Lorcana does colors is that you choose 2/6 colors and you can use any cards from them and none from others. Which means there's no monocolored decks (unless they'd print payoff cards with truly egregious conditions), no distinction between splashing, and definitely no 3+ color decks, ever. And limited does away with colors altogether, which sounds insane to me.

It didn't feel to me that HS randomness in Classic was that significant outside of specifically Ragnaros. And I mostly played Zoolock, an archetype with tons of "discard from hand at random" effects and random toughness boosts and the Knife Juggler. I mean, it didn't feel like chess, and a good thing too, but mostly from draws. Especially "do they have the boardwipe/the removal/the lethal", which is there for most magic-likes.

They did ramp up randomness a hell of a lot shortly after though.