the problem with the Duel Masters/WoW TCG/Lorcana approach of playing all cards as lands is that it's an absolute variance killer. in Magic, an ideal starting hand has, say, 3 lands and 4 spells that you can use early on to establish your game plan. but it's very easy to not get exactly that. you might have 4 lands, reducing your early options, or you might have 2, making lower casting costs even more valuable as a stopgap. and the 4 spells you have may not curve out perfectly. you might have a redundant 2-drop and no 3s, or you might have an expensive spell you can't use yet but will come in handy later. there's a lot of things that could go "wrong", which allows the game to create many different possible openings even in the same matchup.

if, on the other hand, all 7 of your starting cards can be either lands or spells at will, the odds of having that perfect opening go up significantly. the 8-drop I was hoping not to draw until later? it's a land now. the extra 2-drop I can't fit into my curve? land. the off-color spell I don't have the mana source to cast? oh you better believe it's a land. (which is why, for the record, I don't really buy that the system allows for much in the way of color screw.) and since I start with 7 options, not 4, it's much more likely that, somewhere in there, I've got the options I was hoping for. the exact cards may vary, but the basic dynamic of an opener is pretty similar across games, so I have to design my curve a lot less carefully, and matchups become redundant and repetitive a lot faster. this is actually one space where Hearthstone's system works better than Duel Masters: by not requiring cards at all, it lets them give you a much smaller starting hand, which does go some way toward reintroducing variance. in my experience with Hearthstone it's not really enough, but your mileage may vary.

my point, though, is that I think this argument:



is asking the wrong question. I agree that the middle-ground impact is "barely noticeable", which is why Magic's mana system is always the first thing on the chopping block for any new TCG, but noticeable isn't the same as important. it's like how Dominion starts you off with a couple Estates in your deck: having some of the cards in your deck, at any given time, be functionally dead makes the flow of play significantly more dynamic. in fact, the latter kind of variance you mention (variance of card options available) is in no small part a product of the former: that card determinism thing (great term, by the way) is the only way to ensure that sometimes you just don't have good options, and as frustrating as that can be in the moment, I think it leads to more compelling experiences overall if sometimes you have to solve for a bad situation. the value of the land system isn't that you might not draw the right amount of lands. it's that you definitely draw less of everything else.

Eh ... when it comes to mana/resource systems in TCGs, I feel as though the way Magic does it increases the complexity of deck building, which in turn could be considered a barrier to entry since players need a deck in order to play. I mean I'm not a fan of the Dragon Ball Super/Duel Masters/Kaijudo idea of lands are also nonlands, but I feel like the potential that Force of Will tried to implement as far as making mana more accessible to new players, and allow them to get more familiar with more immersive parts of gameplay like combat and casting spells much more quickly.

Or, if we're allowed to use analogies, Force of Will is like a Windows OS; Magic is like a Linux OS. More customizable, but requires a higher degree of expertise to make functional and/or optimize.

I feel like maybe you just want more background variance than I do?
Like, I don't like deterministic games, and I don't feel visceral hatred towards coin flip cards (I think they're cool!), but I think games where both people get to do their thing and have a fine draw are plenty interesting on their own, and I think if most blowouts that happen are due to enemy action rather than your deck betraying you, it's not badly textured gameplay at all.

Yes, you can play your off-color card as a land, but you had to give up the option to use it as a spell. And you're playing your second color for a reason, supposedly! If your starting hand is 5 cards all of different colors, you can't cast any of them and you are absolutely doomed. If your starting hand is 6 cards 2 of each color in a 3 color deck, and some of them are double-pip, it's far from smooth. You cannot follow up a UU card with a 1GG card.

There are so many ways to introduce more variance btw. Less number of allowed copies per card and HS-like legendaries, altering starting hand size and mulligan rules, swingy effects, narrow but powerful effects, random effects, more color-restrictive costs...

You may notice that Magic's evolution as a game have been almost entirely into the direction of reducing variance. There was no mulligan rule at first, and then it got changed about five times and it got more permissive with each iteration. We swapped out HS-like legend for a rule with less variance, and then another with even less variance. We introduced sideboard as a concept. There's been more and more card draw, more and more scry-like and cycling-like mechanics, more and more accessible and powerful color fixing; and lately they're reintroducing efficiently-costed tutors and wish mechanics.

I remember reading somewhere where someone was breaking down magic stated that mtg is a double variance game - the first being your starting seven cards, and the second being how many lands in that hand. Even the strongest magic player can't win with mana flood/screw and most people will agree that those are kind of games they hate the most. I have read arguments about how lands are the best and worst part of magic and I agree with that. Getting land screwed and having no-games is one of the most frustrating things ever but the flip side is that when you do draw the land you need on the crucial turn, you can hear the horns of victory sounding your opponent's demise. Lands also makes deck-building more interesting but the downside is that the mana base becomes a restricting factor. Lands produces a second layer of variance, for better or for worse. The issue with lands and the mana system is that there is no real middle-ground' and whatever middle-ground that's left is increasingly getting smaller as the power creep keeps increasing, missing a land drop in current day magic is so much worse than it was in the past.

As far as the original post's point about parasitic design - yeah, that's a horrendous way to avoid deck generalization . "Here are your 5-10 cards that all directly refer to each other by name so that's your new deck type! Throw out all your other trash because they don't explicitly call out these cards."

Lack of a mana system also eliminated all the aspects of tempo tied to that whole system. Yes, technically you can put restrictions on how many whatever you can cast per turn - in the case of Yu-Gi-Oh it quickly devolves into just playing cards without those restrictions or special summoning everything - which then leads to games being close to 1 turn in length due to essentially limitless tempo.

Then with deck generalization the different factions being tied to the resource used is afaik the most natural way to have factions overall, with MTG lands especially enabling blending them nicely and creating their identities. Something like Hearthstones raw categorization is quite artificial and that artificiality will affect design where it isn't surprising Hearthstone devs turned toward actually spelling out some sort of a color pie -esque determinations.

However, the market overall has gotten oversaturated with MTG clones where Yu-Gi-Oh can be refreshing by simply being considerably different from MTG rather than its usual variants such as Hearthstone. Seems like most card games default to being some new sub-branch of MTG though which is just bland af. Whatever custom card games I developed in the past, I made sure that they wouldn't just be some altered MTG clone.

On the MTG variants themselves, I don't think the different systems for mana resources shown in the MTG variants are strictly better or worse options. It's the usual with game design where there aren't exactly 'solutions', just choices (albeit very possibly conflicting design principles).

EDIT: Oh I btw abhor the way Hearthstone plays with everything drawing a card and being midrange sticky hell where players go through the game with 5+ cards in hand at all times. It's especially troubling that this is kinda how EDH plays and these influences are most certainly spreading to 60 card constructed formats in terms of MTG design which causes a lot of development trouble.