you do add strategy because I don't think the most "obvious" card choice is obvious at all. There are many solutions to an opponent's play, some of which are actually threats of your own (opponent plays creature, you play bigger creature instead of just destroying theirs).
Quote: rather than figuring out what can be done with what is available
Everything is available which means you have a larger selection of possibilities to choose from.
Having to 'make due' on just what is available in a normal MTG game is part of Magic - but in a theoretical new game you don't have that attachment to how things 'are supposed to be' and can tailor the game elements to the new status quo.
Quote:Original post by Dekasa If you eliminate randomness, you also have a game where each player comes in and does the same thing every game they play. It could make for a game that isn't played much.
Yeah, like chess and go.
To be fair, Chess and Go are conceptually no different than Tic-Tac-Toe or Checkers. The difference is the size of the problem space. I would think that a MTG type game without chance would have a relatively small problem space.
One way to add depth is to have less perfect information. Allow players to make plays that their opponent can not immediately read. Rock paper scissors isn't very complex, but the choice of what to play is made interesting in that you don't know what your opponent will play.
Maybe look at other games for inspiration. Citadels might be a good one.
Battleforge is exactly this. It eliminates randomness, but is essentially a CCG in that you assemble a deck of twenty cards, and these cards make up the units and buildings you can create in a real time strategy style game. So long as units have exact, rather than random, statistics then there is no element of chance.
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On a side note, I wont even entertain the idea that chess has no strategy. Either someone has no idea how to play chess, or there's a troll lurking about. No one could be that stupid, after all.
Quote:Original post by vaneger you do add strategy because I don't think the most "obvious" card choice is obvious at all. There are many solutions to an opponent's play, some of which are actually threats of your own (opponent plays creature, you play bigger creature instead of just destroying theirs).
A large part of MTG strategy is gaining some advantage over the "play bigger creature" approach with synergies between cards (e.g. lots of Merfolk creatures + Merfolk Sovereign who gives them a bonus) and explosive combos (e.g. the classic Channel + Fireball to convert life points to damage and kill the opponent on turn 1 or 2).
With a stacked deck, or with freely selected cards, this component degenerates: either there are so few potential synergies that the accumulation of enough insignificant moves to have some strategic depth is the only option, or the game degenerates into RPS-like blind moves (try a combo or try to disrupt the opponent's one).
In both cases, an identical, not shuffled deck for each player leads to the emergence of a well-known dominant strategy.
Quote: Having to 'make due' on just what is available in a normal MTG game is part of Magic - but in a theoretical new game you don't have that attachment to how things 'are supposed to be' and can tailor the game elements to the new status quo.
Random card drawing forces the player to plan for the average and worst case, rather than for the best case. This is a good feature for any strategy game, and I don't see why you want to remove it.
I think for it to work with a game like magic the strategy would come down to card timing and mystery.
What I would suggest is each player has a hand of 20 cards; a mana reserve that increases by 1 for each land in play at the start of their turn, the mana left in the reserve carries over each turn. All players start with 2 lands in play. It costs 1 mana to play 1 card. Once a card is played it either stays in play until destroyed or is discarded after use depending on the card.
I would probably also have cards in hand also be the players life points if you take damage you discard cards, you lose if you are attacked are have to discard your last card or you have no cards in hand at the end of any turn.
Then there is plenty of scope for strategy, play speeds, card reserves, and mana storage all play important factors. Save mana each turn to play more cards later on. Use it all or save some from defence, include additional lands in your deck to increase mana generation, Focus on creatures or direct damage, risk it all on one attack or play it safe
Quote:Original post by LorenzoGatti In both cases, an identical, not shuffled deck for each player leads to the emergence of a well-known dominant strategy.
Only if you know both decks. If you knew they had no counter for it, you could do something like the old-school Lightning Bolt/Channel/Fireball thing, but an opponent has numerous ways to counter that (I dunno... Force Spike/Lightning Bolt? It's been 12 years since I last played...) so you might have to pick a different strategy.
Quote:Random card drawing forces the player to plan for the average and worst case, rather than for the best case. This is a good feature for any strategy game, and I don't see why you want to remove it.
It might be that you simply don't want it. I don't think Chess would be better with a random factor, for example. And I think the original poster Girsanov is really trying to dig into how you would go about making a new game in the spirit of Chess, rather that doing what most computer games do and relying on the random factor to add the strategy. I think that's a useful avenue to research.
for sake of simplicity. Keep the normal rules of MTG but separate the deck into sets of 10. Instead of going through your "untap step" you can instead choose to swap your hand with one of the sets of 10(any remaining cards in your hand becomes a new set).
Random does not necessarily give a player more interesting choices. Unless the player is able to somehow influence random events, I think they are generally boring. The randomness in MTG is *entirely* controlled by players. They choose their decks and they choose the probabilities of drawing cards. If you were to add a new rule that says "roll a dice and draw that many cards" it wouldn't make the game any more fun, because you don't make any decisions based on the randomness.
Quote:Original post by Zouflain On a side note, I wont even entertain the idea that chess has no strategy. Either someone has no idea how to play chess, or there's a troll lurking about. No one could be that stupid, after all.
First of all, I didn't see anyone saying chess wasn't strategic. I think maybe someone thought someone was being sarcastic where they weren't ("The ability to position pieces (on a board) really add a ton of strategy to Chess.", i think is a valid point and they weren't being sarcastic).
Like others had said, I key part is deception and bluffing. In the case of magic, if you are both playing the exact same deck, with the ability to play any card at any time, the is a lot less strategy because you know how your opponent can react. Now, chess has that same aspect, but there are so many choices (after the first few moves there are thousands and thousands of combination if I remember correctly) that you try to guess what they may do. If you are playing magic with a 60 card deck, and at the beginning of your turn you search your deck for a card and put it in your hand, there are a lot of variable things one can do. Now, with magic card pool, you could set up infinite combos and first turn kills very easily, but with a standard aggro deck, with creatures and a healthy normal mix of creature removal (which, if you are making your own game, you could control this from the start), this I think could potentially retain strategy while removing randomness.
To reiterate, it's about deception, bluffing, etc, not just alternating bringing out the big guys. It's about making decisions, having options, choosing one vs the other. That's something that makes a game fun, and adds strategy (not the only thing mind you).
This is a good thread, I'm excited to see how it progresses.
