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Mtg somehow has more brutal gacha, than some gacha games.

This whole discussion focused on competitive games with two or more players, but what about a single player game? It seems that the main concern cited throughout is disincentivizing new players due to creating a skill gap. In a single player game, couldn't memory be used to add challenge to various parts of the game?

I disagree on the idea that once an IP you like comes in it, you will change your mind on UB. I love Final Fantasy but I personally still prefer Magic as a game and as a lore vibe to be its own thing. If other people do enjoy it, that doesn't bother me directly. Although I wish the market didn't reward this kind of IP salad approach. Part of it is simply being a little bit too aware of capitalism, its mechanisms and their consequent moral depravity, which respectively break my immersion and reduce the joy of an experience. Personally, I can't shut that off. Tacking on the idea that Wizards could be beholden to over committing UB cards and might overdesign such cards, it just compounds the ever snowballing list of errors around this fundamentally great game.

6:50 thank you for explaining what Commander is

I heavily disagree with the point presented on fighting game combos and the idea of being against 'memorization' in general. It's a too 'by the numbers' perspective that completely eliminates any nuance behind it. I think it's best illustrated with an analogy to piano. Playing the piano is like a combo in that you need to memorize key patterns in order to get the right output. And like combos, we have developed machines that will automatically output a piano song given a single button input. However, being skilled at playing one is not considered a problem for other pianists. Why? Well, to get the obvious one out of the way, piano is not a PvP performance. It's more of a Player vs Self, where it's more about overcoming the player's own limits. This is more of a problem with human psychology in general; we tend to blame things around us before ourselves and PvP environments provide us with a ripe target. Fighting games also just lack super rewarding offline modes and entertaining casual modes. Smash has them and it's the biggest game that's closest to the fighting game genre out there. There's not really a mode where you can win versus other players that's low stakes and highly random, makes you interested in the core game mode and helps you get into that introspective mindset that helps you improve. Two, because a human is in control the performance can fail. A combo can drop or someone can fail to pick up a combo from a stray hit because they weren't aware they could. Some characters in fighting games are explicitly designed around having long pokes that can only be comboed out of from specific ranges and get heavily punished for attempting them outside of those ranges in a way that's difficult to eyeball for a human. It provides for an element of randomness since your mood can affect your performance and it's hard to control that on a day to day basis, but you can still (attempt to) control for that randomness. Dropping a combo or attempting the wrong one at crucial moments is very much woven into the general play of fighting games and it's even resulted in game mechanics where you can force your opponent to drop a combo. The part where I agree though is that a new player's attention is focused too much around combos. A very common meme within pretty much any fighting game circle is that one person who labs a cool new combo but can never land it because they spent all their time doing cool combos instead of playing against other people. In my opinion though this is a failure of the devs to properly signpost that there are other skills a player should learn beforehand. Among the bog standard modes every fighting game comes with is a combo trial mode, which immediately puts emphasis on combos and long strings of attacks. There isn't a mode that comes with prerecorded punish scenarios, whiff punish scenarios, the defending against the different options a character has, etc and it's left to the player to use training mode to figure how to test those scenarios, which a new player will never realistically figure out by the time they've decided whether or not they like the game. It's something that really should be included in every fighting game, but only a few do it and even then only partially.

Holy shit, is there a long version of this ?

Crash 4 was guilty of making you feel like you didn't progress by progressing as you finish each level and see just how few gems you got.

This is by far my favorite game design channel. It’s niche for sure, but for people who are into this kind of stuff, it’s fantastic!

I strongly disagree with this entire video. This seems to be an attack on skill based games like chess. Your premise seems to be that because chess is a game where skill dominates, all the players become too skilled and there are only skilled players on the high end and low skilled players on the low end and no in between. This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how skill is developed. In any skill based game with an elo matchmaking system like chess, people don't just magically become pro players on their way up the ladder. There will always be a wide range of skill levels and if the game is populated enough there will always be players at your skill level to play against. It's not even about new players vs old players - the fact is in chess there are new players who are better than other players who have been playing for years. So there will always be a range of skill levels and there's already a built in chance that the lesser skilled player can win just based on the elo formulas.

polygon just put out a video about playing cards I think it would be cool to hear your reaction to it!

Playing Flesh and Blood is so good, meta IRL is ever changing.

Fighting games aren't moving away from 10 button combos. That was something tekken 7 added. What you're talking about started with street fighter when hit stun was a glitch and people discovered combos

This mainly is due to a lot of online games simply not having good/balanced matchmaking even in "casual" queues or game modes. A lower skilled player should only be matched with other lower skill players but that's never the case. Especially fighting games where queue and are placed against some guy with 1500+ hours on a single character, you get juggled Perfect'd and then turn the game off. Its the reason McC2's rerelease on FIghting Colleciton flopped. That game is notoriously unbalanced/unfair and people were jsut playing the best set of characters

Not sure if I'm getting the story right, but I recall Chet Faliszek saying something about how some people at Valve early on in the development of Left 4 Dead said something along the lines of "This game is badly designed because all hell broke loose and I almost died" -- and Chet had to explain to them that that's how the game was supposed to work.

Randomness can be a double-edged sword. Check out the Shin Megami Tensei series. The amount of randomness can make even the weakest mobs can crush you depending on the turn order and enemies combination. You could lose hours of grinding/exploration due to one random encounter that went really wrong against a normal enemy. In s single-player game, randomness is probably one the worst approaches. Of course, in multiplayer games, in which there is a (often huge) skill gap between casual and harcore players, adding random elements to reduce the amount of skill required to be evenly matched, might help casuals, but will often drive away more skilled players, who'll feel like their effort has been for nothing if the game won't recognize it.

Part of what bothers me as an average player of dozens and dozens of games marked "competitive" is the delegitimization of just wanting to JUST have fun and play the game. The games themselves warp to suit players that are professional or important, but the changes they make don't suit me. I don't watch competitive matches of most games I play, I don't care about world tournaments of the games I want to play. I just want to play the game and have fun playing the game.

predicting the need for foundations months before it was announced...hahaha

The lego flowerpot is quite cool

I really enjoyed the last few sentences of the talk and felt really understood. Commander content is kind of overtaking and overshadowing the original MTG game. I'm loving several Highlander formats, the 60-card-formats and even some unusual things like Dandan but I'm really not into Commander. Well, I could write a lot about this issue, but you know what I mean, I guess...

To be clear the meta turnover thing definitely does still happen. In games with slower content changes like fighting games it's very frequent.

It's not just a skill gap issue, competitive players will force devs to make fun mechanics either change or dissappear if it's seen as not perfectly balanced, or they will ask for things to be buffed that 90% of players already think is broken but "doesn't work at high rankings". Or they will have the devs change the game so much it actually messes up the franchise, look at Halo. Halo 5 is a direct result of pandering to the pro players, and in doing so it almost killed the IP.

Pro players arent the best to give solutions to a format/meta when the products are released too fast. They dont have time to find a solution, they have to learn the new meta

"unless you have like an unhealthy meta" you mean like most of the metas of most of pvp games ? 💀 Thats just the way the Yugioh meta is, same for pokemon unite, pokemon pocket etc etc

Part of the issue is when the enthusiast/competitive portions intersect in the way it does in the fighting game community. Because being competitive is not very lucrative even for many of the best players, there's incentive to create enthusiast content that generates clicks - despite also being part of the community most conducive to problem solving. The results of this are some of the worst discussions surrounding fighting games in the genre's history.

Gavin is slowly turning into Sirius Black.

Really good explanations!

Can anyone please explain to me what the valley of effort is?

Game design plays a lot in matters of meta. Not talking about card games, I’d say that some videogames need to tone down the ability to optimize builds. As an example, Pokémon should have a max of 3 perfect IV and never more than that, even with hyper training/bottle caps. That way, everyone would have less optimized pokemon, making builds more interesting. Also breeding would be easier. That’s only an aspect I used just to get the idea across. Pokémon is a mess that needs to be rebooted/reworked. Basically, giving players choices on where to put the optimizations without letting them do it all over it maker for more fun games.

The very premise of magic the gathering is competetive. And i believe the artwork and flavor text were actually meant to evoke emotions and take your opponent off of their game.

lemme google the flow chart real quick. "results oriented" Early game meta is the only thing that matters imo. By the second tournament you have a bunch of clones of the winner from the first. Copy paste, such skill. Theorycrafting is a niche nowadays. To be fair, piloting is a skillset. But thats what it breaksdown to imo. Whos the best pilot is the real question. Deck buildling is just copy paste

I'm 7 minutes in before I realized these are all card games. I thought the board / card games in the shot were deco. XD

Your comments on fighting games are nonesense. Makes me question the rest of what you're saying here.

12:00 the turnover meta that you are talking about is clearly seen in Vintage mtg. The T0 deck stabilizes as the most popular, T1 is the known counter, then T2 that is good into both of them sees a lot of competitive success. Then the rotation comes as creators and pros adapt to the adaptations. This has been affected by the Horizons sets printing powerful cards but ultimately this is the entire system that Vintage is based on.

More like dredgeful, amiright folks?

I don't really appreciate how matter of fact you guys speak. You're designers but you're gamers too. I don't like language that creates a divide as if you know more than the person who plays the game. It's a little bit too arrogant for simply having the know how to make them.

I play pauper from time to time (when I see my favorite deck doing numbers in tournaments), in our pauper community whenever someone talks about edh, somebody would jokingly say "what's commander?" and someone else would always reply "it's a board game loosley based on mtg"

Standard made more sense back when it lasted two years. It rotates way too fast now.

I disagree with the premise of this video for a couple reasons/facts. 1) MtG has the highest non-game ratio compared to any other 1v1 card game. Failure to make land drops leads to more non games than any combo. This is a big reason why Commander has usurped the original way to play the game. Using threat assessment you can safely ignore the person whos missing mana and interact with the person who is playing. 2) MtG has no recognizable IP. Im willing to bet that at the end of 2025 the 3 best selling MTG sets will be LotR, Final Fantasy, & Marvel. It relies heavily on other IPs and gimmicks from other IPs placed into MTG. 3) Instant speed interaction does create a subgame but as someone who has Top 8'd several large scale events you ignore this subgame. You make them have it. Statistically they don't "have it". Make them waste their mana and you continue to play optimally. 4) Magic decks on average will only see 12-20 of their cards per game. This means that 40 cards in your deck don't matter meaning the ability to play around an opponent is extremely diminished. Games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh don't have this problem. 5) Magic cards in recent sets have been designed for multiplayer. This has caused back breaking issues in 1v1 play where these cards completely overtake the game. See Companion, Initiative, Energy, and The Monarch as some examples of this

It's not "the internet" that does this. It's people who can't find meaning in their lives, and so try to turn games into purpose instead of relaxation and fun.

Just found this podcast. Love it

People remember sinkhole but almost no one seems to remember demonic hordes. You had to give it three black in upkeep and destroy one of your own lands but it was a 5/5 that was just tapped to destroy land. You put an instant energy on it and it would literally destroy two of your opponent's lands every turn or destroy one land and attack them for five.

Pinball actually suffered from this in a way that effectively killed it. They started making the machines more interesting and complex to cater to the fans that put the most money into them, but at the cost of turning away more and more novices with machines that were too confusing. Eventually they hit the point where the machines were too hard for novices and thus only played by the skilled, setting it up for the collapse arcade games to kill it off.

what a great fucking video. A very rare no fluff game design overview that delves deep enough to get to something actionable across game genres. Instant sub.

Content overload puts pressure into experimentation, but it might not always be positive, incentivizing. The more you know about a given meta, the less incentivized you are to play "under" it, even when it seems to be a right fit to counter a dominant strategy, because the desire for innovation and pioneering might be overshadowed by the fear of social judgment. "Why would you think you've come up with an answer, how do you think this is a new idea, if hundreds of people whose JOB it is to play this game daily, for tournament results and/or content, didn't?" It is not surprising that often, in Magic, meta shifts come from "small tournaments", MTGO leagues, etc. You don't see wild things in big tournaments with a lot of media coverage. A player in a big tournament, pro or not, is likely to lean towards the safest option, although each will differ in meta reading and positioning, but seldom entirely unexpected technology. When it's done, it's regarded as "expressive", a "personal choice", as in not objective or optimal. Competition is results oriented. They may feel disincentivized to experiment themselves. A player in a small tournament is not in for thousands of dollars, they usually can afford the risk of failure. They're also not being live-streamed to hundreds or thousands, so there's less fear of ridicule. However, if this same player consumes non innovative content, they also may fear feeling inadequate for trying something different from what they spend time watching. In this content overload environment, one might feel that their own voice is irrelevant. Specially when online discussion is more often than not abrasive and non constructive. Maybe a more comprehensive tournament structure could create opportunities for innovators. Maybe, without a community or audience willing to listen, change remains smothered.

Frankly, I think a big reason that competitive games are declining in popularity for content is simply: People don't wanna play them as much anymore. All of my friends pretty much agree that the culture that surrounds competitive multiplayer games has grown increasingly focused on the 1% of players. If you play Leauge or Call of Duty or Counterstrike, you're pushed and pressured by people to play at the absolute peak of your game. And if you peak mid gold? You're the worst thing ever and you shouldnt even be playing. that kind of attitude just ruins the whole thing for me. The love of the game just isn't there. I peaked Diamond in Smite, top 16%, back in 2015. I've been part of the grind to the top. I just dont have the energy for it anymore. I have the time, and I still love playing competitive games, but I hate the people who play them. There's no sportsmanship. Its just "win or cry trying."

I don't understand this crying about competition in a game that is focused on competition. If someone don't like it, go play Minecraft or The Sims... I play Yu-Gi-Oh with a Blue-Eyes deck, which is considered a tier 3 deck. I play it because I can't afford a better one. I accept that I have to work harder to win. But here, under this video, I see that every other comment is tears about how bad ranked games are...

Every time I come back to this channel the guy on the right looks more and more like Einstein.

As a primarily EDH content creator myself, I love focusing on the fun and weird stuff like you said. I play Modern or other card games for my competitive itch. But EDH, to me at least, is a causal format first. So playing with cards I don’t see often is what draws me to the format. Love the content and keep it up!

It used to take a while for a metagame to get figured out and sometimes you'd get a surprise break out deck (Mono Blue Devotion from RTR-Theros PT). Now with all of this data flowing as fast as its being produced, I find it very hard to maintain interest in playing ranked ladders online

RUclips has shown that, paradoxically, it is indeed possible to optimize the fun out of a game whose purpose is to have fun