Are Magic: The Gathering Cards Getting Too Complicated?
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
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I have to agree in some aspects, the cards are getting more wordy but at the end of the day,the game changes and it will always move on as a card game.
We can't always have grisly bears and savannah lions,the game would become stagnant and people will lose interest,it evolves,it can't be stuck in the past.
I still play grand arbiter as a commander and he's from 2006! He's no good in terms of today but I still love playing him.
When the game -starts making less money- is when complexity creep will have gone too far
There is a lot of valid things to be said about wordiness, but at least we aren't illegible while doing it like yugioh.
Though we should stop making more artifact tokens and doing the day night dungeon stuff.
😗 The Quezzles sound pretty cool, actually! I'll suggest it to friends who don't have pets that'll eat the pieces. 😅
There's a card coming up in LCI that is going to require literally changing some of the rules, and I'm just waiting to see how badly it's going to get mangled when the new comp rules release...
"Reading the card, does not explain the card but actually initiates a short word problem and reading comprehension check."
And a 15 minute debate with the other players because none of them are level 1 judges
The times a strange rule interaction happens are becoming more and more frequent.
In the old days. Once a year.
3 years a go. Once a month.
Now every game session one game with a rule interaction we have a discussion about how it works exactly.
“Endymion the mighty master of magic” would like a word with the magic community
Remember that Heroes of the Realm card that had you "make a charisma check"? No way they don't try pulling that in some D&D set down the line.
@@OgreSayrone as an Endymion player, yes. Honestly I hope Magic doesn't end up like YGO where you just negate your opponent from playing at all with zone negates and such, that is anti-fun.
Magic player: “This card has too much text on it!”
Yugioh player: “First time?”
I had a feeling someone was going to make this comment before I could...
*makes Professor play Endymion*
@@Kylora2112 he’d have a stroke if he looked at Kashtira Fenrir
Difference is, YGO players tend to actually defend it
Exactly the first thing I thought xD
What I will miss most from vanilla creatures are all the opportunities to flesh out MtG lore using their text boxes. In a world where we are now inundated in strange IPs and pop culture references, the chances for telling the actual MtG story in an organic way are now few and far in between.
Great point!
Learning about the lore through the flavor texts is something that vanilla creatures excelled at.
Right when I started playing (and only knew some basic lore and characters), this was a reason that could make me appreciate even the 'chaff' in people's collections when I started playing.
Some might say that those really interested can just google it.
But getting the story told 'organically' through selected bits of information on the cards itself is very different from that kind of research.
(On days before the internet, this even made the lore somewhat of a scavenger hunt. Finding a quote from a known Legend on another card felt special, haha.)
@@LinkEXyep. Opening a pack and learning about a plane like Amonkhet and Innistrad because the cards have room for flavor text is great. Flavor text is a lot of the reason why I like goblins so much. They're flavor texts are just goofy, especially a lot of the old ones.
I feel cards are less iconic now because we don't have that room for flavor text. I can't for the life of me tell you what Hatred does but I can certainly recite that flavor text
Yes! Pokemon can teach MTG that a card is might be desiderable even only for the beautiful artwork and what it represent, there are already a lot of card for playing difficult.
Something that struck me recently about this when I was sorting through a trove of old cards I found is that this also means we're getting *way* less flavor text than we used to. So many cards today have so much text that there's just no room for it, and I think that's a real loss for the game, too
i agree
I miss flavor text 😔
100%. Flavor text was filled with lore, and lots of them were really funny.
I dread the day when flavor texts stop getting printed altogether
Not to mention flavor today seems to have a much higher chance of being a pun than a few years ago - not that puns didn't exist in the past either (thanks Jaya) but there were also plenty of cards with actual lore, now they're kind of a rarity.
Exactly, actually it is always the first thing I read when I'm impressed by a card's art
I think a big part of this is due to Arena. It is a lot easier to keep track of all this stuff when a computer does it for you... but it becomes much more of a headache for those in paper.
And for further clarification, I mean that I believe WOTC is designing recent cards with Arena play in mind, more so than paper play... (See mutate, Day Night, Roles, etc)
This, exactly this.
I´ve had the same feeling for quite some time now. All these mechanics make sense with a computer in the background, but when played in paper I constantly catch myself asking how I am supposed to do this
Agreed!
Just another reason I think Ikoria was the death knell of Magic as it used to be. Broken mechanic in companion, mutate being a heck of a lot easier to track in the brand new shiny Arena client, the start of every single set being bundled with a commander precon, even universes beyond with mechanically unique cards started in Ikoria with Zilortha not having a magic version you could play.
Double sided cards are the worst offenders. You can't even double check without unsleeving. Edh feels more and more like a reading competition
Well that’s what the helper cards are for right? I put those in the deck and keep the double sided cards in a separate pile w/ clear sleeves
@@willjackson5885 Same! Really helps prevent wear and tear on MDFC lands in particular.
@@willjackson5885And when you check them the entire table knows what you drew just now.
@@willjackson5885 Putting placeholder cards in your deck and carrying an extra deck with the actual cards does not help with complexity, even if it is the right thing to do in this case
@@branimirstoilov8640I just use inner sleeves for double sided cards, no worrying about taking em out all the time
Last week, I was in an EDH game sitting next to a player with a deck full of the new "Dr. Who" cards. Pretty much the whole time, I had no idea what was going on, as he traced through various lines in which his cards copied each other, gave him tokens, gave his opponents tokens, and drew him even more cards to keep doing even more different things. There were multiple effects on the board that punished the rest of us for taking various game actions, all of which he was apparently immune to himself. It felt like we were playing a different game. To be clear, I've been playing Magic for over 26 years. I play various formats and go out of my way to use weird and obscure cards. And in this game, I was completely lost. I was pretty badly manascrewed, so I didn't really have anything better to do than try to follow the Rube-Goldberg machinations of the deck on the table next to mine. It was too much. Incidentally, I won the game in the end. My Whovian-inclined opponent kept feeding me tokens because I was the safest player at the table to take them, and after he went down and took another player down with him, I had just enough power to close the game out.
Been playing with the dr who cards and they're fun but very mechanically dense, especially as they're supposedly targeting new players. The interaction with the 'suspend' and 'time travel' mechanics is very fiddly to keep track of, even without all the copying of abilities you can do.
Been getting into budget formats which fixes a lot of issues Magic is having lately
Come play prd-modern, it's not very budget but it's the most balanced format 😊
Most budget format is proxying.
@@TheLuminousCleric I like the idea of only proxyng cards that I already had at some point or that is not too expensive.
Because I'ce never hoarded cards sometimes I got unfortunate of trading or selling stuff that went up in price.
(I had 8 rystic studies when it costed like 25 cents lol, fire and ice sword and umezawa jitte are other things I sold underpriced)
But I'm 100% supportive if someone want to proxy the whple deck though lol.
Pauper is probably the most pure and clean magic has and had ever been
@@thanhavictus Not really easy to find certain stuff though, priestess of.Titania for example
4:15 fun fact, Lorwyn Jace has less total words than WOE Ashiok's passive ability only. Now that "mill" is a keyword, an entire Jace would have less text than any one of Ashiok's abilities by itself.
Hilarious if the implications weren't so painful.
A while back I saw someone on social media had compiled a list of the top 5 wordiest Magic sets - that is, the sets with the highest average number of words per card. One of the 5 was Future Sight (which, as a reminder, was a set that was supposed to give players a glimpse into what Magic's future might look like, and which featured the most new mechanics of any set ever). The other 4 were in Standard.
"planeswalker with 5 abilities, a static ability and a level-up based ability? Nice!"
"Uh, Questing Beast is just a English-Vanilla, just like pale tea"
"If the card has no pair of ETB effect, or both an ETB and LTB, or ETB and protection/evasion, or ETB and gives ETB, or ETC and cast trigger, is not worthy" ... "what about Black Lot..." "NO ETB == NO WORTHY"
Wouldn't you have to explain every new mechanic on the cards in Future Sight ?
@@dudono1744 yeah i imagine future sight's wordiness comes from the amount of reminder text on each card w/ a new mechanic
This is a huge concern for me as well. I'm very, *very* detail oriented and systems focused, and it gets challenging at a Commander table for me already. For other friends and family members, Commander is already just too much to keep track of. A lot of times they just trust opponents will tell them when something relevant comes up rather than actually trying to keep up with and understanding their board states.
The game didn't have to be this way, but it is now and I don't know how much worse it can get without something breaking. Commander can't bear the strain of much more of this while staying even remotely accessible, and without Commander (which people love to rag on now), I don't see a healthy future for the game. There are so many things making me rethink my love of this game. Maybe after well over a decade I'm just burnt out, but I genuinely feel like it's more than that. And it's heartbreaking to say, but each day I step a little more firmly into the camp of "Magic is slowly strangling itself to death".
Everybody is juist building up with hardly keeping track of whatever everybody else does because every permanent has synergy with another permanent and 3 abilities.
And it gets worse: people nowadays don't even understand their own board state anymore. They have 5 creatures on board that all have multiple abilities, including triggers. So turns takes ages resolving all the triggers. And synce there's a lot of combo potential, triggers activate other triggers activating more triggers. Exile is also a valid part of the game now, so you have to keep track of what's in exile as well. I was just looking at the latest (1 november) spoilers and my heart sank a bit. I am not sure if I can keep up this way.
It almost feels like those "card game anime" like Yu Gi Oh or WIXOSS where the opponent actually has to explain the card to the main character everytime^^
@@zarator7429 I'm pretty sure that's not just the anime but actually an integral part of the YuGiOh experience when playing the game.
Yep, I play commander as a relatively new player and with a lot of other relatively new players and it feels like unless something's an imminent threat nobody really knows what's going on with each ither's boards beyond broad strokes. Everything interacts with everything else and has far too much text to read qnd retain knowledge of.
14:15 It's funny the Professor mentions this. The last time I went to an FNM was a War of the Spark Prerelease with my college playgroup. We were pretty hyped about the concept of Planeswalker passives, and WotS definitely delivered, though they mostly ended up gunking up the Limited playing field instead of adding much to it! The group was more of a revolving door, so I fell out of touch after graduating that Winter, so late 2019 was the last time I shuffled up... until a month or so ago when I got into contact with an old highschool friend.
He invited me to play Standard, and without doing much research, I offered to bring a casual Standard deck I still had sleeved up from 2017 (a mono-black tempo deck with Yahenni and Aethersphere Harvester at the top-end, fueled by cheap recurring threats like Reassembling Skeleton, Dread Wanderer, and Scrapheap Scrounger), still one of my proudest brews to-date. When I showed up to the table in 2023, the number of times I had to interrupt to ask what an effect did was borderline embarrassing, and I joked that the players were making stuff up as they went (I still don't understand all of the double-sided mechanics haha).
So yes, even a veteran here felt alienated at the table, not because of the power level or even the complexity, but the fact that cards and mechanics nowadays can be borderline obtuse, if not just misleading. Not to say I didn't have fun! But it definitely didn't have that same awesome spark of seeing someone pull out a cool new combo I'd never seen before and immediately having it click how it worked, which is what made me interested in the game in the first place! Sorting through the complexity in the interactions *between* cards to do unique and interesting things, instead of just having to understand the complexity loaded into an individual card on its own.
This issue makes Magic much harder for new players. I remember when Magic players used to make fun of Yugioh cards in the 2010s
Yup, I stopped playing a little after Tempest and it just looks too complex for me to wanna get back into now.
@@moonsy-9733play pre modern.
@@moonsy-9733Play pauper. This video explains why pauper is the best MTG format. And there are a lot of different reasons.
Next we're gonna get GYs.
pauper is certainly not the best, but okay lol@@ruimartins841
Complexity imho is also tied to the 'too many products' problem. Design space in magic, while massive, is still finite and so you need more and more complex permutations to create interesting effects and not just repeats of previous cards, this was inevitable in the long run, but the increased rate of releases have made the problem worse.
Solution: Release another Llanowar Elves
@@syrelianI love 'functional reprints.' Cards with the exact same mana cost/abilities/power&toughness, just with a different name. I like that my hypothetical modern elves deck can play 8-12 copies of llanowar elf, so why not try it with other cards?
@@jordangroblewsky2087 You need to be careful about "functional reprints" though - if the base card is good, you can create an amount of redundancy than can drastically alter a deck's viability, especially if the cards in question have synergy with each other.
@@jordangroblewsky2087 because over time this would kill commander, which is probably currently the biggest format out there. If you have too many functional reprints commander becomes constructed with 100 cards and is no longer different and fun
I miss when dropping a couple mana dorks would help casting a huge 6/4 on turn 4 and that it felt huge and powerful xD
I find myself more and more playing either cube or custom decks where the focus is on simpler creatures, interesting interactions, and an often overlooked aspect: good flavor text.
I think the best example of powercreep is the fact that Baneslayer Angel returned to Standard a couple years ago and wasn't even playable. For those who don't remember the frenzy and controversy when "Bankslayer Angel" was first printed in 2010, it was $100+ a copy, completely dominated the game, and was universally considered emblematic of the fact that powercreep had gone too far.
Oh man, gone are the days of Walletslayer and Ca$hseize (thoughtseize).
I still remember when I traded a Foil Baneslayer for THREE revised Tropical Islands. I was getting the bad end of the deal at the time.
Not to mention that its existence immediately undermined the stated goal of the Mythic rarity slot and it took WotC less time to break their word on that rarity than it took to write their word on it.
@@ForeverLaxx Was Mythic rare supposed to be for legendary cards only? Interesting
@@syferpolski4344 No, it was supposed to be for niche/build-around cards not generically powerful/slots into any deck of its colors. Wizards pretty much went back on this almost immediately when they realized they could print "chase" cards at Mythic in order to inflate booster/box sales.
Planeswalkers were the only stated exception to that guideline.
I feel like one of the biggest things to slow down complexity creep is for Wizards to be more comfortable reprinting cards. There are so many cards which would fit well in a limited environment and in sets in general, and the constant pumping of new game pieces over reprints will only encourage cards to get more and more complex to avoid functional reprints that homogenize decks
This is one of the reasons I like the 'bonus sheets' we've had in some recent sets (mystical archive in STX, multiverse legends in MOM, etc.), they put classic cards into draft without putting them into standard/pioneer/etc. which gives wotc a lot of room to enrich draft formats without affecting constructed. How they've impacted the format they're in has varied wildly, but I'm excited to see what they'll do with it in the future
This
One of the most frustrating things wotc did in terms of making things needlessly complex, was instead of making just new dungeons to venture into they decided to make one special dungeon that needed a new mechanic to get into
They have reversed complexity (and power) creep in the past! After timespriral there was a concerted effort to get complexity under control. When I started playing in 2013 there was a concerted effort to make simple sets with vanilla or french vanilla creatures at common. I wouldn't be shocked if they pulled back on complexity in the next three or four years.
Hard to do that when Commander is the flavor of the day, when the most popular format has almost every card possible, then several years without anything that beats literally everything that came before would be a tough sell
@@MistaZiggy Reign in complexity creep with brazen power creep instead to still sell cards. A 1 mana 3/2, or 2 mana draw 3, etc.
@@Clumbob Yeah, as much as I dislike power creep in eternal formats, I dislike complexity creep even more. I would accept a new level of power if it meant each card wasn't a Shakespearean monologue anymore.
The easy solution to that is to start a Commander format that only allows cards from more recent sets. Old Commander will still exist, but it will become much like Legacy is in two person magic, an expensive game played by few people. @@MistaZiggy
Fogey alert: I remember when the enemy pain lands being printed in Apocalypse was a Big Deal, and the set itself being enemy color pair focused was mind blowing.
And I remember when Spiritmonger was one of the first cards designed by the MtG playerbase, just like Forgotten Ancient and Waste Not.
@@LadyLunarSatine Ah, yes, Mr. Babycakes.
I feel like there was a moment where vanilla creatures were pushed into the design space of tokens. But even their complexity has been creeping up. Not to mention all the non-creature tokens which aren't even explained on the card and you need to pull out physical token reference material to confirm what it does!
Aka energy tokens, quests, into the dungeon. MTG is getting to be calculus level complicated.
@@Lonovavir The ring tempting you... roles...
@@NightChime Amass (and now Amass Orcs, because Amass needed to be more annoying).
This is what keeps me from playing as much Magic as I'd like to. Getting older has meant less time, and it feels so difficult to keep up. I also love brewing decks, but with so much text to decipher and complicated synergies, it takes forever to come up with something that feels novel and playable. Add to that the time for feeling like I'm prepared to play competently in a draft. Most of the time I just say forget about it.
Just play with old cards that aren’t nearly as complex. Build your own decks to the level you think is the most fun and just play with friends or gamers who are interested in a simpler and more strategic game of MtG.
I enjoy MtG when the most complex decisions I have to make are things like whether to double block or not because my opponent might be holding a pump spell.
I think MtG is pretty boring when my opponent connives, enters into the dungeon, populates, amasses, and crews all on one turn after somehow getting the mana from the treasure tokens he got after his saga leveled up and blah blah blah…etc. The cards are so complicated that the basic mechanics of combat aren’t even very important now. It’s like every deck is a combo deck.
I think this is one of the consequences of Wizards choosing to focus on eternal formats like Modern and Commander as the pushing force of the game, where every set is on some level designed to compliment them. It's a shift in mentality that has a huge impact on how cards are made. No longer are cards just designed in the context of being sustainable in a standard rotation and making bulk vanillas and cards that serve the same function as previous cards for the game's limited spaces is no longer a concern or seen as viable. Every new card designed is being printed into a space, where they need to contend for players' attention with every card that has ever been released. You can't just print a Monastery Swiftspear that's wearing a different hat, because this standard rotation could use something like that. Whatever new Monastery Swiftspear equivalent is made today for some set needs to be directly competing with the original by serving a unique function or being strictly better. On one hand it encourages good game design, but it's clashing with the game's want to push product as fast as they are, because how long can you make hundreds of wholly unique designs every month before the game snaps under the weight?
It's a familiar feeling, because this has been Yu-Gi-Oh's bugbear for years now. Because YGO is only really designed for one format, which would be what Magic players understand as Legacy, cards throughout YGO's history have always been competing with their entire back-catalog, which means every new card that wants to get players' attention has to do something no other card has ever done or do it in a way that hasn't been done before. The game centralizing on tribal-style archetype design has alleviated this, where certain functions can be endlessly reprinted just for the new archetype, but at some point, said archetype needs to be doing something fresh and new or something super strong to entice people try them out. This lead to this cycle of every 4 or so years a new mechanic that completely transforms the way YGO is played needed to be released until that model became unsustainable. It's crazy to think that since the days of me only playing YGO, these same problems are now spilling into the game I had recognized as being mostly free of them.
This is certainly a concern, but of all the things that are wrong with Magic, I think this is one of the more solvable dilemmas. In their current state anyway, it is clear that Magic's game designers are care about the end results of their products and it's not like Hasbro's making money by the word on every card. When the breaking point is found, dialing back and finding new solutions is something I do believe they can figure out. Magic might be suffering from quite a few problems because of business-driven decisions, but on the design end, I do still think Magic is being made by people that are willing to find the solutions to these issues.
Agreed. The standard format is what helped MTg stay fun for so long. Not having to worry about a life times back log to compete with yet those formats were there to use your old cards in.
Strangely I feel they could have found away to step around having to deal with wanting to make cards for commander. For instance having a hand full of cards similar to the time shifted printed specificaly for other formats.
Thank you. I wanted to say basically the same. I think it's really bad that WotC lost the focus from standard and designing in that space to getting powercrept while also having to balance the entire back catalog.
Honestly, as a very casual player who almost exclusively plays commander on the rare chance these days I actually get to play, I would love it if they could focus more on the standard format. Effectively reprinting an older card but in the theme of the new set means I have a chance of actually getting that card my commander could use without having to find (and afford) a copy of it for purchase somewhere.
It's a big reason why I'm finding commander less fun in particular. I've got memory issues anyway and keeping track of 3 insane board states is getting too much to be fun all the time.
Been running into this as well. I haven't played much since 2019 and now when I come back it's so hard to keep track of everything.
Agree
I gave up playing paper because of how difficult it is to keep track of it. Far too many abilities and triggers and card gibberish
Same here. Have ADHD, and ALSO don't get to play very often, and so don't really have much need/chance to remember what cards do. So keeping track of all my OWN triggers, let alone 3-5 other players becomes very tricky, and even on good days just becomes so much cross referencing it loses some fun.
My friends whom i play with had the same issues. I started building Pauper EDH decks, as well as our own format, which is basically Pauper but with only UC/C in the deck and any rare commander. So far people enjoy it much, there are still strong, fun or surprising combos but the overall gamestate is easy to follow around.
Honestly, I think this is the reason I like my Yargle and Multani vanilla tribal deck. Sometimes it's nice to just say "it's just a 7/6" instead of reading off 5 abilities.
I feel similarly, but I like having etb effects or alt costs, they make you think about ordering and when to use certain creatures but once they are on the field that’s it. It’s why I like the Tyranid deck so much (I’m kinda new to magic)
The "french vanilla" was a great observation and was new to me. Thank you for giving me more insight on current card design.
I think some of the walls of text could be better expressed, if the card uses the same terminology that players are already using.
F.e.
"Search your library for up to two basic land cards and put them onto the battlefield tapped."
could be expressed as:
"Fetch 2: basic land (tapped)".
We have seen this with the introduction of "mill" and i can imagine that this will be more common for other mechanics in the future.
This is not a fix for compexity creep, but its easier to explain the card, if it already uses the same terminology as the players (although increases the already high introduction barrier).
Handling complexity is hard, but these are just my thoughts on the topic.
If wizards of the coast wants to still make cards really complex, they should at least make an online card interaction tester. As someone who just saw you playing around four months ago this would’ve made it so much. Easier to understand how cards work if I could just see how they interact from wizards instead of being confused, having to read the rules, then think then read the rules again then think then read the rules and then finally give my guess. I asked how it would work which might be wrong.
I started playing mtg this year and it's very interesting to see these videos talking about the state of the game compared to years past. I don't have any experience with earlier Magic, so it's very helpful to get a greater picture of what problems the game faces today compared to before. With that being said, I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase with the game and am enjoying every part of it probably a bit more than I should:)
Same here, it’s a fun experience so far
Commenting so youtube notifies me if more new players' comments drop by.
Yeah I haven't found it too much as a newbie but then I've been a Yugioh player for 10ish years so am used to scan reading for keywords.
As a player that took a break from mtg after guilds of ravnica and came back two months ago I can confirm that opening a new booster and reading through cards it really felt werid coming back home and checking out some commons from 5 years ago.
I REALLY resonate with this topic.
I began in original Mirrodin (2003?) and stop after a couple years, getting back in the game around the time of Neon Dinasty.
I was speechless as how much the game has changed in powercreep, as now a 10/10 for 5 green mana is actually a thing.
But the thing that I found more upsetting is the constant walls of text and the obscene amount of triggers and stuff that happens in a board with barely 4 or 5 permanents in a single turn.
Luckily I found Pauper, which has a lot of advantages, the biggest of which is the fair amount of complexity in a game, where you don't have to lose your mind to read every fuckin card that enters the battlefield, and then pause for 5 minutes everytime to evaluate what the hell that implies.
So yeah, #lowerthepowercreep must be a thing, imho 😅
(The power creep from Mirrodin to Kamigawa was so high for us, that me and my friends created a new way of saying. Whenever anything in any context was deemed too powerful, we used to say "c'moooon, this shit is too Kamigawa!!"😂)
That's wild, because kamigawa block was a significant power down from mirrodin
@@fatpad00 not for a 15yo who didn't properly understand the intricate game mechanics ;)
@@cronothblackmetal297 I feel that lol.
I started playing strictly kitchen table casual during Alara block and cracked a lot of Zendikar block packs. I remember being bummed to get a land in the rare slot. Fast forward to 2016ish after I had taken a few years off and got back into the game with more disposable income, and therefore interested in competitive formats. I quickly found out those "crummy rare lands" were the seriously in demand fetchlands. I had a foil misty rainforest and marsh flats, plus almost a dozen other non-foil fetches. Iirc it was around $400 in "junk" rares lol
Pauper feels like a break for your brain after a few standard games xD
I started playing MTGA and man, sometimes I spend so much time reading and understanding a single card my opponent just played that the fuse counter runs out haha...
A 5 mana 10/10 isn't just a thing, it's an unplayably bad thing. And TBH, you could insert it pretty far back in the game's history and it would still be unplayably bad. A 5 mana 19/19 would still be bad, and while a 5 mana 20/20 would be bad for the game due to cheesy fling decks, I'm not sure those decks would actually be good, just annoying.
I first knew magic as a kid on the onslaught/legions set almost 20 years ago, I really liked the text on the cards resembling some epic's dialogue/poems, now I come back to it thanks to arena and this was my first thought on the paragraphs each card has, specially in alchemy!!
My first reaction was "Oh come on, Vorinclex doesn't have that much te- OH RIGHT! It has a a BACK SIDE too. Yikes."
Finally some extended discussion on this observation with Magic design. Not only does the complexity creep make the game less attractive for new players, it makes it increasingly cumbersome for entrenched players. No joke, one of my opponents at WOE pre-release walked out before Game 2 because he, someone who noted he had a learning disability, could not comprehend the adaptability of roles or how they interacted with the board. And even that doesn't speak to how many counters, tokens, markers, etc. are now required to adequately represent a boardstate.
It just strikes me as ironic how, with all the crossover products aimed at making the game more 'accessible', the cards themselves are endeavoring to do the opposite.
It's especially surprising to me that the Universes Beyond products, at least the commander decks, are so mechanically dense despite being meant to draw in fresh eyes. I'm not advocating the opposite, but I'd expect some set-level consideration where you only have a half dozen mechanics interspersed and repeated, rather than two dozen one-offs, with some having not been visited for over a decade.
I do so appreciate getting a common with some SWEET art, and full of flavor text.
I look to my yugioh experience and consider the plethora of normal monster (vanilla creature) support, from cards that let you draw extra if you drew one and revealed it in your draw phase (heart of the underdog) that lets you continue that until you draw a non-normal; A card that forces both players to only summon normal monsters for a turn (heat wave); And a card that disables all abilities of monsters on the table, which has no negative for your normals (skill drain).
Some dedicated support for non-token vanillas in mtg would be rad, something a bit more interesting than just giving vanillas a keyword would be cool (like letting you deal bonus damage to the face if they're blocked or something).
How come every time I get into a hobby I always feel like I’m getting in on the back leg and I’ll never experience the hobby at it’s peak?
I feel the exact same way!
Because folks in every hobby more than a year old constantly whine that whatever came before was the best thing.
Magic is good, great even. Even Prof would say that I wager. The focus on negatives is part of trying to respond to change that is heading in a bad direction, not necessarily that the game is ruined or dying
Because capitalism
Peak is a weird way to put it...we just left the the plains of simplicity and entered into the swamps of rules and the mountains of text. The game is more complex, but not declining.
It's still so much fun. There's currently too much of it to take it all in, so you just need someone to guide you towards what they think is the most fun. But seriously, if they'd never print a new card ever again, you could still have a great time with it no matter what.
I remember first really noticing this phenomenon with Throne of Eldraine. I believe it only had one vanilla creature, and even that had a relevant creature type (Knight).
Excellent episode as always Prof.
So you don't count creatures with Adventures, then?
In Marvel Snap, there is the card Patriot, which gives all creatures without abilities +2 strength including Tokens. Might something like be a opportunity to give Vanilla cards a comeback ?
There are a few Magic cards that do something similar, those being Muraganda Petroglyphs, Ruxa, and Jasmine Boreal of the Seven. I would be interested in seeing more cards like that, as they would help make vanilla cards more competitive and just be good support in token decks.
I think there are two more potential reasons for this:
1) kind of the opposite of power creep, balancing. Often times a simple effect might be too powerful by itself or would combo with pre-existing cards easily. Should this happen, designers can either balance an early card design by increasing mana cost, number of colours, or etc. However, these can very easily turn a card unplayable or mess with the flavor. Instead, they add restrictions to turn the effect down.
Consider Skrlev's hive which could have just been Bitterblossom but with toxic instead of flying. The Myte tokens' power had to be turned down a bit so they added "can't block". But then the effect is two weak so they added "corrupted: give lifelink". Restrictions are often things like "if cast from your hand", "until the beginning of your next end step", "if this is the second time this ability triggers".
2) Telling a story or describing a character can also be a lot easier. Beyond universe cards are the biggest culprits here in my opinion. As an example, Frodo, Sauron's Bane has an ability that tells his story of growth in a very non-sublte way. Pretty much every legendary creature in that set has a wall of text.
I think a much better way of story telling can be seen in cards like lovestruck beast, corpse cobble, silverbolt, rest in peace, fling, etc.
To me, wordiness feels like a shortcut. It's an easy way of controlling balance and flavor, circumventing the need for creativity. I think if designers had more time in between releasing new sets, they would have the time to come up with creative solutions to making flavorful and balanced cards in a non-complex manner.
Vanilla creatures could be designed with additional types/subtypes giving them mechanical synergies without 'changing' the card
This becomes meaningful when sets release with tribal cards
right! as simple as creating a couple of cool on-color vanilla enchantment creatures to trigger enchantment synergies in an enchantment-matters set.
Or a simple 1/4 soldier in white in a set where soldier matters and white is a control color, and so on...
Or just make them the key to powerful effects like in yugioh.
For example, the two most iconic yugioh monsters are dark magician and blue eyes white dragon.
They're two vanilla creatures that do nothing on their own but there are a lot of cards that says uf you control one of them you can cast X or Y from your hand or cheat other thibgs into play.
You could have this in mtg easilly.
@@lainhikaru5657or sunseed genuis loci which actually has a decent deck
@lainhikaru5657 Even yugioh has that problem though. Dark Magician could be an effect monster and it wouldn't change anything about his deck. Generic vanilla monsters have long since been dead, and the only support for them is like... Rescue Rabbit and Unexpected Dai; and that's just to get free bodies on the board to be tributed for a link summon or something.
@@crabking3525 I would disagree, since the cards are Vanilla they can have 'their effects' on other cards as a cost, and if the Dark Magician/Blue-Eyes had semi-meaningful effects they would become more powerful outside their archetypes
an example would be Blue-Eyes & Alt Blue-Eyes
If Blue eyes also had a GY or Special summon effect, then you'd be getting a free summon and have another useful dragon for Link/Fusion/XYZ that also gives your dragon strategy an entire library of searchable spell/trap/monster effects
I 1000% agree. I’ve taken a small hiatus and coming back I felt everything just replaces everything I own. It’s crazy.
Ashiok, Wicked Manipulator's static ability does have something to do with the other abilities. If you can engineer a situation where you would pay life (or your opponents do), then the cards you exile instead will put a +1/+1 counter on any Nightmare creatures created with the -2 ability, and they will boost the total Mana value relevant to the ultimate. And the +1 ability will also do both of the above.
To add onto this, a player can find other ways to put cards into exile to get even more use out of those cards via Ashiok's abilities
@@tailez606 Not to mention the card's ultimate ability is a way to mill your opponents down to nothing
Thank you for making this. I've been trying to look at the new Ixalan cards and there are just so much text I can see this slowing down our games and not having everyone at the table fully understand what the cards do.
I think it’s very telling that despite having less words, magic cards are starting to do MORE than yugioh cards.
That's because like a third of the card text of an average yugioh card is restrictions. Also no symbols for costs in yugioh.
As someone who has only recently returned to Magic since 2018 this is rather evident. Half of the time I have to read a card multiple times to understand it and then read it again before playing it.
It's easy to get an advantage in historic by running weird cards that majorly hurt opponents who don't understand them
Then I ask my opponent, then I ask another person at the table, and then a judge.
this and i have to google rules i havent heard of before
True😅
I have to agree. I recently started playing again after 20 years away and was it a bit of a learning curve at first. Magic has changed quite a bit since 2003.
This video is so expertly put together it’s a work of art - i give this an A+.
Thanks for bringing this up. I'm new and only play Arena as of right now. I honestly thought the game had always been this complex.
My biggest issue with this is when trying my hand at the premiere draft. I don't have all these cards memorized. I'm going through and reading each one to build my deck. In a few instances, my card was auto-selected because I couldn't read fast enough. It was extremely frustrating.
This happens to me at least once per draft. It's a big reason why I don't draft enough to avoid it.
I think it is a good idea to mostly replace vanilla creatures with french vanilla creatures, or creatures with easy effects, like ping effects. At the same time i dislike the convuluted new textmesses. I think upping the floor should be contrasted by lowering the celling aswell.
Draft feels fine with a lot of french vanilla cards, and most keywords are easy enough for new players to get the gist of in no time.
As someone that started playing about a year ago. I'm now have most keywords memorized, but my first few games involved a lot of asking other players and/or pulling out my phone to look up what all the simple keywords did.
And that is why, when we have commander nights, during a players turn, I can casually walk out, go to the store and grab some soda and chips, come back, check my phone, walk my dog, and return just in time for my turn to start
Thats mostly just people being drunk/dumb
On point as always, Professor. Thank you for speaking up for the game we all love.
coming back to magic after a few years, this change is sooooo obvious. I really liked the Lord of the rings set, it felt not too complicated
I started playing Magic again earlier this year (after a hiatus since 2004). I still have to constantly ask my opponents what my cards do, why I'd even want to do that and how I should play them best.
You need a special kind of friends that try their hardest to help you make good turns against them and I'm so glad I have those. I couldn't even imagine playing against random players at an event instead of this save environment.
true. My playgroup needs to be extremely patient at times as well. I'm fortunate to have well experienced players that have so much love for the game they don't mind waiting or explaining or even helping me out at times when I ask what should be removed because everything seems a threat. But there's always a few that havent developed that social skill (yet) I always get the idea they pay to win, play to win and don't care about having a good time on the table with friends.
Makes you wonder what a set based on Muraganda would look like. More vanilla critters with weird P/T and fun flavor text would be nice
Let's hope for Muraganda as the autumn set for 2025 or 2026, it's the core set slot :-)
I like the idea of a French vanilla format, where the only creatures you can have are no more complex than Draw a card, or keywords but instants and sorceries are allowed to have actual text. That way the board state is always clear and it's only stuff that goes away which adds complexity. Not sure how you would add enchantments or artifacts though
This video in particular really spoke to me. I played MTG a lot as a kid, returned years later with Khans of Tarkir. Played regularly for a while after that with Friday night drafts and pre-releases. Took another break for family reasons, and now I was thinking about maybe, just maybe, getting back into the hobby. However after seeing what's being printed now I'm just getting my fix through Arena. As much as I love having the actual cards and stuff, sometimes it's nice just to boot up the PC and play a round or two before logging off.
I was playing only Arena because everything else was so expensive.
Then Habro changed some things to make more money, and I uninstalled to never play again.
I'm not so sure about this one. the video felt like the majority of it was meandering around pointing at recent cards and going "look at this, isn't it so complicated?", interspersed with the occasional genuinely thoughtful critique of modern card design. I do think complexity creep is a very real thing and a genuine game design issue, I just don't think this video in particular does a great job of breaking it down. I hope I'm not being too mean, I do very much enjoy TCC's usual commentary on the game, it's just that I also really value thoughtful discussion in communities and I feel that kind of thing can only be fostered if everyone gives their full genuine thoughts, which is what I hope to do a little bit of here.
Refer to Magic Core Set 2010. Once a year Wizards R&D can release a "Starter Set" with low complexity and print new "Starter Commander Decks". Which can include cards such as Birds of Paradise, Lightning Bolt, Ponder, Path To Exile, Jace Beleren etc. Set may be notable with high in demand reprints. I like referring low complexity games as "Sober Magic" that helps introduce others to the game and make friends. High power/high synergy magic can be made to "lose friends".
They stopped doing core sets because everyone down the line had trouble selling them. No one wants to buy low-power, simple sets.
Core sets were always my favorite. They felt so to-the-point, approachable, and clear with each color’s core values.
I wish powercreep could be more focused on pumping up the values on fewer abilities rather than on adding more and more weaker abilities.
@@MagnaMagum That might even be true, but the learning from that shouldnt be to stop printing "easier" sets, but to put more in demand cards in them. Remember: theres multiple ways to react to an observation you dont like to see again in the future
I'm no game designer, but I think at least some vanilla creatures being added to the game is healthy. One way to do this is to probably pull back on spells and abilities that target any creature without a stipulation. A card that says "Destroy target creature" naturally benefits creatures with Hexproof or Ward or other effects. Cards like Plummet that target creatures with specific abilities or keywords leaves room for Vanilla creatures to shine
The worst is when you play against a player who has such cards in a language you don't speak yourself. You have to ask several times to summarize the card (and all of its sides). Or look each one up online and keep them open in multiple tabs.
I can't speak for all, but I just started playing MTG this year. I started in March and have been playing ever since. I do agree that there are some complex cards but most of the time all the words boil down to a simple explanation for something. If you take your example of vorinclex all the card is doing is grabbing you two basic forests and giving you a 6/6 reach body. Yes, it has the ability to exile itself, but you can again boil that down into "don't let vorinclex exile itself or you're probably going to lose". All the praetors from that set are like that with maybe the exception of Gin Gitaxis, because his is so hard to pull off that if someone does it I'm like "yeah I'll take the loss just show me what it does XD." I can not speak for commander because I have not played alot of it, but the games I have played have been a little hard to understand so I concede that commander is pretty complex. That might also be because I don't know all the cards from all the previous sets before the current standard rotation. Also, commander has cards that are only commander cards so I feel like it just fair to say there are too many cards in commander to not have to have your opponents read out what their cards do. Maybe this is mitigated after playing many commander games, but I would hazard a guess that it's not. The reason I started playing magic was because my coworkers also wanted to try playing. Honestly, that's probably how many people start playing MTG, because just randomly deciding to start playing without the influence of people you know is not likely. In my case I just wanted to play with my friends and it is really addicting. The game is fun BECAUSE it's complex. I like the complexity because there are so many ways to build a deck and so many interactions that you can have. Anyway, all that to say that I am a new player and I don't mind the complexity and still find the game fun. Maybe players who have been playing for a long time can see the changes over the years and not like them. My question is what else are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to just reprint the same cards over and over again? Change is fun. That's just my opinion though.
I am a new player, and I have lost games in Arena as I was reading the card text due to timing out.
I can pick up card games very easily and tend to memorise cards to the point where the art alone reminds me of rules (Netrunner I knew inside and out) and I CANNOT do that with Magic there is just too much text on rares/mythic rares and there are too many of those too. I can't imagine the barrier it poses for people who are trying to get in.
Disclosure: I'm horrible at Yugioh for similar reasons.
@@deadlyregI have made it a habit of jotting down my thoughts as they pop into my head in these early days. Two days ago I wrote down, “Planeswalkers: they do not make the game more difficult or interesting, so much as they make it more complicated.”
@@HyggeState I got a laugh out of that, they really are just this side dish of nonsense off to one side that you need to slow the game down, in a kind of annoying way, to deal with. Less really is more.
I use a nice moderation of a budget format now, called Magi. Every deck we play in my group is all commons except for 4 uncommons and three rares (1 of those three can be mythic). Keeps the complexity to a minimum while having some interesting power variations. Also keeps deck costs reasonable, especially for casual and new players.
I think my last set I played regularly outside of just a prerelease was Khans/Dragons of Tarkir, and so I clicked expecting a bit of hyperbole, but wow those cards melted my brain.
I would love to make some "beginner" decks to keep around the house for casual pickup games to teach people based around single keywords and vanilla creatures but would have no idea how to do that with the current card pool, I'd probably have to go back pretty far to build them so they're newbie accessible.
I think the problem is how high the degree of internal complexities and sub-games are. Even as an extremely established player, I recently bungled how the initiative works when playing with it for the first time. When you add up the monarch, the initiative, absurdly complicated mechanics like mutate, and “the ring tempts you” you are starting to get into a scenario where there are potentially multiple sub-games going on within the game, and it’s this “game within game” dynamic that drives overwhelm and difficulty keeping track.
Wizards should return to printing vanilla creatures, they can make them interesting through casting costs, creature type, and power/toughness combinations, along with art and flavor text. They should also focus on balancing out the ratio of simple versus complex cards in a set so that not all of the cards are so complicated.
I don't know, printing worthless vanilla cards doesn't stop the initiative from being complicated, it just makes it so you pull a 0 cent common instead of a 5 cent common. It's clear that you need to put an actual interesting spin on a vanilla creature to make it a worthwhile piece of cardboard, like yargle and multani.
Although, who really knows. If they straight reprinted collossal dreadmaw in the new Ixalan set, people would probably lose their shit.
I will contend those subgames were not designed to be played together, and if you are playing them together that's on you.
@@EwMatiashow is it on me if I bring one thing and my opponent brings another one?
Or even worse, in commander if everyone of the 4 people brings one of those subgames?
@@xolotltolox7626 It's on you for playing those formats.
Commander will always be insanely complex even if every set was 50% vanilla creatures. It's the most complex format by virtue of what it is. You're using 30 years of cards, most of which are not designed with knowledge of the others in mind. It was always gonna get harder and harder to parse board states because you cannot stop the critical maas of complex cards from happening at some point. At best you can delay it.
Just want to point out that the new Ashiok's static ability very much DOES have synergy with her -2 and -7. And her +1 has similar synergy with her -2 and -7. It's a very coherent design built around exiling your own cards. But I do agree that it is rather complex.
Ashiok is they/them, but also just because their static exiles doesn't mean it's not still confusing to many players that they don't inherently have any tie to the paying life mechanic. I don't think it's a mistake, but it's definitely hard to remember on the first few readings.
Considering they do things based on total mana value of cards you own in exile, a free way to exile cards does somewhat synergize, but it's just not the ability one would expect to go along with it.
@@boonsaplenty3924 ashiok is a wicked witch lol? i mean its obviusly a female
@@qwerte6948It's hilarious that you say they're "obviously" female when they have been referred to as "he", "it", "they" or simply "Ashiok" (and also suggested to be genderless) in official MTG material, but never "she". So congratulations on being as wrong as you could possibly be, I guess.
@@qwerte6948
I'm gonna assume you're being genuine in which case: sorry friend, Ashiok isn't a witch or female. They're, as far as all available story material goes, a genderless nightmare person.
I'm glad someone brought this up to the community. I just got back into MtG after a few years, and I went to a Lost Caverns of Ixalan draft mostly blind. It took me a significant amount of time to read all the cards and process what they do, so I was slow in drafting, deck building, and playing. I have gotten a little older so it doesn't help that my mental processing speed, but it definitely didn't help that pretty much every card now has a unique ability with a wall of text (and sometimes even both sides of the card are covered in text now). I used to be able to walk in, draft a new set completely blind, and have a good win rate, but this time I was struggling to even read all the cards within a reasonable amount of time, and I even misread a few so they ended up being different from what I initially thought.
I'm back after probably over 20 years. My boy wanted to go to our local game shops draft night. I said why don't we give it a go at home first. So glad I did. I would not want to subject a regular player to the hour plus time it took me to read, google what the mechanic meant and choose. It was sad lol.
Power creep, I feel like, is showing in flesh and blood, especially since it’s a relatively new game. I bought one deck, and a year or two later, I bought a new deck and suddenly they have mentors that can bring a really good card from anywhere in the deck into the arsenal.
words-per-card has been certainly increasing recently despite how keyword-ed a game Magic is, i look forward to hearing your thoughts on it
"Reading the card, does not explain the card but actually initiates a short word problem and reading comprehension check."
@@JStack Reading the card and figuring out how it interacts with all of my other cards takes two hours now
Because you can only have so many one word mechanics that are intuitive. So to actually have creative cards they have to put more text on the card instead of creating new keywords. I’ve noticed a lot of card text is actually explaining a sort of unintuitive keyword like sunburst or ravenous.
Keywords within keywords, i.e. double strike, time travel, dash/blitz, modification, initiative, partner WITH, incubate/Siege/craft/daybound, Map tokens, etc.
"Reading the card does NOT explain the card" is one of my biggest pet peeves with recent Magic design. They cram cards with so much text that they can't even add reminder text for set-specific mechanics anymore.
It's a huge issue when trying to choose new cards from the Cube, my playgroup isn't really following spoilers for new sets or playing Standard, so I can't have cards like this into it.
What a great video. I played from 2004 to 2007, then 2012 and 2013. Now I feel like getting back to it, but damn there's A LOT to catch up! Some many new token types, abilities, and the power is on another level... I do enjoy some new stuff, but getting my wife to play it took longer than needed, definitely.
0:33 complexity creep reminds me of Fire Emblem Heroes. In like 3 years they went from single sentence skills like "+3 strength while unit attacks" to "On every even turn, if unit begins turn next to a female unit or a dragon unit, when unit attacks a red unit, ignore all supports from green units, unit gets +5 to all stats and bonus doubler, revert bonuses on enemy unit, enemy cannot follow up, unit always follows up, and unit gets an additional special charge per attack."
Bloody fucking hell.
The fact that nowaday we have like 15 sets per year also speeds up the complexity of cards
I think this is probably the biggest single contributing factor. “15” x the amount of “new” or “unique” cards players are going to say “hey why do we have 15 different types of llanorwar elves? Isn’t it just the same card with different art?” And also not be happy cause it will feel lazy. In order to create mechanically unique cards, things are going to get more complex, and I’m all for it (the complexity is part of the draw for me), but how fast WotC is doing that is another story.
I miss the old creatures to be honest. Old cards were mostly simple maybe powerful but simple. Non of the power 9 is very complicated but they are still one of the best. also i feel MTG got more and more creature focused over time. No old creature is really relevant right now. some spells and artifacts and enchantments are but not any creature for what i know. And i feel thats just sad.
the game is over 25 years old, thats natural. And the power 9 are only relevant because they are design MISTAKES. Cards that were made before anyone understood how the game is played optimally. Its natural and healthy for old, simple cards to become teaching tools that are not really played for competitive advantage. Whats unhealthy is that a card like black lotus is so badly designed it can never ever be legal for play.
The power 9 also aren't particularly interesting
@@ich3730Just look at the perma-banned cards in Yugioh. Same deal. "Draw two cards." "Draw three cards, then discard two cards." "Pay 1000 life points; Look at your opponent's hand, then shuffle one card from your opponent's hand into their deck." "Pay 1000 life points; Discard one random card from your opponent's hand, then your opponent discards a card." Simple effects that are absolute blowouts if they resolve.
I was super looking forward to the new Ixalan set prerelease as I had such a fun time going to the first one and absolutely love the prehistoric cave setting like in Ark: Aberration.
Usually I glance at a few spoilers to understand the keywords before attending pre-release but not the cards themselves- seeing the cards for the first time as I open them. This time I decided to get a look at the spoilers to see the Jurassic World cards and from there peeked at the rest of the set. The excitement quickly turned to confusion while trying to comprehend the set.
I think Magic needs to do some sort of new format for 2003-2021 players similar to how Yu Gi Oh constantly releases reprints of old content for the casual nostalgic players. Pauper/Peasant might be what I'm looking for but I'd love an officially endorsed format for the generation between Old Fogies and Ragavan; with maybe a limited number of Mythic Rares as those tend to by the worst offenders.
I miss the design philosophy that guided Invasion block, Odyssey Block, the original Kamigawa Block, the original Shards of Alara block, and the original Zendikar Block. For me, those sets had great complexity balance.
Ashioks abilities are related. They just don't focus on the life gain. They deal with exiting your cards and turning paying life into card exile instead to prep for the ult.
Bad design regardless
@@trenchaus L take
@@trenchaus bad take regardless
As a player who stopped playing in 2001 and only just returned during All Will be One, the "Hill Giant" comparison was very relatable.
I'm returning player (last played Zendikar Rising in 2020). I started the Arena new player experience to remember what exactly to do. Every two color deck in the beginner experience takes me like 15 minutes of reading, just to get somewhat familiar with the cards. When the game hits I draw 7 and realise I have no memory about half of them. If it looks like a decent curve with some creatures I just yolo it and figure it out when the time comes. I'll probably stick around for the new set this month, but if limited is such a chore I'll probably be out in no time.
My goal of a relaxing 'Jasmine boreal of the seven' deck feels now valid and the facts explain why I haven't found many newer cards for it😂
I feel like precons should have an average word count per card database, to aid newer players. :)
I don't mind complexity as long as they're legible and we can figure it out. The worst actual thing they've ever done was textless Cryptic Command and Textless four-color Omnath, where the cards do like four different things.
Honestly WotC need to get over themselves and just reuse wordings and create more functional reprints instead of bending over backwards to create similar-but-slightly-different cards. Writers (Both good and bad) repeat themselves a lot too, hell for some people its a staple of their writing and in this case it would probably help if we had repeats of mechanics rather than cards that read "Draw a card if you're wearing a hat!" And then a card that reads "Draw a card if you have a piece of clothing on your head." - Both of these do the exact same thing but aren't allowed to say the exact same thing because the clause had to be slightly different or else someone at wotc would pluck their hairs out in agony over how 'unoriginal' it would've been.
As a brand new mtg player who just constructed his first standard deck from a Jumpstart booster pack, it took _hours_ while I tried to figure out every ability and nuance and I'm not even sure how I did. Guess I'll find out! 😅 I would have loved it if there were a bunch of vanilla creatures to make things easier....
Also, before anyone says, 'don't buy packs; buy singles,' _you_ try buying single cards and making your own deck as a brand new player with zero guidance staring at 20,000+ cards and not sure which cards go best with which and which cards are a good deal vs ripoff. I'll buy singles once I play a few dozen games and get a better handle on everything. Until then, I wanted simple so I got a booster set. Which wasn't as simple as I'd hoped, but it narrowed down what I had to learn.
I'm completely fine with complexity - I came from yugioh and my first format was commander, and I actually enjoy having cards that can do a lot of things. More words (theoretically) means more effects, meaning more things I can do on my turn, meaning more fun for me. My issue is more with cards being convoluted/more involved than they need to be, with the main example being Venture into the Dungeon.
When you boil it down to its base components, it's actually pretty straight forward: Whenever you trigger the effect, activate some effect (sometimes a modal choice) in a specific sequence based on how many times you've triggered it. Not astronomically different from something like Demonic Pact when you break it down.
However, because it requires multiple additional game pieces, some kind of marker to signify where on the dungeon map you are, as well as another marker to signify you've completed a dungeon for effects relevant to that, it requires a lot more to keep track of for what are ultimately relatively simple effects.
^Very much this
One small annoyance I found while building a Tasha deck was the variety of ways they write out, exile some cards, play them later. You have: play them with any type of mana, mana of any color, cast them with any type, cast them with any color, pay life, play only certain types of cards exiled, play this turn, play until next turn, play only cards exiled with a certain card, etc. I had to make a list of the different types of exile zones and it was 10+ different ways a card could be exiled with different rules of how to play it. Cause you can play them long after the card that exiled them is gone so it's hard to keep up with the stipulations on how to use the cards in exile. Still a fun deck though
I liked how at the end the videos came up in the wrong order!
Do you think mechanics similar to yugiohs normal monster interactions would have a place in mtg? E.g. a keyword ‘vanilla’ what that identifies the card as having no other abilities, and can be interacted with via other cards
We already have cards that interact with cards with no abilities (e.g. Muraganda Petroglyphs)
Interacting with vanilla creatures could be an interesting design space to explore more in the future, though.
Time to build that Alexander Clamilton deck I've been dreaming about
Once upon a time Mark rosewater talked about a thing called New world order. It was a method of taming the complexity in magic by hiding it among rare and mythic cards while keeping common cards relatively low complexity. I don't know if they abandoned that framework, but it really seems like they should revisit it or at least update it so it can apply today.
I don't really like that, because it is horrendous for constructed formsts, because you basically force all the playable cards into higher rarities
@@xolotltolox7626 complex cards aren't necessarily the best cards. And simple cards aren't necessarily bad.
@@Nobilitism pretty much all good simple cards have been done before, because with simple cards there is only ever so much you can do.
Because with simple effects the only way you can balance cards is via mana cost or reducing numbers (cancel and counterspell, time walk and the 5 mana time walk, lighning bolt and the two mana lightning bolt/shock)
And let's be honest here, most simple card designs have already been "solved"
New World Order didn't go anywhere. Note how all the "complexity" examples used in this video are from rares and mythic-rares as intended. Where as lower rarity cards are more streamlined in effects and abilities.
That isn't to say however lower cards haven't evolved over time as Prof said, at which point it becomes a multifaceted discussion of opinions where the current line should be drawn. In many cases the average intelligence of the player base both new and old has increased as "gaming" and the ideas born from it have become more common place and "socially acceptable" (weird term but can't quite think of a better one atm). As a result this has impacted the amount of wiggle room at common and uncommon designers feel they are able to use. For example the upcoming Ixalan set, most commons and uncommons are cards that do at most two things.
I'd like to use the public perception of DnD and the terms used in and around it as an example. Go back to the 80s and 90s and, to many, the public at large ridiculed and "didn't get" people who enjoyed the hobby and the discourse around it. Now, the terms and fandom around DnD have had the time to permeate through more aspects of society and common culture that even if someone doesn't play DnD they have most likely heard of many of the game mechanics and memes from it. Is everyone an expert now? No but there is a much firmer foundation to be able to jump off from sort of speak and less "hand holding" that realistically needs to be done.
14:00 and my eyes are glazing over and my favorite creature is Gurzigost, but voracious cobra is a bit less stressful.
I have been in and out of MTG since 94, and now occasionally play a casual game of commander with some of my older cards that I have and enjoy seeing the looks on the faces of my opponents when I play KISMET and ROYAL ASSASSIN and use the assassin to take out their big bad creatures, I also have JESTERS CAP and GRINNING TOTEM in the deck and that makes them nervous when they can't counter or get rid of them before I use them, also have DEFENSE GRID in the deck with RACKLING and VISELING.
Recently had a friend check out my decks and play Magic with me who hadn’t played since the late 90s. He was confused that there were even other ways to play 😂.
He was most at home trying some Pauper with me… the commander decks we looked at were shocking to say the least. Interesting to get that perspective from someone who had been away for so long.
lol I too have a friend who kept on playing while I stopped looking at cards for some years, occasionnaly he wanted to show me the newest decks he had and I was like wut... is this for real ? Halfway through the deck I already forgot what the 1st card actually did
It's a bummer that the trend towards snowballing complexity began with Strixhaven, a set whose flavor and characters appealed to me more than any other Magic set for years before or since.
"20 Questions and a Migraine" would be a great podcast name.
Card effects being short and sweet (and easily read with keywords) was honestly what helped me get into the game back in high school. Boy, do I wish I could go back.
I love you for this video! Hate long and difficult text on the cards.
Yeah, good point. Frazzled Editor defined a "wordy" card as a card with 4+ lines of rules text.
Cards are way wordier now.
First card I thought of when I saw the title of this video
Alexander Clamilton becomes an op commander.
A la "fathomless descent" there should be "extra wordy".
As always, shoutout to pauper for dodging virtually every corporate-mandated L that WotC's shiny golden rear so generously excretes
I agree Professor! I do think the game can be too complex. Having to spend so much time to study and understand the cards.. can make it quite difficult for newer players. Especially if there are more then 2 players in a game. Thanks for the video.. it's a good topic to be able to talk about.