Do share if you enjoy random effects in card games or would you rather see less of it? Sources List below: docs.google.com/document/d/1qj40X863aiJ26xMxsvJb2h1fJRwLrIMkcoDH4ZkKk8M/edit
excellent video and breakdown. Card games have really fascinating interactions between mechanics, players, and the meta knowledge. RNG is a feature that I do quite enjoy, but I often feel can be overly punishing for something that is simply out of player control... now give a player a few options and it blows up on them.. Well, for me at least, I view it as a 'me' problem.
The situation you described in Balatro is exactly what made me stop playing. Managing a bad/good hand, and navigating the randomness of your deck are good gameplay elements, normal in a card game. But the game adds too much randomness on the boss you face (something you have no control over). When you build around a strategy (like a suite, or figures, or pairs), and the game suddenly put you against a boss that says "your strategy doesn't work here", there is simply nothing you can do. It's like playing warrior in arena in hearthstone, and your opponent #12 has a passive rule saying "you cannot play warrior cards". Even the bosses of Slay the Spire, which can be really punishing for certain types of deck (like the Awakened One vs a power deck) don't feel nearly as unfair. I've faced Balatro bosses that literally made my whole hand permanently hidden. At some point, it feels like the best meta-strategy is to NOT build toward a specific type of gameplay, when building toward a specific type of gameplay is the fun part of the game.
Cool to see a different perspective on this. For me the game has been so brazen in being an RNG fest that the irritation of having my build turned off passes through me immediately. Evidently that's not 100%. While in StS, getting to Time Eater with a spam deck for the first time made me shoot steam out my ears. Different strokes for different folks, probably.
@@GamesDeconstructed I understand the randomness of facing a hard counter boss. But there's "counter" as in "you're gonna have a hard time" and "counter" as in "you literally cannot play". I the Awakened One said "your power cards have no effect", it would be much more frustrating than "if you play power cards, the boss gets stronger". There is also the frequency. In StS, a spam deck has a 33% chance of facing Time Eater. In Balatro you fight so many bosses, you are more likely to face your hard-counter than not. And finally, it's about adaptation (as you mention in the video, the skill associated with randomness is adapting to it). If I see Time Eater in StS, I have a full chapter, 33% of my run, to prepare for it. In Balatro, if you face your hard counter, you only get two shop phases to try and adapt.
@@DarksteelPenguin all fair points. I believe there's like 3 solutions that you might randomly see in shop if you find yourself against a "turn off your build" boss. In a late ante you won't pivot in 2 blinds, so it's either the reroll voucher or one of the 2-3 jokers that could help, like the resurrection one. If you don't see these, you're cooked. The StS bosses being a 85:25 counter against my builds doesn't make that much difference for me from Balatro's being 100-0, though I can theoretically see the appeal.
There have been MANY times I get cooked by a boss blind, but it is not a more often than not situation. There are ways to play around them, but they are also predicated on chance.
@@Gorbgorbenson I've heard voices that the most reliable builds for experienced players seem to be non-specific. You get a high mult and can win with high cards if need be, which would make you more difficult to counter. Though I still mess around with the counterable, go hard on one thing builds cause it's fun.
My personal philosophy is that the point of a card game, generally, is for the randomization of deck order to be the rng that you plan around and have to deal with, from which variance emerges. I don't really see the point of adding more randomness outside of that, or any case where that makes the game more strategic or engaging. The cards that you draw in a random order should still reliably do specific, non-random things. Hearthstone has always felt antithetical to card games to me for that reason, and I've never been able to get into it
if you know, teamfight tactics and other autochess games work with this well, the units that you buy are random yet the stats etc are not. You need to limit rng so the point of the game is controlling and playing optimally with your rng
@@toa12th4 autochess/autobattlers is a small genre of games where units you've bought out of a pool to form a comp and placed on a board of some sort fight in AI controlled battles. So you don't control the battles themselves, but concentrate on deciding which units to buy, how to combo them, where to place them etc. Some examples are the eponymous Autochess, Hearthstone Battlegrounds, about 17 Chinese clones of autochess, Dota Underlords (RIP). Teamfight Tactics is the league of legends flavored one, it's available in the Riot client. They do share some DNA with card games and I've played and enjoyed most of the big ones. I think TFT or HS Battlegrounds would be good introductions to the genre if that seems like something you'd be interested in.
Not knowledgeable enough about Legacy to do that I'm afraid. I did have a Four Horsemen anecdote in between the Cascade sections in one script draft but ended up cutting it so it'd flow better. Would still love to talk about Four Horsemen sometime :D
My personal issue with discover in hearthstone is that 90% of discover cards become useless once they rotate to wild (eternal format), and that wouldn't be so problematic if we didn't get so many discovers per expansion.
Yeah, I think that's not something taken into account when designing these. A Discover a Dragon card in a Standard rotation where Dragons have a specific identity and roles rotating to Wild is gonna make it a chaotic grab bag, for example. Some more specific discover pools I still like in Wild, but yeah, most have a really large range of outcomes.
Pre watching thoughts: randomness is fun, but built into the card it should not be too powerful / game deciding. So either random cards should be weak when low roll and just above average when high roll, or they should be modal, all solid mid-power outcomes that have distinct flavor and advantages
Personally, I feel like randomness that requires good game knowledge and deck construction skill leads to the most fun/interactive randomness. Examples like Cascade decks, self-mill strategies, or even just ... card draw, are what give me the satisfaction of knowing that I used player skill to construct my deck in such a way that the outcome I desire is the most likely one. Understanding the odds(Discover, Draft, etc) is significantly less rewarding to me than controlling them, if that makes sense. Also, I'm of the opinion that modal cards that don't let you select the mode deserve to be relegated to gimmick functions exclusively. The best the card can do should never be too high above par for a similarly costed card, and the worst should ideally not be much lower.¹ Almost no cost is high enough to let a card read "Win the game immediately... maybe :)", and no cost reduction is enough such that it should have a chance to read "You lose, go home." I suppose my thesis is that randomness in card games should, ideally, allow the player as much skill expression as possible. Playing cards with output randomness that lets them occasionally be above rate can feel sacky², oftentimes for both players involved. Discovery is a cool feature insofar as it allows players the skill expression to know which cards allow them to access which outs, but the odds therein are entirely out of the player's control. "Just memorize a list" isn't what I'd call "great" skill expression, and "just read this whole list to understand whether or not this card is usually above rate on mana cost" makes understanding a card's value at a glance unintuitive as hell. (For context, I play primarily paper TCGs, and, although I've played my fair share of digital card games, I recognize that [obviously] my bias is towards the things that I engage with more often.) ¹Unless the card's "worst-case" effect is already above par, in which case, it's clearly just a busted card anyway and it's fine if the effect ceiling is a little higher than what would typically be acceptable. Examples include the infamous "________ Goblin" from MTG's latest un-set. ²Yugioh slang referring to a loss or huge tempo swing, because your opponent pulled a hail mary. (E.g. drawing a card you can only run one copy of that basically wins the matchup immediately)
Well put, I think your thoughts are reasonably similar to mine, especially when it comes to paper TCGs. 'Memorizing a list' form of skill expression is mid for sure, but Hearthstone has occasionally done interesting things with it, making the list's contents conditional, having you choose a card for your opponent as well or having the choice between picking one of 3 discovered spells and a truly random, unknown one. There are skill expression opportunities there, and there's a number of them in playing with randomness in general. It's just that I feel CCGs are not the best place to showcase them in a way that's fun. There are push-your-luck board games that involve a level of skill, odds ratio calculation or having good heuristics for picking the highest EV option in complex situations are real skills. And their use can be fun, but few competitive card games create the context for it.
@@GamesDeconstructed It might simply be a case of "if you're going to feature internal heuristic judgment and over/under evaluations as a skill one needs to learn for this game, you need to lean all the way in and make a true gambling CCG" -- a space that hasn't (to my knowledge) been explored beyond casino table games. Personally, I'll just stick to my hypergeometric calculator and keep dredging until WotC rips it from my cold, dead hands.
@@NoxiousAffection I feel like Snap leaned into it a bit, with it's short games and emphasis on cube gain rate as opposed to win rate being the main factor for climbing. Which theoretically should allow one to rationalize that losing a single match to RNG is not a big deal. Turns out folks still hate winning or losing matches to a die roll and Hela Discard, which loses or wins the game based on whether they discard their finisher randomly, gets people seething.
I dont like either, but the randomness in hearthstone discover effects is worse than in magic arena draft effects because the pools are much broader. Magic has defined "spellbooks" to draft from, meaning the outcomes are still pretty singular. The issue is that it basically gives you a choose 1 of 3 effects. Most of which are actually good. The worst is the one that lets you get off color cards and play them because it's on a mana rock that produces any color. Shit is so aggrivating to play against.
The variety of what discover pools are based on is wild. Like you've got deterministic ones (one of these 3 specific spells) all the way to "discover any card in the game" pretty much. I'd be lying if I said I enjoy all of them equally.
@@GamesDeconstructed I felt as though games were determined by who has more and who has better discover spells (among other issues I have with HS), and I think Mtgs version of it, where you look at cards, pick 1 or 2 and put the rest on bottom or gy is much more balanced and fair to your opponent.
Do share if you enjoy random effects in card games or would you rather see less of it?
Sources List below:
docs.google.com/document/d/1qj40X863aiJ26xMxsvJb2h1fJRwLrIMkcoDH4ZkKk8M/edit
excellent video and breakdown. Card games have really fascinating interactions between mechanics, players, and the meta knowledge. RNG is a feature that I do quite enjoy, but I often feel can be overly punishing for something that is simply out of player control... now give a player a few options and it blows up on them.. Well, for me at least, I view it as a 'me' problem.
The situation you described in Balatro is exactly what made me stop playing. Managing a bad/good hand, and navigating the randomness of your deck are good gameplay elements, normal in a card game. But the game adds too much randomness on the boss you face (something you have no control over). When you build around a strategy (like a suite, or figures, or pairs), and the game suddenly put you against a boss that says "your strategy doesn't work here", there is simply nothing you can do. It's like playing warrior in arena in hearthstone, and your opponent #12 has a passive rule saying "you cannot play warrior cards". Even the bosses of Slay the Spire, which can be really punishing for certain types of deck (like the Awakened One vs a power deck) don't feel nearly as unfair. I've faced Balatro bosses that literally made my whole hand permanently hidden.
At some point, it feels like the best meta-strategy is to NOT build toward a specific type of gameplay, when building toward a specific type of gameplay is the fun part of the game.
Cool to see a different perspective on this.
For me the game has been so brazen in being an RNG fest that the irritation of having my build turned off passes through me immediately. Evidently that's not 100%.
While in StS, getting to Time Eater with a spam deck for the first time made me shoot steam out my ears. Different strokes for different folks, probably.
@@GamesDeconstructed I understand the randomness of facing a hard counter boss. But there's "counter" as in "you're gonna have a hard time" and "counter" as in "you literally cannot play". I the Awakened One said "your power cards have no effect", it would be much more frustrating than "if you play power cards, the boss gets stronger".
There is also the frequency. In StS, a spam deck has a 33% chance of facing Time Eater. In Balatro you fight so many bosses, you are more likely to face your hard-counter than not.
And finally, it's about adaptation (as you mention in the video, the skill associated with randomness is adapting to it). If I see Time Eater in StS, I have a full chapter, 33% of my run, to prepare for it. In Balatro, if you face your hard counter, you only get two shop phases to try and adapt.
@@DarksteelPenguin all fair points.
I believe there's like 3 solutions that you might randomly see in shop if you find yourself against a "turn off your build" boss.
In a late ante you won't pivot in 2 blinds, so it's either the reroll voucher or one of the 2-3 jokers that could help, like the resurrection one. If you don't see these, you're cooked.
The StS bosses being a 85:25 counter against my builds doesn't make that much difference for me from Balatro's being 100-0, though I can theoretically see the appeal.
There have been MANY times I get cooked by a boss blind, but it is not a more often than not situation. There are ways to play around them, but they are also predicated on chance.
@@Gorbgorbenson I've heard voices that the most reliable builds for experienced players seem to be non-specific. You get a high mult and can win with high cards if need be, which would make you more difficult to counter.
Though I still mess around with the counterable, go hard on one thing builds cause it's fun.
My personal philosophy is that the point of a card game, generally, is for the randomization of deck order to be the rng that you plan around and have to deal with, from which variance emerges. I don't really see the point of adding more randomness outside of that, or any case where that makes the game more strategic or engaging. The cards that you draw in a random order should still reliably do specific, non-random things. Hearthstone has always felt antithetical to card games to me for that reason, and I've never been able to get into it
if you know, teamfight tactics and other autochess games work with this well, the units that you buy are random yet the stats etc are not. You need to limit rng so the point of the game is controlling and playing optimally with your rng
@@oliver1784 I'm not familiar with the genre, what's autochess/teamfight tactics?
@@toa12th4 autochess/autobattlers is a small genre of games where units you've bought out of a pool to form a comp and placed on a board of some sort fight in AI controlled battles. So you don't control the battles themselves, but concentrate on deciding which units to buy, how to combo them, where to place them etc.
Some examples are the eponymous Autochess, Hearthstone Battlegrounds, about 17 Chinese clones of autochess, Dota Underlords (RIP). Teamfight Tactics is the league of legends flavored one, it's available in the Riot client.
They do share some DNA with card games and I've played and enjoyed most of the big ones. I think TFT or HS Battlegrounds would be good introductions to the genre if that seems like something you'd be interested in.
I was expecting a legacy hollowvine reference at the end there when you went into a discussion about controlling the odds!
Not knowledgeable enough about Legacy to do that I'm afraid.
I did have a Four Horsemen anecdote in between the Cascade sections in one script draft but ended up cutting it so it'd flow better. Would still love to talk about Four Horsemen sometime :D
My personal issue with discover in hearthstone is that 90% of discover cards become useless once they rotate to wild (eternal format), and that wouldn't be so problematic if we didn't get so many discovers per expansion.
Yeah, I think that's not something taken into account when designing these.
A Discover a Dragon card in a Standard rotation where Dragons have a specific identity and roles rotating to Wild is gonna make it a chaotic grab bag, for example.
Some more specific discover pools I still like in Wild, but yeah, most have a really large range of outcomes.
Pre watching thoughts: randomness is fun, but built into the card it should not be too powerful / game deciding. So either random cards should be weak when low roll and just above average when high roll, or they should be modal, all solid mid-power outcomes that have distinct flavor and advantages
Personally, I feel like randomness that requires good game knowledge and deck construction skill leads to the most fun/interactive randomness. Examples like Cascade decks, self-mill strategies, or even just ... card draw, are what give me the satisfaction of knowing that I used player skill to construct my deck in such a way that the outcome I desire is the most likely one. Understanding the odds(Discover, Draft, etc) is significantly less rewarding to me than controlling them, if that makes sense.
Also, I'm of the opinion that modal cards that don't let you select the mode deserve to be relegated to gimmick functions exclusively. The best the card can do should never be too high above par for a similarly costed card, and the worst should ideally not be much lower.¹ Almost no cost is high enough to let a card read "Win the game immediately... maybe :)", and no cost reduction is enough such that it should have a chance to read "You lose, go home."
I suppose my thesis is that randomness in card games should, ideally, allow the player as much skill expression as possible. Playing cards with output randomness that lets them occasionally be above rate can feel sacky², oftentimes for both players involved. Discovery is a cool feature insofar as it allows players the skill expression to know which cards allow them to access which outs, but the odds therein are entirely out of the player's control. "Just memorize a list" isn't what I'd call "great" skill expression, and "just read this whole list to understand whether or not this card is usually above rate on mana cost" makes understanding a card's value at a glance unintuitive as hell.
(For context, I play primarily paper TCGs, and, although I've played my fair share of digital card games, I recognize that [obviously] my bias is towards the things that I engage with more often.)
¹Unless the card's "worst-case" effect is already above par, in which case, it's clearly just a busted card anyway and it's fine if the effect ceiling is a little higher than what would typically be acceptable. Examples include the infamous "________ Goblin" from MTG's latest un-set.
²Yugioh slang referring to a loss or huge tempo swing, because your opponent pulled a hail mary. (E.g. drawing a card you can only run one copy of that basically wins the matchup immediately)
Well put, I think your thoughts are reasonably similar to mine, especially when it comes to paper TCGs.
'Memorizing a list' form of skill expression is mid for sure, but Hearthstone has occasionally done interesting things with it, making the list's contents conditional, having you choose a card for your opponent as well or having the choice between picking one of 3 discovered spells and a truly random, unknown one.
There are skill expression opportunities there, and there's a number of them in playing with randomness in general. It's just that I feel CCGs are not the best place to showcase them in a way that's fun.
There are push-your-luck board games that involve a level of skill, odds ratio calculation or having good heuristics for picking the highest EV option in complex situations are real skills. And their use can be fun, but few competitive card games create the context for it.
@@GamesDeconstructed It might simply be a case of "if you're going to feature internal heuristic judgment and over/under evaluations as a skill one needs to learn for this game, you need to lean all the way in and make a true gambling CCG" -- a space that hasn't (to my knowledge) been explored beyond casino table games.
Personally, I'll just stick to my hypergeometric calculator and keep dredging until WotC rips it from my cold, dead hands.
@@NoxiousAffection I feel like Snap leaned into it a bit, with it's short games and emphasis on cube gain rate as opposed to win rate being the main factor for climbing. Which theoretically should allow one to rationalize that losing a single match to RNG is not a big deal.
Turns out folks still hate winning or losing matches to a die roll and Hela Discard, which loses or wins the game based on whether they discard their finisher randomly, gets people seething.
The problem with randomness is both winner and loser dont feel good about it especailly the side that lost
I dont like either, but the randomness in hearthstone discover effects is worse than in magic arena draft effects because the pools are much broader. Magic has defined "spellbooks" to draft from, meaning the outcomes are still pretty singular. The issue is that it basically gives you a choose 1 of 3 effects. Most of which are actually good. The worst is the one that lets you get off color cards and play them because it's on a mana rock that produces any color. Shit is so aggrivating to play against.
The variety of what discover pools are based on is wild. Like you've got deterministic ones (one of these 3 specific spells) all the way to "discover any card in the game" pretty much.
I'd be lying if I said I enjoy all of them equally.
@@GamesDeconstructed I felt as though games were determined by who has more and who has better discover spells (among other issues I have with HS), and I think Mtgs version of it, where you look at cards, pick 1 or 2 and put the rest on bottom or gy is much more balanced and fair to your opponent.
Second?
First?
First