Historical Progress of Magic November 16, 2009
Posted by James in : all, random, reviews, design , trackbackWe experience a lot of progress in our personal lives. We evolve from someone willing to touch fire and walk into traffic into a much more reasonable kind of person. Society also has progress when it comes to technological improvements. What about Magic? Is Magic better now than it used to be? Consider the following points:
- Combos: Are there fun viable combos? (Medium powered combos are best.)
- Linearity: Do cards tell us what deck to make?
- Viable variety: Is it possible to make a viable deck of your own?
- Innovation: Are there fun new ideas implemented?
- Limited: Is draft any fun?
Improvements
A lot of improvement was seen from Invasion to (September 2000 to May 2008) concerning innovation, linearity, and draft. The most important improvement was the fact that draft became more and more fun. Making draft fun requires that R&D keep draft in mind when making cards. In other words the game became holistic: There had to be the right balance of removal, mana costs, color power levels, flying creatures, and so on. Ideally, every card fits into a piece of this puzzle.
I experienced the improvement of draft starting with Onslaught. Consider how each set was an improvement:
- Pre-Onslaught: Take all the removal. Creatures tend not to be very good. Some combos were occasionally viable, such as madness or threshold combos.
- Onslaught: The power level of commons was increased. Common creatures in particular could be worth taking. Every color had a single purpose (tribe) and was fairly well balanced. Any tribe could do well if drafted appropriately. However, it could be hard to draft a mono-colored deck.
- Mirrodin: The power level of commons was significantly increased. It was very easy to make a powerful draft deck, but almost everyone ended up with an artifact deck. (After 5th Dawn, everyone also ended up with a 5 color deck.)
- Kamigawa: There were at least 6 tribes, and 50% of the cards were Spirits, which made it possible to draft a multicolored deck. However, spirits got boring. Too much of the same thing. (Even worse was Saviors of Kamigawa, which was all about getting 7 cards in hand. That didn’t help the tribal theme and it forces us to do what we don’t want to do.)
- Ravnica: Ravnica was nearly perfect and many of my friends say it was their favorite. It lacked linearity but some combos, and its demand for two colored decks was easy enough. However, it became a little overwhelming when the trilogy was complete, and combos became less important at that point.
- Timespiral: Possibly my favorite draft set. Lots of combos and freedom to choose your own colors. However, it did lack linearity that some players enjoy.
- Lorwyn: Commons became extremely powerful, so bombs were a lot less important than usual. Perfected the tribal theme from Onslaught by making the tribal themes multicolored.
- Shadowmoor: Commons continued to be powerful, but decks were a lot less linear than Lorwyn. Deck types were mainly controlled through two color deck themes, similar to Ravnica. It’s greatest feat was helping us avoid mana screw. Hybrid colors helped avoid color screw, and Eventide’s retrace helped us when we got mana flooded.
- Shards of Alara: Things go as downhill for draft as I’ve ever seen. Bombs were essential. Mana fixing wasn’t so great, and it forced us to play 3 color decks. (I would have much preferred mana fixing found in Ravnica.) Conflux helped a little with mana fixing, but tried to get us to play five color decks.
- M10: Still not great. Bombs are much too important and the commons tend not to be good enough. Removal became all-importance once again.
- Zendikar: Still not great for much of the same reason as M10.
The improvements of draft are very noteworthy because it’s one of the hardest ways to improve the game. It requires that the game itself is well made and that every card is part of a greater whole. From this perspective the game peaked around Timespiral and it quickly declined with Shards of Alara.
When will it become perfect?
Will Magic ever become perfect? Probably not. It probably has never come close to perfection and there are at least couple good reasons for that. One, time and money. R&D has limited resources. Hasbro wants to pinch every penny and get the most for the least money. They want a working game for an affordable cost rather than a perfect game for a steep cost. They could give R&D teams a couple years to make each set, but that would cost too much.
Two, they hold back. As Kenneth Nagel said last week:
If you’ve ever been in an entertainment business that releases content on a regular basis, you come to realize that it’s best to “spread out the awesome” across multiple releases. That way your audience finds compelling content in all your products rather than being spoiled by all the good stuff at the beginning, and the really good stuff has breathing room.
This is very evident from Core sets. Although M10 is the best core set, it is still lacking. All the 2 casting cost 2/1 creatures are total junk. But at least they are better than all the 3 casting cost 2/2 creatures of 10th edution. But even 10th edition was a lot better than 9th edition… And 8th Edition didn’t even have proper dual lands. And consider the “innovation” found in core sets:
- 9th Edition: Some important cards were added, like pain lands.
- 10th Edition: Legends, and a lot more important cards. And they were black bordered.
- M10: Planeswalkers, more important cards, and some “new” cards.
We can easily predict that M11 will also have some “innovation” (perhaps gold cards, and/or hybrid cards). However, it is also very likely that the average common of M11 will still have a lower power level than appropriate (just like every other core set.)
The core sets are an interesting example of “holding back” in order to appear innovative. For the most part the innovation is an illusion because very little is truly original in core sets.
Just like core sets hold back, we can freely assume that all sets hold back to some extent. There are many ways to improve mana fixing, for example, but it would be “too awesome” to give us the mana fixing now. Instead, we will probably have to wait another 10 years before seeing much of it. As far as mana fixing is concerned, Magic is years in the past.
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