TCG card draw for energy

personally, I liked Duel master's system of being able to use any card in your deck as mana(whatever color the card is, is the color of mana)

it prevents you from being mana screwed, and adds an extra layer of strategy because the player has to manually choose which cards in his deck are the most useful for his current opponent.

>Explain why it's OK to win or lose on turn one STRICTLY based upon a dead-hand draw.

That's what mulligans are for.

mulling to 4 in the current meta, you might as well just forfeit, unless you're running one of those "if I get this combo I win" decks.

mulligan hurts you. you are giving up a card each time. if your opponent got a decent first hand, you just intentionally put yourself at card disadvantage, just to get an ok opening turn.

Such is the price you pay for getting to keep redoing your opening hand. A mulligan to 4 is about the most extreme I'll go before I'll just keep it, in Modern it's not too bad and Legacy has ways to dig you back out of the hole, the scry helps a little too.

In practice even an unlucky game has me normally stick at 5 or 6.

>in the current meta

There are at least 8 "current metas", which one are you referring to?

Come on user, don't be sassy if you're an idiot.

>Draw 7 cards, all lands
>Mulligan to 6 with top deck scry (let's say information on 7 cards)
>Mulligan to 5 with top deck scry (6 cards)
>Mulligan to 4 with top deck scry (5 cards)

So, without actually drawing anything, you can look at 23 cards to hit a workable hand with 3 lands in it, and in a 60 card deck, that's basically half your deck. It's statistically unlikely that a well constructed deck will get consistently fucked without an error in shuffling, but even if they do, it's very unlikely that it will happen 2 games in a row over a best-of-three match.

explain

why

you're okay

with a scenario

that statistically IS possible

and yes

even a mulligan can generate shitty, game losing results

MMDoC had the best resource system. Besides resource cost cards had stat requirements from your hero: might, magic and destiny (shown as fist, flask and banner). Magic for spells, destiny and sometimes magic/might for fortunes, might and any combination for creatures. Each turn your mana production is raised by 1 but stats of your hero doesn't change. You spend hero action to raise one of his stats by 1, draw a card for 1 mana or use unique hero abilities if any. It was the best of both worlds, automatic resource gain and card requirements without mana screw.

it's happened in EDH but the example I gave numbers from is actually from duels

It's statistically possible that you can pick up a women by acting like a jackass on the internet.

That doesn't mean it's going to happen to you anytime soon, or should be something you concern yourself with.

Because

It

Allows

You

To

Design

Lands

That

DO

Things

Other

Than

Tap

For

Mana

If it helps I'm also OK with a game where statistically it is possible for me to win matches by default because my opponents diabeetus felled him. Shit happens.

>that statistically IS possible
Because it's really unlikely unless your deck is shit. Things towards the outside of the bell curve by definition do not happen often, but by definition they happen. Do you live in a plastic bubble?

Because it's a statistical outlier.

The odds of you mulling to 4 and never seeing a keepable hand is astronomical. Unless you're a bad deck builder, but then you have way more problems.

You know that you don't scry every time you take a new mull, right? You scry at the beginning of the first turn if you mulled

No? You scry right after you draw your hand, and you can choose to keep that hand after you have knowledge of your scry'd card.

>t. I did exactly this many times in various magic events since the mulligan change, and literally no one has cared

what game is that? I don't recognize it's art or anything in that sentence

touche, user

However I'm literally not OK with that scenario either. Not at all.

Wrong.

magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/new-mulligan-rule-starting-battle-zendikar-prereleases-2015-08-20

Might and Magic: Duel of Champions was digital CCG from 2013

Literally wrong

103.4: Each player draws a number of cards equal to his or her starting hand size, which is normally seven. (Some effects can modify a player's starting hand size.) A player who is dissatisfied with his or her initial hand may take a mulligan. First, the starting player declares whether or not he or she will take a mulligan. Then each other player in turn order does the same. Once each player has made a declaration, all players who decided to take mulligans do so at the same time. To take a mulligan, a player shuffles his or her hand back into his or her library, then draws a new hand of one fewer cards than he or she had before. If a player kept his or her hand of cards, those cards become the player's opening hand, and that player may not take any further mulligans. This process is then repeated until no player takes a mulligan. (Note that if a player's hand size reaches zero cards, that player must keep that hand.) After all players have kept an opening hand, each player in turn order whose hand contains fewer cards than that player's starting hand size may look at the top card of his or her library. If a player does, that player may put that card on the bottom of his or her library.

Well, shit. I've cheated quite extensively in some pretty prestigious tournaments. Ain't that some shit? I'm surprised none of the cock-knocking rules lawyers haven't called me out on it yet.

To be fair, I've seen a lot of other people do it as well.

I enjoy the aspect of risk. You're like the scrubs that complain about missing a 95% chance to hit in XCOM. Don't like it? Play something else.

I don't mean to be rude, but that you can't identify the format speaks volumes about the quality of deck building at play.

Well, a lot of people were/are confused by the rule change, even though it's one tiny change that affects like 1% of games.

Hell, I still forget to do it sometimes and that also is technically cheating.

Just try to remember how it works and correct yourself in the future.

See, I'm like the God Emporer Worm from Dune. If everything in life was orderly, things would be predictable, and thus boring. With the element of chance, even the most mundane thing becomes fascinating, pregnant with possibility.

Same reason I like baseball. Anything can happen with one swing of the bat. I saw a baseball land directly in some guy's beer last time I was at the park. If that was

>I've cheated quite extensively in some pretty prestigious tournaments

As somebody who has played in PTQs and GPs where not a single person there would let you get away with that shit, I'd love to know how you define a "prestigious tournament".

Personally, I like Partial Paris a lot better, but I can see how that causes a lot of issues in older formats. I remember what old EDH was like.

Calm your tits. Sanctioned sealed/limited at various game-stores with judges and independently verified decklists. Pretty prestigious means there were a lot of entrants who paid a lot of money to be there.

It isn't okay, and magic is fundamentally flawed as a result. You should read Maro's justification of Mana screw. It's enlightening how retarded the guy is.

LGS drafts and sealed events don't fall into any definition of prestigious, there are thousands per week.

Well, if you didn't just shit on my parade, captain buzzkill. With a $100 buy in, you'd think people would have said something to the judge.

>With a $100 buy in

Christ, I'd only ever pay that to do some sort of Urza block or older draft.

Fuck me that must have been a huge draft. GP louisville was only $75.

People will say land-style resource systems are good because it makes each match different even if players continue using the same deck.

This is true for MTG, but only because MTG is a terrible game with very few meaningful decisions during the actual match itself. A good litmus test for a card game is "if every card was vanilla and both players used identical decks, how many matches could be played before the players get bored."

>the game designer is retarded, I know how to do games better!

The biggest con of having dedicated land cards is that they present few interesting play decisions.
Barring some very few outliers, like playing around mass-land removal or using it as discard fodder, you'll nearly always play a land during your turn. Any decisions about playing for color or something else are not intrinsic to the card type itself.
So, in a sense, lands have moderate strategic value (which and how many lands do I want to use in my deck?), but very low tactical value (if I have a land, I'm probably going to play it)

That's really the biggest thing with lands. They have a few other upsides and downsides, like additional designspace as a card type or being often an "unfun" and boring draw, that figure into the decision if it's worth to have lands or not.

Getting a free point of Mana each turn makes certain strategies 100% risk free and removes a giant portion of design space and tactical decisions from the game.

Because it can happen in every card game. This is not a problem unique to Magic, all card games have an element of chance which means there is always a risk of you losing simply because you got unlucky. Everyone has played a game that was won or lost by a lucky topdeck or because the opponent happened to have the perfect counter in his opening hand, it's part of playing the game. Getting mana screwed/flooded is the most obvious and frustrating example of this in Magic but as other anons have pointed out with proper deck building it can be almost completely eliminated, and with all the good stuff lands add to the game most consider it a pretty good tradeoff.

In games without mana, what if you draw all your highest cost cards before you have tge resources to spend them? What if your opponent kills you before you even get the chance to play a card because you drew your 7 highest costing cards in the first 7 turns? There are inherently bad scenarios that are sometimes out of your control. If you don't want to even have the remote chance to encounter such things then playing card games is the actual mistake you're making. The choice of card game is irrelevant unless they somehow remove the inherent randomness of the top card of your deck at any given moment.

So you are saying MTG is objectively worse than games without mana because it has the mana problem on top of the drawing expensive cards problem.

>You should automatically accept that something unfun is fun because some guy says so.

Yes. If your (only) metric is the chance of getting screwed by luck of the draw then you shouldn't play MTG. MTG is objectively worse in that regard.

>A good litmus test for a card game is "if every card was vanilla and both players used identical decks, how many matches could be played before the players get bored."
>"how interesting is a game if we remove everything interesting about it?"

If your game isn't interesting to play with vanilla cards, it means your game is shit. The actual game part of MTG is indefensibly garbage -- the only interesting stuff happens before the match even begins when you're building a deck.

Further, having a robust game at your core mitigates the long-standing issue of rock-paper-scissors style deck matchups. When the players don't have the tools to do something during a match, the "skill" becomes about correctly guessing what meta deck your opponent happened to pick.

What collectible card games on the market are still interesting when you play nothing but a procession of vanilla creatures or their local equivalent?

I said decent, anyway, before we go further. Not great or even good, decent. It's also unfair to specify "collectable" as if being a collectable game is a good excuse for a game being bad.

Doomtown has (had) a politcal and economic development aspect. Netrunner has it's bluffing game. Race for the Galaxy has tempo, hand management, and a heavy emphasis on predicting your opponent. Pax Renaissance is literally composed of vanilla elements but the system is so robust that two cards identical except one is located in Britain and the other is located in the Ottoman Empire is a huge difference. Codex allows any creature to block in five different ways and on the offensive you have to choose between targeting their units, buildings with special effects, buildings that let them play units, heroes that let them cast spells, and the face (and that's just options in combat alone).

>Netrunner has it's bluffing game. Race for the Galaxy has tempo, hand management, and a heavy emphasis on predicting your opponent.
Remind me how these are absent from mtg again?

You're just as likely to get hit by a bus, and yet here you are, still shitposting on the Internet.

>lands are good because they can do things other than just be lands
Things that aren't lands can also do that.

Nearly all that shit is in magic you fool.

And yet none of those games feature Mana screw.

I can't remember the last time I experienced mana screw. In four years of playing this game, it was only ever a problem in my fledgling days. When people tell you to git gud, they're not just brushing you off. Magic is not a casual game and there are a wealth of resources to help you master it. Or you could go play one of those "superior" games you mentioned.

Because magic isn't a game for children with low comprehension

Are there seriously people who pretend it's for any other reason than to sell expensive lands? Why else would those lands be rare?

>tfw the game is dead
Fuck you Ubisoft.

I just found this in my dads old collection. It doesn't even tap for mana AND it kills my creatures if I don't have more lands! Why would you be okay with a game that has lands that don't even tap for mana!?

Land is too deeply rooted into the games mechanics to be changed at this point

the only real thing that I think could be changed to make the game better is making the mulligan rules less disastrous. In Modern and Legacy it isn't that bad since the decks are so consistent and have so much flitering that they can usually recover from going to 6 or 5 but in a format like Standard going to 5 is pretty much an automatic loss and going to 6 is very unfavorable.

maybe allowing one free redraw or giving players the options of doing draws like hearthstone where they can choose to keep a few cards in their opening draw and pitch others back would help make things a bit more consistent in Standard but as it stands now the mulligan rule is really shitty

Nice anecdotal evidence!

Let me tell you about mine. I've used decks crafted by the 1996 world champion himself, blessed by Richard Garfield, and have had a every pro player since 2000 on retainer to advise me about how to Mulligan. Following their advice, and performing several arcane karmic rituals to bring good fortune daily, recommended by hermetic Buddhist sages known to keep and study the true last words of Jesus Christ, I still experience mana screw every other game.

It's a problem. If yours was the typical usecase, then there's another problem: mana screw isn't fulfilling is purpose. According to rosewater himself, Mana screw was designed to ensure good players would sometimes lose to bad players. If Mana screw isn't actually a concern for good/rich players, then it literally only exists to make bad players lose more often to good players.

So which is it chump?

>including the dev team
But Maro calls the land and mana system one of the game's greatest strengths.

I don't disagree with your other points, but if you literally experience mana screw every other game you could probably stand to build some better decks.

Of course it is; it makes the game much more profitable.

Don't blame me, blame the 1996 world champion. (Mostly I was mocking anecdotal evidence that is obviously untrue, like the one that Mana screw has never happened to him. )

It is as long as fetch lands and double colors are rare, and their use unpunished.

So yeah, it makes that money, because it basically every standard set will have some chase rares without rnd having to actually do something creative to make them.

> ITT: people who don't know how to shuffle correctly OR mulligan

Could you be any more mad?

Okay so you don't actually want to discuss anything and just want to shit on a game you're upset about. That's fine. My advice to you is play another game instead of insisting the one you don't like is bad.

Could you have any less of an argument?

Like I said above, I have advanced computer algorithms run on secret Mars based super computers and pro players so good the magic illuminati tried to assassinate them rather than have their success be shown, advising me on how to Mulligan. I didn't mention shuffling, but I play on a secret hacked version of mtgo which attunes itself to quantum fluctuations to generate truly random shuffling.

If you want to discuss the actual reasons and justifications for mana screw, I did that in the bottom half. If all you want to do is provide unprovable annecdotal evidence, I refer you to the to half.

The probability of a no land opening hand with 24 lands in a 60 card deck is 2%.

I play limited almost exclusively, but this applies to general deck design. The default advice I hear from every LGS I've ever drafted at is to run 18 lands in a 40 card deck. The problem I kept encountering was late game flooding, and I knew that having a deck consisting of 45% lands was nonsense. I ended up doing the hypergeometric distribution calculations and came to the conclusion that 16 was far preferable. 16 lands gives you an 8% increase in probability of being mana screwed but a 17% decrease in probability of being flooded; and screw beats flood in the long game. What's really strange is that even after showing people the math and probability breakdowns they still insisted on running 18 land.

Personally, I'm usually way more afraid of mana flood. If you don't have plenty of things to play on two or three lands, you might want to look at your curve.

What? EVERYBODY I have ever talked to who was even a little competent at drafting has said the default land count is 17, not 18. 16 lands is for aggressive decks with low curves, 18 is for certain formats that are very slow or the lands very important

Supposedly the game devs said that the MTG system was superior according to MaRo

Both flood and screw are unacceptable gameplay elements brought on by the land system.

The post you quoted is guilty symplifying very complicated probability questions to a ludicrous degree , to demonstrate a point in their internet argument. Odds are their retelling of the whole story is false.

They probably watched LSV running 18 lands with some nonsense cube build and think they should do the same.

I swear by 16 unless your deck has multiple cards that cost more than 6. I went 3-1 with a 15 land Red Blue tempo/burn deck at prerelease, and felt I probably could have cut it down to 14.

It does not need to be justified. It is caused by bad deck building and/or rng. I literally do not get mana screwed. Do you know how? Because I use a set of one mana cards as an engine to control my draws. There are many methods available to the player that help smooth draws and avoid mana screw. If you have any interest in this game remaining, I recommend you look into it and git gud.

>symplifying very complicated probability questions to a ludicrous degree
>Odds are their retelling of the whole story is false.

Are you seriously doubting my autism?

>to demonstrate a point in their internet argument

Who or what was I arguing against? I was going over solutions to mana issues.

I refer you to the original point then: mana screw was designed to hurt good players, to let bad players win every now and then against them. Your argument, if true (it isn't), would mean Mana screw isn't serving its purpose. A mechanic that doesn't serve the purpose it was created for is flawed.

Then again, if Mana screw does hurt good players, it is flawed. The best player should win the game.

So either way you look at it, mana screw is a flawed mechanic.

And again, nice unprovable annecdotal evidence!

Mana screw isn't just a matter of the amount of lands, which is what your hypergeometric distribution simplifies to.

There's color screw, spell screw (have the lands to play your low cost cards but have only drawn high cards), etc, and any one of them can happen at different stages of the game. Pretending the odds of Mana screw are only 2% based on your distribution ignores the limits of what your distribution actually calculated.

Fucking freshmen I swear. Take some real stats courses before you try this again.

>Explain why it's OK to win or lose on turn one STRICTLY based upon a dead-hand draw.
>Abloo bloo, I don't like even a modicum of chance in my games, even statistically rare possibilities are UNACCEPTABLE! Even if the game has ways to mitigate their effects!
Go play a fighting game.

Nobody said that. Hearthstone, force of will, basically any card game all have chance. Of course, the chance isn't tied to your ability to actually play the game.

Nice strawman though.

>Why do they still design with this whole "draw land cards" in the first place?

You forget that MtG was one of the first TCGs. Some of the rules are old, and obsolete, but they're grandfathered in.

If they were to make an MtG2, electric boogaloo, I'd be surprised if they kept the land mechanic.

>Pretending the odds of Mana screw are only 2% based on your distribution ignores the limits of what your distribution actually calculated.
The odds of mana screw are much higher than 2%, I said that the odds of a no land opening hand are 2%.

>There's color screw
That's what the entire first half of my distribution chart is dedicated to. Just because I didn't explicitly mention it in my post doesn't mean I didn't account for it.

>spell screw (have the lands to play your low cost cards but have only drawn high cards)
This is mostly a curve issue.

>Take some real stats courses before you try this again.
I took Discrete 1&2, Probability and Statistics 1&2 and all the requisite Calculus courses in college, there is really no need to be this antagonistic over post on a Taiwanese basket weaving forum.

>If they were to make an MtG2, electric boogaloo, I'd be surprised if they kept the land mechanic.
Well that's too bad because the designers say lands r gud.

Unless they've changed their stance since then as a result of too many people wising up to their schemes.

>go play a fighting game
Every fighting game has a high-low mixup friend. That's a 50/50 deal

>Well that's too bad because the designers say lands r gud.
I think that's more a case of sweet lemons then them actually thinking lands are good.

They're stuck with it, so they might as well claim the mechanic is beneficial.

Partial Paris (Hearthstone) isn't good as it allows you to keep cards and it makes combo too good. Honestly only thing I might consider is the highlander rule of revealing a no land hand to get a free mull or maybe even scrying equal to the difference in hand size.

This is not really an argument for or against lands as a thing because of if it's a good mechanic, but just price.

To be honest, nobody actually answered what was asking for is if MTG can do well with a Mana system without lands, which I think is no. Even if it's a choice between drawing and a land, it'll make midrange to good as they can just keep their hands of hatebears. Magic just really can't work without the Land system, especially because so many cards work with it or circumvents it (fetches make it easier to prevent screw although at the cost of stopping the protection against using too many colors)

Magic Duels. The game which doesn't match any format in paper magic. No need to be a pompous dick user

Not that user but there's 2 flaws in your reasoning.

1. You assume that just because a mechanic isn't serving it's stated purpose (as given by a man who did not design the game and who is known to be a PR shill) that means it's bad and should be removed. It doesn't matter what the original reason for including lands was, they add an additional layer of complexity to the game at relatively little cost, provided you know how to build a deck.

2.
>The best player should win the game.
That's not how card games work, go play chess if you want a game where the more skilled player will always win. Card games have elements of both chance and skill, which means sometimes you just get unlucky, this is true for all card games not just MTG. Lands do add more opportunities for you to get screwed over by random chance, but if you know what you're doing that chance can be reduced so low that it becomes a statistical anomaly.

That's a pretty poor argument.

1. If a mechanic doesn't serve the purpose, then any negative effects it has are similarly pointless. What benefit does having lands actually provide? You state complexity, but other games have proven you can have complexity without a significant chance to be locked out of the game from the start.

2. You might suggest RNG, as you did in point to, but again, other games provide ample RNG without the undesirable effect of being unable to pay the game 1/20 hands.

>What benefit does having lands actually provide?
see everything posted in this thread that you are willfully ignoring.
>You state complexity, but other games have proven you can have complexity without a significant chance to be locked out of the game from the start.
So I guess every card game that uses a standard deck of cards is terrible because it's possible to draw a hand that can literally do nothing. I guess Hearthstone is a bad game because it's possible to draw a hand full of 10+ cost creatures, mull the entire thing and still have a hand full of 10+ cost card, then lose because you can't play anything
>You might suggest RNG, as you did in point to, but again, other games provide ample RNG without the undesirable effect of being unable to pay the game 1/20 hands.
You would have a point if mulligans didn't exist and every match was best 1/1, but it's not. Much like Poker sometimes you just can't win, but you get ample chances to leverage your luck to the point that despite what you think the more skilled player almost always wins.

People have already stated ITT some of the benefits of having lands. They add additional depth to deckbuilding, they allow the game to support a wide variety of deck types and strategies, they ensure that cards don't need to be restricted to certain classes/archetypes, there's probably a few others that I'm missing. And stop exaggerating, you don't get mana screwed/flooded every 20th game, and if you do you should look at your deck and make some changes. What are the other games you're referring to by the way?

You are retarded. The only benefit you stated in the post was complexity. Point to another one you mentioned.

You mentioned hearthstone, but hearthstone is a game where good deck building actually does 100% eliminate the odds of not having any plays by turn two or three. Additionally, when you finally do draw a okay, you can land it immediately, unlike MTG, where drawing your first land on turn 4 isn't going to help you play a two drop that turn.

As for your statement on RNG, just no. Other games have RNG. This is fine. Other games don't have the RNG tied to your ability to play the game. Whatever benefit MTG derives from having RNG Mana can be achieved with a less annoying mechanic. RNG Mana is fundamentally flawed.

>Depth to deck building
That can be achieved with mana decks. If you're talking about the minimization of risk with land amounts and distribution, then no. That isn't the type of depth any card game needs. It's more of a tax on the deckbuilder's wallet than their mental faculties.
>Variety of archetypes
Again, Mana decks do the same thing.

And 1/20 isn't an exaggeration. That's about accurate given what I've observed across streamers, and my own play experience.

Other games:
Poker, or any traditional playing card game. (RNG without being unable to play)
Hearthstone (mana without screw, still has reduced RNG in the form of card draw and random effects, also kicking magic's ass in terms of popularity with newer generations)
Force of will (the game I would be playing if it wasn't for the art, and an example of Mana decks)

The only games I can think of that's an example of mtgs RNG Mana done well would be Ascencion or dominion, but you never really have the possibility of being locked out of play for more than the first turn in those, and they are a far cry from actual lands systems.