Can someone tell me what the pros and cons of MTG are?

>the sheer depth of interactions due to thousands of cards,
>the learning curve
this is only a problem if you are a software engineer

sup reynad

Reboot everything starting with C19 to use the Pokemon TCG business model.

>online TCG is free-to-play with missions to unlock boosters
>all paper boosters are redeemable online
>theme deck league online to give them a use
>singles are reprinted in tins and battle decks to keep costs down
>tons of promo and secret prints to "pimp out" your deck if you want
>advertise to teens and really promote the online game

>planeswalkers were a mistake

fixed for you

More cons:
>Piss-poor balance between cards in general, within sets but especially between sets and blocks
>Very pay-2-win (rarity basically is power level these days)

And as for what I'd do to un-fuck it, well, the elephant in the room has to be addressed and shooed away: the game is too expensive. Its cost to players has to be driven drastically down for player retention. Currently everybody gives up within an average of 2 years because all their cards rotated out of Standard, and they lack the extreme $$$$ required to enter Modern. They're practically forced to leave. Only ones that stay are the Stockholm syndrome victims.

They could simply cut the pack prices down to one dollar or so, or they could start printing tighter sets with less chaff (instead of 30 good cards within 300 trash cards, just print the good cards). They could alter the deck construction rules so that you cannot play with decks that consist entirely of mythics and rares anymore. They could lower the deck sizes to 40 from 60 (they were 40 at the start). But one way or another, the price of the _average_ viable deck has to come down in every format.

The con is that the best format is legacy which is very expensive

the pro is that its the best card game invented so far

Lands literally are the biggest design error in Magic though.

Well not lands themselves, but the fact that you have to draw them randomly with your spells. You should have two decks, a land deck and a spell deck, and each turn you choose which to draw from.

t. Burn player

Are you seriously trying to defend the fact that people lose games randomly to mana screw all the fucking time? Even at Pro Tour? Do you fucking think shit like randomly not getting your basic resources, without which you cannot do anything, has any place in a well designed game?

This is why deck construction is important and games in tournaments are played as a series of matches rather than single elimination. A lot of deck construction conceptually is not just about winning but minimizing variability and the dangers of mana screw.

You control the amount of lands, you control the percentages. If you built your deck right and you shuffled enough to make it completely random (mathematically 7 solid riffle shuffles) then yes, its your fault.

Furthermore I knew a guy that every time he didn't get enough lands who throw an autistic fit and take out several cards in his deck for lands. He did this EVERY TIME and never thought about the underlying reasons he wasn't getting the mana he needed at any given time. Mana screw is a real thing, but many people shout about it when their decks are practically designed for it to happen.

Not him but I do not defend mana screw happening. Even with well constructed decks mana screw happens.

Do you know how you make mana screw/flood "acceptable"? You play a lot of games. You sit down and instead of the usual best of 3 bullshit you jam 10-20 games at a time. Doesn't matter if it's Limited, Constructed, or if you're playing casually or competitive. You smash out a dozen games against your opponent and voila, who gives a fuck if someone got screwed a couple times. I don't fucking understand why everyone just starts disassembling their fucking deck at the end of a draft or sealed event; that's their goddamn problem because I just want to keep playing; they are throwing the opportunity to play games away when they disassemble their deck.

Zero fucking problem with mana screw in the game if people actually gave enough of a shit to play. Except they don't, because they aren't motivated to play unless there are prizes on the line; and that's what separates the faggots from the serious players - serious players just want to play and lean and who gives a fuck about prizes.

You might be saying that it's unacceptable in competitive play where you only play best of 3. True, that does suck. But only fucking retards derive all the value in this game from playing at GPs or FNM. If people can't sit down and play over ten games with a single deck if only just to learn the matchup then they're doing it fucking wrong.

Again, mana screw is not a fucking problem. It's only a problem to faggots who don't want to play games.

Awww poor Wendys chef

Legacy is literally the worst format tho

Wrong. Its the perfect mix of aggro, control, and combo.

Other formats on the other hand............

Combo is autistic and so is draw-go Control
Im so glad they powered that shit down in recent years

>legacy control is draw go

lmao

All control is autistic. Prison, draw-go, tempo. Im glad Legacy will die and with it that gameplay style. No one is gonna pay SCG ,CFB, or CardKingdom $550 for a Revised Tundra or Volcanic Island. They just will not get in. Legacy is a dying format.

To an extent Modern will slowly die too until its replaced with something new albeit much slower then Legacy cause no Reserved List. Modern has a perfect meta. Aggro with some midrange and fringe combo, control thankfully sucks and I get to smash UW Autists with Goblin Guides and Arcbound Ravagers every Friday

>Legacy will die
Meanwhile, legacy just got added to the pro tour

loving
every
laugh

Except Legacy's problem stems from price of cards and availability of cards. In fact, that's the problem in every format.

Doesn't matter. Having Legacy be a team-event format doesn't help revive it. It still has the same fucking primary problem it had before you dumb retard. It's like "fixing" a broken leg with morphine - your fucking leg is still broken.

I dont understand. I already admitted that the con of mtg or legacy is that it is very expensive. You telling me that legacy is very expensive does do anything, its like telling me that i need oxygen to survive. I already know that

>Can someone tell me what the pros and cons of MTG are?
cons:
expensive AF
as someone already said, most of the players are mentally challenged people
it requires a lot of dedication
pro:
still the best collectible card game
>What would you do to make it better?
ban (((reserved))) list
abort the hearthstone tier art direction and mechanic concept

Manaless dredge is a thing if you hate lands. :^)

If a third of your 60 card deck is lands, you're actually likely to have 4 or so of those games decided because either you or your opponent got screwed/flooded and couldn't do shit, it only feels like less of an issue because it can happen to both of you in different ways. I'd much rather have games where we both could play and do what we wanted more reliably than know how often you actually win/lose because mana.

If you check most strong decks, they all have something to just say fuck it to the mana system and be allowed to play the game, be it by having a lot of cantrips so you shrink the odds a lot, using mechanics to not allow the poor design to interfere with their deck so much(tron, dredge, vials, etc) and so on. Even something as simple as fetches exists to get around how bad the mana system is.

Mana screw is a fucking problem and ignoring it just because of how you can just go around gambling for more and more games doesn't make the bad design go away. Other card games have already presented systems that are better solutions and could be balanced with more dedication and even Wizards realises mana is a big issue and keeps trying to see how close they can get to breaking the system without completely removing it.

Pretty much this.

It's basically the DnD of card games.

I don't think it was an error, it's just a mechanic that is rooted in it's time. Magic is older than most of the posters on Veeky Forums games in general have come a long way.

>yeah mate, don't complain that a third of your games are boring predetermined shit, just play more and waste more time lol
retard

You can minimize it all you want but even when your deck is PERFECT, and I mean "designed by world champion and piloted by world champion" PERFECT, you will still lose to mana screw 10-15% of the time. That is completely unavoidable in the game due to the simple fact that best possible ratio of lands, that literally CANNOT be improved in any way, is not good enough to guarantee lands when you need them, or spells when you don't.

Then the balance is already perfect because your opponent will have lost the same number of times making the score even.

You can't possibly be this stupid. Why would anyone throw money away on Magic when you could just pick up a dozen board games instead?

the balance is already perfect

you can only win or lose

a perfect 50/50

Most people don't want to play against the same guy 10 times with the same 75 cards.

Because your games aren't as flawless as Magic: The Gathering

I don't think that pay to win is the correct terminology. The barrier to entry of eternal formats is ludicrously expensive, but once you've payed it the amount of money you've spent on magic literally doesn't affect your ability to win. I assume you don't play any competitive magic, because lowering the deck size to 40 would break combo and aggro decks so hard that it's not even funny.

Well put, mi amigo blanco.

>a third
With good deck construction, it really should only be around 5%. Unless you're a shitter that plays burn, of course.

Don't forget that's only true if you play eternal formats and can afford those cheap fetchlands, goyim.

Literally just use proxies. Stores around where I am allow proxies for legacy, and I play proxied games all the time with friends.

Not even, any non Brainstorm format (which is literally only Legacy cause even Vintage doesnt have that shit) around 15% of your games will be decided by mana screw, and that includes games you won only cause your opponent flooded or whatever. Also Burn is fine and deck elitism is cancer

Only new players buy packs, though.

If I was in charge of mtg, I'd try to hook poorfags and children once every five years by lowering entry costs.

And stores so they can sell singles. Cheaper packs means cheaper singles.

Icd probably buy them if they were $2. Icd sure as hell do more drafts and sealed since those would be cheaper too.

>Few good waifus
Now that I'll have to disagree with you on that senpai. With five colors and 32 combinations (including none), there's something for everybody!

on the internet pay2win means it costs more money than I'm willing to pay to be competitive

Deck minimums went up because games were absurd at 40.

Stores aren't paying $4.50 for their boosters, though.

They are not paying 2$ either.

Trouble is that the land system is so ingrained that to get rid of it you'd be better off just making a new game entirely.

That would be standard.

>can only get one rare or higher in a pack

fuck even in hearthstone you have 1/3rd the cards and can pull two legendaries in a single pack

There are actually people that pay more than $2 for packs?

What a world.

>Magic: the Gathering
>Flawless
Next you'll tell me that 3.5 was the best edition of D&D.

its too fucking expensive but the game is good theres no doubt about it
see if theres pauper in yr city, cheap way to get into the game.

>too expensive
Budget decks exist, you know, and there are formats like Pauper.

One of the nice things about MTG is that you're assured some payback for the money you put into the game. If you were to one day quit, you could sell an eternal deck you built for a good chunk of the cost. Not so with many other hobbies.

Everyone seems to want card prices to drop when they buy, but for their value to stay stable over the long-term somehow. If Snapcaster all of a sudden dropped to 30 dollars each you'd probably say, great, finally I can buy a playset. But if the next day WotC decided to reprint it 100 times to drop the price to 5 bucks, you'd probably be rightfully pissed.

MtG is a collection based game. People like knowing their cardboard is worth something. Look at Force of Will, no faster way to kill your game than to constantly reprint things and drive your card prices to zero. It shits in the face of all early adopters.

Mucho kek

I'm deeply concerned about aggro fags being allowed to have an opinion about the game mechanics. That aside, I don't if you compare it to other CCGs or other ways to spend time and money

pros:
>recognized worldwide
>a lot of formats for different tastes
>effort put into lore and art (though not as much as some people would want)
>some chance that your cardboard retains ((((value)))) over time, or even grows
>isn't going anywhere

cons:
>addictive
>WotC is good at milking money (but so are most successful game companies)
>a clusterfuck of mechanics from different eras and rules that sometimes get tweaked, you need to pass actual fucked up exams to become a judge
>uncertain status of the game as a "cyber sports" event that has almost nothing that keeps actual sports from falling apart
>balance between sets generally doesn't exist

I'd love to have access to old cards without having to order them from overseas or shelling hundreds of dollars for a single, but that would probably be bad for the game.

>No digital version that isn't utter shit

This really sucks, the MTGO client is basically the same as it was in 2003. Not to mention the cost is almost 1:1 for an already expensive game.

>buy in to Standard decks, the most easily accessible and popular format
>3 months (or less) later, your cards are now garbage and worth pennies
>time to buy new cards while they're at their peak pricing before repeating it all over again in another 3 months

>buy in a deck right after a set releases, oh boy time to cross my fingers and hope I made the right choice and that my deck won't be complete garbage and worthless after pro tour in 3 weeks of set release

I can make better use of my time and effort

>anime avatarfag
>whines about SJWs
checks out

Mana screw is intentionally built in so that people can blame it when they lose a game

God I miss Frank and Sons so bad, one of the few things I miss from CA after moving to OR.

god forbid you play a different format. It's true what they say, standard babbies really are retarded.

>PROS
Fun gameplay.
Lots of card choices.
Lots of ways to play the game.
Can last from 20 min to 5 hours.

>CONS
There are a lot of crap cards. Prices are too damn high if you get bored good luck making a new deck. People act in an allmost occult way to non-mtg players, newcombers aare shun by the older players for not spending as much sheckels as the oldfags.

You can solve the cons if you have a group of friends who aren't assholes ans whine how it is bad to proxy cards because they can't pay-to-win you. Most fun format is Comander, add every card costs you printing paper and colors and you will have a blast. Just keep away from the tournaments, game is not compeditive unless you play Standard, in that case the meta is determened by Wizards and there are top 3 decks that steamroll eveything. Also pro players and people whom live of magic are such bitches when you mock or critisise the hobby, fucking faggots.

>add every card costs you printing paper and colors
i dont understand this sentence

You forgot fat.

Rotation is annual. Cards are legal for 2 fucking years.

>avatarfag

You seem to be misusing that term, please familiarize yourself with what it actually means before you post again. Thank you.

>Budget decks exist, you know

Why do people bring this stupid argument up? "This game totes isn't overcosted as fuck, look, you can play this one $50 pile of jank with a 32% winrate". No. That isn't fun you stupid fuck. Playing one shitty deck all year round because that's all you can afford is not fun.

>and there are formats like Pauper.

Unsupported, irrelevant and also unfun because playing only with commons is training wheels mode.

>Doesn't understand what pro means

>playing only with commons is training wheels mode
Confirmed for never having played pauper

>Everyone seems to want card prices to drop when they buy, but for their value to stay stable over the long-term somehow

I don't want card prices to "drop when I buy", I want them to start low and stay low forever. No card should cost more than a dollar. When I buy a $3 pack, it should be virtually guaranteed that the rare is $1, the uncommons $0.30 and and the commons $0.10 a piece and they'll stay at those levels for all eternity. The problems all arise when one card is suddenly $50 or $80 or $500 and you need a playset.

All the interesting cards in the game are rare or mythic. Commons have been vanilla trash since Maro decided that printing complex interactions at every level of rarity is scaring the timmies away.

Most cards aren't even expensive as long as you're not playing Legacy or something. You can make a $20 shitter infect/proliferate artifact -spawn deck to autowin within five turns for less than $20.

>buy modern deck
>three years later the deck is as relevant as ever and the cards even more expensive

feels good not to be retarded

He didn't say little potential for good waifus. He said few good waifus. Which is true. Every named woman on a magic card is just another STRONG FEMALE BATTLE MOM.

>buy modern deck
>it gets banned

oops.

pros
>fun game
>lots of cards
>easy to find people to play with
>a format for everyone

cons
>stupidly retarded expensive if you have not been playing for over a decade
>player base is autistic as fuck
>average deck costs $1000 in most formats
>digital format sucks ass
>sjw company
>t2w as fuck
>despite having thousands of cards there are only about 5 viable decks in any given format
>buyouts happen constantly

>What would you do to make it better?
get rid of the reserve list and open a dedicated reprint facility that churns out card priced over 30 dollars

>Most cards aren't even expensive

"Most cards" aren't playable. "Most cards" don't matter. If shocklands, fetchlands and dual lands are expensive, the entire game is expensive.

>I'd love to have access to old cards without having to order them from overseas or shelling hundreds of dollars for a single, but that would probably be bad for the game.
nah, the secondary market is killing magic. most people cant afford to play anything that retains player base like modern so people spend about a year in standard then leave. commander is the newest fad but wont retain players cause it just boring after a while and still isnt cheap. there is pauper but no LGS support has basically killed the format if you dont want to play on the god awful mtgo client which i dont blame anyone who doesnt

>unfun because playing only with commons is training wheels mode.
what? pauper is a stupidly power fulled format, you have no idea how strong a ton of common cards are, a large portion of them are out right banned in legacy. that said it is unsupported and completely irrelevant

I don't care about power so much as I want cards to be complicated and have exotic out-of-the-left-field effects that combine into absurd synergies. That is what makes this game interesting. Playing with commons only sounds like hell to me regardless of power level involved because commons are just stupidly fucking simple and boring - intentionally designed that way.

maybe you should actually give pauper a try before spouting nonsense then. pauper literally has all that shit and more. i mean fuck im literally running a turn 5 infinite combo deck right now made out of only common cards

Have more 4 player products that has everything built in it like pic related. Reduce the price range, more quality reprints, telling the secondary market to fuck off and stop putting every tournament level card at mythic rare. Getting rid of the FNM card and replacing them with tokens is for the good of the game, since it chases away tryhards from standard.

>t2w
Trade to win?

Try to win, duh.

Sorry, I thought he meant trading creatures in combat like that shitty hearthstone game.

Well one of the few things in MTG that are actually good value are the theme decks and deckbuilder boxes which is focused towards 2 player mostly which I like better since it's a lot easier to teach one person how to play casually with the duel decks or 2 theme decks. You could easily buy a theme deck (which comes with 2 boosters) + a builder box for like $40 total and have plenty of room to play casually.