Alternate M:tG Color Wheel: Take II

[Whipstitch]

I die inside every time someone shuffles their physical EDH deck during play. It makes me shake my cane from my porch and complain about how in my day it was a casual format.

[EightWave]

Actually I am way more impressed with those White Weenie lists, those are in are real sense more interesting decks from a deck design point of view. You might see a deck that brainlessly counts to twenty, but I see one that has been well tuned to resist opposing lines of interaction. The reason that White Weenie has not worked in most formats is that the deck folds hard to sweepers and has no reach. In a format with shocks and checklands the obvious solution is to splash red and play burn, or even splash blue and play negate and spell pierce. They've instead elected accept that their board will be wiped and build the deck to recover from sweepers as well as possible. That fascinates me, it's something I would never have thought of and it top eighted a ProTour.

I just read this thread, and I think this is where the conversation went off the rails. Mistborn is doing the classic game design mistake of conflating possible with optimal.

For an example of this, just look at Shadowverse. Because of the heavy synergy effects and the fact that different leaders literally cannot use each other's cards, individual decks have very few flex slots. Indeed, many decks are "essentially unplayable" because they aren't complete - that is that there simply aren't enough constructed playable cards in the card set for their deck to have all their slots filled with cards that aren't hot garbage. Whole archetypes have gone from "essentially unknown" to "Tier 1 with a bullet" after the printing of just one or two cards - and then sunk into memeland when just one of their cards was hit with the nerf stick.

Weird build around cards just create more decks because they enable new archetypes rather than slotting into existing ones. Like compare The Scarab God to Wilderness Reclamation. Both cards very powerful, but when The Scarab God was released people slid the card into existing good decks and it sucked. Wilderness Reclamation on the other hand caused people to brew up entirely new deck-lists.

If you play casual M:tG (like I do), synergy decks and weird build-around cards really do expand the card space because in a casual format I can say "I want to make the best zombies deck I can" and then just have fun with it. It doesn't really matter if I only win one game in five, I'm just having fun with my zombie deck. A friend of mine made a deck centered on Blinding Mage and Assault Griffin because he bought a big box-o-cards and those two were fully 10% of the 1000+ cards.

[Mistborn]

Honestly I'm willing to tap out on the cyclers thing, but the redone color pie isn't meaningless. When effects were divided in the original color pie the card advantage, tempo, ect were not understood and thus for the first 10 years balance between colors was fucked. To a certain degree it was never unfucked rather the scope of what they could print had to be limited because of it.

The idea behind the reworked color pie is to ensure that each color has a method of card advantage/card selection, some kind of answers, and a way of interacting with spells. So for example Time has straightforward draw some number of cards effects, Void has effects that draw cards at the cost of some additional non-mana resource, Mind has Anticipate effects, Light has Scry stapled to some number of it's business spells, and Nature has various card advantage effects focused on creatures or lands.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm confused - are you saying that a mono-color deck for each of the 5 colors not only can't work, but has never worked?

[Username17]

You're still caught in the hard bound liars paradox where you keep saying you just want to reshuffle the color pie in Magic (thereby accepting all the rules and restrictions of making cards for specifically M:tG), but also talking about new colors and mana symbols (which is totally off the table when discussing M:tG specifically).

If you have "Time" instead of "Red" then we aren't talking about reshuffling the color pie for Magic, we're talking about a new game. And if you're talking about a new game you aren't bound by deck size, hand limits, draw rates, method of resource allocation, or even number of suits.

If you're going to abandon backwards compatibility by changing the familiar black fireball in a pale red circle with a blue circle that has a black hourglass in it, you have to justify every single design decision that you are keeping the same as MtG. Every. Single. Fucking. One. Because you've abandoned backwards compatibility, so "Because it's backwards compatible" is no longer a mic drop. Indeed, it's not an answer at all.

So now you got to answer little questions like "Wouldn't it make a lot more sense if 'Menace' was called something like 'Flanking' or 'Vigilance' was called something like 'Endurance'?" But you also have to answer big questions like "Why don't we set up the game to be more even between the first and second player?" or "Why don't we set up the game so that your chance of not being able to play any cards before turn 5 is less than 5%?" And you have to answer all of those questions without saying "Because Magic did it that way." because Magic has blue mana being a black raindrop on a light blue background instead of black eye on a purple background and that answer is fucking closed to you.

And once you start making rules changes that will make it be that your chance of not drawing a third land by turn four after keeping a 2 land hand on the play is less than nineteen fucking percent, then what's stopping you from having a deeper and bigger color pie? Why should conditional counterspells be in the same color as unconditional counterspells? Like, Essence Scatter, Negate, Quench, and Cancel could be in four different colors. And if you're making a new color pie, why the fuck wouldn't you do that? Wouldn't it be more interesting if you could play around Purple counterspells by playing off curve when they have mana up?

-Username17

[Mistborn]

It's true that once you've instituted a new color pie with new symbols nothing stops you from making other sweeping changes. There is a good reason not to do that to start with, which is to retain a shared context. The more of the rules and assumptions that are retained the easier it is for new proposed designs to be communicated.

As for counterspells the current proposed system already has sort of spread conuntermagic across two colors. Mind has a Cancel, but Time has Remand which is not to be sneezed at. I'd probably give Negate effects to either Nature or Light and then you have countermagic spread across 3/5th of the color pie, which is about as far I'd like to see it spread.

[Leress]

It's true that once you've instituted a new color pie with new symbols nothing stops you from making other sweeping changes. There is a good reason not to do that to start with, which is to retain a shared context. The more of the rules and assumptions that are retained the easier it is for new proposed designs to be communicated.

No...No it doesn't. This very thread proves that.

[deaddmwalking]

When you say 'it's like Magic, but different', every element is called into question.

Think of it like Pathfinder - it's like 3.5 but different. You can't actually assume something works like it did in 3.5 - if you want to be correct you actually have to check every bloody thing. Classes, spells, feats - it never ends. It is never safe to assume that it didn't change arbitrarily just because they kept the original structure.

[Mistborn]

When you say 'it's like Magic, but different', every element is called into question.

Think of it like Pathfinder - it's like 3.5 but different. You can't actually assume something works like it did in 3.5 - if you want to be correct you actually have to check every bloody thing. Classes, spells, feats - it never ends. It is never safe to assume that it didn't change arbitrarily just because they kept the original structure.

I don't think the analogy holds up. Magic has two components a rules engine, and a set of cards that are printed that "run" on that engine. The first is coherent even if you discard all printed cards, and could be used to "run" an entirely different set of cards.

Like honestly are you guys braindead because this isn't a hard concept to wrap your head around. In magic there is a color pie, each effect that the game has access to "belongs" to one or more colors. The exercise is simple. Reassign which effects go to each color and then give the colors new names to reflect the change.

[Leress]

Like honestly are you guys braindead because this isn't a hard concept to wrap your head around. In magic there is a color pie, each effect that the game has access to "belongs" to one or more colors. The exercise is simple. Reassign which effects go to each color and then give the colors new names to reflect the change.

No, we get that part. What I don't get is what is the end goal of this exercise. Are we still trying to be Magic but slightly different? Then why change names. If we are changing names why even be Magic at that point?

[Mistborn]

No, we get that part. What I don't get is what is the end goal of this exercise. Are we still trying to be Magic but slightly different? Then why change names. If we are changing names why even be Magic at that point?

There isn't a particular end goal, it's just a thought experiment I thought was interesting.

[deaddmwalking]

I agree it's interesting.

The colors in Magic have had a certain amount of thematic drift.

Where we are...right now...feels like a pretty good place. I don't know why Haste is Red and Flash is Blue, but the colors play distinct and each color has strategies that work in a variety of formats.