Moe to sexy girls 'color' wheel

[Username17]

And here's five more Midrange archetypes:

• Chaos/Hope: Favorable Winds: Harpies, Sphinxes, and Angels of various sizes all get bonuses from stuff that helps out the air and fortifications and earthquakes that delay ground pounders of your opponent.
• Chaos/Law: Taxes Tempo: Slow your opponent down by making their stuff cost more and also straight up counter their shit if they can't pay even more than that. Play off curve to leave mana up to get 'em, and also force your opponent to play off curve.
• Chaos/Nature: Warrior Tribal: Chaos Warriors and Tribal Warriors team up to wear helmets with antlers on them and smash your opponent's face in with a steady stream of straight forward above-curve threats.
• Chaos/Gloom: Revel in Riches: Acquire treasure and heap it onto your holdings. Play tower defense with threats that don't directly attack your opponent's life total.
• Gloom/Hope: Angels of Death: Use sweepers that for various reasons don't hit your big vassals.

-Username17

[Username17]

And the final five archetypes:

• Gloom/Law: Expendable Soldiers: Spam the board with expendable soldiers and ghosts and then buff them so they can trade up against your opponent or just overwhelm them if they don't put up a fight.
• Gloom/Nature: Dark Elves. You have fairies and you steal creatures and then eat them.
• Nature/Hope: Priestesses and Druids. You have several different flavors of spellcasters that do synergistic things where you use some to pay for the powers of the others.
• Nature/Law: Unicorn Knights. You have elves and knights and castles and you keep your creatures alive and wear your opponent down with overlapping protections.
• Law/Hope: Temple of Commerce. You have merchants and clerics and do stuff involving moving costs around. Mana battery up some giant angels.

Once you look at what the target decks are supposed to be doing, you'll have to fiddle around with your assignment of things. So I noted that I imagined several of the Nature factions being involved in "protect the queen" style shenanigans where they defend threats on the board rather than play new threats. Which in turn suggests that Nature should get the anti-Spell counterspell rather than anti-Summon counterspell. I also note that Hope seems to be in to playing big things a lot of the time, so the basic creature that taps for one mana is probably an Orange Priestess rather than a Green Elf.

One thing that is often noted is that the Blue conceptual space is far too large in Magic the Gathering when it comes to spells, and too small when it comes to creatures. For the Moe wheel, the Blue non-creature bits have been decisively split up. I would say the following Blue Magic cards show up in Green (Nature):

While the following Blue Magic cards show up in Purple (Chaos):

And the following Blue Magic cards show up in Blue (Gloom):

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Should the subterranean miner women have large or small chests

[maglag]

Should the subterranean miner women have large or small chests

Both and everything in between.

[Username17]

Should the subterranean miner women have large or small chests

That's an example of a design decision where you are not limited to one or the other and indeed should choose both. The easiest and most obvious way forward would be to have "Dwarves" who are Law and are depicted as hearty and squat and large bosomed, and "Kobolds" who are Gloom and depicted as blue skinned waif-like girls. Both can carry pick axes and be in tunnels.


That's a traditional folkloric Kobold.

You just sex up the traditional Kobold and it's basically a Drow.

So here's your Dwarf:

And here's your Kobold:

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Is 7 the optimal hand-size?

Why not 5? Or 9?

Is there going to be forced discard if you have more than then the allowed number of cards?

Do you discard to your graveyard, or back to the bottom of your deck each time?

[OgreBattle]

I've been enjoying 5 as max hand size, makes for less opportunity for decision paralysis and encourages playing something as discarding down to 5 happens

Max tabletop space is something to consider

[DrPraetor]

Five card draw may be a better game in some abstract sense, but people have more fun with texas hold 'em for a reason.

Frank has the math worked out for 7 card hands and the law of unintended consequences is very real.

That said, I think (Frank), that you're failing to explore the design space in rush decks. Rush decks can want Dark Rituals, they can want Berserk - if you make these cards good enough to want. MtG has a severely restricted design space where if you let people just have a deck of lightning bolts, you'd need degenerate timewalk decks to compete. Failing that, it's better for a deck of Savannah Lions to be viable than for such a deck to be non-viable, but it's more interesting if you want some mix of Lions and Roars.

Realizing these are two degrees of freedom which invite chaos: if you give each player 20 hit points plus a fortress to crack, and then you give rush decks combat maneuvers or something to play in addition to their weenie hordes, you might tune into a happy medium where rush decks are viable without being overwhelming, and also more interesting to build, play and tune.

If you're going to release a magic successor that has cute girls on all the cards - you might as well find some way to improve the game on that dimension, if you're doing anything at all.

[Username17]

Decks based around Berserk and Dark Ritual aren't really Aggro so much as Fast Combo. There are setups that can bring out the right combo and win on the first turn, but despite the speed, these are not aggro decks. An aggro deck is a deck which is reasonably fast and also very reliable due to redundancy and low curve requirements. A deck which is fast but has a lot of moving parts or deeply reliable but slow and powerful does not have all of the qualities of an aggro deck and isn't an aggro deck.

In any case, when you're drawing a net of one card per turn and playing a resource card and spending resources on playing another card, you are essentially down one card in hand per turn. This means that to a first approximation, starting hand size is the number of turns the game goes on before you start top decking. Thus, larger hand sizes are good.

On the flip side, hands that are physically larger are also physically harder to deal with. A hand size of 9 is a pain in the ass. Thus, smaller hand sizes are good.

In general, hand sizes between 6 and 8 are fine. 7 is often chosen for games like Stud Poker and Magic the Gathering because it is near the upper limit of what people can handle in their physical hands and provides enough options to be interesting.

-Username17

[Username17]

More broadly, a Midrange or Control deck is going to always be better than an aggro deck on a card for card basis. They have the luxury of durdling for the first few turns of the game, and when they deploy threats those threats are comparatively bonkers. It's not just that they will eventually play a tyrannosaur that will kill you in three hits, it's that they are playing a deck that has cards like that in it, so the next turn they are playing another one.

The Aggro deck can only compete at all because of Tempo and Reach. Tempo is the concept that something done now is worth more than something done in the future. And Reach is how you close out a game through someone's stabilization.

The simplest of course is cheap creatures and burn. And that's why "Red Deck Wins" is a fixed standard archetype in every standard rotation in recent memory and "Burn" continues to have a metagame share in non-rotating formats. Cheap creatures can provide Tempo against a deck waiting for larger and more powerful effects, and burn that can be played directly to the face can provide the Reach needed to close out games against decks that manage to stabilize the board by putting down monstrous beasts.

But that's not the only way to do it. Mono-Blue Tempo is a deck that plays cheap creatures with evasion and cheap counterspells. It lays down early pressure that is difficult to really stabilize against, protects its creatures in play, and tries to run you over. It has Tempo and it has Reach. It's an Aggro deck, it just doesn't have any burn at all.

-Username17

[GreatGreyShrike]

Another thing to note with analysis of aggro decks, in addition to Tempo and Reach advantages you wrote about already: aggro decks usually go comparatively mana-light, and they get more cards that do non-mana-generating things per card drawn over the course of a game. The monoblue and monored aggro decks tend to run 18-21 lands and a typical control deck is more in the 25-26 lands region. Also the aggro decks can and should keep hands with low mana counts that a control deck would mulligan. Every time you draw in an aggro deck, you're more likely to find a non-land card and less likely to get another land you don't need as an aggro deck. In a real way, you often get more non-mana cards as the aggro deck than the control deck gets, so trading cards one-for-one is actually extremely good for them.

[Username17]

It's true that if you draw less lands you draw more spells. And with the option of binning a card at the end of your turn to draw a new one, flood protection is fully enabled. A deck that needs less lands will be able to bottom all lands it draws after its target. Meaning that a deck intended to get by on 3 lands will necessarily see two more spells than a deck intended to get by on 5 lands.

Note that this dynamic means that decks that are in topdeck mode won't "draw a card, play a land, pass the turn." If they draw a land after they've hit their top of their mana curve they will bottom it at the end of their turn and have two cards to look at for action next turn. This makes X spells and Kicker spells useless to the average deck - players literally will not ever randomly have a bunch of extra lands in play with a typical aggro or midrange deck. Only decks with significant amounts of card draw will ever bother playing extra lands.

-Username17