Alternate M:tG Color Wheel: Take II

[Username17]

Only two times actually. It comes into play tapped and only untaps itself twice. Also they've seriously printed a 5 mana 8/8 trampler with upside since then, and for most of that format the best deck Temur energy could play Verdurous Gearhulk and elected not to.

Yeah, I'll cop to not having noticed the comes into battled tapped part because it was in the middle of the sentence with the counters. That card would of course be completely useless.

But the fact that Verdurous Gearhulk saw only limited play tells us a lot about the limitations of counting to 20 in MtG. A 1, 2, 3, 4 curveout kills your opponent on turn 5 with no synergy even using draft chaff. An aggressive deck with good cards can kill on turn 4. Hero, Judith, Reinforcements is three cards that kills on turn 4 with no turn 1 play at all. A single unanswered threat will kill your opponent in not very long whether it's a 3-drop or a 7-drop. An unanswered Legion Warboss on turn 3 kills your opponent on turn 6, which is faster than an unanswered Gearhulk on turn 5 will do the job.

If you want people to play cards that cost 5+ mana that are merely big threats that put a clock on the opponent, you're going to have to fundamentally change how the game works. Perhaps freespawn bullshit blockers to clog up the battlefield for the first few turns like in Artifact, or have escalation phases like in one of the WH40K card games. Because as long as 1+3+6+10=20, 5 mana threats need to provide value when answered or there isn't really a circumstance where you wouldn't rather just have a cheaper threat in your deck.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Wouldn't 3-4 cost kills and 5 cost board wipes be a solution for getting the game to last longer?

I feel a 5-6 turn game is a feature though

[DrPraetor]

It's a very difficult design problem, because of the emergent properties.

If control decks don't also win, then it doesn't matter if there is midrange removal because people won't play long-game decks (you might splash some into an aggro deck but that's not going to extend the game much, if at all).
If the midrange removal is too good, then no-one will play aggro decks against which you can use it, and games will drag very long indeed.

So the average length of a high-calibre constructed deck game is very sensitive to the break point on near-ties between high powered decks and on how that in turn shifts the meta around.

Then, as you say, some people prefer 5-6 turn games with a complicated board state.

The only hard rule, I think, is that you don't want a degenerate state where one deck/strategy is clearly superior to all the others. You want a plurality of more-or-less equally competitive decks in order to keep things interesting. All else is subjective.

[Mistborn]

If you want people to play cards that cost 5+ mana that are merely big threats that put a clock on the opponent, you're going to have to fundamentally change how the game works. Perhaps freespawn bullshit blockers to clog up the battlefield for the first few turns like in Artifact, or have escalation phases like in one of the WH40K card games. Because as long as 1+3+6+10=20, 5 mana threats need to provide value when answered or there isn't really a circumstance where you wouldn't rather just have a cheaper threat in your deck.

I'd like to note that people played 5+ mana crearures that are merely big threats that put a clock on the opponent. Spectral Force went into decks that people played in real tournaments, go a couple years back and Covetous Dragon won the 99 world championship. If you want to kill someone by curving out with small creatures obviously that's much going faster. If your deck wins with big dumb objects instead the advantage isn't that it's faster, it's that the numbers of cards in your deck dedicated to attacking for damage can be much smaller freeing up space for something else.

[deaddmwalking]

I'd like to note that people played 5+ mana crearures that are merely big threats that put a clock on the opponent.

I don't think you can both simultaneously claim that this game is 'like Magic' and 'not like Magic' at the same time. Or rather, if you do, you can't take for granted that some things will continue to work the way they do in Magic: the Gathering if you change something else.

I think it's really worth examining your fundamental assumptions about the game - especially relative win-rates of different strategies. If you imagine a game like 'War', there is no deck construction component; there is no skill, resolving who one is simply a matter of continuing to flip cards until it is resolved and each side has a 50% win-rate. As you increase the number of choices available, better players are going to win more often. In a high-skill game like Chess, even when both 'decks' are the same, the best players don't lose to beginners.

What makes Magic so difficult is that you want the novice players to SOMETIMES win, even if they make mistakes. In Magic, sometimes even the 'best decks' get mana-screwed or otherwise get a bad draw. If you're trying to make decks more reliable, you run into the problem that more skilled players win commensurately more often - if you go too far in one direction novice players give up before they learn the game; go too far in the other and there is no reward for mastery.

In a draft game, how much advantage should mastery give?

In constructed, is it more important to build a deck that is 'good' or build a deck that works against the 'best deck'? I remember in some of the Shadowverse discussions that people built a deck that was good against the most popular decks rather than the best deck they could build in the abstract (until the meta changed and some decks became correspondingly less important). Effectively, you have to ask how you avoid a situation where 'the best deck' becomes 'the only deck'.

[Krusk]

i played magic from like 95-08. my group still plays off and on, and will ask me to come to prerelease or release drafts on occasion. I generally don't look at the deck list ahead of time, and just draft rares or stuff with under 3 mana cost. I also generally place enough that i win some prize and occasionally win. Top 20%.

MTG is weighted very heavy to low cost speed play. Especially in drafts. Mastery of the game is not really a requirement much at all if you've figured that out. If you have a spell costing 4-5 you better have a damn good reason, 6+ you better cheat to get it in play (from graveyard or something), and 8+ your just an idiot.

in constructed, that tactic still beats most of the chaff. You then come up with a combo or counter for the wheat decks, and are suddenly really competitive.

[Username17]

Wouldn't 3-4 cost kills and 5 cost board wipes be a solution for getting the game to last longer?

I feel a 5-6 turn game is a feature though

Magic has 1-2 cost kill spells, some of which are even quite good. It also has 3 mana conditional board wipes like Cry of the Carnarium that gives all creatures in play -2 toughness until end of turn.

The issue isn't that you can't play Control or that you can't drag out the game if that's what you want to do. You certainly can! The issue is that an unopposed threat puts a clock on your opponent whether it's a 3-cost or 7-cost threat. A deck that just wants to put threats on the board has little incentive to play cards that cost 5 mana. Not because they wouldn't be better to play than 3 or 4 mana cards on turn 6 or 8 or whenever you draw your fifth land - but simply because it's a dead card in your hand on turn 2 or 4. And honestly, you don't need that kind of aggravation. Putting more 2, 3, and 4 cost threats in instead simply makes the deck more consistent - and therefore better.

Now decks that intend to spend their first few turns trading resources with their opponent and putting a meaningful threat down later on can afford to have threats that are bigger and costlier and present shorter clocks when played and might even have some kind of built-in protection.

---

Now there are lots of ways you can adjust the rules of the game to change what kinds of decks people make. Some samples include:

• No attacks before turn 4. Possibly even let the second player to get the first attack phase.
• Draw Poker where you could throw back 5-cost cards for a free replacement. Either instead of or in addition to a normal mulligan.
• A set number of lands bonus in your opening hand.
• A separate Land Deck and Spells Deck.

All of these kinds of changes would lead to very different deck construction. If you just make Magic Cards but the 1, 2, and 3 cost spells are really powerful - then we pretty much know what's going to happen.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

All of these kinds of changes would lead to very different deck construction. If you just make Magic Cards but the 1, 2, and 3 cost spells are really powerful - then we pretty much know what's going to happen.

See this is where we are likely at odds. I'd argue that pushing high cost cards is what has let to the worst magic formats, and that the game would be better off if creatures at the 3, 4, and 5 cost were scaled back to some extent. Like backing the running Kamigawa Dragons and the like represented a serious commitment to a ramp or control strategy. Bloodbraid Elf, Baneslayer Angel, Thrun, Glorybringer, the fucking Scarab God, these cards all do not require that kind of commitment. Which in turn leads to terrible formats dominated by artless mid-range decks that are a pile of the best cards available.

[Username17]

See this is where we are likely at odds. I'd argue that pushing high cost cards is what has let to the worst magic formats, and that the game would be better off if creatures at the 3, 4, and 5 cost were scaled back to some extent. Like backing the running Kamigawa Dragons and the like represented a serious commitment to a ramp or control strategy. Bloodbraid Elf, Baneslayer Angel, Thrun, Glorybringer, the fucking Scarab God, these cards all do not require that kind of commitment. Which in turn leads to terrible formats dominated by artless mid-range decks that are a pile of the best cards available.

That's obviously something of a personal preference thing, but mostly I think it's just a "you being totally wrong" thing. There is absolutely nothing "artless" about midrange decks. Consider these two Grixis Energy decks:

Planeswalker (3)
3 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
Creature (17)
4 Glint-Sleeve Siphoner
4 Glorybringer
2 Hostage Taker
3 Whirler Virtuoso
2 The Scarab God
2 Torrential Gearhulk
Instant (14)
2 Abrade
3 Supreme Will
4 Harnessed Lightning
3 Fatal Push
2 Vraska's Contempt

----

Planeswalker (2)
2 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
Creature (19)
4 Glint-Sleeve Siphoner
4 Glorybringer
2 Gifted Aetherborn
2 Hostage Taker
2 Champion of Wits
3 Whirler Virtuoso
1 The Scarab God
1 Vizier of Many Faces
Sorcery (2)
2 Doomfall
Instant (11)
1 Abrade
4 Harnessed Lightning
4 Fatal Push
2 Vraska's Contempt

Both were 26 land decks that played a 2-mana Menace creature. In fact, the core element of both decks is that there is a lot of interaction. It's not an exaggeration to say that in the first list 27 out of 34 non-land cards in the deck interact with your opponent's cards. The second deck is a little harder to categorize (do we count the Gifted Aetherborn and the Vizier as interaction or not?), but regardless it's clear that over two thirds of the spells in the deck are interactive in nature.

On the other hand, let's look at two ProTour Top Eighting 20 land White Weenie decks:

Creatures (27)
4 Dauntless Bodyguard
4 Healer's Hawk
4 Leonin Vanguard
3 Skymarcher Aspirant
4 Adanto Vanguard
4 Ajani's Pridemate
4 Benalish Marshal
Spells (3)
3 Pride of Conquerors
Enchantments (10)
4 Legion's Landing
4 History of Benalia
2 Conclave Tribunal

---

Creatures (26)
4 Dauntless Bodyguard
2 Healer's Hawk
4 Skymarcher Aspirant
4 Snubhorn Sentry
4 Adanto Vanguard
4 Benalish Marshal
4 Venerated Loxodon
Spells (2)
2 Pride of Conquerors
Enchantments (12)
4 Legion's Landing
4 History of Benalia
4 Conclave Tribunal

Those decks have only Conclave Tribunal to interact with their opponent at all. Everything else is just aggro face creatures or pump spells. Or in the case of the Marshal and Loxodon, both. Not counting Convoke spells, nothing in the entire deck costs more than 3 mana. They are primarily different in that one of these decks leans more heavily on the lifegain package and the other leans more heavily on the City's Blessing. From a curve and playstyle standpoint they are basically the same deck, and you could design a script that could play either deck tolerably well regardless of opposition.

Calling Grixis Energy an "artless" deck is basically insane. Not only did it have a lot more meaningful deck building decisions than White Weenie, it had a lot more meaningful play decisions. You're well within your rights to enjoy playing White Weenie more than Grixis Energy, but it's just factually true that Grixis Energy begets more interesting conversations about deckbuilding, sideboarding, and in-play choices. It just does. It's a more complicated deck with more moving parts and more meaningful decision points both during and between games.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Calling Grixis Energy an "artless" deck is basically insane. Not only did it have a lot more meaningful deck building decisions than White Weenie, it had a lot more meaningful play decisions. You're well within your rights to enjoy playing White Weenie more than Grixis Energy, but it's just factually true that Grixis Energy begets more interesting conversations about deckbuilding, sideboarding, and in-play choices. It just does. It's a more complicated deck with more moving parts and more meaningful decision points both during and between games.

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.

Despite or even because of having more complicated cards, the decisions that went into building the Grixis "Energy" decks are indeed less complicated. At a fundamental level the gameplan is to play cards that are pound for pound better than your opponents cards. It's not trying to execute a well defined plan or leverage some kind of internal synergy. It's cards may "interact more" with it's opponents cards but they interact with eachother very little. The lines of play each game will indeed be very different but that will because the cards the comprise the deck are disunited and you'll draw them in a differnt order every time.

[Whipstitch]

From my perspective as long as the play is very different the other stuff is basically just details. Would you still find the white deck design interesting if it wasn't rare? "What should general play look like?" is a much different question than "What decks delightfully tickled the hipster region of your brain?"

[Mistborn]

From my perspective as long as the play is very different the other stuff is basically just details. Would you still find the white deck design interesting if it wasn't rare? "What should general play look like?" is a much different question than "What decks delightfully tickled the hipster region of your brain?"

Synergy decks and to a lesser extent linear decks are more interesting, they are also healthier for the metagame. They increase the range of cards that see play. Greater Good, Tallowisp, Promise of Bunrei, Ebony Owl Netsuke, Scryb Ranger, Weird Harvest are all marginal cards that saw play solely because they synergized with the right cards. Those strategies are easier for players to adapt around and those adaptions in turn can bring more cards into the spotlight. Azorius Guildmage for instance saw play because it could slip under Heartbeats control element and lock them out of Transmute with her second ability, heck because of decks with Ebony Owl Netsuke people registered One with Nothing in their 75 for ProTour Honolulu. If people's decks are instead just piles of good cards there isn't the same option of breaking up key synergies or finding a silver bullet.

[Username17]

If people's decks are instead just piles of good cards there isn't the same option of breaking up key synergies or finding a silver bullet.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that genuine silver bullet cards are fucking awful and the worst thing in Magic. The worst thing, the very worst thing in the original Magic wasn't the ridiculously overpowered nature of Time Walk and Black Lotus, it was the fucking feelbads of playing a Black deck and some asshole playing Karma and having it be literally impossible for you to cast spells for the rest of the game.

But beyond that, you're still just wrong. Go back and look at the two Grixis Energy decks I linked. Notice how one uses Supreme Will as a piece of 3 mana interaction and the other uses Doomfall instead? That's because the deck using Supreme Will has Torrential Gearhulk and the one using Doomfall doesn't. Gearhulk can flashback instants but not sorceries so it has synergy with Supreme Will and not with Doomfall. Those kinds of card choices are all over both decks. The choice to use Fatal Push or Abrade in flex slots has to do with what you think you're going to face. Those choices are deep and impactful. The choice to use Skymarcher Aspirant instead of Dauntless Bodyguard is basically meaningless almost all the time.

But on a broader level, you're actually much wronger than that. White Weenies put six copies into Pro-Tour Guilds of Ravnica despite being a deck whose win percentage wasn't particularly exciting before, during, or after the Pro-Tour. And it did it because Golgari Midrange was generally acknowledged to be the best deck. White Weenies isn't especially techable because there isn't very much difference between the cards that live in the flex slots. White Weenies is strong against decks that are teched to brawl it out with Golgari Midrange decks. And at the Pro-Tour, even the Golgari Midrange decks were teched out to brawl it out with Golgari Midrange decks.

Now Golgari Midrange is and was a deck with a lot more versatility. Chupacabra is a value card and so is Findbroker, but they generate value in different ways and are good against different strategies. Chupacabra is better when your opponent is beating down, Findbroker is better when you're opponent is trying to clear your board. Golgari (now often played as Sultai because Hydroid Krassis is absolutely bonkers in games that go long) has a lot of options. Everything is essentially a flex slot - I don't even run Wildgrowth Wanderer in mine and it works fine. The deck uses 0-3 copies of four different Planeswalkers and some players forsake the Planeswalkers entirely in order to run the Immortal Sun. Some versions are almost literally nothing but lands and creatures, leaning heavily into Undergrowth and Vivien synergies with Creature cards, while others use various grindy loops and enchantments. My personal version uses two different Sagas. Golgari (or Sultai) can be tweaked to go big or go small. It has versions that are weak to flyers and versions that essentially maindeck Plummet because they have a version of that which is technically a creature and they start looping 6/6s when they hit an arbitrary number of creature cards in the graveyard.

But precisely because Golgari is so tunable, there are decks that it can be untuned for. Making a Golgari deck that face smashes White Weenie is actually very easy - but during the Pro-Tour people weren't doing it because public enemy number one was other Golgari lists. But while Golgari Midrange ended up having a 63% Day 2 Conversion and was a totally respectable deck (and the most played deck on Day 2) - it put zero copies in the Top Eight and Boros Aggro put six.

That story is only possible because Midrange decks aren't just a pile of the best cards in their colors. They are actually very interesting and there's a lot going on. The choices of cards that provide value and the cards that interact and the cards that threaten are very impactful. And the fact that the decks have cards that fill all of those roles is really important and creates a lot of levers for adjustment.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

That story is only possible because Midrange decks aren't just a pile of the best cards in their colors. They are actually very interesting and there's a lot going on. The choices of cards that provide value and the cards that interact and the cards that threaten are very impactful. And the fact that the decks have cards that fill all of those roles is really important and creates a lot of levers for adjustment.

The "best cards" to put in your pile is indeed is a highly contextual, especially with regard to answers. Every deck that's not aggro(and some that are) needs to tune it's answers to the field or end up with the wrong ones. The midrange deck is making the same decisions that every other deck is making with very little decision space unique to, the abundance of flex slots is a symptom of that lack of identity. Control decks also deal with cards, that interact, that threaten, and that provide value, but have the added complexity of having to curve their answers. Or consider Wilderness Reclaimation and Crackleing Drake, or from previous eras Greater Good, and Tallowisp these cards lead to new decision spaces because including them changes how you would evaluate every other card you would put in your deck.

[Username17]

Golgari Midrange from Guilds of Ravnica period entertained the use of the following 4-cost cards:

Ravenous Chupacabra
Golgari Findbroker
Vraska, Gorgon Queen
Vraska's Contempt
Karn, Scion of Urza
Phyrexian Scriptures
Vine Mare
Nullhide Ferox
Path of Discovery
Beast Whisperer
Poison Tip Archer
Ritual of Soot
Ripjaw Raptor
Status // Statue
Twilight Prophet

All of those cards have the potential to be worth more than a card in certain board states - with many of them simply eliminating one of your opponent's cards or putting a card into your hand while providing some form of additional value on top of that. Some of them are clean 2-for1s or engines that proceed to produce value. But many of those cards are legit bad against certain kinds of opposition. Most obviously, the Sweepers don't do a lot against creatureless decks, but Ripjaw Raptor trades down against many Black removal effects even as it is amazeballs against Red. Many of those come with significant deckbuilding restrictions - Beast Whisperer is a bad card if your next three plays are going to be Planeswalkers, Enchantments, or Kill Spells. And very importantly: there isn't enough room for any deck to include even half of those cards, despite the fact that they all see some amount of play.

The decision tree on making a Midrange deck like Golgari is extremely deep. Much bigger than the decision tree on making a deck like Red Deck Wins or Boros Aggro. And I'm saying this as someone who likes and respects aggro! Frank Karsten is my favorite Magic commentator, and I totally dig his deep dives into tuning aggro decklists. Articles like This One are fucking beautiful. There's a lot going on. Choosing what deck to play is often not simple, and even within aggro archetypes there are often quite consequential modules. The choice of whether to play the Pridemates and Lifegain package in your White Weenies deck is important and the correct choice will depend on what you expect to be up against. Pridemate is good against Golden Demise and Deafening Clarion, but it's bad against Ritual of Soot and Kaya's Wrath. And so on. But let's be fucking real for a moment: the entire decision tree of everything to put into or not put into your Red Deck Wins list is not as deep as the question of which 4-drops to include or exclude in a Golgari list. It just fucking isn't. It's not even particularly close.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

And, this is a very difficult problem to "fix".

Midrange decks are at rough parity with weenie decks even though weenie decks don't have nearly as many meaningful choices or flashy stuff to do.

You might think you can fix this by moving a lot of the cool tactics down -1 in mana cost, but in reality, if you printed a lot of powerful and versatile 2 and 3 cost cards, the 4 cost cards would become curiosities that seldom see play.

Giving white more choices in the 2 mana facehugger slot only makes a difference at all, at the constructed level of play anyway, if these new choices are good compared to what's available. More good choices makes the entire deck archetype stronger, and if Red Deck Wins gets too strong, it immediately obviates everything higher in the mana curve.

The fundamental choices about how Magic: the Gathering works as a game are largely responsible for this. Compare to a game like Shadowfist, where weenies are intrinsically favored by drawing a greater number of cards, but where the game is essentially guaranteed to see an opportunity for 5 drops to enter play. The underlying mechanics of the game are more robust and tolerant than is Magic - which enjoys first-mover advantage, and was amazingly innovative, but which has shortcomings in design that took *literal decades* to design around in terms of the card offerings.

[Mistborn]

But let's be fucking real for a moment: the entire decision tree of everything to put into or not put into your Red Deck Wins list is not as deep as the question of which 4-drops to include or exclude in a Golgari list. It just fucking isn't. It's not even particularly close.

I think you've missed the point, the point is that as a design goal we ought to push decks towards synergy and away from card power, because that results in more cards being played in more decks and thus a healthier metagame. Especially if the synergy we are pushing is in the form of open ended enablers instead of linear strategies.

White weenie and Sligh are among the least complicated decks. They ask two questions, "how can I best curve out?", and "how are they going to try stop me?" Midrange on the other hand has three questions are "what are the right answers to play?", "how does my deck generate value?", and "what are the best threats available?". Historically people were down on midrage strategies because it had to adopt the opposite role of whatever it was playing, and since cards tended to be more tightly focused sometimes it "draws the wrong half of it's deck". The problem with modern design that often one card is the answer to two or all of those questions. The Scarab God is a both value engine and a difficult to answer threat, Chandra Flamesculptor (and most of the viable 'walkers) are value engines, answers, and endgame threats. In the worse case scenario you have situations where there isn't a "wrong half of the deck" and you get Jund era standard.

On the other hand consider the three builds of B/W midrangeish beatdown the existed in OG Ravnica. If you were building B/W you had to deal with the same questions of the various midrange decks, but in addition you had to decide with what synergies to invest in. You weren't just tuning a few cards you were choosing to include or exclude an entire engine. That created a decision environment complicated enough that Patrick Chapin had a whole article on how everyone else was getting it wrong.

[Username17]

I think you've missed the point, the point is that as a design goal we ought to push decks towards synergy and away from card power, because that results in more cards being played in more decks and thus a healthier metagame.

This is factually the opposite of a true statement.

Synergy decks have a restricted pool of cards to draw upon, and have less flex slots. They play less different cards. When synergy decks are good, the played card pool shrinks substantially. Like obviously and demonstrably.

Let's name some recent tier-1 synergy decks: Zombies, Marvel, Temurge, 4-C Rally. None of these decks have very many flex slots. The synergy creates deckbuilding constraints, and those constraints lead to decks that play very few different cards. Because that's historically how it always works, and if you think about it for twenty seconds you can very easily see that that is how it is always going to work.

Imagine for the moment that Black/White Knights was a Tier 1 deck. It isn't, but just go with me here. It might have been Tier 1 if Unclaimed Territory was able to interact properly with History of Benalia, but it doesn't so whatever. The point is that Knights relies on cards that do good things for cards with the Knight type. If new Black and White cards are made that aren't Knights and don't do anything particularly good for Knights, then it doesn't matter if those cards are good on their own or even if they match up well against a particular strategy - Black/White Knights isn't going to play those cards. There are 49 Knights in Standard at the moment, and a lot of them are not constructed viable or aren't even Black or White to begin with. It is not an exaggeration to say that Sultai Midrange has more different viable cards that see play in the 4-cost slot than Black/White Knights has Creature cards in all slots combined.

The issue is that the threshold to play a card is that it brings enough advantages over a card in your deck against the field you expect to play in. In a synergy deck, every card in your deck has a higher inertia to be moved because of synergy effects. A card that makes Energy is very valuable in Marvel, a card that is a Zombie is very valuable in Zombies. A card that is a 3-cost or less creature is very valuable in Bant Company. A card with ETB or Death Triggers is very valuable in 4-C Rally. And so on and so on. Cards in those decks are harder to replace and because of it those decks play less different cards. The deck variation between two builds of Aetherworks Marvel was substantially less than the variation between two builds of Mardu Vehicles.

And it's always going to be like that. The "value" decks are always going to have a larger card pool to seriously consider than the "synergy" decks. This is obviously and definitionally the case. You are mathematically provedly wrong. And also historically experientially demonstrably wrong.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

And it's always going to be like that. The "value" decks are always going to have a larger card pool to seriously consider than the "synergy" decks. This is obviously and definitionally the case. You are mathematically provedly wrong. And also historically experientially demonstrably wrong.

You've got it entirely backwards. I'm not wrong because of synergy deck has a smaller card pool. That's the point. The synergy deck will not play a number of cards in it's colors often even though the powerlevel of those cards is very high, and that's a good thing. It will also have cards that are powerful for it but other decks won't touch, which is also good. That means there are more powerful cards that go into different decks which gives the opportunity for more decks to arise.

[Foxwarrior]

If what you want is a smaller card pool per synergy deck generally, why have only 5 colors instead of making up a new color for each deck you want people to play?

[Username17]

It will also have cards that are powerful for it but other decks won't touch, which is also good. That means there are more powerful cards that go into different decks which gives the opportunity for more decks to arise.

I could see why you'd think that was true. But you're wrong. Instead of being true, that is the opposite of true.

If a powerful card doesn't have a powerful deck to slot into, it's a kitchen table curiosity and maybe "good in limited." When decks are split into tiny islands that can't share cards because of synergy effects, what actually happens is that most of the decks aren't Tier 1 and the decks that are Tier 1 become extremely close to the "stock" list all the time.

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.

That's not even an exaggeration. Tempo Dragon went from a mythical deck that was indistinguishable from statistical noise to the number one deck in the format with the creation of literally two Tempo Dragon cards. And it for all intents and purposes stopped being a competitive archetype when one of them was nerfed.

I quit that game before the whole rotation shit happened, but even a casual look at meta shares tells me that Shadowverse is still stumbling along in precisely the same way - while there are many decks that theoretically exist, only a few decks actually have decent winrates and unsurprisingly those decks make up an overwhelmingly massive percentage of the meta. Those decks don't really change very much, because they can't. I don't know what G. Chimera Runecraft is, but apparently it's eating a lot of faces right now. And cordoning off cards from being transferred between archetypes just means that that deck is going to vary very little and that other decks that can't keep up will take their section of the card base and flush them down the fucking toilet.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

There's an unstated assumption here that all synergy decks (and indeed all synergictic cards) can only be hyper linear. Essentially you model for synergy is "the tribal deck" where your deck an elf deck and you play elves and elf accessories. That's not how synergy decks have worked for the majority of the game, instead they start with the one card you put into your deck that causes you to reevaluate every other card. Right now that card is Wilderness Reclamation but they used to print a lot more card like that, the weird build-arounds. Sometimes they got there and sometimes they didn't, but when the did you got a deck that was unlike other decks in a fundamental way.

[deaddmwalking]

I'd be curious to see how you define a card like Wilderness Reclamation as a 'synergistic card' without relationship to other cards. On the face of it, it is a 'high value card'. It gives you back the mana you spend on it. The fact that it is a good value and brings extra value to other cards means a lot of decks can use it, but that's true for any other good card.

I take it you would not be happy if every Tier 1 deck were using Wilderness Reclamation, even if some were using it for Blue Flash and some were using it for activated abilities on the opponent's turn.

[Username17]

There's an unstated assumption here that all synergy decks (and indeed all synergictic cards) can only be hyper linear. Essentially you model for synergy is "the tribal deck" where your deck an elf deck and you play elves and elf accessories. That's not how synergy decks have worked for the majority of the game, instead they start with the one card you put into your deck that causes you to reevaluate every other card. Right now that card is Wilderness Reclamation but they used to print a lot more card like that, the weird build-arounds. Sometimes they got there and sometimes they didn't, but when the did you got a deck that was unlike other decks in a fundamental way.

Except you know, that's completely bullshit because of all the Synergy Decks I mentioned, Tribal Synergy decks were only Zombies and Knights. All the other ones I mentioned, such as Aetherworks Marvel, Temurge, Rally, and Bant Company do not have meaningful tribal synergies but are still obviously synergy decks.

The point is that there isn't very much room to swap cards out in 4 Color Rally because the entire win condition is that you Rally the Ancestors and something stupid happens when you put nine ETB and death triggers on the stack. Cards that don't fill the yard or do something stupid when Rally the Ancestors brings them into play can't be played in that deck whether they are good cards or not in some abstract way. And because of that, the entire metagame had a lot less cards being played when 4 Color Rally had a significant share of the metagame.

Decks like Nexus Turbo Fog are interesting novelties, but when they really get there they cause the card diversity of Standard to go down, not up. Because Nexus Turbo Fog has less cards that it is interested in than a deck like Boros Angels, Esper Control, or Sultai Midrange does. Designing a game around trying to make all decks be hyperfocused synergy decks like Nexus Turbo Fog or 4 Color Rally would necessarily be a game with significantly less diversity in card usage than Magic currently enjoys. It would just obviously do that, because the number of Tier 1 decks isn't going to change, but the card diversity within each Tier 1 archetype would obviously go down.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Question, did you play magic during mid 00's? Because I've been gesturing in the direction of original Ravnica Block and I feel like that's falling on deaf ears. There were a fair number of weird synergy cards like I'm proposing and that format if rembered fondly as one of the most diverse of all time, despite or even because of decks that were way weirder and way less fair then Temurge, Rally, or even Marvel. You had the your aggro, your control, even your good stuff midrage, but you also had decks you don't see the like of today like, Owling Mine, Heartbeat, Greater Gifts, Dragonstorm, or Pickles.

Like you seemed so shocked and appalled by the Rally the Ancestors decks that I felt the need to look them up(I did't play standard when those decks were meta) and it just seemed fine. I expected way more looting effects and self mill, but apparently no the deck seems to mostly just played creatures the fair way and eventually cast big Rally that would kill them. (I checked some vods of the deck and apparently what you do is use the first rally to draw a bunch of cards to find the second one and then you could set up your graveyard when you discarded to hand size). It seems like a combo engine that's relatively slow and easy to disrupt.