Why bad cards exist

EDHdad

One huge mistake that Richard Garfield made when he first designed Magic was thinking that you could balance the power of a card by making it rare.  Ancestral Recall is from the same cycle as Lightning Bolt, Dark Ritual, Giant Growth and Healing Salve, but the other 4 cards are common, and the Ancestral Recall is rare.  The idea was that most Magic players would buy maybe one 60-card starter deck and 2 or 3 15-card booster packs, and that would be their entire lifetime expenditure.  Nobody (they thought) would try to complete a set or put 13 Black Lotus, 13 Ancestral Recall and 13 Lightning Bolts into a deck.

Another thing that was supposed to balance Magic was the existence of Ante.  In the original rules, before each game, you and your opponent would remove a random card from your deck before playing, and whoever won would get to keep both cards. 

Imagine if Puzzle Quest did the same thing - you put Decimator of the Provinces into your deck and there's a chance that, not only will the card be removed from the game before playing, but also if you lose the game, you also lose that card forever.  Now, a bunch of Lightning Bolts and Healing Salves don't look so bad when it means you might win your opponent's Ancestral Recall.

Unfortunately, playing for Ante totally sucked.  Nobody enjoyed it.  Getting singles back then was like pulling teeth.  If you lost a card from your deck, you'd have a heck of a time replacing it.  And if you won someone's random card, you might not have any use for it.  Plus, Ante was actually illegal in certain parts of the country.  So, they got rid of the concept, banned all Ante cards from every competitive format, and quietly swept the concept under the rug.

One thing to note about Ornithopter and Lotus Petal are that they were actually common cards when first printed.  They were reprinted as Super Duper Ultra Rare Masterpieces because they are iconic, and see some competitive play, and when they were first printed, Magic didn't have fancy schmancy foils or any other way to make an ordinary card "chase".

In paper Magic, there are quite a few common and uncommon cards which are extremely useful in constructed play.   A 75-card Legacy Burn deck, capable of going 5-0 in a competitive tournament might contain as many as 54 commons and basic lands, and not a single Mythic rare.   A Modern Tron deck which can take down a tournament might contain 52 commons, uncommons and basic lands. 

I'm hopeful that the new tournament structure will allow the developers to experiment with different competitive formats where the determining factor isn't the size of someone's wallet but their ability to match gems and sling spells.  Once this is achieved, I'm also hopeful that they might loosen up on their silly throttling of the collector's ability to obtain specific cards.  After nearly a year and a half of playing, it should be possible for anyone to have a complete set of Origins, or to simply purchase some elusive card for a reasonable price.  It was a mistake for the original Magic developers to think that they could balance power level simply by limiting the print run of a card, and it is a mistake today with the Puzzle Quest version.  If Pig is too strong, then Nerf the Pig.  But if someone wants to pay good money to buy a copy of pig, I say let them.

There are other games which finance themselves by selling non-game related upgrades.  For example, people who pay money might get a foil version of a card or a different skin to play the game on, but spending money doesn't give them a competitive advantage in the game itself.

wereotter

EDHdad said:

There are other games which finance themselves by selling non-game related upgrades.  For example, people who pay money might get a foil version of a card or a different skin to play the game on, but spending money doesn't give them a competitive advantage in the game itself.

We reached the point already where cards that already exist in the game are being reprinted with different art. I don't know what the right cost would be, but I know that I personally would prefer to see this art for Demolish as opposed to what we already have in the game from Origins.


We also know soon that with Amonkhet we'll be getting another printing of Evolving Wilds with this art:


This is one I personally find more visually appealing and would prefer to see in my hand as opposed to what we have now.

On top of that we have reprints of commons from Oath of the Gatewatch coming in Amonkhet. These will be cards never seen in the game because they skip the commons from every small set, but that alternate art could be made available for purchase with runes/crystals/a couple real world dollars. These could be small transactions, but are the kind of little things that can add a steady stream of income to the game without actually having to add much more code. Just tell the game to fetch a different art file while the rest of it acts identically.

madwren

EDHdad said:

I'm hopeful that the new tournament structure will allow the developers to experiment with different competitive formats where the determining factor isn't the size of someone's wallet but their ability to match gems and sling spells.  Once this is achieved, I'm also hopeful that they might loosen up on their silly throttling of the collector's ability to obtain specific cards.  After nearly a year and a half of playing, it should be possible for anyone to have a complete set of Origins, or to simply purchase some elusive card for a reasonable price.  It was a mistake for the original Magic developers to think that they could balance power level simply by limiting the print run of a card, and it is a mistake today with the Puzzle Quest version.  If Pig is too strong, then Nerf the Pig.  But if someone wants to pay good money to buy a copy of pig, I say let them.

Thank you. The greatest lesson that MTGPQ could learn is that scarcity does not breed excitement.

Scarcity breeds resentment.

ZW2007-

Ohboy said:

1) all cards are free if you haven't spent money. But let's say time is money. Half the paper masterpieces aren't worth much either. You're not going to get your value back:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/index/MS2#online

lets compare paper costs since that's a more accurate look at ROI:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/index/MS2#paper
As of this post, the lowest valued paper masterpiece is worth $21.36. If you purchase a booster pack at retail price, it's still a net profit of over $17.

Ohboy said:

2) you also get masterpieces as a "bonus" as you put it, from packs. Playing the elite pack game is entirely Voluntary. As can be evidenced by the many people boycotting trials. 

From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of bonus for English Language Learners
Bonus: something good that is more than what was expected or required
It's not really a bonus if it's something you'd just as likely throw away.

Ohboy said:

4) from what I gather, the vast majority of players are casual ones. It just seems like everyone is Uber competitive because competitive people just tend to come to forums more. 

Your statement needs more evidence to support it

Ohboy said:

There's something else he touched on, which is that you can't hide good cards that look bad if there are no bad cards.

I should have touched on this before but just because they share a name in the title of the games, does not make them alike. These reasons cannot and do not apply to PQ.
Here's a quote of my own from MaRo:
"Henry Stern, William Jockusch, and Worth Wollpert (among others) spend countless hours trying to create balanced environments." (Emphasis my own.)

Ohboy said:

Just thought it was an interesting article, because it was addressing concerns as Mtg was transitioning out into a more mature game. 

Experts with better memory might chime in on this, but Mtg was very much like this when it started out. Lots of outright useless cards that could never be used because limited format wasn't invented yet. Some of the worst ones were rares(highest rarity at that time). Rainbow vales anyone? Life lace? Ancestral recall was part of a cycle that was so useless I've forgotten what the other colors did. 

I agree that it is an interesting article but I disagree with your interpretation. The entire problem here is that they are using M:tG as the content backbone of their match-3 game and yet they are somehow repeating the exact same mistakes that almost killed M:tG 20 years ago. (and, from this poster's point-of-view, might actually kill M:tGPQ.)

// Removed Attack On Player -Brigby

Brigby

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