Brainstorming dominant strategy avoidance

Mburn7

babar3355 said:

Can't we just linearly scale the PW deck restrictions for each tier?

So for your Ob Example:

8/8/8 Bronze,

8 * (12/10) = 9.6 so 10/10/10 Silver

8 * (15/10) = 12 so 12/12/12 Gold

 8 * (20/10) = 16 so 16/16/16 Platinum

Seems pretty simple to me.  If you apply the same formula to PWs regardless of level you would get a similar result. Just round up anything .5 or greater and down for anything less

I don't think that would work, the point of deck restrictions is to make walkers balanced.  It is seriously difficult to design decks when you run out of support or spell space halfway through, this would get rid of that. 

It would be cool to have specific events where you get more cards in the deck, like the old Saheeli challenge where her deck had 12 cards [citation needed].

I also like the idea of specific events having 4 creature slots instead of 3.  I don't think it'll work game-wide, but it would be cool on occasion, to allow more combos to be able to actually go off.

I have long said the easiest way to fix cycling would be to make the supports more like their paper counterparts where they drain mana every time they are activated (drake haven costs 2 per drakes, I think the Faith of the Devoted costs 1 or 2 in paper).  If they had a "drain 3 mana" caveat on them New Perspectives would not make it infinite, thus balancing everything out (mostly)

Mainloop25

Your last paragraph is also a good nerf to NP

ElfNeedsFood

New perspectives could be “Draw three cards. Reduce cycling costs by 3” or maybe just 1 or 2. 

Mainloop25

I dunno... I'm not sure how cycling a card for zero mana would work. You'd probably end up in the same boat, or even worse in some ways

ElfNeedsFood

As it is, it makes Desert of the Mindful and a few other spells cast for free. 

shteev

ElfNeedsFood said:

As it is, it makes Desert of the Mindful and a few other spells cast for free. 

Desert of the Mindful and cards like it should not exist. It's not just NewPs that casts it for free, spells like Days Undoing and Behold the Beyond do too.

Mind you, those spells shouldn't exist either.... man this game is a mess.

I was drafting paper the other day, and came across Scour From Existence, and I remember when I was rather pleased to see that turn up in MTGPQ as it was a decent, playable removal spell. A different company could have spent 10 years power creeping from that all the way up to where we are today. Not D3/Hibernum, apparently.

Doomstat

Mainloop25 said:

I always thought that cycling would be toned way down if you couldn't use the mana on the cycling card to cycle it. If you had to use a different card's mana to cycle it, you would run out of mana. It would feel like how I used to have to cycle stuff before I got New Perspectives. Better yet, just nerf New Perspectives while you're at it. 

All of this is just my opinion on how cycling works for my play style. This is not me saying this is how it has to be, just trying to add some outside opinions/views. Much love.
 
Considering if I ever choose to cycle, it's with Kiora. Shefet Monitor, Desert of the Indomitable, Beneath the Sands, Hieroglyphic Illumination... all amazing. The mana generation the first three give makes New Perspectives gain 3 mana not needed. Hieroglyphic Illumination gives you the draw, though not as good as New Perspectives.

The reason I quoted you, @Mainloop25; is because if I put Lay Claim as my top card in hand and with even half mana, with these other cards I can cycle for a decent time without worrying about if I have New Perspectives in play. I'm using the mana built into Lay Claim to cycle the cards in my hand until I'm at 6, the cycling Monitor to likely fill Lay Claim again to continue my cycling frenzy. 

Increasing the cost of cycling slightly,  changing the mana gain from New Perspective, changing where you take the mana from to cycle a card, I don't think any of that would help enough to stop cycle from being a dominant strategy. Changing it drastically would be the only way to "fix cycling." And I'm talking full mana cost of card being cycled or cycle two or more cards to draw one card, etc.

You can only slow it down unless you remove it. 

Kinesia

It's good to discuss cycling, I think it needs a _lot_ of discussion to work out all the potential issues. Every solution I've heard leaves other problems so far.
The main thing is that new perspectives (and others) should never be reducing cost below 1 including any mana they add. There needs to _always_ be a cost, currently there isn't. (Cycling Nissa is seriously badly designed too, but cycling needs general fixing first)

One thing though... I _love_ that the deserts were done as spells instead of supports. Because of the planeswalker restrictions (which I definitely don't want removed) it's actually important that you can get mana as spells as well as supports.

wereotter

Thuran said:

wereotter said:

babar3355 said:

Interesting question. 

One thing that would make the game more nuanced would be to increase the deck size from 10 cards to something greater.  I understand the challenge for newer players so perhaps you could scale the decks based on the player level. 

Something like:

Bronze - 10 card deck

Silver - 12 card deck

Gold - 15 card deck

Platinum - 20 card deck

Tagentally related, this could be a solution to duplicate cards. Make it a 40-card deck and you have to individually fill all 40 slots. So want 4 Onnicience in your deck? You better have 4 copies of it. 

Would make bomb mythics still good but not game breaking, and create more of a reliance on lower rarity cards. It would literally destroy certain decks, yes, but it would also shake things up in a way the game desperately needs.

As as far as cycling, at least for PvP events, put a hard limit on the 40 cards. Once you run out of deck, you lose. That would make other cards suddenly more valuable too, like Aven Mindcensor and Winds of Rebuke since they could be part of your win condition. 

I love the idea, but keep in mind paper mtg doesn't use 40 cards, but typically 36 or 23, since lands are not a thing in mtgpq. So, I'd say maybe 30 cards, to more closely reflect paper deck building, and still have a round number? At least for a version with unlimited deck size.

Another option is the one magic duels used, restrictions are: 1 of each mythic, 2 of each rare, 3 uncommon and full 4 copies of commons.

True, however two things, one: in paper magic you still have to kill the lands, so 60-card is more in line there. And two: 40-card is more in line with the current code that just makes a 40-card deck out of the 10 cards you specify, and then makes more decks below it when you either run out of cards or attempt to fetch a card that doesn't exist in your current deck. So, easier to code, I would think. 

Kinesia

Part of the reason this game is more accessible to some people is that it's limited to 10 cards. Increasing it more would actually scare some people off.
I understand the desire, but deck restrictions breed creativity, trying to fit in what you what into just 10 cards is actually good for you.

babar3355

Kinesia said:

Part of the reason this game is more accessible to some people is that it's limited to 10 cards. Increasing it more would actually scare some people off.
I understand the desire, but deck restrictions breed creativity, trying to fit in what you what into just 10 cards is actually good for you.

See I see it the other way.  All my blue decks have pull from tomorrow unless I cant cast spells.  All of my green decks have Rx and Shefnet.  All of my white decks use deploy in legacy. Virtually all of my decks include Heart of Kiran and Metalworks Colossus. Pretty much all of my decks have not changed in two months unless I was just screwing around.  That's not healthy for the game.

I do think you should increase the deck size slowly and perhaps 20 cards is too much in platinum.  However, increasing deck size would add variability that would make the game more difficult. 

But yeah, if they wanted to start by just increasing the deck size to 12 cards in TotP or a single event to get a gauge of the player reaction I think that would be a positive step. 

Luciandevine

shteev said:

Cycling is broken. Not efficient, not powerful, not overpowered, actually broken.

The only reason we, the players, did not call it as broken before release is because Hibernum didn't explain to us how it worked then. "Surely", we thought, "Surely it won't simply be a case of paying 1 mana a pop to go through your deck looking for your other broken cards? That would be ludicrous!! Let's wait and see how it actually works".

This, this, and...this.

I am in gold, ranking anywhere from top 1-25, depending on whether I make a mistake or not. Note that I said make a mistake, not get out RNG'ed, but that's a different discussion. I have the cards to get to plat if I want. I don't want to right now, because I don't have all the super op's that are necessary to compete in platinum. That being said, back to the point.

I am actually surprised that New Perspectives made it past development stage in it's current form. When it gives more mana to a cycling card than the card takes to cycle, you have the makings of a near infinite cycle combo just from that. That's before we add Curator of Mysteries and make an all but mathematically certain infinite combo. Then you take that and add stuff like Drake Haven, or FotD, which I do have, and Horror of the Broken Lands, which I have to use instead of Drake Haven, and the rest of the deck literally builds itself.

Another problem comes from the fact that Perspectives, Drake Haven, and Curator are all in the same color, making it so that you can effectively use any blue planeswalker to go infinite. This could be as simple as the base Jace to all 4 of the UX PW's, letting you basically do this for every node, while naturally keeping in mind the specific objectives of said node/fight.

The biggest offender is obvious, but I'm going to say it anyway. Nissa, Steward of Elements was built for cycling, and when you combine the aforementioned blue cards with all of the green cards that turn X gems to green, one of which does it while being cycled...you have an infinite cycle that speeds up the clock by up to 12 damage per cycle.

Now as for fixes, sadly there's not much that can be done to fix the problem that doesn't involve the nerfhammer, which we all hate. I'll be the first to admit,l which I have already done, that I do use the cycling deck, but I use it when I have to, not every available opportunity, because it's boring as hell. The 3rd tier of the  Bolas event is particularly annoying because that is just too many dang cycles. I only really do it because I am hoping for the RNG to work out in my favor and give me a turn 1 kill, at which point I will prolly stop at the 600 point limit from then on.


Anyway, I'm sidetracking myself. There are a couple of different ways to go about using the nerhammer. The most obvious one is naturally to just nerf Perspectives. Increasing it's mana cost is sadly not enough, the same can be said for Drake Haven. The problem comes once it's in play. You would basically have to nerf the mana that it gives to each cycling card you draw. 2 Mana is a possibility but even I, without the majority of the broken Nissa decks have a deck that functions exclusively with cards that cycle for 2 mana or less. This leaves us with the question of whether to nerf it down to 1 mana per cycling card you draw.

The next solution is to increase the cycling cost of the most offending cards. This might not work either, though, because as has been stated, you can use mana from other cards to cycle, and if you are drawing 2 cards per cycle with Curator, you will still likely be able to go infinite.

This leads me to my final, and maybe best solution, which is to change the way cycling works and make it so that you can only cycle the card if you have enough mana on the card, not just in your hand. If you combine this option with either of the top options you still end up with a deck that can do it's job, it just won't be as infinitely efficient as it is right now.

I know that this is a long rant, but I am going to end it with a final point. We have already pointed out that this game can learn a lot from the lessons and mistakes of the paper version. This is specifically referring to the banning of cards, or in this case nerfing. If a card/combo is so format-defining/warping that every deck, or in this case color combo is using it, then you have a problem. If you want diversity you sometimes have to force it. People might hate it at first, but you end up with a better game as a result.

Kinesia

I don't want to quote the above the above because it's too big! Thanks @luciandevine, But it covers most of the stuff I've thought about.
With New Perspectives and the Monuments I'd rather they change from "adding mana" to "reducing cost".
If New Perspectives reduced cycling cost by 1 (to a minimum of 1) instead of adding mana it would help.
The monuments (on the other hand) should be a lot cheaper but again they should reduce casting cost rather than adding mana.
The code to reduce costs exists and is used in some places like Jace 1s 2nd ability. When the monument goes away you can put the cost back.

This probably doesn't fix everything but it helps.

(This also opens up Kiora, would changing her 2nd to "reduce casting cost" instead of "add mana" help things or be broken in a different way? Because I don't think she should put mana on Shefet.)
(NissaTownBicycle still needs fixing after all that, but we need the cycling solution first.)

The "only cycling with mana on the card", I thought about that or a toggle (like Awaken), but it was pointed out to me that it's actually important that you can cycle a card to try and find an immediate solution to a problem, that that's part of the _proper_ point. 
And I agree with that criticism, I don't want infinite cycling at all, but I _do_ want to be able to cycle 1 or 2 cards looking for something to fix my existing problem.

Someone else suggested "You can't use the mana on the card itself" and that's interesting, it might open up trouble I can't work out straight away. It's also confusing...

What would "You can only use cycle from the first position" do?

wereotter

With regards to New Perspectives, it was probably intended to more closely mirror its paper counterpart. The paper card makes cycling free as long as you have 7 or more cards in hand. Something harder to pull off in paper magic as you're frequently using cards faster than you draw them. It would have been nice to have a similar restriction in place here, you can't cycle for free unless you have a full hand.

You could further fix cycling by also making Drake Haven more closely mirror its paper counterpart. It costs mana to make drakes when you cycle in paper magic, so perhaps Drake Haven would drain mana from your cards in hand when you cycle to make drakes, and if you have no mana, you get no drakes.

That would certainly nerf the cycling decks. They'd be difficult to pull off, but not unplayable. I'm sure Nissa and Kiora would still be able to abuse them, but it wouldn't be so easy to pull off for every other blue planeswalker.

Sirchombli

I agree that cycling is fundamentally broken. It let's you do things before you match gems. It's hilariously easy to exploit. Perspectives plus archive effectively let's you cycle all day for free. Want a 400 power Drake, all you need is 10 minutes and a strong thumb. If the ai could cycle, we'd have another baral on our hands. As is, we have a cheat code. In exchange for torturously dull game play you'd have to fall asleep to lose. That isn't really good for the game. There is one set of circumstances in which I cycle and I dread it every time it comes up. 

The real issue is I think it was a mistake in general. This game has a much simpler turn cycle than paper, and cycling just circumvents that. I'll be glad when akh and hou rotate. I don't like playing with or against cycling. There's nothing quite as fun as censor, censor, flood waters every other turn.