Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

My biggest beef with Magic isn't the lands system, but that the game is fundamentally stingy with cards, leading to many non-games, and/or turns where you pray for the right top-deck and don't get it.

(This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.)

Given the huge cardpool, there's no real way to "fix" MtG that couldn't be exploited in the metagame (aside from limited, or social formats like Commander).

But that aside, I think there are two relatively minor fixes which would go a long way:

- You can spend your "land for turn" to exile the land instead, and draw a card.

- Before your starting draw, Scry 1.

View on HN

Magic isn't really stingy with card draw, if I understand what you're saying. It might be a drawback in a specific strategy, but that's how the game balances itself. If weenie or burn decks had card draw (or selection) on par with control decks, they would be too good...

Love that "land for turn", although I think it might shift the balance a little too much, in that you can make a deck with too much land and high cost spells and know you can cast them reliably. There needs to be a risk factor in building up to high mana to make low mana spells matter.

Possible tweaks, maybe it has a cost (all lands have cycling 1 or 2 mana or life.) Or delay that draw until end of turn, which feels like about the right power level, but does have memory and execution issues.

My thinking is that there's a tradeoff, that you slow your ramping in exchange for cycling (replacing your land for turn). You trade your acceleration towards big spells for more consistency (or just fewer dead draws).

I don't play any IRL magic but I know it can be hard to "fix" and maybe isn't broken. Casually those rules would probably be good house rules to balance play, though even small changes like this could change balance and lean all decks towards exploiting the rule

to point, your land for draw is kinda implemented with trade routes https://gatherer.wizards.com/9ED/en-us/108/trade-routes

And that has an additional mana cost to balance it (though it does have additional bonus). So you could kinda say "everyone gets trade-routes already in play" but like any "free card" fix does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken" ?

> does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken"

exactly, that's why it probably isn't feasible other than casual/social play: there's no change to the fundamental rules that doesn't end up warping the meta-game. (Particularly if the fix relates to mitigating mana flood/screw with consistency: I suspect it rewards combo lists, whose win-cons are indistinguishable from "find three specific cards".)

> (This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.)

Is Netrunner something you can get into these days, or is it hopelessly OOP? I remember hearing good things about it.

There’s a community keeping it alive with fresh content: https://nullsignal.games/

I sadly haven’t convinced my MtG playgroup (or family or other friends) to try it with me.

It's alive and well, and the community is welcoming and happy to teach: https://nullsignal.games/players/around-the-world/

Cards release more slowly than the FFG era, but the current stewards (Null Signal) have been doing a great job for the last eight years.

There's a community app to play against an AI, which has a good tutorial if you want to dip your toes in: https://chiriboga.sifnt.net.au/

The "land for turn" concept is genius. I'd say only once though. If you draw another land, that's the nuts.

Well that's your "land for turn" not "replace playing a land". You can only play one land each turn, if other cards let you play extra lands...you can play extra lands!

I understand, I just meant it wouldn't be good to let the player cycle through their cards if they kept drawing a land with this rule specifically. You still play lands as normal if desired, and you can still play extra lands if other cards let you play extra lands.

> the game is fundamentally stingy with cards

Just play blue, that's not a problem then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com