At a very basic level some games rely on lots of luck or chance-based mechanics, such as rolling a dice, whereas some games forego luck completely in favor of player skill (i.e. chess).

Some games use a pseudo-random number generation which lies somewhere between the two. Blizzard games, for example, are known to use a system of random number generation for their system, but with safeguards in place to prevent winning or losing streaks.

Pseudo-randomness helps to prevent player frustration. This is the system that I think will find its way into most mainstream games as it strikes a balance between the feast or famine that can occur in actual luck-based systems. You can find modern examples of pseudo-randomness in games like Clash Royale, which generates a pre-determined chest cycle for each player. You can also see Hearthstone which has been suggested to have a system in place that guarantees legendary cards when players open a certain number of packs.

Different Flavors of Random

I want to focus how game systems handle luck differently, specifically how Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering deal with variance.

The randomness in both games is translated every differently, but it can be boiled down to their resource generation. Magic the Gathering has random resources. In any given game of Magic no player is guaranteed to draw any mana(the resource cards) in their game. The chances of drawing a resource are the same as any other card in the game and it’s up to the player to manipulate their deck, both in card selection and deck building, in order to provide them with consistent resource generation.

Hearthstone, however, foregoes any kind of randomness in its resources generation. In order to avoid non-games, games where a player might draw too many (flood) or too few (screw) resources, Hearthstone delivers a constant stream every turn and has a predetermined resource cap. Players simply gain a single mana crystal every turn and this ensures that players will always be able to use their cards in Hearthstone.

So then, if Hearthstone has a consistent resource generation, how do they prevent every game from playing out the same? To solve this issue Blizzard has baked randomness into their cards. Cards in Hearthstone are much more likely to have random effects that are difficult to predict, even at the most competitive level, in order to make up for the consistency of its resources.

Cards like the one shown above, Madder Bomber, ensure that playing the same card in multiple games will create different board states and problems to be solved by each player. Cards in Magic, however, have a tendency to be very consistent because getting to cast that card is not a guarantee.

The card shown here, Thragtusk, was a dominating force in Magic standard when it was legal for play because of its reliability. The creature stabilized the player by granting them life and gave them insurance against removal spells with the Thragtusk’s ability to generate another creature when it died. A card like this would be too powerful in Hearthstone because reaching the necessary resources to cast this card is a given. On turn 5, your opponent will most likely player this card every game if it was in Hearthstone and since there is no randomness to its abilities, it would make the game very stale.

The Goal of Luck

Ultimately, what’s the goal of luck? It’s to create stories. Highs and lows in a game are areas for players to create memorable moments. The more moments your game can create like that, the more players are going to remember their gaming experience. For example, you can find numerous Hearthstone videos of random effects creating huge swings in gameplay which draws ooo’s and ahh’s from the community. These systems require delicate balance in order to avoid too much frustration, but when properly executed they craft an excellent player experience.

Welcome to my blog and first entry! This is a passion project of mine where I will pontificate about my obsessions in gaming. Without further adieu here’s my first article:

I recently attended the Grand Prix: Oakland tournament for Magic: The Gathering and learned a few valuable game design lessons from it. Namely, deck building costs and how they affect the way that players will adapt to a game.

An intro to Deck Building Costs

To put it simply a deck building cost is the opportunity cost that any given card has in a deck of Magic cards. This concept holds true for virtually any deck building game. You can only play so many cards in your deck and you will only want to play the best ones possible, assuming you’re a competitive players. In Magic there are variety of deck building costs that players will need to consider when creating their decks.

The most basic cost a player will have to consider is the card slot. A competitive player will generally only want to run a 60 card deck (the minimum). With that in mind each card you put in your deck means one less card that you could have put in the deck instead. This gets players to ask themselves questions like, “Is this card good in my deck?” or “When is this card most useful?” By answering those questions players can determine of any given card is worth a slot or not.

The second major concern for deck builders is the concept of a mana curve. In any given game of Magic players are going to draw a play cards every turn. Since players are limited to playing a single land per turn, regardless of how many reside in their hand, players will need to have cards with variable mana costs to ensure that they have something to do at each stage in the game.

A deck with too many late-game cards will often lose to other decks that contain many early game cards. Likewise if a lower curve deck stumbles and doesn’t finish off an opponent with a more late-game (higher curve) deck, they will likely see the game slip away from them as their opponent player more powerful cards.

Land Tax

There are other major developmental factors that will influence deck building costs. The major one I am going to discuss in this article are resources. The better and more flexible resources that a player has available to them, the heavier the cost each card has. But how can that be? Shouldn’t more resources allow you to play more stuff?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, better and more flexible resources means that you can play more stuff in your Magic decks. However, this new-found flexibility means that every card you play has to be better than nearly every card available to you. Normally you don’t need to consider what red goblins are available to you in your black zombie deck. However, if you found that accessing goblins was essentially free for your zombie deck, you would then have to weight the benefit of each zombie card across two different pools of cards instead of one.

The card above, Siege Rhino, normally would come with the high cost of devoting significant deck building resources to fitting a rather strict mana cost. Requiring 3 different colors of mana by turn 4 is normally a tall order for Magic decks to play. Now, however, the mana resources available are so flexible that casting this card is rather easy.

In Magic design cards with strict mana costs tend to be stronger than those without. This makes sense since you have to devote more resources and deck building slots to utilizing them. You can compare Oran-Rief Hydra to Siege Rhino and see that only of them impacts the game immediately. Siege Rhino, by virtue of being a 3 color card, brings the diversity of power that each of those 3 colors represents to the table. This is not an entirely fair comparison given that Siege Rhino is one of the most competitive creatures to ever be printed in Magic, but it does demonstrate that the more strict a card’s mana cost is the more power you can expect from it.

Pushed out by Diversity

So what exactly does all this crazy mana and resources mean for the standard season in Magic? Well, it means that all of the decks that we would expect to see in a normal season don’t exist. The most glaring example of this is the total absence of mono-red in the format. Mono-Red is a staple of every Magic standard that has been pushed out by the current mana bases.

Mono-Red, or as it’s called in the Magic scene, Red Deck Wins, serves a very important purpose in the Magic ecosystem. First and foremost it is a cheap deck. By that I mean both monetarily and in-game. The deck seeks to end games as quickly as possible by flooding the game board with small aggressive creatures backed up by cost-efficient damage spells. This deck is also an important safety valve in any given format. The existence of mono-red means that Magic decks can never be too slow or too greedy. If your deck doesn’t get going until turn 4 regularly, you’ll also regularly lose to mono-red decks that can kill on turn 4 if not contested. Mono-Red is a tournament and constructed format staple because it preys on clunky decks and is an easy buy in for new players.

The resources available right now in standard are so good that you won’t find this deck in existence. The best you can do is a two color aggressive deck, but sadly this deck will run you $100+ as a new player because you’ll need to purchase all the expensive lands that make this deck possible. Why play 1 color in a world where multiple colors don’t have a cost?

A Prismatic Season

Instead of mono-colored or even two colored decks, this standard season is overrun with 3 and 4 color decks. Resources are so good that you can easily expect to meet reaching 4 colors by turn 4 regularly.

Some of the current reigning decks play multiple 3 color cards that share only two colors. The mana base is so flexible that it allows players to utilize these powerful cards in combinations that we would not normally see or you could even argue were not intended to be seen.

Lastly these multi-colored cards create an interest dynamic for the rest of Magic. Cards that require multiple copies of the same resource have become too difficult to cast.

Here we have a great example of the deck building costs that extensive mana bases imposes. Drana is by all means a constructed worthy card. Her mana cost is fairly pushed for the effect that she provides, but Drana is nowhere to be found in standard. The fact that she costs two black mana is just too high for decks that want to play 4 color cards. Fetching and producing two black mana often means that you won’t be able to produce your third or fourth color if you are running a multi-color deck.

This means that Drana is forced to sit in the sidelines while everybody plays Sadly committing to a single color too heavily in this standard just cannot compete with the power that 3 or 4 color decks provide.

TL;DR

In short, the mana bases in Magic are so flexible right now that playing anything other than 3–4 colors is a trap. Two color decks just cannot compete with the diversity and flexibility that the other decks in the Magic standard provide. The cost of deck-building is at all time high in Magic, both monetarily and intellectually, as players fill their decks to the brim with multicolored threats and mana bases.