Some time ago, I tried to recreate a few basic Powershell commands as MTG cards.[0] Try/Catch [1] is one of my favorites - it's designed to "pre-counter" counterspells.
[1] Reveal 2 cards from your hand. Choose 1 and pay its casting cost, then cast it as normal. If it fails to resolve, reset the game state to before the card was cast, then cast the second card as normal.https://i.imgur.com/E2cbdEo.png
You'd probably want for a try catch:
Try catch (0)
Instant
Split Second
Exile a card from your hand. You may cast a card from your hand with CMC greater than or equal to the exiled card as though it had flash. That spell gains "if this spell is countered, you may play the exiled card without paying it's cost".
... Of course, it's not perfect but it's closer. Doing things like "reset the game state" are not defined in the rules very well, especially since the state wouldn't be the same (there are ways to make it illegal to undo). So that would just be a mess.
play cardA -> get countered ->state reset -> play card B -> B gets countered (because your opponent recovers the counter and untapped cards, due to the reset).
I played Magic briefly as a teen and the thing that bothered me the most was how mana worked and the tendency to either get mana flooded or mana screwed. I even played a custom format with friends where you separated your deck and your mana into two decks and drew one from each every turn. It made the game much more enjoyable and consistent.
This is generally seen as the main flaw with the games core design. Most other currently successful trading card game (mainly Hearthstone) with mana resources have gone the route of providing a consistent source of resources per turn. This approach does significantly reduce the variance match to match and leads to a lot less of the "feel bad" moments of getting flooded or screwed.
That being said I personally find the variance that Magic has when it comes to mana resources to be more interesting than the alternatives as most of the newer card games have abandoned the idea of having mana resources(lands) in your deck all together. I think the lands are one of the main things that makes Magic an interesting card game.
One interesting alternative to lands was from the World of Warcraft Card game (spiritual successor to Hearthstone) which allowed you to play any card from your hand face down as a mana resource. Although they completely did away with this in Hearthstone so they could limit the deck size and the reduce the number of duplicate cards that were needed in each deck.
Have you ever looked at Hearthstone? I tried it briefly, and I think it's got its share of problems but I thought that the way they designed around this was really cool.
https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mana covers it in detail, but the gist of it is that mana is generally an automatic thing, and it's granted per-turn at an increasing rate throughout the game, meaning that most games follow a natural power curve that is immune from flood/screw.
There are still actions that affect mana and strategies around those, and some neat concepts like The Coin, the special card always given to the player who goes second that gives you one extra mana for one turn, to help with the disadvantage. But overall it beats what I consider to be a really annoying flaw in MtG.
But that affects both players equally, as in general the luck factor. My experience is that while you might lose a few games stupidly because of mana screw/flood, in the long run luck balances out and skill makes the difference.
The more I play magic, the more I like the mana system, actually. It's very frustrating occasionally, but it usually is a message to me that I need to change my deckbuilding, add more filtering, card advantage, etc.
That's more an issue with the design of your deck than with the game, or the design issue is that one may not know how to build a deck to avoid such issues.
MTG isn't built for a consistent (late) game natural Mana curve and being able to do what you suggest would fundamentally change the game. For worse imo.
For example with no Mana acceralation/mananipulation the optimal number distribution to have to maximize Mana spent through turn 5 is 29 lands and only 3 five drops.
After which you will quickly have more Mana than you need.
Very few decks run 30 lands.
You can't design a deck that satisfies the condition of natural ly dropping a land each turn and spending the most Mana.
The more consistently you want to say, have 5 lands on turn 5, the more lands you need, which means less space for other cards in your deck.
Similarly the more you want to be able to spend that 5 Mana past turn 5 the more higher cost cards you need, which means fewer cards of other cost. Which means your more likely to be Mana flooded early since your deck won't have the space to consistently play smaller stuff. Try to and will come at the cost of making it more difficult to curve at higher N.
The optimal turn 5 deck curve has no 1 drops. You can't have it both ways.
As for your suggestion, it would only be better for beginners who don't know how to build around a curve, as the cards are not designed for such rules and would break the game in other ways.
I played a format that stated you could put creatures down as long as you had enough mana to cover their cost, but you couldn't attack with a creature unless you payed for their cost. You would have to pay their cost every time you attacked with them. This variant meant you would need to prioritize spells versus attacking. You wouldn't attack with all your creatures so you could save some mana for a counter spell.
This game mechanic (mana burn) was removed when the rules were refactored across the past 20 years. Mana (edit:) simply disappears at the end of each stage.
That's indeed a fundamental problem with Magic. Most modern TCGs have some form of mitigation.
You may look into "Force of Will" (the game, not the card). It plays a lot like Magic but mana is in a separate deck. Each turn, you have the option of playing a magic stone (same as a land in Magic) directly from that deck or do some other action instead.
That's why in most formats lands are considered staples and fairly expensive. Duallands, shocklands, and fetchlands can make your mana base much smoother.
I know this proof but I'm not happy with it. It goes out of its way to setup a
Turing machine (though not a very obvious one) using M:tG cards- however, that
doesn't prove that the M:tG _game_ is Turing-complete. It proves that the
specific cards chosen can be used to create a Turing machine under a subset of
the game's rules, which is not quite the same thing.
For a more complete proof one needs to take into account the fact that the
text printed on existing cards is a derivation from some grammar - the grammar
of the M:tG "ability text" (there is no official name for the game's
language). In other words, the ability text on existing cards is no the whole
ability text language. The complete language is a superset of the strings on
existing cards. To prove the game as Turing complete, one needs to prove this
language is Turing complete- not a subset of its strings.
To give an analogy, think of the game's rules as the JVM, the ability text
grammar as the syntax of the Java language and the actually printed cards as
some arbitrarily chosen set of Java programs. You can perhaps put together a
Turing machine by stitching together those Java programs, but that will not
tell you anything about the Turing completeness of the language itself.
Instead, the straightforward proof is to use the Java syntax to write a Turing
machine and run it on the JVM.
There is, of course a slight problem with taking this approach for M:tG; that
the game's rules are very well defined (there's the Comprehensive Rules that
go a long way towards resolving any ambiguity) but there is no full
specification for the ability text language itself. So the M:tG machine is not
well defined.
Then again, it's easy to derive at least a subset of the rules of ability
text. For instance, if you see a card that says "Destroy target Elf creature",
and you know that "Elf" is a "creature" type, you can substitute "Elf" for any
creature type and generate any number of very probably correct ability text
sentences- "Destroy target Goblin creature", "Destroy target Cat creature",
"Destroy target Pirate creature" etc [1].
In this way it may be possible to generate the appropriate ability text
expressions to construct a Turing machine- and prove that the M:tG game is
Turing-complete.
________________
[1] Actually the ability to generate arbitrarily many well-formed expressions
in a language is a hallmark of Turing-completeness. If we can't assume that
the ability text on existing, printed cards is not the whole language, then
Turing completeness becomes much harder to argue for.
How is the MTG scene these days? I spent my childhood through high school obsessively playing the game, reading these sorts of breakdowns, and spending all my money. Then life got in the way and I haven't played in about 10 years. I remember Friday Night Magic used to be a wholesome way to spend a Friday evening, and you got a lot of entertainment for the $5 entry fee.
The latest set, Dominaria, is the best in years. Richard Garfield worked on it.
Magic: Online is slowly being bled out by Wizards in favor of their new Hearthstone-like digital client.
That said, the best way to play today is Vintage Cube drafts on Cockatrice. Free. High level of play. The best cards. There’s almost always a game going.
Well, the "spending all my money" part hasn't changed at all, in fact depending on the format you're interested in, that may be the defining characteristic of your experience.
The wholesomeness of Friday Night Magic is highly dependent on what your LGS scene happens to be like though, that part hasn't changed too much.
Magic's player base is bigger and more vibrant than it's ever been, and I think by most metrics Limited (Draft, Sealed) and Casual (e.g. Commander) formats are more fun and accessible than they've ever been before. For older formats like Legacy and Vintage (even Modern to an extent), card availability can present an insurmountable financial obstacle to play, unfortunately.
I dip my toes in every once in a while, I'd say the scene is a whole lot more vibrant I because of the ecosystem of online publications, youtube videos, and podcasts.
Power creep is real. If you remember the days when Savannah Lions was highly efficient, you're in for quite a shock.
I think it's mostly online. Magic stopped doing big convention at LA convention for new set release. They stop releasing or giving promo cards they only give foil token cards now. It doesn't seem like they supporting hobbyshop as much. Standard is not the most popular format. It seems like Modern is their most popular since cards are expensive now.
It also seem like they're pushing for online more they've release a new online client that only deal with current cards and beyond iirc Magic Arena but the card economy there suck for some reason. I only hear this from a twitch streamer Hoogland in term of what happening to Arena. Jeff Hoogland also talk about the tournament is getting bigger but they've never up the prizes.
A while back there were a few very very alt-right like personalities in the magic scene. It got pretty bad when one of them sic his fanbase against a cosplayer and she end up with threats and decided to quit. The cosplayer announced it via twitter or something saying she's selling everything. That dude got banned. Another dude also got banned cause he read Mien Komf (hitler book) and edgelord online.
Advent of twitch have made making side money with video games a thing so yeah. That's what sup with magic scene it went digital.
I haven't been played much for a few years now, but the game is doing well. I think the community is larger than ever.
The game itself is in a bit of an odd spot. Standard (aka type 2) has been very unbalanced in recent years with many cards being banned, and sometimes emergency banned. Many players are opting to play modern rather than standard, since standard has had it's problems. The sets themselves actually look really fun, but since so many ideas have already been explored, the mechanics are getting more unique, and that can lead to odd interactions between cards which makes it harder to balance.
I might be a little off since I'm not very active in the scene right now though.
I'm still a huge fan though I don't really have time to play anymore. I do have a cube for drafting that I'll bring out with friends every once in a while though.
I've gotten into MTG three times, once around 1997, then 2003, and then 2017.
Differences today: FNM is still available, relatively inexpensive, and fun. EDH is now a common format, but I never enjoyed it. League is also a common format: you play three matches per week for four weeks. The first week you start with three booster packs, and then each week afterwards you open another pack, and you can rebuild your deck as much as you like. You're paying something like $20 for cards and you get four weeks of games out of it.
I don't care for constructed play but part of that might be the fact that 2003 and 2017 had problems with standard constructed.
MTG Arena, a new online version of the game, is in closed beta and I like it quite a lot. If you want to see how Magic is like nowadays, joining when it goes into open beta may be a good idea.
Still going strong, probably more popular than ever. There is now 2 distinct ways to play the game online Magic Arena, and MTGO (Magic The Gathering Online). Full rules enforcement, matchmaking, drafting, etc. etc.
"Paper" Magic is still very popular, with a big 1000+ tournament happening throughout the US (and the world) every weekend.
The cost has unfortunately gone up, its pretty rare to find a $5 entry fee anymore. A pack of cards is $3.99 (or $9.99 for special sets). A competitive deck of cards can run $150-350 for the "Standard" format (only cards from the past 1-2 years) or $700-1500+ for "Modern" (most every card from 2003 onward).
Pretty good. I played around 4th/Ice Age through Mirage when I was in grade school.
There's some neat new things. There's the Commander format, which is neat. I've got no idea what semi-pro/pro playing looks like these days, but they've managed to keep it fun and interesting. I've only played a dozen games in the past 2 years with friends decks, but I like where they've gone.
Before even worrying about what the game is like these days, I'd check out the local shops and see if you enjoy the company of the players in your area. The people you'll be spending your time with can make or break just about any hobby.
The game mechanics are streamlined/polished a bit to make it more accessible to newcomers, but otherwise, not much has changed. (aside from a lot of power creep)
[+] [-] stephengillie|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://imgur.com/a/4sa6v
[1] Reveal 2 cards from your hand. Choose 1 and pay its casting cost, then cast it as normal. If it fails to resolve, reset the game state to before the card was cast, then cast the second card as normal. https://i.imgur.com/E2cbdEo.png
[+] [-] ggggtez|7 years ago|reply
Exile a card from your hand. You may cast a card from your hand with CMC greater than or equal to the exiled card as though it had flash. That spell gains "if this spell is countered, you may play the exiled card without paying it's cost".
... Of course, it's not perfect but it's closer. Doing things like "reset the game state" are not defined in the rules very well, especially since the state wouldn't be the same (there are ways to make it illegal to undo). So that would just be a mess.
[+] [-] kace91|7 years ago|reply
wouldn't that make the card useless?
play cardA -> get countered ->state reset -> play card B -> B gets countered (because your opponent recovers the counter and untapped cards, due to the reset).
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Fnoord|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiado|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junctioniv|7 years ago|reply
That being said I personally find the variance that Magic has when it comes to mana resources to be more interesting than the alternatives as most of the newer card games have abandoned the idea of having mana resources(lands) in your deck all together. I think the lands are one of the main things that makes Magic an interesting card game.
One interesting alternative to lands was from the World of Warcraft Card game (spiritual successor to Hearthstone) which allowed you to play any card from your hand face down as a mana resource. Although they completely did away with this in Hearthstone so they could limit the deck size and the reduce the number of duplicate cards that were needed in each deck.
[+] [-] nlawalker|7 years ago|reply
https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mana covers it in detail, but the gist of it is that mana is generally an automatic thing, and it's granted per-turn at an increasing rate throughout the game, meaning that most games follow a natural power curve that is immune from flood/screw.
There are still actions that affect mana and strategies around those, and some neat concepts like The Coin, the special card always given to the player who goes second that gives you one extra mana for one turn, to help with the disadvantage. But overall it beats what I consider to be a really annoying flaw in MtG.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uxp100|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eswiire|7 years ago|reply
MTG isn't built for a consistent (late) game natural Mana curve and being able to do what you suggest would fundamentally change the game. For worse imo.
For example with no Mana acceralation/mananipulation the optimal number distribution to have to maximize Mana spent through turn 5 is 29 lands and only 3 five drops.
After which you will quickly have more Mana than you need.
Very few decks run 30 lands.
You can't design a deck that satisfies the condition of natural ly dropping a land each turn and spending the most Mana.
The more consistently you want to say, have 5 lands on turn 5, the more lands you need, which means less space for other cards in your deck.
Similarly the more you want to be able to spend that 5 Mana past turn 5 the more higher cost cards you need, which means fewer cards of other cost. Which means your more likely to be Mana flooded early since your deck won't have the space to consistently play smaller stuff. Try to and will come at the cost of making it more difficult to curve at higher N.
The optimal turn 5 deck curve has no 1 drops. You can't have it both ways.
As for your suggestion, it would only be better for beginners who don't know how to build around a curve, as the cards are not designed for such rules and would break the game in other ways.
[+] [-] rpowers|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephengillie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lozenge|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|7 years ago|reply
You may look into "Force of Will" (the game, not the card). It plays a lot like Magic but mana is in a separate deck. Each turn, you have the option of playing a magic stone (same as a land in Magic) directly from that deck or do some other action instead.
[+] [-] jeeyoungk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xedarius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _raoulcousins|7 years ago|reply
https://www.channelfireball.com/tag/frank-karstens-magic-mat...
[+] [-] ahoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yanowitz|7 years ago|reply
https://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html
For more accidentally Turing complete systems, see
http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
For a more complete proof one needs to take into account the fact that the text printed on existing cards is a derivation from some grammar - the grammar of the M:tG "ability text" (there is no official name for the game's language). In other words, the ability text on existing cards is no the whole ability text language. The complete language is a superset of the strings on existing cards. To prove the game as Turing complete, one needs to prove this language is Turing complete- not a subset of its strings.
To give an analogy, think of the game's rules as the JVM, the ability text grammar as the syntax of the Java language and the actually printed cards as some arbitrarily chosen set of Java programs. You can perhaps put together a Turing machine by stitching together those Java programs, but that will not tell you anything about the Turing completeness of the language itself. Instead, the straightforward proof is to use the Java syntax to write a Turing machine and run it on the JVM.
There is, of course a slight problem with taking this approach for M:tG; that the game's rules are very well defined (there's the Comprehensive Rules that go a long way towards resolving any ambiguity) but there is no full specification for the ability text language itself. So the M:tG machine is not well defined.
Then again, it's easy to derive at least a subset of the rules of ability text. For instance, if you see a card that says "Destroy target Elf creature", and you know that "Elf" is a "creature" type, you can substitute "Elf" for any creature type and generate any number of very probably correct ability text sentences- "Destroy target Goblin creature", "Destroy target Cat creature", "Destroy target Pirate creature" etc [1].
In this way it may be possible to generate the appropriate ability text expressions to construct a Turing machine- and prove that the M:tG game is Turing-complete.
________________
[1] Actually the ability to generate arbitrarily many well-formed expressions in a language is a hallmark of Turing-completeness. If we can't assume that the ability text on existing, printed cards is not the whole language, then Turing completeness becomes much harder to argue for.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kingbirdy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] claudiulodro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandnewlow|7 years ago|reply
Magic: Online is slowly being bled out by Wizards in favor of their new Hearthstone-like digital client.
That said, the best way to play today is Vintage Cube drafts on Cockatrice. Free. High level of play. The best cards. There’s almost always a game going.
[+] [-] xanamander|7 years ago|reply
The wholesomeness of Friday Night Magic is highly dependent on what your LGS scene happens to be like though, that part hasn't changed too much.
Magic's player base is bigger and more vibrant than it's ever been, and I think by most metrics Limited (Draft, Sealed) and Casual (e.g. Commander) formats are more fun and accessible than they've ever been before. For older formats like Legacy and Vintage (even Modern to an extent), card availability can present an insurmountable financial obstacle to play, unfortunately.
[+] [-] thenanyu|7 years ago|reply
Power creep is real. If you remember the days when Savannah Lions was highly efficient, you're in for quite a shock.
[+] [-] digitalzombie|7 years ago|reply
It also seem like they're pushing for online more they've release a new online client that only deal with current cards and beyond iirc Magic Arena but the card economy there suck for some reason. I only hear this from a twitch streamer Hoogland in term of what happening to Arena. Jeff Hoogland also talk about the tournament is getting bigger but they've never up the prizes.
A while back there were a few very very alt-right like personalities in the magic scene. It got pretty bad when one of them sic his fanbase against a cosplayer and she end up with threats and decided to quit. The cosplayer announced it via twitter or something saying she's selling everything. That dude got banned. Another dude also got banned cause he read Mien Komf (hitler book) and edgelord online.
Advent of twitch have made making side money with video games a thing so yeah. That's what sup with magic scene it went digital.
[+] [-] xeonoex|7 years ago|reply
The game itself is in a bit of an odd spot. Standard (aka type 2) has been very unbalanced in recent years with many cards being banned, and sometimes emergency banned. Many players are opting to play modern rather than standard, since standard has had it's problems. The sets themselves actually look really fun, but since so many ideas have already been explored, the mechanics are getting more unique, and that can lead to odd interactions between cards which makes it harder to balance. I might be a little off since I'm not very active in the scene right now though.
I'm still a huge fan though I don't really have time to play anymore. I do have a cube for drafting that I'll bring out with friends every once in a while though.
[+] [-] klodolph|7 years ago|reply
Differences today: FNM is still available, relatively inexpensive, and fun. EDH is now a common format, but I never enjoyed it. League is also a common format: you play three matches per week for four weeks. The first week you start with three booster packs, and then each week afterwards you open another pack, and you can rebuild your deck as much as you like. You're paying something like $20 for cards and you get four weeks of games out of it.
I don't care for constructed play but part of that might be the fact that 2003 and 2017 had problems with standard constructed.
[+] [-] Fargren|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mox1|7 years ago|reply
"Paper" Magic is still very popular, with a big 1000+ tournament happening throughout the US (and the world) every weekend.
The cost has unfortunately gone up, its pretty rare to find a $5 entry fee anymore. A pack of cards is $3.99 (or $9.99 for special sets). A competitive deck of cards can run $150-350 for the "Standard" format (only cards from the past 1-2 years) or $700-1500+ for "Modern" (most every card from 2003 onward).
[+] [-] tibbon|7 years ago|reply
There's some neat new things. There's the Commander format, which is neat. I've got no idea what semi-pro/pro playing looks like these days, but they've managed to keep it fun and interesting. I've only played a dozen games in the past 2 years with friends decks, but I like where they've gone.
Mana burn is gone!
[+] [-] gascan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimmen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|7 years ago|reply
Magic is still pretty expensive, though.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] plmkijnhyt|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] magicweasel|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ericnyamu123|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]