Comic for Wednesday, May 15, 2024

[mlooney 3,471]

https://www.egscomics.com/comic/hope-063

I don't play MTG but that seems a bit over powered

[ijuin 584]

So overpowered that Sam decided to concede right away rather than even try to slog through it.

[mlooney 3,471]

If I had a normal amount of hit points and my adversary suddenly got 10x hit points I would run away.  But that would be in TTRPG. 

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,602]

 

Cards that multiply other cards tend to be broken.  They are followed by rule changes players don't want.  And the publishers keep printing them.  

 

[mlooney 3,471]

I never understood the idea of printing a card, then banning it.  Is there no play testing going on?

[ijuin 584]

I think it’s more a matter of combinatorial explosion—when there are hundreds/thousands of cards, it is impossible to calculate every possible combination and its effects. Even Chess, with just 32 pieces across 64 possible spaces, would require more calculation than is physically possible in this universe in order to account for every possible combination.

[mlooney 3,471]

I've read that MtG is the most complex game ever made.  I've also read the it's Turing complete, which is a bit hard to understand how a card game can be a computer.

[Darth Fluffy 315]

On 5/17/2024 at 11:27 AM, mlooney said:

I never understood the idea of printing a card, then banning it.  Is there no play testing going on?

From the publisher's POV, they are primarily 'printing money', rather than publishing a game; like Hasbro's outlook on D&D. Maximizing monetization is the goal, even at the expense of balance; and I'd imagine, an overpowered card would be quite attractive until it is banned. Banning then becomes planned obsolescence. In the long run, they may be destroying their market, but modern business thinking promotes short term profits over long term growth. And from a business perspective, there is no reward for making and abstractly great game,  aside from the income.

[Don Edwards 554]

I would add:

1) Banning cards is the less important of the two obvious forms of planned obsolescence in M:TG. The other is that standard tournament format requires only cards of the basic deck and a few specific (most recent) expansions. Bunches of cards routinely get dropped from those tournaments simply because they've been out a while, and the company wants the players to buy new cards.

(Caveat: it's been more than 10 years since I've played a game or even owned a Magic card. So my info may be out of date.)

1) The designers of these cards aren't perfect, and neither are the folks who choose which designs to approve. Occasionally they will produce a card that (probably in combination with some other card, or even any one or two of several other cards) works in a way they didn't anticipate and is obviously overpowered. Well, obvious once it's seen in action. Which tends to cut people who DON'T have it out of tournament, or more-serious "friendly", play - decreasing the market. Particularly if one or more of the combo cards are rare, so only a few will have it - and most of those will be folks willing to shell out significant amounts of cash to get it.

[Darth Fluffy 315]

On 5/18/2024 at 8:34 AM, mlooney said:

I've read that MtG is the most complex game ever made.  I've also read the it's Turing complete, which is a bit hard to understand how a card game can be a computer.

I play a lot of board games, many of which have a card mechanic, and I've been struck by how much cards, even though randomized, are like software. I suppose if you model it thoroughly, it would be a kind of stoichastic computer.

Weird things can be Turing complete and then be used to make (frequently impractical) computers. Conway Life, for instance, can be used to make a computer which can in turn run Conway Life. You could stack these and create slower and slower layers. Similarly, you can create a computer within Minecraft. It is painful to imagine someone taking the time to do this.

My limited understanding of 'MtG is Turing complete' is that this requires a specific set of cards, and might also require stacking them in a specific order.