Sample Format: Infinite Magic II
Jul. 20th, 2008 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIn Magic:TG, you have a deck of 60+ cards, containing at most four of any card (except basic lands, which produce mana). This is sort of an historical aberration. When Richard Garfield first invented Magic:TG he was working out what it should be from scratch, and he imagined people trading one-on-one for cards they wanted, thus part of the game is acquiring the cards you need, and part of the game is building a deck out of them, and part of the game is playing a game with those decks.
However, it turned out that the internet came along and made it very easy to trade cards with people all over the world. Thus a casual player might be limited by the cards they had to hand, but someone willing to pay, or a professional player who had to pay to get the best deck, could buy the best cards. So, instead a rule was instituted you could only have 4 of any card, and magic cards are designed with this assumption.
Most cards would be fine if you had a deck full of them. If you could start with a deck containing 50% a simple creature, 50% a simple land, and see how it did, and refine it from there, it would fulfil deck design better. (You could also do away with the 60 card deck rule, as there's no advantage by starting with only the cards you want.) However, a few cards are fine in small numbers, but completely break in large numbers.
Eg. if you relax the "four card" limit in normal magic, one very good deck would be sixty Rocket Powered Turbo Slug. (This is a card from the humorous Unhinged set. But there are similar problems in tournament-legal magic cards.) This card is a creature you can attack with and pay for the turn after. Normally this is just a cute trick and you can learn about resource management and investment. However, if you start the game with a hand of seven of these, they can all be put into play, attack, and deal 3 damage on the first turn, and your opponent is dead.
What happens if you play infinite magic, with an infinite deck?
An infinite deck
I think you actually need to have an uncountably infinite deck, since it's impossible to have countably infinitely many cards, and choose one of them with equal probability. This doesn't matter if you express the composition as percentages, so I'm going to ignore it for now, but I think is broken.
What decks are good in this format? Well, much the same as the decks that are good in normal magic without the four card limit, except that cards which let you pay life to do things are even more broken. For instance, a good deck would be:
50% black lotus (An infamously overpowered card from the first magic set, which gives you one-off three mana. If the game was guaranteed to go on several turns, this would be fair, as most cards give you mana every turn, and this gives you a short burst at the expense of having mana in the future. However, if you can use lots of mana to win on the first turn, as we're about to do, this is irrelevant.)
50% necropotence (An infamously overpowered, blah blah blah. This lets you pay life to draw cards. Which sounds ok -- who wants to lose life? However, if you pay nearly all your life, you can draw lots of cards, and the perfect combination of cards can be a win on the first turn, blah, blah, only more broken if you have infinite life, blah blah )
1 fireball (This turns any amount of mana into damage to your opponenet, and is a good card, but is not infamously overpowered.)
You could use almost any other card instead of fireball; anything that lets you turn infinite mana into infinite damage.
The strategy: get an opening hand with at least one black lotus and at least one necropotence. Play the lotus, kill it, getting three mana, use the mana to play the necropotence, pay infinity life (leaving infinity left) to draw infinitely many cards. Play an infinite number of black lotuses to get an infinite amount of mana, and kill your opponent with one infinitely large fireball.
Conclusion
That's not very interesting. Obviously you can tweak it around. For instance, there are cards that let the opponent counter any spell without paying mana (again, the idea is they pay for it later), so one of those can ruin your whole deck. You need some answers to that, probably more of the same card.
If you play Yawgamoth's Bargain instead of Necropotence, you can draw those cards on the first turn, rather than at the beginning of the second turn. That's a bit better, but there's a 5% chance of drawing 6+ bargains, and you need two black lotuses to pay to play one.
There might be other combinations which let you win even earlier. (There was a fun combo in normal magic which let you get magic before your first turn, and then you can bootstrap to one of these infinite kills.)
I'd be interested to see the metagame (which decks are good, and which beat which other ones, like rock-paper-scissors), but it doesn't look like it'll be very different to playing finite decks with no four card limit.
Next time
What if you play with the four card limit on infinite decks? (Or maybe ban cards which are very broken in this format?)
However, it turned out that the internet came along and made it very easy to trade cards with people all over the world. Thus a casual player might be limited by the cards they had to hand, but someone willing to pay, or a professional player who had to pay to get the best deck, could buy the best cards. So, instead a rule was instituted you could only have 4 of any card, and magic cards are designed with this assumption.
Most cards would be fine if you had a deck full of them. If you could start with a deck containing 50% a simple creature, 50% a simple land, and see how it did, and refine it from there, it would fulfil deck design better. (You could also do away with the 60 card deck rule, as there's no advantage by starting with only the cards you want.) However, a few cards are fine in small numbers, but completely break in large numbers.
Eg. if you relax the "four card" limit in normal magic, one very good deck would be sixty Rocket Powered Turbo Slug. (This is a card from the humorous Unhinged set. But there are similar problems in tournament-legal magic cards.) This card is a creature you can attack with and pay for the turn after. Normally this is just a cute trick and you can learn about resource management and investment. However, if you start the game with a hand of seven of these, they can all be put into play, attack, and deal 3 damage on the first turn, and your opponent is dead.
What happens if you play infinite magic, with an infinite deck?
An infinite deck
I think you actually need to have an uncountably infinite deck, since it's impossible to have countably infinitely many cards, and choose one of them with equal probability. This doesn't matter if you express the composition as percentages, so I'm going to ignore it for now, but I think is broken.
What decks are good in this format? Well, much the same as the decks that are good in normal magic without the four card limit, except that cards which let you pay life to do things are even more broken. For instance, a good deck would be:
50% black lotus (An infamously overpowered card from the first magic set, which gives you one-off three mana. If the game was guaranteed to go on several turns, this would be fair, as most cards give you mana every turn, and this gives you a short burst at the expense of having mana in the future. However, if you can use lots of mana to win on the first turn, as we're about to do, this is irrelevant.)
50% necropotence (An infamously overpowered, blah blah blah. This lets you pay life to draw cards. Which sounds ok -- who wants to lose life? However, if you pay nearly all your life, you can draw lots of cards, and the perfect combination of cards can be a win on the first turn, blah, blah, only more broken if you have infinite life, blah blah )
1 fireball (This turns any amount of mana into damage to your opponenet, and is a good card, but is not infamously overpowered.)
You could use almost any other card instead of fireball; anything that lets you turn infinite mana into infinite damage.
The strategy: get an opening hand with at least one black lotus and at least one necropotence. Play the lotus, kill it, getting three mana, use the mana to play the necropotence, pay infinity life (leaving infinity left) to draw infinitely many cards. Play an infinite number of black lotuses to get an infinite amount of mana, and kill your opponent with one infinitely large fireball.
Conclusion
That's not very interesting. Obviously you can tweak it around. For instance, there are cards that let the opponent counter any spell without paying mana (again, the idea is they pay for it later), so one of those can ruin your whole deck. You need some answers to that, probably more of the same card.
If you play Yawgamoth's Bargain instead of Necropotence, you can draw those cards on the first turn, rather than at the beginning of the second turn. That's a bit better, but there's a 5% chance of drawing 6+ bargains, and you need two black lotuses to pay to play one.
There might be other combinations which let you win even earlier. (There was a fun combo in normal magic which let you get magic before your first turn, and then you can bootstrap to one of these infinite kills.)
I'd be interested to see the metagame (which decks are good, and which beat which other ones, like rock-paper-scissors), but it doesn't look like it'll be very different to playing finite decks with no four card limit.
Next time
What if you play with the four card limit on infinite decks? (Or maybe ban cards which are very broken in this format?)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 11:36 am (UTC)I think for infinite decks (whether countable or uncountable), listing card contents by percentages or other fractions of 1 is the way to go.
And you know the best way to investigate the metagame? Invite people to submit decks for the format - perhaps limiting it to two or three decks per submitter - and mentally play out a tournament, like I do each week for Three Card Blind.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 11:37 am (UTC)Er, I hope you're being silly here. Even with four copies of every Magic card ever printed, you're still some way short of an infinite deck :)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 12:29 pm (UTC)Yes, I vaguely remembered something like that. The difference is, the Rocket-Powered Turbo Slug deck is the only single-card deck that actually gains an advantage from it :) (I admit, I happened to see someone else mention the idea, not realise it myself.)
like I do each week for Three Card Blind.
Ooh, that's really interesting. Ingenious.
Invite people to submit decks for the format
Yeah, I'd be really curious to see. I'm not sure anyone would though. I expected at least some ex-magic geeks to post degenerate suggestions here, but didn't see any.
But then, the fact that the solution isn't obvious suggests it might be at least interesting enough to try.
(Unfortunately, it can be complicated because there's a random element: my back-of-the-excel calculations gave a lotus/necropotence deck a 98% chance of winning in the first turn, and lotus/yawgamoth's-will a 95% chance, how do you compare those...? :))
no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 12:46 pm (UTC)If you allow finite decks, then I think any deck with a reliable infinite combo will inevitably go off and win before an infinite deck can draw any non-basic card. (For the purposes of this discussion, relentless rats are a basic creature :))
(Can you guarantee an infinite combo? I guess so, if you can just draw your entire deck. You don't need any defence, so you can include lots of lands and the combo pieces, and will hit it before you draw the last few cards in your deck. )
On the other hand, what happens if you insist on infinite decks? The first non-basic card drawn had better win the game. If you include more cards, do you have a greater chance of drawing them first? Um, I'm not sure how to work that out.
Will you still be alive when the first non-basic card is drawn? That's interesting. You've basically both played with a basic land plus relentless rats deck, which I think is a random walk on your life totals. Which I think means the walk will almost surely leave each player with a more rats than their opponent at some point, regardless of how few rats and swamps they include, which means both players will already have dealt infinite damage by the time the first non-basic land is drawn. But I'm not sure.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 01:21 pm (UTC)I'm impressed how varied it is. I guess the ban rule would always do that, but it's still interesting that you don't get one deck dominating.
Oh, and bringing ten brothers to play is insane! That's an amazing amount of intricacy for the format.