The home-made Magic:TG set I designed from scratch

[jack]

I followed in Alextfish's inadvertent lead and spent the last two weeks designing an original Magic:TG set entirely without intending too. I started with a couple of cute ideas for individual cards I'd had ages ago (Tiny Bunny), and came up with a string of other ideas for other natural animals, especially for other sorts of rabbit, and spent a weekend talking ideas over with Liv.

And then kept on getting more ideas, and ideas for how to put them together, until I'd put them together into a cohesive set of 250 cards common, uncommon and rare, and with a variety of themes.

You can see a random three cards each time you refresh at http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/random.php (Edit: Updated version)

And you can see a list of all the cards here: http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/all_img.html (or img&text listing). (Edit: Updated version)

Culturally, the world is based around very traditional, English, non-ostentatious fantasy:

1. Normal woodland animals, represented as magic cards.

2. Small humanoid forest dwellers, called Boggles by themselves, and Ouphes by people who talk fancily. They're something like Pratchett's gnome series -- tenacious, brave and goofy, rather than stupid, greedy/angry and goofy. They have little wars between tribes, have legendary heroes, and so on. They often ride animals into battle.

3. Boggle shamans, who do druid-like stuff, channeling-spirits-of-animals to magical effect, but not throwing fireballs.

4. Gentlemen-magicians, in a very Jonathan-Strange-like mould, except living in an England that was never deforested or industrialised. To some extent, the set is more from the view of the boggles, so humans are strange and exotic -- there are five magicians in the set, and only a couple of other humans servants.

5. Really weird stuff, hidden away in the forest, based a lot on a Carol's Jabberwocky-like feel, which feels it's leaking in from some other plane.

Comments

[simont]

Now I know very little about M:TG, so if you'd rather not start an "educate Simon from scratch" subthread then I'll understand ...

What's the mechanism for game balance when designing a custom deck in this sort of way? Would you only use it to play against somebody using exactly the same deck? And if not, if you'd expect to play this deck against somebody using a deck of their choice, how do you ensure that one deck isn't hugely overpowered compared to the other? (As a trivial example, in the absence of any such mechanism, what would stop me designing a custom deck in which every card was labelled "Instantly kills the other player stone dead" or some near equivalent?)

In the absence of self-designed cards, I would have guessed that each card probably had some sort of cost value set by WotC and a player building their own deck had to arrange that its total cost was less than some fixed value, or matched that of the opponent's deck reasonably closely, or some such. (Bonus: this scheme also provides a natural handicap system.) But if you're designing cards of your own, that surely can't work unless WotC anticipated the idea and devised an extremely clever and general and yet unambiguous algorithm for deciding on the correct cost of card types that they hadn't specifically foreseen?

[liv]

There isn't any particular mechanism to stop people from designing stupid decks if they want to, but for one thing that's not much of a challenge, and for a second thing, nobody would want to play with them. People try to design decks that are reasonably balanced and reasonably comparable to the official decks, because they want to do something interesting rather than something trivial! Jack knows more about this than I do, but I think that most official competitions require all competitors to select a deck of 60 cards from the same set of 250. For informal playing with your friends, it's simply a matter of what you can convince them to accept; wildly unbalanced games are self-limiting on the grounds of being no fun.

Also I don't think WotC is particularly interested in creating infrastructure to help people make their own custom decks. Their business model is selling you the official cards, over which they have a monopoly. Making your own deck is a kind of fanfic type activity, it's not really encouraged, but it's also not really worth policing and indeed turning a blind eye may provide an incentive for more people to get into official Magic.

[simont]

for one thing that's not much of a challenge, and for a second thing, nobody would want to play with them

Fair enough; I did wonder if that would be the answer to my obviously stupid example. Perhaps I should have asked about more accidental imbalances instead.

most official competitions require all competitors to select a deck of 60 cards from the same set of 250

Ah, that's what I was missing; so you never get any advantage that the other player couldn't have had too if they'd wanted it. That makes sense.

I don't think WotC is particularly interested in creating infrastructure to help people make their own custom decks

A good point too :-) I was concentrating on the fact that it sounded nigh-on impossible to me, but that's another good reason why they wouldn't have done it!

[jack]

I remember I somewhere have a post about the question, suppose there was a magic card let you "invent any magic card you can think of and a fair resource cost for it, and put it into your hand", and asking if there was any possible way of actually defining "fair", and most people didn't really understand but someone (one of the gareths?, not the one from the gallery) actually thought of an answer.

[jack]

not start an "educate Simon from scratch" subthread then I'll understand ...

Actually, I really like it: most of my friends have already played enough magic to know the general idea, or are convinced its not for them at all and don't want to know, so I'm actually interested in what I can explain to someone.

(I tried to make some of the explanation as non-jargony as possible, but I know that actually, I'll always miss so many basic assumptions in doing so it actually won't be accessible to someone who doesn't know the rules to start with.)

What's the mechanism for game balance when designing a custom deck in this sort of way?

The appropriate analogy is more like I've designed a new pack of robo-rally option cards, or a new suite of dominion cards.

The way Magic:TG works is, every quarter wizards released 150-250 new designs. These aren't sold individually, you can only buy them in sealed packs of fifteen of unknown content. But now it's also possible and common to buy individual cards direct from websites which specialise in buying them second hand, or simply opening new packs themselves on an industrial scale.

There's two standard ways to play magic. One is "limited", you get together with some friends (normally at an organised event, but possibly just at home) with a big pile of unopened packs. Then you divy them up (either by just taking N packs each, or by opening one pack each, choosing the card you like most from it, then passing it round the table, until everyone has 45 cards) and try to assemble a deck out of whatever you've got. Then you all play your decks against each other.

The other is "constructed", you pre-assemble a deck out of any cards on the allowed list you're able to acquire by any means. Typically "any cards from the last year" or "any cards ever, apart from these 20 really stupidly unfair ones" in tournaments or "any cards ever, but this is just for fun, so pick something fun and not too powerful" at home. Then you turn up and play someone else's deck.

I generally do the "build a deck" thing when I play with friends, the idea being to build something fairly interesting and not worry when the cards come from. It's like dominion, often the question is "Wow, if I could get these two cards together, they'd do something awesome, I wonder if I can?"

The second does have the problem that if you want to be competitive, you may not have the cards you want, and buying them may be expensive.

balance

In limited, everyone has approximately the same chance, because they're all opening cards from the same year. To be fairly balanced, the main requirement on the card design is that they not be TOO variable -- if most say "do blah" and one says "totally destroy target player" then obviously everyone who happens to open one of the latter wins, and everyone else doesn't. There are other things that make it more fun, but it's inherently somewhat balanced.

In constructed, the limit is "how much you're prepeared to pay in real money" and "what's the best deck I can think of" for one of the hypothetical "totally destroy" cards. In the "allow all cards ever" format, this is actually a problem, because when magic first came out, some cards really were very nearly that good, and have never been reprinted and now cost hundreds of pounds.

In in-game terms, cards are balanced by requiring resources (mana) to pay for them. So everyone recognises that "win the game" should require more mana than "do 1 damage". And you need some of each, because in the early game you have few resources.

And a major part of the design is decided how MUCH more. Of course, there is not a perfect formula: wizards explicitly vary this to support or hinder certain sorts of cards, and have some better than you'd expect and some worse, and it varies over time.

In principle there is a "fair" mana cost for a card, but only relative to other similar cards.

my set

So, what does it mean to write my set.

The obvious thing to do with it is to invite people to play a limited game, because that's what new sets from wizards do, and then it's inherently fair between people (although I may still have too many cards too powerful or too weak compared to their mana cost).

It would also be possible for someone to use a few, or a lot, of the cards in a constructed deck, but you obviously couldn't play that against a random opponent, you'd play against someone who was curious about game design and interested in your set, and assumed that the cards were designed to be fair, and interested in "given these cards, what's an interesting deck you could make out of them?"

[simont]

Very informative, thank you! I think a lot of the problem was that I had missed the careful distinction you (and presumably all MTG players?) made between 'deck' and 'set'; I had assumed the words were basically interchangeable and that you were designing a deck to play against someone else's totally unrelated one, and hence most of my misunderstanding.

[jack]

Ah, yes exactly. I'd forgotten "set" wouldn't be obvious from context when I posted the original.