In Magic the Gathering, I'd actually say the "cost" of a card having a higher mana cost doesn't scale linearly, but actually exponentially. Not only does the player have to play more lands, they also have to draw those lands, take turns to play those lands, and risk the higher cost card not doing anything if they don't get enough lands. All these factors further compound the problem the higher a card's cost is. To put it another way, the difference between a 5 and 6 mana card is greater than the difference between a 1 and 2 cost card.
That's a different way of approaching it, but the result ends up the same. Instead of 1-drops being more powerful than other costs, each higher cost has a much higher opportunity cost in many ways as you go up the curve. Good call on bringing in the costs of having to play more lands, and spend more time building mana to make a play!
However, there is a point on the graph where it falls off and the cost often doesn't mean anything at all anymore. Reanimate spells, Show and Tell, Sneak Attack, Academy Rector and many other cards and interactions in the game essentially let you cheat costs and get cards for free or a significantly reduced cost. Darksteel Colossus could cost ten thousand mana, ut I am still going to cheat it into play with Tinker.
This gets even more pronounced when you have things like counterspells. Similar to the doomblade example, but more generally applicable than just creatures that do not have any evasion.
Also, we need to remember card advantage. You mentioned drawing lands, but it goes deeper. He compared playing three one-mana cards to playing one 3-mana card. The difference in cost is not just opportunity cost, but also that you would need to spend three whole cards on that play.
@@shoot_game718 This was exactly my thought when he mentioned that. It’s a huge advantage to cast a wrath effect for 5 and get rid of 5 1-cost cards. That’s the same amount of mana but those 5 1-costs represent a ton of card investment.
Playing multiple 1-costs SHOULD be strong until you run out of cards, balanced by 1-costs being bad in topdeck mode. If a game is too fast, card advantage stops being so important so low cost cards dominate.
Very good point! That's one thing I didn't get into in the video as much, since 1-cost cards still need to be worth the card in your hand. A LOT of MTG's 1-drops are unplayable because they don't provide a full card's worth of value, despite the low mana cost. The bigger issue is that the efficiency gap is so huge, trying to make 1-cost cards that are playable, but not overpowering, is very difficult.
i think you said it quite perfectly, you didnt really go deep because there are so many variables that it would fry the midns of those of lowe intellect but you put it perfectly based on the simple point of view.
Very true. Something merely going from being a one mana 1/1 to a 2/1 can instantly make it far more powerful whereas even that same increase applied to a 2 drop just isn’t the same. 3/2s are good but just not that much better.
Its a good point knowing that competitive formats tends to be in all games aggresive, wich promote the use of 1 or zero mana drops. THats why monored is always competitive in standard. And with the philosophy of MTG red is naturally the most competitive color. Have to mention a card that breaks most of those decks, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
@@tcgacademiaI don't feel it is difficult so much as it is tempting to make over powered cards to sell packs. Jackle Pup, Kird Ape, Savanah Lions, Isumaru, Goblin Guide and more are all fair 1 drops, but Ragavan is some Over Powered Complexity Creep BS. Skullclamp was a mistake based on a last minute change when they thought +1/-1 instead of +1/+1 would be less powerful and more flavorful. Ragavan was not a mistake. It was a choice.
One factor I don't think you mentioned is that with renewable resources a cheaper card is more likely to be playable for "free" using left-over resources that would otherwise go to waste, meaning not only is the card more efficient on its own, but it's also *more* likely that you can kinda sorta ignore the cost entirely.
"Left over resources" is an interesting quirk of renewable systems. I don't think I've gone into it in the past, but it does definitely have some effects on games - for one example it also really prioritizes curving out so you maximize your resource use each turn of the game.
with the increasing prevalence of “once per turn” effects on mtg, there is increasing weight to the theory that all mtg decended card games tend towards yugioh, yugioh just advances faster on the trend line. the specific culprit being that the more efficient cards get and the more common infinite combos become you tend towards zero cost spells as power creep progresses.
It's pretty funny when a "control'" deck still has the option to combo to an OTK the instant the opponent lets their guard down with the right cards in hand.
@@AbsurdAsparagusYugioh doesnt even have infinite combos. The only one is morphtronic telephone for Morphtronic telephone, which is a bit like myr Retriever for myr retriever If it would put the other artefact into Play. It doesnt got any good aplications though
I think this analysis completely ignores the concept of card advantage. Sure 2 1 cost cards might be stronger than a 2 cost card, but TWO cards is an investment of a different resource. Depending on the card flow of a game and the strategy of a deck, it's basically always a consideration if you will run out of cards before winning. The main issue of something like death's shadow is that if you don't win before you empty your hand, your opponent will be in a very advantageous position since drawing a 2 cost card with ~1.5 times the power of a 1 cost card is still better if you only get that one card. On the flip side, take a look at UW control, a deck happy to play 2+ cost cards specifically because something like supreme verdict can defeat multiple of the opponents cards for only one of yours, speeding up the process of running your opponent out of CARD resources and putting you in the advantageous position.
Card advantage balancing out resource advantage is a great theory, and it works well to a certain point, but the efficiency advantage of 1-cost cards is so much higher than any other cost that it can be really difficult to balance, especially over the long term.
@@tcgacademiaAnother thing that you don't consider in this video, related to card aventage. Is that a land costs a card. To play a 3 Cost card, i've had to play 3 lands. To play a 1 cost card I only have to play one land. That's 4 cards vs 2. If you put a lot more 3 drops in your deck, you must also put more lands. Not only you get less payables. But also, you have to expend more cards to play your cards. Specially if you want to play two cards a turn. If you play 1 drops, you get to play with only one land. And you don't need to invest a lot more on mana if you don't want to. That is efectibly more cards to be able to play with. And don't need to go as land drops. That's why 1 drops fire like crazy, and you keep playing the game, while your oponent has nothing to play, or do, but watch how he dies.
@@lucasfigueroa6165 Good point! It's not a huge difference, but in MTG being able to run less lands does help in the late game, since after a point lands are just dead cards, and running fewer lands means you draw less of them when you don't need them.
Honestly we can argue hypotheticals until we’re blue in the face but in practice the formats in magic with larger card pools and thus more OP 1 drops is largely dominated by decks that have a shit ton of 1 drops. (As was shown in this video). There are quite a few reasons for this, though, some of it being self defeating. For instance, Fatal Push is good but since the format is so fast and has mostly smaller things, it means fatal push is even more consistent whereas, while it’d still be good in standard, it’d also miss more often which would ironically make it worse in a weaker format just by virtue of having fewer good targets. It also doesn’t help that they’ve banned cards like Wrenn and six which prey on 1 toughness creatures because people get mad that it’s too efficient and neuters the effectiveness of 1 toughness creatures (the same issue people have with orcish bow masters)
Another aspect of this that I think is important to acknowledge is the "play on curve" issue. Being able to play cards on those early turns, and not letting that mana go to waste, is really important to tempo. So you end up with an issue where you either keep the 1 cost pool small and this becomes super luck based as there are probably only a couple good cards at each low cost, or you make a ton and you end up with this issue. This is why I'm really fond of the Build Divide/Z/X/Dragoborne solution of starting at 2 mana. Since your turn 1 mana pool is now 3, it becomes far easier to ensure your players have a healthy amount of turn 1 playable cards to put in their deck so they can consistently play on curve in the early game, without running into this balance issue.
Yeah, the Build Divide/Z/X/Dragoborne solution is really clever. It's a very small adjustment that most people won't even think twice about, but it removes a ton of pressure to print 1-cost cards and lets players curve out more naturally.
The other issue too is that in a game like magic, it’s not unheard of to get stuck on 2 or 3 mana. And in those cases, not being able to play your 3-4 drops or double spell your 2 drops hurts. So even decks that do play 3,4,&5+ drops still often end up wanting something to do early to help balance their curve. This is one of the reasons the mana storage system in Legends of Runeterra is so amazing. By reducing the lost efficiency of having no 1 or 2 drops early on, you end up ensuring that there are a lot more viable strategies.
@@K1ngsd1how to say you didn't watch video without telling you didn't watch video. 3-mana problem is not the thing there thanks to relative cost being way lower (4mana is just 33% more than 3 where opossed to 2 mana being 100% more) Also by starting with 3 mana turn 1 you can't possibly double spell untill turn 3 which remove second part of problem (how fast can you be with spending those cards)
The same thing has been an going thing with my EDH group, about a year and a half ago we were playing relatively average powered decks, nothing CEDH, but as we started building towards that power more recently our deck curves have changed drastically going from an average cmc of 4-5, down to 2-3.
Yep, same thing started happening to me in modern - although this was wayyyyyy back when modern was just starting out. In formats with large card pools, the more competitive you get, the more you realize you just can't put those sweet 5-drops in your deck and hope to win consistently.
There is also another problem in magic that's very similar which is the 1.5 cost problem. Prophetic prism costs 2 mana, draws you a card when entering and has 1 + tap: add a mana of any color. It's a pretty bad card that can sometimes do things, mostly in limited. Arcum's astrolabe is the same thing but at 1 mana, and it's banned in modern, legacy and pauper because it was warping those formats around itself. It's like the balanced version of the card costs ~1.5 mana. The astrolabe costs snow mana instead of normal mana as a way to try to cost that .5 mana, but it didnt work.
Yeah, it's kind of neat how many cards aren't goo enough at one cost, and just a little too good at cost -1. One Piece gives 2 resources a turn, which is about the closest I've seen a game get to really talking this issue. Not a huge issue, but one that comes up and can be kind of annoying to design around.
The .5 mana thing is extremely frustrating in the context of videogames, i get starting at 1 and working with increments of 1 for tabletop where players need to keep track, but when you got a computer counting and tracking for you, there's no excuse not to use more balance-friendly numbers
The solution is to not to try to push cards that far in your power creep. The FIRE design philosophy in Magic has really messed with the game in my opinion.
That was really interesting! never seen that idea of starting with higher ressource count before but I really like it, not only does it helps with the problem you're mentioning but it also means it allows designing cards that effectively cost what would normally amount to fractions of a ressource so it gives much more flexibility in balance. 0 cost cards have to be absolutely garbage to not be completely busted, but making something basically amount to a 0,5 cost card allows making it do *something* that's worth the card in your hand without immediately breaking the game.
Don't get me started on factional costs! There are so many cards I've looked at where they're a little too weak at one cost, but lower the cost by one and they're suddenly too strong. I think all games run into this at some point, but a higher starting cost definitely does give more flexibility.
Yeah, it's pretty difficult to notice in smaller formats. I only noticed it when I was deck-building for modern format MTG and trying to figure out how to improve my deck against the field, only to realize that I was playing 2 drops while the threats I was worried about mostly cost 1. It's an almost invisible pressure pushing the average CMC of decks lower.
Someone else already said something to this effect, but here's my take on it. There's more than one way to view efficiency: you have resource efficiency (or effect-to-cost ratio, where one drops excel); and then you have card efficiency (or effect-to-cards-spent ratio). Since most cards only cost one card (itself) to play, card efficiency is really just a measure of how great a card's effect is -- and it shouldn't be any surprise that this is where higher cost cards excel. Lots of one drops can produce great effects, but at the cost of card disadvantage. A single five drop will have dual pros and cons. So a card's true efficiency should be measure in units of (effect produced) / (total cost) where the total cost of a card factors in both resource cost and cards spent. Now for some math. Let's estimate that a card in mtg is worth ~1 mana (I'm basing this on the card Simian Spirit Guide, and some other things). Let's say that we value the effect of a particular one drop at N units, and a particular k-drop at F units. The true efficiency of k of those one drops is k*N/(k [mana] + k [cards]) = k*N/(k [mana] + k [mana]) = k*N/(2k) = N/2, while the true efficiency of the k-drop is F/(k [mana] + 1 [cards]) = F/(k [mana] + 1 [ mana]) = F/(k+1). Ideally, these efficiencies should be equal, so we have F = (k+1)/2*N. Note that for k=3,5,7, we have F = 2N, F = 3N, and F = 4N. This means that an equally efficient 3-drop should have 2 times the effect and an equally efficient 5-drop should have 3 times the effect of your given 1-drop. And sorry if this was super convoluted, I'm too lazy to go back and fix it lol. This doesn't seem to hold for creatures, but for instants and sorceries, it seems pretty accurate. Compare Reach Through the Mists, with Divination, and Jace's Ingenuity. They are rated similarly on the Gatherer, which suggests similar true efficiency, and their effects line up exactly with the above. Also, maybe it's not that the math is wrong, but that creatures tend to become more efficient at higher mana costs. This could be seen as one way to incentivize players to engage with the combat system
This definitely holds true in a broad sense, but it can be really hard to lock effects into that formula, especially once conditional effects enter the picture. All it takes is one condition that's a little too easy to meet, and suddenly all your two-mana removal is obsoleted by Fatal Push. Further, because Magic starts with a large up-front hand of cards, and draws cards more slowly over gameplay, the efficiency value of a given card changes depending on the number of turns the game takes to finish - faster games means resource efficiency starts to become more important than card efficiency. Although in support of what you said, the tension between resource efficiency and card efficiency is usually enough to balance cards in standard formats with smaller card pools - it only really starts to become an issue in eternal formats with much deeper card pools (or if someone slips up in the balance department).
@@tcgacademia Completely agree! I was just looking for a more tangible way to describe the relationship between resources, cards, and effects. Also, that's a very valuable point you make about efficiency of cards as a function of game length -- I had not considered that particular angle when I made the above comment! To me, the true efficiency of a card is much more like the value of some commodity in a living economy. It varies depending on the current metagame, interactions with other cards in the card pool, etc. Economists have ways to model such things with a greater degree of rigor (I would assume), but I imagine it gets pretty complicated and statistical.
I want bring to the table how in the Digimon card game, that doesn't manage resources by cards but still with costs, the designers limit the space por 1 cost creatures with the minimum being 2 and only vainilla exist at that cost. For context, in Digimon there is a shared resource track, that goes up to 10 for each player. Your turn last until the memory goes beyond the 0 threshold at the middle at how much you pass over that threshold is the starting resources in your opponent turn. Because of this design, is possible to bring high cost card to the battlefield but in respond your opponent could play more cards in their turn. Small drop decks aren't as prominent now but the game suffers for something that all these resources base games have to endure, mana cheat and how playing thing for free is busted. It would be cool to see an analysis about that
Digimon is a game I've been interested in trying for a while. Although I'm still a bit salty over it - when the game released in Japan I tried to buy some JP starter decks, and they were sold out. So I waited until it was released in english and tried to buy some EN starter decks, also sold out, and scalped to nonsensical prices. Still haven't worked up the motivation to try finding starter products again. But yes - the resource system does seem very interesting - although also prone to the one-mana problem, or low-cost problem, at least.
@@tcgacademia The Digimon TCG has a "normal" baseline average cost of 3. Yes, higher level Digimon will cost more to play, but higher level Digimon have alternate costs which allows you to place them on top of lower level Digimon with the average cost of three. This in turn has allowed Digimon to release support cards in the form of Tamers that will set a player's resource pool at three if they are below that at the start of their turn. In addition, if a player ends their turn without giving their opponent resources, the game sets the opponent's resource pool at three. The game is built around using three costs as the average. Yes, there are one cost cards; but they are there to allow players to manipulate the resource pool against their opponents as a tug of war mechanic. As a player, you're in control of your resource pool and your opponent's resource pool. In addition, because Digimon has a mechanic where when you place a higher level Digimon on top of a lower level Digimon you draw a card, it effectively allows cards to become cantrips for draws. And players should never feel like they run out of resources.
@@ArcDragoon Interesting. Players seem to really like the resource system, so I do want to give it a try at some point. I really like how the evolutions cantrip - it's a really simple solution to the inherent card disadvantage of stacking an evolution on top of another card. A lot of games have played with an evolution mechanic, so I like that this game seems to have put some thought into making sure the mechanic is something players actually want to do.
Whoa whoa whoa. You can’t compare one 3 mana card to three 1 mana cards while completely overlooking the card advantage. That being said, the point of your video is good.
was about to say this, i never played mtg but plenty of online ccgs, how come these decks with a bunch of 1 drops not run out of cards and if these are creatures how come they don't get wiped by control decks
One cost can be scary but can also be used for a target pulling dolls. Though it has to be done right. An example I feel is something like the level 1 rear guards.
You can also balance out 1 mana problems with reduced starting hand sizes, smaller hand sizes encourage larger more impactful cards to be played. MTG is the worst for this as you need to have lands as well as spell in your hand meaning you need a large starting hand size, this gives the cheap spells even more value as you can reduce your decks land count without much risk of getting mana screwed, this is the same as card advantage.
The more expensive the better value you get eventually, like buying in bulk, like ghalta primal hunger, he is a 12/12 and trample, and if played right he costs 2 mana, so wouldn't you rather have that over 12 1/1's that cost 12
I've always been curious how games like MTG and Lorcana would feel if you just like, merge the first two turns. So, just draw 2 cards, place 2 mana/ink, then start from there. No removing 1-cost cards, just shifting gameplay forward slightly, and only at the very start. I wonder if it'd feel quicker without breaking balance all that much or if it just wouldn't even matter
I actually like that idea quite a lot! Definitely less elegant from a rules perspective, and 1-costs are still going to be important, but from what I've seen in games like Z/X, this could be good for gameplay overall.
Another topic that piggybacks off the one cost problem is the Agro problem. Aggro decks don’t have to be better than their opponents entire deck, they just have to be better than their opening hand and first few turns. By playing any aggro deck you sort of invalidate 2/3 of your opponents cards which sucks :/
Yep. While you do want aggro to be a viable strategy, it also puts a ton of pressure on the other decks to keep up. Which leads to the downward pressure on costs. It's a balancing act to make aggro functional while also making it possible to use higher-cost cards - and it gets more and more difficult the more cards you add to the card pool.
Control can use cheap counter and removal until turn 4 which from there they would normally stabilize or lose. It's not invalidating u just never planned for their deck if u can never get ur cards out without luck
Aggro has to be this way. The reason why is because aggro's first few turns of smashing your face are completely undone by a board wipe and a little life gain. The eternal formats in MTG are tricker to talk about because the metagame is so solved, decks are so efficient, and every deck plays multiple sides of the "metagame clock."
As someone that’s studied game design and played a fair bit of magic, this really helped me understand better why some formats like modern are so fast. Very interesting. It’s actually pretty similar conceptually to one of the weird issues I had in fire emblem heroes. In that game, due to the smaller maps, cavalry move 3 spaces, infantry 2, and armored 1. As compared to, say 6, 5, 4 in Fire emblem engage. Due to the same things you discuss here, there’s just a much bigger impact when the difference is 1 to 3 than 4 to 6.
Interesting to see this problem come up in a different context. I've played my fair share of fire emblem games, and move 1 just sounds painful, no matter how small the map it.
damn, movement is already broken to begin with in fire emblem so I can't imagine what it's like having your cavalier with basically the equivelent of 10 movement (or 12 if you take armor knights as the baseliine) they would need to have incredibly low stats for you to even consider using other units
@@Laezar1 not really because even the lowest stated units are debatablely playable but that movement stat allows a wide range of advantages from rescue dropping, visiting villages, supporting other allies in battles and so on which out beats many other units.
@@frostbite_1244 You're saying not really but you seem to confirm what I'm saying "even the lowest stated units are playable" means that they did not give high movement units stat low enough to balance it out =p
@@Laezar1 true, they usually don't balance it out, there are a couple exceptions like Lowen or Forde but even then you could do worse. Weak units are complicated because they can be supported by stronger units and thus become playable but if everyone is weak then you really feel it... Like the Dawn Brigade, a running joke throughout the community but I'm serious they suck to use and their cavalier dies in a single damn hit.
I would like to mention though that in many contexts good one drops can be very healthy for the game. One thing that mtg has recently been doing is add more good one-drops to limited, and having them be narrow-ish cards that are good if played well. One example of this was Network Disruptor in Kamigawa. Limited is always slower and having good one drops in it makes the games more dynamic
I think being able to start your curve early is definitely important. The issue is that even if they're narrow, if you pack enough of them into a game, they'll inevitably start to dominate. Which is why the Z/X solution is so clever - you can start your curve on turn 1, without running into the massive efficiency gap between 1-drops and everything else. But for an established system like MTG, some number of 1 drops is probably necessary, even if it pushes the power of their eternal formats.
Yeah, I think the key with some of the best designed one-drops to try and make them not as good early and not as bad late, like Network Disruptor, or for a more constructed-related example, Knight of the Ebon Legion. You're right that mtg kind of can't avoid it, so they have to know how to design one drops that don't just destroy you when they're played early
@@naverdadendada And to be fair, mtg is usually pretty good at balancing 1-drops. They're rarely the culprit when something breaks in a format. There's just a cumulative effect that builds up the more of them are available in a format.
It also gives your opponent a land. In fact, path has almost completely disappeared from Modern because even hitting a 3 drop with it is usually so bad.
@@Reverie42 to be fair the lack of path in modern is mostly contributed by solitude and leyline binding. If these cards didn't exist path would be the choice of removal quite frankly, it's just been horribly power crept by a 0 mana option and an option that doesn't have the drawback and also removes other crap.
@@xed8530 Path had been falling off for 2 years by the time Solitude was first printed. At a certain point, the power level in Modern just hit an inflection point where giving your opponent a land was too big of a downside. Same thing happened to Goblin Guide in burn, even though it'd be a couple years before we got the more common replacements we see now.
I have genuinely come to hate creature cards of any kind. Three of my top 5 decks (in terms of enjoyment not power) have a deficit of creature spell cards. Two of those three don't have creature spells at all! The other two of the 5 are unsurprisingly green.
Another massive part of low cost cards being important comes from how accessible card draw is and if the way you gain resources is dependent on those cards. A system with lower card draw (or card draw that is expensive in cost) and a mana system that acts independent from your hand encourages higher cost cards to make the most out of your limited resources.
It's also worth pointing out that mana scaling means it takes much more time to play multiple even fairly low cost cards let alone high cost ones: it only takes 2 mana to play 2 1-cost cards, but it takes 4 to play 2 2-cost cards, even relatively low costs like 4 mana take 8 whole turns to be able to play a second copy. This is why mana ramp is so important because you can get these 6-8 cost cards out on turn 4-5 which is why effects like Trample are really important for bigger creatures because otherwise they get blocked indefinitely by 1/1's rather than trading 1 big card for 3-5 smaller one's
The core problems with the number 1 apply to games outside the CCG sphere as well. One basic example I use for boardgame design is that flipping a random card of value 1-3 means your top result is THREE TIMES bigger than your lowest result, which is often way more random than is appropriate; simply changing this to be 2-4 instead already tones down that extreme significantly while still allowing room for the design to be risky/unpredictable/etc. as desired.
Really good point! This definitely holds true for games of any genre - another interesting example brought up in a comment was Fire Emblem's mobile game, which moved from ~4-7 movement ranges to 1-3, making max movement characters way stronger. If they had just gone with 2-4, it would have come pretty close to capturing the movement ranges in the original games.
I love seeing all this discussion and I read as much as I could, but I apologize if my contribution has been mentioned already. I think an interesting alternative would be to lean into the low cost cards and have a sqrt(x) or log(x) looking function for our mana instead of a linear one where each additional land provides less mana than the one before. Such a system may allow for significantly stronger 3 cost cards that can buck the trend or allow for more synergy in the 1-drop slot for cards to reach their max power level. Other, similar, ideas, might include a system like the tron lands or cloudposts where 1-drops are quickly out scaled because the mana scales up faster. I've seen systems where mana can be saved between turns and systems where specific game actions are limited, but if you know any systems similar to those I'm describing I'll do some research and come back. a couple more notes: Although a lot of those highlighted modern cards only cost 1 mana, they are not all cards that can be played on turn 1. Taking Death's Shadow as an example, that card is typically not played until turn 3 due to the strict life requirement. Other cards that were highlighted are strictly reactive cards, or cantrips that may provide some filtering, but only contribute a bit to the proactive game plan. In support of your main thesis, I'd like to mention that 1-cost cards have an additional power of flexibility. Having 1-cost cards in your deck allows players to fill in the gaps of spending their mana. This can be good because it reduces the risk of failing to curve out, but that consistency is detrimental in other ways. I'm also reminded of Hearthstone's system where low cost defensive cards were typically much more pushed (stat-wise) than low cost offensive cards. I assume this is because of the match up charts where low cost cards would be useless in Control vs Control and fine in every other scenario. In such a situation you need strong low cost cards to reduce the swingyness of each draw.
While not a resource issue specifically, Yugioh has a similar problem ever since link monsters came out where link 1s, for the most part, tend to fill 1 of 2 roles: 1. being a crazy good, easy to use combo piece to often access important cards straight from the deck 2. An overly simple way to trigger overpowered graveyard effects that were meant to be balanced by the need to be sent there. Currently 6 of the 19 banned link monsters, and all 3 of the limited ones, are link 1s
I made a 0 cost meme card that has morph. When the card is targeted by anything, thats its morph cost and causes the targeting player to lose the game. The card is "You Lost The Game". If the card is played any other way, it immediately gets exiled instead.
Funnily enough, there is a trap card in Yugioh similar to this called "Waking the Dragon" that has the effect that, if it is destroyed by your opponent while it is set, you get to cheat out something from your Extra Deck, which would usually be Ultimate Falcon (monster with big stats unaffected by card effects) or a floodgate.
The problem isn't the existence of one-cost cards in MtG, but the power level of the one-cost cards. Hard removal, actual threats, denial, etc. One cost cards can do everything in legacy. Of course, as you pointed out that the lowest power level and smallest card pool format of MtG does not have this problem and I think it's due to both reasons, availability and power level. A VERY easy way of fixing this problem is by exponentially increasing the power of cards with cost, but that does not come without its own drawbacks.
A challenge to designing balanced 1 cost cards is also considering the cost of playing a card. Spending 4 mana on 1 card SHOULD be less impactful than spending 4 mana on 4 cards. But the balance is crazy hard to find (if its even possible at all)
@@zousssnotzeus5341 People complaining about modern MTG art make me laugh, those oldschool MTG cards are uglier than sin. Like vomit splattered on a piece of cardboard.
Not once did you address card advantage as a resource here, and it's absolutely fundamental to this question. 1 cost cards are important, sure, but you don't see so many decks with nothing else - even in formats where it's possible to do just that and run only the most "efficient" 1 cost effects. The even more fundamental limitation of resources than mana is cards in hand; not only does this play into whether you get your resources, but you can't cast a spell pierce that isn't even in your hand or otherwise granted to you to cast by some card effect. A 4 mana card doesn't have to be 4x as powerful as a 1 mana card, because both of them cost the same 1 card - that's 1 draw, 1 deckbuilding slot, etc. Another way that 1 cost cards are kept from taking over the game is that they're not allowed to draw more than self-replacement, that is not to repeatedly draw without costing more mana nor to have 2+ draw built in. Playing 1 card on turn 1, 2 cards on turn 2, and 3 cards on turn 3 without a way to draw extra? If you hit every land drop to do that, you're down to 1 card in hand. I hope it's a 3-4 cost, or you topdeck one, or turn 4 is going to look really sad. Meanwhile, hitting a 1, 2, and 3 cost plus the land drops leaves a player with 4 cards in hand if they didn't draw any extra. 5 vs 2 in hand on the turn 4 draw, more than double the options and threats. If you can get the same effect from a single card for 6 mana, it's a less expensive way to do so than getting that effect from three cards for 1 mana each. Double the mana cost, but a third the card cost.
What do you think about giving " cycling" ability to lands and/or limit the number of copy inside a deck bases on the rarity? (Ex. Common 4, un 3, r 2, mythic 1)
Cycling on lands is definitely good, although it does have the potential to make one-cost cards even stronger since decks become more reliable (which makes playing to the board early even more important). Definitely an improvement, though! I don't love restrictions based on rarity, since it tends to make games more swingy, depending on who draws more of their powerful, restricted cards, and who is stuck drawing commons.
This also incentivizes decks which can reuse/ protect their higher rarity cards. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it could be if you don't account for it. (basic example is a deck that can return rare cards from the grave to replay).
This definitely has some interesting implementation for Pokemon TCG... one energy Pokemon attacks typically have some restrictions or challenges to get going. They typically try to design around the best attackers having two energy attacks (which in some cases can require one attachment) with some one and three energy attackers of note.
While I'm not very familiar with competitive MTG in particular, I've played some other card games, and my experience is usually more that the reason they're used so much has more to do with "the games are usually decided very very early" - sometimes that's because one player outright kills the other player, other times it's because they play cards that gain value over time in a way that makes the game basically impossible to recover from if they aren't immediately answered. This pushes players to focus more and more on the early game because anyone that doesn't won't survive to the lategame, because whether a card is or isn't good in the lategame doesn't matter if the game has already ended or is unsalvageable by the time you can play it - even if a 6 cost card were 6x as efficient as a 1 cost card it would probably still be garbage because the game is probably over by the time you can play it.
iei thanks~ would be helpful for a tcg that I'm currently working on. btw, can you make a video explaining the good and bad mechanics about "Rebirth for you''?
Funny enough, I was planning on doing something like that, and it ended up getting derailed pretty early on and turned into my 'Randomness' video. I would like to revisit it properly in the future for a more thorough review, but at this point I have a ton of video ideas, and only so much time to make them, so unfortunately it'll likely be a while before I get back to Rebirth for You.
I've long thought that mana should start at 2, because decks with proactive 1 mana creatures are so heavily variable in strength based on their opening hand.
does that part where you say you could play 1 spell vs 3 spells shouldn't consider card advantage? also i feel some important points like global damage and effects that benefit from targeting a single card like bringing from the grave are being ignored
I don't think it's really efficiency that's the main factor of one cost cards, but speed. If the game is decided before turn 3, then the 3 cost card is not just 3x more expensive than the 1 cost card, but infinitely more expensive, as it was simply never possible to cast that card in that game.
If I remember right the only cards (well, creature cards) in Duel Master that costed 1 mana were blockers of a power level of 2000, and a card that had to attack each turn if able with 1000 power. I just don't see it as a problem, since most of the cards are purely defensive, while the one aggressive card gets completely destroyed by all the defensive one, and you don't have the option to not attack while it is on the field.
I like it a lot. It feels like it should dodge this problem better than most, but I could still see it having a 0-cost problem in the distant future. For now it's dynamic, strategic, and doesn't leave player screwed.
Funny how games without mana systems (notably Yugioh) have a different issue in the opposite direction Without a mana system card advantage reigns supreme at all times and it's pretty easy to draw equivalents, doom blade is a powerhouse for it's low cost 1:1 removal where even something that can go card positive like raigeki being a board clear with no cost isn't as useful because it doesn't help you on your first turn and can't generate advantage till turn 3 only if your opponent doesn't manage to OTK before you get another turn.
The one thing you should of mentioned is the possibility of one cost cards like Gurmag Angler. They are not one cost out of the gate but can become one costed later. Other then that good video
I think a good way of overcoming the 1-cost problem is to make mana plentiful but cards expensive. For example, in Hearthstone, you're never subject to mana screw because all mana is colourless and gained automatically, but you only draw 1 card per turn. This means you'll run out of cards quickly if you play things that are too low-cost. As a result, the best Hearthstone decks generally have ~7 1-cost cards out of 30.
I think an aspect touched on but not explained fully (not that you didn't have a lot to go over to start with) was the concept of tempo. There is that aspect of "Why play one 4 cost when I could play four 1 cost cards" that you touched on, but there's also the aspect of playing your 4 drop, then your opponent spending 1 or 2 mana to remove it, and having 3 or 2 mana left over to further develop their position. In that scenario, you've used all your resources in an attempt to further your board, while your opponent both negates your move while furthering their position at the same time, with the rest of their board likely untouched by your move and so is now an even more difficult problem to deal with. This is why in Magic's older formats, only the strongest cards that cost 3 or more get played, because they have to do as much if not more work than your opponent's best 1 mana removal and best 2 drop threat combined. Which reminds me of another point, which is two 2 mana threats cannot be dealt with by a single-target removal spell unlike a single 4 drop, making the former play hardier than the latter.
I very slightly allude to that for all of about 2 seconds by mentioning "dies to doom blade" - since that's also part of that argument. It is a good point to mention, though, and helps keep the advantage of low cost cards much further into the game than just the first few turns.
not only DM did it... after DMs "fall" the WoW TCG did the same (and they had quest cards that you played faced up in your resource and you could "solve" them to do extra stuff and flip them over) and even the VS System TCG did the same
This discussion is interesting to view through Dragon Ball Super card game's history. Early on, one cost cards or cards intended to be used for one cost were fairly low commitment. Senzu Bean pumps up a card for the turn and untaps 2 energy (energy works the same as Duel Master's resource), Buu draws a card on play, Furthering Destruction Champa bumped power for a battle and gave your card (if it's attacking) double strike (if an attack hits, defender takes 1 card from life area and adds it to hand, double strike makes them take two instead), they also produced a wave of Counter Attacks like Whis's Coercion which negated an attack for 1 energy and each color had their unique one. Later sets introduced units who could play themselves if you used them to aid in a battle, yielding a body that could attack the opponent with little commitment. During the early days, and several patches in the game's histroy, there have been some wild strategies that could do quite a bit for little to no cost.
Yep! I go over this a bit more in another video on resource systems specifically, but any resource that refreshes each turn is renewable (lands, or 1/turn normal summon), and any that you discard from play are consumable. Both lead to slightly different play patterns, but 1-drops are less dangerous in consumable systems.
The ideal number of 1 cost cards in an aggressive mana curve is 26. I arrived at this number assuming that you want to play 1 spell on turn 1, and 2 spells on turn 2, emptying your hand as fast as possible. 26 out of 60 gives you the best chance of having exactly 3 in your opening hand. 17 land, 26 1-drops, means you have the best chance of having 2 land and 3 1-drops in your opening hand. I have won tournaments based on this streamlined mana curve and you can too!!
People keep bringing up the fact that low cost cards mean you end up with an empty hand sooner, but have they played MTG recently? So many cards replace themselves that most decks are choked on mana rather than number of cards in hand.
1 mana creature is generally at most a 3 total pow + toughness Then 2 mana for 5; 3 for 7; 4 for 10; 5 for 12 From there, the size stops increasing at 6 & 7 (exceptions for 8+ mana but they’re rarely created) because the creatures start getting powerful game ending abilities. For something to be played competitively it would need to break that mold like: death’s shadow or tarmagoyf.
I get your point but if your response to my 3 mana card is more than 2 cards, my 3 mana card fulfill its purpouse. What I'm trying to say is that you're considering only mana without matching with card pool per turn. At the end of the day you can have as many 1 mana card as you want but after turn 4-5 you probably ends up in the scenario where you have no card on your hand and you only use once per turn. Beside, the beefier decks not only ends ups having more playable card at that same point but worst scenario they would drop down the same quantitative of cards per turn but with higher inner power.
There is also the issue of how the abilities themselves are valued. Creating a token, gaining card advantage, giving buffs both temporary and permanant, having keywords like flying, haste, or prowess, etc. These all need to be properly valued on how cards are made. Monestary Swiftspear is a key example for why this is a problem. Can't be killed in a 1v1 with a basic 1 drop unless that card has upside. Instantly able to be capatilized on because of haste, and stays until late game being able to compete with 4-5 drops easily because of Prowess. It easily wins games by turn 5 if your opponent doesn't take care of it quick. But THAT is the problem itself. One drops have gotten so powerful that there is basically no downside to only using them. Before, you actually needed to get something like Craterhoof out in order to make 1 drops matter but now they compete 1 on 1 with creatures like Craterhoof by themselves.
Why not have a separate deck just for lands? Then you can choose which deck to draw a card from, so you don't get mana flood or mana screw. Maybe even separate creature and spells.
So while 1 mana cards tend to be quite efficient at their niche, they tend to be quite inefficient where it comes to card advantage. 1 mana spells tend to be 1-for-1 kinds of actions, but at 3 or more mana you can answer more than one card with a card, or generate more resources. Wandering Emperor for example, can generate one 3/3 Vigilance creature token every two turs. So let's say a Wandering emperor stays on the field for 6 turns. She generated 3 "resources" with roughly 6 mana value, without needing to spend extra mana or cards. In her "removal mode", although conditional, Wandering emperor is guaranteed to be a 2-for-1. Sunfall is another card that is often a 4-for-1, granted, you do need to spend 5 mana, plus 2 mana to get the full benefit. Of course, this is more apparent in Standard. In fast formats like Modern there are 1 mana spells with the potential to generate card advantage like Ragavan. Conclusion: In Standard, cards with higher costs are balanced in the fact that they tend to generate immediate 2-for-1 kind of interaction, or continuous resource generation, which tend to take over the game if the game goes long.
Standard helps by letting them rotate out one drops before you get a critical mass of them. You definitely need a pretty big card pool before this starts becoming a problem, unless the designers mess up the balance.
Idea: A renewable linear system where you can overpay, and you MUST pay at least 3 resources per effect, unless you increase your "precision" stat, which allows you to spend as little as 2, 1, or 0 on a cost. Basically, if your deck doesn't run the precision mechanic, then everything from 0 to 3 costs the same for you. If you want to rapidly cast cheap spells, it imposes an additional requirement on you. Alternatively, the precision system could be built into the game from the core mechanics. Once per turn, you can play a card as a precision bonus instead of paying its cost for its own effects. This would also make anti-precision effects more valuable. Alternative: Instead of everything costing at least 3 without precision, every card has two costs, its base cost and its challenge cost. You must pay both for the effect. The challenge cost is reduced by your precision stat. Even expensive cards may then include some high challenge cost, requiring you to invest in precision to afford them.
Out of all the card games that I've played that uses a resource type system where each card has a "cost" I don't think any of them have linearly scaling power. The biggest example is if you look at cards that are just big stat blocks. Most of the time if they cost 4 or less they are ok or good, however normally when a card reaches the 5 cost mark it needs some sort of game winning effect to be good, no matter how high its stats are.
This is how Shadowverse Evolve operates. If your card costs 5 or more it's doing something huge. Usually 1 costs do very little and are either 2/2 vanilla, 2 damage to follower quick spells that gain small effects later in the game when a condition has been met, or Bellringer Angel that's a 1 cost 2 defense blocker that draws a card on death. But then you look at the high cost cards and see where the inevitability of game enders come in. Every deck has a turn where they can enter God mode and present a win condition and very rarely does that rely on 1 cost value chumps.
Games with 1 mana gem per round like Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra seem to be more midrange heavy with 3-5 cost cards being the most important, while more aggressive 1-3 cost strategies also can exist along higher cost 5-10 mana, but these can lose to bad hands.
One advantage of digital tcgs is that they can patch any 1-drops that end up stronger than anticipated. In physical games, powerful one drops just keep accumulating in a format until they get banned. Guaranteed mana also helps make higher cost card more palatable as well, since you don't have to worry about not being able to play them in the same way as a system like lands. One-drops are still risky, but the system of those games definitely cuts down on that risk a bit.
Have you ever done an assessment of costing and resources for any of Decipher’s old games and how that affects costing balances? Since the company had a mantra of not wanting to do anything like WOTC, they had very different resource management from any of the games listed in the video. Star Trek: No cost to any card. One card play (start of turn) and one card draw (end of turn). Infinite interrupts (like instants) can be played per turn. No maximum hand size. Discard from hand effects were devastating because of the tempo disruption and that you could get locked out of games that way. Card draw was also possibly more powerful than in MTG. Power creep involved ways to play more than one card per turn, which was awkwardly necessary for the game to grow. Star Trek (2nd Edition): Cards cost between 0-7 counters. You have 7 counters per turn to spend. Drawing additional cards cost 1 counter per card. Any cards in hand in excess of 7 at the end of the turn must be discarded. Star Wars: Decks are fixed at 60 cards and can never be larger. Locations played on table (no cost, no limit to number that can be played) typically generate ‘Force’ for both players. A player’s cards in deck are used as their Force to play cards in hand. At the start of their turn, they activate an amount of Force up to the amount they can generate from locations +1 by placing cards from the top of their deck face-down in a pile. As they play cards, they stack their ‘active’ force used to play the card into a ‘used pile.’ At the end of the turn, any ‘active’ force remaining can be drawn into hand, one at a time. No maximum hand size (but cards punish you for having too big of a hand). Unused Force can be banked for future turns. Used Force is cycled back into the deck. Note that this game has built-in top deck abilities as part of its combat system (destiny draws) and card-counting (tracking destinies) is an essential part of the game. LOTR TCG: Players play good guy cards on their turn (their ‘fellowship’ which has no interaction with any other fellowship) and bad guy cards on opponent’s turns. Good guy cards add a ‘shadow’ cost to a ‘twilight’ pool. Moving your fellowship towards Mount Doom adds more twilight. Bad guy cards remove twilight from the pool to play. Adding and especially removing twilight is very powerful. Hand of 8 cards recycles at the end of your turn and each time a fellowship moves when it’s not your turn. Any cards in excess of 8 are discarded.
I haven't, but those all sound like really interesting game systems to explore. My list of games to try is already pretty long, but you've definitely piqued my curiosity on those. It'll be interesting to see how this issue comes up in that context, or if their systems manage to avoid it altogether.
didn't even mention card draw? o.O playing 3 one-costs costs your hand, well, three cards instead of one for one 3-cost.... which is a price to be considered. Card draw isn't cheap in the card games I played at least.
There's definitely a whole video to be made about why format rotation exists, but managing the number of available 1-cost cards and spreading effects along the mana curve is definitely one of the reasons.
Simple explanation to this is that in Modern there is a larger pool of good or imbalance in some cases 1-cost cards, in standard people cannot do that because the total card pool is significantly smaller. The reason Why MTG is still going strong is because they try to slowly update their card pool with cards that combat the issue of mana-screw/flood, however the issue still remains because they are using land cards as a resource, while Duel Masters had each card become a resource and a playable card, the same is also seen in the more modern flesh and blood TCG, I also attempt to design a similar system when I find the time since I want to create something fun that doesnt rely so much on negative randomness. I have been in a tournament once where all I drew the entire tournament was up to 2-3 lands, it has happened which displays how unfun that play-day was. Nowadays people tend to seek a fun time in video games, which is sad considering it is not the same feeling as a game played in person, the experience is much different and video games often feel alienating at best, so I commend Flesh and Blood for doing what they do right now and pushing that game with even ready-made completely themed and ready to play decks. (Buy and Play right away). The game I design (on my offtime) has also a dual/multi purpose card system which enables some extra choices. Just a reminder though that such systems make games more complex and the barrier to entry a bit higher, meaning it appeals to a narrower audience, however no one can stop us from engaging with something complex in a simple way and really no one has to be perfect. Also the only crypto game I have seen done right is Skyweaver apparently, although they use the more generic resource system similar to Hearthstone.
Runeterra is having a problem similar to this in its eternal format because 1) the game has no good cheap boardwipes for swarms, 2) the game has reached a critical mass of conditionally overtuned 1 drops, changing aggro decks into big aggro/stompy decks, and 3) the initiative switch system and lack of cheap multi target tools means going wide is extremely strong. Standard doesnt really have that problem luckily, which shows how important critical mass is.
In my own game design, I've found out myself that 1-drops are surprisingly difficult to design well. A 1-drop combat trick is pretty easy to do, and "spend 1 extra mana when casting this to gain a bonus effect", which is often pretty similar, is easy to do, but other kinds of 1-cost cards mean that any X mana turn can also be an X-1 and 1 turn, and that's where I think the real issue lies. A turn 4 spent casting four 1-mana spells is usually not that bad because you've spent 4 cards in hand (plus resource cards). 1-drops are often disproportionately powerful, but unless you have the draw to back it up, you pay for that in having weaker future turns. The bigger issue for me has been those X-1s. Playing a previous turn's card is usually not a very big power decrease compared to what this turn could have been, and towards the later portion of the game it's something you often do anyway because you don't want to have cards of every possible total cost in your deck. This means when you have lots of good 1-drops too, you get quite a few turns where your main play is still almost a turn's worth of value on its own, but you also get the extra value of adding in a 1-drop. It's especially potent in decks with 'breakpoint' costs, the costs of your key combo pieces. If your combo is a 2-cost card and a 4-cost card, then your turn 3 isn't any more valuable than your turn 2 in many cases, since on turn 3 you'll often find yourself casting the combo piece you wanted to cast on turn 2, so you pay virtually nothing to throw in a 1-drop, and likewise for your turn 5.
Good point! I think it's a trap that's easy for a game to fall into - they focus too much on one-drops as curve starters and not enough on one-drops as curve extenders.
@@tcgacademia Very true. That's something I like about Yugioh in comparison - pretty much the only difference between a starter and an extender is whether or not you have to normal summon it, which means the game naturally makes you think about how cards behave in each role and which if any restrictions you want to build into them.
The not yet out furry card game animal kingdom has a system with designated building cards that gives you 2 energie each turns but you can always use any other card to make slums that only produce one, since the game isnt out yet its a bit hard to judge the strength of 1 drops
I just noticed that the "start with 2 mana from T0" isnt a fix on its own. Imagine if you could put two lands at the start of the game in Modern. Modern would still play the same mix of Evoke elementals, 1-drop rares and Orkish Bowmasters that it currently does. It is much more of a function of 1 drop cards being that efficient in Modern. The one difference would be that we'd see even more The One Ring central strategies, maybe some more Urza. The real solution is that you really have to design 1 drops well, and starting with a city of traitors on the field is just a smoothing move. Actually, a workable solution might be just to have the baseline for lands be 2 mana, but thats just a wild guess.
Definitely not a fix on its own - you still have to be disciplined and avoid making 1-drops as much as possible in these systems. The real advantage is these systems don't need 1-drops for turn one plays. Not every game can have the kind of discipline of Duel Masters that has avoided 1-drops for most of the game. There's always the temptation to make the first turn more exciting than 'land, go', so designers keep trying and make 1-drops relevant. Starting with lands in play gives you options to make relevant first turn plays, without running into the efficiency gap that 1-drops have over every other cost.
Yugioh's a weird one! A video taking a closer look at yugioh is definitely on my short list of ideas, since it's design direction is so strange compared to other tcgs.
I've played Yu-Gi-Oh for a little over 20 years and can confidently say it certainly is a strange case. There's certain archetypes that have strategies so out there it's like you're playing 2 separate games, with Infernities having effects that only work when your hand is empty or the Metaphys/Ghoti strategy of banishing your own cards to play during your opponents turn. Your own cards are the "mana resource" and managing them effectively can be difficult, with each card individually having potentially game defining effects. It's wild
Yugioh existing for so long and not having any card rotation ALSO makes it mega weird. At least Konami is starting to support other formats finally a bit
It's worth bringing up the one of the lead creators of MtG who then made Duel masters went on to currently make the game battle spirits which expanded on the DM method with the core engine. Now mana is a constantly ticking resource that increases steadily, however the resources are then eaten up by creatures semi-perminently
Neat - I didn't realize the creators crossed over there! BS has been on my pile of game to try for a while now - I have a pair of Japanese decks, and BSS on preorder - not sure which one I'll end up trying first! The core system looks really interesting.
@@tcgacademia it's held up these 14-15 years with like no changes bar the soul core, and it should say how big it actually does counter the 1 cost problem that while most games solve going first by drawing less BS and BSS gives going second a fifth starting core. You then add the fact it's consistent enough to be played with directly and you get a situation where 2/6 of the colours you can play have active playstyle around manipulating it. Green is obvious since while the mainstay abilities are tapping your opponent's spirits or summoning in battle step, the thing it does best at is just raw extra core generation; all while purple's actual core thing is forcing as much of your opponent's cores out of play for a special destruction type called depletion. Something you might also recognize and appreciate to examples you gave, the core system actually does have a nod to duel masters as most permanent (all spirits and most nexuses) have symbols on them that more than being just player damage, and a much cleaner solution to duel masters having to create double breaker abilities, also actively reduce the costs of other cards of their colour, so you get the benefits duel masters tried fixing with cards as resources without them eliminating them as playable.
I would never classify a pitch spell in the same category as any other card that costs 1 or less. Fury and Grief are only outliers because they almost always trade 1-1, which isn't true of a spell like Force of Negation.
I'm confused, two times in the beginning of the video you talk about 1 cost cards in the modern meta but highlight 2/3/and 7 cost cards as if they are one cost?
if we consider Hearthstone, facing multiple 1-cost cards are not much a problem, since there are AOE cards, plus the ratio of power by cost tends more to be quadratic/exponential, playing a 9 or 10-mana card when you have a maximum of 10 mana should have a significant effect compare to 2 5-mana card or 10 1- mana
Hearthstone is in an interesting spot since they can design around this issue much more easily than physical tcgs can. One of the big things that leads to this problem is the accumulation of cards over time - like Death's shadow or burn spells, eventually you get enough cards on their own that can function as a viable deck. But because it takes a while to build up that critical mass of cards slightly ahead of the curve, it's rare it's an issue with a single format. Physical games are left with these cards in their eternal formats, but Hearthstone can just patch them so you never get to that critical mass of 1 drops to overwhelm the other cost options.
It's not a big issue in magic either unless u don't carry board wipes mass damage or have strategy to win outside of damage. It's not as strong in hearthstone because there's a limit to how many things can be on the field
The issue with MtG's 1-drops is mostly based around the fact that drawing cards is very common. There are a lot of ways to draw additional cards, so you actually get to the question of "do I want to play one big spell or many small ones?"
your videos are nice. thanks btw i think archetype locks sound horrible but it keeps balance at bay and you can properly support decks that need it. in this case 1 cost things would be fine. you could have it do something appropriate for its cost
Thanks! Archetype locks are an interesting one - they're a useful design tool, but it's definitely possible to overdo them. I think even archetype specific one drops are tricky - especially when a lot of archetypes can get away with only playing 3 or 4 cards from the archetype in another deck shell.
@@tcgacademia aye true that. i think no matter how, you might end up with either an evil combo concotion or youll make people feel bad for not allowing them to mix cards. id personally go against the grain and make cards fpr specific decks and you couldnt mix them, but give you plenty lf choice and try to give proper support. cards without archeytpes you could put into any deck would be easier to keep an eye on seen as there would be less. its a dilemma lmao
i think calling this a "problem" is a bit of a misnomer, in MTG specifically there are informed descisions that go into the mana values of your spells aside from "hey look i cast three spells in a turn because they exist" The examples you brought up have specific reasons for playing 1 drops, Murktide is a deck that looks to fill the graveyard as quickly as possible, through casting efficient noncreature spells that either trade with your opponent 1 for 1, or cantrip into different spells, so you can cast an 8/8 murktide regent and protect it for a win. Death's shadow is a full on aggro deck that looks to win the game on turn 3/4 by slamming a large deaths shadow early by dealing damage to yourself. Burn is in a similar vein, trying to kill as quickly as possible. Typically, the most important spells in your deck will hover around 2/3 mana, as they are actually usually more efficient when you take into account card advantage as a resource
The issue is see with MTG here is that there is excessive creep when it comes to the utility and complexity low cost creatures are allowed. Once upon a time a 1 cost would get 1 effect, or 1 keyword. Now, 2 keywords + an effect. Ragavan is a prime example of this. 2 effects that trigger at the same time, plus an alternative casting method. If 1 cost creatures had remained 1/1 haste for 1, modern would not look how it looks now.
I'd argue that the "problem" isn't 1-cost cards being 1 mana which is significantly less than cards that don't cost 1 mana, but actually just power creep. You said it yourself in Standard, mana curves look much more reasonable when the card pool is fair. In eternal formats, power-creep is king and all of the design flaws of cards like thought seize, ponder etc show their ugly faces. But even in Modern and Legacy, people still play cards that aren't one-drops because casting multiple spells per turn is strong, and you will incidentally enable yourself to play 2 and 3 mana cards when you make that happen. Then you get to consider the quality of 2 and 3 mana cards. The more efficient the cards are that slow the game down, the better higher-costing cards look. Once you start top-decking, you want the most impact for a single castable card. If you have 3 mana, you don't want to draw the best 1-drop possible. You want to draw the best 3-drop possible. If you're top decking and you have 5 mana, then the best card you could draw is the highest impact card in the game for 5 mana in that position. When the game is slowed down like this and early game threats can be answered altogether, then the meta-game must shift to more resilient threats, which generally cost significantly more mana. Remember the Jund decks running around in 2013 Modern? They were running death rite shamans and thought seizes for sure, but like Reid Duke was running a whole playlet of Liliana of the Veil. He had fulminator mages, 4-drop Olivia Voldarens, Maelstrom Pulse, Blightening, even 2 mainboard 4-drop Chandra Pyromasters. The format was slow. He couldn't get away with a lower curve. He had to diversify his threats and he had to play 3-mana and 4-mana cards even in Modern. Power creep, not just 1-drops in general, is what leads to the format's meta being too fast. Also, cEDH is a weird format right now where even though the banned list allows us to play mana crypt, mana vault, time twister and other really insanely broken cards that not even legacy allowed, people still play high cost cards. My tier 1 Tivit deck runs Tivit, a 6 mana commander. It achieves that because I can actually control the game during the time it takes to develop that mana with cards that slow the game down like Counterbalance, Toxic Deluge, Talion the Kindly Lord, etc. I also have access to fast mana, which can enable me to play my 6-mana card on turn 1 using cards like Jeweled Lotus, Lotus Petal, Mox Opal etc. And why pay 6 mana and 4-5 cards to dump my commander on turn 1 instead of playing 6 1-drops? Because I wouldn't be able to have enough cards in hand at the beginning of the game to play 6 1-drops. When you allow fast mana, it really breathes new life into higher mana-costing cards. You have to spend cards to get mana advantage, and then that card you cast has a huge payoff like Ad Nauseam on turn 1 or 2 for example is a huge play. Turn 1 Rhystic Study is widely regarded as one of the best opening plays in cEDH.
Hearthstone managed to avoid this problem, 1 cost cards are normal but not meta defining. They can be run in aggro decks, but they run out of steam and lose to control decks. Or there effects are minimal and compliment a turn rather than defining the turn.
There's definitely tons of ways to avoid the problem, and one of them is to just be very careful when designing your one drops. Digital tcgs are really well positioned to deal with this problem, since any problematic one-drop can be patched, making designing them much safer.
I don't necessarily think effecient 1 cost cards is a problem, would it have been better if the breakpoint was at 2 or 3 instead? Granted I think in MTGs case it is more so a problem of unavoidable power creep in eternal formats. Interestingly enough, in Commander 1 drops are generally terrible unless they have a very strong utility effect, lightning bolt while an all star in every format it is legal in becomes a lot worse when you can't run it as a 4-of and there are more than two players at the table. The best cards are actually the big splashy spells that would never see play in any other format, a cardlike Twilight's call would never see play (unless you could cheat it out) but hard casting it in commander to close out a game is actually a viable strategy. Perhaps a revisited idea of rewarding players for running a singleton deck is the answer to making more cards viable?
I think multiplayer is a bigger impact than singleton. I don't know enough about CEDH to say for sure, but I imagine Ragavin is an absolute menace to that format.
This is why classic Vs. System was so good. Characters had costs, effect cards (plot twists and locations) had Thresholds. Plus the game was designed to be played as a curve. You still would need good 1 cost characters but many times over the most powerful effect they had was a search effect.
I haven't played Vs. System, but the problem is really just designing a curve that doesn't let low-cost cards dominate at all stages - and there's definitely plenty of ways to do that.
@@tcgacademia Vs. System had it, it was a great game. I'm not sure why UDE stoped printing it, probably it wasn't making "enough" money. It has been revived as a LCG with the rename " Vs System 2PCG", it still has a curve but I don't enjoy the new version as much as the old.
UR Murktide, Burn, and especially UB Shadow aren’t great examples of this, as they’re tempo decks, which we would expect to contain lots of 1-cost cards even if they weren’t good. Being able to make a play on the first turn is just that important for these decks. A better example is Legacy Lands. Lands has 9 total cards that cost 2 or more in it. The other 18 nonland cards cost 1 or less. This is a control deck that wants to play very long games, and 2/3 of its nonland cards are 1-drops. Only 4 of those cards are really important to play on turn 1 for Lands, so it has 14 cards (out of 27 nonlands) which it could replace with 2+ MV cards, but doesn’t. Another example is Jeskai Control, another Legacy deck, which plays 17-18 cards that cost 0 or 1, out of ~40 nonlands. (Prismatic Ending doesn’t count as a 1-cost because it frequently isn’t.) None of them are important to play on turn 1.
Good point! I tend to focus on Death's Shadow when I think about this, since that's when I really started to notice that 2 mana interaction was just getting to be too slow, but it really drives the point home when you look at decks that play tons of 1-drops even if they don't care much about slamming things onto the table as quickly as possible and are generally happy with longer games.
This was interesting. It's less of 1-cost cards and more of a "small numbers" problem combined with a large selection of cards. Hearthstone has this problem quite often. In HS having something cost 1-2 mana more kills the card / hero power but you can't exactly go 1.5 or 1/2 mana. The small numbers problem affects the competitive side card games. But the "big numbers" problem I'd argue is worse off. Namely the game becomes more complex. When a game is more complex the harder it is to get people to invest and play it. As a result of less people playing the competitive scene shrinks or is non existent. At the end of the day in order for a game to have a large competitive community they have to have an even larger casual player base. Even if it's better balanced the game if casuals don't like the game because it's too hard to play due to complexity the game will slowly fade into obscurity. And when the game isn't making any money development dies then the game dies after a time.
It's funny, someone earlier mentioned Hearthstone didn't really have this problem. Hearthstone's system definitely seems just as vulnerable to this problem as any other, but being a digital tcg does open up some interesting solutions. 1/5 cost is something I've seen come up in a lot of games, and it's definitely interesting - sometimes an effect is really strong at 3 cost, but too weak at 4, or similar. And yeah, it's definitely important to keep casual audiences in mind. Some of the things competitive players love can actively turn away more casual players, so it's a tricky balancing act, and some games have definitely swung too far in one way or another.
1 mana cards need to be very efficient, as a cost of 1 to 2 is not double the cost, as drawing is a resource and that resource can be valuable, a real important thing is health totals, commander starting at 40hp means that an aggro strategy, which 1 drops are inherently more important, are less viable, combine that with multiple enemies and a deck that needs to deal 20 damage becomes a deck that has to deal 120 damage if he wants to rush down the whole table, (assuming that somehow no one does anything to eachother, or heal)
Hearthstone would have been an interesting case to look at: the available mana besides being renewable also ramps up automatically (no card investment needed), and the base draw is (/was) relatively slow, so having a bunch of 1-drops is just not practical, since you'll just empty your hand and still float mana. Value and card advantage make even very aggressive decks focus more in twos and threes rather than ones.
There have been plenty aggro decks in Hearthstone that run 50%ish one drops and a handful of other cards with charge or direct damage to finish the opponent off.
In Magic the Gathering, I'd actually say the "cost" of a card having a higher mana cost doesn't scale linearly, but actually exponentially. Not only does the player have to play more lands, they also have to draw those lands, take turns to play those lands, and risk the higher cost card not doing anything if they don't get enough lands. All these factors further compound the problem the higher a card's cost is.
To put it another way, the difference between a 5 and 6 mana card is greater than the difference between a 1 and 2 cost card.
That's a different way of approaching it, but the result ends up the same. Instead of 1-drops being more powerful than other costs, each higher cost has a much higher opportunity cost in many ways as you go up the curve. Good call on bringing in the costs of having to play more lands, and spend more time building mana to make a play!
However, there is a point on the graph where it falls off and the cost often doesn't mean anything at all anymore.
Reanimate spells, Show and Tell, Sneak Attack, Academy Rector and many other cards and interactions in the game essentially let you cheat costs and get cards for free or a significantly reduced cost.
Darksteel Colossus could cost ten thousand mana, ut I am still going to cheat it into play with Tinker.
This gets even more pronounced when you have things like counterspells. Similar to the doomblade example, but more generally applicable than just creatures that do not have any evasion.
Also, we need to remember card advantage. You mentioned drawing lands, but it goes deeper. He compared playing three one-mana cards to playing one 3-mana card. The difference in cost is not just opportunity cost, but also that you would need to spend three whole cards on that play.
@@shoot_game718
This was exactly my thought when he mentioned that. It’s a huge advantage to cast a wrath effect for 5 and get rid of 5 1-cost cards. That’s the same amount of mana but those 5 1-costs represent a ton of card investment.
Playing multiple 1-costs SHOULD be strong until you run out of cards, balanced by 1-costs being bad in topdeck mode.
If a game is too fast, card advantage stops being so important so low cost cards dominate.
Very good point! That's one thing I didn't get into in the video as much, since 1-cost cards still need to be worth the card in your hand. A LOT of MTG's 1-drops are unplayable because they don't provide a full card's worth of value, despite the low mana cost. The bigger issue is that the efficiency gap is so huge, trying to make 1-cost cards that are playable, but not overpowering, is very difficult.
i think you said it quite perfectly, you didnt really go deep because there are so many variables that it would fry the midns of those of lowe intellect but you put it perfectly based on the simple point of view.
Very true. Something merely going from being a one mana 1/1 to a 2/1 can instantly make it far more powerful whereas even that same increase applied to a 2 drop just isn’t the same. 3/2s are good but just not that much better.
Its a good point knowing that competitive formats tends to be in all games aggresive, wich promote the use of 1 or zero mana drops. THats why monored is always competitive in standard. And with the philosophy of MTG red is naturally the most competitive color. Have to mention a card that breaks most of those decks, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
@@tcgacademiaI don't feel it is difficult so much as it is tempting to make over powered cards to sell packs. Jackle Pup, Kird Ape, Savanah Lions, Isumaru, Goblin Guide and more are all fair 1 drops, but Ragavan is some Over Powered Complexity Creep BS. Skullclamp was a mistake based on a last minute change when they thought +1/-1 instead of +1/+1 would be less powerful and more flavorful. Ragavan was not a mistake. It was a choice.
One factor I don't think you mentioned is that with renewable resources a cheaper card is more likely to be playable for "free" using left-over resources that would otherwise go to waste, meaning not only is the card more efficient on its own, but it's also *more* likely that you can kinda sorta ignore the cost entirely.
"Left over resources" is an interesting quirk of renewable systems. I don't think I've gone into it in the past, but it does definitely have some effects on games - for one example it also really prioritizes curving out so you maximize your resource use each turn of the game.
@@tcgacademia something like spell mana in LoR helps with this sort of thing
@@tcgacademia A method I came up with to deal with this problem is having every "land" take 2 turns to fully "untap" instead of MTG's 1.
And then there's a game where every card is cost 0 and leads to a bunch of ridiculous plays.
with the increasing prevalence of “once per turn” effects on mtg, there is increasing weight to the theory that all mtg decended card games tend towards yugioh, yugioh just advances faster on the trend line. the specific culprit being that the more efficient cards get and the more common infinite combos become you tend towards zero cost spells as power creep progresses.
Yes as a yugioh player I'm very familiar.
Where even the more conservative decks can generally get 2 boss monsters and an omni negate or 2 up
It's pretty funny when a "control'" deck still has the option to combo to an OTK the instant the opponent lets their guard down with the right cards in hand.
@@AbsurdAsparagusYugioh doesnt even have infinite combos. The only one is morphtronic telephone for Morphtronic telephone, which is a bit like myr Retriever for myr retriever If it would put the other artefact into Play. It doesnt got any good aplications though
This video has changed how I think about resource systems in every card game. Thanks for making it!
I think this analysis completely ignores the concept of card advantage. Sure 2 1 cost cards might be stronger than a 2 cost card, but TWO cards is an investment of a different resource. Depending on the card flow of a game and the strategy of a deck, it's basically always a consideration if you will run out of cards before winning.
The main issue of something like death's shadow is that if you don't win before you empty your hand, your opponent will be in a very advantageous position since drawing a 2 cost card with ~1.5 times the power of a 1 cost card is still better if you only get that one card.
On the flip side, take a look at UW control, a deck happy to play 2+ cost cards specifically because something like supreme verdict can defeat multiple of the opponents cards for only one of yours, speeding up the process of running your opponent out of CARD resources and putting you in the advantageous position.
Card advantage balancing out resource advantage is a great theory, and it works well to a certain point, but the efficiency advantage of 1-cost cards is so much higher than any other cost that it can be really difficult to balance, especially over the long term.
@@tcgacademia You are just wrong.
@@tcgacademiaAnother thing that you don't consider in this video, related to card aventage. Is that a land costs a card. To play a 3 Cost card, i've had to play 3 lands. To play a 1 cost card I only have to play one land. That's 4 cards vs 2. If you put a lot more 3 drops in your deck, you must also put more lands. Not only you get less payables. But also, you have to expend more cards to play your cards. Specially if you want to play two cards a turn.
If you play 1 drops, you get to play with only one land. And you don't need to invest a lot more on mana if you don't want to. That is efectibly more cards to be able to play with. And don't need to go as land drops.
That's why 1 drops fire like crazy, and you keep playing the game, while your oponent has nothing to play, or do, but watch how he dies.
@@lucasfigueroa6165 Good point! It's not a huge difference, but in MTG being able to run less lands does help in the late game, since after a point lands are just dead cards, and running fewer lands means you draw less of them when you don't need them.
Honestly we can argue hypotheticals until we’re blue in the face but in practice the formats in magic with larger card pools and thus more OP 1 drops is largely dominated by decks that have a shit ton of 1 drops. (As was shown in this video). There are quite a few reasons for this, though, some of it being self defeating. For instance, Fatal Push is good but since the format is so fast and has mostly smaller things, it means fatal push is even more consistent whereas, while it’d still be good in standard, it’d also miss more often which would ironically make it worse in a weaker format just by virtue of having fewer good targets. It also doesn’t help that they’ve banned cards like Wrenn and six which prey on 1 toughness creatures because people get mad that it’s too efficient and neuters the effectiveness of 1 toughness creatures (the same issue people have with orcish bow masters)
Another aspect of this that I think is important to acknowledge is the "play on curve" issue. Being able to play cards on those early turns, and not letting that mana go to waste, is really important to tempo. So you end up with an issue where you either keep the 1 cost pool small and this becomes super luck based as there are probably only a couple good cards at each low cost, or you make a ton and you end up with this issue.
This is why I'm really fond of the Build Divide/Z/X/Dragoborne solution of starting at 2 mana. Since your turn 1 mana pool is now 3, it becomes far easier to ensure your players have a healthy amount of turn 1 playable cards to put in their deck so they can consistently play on curve in the early game, without running into this balance issue.
Yeah, the Build Divide/Z/X/Dragoborne solution is really clever. It's a very small adjustment that most people won't even think twice about, but it removes a ton of pressure to print 1-cost cards and lets players curve out more naturally.
The other issue too is that in a game like magic, it’s not unheard of to get stuck on 2 or 3 mana. And in those cases, not being able to play your 3-4 drops or double spell your 2 drops hurts. So even decks that do play 3,4,&5+ drops still often end up wanting something to do early to help balance their curve. This is one of the reasons the mana storage system in Legends of Runeterra is so amazing. By reducing the lost efficiency of having no 1 or 2 drops early on, you end up ensuring that there are a lot more viable strategies.
How is that solving a problem? It just creates a 3 mana cost problem.
@@K1ngsd1how to say you didn't watch video without telling you didn't watch video.
3-mana problem is not the thing there thanks to relative cost being way lower (4mana is just 33% more than 3 where opossed to 2 mana being 100% more)
Also by starting with 3 mana turn 1 you can't possibly double spell untill turn 3 which remove second part of problem (how fast can you be with spending those cards)
The actual "1 mana card problem", he was supposed to talk about this one
Clicked for Deadly Fighter Braid Claw, stayed for the compelling discussion.
He is the boy
hehe look who i found
Ah yes, a fellow Duel Masters fan.
I was gonna say rare duel masters fan. Then I realised it's the gauntlet
@@FrankOpinion1plenty of fans. Of the anime.
The same thing has been an going thing with my EDH group, about a year and a half ago we were playing relatively average powered decks, nothing CEDH, but as we started building towards that power more recently our deck curves have changed drastically going from an average cmc of 4-5, down to 2-3.
Yep, same thing started happening to me in modern - although this was wayyyyyy back when modern was just starting out. In formats with large card pools, the more competitive you get, the more you realize you just can't put those sweet 5-drops in your deck and hope to win consistently.
There is also another problem in magic that's very similar which is the 1.5 cost problem. Prophetic prism costs 2 mana, draws you a card when entering and has 1 + tap: add a mana of any color. It's a pretty bad card that can sometimes do things, mostly in limited. Arcum's astrolabe is the same thing but at 1 mana, and it's banned in modern, legacy and pauper because it was warping those formats around itself. It's like the balanced version of the card costs ~1.5 mana. The astrolabe costs snow mana instead of normal mana as a way to try to cost that .5 mana, but it didnt work.
Yeah, it's kind of neat how many cards aren't goo enough at one cost, and just a little too good at cost -1. One Piece gives 2 resources a turn, which is about the closest I've seen a game get to really talking this issue. Not a huge issue, but one that comes up and can be kind of annoying to design around.
The .5 mana thing is extremely frustrating in the context of videogames, i get starting at 1 and working with increments of 1 for tabletop where players need to keep track, but when you got a computer counting and tracking for you, there's no excuse not to use more balance-friendly numbers
The solution is to not to try to push cards that far in your power creep. The FIRE design philosophy in Magic has really messed with the game in my opinion.
That was really interesting! never seen that idea of starting with higher ressource count before but I really like it, not only does it helps with the problem you're mentioning but it also means it allows designing cards that effectively cost what would normally amount to fractions of a ressource so it gives much more flexibility in balance.
0 cost cards have to be absolutely garbage to not be completely busted, but making something basically amount to a 0,5 cost card allows making it do *something* that's worth the card in your hand without immediately breaking the game.
Don't get me started on factional costs! There are so many cards I've looked at where they're a little too weak at one cost, but lower the cost by one and they're suddenly too strong. I think all games run into this at some point, but a higher starting cost definitely does give more flexibility.
Interesting topic! I never thought of it this way.
Yeah, it's pretty difficult to notice in smaller formats. I only noticed it when I was deck-building for modern format MTG and trying to figure out how to improve my deck against the field, only to realize that I was playing 2 drops while the threats I was worried about mostly cost 1. It's an almost invisible pressure pushing the average CMC of decks lower.
Someone else already said something to this effect, but here's my take on it. There's more than one way to view efficiency: you have resource efficiency (or effect-to-cost ratio, where one drops excel); and then you have card efficiency (or effect-to-cards-spent ratio). Since most cards only cost one card (itself) to play, card efficiency is really just a measure of how great a card's effect is -- and it shouldn't be any surprise that this is where higher cost cards excel. Lots of one drops can produce great effects, but at the cost of card disadvantage. A single five drop will have dual pros and cons. So a card's true efficiency should be measure in units of (effect produced) / (total cost) where the total cost of a card factors in both resource cost and cards spent.
Now for some math. Let's estimate that a card in mtg is worth ~1 mana (I'm basing this on the card Simian Spirit Guide, and some other things). Let's say that we value the effect of a particular one drop at N units, and a particular k-drop at F units. The true efficiency of k of those one drops is k*N/(k [mana] + k [cards]) = k*N/(k [mana] + k [mana]) = k*N/(2k) = N/2, while the true efficiency of the k-drop is F/(k [mana] + 1 [cards]) = F/(k [mana] + 1 [ mana]) = F/(k+1). Ideally, these efficiencies should be equal, so we have F = (k+1)/2*N. Note that for k=3,5,7, we have F = 2N, F = 3N, and F = 4N. This means that an equally efficient 3-drop should have 2 times the effect and an equally efficient 5-drop should have 3 times the effect of your given 1-drop. And sorry if this was super convoluted, I'm too lazy to go back and fix it lol.
This doesn't seem to hold for creatures, but for instants and sorceries, it seems pretty accurate. Compare Reach Through the Mists, with Divination, and Jace's Ingenuity. They are rated similarly on the Gatherer, which suggests similar true efficiency, and their effects line up exactly with the above. Also, maybe it's not that the math is wrong, but that creatures tend to become more efficient at higher mana costs. This could be seen as one way to incentivize players to engage with the combat system
This definitely holds true in a broad sense, but it can be really hard to lock effects into that formula, especially once conditional effects enter the picture. All it takes is one condition that's a little too easy to meet, and suddenly all your two-mana removal is obsoleted by Fatal Push. Further, because Magic starts with a large up-front hand of cards, and draws cards more slowly over gameplay, the efficiency value of a given card changes depending on the number of turns the game takes to finish - faster games means resource efficiency starts to become more important than card efficiency. Although in support of what you said, the tension between resource efficiency and card efficiency is usually enough to balance cards in standard formats with smaller card pools - it only really starts to become an issue in eternal formats with much deeper card pools (or if someone slips up in the balance department).
@@tcgacademia Completely agree! I was just looking for a more tangible way to describe the relationship between resources, cards, and effects. Also, that's a very valuable point you make about efficiency of cards as a function of game length -- I had not considered that particular angle when I made the above comment!
To me, the true efficiency of a card is much more like the value of some commodity in a living economy. It varies depending on the current metagame, interactions with other cards in the card pool, etc. Economists have ways to model such things with a greater degree of rigor (I would assume), but I imagine it gets pretty complicated and statistical.
I want bring to the table how in the Digimon card game, that doesn't manage resources by cards but still with costs, the designers limit the space por 1 cost creatures with the minimum being 2 and only vainilla exist at that cost.
For context, in Digimon there is a shared resource track, that goes up to 10 for each player. Your turn last until the memory goes beyond the 0 threshold at the middle at how much you pass over that threshold is the starting resources in your opponent turn. Because of this design, is possible to bring high cost card to the battlefield but in respond your opponent could play more cards in their turn. Small drop decks aren't as prominent now but the game suffers for something that all these resources base games have to endure, mana cheat and how playing thing for free is busted. It would be cool to see an analysis about that
Digimon is a game I've been interested in trying for a while. Although I'm still a bit salty over it - when the game released in Japan I tried to buy some JP starter decks, and they were sold out. So I waited until it was released in english and tried to buy some EN starter decks, also sold out, and scalped to nonsensical prices. Still haven't worked up the motivation to try finding starter products again. But yes - the resource system does seem very interesting - although also prone to the one-mana problem, or low-cost problem, at least.
@@tcgacademia
The Digimon TCG has a "normal" baseline average cost of 3. Yes, higher level Digimon will cost more to play, but higher level Digimon have alternate costs which allows you to place them on top of lower level Digimon with the average cost of three. This in turn has allowed Digimon to release support cards in the form of Tamers that will set a player's resource pool at three if they are below that at the start of their turn. In addition, if a player ends their turn without giving their opponent resources, the game sets the opponent's resource pool at three. The game is built around using three costs as the average. Yes, there are one cost cards; but they are there to allow players to manipulate the resource pool against their opponents as a tug of war mechanic. As a player, you're in control of your resource pool and your opponent's resource pool.
In addition, because Digimon has a mechanic where when you place a higher level Digimon on top of a lower level Digimon you draw a card, it effectively allows cards to become cantrips for draws. And players should never feel like they run out of resources.
@@ArcDragoon Interesting. Players seem to really like the resource system, so I do want to give it a try at some point. I really like how the evolutions cantrip - it's a really simple solution to the inherent card disadvantage of stacking an evolution on top of another card. A lot of games have played with an evolution mechanic, so I like that this game seems to have put some thought into making sure the mechanic is something players actually want to do.
And now the game is dead. Damn you, Bandaid.
@@DominatorLegend ...is thriving more than ever, heck its getting a webcomic and web novel based on the card game
Whoa whoa whoa. You can’t compare one 3 mana card to three 1 mana cards while completely overlooking the card advantage.
That being said, the point of your video is good.
was about to say this, i never played mtg but plenty of online ccgs, how come these decks with a bunch of 1 drops not run out of cards and if these are creatures how come they don't get wiped by control decks
One cost can be scary but can also be used for a target pulling dolls. Though it has to be done right. An example I feel is something like the level 1 rear guards.
Yep, it's definitely a matter of doing it right - not doing it at all is just throwing away design space.
You can also balance out 1 mana problems with reduced starting hand sizes, smaller hand sizes encourage larger more impactful cards to be played. MTG is the worst for this as you need to have lands as well as spell in your hand meaning you need a large starting hand size, this gives the cheap spells even more value as you can reduce your decks land count without much risk of getting mana screwed, this is the same as card advantage.
Good point! Mtg doubly penalizes you for running high cost cards due to the land ratio needed to support higher curves.
The more expensive the better value you get eventually, like buying in bulk, like ghalta primal hunger, he is a 12/12 and trample, and if played right he costs 2 mana, so wouldn't you rather have that over 12 1/1's that cost 12
Love this video! And it's also extremely helpful since I'm making my own TCG for fun.
Good luck - designing a tcg is a really fun project!
@@tcgacademia It is! I'm almost done with the common cards for 1 of the 3 affinities in my game. Already 60 hours in or so but it's a blast!
I've always been curious how games like MTG and Lorcana would feel if you just like, merge the first two turns.
So, just draw 2 cards, place 2 mana/ink, then start from there.
No removing 1-cost cards, just shifting gameplay forward slightly, and only at the very start.
I wonder if it'd feel quicker without breaking balance all that much or if it just wouldn't even matter
I actually like that idea quite a lot! Definitely less elegant from a rules perspective, and 1-costs are still going to be important, but from what I've seen in games like Z/X, this could be good for gameplay overall.
Another topic that piggybacks off the one cost problem is the Agro problem. Aggro decks don’t have to be better than their opponents entire deck, they just have to be better than their opening hand and first few turns. By playing any aggro deck you sort of invalidate 2/3 of your opponents cards which sucks :/
Yep. While you do want aggro to be a viable strategy, it also puts a ton of pressure on the other decks to keep up. Which leads to the downward pressure on costs. It's a balancing act to make aggro functional while also making it possible to use higher-cost cards - and it gets more and more difficult the more cards you add to the card pool.
Control can use cheap counter and removal until turn 4 which from there they would normally stabilize or lose. It's not invalidating u just never planned for their deck if u can never get ur cards out without luck
Aggro has to be this way. The reason why is because aggro's first few turns of smashing your face are completely undone by a board wipe and a little life gain. The eternal formats in MTG are tricker to talk about because the metagame is so solved, decks are so efficient, and every deck plays multiple sides of the "metagame clock."
As someone that’s studied game design and played a fair bit of magic, this really helped me understand better why some formats like modern are so fast. Very interesting.
It’s actually pretty similar conceptually to one of the weird issues I had in fire emblem heroes. In that game, due to the smaller maps, cavalry move 3 spaces, infantry 2, and armored 1. As compared to, say 6, 5, 4 in Fire emblem engage. Due to the same things you discuss here, there’s just a much bigger impact when the difference is 1 to 3 than 4 to 6.
Interesting to see this problem come up in a different context. I've played my fair share of fire emblem games, and move 1 just sounds painful, no matter how small the map it.
damn, movement is already broken to begin with in fire emblem so I can't imagine what it's like having your cavalier with basically the equivelent of 10 movement (or 12 if you take armor knights as the baseliine) they would need to have incredibly low stats for you to even consider using other units
@@Laezar1 not really because even the lowest stated units are debatablely playable but that movement stat allows a wide range of advantages from rescue dropping, visiting villages, supporting other allies in battles and so on which out beats many other units.
@@frostbite_1244 You're saying not really but you seem to confirm what I'm saying "even the lowest stated units are playable" means that they did not give high movement units stat low enough to balance it out =p
@@Laezar1 true, they usually don't balance it out, there are a couple exceptions like Lowen or Forde but even then you could do worse.
Weak units are complicated because they can be supported by stronger units and thus become playable but if everyone is weak then you really feel it... Like the Dawn Brigade, a running joke throughout the community but I'm serious they suck to use and their cavalier dies in a single damn hit.
I would like to mention though that in many contexts good one drops can be very healthy for the game. One thing that mtg has recently been doing is add more good one-drops to limited, and having them be narrow-ish cards that are good if played well. One example of this was Network Disruptor in Kamigawa. Limited is always slower and having good one drops in it makes the games more dynamic
I think being able to start your curve early is definitely important. The issue is that even if they're narrow, if you pack enough of them into a game, they'll inevitably start to dominate. Which is why the Z/X solution is so clever - you can start your curve on turn 1, without running into the massive efficiency gap between 1-drops and everything else. But for an established system like MTG, some number of 1 drops is probably necessary, even if it pushes the power of their eternal formats.
Yeah, I think the key with some of the best designed one-drops to try and make them not as good early and not as bad late, like Network Disruptor, or for a more constructed-related example, Knight of the Ebon Legion. You're right that mtg kind of can't avoid it, so they have to know how to design one drops that don't just destroy you when they're played early
@@naverdadendada And to be fair, mtg is usually pretty good at balancing 1-drops. They're rarely the culprit when something breaks in a format. There's just a cumulative effect that builds up the more of them are available in a format.
When Path of Exile can remove any creature for 1 mana, spending more than 1 mana on a creature leads to a blowout
It also gives your opponent a land. In fact, path has almost completely disappeared from Modern because even hitting a 3 drop with it is usually so bad.
@@Reverie42 to be fair the lack of path in modern is mostly contributed by solitude and leyline binding. If these cards didn't exist path would be the choice of removal quite frankly, it's just been horribly power crept by a 0 mana option and an option that doesn't have the drawback and also removes other crap.
@@xed8530 Path had been falling off for 2 years by the time Solitude was first printed. At a certain point, the power level in Modern just hit an inflection point where giving your opponent a land was too big of a downside. Same thing happened to Goblin Guide in burn, even though it'd be a couple years before we got the more common replacements we see now.
@@Reverie42? Goblin Guide is still extremely popular in burn
I have genuinely come to hate creature cards of any kind. Three of my top 5 decks (in terms of enjoyment not power) have a deficit of creature spell cards. Two of those three don't have creature spells at all! The other two of the 5 are unsurprisingly green.
Another massive part of low cost cards being important comes from how accessible card draw is and if the way you gain resources is dependent on those cards. A system with lower card draw (or card draw that is expensive in cost) and a mana system that acts independent from your hand encourages higher cost cards to make the most out of your limited resources.
so does an action system where you can only do so many things in one turn but make it slightly more generous than what mtg does
It's also worth pointing out that mana scaling means it takes much more time to play multiple even fairly low cost cards let alone high cost ones: it only takes 2 mana to play 2 1-cost cards, but it takes 4 to play 2 2-cost cards, even relatively low costs like 4 mana take 8 whole turns to be able to play a second copy. This is why mana ramp is so important because you can get these 6-8 cost cards out on turn 4-5 which is why effects like Trample are really important for bigger creatures because otherwise they get blocked indefinitely by 1/1's rather than trading 1 big card for 3-5 smaller one's
The core problems with the number 1 apply to games outside the CCG sphere as well. One basic example I use for boardgame design is that flipping a random card of value 1-3 means your top result is THREE TIMES bigger than your lowest result, which is often way more random than is appropriate; simply changing this to be 2-4 instead already tones down that extreme significantly while still allowing room for the design to be risky/unpredictable/etc. as desired.
Really good point! This definitely holds true for games of any genre - another interesting example brought up in a comment was Fire Emblem's mobile game, which moved from ~4-7 movement ranges to 1-3, making max movement characters way stronger. If they had just gone with 2-4, it would have come pretty close to capturing the movement ranges in the original games.
What’s your thoughts on the battle spirits saga mechanic and resource system if I may ask?
I love seeing all this discussion and I read as much as I could, but I apologize if my contribution has been mentioned already.
I think an interesting alternative would be to lean into the low cost cards and have a sqrt(x) or log(x) looking function for our mana instead of a linear one where each additional land provides less mana than the one before. Such a system may allow for significantly stronger 3 cost cards that can buck the trend or allow for more synergy in the 1-drop slot for cards to reach their max power level. Other, similar, ideas, might include a system like the tron lands or cloudposts where 1-drops are quickly out scaled because the mana scales up faster. I've seen systems where mana can be saved between turns and systems where specific game actions are limited, but if you know any systems similar to those I'm describing I'll do some research and come back.
a couple more notes:
Although a lot of those highlighted modern cards only cost 1 mana, they are not all cards that can be played on turn 1. Taking Death's Shadow as an example, that card is typically not played until turn 3 due to the strict life requirement. Other cards that were highlighted are strictly reactive cards, or cantrips that may provide some filtering, but only contribute a bit to the proactive game plan.
In support of your main thesis, I'd like to mention that 1-cost cards have an additional power of flexibility. Having 1-cost cards in your deck allows players to fill in the gaps of spending their mana. This can be good because it reduces the risk of failing to curve out, but that consistency is detrimental in other ways.
I'm also reminded of Hearthstone's system where low cost defensive cards were typically much more pushed (stat-wise) than low cost offensive cards. I assume this is because of the match up charts where low cost cards would be useless in Control vs Control and fine in every other scenario. In such a situation you need strong low cost cards to reduce the swingyness of each draw.
While not a resource issue specifically, Yugioh has a similar problem ever since link monsters came out where link 1s, for the most part, tend to fill 1 of 2 roles: 1. being a crazy good, easy to use combo piece to often access important cards straight from the deck 2. An overly simple way to trigger overpowered graveyard effects that were meant to be balanced by the need to be sent there. Currently 6 of the 19 banned link monsters, and all 3 of the limited ones, are link 1s
I made a 0 cost meme card that has morph. When the card is targeted by anything, thats its morph cost and causes the targeting player to lose the game. The card is "You Lost The Game". If the card is played any other way, it immediately gets exiled instead.
Funnily enough, there is a trap card in Yugioh similar to this called "Waking the Dragon" that has the effect that, if it is destroyed by your opponent while it is set, you get to cheat out something from your Extra Deck, which would usually be Ultimate Falcon (monster with big stats unaffected by card effects) or a floodgate.
The problem isn't the existence of one-cost cards in MtG, but the power level of the one-cost cards. Hard removal, actual threats, denial, etc. One cost cards can do everything in legacy. Of course, as you pointed out that the lowest power level and smallest card pool format of MtG does not have this problem and I think it's due to both reasons, availability and power level. A VERY easy way of fixing this problem is by exponentially increasing the power of cards with cost, but that does not come without its own drawbacks.
A challenge to designing balanced 1 cost cards is also considering the cost of playing a card.
Spending 4 mana on 1 card SHOULD be less impactful than spending 4 mana on 4 cards. But the balance is crazy hard to find (if its even possible at all)
I’ll never complain about magic the gathering artwork being too generic ever again.
I will complain for bout of us.
Honestly half the reason I collect mtg cards is for the art
It's the main reason I won't ever get into magic. Boring and generic art that's only became worse in recent years
how could you ever complain about that magic art is usual pretty hot
@@zousssnotzeus5341 People complaining about modern MTG art make me laugh, those oldschool MTG cards are uglier than sin. Like vomit splattered on a piece of cardboard.
Not once did you address card advantage as a resource here, and it's absolutely fundamental to this question. 1 cost cards are important, sure, but you don't see so many decks with nothing else - even in formats where it's possible to do just that and run only the most "efficient" 1 cost effects. The even more fundamental limitation of resources than mana is cards in hand; not only does this play into whether you get your resources, but you can't cast a spell pierce that isn't even in your hand or otherwise granted to you to cast by some card effect. A 4 mana card doesn't have to be 4x as powerful as a 1 mana card, because both of them cost the same 1 card - that's 1 draw, 1 deckbuilding slot, etc. Another way that 1 cost cards are kept from taking over the game is that they're not allowed to draw more than self-replacement, that is not to repeatedly draw without costing more mana nor to have 2+ draw built in. Playing 1 card on turn 1, 2 cards on turn 2, and 3 cards on turn 3 without a way to draw extra? If you hit every land drop to do that, you're down to 1 card in hand. I hope it's a 3-4 cost, or you topdeck one, or turn 4 is going to look really sad. Meanwhile, hitting a 1, 2, and 3 cost plus the land drops leaves a player with 4 cards in hand if they didn't draw any extra. 5 vs 2 in hand on the turn 4 draw, more than double the options and threats.
If you can get the same effect from a single card for 6 mana, it's a less expensive way to do so than getting that effect from three cards for 1 mana each. Double the mana cost, but a third the card cost.
To be honest by now magic has a 0 cost problem
What do you think about giving " cycling" ability to lands and/or limit the number of copy inside a deck bases on the rarity? (Ex. Common 4, un 3, r 2, mythic 1)
Cycling on lands is definitely good, although it does have the potential to make one-cost cards even stronger since decks become more reliable (which makes playing to the board early even more important). Definitely an improvement, though! I don't love restrictions based on rarity, since it tends to make games more swingy, depending on who draws more of their powerful, restricted cards, and who is stuck drawing commons.
This also incentivizes decks which can reuse/ protect their higher rarity cards. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it could be if you don't account for it. (basic example is a deck that can return rare cards from the grave to replay).
This definitely has some interesting implementation for Pokemon TCG... one energy Pokemon attacks typically have some restrictions or challenges to get going. They typically try to design around the best attackers having two energy attacks (which in some cases can require one attachment) with some one and three energy attackers of note.
While I'm not very familiar with competitive MTG in particular, I've played some other card games, and my experience is usually more that the reason they're used so much has more to do with "the games are usually decided very very early" - sometimes that's because one player outright kills the other player, other times it's because they play cards that gain value over time in a way that makes the game basically impossible to recover from if they aren't immediately answered. This pushes players to focus more and more on the early game because anyone that doesn't won't survive to the lategame, because whether a card is or isn't good in the lategame doesn't matter if the game has already ended or is unsalvageable by the time you can play it - even if a 6 cost card were 6x as efficient as a 1 cost card it would probably still be garbage because the game is probably over by the time you can play it.
Doesn't the card draw system balance this effects?
iei thanks~ would be helpful for a tcg that I'm currently working on.
btw, can you make a video explaining the good and bad mechanics about "Rebirth for you''?
Funny enough, I was planning on doing something like that, and it ended up getting derailed pretty early on and turned into my 'Randomness' video. I would like to revisit it properly in the future for a more thorough review, but at this point I have a ton of video ideas, and only so much time to make them, so unfortunately it'll likely be a while before I get back to Rebirth for You.
I've long thought that mana should start at 2, because decks with proactive 1 mana creatures are so heavily variable in strength based on their opening hand.
does that part where you say you could play 1 spell vs 3 spells shouldn't consider card advantage?
also i feel some important points like global damage and effects that benefit from targeting a single card like bringing from the grave are being ignored
I don't think it's really efficiency that's the main factor of one cost cards, but speed. If the game is decided before turn 3, then the 3 cost card is not just 3x more expensive than the 1 cost card, but infinitely more expensive, as it was simply never possible to cast that card in that game.
That's definitely a good point. It's virtual card advantage if your opponent is defeated before they can use half of their cards!
If I remember right the only cards (well, creature cards) in Duel Master that costed 1 mana were blockers of a power level of 2000, and a card that had to attack each turn if able with 1000 power.
I just don't see it as a problem, since most of the cards are purely defensive, while the one aggressive card gets completely destroyed by all the defensive one, and you don't have the option to not attack while it is on the field.
What do you think about flesh and bloods resource system?
I like it a lot. It feels like it should dodge this problem better than most, but I could still see it having a 0-cost problem in the distant future. For now it's dynamic, strategic, and doesn't leave player screwed.
Funny how games without mana systems (notably Yugioh) have a different issue in the opposite direction
Without a mana system card advantage reigns supreme at all times and it's pretty easy to draw equivalents, doom blade is a powerhouse for it's low cost 1:1 removal where even something that can go card positive like raigeki being a board clear with no cost isn't as useful because it doesn't help you on your first turn and can't generate advantage till turn 3 only if your opponent doesn't manage to OTK before you get another turn.
Yugioh (especially mondern yugioh) is completely bonkers from a game design perspective. I've wanted to do a video about it for a while!
You could analyze the 1998 to 2005 era of yugioh, from synchros to now game has been broken honestly@@tcgacademia
The one thing you should of mentioned is the possibility of one cost cards like Gurmag Angler. They are not one cost out of the gate but can become one costed later. Other then that good video
Could have added a note somewhere for sure - there were a lot of 'functional 1-drops / free spells' that actually had a non-1/0 CMC.
I think a good way of overcoming the 1-cost problem is to make mana plentiful but cards expensive. For example, in Hearthstone, you're never subject to mana screw because all mana is colourless and gained automatically, but you only draw 1 card per turn. This means you'll run out of cards quickly if you play things that are too low-cost. As a result, the best Hearthstone decks generally have ~7 1-cost cards out of 30.
I think an aspect touched on but not explained fully (not that you didn't have a lot to go over to start with) was the concept of tempo. There is that aspect of "Why play one 4 cost when I could play four 1 cost cards" that you touched on, but there's also the aspect of playing your 4 drop, then your opponent spending 1 or 2 mana to remove it, and having 3 or 2 mana left over to further develop their position. In that scenario, you've used all your resources in an attempt to further your board, while your opponent both negates your move while furthering their position at the same time, with the rest of their board likely untouched by your move and so is now an even more difficult problem to deal with. This is why in Magic's older formats, only the strongest cards that cost 3 or more get played, because they have to do as much if not more work than your opponent's best 1 mana removal and best 2 drop threat combined. Which reminds me of another point, which is two 2 mana threats cannot be dealt with by a single-target removal spell unlike a single 4 drop, making the former play hardier than the latter.
I very slightly allude to that for all of about 2 seconds by mentioning "dies to doom blade" - since that's also part of that argument. It is a good point to mention, though, and helps keep the advantage of low cost cards much further into the game than just the first few turns.
not only DM did it... after DMs "fall" the WoW TCG did the same (and they had quest cards that you played faced up in your resource and you could "solve" them to do extra stuff and flip them over) and even the VS System TCG did the same
Coming back to this video as a Hearthstone Wild player who saw the meta, in real time, devolve into decks with over 15 1-drops. We were never safe.
This discussion is interesting to view through Dragon Ball Super card game's history. Early on, one cost cards or cards intended to be used for one cost were fairly low commitment. Senzu Bean pumps up a card for the turn and untaps 2 energy (energy works the same as Duel Master's resource), Buu draws a card on play, Furthering Destruction Champa bumped power for a battle and gave your card (if it's attacking) double strike (if an attack hits, defender takes 1 card from life area and adds it to hand, double strike makes them take two instead), they also produced a wave of Counter Attacks like Whis's Coercion which negated an attack for 1 energy and each color had their unique one. Later sets introduced units who could play themselves if you used them to aid in a battle, yielding a body that could attack the opponent with little commitment. During the early days, and several patches in the game's histroy, there have been some wild strategies that could do quite a bit for little to no cost.
0:02 like the normal summon?
Yep! I go over this a bit more in another video on resource systems specifically, but any resource that refreshes each turn is renewable (lands, or 1/turn normal summon), and any that you discard from play are consumable. Both lead to slightly different play patterns, but 1-drops are less dangerous in consumable systems.
The ideal number of 1 cost cards in an aggressive mana curve is 26. I arrived at this number assuming that you want to play 1 spell on turn 1, and 2 spells on turn 2, emptying your hand as fast as possible. 26 out of 60 gives you the best chance of having exactly 3 in your opening hand. 17 land, 26 1-drops, means you have the best chance of having 2 land and 3 1-drops in your opening hand. I have won tournaments based on this streamlined mana curve and you can too!!
People keep bringing up the fact that low cost cards mean you end up with an empty hand sooner, but have they played MTG recently? So many cards replace themselves that most decks are choked on mana rather than number of cards in hand.
1 mana creature is generally at most a 3 total pow + toughness
Then 2 mana for 5; 3 for 7; 4 for 10; 5 for 12
From there, the size stops increasing at 6 & 7 (exceptions for 8+ mana but they’re rarely created) because the creatures start getting powerful game ending abilities.
For something to be played competitively it would need to break that mold like: death’s shadow or tarmagoyf.
I get your point but if your response to my 3 mana card is more than 2 cards, my 3 mana card fulfill its purpouse.
What I'm trying to say is that you're considering only mana without matching with card pool per turn.
At the end of the day you can have as many 1 mana card as you want but after turn 4-5 you probably ends up in the scenario where you have no card on your hand and you only use once per turn. Beside, the beefier decks not only ends ups having more playable card at that same point but worst scenario they would drop down the same quantitative of cards per turn but with higher inner power.
There is also the issue of how the abilities themselves are valued. Creating a token, gaining card advantage, giving buffs both temporary and permanant, having keywords like flying, haste, or prowess, etc. These all need to be properly valued on how cards are made. Monestary Swiftspear is a key example for why this is a problem. Can't be killed in a 1v1 with a basic 1 drop unless that card has upside. Instantly able to be capatilized on because of haste, and stays until late game being able to compete with 4-5 drops easily because of Prowess. It easily wins games by turn 5 if your opponent doesn't take care of it quick. But THAT is the problem itself. One drops have gotten so powerful that there is basically no downside to only using them. Before, you actually needed to get something like Craterhoof out in order to make 1 drops matter but now they compete 1 on 1 with creatures like Craterhoof by themselves.
Why not have a separate deck just for lands? Then you can choose which deck to draw a card from, so you don't get mana flood or mana screw. Maybe even separate creature and spells.
So while 1 mana cards tend to be quite efficient at their niche, they tend to be quite inefficient where it comes to card advantage.
1 mana spells tend to be 1-for-1 kinds of actions, but at 3 or more mana you can answer more than one card with a card, or generate more resources.
Wandering Emperor for example, can generate one 3/3 Vigilance creature token every two turs. So let's say a Wandering emperor stays on the field for 6 turns. She generated 3 "resources" with roughly 6 mana value, without needing to spend extra mana or cards. In her "removal mode", although conditional, Wandering emperor is guaranteed to be a 2-for-1.
Sunfall is another card that is often a 4-for-1, granted, you do need to spend 5 mana, plus 2 mana to get the full benefit.
Of course, this is more apparent in Standard. In fast formats like Modern there are 1 mana spells with the potential to generate card advantage like Ragavan.
Conclusion: In Standard, cards with higher costs are balanced in the fact that they tend to generate immediate 2-for-1 kind of interaction, or continuous resource generation, which tend to take over the game if the game goes long.
Standard helps by letting them rotate out one drops before you get a critical mass of them. You definitely need a pretty big card pool before this starts becoming a problem, unless the designers mess up the balance.
Idea: A renewable linear system where you can overpay, and you MUST pay at least 3 resources per effect, unless you increase your "precision" stat, which allows you to spend as little as 2, 1, or 0 on a cost.
Basically, if your deck doesn't run the precision mechanic, then everything from 0 to 3 costs the same for you. If you want to rapidly cast cheap spells, it imposes an additional requirement on you.
Alternatively, the precision system could be built into the game from the core mechanics. Once per turn, you can play a card as a precision bonus instead of paying its cost for its own effects. This would also make anti-precision effects more valuable.
Alternative: Instead of everything costing at least 3 without precision, every card has two costs, its base cost and its challenge cost. You must pay both for the effect. The challenge cost is reduced by your precision stat. Even expensive cards may then include some high challenge cost, requiring you to invest in precision to afford them.
Out of all the card games that I've played that uses a resource type system where each card has a "cost" I don't think any of them have linearly scaling power. The biggest example is if you look at cards that are just big stat blocks. Most of the time if they cost 4 or less they are ok or good, however normally when a card reaches the 5 cost mark it needs some sort of game winning effect to be good, no matter how high its stats are.
This is how Shadowverse Evolve operates. If your card costs 5 or more it's doing something huge. Usually 1 costs do very little and are either 2/2 vanilla, 2 damage to follower quick spells that gain small effects later in the game when a condition has been met, or Bellringer Angel that's a 1 cost 2 defense blocker that draws a card on death. But then you look at the high cost cards and see where the inevitability of game enders come in. Every deck has a turn where they can enter God mode and present a win condition and very rarely does that rely on 1 cost value chumps.
Games with 1 mana gem per round like Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra seem to be more midrange heavy with 3-5 cost cards being the most important, while more aggressive 1-3 cost strategies also can exist along higher cost 5-10 mana, but these can lose to bad hands.
One advantage of digital tcgs is that they can patch any 1-drops that end up stronger than anticipated. In physical games, powerful one drops just keep accumulating in a format until they get banned. Guaranteed mana also helps make higher cost card more palatable as well, since you don't have to worry about not being able to play them in the same way as a system like lands. One-drops are still risky, but the system of those games definitely cuts down on that risk a bit.
Have you ever done an assessment of costing and resources for any of Decipher’s old games and how that affects costing balances? Since the company had a mantra of not wanting to do anything like WOTC, they had very different resource management from any of the games listed in the video.
Star Trek: No cost to any card. One card play (start of turn) and one card draw (end of turn). Infinite interrupts (like instants) can be played per turn. No maximum hand size. Discard from hand effects were devastating because of the tempo disruption and that you could get locked out of games that way. Card draw was also possibly more powerful than in MTG. Power creep involved ways to play more than one card per turn, which was awkwardly necessary for the game to grow.
Star Trek (2nd Edition): Cards cost between 0-7 counters. You have 7 counters per turn to spend. Drawing additional cards cost 1 counter per card. Any cards in hand in excess of 7 at the end of the turn must be discarded.
Star Wars: Decks are fixed at 60 cards and can never be larger. Locations played on table (no cost, no limit to number that can be played) typically generate ‘Force’ for both players. A player’s cards in deck are used as their Force to play cards in hand. At the start of their turn, they activate an amount of Force up to the amount they can generate from locations +1 by placing cards from the top of their deck face-down in a pile. As they play cards, they stack their ‘active’ force used to play the card into a ‘used pile.’ At the end of the turn, any ‘active’ force remaining can be drawn into hand, one at a time. No maximum hand size (but cards punish you for having too big of a hand). Unused Force can be banked for future turns. Used Force is cycled back into the deck. Note that this game has built-in top deck abilities as part of its combat system (destiny draws) and card-counting (tracking destinies) is an essential part of the game.
LOTR TCG: Players play good guy cards on their turn (their ‘fellowship’ which has no interaction with any other fellowship) and bad guy cards on opponent’s turns. Good guy cards add a ‘shadow’ cost to a ‘twilight’ pool. Moving your fellowship towards Mount Doom adds more twilight. Bad guy cards remove twilight from the pool to play. Adding and especially removing twilight is very powerful. Hand of 8 cards recycles at the end of your turn and each time a fellowship moves when it’s not your turn. Any cards in excess of 8 are discarded.
I haven't, but those all sound like really interesting game systems to explore. My list of games to try is already pretty long, but you've definitely piqued my curiosity on those. It'll be interesting to see how this issue comes up in that context, or if their systems manage to avoid it altogether.
Great video! I wish it would have been recommended to me sooner!
didn't even mention card draw? o.O
playing 3 one-costs costs your hand, well, three cards instead of one for one 3-cost.... which is a price to be considered. Card draw isn't cheap in the card games I played at least.
Good way to look at it, it's one of the reasons i play standard.
Wotc noticed so they're lowering the power of 1 drops
There's definitely a whole video to be made about why format rotation exists, but managing the number of available 1-cost cards and spreading effects along the mana curve is definitely one of the reasons.
Simple explanation to this is that in Modern there is a larger pool of good or imbalance in some cases 1-cost cards, in standard people cannot do that because the total card pool is significantly smaller.
The reason Why MTG is still going strong is because they try to slowly update their card pool with cards that combat the issue of mana-screw/flood, however the issue still remains because they are using land cards as a resource, while Duel Masters had each card become a resource and a playable card, the same is also seen in the more modern flesh and blood TCG, I also attempt to design a similar system when I find the time since I want to create something fun that doesnt rely so much on negative randomness. I have been in a tournament once where all I drew the entire tournament was up to 2-3 lands, it has happened which displays how unfun that play-day was.
Nowadays people tend to seek a fun time in video games, which is sad considering it is not the same feeling as a game played in person, the experience is much different and video games often feel alienating at best, so I commend Flesh and Blood for doing what they do right now and pushing that game with even ready-made completely themed and ready to play decks. (Buy and Play right away).
The game I design (on my offtime) has also a dual/multi purpose card system which enables some extra choices. Just a reminder though that such systems make games more complex and the barrier to entry a bit higher, meaning it appeals to a narrower audience, however no one can stop us from engaging with something complex in a simple way and really no one has to be perfect. Also the only crypto game I have seen done right is Skyweaver apparently, although they use the more generic resource system similar to Hearthstone.
Runeterra is having a problem similar to this in its eternal format because 1) the game has no good cheap boardwipes for swarms, 2) the game has reached a critical mass of conditionally overtuned 1 drops, changing aggro decks into big aggro/stompy decks, and 3) the initiative switch system and lack of cheap multi target tools means going wide is extremely strong. Standard doesnt really have that problem luckily, which shows how important critical mass is.
Always interesting to hear when this issue shows up in another game.
Interested to hear how you think hearthstone fits into all of this?
Excellent video! Surprised this channel hasn't come up into my feed sooner. Subbed>
Seems like youtube really liked this one! Thanks for the sub!
In my own game design, I've found out myself that 1-drops are surprisingly difficult to design well. A 1-drop combat trick is pretty easy to do, and "spend 1 extra mana when casting this to gain a bonus effect", which is often pretty similar, is easy to do, but other kinds of 1-cost cards mean that any X mana turn can also be an X-1 and 1 turn, and that's where I think the real issue lies. A turn 4 spent casting four 1-mana spells is usually not that bad because you've spent 4 cards in hand (plus resource cards). 1-drops are often disproportionately powerful, but unless you have the draw to back it up, you pay for that in having weaker future turns. The bigger issue for me has been those X-1s. Playing a previous turn's card is usually not a very big power decrease compared to what this turn could have been, and towards the later portion of the game it's something you often do anyway because you don't want to have cards of every possible total cost in your deck. This means when you have lots of good 1-drops too, you get quite a few turns where your main play is still almost a turn's worth of value on its own, but you also get the extra value of adding in a 1-drop. It's especially potent in decks with 'breakpoint' costs, the costs of your key combo pieces. If your combo is a 2-cost card and a 4-cost card, then your turn 3 isn't any more valuable than your turn 2 in many cases, since on turn 3 you'll often find yourself casting the combo piece you wanted to cast on turn 2, so you pay virtually nothing to throw in a 1-drop, and likewise for your turn 5.
Good point! I think it's a trap that's easy for a game to fall into - they focus too much on one-drops as curve starters and not enough on one-drops as curve extenders.
@@tcgacademia Very true. That's something I like about Yugioh in comparison - pretty much the only difference between a starter and an extender is whether or not you have to normal summon it, which means the game naturally makes you think about how cards behave in each role and which if any restrictions you want to build into them.
The not yet out furry card game animal kingdom has a system with designated building cards that gives you 2 energie each turns but you can always use any other card to make slums that only produce one, since the game isnt out yet its a bit hard to judge the strength of 1 drops
I just noticed that the "start with 2 mana from T0" isnt a fix on its own. Imagine if you could put two lands at the start of the game in Modern. Modern would still play the same mix of Evoke elementals, 1-drop rares and Orkish Bowmasters that it currently does. It is much more of a function of 1 drop cards being that efficient in Modern. The one difference would be that we'd see even more The One Ring central strategies, maybe some more Urza. The real solution is that you really have to design 1 drops well, and starting with a city of traitors on the field is just a smoothing move.
Actually, a workable solution might be just to have the baseline for lands be 2 mana, but thats just a wild guess.
Definitely not a fix on its own - you still have to be disciplined and avoid making 1-drops as much as possible in these systems. The real advantage is these systems don't need 1-drops for turn one plays. Not every game can have the kind of discipline of Duel Masters that has avoided 1-drops for most of the game. There's always the temptation to make the first turn more exciting than 'land, go', so designers keep trying and make 1-drops relevant. Starting with lands in play gives you options to make relevant first turn plays, without running into the efficiency gap that 1-drops have over every other cost.
and then there's yugioh lol
Yugioh's a weird one! A video taking a closer look at yugioh is definitely on my short list of ideas, since it's design direction is so strange compared to other tcgs.
Doesn’t that just sum every TCG discussion
I've played Yu-Gi-Oh for a little over 20 years and can confidently say it certainly is a strange case.
There's certain archetypes that have strategies so out there it's like you're playing 2 separate games, with Infernities having effects that only work when your hand is empty or the Metaphys/Ghoti strategy of banishing your own cards to play during your opponents turn. Your own cards are the "mana resource" and managing them effectively can be difficult, with each card individually having potentially game defining effects.
It's wild
Yugioh existing for so long and not having any card rotation ALSO makes it mega weird. At least Konami is starting to support other formats finally a bit
You can say that Yu-Gi-Oh relies only in card cost
It's worth bringing up the one of the lead creators of MtG who then made Duel masters went on to currently make the game battle spirits which expanded on the DM method with the core engine.
Now mana is a constantly ticking resource that increases steadily, however the resources are then eaten up by creatures semi-perminently
Neat - I didn't realize the creators crossed over there! BS has been on my pile of game to try for a while now - I have a pair of Japanese decks, and BSS on preorder - not sure which one I'll end up trying first! The core system looks really interesting.
@@tcgacademia it's held up these 14-15 years with like no changes bar the soul core, and it should say how big it actually does counter the 1 cost problem that while most games solve going first by drawing less BS and BSS gives going second a fifth starting core. You then add the fact it's consistent enough to be played with directly and you get a situation where 2/6 of the colours you can play have active playstyle around manipulating it.
Green is obvious since while the mainstay abilities are tapping your opponent's spirits or summoning in battle step, the thing it does best at is just raw extra core generation; all while purple's actual core thing is forcing as much of your opponent's cores out of play for a special destruction type called depletion.
Something you might also recognize and appreciate to examples you gave, the core system actually does have a nod to duel masters as most permanent (all spirits and most nexuses) have symbols on them that more than being just player damage, and a much cleaner solution to duel masters having to create double breaker abilities, also actively reduce the costs of other cards of their colour, so you get the benefits duel masters tried fixing with cards as resources without them eliminating them as playable.
I would never classify a pitch spell in the same category as any other card that costs 1 or less. Fury and Grief are only outliers because they almost always trade 1-1, which isn't true of a spell like Force of Negation.
I'm confused, two times in the beginning of the video you talk about 1 cost cards in the modern meta but highlight 2/3/and 7 cost cards as if they are one cost?
I'm counting anything that can be played as a 1 or 0, so it catches a lot of cards with cost reductions or alternate costs.
if we consider Hearthstone, facing multiple 1-cost cards are not much a problem, since there are AOE cards, plus the ratio of power by cost tends more to be quadratic/exponential, playing a 9 or 10-mana card when you have a maximum of 10 mana should have a significant effect compare to 2 5-mana card or 10 1- mana
Hearthstone is in an interesting spot since they can design around this issue much more easily than physical tcgs can. One of the big things that leads to this problem is the accumulation of cards over time - like Death's shadow or burn spells, eventually you get enough cards on their own that can function as a viable deck. But because it takes a while to build up that critical mass of cards slightly ahead of the curve, it's rare it's an issue with a single format. Physical games are left with these cards in their eternal formats, but Hearthstone can just patch them so you never get to that critical mass of 1 drops to overwhelm the other cost options.
It's not a big issue in magic either unless u don't carry board wipes mass damage or have strategy to win outside of damage. It's not as strong in hearthstone because there's a limit to how many things can be on the field
I love how netrunner solved this Problem 30 years ago.
The issue with MtG's 1-drops is mostly based around the fact that drawing cards is very common. There are a lot of ways to draw additional cards, so you actually get to the question of "do I want to play one big spell or many small ones?"
Definitely doesn't help the issue, but there's a lot of games with even more card draw than Magic, which makes the issue even more dangerous!
It's also an issue because of how blocking works. You can just choose not to block with your aggro runouts and hope to win faster than the opponent.
your videos are nice. thanks
btw i think archetype locks sound horrible but it keeps balance at bay and you can properly support decks that need it. in this case 1 cost things would be fine. you could have it do something appropriate for its cost
Thanks! Archetype locks are an interesting one - they're a useful design tool, but it's definitely possible to overdo them. I think even archetype specific one drops are tricky - especially when a lot of archetypes can get away with only playing 3 or 4 cards from the archetype in another deck shell.
@@tcgacademia aye true that. i think no matter how, you might end up with either an evil combo concotion or youll make people feel bad for not allowing them to mix cards.
id personally go against the grain and make cards fpr specific decks and you couldnt mix them, but give you plenty lf choice and try to give proper support. cards without archeytpes you could put into any deck would be easier to keep an eye on seen as there would be less.
its a dilemma lmao
This is a great video, thank you for the insight.
Thank you!
Interesting analysis, ty
When you mentioned that burn deck, you marked cards that cost more than 1 mana in your example.
Those cards are never actually cast for their full mana, they have mechanics that let you pay 1 instead.
@@thoughtprism2963 that...honestly would make it count as a modified 1 right?
@@thoughtprism2963 they actually get cast for retail a fair amount of the time due to the shift in playstyle of burn depending on the match up.
i think calling this a "problem" is a bit of a misnomer, in MTG specifically there are informed descisions that go into the mana values of your spells aside from "hey look i cast three spells in a turn because they exist"
The examples you brought up have specific reasons for playing 1 drops, Murktide is a deck that looks to fill the graveyard as quickly as possible, through casting efficient noncreature spells that either trade with your opponent 1 for 1, or cantrip into different spells, so you can cast an 8/8 murktide regent and protect it for a win. Death's shadow is a full on aggro deck that looks to win the game on turn 3/4 by slamming a large deaths shadow early by dealing damage to yourself. Burn is in a similar vein, trying to kill as quickly as possible. Typically, the most important spells in your deck will hover around 2/3 mana, as they are actually usually more efficient when you take into account card advantage as a resource
The issue is see with MTG here is that there is excessive creep when it comes to the utility and complexity low cost creatures are allowed. Once upon a time a 1 cost would get 1 effect, or 1 keyword. Now, 2 keywords + an effect. Ragavan is a prime example of this. 2 effects that trigger at the same time, plus an alternative casting method. If 1 cost creatures had remained 1/1 haste for 1, modern would not look how it looks now.
Never considered this, great topic!!
Thank you!
I'd argue that the "problem" isn't 1-cost cards being 1 mana which is significantly less than cards that don't cost 1 mana, but actually just power creep. You said it yourself in Standard, mana curves look much more reasonable when the card pool is fair. In eternal formats, power-creep is king and all of the design flaws of cards like thought seize, ponder etc show their ugly faces. But even in Modern and Legacy, people still play cards that aren't one-drops because casting multiple spells per turn is strong, and you will incidentally enable yourself to play 2 and 3 mana cards when you make that happen. Then you get to consider the quality of 2 and 3 mana cards.
The more efficient the cards are that slow the game down, the better higher-costing cards look. Once you start top-decking, you want the most impact for a single castable card. If you have 3 mana, you don't want to draw the best 1-drop possible. You want to draw the best 3-drop possible. If you're top decking and you have 5 mana, then the best card you could draw is the highest impact card in the game for 5 mana in that position. When the game is slowed down like this and early game threats can be answered altogether, then the meta-game must shift to more resilient threats, which generally cost significantly more mana.
Remember the Jund decks running around in 2013 Modern? They were running death rite shamans and thought seizes for sure, but like Reid Duke was running a whole playlet of Liliana of the Veil. He had fulminator mages, 4-drop Olivia Voldarens, Maelstrom Pulse, Blightening, even 2 mainboard 4-drop Chandra Pyromasters. The format was slow. He couldn't get away with a lower curve. He had to diversify his threats and he had to play 3-mana and 4-mana cards even in Modern. Power creep, not just 1-drops in general, is what leads to the format's meta being too fast.
Also, cEDH is a weird format right now where even though the banned list allows us to play mana crypt, mana vault, time twister and other really insanely broken cards that not even legacy allowed, people still play high cost cards. My tier 1 Tivit deck runs Tivit, a 6 mana commander. It achieves that because I can actually control the game during the time it takes to develop that mana with cards that slow the game down like Counterbalance, Toxic Deluge, Talion the Kindly Lord, etc. I also have access to fast mana, which can enable me to play my 6-mana card on turn 1 using cards like Jeweled Lotus, Lotus Petal, Mox Opal etc. And why pay 6 mana and 4-5 cards to dump my commander on turn 1 instead of playing 6 1-drops? Because I wouldn't be able to have enough cards in hand at the beginning of the game to play 6 1-drops. When you allow fast mana, it really breathes new life into higher mana-costing cards. You have to spend cards to get mana advantage, and then that card you cast has a huge payoff like Ad Nauseam on turn 1 or 2 for example is a huge play. Turn 1 Rhystic Study is widely regarded as one of the best opening plays in cEDH.
What about the solution Hearthstone came up with?
Hearthstone managed to avoid this problem, 1 cost cards are normal but not meta defining. They can be run in aggro decks, but they run out of steam and lose to control decks. Or there effects are minimal and compliment a turn rather than defining the turn.
There's definitely tons of ways to avoid the problem, and one of them is to just be very careful when designing your one drops. Digital tcgs are really well positioned to deal with this problem, since any problematic one-drop can be patched, making designing them much safer.
I don't necessarily think effecient 1 cost cards is a problem, would it have been better if the breakpoint was at 2 or 3 instead? Granted I think in MTGs case it is more so a problem of unavoidable power creep in eternal formats. Interestingly enough, in Commander 1 drops are generally terrible unless they have a very strong utility effect, lightning bolt while an all star in every format it is legal in becomes a lot worse when you can't run it as a 4-of and there are more than two players at the table. The best cards are actually the big splashy spells that would never see play in any other format, a cardlike Twilight's call would never see play (unless you could cheat it out) but hard casting it in commander to close out a game is actually a viable strategy.
Perhaps a revisited idea of rewarding players for running a singleton deck is the answer to making more cards viable?
I think multiplayer is a bigger impact than singleton. I don't know enough about CEDH to say for sure, but I imagine Ragavin is an absolute menace to that format.
Could have lands in a separate pile and every turn you either play a land of your choice or cards from your hand.
Thanks for this! You should check out the approach of Flesh And Blood TCG to this issue, maybe you'll find it interesting
This is why classic Vs. System was so good. Characters had costs, effect cards (plot twists and locations) had Thresholds.
Plus the game was designed to be played as a curve.
You still would need good 1 cost characters but many times over the most powerful effect they had was a search effect.
I haven't played Vs. System, but the problem is really just designing a curve that doesn't let low-cost cards dominate at all stages - and there's definitely plenty of ways to do that.
@@tcgacademia Vs. System had it, it was a great game. I'm not sure why UDE stoped printing it, probably it wasn't making "enough" money.
It has been revived as a LCG with the rename " Vs System 2PCG", it still has a curve but I don't enjoy the new version as much as the old.
UR Murktide, Burn, and especially UB Shadow aren’t great examples of this, as they’re tempo decks, which we would expect to contain lots of 1-cost cards even if they weren’t good. Being able to make a play on the first turn is just that important for these decks.
A better example is Legacy Lands. Lands has 9 total cards that cost 2 or more in it. The other 18 nonland cards cost 1 or less. This is a control deck that wants to play very long games, and 2/3 of its nonland cards are 1-drops. Only 4 of those cards are really important to play on turn 1 for Lands, so it has 14 cards (out of 27 nonlands) which it could replace with 2+ MV cards, but doesn’t.
Another example is Jeskai Control, another Legacy deck, which plays 17-18 cards that cost 0 or 1, out of ~40 nonlands. (Prismatic Ending doesn’t count as a 1-cost because it frequently isn’t.) None of them are important to play on turn 1.
Good point! I tend to focus on Death's Shadow when I think about this, since that's when I really started to notice that 2 mana interaction was just getting to be too slow, but it really drives the point home when you look at decks that play tons of 1-drops even if they don't care much about slamming things onto the table as quickly as possible and are generally happy with longer games.
This was interesting. It's less of 1-cost cards and more of a "small numbers" problem combined with a large selection of cards.
Hearthstone has this problem quite often. In HS having something cost 1-2 mana more kills the card / hero power but you can't exactly go 1.5 or 1/2 mana.
The small numbers problem affects the competitive side card games. But the "big numbers" problem I'd argue is worse off. Namely the game becomes more complex. When a game is more complex the harder it is to get people to invest and play it. As a result of less people playing the competitive scene shrinks or is non existent.
At the end of the day in order for a game to have a large competitive community they have to have an even larger casual player base. Even if it's better balanced the game if casuals don't like the game because it's too hard to play due to complexity the game will slowly fade into obscurity. And when the game isn't making any money development dies then the game dies after a time.
It's funny, someone earlier mentioned Hearthstone didn't really have this problem. Hearthstone's system definitely seems just as vulnerable to this problem as any other, but being a digital tcg does open up some interesting solutions.
1/5 cost is something I've seen come up in a lot of games, and it's definitely interesting - sometimes an effect is really strong at 3 cost, but too weak at 4, or similar.
And yeah, it's definitely important to keep casual audiences in mind. Some of the things competitive players love can actively turn away more casual players, so it's a tricky balancing act, and some games have definitely swung too far in one way or another.
I like the Epic Card Game's approach where all cards cost either 1 or 0 and you only get a single resource on each player's turn.
I think more limited cost ranges can work, but it does feel like it limits design space if you're trying to make a full-size tcg.
1 mana cards need to be very efficient, as a cost of 1 to 2 is not double the cost, as drawing is a resource and that resource can be valuable, a real important thing is health totals, commander starting at 40hp means that an aggro strategy, which 1 drops are inherently more important, are less viable, combine that with multiple enemies and a deck that needs to deal 20 damage becomes a deck that has to deal 120 damage if he wants to rush down the whole table, (assuming that somehow no one does anything to eachother, or heal)
Hearthstone would have been an interesting case to look at: the available mana besides being renewable also ramps up automatically (no card investment needed), and the base draw is (/was) relatively slow, so having a bunch of 1-drops is just not practical, since you'll just empty your hand and still float mana. Value and card advantage make even very aggressive decks focus more in twos and threes rather than ones.
There have been plenty aggro decks in Hearthstone that run 50%ish one drops and a handful of other cards with charge or direct damage to finish the opponent off.