Been playing Magic for 30 years, and this was the most lucid explanation I've ever heard in defense of Magic's mana system: "Magic forces a tension in deckbuilding between an economy strategy and a rush strategy." Incredible stuff.
This seems like the right video to say that while your MtG content is clearly the most successful and it makes sense that you would continue to focus on Magic as a primary point of reference. I see your channel as a games design channel first and a magic channel second.
I like to think of the 3 axes -Tempo vs Innevitability -Threat vs Answers -Redundant vs Specific Tempo + Threats + Redundant is aggro. Each card does the same thing, win now. The Philosophy of Fire (1 card = x damage) incarnate. Tempo + Threat + Specific is combo. You want those 2 cards asap to close the game. Tempo + Answers + Redundant is Aggro-control or Tempo. Few threats but enough disruption to delay the opponent enough to win. UG madness with counters and Death's Shadow with Thoughtseize. Tempo + Answers + Specific is rarely a archetype, but is how many sideboard "silver bullet" act. Blood Moon vs Tron or Graveyard Hate vs dredge will not stop them, but will delay them enough, hopefully. Innevitability + Answers + Redundant is control. You have enough counterspells or removal to survive until your late game finisher secures your win. Innevitability + Answers + Specific is prison. Lantern control and Shop/Trinisphere. Once you invalidated the opponents deck, winning is a formality. Innevitability + Threat + Redundant is Midrange. Instead of playing removal every turn, present a new threat every turn like a resilient creature (bloodbraid elf, spiritmonger, hazoret, heart of kiran) or planeswalker until you snowball or overvalue your opponent. Innevitability + Threat + Specific is the other side of combo. If a control deck doesn't close the game, the combo player can just sandbag ressources until they can play past the wall of permission. That plus the eternal question "Who is the Beatdown". In my old modern grixis control, I had to be the beatdown against Tron and Primeval Titan decks or they just can play 3 wincons in a turn with natural land drops.
Combo is such a bizarre archetype to me because it doesn't directly map onto the circle in the video: Rush, Resources, Defense, and I am stuck between saying it is an illusion and saying it is a real archetype. Combo decks should generally be considered Rush I think. Due to their weaknesses to defensive interaction, they struggle very similarly to other decks that try and close the game out quickly. Where a turn 3 board wipe will destroy an aggressive creature deck, a well placed discard or counterspell can neuter a combo deck. I think the distinction between redundancy and specificity is important for the deck building aspect of it, but it is more specific to Magic and other games that operate much more similarly. There is also the argument that you can have combo decks that are themselves defensive decks. Lantern control is perhaps the best example of it. If you have lantern of insight, and 3 cards that mill, you have assembled a "game winning" combo. It is just a defensive one instead of an aggressive one.
Oh yeah, this is a classic Rock Paper Scissors triangle. This same one is also in StarCraft. There are also bacteria that take up this strategy. Some spend their energy to develop powerful poison to melt other bacteria, some spend their energy to develop defenses against poison, and some forgo attack or defenses to try to eat as much as possible. Not every game follows this triangle in particular, not every card game even, but it's the bedrock of all multiplayer games where you interact with your opponent in a meaningful way. Fighting games have attack/block/throw, but also poke/whiff punish/pressure. Pure racing games have passing on the left or the right
I'm going to guess you know nothing about racing. Which is OK, but passing in racing is the tiniest component of racing strategy. In some races, pilots intentionally don't take first for half a dozen reasons until the last minute. In other races, they take first as soon as possible and try to keep a gap from the pack until the finish line.
@Mello675 I think they had the wrong words for it, but Racing does follow this a little bit too. Get ahead and stay ahead is Rush. Draft behind and outlast them to pass at the end is economy, and perhaps here is where the analogy falls apart, but defense is preventing others from passing you, perhaps by taking slightly less efficient lines, sacrificing your tempo or economy in the process.
@@Aaron-cs3xl I'm not saying that racing involves rush, economy, or defense. I'm saying that when you're passing someone else during a race that rock paper scissors is involved. Predicting your opponent and choosing the thing that beats their choice.
@@Zarbon000 I often kill everyone with atraxa infect, via proliferate and other mechanics, it all depends on the texture of the game, I do not agree that combo is different than aggro is a fair way to dismiss turbo combo decks that just look to combo fast and win, they're the clearest "rush" decks in commander, they're just not accepted in lower power tables due to them having lesser interaction and are more in the cEDH world.
I like this circle but also have some considerations: - Pure combo decks (OTK, 1TK, 2TK, etc) also mostly fall into the "Rush" category. - I disagree with the idea of redundancy being a "Rush" thing. Redundancy is a quality in general, any deck needs to be consistent to work. In Magic, it can be achieved by having multiple copies or by having tutors or more card draw. - An interesting situation arrives in games like Age of Empires 2, where most rush strategies send units to stop the enemy economy on their tracks instead of winning on the spot, so they could be considered a double defense/rush win against an economy strategy.
To help people think about the economy outside of MTG think about; ammo for shooters, timers and stamina for sports, quarters for old school arcades, patience for playing "getting over it," or different friends to play commander with after wipe all their lands
The strategy circle of rush/economy/defense is a wonderful concept. In all my years of being an avid consumer of game design media, I've seen many people try to break down universal game strategies but they never pulled it off this successfully. This is the most interesting video you've made for me, personally, and I'd love to see more on how it applies to not just mtg and starcraft but other games as well. I will definitely be keeping the concept in mind in the future. Good work, fellas.
I'm trying to think through this in terms of fighting games, which is what I usually do here. Rush is obvious, we have an archetype literally called rushdown where you're trying to be so aggressive that your opponent doesn't have a chance to put up their own gameplan. Defense is likely zoning, where you're staying far away, using projectiles or very large hitboxes to preempt approaches and restrict the opponent's movement. Those are straightforward enough, I think. Economy is trickier though. "Resource" immediately brings to mind meter, but you can't really play most fighters with a mind for just hoarding a bunch of meter and dropping it all at once to secure a win. Most meters max out quickly, which encourages you to spend frequently so you can start gaining again. Instead, I think economy would be best understood as a vortex character. If economy can be thought of as accruing a favorable board state, then the equivalent in a fighter should be to seek interactions which lead you to advantageous positions repeatedly. Typically that would be looking for hard knockdowns, which put your opponent in a situation where they're lying on the ground and have very few options to react to whatever you do next. Vortex characters are good at finding knockdowns, then doing something that's difficult to deal with that leads into another knockdown. You might even be sacrificing combo damage for the sake of ending in a knockdown, because setting yourself up for success in the next interaction is more important than the immediate reward of more damage. You maintain the "resource" of a favorable position.
Puzzle strike is a fighting game built with this structure in mind. We aren’t well versed in fighting games, so taking a look at that game might help to see how the circle applies.
many fighting games actually do revolve around more economy minded gameplay. Third Strike and sf6 are both examples of games where economy focused gameplay can be very strong. Chun Li wants to play economy and defense in 3S; her super is her primary win condition, and most of her other good tools are ones that let her control the pace of the match in order to build said win con, or are combo enablers that let allow her to activate it. Contrast this with Yun, who isnt able to save up genei jin stocks, and so is instead forced to play a hyper aggressive gameplan, often only losing if his opponents defense makes him run out of gas. If you want a great example of defensive play beating aggressive resource spending, watch the finals of combo breaker for sf6. El Chakotay's opponent (i forget his name sorry) actively spends the game playing an extremely aggressive rush strategy, losing to El Chakotay choosing to maintain a strong defense, inevitably leading to El Chakotay getting the upperhand on meter and closing the game out by having more tools at his disposal than his opponent. Fighting games, in the abstract, are games where one has to balance various commitments and striking a balance between proactive and reactive play. Something as basic as "im gonna take the throw" involves risk assessment and resource management, its essentially a defense-oriented bet that you can waitout your opponents rush until they run out of gas and take your turn back.
resource is kinda difficult to get pure the closest i'd say would be people like third strike chun li or yun who's win condition is to get meter get a hit and then start melting your opponents with supers. or an install character like UMVC3 Pheonix Wright or ABA from Guilty Gear, Or a level up character where you start out weaker than the rest of the cast but can level up through the match.
Never thought I would be thinking about Tekken on an MTG vid, but here I am 😅 Despite the series very much not having much in the way of projectiles, these archetypes still exist in the series. Rushdown - Reina, Heihachi, Miguel Keepout - Lee, Bryan, Victor Vortex - Kazuya, Dragunov You also have a lot of characters who shift between these, such as Paul, who shifts between Keepout and Vortex based on the situation.
@@jmanwild87 Good call with level up characters! Jamie in SF6 definitely does a lot to embody this, with his gameplan evolving dramatically as he gets his drinks off. Manon as well, to a lesser extent. I almost wanna say Q taunts in 3s too, lol. I feel like 3s Chun and Yun aren't really set apart from how other characters use supers except in that their supers happen to be very, very strong. Like, "playing neutral with strong buttons until you build the meter to confirm into high damage" describes a *lot* of characters in the cast. It's just that Chun has (some of) the best buttons, the best meter build, and the best confirms. They emphasize the ways in which meter is a matter of economy for sure, but I don't think they represent an especially economy heavy playstyle. Something else I find interesting is characters who start with a set amount of a resource that only goes down over the course of a match. Weird example but I play Kirei in FUC and his Black Keys function like this. They're extremely strong projectiles that convert into a full combo off counterhit from almost full screen, but you only get ten per round. It's a resource, but it's about how to spend your limited supply, not about hoarding a stockpile to create a winning situation. idk how that plays into this "economy" idea, if it does at all. Speaking of meter as a resource, FUC is also cool in that there's a universal meter drain move, which lends a lot of depth to how you compete over meter. It's especially valuable because meter is super strong, with burst tied to meter and crazy damage off the super unscale glitch. The meter war is so important that sometimes when I feel like I'm at too low health to take a round anymore, I'll still look for openings just to get off the meter drain. What a cool game. I still like vortex as representing the role as a whole because it plays into the idea that your strategy can shift between these three styles. All this other stuff is very character specific, but everyone has access to oki and you can choose how big a part of your gameplan you want it to be. This comment is already too long but quick shoutout to Under Night. It never clicked with me but it feels wrong to discuss resource management without mentioning GRD. So uh, obligatory GRD mention.
I don’t understand how this system applies to games where one player winning is tied to the other losing (say, a pvp total war battle). But I could see a modification where economy is building your possible action space, rush is spending that space to win, and defense is protecting that possibility space
Even chess has these design principles at play. Opening variations are decided by players' preferred strategies and the forced reactions by those strategies; gambits are inherently rush strategies because they are attempting to forego a resource investment (pieces) to get a positional footing that wins the game faster. Other aggressive strategies may aim to push pieces farther faster and catch opponents on a bad move. Defensive strategies will aim to protect the king early and shore up their position quickly to survive early aggression, and economy strategies will aim to develop as many pieces as possible and hope to gain a payoff in the mid-game when the tipping point happens and there are lots of trades, or even simply by gaining a significant positional advantage. As the level of play increases these strategies tend to converge and things like purely aggressive strategies get weeded out since good players don't "fall for" the tricks, but its still important to recognize those strategies because they can win games against players that don't respect them with their own moves; in other words, the aggressive strategies that exist force players to invest in defensive moves rather than purely developmental moves so they aren't beaten by the cheeky rush strategies, and that then changes the texture of the game when those moves are made.
This is the best video I've seen in this channel, and the bar was high! This is clear and fundamental knowledge that clarifies everything else about design. Thanks!
Have you guys ever tried "Twilight of the Gods"? It had... an interesting take on the resource conundrum. Basically any card can be a resource (and there's 3 levels of them), BUT you can't play your cards as resources - you have to trade/steal them from your opponent and those become your resources.
As someone who only recently got into the deeper design behind Magic as a game, I want you to know I could follow along decently well. I feel y'all did a good job making it clear.
I love this topic. Specially for RTS, where it's so explicit and you get to be a lot more granular with where you stand in that spectrum in any given game. And even in different parts of the same game, if some power spikes are game-warping enough. You get entire story arcs in Broodwar matches sometimes.
This entire video could have been talking about RTS. Yes StarCraft is a masterpiece. Both players start at the same point and decide on economy, defense (towers or keeping troops home) or some kind of rush. No decision is inherently wrong or right but depending on play you may have an advantage.
I've been playing magic for ten years. You two are not enraging magic players, you are argueing how strategy games have aggro, midrange, and control strategy built within them. I've also seen as a triangle.
The Tank, The Healer, the Damage Dealer, The tank can deal with enemy interaction, the healer can interact with your side, and the damage dealer can interact with the enemy.
I was halfway through writing my comparison to starcraft in my head before you mentioned it lol. But I've got nothing better to do so I'll just expand on some ideas. "Defense" probably makes people think of things like stationary towers or w/e in various rts games, but it also relates to what type of offense you run. One way of breaking down unit composition (that im stealing from day9) is the idea of "mobile" units vs "powerful" units. Mobile units are hasty ones; they pose an immediate threat, trading efficiency for speed. Likewise powerful units are the opposite; think siege tanks. Defense in this way doesnt need to mean strictly defense-only tools. Defense can just mean a unit who is designed to trade immediacy in threat level with resource efficiency. This trade is what causes you to lose to economy; my zerglings wouldve ran that guy over before you even crossed half the map with your siege tanks. Likewise a 4/5 with vigilence is probably way less raw offensive power than what you'd get spending the same amount on 2/1s with haste, but it gives you both a resource advantage and inevitibility against a deck whose power caps off at 3.
hi! i’ve been watching a lot of your videos recently and i especially appreciated this one because of how it was focused on a more general game design concept. i’m currently designing cards for a ccg that i’m making as a casual personal project, and i’ve always been very interested in game design theory as a whole. i wanted to ask if you could elaborate on one point you mentioned: that card games without resources in deck (in other words, providing the economy automatically for the player) subvert the economy part of the circle. this brings to mind hearthstone for me, but you could use any card game that fits this as an example. are there any specific examples of issues in card games you could point to that stem from this subversion in economy? for example, maybe you could make the argument that aggro / combo / “rush” decks are more dominant in hearthstone because of the perfect mana, whereas “economy” decks might struggle more to get a place in the meta. this in particular is something that i’ve personally noticed, and i think it might be tied to the strategy circle. i was just wondering because hearthstone was the first card game that i ever played, and that caused me assume that perfect mana was the standard or norm for card games. this video made me reconsider my perspective on that, and i’m going to spend more time thinking about the tradeoffs between in-deck resources and automatic resources. this is an especially important concept to me because my card game uses the same automatic mana system that hearthstone does. thank you so much!
Awesome that you’re working on your own game! This is also something we noticed with hearthstone and it’s a great case study in what happens when your resources aren’t at odds with your means of winning. Of course you can design a system that works that way, but you would want to keep it in mind when you’re creating aggressive strategies. You’ll need to build in the tension elsewhere. Early on hearthstone did this with randomness, but players quickly became frustrated. Also, I think this is why we have seen charge become antiquated with rush taking its place. There isn’t one right way to build a system, but there are elements to arrange in different configurations. The innovation I’m looking for is in how to maintain the strategy circle while improving on player’s quality of play.
It's not necessarily that the automatic distribution of mana each turn takes away from economy since economy is just increasing the pace at which you build your resources and there is still value in that. But what it does do is create a much higher level of consistency for aggro and midrange decks, to the point that most aggro decks bleed into midrange because they can. In Magic, when running aggro, it's a balance of how many lands to try and maintain in your starting hand to get going versus how many you'll need in the end. So you run much lower mana than other deck archetypes and you ideally want 2-3 mana in hand, however you don't want to draw beyond 4-5 mana throughout a game because at a certain point it's redundant. When mana isn't a card that you can draw (like in hearthstone), then you know that essentially everything you are drawing is "gas." You essentially just won't have a dead draw, unlike in Magic. But in allowing players to not have dead draws in the mid-game and also having resources pile up consistently over time there really isn't much of a reason why aggro decks in HS can't play into the 4-5 cost cards where in Magic the highest you'd maybe ever want to go is 4-cost, if that. To add to that, because resources continue to grow, if your aggro deck (which now has the potential to look more like midrange) can gain resources over the course of the game, you can also start to gain resources equal to the economy player's resources since they have a mana cap. Meaning that how the economy player has to win is by "rushing" into higher cost things that have to be costed in a way that makes up for them needing to take longer to bring out. I'm sure I'm missing some points here, but I think these are some major ones. I hesitate to call these issues, I just see these as quirks to a system, it's not that it makes any game better or worse. Every system will have aspects that benefit one side of the strategy circle more than the other, but if you are aware of the way your system leans you can account for that and make adjustments to the card's accordingly.
On a systems level, I don't think Hearthstone necessarily lacks economy. You can Wild Growth, draw cards, and build a deck around always having something to spend mana on. There is plenty of design space to enable this play style. Like in Magic, you don't win by having 8 mana available, you win by spending it. From what I've seen in modern Hearthstone, players don't run out of cards so easy. A third of the cards in your aggro deck might draw or discover another non-land card. "Turn 7: 4-drop, pass" is a lot different than "Turn 7: 3-drop, battlecry draw, 3-drop". The latter appears to have a lower curve, but can spend more mana per turn once out of cards. This kind of content design deemphasizes the aspect of card/curve advantage in the system design. I've heard tales of Control Warrior fatigue battles that were unpopular and inflated game times. It sounds like Blizzard now tries to err towards making "fun" mistakes in balance and letting players do something every turn.
There's an old article that I read titled "What I know about Magic: the Gathering" by Douglas Buel (dbuel) on BoardGameGeek that echoes your point on the three parts of the circle, though in that case the three types of deck dbuel identifies are Aggro, Combo and Control (which is a seperate axis from the other two), with Midrange and Aggro-Control being derivatives of the Aggro-Control Spectrum. I would suggest reading it since it's very much in line with your observations In that vein, I feel you didn't touch on how most "Economy" strategies are also combo decks since decks like Storm are in essence game plans to generate either infinite or functionally infinite mana. In your example of Affinity, like you said it is an aggro deck, but the mechanics of the deck are closer to a combo deck based on synergy than on anything resembling an efficient mana curve. This also puts decks like Elves and Tron in this category, because the main strategies of those decks are all about breaking the established rules of magic in regards to mana progression.
Good points. We’re seeing combo as sort of a secondary strategy that can be built with different leanings. You could be a defense based combo deck like splinter twin or a rush based combo that is attempting to win before your opponent can play anything meaningful, like oops all spells. It does get a little tricky with economy based combo and infinite mana. The line between rush and econ becomes a bit fuzzy.
I wonder now and I will keep this in mind: Should I not violate these three ideas in designing my card game? I suppose it is clear and easy to understand what the cards are trying to do and that's why it's a good idea. Thinking back, many of my fav decks fall into these archetypes. Great vid!
I think the danger zone is when a game piece covers too many of these extremes at the same time. Having to make a choice if a card will act as defense or economy is interesting. When there are no drawbacks or tradeoffs is when things become too obvious.
I’d love to hear how this sort of strategic philosophy applies to a bunch of other card games or even stuff like board games or Mobas, even single player games with character customization.
This is interesting to me, because normally when I think about Magic's different archetypes, I think about a triangle of aggro, combo, and control, with midrange being kind of in the middle. And most other archetypes are some mix of the two, for example tempo decks being aggro/control, storm being aggro/combo, and lantern being combo/control. Aggro tends to beat control, control tends to beat combo, combo tends to beat aggro. Midrange is distinct in that it plays for flexibility, so it tries to shift to aggro to beat control, and control to beat aggro. I don't know if I'd really call it defense, though? Since it doesn't play defense that much more than other lists. I actually think one of the distinctive things in Magic is that there isn't really a defense archetype? More that there are individual defensive cards people slot into decks regardless of whether they're rush or resource. Tons of aggro decks play Bolt, or Thoughtseize, or Fatal Push, for example. Even the most aggro deck I can think of, Legacy Storm, still plays counterspells and Veils for defense. Even prison decks like Lantern usually end up winning by either making the opponent lose the resource game, or by aggro-ing them out before they can recover. That probably has something to do with why sideboards are such a distinctive feature of Magic, TBH, since that's where most of the defensive deckbuilding goes for basically every archetype.
Great points. Part of why we’re seeing this as a circle is that a deck isn’t usually made up of just one extreme, but some percentage of each. This model is at the most macro level of “what am I doing and what is it costing me?”. Seeing defense as interaction I think helps to see its expression in MTG. Evaluating cards for their modularity is also important. Lightning bolt is both a rush card and a defense card in the classic bolt the bird scenario and deciding which mode is the right one is where so much of MTGs strategy comes from. This video is mostly a primer for more to come.
in my mind, aggro slots neatly into rush, combo fits into economy. combo inherently breaks the economy. i considered midrange this slot but ultimately, i think its neater to place midrange and control in the defense role. they have different philosophies on how to beat aggro but that is often their main gameplan.
The tradition archetypes of mtg don’t fit cleanly into rush, econ, defense. We consider the strategy circle one layer more zoomed out than the archetypes. We have an upcoming video about it.
When I first learned about "the StarCraft triangle", I tried to apply it to everything, and found that it didn't always fit nicely. However, one time I found it illuminating was with the 1v1 puzzle game Puyo Puyo. Matching puyo to make chains is the only action. It both attacks your opponent and defends you from their attacks, so it seemed like just a bigger-number contest at first. The exponential scaling makes long chains strong, so just build big and fire second, right? However, in high level play, you see small, inefficient attacks mixed in while players build up resources for their big attack. A successful small attack can seal off an opponent's resources long enough to use the rest of yours without threat of a counterattack, winning you the game. Rush strategy found! But where's the tradeoff? A chain meant to rush could instead be extended for the late game, right? Would defense just be the same as attack? Not quite, because of some details in scoring and time. A 2-chain is weak, and can be a big waste for how little it slows the opponent. A 4-chain completely unblocked is nearly impossible to come back from, but gives the opponent a lot more time to react and build a suitable counter. The attacking solution is "power chains". Adding more puyo to each chain link adds damage, though less efficiently than using the same puyo to make more links. A power 2-chain can be a threatening rush, but uses board space inefficiently if you convert it into your late game long chain. You could defend with a similar attack, or do so more efficiently with a 3 or 4 chain, since you don't care about the speed. Distinct defense found! But how do defense and econ differ? It comes down to how quickly you can activate that defensive 3- or 4-chain as you're building up. A single-player strategy may use the pieces and board space very efficiently, but have long stretches of time where it can't construct an appropriately sized subchain. A defensive strategy accepts oversized chain links and imperfect space usage in order to stay close enough to safety to react in time. These are general descriptions, but in practice, a skilled player can sometimes extend their planned 2-double efficiently or find an incidental 3-chain attack while just trying to build their main chain. High level matches are a great watch as you see players constantly shift their playstyle to match their opponent's options second to second. You can really feel the triangle, or circle as it were.
Good point, it's interesting to compare! Strategy games seem to use hidden information to keep you from foiling any deviation from the center. Puyo has perfect information on your opponent, and so has to compensate by being fast, being hard to process, and using random pieces to force you into different corners. There are definitely major tradeoffs. I wonder what's in the middle...
I like to think about "aggro" and "control" as relatives. No deck IS aggro. Aggro is something that a deck is in a given match. The player doing the agression in a match is being the aggro, and the player on the receiving end is being the Control. If you construct a deck to be agressive by default, but in a given match you end up on the control position, you should adjust your mindset. If you keep trying to be aggro, you will end up being out raced and lose. Same thing for a more controly deck that dont adjust itself to take on the agression when it should. Understanding this relative position and learning to adapt is what separare the great players from the masses hehe PS: Curiously, Kemet has 3 colors. Attack, defense and economy. At least until they added a forth in a expansion hehe
I think mana can be separated from the deck successfully, design-wise. While no card game has seen the same level of success that mtg has, there are plenty of critically acclaimed games that successfully designed manascrew out of their systems (or at least greatly mitigated it): ashes: rise of the Phoenixborn, sorcery:contested realm, flesh and blood, game of thrones lcg, legend of 5 rings lcg, etc.
Where would you place jund in the circle? I always thought what makes jund a deck is all the 2 for 1s, so I'd be a economy deck. But you mention midrange to be somewhere in between rush and defence, which also makes sense. I'm confused :p
Jund is interesting. Maybe it depends on the era, but I think certain cards act as economy, but overall I’d say its strength lies in its ability to interact while applying pressure. Thoughtseize, tarmogoyf, lightning bolt, maelstrom pulse, each of these cards slots into an aggressive defense(interaction) strategy. While some cards the deck runs are 2 for 1s, not many are dedicated economy cards in card draw and/or land ramp. Sometimes Jund has played a mana dork, but that’s about it. Keep in mind that the circle is labeling extremes and each deck is a different shaped triangle in the center of the circle. No deck is likely to be all of one extreme as the individual cards in your deck lean in different directions. I’m seeing Jund’s triangle as defense first, rush second, economy third. But, I could see an argument for otherwise.
You're very focused on the circle but you aren't thinking about the interior, jund is a central strategy that trys to adapt to it's opponent. It would rush control, or defend against rush, while trying to grind advantage. Especially in a game like magic with such a huge volume of effects doing all 3 is very likely, it's how much of each you are doing. Jund is a great example, modern jund can have no spells costing over 2, most of which trade 2-1 and has a high amount of removal. It's not as agro as mono red swiftspear burn, it's not as defensive as a mono black control, it's not as economy as mono green ramp. But it combines them all and flexes to it's opponents weakness.
I work on combat design on a fighting game. Would you guys ever have an interest in discussion about that and some of the design overlap? There's an old adage that says when a fg player gets old, they start playing tcgs
We have seen others present it as a triangle, but we felt like it implied an end state to a particular extreme. The circle implies the ability to move between states. But yeah a triangle could also work haha.
@@distractionmakers hmmm make sense, fluidity is an important aspect to highlight. Playing all the archetypes or leaning in all the strategies in this case, helped me a lot to improve in TCGs in general. Having a broad sense of all the possible paths in a game gives you a much more accurate picture of the pros and cons of your chosen path and its interactions with the other ones.
I love Stax, but never liked the design of Lodestone Golem. It just does too much, it is already a solved puzzle out of the box. It is aggressive (rush) but also taxes your opponent which has the double effect of defense by suppression and economic gain through relative ressource advantage.
Aggro is cheap to netdeck in most MTG formats due to the usual low average card rarity, that is a large part of why it spikes early. There is a reason Aggro really appeared slightly later than Control or Midrange, you need the resource distribution curves and card power tradeoffs to be well understood to design it in the first place. Funny enough, Control will probably take over MTG's Standard format (even more than currently) immediately at the next (Summer 2024) rotation: Aggro is losing most of its core cards and B/UB Control is losing little of value. It is the one where you don't need to know how to handle the new environment this time. Personally I think along a three axis cube when considering design: Aggro-Control on one axis with Isolating-Combining on the other and Economy filling it out. The first axis is about how the build focuses on attack or disruption. The second axis is how much your cards interact among themselves, the stereotypical control player view of what RG Stompy does (burn cards and vanilla creatures only) on one end and the crazy 10 card combo for instant win stuff on the other. The third axis of course is how much effort is being put into generation of resources over time. Every build option fits somewhere in that space. Of course the specifics change depending on the game: lack of effective resources is why Yugioh basically does not have a rush strategy any more for example. And yes, Thoughtcast was more of a problem than Ravager in that silly deck. You thought they were finally out of steam then suddenly they have everything they need again for exactly... U mana.
I'd like to tell you I am an ex casual player but truth is there's no casual side to ygo: your deck is either good or bad, that's it. The game is broken down to its fundamentals and there's no variety: if you're playing a blue eyes white deck there's no different take on the deck you're always playing the same thing in its current best iteration (ie whichever new mechanic decided to bless the old archetype for nostalgia sake)
the zirgling rush strategy is what the cpus from warcraft 2 tides of darkness did, just with knights and then archers. It was brutal. As a kid I always thought they were cheating.
As much as I hate Hearthstone - and boy do I ever hate that WoW-skinned slot machine - it’s mana system makes **way more sense** than MTG’s. We’re supposed to be wizards slinging spells but we’re also dependent on being lucky enough to draw lands to cast those spells? How does that make any sense? Having a consistent mana base makes way more sense thematically and helps shift the focus of the game toward skill rather than luck (unless you’re Hearthstone of course, in which case just make everything RNG and completely destroy your game).
I think it's great you analyze game design through something popular like MTG. It's the first tcg and the best one, what are you supposed to do? Talk about ygo? Lmao I mean I guess you could if you were describing what to absolutely avoid.
“Every strategy needs a weakness” So here is my problem: what is the weakness of landfall and lands decks? Their economy is to grow mana and sudo draw it out the deck. They profit in many ways but in commander it’s taboo to mass land destroy (MLD). Using up slots in my deck construction to ward off in suboptimal ways extra land drops is a real bummer. There is no feels fair situation. It’s one way or another. Commander is plagued with such problems and I’ve played against enough decks to see the ramp ones usually take the win. The problem also is that it’s hard to convince the table to turn on someone who has no creatures in play but 9 lands on turn 5. Usually they players threat asses based on creature and no land permanents on board instead and let the lands players run away with a win.
Yeaaaah the trend of turning lands into spells is really troubling and warping every format. The legacy lands deck is also extremely powerful because there are so few vectors of interaction. As for commander, the strategy circle still exists, but looks quite a bit different. Each part of the circle can fit inside of each deck so players can move between them more dynamically during gameplay. Rush is presented as combo, defense is almost entirely proactive to save your own combo, and every deck is built as an economy strategy first. 40 life really warps the game and is a “defense” against rush built into the system. Commander damage tries to fix this, but you still have to deal 63 damage to 1v1s 20.
@@distractionmakers I have built a cEDH slicer deck which functions really interesting when focusing on rush. It may just be the best rush commander ever designed. But defense does stop it. 🤷♂️ Applying the circle to commander is very interesting since economy is such a main stay component in all good deck construction.
Players need to learn that the tradeoff for ramping is not developing your board state and therefore not deploying blockers (it also generally tends to happen at Sorcery speed more often than Instant speed which means it's difficult to hold up interaction). You need to punish the lack of defenses in order to enforce that tradeoff, or otherwise it's as if a tradeoff hasn't been made and that ramp player simply gets to profit for free. (As an aside, this is a big reason why Selvala, Heart of the Wilds is such a powerful Commander deck outside of CEDH; Selvala's ability allows you to ramp *by* developing your board state, and therefore you are building your economy and offense/defense at the same time. The trick in optimization is to build the deck in such a way that you can either consistently protect Selvala herself without diluting the deck too much, or pack enough supplementary economy cards that losing Selvala doesn't hamstring you to the point of playing only one threat at a time in the mid-late game versus three opponents, without forfeiting that signature advantage Selvala's purpose is to grant you. This is also partially why historically, large bodies with card draw on them tended to appear in UG and not mono-G, while even as Green received more card draw it tended to appear on spells and check creature stats; the extra instability in mana economy or lack of board development allowed for some balance. E.g. Rishkar's Expertise and successors, which provide you card advantage, mana advantage, and the opportunity to deploy boardstate all in one action on one card... The singular thing keeping them even remotely tied down to a modicum of balance is that they still tend to require the player to have *previously* invested in developing a respectable asset by size or volume on the board to leverage through checking creature characteristics for a value, as well as not being creatures themselves still means the entire deck can't be composed entirely of redundancies of this effect.)
Been playing Magic for 30 years, and this was the most lucid explanation I've ever heard in defense of Magic's mana system: "Magic forces a tension in deckbuilding between an economy strategy and a rush strategy." Incredible stuff.
Yes. That is a great way to see the point. Some modern card games play with their idea. Runatera summoned fake cards in your deck.
their are 3 strategys
1 Hardended scales
2 Lantern control
3 Primeval titan
those aren't strategies, they're archetypes. Ramp, aggro, weenie, stall. those are strategies.
@@NoahRobertson-w4b I think they're joking
So glad you mentioned Lantern Control, that was immediately what popped in my head for defense when the 3 categories were laid out
Shout out to Rhystic for making a video on it recently. Love the archetype
This seems like the right video to say that while your MtG content is clearly the most successful and it makes sense that you would continue to focus on Magic as a primary point of reference. I see your channel as a games design channel first and a magic channel second.
I'm in agreement here.
I like to think of the 3 axes
-Tempo vs Innevitability
-Threat vs Answers
-Redundant vs Specific
Tempo + Threats + Redundant is aggro. Each card does the same thing, win now. The Philosophy of Fire (1 card = x damage) incarnate.
Tempo + Threat + Specific is combo. You want those 2 cards asap to close the game.
Tempo + Answers + Redundant is Aggro-control or Tempo. Few threats but enough disruption to delay the opponent enough to win. UG madness with counters and Death's Shadow with Thoughtseize.
Tempo + Answers + Specific is rarely a archetype, but is how many sideboard "silver bullet" act. Blood Moon vs Tron or Graveyard Hate vs dredge will not stop them, but will delay them enough, hopefully.
Innevitability + Answers + Redundant is control. You have enough counterspells or removal to survive until your late game finisher secures your win.
Innevitability + Answers + Specific is prison. Lantern control and Shop/Trinisphere. Once you invalidated the opponents deck, winning is a formality.
Innevitability + Threat + Redundant is Midrange. Instead of playing removal every turn, present a new threat every turn like a resilient creature (bloodbraid elf, spiritmonger, hazoret, heart of kiran) or planeswalker until you snowball or overvalue your opponent.
Innevitability + Threat + Specific is the other side of combo. If a control deck doesn't close the game, the combo player can just sandbag ressources until they can play past the wall of permission.
That plus the eternal question "Who is the Beatdown". In my old modern grixis control, I had to be the beatdown against Tron and Primeval Titan decks or they just can play 3 wincons in a turn with natural land drops.
Combo is such a bizarre archetype to me because it doesn't directly map onto the circle in the video: Rush, Resources, Defense, and I am stuck between saying it is an illusion and saying it is a real archetype.
Combo decks should generally be considered Rush I think. Due to their weaknesses to defensive interaction, they struggle very similarly to other decks that try and close the game out quickly. Where a turn 3 board wipe will destroy an aggressive creature deck, a well placed discard or counterspell can neuter a combo deck. I think the distinction between redundancy and specificity is important for the deck building aspect of it, but it is more specific to Magic and other games that operate much more similarly.
There is also the argument that you can have combo decks that are themselves defensive decks. Lantern control is perhaps the best example of it. If you have lantern of insight, and 3 cards that mill, you have assembled a "game winning" combo. It is just a defensive one instead of an aggressive one.
well said
Oh yeah, this is a classic Rock Paper Scissors triangle. This same one is also in StarCraft. There are also bacteria that take up this strategy. Some spend their energy to develop powerful poison to melt other bacteria, some spend their energy to develop defenses against poison, and some forgo attack or defenses to try to eat as much as possible.
Not every game follows this triangle in particular, not every card game even, but it's the bedrock of all multiplayer games where you interact with your opponent in a meaningful way.
Fighting games have attack/block/throw, but also poke/whiff punish/pressure.
Pure racing games have passing on the left or the right
I'm going to guess you know nothing about racing. Which is OK, but passing in racing is the tiniest component of racing strategy. In some races, pilots intentionally don't take first for half a dozen reasons until the last minute. In other races, they take first as soon as possible and try to keep a gap from the pack until the finish line.
@@Mello675 sure, but when during those times are the racers directly interacting?
@Mello675 I think they had the wrong words for it, but Racing does follow this a little bit too. Get ahead and stay ahead is Rush. Draft behind and outlast them to pass at the end is economy, and perhaps here is where the analogy falls apart, but defense is preventing others from passing you, perhaps by taking slightly less efficient lines, sacrificing your tempo or economy in the process.
@@Aaron-cs3xl I'm not saying that racing involves rush, economy, or defense. I'm saying that when you're passing someone else during a race that rock paper scissors is involved. Predicting your opponent and choosing the thing that beats their choice.
Also highlights how the system wasn’t built for commander,
sorry I had to do it.
There is no rush.
@@Zarbon000Voltron, Infect, thoracle or other turbocombo decks.
Rush does exist, it's just kinda frowned upon
@@Zarbon000 Exactly.
You get punished for committing to a rush strategy in a 4player game, therefore everyone become Economy-Defensive
@@warriorkr Combo is different than aggro. Infect I guess would be Rush. Could be. But it can’t kill everyone.
@@Zarbon000 I often kill everyone with atraxa infect, via proliferate and other mechanics, it all depends on the texture of the game, I do not agree that combo is different than aggro is a fair way to dismiss turbo combo decks that just look to combo fast and win, they're the clearest "rush" decks in commander, they're just not accepted in lower power tables due to them having lesser interaction and are more in the cEDH world.
Thanks you guys fortalking about that It's making me think about my own work a little bit better
blessed be the algorithm that delivered this high quality high level discussion on mtg game design. great work fellas, subscribed.
I like this circle but also have some considerations:
- Pure combo decks (OTK, 1TK, 2TK, etc) also mostly fall into the "Rush" category.
- I disagree with the idea of redundancy being a "Rush" thing. Redundancy is a quality in general, any deck needs to be consistent to work. In Magic, it can be achieved by having multiple copies or by having tutors or more card draw.
- An interesting situation arrives in games like Age of Empires 2, where most rush strategies send units to stop the enemy economy on their tracks instead of winning on the spot, so they could be considered a double defense/rush win against an economy strategy.
To help people think about the economy outside of MTG think about; ammo for shooters, timers and stamina for sports, quarters for old school arcades, patience for playing "getting over it," or different friends to play commander with after wipe all their lands
The strategy circle of rush/economy/defense is a wonderful concept. In all my years of being an avid consumer of game design media, I've seen many people try to break down universal game strategies but they never pulled it off this successfully. This is the most interesting video you've made for me, personally, and I'd love to see more on how it applies to not just mtg and starcraft but other games as well. I will definitely be keeping the concept in mind in the future. Good work, fellas.
I'm trying to think through this in terms of fighting games, which is what I usually do here. Rush is obvious, we have an archetype literally called rushdown where you're trying to be so aggressive that your opponent doesn't have a chance to put up their own gameplan. Defense is likely zoning, where you're staying far away, using projectiles or very large hitboxes to preempt approaches and restrict the opponent's movement. Those are straightforward enough, I think.
Economy is trickier though. "Resource" immediately brings to mind meter, but you can't really play most fighters with a mind for just hoarding a bunch of meter and dropping it all at once to secure a win. Most meters max out quickly, which encourages you to spend frequently so you can start gaining again. Instead, I think economy would be best understood as a vortex character. If economy can be thought of as accruing a favorable board state, then the equivalent in a fighter should be to seek interactions which lead you to advantageous positions repeatedly. Typically that would be looking for hard knockdowns, which put your opponent in a situation where they're lying on the ground and have very few options to react to whatever you do next. Vortex characters are good at finding knockdowns, then doing something that's difficult to deal with that leads into another knockdown. You might even be sacrificing combo damage for the sake of ending in a knockdown, because setting yourself up for success in the next interaction is more important than the immediate reward of more damage. You maintain the "resource" of a favorable position.
Puzzle strike is a fighting game built with this structure in mind. We aren’t well versed in fighting games, so taking a look at that game might help to see how the circle applies.
many fighting games actually do revolve around more economy minded gameplay. Third Strike and sf6 are both examples of games where economy focused gameplay can be very strong. Chun Li wants to play economy and defense in 3S; her super is her primary win condition, and most of her other good tools are ones that let her control the pace of the match in order to build said win con, or are combo enablers that let allow her to activate it. Contrast this with Yun, who isnt able to save up genei jin stocks, and so is instead forced to play a hyper aggressive gameplan, often only losing if his opponents defense makes him run out of gas.
If you want a great example of defensive play beating aggressive resource spending, watch the finals of combo breaker for sf6. El Chakotay's opponent (i forget his name sorry) actively spends the game playing an extremely aggressive rush strategy, losing to El Chakotay choosing to maintain a strong defense, inevitably leading to El Chakotay getting the upperhand on meter and closing the game out by having more tools at his disposal than his opponent.
Fighting games, in the abstract, are games where one has to balance various commitments and striking a balance between proactive and reactive play. Something as basic as "im gonna take the throw" involves risk assessment and resource management, its essentially a defense-oriented bet that you can waitout your opponents rush until they run out of gas and take your turn back.
resource is kinda difficult to get pure the closest i'd say would be people like third strike chun li or yun who's win condition is to get meter get a hit and then start melting your opponents with supers. or an install character like UMVC3 Pheonix Wright or ABA from Guilty Gear, Or a level up character where you start out weaker than the rest of the cast but can level up through the match.
Never thought I would be thinking about Tekken on an MTG vid, but here I am 😅
Despite the series very much not having much in the way of projectiles, these archetypes still exist in the series.
Rushdown - Reina, Heihachi, Miguel
Keepout - Lee, Bryan, Victor
Vortex - Kazuya, Dragunov
You also have a lot of characters who shift between these, such as Paul, who shifts between Keepout and Vortex based on the situation.
@@jmanwild87 Good call with level up characters! Jamie in SF6 definitely does a lot to embody this, with his gameplan evolving dramatically as he gets his drinks off. Manon as well, to a lesser extent. I almost wanna say Q taunts in 3s too, lol.
I feel like 3s Chun and Yun aren't really set apart from how other characters use supers except in that their supers happen to be very, very strong. Like, "playing neutral with strong buttons until you build the meter to confirm into high damage" describes a *lot* of characters in the cast. It's just that Chun has (some of) the best buttons, the best meter build, and the best confirms. They emphasize the ways in which meter is a matter of economy for sure, but I don't think they represent an especially economy heavy playstyle.
Something else I find interesting is characters who start with a set amount of a resource that only goes down over the course of a match. Weird example but I play Kirei in FUC and his Black Keys function like this. They're extremely strong projectiles that convert into a full combo off counterhit from almost full screen, but you only get ten per round. It's a resource, but it's about how to spend your limited supply, not about hoarding a stockpile to create a winning situation. idk how that plays into this "economy" idea, if it does at all.
Speaking of meter as a resource, FUC is also cool in that there's a universal meter drain move, which lends a lot of depth to how you compete over meter. It's especially valuable because meter is super strong, with burst tied to meter and crazy damage off the super unscale glitch. The meter war is so important that sometimes when I feel like I'm at too low health to take a round anymore, I'll still look for openings just to get off the meter drain. What a cool game.
I still like vortex as representing the role as a whole because it plays into the idea that your strategy can shift between these three styles. All this other stuff is very character specific, but everyone has access to oki and you can choose how big a part of your gameplan you want it to be.
This comment is already too long but quick shoutout to Under Night. It never clicked with me but it feels wrong to discuss resource management without mentioning GRD. So uh, obligatory GRD mention.
Loving all of this conversation. Great stuff guys.
I don’t understand how this system applies to games where one player winning is tied to the other losing (say, a pvp total war battle). But I could see a modification where economy is building your possible action space, rush is spending that space to win, and defense is protecting that possibility space
Freestrider lookout is a good example of a card that blends defense and economy. It rewards interacting with your opponent with extra lands
Even chess has these design principles at play. Opening variations are decided by players' preferred strategies and the forced reactions by those strategies; gambits are inherently rush strategies because they are attempting to forego a resource investment (pieces) to get a positional footing that wins the game faster. Other aggressive strategies may aim to push pieces farther faster and catch opponents on a bad move. Defensive strategies will aim to protect the king early and shore up their position quickly to survive early aggression, and economy strategies will aim to develop as many pieces as possible and hope to gain a payoff in the mid-game when the tipping point happens and there are lots of trades, or even simply by gaining a significant positional advantage. As the level of play increases these strategies tend to converge and things like purely aggressive strategies get weeded out since good players don't "fall for" the tricks, but its still important to recognize those strategies because they can win games against players that don't respect them with their own moves; in other words, the aggressive strategies that exist force players to invest in defensive moves rather than purely developmental moves so they aren't beaten by the cheeky rush strategies, and that then changes the texture of the game when those moves are made.
This is the best video I've seen in this channel, and the bar was high! This is clear and fundamental knowledge that clarifies everything else about design. Thanks!
Have you guys ever tried "Twilight of the Gods"?
It had... an interesting take on the resource conundrum. Basically any card can be a resource (and there's 3 levels of them), BUT you can't play your cards as resources - you have to trade/steal them from your opponent and those become your resources.
Huh… we will have to check it out. That sounds like it would have some very interesting implications haha.
Hahaha funnily enough just saw CGB explain the Mirrodain problem to Raran which was hilarious to get a history refresh to then see it come to life.
Haha I’ve seen that video pop up. I should watch it.
I was gonna said the exact same thing lmao
As someone who only recently got into the deeper design behind Magic as a game, I want you to know I could follow along decently well. I feel y'all did a good job making it clear.
This is an underrated channel for magic players.
I love this topic. Specially for RTS, where it's so explicit and you get to be a lot more granular with where you stand in that spectrum in any given game.
And even in different parts of the same game, if some power spikes are game-warping enough. You get entire story arcs in Broodwar matches sometimes.
It’s so true. StarCraft is such a masterpiece. It’s a shame it doesn’t have a bigger following.
This entire video could have been talking about RTS. Yes StarCraft is a masterpiece.
Both players start at the same point and decide on economy, defense (towers or keeping troops home) or some kind of rush.
No decision is inherently wrong or right but depending on play you may have an advantage.
I've been playing magic for ten years. You two are not enraging magic players, you are argueing how strategy games have aggro, midrange, and control strategy built within them. I've also seen as a triangle.
I’d definitely like to see more on the circle in the future.
The Tank, The Healer, the Damage Dealer,
The tank can deal with enemy interaction, the healer can interact with your side, and the damage dealer can interact with the enemy.
Exactly.
Very good video, im gonna think and playtest quite a bit to figure out how this applies to the tcg im currently designing
The analogy even applies to games as “simple” as monopoly
I was halfway through writing my comparison to starcraft in my head before you mentioned it lol. But I've got nothing better to do so I'll just expand on some ideas.
"Defense" probably makes people think of things like stationary towers or w/e in various rts games, but it also relates to what type of offense you run. One way of breaking down unit composition (that im stealing from day9) is the idea of "mobile" units vs "powerful" units. Mobile units are hasty ones; they pose an immediate threat, trading efficiency for speed. Likewise powerful units are the opposite; think siege tanks. Defense in this way doesnt need to mean strictly defense-only tools. Defense can just mean a unit who is designed to trade immediacy in threat level with resource efficiency. This trade is what causes you to lose to economy; my zerglings wouldve ran that guy over before you even crossed half the map with your siege tanks. Likewise a 4/5 with vigilence is probably way less raw offensive power than what you'd get spending the same amount on 2/1s with haste, but it gives you both a resource advantage and inevitibility against a deck whose power caps off at 3.
Great points. Thanks for elaborating on the StarCraft connection.
hi!
i’ve been watching a lot of your videos recently and i especially appreciated this one because of how it was focused on a more general game design concept. i’m currently designing cards for a ccg that i’m making as a casual personal project, and i’ve always been very interested in game design theory as a whole.
i wanted to ask if you could elaborate on one point you mentioned: that card games without resources in deck (in other words, providing the economy automatically for the player) subvert the economy part of the circle. this brings to mind hearthstone for me, but you could use any card game that fits this as an example. are there any specific examples of issues in card games you could point to that stem from this subversion in economy?
for example, maybe you could make the argument that aggro / combo / “rush” decks are more dominant in hearthstone because of the perfect mana, whereas “economy” decks might struggle more to get a place in the meta. this in particular is something that i’ve personally noticed, and i think it might be tied to the strategy circle.
i was just wondering because hearthstone was the first card game that i ever played, and that caused me assume that perfect mana was the standard or norm for card games. this video made me reconsider my perspective on that, and i’m going to spend more time thinking about the tradeoffs between in-deck resources and automatic resources. this is an especially important concept to me because my card game uses the same automatic mana system that hearthstone does.
thank you so much!
Awesome that you’re working on your own game!
This is also something we noticed with hearthstone and it’s a great case study in what happens when your resources aren’t at odds with your means of winning. Of course you can design a system that works that way, but you would want to keep it in mind when you’re creating aggressive strategies. You’ll need to build in the tension elsewhere. Early on hearthstone did this with randomness, but players quickly became frustrated. Also, I think this is why we have seen charge become antiquated with rush taking its place.
There isn’t one right way to build a system, but there are elements to arrange in different configurations. The innovation I’m looking for is in how to maintain the strategy circle while improving on player’s quality of play.
It's not necessarily that the automatic distribution of mana each turn takes away from economy since economy is just increasing the pace at which you build your resources and there is still value in that. But what it does do is create a much higher level of consistency for aggro and midrange decks, to the point that most aggro decks bleed into midrange because they can. In Magic, when running aggro, it's a balance of how many lands to try and maintain in your starting hand to get going versus how many you'll need in the end. So you run much lower mana than other deck archetypes and you ideally want 2-3 mana in hand, however you don't want to draw beyond 4-5 mana throughout a game because at a certain point it's redundant. When mana isn't a card that you can draw (like in hearthstone), then you know that essentially everything you are drawing is "gas." You essentially just won't have a dead draw, unlike in Magic. But in allowing players to not have dead draws in the mid-game and also having resources pile up consistently over time there really isn't much of a reason why aggro decks in HS can't play into the 4-5 cost cards where in Magic the highest you'd maybe ever want to go is 4-cost, if that.
To add to that, because resources continue to grow, if your aggro deck (which now has the potential to look more like midrange) can gain resources over the course of the game, you can also start to gain resources equal to the economy player's resources since they have a mana cap. Meaning that how the economy player has to win is by "rushing" into higher cost things that have to be costed in a way that makes up for them needing to take longer to bring out. I'm sure I'm missing some points here, but I think these are some major ones.
I hesitate to call these issues, I just see these as quirks to a system, it's not that it makes any game better or worse. Every system will have aspects that benefit one side of the strategy circle more than the other, but if you are aware of the way your system leans you can account for that and make adjustments to the card's accordingly.
On a systems level, I don't think Hearthstone necessarily lacks economy. You can Wild Growth, draw cards, and build a deck around always having something to spend mana on. There is plenty of design space to enable this play style. Like in Magic, you don't win by having 8 mana available, you win by spending it.
From what I've seen in modern Hearthstone, players don't run out of cards so easy. A third of the cards in your aggro deck might draw or discover another non-land card. "Turn 7: 4-drop, pass" is a lot different than "Turn 7: 3-drop, battlecry draw, 3-drop". The latter appears to have a lower curve, but can spend more mana per turn once out of cards. This kind of content design deemphasizes the aspect of card/curve advantage in the system design.
I've heard tales of Control Warrior fatigue battles that were unpopular and inflated game times. It sounds like Blizzard now tries to err towards making "fun" mistakes in balance and letting players do something every turn.
There's an old article that I read titled "What I know about Magic: the Gathering" by Douglas Buel (dbuel) on BoardGameGeek that echoes your point on the three parts of the circle, though in that case the three types of deck dbuel identifies are Aggro, Combo and Control (which is a seperate axis from the other two), with Midrange and Aggro-Control being derivatives of the Aggro-Control Spectrum. I would suggest reading it since it's very much in line with your observations
In that vein, I feel you didn't touch on how most "Economy" strategies are also combo decks since decks like Storm are in essence game plans to generate either infinite or functionally infinite mana. In your example of Affinity, like you said it is an aggro deck, but the mechanics of the deck are closer to a combo deck based on synergy than on anything resembling an efficient mana curve. This also puts decks like Elves and Tron in this category, because the main strategies of those decks are all about breaking the established rules of magic in regards to mana progression.
Good points. We’re seeing combo as sort of a secondary strategy that can be built with different leanings. You could be a defense based combo deck like splinter twin or a rush based combo that is attempting to win before your opponent can play anything meaningful, like oops all spells. It does get a little tricky with economy based combo and infinite mana. The line between rush and econ becomes a bit fuzzy.
Following up on the call to action - this rules! Love your vids
I wonder now and I will keep this in mind: Should I not violate these three ideas in designing my card game? I suppose it is clear and easy to understand what the cards are trying to do and that's why it's a good idea. Thinking back, many of my fav decks fall into these archetypes. Great vid!
I think the danger zone is when a game piece covers too many of these extremes at the same time. Having to make a choice if a card will act as defense or economy is interesting. When there are no drawbacks or tradeoffs is when things become too obvious.
Great series of discussions
I’d love to hear how this sort of strategic philosophy applies to a bunch of other card games or even stuff like board games or Mobas, even single player games with character customization.
This is interesting to me, because normally when I think about Magic's different archetypes, I think about a triangle of aggro, combo, and control, with midrange being kind of in the middle. And most other archetypes are some mix of the two, for example tempo decks being aggro/control, storm being aggro/combo, and lantern being combo/control. Aggro tends to beat control, control tends to beat combo, combo tends to beat aggro. Midrange is distinct in that it plays for flexibility, so it tries to shift to aggro to beat control, and control to beat aggro. I don't know if I'd really call it defense, though? Since it doesn't play defense that much more than other lists.
I actually think one of the distinctive things in Magic is that there isn't really a defense archetype? More that there are individual defensive cards people slot into decks regardless of whether they're rush or resource. Tons of aggro decks play Bolt, or Thoughtseize, or Fatal Push, for example. Even the most aggro deck I can think of, Legacy Storm, still plays counterspells and Veils for defense. Even prison decks like Lantern usually end up winning by either making the opponent lose the resource game, or by aggro-ing them out before they can recover. That probably has something to do with why sideboards are such a distinctive feature of Magic, TBH, since that's where most of the defensive deckbuilding goes for basically every archetype.
Great points. Part of why we’re seeing this as a circle is that a deck isn’t usually made up of just one extreme, but some percentage of each. This model is at the most macro level of “what am I doing and what is it costing me?”. Seeing defense as interaction I think helps to see its expression in MTG. Evaluating cards for their modularity is also important. Lightning bolt is both a rush card and a defense card in the classic bolt the bird scenario and deciding which mode is the right one is where so much of MTGs strategy comes from. This video is mostly a primer for more to come.
in my mind, aggro slots neatly into rush, combo fits into economy. combo inherently breaks the economy. i considered midrange this slot but ultimately, i think its neater to place midrange and control in the defense role. they have different philosophies on how to beat aggro but that is often their main gameplan.
The tradition archetypes of mtg don’t fit cleanly into rush, econ, defense. We consider the strategy circle one layer more zoomed out than the archetypes. We have an upcoming video about it.
When I first learned about "the StarCraft triangle", I tried to apply it to everything, and found that it didn't always fit nicely. However, one time I found it illuminating was with the 1v1 puzzle game Puyo Puyo.
Matching puyo to make chains is the only action. It both attacks your opponent and defends you from their attacks, so it seemed like just a bigger-number contest at first. The exponential scaling makes long chains strong, so just build big and fire second, right? However, in high level play, you see small, inefficient attacks mixed in while players build up resources for their big attack. A successful small attack can seal off an opponent's resources long enough to use the rest of yours without threat of a counterattack, winning you the game. Rush strategy found!
But where's the tradeoff? A chain meant to rush could instead be extended for the late game, right? Would defense just be the same as attack? Not quite, because of some details in scoring and time. A 2-chain is weak, and can be a big waste for how little it slows the opponent. A 4-chain completely unblocked is nearly impossible to come back from, but gives the opponent a lot more time to react and build a suitable counter. The attacking solution is "power chains". Adding more puyo to each chain link adds damage, though less efficiently than using the same puyo to make more links. A power 2-chain can be a threatening rush, but uses board space inefficiently if you convert it into your late game long chain. You could defend with a similar attack, or do so more efficiently with a 3 or 4 chain, since you don't care about the speed. Distinct defense found!
But how do defense and econ differ? It comes down to how quickly you can activate that defensive 3- or 4-chain as you're building up. A single-player strategy may use the pieces and board space very efficiently, but have long stretches of time where it can't construct an appropriately sized subchain. A defensive strategy accepts oversized chain links and imperfect space usage in order to stay close enough to safety to react in time.
These are general descriptions, but in practice, a skilled player can sometimes extend their planned 2-double efficiently or find an incidental 3-chain attack while just trying to build their main chain. High level matches are a great watch as you see players constantly shift their playstyle to match their opponent's options second to second. You can really feel the triangle, or circle as it were.
Great insights about Puyo Puyo! Makes me curious about its applications of indirect interaction on other genres.
Good point, it's interesting to compare! Strategy games seem to use hidden information to keep you from foiling any deviation from the center. Puyo has perfect information on your opponent, and so has to compensate by being fast, being hard to process, and using random pieces to force you into different corners. There are definitely major tradeoffs. I wonder what's in the middle...
Thanks for the video!
I like to think about "aggro" and "control" as relatives. No deck IS aggro. Aggro is something that a deck is in a given match. The player doing the agression in a match is being the aggro, and the player on the receiving end is being the Control.
If you construct a deck to be agressive by default, but in a given match you end up on the control position, you should adjust your mindset. If you keep trying to be aggro, you will end up being out raced and lose. Same thing for a more controly deck that dont adjust itself to take on the agression when it should.
Understanding this relative position and learning to adapt is what separare the great players from the masses hehe
PS: Curiously, Kemet has 3 colors. Attack, defense and economy. At least until they added a forth in a expansion hehe
I think mana can be separated from the deck successfully, design-wise. While no card game has seen the same level of success that mtg has, there are plenty of critically acclaimed games that successfully designed manascrew out of their systems (or at least greatly mitigated it): ashes: rise of the Phoenixborn, sorcery:contested realm, flesh and blood, game of thrones lcg, legend of 5 rings lcg, etc.
Where would you place jund in the circle? I always thought what makes jund a deck is all the 2 for 1s, so I'd be a economy deck. But you mention midrange to be somewhere in between rush and defence, which also makes sense. I'm confused :p
Jund is interesting. Maybe it depends on the era, but I think certain cards act as economy, but overall I’d say its strength lies in its ability to interact while applying pressure. Thoughtseize, tarmogoyf, lightning bolt, maelstrom pulse, each of these cards slots into an aggressive defense(interaction) strategy. While some cards the deck runs are 2 for 1s, not many are dedicated economy cards in card draw and/or land ramp. Sometimes Jund has played a mana dork, but that’s about it.
Keep in mind that the circle is labeling extremes and each deck is a different shaped triangle in the center of the circle. No deck is likely to be all of one extreme as the individual cards in your deck lean in different directions. I’m seeing Jund’s triangle as defense first, rush second, economy third. But, I could see an argument for otherwise.
So this idea is further expanded upon by Chapin's Array. Breaking down MTG decks into different parts of the clock.
Oh interesting! I hadn’t seen this before, but I like it. Fits very well into part 2. I’ll be sure to include this and credit Chapin.
Attack is trying to win, defense is trying to not lose, economy is gaining resources to do either.
1. Principle of Fire 2. Card Advantage 3. Tempo (as a concept not archetype)
You're very focused on the circle but you aren't thinking about the interior, jund is a central strategy that trys to adapt to it's opponent. It would rush control, or defend against rush, while trying to grind advantage.
Especially in a game like magic with such a huge volume of effects doing all 3 is very likely, it's how much of each you are doing.
Jund is a great example, modern jund can have no spells costing over 2, most of which trade 2-1 and has a high amount of removal. It's not as agro as mono red swiftspear burn, it's not as defensive as a mono black control, it's not as economy as mono green ramp. But it combines them all and flexes to it's opponents weakness.
Good observation. Part 2 will focus on how specific strategies form a triangle in the center of the circle.
I work on combat design on a fighting game. Would you guys ever have an interest in discussion about that and some of the design overlap? There's an old adage that says when a fg player gets old, they start playing tcgs
Haha. Well, we aren’t experts in the genre, but there’s always something to learn.
@@distractionmakers well lmk, I'm always happy to talk design of any kind
Great video to think about my deckbuilding. Why not call it the strategy triangle though? I mean, you have 3 angles...😂
We have seen others present it as a triangle, but we felt like it implied an end state to a particular extreme. The circle implies the ability to move between states. But yeah a triangle could also work haha.
@@distractionmakers hmmm make sense, fluidity is an important aspect to highlight. Playing all the archetypes or leaning in all the strategies in this case, helped me a lot to improve in TCGs in general. Having a broad sense of all the possible paths in a game gives you a much more accurate picture of the pros and cons of your chosen path and its interactions with the other ones.
@@distractionmakers Ever heard of the rushdown/grapple/zoner triad within fighting games?
I like and subscribe
W00t! First upvote and first comm.
Now I want to know what these guys would think of the One Piece TCG.
I love Stax, but never liked the design of Lodestone Golem. It just does too much, it is already a solved puzzle out of the box. It is aggressive (rush) but also taxes your opponent which has the double effect of defense by suppression and economic gain through relative ressource advantage.
As a magic player, I am confused and enraged.
Nice
Aggro is cheap to netdeck in most MTG formats due to the usual low average card rarity, that is a large part of why it spikes early. There is a reason Aggro really appeared slightly later than Control or Midrange, you need the resource distribution curves and card power tradeoffs to be well understood to design it in the first place.
Funny enough, Control will probably take over MTG's Standard format (even more than currently) immediately at the next (Summer 2024) rotation: Aggro is losing most of its core cards and B/UB Control is losing little of value. It is the one where you don't need to know how to handle the new environment this time.
Personally I think along a three axis cube when considering design: Aggro-Control on one axis with Isolating-Combining on the other and Economy filling it out. The first axis is about how the build focuses on attack or disruption. The second axis is how much your cards interact among themselves, the stereotypical control player view of what RG Stompy does (burn cards and vanilla creatures only) on one end and the crazy 10 card combo for instant win stuff on the other. The third axis of course is how much effort is being put into generation of resources over time. Every build option fits somewhere in that space. Of course the specifics change depending on the game: lack of effective resources is why Yugioh basically does not have a rush strategy any more for example.
And yes, Thoughtcast was more of a problem than Ravager in that silly deck. You thought they were finally out of steam then suddenly they have everything they need again for exactly... U mana.
and then there's yugioh, where a deck is considered non-competitive, if not downright bad, if it doesn't excel in all 3.
I'd like to tell you I am an ex casual player but truth is there's no casual side to ygo: your deck is either good or bad, that's it. The game is broken down to its fundamentals and there's no variety: if you're playing a blue eyes white deck there's no different take on the deck you're always playing the same thing in its current best iteration (ie whichever new mechanic decided to bless the old archetype for nostalgia sake)
I did one of those
1:16 "comment"
the algorithm don't care about substance
You're welcome :)
Again the Rush, Defense, and Economy strategy sound just like Civ games! First thing that comes to my mind is Age of Empires.
the zirgling rush strategy is what the cpus from warcraft 2 tides of darkness did, just with knights and then archers. It was brutal. As a kid I always thought they were cheating.
The Pokemon TCG has gotten to the point where rush decks are super consistent. It's so bad that they had to make a casual tcg app. :(
Why not use the standard terms: "Aggro, Combo, Control"?
It would be aggro, midrange and control
As much as I hate Hearthstone - and boy do I ever hate that WoW-skinned slot machine - it’s mana system makes **way more sense** than MTG’s. We’re supposed to be wizards slinging spells but we’re also dependent on being lucky enough to draw lands to cast those spells? How does that make any sense? Having a consistent mana base makes way more sense thematically and helps shift the focus of the game toward skill rather than luck (unless you’re Hearthstone of course, in which case just make everything RNG and completely destroy your game).
I think it's great you analyze game design through something popular like MTG. It's the first tcg and the best one, what are you supposed to do? Talk about ygo? Lmao I mean I guess you could if you were describing what to absolutely avoid.
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“Every strategy needs a weakness”
So here is my problem: what is the weakness of landfall and lands decks?
Their economy is to grow mana and sudo draw it out the deck. They profit in many ways but in commander it’s taboo to mass land destroy (MLD).
Using up slots in my deck construction to ward off in suboptimal ways extra land drops is a real bummer. There is no feels fair situation. It’s one way or another.
Commander is plagued with such problems and I’ve played against enough decks to see the ramp ones usually take the win. The problem also is that it’s hard to convince the table to turn on someone who has no creatures in play but 9 lands on turn 5. Usually they players threat asses based on creature and no land permanents on board instead and let the lands players run away with a win.
Yeaaaah the trend of turning lands into spells is really troubling and warping every format. The legacy lands deck is also extremely powerful because there are so few vectors of interaction.
As for commander, the strategy circle still exists, but looks quite a bit different. Each part of the circle can fit inside of each deck so players can move between them more dynamically during gameplay. Rush is presented as combo, defense is almost entirely proactive to save your own combo, and every deck is built as an economy strategy first. 40 life really warps the game and is a “defense” against rush built into the system. Commander damage tries to fix this, but you still have to deal 63 damage to 1v1s 20.
@@distractionmakers I have built a cEDH slicer deck which functions really interesting when focusing on rush. It may just be the best rush commander ever designed. But defense does stop it. 🤷♂️
Applying the circle to commander is very interesting since economy is such a main stay component in all good deck construction.
Players need to learn that the tradeoff for ramping is not developing your board state and therefore not deploying blockers (it also generally tends to happen at Sorcery speed more often than Instant speed which means it's difficult to hold up interaction). You need to punish the lack of defenses in order to enforce that tradeoff, or otherwise it's as if a tradeoff hasn't been made and that ramp player simply gets to profit for free.
(As an aside, this is a big reason why Selvala, Heart of the Wilds is such a powerful Commander deck outside of CEDH; Selvala's ability allows you to ramp *by* developing your board state, and therefore you are building your economy and offense/defense at the same time. The trick in optimization is to build the deck in such a way that you can either consistently protect Selvala herself without diluting the deck too much, or pack enough supplementary economy cards that losing Selvala doesn't hamstring you to the point of playing only one threat at a time in the mid-late game versus three opponents, without forfeiting that signature advantage Selvala's purpose is to grant you.
This is also partially why historically, large bodies with card draw on them tended to appear in UG and not mono-G, while even as Green received more card draw it tended to appear on spells and check creature stats; the extra instability in mana economy or lack of board development allowed for some balance. E.g. Rishkar's Expertise and successors, which provide you card advantage, mana advantage, and the opportunity to deploy boardstate all in one action on one card... The singular thing keeping them even remotely tied down to a modicum of balance is that they still tend to require the player to have *previously* invested in developing a respectable asset by size or volume on the board to leverage through checking creature characteristics for a value, as well as not being creatures themselves still means the entire deck can't be composed entirely of redundancies of this effect.)