>>97495637
Mostly, they weren't.

>>97495637
They didn't know anything about making a card game and were only making stuff that sounded like it would work. Magic was only going to start actually having some thought put into the sets after the failure of Homelands.

>>97495637
Garfield making a good system with lands and mana was basically a complete accident. He was a complete retard.

>>97495715
And even then, lands being distinct cards in the main deck has a bunch of really awkward influences on the competitive scene from the ceiling it places before they screw you.

>>97495732
Nah that's good actually. It invites a ton of interesting deckbuilding challenges and it's what makes the color system so interesting because there is actual strategy and calculations involved with taking multiple colors, not to mention all the cards that fetch lands.

A separate land deck completely ruins the point of having lands because you don't have to give up any gas, ever. You always have precisely the amount of resources you need. Pokémon having it made the game insanely worse in every way.

>>97495637
i dont play shit games what is this

>>97495751
The problem is the "ceiling" of win-rate imposed by it being so high that it severely limits the tournament dynamics, such that the sort of enduring performance onlookers latch onto can't exist. Thus the issue with overlooking cheating, because that's utterly required to HAVE "star players" drawing eyes.

>>97495637
IIRC, Garfield didn't think people would go out and buy more then one of the same card. People would just buy a deck, MAYBE trade a few times, but ultimately just play with what they had. So if you did happen to get a Black Lotus, or Ancestral Recall, or Time Walk, it'd only be a one of and wouldn't be enough to break the game especially with how low the power level was for most of the cards.

>>97496042
Also that most players wouldn't research what else exists, so if they get blindsided by a lotus, it's more of a wow factor thing than an "ugh, powergamer over here running the meta deck".

>>97496042
>>97496128
Be fair to the guy who invented a medium, what is eminently predictable with even a data set of 1 is not nearly as predictable with no data sets.

>>97495977
>The problem is the "ceiling" of win-rate imposed by it being so high that it severely limits the tournament dynamics,
....not really? What are you talking about?

>>97496179
I don't recall the exact numbers, but loss rates to raw volume of land cards are high enough that even with best-of-three for individual matchups tournament records remain constrained below the sort of streaks that make a given player noteworthy enough to maintain an audience. Without such players, the attention on tournaments is greatly reduced, thus reducing the concentration of competitive customers who'll buy into card power, thus crippling the effectiveness of one of the few levers WotC has for reliably keeping Hasbro's profoundly retarded management off their ass.

Even outside letting blatant cheating pass, this is why Magic: the Gathering has a long list of very weird tournament functions: They're to skip "star players" past the chaff so that they are exposed to less chances to whiff on raw land count to keep their reputation up. Which sucks ass to play through and is terribly unsatisfying for spectators.

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>>97496299
That is simply not true. I can name several famous players just off the top of my head- Kai Budde, Bob Mahers, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, etc. that and winrates for tournaments are literally public.

>>97496318
...Because WotC enables a lot of fuckery to get around the game's wiff-causing functions.

>>97496438
source: I made it up

>>97496154
I don't WANT to be fair. I want to shit on people and hobbies. That's what this whole board exists for.

>>97496483
No, the source is barely-remembered drama videos with wildly varying amounts of receipts from at least five years ago.

>>97496537
No, the board is to contain the wh40kiddie's autism, anon. Making stupid claims about MTG is just a bonus.

>>97495715
you can tell this is true because without exception, everything following magic with garfield's name on it is a flop.

>>97495732
>>97495977
>>97496299
>>97496438
>>97496608
schizos have to come up with shit like this instead of just admitting that lands are an impeccable elegant system that is an irreplaceable part of a good tcg (making magic the only good tcg)

>>97497495
Cards that do NOTHING but let you use your other cards as a sacrosanct bedrock of the game everything must be shackled to is necessarily creating awful scenarios where you fail not only to get the right answers, but to get anything going at all because of a hard prerequisite. Which is a problem for the good-faith competitive players because it means that no matter how skilled they are, they can be rendered wholly helpless by the basic design of the game. The same feel-bad issue applies to "hard" control decks that make serious headway into shutting down EVERYTHING you try to do, and the same logic extends to considering them a design mistake.

Take a look at /v/ rants about forced 50% win rates. And that's with intentionally designed systems imposing further difficulties as your apparent skill increases, not something that slaps EVERYBODY eventually no matter who they're up against. People who play Magic: the Gathering want to play it, not go-fish.

>>97497575
>t. "i put too few lands in my deck and keep wondering why i dont draw lands"
genuinely and earnestly filtered

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>>97497575
Mtg has enough variance to make it less skill dependent than chess, but mtg is still very skill dependent at high levels. Sure it's possible for anyone to draw so bad that a specific match is unwinnable, but deck building, mulliganing and playing to your outs provide enough tools to manage that variance that a skilled player will win at a consistently higher rate than a bad player. The rate of games decided purely by luck of the draw is quite low, even if all games are affected by luck.
Pic related is a game decided by luck, but if you recognize any face in it then your claim that mtg can't have skill based stars is false.

>>97497488

This. Garfield was a one hit wonder that created one of the biggest game successes ever purely by accident.

>>97497629
NTA but even if you have literally the best possible mana about 20% of your games will be autowin or autolose because either you or your opponent drew too many lands or too few. There's simply no way around this with the system as it currently exists. You can see it on the Pro Tour, best players piloting the best decks and they too get fucked regularly by pure land RNG.

>>97497641
>source: i watched a YouTube video a few years ago

>>97497647
Literally watch the pros play. Even if your deck is _perfect_ you simply will completely randomly draw like shit and get fucked. It's a simple mathematical inevitability and the only way to stop that would be making every card a double-faced land/nonland card.

>>97497630
Constructed Magic has quite a low skill ceiling actually. It's rather easy to reach a skill level where you literally never make a play error, barring outside factors like fatigue (which is a valid factor I admit - to be the best you have to play correctly even when you're about to pass out).

Where most actual skill manifests is deck design, but deck design has kind of been outsourced now (all the successful players work in teams to design and test decks, and they rely on play data collected from hundreds of thousands of matches played online). Drafting is the last remaining bastion of true skill, as it is "deck design" that you have to do on the fly, unassisted.

>>97497629
Putting more lands only reduces odds of getting too few, only reaching zero at the truly silly extreme of 54, and increases the odds of getting too many.

>>97497630
How many cheating scandals and wonky mechanisms to funnel them past early rounds do you need cited to get that the "skill-based stars" are artificially inflated beyond the game's natural carrying capacity?

>>97497658
Technically, you "could" have a gap of 6, plus empty-board costs for draws like discards, life, or giving the opponent something. Also pretty sure that the Warcraft TCG did that.

>>97497673
I'd hesitate to go THAT far, memorizing play-lines for most metas is non-trivial and it can very quickly pick up little variations that explode the decision-space. It's enough that the extra info has been explicitly mentioned in several hand-checking discards.

>>97497634
What about RoboRally and King of Monsters?

>>97497495
There are no good tcg. Wipe your arse and go for a walk.

>>97497658
Oh my god, a card game where you can get bad draws?
Grow up.

>>97497673
I agree that draft is more skill testing, but I don't think many constructed games are played flawlessly (and thus deterministically). It depends on the match up obviously, but there are decks with sufficiently broad decision trees that optimal play is really unlikely.
>>97497692
You too can have byes in tournaments by winning qualifiers and previous tournaments anon, have you considered that you might just be bad at the game?

>>97497731
>You too can have byes in tournaments by winning qualifiers and previous tournaments anon, have you considered that you might just be bad at the game?
It's a point of principle. Byes bypass the chance of a whiff, and thus artificially inflate "pro-player" careers with a win-more embedded into the tournament format, pressured by the fact that lands brick matches without recourse.

>>97497744
This shit literally doesn't happen. You have mulligans, they give you infinite tools to fix your mana like fetches, landcycling and MDFCs and you're still too retarded to play them. There is literally a competitive deck in pauper right now who runs four (4) lands and it can still play just fine without having fear of bricking.

>>97497488
King of Tokyo is pretty kino. Great Dalmuti too

>>97497488
Netrunner is good

>>97497692
>How many cheating scandals and wonky mechanisms to funnel them past early rounds do you need cited
Sleight of hand is also a skill you need to train if you want to go pro :^)

>>97495696
Good times though, I started with 4th and I honestly used to have a lot of fun with the few guys I knew that played.
Was it homelands or fallen empires that fell flat?

>>97497488
Couldn't care less about magic, RoboRally is pure kino. Pure fun and joy fucking over the other players, watching them get fucked, while getting fucked over yourself.

>>97498315
Homelands. It was so impressively shit they literally had to mandate players to use the cards by implementing a rule where players HAD to bring a certain amount of cards from each legal set. Because otherwise nobody would touch any packs. This is why people were bringing shit like Serrated Arrows into comp play, because Wizards was literally forcing them to.

>>97498315
Homelands is so bad that if you were foolish enough to draft it, there's a pretty decent chance of stalemating because both players end up with a wall of high toughness, low power creatures and no way to meaningfully deal with or bypass them. A ton of creatures from the set gain bonuses when blocking and everything is weak and overcosted. It's not even fun in its own limited format.

>>97499123
Most of the early sets end up like this because there is simply not enough evasion or tools to break stalemates around.

>>97495715
>>97497488
>>97497634
Spectromancer was quite alright

Duel Masters did mana better.

>>97499251
Not really.

>>97499251
if duel masters was so good, where is it now?

>>97499251
It didn't really. It's the mana system with all the fun parts taken out. There are no longer any interesting decisions in deckbuilding regarding mana fixing or land count. You always have all the mana you want and all the gas you need. It's boring.

>>97499438
The most popular tcg in japan.

>>97500703
Mogged by Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon

>>97500703
That's like being first in the special olympics

>>97497693
>What about RoboRally and King of Monsters?

I can't speak for the other one, but Roborally is a HORRIBLE fucking design. Interestingly it's horrible in the exact same way Artifact, another Garfield flop, was: it is trivially easy to make the correct decisions, but the game's inherent randomness ruins your turn regardless of your decisions. This feels unbelievably bad to the players, having your actions undermined constantly not by other players, but by the game itself.

>>97497984
It happens all the time and you're delusional.
>no fear of bricking
There isn't a single deck in Magic history that has "no fear of bricking".

>>97497712
That is bad design. You grow up.

>>97503971
Land Spy and Belcher both literally, physically, cannot brick ;)

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>>97503971
Again, this game has so many mana sources, land fetching and card selection tools you can literally run a deck with four (4) lands in a format with only commons and be extremely effective. There is a variation of the deck that runs ONE land. You are literally just retarded.

>>97497488
Netrunner is leagues better than MtG and it was murdered because of corporate politics.

>>97504155
It died because core 2.0 did not reinvigorate interest.

>>97504155
lmao no netrunner was a meme. asymmetrical ccg is a hilariously bad idea.

>>97504167
This is the kinda shit opinion that prevails on acg now. I weep for the future of this board.

>>97497692
Well, one would be a good start. Can you cite one?