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I hate Magic: the Gathering. There, I said it. hate pretty much any kind of collectible game for one primary reason (other than expense): the need for system mastery. Instead of needing an overall understanding of the system, players need to know the minutiae of the game. For instance: I can see that my enemy is playing a chartreuse deck, which means he’s probably relying on Topkin’s Magnificent Frying Pan. I could counter it with a Persimmon of Excellence, but I don’t have $75 for the single, so I’ll use a combo of Discordant Wand and Socks of Barbarian Ragewool. Now to counter me, he’ll need to play The Turnip of Power…

That’s not winning because through tactics; it’s winning through system knowledge. It’s like a convoluted game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. And it costs a lot.

Mastery As a Game Feature

Despite my personal feelings, our official stance at GeekSpeaker is “play what you like.” Clearly, collectible card games fill a niche, or else people wouldn’t play them. Magic, Pokemon, Game of Thrones, etc. (does Cooking Mama have CCG yet?) all do things that other games don’t. They provide a competitive forum for players that doesn’t rely on athletic abilities like twitch muscles and hand-eye coordination. Despite this, they allow their players to be social. You can sit down with your buddies and play Magic (with side-talk and and drinks and everything!).

Unlike chess or a boardgame, CCGs allow players to strategize and customize in advance, creating your own armies/spellbooks/shoe collections. This is the beauty of them: they turn system mastery into a feature. Poring over new decks and devising card combinations gives players an edge. It scratches the itch for preparation and optimization. A person can be objectively “good” at Magic, the way they can chess or football, all they way up to professional M:tG players. You can’t do that with roleplaying games (though if you figure out how, let me know). Even in closed tournaments (without premade decks), system mastery is a skill players must hone.

Personally, this level of system mastery doesn’t appeal to me. Nonetheless, it was this sort of thinking that that allowed Wizards of the Coast to save D&D…from itself.

How Magic Saved RPGs

By 1997, D&D was dead in the water. I hate to trash a particular edition, but I’m going to: 2e’s mechanics were draconian and inaccessible. According to D&D lore, Lorraine Williams was a horrendous sea-hag banned in-house playing, rendering playtesting impossible. Whether this rumor is true, TSR was flopping as a corporation due to mismanagement by a number of parties. A handful of other games had sprung up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but none of these had captured the nation’s imagination the way D&D had.

Enter Wizards of the Coast. In 1993, the publication of Magic: the Gathering practically re-invented the gaming industry in 1993. The game exploded in popularity and Wizards bought D&D in 1997. Sure, this was meant as a business decision and not a favor to gamers, but it would’ve been easy enough to create their own game–or to buy the license and sit on it until an interested party was willing to pay more for it. After three years of development, they released D&D 3.0, and it was good. Regardless of your current opinion of 3e/3.5/Pathfinder, the system redefined the RPG genre. The introduction of feats and skill points streamlined the game and offered players vast customization options. More importantly, it paved the way for the revolutionary Open Game License, something that allowed numerous small companies to create d20 compatible RPG products across any genre. It was like a version of Rifts that didn’t look like it was edited by M.C. Escher.

Ivory Tower Game Design

There was only one problem. The flexibility of 3e forced players to become “experts” in the system. Now, most RPGs encourage some level of mastery. Where 3e faltered is that its options range from the insanely powerful (druid, cleric, Quicken Spell) to the utterly useless (monks, Toughness, Spring Attack past level 10, monks). An article written by Monte Cook explains this problem:

Magic also has a concept of “Timmy cards.” These are cards that look cool, but aren’t actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they’ve figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn’t exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others. Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it’s not the best choice of feat. If you can use martial weapons, a longsword is better than many other one-handed weapons. And so on — there are many other, far more intricate examples. (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn’t design it away — we wanted to reward mastery of the game.) There’s a third concept that we took from Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept “Ivory Tower Game Design.” (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it’s got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves — players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.

As Monte Cook said, the designers of 3e weren’t trying to create a vast power disparity, and I believe him. However, some critics have taken Monte Cook’s admission as proof that D&D 3e is riddled with “trap options,” designed to trick new players. That’s ludicrous, in my opinion. The truth is, the designers probably just didn’t expect people to play in certain ways, so some options became vastly more powerful when taken out of their intended use.

Unfortunately, we–and a lot of others–did play that way, and “pimp my character” became a fun mental exercise. An entire sub-community formed around it on the optimization boards. The problem? As Tom mentioned in our podcast, practical advice became harder and harder to acquire and the system began to bloat with extra options. Worse, it left game developers with a unique conundrum: should they balance their encounters around an optimized group using five buffs, or a non-optimized group using one?

Personally, the emphasis I placed on optimization in the heyday of 3.5 burned me out. My playstyle had moved further and further from what I enjoy (telling cool stories with my friends) to number-crunching. D20’s power scale lead to 4e’s focus on streamlining and balance, which just weren’t for me. Our official stance is that both games kick goblin arse because they (mostly) achieve their mechanical goals and players happily play them.

The lesson here is that system mastery is a feature in CCGs, but has a tenuous relationship with tabletop games.