Anyway, one thing that distinguishes Magic from other games is that it keeps changing: every few months, there’s a new set released, which changes the relative effectiveness of various strategies. You have to keep experimenting and learning in order to continue to do well; figuring out what the best deck to play at a tournament basically requires Doing Science, and it can—and does—go wrong in all the same ways that real science goes wrong.
Agreed, but I think that a strong point against Magic is the large amount of money that it costs to build a competitive deck. I enjoyed playing it for a few years, but eventually ran out of steam (partially for this reason, partially because I especially enjoy B/W control, which wasn’t so good anymore.)
Hardly at the same level, but I wonder how much can be gained just by doing something like switching from Chess to something like Chess960. (Hardly at the same level because it’s just a one-time injection of randomness; if people had been playing that all along, there still would not be new chess expansions released every few months.)
Sorry.
Anyway, one thing that distinguishes Magic from other games is that it keeps changing: every few months, there’s a new set released, which changes the relative effectiveness of various strategies. You have to keep experimenting and learning in order to continue to do well; figuring out what the best deck to play at a tournament basically requires Doing Science, and it can—and does—go wrong in all the same ways that real science goes wrong.
Agreed, but I think that a strong point against Magic is the large amount of money that it costs to build a competitive deck. I enjoyed playing it for a few years, but eventually ran out of steam (partially for this reason, partially because I especially enjoy B/W control, which wasn’t so good anymore.)
Yeah, Magic is ridiculously expensive when compared to many other games. :(
Hardly at the same level, but I wonder how much can be gained just by doing something like switching from Chess to something like Chess960. (Hardly at the same level because it’s just a one-time injection of randomness; if people had been playing that all along, there still would not be new chess expansions released every few months.)