Interestingly, this seems to pointing at the heart of the thing that I don’t like about Magic, which I’ve long thought of as ‘combos’ (and sometimes as ‘good cards’). That is, most of the Magic decks that I want to make are something like tribal creature decks, where I gradually accumulate Slivers or Knights or whatever (and, ideally, the power ramp looks quadratic instead of linear, but that’s not essential). [I think Zvi, at one point, called this strategy of playing Magic the game of ‘looking at pretty pictures’.]
Most of the Magic decks that get made by my friends who like Magic are closer to “here’s a combination of three cards that means ‘I win’, and the deck is built around getting that combo out before the other person can get their combo out.” Multiplayer Magic games (common among my friends) often have as a dominant strategy “sit there attempting to not look dangerous, until you can kill everyone in the same turn.”
L5R had a card-by-card mulligan, which exacerbated this problem even more, I think, altho the replacement of lands with a fixed mana income (that could be saved across turns) did a lot to reduce the need for mulligans at all.
Interestingly, this seems to pointing at the heart of the thing that I don’t like about Magic, which I’ve long thought of as ‘combos’ (and sometimes as ‘good cards’). That is, most of the Magic decks that I want to make are something like tribal creature decks, where I gradually accumulate Slivers or Knights or whatever (and, ideally, the power ramp looks quadratic instead of linear, but that’s not essential). [I think Zvi, at one point, called this strategy of playing Magic the game of ‘looking at pretty pictures’.]
Most of the Magic decks that get made by my friends who like Magic are closer to “here’s a combination of three cards that means ‘I win’, and the deck is built around getting that combo out before the other person can get their combo out.” Multiplayer Magic games (common among my friends) often have as a dominant strategy “sit there attempting to not look dangerous, until you can kill everyone in the same turn.”
L5R had a card-by-card mulligan, which exacerbated this problem even more, I think, altho the replacement of lands with a fixed mana income (that could be saved across turns) did a lot to reduce the need for mulligans at all.