You get something like this with competitive multiplayer commander in Magic. As your resources (mana) increase each turn, your ability to win the game grows exponentially, while your ability to restrict what other players are doing grows linearly. The reason this happens is because there are powerful combos available that allow one player to instantly defeat the other three players, and that your interaction (answers to other player’s combos) typically only stops one player at a time. On the face of it, it’s better to spend two mana tutoring your win condition instead of two mana stopping one other player, because stopping the other player puts you both behind relative to the other two people who are sitting at the table. On the other hand, winning the game stops everyone else!
As a result, the people who tend to win are those who attempt to combo off after someone else already has, because the other players have wasted their resources on stopping the initial threat and don’t have the mana left to interact with them.
While competitive commander doesn’t have the same lose condition you’re describing, this resource problem encourages a lot of bad Molochian behavior from a fun perspective. For example, you’re strongly encouraged to lie about not having answers and forcing other people to pay the cost to interact (usually through something called priority bullying), in order to get ahead. You’re also incentivized to misrepresent the severity of threats, so that people are less likely to interact with you and more likely to interact with your opponents. Depending on how much you want to push social boundries, you can also do things like commit to deals and then break them the moment it wins you the game, burning your immediate political capital for victory right now at the long term cost of distrust in every future game you play with the same people.
Another, rarer example of a molochian strategy is to force your opponents to play through an entire combo. Some combos can be extremely long and convoluted (usually because they’re the non-deterministic kind, Kraak forcing people to flip dozens of coins is a favorite example), so people will usually end the game to keep on playing something else once the see the opponent get enough resources that them winning is very likely. But occasionally, you’ll get players who want to see the entire thing executed by hand, in order for them to provide that it’s possible. This can happen because it’s RNG dependent (maybe all 15 coinflips end up tails and you fizzle), or because the comboing player is bluffing and doesn’t actually have a win condition. 95% of the time, the result of this is that everyone at the table gets to wait an extra 20 minutes for the match to end in the outcome of the guy winning (because they’ve already generated so many resources), and 5% of the time you find out that they were lying and trying to scare everyone else into conceeding because they don’t have an actual win condition.
TLDR: In CeDH, or competitive commander for Magic, the best strategies for winning are often a race to the bottom in terms of the amount of fun that people have with the game. Because there’s an incentive for lying to other players and getting them to waste their resources, players who pursue socially toxic strategies that drive people not to play again end up winning more.
The only magic format that I found consistently fun was draft. I think the game is just not very well optimized for expected fun. Like, you have to carefully balance LANDS with your real cards, and most of the lands are nearly forced to be boring, and even if you get the balance right sometimes you don’t get to place because the lands don’t come up. I guess this is partially a skill issue but I played for years and this happened to me and all of my usual opponents regularly as far as I remember. Why would you design a game so that you can get unlucky and not get to play, like, at all? And then on top of that often someone just gets a wild combo and stomps and it’s not fun to get stomped and it’s not that fun to stump either.
I also love draft, although I prefer to curate it myself. I like that it tests all of the skills of magic, including drafting, deck building, and piloting on the fly.
For example, this is a synergy cube I created a few months back. The overview page has examples of decks that emerge naturally while drafting certain synergies, although there are plenty more for someone creative to find. I think you’d like this sort of experience, because none of these cards wins individually, and the mana curve is so low that your threats will very rarely end up bottlenecked by land drops.
You get something like this with competitive multiplayer commander in Magic. As your resources (mana) increase each turn, your ability to win the game grows exponentially, while your ability to restrict what other players are doing grows linearly. The reason this happens is because there are powerful combos available that allow one player to instantly defeat the other three players, and that your interaction (answers to other player’s combos) typically only stops one player at a time. On the face of it, it’s better to spend two mana tutoring your win condition instead of two mana stopping one other player, because stopping the other player puts you both behind relative to the other two people who are sitting at the table. On the other hand, winning the game stops everyone else!
As a result, the people who tend to win are those who attempt to combo off after someone else already has, because the other players have wasted their resources on stopping the initial threat and don’t have the mana left to interact with them.
While competitive commander doesn’t have the same lose condition you’re describing, this resource problem encourages a lot of bad Molochian behavior from a fun perspective. For example, you’re strongly encouraged to lie about not having answers and forcing other people to pay the cost to interact (usually through something called priority bullying), in order to get ahead. You’re also incentivized to misrepresent the severity of threats, so that people are less likely to interact with you and more likely to interact with your opponents. Depending on how much you want to push social boundries, you can also do things like commit to deals and then break them the moment it wins you the game, burning your immediate political capital for victory right now at the long term cost of distrust in every future game you play with the same people.
Another, rarer example of a molochian strategy is to force your opponents to play through an entire combo. Some combos can be extremely long and convoluted (usually because they’re the non-deterministic kind, Kraak forcing people to flip dozens of coins is a favorite example), so people will usually end the game to keep on playing something else once the see the opponent get enough resources that them winning is very likely. But occasionally, you’ll get players who want to see the entire thing executed by hand, in order for them to provide that it’s possible. This can happen because it’s RNG dependent (maybe all 15 coinflips end up tails and you fizzle), or because the comboing player is bluffing and doesn’t actually have a win condition. 95% of the time, the result of this is that everyone at the table gets to wait an extra 20 minutes for the match to end in the outcome of the guy winning (because they’ve already generated so many resources), and 5% of the time you find out that they were lying and trying to scare everyone else into conceeding because they don’t have an actual win condition.
TLDR: In CeDH, or competitive commander for Magic, the best strategies for winning are often a race to the bottom in terms of the amount of fun that people have with the game. Because there’s an incentive for lying to other players and getting them to waste their resources, players who pursue socially toxic strategies that drive people not to play again end up winning more.
The only magic format that I found consistently fun was draft. I think the game is just not very well optimized for expected fun. Like, you have to carefully balance LANDS with your real cards, and most of the lands are nearly forced to be boring, and even if you get the balance right sometimes you don’t get to place because the lands don’t come up. I guess this is partially a skill issue but I played for years and this happened to me and all of my usual opponents regularly as far as I remember. Why would you design a game so that you can get unlucky and not get to play, like, at all? And then on top of that often someone just gets a wild combo and stomps and it’s not fun to get stomped and it’s not that fun to stump either.
I also love draft, although I prefer to curate it myself. I like that it tests all of the skills of magic, including drafting, deck building, and piloting on the fly.
For example, this is a synergy cube I created a few months back. The overview page has examples of decks that emerge naturally while drafting certain synergies, although there are plenty more for someone creative to find. I think you’d like this sort of experience, because none of these cards wins individually, and the mana curve is so low that your threats will very rarely end up bottlenecked by land drops.
That’s interesting—I used to play with my brother’s cube but never thought of building a cube as part of the game.