Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outside the game as in Magic the Gathering. Dominion randomly sets 10 cards to be accessible to players, out of ~500 for an extremely huge number of combinations, such that each 10-set is always new. Dominion shines as card value, and the value of card interactions (e.g., in a combo or engine), can vary significantly by the random 10-set context. In a sense this gives a tremendous sense of novelty, significantly more than playing Magic the Gathering.
Just compare an old set to a modern set: 1995 https://scryfall.com/sets/4ed 2024 https://scryfall.com/sets/mkm
An abstract oil painting https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/104/stasis An unsettling watercolour https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/181/cave-people
Sometimes less is more! Realism is boring.
A thing I disliked (as a kid) about the old cards, as they transitioned to these more homogenised styles, was how wildly different the cards looked. It didn’t feel like one game, and there were many artistic styles I simply didn’t like.
But looking back now, the old cards artwork is so much more iconic; in part because of the nostalgia, but in part because each card is different from those drawn by other artists, you remember them better apart.
For anybody interested, there is a documentary about the history of the art in D&D: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8888186/ It’s quite interesting.
The cards that you play are ordinary playing cards, but the way you modify how they score and what cards you have in your deck is a cool discovery process.
The one at dominion.games really isn't too bad - not as good as isotropic IMHO but not bad either.
At least the Temple Gates version honors past purchases made on Making Fun dominion, even if they came from a Humble Bundle.
I love all the 3 games you mentioned, but not mtg because card packs should be illegal from my perspective (I know it's a me problem). they can say whatever they want, it is legal gambling
It tends to break down with more than 4 or 5 players - I wish there was a version of it for larger groups to play online.
https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gam...
That's funny: I think it is quite likely that I once found that same trap door and descended that same ladder. It's quite a magical place.
Not that I ever had the chance to play the pre-release version of the game, but the explosion of complexity has made me yearn for exactly this, a "smaller, more limited version"... so much so that I wrote https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ to try and capture it (and also, admittedly, as a bit of a joke/dig)
I believe Garfield also gave creative input during development.
[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-con...
that was like the original bitcoin. anyone who still held on to those cards , especially the power 9 or dual lands, made a killing
Was that a joke or serious? I was enjoying the article until that abrupt end and it just felt dark. A company forcing imprisoned humans to distribute their product?
Are you unfamiliar that slavery is illegal in America except for prisoners?
It's difficult for me to go back and think that the best times for Magic were the moments when he was in charge: Magic's R&D team has done more work on the game that basically anything else in the boardgame industry, or the videogame industry. The need to keep printing new sets at ever speeding cadences (far more than 2 sets a year), causes failing sets, but from a design perspective, I'd argue that the golden age of the game is way past Garfield's intervention. I'd say the golden age of the game was from Invasion in 2000 to Return to Ravnica in 2012. Garfield left the game in better hands in 1995 or so.
And in that environment, it's not pay to win exactly, it's pay for a shot at winning.
Playing with printed cards though is janky. It’s not how the game is meant to be played and contradicts the aesthetic experience. Better to switch to dominion where the intended experience doesn’t revolve around pay to win
Yah, good luck with that. Anyone who has played competitively knows you will absolutely get stomped by a higher skill opponent even if your deck is more powerful on paper unless the discrepancy is ludicrous. Garfield made his game too well to fall to such trite criticisms...he outdid himself, its immune to his own potshots, lol
1) In the original game, "balance" was meant to be achieved through the ante system, so if you loaded up your deck with good rares and managed to lose, you were risking more than your opponent was.
2) There was no competitive collectible card game scene so nobody was thinking about balance, it was just about having fun. Chaos orb was everyone's favorite card when the game first came out.
3) They didn't know that people would collect magic cards in any serious way, so they weren't thinking about resale value or getting people to buy a bunch of cards so they could have the rares. Baseball card and comic book dealers early on were completely uninterested in dealing with magic cards for quite a long while.
4) You're looking backwards with decades of experience of playing collectible card games. It was not at all immediately obvious that moxes and black lotus would be good, and people did not understand either "card-advantage" or "tempo" for many months after the game was released. The early meta was all people trying to get out big minions. It took quite a few months before people started figuring out degenerate decks, and even then, there wasn't a lot of communication between players early on unless you were on a few news groups, and not many people were. A lot of it was just word of mouth.
Yeah, to echo this point exactly: as a kid I remember that it was distinctly disappointing to open a pack and get a boring mana-related card, such as a mox or dual land, in the rare slot. We all wanted cool big creatures instead!
Pretty soon, the usefulness of those mana cards became clearer. But I still recall finding it ridiculous that moxes were selling for a steep $15 at a gaming convention.
I stopped playing a few years later and sold all my good cards. I cringe seeing how much even a lowly Arabian Nights mountain sells for these days...
The hate against arena isn't due to lack of polish or it not working well, it's about what it's trying to do. It's not about collecting or trading cards anymore it's about opening as many loot boxes (packs) as possible.
MTGA let you purchase specific cards, Arena does not and likely never will. That isn't an oversight, that's a conscious choice to get people to spend money on buying more digital packs. That's a big reason it gets hate.
And you can buy individual cards in arena. You can buy wildcards in the store and redeem them for any card of the corresponding rarity. They’re stupid overpriced in many cases but you can’t say it’s not possible.
As for rares I don't think Richard Garfield ever intended to make it an expensive game. Magic is one of if not the first trading card game they didn't really know what they were getting into. They thought people might buy a handful of random cards (not 4x best card) and everyone might use different cards (whatever they had lying around). Closer to traditional kitchen magic. He never intended the game to be so expensive. And mythic rares weren't a thing for the first decade and a half.
The main thing that went wrong with MTG was reducing it to 1v1 primarily. MTG is a hugely different game when there are multiple simultaneous opponents.
Black lotus, mountain, channel, fireball.
And you could make a deck with 10 of each of those if you wanted according to the original rules.
I kinda waffle between the two. Arena's my first love for the reasons you mention, but sometimes it's nice to simply buy some singles and throw together a (Pauper) deck for some fun on MTGO Online (especially since their set selection goes much farther back). I never play that one competitively, though. Feels like playing online poker against a community that's been refined down to 100% professional grinders or wannabes.
The accessibility of the game is poor in terms of rules, to properly play mtg you need to know a lot of cards (the rules are mostly on the cards).
I have been looking forward purchasing a deck of proxies to play with a friend of mine.
I thought it was just nostalgia, but looking at the sets you linked the 1995 one (I'd never seen) excites me while the 2024 does nothing... it could almost be AI. It's not just the same faces, but the same framing, same expressions, same "grand fantasy architecture", same MMO-esque magical swirls and sparkles, etc.
The abstract pieces weren't just whimsy, they felt like they could be based on vastly different local traditions or culture, history, or come from different time periods.
I was not aware that they introduce that. I gave up on it a while ago.
But wow, those prices! So they kinda addressed the purchasing individual cards, though the trading aspect of the trading card game is still conspicuously missing.
From my perspective the idea of a game being compelling because of the mystery doesn't work with PvP because the fundamental mechanic pushes people to learn the meta so they can win. If the original goal of Magic was to allow people to feel the wonder of discovery, either it should have been a PvE game with a GM, or the booster packs actually are a core mechanic that provide the thrill of the unknown, in which case the game was structured from the start to make money.
1. First of all, you could print proxies when playing with friends to try out card.
2. You could buy individual cards from other players or your local game shop.
3. You could sell your cards.
The previous iteration (MTGA) had both 2 and 3 as part of the game. What's more, they would let you "cash out" your digital cards for physical cards.
You were not required to get cards by opening packs (which I agree is the ancestor of digital loot boxes). But Arena got rid of any way of getting cards outside of "lootboxes" because they want to get as much money out of your as possible, not because it's better for the game.
I think it's high time that the first sale doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) be applied to digital goods.
My original comment was telling them specifically to find people to play with who aren’t like you.
...and I think King of Tokyo/New York is absolute rubbish.
Some of his other games have their niche of players but very small by comparison. KeyForge was very flash-in-the-pan in terms of popularity.