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How To Improve Magic

I was struck by inspiration while reading through some articles on other websites. One article mentioned how devastating it can be to make your opponent discard their entire hand in the early game. Another article about building fun decks said that the ideal tempo is to play a land every turn, and something else, eg a creature. I've been around long enough that I still miss Balance. Of course I loved it for the sheer equality of its effect and would only play it late in the game when my opponent had overextended, not for how it could be broken *cough*.

It struck me that there would be a way to fix the first problem, early massive discard, while also giving the game a better tempo. Simply make the player build two libraries. They start with no cards in hand and then each turn they draw one card from each pile. This means that people could quite easily split the piles into land and non land for instance, or do weird Zvi like tricks and other combos.

This makes the game much less dependent on luck. At least, it means that the game is much less susceptible to the sorts of luck based problems that afflict it now. Mana screw and glut seems to be one of the main things determining placing in sufficiently large tournaments. Mulliganing is a key weapon in the combo player's arsenal, and is how they try to break the 4 card limit.

Certain kinds of cheating would be eliminated, whereas others would be more prevalent. For example, you might feel pretty ripped off to have your opponent play a one drop on turn 1, 2 drop on turn 2, three drop on turn 3, four drop on turn 4, five drop on turn 5, etc. Anything involving library manipulation would need to be rethought. You might then think about allowing two different graveyards, one for each library, and allow the player to choose which graveyard to put each card in. This has interesting implications for Nether Spirit style creature recursion.

Would Counterspell be broken? If my opponent has a pile full of counters would we start seeing tournament reports that read like this:

Game 1 I drew Blastoderm, Blastoderm, so I lost.
Game 2 I draw an elf and win with Elf Beatdown
Game 3 I draw Blastoderm, Chimeric Idol and lose.
(with an obligatory rant on deckscrew).

Back before Masques I seriously considered putting together a Highlander deck with 18 counters in it, and I think that was the cut down number to allow room for everything else. There are a lot of different kinds of Counterspell out there folks.

This is the kind of thing that Whispers of the Muse style decks did. They had to draw enough counters to keep up and equalise the number of spells you play with the counters they draw.

With the two library game a sideboard of 1 and 2 casting cost creatures would soon sort this out. Since you could run them out of mana for countering, an all counter library wouldn't necessarily be broken.

Then there is the consideration of whether this would actually make combo decks easier? After all, you only need to go through 30 cards to get the four or five you need, in fact, why use 30 cards? Why not just put the three combo cards in their own deck, stack the other deck with mana, and viola! You win. Or do you? I think that Magic is more complicated than that but maybe I am a hopeless optimist.

Fruity pebbles would be an example of this, you could put the Ornithopter, Enduring Renewal, Ashnod's Altar and Fireball on one pile, and red and white mana in the other. Turn 4, you win.

However most modern combos that rely on a small number of cards also tend to assume that you have a lot of cards to throw away or do something with to fuel the combo engine. Pros Bloom and High Tide both either assumed you had lots of cards to burn to gain mana (Bloom) or kept drawing back up to 7 cards (Tide, Jar etc).

What about Necro? Wouldn't it be insanely much better in this format? Well, yes. You could guarantee not drawing land for instance, which means that you draw far fewer dead cards. Or with Necro and Dark Ritual in a pile of their own you could semi reliably go off on turn 2 if you didn't mind drawing land. You've got to draw a source of black mana in two hits to the other side of the deck which implies a 50% mana ratio, and hence 50% dead cards. But going to even seven cards reliably would still be powerful, of course now you are missing out on two draws a turn instead of just one, but it hardly serves to balance that aspect of the game.

You could have a rule that no player may put cards into their hand over and above the limit of number of turns times 2, any excess are removed from the game instead.

Of course, the irony is that Necro Donate would be even better without the Necro, because you could put the Donate and Illusions on one pile, and 'double strength lands' (ie cards that give you two mana) in the other. Turn 3, you illusions, turn 4 you donate. Viola.

Maybe the solution to these combo problems is to change the nature of the libraries: force the players to use two equal piles of 30 cards (20 for limited) and alternate drawing from them, still drawing 2 cards a turn and starting with none. This makes it just as hard, if not slightly harder, to combo, and beatdown and control would be much more consistent, which seems to me to be a worthwhile thing which would increase the enjoyment of the game.

It does mess with the whole concept of a mana curve. You might for instance expect that games would go at least 8 turns, and hence play with 4 one drops, 4 two drops, 4 three drops etc through to 4 7 drops and 2 eight drops, since you could reasonably expect to have much more mana on the table than you can normally expect.

Depending on the environment, there is usually a cut off point at which a spell is just too expensive. This is usually about 3 to 5 mana. In most decks if the 4 mana spells don't win you the game, you're in trouble. Eg Wrath of God, Armageddon, Blastoderm. Some 5 mana spells are playable eg Plow Under, Saproling Burst. Oh, wait, they're almost all Green or Black, which have the special ability of mana acceleration. Elves, Budgies and Dark Rituals, oh my!

You could not necessarily count on that cut off point if you could reliably play a land every turn, and the likelihood of not being able to have played something by turn 4 or 5 is quite low. With 15 4 cc or less and 15 4 cc or more the odds would be 15/30 * 14/29 * 13/28 * 12/27 = 5% that you will draw nothing from a particular half of your deck by turn 4. This bodes well for two-coloured decks as well, because you have excellent odds of finding both kinds of mana while the game is still young.

With a three colour deck (lands evenly split) the odds would be 20/30 * 19/29 * 18/28 * 17/27 = 17.67% chance of not finding a particular type of land by turn 4, 11% by turn 5, which is obviously much riskier, but still pretty good compared to the current odds. Of course if you use 12 dual lands and 18 basics, your odds get better, to 6.6% chance of not finding the type of mana you need by turn 4. If you like this could then be considered colour screw, which would happen roughly once every 15 games.

Games would also be quite fast, particularly in the early stages. Draw, play a land and pass, draw play the land play a grizzly, draw play the land attack and play a grizzly. The choices are much more basic when you only have two cards in hand, and one of them is a land. You play the land and then, if you can, the other card. If you have creatures out and they don't, you attack. Etc.

So large spells and multi coloured decks would benefit, to the detriment of combo decks. Games would be faster and less luck dependent.

What a shame.

Rick
(AWOL from Paradise)