For those of you unfamiliar with Magic, its a trading card game in which two (or more) players duel to determine a winner. It's premise is similar to many RPGs, PVP video games, and games based around miniatures. Each person comes to the game with a deck of cards and 20 life. The deck of cards is filled with spells and creatures to vanquish the player's opponent.
An interesting primer on the subject was written this week by Magic's head of design, Mark Rosewater. You can read it here.
Anyway, there are several things that make Magic work as a game. First off, it's balanced. Cards come in 4 rarities: common, uncommon, rare, and mythic rare ("super" rare, the rarest of the rare). Assuming people are only opening booster packs to obtain their cards (15 random cards consisting of 1 rare or mythic rare, 3 uncommons, 1 land, and 10 commons), the player will find the lowest rung cards more often than they will find the top tier cards. There are 10 commons in a pack, which are generally far lower on the power scale than the rares, of which there is only one. Rares, in turn are generally less powerful than mythic rares, which players will see, on average, in 1 out of every 8 boosters.
This mechanic seems fairly obvious, but it does provide balance. It makes sure that people don't play necessarily with only the best cards.
Next, and more importantly, the cards of Magic are divided into 5 colors. White, Blue, Black, Red, Green (WUBRG for short). This is important because of the way players play spells. Every turn a player can play a land, which produces a color of mana. A Mountain, for example, produces red. Islands produce blue, and so on. Each spell or creature a player casts costs mana, both colored and colorless. Colorless mana can be paid with any color of mana, but colored mana must be paid with a land that can produce that color. For example, a spell that costs 1 red and 2 colorless (abbreviated 2R) cannot be played by tapping 3 Islands, because Islands cannot produce that 1 red mana that is necessary.
This limitation ensures that players cannot just take the most powerful cards and throw them into a deck. The more colors you add for your spells, the less likely you will be to have the correct colors of lands to play those spells. Balance. Something else lands control is timing. Each player can only play one land per turn, and each land taps for 1 mana of its color, so a spell that costs 8 total mana can't be played until at least turn 8. This ensures players can't play the really awesome spells until later in the game.
Another things that makes Magic tick as a game, and my personal favorite thing about it is flavor. Flavor is inside-speak for the story that takes place beyond the cards. Being a fantasy-type game with wizards and dragons, each card is tied to a larger story . the stories change from time to time as new worlds are visited and new characters discovered, but there's always a story there. The term flavor refers to a card's place in a story and how that card shows it. Flavor comes in many different forms, from the art on the card to the way the card functions. But the idea behind the cards is that you look at the card, read it, and you get some sense of where it falls in the story. You can take the cards from an entire set and look at them, and you get a pretty good sense of the story as a whole and the characters that make it up. Flavor also refers to how well the card's ability matches up with what it does inside that world.
All this gives players a sense of time and place and meaning. That part of it is so critical in many players' enjoyment of the game. The more flavorful the cards are, the more these types of people like them. I fall solidly in that category.
Fianlly, Magic is varied and open enough that players can create different types of decks. One player may play weenie creatures, which is a deck built around play a ton of small creatures really quickly and beating face with them. Other decks are control decks. They destroy creatures and counter spells and try to make the tempo of the game slow way down. Then there's everything in between. And Magic lets players do this, because it's designed to be played that way.
Now, a new game was introduced to the market, Epic. Read about it on their website. Check out some of the cards here. Now this game professes to be better than other TCGs (Magic in particular) because it is simpler. There are no lands to produce mana, no casting costs, no colors. There are champions, objects, and events. You can play as many of most locations and objects as you want to per turn, because, well, there's nothing to stop you. They are, for the most part, free to play, so you could theoretically have a hand of 7 spells that all say "Deal 8 damamge to your opponent", play them all on your first turn, and win the game.
Champions (and some events/objects) are a little different. They require an "Action Point" to play. Each player gets one action point per turn, so each player can cast 1 champion per turn. Action Points can't be carried over, so none of the champions cost more than 1 AP. Sure, it might be cool to cast the biggest champion in your deck on the first turn of the game, but it doesn't feel balanced. It feels like the game was designed with very quick matches in mind. Granted, your opponent is likely going to put down a big guy on his turn too, but it still feels unbalanced.
In Magic, the colors of spells dictate what you can play in your deck. Epic has no such thing. So what's to stop a player from making a deck that's composed of all the best cards released for it. Answer: nothing. And that's not interesting at all.
One of the most common comments in the Epic forums is "broken". Broken is a term that is synonymous with "overpowered" or "unfair". Forum posters use the term "broken" to describe not only the cards, but the game itself. I'll get back to this in a minute.
Having browsed the card list and tried my hand with the demo decks publiched online, I can definitely tell you that there is exactly one kind of deck that can be built with Epic cards: super aggressive decks. There is no depth to the card pool. It's all huge champions, big spells, and a few cards that essentially say "destroy this". Where is the fun in that? I've never been a fan of mindless aggro decks in Magic, because they take no talent, skill, or really even intelligence to play. Their gameplan is this: drop creatures, attack with creatures. But Magic has other types of decks to play besides dumb aggro, so I'm able to play decks that can control dumb aggro decks and win much farther into the game. Epic offers no such options. Lay big creatures and play big spells really fast or die. Boring... shallow.
The thing that irks me the most is the utter lack of flavor to any of the cards in the game. There is obviously no overarching story, no true characters, no depth. For example, on many of the cards in the demo decks linked above, there is italic text near the bottom of the card. That's called flavor text in the Magic world. It has no impact on the game, it doesn't do anything, but it adds flavor to the card, it tells a piece of the story, it helps build a character or describe a location. The "flavor" text on the Epic cards does not do this. It's a collection of rather inept sayings and cliches with rather bland attempts at wit. For example, some cards with flavor text:
- Deathblow: "That's gotta hurt" - This obviously has nothing to do with any sort of story
- Deep Thought: "Hmmmm...." - again, same complaint
- Rejection: "Talk about the cold shoulder" - Aye yay yay
and my personal favorite - Bruiser: "What he lacks in finesse, he makes up for in stepping-on-your-face"
I'll stop there. So anyway, no story, just a bunch of random cards.
One other thing. The art. The artists who draw for Magic, and the folks who write the style guidelines for each story, are very particular in making sure players can look at cards and tell where the creature is or where the art takes place. You can look at a collection from a Magic set and tell that they all take place on the same world. There's no such continuity in Epic.
So, that brings me back to "broken". This term very much fits Epic. Sure, you can play a ton of big spells really quickly, and I'm sure for some that there is a huge thrill that goes along with that. But that thrill will wear off. People will get to the point where they look at it as just the next big, overpowered creature. Since there's nothing deeper than the cards themselves to keep people hooked, the game will become boring once people scratch through the shiny facade.
That's not to say that Epic doesn't have potential, it does. But it needs balance and depth (both in flavor and in deck types). It needs to take itself more seriously, and it needs to shake the image of being "broken". If it can do these things, I could see it catching on - heck I might even try playing it again. But for now, I see it being relegated to the trash can rather quickly.
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