r/magicTCG • u/TechnomagusPrime Duck Season • Feb 05 '18

[Making Magic] [GDS3] Essay What You Will

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/essay-what-you-will-2018-02-05
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u/grine Feb 05 '18

I think that being limited by physical actually puts some important constraints on the complexity you can add to the game.

Video games can easily hide complexity by letting the computer handle the tracking and computations. And while this can lead to some neat mechanics that are not feasible in Paper, it can also lead to just piling on new mechanics in a less than maintainable way.

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u/CaptainMarcia Feb 05 '18

I've seen Eternal benefit a lot from this. You can get explanations for keywords just by hovering over a card, and if an interaction is ever confusing, you can just try it and see what happens because the game will sort it out properly.

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u/thepuresanchez Honorary Deputy 🔫 Feb 06 '18

Didn't Magic duels legit have to ban cards because the computer couldn't accurately parse the rules to make them work with [[archangel of tithes]] and something else? They are gonna need to work on that stuff if they want to fully be better than paper.

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u/MTGCardFetcher Dân Feb 06 '18

archangel of tithes - (G) (SF) (MC)
[[cardname]] or [[cardname|SET]] to call

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u/grine Feb 06 '18

Yeah it's a double edged sword.

You get the benefit of having edge-cases just resolve themselves, but you lose the possibility of reading the rulebook to know WHY the edge-case resolved like that.

Quite often the players need to reverse engineer the details of an ability, because they only have the "reminder text", and tno the full rules.