The seventy-five card deck size seems at first like it would pull us in the opposite direction. Each card is less likely to come up each game. That helps, but it also forces players to use more of the generically good cards to round their deck out, and makes it much harder to use a few quirky cards as the basis for a deck, since you can’t find them as reliably.
The bigger drawback here was making the climb to build a collection feel super steep. Not only do I need four copies of this legendary card, each of which takes weeks worth of games to afford, each copy is only one of seventy-five cards. That’s noticeably different from sixty, and miles away from Hearthstone where you have one copy of each legendary card, two of each other card, and the deck is thirty cards. Hearthstone’s decks are not as small as they look, since they don’t include lands, but it does make it feel like every card decision you make counts for a lot. In Eternal I did not feel that way.
Yeah, I’ve started thinking about the number of ‘active cards’ in a deck and how that plays into choice. One of the things that I really like about Commander is that the one-card-per-deck rule means you have about 60-70 active cards in the deck, and this impedes the “accumulate the pieces of my combo and then end the game” style of playing Magic in favor of the positional style of playing Magic.
The last card game I played seriously was the new Legend of the Five Rings LCG, which has 2 40 card decks (to oversimplify, one only has creatures and the other only has instants) and a max of 3 copies per card, which meant ~26 active cards in the deck, which of course was reduced by the “every deck should have X” cards, of which there were about 5.
I still don’t have a strong sense (from a game design angle) of what the right number should be. Deck design seems interesting only to the extent that a deck is a proposal about the strength of various joint mechanics (“Cards A, B, and C go together well”), but this suggests that the purest form of deckbuilding might actually involve quite small decks.
[This suggests a Magic format where you have some ‘base decks’ on offer, maybe shuffled, maybe not, and your ‘actual deck’ is your starting hand, that you get to choose entirely. If the base decks only contain the equivalent of forests and Grizzly Bears, then the question is something like “can you fit a game-ender into 7 cards, with enough disruption and counter-disruption that yours goes off first?”]
I played some L5R back in the day, I found it fun but didn’t take it seriously, to the place where collections were complete and decks started to look the same. Felt like a game that used tricks to avoid players getting too ruthless and breaking the game. Which is fine!
Some Magic decks and matchups will always be positional, as is limited, and yes it is something I’d like to do more often in constructed (but far from all the time).
There are some really cool mental games you can play with tiny decks. Have you played three-card Magic? It is exactly what it sounds like, and the metagame can keep you amused for at least hours.
[This suggests a Magic format where you have some ‘base decks’ on offer, maybe shuffled, maybe not, and your ‘actual deck’ is your starting hand, that you get to choose entirely. If the base decks only contain the equivalent of forests and Grizzly Bears, then the question is something like “can you fit a game-ender into 7 cards, with enough disruption and counter-disruption that yours goes off first?”]
Having restricted choices for groups of cards, and then only picking a few of them, seems to be moving almost somewhat Codex-ward… (although I gather from the other comments that wasn’t really your intention).
Yeah, I’ve started thinking about the number of ‘active cards’ in a deck and how that plays into choice. One of the things that I really like about Commander is that the one-card-per-deck rule means you have about 60-70 active cards in the deck, and this impedes the “accumulate the pieces of my combo and then end the game” style of playing Magic in favor of the positional style of playing Magic.
The last card game I played seriously was the new Legend of the Five Rings LCG, which has 2 40 card decks (to oversimplify, one only has creatures and the other only has instants) and a max of 3 copies per card, which meant ~26 active cards in the deck, which of course was reduced by the “every deck should have X” cards, of which there were about 5.
I still don’t have a strong sense (from a game design angle) of what the right number should be. Deck design seems interesting only to the extent that a deck is a proposal about the strength of various joint mechanics (“Cards A, B, and C go together well”), but this suggests that the purest form of deckbuilding might actually involve quite small decks.
[This suggests a Magic format where you have some ‘base decks’ on offer, maybe shuffled, maybe not, and your ‘actual deck’ is your starting hand, that you get to choose entirely. If the base decks only contain the equivalent of forests and Grizzly Bears, then the question is something like “can you fit a game-ender into 7 cards, with enough disruption and counter-disruption that yours goes off first?”]
I played some L5R back in the day, I found it fun but didn’t take it seriously, to the place where collections were complete and decks started to look the same. Felt like a game that used tricks to avoid players getting too ruthless and breaking the game. Which is fine!
Some Magic decks and matchups will always be positional, as is limited, and yes it is something I’d like to do more often in constructed (but far from all the time).
There are some really cool mental games you can play with tiny decks. Have you played three-card Magic? It is exactly what it sounds like, and the metagame can keep you amused for at least hours.
I had not! It looks like a much better distilled version of the thing I was pointing towards.
Having restricted choices for groups of cards, and then only picking a few of them, seems to be moving almost somewhat Codex-ward… (although I gather from the other comments that wasn’t really your intention).