20 (game design) lessons from 20 years of MtG, which one do you think were applied to TOS?

[sleepychotz]

I wonder how much does IMC know about this when developing game “mechanic”.

• Fighting against human nature is a losing battle
• Aesthetics matter
• Resonance is important
• Make use of piggybacking
• Don’t confuse “interesting” with “fun”
• Understand what emotion your game is trying to evoke
• Allow the players the ability to make the game personal
• The details are where the players fall in love with your game
• Allow your players to have a sense of ownership
• Leave room for the player to explore
• If everyone likes your game but no one loves it, it will fail
• Don’t design to prove you can do something
• Make the fun part also the correct strategy to win
• Don’t be afraid to be blunt
• Design the component for its intended audience
• Be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them
• You don’t have to change much to change everything
• Restrictions breed creativity
• Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them
• All the lessons connect

Ref:

1. https://youtu.be/QHHg99hwQGY
2. http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-1-2016-05-30
3. http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-2-2016-06-06
4. http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-3-2016-06-13

[NotSoAccurateNo1]

“Game design lessons”? More like catchy phrases to list off at a peptalk when you don’t really know the specifics of what should be done.

My response to any of those things is “k”.

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Now, if you want to have a conversation about actual game design, we can start with something like “where should the player want to go”, “how does the player get there”, “what does the player do along the way”, “are these fun and interesting for the player?”, “what can we change to make these things better?” yada yada yada. This is all starting line stuff but it applies just as well to every little bit of any game.

[sleepychotz]

Watch the video man.

[Unlocked]

What does card game has to do with ToS?

[sleepychotz]

It lesson doesn’t specific toward cards, but the game audiences. its universal game design lesson , not card game design lesson. its nice video to watch if u have the time.

[Nekorin]

Don’t really think that the MTG design lessons mechanics will actually fit for ToS though. They are fundamentally 2 totally different games.

MTG is more like a turn based, one vs one (PVP) chess like game, so much unlike ToS which caters to PVE mostly (currently). The game is also skewed and unbalanced so much that they need to rotate/introduce the set every now and then to shift the card pool available.

Metas are all the more prevalent for MTG than in ToS, this is something in which I think ToS is now beginning to pick up since they are balancing most of the classes so that each class is still viable. Just see how many crap rares and deck builds we have in MTG and we can see that the game doesn’t really balance itself throughout the entire card pool.

Audiences catered to for 2 games are totally different too. One (MTG) focuses on 1v1 most of the time while the other (ToS) focuses on just not character builds but also synergies between players with different builds.

[ridelith]

Point me to a single listed aphorism in OP that can only be applied to card games instead of any game.

Discussing differences between ToS and MtG won’t get us anywhere here, what’s listed apply to any game. The thing is: it’s way too generic to give us anything concrete to work on ToS.

What’s the point in this thread? To point out flaws in IMC thought process? To point out how out of touch IMC is with the rest of the gaming industry? To make devs read this and have an epiphany?

To me it seems that what we can acomplish here is merely reaffirming what we already know: IMC is out of touch with the werstern market and with basic pro-consumer design choices. We’ve beaten this horse for 2 years on a daily basis already.

[Unlocked]

geez, I can say the same for every single company. I’ve never found myself an MMO that would get me addicted to play it more than 3 months. These 3 months probably were longest period I ever spent playing on a single MMO in Guild Wars 2. I usually quit MMORPG after a month or few weeks, sometimes I return after a long break, but still there is no perfect game or rules that would define one.

[Nekorin]

The thing is: it’s way too generic to give us anything concrete to work on ToS.

Agree and thanks for stopping me there. Kind of got carried off since I played MTG quite a fair bit and contributed a number of threads/forum posts/guides in MTGsalvation too prior to ToS.

It is like throwing the design fundamentals in without telling where to improve at all, feels a lot like adding academic references in an essay without noting whether they pertain to the subject matter. Think that’s why in my post I keep trying to relate the 2 together.