TCG Theory - The 1-Cost Problem

renewable resource systems have been a part of trading card game design since the birth of the genre widely recognized as to the first trading card game magic the gathering uses land cards that can be played once per turn tapped for mana to pay for costs and effects and then untap at the beginning of the next turn ready to be used again as you play land after land and they all untap at the beginning of each of your terms you find an overall linear increase of resources turn over turn leading to each turn having more resources to use than the turn before it over the years one consistent criticism of this system is that having specific resource cards can lead to an imbalance of resources leading to either too many which is mana flood or too few which is mana screw in either case ending the game not due to player inputs but rather due to poor luck that doesn't allow one of the players to play out their cards probably the most notable attempt to fix this flaw in the system is dual masters the resource system is nearly identical but instead of requiring specific resource cards it allows for any card to be played as a resource this removes most of the luck based elements from resource development and is widely regarded as a good move many games since then have adopted mana systems heavily inspired by dual masters such as zx and build divide however issues of mana screw and mana flood may have been hiding another problem with magic the gathering's mana system a hint of this issue can be found in dual masters which has drastically fewer cards that cost one mana when compared to magic the gathering another hint can be found in zx and build divide which start with two cards already in your mana zone from the first turn of the game the problem that all this is hinting towards is what i call the one mana problem in a linear renewable resource system one mana cards are incredibly dangerous if we look at magic the gathering standard formats this might be a bit hard to see for example if we look at the top three decks at the time of writing this video we see that most one cost cards are minor defensive cards the only proactive one cost card among the top three decks is very heavily dependent on a single archetype and is highly demanding of the deck's commitment to its archetype it's almost impossible to play this card outside of that one specific archetype however if we switch our view over to the modern format a very different picture emerges at the top spot in the modern meta right now blue red regent stacks feature a full 25 one cost cards out of only 41 non-land cards in the deck likewise in the number two spot burn decks are running 24 one cost cards out of their 40 non-land cards in both cases that's more than half the deck taken up by cards with a single mana cost third place looks a little bit different since the card it's built around relies on a gimmick that forces the deck to not have any cards that cost less than three it allows the deck to cheat on its mana costs in other ways however as we continue looking down the lists we can see plenty of other examples of the extreme importance of one cost cards such as in death's shadow decks where a full 34 of the 43 non-land cards cost one or less the remaining nine cards all cost two there's nothing in the entire deck that costs three or more in fact if we look at all of these decks ignoring the obvious outlier of the stomping footfalls deck with its very specific gimmick the only card that costs three or more among all of these decks is three copies of archmage's charm that are found in the blue red regent decks there is a relatively simple reason for this and it's raw efficiency going from a cost of one to a cost of two is doubling the cost going from a cost of one to a cost of four is quadruple the cost incidentally this is why high cost cards are very rarely played in formats that have large card pools to choose from for cost cards are rarely going to have four times the power and most importantly the utility of a one cost card the classic example of this is that forecast cards are still represented by a single creature and therefore they still die to a single removal spell this is the classic dies to doom blade argument another way of looking at it is that on turn 3 of the game you have the option of casting 1 3 mana spell or 3 1 mana spells or smaller card pools this isn't as much of an issue it can be largely designed around such as ensuring that one cost cards are heavily siloed into the types of decks they are effective in but overall small card pools is not exactly the defining feature of trading card games dual masters and magic the gathering try to manage this problem by limiting the number of one cost cards printed dual masters is much more aggressive in managing their numbers whereas magic the gathering tries to focus much more on siloing its one mana cards into different archetypes in either case as long as the one mana cards are carefully rationed the baseline for evaluation shifts to two cost cards while moving from a one cost card to a two cost card is a doubling of the cost or plus one hundred percent moving from a two cost card to a three cost card is only 1.5 times the cost or plus fifty percent in other words just by shifting the baseline cost from one to two the efficiency drop-off as you move up the curve is half as severe this is taken a step even further in zx and build divide in a particularly clever move by starting the game with two resources already in play the baseline cost for return 1 play is shifted up to 3. from here the drop-off of efficiency from cost to cost is dramatically lower than in a one cost baseline system which leaves a lot more room in the deck for higher cost and higher powered cards if we compare the spells per turn the difference is also quite striking by turn 3 players are still only able to cast one spell per turn whereas in the game with a one mana baseline you're able to cast three different spells during that same turn in this kind of accelerated start system one and two cost cards are still just as dangerous as they are in a more traditional system if not even more dangerous but there's far less need for them to be designed for the game in the first place while the efficiency of one cost cards is something of a problem in all resource systems in games like lacrosse with consumable resources there are a few mitigating factors that mana systems don't have most importantly of them is that costs in these consumable systems already tend to have a much narrower range as a function of the system itself in these systems most playable effects already don't cost more than two although the danger of this is that it can be somewhat limiting in terms of design space this limitation is known from the initial creation of the game and it can be managed through other rule systems one example seen in vanguard lacrosse and others is a level system a one cost effect at level four can be scaled up to be much stronger than a one cost effect that is accessible from level one this allows for a wide diversity of effect power despite a much more limited cost range while the one cost problem is still dangerous for all resource systems if you're designing for a game that features a linear renewable system that develops somewhat similar to magic the gathering duo masters or other games the one cost problem needs to be an active consideration during development the more one cost cards that are available in these kinds of games the more pressure these cards are going to exert on all other costs if this is left unchecked this will ultimately become an extremely potent driver of power creep within the game eventually if left to go for too long this will start to invalidate nearly every other cost of card in the game greatly limiting the effectiveness of a resource system as a functioning tool of card development within the game itself

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Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022