How Boosters Solved One Of Magic's Biggest Problems and Why They Don't Anymore 

The early bit about alpha did not mention Ante as an intrinsic game mechanic. You were each supposed to set a random card aside as ante. The winner got all ante’d cards. The goal: a way to force deck changes over time, and balance. The most powerful deck would have most to lose. Turns out people really don’t like losing their cards, so it was dropped pretty quickly.

Something that I think leads to this perception of a stagnant meta is how ranked ladders work for most games. In a ranked ladder like MTGA or Hearthstone, there's a high cost to experimentation: you'll lose a lot of rank, and undo the progress you've made on the ladder. People are incentivized to use what's been proven to work if they want to gain rank, and it becomes a feedback loop of people using only proven decks, thus further proving to everybody that the same few decks are all that's viable.

I think not being able to access all the cards is a fundamental feels bad for competitive games. The only thing worse to losing to the meta is losing to a meta you can't even opt into.

21:25 "she's never done this; why is she doing this now?" She is obviously interested in a serious discussion of how to keep "the meta" fresh in CCG's. Kudos on following sound editing advice re: cats in the shot.

Id be curious to see WOTC try experimenting with non booster sets. I Have to imagine they sell so much through commander precons that having something like a 300 card cube or Wizard Tower style box with 1x of every card (or maybe 2x of everything common) would be interesting to see. I know Conspiracy exists but those cards are mostly unusable outside of a draft environment. IDK. I can imagine a Universes Beyond set being released as like a big $200 LCG experiment set vs 4x commander precons

Netrunner had randomized booster packs. The Fantasy Flight remake of the game is Android: Netrunner. That is the game that used the living card game model. They were non-randomized expansions.

Coming from a fighting game perspective, we have kind of the opposite approach. Balance patches occur in yearly intervals to give the game time to breathe, let players figure out whether the top tiers are what they're cracked up to be, and make the right changes. As opposed to trying to patch all the time to induce churn in the meta game. Also fighting game characters tend to be built in such a way that players steadily master them and figure out more about them, which is how there are meta shakeups in 20 year old games.

I'd also say, the whole issue with meta and churn is very prevalent in board games right now. A decade ago you could pick a game on BGG and there would be pages and pages of strategy forum discussions by people who have played the game 100+ times. Now you can go to the strategy forum for the hottest, fastest selling games and there's like 2-3 posts like "I played this twice, red hero's ability is OP, this game is solved and done." And then ppl move to the next game. Is red OP? Maybe, but you don't know that from 2 games. The perception of stale meta combined with tons of choice means there is little push to try to shake up a "solved" meta for a game. TCGs at least have prize events with incentive to think outside the meta, but other games don't.

Cat showed up, I've never felt more loyal to this channel before. Truly a blessed video!

Flesh and Blood's Living Legend system does a pretty interesting job with churn, at least now after some recent tweaking. When Lexi and Iyslander rotated out 2 months before HVY, the meta became incredibly wide and unsolved. Heroes rotating mid-season along with the armory deck precon serving as a mini set, we had a ProQuest season where Week 1 was different than Week 2-3 was different from Week 4/rest of month. Culling cards is important, and if you're going to do that, why not use it in a way to maintain interest in the game by letting non-meta strategies get a second appraisal before another set butts its head in. While MtG's set rotation could have a similar shaking up effect, the fact it's timed with a set release kind of nullifies its individual impact.

The normal booster pack was the watering hole that every magic player had to come to. Now that the game is divided into so many specialty sub products, magic has lost it’s appeal to me.

That is what, in my opinion, hearthstone is doing much better nowadays. The cycle from 2014-2019 was expansion, 2 months later maybe balance changes, 2 months later expansion. The cycle now is big set, 1 month later big balance changes (maybe 1 smaller one in the middle), 1 month later mini set, 1 month later big balance changes, 1 month later big set again.

I am always chasing the dragon of playing card games as a kid/teen. Back when the only way to expand my collection was to top an event or get a few packs on a holiday. I went to every FNM ans prerelease because I wasnt going to miss a chance at booster packs and trading, the main ways I acquired cards I wanted.

I think Pokemon handles this pretty well, and I mean VGC not the card game. A team is only 6 mons and each one is a specific bundle of stats and move but there are endless knobs you can turn to customize their gameplay. So the sheer number of permutations makes a meta easy to grasp but hard to solve, and there's a constant ebb and flow of rock-paper-scissors counters. Also the Pokemon company has a very hand-off approach to balance, which means that's it's on the players to figure out ways to beat or adapt to top meta threats. I think too often digital card games rely on patches to change the meta rather than wait for the players to become creative and that's a shame.

Booster packs in a game like magic are fundamentally different than loot boxes because randomness is required to play draft and sealed.

one sad thing about boosters that goes to actually quickening churn is the concept of a chase card. the studio is incentivised to print cards that are just a noch above the rest to sell more boosters. these cards then become the obvious focal point of the next meta decks, with little exploration required since their stats are just straight up better. i think pokemon moved into a good direction with this by making alternate arts the chase cards. but they still print a lot of bulk. i imagine if they pushed the numbers on the bulk a bit, there would be potentially tons of viable decks. but since they insist on printing one card with 330hp and 200 damage and then another with less hp that pays more energy to do less damage they needlessly pidgeonhole the meta to focus on the obviously superior cards.

Boosters don't make sense with how anyone plays anymore. I don't get cards in boosters and trade them with other people. That's not how people acquire cards anymore. They buy singles. If you want a certain thing it's cheaper and less burdensome to just do that. And they already decided the common and uncommon slots are for draft shaft. So you are paying $4 for a single random card.

I think the Keyforge format you referred to was Alliance, which imo strikes the perfect balance between what the game was intended to be while still allowing some customization/optimization. In essence, you combine 3 House pods from up to 3 different decks, but you have to take the *whole* pod. This means you still have to tangle with suboptimal deck compositions, but you can choose to combine ones based on synergy or shoring each other's weaknesses. Also, Flesh and Blood has their Living Legend status (in addition to a traditional banlist), which means that you *can't* play the same hero forever; they will eventually be retired, but stronger heroes will be retired faster. One major problem with Magic's solution of "release more product", is that more product costs more money, effectively raising the cost of keeping up with the game. So while players with deeper pockets will engage for longer due to the improved churn rate, you'll also be preventing poorer players from playing in the first place which is like the highest churn rate possible?

The first few months of Legend of Runeterra's beta did limit the amount of cards everybody could acquire: you could only use money to buy a set limit of wildcards per week, and every other way of earning cards was time gated in some way. It was a blast to play, a period of constant calculating how to both use the cards you had randomly unlocked alongside the few wildcards you could buy each week, it was probably the most fun I ever had in a TCG, but it only lasted a little while. Eventually, Riot realized the system wasn't sustainable, new players could never catch up, and when the first set came out it became obvious that players that had been saving up ingame currency would simply be able to buy the whole set, while newer players couldn't.

We're wanting to avoid boosters in our game (and go more LCG style) so this question has been one to keep me up at night. This is where I think Unmatched has done wonders as it has enough variance and strategy to it that, a bit like chess, the meta is never quite "solved" and the release of new fighters and formats do keep things from getting too stale. Also the "alliance" Keyforge format is not player driven, but was an official format created by the new owners of Keyforge.

I've been playing since Ice Age competitive and casually, both sealed and constructed. The reasons my friends and I have switched to EDH exclusively and buying singles are too much product too fast and it's too expensive to draft and keep up with the various metas. We would much rather build our EDH decks that we can keep 90% the same for months or years and still be fun and viable with minimal changes.

I just saw a similar debate over the launch of Star Wars Unlimited. 'Ugh, why is FFG doing it via boosters instead of LCG?' etc. And it seems the answer really is in psychology. No LCG has ever really caught on, even Netrunner. A set comes out, it's bought, and then it's instantly dead and quiet. The booster enables events beyond just meta constructed to keep the game in people's minds longer between sets. Even if the meta is stale, the events or seeing boosters on the shelf, or cards in the display keeps the game feeling current and played.

Not sold that variance is a strong method of reducing churn. The real mechanism is increased complexity. In the example of Snap - while the locations provide variance, its the increased complexity of interactions with your characters that can give off-meta decks an edge. If you had a pure variance adding system that gave a random player +1-3 points, the impact on churn would be zero as the best deck is still wins the most. The answer for keeping the meta unsolved longer is to add more complex tactics. This allows good players to find edges with less commonly played decks. The best example here is chess - no variance, highly complex, 100s of years of unsolved meta.

i thought you were making good points right up until 21:20. all arguments completely demolished, excellent rebuttal by the feline.

I am a card game designer, and my interest is mainly draft. I imagine having each set as a cube, and encouraging cube home brews to be the focus. Conducted is possible, but not the focus.

In much the same way that Keyforge solves the churn problem with its fully randomized decks but in doing so removes deck construction and personalization, digital distribution can solve the problem, but in doing so removes the collectibility aspect of the game. Sure, some digital cards can still be harder to obtain than others, but that’s not the same thing as having a game whose pieces are literal collectors’ items. Also, maybe this is “boomer” of me, but the tactility of physical cards is an important aspect of my enjoyment of the game. Shuffling the cards, holding them in my hands, flipping through trade binders, those things create a visceral experience that a digital game just can’t reproduce. Moreover, the value of the FLGS as a “third space” can’t be overstated. I wouldn’t still be playing Magic weekly if it wasn’t for the social aspect of going to the game store, seeing my fellow regulars there, exchanging banter with them during the game, chatting between rounds, etc.

I would argue that for the player base that engages with the game's broader community, in the present day, boosters have no effect on the rate the meta is solved, and actually increase player frustration for this player base. Because the players invested enough to solve the meta and share that information, will always have the resources and access to cards. So the top players solve the meta, and then players that want to play with decks that are meta, will see that the best decks cost upwards of $300 and are out of reach. And when the solution to this is to increase release frequency, that means that the 300+ dollar deck may have expensive cards that lose their value in a few months and need to be replaced, or a whole new deck needs to be built. This is a huge tangent, but I think it's the biggest barrier to entry to mtg for competitive players. I and several others I know are really competitive with gaming and love card games, but outside of draft, in order to play competitively I'd need to invest a large amount of money upfront just to get in the door. Where as something like LoL or Rocket League or Overwatch, if the players goal is to play competitively, they can just buy the game or a few characters and feel "competitive" even though they are a new player and are objectively bad. Then as they become more invested in the game they probably become more open to making larger investments buying more characters, or cosmetics, or tournament entry (like drafts or opens).

I'm sure Garfield initially wanted decks to have surprises for other Players (his ideal for an "infinitwly unknown" CCG). When Star Wars Unlimited came out, people claimed that the META was Solved with the AGGRO Savin deck within a week!! Set 2 is almost upon us, and ideas are still coming out! With Tournaments still showing different builds with all colors and leaders. Though, its probably the strong design of that first set. While Pay2Win is tied to it, I do think that a limiter is good for the game (money > getting the cards). Randomizing what you get as well (booster). I don't think I've ever seen a proposed system can fix this. The upcoming Altered TCG is going to be interesting.

The meta being consensus rather than truth is something that has been recently discussed in the YGO community as well.

Booster packs are a form of progression now. It’s to make the experience satisfying and fun. They don’t do anything to control the meta anymore for sure

Love the channel and the cat! Availability of information is what it is and Magic players just need to live with it. Boosters don't work now beause of the market for singles and availability of information(solving the meta). MtG is an expensive hobby depending on the format/level you want to play at. For Commander and Standard to start you can buy Precons and soup them up for comparatively reasonable amounts, Modern, Vintage and Legacy are expensive due to the volume of cards that are legal. If you want to compete in a Pro Tour you have to spend/research, that's the price of entry. I play mainly on Arena, when a new set drops 1-2 weeks in I look up a few decks, find one I think I like/understand, have cards for and play a bit with it, sub in some things if I don't have the wildcards. I adapted to being a f2p player, I'm not fussing about you guys that have the $$ to spend on your hobby. Winning or losing it's whatever as long as I'm having fun. Short to meduim length games and decent back and forth is fun, not some dude spinning his wheels for 20 minutes. Yes I play mostly agro or creature decks, although mill is sometimes stupid fun. MtG is a paper product but Arena is digital learn what the do's and don'ts are in a digital space from Hearthstone (like how they fixed Shudderwock and Yogg) and Marvel Snap, hire Ben Brode as a consultant I hear he's good at these things. I like the tier system in Marvel Snap, it moves from simple and janky, to streamlined and possibly still janky depending on drops/locations, but importantly at some point in tiering up the player learns deckbuilding and how the deck should play out.

I am guessing it was the sports card collection market that did it first. Also the secondary market is a stability. Since you can just buy the singles you need to play. How many gotcha games offer the top drops for like $20?

I think it's funny that we talk about metas becoming solved and stagnant, when the most popular meta is Commander. Commander is functionally infinite metas, thanks to rule Zero. This also applies to Kitchen Table magic, which is the real most popular format. And despite EDHrec, a big part of these formats is building your own personalized deck, not net-decking.

Loot boxes probably came from Studying gambling (and addiction) Gachas (which likely came from TCGs which were massive in Japan) Loot games like Diablo with randomized drops

The point about strategy vs. tactics is what made me quit Yugioh. When Ishizu Tearlaments was the undisputed only deck of the format for four months. I no longer felt like my favorite part of the game (deckbuilding) was supported even though talking heads were, and still are, raving about how amazing the format was because only good players were winning and the board states were extremely complicated to the point that if you weren't popping adderall you weren't competing. Konami knew this would happen since it had happened in Japan, let it happen here, and then let it happen again recently with Snake-Eyes. Then they banned cards around Snake-Eyes which removed even more unviable untiered strategies that weren't competing from the pool of stuff to build with. And then I gave up. My desire to play died and so did my locals scene.

The implicit assumption in this video, which I don't think is valid, is that a "solved meta" is a bad thing. It's worth asking how so many other kinds of games (RTS, fighting games, certain shooters, board games, etc) approach this issue. Modern day Magic is fairly unique in the overall gaming space in this regard. Very few other developers worry much about keeping the game "fresh" or preventing it from being "solved". Why is that? As I see it, modern Magic *has* to adopt this attitude because of more fundamental design choices that Wizards has made in recent years. From around 2012 to 2016 Standard was a pretty healthy format. Smartphones had been in our pockets for years at this point and people had access to plenty of information about the metagame. Metagames were "solved" then just as they are now. But nobody complained about it then because those metas were *healthy*. Wizards had not yet begun to push chase rares and mythics the way they do now. There were good answers to threats. Multiple archetypes were supported, even if they might "feel bad" for some players. So when the best decks were figured out you were still left with a diverse metagame where you could pick a deck and have a solid chance at winning, especially with good sideboard decisions. A decade later and there are clearly pushed chase rares that exceed $50/copy and have virtually no risk or failure modes. Strong creatures at one point had risks associated with them, setup required, or serious deckbuilding constraints (which would increase diversity as specific decks were built around those threats). If Wizards printed Hypnotic Specter, Psychatog, Tarmogoyf, and Morphling into Standard tomorrow I'm not sure how much play they'd see. Those are all time great threats, but they just don't fit the modern mold of "cost efficient threat that does something right away without requiring big deckbuilding concessions". When threats had failure modes or constraints, the decks built around them had weaknesses. Those weaknesses could be exploited by other decks, leading to a healthy metagame. The ceiling was still high, but the floor was lower. When threats don't have weaknesses, the metagame is just about finding the best combination of threats and answers to overpower what everyone else is doing. When it's solved, it's uninteresting because there's nothing you can do against the best deck. The cards in it are the best at being designed not to fail. Interestingly, Wizards started pushing this new approach to card design around late 2016 and Standard Magic began its death spiral shortly after that. Wizards later blamed the internet and Covid, but the internet was already there and the problems began well before Covid.

CAT! ...sorry what were you talking about?

The problem you're describing is THEORETICALLY why commander exists. Its started as a casual format built to play the big splashy unplayable cards and give them a home. Competitive types have always trashed that, though. Not to mention it being an eternal format.

do you think the multiple ways of playing Magic is a way to solve churn. so Magics Breath and variety should be used as a way to solve the problem?

1. Metagames are inherently dynamic, and rarely truly "solved". In Yugioh, some retro formats are named after what's now considered to be maybe the third best deck in that format, because the meta has continued to develop. 2. Having limited access to cards changes how you interact with those cards. A limited environment is different to a constructed one. In limited you have to make the most of the cards available to you, and you know your opponents are in the same boat. 3. The dynamism of a metagame is more apparent in limited environment, what colours are open in your pod, and what strategies are available to you, is something you have to learn to read and respond to 4. In a constructed environment, the barrier to trying new things is price. A deck that's competitive or otherwise interesting can simply be to expensive for you 5. Boredom, if you can't afford a deck that wins, or perhaps you can only afford one deck, how long will you keep playing? 6. Fatigue, if mtg has a set every month you absolutely can miss an entire set by accident. These days a new set arrives and we're already getting spoilers for two others. The marketing is trying for a state of perpetual hype for the next thing, it kinda becomes harder to enjoy the present (or indeed enjoy what we had a month ago) I honestly feel like fewer products with greater accessibility would reduce magic's churn. If you can feasibly build any deck, then you've always got something new to try without it being forced upon you. Old metagames see new developments when ppl have free access to the cards, and people can actually afford to experiment. If you're not priced out of competing, you have more incentive to learn both the strategy and tactics. If you don't want to compete, having cards means you can brew more jank. Obviously it's a business, we can't just all get all the cards for free all the time, and building a collection is a joy in itself, but id argue a more accessible game is more fun

10/10 conversation, 15/10 cat

Anyone have a link to the skaf Elias video?

Is part of the problem of metas self-consistency? By having cards and mechanics that rely more on situations and what your opponent is doing, it's harder to make a meta, right?

You eliminate player churn by not treating your customers like a money printing machine, you make the game fun to play in both casual and competitive, you make product fun to open. So: 1. Stop releasing so many products 2. Spend more time playtesting and creating sets 3. Stop printing collector boosters, put those back into play boosters so they can have a "big hit" and bring some value back to foils

I was hoping you'd mention keyforge. In a competitive 1v1 card game, identity through deck building is largely a myth anymore. You mentioned how the meta gets solved by consensus. If you aren't part of that consensus or acknowledging it though gameplay, then you aren't competing. 99% of players arenrt deck building. They're meta decking and changing a card. Because keyforge decks are unique, the identity comes through in the selection of the deck for competition. There are still meta consensus, but often it's cards or combos and there's enough to go around really. And more things do get explored due to the nature of the game. My KF identity is closely tied to Gasoline Maximiliano for example, and the styles that go with it. Anecdotally, I was having somewhat of an identity crisis in legacy, and what deck I would want to build. Bouncing from deck to deck. Keyforge helped me sort out what type of player I am. In that sense I can express identity by choosing an already solved meta deck. And keeping up with the meta changes around it. I still wouldn't call it deck building though. I think games like magic would benefit greatly from keyforges distribution model, and I'm more surprised that hasn't been adopted yet. It would be easy to make a format of "one jumpstart style 40 card deck" standard, and then let edh be the expression format.

Standard cycle to 2 years again. Then drop the price of boosters a bit so it doesnt burn so much when your cards cycle out. And reprint more of the pricey cards so wizards can swing to more booster purchases.

Uhm cool, magic, booster packs. OMG A CAT. Sorry what youre saying?

is aftermath style sets a way to try and deal with churn? Also cat appeared Mission accomplished

To me, the only formats in MtG worth playing are draft, pauper, and legacy specifically due to their metas (or lack thereof for draft). The first is an exercise in deck building and is the game as i believe it was originally intended: play with what you get. Pauper and Legacy are the two eternal formats that are never solved. Pauper is low power, but with few good answers to threats; that makes games compelling. Plus, it's cheap. Legacy is high power with proper answers to threats and FTKs. Standard and EDH are unbearable because they are designed for the casual crowd, where people would rather complain and demand bans than actually figure out how to beat something. Anytime I'm in a queue for Bo3 Standard (because Bo1 promotes surprise strategies that immediately lose to sideboarding), the wait is significantly longer than Bo1. It's fine and good to have causal formats, but when they dominate the game as a whole, everything else goes downhill.

Interest video. I enjoyed a lot of your points and really enjoyed the way you guys dissected this issue. I’d say check out Flawed TCG for a really fresh answer to this question. The concept of a codex and customizable units, brought to a TCG in a way.

11:55 What did Marvel Snap do to extend the collection process? It was cringed at but not explained

If you want to reduce churn, just add more cats.

I think the question is more about how you control churn in 60 card competitive formats and in the age of the internet... I just don't know. Now I know you two aren't crazy about commander but by being a casual, eternal, singleton format I feel like it does a better job of answering the churn question because it is almost unsolvable and the card pool is so huge and constantly expanding that the experience stays very fresh. Regarding Warhammer, as an ex player I can tell you that the current model of constant rules and point changes is beyond infuriating when it is tied to a game that requires dozens of hours of work any time you have to change your list due to assembly and painting. At this point in my life I have much more extra income than free time so I just can't play a game that disrespects my time in that manner. Which is unfortunate since I think the core game experience is pretty awesome.

If Keyforge gave you more than the minimum amount, say six more cards, and you cut down to your deck size, you’d have a sideboard and a little more sense of ownership over the deck without fundamentally changing the approach.

I liked Forrest's point about there being multiple games being played. We imagine deck construction, deck evaluation, and play refinement playing off each other and cycling around. However, deck creation and evaluation can be done for you. Not only do players spend less time making non-meta decks, they spend less time playing and refining specific strategies for these decks. The cycle is shortened significantly, and players "get through" the content quickly by avoiding most of it. It feels like a branching story game where everyone looks up a guide for the only ending they care about. A lot of content is being written for no one.

Yea TCG booster packs were proto loot boxes.

If the goal was $40 while you're still doing good at pre-releases cuz that's the price of a kit

Saw cat, remembered to like the video

I really think stopping spoilers is probably the answer to this meta extension. No more theory crafting till everybody can actually hold the cards in their hands.

With booster packs, if i open a card I dont want. I can sell it to someone who does, and use that money to buy another pack. Maybe even make some money, or trade for a card I do want. When i open a loot box and get a skin I dont want. I have to keep it, and spend more money.

I think loot boxes started with csgo. Or TF2 idk which came first. Idk if csgo/tf2 were inspired by tcgs tho.

can we lead with the cat instead of waiting 20 minutes next time?

KITTEH!!

A game that tends to get “solvable” is fundamentally flawed in gamedesign, because that means the game is more a set of rules than it is an actual game of decision-making. If the rules weight more than the players decisions the game is fundamentally bad.

Came looking for copper and found gold(Chonky cat).

Abolish booster packs!

Kitty! \o/

5th

Let's see if I got everything. -Variance in the game reduces churn. -Changing the codex refreshes the meta without changing the game pieces. Solution : Every format now has planechase decks. The planechase cards rotate regularly and are imposed by format. Rule 0 and kitchen table allow any planechase plane in casual. cEDH has its own mandated planechase deck.

Why not just stop spoiling entire sets before release? The booster model is so much cooler when you don't have that information.

first!

A explorable space, is to do like online games do it, with "seasons". "In 2025, all soldiers cost 1 less to cast, instants have cantrip and all defenders have annihilator"