by Klaxas
tumorous wrote:
stadi wrote:
I think there's a difference here. The problem with MtG is that it's newer expansions make the older ones outdated. At least in official play.
What we know about Mage Wars, expansions only give more options. Of course they might change strategy in the long run but that's not a problem, change and diversity will only keep interest up.
What we know about Mage Wars, expansions only give more options. Of course they might change strategy in the long run but that's not a problem, change and diversity will only keep interest up.
Yes, but -- aside from the profit motive -- there are gameplay reasons in Magic that support rotating out old sets. It is extremely difficult to design and release cards that support new strategic options in perfect balance with the existing metagame. So new cards will tend to be too good or too bad to compete.
If they're too good, you end up with power creep: the more powerful cards and strategies force obsolescence onto old cards. If they're too bad, fewer players will be interested in buying new cards -- why buy cards that are worse than what you already have? Either the new stuff or the old stuff is worse.
In the ideal competitive LCG world, all your old cards are still just as good and the metagame evolves smoothly over time. If you ask Magic designers, I think they would find this impossible. That's why bannings happen and people complain when new sets are seen as too boring/weak/bad... because striking that balance is incredibly hard, even for the caliber of design team that Wizards can put together.
Although, to bring this back to Mage Wars: factions help a whole lot, because they limit the design space. In Magic, every card ever released can be combined with every other card ever released. Mage Wars limits how much crossover you can have between factions -- so you wouldn't be able to just make a deck out of all the best cards of the last 2/5/10 years supporting a certain strategy.
yes the design space in mage wars is limited but not a whole lot honestly. there are 10 schools (6 major, 4 minor elemental) and yes mages are trained in certain schools, but nothing prevents mages from learning outside thier school, (it just costs more points) and nothing prevents mages from even using a restricted school (a holy priestess can use dark spells, and a warlock can use holy spells)
the number of actual restricted cards is far far less than you would guess. i believe in the base set there are 12 or so different cards that are only usable by one mage, or by someone trained in a certain school. im sure this will grow with time, but i believe the percentage of actual cards restricted to maged to remain fairly small