Monday 25 November 2013

Mana Screwed

People don't like getting mana screwed.  They also don't like getting mana flooded.  When SolForge came out I saw various people saying that it was great that you couldn't get mana screwed because you could always play your cards.  In Hearthstone you always get one more mana a turn, so you never don't get mana.

I'm sure that VashtaNerada felt great about having seven cards in hand here
But you can draw no rank three cards on your third trip through the deck in SolForge.  You can get all threes in your Hearthstone hand and then draw twos later on and never manage to deal with your opponent's one, two, three, four, five.  You can trade card for card and then draw one and two drops while your opponent draws sevens and eights.

In card games your shuffle your deck.  There will never be a card game where you can't get frustrating draws that seem to lock you out of the game while your opponent runs all over you.

If there was - for example, if you played Magic with pre-ordered deck - then it wouldn't be much of a card game.  It would be more like paper, rock, scissors, and even that only if the metagame was very flexible.  More likely it would be like flipping coins to see who wins.

Any game with no element of chance and no element of hidden information is not much of a game.  Chess and other games of strategy might seem like counter examples, but in reality there is an element of chance in them.  If you knew the total implications of all of your moves then you would be playing tic-tac-toe, not chess.

So basically sometimes you are going to get screwed, like, for example, when you finally rip back to back big dudes and your opponent rips back to back Mind Control.  Tough.

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