The free Izzet deck you can get in MTG Arena is generally themed as "instants and sorceries matter" and gives you a bunch of red burn spells and blue card-draw spells, and creatures like Wee Dragonauts and Crackling Drakes that get boosted as you cast those cards.
But there are two really exciting spells in the deck that, when they go off, are the exact sort of feedback loop combo the Izzet would be fascinated by.
One, the one that's more straightforward, is Niv-Mizzet, Parun, the legendary guildmaster. He's a 5/5 flyer that can't be countered - pretty good to start - and then he's got the following: each time you draw a card, he deals 1 damage to a target of your choice. And then, any time you cast an instant or sorcery spell, you draw a card (and thus proc that damage.)
With cards like Radical Idea and Chemister's Insight, you can draw several cards to ramp up and then Jump-Start them later in the game. So when you have enough mana, you're getting two cards (one for the card and one from Niv) for a single Radical Idea, and thus two damage, not to mention the chance to cast more spells that you've just drawn.
Now, let's talk Thousand-Year Storm.
TYS is trickier, but its eventual effect is astounding. Each instant or sorcery you cast, the enchantment will allow you to copy it for every other spell you've cast. So, let's say you hit a target with Lava Coil. Then you shock another one - you now get two Shocks. Then, if you have the mana, you cast Radical Idea - which is now 3 of them. And if you have Niv out, you're getting a card for each of these casts, not to mention all those cards from that triple radical idea, which is turning him into a machine gun.
The problem, of course, is actually surviving to the point where you can get this off.
While it's been glorious when I've actually managed to get to this point, it's pretty rare. Being red/blue, and without much in the way of bounce/counterspell, there's nothing you can really do about Enchantments (Underworld Dreams, which punishes you for each card you draw, is a real hoser.) Also, with red removal, unless you get Niv into his machine gun mode, it'll be hard to take down anything really big (like some Ikoria behemoth mutant.)
I'm tinkering with the deck (I added another TYS and Niv, for one thing) but while I'm worried the archetype isn't going to work all that well in this format, it's so fun when it actually goes off that I want to try to make it work.
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Monday, July 6, 2020
Preparing for the Main Event
My players in my Ravnica D&D campaign have been building up to a big attack on a Simic laboratory that is being used by a rogue biomancer who is aligned with the Phyrexians in an attempt to infect the most populous plane in the multiverse.
I've been thinking, thus, a lot about climactic battles and encounter balancing.
There are, by my count, six combat encounters the party is likely to deal with over the course of the attack. They're level 10, so resources are rather plentiful and they're pretty tough.
I don't know to what extent the players are going to feel the need to push forward - I'm treating these labs like a dungeon, so while they do run the risk of being attacked should they take a rest, they will be able to complete at least a short rest once or twice during their push.
While this is certainly the main event of tier 2 for the party, it's actually not going to be the finale - they have to face off against my planeswalker villain. I think she's going to be more intent on escaping than fighting, so I might have her planeswalk out at half health or so, but I do think that she should be a tier-4-level bad guy.
But before we get to that, I want to make sure that the lab fight will be sufficiently exciting and challenging while remaining balanced.
I've been fairly religious with the Xanathar guidelines for encounter building, which has yielded some scary moments but hasn't actually killed anyone yet. While I'm not eager for anyone's character to die (though there is ample opportunity for resurrection - the Orzhov even have a whole payment plan structure your friends can get you indebted to) I do want to give the characters some pause. I think the slog of going through six different fights (potentially fewer, as two of them can be RP'd around) might be enough to make the final fight dicey by default.
In fact, as I write about this, I think the key is to make the actual tier 2 finale (after which they'll all hit level 11) the truly scary fight. A kind of wake-up call after the triumph of the big dungeon.
Essentially, I'm going to balance a fight for level 16 (maybe slightly lower) that they'll be fighting at 10.
I've been thinking, thus, a lot about climactic battles and encounter balancing.
There are, by my count, six combat encounters the party is likely to deal with over the course of the attack. They're level 10, so resources are rather plentiful and they're pretty tough.
I don't know to what extent the players are going to feel the need to push forward - I'm treating these labs like a dungeon, so while they do run the risk of being attacked should they take a rest, they will be able to complete at least a short rest once or twice during their push.
While this is certainly the main event of tier 2 for the party, it's actually not going to be the finale - they have to face off against my planeswalker villain. I think she's going to be more intent on escaping than fighting, so I might have her planeswalk out at half health or so, but I do think that she should be a tier-4-level bad guy.
But before we get to that, I want to make sure that the lab fight will be sufficiently exciting and challenging while remaining balanced.
I've been fairly religious with the Xanathar guidelines for encounter building, which has yielded some scary moments but hasn't actually killed anyone yet. While I'm not eager for anyone's character to die (though there is ample opportunity for resurrection - the Orzhov even have a whole payment plan structure your friends can get you indebted to) I do want to give the characters some pause. I think the slog of going through six different fights (potentially fewer, as two of them can be RP'd around) might be enough to make the final fight dicey by default.
In fact, as I write about this, I think the key is to make the actual tier 2 finale (after which they'll all hit level 11) the truly scary fight. A kind of wake-up call after the triumph of the big dungeon.
Essentially, I'm going to balance a fight for level 16 (maybe slightly lower) that they'll be fighting at 10.
Saturday, July 4, 2020
The Irony of the Monoblue Mill Deck
One of the MTG decks I've been playing a lot is one I call "Mind Games." It's a mill deck, designed to stall out the opponent long enough for my various mill cards to pour their library into their graveyard and get me a win as they try to draw a card that isn't there.
The deck either works or it doesn't, of course, though that's true of any strategy. The thing that's unusual about it is that there's no amount of life gain or bulwark of defense that prevents this from working. When you play against me, you have a ticking clock - you've got to take me down before I can get my mill engine running at full steam.
What's ironic is that, from my perspective, it plays a lot like an aggro deck.
I have a very traditionally aggro Rakdos deck that I also play a lot (I call it "Rakdos Rager," as if I'm throwing the most debauched party.) With an aggro deck, at least of this style, you really focus in on two things: dealing damage quickly and removing obstacles to that damage.
So the RR deck is all about cheap, fast creatures that consistently hit, and then burn and removal spells to clear out creatures that might block. If the RR deck hasn't gotten the opponent down below 10 health by turn 5 or so, I'm in deep trouble, because there aren't a lot of things I can do once they start summoning powerful defenders.
Oddly, the mill deck works the same way - I laser-focus on milling them as much and as efficiently as possible, and I have a number of bounce, counterspells and "crowd control" spells to lock down or eliminate their aggressive strategies.
Just as you're racing against my clock, I'm racing to make sure that clock runs as fast as I can make it.
Good games tend to start with the powerful enchantments that I want out - Drowned Secrets causes you to mill a target (you) every time I cast a blue spell - it's a blue deck, so any spell I cast is a blue spell. Teferi's Tutelage is more consistent but less spectacular. In addition to letting me loot one card when it comes into play (draw a card, discard a card) it also mills the opponent for 2 each time I draw a card (including the one gained by looting.)
Both of these are wonderful to have multiples out, as the effect is multiplicatie. If I can get two Teferi's Tutelages out, it means every single turn I take, the opponent is milling 4 cards. With a 60 card deck, including their own draw, that's 5 cards a round, or a 12-turn clock (though naturally it takes a few turns to get up to that.)
Sage's Row Denizen is a creature I also have 4 of in the deck, and has a similar effect - when a creature comes into play, it mills the opponent for two. While this has the added benefit of a 2/3 body that can block smaller creatures, it's also more vulnerable, given how much more prevalent creature removal (and burn spells) are.
When the deck is firing on all engines, I have one or two copies of each of these. Then, when I cast something like Wall of Lost Thoughts, it's a blue spell, triggering Drowned Secrets, and it's a creature, triggering Sage's Row Denizen, and then it mills the opponent for 4 when it comes into play (and becomes a 4-toughness roadblock to enemy aggressors.)
What can make the deck frustrating is when the drawn cards don't quite line up. I've sometimes gotten things like the Wall early on, which is fine on its own, but on its own only does 4 cards. While the deck is, in theory, pretty good against defensive control decks, an Azorius deck with decent removal, or one with lots of flying creatures (like the pre-made one) can make it hard to hold off the assault. Frogify and liberal counterspells can help a bit with this, but it's not a very favorable matchup.
I have two copies of Ashiok, Dream Render, which can turn a potentially bad matchup against some graveyard-based Golgari deck into a total hoser, given that Ashiok not only mills, but exiles the entire graveyard after using their ability (I've definitely seen some Golgari players immediately concede upon using that ability.)
Anyway, I've been branching out, tinkering with my Dimir deck to make it work a little more like how I conceived it (fewer vampires, more removal and blue shenangians) and futzing with Orzhov and even an... Esper? That's WUB, right? An Esper Vampire deck that is only those colors so that I can include all the vampires I have.
The deck either works or it doesn't, of course, though that's true of any strategy. The thing that's unusual about it is that there's no amount of life gain or bulwark of defense that prevents this from working. When you play against me, you have a ticking clock - you've got to take me down before I can get my mill engine running at full steam.
What's ironic is that, from my perspective, it plays a lot like an aggro deck.
I have a very traditionally aggro Rakdos deck that I also play a lot (I call it "Rakdos Rager," as if I'm throwing the most debauched party.) With an aggro deck, at least of this style, you really focus in on two things: dealing damage quickly and removing obstacles to that damage.
So the RR deck is all about cheap, fast creatures that consistently hit, and then burn and removal spells to clear out creatures that might block. If the RR deck hasn't gotten the opponent down below 10 health by turn 5 or so, I'm in deep trouble, because there aren't a lot of things I can do once they start summoning powerful defenders.
Oddly, the mill deck works the same way - I laser-focus on milling them as much and as efficiently as possible, and I have a number of bounce, counterspells and "crowd control" spells to lock down or eliminate their aggressive strategies.
Just as you're racing against my clock, I'm racing to make sure that clock runs as fast as I can make it.
Good games tend to start with the powerful enchantments that I want out - Drowned Secrets causes you to mill a target (you) every time I cast a blue spell - it's a blue deck, so any spell I cast is a blue spell. Teferi's Tutelage is more consistent but less spectacular. In addition to letting me loot one card when it comes into play (draw a card, discard a card) it also mills the opponent for 2 each time I draw a card (including the one gained by looting.)
Both of these are wonderful to have multiples out, as the effect is multiplicatie. If I can get two Teferi's Tutelages out, it means every single turn I take, the opponent is milling 4 cards. With a 60 card deck, including their own draw, that's 5 cards a round, or a 12-turn clock (though naturally it takes a few turns to get up to that.)
Sage's Row Denizen is a creature I also have 4 of in the deck, and has a similar effect - when a creature comes into play, it mills the opponent for two. While this has the added benefit of a 2/3 body that can block smaller creatures, it's also more vulnerable, given how much more prevalent creature removal (and burn spells) are.
When the deck is firing on all engines, I have one or two copies of each of these. Then, when I cast something like Wall of Lost Thoughts, it's a blue spell, triggering Drowned Secrets, and it's a creature, triggering Sage's Row Denizen, and then it mills the opponent for 4 when it comes into play (and becomes a 4-toughness roadblock to enemy aggressors.)
What can make the deck frustrating is when the drawn cards don't quite line up. I've sometimes gotten things like the Wall early on, which is fine on its own, but on its own only does 4 cards. While the deck is, in theory, pretty good against defensive control decks, an Azorius deck with decent removal, or one with lots of flying creatures (like the pre-made one) can make it hard to hold off the assault. Frogify and liberal counterspells can help a bit with this, but it's not a very favorable matchup.
I have two copies of Ashiok, Dream Render, which can turn a potentially bad matchup against some graveyard-based Golgari deck into a total hoser, given that Ashiok not only mills, but exiles the entire graveyard after using their ability (I've definitely seen some Golgari players immediately concede upon using that ability.)
Anyway, I've been branching out, tinkering with my Dimir deck to make it work a little more like how I conceived it (fewer vampires, more removal and blue shenangians) and futzing with Orzhov and even an... Esper? That's WUB, right? An Esper Vampire deck that is only those colors so that I can include all the vampires I have.
Complicating Armor Class in D&D
AC is a simple concept for D&D, at least in 5th Edition. The higher your AC, the higher someone needs to roll on an attack roll to hit the target. Players will generally hover between 10 and 20, depending on your character's build (my Eldritch Knight Fighter currently sits at 22).
For gameplay, it's pretty smooth and I think works well, but I also always felt like there was one big glaring weirdness with it:
Dodging an attack or deflecting it with armor are treated exactly the same way.
A Monk, for example, does not wear armor, and instead gets to add their Wisdom modifier on top of their Dexterity modifier. If you're diligent about stacking up both stats with your ASIs, you'll eventually get +5 to both and thus have 20 AC (which is the same as someone in full plate with a shield - in other words, quite good).
The notion of a Monk having high AC is that they are dodging very effectively - the Dexterity is their physical capability of moving out of the way when a sword or claw comes toward them, and the Wisdom represents their situational awareness - being able to anticipate where the blows will be coming from.
A Paladin, for example, once they amass a fairly large amount of gold, can get plate armor and, if it's their playstyle, they can use a shield to get their AC up to 20 (before accounting for magical items and such.) But the flavor of this is very different. As a big, metal-clad bruiser, the Paladin is relying not on getting out of the way of attacks, but instead for their tough armor to make attacks glance off of them.
Of course, this is all purely on the defensive side of things, too. When you make an attack roll, you're trying to aim your strike or shot or what have you at the target. If you roll low, you miss, but is that miss your fault, or just the fact that the enemy is too heavily-armored or agile and avoided the attack's consequences.
As a DM, I sometimes try to flavor misses in different ways.
For example, if a player attacks a highly dextrous but unarmored foe, we can break it down two ways: if the attack is below a ten, the player just failed the attack in some obvious way - you pulled the trigger on your crossbow too early and it went wide. This accounts for the free 10 points of armor class everyone gets before applying their stats. If it's above ten, but still misses, the target was just too adept at dodging and evaded the attack.
Then, when armor comes into play, things get a bit different. Basically, if the attack would still hit if it weren't for the target's armor - essentially if you subtract the armor bonus from the target's AC (leaving the dexterity, up to a max of two with medium armor) - you can say that the attack does actually hit, but is absorbed by the armor. So let's say you shoot at a ranger in Scale Mail - they're dexy, so they have 16 AC. If you get 1-9 on your roll, it's entirely your fault. If you get 10 or 11, they dodge out of the way, but if you get 12-16, that 4-point range is covered by the Scale Mail's 14-AC bonus, which means that, flavor-wise, the attack is deflected or caught by the scales.
Naturally, when it comes to heavy armor, there's no dodging at all - in this case, it's either a total miss below 10 or it's caught on the armor up to the target's AC.
You can even play this up with shields, where if the attack would have hit had the target not been using a shield, you can say that they deflect the attack with a quick block.
Now, you may ask:
What the hell is the reason for even thinking about this?
After all, the mechanics of the game don't care if you're dodging or deflecting attacks, and maybe your DM (or you, as a DM) simply say that the heavily-armored Death Knight is dodging out of the way of all the party's attacks.
That's totally your right to do so, but looking at things this way opens up new possibilities for homebrew rules.
Mind you, what I'm proposing would be a significant change to the rules and possibly break the game, but hear me out:
You could make a distinction between dodging and armor by making its interaction with damage work differently.
In real life, a shield doesn't magically negate an enemy's attack - it works in part by being a big heavy thing that absorbs the momentum of an enemy's strike and also in spreading the pressure of that strike to a wider surface. The reason we use blades, after all, is because they allow us to focus the force behind an attack on a relatively tiny surface area - the smaller the surface area, the greater the pressure. A bullet is a tiny object, and it's not all that heavy, but we launch them at such high velocities that they can pierce armor and bodies effectively - gunpowder weapons are part of the reason heavy metal armor isn't used anymore.
The idea behind a warhammer, then, is that you make it heavy enough that, even with a blunt surface, the force will be strong enough to crush the enemy. And that's before you even take into account that real warhammers tended to have spikes or relatively small heads - none of the kind of massive mallets that you tend to see in fantasy. They were more like a normal utility hammer on the end of a long pole.
So, I think you could separate Dex-based AC into something like "dodge chance." A Monk would be far more likely to dodge thanks to their Wisdom-based training, and would more or less be unchanged.
Armor, however, would work a bit more like the Heavy Armor Master feat - subtracting damage taken. However, HAM is kind of laughable as it stands now, only reducing damage by 3 (and only from nonmagical attacks.) When a young red dragon that hits you three times is going from 43 physical damage and 3ish fire to 34 and 3 ish fire, that's still roughly 80% of the normal damage you'd be taking - a hell of a lot less impressive than a Barbarian simply raging through that damage.
So I think, with this system, you'd want to make armor a lot more effective. For one thing, the expectation would be that you'd get hit a lot more, as, by wearing heavy armor, you're less likely to dodge attacks. (I haven't totally figured out how lighter armors would work, but if this system works it might not be too hard to hybridize it in a similar way to how it works now.)
For the sake of argument, let's start with the notion that your Armor (this is the new version, rather than AC) just reduces the damage you take (you could also make magic armor more important and hopefully easier to get by requiring magical armor to reduce magical damage) by an amount equal to its value.
So let's say that you're a newly-made paladin who fights with a two-hander, so you've only got chain mail, giving you 16 AC.
You've leveled up to the point where your DM isn't just being mean by sending you up against a CR 10 Young Red Dragon.
On average, in the current system, with the Dragon's +10 attack bonus for its bite and claws, it's going to hit you any time it rolls a 6 or higher, which is, conveniently for this example, 3/4 of the time. The bite hits for an average of 17 piercing and 3.5 fire damage, while the claws hit for an average of 13 damage.
So if we take the average damage and we multiply it by the chance the dragon has to hit you, we get the bite hitting you each round for an average of 15.375 and the claws hitting you on average for 9.75 (twice).
Add those up and we get 34.875 damage you'll be taking per round if the dragon focuses on you (and doesn't recharge their breath weapon).
Now, clearly, that's going to go way down if we just subtract Chain Mail's current armor value from the hits. While wearing heavy armor, your Dodge chance is just 10 - regardless of your Dex - and that means that with a +10 to hit, the dragon can only miss you entirely on a natural 1.
But what happens to the hits?
If it's purely subtractive, that makes the claws do nothing whatsoever even if they hit, unless the damage roll is high. Essentially, to do anything, the dragon needs to roll at least 11 on their 2d6, which means a 6 on one die and a 5 or 6 on the other - very unlikely. Meanwhile, the bite will do more damage - we can say the fire goes through regardless, and then the 2d10+6 means you'll need to get at least 11 on 2d10, which is actually the average roll for those dice, so about half the time that'll do damage to this fresh-out-the-box paladin.
So already, there's evidence that this system could have problems. The first thing I'd do is reduce "armor" by half or so. So Chain Mail now gives you 8 armor, which subtracts from attacks.
In this case, the Dragon still hits you 19/20 times. But when it does hit you, as long as it gets over 2 on its 2-die rolls, it'll wind up doing at least some damage to you. Basically, the average for the bite becomes the average of 2d10+6 (so 17) - 8 (so 9) plus 3.5 fire damage. The claws become the average of 2d6+6 (so 13) - 8 (so 5)... except that then I think I'm messing up the math because there are negative numbers skewing the average lower.
If we just ignore that issue for now to get a rough estimate, that means we're looking at a total of 9+3.5+5+5, or 22.5 average damage (well, times .95 because of the chance to get a natural one.)
That's still a lot lower than the current average damage, but feels more fair.
Here's the ultimate consequence of a system built like this:
It means a heavily-armored character will be far better at surviving hordes of small enemies that don't hit so hard. If you've got 30 skeletons stabbing them with shortswords, they'll barely take a scratch (in fact, unless they crit, a skeleton's shortsword damage maxes out at 8, so they will be entirely safe from them) while a comparably leveled Monk is going to, after 30 attacks, probably get hit a few times at least.
However, against a giant foe like, well, a giant, that heavy armor isn't going to be as effective, as subtracting 8 from a Frost Giant's Greataxe (average damage 25) is going to look less attractive than just out-and-out avoiding the attack about half the time (which a Monk with AC 19 would do.)
The question, then, is what you think of that consequence.
For my purposes, I'll happily stick with 5E's AC/+to Hit system, as it's very simply to understand and lets combat run smoothly.
However, this futzed-with system is, I'd argue, more realistic, and also introduces some interesting strategic possibilities for a D&D-like RPG system. (I'm well aware I might just be reinventing the wheel here, as I'm just not very familiar with non-5E systems.)
It would allow your heavily-armored fighter or paladin (or cleric, even) to wade through hordes of undead to rescue a beloved NPC with little fear, but when you want someone to draw the attention of a massive dragon, you'll probably want your agile Monk or Rogue to draw their fire.
I might have some homebrew to work on.
For gameplay, it's pretty smooth and I think works well, but I also always felt like there was one big glaring weirdness with it:
Dodging an attack or deflecting it with armor are treated exactly the same way.
A Monk, for example, does not wear armor, and instead gets to add their Wisdom modifier on top of their Dexterity modifier. If you're diligent about stacking up both stats with your ASIs, you'll eventually get +5 to both and thus have 20 AC (which is the same as someone in full plate with a shield - in other words, quite good).
The notion of a Monk having high AC is that they are dodging very effectively - the Dexterity is their physical capability of moving out of the way when a sword or claw comes toward them, and the Wisdom represents their situational awareness - being able to anticipate where the blows will be coming from.
A Paladin, for example, once they amass a fairly large amount of gold, can get plate armor and, if it's their playstyle, they can use a shield to get their AC up to 20 (before accounting for magical items and such.) But the flavor of this is very different. As a big, metal-clad bruiser, the Paladin is relying not on getting out of the way of attacks, but instead for their tough armor to make attacks glance off of them.
Of course, this is all purely on the defensive side of things, too. When you make an attack roll, you're trying to aim your strike or shot or what have you at the target. If you roll low, you miss, but is that miss your fault, or just the fact that the enemy is too heavily-armored or agile and avoided the attack's consequences.
As a DM, I sometimes try to flavor misses in different ways.
For example, if a player attacks a highly dextrous but unarmored foe, we can break it down two ways: if the attack is below a ten, the player just failed the attack in some obvious way - you pulled the trigger on your crossbow too early and it went wide. This accounts for the free 10 points of armor class everyone gets before applying their stats. If it's above ten, but still misses, the target was just too adept at dodging and evaded the attack.
Then, when armor comes into play, things get a bit different. Basically, if the attack would still hit if it weren't for the target's armor - essentially if you subtract the armor bonus from the target's AC (leaving the dexterity, up to a max of two with medium armor) - you can say that the attack does actually hit, but is absorbed by the armor. So let's say you shoot at a ranger in Scale Mail - they're dexy, so they have 16 AC. If you get 1-9 on your roll, it's entirely your fault. If you get 10 or 11, they dodge out of the way, but if you get 12-16, that 4-point range is covered by the Scale Mail's 14-AC bonus, which means that, flavor-wise, the attack is deflected or caught by the scales.
Naturally, when it comes to heavy armor, there's no dodging at all - in this case, it's either a total miss below 10 or it's caught on the armor up to the target's AC.
You can even play this up with shields, where if the attack would have hit had the target not been using a shield, you can say that they deflect the attack with a quick block.
Now, you may ask:
What the hell is the reason for even thinking about this?
After all, the mechanics of the game don't care if you're dodging or deflecting attacks, and maybe your DM (or you, as a DM) simply say that the heavily-armored Death Knight is dodging out of the way of all the party's attacks.
That's totally your right to do so, but looking at things this way opens up new possibilities for homebrew rules.
Mind you, what I'm proposing would be a significant change to the rules and possibly break the game, but hear me out:
You could make a distinction between dodging and armor by making its interaction with damage work differently.
In real life, a shield doesn't magically negate an enemy's attack - it works in part by being a big heavy thing that absorbs the momentum of an enemy's strike and also in spreading the pressure of that strike to a wider surface. The reason we use blades, after all, is because they allow us to focus the force behind an attack on a relatively tiny surface area - the smaller the surface area, the greater the pressure. A bullet is a tiny object, and it's not all that heavy, but we launch them at such high velocities that they can pierce armor and bodies effectively - gunpowder weapons are part of the reason heavy metal armor isn't used anymore.
The idea behind a warhammer, then, is that you make it heavy enough that, even with a blunt surface, the force will be strong enough to crush the enemy. And that's before you even take into account that real warhammers tended to have spikes or relatively small heads - none of the kind of massive mallets that you tend to see in fantasy. They were more like a normal utility hammer on the end of a long pole.
So, I think you could separate Dex-based AC into something like "dodge chance." A Monk would be far more likely to dodge thanks to their Wisdom-based training, and would more or less be unchanged.
Armor, however, would work a bit more like the Heavy Armor Master feat - subtracting damage taken. However, HAM is kind of laughable as it stands now, only reducing damage by 3 (and only from nonmagical attacks.) When a young red dragon that hits you three times is going from 43 physical damage and 3ish fire to 34 and 3 ish fire, that's still roughly 80% of the normal damage you'd be taking - a hell of a lot less impressive than a Barbarian simply raging through that damage.
So I think, with this system, you'd want to make armor a lot more effective. For one thing, the expectation would be that you'd get hit a lot more, as, by wearing heavy armor, you're less likely to dodge attacks. (I haven't totally figured out how lighter armors would work, but if this system works it might not be too hard to hybridize it in a similar way to how it works now.)
For the sake of argument, let's start with the notion that your Armor (this is the new version, rather than AC) just reduces the damage you take (you could also make magic armor more important and hopefully easier to get by requiring magical armor to reduce magical damage) by an amount equal to its value.
So let's say that you're a newly-made paladin who fights with a two-hander, so you've only got chain mail, giving you 16 AC.
You've leveled up to the point where your DM isn't just being mean by sending you up against a CR 10 Young Red Dragon.
On average, in the current system, with the Dragon's +10 attack bonus for its bite and claws, it's going to hit you any time it rolls a 6 or higher, which is, conveniently for this example, 3/4 of the time. The bite hits for an average of 17 piercing and 3.5 fire damage, while the claws hit for an average of 13 damage.
So if we take the average damage and we multiply it by the chance the dragon has to hit you, we get the bite hitting you each round for an average of 15.375 and the claws hitting you on average for 9.75 (twice).
Add those up and we get 34.875 damage you'll be taking per round if the dragon focuses on you (and doesn't recharge their breath weapon).
Now, clearly, that's going to go way down if we just subtract Chain Mail's current armor value from the hits. While wearing heavy armor, your Dodge chance is just 10 - regardless of your Dex - and that means that with a +10 to hit, the dragon can only miss you entirely on a natural 1.
But what happens to the hits?
If it's purely subtractive, that makes the claws do nothing whatsoever even if they hit, unless the damage roll is high. Essentially, to do anything, the dragon needs to roll at least 11 on their 2d6, which means a 6 on one die and a 5 or 6 on the other - very unlikely. Meanwhile, the bite will do more damage - we can say the fire goes through regardless, and then the 2d10+6 means you'll need to get at least 11 on 2d10, which is actually the average roll for those dice, so about half the time that'll do damage to this fresh-out-the-box paladin.
So already, there's evidence that this system could have problems. The first thing I'd do is reduce "armor" by half or so. So Chain Mail now gives you 8 armor, which subtracts from attacks.
In this case, the Dragon still hits you 19/20 times. But when it does hit you, as long as it gets over 2 on its 2-die rolls, it'll wind up doing at least some damage to you. Basically, the average for the bite becomes the average of 2d10+6 (so 17) - 8 (so 9) plus 3.5 fire damage. The claws become the average of 2d6+6 (so 13) - 8 (so 5)... except that then I think I'm messing up the math because there are negative numbers skewing the average lower.
If we just ignore that issue for now to get a rough estimate, that means we're looking at a total of 9+3.5+5+5, or 22.5 average damage (well, times .95 because of the chance to get a natural one.)
That's still a lot lower than the current average damage, but feels more fair.
Here's the ultimate consequence of a system built like this:
It means a heavily-armored character will be far better at surviving hordes of small enemies that don't hit so hard. If you've got 30 skeletons stabbing them with shortswords, they'll barely take a scratch (in fact, unless they crit, a skeleton's shortsword damage maxes out at 8, so they will be entirely safe from them) while a comparably leveled Monk is going to, after 30 attacks, probably get hit a few times at least.
However, against a giant foe like, well, a giant, that heavy armor isn't going to be as effective, as subtracting 8 from a Frost Giant's Greataxe (average damage 25) is going to look less attractive than just out-and-out avoiding the attack about half the time (which a Monk with AC 19 would do.)
The question, then, is what you think of that consequence.
For my purposes, I'll happily stick with 5E's AC/+to Hit system, as it's very simply to understand and lets combat run smoothly.
However, this futzed-with system is, I'd argue, more realistic, and also introduces some interesting strategic possibilities for a D&D-like RPG system. (I'm well aware I might just be reinventing the wheel here, as I'm just not very familiar with non-5E systems.)
It would allow your heavily-armored fighter or paladin (or cleric, even) to wade through hordes of undead to rescue a beloved NPC with little fear, but when you want someone to draw the attention of a massive dragon, you'll probably want your agile Monk or Rogue to draw their fire.
I might have some homebrew to work on.
Friday, July 3, 2020
The MTGA Pre-Made Decks are Pretty Good
When you first boot up MTG Arena, you'll have a little tutorial teaching you the basics of the game, and then you get a little series of other tutorials focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the five colors - giving you decks to play with pre-determined card draws against a computer-controlled opponent, pitting each color against each of the other colors, and then a final challenge where they put you against another player (though you get credit for this one win or lose.)
This challenge will give you five mono-color decks. Then, over the course of a week, roughly, you'll get a new deck each day if you complete little quests where you're supposed to cast spells of certain color combinations. These are all themed on the Ravnica guilds, and are composed largely of Guilds of Ravnica-block cards, and lean into the mechanics of that block for each deck.
And I've got to say, some of these decks are pretty decent.
You get the allied color pairs first, rotating so there aren't any immediate repeats of colors - so you get Gruul (G/R) followed by Azorius (W/U) and then Rakdos (R/B) then Selesnya (W/G) and finally Dimir (U/B). Then, I had a quest that just gave me a mythic rare card (I believe a random one) and the next one gave me the other five guild decks.
This is actually a pretty generous infusion of cards (it also comes with one "shock land" for each color pair, which I remember being insanely expensive when the original Ravnica block came out.) But I'm also shocked at how well some of these decks actually play.
The Azorius one is a solid control deck - you get a bunch of flying creatures, life-gain, and lots of bounce, as well as Dovin's Acuity, which is an enchantment that grants you a card and some life when you play it and bounces back to your hand when you cast an instant during your main phase (there's a similar card for Dimir called Disinformation Campaign that makes the opponent discard instead of giving you life, and bounces back when you use the Dimir keyword called Surveil.)
I've also found the Izzet Deck to be pretty darn powerful as well - it's focused on sorceries and instants (as the Izzet have always been) but while the card-draw of blue and the direct damage of red are already pretty powerful, you also get a crazy enchantment called Thousand-Year Storm, which turns those low-cost, early game cards into absolute nukes.
The way Thousand-Year Storm works is that each time you cast a Sorcery or Instant, you copy it for every other sorcery or instant you've cast that turn. So while it's not going to do much for you early on (it also costs 6 mana, so it's not like you'll have it out there early anyway) if you can get off some cheap spells (Radical Idea, which costs 2 and just draws you a card, and has Jump-Start, is a great feeder for this) by the time you've cast two or three spells, a single Shock will do a massive amount of damage.
This is obviously combo material, but it's enough on its own to work pretty well even for a more generalized deck.
I don't think any of the decks are terrible - I will say I never seem to do that well with Gruul decks. And perhaps it's a sign of a healthy metagame that there's such diversity in the decks I face that I can get a win with any of these decks once in a while.
This challenge will give you five mono-color decks. Then, over the course of a week, roughly, you'll get a new deck each day if you complete little quests where you're supposed to cast spells of certain color combinations. These are all themed on the Ravnica guilds, and are composed largely of Guilds of Ravnica-block cards, and lean into the mechanics of that block for each deck.
And I've got to say, some of these decks are pretty decent.
You get the allied color pairs first, rotating so there aren't any immediate repeats of colors - so you get Gruul (G/R) followed by Azorius (W/U) and then Rakdos (R/B) then Selesnya (W/G) and finally Dimir (U/B). Then, I had a quest that just gave me a mythic rare card (I believe a random one) and the next one gave me the other five guild decks.
This is actually a pretty generous infusion of cards (it also comes with one "shock land" for each color pair, which I remember being insanely expensive when the original Ravnica block came out.) But I'm also shocked at how well some of these decks actually play.
The Azorius one is a solid control deck - you get a bunch of flying creatures, life-gain, and lots of bounce, as well as Dovin's Acuity, which is an enchantment that grants you a card and some life when you play it and bounces back to your hand when you cast an instant during your main phase (there's a similar card for Dimir called Disinformation Campaign that makes the opponent discard instead of giving you life, and bounces back when you use the Dimir keyword called Surveil.)
I've also found the Izzet Deck to be pretty darn powerful as well - it's focused on sorceries and instants (as the Izzet have always been) but while the card-draw of blue and the direct damage of red are already pretty powerful, you also get a crazy enchantment called Thousand-Year Storm, which turns those low-cost, early game cards into absolute nukes.
The way Thousand-Year Storm works is that each time you cast a Sorcery or Instant, you copy it for every other sorcery or instant you've cast that turn. So while it's not going to do much for you early on (it also costs 6 mana, so it's not like you'll have it out there early anyway) if you can get off some cheap spells (Radical Idea, which costs 2 and just draws you a card, and has Jump-Start, is a great feeder for this) by the time you've cast two or three spells, a single Shock will do a massive amount of damage.
This is obviously combo material, but it's enough on its own to work pretty well even for a more generalized deck.
I don't think any of the decks are terrible - I will say I never seem to do that well with Gruul decks. And perhaps it's a sign of a healthy metagame that there's such diversity in the decks I face that I can get a win with any of these decks once in a while.
MTG Arena Is Great... When It Doesn't Crash
Magic the Gathering Arena is the... two year old, I think, online digital client for playing Magic the Gathering. You get a digital card collection from which you can build decks and battle other people. Much as Blizzard took a lot of inspiration from Magic in building Hearthstone, you can see how Wizards took some ideas from Hearthstone in terms of monetization and online features here with this second run at an online version of their groundbreaking card game.
Now that Arena is on Macs, I've finally been able to jump into the ring, and I've got to say that the game runs wonderfully smoothly, even on my old-ass computer (which I got in fall of 2014). Or rather, I should say that it runs smoothly when it runs at all. When it's rolling, the game is responsive and quick, and one of the things that has made this such a better experience than MTG Online is how smooth it is.
There are some tricks they've taken to make it go faster. For one, there's a rather smart AI system that will automatically tap lands for mana when you want to cast a spell. It almost always taps them in a manner to leave as much open for you to cast other spells you have in hand - if you have dual lands, for instance, it'll prioritize tapping basic lands if you can cast the spell with them.
So while the play experience tends to be great once I get into a match, it has its problems.
Every time I boot the game up, it claims there was some problem with the assets when it previously shut down, and it needs to verify them. Then, the game will often crash if I try to queue up for a match or, rarely, right as a game starts.
Generally, I never have these issues in the middle of a game. But every time I try to open up the client is a coin toss whether it'll just immediately crash and quit, and the odds of it crashing when I try to queue for a match are about 5-10%
It's more of an inconvenience than a game-breaking problem - only rarely have I found myself desperately trying to get back online while my timer runs out and I fail to mulligan on a hand with a single off-color basic land - but it's definitely annoying.
My hope is that this is just early kinks in the system that will be worked out after the Mac client has been out for a while. I don't recall there being a beta for the Mac client, which is annoying, but also potentially a reason to believe that these issues will be addressed in new builds later down the road.
What I worry about is that there's some problem with my computer in particular.
Now that Arena is on Macs, I've finally been able to jump into the ring, and I've got to say that the game runs wonderfully smoothly, even on my old-ass computer (which I got in fall of 2014). Or rather, I should say that it runs smoothly when it runs at all. When it's rolling, the game is responsive and quick, and one of the things that has made this such a better experience than MTG Online is how smooth it is.
There are some tricks they've taken to make it go faster. For one, there's a rather smart AI system that will automatically tap lands for mana when you want to cast a spell. It almost always taps them in a manner to leave as much open for you to cast other spells you have in hand - if you have dual lands, for instance, it'll prioritize tapping basic lands if you can cast the spell with them.
So while the play experience tends to be great once I get into a match, it has its problems.
Every time I boot the game up, it claims there was some problem with the assets when it previously shut down, and it needs to verify them. Then, the game will often crash if I try to queue up for a match or, rarely, right as a game starts.
Generally, I never have these issues in the middle of a game. But every time I try to open up the client is a coin toss whether it'll just immediately crash and quit, and the odds of it crashing when I try to queue for a match are about 5-10%
It's more of an inconvenience than a game-breaking problem - only rarely have I found myself desperately trying to get back online while my timer runs out and I fail to mulligan on a hand with a single off-color basic land - but it's definitely annoying.
My hope is that this is just early kinks in the system that will be worked out after the Mac client has been out for a while. I don't recall there being a beta for the Mac client, which is annoying, but also potentially a reason to believe that these issues will be addressed in new builds later down the road.
What I worry about is that there's some problem with my computer in particular.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Either We've Got a Pretty Healthy Meta or MTGA's Card-Acquisition Makes Filling Decks with Powerful Cards Harder
One thing I've been very happy to see playing Magic The Gathering Arena is that I see a fair number of different decks amongst my opponents.
Certainly, there are some archetypes that I keep coming across - like Orzhov life-gain mixed with Ajani's Pridemate, or a plethora of Vampire decks. Some of these are clearly slight variations on the 15 constructed decks you'll automatically get for playing (one for each color, and then one themed on each of the Ravnica guilds) so I can't complain that much.
In all honesty, my mono-blue mill deck (which I call "Mind Games") is one I've seen others play, though I think that's less because it's some net-decked copy and more because the cards in it - stuff like Drowned Secrets - is all pretty obvious, and there aren't a ton of options (I've definitely been having a better time since swapping out some Negates and putting in Essence Scatter - the former counters non-creature spells while the latter counters only creature spells, both for 1U).
Still, I feel like things are diverse enough that I can pop in an odd deck and win with it with a bit of luck and some good play.
Right now I'm thinking my Dimir deck feels like it needs more of a thematic hook. I've tended to like Blue/Black in part for just the flavor of it, but also because I like Blue's controll-y elements with Black's aggression and removal. Right now I have a fair number of vampires in it, but stuff like the Bloodied Aerialist or whatever that's called feel kind of off-theme in a deck that's not built around life-gain.
I splurged a little on some gems, but I've been holding them in reserve. I'm thinking I'll grab some more when Zendikar Rising comes out and I can get a whole mess of cards with the new set and try to build something around new mechanics. I'd love to try out some of the Ikoria stuff, but the initial dollars I slapped down I focused more on the Guilds of Ravnica block because that's what I was familiar with (and with the free decks focused on those, it's been easy to build onto them.) And I'm hesitant to just plunk down a fortune to invest so quickly in what is effectively my third collection of Magic cards (I assume my MTGO account is still, like, existent, but I doubt I'll be accessing it any time soon. Meanwhile my cardboard cards are mostly more than 20 years old and probably staying there until my next-of-kin decides to see what they can get for them after I've croaked.
That got dark.
Anywho.
The lack of card-trading and thus specific-card selling is, I imagine, a force that has made most players work with what they've got. I remember how MTGO back in the day was all about trading Contest Passes to bots that would sell cards, and here, instead, you just acquire tokens that can be traded in for certain rarities of cards.
The way this token system appears to work, as far as I can tell, is this:
Each time you open a new pack, you get some progress toward a new uncommon and a new rare card, and every few rares, you get progress toward a mythic rare card. If you already have four copies of a card, you just get a full on token in the pack instead of that card. Also, I think sometimes you just get a token instead of your ordinary rare card per pack, which is pretty cool.
The tokens can then be turned in whenever you want to make a card of that rarity. You can actually build a deck out of cards you have and don't have, and you can then hit a "craft all" button that, if you have the tokens for it, will craft the full deck.
So, actually, it might be easier to get the ultra-rare cards than it was in MTGO, because any rare card is just a rare card, unlike real trading situations, where a Royal Assassin, as awesome as it is, is a lot easier to get than a Black Lotus.
Certainly, there are some archetypes that I keep coming across - like Orzhov life-gain mixed with Ajani's Pridemate, or a plethora of Vampire decks. Some of these are clearly slight variations on the 15 constructed decks you'll automatically get for playing (one for each color, and then one themed on each of the Ravnica guilds) so I can't complain that much.
In all honesty, my mono-blue mill deck (which I call "Mind Games") is one I've seen others play, though I think that's less because it's some net-decked copy and more because the cards in it - stuff like Drowned Secrets - is all pretty obvious, and there aren't a ton of options (I've definitely been having a better time since swapping out some Negates and putting in Essence Scatter - the former counters non-creature spells while the latter counters only creature spells, both for 1U).
Still, I feel like things are diverse enough that I can pop in an odd deck and win with it with a bit of luck and some good play.
Right now I'm thinking my Dimir deck feels like it needs more of a thematic hook. I've tended to like Blue/Black in part for just the flavor of it, but also because I like Blue's controll-y elements with Black's aggression and removal. Right now I have a fair number of vampires in it, but stuff like the Bloodied Aerialist or whatever that's called feel kind of off-theme in a deck that's not built around life-gain.
I splurged a little on some gems, but I've been holding them in reserve. I'm thinking I'll grab some more when Zendikar Rising comes out and I can get a whole mess of cards with the new set and try to build something around new mechanics. I'd love to try out some of the Ikoria stuff, but the initial dollars I slapped down I focused more on the Guilds of Ravnica block because that's what I was familiar with (and with the free decks focused on those, it's been easy to build onto them.) And I'm hesitant to just plunk down a fortune to invest so quickly in what is effectively my third collection of Magic cards (I assume my MTGO account is still, like, existent, but I doubt I'll be accessing it any time soon. Meanwhile my cardboard cards are mostly more than 20 years old and probably staying there until my next-of-kin decides to see what they can get for them after I've croaked.
That got dark.
Anywho.
The lack of card-trading and thus specific-card selling is, I imagine, a force that has made most players work with what they've got. I remember how MTGO back in the day was all about trading Contest Passes to bots that would sell cards, and here, instead, you just acquire tokens that can be traded in for certain rarities of cards.
The way this token system appears to work, as far as I can tell, is this:
Each time you open a new pack, you get some progress toward a new uncommon and a new rare card, and every few rares, you get progress toward a mythic rare card. If you already have four copies of a card, you just get a full on token in the pack instead of that card. Also, I think sometimes you just get a token instead of your ordinary rare card per pack, which is pretty cool.
The tokens can then be turned in whenever you want to make a card of that rarity. You can actually build a deck out of cards you have and don't have, and you can then hit a "craft all" button that, if you have the tokens for it, will craft the full deck.
So, actually, it might be easier to get the ultra-rare cards than it was in MTGO, because any rare card is just a rare card, unlike real trading situations, where a Royal Assassin, as awesome as it is, is a lot easier to get than a Black Lotus.
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