Top Five things I'm not going to miss about MMDOC's open format

So after getting trapped above 1000 elo and roughly forced to play against people with actual, serious decks, MMDOC became something of a surreal game. After a bit more grinding I realized I should probably either spend the resources I had, or just stop playing the game altogether, which seemed far from optimal.

I didn't exactly enter the tournament scene or something. I tried playing jackpot, but it was largely a waste of time, as apparently players imagine that with such prizes on the line they should ... Take about a million years to do anything. Given JP only pays out to a tier I'd probably not reach to justify playing it, I just went back to grinding ranked matches to keep piling up wildcards, which got me to around 1200~ rating, peaking at about 1300 or so but no higher.

At about 1200 you start to actually play against tournament decks, though they tend to be a mixed breed of people who probably got stuck just over 1500 and then legitimate good players. Good players with good decks mostly crushed me, which I guess is how it should be, but bad players were quite the mix.

So with the patch hitting tomorrow and my time playing open drawing entirely to a close (spoilers; it sucks and they're killing it) I thought I'd outline the five things I found most disappointing about playing at the higher levels. This isn't really a review, it is just me venting.

Consider it therapy, or a discussion of how game design can go bad.




Honorary mention: Snap conceding to Academy players

This is maybe more an observation about the system and the way it rewards time spent on a game, which is to say, it doesn't. The system they're currently using, which is thankfully being replaced, relies on a set of calculations to determine the value of a game. The best determining factor unfortunately isn't time.

Academy players, on average, took me 40% longer to finish games with, with roughly 2-3 more actual turns in the game. Part of it is a matter of the UI not being exactly what you'd call great at deck sorting and lining up targets, and part of it is just that somehow "playing control" means they play at the speed of a slug, taking 30 seconds to put down altar of shadows and pass the turn.

Of course, there's also OTK, which should be quick, but OTK players consistently got upset when they didn't win or were missing a piece and would stubbornly go through their entire combo just to have their wizard fellow punch a Demented then pass the turn to die.

Thankfully, this is getting fixed, though I have this horrible feeling it won't slant rewards towards the player who plays faster. Games really should be built around the idea that one player shouldn't stall and mess around.

At least MMDOC doesn't have multi-queuing, though.

5) Dark Assassin

Actually, DA is pretty benign, but the card is so much higher power than anything else at two it is a little ridiculous. Neutral creatures in general are really odd in MMDOC, in that every deck can play them, so either they do or no deck is supposed to play them except Crag Hack.

That being said, the game is very tempo based, and the guy who draws two of these at the start is at such a huge advantage against the person who doesn't, given very few decks can block a DA and survive if the opposing player has basically any card in their hand to interact with it. Aggro vs aggro coming down to "this dumb creature we should both play four of" is a little silly, though more obnoxious than really something to complain about.

I really love the art though. Look at that guy. He wants to knife you a question.

4) Resource denial event cards

I'm not really sure of the design principle that went into these and they actually make me saddest of all the stuff in the upper level MMDOC decks. I mean other cards are frustrating or overpowered, but the resource denial cycle are just awful. Let's see, they:

Punish slower draws, making it hard to get back into a game you're losing.
Discourage flexible deck building, since you're penalized for not going all fortune or all magic already, so this is just overdoing it.
And lastly: Event cards are completely random, so having a chance to spawn a double mana storm turn that completely destroys your turn is hideous and makes events unfun where they should be fun! I really liked the event cards you could shape to your will, like Month of the Emerald song giving me just enough toughness on a smaller guy to use with sacrificial altar. I even appreciated losing a game where my opponent targeted my guy with Day of Sanctuary so I couldn't target him during my turn, then killed it next turn when he had the resources to do it.

That's neat and interactive, whereas the resource denial shit was just obnoxious and worsened the game. That being said, I still feel like the four card limit shouldn't apply to events. You should have no more than 2 of an event in your deck, to keep thinking changed up and interesting. It's a really awesome mechanic, but it's kinda lame losing to "oh you got two week of the mercs" or "oh I flipped double week of the taxes huh?"

3) Ambush

Ambush is a fairly broad category and there are more than a few ambush cards that aren't all that playable or are pretty balanced, but the problem really isn't how backbreaking Sayama Stalker is - though the card is a little too good at 2 but largely fine - but rather how unenjoyable the mechanic is to interact with.

Lane based combat is good, and the whole interplay of where things should go and how to move around is really what I like about MMDOC. Ambush tends to basically shut lanes down - A double stack of stalker and dune prowler just creates a lane you can't deploy into, which is such a tempo pushback it can create really frustrating game states. You have to move into the lane, but then, the creature can just get outmaneuvered back away and blech. It just vomits all over tempo at very low opportunity cost.

2) Blackskull Vulture

There is no single card in MMDOC that I think represents a greater divorce between the design principles that make MMDOC an exciting tactical game. Unlike Magic your opening draw, while important, doesn't decide 70% of a game. A slow hand can be cultivated into a powerful midgame position. This is a great game to play, and makes it feel far less luck based.

Blackskull throws all of that out the window. The card is basically like playing against Affinity, but with very little in the way of quick easy removal, and basically no downside other than you might pay it for a fair price once in twenty games. Myr Enforcer was 7 if you didn't have any artifacts, but Blackskull Vulture isn't really more than it should be - Radiant Glory was considered quite good at its power level, and Blackskull was +0/+1/+1 even if cast without activating its ability.

Which you basically always did, often to the point the card could be slammed down in multiple for free. That's just so dumb.

1) Spell-Thor

To say that Spell-Thor, as a Magic player, presents bad game design vastly understates how unfathomably poor the thinking and development that went into this archetype is. The entire school of thought going into making pre-baked restricted cards that nearly every deck can tutor for stinks terribly of pay to win. It's not something I'm keen on leveling towards them, but there's a reason Magic did away with tutors and restricted cards oh, I don't know, two decades ago.

(And yes, Vintage does have them. And Vintage can be chiefly defined as pay to win, as the dollar value of your deck dramatically changes your win/loss ratio in any Vintage metagame)

But Spell-Thor takes it a step further, and combines that tutorable, one-of wrath of god with two particular additional elements. First and foremost, a creature which reduces in mana cost based on creatures killed, which in and of itself is just awful design in a game primarily about tempo and maneuvering. Blackskull Vulture is just poorly thought out. Yes, I already mentioned it, but it's straight up my most hated card, by far and away. There's several dumb, overpowered cards, but Blackskull represents something as retarded as the design impetus that went into Affinity brought into a game where it can not ever be fundamentally fun. Granted, Blackskull is never stuck in your hand at 4. It simply doesn't happen, so it's costed at below four and the developers are just lying to themselves. Would they have shipped it at cost 2? No? Well they did. The average I saw Vulture deployed at was below two.

On top of that, a good player - Which most Spell-Thor players chiefly are not, though I'm not sure if that's a matter of just getting bored with playing a dumb archetype to grind or being drawn to what they can manage to play - can be very precise with that FoF. If the board permits, they end up keeping their orc and their elephant, and dumping two vultures against a clear board. Sometimes you can pressure them, but unlike playing against Cass or Lock there are simply turns the lower power deck can't play around.

Sure, Spell-Thor probably isn't that much more annoying than Pillage and Prison and all those things, but there's just so much wrong with the deck from a fun perspective and it comes off as so easy to play, given the board reset->vultures combo is just so ridiculously huge a tempo swing. Never mind the fact the deck effectively plays early game (due to having two power shooters at 1) and effective mid game due to having two back to back seven health frontline troops where other decks barely get those any at any cost. The gateless inferno deck I ground with had exactly four creatures capable of living through a 3 point FF, the haven and sanctuary decks had zero.

Frankly, if nothing else, the idea of a midrange deck wiping its own board and then dumping three cards for free is just so repulsive to me as a longterm Magic player. I'd only played against Cass fortune a couple times, and while it was certainly only a little less powerful and Prison is a really frustrating card, Spell-Thor was absolutely everywhere and made up such a huge chunk of the metagame from 1000-1500 elo it just got way more annoying.  Sandyrush was pretty wild too, but if you fought back on Sandyrush they didn't just wipe the board and start over with three vultures.

In Conclusion

All of this crap is gone, and the game looks much improved. The developers may have made mistakes, but unless HoN brings back all this shit, I'm pretty eager to crack my HoN box with the very last of my seals tomorrow, and then get to grinding BS2 packs. I really hope that unlike two decades of Magic development that has some sort of brain problem where they just can't stop making overpowered blue cards ... Anyway the mmdoc guys seem to have a good handle on what they are doing.

The BS2 card pool looks great, and most of the HoN previewed stuff looks great too. It's a pretty upbeat launch, in the face of being bored to tears by D3 (why did my friend buy me this game good lord) and struggling with Syndicate (2012) which ehhh why did I buy this game?