Faeria vs Magic the Gathering

[Michelle Wong]

I have played Faeria and Magic the Gathering, and I want to compare them (in terms of gameplay, not in terms of the business models).

The main difference between the games is that MTG is a braindead game, there are not many decisions or strategy involved. It's a good game to play when you just want to chill, relax and not focus too much on the game (it can be played in one's sleep, it is so easy).

Faeria is a deep strategy game which has many decisions and each turn must be planned carefully. I am very glad a game like this exists. It is far superior to MTG in terms of strategy.

We are lucky to have this game called Faeria.

[Michelle Wong]

Yes, CrabNicholson expressed the point very well. MTG basically plays itself, it is more or less braindead, a somewhat fun game to pass time but no one should ever pretend that it requires much skill. It does not.

[puschit]

I am playing Magic since 1994 and cannot understand how "MTG is a braindead game, there are not many decisions or strategy involved." or Faeria would involve sooo much more strategy. Faeria does have the board and yes, that adds another element, but it also lacks many, many others. And I am not even talking missing card types like enchantments - the very fact that you can respond to anything in Magic even when it's your opponent's turn with a system of last in first out adds a dimension that easily cancels out the board of Faeria.

Complaining that everyone plays the same deck is a moot argument on so many levels. For one, that happens to ANY CCG that stays around long enough and has millions of players that numberchrunch everything. If Fearia hat that many players, this game would also have been distilled down to a couple of decks that everyone plays.
Next, the number of viable decks has nothing to do with how difficult it is to pilot them or how many decisions you have to make. Implying that it has kind of reveals that you don't know that much about the inner workings of CCGs.
Then there many, many formats and options to play, including variants like Commander. Nobody forces you to play Standard comepetitively.

I do enjoy Fearia, especially over Hearthstone, but I always considered it to be somewhere between Hearthstone and Magic complexity vise. Short card texts, main focus on creatre based combat, no continous global effects, no timing rules because there is no interaction when it's not your turn, no additional zones of play like exile and graveyard, no need to add lands to your deck and and and. The latter alone sets Magic aside, it's the only CCG in existance that has this mana system. The main reason why other models are used in about every other game? Because it's very complicated to build a deck with the right amount of mana sources, the correct mana curve and so on. I know players that do well with copied decks that haven't figured out the inner workings despite being veterans for 10+ years.

To say Magic itself is braindead and needs no skill is ludicrous. As always: You actually need some skill to see why it needs skill ... back in my times as moderator of TheManaDrain.com I was in awe how much you could know about this game and what really seperates players from another. When I arrived at BeyondDominia, I thought of myself of a good Type I player because I did well in local tournaments, but I quickly learned that I was John snow, I knew nothing. Even years later after I joined the Type I Clan and was honoured to moderate the Apprentice forum of TheManaDrain I knew my place - everyone else was just levels above my skill that I didn't knew existed.

Again, for the record: Fearia is a damn fine game, that's why I am here, but having deeper strategies is not the reason for that.

[CrabNicholson]

Aggro decks: play the creatures that best fit the curve and attack every turn
Combo decks: delay the opponent and/or draw cards until you get your combo, then play it. Use force of will or pact of negation to stop counterspells.
Control: counterspell anything that's a threat until you can play your win condition
Midgame decks: get laughed out of the room because half the decks you are facing will kill you by turn 4 or earlier

I usually hop from game to game, since netdecking and stale metas are a problem for any card game, but with MTG this is more pronounced than any other game I've played. They pretty much have a culture of netdecking. I've beaten world pros in tournaments before, it's not some feat, they never had a chance, because I recognized the meta and built a counter-deck that beat them. If they had played a different meta deck that mine didn't counter, I wouldn't have won.

You also brought up another thing that I forgot entirely: land floods and land screws. Always annoying to happen, and can throw a game, even if you've mathematically tuned your deck to have optimal numbers of lands.

Faeria isn't the most complex card game ever, but at least it's relatively cheap to jump into and out of, and it doesn't have such a pervasive metagame. If you ask me the best competitive card game ever, I would say Android Netrunner, but I haven't played that for a few years either. I'm sure by now it's probably developed the same CCG syndrome of ramping costs and metagame stagnation that every CCG succumbs to eventually.

[Hier kommt die Sonne]

Faeria has more strategy because it's not made exclusively of cards. In MTG you play cards and activate abilities. In Faeria you create lands, move creatures, block paths, choose an action from the power wheel, etc.
But I would say MTG is far more complex than Faeria simply because of the instant speed effects and the stack. Not to mention the amount of cards, mechanics and game zones.
However, MTG can be a lot more forgiving (mainly in slower formats like standard and modern) due to board wipes. In Faeria, things kind of snowball and the first player to get an advantage is more likely to win the game (which makes the game much more linear in my opinion).

[Michelle Wong]

I consider Faeria to require more skill than MTG due to the vastly greater amount of decisions you can reasonably take due to movement, land placement and combats. It does not "play itself".

I think Mythgard is roughly on the same level of Faeria in terms of skill required (medium).

I've heard that Gwent has a very high skill ceiling, never played it though.

[puschit]

Michelle:
I still can't follow you, what do you mean with "play itself"? Fearia has this single additional feature with lands and movement but doesn't that also "play itself" once you got the hang of it? Every game you do the same things over and over and the descisions you have to make aren't that complicated, especially with an opponent that cannot interfere with you while it's your turn. And again - if Fearia had millions of players like Magic has, then everything here would be more competitive as well - and that means less deck varity and more repetitive gameplay.
Seriously, what are those "vastly greater amount of decisions" you can make here besides land placement and creature movement?

Cleric: Yes, in Faeria things escalate fast and the one getting an advantage usually wins. But isn't that also a thing that makes it less deep? I don't really have to play around certain cards here in Faeria, I just try to steamroll and fight over the board at all times.

[Michelle Wong]

In Faeria, you have many decisions (for example, where to move each troop each turn). In MTG attacking and blocking is much simpler.

[ąę]

Publicado originalmente por Michelle Wong:

Ask any of the top MTG players and they will tell you that LUCK is the most important determiner in tournaments.

You couldn't be more wrong. Do you actually know any top MTG players? A friend of mine is an ex-MTG pro and he's saying that magic has immense depths strategy-wise. Just look at a single data point - somehow, him, me and a couple of other solid players have been dominating the local Prerelease tournaments for many years. If the game is all about luck, we wouldn't be consistently finishing in top8's of those tournaments year after year, while some other players have been playing for a long time hardly ever making it there (and bear in mind that Prerelease is a sealed deck format, most random in the whole MTG).

[puschit]

I asked what's there besides that. Magic has a myriad of other things to worry about that Faeria hasn't. The entire concept of the stack and interfering with your opponent during his turn is more than enough to cancel that - which I stated thrice already and you ignore that every time. But Magic also has continous global effects, tons of activated abilities, cards that fundamentally change the game rules, way more card types, alternative ways to win (poison, milling), many formats and whatnot. Just compare the average length of card texts and what they do - and then tell me again how Faeria is deeper.

[CrabNicholson]

I hear people referencing the stack a lot as some sort of holy grail for why MTG is so complex... but in practice the stack is only used for counterspells 99% of the time. Have something you don't want to get off? Counterspell it. Have something you want to get off and you know the opponent has a counterspell? Counterspell his counterspell. You could say that control-vs-control is some brilliant mindgame, but really it comes down to what you draw... the winner is the one who has one more counterspell he can cast. The only other major use for the stack is to modify your own spells for a combo. Which would be cool except it loses its novelty when everyone is doing the same combo, so it's not like it's some clever trick they thought up on the spot to clinch out the game.

All these alternate win conditions, milling, poison, etc. are really just fulfilling the same role as HP. Okay, so you attack his deck instead of his health. Either way you're just trying to deplete a resource down to 0 before he can kill you, you've just replaced one HP pool for another. Continuous global effects are only really useful if they are a cheap part of a combo or control mechanism. Most of the really cool effects are midgame effects and thus unplayable. Your 7 mana cost enchantment (like Debtor's Knell) is useless because the game will be over before turn 7.

MTG certainly has a much larger volume of cards, so it's more complex in that regard, and the game mechanics themselves are more complex. But in terms of the actual, practical level of creative thought that goes into deck design and playing a match, it is completely auto-pilotable.

[puschit]

That is so utterly untrue that I don't even know where to begin. The stack is only used for counterspells? What? Every single activated ability and every instant uses the stack as well as come-into-play-effects, triggered effects and whatnot. Here is one of the most basic things that happens in about any game of Magic:
Player A has a 2/2 creature and holds a Giant Growth (gives +3/+3 to a creature temporarily). Player B holds a Lightning Bolt (does 3 damage to target player or creature). Both are instants, so they can be played any time you have priority.
So, if player A wants to boost his creature, he plays Giant Growth, but it is only put on the stack and hasn't resolved yet. Player B can respond by casting Lightning Bolt on that creature. Player A could respond to the Lightning Bolt but let's say he doesn't have anything else, so the effects are resolved. Lightning Bolt resolves first and kills the creature. Then Giant Growth resolves but doesn't have any target anymore, the creature is already dead, so it fizzles (is countered).
Otoh, if the opponent tries to bolt the creature first, player A can respond with Giant Growth, which resolves first, pumping it to 5/5. Then the Bolt resolves and the creature survives.
And that means you can bluff, it means you have to know what the opponent COULD do at any time and it means you have to think twice and thrice before you do anything!

And as I said, almost EVERYHING uses the stack - a creature that can pump itself or others with one of the abilities, damage prevention, regeneration, bounce effects, you name it. If you ever experienced a multiplayer game where one player casts a mass destruction spell like Balance and everybody responds by activiating stuff before it get's destroyed or trying to save things or trying to manipulate the number of cards in hand and lands/creatures in play so the Balance will have a different outcome ... if you ever experienced this we wouldn't have this discussion!
Oversimplifying this or even reducing this to just counterspells is not just unfair, it's flat out telling me that you have no clue of Magic or are very bad at it.

I could as well oversimplyfy Fearia's land placement and movement which "seems to be the holy grail of Fearia" and as far as this discussion shows the ONLY thing that gives the game more depth. Placing a land every turn, occupying the wells and moving around units in single steps isn't exactly rocket science either. Most games follow the same pattern, especially the first couple of turns are more or less preset and there are only two questions to answer - "am I attacking or defending?" and "when do I start drawing extra cards?" Much like in Magic. That's oversimplified of course but you can see how easy it is.

[CrabNicholson]

Pumping up monsters using activated abilities and so on is something so basic I wouldn't consider it worthy of mention. It's not some master strategem, you simply wouldn't try to Lightning Bolt an enemy creature if they had, say, G:+1/+1 because it would be trivial to pump it out of kill range if he had the mana available. Same thing with tap abilities, It's pretty standard that if something is going to be removed and you can tap it to get a beneficial effect off before it dies, then you go ahead and do that... because why wouldn't you? Also cards like Giant Growth are rarely played outside of casual games precisely because it is so easy to fizzle them with removal (same with Auras). Equipment cards are more common because they stick to the field better. It's standard practice in the meta (at least back when I played) not to make decks that are vulnerable to two-for-one removals like that. Zany situations like someone casting Balance during a big table multiplayer match with friends might be fun and involve some thought but only because that is so far outside the meta that it challenges you to think originally. But this doesn't happen in serious matches, and when it does, it is something that you have already studied and dealt with before. You can say that predicting how the opponent will respond to your actions is evidence of the skill threshold, but it really isn't because it is very easy to predict how cards with activated abilities will be used, and is also easy to recognize a deck you have played before and infer what he will likely have in his hand, so this mechanical complexity doesn't translate into a greater degree of meaningful choices available to the player.

These game mechanics are not very complex or intriguing when you've played the game 1000 times. When you are experienced enough at something, it becomes second nature to be able to analyze it at a glance, and dismiss what is a bad move or what is a risky move. That's what I mean when I say the game plays itself. With enough practice it becomes obvious in any situation what the correct move is. Your choices, for that matter, are extremely limited, since you only have a fixed number of cards, a well-studied idea of when to play those cards, and the games themselves are very short (unless it's control-vs-control, where it's an absolute grindfest). Matches are extremely inflexible due to this. At least Faeria gives you a power wheel which you can use to draw, gain mana, add lands, etc. or you can play a creature defensively, offensively, as a harvester, etc. MTG doesn't offer this much flexibility. That's a big reason why I liked Android Netrunner, because it gave the player the most flexibility with their actions.

Also I already said myself that I didn't consider Faeria a complex game, but that I liked it because it was relatively cheap to jump and and out of, and that it's meta is less hard-cast than the typical MTG meta. So it provides more novelty-per-dollar (this is a very qualitative metric, I know) for me than MTG.

[Michelle Wong]

I agree with everything CrabNicholson said. It is extremely clear that MtG is not a game which requires high skills. When you play a game of MTG, it is usually EXTREMELY easy to recognise the best line of play, a 10 year old who knows all the rules of the game can usually do it. It doesn't require high IQ. The game simply plays itself most of the time, when you know the game, know the meta, and choose a good deck based on the meta you expect to see.

Faeria is not at the peak either, but it sure requires more thought on the part of the player than MTG.

I'd say Chess and GO are two of the most common games which require HIGH skill.

I'd say Artifact or Gwent (and Faeria and Mythgard) are well below Chess and Go in terms of skill differential, however they require a lot more skill than MtG does.

MTG is for people who just want to relax and have fun (mainly around a kitchen table or a Friday night setting).