Step one: Grow a thicker skin.
What use is a thick skin, if everyone happens to be right? Then it’s just being oblivious, which is just as bad.
Edit: Most of the people I’ve met who I would consider thick skinned just come off as assholes. It’s staying in that middle ground I guess. Don’t make every error personal.
I guess we’re defining it differently. I’m talking ability to receive criticism or disagreement without having to lash out emotionally because you perceive it as a personal insult. Usually that lets you get some perspective on the situation, right or wrong.
It’s doubly important on the internet, since most people don’t actually know you (or your agenda).
It sounds like you’re confusing the economics of CCGs with the mechanics of CCGs.
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Sure, rare cards sell, but in the secondary market, not the primary. While it may be that some publishers hope that players will purchase box after box chasing a particular rare, that’s unrealistic when players can simply spend $XX at the local game shop and get the instant gratification of having the rare in hand. The publisher receives none of the money generated by the secondary market, and thus has no financial incentive to intentionally make rare cards more powerful.
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Given the vast number of rares across all Magic editions, I’d argue that Magic is not much less balanced than the games you cite as examples. More than a few of the “unbalanced” rare cards in Magic were not intended to be so by design, it was clever players who saw the potential to combine them with other cards and create an unbalanced situation. This was especially true in the early years when Magic’s playtesting was limited to a handful of staff at WotC. More recent editions have been much better balanced across the board. Some of the most powerful cards in Magic are still commons and uncommons, and there are hoard of “useless” rares out there as well.
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Yes, Rarity as a game mechanic does force people to compensate. That’s what the intent was all along. Again, the secondary market for CCGs was never a factor in the initial design of Magic. The original intent was for the player to make do with what he had, and formulate a strategy and deck from that. Obviously with access to money and a card store you can circumvent this game mechanic and simply buy singles of whatever card you wish to flesh out your deck, but this breaks the game in a way, albeit a small one. Because this rarity was a base mechanic of the game system, it could not be entirely weeded out in successive editions, though they tried flattening it somewhat with sets like Fallen Empires and Homelands to little success (people LIKE rares). Since many of the CCGs that followed in Magic’s wake copied this tiered rarity mechanic, it set a standard for the industry. It helped a lot that the secondary market exploded for Magic and other CCGs, where the success of your game could be measured in the price of your singles.
It’s very challenging to create a CCG that strikes a balance between rarity and power in each set, yet remains interesting and fun to play. That is why the card shops are littered with the corpses of dead CCGs selling for $5-$10 a sealed box.
All I expressed was doubt that the game contained no power rares. Are all the commons and uncommons perfectly balanced as well?
Why not base your opinion about other games on something other than blind assumption?
I’m planning on checking SF out.
The games I mentioned seem better balanced because they are better balanced, with the same sorts of obsessive power-gamers looking for loopholes playing them. You have this implicit assumption that the people who play other games haven’t also played magic, or that they were bad at it.
My point was that Magic has a larger playtesting community and a more cutthroat tournament scene, which leads to greater scrutiny. I don’t think that necessarily means SF/Vamp players suck.
In my experience, the opposite is in fact true: The better (tournament winning) card game players I’ve met tend to prefer to not play magic, with it’s power rares and fairly small set of tournament viable decks, and have a much broader experience in trying different games.
(In reference to the above bolded quotes) So… ax to grind, or just very defensive?
I recently moved to a new state, and in an effort I’m taking Magic back up. I quit playing around the time Alliances came out. Can someone fill me out on what’s going on right now set-wise or anything else?
Check out Wizards of the Coast’s website. I quit playing not long after you did, but I still keep up on what’s new through the site. For quite awhile they were cranking out 3 new expansions a year, and there have been several revisions of the main edition since 4th (the last you would have played with), in fact, they’re on TENTH edition now (no kidding). It got pretty insane with the sheer volume of cards released per year, you’d have had to spend a small fortune to try and keep up. That’s what eventually did me in, along with the fact that DCI tournament rules only allowed the previous two expansions and most recent main edition in Type II tournaments, which meant hundreds of dollars in cards were useless within a year of purchasing them.
I plan to mainly stick w/ draft tourneys, since that is mostly what is played here, so the too frequent expansions should not be an issue. The blocks that seem to have multiple expansions seems weird.