Super Fun Awesome Format - Why I Chose Some Rules To Keep Things From Breaking And Ended Up Breaking Other Things Anyway
Tuesday, July 30, 2013 at 12:24AM The last article I wrote, I explained the foundations of Super Fun Awesome Format, an alternate game mode for Magic: the Gathering. It uses the same rules as the base game, with the following stipulations:
-Players start the game with 40 life and 10 cards. (As opposed to 20 life and 7 cards, this makes games last longer, and give players more options at any point during the game.)
-Players may play any card in their hand face-down as a land with every basic land type. (Instead of hoping to draw specific cards which let you produce mana (which is what lets you do anything at all,) you always have the option to get more mana for yourself. This introduces choices in what you want to give up to get more mana, and ensures a more-or-less smooth increase in what players can do over the course of the game.)
-Once per turn, if a player has no cards in hand, that player may cast one of their lands as the spell it actually is. (Running out of cards no longer means you have no more options – you actually have quite a few! Planning ahead and playing cards you might need later on as lands to come out ahead! It’s not without risk, however – you lose that land, so you have less mana available to you; do stuff now at the cost of doing more stuff later.)
-All players draw from the same deck, which is supplied beforehand. (I build the deck, so I have control over what is and is not possible. If players built and used their own decks, the previous rules could be abused endlessly because they mess with the core of the game. My goal is to build a deck which, instead of abusing the prior rules, takes advantage of them to create interesting, novel situations, and makes the game something truly different than Magic.)
It’s that last rule that has given me a lot of trouble, but it’s the only thing keeping the format from being a broken, unbalanced mess. Magic is balanced around the idea that there are five different ‘colors’ of mana (White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green,) and any land is usually only ever going to produce one, maybe two of those. If I want to play something that costs Red mana, but I only have Blue mana available, I can’t cast it. This keeps decks from playing all the best cards available – the best cards are all in different colors, so it’s not feasible to build a deck that’s chock full of only the best things because you can’t reliably cast them when you need to.
My job as a designer Is to keep things from being unbalanced, to keep things fair. A player’s job is to find things that are unbalanced, abuse them as much as possible, and make things unfair. Letting players build their own decks will invariably lead to them being tweaked to be ruthless and bloodthirsty, and it would not achieve what I’m aiming for, so I’m not letting that happen.
My job is to assemble as interesting a set of cards for use in SFAF as possible, and in doing so I’ve tried out a lot of cards which… just don’t work. That’s sort of a lie – they’ve worked too well, making everything outside of abusing them irrelevant or non-optimal. It doesn’t lead to good gameplay, and over the years I’ve identified problem cards, and why they’re too good. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Submerge – Submerge puts a creature card on top of its owner’s deck. This is insanely neat – insanely, I tell you! – because the same deck belongs to each player. If you Submerge a creature, you can draw it because it goes on top of your (everyone’s, really) deck. Then it becomes yours, because you drew it, and now you can play it. Messing around with cards in the library is an awesome design space with repercussions unique to SFAF, because changing what people can draw affects everybody. I can Submerge your creature, trying to draw it for myself, but before I can draw it, you could cast a spell which lets you draw cards, foiling me – there are a ton of neat interactions available here.
So why is Submerge a problem? Well, thing is, Submerge has a rule on it that says if you control an Island (a basic land type) and your opponent controls a Forest (another basic land type), you can cast Submerge for free. Since every land you play in SFAF is, by default, every basic land type, Submerge is always free. At first I thought it was awesome, because it made use of the ‘every basic land type’ rule, but frankly the card is just way too good to be free. There are others that do the same thing, but have to be paid for, which is just fairer.
Mystic Speculation – Mystic Speculation lets you look at the top three cards of your deck, put any number of them on the bottom, and put the rest back on top of the deck in any order- which is awesome, because you get to control what everybody draws! The problem is that instead of discarding it on use, you can pay a pittance of mana and put it back into your hand again. Mystic Speculation lets you inexpensively control what your opponent is going to draw – forever. What the hell was I thinking?
Walk the Aeons – Walks the Aeons allows you to take an extra turn. Instead of discarding it on use, you can sacrifice (get rid of) three Islands (Islands are a basic land type, so every land you play is an Island) to put it back into your hand. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that exchange, I think – you’re gaining an extra turn, but you sacrifice three turn’s worth of lands that you’ve played to do so. It’s not great, but it could be used near the end of the game to take many turns in a row in an attempt to kill the other player – there’s nothing wrong with that, either, because if it fails you’re very far behind, and you have to have good enough attacking units and spells to close the deal.
The reason it’s a problem is because of an entirely different card, Izzet Cronarch. Izzet Cronarch, when you cast it, lets you return a spell card to your hand, meaning you can use it again later. Walk the Aeons already has a way of making itself reusable, though, so what gives? Well, the thing is there are a number of cards that let you return Izzet Cronarch to your hand. So you can Walk the Aeons to gain an extra turn, Izzet Cronarch to get Walk the Aeons back, recast Walk the Aeons, play something that will let you replay Izzet Cronarch, which lets you replay Walk the Aeons… that sequence only gains you three extra turns, but there are a lot of ways to keep it going forever.
Izzet Cronarch is a huge force in SFAF. There are a lot of spells where casting it once is good, but twice or more is great – sometimes overwhelmingly so. A spell which lets you take an extra turn is fine – it costs mana to play it, so you’re not doing as much the turn you cast it. But if you cast it every turn, your opponent never gets an opportunity to do anything, and running over them is trivial given infinite time (which you have.) Izzet Cronarch might be the real culprit here – it’s made a number of cards impossible to use in SFAF – but it makes spells that have already been cast relevant again, because they can be recast. As the game goes on longer and more cards get put into the discard, Izzet Cronarch effectively has a wider range of effects, making the game a little less dependent on what you draw. It adds enough good properties to the game that I think it’s worth inclusion, despite its negative properties.
Memory Lapse – Memory Lapse counters a spell (negates all its effects), and puts that spell on top of its owner’s deck. Memory Lapse was neat because it had its own workaround. Most of the time in SFAF, you’d want to play top-of-library effects near the end of your opponent’s turn, so that you would draw the card you were trying to steal at the beginning of your turn, no effort required. Memory Lapse wasn’t always good at doing that, though, because Memory Lapsing something during your turn meant the next person to draw as part of their turn would be the opponent, just giving them the chance to use it again. Memory Lapse often required a little extra effort to work the way you wanted it to, which was awesome. Unfortunately, in SFAF, counterspells on the whole are much cheaper than anything else. They also work against everything, and are purely defensive, which drags games out since being aggressive is so much more expensive. Counterspells are valuable to include, because the effect they have on the game is interesting, but making an impervious defense largely out of counterspells is both too easy to do and too hard to fight against. To negate that, any counterspells I include will be more expensive from now on, which means Memory Lapse, which only costs two mana, is getting booted.
There are a few common trends here – easily repeatable effects are often too good. Effects which are cheaper than they should be are too good. They’re usually pretty easy to spot, but when I first started designing the format, I was willing to let anything happen. It’s gotten me in some trouble balance-wise, but I’ve discovered a lot through the design process of trying out everything possible, and tossing/tweaking what doesn’t work. I’ll be talking about that more next time – exploring your design space as much as possible, realizing when options are unfairly good, and recognizing the relative costs between different strategies. See you then!
Reader Comments (3)
It sounds like counter spells (a defensive option) and draw manipulation (a slowing option) are too powerful in SFAF. Do ya think this is because players' life totals are doubled, and therefore defensive options made the game too long?
Probably. But do you think they would still be interesting in a format where you started with 10 life? When you start so close to death, do defensive options become more thrilling (you feel like you're thwarting your opponent and your cunning is the only thing keeping you alive), or would aggressive options become preferable because, well, just finish the game now?
I guess I'm pondering the correlation between the desired length of a game and the balance between aggressive and defensive options. Nicely done!
I'm fully open to the idea that the starting life total is too high - a quick change to that might make things move quicker. 10 life is incredibly low - a few spells would be able to kill the opponent on turn 10 just by themselves. The idea is pretty sound, though - the farther away I am from dying (because it'll take longer for you to eat through my life total) the longer I have to simply amass resources. Players being in danger quicker means they would have to be defensive sooner. I'll probably lower it to something like 30, for beginning.
I wasn't enormously clear--not SFAF and its current deck, but a hypothetical format in which you start with 10 life (and burn spells are less common)? Would defensive options feel more exciting, or would they still feel like they're dragging out the game? And, worse, would the format lose some of its flexibility and interesting choices?