Sandboxes and Skilltesting

Magic: the Gathering is an omnipresent game in the nerdy gaming space. It's been around for decades and shaped multiple other major games in the field, defining what customizable card games (CCGs) look like to multiple generations of players. Many of Magic's fans think of it as the best thing since sliced food tokens. My own relationship with the game is more complicated. There's plenty I appreciate about it, but I've also come to feel that it's more of a sandbox for doing things than it is an interesting game.

The Sandbox of Magic

One of the things that most contributes to Magic's enduring popularity is the fact that it's an engine for expression. You get to choose every single card that goes into your deck, you get to choose how greedy you want the playable component of your deck to be, you get to choose tech cards for your sideboard--cards that you can add to your deck for a specific matchup. Magic is pitched as a game where you can do many things, and every faction in the game has unique capabilities and sometimes win conditions. There are many cards that offer all sorts of potential to players, to the point where one of the most popular formats of the game (Commander) often sees players calibrating the strengths of their decks to accommodate deck strategies which are significantly weaker than what you can assemble within the available pool of cards.

It gets to a point where it sometimes feels like Magic's essence is in the conversations it inspires, and the deckbuilding and thinking that players do outside of the game. Players talk about how many lands to run, how to exploit newly-revealed cards, and how to build out the bulk of your playable cards so that you don't fall behind on board tempo while trying to win. And sometimes, the conversation is about absolutely broken combinations of cards. Ways to set up board states that lock the game or outright win the game in absurd fashion. Things that are about fundamentally trying to avoid the core costs and interactions of the baseline game mechanics.

When Games Aren't Interesting

I've thought a lot about why, exactly, Magic sees broken combinations pop up again and again. Obviously, this is inherent on some level to any game with a large amount of moving pieces, but I also kept wondering: is there something inherent to Magic's design that promotes overpowered synergies? Is there something that pushes it to be less of a game? Because, make no mistake, in my mind, broken combinations and overpowering synergies do make something less of a game, because they make it more obvious--it's a race to see who can assemble their combo first. One way to view games is through the lens of "a series of interesting decisions", and when something dominates the game with no downside, that makes your decisions less interesting--no matter how many direct counters exist.

And I think there is a fundamental issue there. Magic is a game built around letting players do things. You have lands, which continuously provide resources every turn with no caveats or downsides--income from nothing. You have cards, which have different effects and can be played from your hand to accomplish things. And...that's really it. The only other major universal rules are the combat rules, and those require cards to enter play. If nobody played any creatures to the board, you wouldn't have the combat rules. So, Magic is a game about converting cards into benefits by using the resources from your lands--and those lands represent an unlimited font of potential power. It's an engine that traces itself all the way back to a limitless energy source! You're limited in what you can play by the number of cards in your hand, but there are cards which let you draw more cards. You're limited in what you can play by the amount of lands that you have in play, but there are cards which let you play lands more often. Anything which could be a limitation has an overriding factor.

Obviously, CCGs are to some degree about allowing individual cards to override the core mechanics of the engine, but in Magic, it feels like those core mechanics are incredibly simplistic and exist in order to be overridden. There's nothing like the inherent interaction of, say, the game Flesh and Blood, where cards can almost be universally used to block damage (at the cost of dampening your next offensive turn), or the various default actions available to a runner in Android Netrunner, none of which require cards to utilize. Obviously, one solution here is to make the base game more involved, allowing players to hook into more levers that can control the game, but is there a way to take a basic "do things" game and make it interesting again? I think there is such a game.

Slay the Spire's Skill Test

One of my absolute favorite takes on the cardgame genre is Slay the Spire, a single-player roguelike where you draw cards, play cards, and try to survive a gauntlet of enemies as you ascent the titular Spire. It's filled with variety and careful decision-making, and despite being based on the same skeleton I call Magic out for above, it leverages several things that help make it more of an interesting game. It walks a line between allowing that expression but also keeping things tough and challenging.

In Slay the Spire, you get three energy every turn, guaranteed. You get a full hand of cards, guaranteed. There's even fewer natural limits on play than in Magic, and there's plenty of cards that can be combined to create unbalanced and broken scenarios. So how does that add up to a game that's fundamentally still interesting in execution? What pushes you towards those difficult decisions that keep the spice in games?

The answer is that there's several things that create skill tests in Slay the Spire, things which mean that you don't get to devote all your focus to evading what little limits the game engine inherently has. You have limited freedom to build your deck, and the constant pressures of the game's asymmetry mean that there are secret fundamental limitations that aren't obvious at first glance. The game as a whole is designed to consistently give you a hard time, to deny you the space to render it irrelevant, while still giving you the space to express yourself in strategy.

Slay the Spire's True Limits

The first limit in Slay the Spire is the way deckbuilding works: you don't get to assemble cards however you want. Instead, the game presents a trajectory where you slowly accumulate cards in your deck, get chances to upgrade cards into more powerful forms, and also occasionally get powerful "relics", which provide constant, universal bonuses to your gameplay. You start with mediocrity, and slowly build your way into something that's able to work powerfully within the engine of the game. This might be a very solid build, or it could be a broken synergy that can trivialize parts of the game. The truly broken builds, however, aren't something that you can reliably assemble all of the time--that rarity helps those moments feel special and novel, while ensuring that doesn't describe the main experience.

While deckbuilding, you also have to face the most important (and subtle) aspect of the game: "damage checks" (not a term used in the game, but a very important concept to understand--how much damage do you need your deck to consistently deliver in order to quickly end fights?). You battle your way through many different fights, and each fight features monsters that consistently rain damage down on you, until you reduce their healthbars to 0. You can play cards to defend yourself, but slow attrition is usually a failing strategy, because some enemies are able to amplify their ability to deal damage, and some enemies are able to hinder your ability to defend yourself. If you want to protect your life total, you have to end fights quickly. This means that as you're assembling your deck, there's a tension here: you want to pick up combo pieces and synergies that will pay off later, but you also need to accumulate immediate power that will end fights now.

As one more significant skilltesting factor, enemies escalate in strength over the three "acts" of the game. They have more health, they deal more damage, and they can hit you with more debilitating effects. As you grow in power, so do they. That may be the biggest factor affecting the way that you interact with the game: it remains a game of interesting choices, because the thresholds you have to surpass also increase over time, and they're calibrated so that most decks will find it a challenge to keep up with. As you work to trivialize the challenges, those challenges keep getting nastier. You have to find ways to keep up.

Reframing the Game

If I had to sum up the differences between Slay the Spire and Magic, the most important ones would be what I call "framing". Slay the Spire sees you going up against dozens of fights, each of which is part of an overall arc where you improve your capabilities one piece at a time. Within that framework, you hunt for strategies and try to balance immediate improvement versus overall power level. There's room for expression, but there's also the tension of a game here, where you have to make tough calls and test yourself. Your decisions have meaning--they're not just about having preferences and following optimizations.

There's a framing of Magic that this reminds me of, actually, and it's the form of play that I do enjoy: Limited format, specifically drafts (especially cube drafts). While it's not perfect (and individual matches still feel less interesting to me), each draft in Magic is a tension between trying to build up a strategy and trying to make sure you have enough of a solid deck to play the game. The overall arc of a draft, before you launch into play, has that combination of expression but also decision-making: it's not a game where you can just "pick good stuff". Actually playing the decks can become a bit more rote, but that's because you frontloaded all the decision-making. I think there's a very clear reason why drafting games like 7 Wonders or It's a Wonderful World don't spend too much time on the execution phase: you draft cards as the game goes on, and your card choices are very quickly evaluated for points.

My biggest takeaway here is that there's no one inherent system in a game that prevents it from having interesting gameplay, interesting decisions. Slay the Spire gives guaranteed resources, but still uses elements that create interesting decisions because it focuses the game on a slow progression of a deck of cards, asking you to evaluate how best to upgrade your capabilities over time. It makes the actual gameplay element brisk and simple to work through, something with a few interesting decision points but not something that takes the bulk of the game. Equal space is devoted to the portion of the game where you assemble your power--and it's not something you can just mess around with with no restrictions.

 Sometimes, all it takes to make an interesting game out of something is a bit of pressure.