Balanced Formats and Draw-Go

This article on the mothership appeared, about creating a balanced standard format.

The reactions, specifically here, in the Legacy sub of Reddit, were rather dismissive.

The problem is twofold:

First, they're looking at the problem wrong-that is, as players who love Legacy and think that Legacy Magic is best Magic, instead of Standard Magic as a format WotC needs to keep healthy.

Second, they're living off of the benefits of this philosophy-and the diversity to Legacy that this philosophy brings, mostly without having to deal with a time when this wasn't the case. These days, decks that want to create an overwhelming advantage of cards in Legacy actually have to compete with 'fair' strategies that involve playing good creatures that can help nullify your spells. That's good for the format!

However, the real issue is one that I think everyone overlooks. And it isn't the Go part of Draw-Go.

See, for me the issue isn't that control decks have to keep mana up on the opponent's turn in order to counter spells. That part is problematic, sure-WotC says that having your spell countered 'feels bad' and they want to reduce those-

Massive aside

Feeling bad isn't the only, or even, I think, the most important reason that Wizards doesn't want Magic to be about stack interactions, especially countermagic ones. It's useful for telling the audience an easily grokable reason for the way they want to structure the game but it's far from the only good reason. Other reasons, in my opinion, include:

1) Game complexity. If you've played long enough you've inevitably come up against the "massive stack" where a whole series of spells and triggers get set up and now players have to resolve them.

In the case of stack interactions-or a game with far more focus on stack interactions, this is a pretty big siphon on your brainpower.

A game where permanents are a greater focus means that they can reduce complexity because not everything is happening at once in a single stack and also:

2) Reducing of feel bad moments. Since permanents often don't end the game on the spot this gives players a chance to find a solution to them which feels better, as though you have more of a chance to come back. It also:

3) Increases the design possibilities. WotC doesn't do a lot with the stack and I think it's in no small part because there isn't a lot of design space to be mined there. There's split second and...what other mechanics really can work in that area? Whereas permanents allow for enter the battlefield and death triggers, just to start. But it also means that games generally won't devolve down to sheer speed of card draw, which takes me out of this aside because that's where we get to what really needs to be talked about:

Drawing cards at instant speed.

As I was saying, the Go part of the Draw-Go decks isn't the problem. The problem is the drawing cards at instant speed aspect, a feature that was mostly in blue with a little bit of bleed into black.

It created a huge imbalance in the game. Anyone who didn't want to play the countermagic wars was outmatched by those who did and it severely hampered what decks could be built. The blue player could wait to see if there were spells that needed countering and if there weren't, they could draw cards on their opponent's turn. Or if there were, they could draw cards on their opponent's turn and see if they could turn up countermagic if needed, and in the meantime, sculpt their main turns any way they wanted, with opponents being dead in the water in terms of interactivity.

Midrange decks didn't really exist: it was combo and control with goblins and stompy occasionally peeking from the cave before scuttling back.

Which meant that Wizards could do a few things, and ended up doing a little bit of the first two and a whoooole lot of the last:

Make countermagic cost more, nerf instant speed card draw, and improve creatures to make them a viable path to victory.

It's the instant speed card draw that does it. In the Modern era of Magic cards, we have zero cards that unconditionally allow you to draw more than one card for one mana at instant speed. Dream Salvage comes closest but no one plays that because it requires so much setup.

So instead, you get the next strongest spell, Sphinx's Revelation which people played because the lifegain aspect of the card allowed control players to actually use the cards they drew by giving them time. But, and this part is important: because SR cost 4 or more to use, players couldn't draw cards and use countermagic on the same turn! They had to pick and that decision is far more interesting for players and better for the game.

Similarly, Legacy is a better environment when players have to make decisions about how they will interact. That means color balancing and a real eye on combo decks that are overly consistent.

I'm not saying that Legacy should do something as ridiculous as ban Brainstorm but I don't think an honest conversation about what makes for a healthy format can be had unless we consider the impact of cheap card draw and I just don't see enough people mention this as being an issue.