Magic: The Gathering

Anything less than a proper riffle shuffle like you get with a deck of 52 cards from the drug store for $1.50 is unacceptable for cards that cost like $4 for just 16 pieces of cardboard.

oh dear, you’re gonna get real upset if you look at current market prices

What does a booster pack of regular old Magic cards cost these days?

A meta standard deck can cost $200-$500, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect people to want to protect their property even if you believe the value is overinflated.

I was talking about the cost of a booster pack at the game store.

I guess I’m not sure what you’re arguing at this point

I’m just saying that $4 for 16 cards better shuffle a lot fucking nicer than cards that cost $1.50 for 52!

ah ok, although MtG cards have additional functionality to being usable game pieces. They need to hold a much greater amount of ink, they need to have anti-counterfeit measures (yes, really), they need to be foillable for premium versions, etc. Playability is important but there are other cost considerations that mean they’re not going to have an equivalent cost:value ratio to normal playing cards.

I call bullshit on most of this because, as I said, basic land are free. The cost of printing must be like, fucking nothing.

In a perfect world they would reduce the MSRP in proportion to the cost to manufacture, but MtG has enough market demand that they can produce subpar quality cardstock and still charge the same $4 price tag. If they reduced the cardstock on normal playing cards people wouldn’t tolerate it since that’s the only expectation from playing cards.

I know all the reasons they don’t do it. I’m just saying the truth. The cards suck and sleeves also suck.

If I ever make a card game, it’s going to have the nicest fucking cards.

Mash shuffling sleeves is as effective as a ruffle and can be done as fast or faster than riffling unsleeved cards. You need to get the technique down but it becomes natural after a while.

Citation needed

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613489/magic-the-gathering-is-officially-the-worlds-most-complex-game/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Though similar to role-playing fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, it has significantly more cards and more complex rules than other card games.

Who is this man? What compels him to write such words? Imagine if someone were to write an article about pinball and described it as “similar to football” because balls are involved in both.

yeah that part did raise an eyebrow, but the full paper is at the bottom.

Pros: those guys don’t make that kind of mistake.
Cons: It’s a dry published paper proving the complexity of mtg that nobody will read.

But MTG has literally infinite complexity because if I remember correctly there is no upper limit on deck size in the standard rules.

I mean, that’s basically what they found.

TL;DR mtg is basically the halting problem of game theory.

The obvious aside, I should think if you account for every card and every rule in the game since 1991 it is still insanely complex. A lot of it hinges on what set of rules you are using though. Draft would be complex but probably solveable, while unlimited is unsolveable.

You could probably prove that the minimum number of cards (or very close to it) is optimal which would eliminate most possibilities.