EXP Podcast #506: Playing Our Cards Right

Setting cards on fire isn't tournament legal.

There's never been a better time for people that love cards but lack table space.  With the release of Artifact, Valve is wading into the collectible card game market and retrofitting some of the traditional economic models onto their own marketplace.  This week we do a survey of the landscape and weigh the pros and cons of converting our retirement funds into rare foil cards.

- Here's the show's stand-alone feed
- Listen to the podcast in your browser by clicking here, right-click and select "save as link" to download the show in MP3 format, or click play below.

Show Notes:

- Runtime: 31m 22s
- Music by Brad Sucks

Reviving Magic with Commander

Goblins love it too!

Seriously, I never thought I would write about magic cards again.

This week on PopMatters I praise Wizards of the Coast's willingness to support a casual format that looks to be salvaging the game for me. Of course the real credit goes to Magic players who pioneered the format and experimented with the game. I've always been a fan of home-brew adaptations of games, and apparently so has Wizards of the Coast for quite some time. The number of casual formats is not surprising considering how long the card game has been around.

While I certainly have my own house rules for certain games, I would love to see more casual experimentation with game design in tabletop gaming. Magic's depth certainly lends itself well to manipulation, especially around certain themes. Tribal Wars format, for example, which asks players to create decks around specific creature types, is only possible when you have such a robust catalog of cards to choose from. My Netrunner collection has grown pretty large. Maybe not is the time to experiment with running my own Netrunner variants.

To some extent, designers are doing these thematic tweaks themselves. I recently played Legendary's Aliens tabletop game, which takes its mechanics largely from the Marvel deck building game of the same name. The change in theme is expertly done and adds some neat mechanics (such as scanning rooms) perfectly into its deck building core. In fact, both Aliens and Marvel can be combined into one hilarious mesh between the Marvel and Aliens universe.

I for one welcome our hybrid overlords.

The Trap of Magic 2015

This guy looks so angry. It's probably the terrible UI.

Magic 2015 is not a bad game, but playing it is.

This week on PopMatters, I spend some time pondering why a game that should be so satisfying, and sometimes really is, can also be an absolute frustrating train wreck. The answer, I believe, is that Stainless Games has built an experience almost entirely directed towards a tablet-playing audience comfortable with micro-transactions.

Make no mistake, that audience is there. Hell, if I had a tablet, I would probably be loving this game. Unfortunately there is also a large PC and console player base that feel overlooked or even maliciously neglected. Magic 2015 is the best example of how mobile gaming norms can fundamental change the shape of a product. With significant trimmings and UI changes between this year's and last year's installment of the Duels of the Planeswalkers franchise, the latest game feels like the end game for a company eager to grab hold of a new market of players.

Unfortunately the step towards the mobile player base, those potentially new to Magic the Gathering entirely, is also a step away from an aging group of players who want to casually, but with ease and freedom. I honestly don't know if the developers can please everyone, and to some extent fools like me might just buy these games anyway. But I have a suspicion that the move is an act of desperation that may ultimately alienate the most influential group of Magic followers Wizards of the Coast still has around.