You know, I was on these forums for a while, but I never actually listened to a GS podcast, even the 2010 'comeback'. Now I have. Good stuff.
I love Dishonored as well. Steam will say I have nearly 300 hours in it, but that's because it was on a free weekend once and I actually left my computer running for two weeks just to finish it. Twice. Bought it later on a sale with the dlc missions and still haven't gotten around to them, so I suppose that speaks for replay value. Still, it was the most fun I ever had with a Bethesda title while it lasted, and that's saying a lot.
Playing Magic might not make you a great designer of card games, but it definitely helps. I was on the design team once for a game called Shadow Era, by Wulven Studios. You might remember it if you're a GenCon regular. Anyways, the CEO, Kyle Poole, played a little kitchen table Magic, I don't know how much. He claims to hate the game and a lot of its mechanics despite Shadow Era sharing a lot of them. He hired myself and a bunch of others from their forums (largely why I got pulled away from GS in the first place) to work on finalizing the game's core set before launch.
He (Kyle) was never the lead designer of the game, just the guy with the money, but his management skills weren't... well, they weren't the greatest. We never actually had a 'design lead', which meant that instead of the team making decisions internally to present, we had to go to him and rationalize everything beforehand. Needless to say, there was conflict. We were designing a Magic clone, but with some unique differences largely due to the mobile client and the fact that the game is digital. I'd say it was more like Magic's Portal sets. Anyways, the majority of the team and I played Magic to some degree and many of our instincts involved spotting the mistakes Magic made in the past and correcting them.
If Kyle liked these changes, or at least thought them interesting enough to test, he'd give the o.k. pretty easily. If he wanted us to explain, usually the easiest method was to say, 'Magic already learned this lesson the hard way.' Like you said, developing a TCG is hard. Explaining the mechanics in technical terms to a non-competitive player is even harder. We could point to articles not by players but specifically by MaRo and other devs laying out everything wrong with the unchanged versions. Kyle didn't like that, and pushing any of these was a lot more difficult. There was fighting. Some of them eventually got there, others didn't. Only one of us on the team hadn't had much Magic experience. Guess which one of them is still on the team today.
Still, Kyle's supposedly gotten better. After all our replacements started talking Magic lingo too, I think he learned he'll never get TCG devs that don't. Either way, it was too late for us. Shadow Era barely survived Wulven going into the red after a botched physical launch and after nearly six years running still has two officially released sets (including the one I worked on). It still has players and it still has some classic mistakes from Alpha that will bite the game in the ass if it does survive any longer.
Either way, the rest of us haven't been able to get back into the business. Getting a coding job can be hard, but getting a design position with barely any experience? Good luck.
Long story short, have more faith in LSV and the rest of the CFB crew. Being a Magic player doesn't make you immune to mistakes, but it at least makes you familiar with a lot of them.
Neat! Good luck I'm looking forward to more shows.
Is Magic really that expensive? Holy crap and here I was considering getting into it.. hm...
What is this online client you speak of? I'm referencing this thing that seems to be their 'Hearthstone'.
The difference is that unlike Hearthstone and other digital tcgs, Magic: Online has a built-in third party market that allows you to sell back or trade cards, both for in-game currency and
real money. Digital Magic has pricing slightly less then the American paper singles because of the fact that anyone can theoretically 'go infinite' or turn a profit, just like the paper game. However, Magic: Online costs are about half as much as those sold in England or other overseas markets due to their relative scarcity and the fact that most major singles retailers are American, spiking foreign shipping costs.
You'll spend anywhere on $100-250 on a new standard deck on MTGO. As of quite recently, WotC has swapped the standard print cycle so new cards cycle out of standard every 18-21 months instead of 15-24. This means that standard will change far much drastically and it should prove easier to play much the same general strategy for a very long period of time. If you sell cards as they get older to replace with new ones, the running cost for competing in Standard at a high level shouldn't be more than roughly 20-30 bucks every couple months on average, not including cost and potential rewards of events if you're playing for prizes.
The alternative are called Eternal formats, which don't change nearly as often because older cards don't cycle out. Modern includes every card stretching about as far back as a 2003 ish redesign, considered the 'modern' transition in Magic's history. Legacy goes much farther back, except for a fairly extensive banlist. These formats tend to cost anywhere between $400-$1200 for a list, but once you have those cards, they're yours. Not including the semiannual banlist changes you'll have that deck forever and nothing in it will 'rotate out' like Standard.
