Changing the Start

[Nizmox]

So, I was randomly thinking the other day about what we all know, starting (having the first turn) in MTG is a big advantage (more so in Vintage/Legacy than other formats). So it got me thinking, how could you change it to make things more balanced?
It's clear that having the start is always the way to go, the rules prevent you from looking at your hand first before choosing whether to have the first turn or not, because this would make winning the coin toss even better (maybe in some instances you would take the 2nd turn if you had a good hand with little land).
First turn plays into cards like chalice or trinisphere are next to impossible to deal without cards like force of will. To make matters worse, in tournaments we play best of 3, meaning one player gets to start twice.

Now i'm not suggesting that Wizards will ever change how the game starts, but it's interesting to think about ways you could change it and might be good for casual games.
One option would be to have each player start with a land in play, and neither player can play a land on their first turn. This would mean the player who isn't starting has access to 1 mana while their opponent has their first turn and can potentially respond to first turn plays more easily. You could go a step further and allow players to also play 0 cost spells also, but that has potential for abuse.

We all take it for granted that the player who starts doesn't get to draw and that's just how things are, but just wondering if anyone else has considered other options?

[Jason]

It used to be more broken; even the player who went first drew a card.

Honestly though, I think the system is straight-forward and fair. It operates under a game involving both skill and luck. The die roll happens to be one part of the luck factor in the game.

Saying that, I could see something along the lines of whomever wins the die roll, has the option of playing first, drawing first, or looking at his or her hand and then deciding. If he or she chooses to look at the hand first, the opponent has the option in both games 2 and 3. Otherwise, the rest stays the same. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't change anything though, as nearly every player would still play first and not take the third option.

[MattH]

I believe they ran a poll during some large extended event a couple years ago. On the results slip for each match, they had players mark down who went first each game.

The result was almost exactly equal, with a slight edge to drawing first :P, something like 50.2%/49.8%.

[Tacosnape]

In Modern Legacy, though, I'd be more than willing to bet that statistic doesn't hold. I'd be shocked if the match win% for players going first didn't come in around 60%.

In two decks that are equally balanced, I'd argue the numbers should be even higher, but the 40% accounts for mismatches and games where the advantage of going first wasn't great enough.

[MattH]

If any TOs want to try repeating that experiment, I think the results would be interesting. Anecdotal memory is very unreliable.

[Nizmox]

If any TOs want to try repeating that experiment, I think the results would be interesting. Anecdotal memory is very unreliable.

Yep, it would be great if they could do the same test mentioned for Legacy. See what the stats say. As Tacosnape said, I really don't think we should assume Extended would be the same as Legacy. The higher power the format, the more important having the first turn is. In Vintage it is even more important than in Legacy.

[4eak]

Yet another Wall of Text incoming. I hesitate to take the time to explain my thoughts because I'm not sure anyone else finds them useful, but I hope you'll consider it. I recognize many people don't care for thought-experiments and abstract discussions about game theory, but I find it useful in every game I play. Perhaps this might be of use to you, so I'll start with some context:

My family and I are very hardcore gamers. My basic gaming history: I got hooked on ladder running D2 as a kid; I gateway-drugged into EQ for a long time (still play it for old-times sake on our private server) and became a wealthy, soloing, raid-buying necro; then I played Tribes 2 competitively; I started MTG; then I botted the grind out of WoW to PvP exclusively (seasons 1 and 3 gladiator). Now I just fool around with games, cubing, and playing Magic. My family and I love to play games (you get the point,eh?). But, after so much gaming, we have become pretty selective. We play enough games that we haven't much tolerance left for game imbalance or a lack of challenge.

The 'going first' issue in Magic is the sort of thing that eventually annoyed us, particularly when we started playing the eternal formats. It is one of the injustices in MtG's tournament structure.

To maximize our gaming experience we enjoy changing the rules and creating formats. Testing the boundaries of the game mechanics is really interesting and an important part of analyzing game balance. We really enjoy making sure that every match is competitive, challenging, and fair for all players. Justice in gaming is important enough that it means we often change the rules or re-interpret the objective of the game, often not even abiding by the game-company's rules/intentions/ToS (which are rarely about actual Gaming, and more about money). If that isn't your cup of tea (although the question you posed points in my direction), then read no further.

I keep detailed records of our house's games in a database. While I generally use anecdotal evidence and experience in making decisions and thinking about the game, having harder evidence which is easier to quantify has been useful to me. Keeping track of opening hands, who played first, the game-ending turn, players, decklists/archetype, and small summaries for each game gives perspective and raw data to use.

Using the database, it is easy to tell who is the best player with any number of given decks (all of them, one in particular, a role, etc.), and with more crystallized decklists I get to see the some forms of improvements and limitations of both decks and players in this very localized metagame.

It's been a fun experiment which has been valuable in forming my opinions about the game. I'm pretty obsessed with fairness and justice in gaming, and I tend to leave games after I find them irresolvably imbalanced. Sometimes letters to the devs. have impact, and sometimes not. Luckily, magic seems to be a game which has some roots in mathematical balance and is actively tweaked/nerfed/rotating sets here and there to be more balanced and evolving than many other games; additionally, the playgroup can easily change the mechanics of the game in 'unsanctioned' play (modding Tribes 2 was cool for that too).

With the database we can widen our scope to determine who is "winning" between two decks because we have a larger population of matches/games. You just need to play enough matches that "going first" doesn't matter, as it is just lost in a sea of games which should be statistically even for "going first". Magic tournament structures don't have time for this, and thus you will have some injustice (however small it may be). If you want to make the game more fair, then use a database to store the history of your games.

Wizards ELO system attempts to solve some of the problems. They use a historical database, but the conditions to putting information in that database (sanctioned play) aren't so easy to meet. Their justice system isn't accurate or timely, and it only provides justice to a small sliver of the games you actually play. Also, Wizards will be testing your collection, and not necessarily your skill in such a database. They are poor arbiters who are interested in money (hehe, nice pun!), not gaming; so make your own system.

In addition to solving the 'going first' issue, a database allows you to create unique solutions for other problems in magic.

We now play a version of magic that we invented after having used our game history database for a while. This format required the use of the database, but it made magic as fair as we could make it at even the smallest scopes of time and the largest range of decks and players. Most importantly, it enables us to more clearly define not just who deserved to win, but by what margin they won. Defining the "degree" to which a player wins or loses is part of justice, so we found that to be an important feature we wanted to add. Mind you, it is a handicapping system which could only be employed within a smaller, set group of players with a historical database (sadly like using spherical chickens+vacuum to solve this physics problem!), so it really can't be employed just anywhere. This system not only attempts to handicap skilled players, but it also enables very poor decks to be played fairly against top flight decks. Here was our train of thought:

If a type 2 deck was pitted against a Type 1 deck, the difference in their fundamental turns is so wide that we usually just couldn't viably play the decks against each other. The skill-cap for the type 2 deck was so low in this matchup that skill almost never played a role in deciding who one the match (innately unfair). On some slope, you'll see that even budget decks and tier 1 decks in the same format have the same problems. How do you create an even playing field from uneven cardpools? To alleviate this problem we decided to 'boost the tempo' of the type 2 deck in this circumstance until it had even matchup percentages against the type 1 deck.

How do you boost tempo (we can barely define the term)? Literally give one deck more time/turns than another.

Here is a nutshell example: A type 2 burn deck might have a fundamental turn of 7, and a type 1.5 burn deck might have a fundamental turn of 4. To even the playing field, we give the type 2 deck 3 turns before the type 1.5 deck gets to draw. In this way, the decks are matched more evenly.

This, of course, is not perfect. I really wish I could evenly distribute tempo/time across each stage of the game rather than frontloading the tempo at the beginning (because this favors some strategies more than others), but you just can't take 1.25 drawsteps and 1.25 combat phases. In a game like World of Warcraft, a dev/admin could adjust GCD's and latency (especially if you make your own private LAN server) making the world literally handicapped 'every stage of the game' by a constant amount for the player to be handicapped or improved in the opposite direction; but Magic's true turn-based nature poses limitations to the handicap method.

Other questions arise though. How do you decide the difference of fundamental turns between decks? I think this question required more context, specifically 'who is playing the deck?'. What about if player A is much, much better at a deck than player B? The fundamental turn scales with the pilot, and thus a proper context required historical accounts of each player with each deck.

Instead of just randomly choosing who goes first, we keep tabs on who should go first and how many turns they get. Each player with each deck against each player with each deck has a turn-marker. The turn-marker indicates a historically-reached value of tempo. The value of the turn-marker scales up/down based upon win/loss ratios between specific players with specific decks.

First you have to develop a history to make a marker. Let's start with a blank slate. Take my brother and I, he with Burn and I with MUC, we have no records yet of any games.

The first game has a random start (it will be the only random start). My brother Jim won the roll, so we play a 2/3 match with Jim going first in all games (we call this +0.5 turns in Jim's Favor), and he wins the match 2-0. We record the events, and because I lost, the next match I will start first in all 2-3 games. In the next match I start first (we call this -0.5 turns for Jim), but Jim still wins 2-0 (record it, etc.). This match Jim goes first, then I take my turn, then I take another turn, and then we continue swapping back and forth as normal (we call this -1.0 turns for Jim); but lo and behold, Jim wins the match 2-0 again! In the next match our marker will be at -1.5 for Jim (or +1.5 for me), so I will both start the game and take an extra turn. If I lost the match, then the marker would ratchet up to +2.0 for me or down to -2.0 for Jim, with Jim going first, but me taking my turn and then 2 more beyond that. You get the picture right?

The objective of this system is to help balance the value of a.) going first, b.) the difference in strength between two decks, c.) the difference in playskill between two players.

Essentially, we overcome the 'going first' problem, while also handicapping both decks and players to make the matchup as even/fair as possible. The game is ALWAYS down to the wire.

Now, with only two people, this system only makes games "close" and interesting, but it doesn't tell you by what margin one player is better than another. Here is where you need multiple people playing these matches to have a reference point for interpreting the results of any particular matchup of players and decks.

Where it gets really interesting is when we compare [my Wife playing MUC against my brother Jim with Burn] with [me playing MUC against Jim w/burn]. My wife's turn-marker might be average at +2.0, and my turn-marker might average +3.5. This means that my wife is in fact better at MUC than I am when playing against Jim's Burn. We also have a way to measure BY HOW MUCH one player is better than another with any number of decks and any number of players. We can even tally up turn-markers for all decks against all players and determine not only who is the best player, but by how much they are the best player.

This system removes the rewards of deckbuilding as a skill, and removes any form of value in card collecting. In fact, the system rewards unique knowledge of decks. Not only does it help us more fairly determine who goes first, who deserves to 'win', and by what degree one deck/player is better/worse than another deck/player against a target deck/player, but it makes Magic very enjoyable, as matches are always very close.

If you play with other family and friends a lot, and gamebalance + Justice are important to you, and you don't have some irrational fear of rethinking conditions to winning/losing and doing your own game design, then you should perhaps try the system out.






peace,
4eak