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Cake day: January 21st, 2024

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  • I was struggling to figure out how to express another problem, but I just thought of how to say it. This deeply entrenches metagaming into the game’s formats, since competitive players will even more greatly want to keep secret strategies in their pockets so the wider scene only finds out after they’ve already reaped the benefits.

    Basically, it’s the Magic version of arbitrage. Everyone in Modern is sleeping on Séance, so you keep quiet about your Séance brew until it’s Pro Tour time and you get to cheese wins with an undercosted Séance.

    Tangent time! During Pro Tour Amonkhet, there was a cheesy WU snake deck in draft. Some of the competitors expected Slither Blade to be badly underpicked, so forced decks full of those and Trials of Solidarity. It worked. Once this archetype went public, it stopped working because people were actually trying to pick that snake now. As far as I know, there was no other deck for Slither Blade, so this was basically insider metagame trading.

    Okay, okay, paragraphs. I know you said this was about more than just Magic, but I don’t have enough confidence in my game design or macroeconomics knowledge to say anything insightful in that regard. I mean, some board games have auctions.


  • One obvious problem would be that some cards are good no matter the cost. I’m going to reanimate an Emrakul even if the card costs 40 mana. Manaless dredge will still be manaless.

    In some formats, this would be an excessively obtuse ban list. Obviously oversimplifying, if anything with mana value 4 or higher is utterly unplayable in Modern, any popular cards that “price out” is effectively just banned. People are playing Llanowar Elves to hit 3 mana on turn 2 for a Stone Rain or something. If the price of either changes, whether up or down, that just kills the point of trying to play them.

    Could this work in a game that’s explicitly designed around live market prices? Yeah, I’m sure NFT games are ready for their comeback :P.

    And now, I present without comment that time Valve tried dynamic pricing in Counter-Strike: Source and people could spam buy cheap guns until the server crashed.