Subject: (Misc) Magic Predictability
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 1998 16:40:37 EST
From: Daganstien@aol.com
To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com

There are certain things that can be predicted in a Magic game.  For instance:
"How many land am I likely to draw with 22 Forests in my 60 card deck? " or
"How likely am I to draw the 2 cards of my combo in my initial draw?"  These
are a few among many other probabilities you encounter when playing Magic.

There are alot of other games out there, too.(Really there are, I swear, there
are more games than just Magic.)  Some are like Magic, like Battletech or
Legend of the Five Rings.  Well, not exactly, but they're relatively the same
game when you compare them to checkers or tic-tac-toe.

Speaking of tic-tac-toe....Tic-tac-toe is a game that you cannot lose.  That
is, if you map out all the possible moves you can make.  But the best outcome
you can get is a draw.  There are a finite number of moves you can make in
tic-tac-toe.  The first turn you can make 9 moves, on turn 2 your opponent can
make 8 moves and so on.  So to find out how many possible games there are
multiply 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1.  The answer comes out to 3,628,800
games.  Consequently, the same tic-tac-toe game has probably been played
several times throughout history.

This assumes you continue to fill the board after someone wins the game.

Tic-tac-toe is a predictable game, it can only be won by playing someone who
doesn't know that every game can be taken into a draw.

Then there is chess.  In chess you could map out every possible game, but that
would be an incredibly huge number.  On your first turn alone you have 20
possible moves with pawns and knights having two possible moves a piece.

Then your opponent has 20 possible moves.  Bu turn 2 you have 400 possilbe
games.  Chess is predictable, but not enough so that all games will end in
draws.

The same chess game might have been played twice, and one eventually will be
within the next 1,000 years if people keep playing.

In chess, and tic-tac-toe, there is no luck except in determining who goes
first.

Magic is a different story entirely.  Decks are shuffled, so the draw part of
every turn is random.  There are not a paltry few 32 pieces as in chess, but
every Magic card ever made.  Even if you remove the Great Walls, Sorrow's
Paths, and other mistakes of the game you are still left with a great number
of cards.

Imagine the number for the possible Magic games.  Magic has very little
predictability at all.  That's what makes it great and that's also it's major
weakness.

In Magic, even if your deck just plain sucks, I mean you randomly put together
4 starter boxes of 5th Edition and mixed in 10 packs of Fallen Empires and
Homelands, you can still win.  You can get a good hand, and your opponent can
get a bad one.

On the flip side, no games are definite.  Your expensive, well oiled machine
of a White Weenie deck can meet the fate of some scrub's Hectacomb/Sengir
Autocrat deck just because you got land screwed.

Getting rid of this randomness would change the game a little too much.  Some
have said that there should be a land deck and a regular deck that players
could draw from.  This seems drastic, and it is.  Any other ideas like this
are also very difficult to do just because of the amount of changes that will
have to be made.

So it looks like Magic will always have a degree of luck in it.  So, you can
look forward to many more death by Unstably Mutated Rabid Wombats in the
future, but you can also look forward to killing someone with Scryb Sprites
that have been Giant Growthed three times.

Aaron Huertas

daganstien@aol.com