This forums is for questions, answers, and discussion about First Edition rules, formats, and expansions.
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#600114
Today's Friday Question is actually a challenge:

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I have recently been learning Magic: the Gathering, the most popular CCG. I expected this to be easy, because I play First Edition, famously considered one of the most complicated and confusing games ever made.

I realize that I have been corrupted by several decades of "1E Brain," but I've come to believe this is a crock. MtG is way harder than First Edition. Setting up a "basic" novice game of MtG involves more overhead than a "basic" novice game of Trek. The stack is better defined in their rules, but more complex and counter-intuitive than 1E's chronological initiate-respond-resolve timing cycle. (It's also full of weird angle shots.)

Reading MtG cards requires you to memorize fifty thousand meaningless keywords that aren't explained on the cards (trample! vigilance! lifelink! horsemanship! flash! double strike! enrage! deposit!). First Edition never went too far down that deadly path, and has since reversed course anyway, so we only have like five total "magic words" left in the game. (Guramba, Cloaking Device, Intelligence, ???) Our cards actually say what they do; Magic wants you to memorize an annex first.

I think we developed a reputation for complexity in part because our rulebook was so disorganized. In fact, for many years we didn't have a rulebook; we had a Glossary, which you had to study like Talmud because information was disorganized and impossible to find. A good chunk of the game, for a long time, was handed down by oral tradition, rather than by any actual black-and-white rules. This lack of organization made our pretty simple game appear mind-numbingly complicated to outsiders, but actually we just needed to write things down better. Since the CC began, though, we've been moving in that direction, and now we're doing (in some ways) better than Magic. After all, there are like 90,000 card specific rulings in Magic, but they aren't actually collected anywhere, like in a document you can actually print out, (like our Glossary); they're just posted on database pages for each individual card, one by one. And there's bazillions of them, far more than in our rulings. We work hard to make cards say what they do, and errata cards that don't.

...which is another thing! Magic doesn't errata its cards when wordings get updated; it just announces a wording update and expects you to look it up in the card database whenever you need the correct wording! That's no way to run a card game! Let me print the correct gametext on my card!

Sure, 1E has plenty of strategic complexity. We can do all kinds of cool stuff on the spaceline, even stuff that's kind of weird, and our board state evolves to a point of high complexity much faster than Magic (because a lot of our complexity hits the table in the Facility Phase, rather than in the opening turns). But our complexity is, for the most part, printed right on the cards, in a relatively lightweight rules framework.

Don't get me wrong, Magic is fun. I'm enjoying my time as a planeswalker. It's not even necessarily a bad thing to be complex and hard to understand.

I am just coming to believe that 1E is not as hard to understand as Magic -- and, more broadly, that 1E is not nearly as complex as our community has spent decades convincing itself that it is. (I include myself in that.) To the extent that we still find it complicated, that's more because of bad communication by the rules documents (and thus the Rules Committee) than because we're doing anything especially Byzantine.

This week's challenge: change my mind! Convince me that, no, actually, First Edition, the so-called "CCG of Kings," really is harder to wrap your head around than the current card game market leader. Prove my unhinged rant wrong!

(Or, better yet, don't change my mind, just agree with my correct takes. :) )
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Second Edition Art Manager
By edgeofhearing (Lucas Thompson)
 - Second Edition Art Manager
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Community Contributor
#600116
So, I've only ever played Magic very casually, and I've never been that deep into its rules. But, when I have a question about a rule, there's usually some documentation that can explain it clearly.

First Edition is very different. When I have a question about a rule, I go to the documentation (even the new, clearer documentation), and come out with no ability to answer the question on my own.

Take, for example, this question that I asked*. The only reason that I know that the cards work the way they do is because you said so. I see nothing in the actual documentation that actually makes the ruling clear. Your answer certainly fits within the margins of the documentation, I don't have a problem with your answer, but I'm no more equipped to solve another "how does this location-based card interact with cloaked ships" query than I was before I asked.

Worse, my follow-up question there gets into the reeds of "actions" (which is hopelessly nebulous), and I would never have arrived at the reasoning for Brian's answer based on the documentation I'd read before asking. I feel like, most of the time, my 1E rules questions answers are not based on the rules documents as much as on decades of prior rulings about what the documentation actually means.

I guess what I'm saying is (in my very limited experience with Magic) that Magic is certainly complicated, but it's more precise than First Edition, which is something my simple Second Edition brain requires. That's not to say that it's more or less complicated, but it speaks to the way I think more clearly.

*This is just the first example I came to in the 1E rules forum of something I asked, there are others, like, can you play Data's Body for free with Cybernetics Expertise. The "disabled" entry does not answer the question, only asking the question on the forums does.

#Lucasdrunkposting
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By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#600123
MTG is way more intuitive.

First and foremost, the game is updated to follow the newest and most reliable design knowledge. This means that the game is not just growing with cards but actually evolving as a game. Many of the new cards would not be possible to play with the old one; not just with the power curve in mind, but that they would not fit the old template of how the game plays.

The keywords that you talk of are the evergreen ones (at least most of them). They are explained clearly in the How to Learn rules, and if you get your hands on one of the beginner-friendly, preconstructed decks, the keywords are spelt out with explanation text after.

All the new keywords introduced are always followed by an explanation of what they do. The gameplay is also simpler, so keeping a few keywords in memory is not so hard to do, as the rest of the gameplay is more of a call-response setup.

And having the advantage of being able to build a deck by just taking any random booster pack and adding 3 of each land and starting playing without even having looked at the cards compared to 1E's 2-week slog to try to find a deck that is playable. And even if you want to go deeper, you can goldfish your idea within a minute and know if the thing works or not.

All in all, the thing 1E has that MTG does not is a good connection to the IP. I can also see this with other Decipher games, such as Star Wars; when they tried to rebrand it as Wars after they lost the license, it was just not as good a game as before. This is not to be interpreted as we need to construct everything top down, but more that the soul of the game is based on the experience of being a part of the Trek universe. This MTG never managed to do this to the same extent.

If the game is easier or not, that is probably very subjective. I would say that learning MTG is much simpler than 1E (this comes from 25+ years of teaching board games and card games to kids and adults alike), and players of all ages usually have, after one short 5-minute explanation of the game, able to play a game of their own. This has never happened with 1E in all these years.

I have corroborated this data with multiple other game teachers to be sure this is not just coloured by my own judgement or that I missed some data point along the way. This is also what drives me as a player and designer.

So data is telling me your stipulation is in error. =)
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#600139
edgeofhearing wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:16 am I guess what I'm saying is (in my very limited experience with Magic) that Magic is certainly complicated, but it's more precise than First Edition, which is something my simple Second Edition brain requires. That's not to say that it's more or less complicated, but it speaks to the way I think more clearly.
I buy this, and I think it's the real reason for 1E's reputation. We've improved, but you're right that there's still a long ways to go. That lines up with this:
BCSWowbagger wrote:To the extent that we still find it complicated, that's more because of bad communication by the rules documents (and thus the Rules Committee) than because we're doing anything especially Byzantine.
Smiley wrote:First and foremost, the game is updated to follow the newest and most reliable design knowledge. This means that the game is not just growing with cards but actually evolving as a game. Many of the new cards would not be possible to play with the old one; not just with the power curve in mind, but that they would not fit the old template of how the game plays.
This change may arguably make for a better game; I'm certainly not steeped enough in MtG's metas to have an opinion on that one way or another. But the ongoing evolution of the game certainly creates a higher barrier to entry, since that constant churn and change destabilizes the game and makes old cards hard to make sense of. (It also made a lot of the knowledge I brought to the table from having learned a little MtG in 2003 pretty much useless; the version of the game I learned back then was long gone.)

One must strike a balance between evolution and stasis, because stasis is just a dead game that is going to get solved, but evolution makes the game harder to learn and harder to keep pace with.
The keywords that you talk of are the evergreen ones (at least most of them). They are explained clearly in the How to Learn rules, and if you get your hands on one of the beginner-friendly, preconstructed decks, the keywords are spelt out with explanation text after.
They aren't in the How To Play rules that I see: https://magic.wizards.com/en/how-to-play

I just have to look them up in the comprehensive rules or, more often, on Google. (And then I have to look them up six or seven more times before I remember what they actually do. And then I encounter three new ones in my opponent's deck and just have to take my opponent's word for it how they work.) And, oh brother, there's a LOT of keywords.

I did encounter explanatory text for a keyword on a Magic card -- once. And then I said, "Huh, why isn't that on all the cards? That seems to me like a pretty basic CCG design principle."
All the new keywords introduced are always followed by an explanation of what they do.
Where? Not generally on the cards, in my experience -- and, of course, I'm jumping into the game after zillions of keywords have already been produced.
The gameplay is also simpler, so keeping a few keywords in memory is not so hard to do, as the rest of the gameplay is more of a call-response setup.
I don't think the gameplay is simpler. Trek's core gameplay loop is simple:

1. Report ships and personnel.
2. Use ships to take personnel to missions.
3. Encounter dilemmas at missions until there are no more dilemmas.

There are problems with this loop -- especially the fact that it doesn't actually require any interaction with your opponent at all--but it's not complicated. We can (and have) written one-page rules documents that capture this loop and can get players started in minutes.
And even if you want to go deeper, you can goldfish your idea within a minute and know if the thing works or not.
I can't. Maybe that skill comes in time.

But I can goldfish most Trek stuff very quickly after a while, too.
And having the advantage of being able to build a deck by just taking any random booster pack and adding 3 of each land and starting playing without even having looked at the cards compared to 1E's 2-week slog to try to find a deck that is playable.
It seems to me that this is comparing apples to oranges. It takes a couple weeks to build a deck in 1E if you are trying to win a regional. If you're just trying to play, and don't much care about winning or balance, you can build a perfectly playable deck in an hour -- faster, if you're experienced. (When I did 1E playtesting, I rarely started building my deck more than 30 minutes before start time, and these would be decks with 10-30 cards I'd never used before and perhaps hadn't seen before that morning.)

Still, I do agree with you that 1E could do a much better job of advertising novice-friendly decks to novices. The "I'm an Old/New 1E Player" series by Maggie Geppert was good, but, once it slipped off the main article feed, it was kind of gone. That doesn't strike me as a game-complexity issue as much as a novice-communication problem, though.
I have corroborated this data with multiple other game teachers to be sure this is not just coloured by my own judgement or that I missed some data point along the way. This is also what drives me as a player and designer.
Your experience of teaching the game to newbies is so different from mine. I have not generally had a problem getting even a child playing 1E after a 5-10 minute explanation (as long as the decks were geared toward novices). I don't understand why you aren't able to replicate that, and I wonder what's different.

(Maybe I'm just such a lightning explainer that I'd have people playing MtG in 1 minute! I don't know, never having tried teaching MtG.)
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By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#600144
Shouldn't it be a dual loop for 1E:

Play card - move card - interact with opponents card(s) OR do mission.

The problem is timing and memory. MTG has broken down everything into distinct sections where you are allowed to do certain things. We have play, execute order, "the rest!" in any order, memory issues be dammed!, end of turn things, draw card to end turn.

The thing is that Trek doesn't follow what the zeitgeist is doing, like MTG is. Many other games have copied and built upon MTG, which makes it more natural for most to pick that game up compared to 1E. That being said, the game that D created back in -94 is vastly different and way more complicated now than back when. And the two first expansions did not do much in the form of making the game better, just more complex.
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Second Edition Art Manager
By edgeofhearing (Lucas Thompson)
 - Second Edition Art Manager
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Community Contributor
#600145
BCSWowbagger wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 5:29 pmYour experience of teaching the game to newbies is so different from mine. I have not generally had a problem getting even a child playing 1E after a 5-10 minute explanation (as long as the decks were geared toward novices). I don't understand why you aren't able to replicate that, and I wonder what's different.
It could have a lot to do with what the people who are being taught the game are used to. I've tried teaching 1E to 2E only players, and the general point of failure is explaining (even simple) play and draw engines. Like, okay, I've taught them enough of the structure of the game to get to draw seven cards, but now they have to read 4-5 wall-of-text cards just to play the cards from their hands and draw new ones. My wife in particular just noped out of it right there ("can we do literally anything else?").* Honestly, I can empathize, because it's very close to the feeling I get when I sit across from First Edition Borg.

Likewise, when I tried to teach a bunch of WoW players how to play D&D, there was a lot of interest until we got to the math part. I mean, the computer usually handles that part, and it's really a lot of effort for what boils down to cooperative coin flipping.

*She hates Magic too, but has at least played one full game of Magic with me, which is more than First Edition achieved (and, believe me, I'd rather play First Edition with her).
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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Regent
Community Contributor
#600147
Smiley wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 6:27 pm Shouldn't it be a dual loop for 1E:

Play card - move card - interact with opponents card(s) OR do mission.

The problem is timing and memory. MTG has broken down everything into distinct sections where you are allowed to do certain things. We have play, execute order, "the rest!" in any order, memory issues be dammed!, end of turn things, draw card to end turn.

The thing is that Trek doesn't follow what the zeitgeist is doing, like MTG is. Many other games have copied and built upon MTG, which makes it more natural for most to pick that game up compared to 1E. That being said, the game that D created back in -94 is vastly different and way more complicated now than back when. And the two first expansions did not do much in the form of making the game better, just more complex.
Counterpoint: If "everyone" starts doing what the zeitgeist is doing, then don't "everyone's" games come out looking, feeling, and playing the same?

Sounds kind of boring to me... :shrug:
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By nobthehobbit (Daniel Pareja)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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Moderator
#600154
First Edition was made at a time when Wizards of the Coast was trying to file for patents on literally everything to do with CCGs/TCGs. (I believe they ended up getting exactly one, for tapping, and then Legend of the Five Rings came along with bowing and didn't get hit with a patent-infringement lawsuit that I'm aware of. Maybe someone like Allen would know more.)

But there was a period of time for a while after Magic released that they were trying to get patents on everything, and threatening potential lawsuits against anyone who infringed said patents should the applications be approved. This is why 1E (and other games from that era) have costing systems that are very different from what Magic has, whereas more modern games like Hearthstone have costing systems that are closer to Magic's. (At least, in my opinion that's the case.) Some companies signed licencing deals with Wizards, but others, like Decipher, refused to sign those deals on some matters (like card rarity in booster packs) and stayed away from Magic's mechanics on other matters (like card costing).

First Edition being so different from Magic was a deliberate design feature for legal reasons.
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#600156
edgeofhearing wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 7:14 pm It could have a lot to do with what the people who are being taught the game are used to. I've tried teaching 1E to 2E only players, and the general point of failure is explaining (even simple) play and draw engines. Like, okay, I've taught them enough of the structure of the game to get to draw seven cards, but now they have to read 4-5 wall-of-text cards just to play the cards from their hands and draw new ones. My wife in particular just noped out of it right there ("can we do literally anything else?").* Honestly, I can empathize, because it's very close to the feeling I get when I sit across from First Edition Borg.
Oh, yeah, this is a good point. The wall-of-text cards are both (1) something that is way more prominent in 1E than other games, and (2) reallllllllllly hard for a new player to understand, or even to try to understand because it just feels so hopeless.

This was something I really liked about The Final Frontier + Five-Year Mission: TFF is a wall of text, but it's the only wall of text you need for the deck. Five-Year Mission I could explain as, "This card lets you draw two cards at the end of your turn instead of one card."

I generally find with novices these days that I favor playing with "simple" play engines like HQs, and avoiding Reshape the Quadrant and especially Continuing Mission (which is a really great but totally overwhelming card). But there isn't a perfect solution to this. (HQ's mean lore searches, which is also newbie-hostile.) And you just can't give them a bunch of stuff in the facility phase, because the novice needs to start using cards in order to feel comfortable with them, and a long facility phase just heaps up more and more "things I need to use" without giving them the chance to actually use it.

There's ways to solve for this, but it's a problem that just isn't as pervasive in Magic to begin with. Burn decks just don't have a wall-of-text problem generally at all, and certainly not before you even draw your opening hand.
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By winterflames (Derek Marlar)
 - Delta Quadrant
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#600161
OK, so, 3 things.

Magic keywords: They do a good job of explaining new keywords on cards. But remembering the differences between hexproof, shroud, ward, and protection give us problems.

Beginners learn: a lot of a Beginner's problems start with "does she actually want to learn this game?" My wife refuses pick up any game which could be described as "like" another game she already knows how to play. We were looking at a case of .hack// for $10 at Ollie's. "What is it like?" She googles it and determines it's like magic. "Then why don't we just play magic then? It's just different pictures."

Parsing a rulebook: when I went looking for whether my urza can reduce the madness cost of a spell I am discarding, it took 20 minutes and 4 reddit threads. And we gave up and said no. We didn't actually find an answer. I don't think magic is any easier to find answers for corner cases than 1e. They have like 4 different rule books and you can't search them? And they have a numbering system like the terms and conditions of the stereo system for a new car. If the answer isn't on the gatherer.wizards.com page for the card, you are screwed, Google it and cross your fingers. I don't like the magic rules.
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First Edition Rules Master
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#600166
winterflames wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 9:12 am Magic keywords: They do a good job of explaining new keywords on cards. But remembering the differences between hexproof, shroud, ward, and protection give us problems.
And this leans into my other suspected problem: Because the most popular Magic formats are eternal (i.e. "you can play with cards back to the 90s), even though WotC does limit how much tech is in any given set (for instance, the new LotR stuff uses hexproof but not shroud), if you show up and your friend throws you a Commander deck, you're going to eat all 30 years of mechanics in one big gulp. So there's a certain bit of damned-if-do-damned-if-don't at play. (For example: vanishing is just fading but easier to understand... but that means you have to remember both now, even though they'll never print another fading card again.)

Which we see on the Trek side as well - the "fun"/"powerful" decks are often not the best decks to actually *teach* the game with, because fun/power often includes complexity (to get the combo, or because you need one more Bear for Bear Force One and it's got a bunch of old Portal text on it.)
 
By Slayer07
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#600167
Smiley wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 7:01 am MTG is way more intuitive.

First and foremost, the game is updated to follow the newest and most reliable design knowledge. This means that the game is not just growing with cards but actually evolving as a game. Many of the new cards would not be possible to play with the old one; not just with the power curve in mind, but that they would not fit the old template of how the game plays.
To me this is not an extreme advantage (though I can see why it can be seen that way) and in fact can be seen as a disadvantage. A player spends hundred, perhaps thousands of dollars to build a great deck, learn to play it inside and out and end up loving it, only for it to 'evolve' out of relevancy because of...arguable growth, since older concepts are not always guaranteed to be carried over. Pokemon TCG has this type of thinking, or at least had this the last time I tried anything resembling competitive play, and sorry but I don't approve of the idea of formats where all the money and time I spent to make a deck I love is no longer relevant for competitive play for 'forced growth'.

I can understand 'natural growth' like many main characters in the Buffy CCG having better stats in the third and last recent set as opposed to the first and least recent set, but even then it didn't always invalidate the older cards, making them strategy dependent based on how you wanted to build your deck. But imagine saying because we made the Nemesis Jean-Luc Picard that means Premiere Jean-Luc Picard is no longer playable in tournaments. I'd be very surprised if that didn't upset some people to be told 'you can't play this card because we say so and no other valid reason'.
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Director of First Edition
By MidnightLich (Charlie Plaine)
 - Director of First Edition
 -  
Prophet
#600301
The thing about keyword reminder text in Magic is that it's designed for new players. That means it is prioritized on new player products (intro decks, Game Night, etc.) and on low rarity cards. That principle depends on the idea that new players are buying some packs and thus are seeing far more commons and uncommons, where the reminder text is prevalent, and few rares and mythic rares (that often omit reminder text.)

However, I suspect that buying packs is not the way people get into Magic anymore. Most packs are probably brought by drafters and old farts like me that like opening packs. If you are getting into Magic now, you're probably either a) given a deck by a friend that plays, that is almost certianly rare-heavy, b) buying a preconstructed deck like the Commander decks, which are 100 singleton cards from the entire game, or c) buying singles to get the deck you want.

So while I think the idea behind putting reminder text on commons/uncommons was originally a great way to put it in front of the people that most need it, I think that isn't the case any more.

:twocents:
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Ambassador
 - Ambassador
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#600330
I did encounter explanatory text for a keyword on a Magic card -- once. And then I said, "Huh, why isn't that on all the cards? That seems to me like a pretty basic CCG design principle."
I’m not convinced that keyword reminder text is a good tradeoff. You learn how the keyword works after a few uses, but it sits there unused and distracting the eyes forever.

As a game teacher it’s also possible to tell someone to just ignore that word in bold, until it matters.
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