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Hey out there Magic players! Are your games getting too complicated? I know mine are!
Magic is a very complicated game. It has tens of thousands of functionally unique gamepieces. The interactions are near unlimited. New cards are introduced constantly. Variants, custom alters, and all sorts of foils add to the overall visual chaos.
Looking at your opponents’ boardstates can be a lot. Looking at your own can be a lot. Commander often wants you to grok 4 at a time, or more.
What do we do?
It’s easy to say: play less weird variations and foils, but it’s not that simple. Sometimes you want the art that speaks to you. Sometimes you play the card you opened, or was gifted, or was the only version available. Wizards prints so many variations these days that ‘normal’ magic cards aren’t a given anywhere. Whether we like it or not, variations are here to stay.
But there are other ways to make Magic games easier to look at, and to play.
Here are 10 easy ways to decomplicate your Magic games, and make them smoother.
Note: Some of you play in formats that require a specific list of cards, maybe with a flex slot or two to approach the meta. This post is not for those formats.
10 – No Upkeep
What?! Did you know that nothing happens during the Upkeep phase unless a card says so? So if you have no cards that reference Upkeep, like in my Cube, there’s no need for it. You can just untap and draw unless somebody else wants to cast a spell or use an ability.
For newer players, this is really nice and smooth and intuitive. It’s nice for anyone, really. There’s no checking for triggers, and no anxiety over possibly forgetting. And once newer players get a good handle on the game, they can pick from the Upkeep effects that speak to them in their own deckbuilding adventures.
Wizards is also printing plenty of cards these days that trigger once per turn, like an Upkeep effect, but not during Upkeep. Instead it might trigger at the beginning of combat, or one of your main phases, or at the end of the turn.
If you need a specific effect, take a careful look at the cards available. One of them might provide the effect you want, with a more intuitive timing.
9 – Simplify Your Tokens
Many ‘goodstuff’ decks in green are guilty of flooding the board with a wide variety of different tokens. Beasts, insects, saprolings, hippos, elves, bears, etc. Other colours do too, but rarely as bad. This can be a lot to manage, and make a lot of annoying math/visual chaos for everyone.
Of course you don’t want to remove a really great card from a concept just because it’s the only card in your deck that makes a unique ‘butterfly’ token, but if it’s one of many similar options, and you’re already making plenty of regular ‘insect’ tokens, go with the insect card.
This is another feature of my Cube, where there are only a few kinds of tokens, one per colour, to limit the visual chaos. I don’t want players constantly asking, ‘What’s that one again?’ or having to sort through a huge pile of tokens every trigger to find the one they need.
8 – Simplify Your Counters
A recent development in Magic is an explosion of different kinds of counters to put on cards. Shield, Finality, and Stun counters are among the more prevalent, alongside a full suite of keyword ability counters, like Flying and First Strike counters.
Like with Tokens, some variation is almost unavoidable, but cutting down on the piles of stuff on each card goes a long way to decomplicating your games. To keep things simple in my Cube, there are only +1/+1 counters.
Keeping track of all the extremely common +1/+1 counter effects in Magic is enough of a chore, and if you’re already doing that, toning down other counters can make things much more manageable.
7 – No Searching
Don’t you believe in The Heart of the Cards? C’mon now.
But seriously, no searching means no extra shuffling. No clumps of land because you pulled them all out of your deck and wadded them together in play. No time deciding while your opponents wait. No reliance on a ‘silver bullet’ strategy.
For a newer player, not being forced to search a deck they aren’t familiar with is a huge relief. Handing them a deck to play with, or getting them to draft a Cube full of search cards can be an unpleasant, bewildering experience.
When it comes to getting cards into your hand, most card and board games just have you draw the top card and deal with it.
An experienced player also has a massive competitive advantage with a search card, and while drafting a Cube can require card evaluation anyway, search cards add an extra layer of complication. It’s easier, and fairer, to leave them out.
6 – No ‘Tax’ Cards
Two cards to skip if you want smoother games are Rhystic Study and Smothering Tithe, but this can apply to any effect that adds a little bit of math to the game.
There are a few cards, like Propaganda and Ghostly Prison that force opponents to pay extra mana to attack to with their creatures. These cards are very effective, but more because they force your opponents to make hard, mathy choices rather than stopping creatures from attacking outright. They’re really not all that good at preventing attacking.
A newer, well-intentioned but complicated ability is Ward. Ward is an attempt to make Hexproof less powerful while still keeping the spirit of a ‘shielded’ permanent. Ward is followed by a cost of some kind, usually a mana cost, that’s required to target the permanent that has Ward. A ‘Tax’ to target.
It makes sense as a gameplay mechanic, and has flavour, but when it comes to actual gameplay, Hexproof is simpler, makes choices clear, and accomplishes more or less the same thing.
What all of these Tax effects do is give players another thing to remember, and another variable to factor into their math. When it comes to mana, that can be a nightmare.
Leaving these cards out of your builds makes things much simpler, and keeps you from being that player who has to constantly remind other players of the Tax effect. Do you pay the 1? Do you pay the Ward cost? Are you sick of Tax cards yet? Yes.
5 – Don’t Play With Your Topdeck
One card to skip for sure if you want less complicated games, and the same for your opponents, is Sensei’s Divining Top. Sure, your games go better when you effectively stack your deck a little each turn, but they also go slower, and expand the amount of options you have to consider.
This goes for several other cards as well, like Scroll Rack, but Sensei’s Divining Top is also a complicated mess in a bunch of other ways.
You can instead choose to draw randomly from your pile like a true believer in The Heart of the Cards. It’s liberating, and reminds you that you’re playing a game.
For newer players, having to incorporate manipulating their Topdeck is just like having a bigger hand, but with elements of searching. Extra card evaluation. Extra variables. And when an experienced player does it, it can even feel a bit like they’re cheating.
4 – Don’t Steal From Their Decks
This is a fairly rare ability, but from personal experience, stealing from an opponent’s deck can just be an overcomplicated annoyance instead of a game-winning strat.
The card I want to highlight is Etali, Primal Storm, which can get you a lot of free spells in a 4 player Commander game. Maybe as many as 4 per attack. Seems good, and it can be. But you also get plenty of randos that are now yours to manage.
Those cards can come with any and all of the complications of the other entries on this list, most notably forcing you to keep track of a bunch of tokens or counters that hardly end up mattering to the game. You can choose not to cast them, but in the moment, are you? Just deciding is enough trouble. Chances are you just cast anything you can.
Even the more-targeted effects like Bribery suffer from the issues that search cards do, as well as an added potential to fizzle. Maybe they don’t have a good option. Maybe instead they have 10. Maybe they have 30. Try not to take your time.
If you want to take an opponent’s cards, taking them from play is often just as good and way easier to manage. Plus you almost always get what you want.
3 – Minimize Mana-Based Activations
Having a few key cards with a complicated activation cost is fine. Some are pretty indispensable in some decks. But having too many can just make you glaze. Like looking at an airplane cockpit. All those buttons and levers and dials and gauges….
Sometimes playing real pilot simulator 2024 is a cool game, but sometimes you just want a one-button take-off.
One place this can get out of hand is on lands and mana rocks. Think Sonic Screwdriver from Doctor Who. It has three abilities other than making mana. Pretty good because making mana is the main reason to play it.
These effects are definitely ‘low opportunity cost,’ meaning they’re gravy on top of a card you’d play anyway, but they often just complicate your board.
This is a card I play with, because all the activated abilities are good, but I’ve also had it in play several times and forgot it was anything more than a mana rock. Or I needed the mana every turn for spells and stuff, and the abilities were just extra.
Swapping it out for a 2-mana-cost rock that only makes mana might have been better in those games, and I might not have noticed anyway.
Give it a try. A card that turns sideways to do a thing is pretty satisfying, and when it does it all by itself with no added mana or whatever, it feels good.
2 – Don’t Be Constantly Doing the Math
Let’s compare two cards, Stag Beetle and Beast of Burden. Side by side.
They do similar things. Both land on the board with power and toughness pretty much equal to the number of creatures in play, but Stag Beetle only does the math once. It gets +1/+1 counters equal to the other creatures and moves on. One calculation.
By contrast, Beast of Burden counts when it enters, and then has to recount every time a creature enters or leaves the battlefield. Fine if that’s one at a time, if it’s the only card like that, and if you’re committed to watching it. But if it isn’t, and you’re not?
Constant calculation. And for what? A big vanilla beater? There might be alternatives. Heck, Stag Beetle is even a little cheaper to cast!
Of course there are probably constant calculation cards that are irreplaceable to some concepts, but the rest can be minimized for our collective sanity. It’s simpler just to count them out.
1 – Don’t Play Random Day/Night Cards
Day/Night sucks. Why? It just makes games of Magic more complicated.
Essentially it forces players to keep track of multiple things at all times, ie. whether it’s Day or Night, how many spells have been cast during a turn, and what effects trigger when.
It’s tough to leverage, and tough to strategize around, and a lot of the cards are crummy anyway. They suffer most from being unreliable payoffs, because Day/Night is unreliable, tough to leverage, etc.
If you’re determined to build a Werewolf deck, or something like that, you can at least be the one person at the table keeping diligent track of Day/Night. But it’s cruel to play a single Day/Night card, add the mechanic to the game, and then have that card hardly matter.
Because you still have to keep track of it. Just in case it comes up again. And if your one Day/Night card gets destroyed or you leave the game, it still has to be tracked. The other players can chose to ignore it, but you can also choose to not play cards like The Celestus in a deck that has no other Day/Night effects.
Since the default state of Magic is neither Day nor Night, and those only kick in when a card says so, we must be playing in a different state of sun-based time. But what?
I vote for Brunchtime. Not Day, Night, Breakfast or Lunch. But when the real Magic happens.
Conclusion
Magic has 30,000 cards or so, with more always on the way. Part of the big fun of Magic the Gathering is exploring the potential of a vast catalogue of cards spanning decades. You’ve got options, and there are ways to simplify your playing experience by using those options.
Making a few key choices can make a huge difference in the overall smoothness of your games, and for your opponents. Everybody wins.
Thanks for reading!
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