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"How about a mythic soda?"

"You're not taking into account Robocop's superior understanding of the legal system."

I laughed =P

I agree with Mark on almost all of his points. The mana system of magic is in fact awesome.

I disagree however that the randomness is always good. I've played card games that let you play spells that you don't need as land. It works so much better. This approach still makes you spend your recources and only allows you to play a land each turn but the absence of mana screw makes a player have some control over the flow of the game, essentially making for a more fun experience.

I know Magic was the first game, and these other games have all based their mana systems off of magic, but it does seem to work better for these games in a way.
Well, except that I still like magic better of course.

I dunno how they would make it mecchanically:

Putting the card face down to say it makes (colorless?) mana is not available. Face down cards are 2/2 creatures;

Putting some kind of counter to mark those cards as mana sources instead of spells is a bad idea. It could create memory issues;

A solution to mana screw and mana flood on the terms above could obsolete many land cards. The only thing I'd advocate, if such solutions were implemented, is the removal of mulliganing if mana issues were no more.

It's totally possible to eliminate mana screw from the game, in about a  half-dozen ways.  Probably the best and easiest is to separate lands and  spells into two separate libraries and choose which one to draw from  whenever you draw.  Certain cards would not work under this format but  the majority of the game would function fine.  There's also the  spells-as-lands variant, although I don't really care for that one  myself, I like the fact that lands are cards but I wish they were more  interesting, like if you got some kind of bonus based on which basic  lands you chose to play.  However it's probably not possible to  institute such a system this late into the game.

By the way,  those three comics he posted here are pretty good, but I used to follow  Mark on Twitter and almost all of the comics I saw there just plain  sucked.  A lot of the humor in TFTP seems to be incomprehensible to  anyone who doesn't work in R&D - or else it's just not funny in the  first place.  So I don't feel like bothering to go look at any more.

This  is where the mana system comes in. By making spells have a  cost,  you  are able to make different cards important at different parts  of the   game. Why would you ever play a weaker spell? Because it's  cheaper.   It's something you can do during the early parts of the  game.

Yes, this is exactly why we have cards like Goblin  Guide ,  Garruk's Companion , Blade Splicer ,  Burning-Tree  Shaman , and Phyrexian Obliterator .  Because  you're not  allowed to gain a powerful effect without a commensurate  cost.

Oh, wait, unless you spend lots of money.  Then you're  totally allowed to trash players who play with commons.  Right, I  remember now.

Yeah, mana system is good, except when it decides the game due to mana-screw or mana flood.  Of course, that is because random is random.

The main thing I don't care for is the tendency to not have some form of enemy duals around.  Want to encourage allied colors by having more duals of that sort?  Fine.  Just make sure there's always 1 enemy color set of duals available as well, as otherwise, the tendency to give more powerful cards more of the same mana symbol really hinders the ability to play enemy colors, setting up a situation where the limits are too much, bad limits.  After all, I can play a Phyrexian Obliterator with no problem in B/U or B/R, thanks to 3 playable duals (and a fourth if I wanted to use it).  Yet I can have troubles dropping a Howling Banshee in B/W when I hit 4 lands.