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TreeRol wrote:

To me, there's nothing fun about an unfair game of Magic. Unless you're going for degree of difficulty, I guess.

And it's true that fairness contributes to fun to some extent. But that doesn't mean it's the goal.

Example: Counter-Strike. The game is unfair to some extent, because your internet connection, size of monitor, and quality of mouse all can contribute to how well you can play it. However, forcing it to run at the same screensize, artificially lagging everyone's connection, and banning optical mice would all make the game less fun, even if they made it more fair.

So fairness is only important insofar as it makes the game more fun. If fairness (or randomness, in this case) make the game less fun, then you have to go with more fun and less fair.

And before people strawman the hell out of me: This isn't to say we should go for totally unrandom. Just pick some more middle-of-the-road solution, such as randomizing the print run jump in drafts but keeping it ordered for sealed deck, or whatever.

olstyn wrote:

MTGO is not a first person shooter - you're comparing apples to oranges, and therefore, while I play and love CS, I'm going to ignore that part of your post.

Random jump will lead to results fairly similar to random, in terms of the possibilities for "broken" and/or crap runs of rares - it just means the stuff downstream of the "broken" or crap is consistent, which I don't really see as helpful.

In order to have enforced balance, you'd need a print run with uniform jumps, and then we're right back where we started. Random is not always going to be "fun" by whatever definition you're using, but neither is a print run. Show me a solution that's demonstrably better than both and I'll be right there championing fun with you, but I'm firmly in the camp that "fair" is better than nothing, and therefore is the goal to strive for if fair + fun is not achievable.

I'm talking more about sealed deck here. Random draft is. . . Slightly less rare-based, and thus can deal with random solutions.

But Sealed print runs were always in MTGO up to now, and I think they were much better than totally random. If not for avoiding insane pools, at least they did help mitigate the "5 craps" effect.

MTGKaioshin wrote:

Completely random mimics real life when they mix pax :D
I hear that's important to some



(I'd have to assume that the tournament deck still follows the run for its 3 rares)

Yeah, so in real life, it's more print run than not in sealed deck.

And I'd assume the way packs are put into boxes also has some effect that computer-randomization doesn't exactly mimic.

olstyn wrote:

Ah, but in real life, tournament packs are going away pretty much as we speak.

And sealed deck tournaments will probably die soon enough. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.