The Five Least Fun Mechanics in Magic: the Gathering
The game is fun. The game is a battle. If it's not fun, why bother? If it's not a battle, where's the fun? - Reggie Fils-Aime, former president of Nintendo of America
The designers and developers of Magic: the Gathering are obsessed with the idea that their game should be fun. Longtime lead designer Mark Rosewater has frequently and repeatedly emphasized the idea of players 'finding the fun' in Magic, as well as how design can help players find the fun. In all my scattered years of playing Magic, though, there are a few mechanics that keep showing up as decidedly un-fun, yet continue to appear in the game.
The big reason for this is that Magic is a competitive game at its heart. Though casual formats like Commander have become Magic's main draw, particularly for new players, events like the Pro Tour still exist and even players who don't aspire to become 'professional' Magic players still participate in competitive tournaments with prizes they find valuable. To win those tournaments, players need to be able to do the same things individuals and teams do in any other competition: execute a strategy while trying to stop the opponent from executing theirs. Nearly every mechanic I describe below is a valid strategy or tactic for slowing or stopping an opponent from executing an otherwise winning strategy, so those mechanics are valid to use in the game.
However, since these mechanics exist in the same game played by 'pro players' and casuals, the latter sometimes picks up these tactics and uses them in games that aren't really intended to be as competitive as a tournament or similar event, and that's when these mechanics become un-fun and detrimental to players' enjoyment of the game as a game. It's curious to note that, to some degree, the designers seem to agree with me: for example, casual Magic Arena formats like Jump In! tend not to make use of cards with these mechanics, and when they do, they tend to be fairly limited.
One aside before I begin: one possible criticism of my categorization of these mechanics as un-fun is to say that using these mechanics helps a player win, and winning is, by definition, fun. My response is that winning in and of itself is only fun for the winner, and that a game that can legitimately be called fun is a game that players enjoy even when they don't win. These mechanics go a long way to ensuring that losing players lose in a way that at best prevents them from feeling enjoyment in the game, and at worst actively extinguishes any sense of fun they'd previously discovered. While winning might be one way to avoid that disappointment, it turns out (and my own history with the game backs this up) that quitting also successfully avoids the disappointment that comes with getting repeatedly beaten by un-fun mechanics in a game that's obsessed with trying to be fun.
5. Land
It might seem weird to include such a ubiquitous mechanic as lands in a list of un-fun mechanics. Outside of explicitly gimmicky Commander decks (which, according to the link, would cost over $2000 to build in 'paper Magic'), decks have used land as a source of 'mana' since the very beginning of Magic.
This is problematic for two reasons. First, land has to be included in a deck, even though in most cases, the only thing the land is good for is powering your other cards that actually advance your strategy. While it's difficult to build a deck that can consistently approach even a 60% win rate even in the hands of pro players, it's easy to build a deck that never wins: a deck consisting of nothing but basic land cards. So land is, at best, a necessary evil in Magic deckbuilding.
But this leads to the second problem: since cards are shuffled and effectively drawn from the deck randomly, simple random chance leads to numerous scenarios where land can actively prevent you from winning a game, even if you're not playing the 'goldfish' 60-land deck. The first and arguably most common is known as 'mana-screw' among players, and it happens when the number of lands you're able to draw and play is less than the number of lands you need to be able to play out your other, active cards effectively. Avoiding mana-screw is the main reason for the rule of thumb that a deck should include roughly two lands for each three non-lands, but this isn't a panacea, as anybody with a working knowledge of combinatorics can give you the odds that, even with such a land distribution, you'll still get mana-screwed anyway.
A related problem to mana-screw is 'color-screw', when your deck consists of multiple colors, but you find yourself unable to draw and play a land that can produce one of the colors in your deck, often the one color you need to play the cards filling your hand.
The designers of Magic have done a lot to try to mitigate mana-screw. They introduced the 'cycling' mechanic in Urza's Saga, which allows you to discard a card with cycling to draw a new card, thus digging through your deck more quickly and hopefully getting through land droughts to make your deck playable. Cycling has developed over the years, allowing for alternate cycling costs, additional effects that occur when you cycle a card, and even cards that explicitly allow you to search for a card or type of card, known in Magic as 'tutoring'. Cards with 'basic landcycling' or some explicit land as the target of a cycle have appeared in nearly every recent set, and its safe to say that the designers include these cards as explicit anti-mana-screw tech. Fixing color-screw, similarly, came from printing cards like the original dual-lands that could be tapped for either of two colors of mana, and that proved so effective that similar cards printed in later sets were all limited in some way in comparison to the original dual-lands: lands that enter tapped so they can't be used the turn they are played, 'shock lands' that deal damage to you when they enter (or deal damage to allow them to enter untapped), etcetera.
Cycling, however, doesn't solve the other possible problem with lands: mana flooding. Once you do have enough lands in play to run your deck efficiently, additional lands tend to be just wasted draws that don't help you advance your strategy. Depending on the board state when you get mana flooded, the result can be anything from a series of boring turns where each player plays a land and passes, to outright beard-pulling frustration as an opponent slowly advances their own win condition while you draw land after land that does nothing to stop you from losing the game. It took a long time for the designers to develop tools to try to address this problem: while the original Alpha set of Magic was released in 1993, it took until Zendikar, the main set from 2009, to finally create a 'land matters' set containing mechanics that care if and when you play lands. Even so, most of these tools, like the landfall mechanic, require you to explicitly build your deck to make use of the mechanic, so if you didn't build your deck that way, you still potentially get the overwhelming joy of mana flooding costing you a game. (Note: this isn't to say that Magic designers didn't try to make interesting lands in the sixteen years before Zendikar; just that their efforts didn't really work, as noted by the existence of Sorrow's Path, a card on nearly every commenter's shortlist of 'worst Magic card ever printed'.)
The real way you know that lands as mana source contained in your play deck are a poor, un-fun idea is that other more modern games simply don't do this. Games like Hearthstone, Marvel SNAP, and other online deck-builders have abandoned the idea that mana/energy/what-have-you is a resource that needs to be managed by the player in deckbuilding and have simply declared that players will get a certain amount of that resource each turn as part of the normal game progression, and this improves those games by comparison, since you can more consistently focus on the gameplay loop those designers built rather than getting distracted by the occasional game where random chance either prevents you from playing your deck or forces you to sit and do pointless land drops while your opponent marches toward victory.
This isn't a mechanic that is required to allow strategic or tactical thinking -- hoping your opponent gets mana-screwed is about as useful a strategy as hoping they suffer connectivity problems in Magic Arena. Still, since land as mana is so fundamental to the Magic experience, it's hard to imagine how the designers would be able to change the game to remove it without fundamentally changing the game itself. For as long as Magic exists, the un-fun mechanic of including lands in your deck so that you can draw and play them during your matches will be with us.
4. Forced sacrifice
Sacrifice, as a mechanic, is actually very interesting and has loads of tactical potential. When you sacrifice a creature, you'll usually do it as a cost to play some other card or card ability, so the question becomes, is the loss of the sacrificed thing worth the benefit of what you get by making the sacrifice?
However, there are some cards that, as their effect, force your opponent to sacrifice something, and those cards tend to be among the most un-fun in the game, for two main reasons.
The best case, for the person playing the forced sacrifice effect, is that the opponent has few or even just one thing that can be chosen for the sacrifice, and even better is the situation where that thing is key to that player's strategy, be it offensive, defensive, or both. Getting rid of the thing by forcing a sacrifice, which can be used to get rid of things that would otherwise be extremely difficult or even impossible to destroy, such as creatures with indestructible or hexproof, can feel very satisfying to the player forcing the sacrifice. For the player being forced to sacrifice, though, it's not fun at all.
The opposite case is when the player who draws the card that would force the sacrifice looks across the table and sees that their opponent has lots of relatively minor things which would make a forced sacrifice trivial: perhaps they've been using their Clachan Festival enchantment to make Kithkin tokens, so can choose one or more of these weak tokens to sacrifice instead of their key Kithkin creatures. This makes the forced sacrifice card un-fun for the player drawing it, since the effect is so trivial that the card feels wasted.
Since nearly every possible situation in which a forced sacrifice effect might be used will likely fall into one of the two scenarios above, that effect will be un-fun for at least one of the two players, which makes it bad for the game's ability to be fun.
3. Persistent indestructibility
Indestructible is a keyword that indicates that a card can't be destroyed, either by damage or by effects that explicitly destroy it. In some cases, that indestructibility is temporary, either provided by an activated effect on the card itself, or the effect of some other card played in response to an effect that would otherwise destroy the creature. In these cases, the effect is tactically interesting, as when to play the effect or how to draw out the opponent's playing of the effect so that you can destroy the creature anyway (such as by responding to the effect that would make the thing indestructible by playing a different effect that destroys it) can be moments that swing a game one way or the other.
Much of this tactical interest, though, goes out the window when a card is innately and persistently indestructible. There are ways to deal with even those cards: as noted above, a forced sacrifice can require the destruction of an otherwise indestructible card, and such cards can also be exiled, or if they are creatures, can be destroyed by the game's rules (which ignore the indestructible keyword) if the creature's toughness is reduced to zero or less. The problem with saying, 'oh, there are answers for persistent indestructibility' is that you have to have access to those answers for the game to still be interesting. In a Limited environment, like a booster draft, you might not have any cards with those effects in your card pool, and thus have no ability to deal with persistently indestructible cards. Even if you have such effects, or are playing in a Constructed environment where you've explicitly included such effects in your deck to deal with persistently indestructible creatures, you might not have them in your hand or draw them when you need them, which is purely a matter of chance. (In other words, there's no way to 'get good' at drawing answers to the challenges your opponent puts before you.)
Pretty much the best you can hope for is that your opponent's indestructible thing is a creature small enough so that you can block it in combat without losing your blocker to whatever damage the indestructible thing would deal. Even then, this incentivizes your opponent to hold that creature back and instead make it an impenetrable wall that can block any attacker who doesn't have trample, regardless of size. When the best case scenario for this effect is to create a stale board configuration which isn't fun for either player, the effect is decidedly un-fun.
2. Land Destruction
Mana-screw sucks, as we noted above in entry 5. But what if you could force your opponent to be mana-screwed by blowing up their lands as they play them? Enter the land destruction mechanic.
Land destruction has been an effect that's been in Magic since the very beginning, but is very different now than it was when it was first introduced. One of if not the earliest land destruction cards was Armageddon, a white card that destroyed all lands in play, regardless of who controlled them. This basically enabled the first popular 'control' type deck, where a player would rapidly get to the point where they could play a Serra Angel, use counter spells to stop the opponent from building up a board presence in response, then Armageddon to eliminate the opponent's lands, preventing them from putting out an answer to the Angel, resulting in victory.
This deck was, understandably, very un-fun to play against.
As noted from the wiki article linked above, land destruction now exists primarily in green and red rather than while, and is limited to destroying single lands rather than large amounts of lands to avoid the problems with Armageddon. (The wiki article suggests that land destruction continues to exist to allow players to deal with cards like 'man lands', which can turn into creatures temporarily, but I doubt this is the real reason, as there are plenty of ways to deal with creatures already in the game, even if destroying the land before it can become a creature would be tactically advantageous.) Even so, when enough land destruction effects get into a play format, some kind of land destruction deck inevitably enters the format soon after, trying to recapture the success and popularity of that first Armageddon control deck and leading to extremely boring game after extremely boring game where players don't get to play their best cards and thus pursue their potentially winning strategies. On the Pro Tour, this is excusable as a necessary evil: after all, nobody said your job had to be fun. But in casual formats where fun is the point, this kind of mechanic really doesn't have a place.
1. Discard
If you hate discard effects in Magic, you're not alone. One of the first hated cards in Magic was Hypnotic Specter, a three-mana flyer that, if it damaged you, forced you to randomly choose and discard a card. At first glance, this doesn't seem too horrible, but it was surprising how often a random discard would result in removing the one card you most wanted to keep.
This card would be bad enough on its own if not for the presence of two other cards:
Black Vise, a card that damaged you based on how few cards you had in your hand at the start of your upkeep (before you got to draw), and
Dark Ritual, a card that generates three black mana for the cost of one black mana and allowed players to cast Hypnotic Specter on their first turn, when by definition the opponent can do nothing to stop it.
A particularly hated pattern of play would go something like this: turn one, Swamp, Dark Ritual, Hypnotic Specter; turn two, attack with Hypnotic Specter, play a Black Vise. Granted, this was unusual, given that four of the opponent's first nine cards would need to be the cards listed above, but in an era where the first player still got to draw on turn one and where deckbuilding rules allowed four of each card other than the basic Swamp to be in the deck, if you played enough games against these decks, you'd experience this worst-of-all-possible first two turns a surprising number of times. (And of course, every once in a great while you'd get the true hum-dinger of frustrating opponent openings, a turn one Dark Ritual/Specter followed by a turn two Dark Ritual/Specter/Black Vise. At that point, you might as well just resign.)
Weirdly, unlike some of the other effects described above, discard has only become more prevalent and more creative as Magic has evolved. Cards that require an opponent to discard when they enter play, that have abilities that can force an opponent to reveal cards from their hand so that you can choose one for them to discard, cards that force discard when put into a graveyard or when sacrificed, etcetera. And in black, the color that most frequently makes use of the 'graveyard' (or discard pile) as a resource, these cards can be returned and re-used again and again, turning what otherwise would be a tactical contest of move versus counter-move into a 'top-decking' competition where whoever draws the best cards and can play them immediately wins. The discard mechanic turns interesting and fun games into boring slogs. Just as weirdly, of all the mechanics on this list, this is the one mechanic that shows up most frequently in designed formats like Jump In! Players just learning how to play Magic get to feel how viscerally un-fun discard is as a mechanic, but seemingly in order to get them used to the idea that they should just 'suck it up' and deal with the problem rather than complain that being forced to discard the cards that would be fun for them to play steals their fun and makes the game less enjoyable and more boring.
Again, this isn't a problem for Pro play, where boring but effective is how you win tournaments, but the very success of these cards and the decks built around them encourages them to be played in more casual environments by players who want to win those casual games and don't care if they make the game less fun for everyone, including themselves.
After all, to paraphrase the president of Nintendo of America, if the battle isn't fun, why bother?
