Post by nerafim on Apr 9, 2016 7:38:41 GMT
To continue on the general theme of our time for "What DM do we want?", I am now giving the proper ingame view I didn't have the time or patience for before(a bit late though lol)...I feel we should stop or wait more on these sets (DM-35), half of the reason is due to activity and growth because we have a niche thing going on here, the other one is game balance, so let me get into that now. Again, I regret to not have all of the articles and game theory that goes into this laid out somewhere, but I will see what I can do...
Duel Masters is just simply hard!! Card games in general are hard, but DM in particular perhaps even more so, and this is exactly because it is so easy to pick up and simple on the surface. It's the "easy to play, hard to master" school of thought and game design, which is perfectly fine, but because it's also a card game this means it involves luck and a lot of combinatronics and most importantly imagination. The result from the clash of these two principles is why DM is so fun and addictive and you can feel like you can do or use anything, even find your own individual, unique thing, BUT it is also why it can be absolutely frustrating to pull off the thing you want or indeed even play competitvely.
Duel Masters is a strategy game! Meaning you have to find as many ways as possible to fulfil the game's objective while accounting for the ways in which your opponent tries to do the same, and find out where you can turn the flow of the gameplay in your favor, with the added challenge of getting this so right that it works on multiple opponents at once.
Strategy means timing! Knowing when your play/move/card is good, how far it can take you and that this is good if your opponent goes for a certain set of timings/moves himself. But to do this you need to have high awareness of cards, proper ways to build your decks, matchups understanding ultimately leading to a sense of metagame, and so on. And this is where card games go a step further by constantly adding new cards, causing this entire thought process to increase exponentially from the basics up.
As a result of this natural process, card games change a lot, and by that I do mean A LOT! So much and so fast in fact that either most strats/plays are not even discovered/built or even thought of, but at least not fully understood and calculated for most matchups, and so they go unexperienced and unenjoyed. And more importantly what you knew about the game and how to play so far, does not have the same value anymore.
What does all this mean? Well it means that you can see each card game as a being more games in one, like either as games in a series of strategy games with similar structure of gameplay (say Age of Empires, Civilizations, chess and fairy chess, etc.) or expansions, MODS or just simple game modes within the same one. This happens with virtually ALL card games (some even made it official by having formats), because they keep adding cards and new elements change combinations to a high degree, it can be observed and HAS happened with DM.
So with that you can actually separate DM's Evolution into several games based on how the game plays and what you need to learn about it, and I will just post this in a different topic here.
Each set block can be considered its own unique game however, because of its strategy ecosystem, since that is in fact how card games work, they move in big cycles where each block supports some way to play it while weakening others, but over years it tends to return to previous points and make old methods good again (but not so much the cards).
There are literally HUNDREDS of strategies for each set block, just for Tier 1 and Tier 2 decks, and this is not an exaggeration in any way. But its never really the same strategies (more exactly fixed decklists) that move on from one block to the next, and how good each deck becomes changes also with every change in the card pool/list...all this creates a lot of ridiculous calculations to keep track of and in the process most players don't get to fully enjoy what they want or indeed, much worse, actually become better.
So in conclusion the point is that against such an absurd type of relativity puzzle, we need to kinda focus ourselves on more clear directions and objectives if we are to achieve something to last with our small community and limited amount of efforts, as I am sure a lot of us have other things to do, but the people out there that still love DM and want to play do need to have a place made for them so we can keep this game alive. There are things we can do and thigns we can't, and certain choices prevent others from being made (because they are not good). But enough about general shit, let's talk specifics...
