Food For Thought #3: LSV on the TCG discussed by FFT
Posted 09-23-2009 at 03:00 PM by Rawiswar
Welcome back to Food For Thought! As promised, today Luis Scott-Vargas speaks with us about Epic. For those of you who don't know, Luis Scott-Vargas (usually referred to as LSV) is a professional Magic: the Gathering player whose career accomplishments include first place finishes at Pro Tour: Berlin, U.S. Nationals 2007, and multiple Grand Prix tournaments. Basically, every major tournament type Magic has. He recently placed second at the Epic 5K tournament in San Jose, a Sealed Pack event. LSV shares his insights on Magic on the website ChannelFireball.com, a great source for Magic news, strategy, and humor.
I wanted to get LSV's thoughts on three important questions about Epic TCG. Now, LSV is a little more eloquent than I am (and I conducted this interview as a Facebook message - seriously), so my comments are much longer than his answers, but they'll try to stay entirely within what LSV has said.
Food For Thought: Is the game fun to play, and how skill intensive is it?
LSV: I had a great time playing Epic, and it seems pretty skill intensive. I don't know how it compares to magic in that regard, since even though the games are similar they test skills in different ways.
Thoughts on what LSV said: Obviously it's great to hear that LSV enjoys playing the game, and it's good to know that even in a limited format he considers play skill to be an important factor. I think some of us were afraid that the high power level of individual cards could make Sealed Pack tournaments degenerate into who got the most broken stuff, but the consistent finishes of good players and LSV's comments suggest that play skill is still the most important element.
The best part of what LSV says here is that Magic and Epic "test skills in different ways". This dispels the myth that Epic is just a Magic clone. They're more like basketball and baseball: many important qualities overlap (strength, speed, coordination), but there's enough difference that being great at one doesn't automatically make you great at the other. Just ask Michael Jordan. (Sorry, your Airness, but I had to say it). This also leads nicely into our next question.
FFT: Do you think Epic and Magic can coexist in the market?
LSV: Epic and Magic should be able to coexist, I don't see why they couldn't.
FFT's Thoughts: It might seem like I obsess about this question, but I believe it's crucial to the long-term success of Epic. The fact is the games have many similar mechanics. If Epic and Magic were two versions of the exact same product, there's no way Epic could compete with Magic's head start in infrastructure and player base. Fortunately, LSV seems to think the games are different enough that both can find loyal fans, and they can probably even share many players.
VERBOSE ELABORATION - Feel Free to Skip to the Next Question
Here's an example: Let's say I was opening a fast-food Mexican chain. Taco Raw, it would be called. (Appetizing, no?) But let's say everything on the menu was the same as at Taco Bell. Nobody would ever go to my restaurants, because the people who want this kind of thing already know and trust Taco Bell, and Taco Bell has lower costs due to the size of the organization. My dream has died before it began.
But what if my restaurant offers something similar, but also different? Assuming that "something different" isn't raw taco meat (a poor business plan, even if it does lower preparation costs), people who know and love Taco Bell will still come to Taco Raw because we offer something Taco Bell doesn't. Some customers will probably even become Taco Raw regulars, and only occasionally go to Taco Bell, despite its superior marketing and lower overhead. Ok, this was all really obvious. But it's an important point, and I really like calling a fast food joint "Taco Raw". Back to LSV.
FFT: What's one thing you really like about Epic and/or one thing you really dislike?
LSV: One thing I liked about Epic is the resource system, where the scarce resource is always going to be action points. It creates a good gameplay experience, and really means you can't waste any points during a given game or you risk falling behind. That is also kind of my least favorite thing, at least in Limited. If you do fall behind, it can be very difficult to catch up, since the effective 1 spell per turn limit makes stops really brutal, and in Limited you are unlikely to have a free way to get out of that.
FFT's Thoughts: "[T]he scarce resource is always going to be action points". If you wanted to get successful Epic strategy tatooed on your body (and why wouldn't you?), I recommend this line. Everything you do in Epic should be trying to ensure that your action points do more than your opponent's action points, or even better, that you spend more action points than your opponent does. This is why cards like Knowledge and Inspiration see so little play: at their core, they spend an action point and don't get you closer to winning the game. (Stick with me; we'll discuss card advantage in a second). Conversely, a card like Quick Strike, which will negate an opponent's action point expenditure without using your own, is very strong because it puts you ahead in the game's scarcest (and hence most valuable) resource. I don't really need to tell you that Facilitator is good, do I? It ain't for the card draw.
So if we accept this as our central philosophy, is card advantage important? Absolutely, if you understand what it's doing for you. Every turn you draw one card, but you get a chance to spend two actions (on your turn, then on your opponent's). Once you run out of cards, you can usually only spend one of these actions, because you don't have a card to play with the other. The mirror image is that making your opponent discard all of their cards is basically stripping them of action points. Once you're only playing one card per two turns (yours and your opponent's), if your opponent still has cards, they can spend one action to answer your card (with a stop, break, etc.) and still spend the other action to play something that can kill you.
Do you remember what LSV said about stops being brutal? Your opponent can basically maintain the current game state by stopping any card that you play, which in limited means that with a few stops the opponent can stall the game in a favorable position long enough to kill you. Since limited decks tend to have a higher percentage build/paced cards, late in the game your opponent may only need a stop on your turn, even if you still have cards in hand.
So the bottom line in Epic (a bottom line, anyway) is that you want to use as many actions as you can over the course of a game.* If I spend Dimensional Incompatibility to draw two cards, and those cards allow me to spend actions on two later turns when I otherwise couldn't, I traded one action for two and made a great play. If, on the other hand, I had enough cards that I never needed those two cards to use my actions, I traded one action for no extra actions, which was a disadvantageous play.
Quick Statistic: With 30% of your deck being free cards, by the end of your opponent's third turn you'll have had 6 actions and only drawn 5.6 action points worth of cards, so with no card advantage, you're basically drawing off the top at the start of turn four. Oh, that's if you drew first. So yeah, you're gonna need a little bit of card draw. Just try not to spend more action points on it than you have to.
I'd like to thank Luis Scott-Vargas for taking the time to talk about Epic with us. If you have any interest in Magic whatsoever, ChannelFireball is well worth checking out for limited/constructed strategy, breaking news, and much more. Hope you all enjoyed hearing from LSV as much as I did.
Join us next week, when I will make ZERO mentions of non-Epic card games. Seriously. Wish me luck.
Food For Thought is brought to you by Epic on Magic Workstation. Epic on MWS: because if you don't practice, LSV will just keep beating you.
Links: Magic Workstation, Epic Patch, Prize Update, Time Wars Update.
*AJ Sacher wrote a similar point about Magic, saying the key to success is using all your mana every turn. I don't buy that, because magic has two mana cards with the exact same stats as four mana cards, and top-tier five mana cards that get answered for two mana. I swear, I'm trying to cut back on all these comparisons to Magic. The first step is admitting I have a problem.
I wanted to get LSV's thoughts on three important questions about Epic TCG. Now, LSV is a little more eloquent than I am (and I conducted this interview as a Facebook message - seriously), so my comments are much longer than his answers, but they'll try to stay entirely within what LSV has said.
Food For Thought: Is the game fun to play, and how skill intensive is it?
LSV: I had a great time playing Epic, and it seems pretty skill intensive. I don't know how it compares to magic in that regard, since even though the games are similar they test skills in different ways.
Thoughts on what LSV said: Obviously it's great to hear that LSV enjoys playing the game, and it's good to know that even in a limited format he considers play skill to be an important factor. I think some of us were afraid that the high power level of individual cards could make Sealed Pack tournaments degenerate into who got the most broken stuff, but the consistent finishes of good players and LSV's comments suggest that play skill is still the most important element.
The best part of what LSV says here is that Magic and Epic "test skills in different ways". This dispels the myth that Epic is just a Magic clone. They're more like basketball and baseball: many important qualities overlap (strength, speed, coordination), but there's enough difference that being great at one doesn't automatically make you great at the other. Just ask Michael Jordan. (Sorry, your Airness, but I had to say it). This also leads nicely into our next question.
FFT: Do you think Epic and Magic can coexist in the market?
LSV: Epic and Magic should be able to coexist, I don't see why they couldn't.
FFT's Thoughts: It might seem like I obsess about this question, but I believe it's crucial to the long-term success of Epic. The fact is the games have many similar mechanics. If Epic and Magic were two versions of the exact same product, there's no way Epic could compete with Magic's head start in infrastructure and player base. Fortunately, LSV seems to think the games are different enough that both can find loyal fans, and they can probably even share many players.
VERBOSE ELABORATION - Feel Free to Skip to the Next Question
Here's an example: Let's say I was opening a fast-food Mexican chain. Taco Raw, it would be called. (Appetizing, no?) But let's say everything on the menu was the same as at Taco Bell. Nobody would ever go to my restaurants, because the people who want this kind of thing already know and trust Taco Bell, and Taco Bell has lower costs due to the size of the organization. My dream has died before it began.
But what if my restaurant offers something similar, but also different? Assuming that "something different" isn't raw taco meat (a poor business plan, even if it does lower preparation costs), people who know and love Taco Bell will still come to Taco Raw because we offer something Taco Bell doesn't. Some customers will probably even become Taco Raw regulars, and only occasionally go to Taco Bell, despite its superior marketing and lower overhead. Ok, this was all really obvious. But it's an important point, and I really like calling a fast food joint "Taco Raw". Back to LSV.
FFT: What's one thing you really like about Epic and/or one thing you really dislike?
LSV: One thing I liked about Epic is the resource system, where the scarce resource is always going to be action points. It creates a good gameplay experience, and really means you can't waste any points during a given game or you risk falling behind. That is also kind of my least favorite thing, at least in Limited. If you do fall behind, it can be very difficult to catch up, since the effective 1 spell per turn limit makes stops really brutal, and in Limited you are unlikely to have a free way to get out of that.
FFT's Thoughts: "[T]he scarce resource is always going to be action points". If you wanted to get successful Epic strategy tatooed on your body (and why wouldn't you?), I recommend this line. Everything you do in Epic should be trying to ensure that your action points do more than your opponent's action points, or even better, that you spend more action points than your opponent does. This is why cards like Knowledge and Inspiration see so little play: at their core, they spend an action point and don't get you closer to winning the game. (Stick with me; we'll discuss card advantage in a second). Conversely, a card like Quick Strike, which will negate an opponent's action point expenditure without using your own, is very strong because it puts you ahead in the game's scarcest (and hence most valuable) resource. I don't really need to tell you that Facilitator is good, do I? It ain't for the card draw.
So if we accept this as our central philosophy, is card advantage important? Absolutely, if you understand what it's doing for you. Every turn you draw one card, but you get a chance to spend two actions (on your turn, then on your opponent's). Once you run out of cards, you can usually only spend one of these actions, because you don't have a card to play with the other. The mirror image is that making your opponent discard all of their cards is basically stripping them of action points. Once you're only playing one card per two turns (yours and your opponent's), if your opponent still has cards, they can spend one action to answer your card (with a stop, break, etc.) and still spend the other action to play something that can kill you.
Do you remember what LSV said about stops being brutal? Your opponent can basically maintain the current game state by stopping any card that you play, which in limited means that with a few stops the opponent can stall the game in a favorable position long enough to kill you. Since limited decks tend to have a higher percentage build/paced cards, late in the game your opponent may only need a stop on your turn, even if you still have cards in hand.
So the bottom line in Epic (a bottom line, anyway) is that you want to use as many actions as you can over the course of a game.* If I spend Dimensional Incompatibility to draw two cards, and those cards allow me to spend actions on two later turns when I otherwise couldn't, I traded one action for two and made a great play. If, on the other hand, I had enough cards that I never needed those two cards to use my actions, I traded one action for no extra actions, which was a disadvantageous play.
Quick Statistic: With 30% of your deck being free cards, by the end of your opponent's third turn you'll have had 6 actions and only drawn 5.6 action points worth of cards, so with no card advantage, you're basically drawing off the top at the start of turn four. Oh, that's if you drew first. So yeah, you're gonna need a little bit of card draw. Just try not to spend more action points on it than you have to.
I'd like to thank Luis Scott-Vargas for taking the time to talk about Epic with us. If you have any interest in Magic whatsoever, ChannelFireball is well worth checking out for limited/constructed strategy, breaking news, and much more. Hope you all enjoyed hearing from LSV as much as I did.
Join us next week, when I will make ZERO mentions of non-Epic card games. Seriously. Wish me luck.
Food For Thought is brought to you by Epic on Magic Workstation. Epic on MWS: because if you don't practice, LSV will just keep beating you.
Links: Magic Workstation, Epic Patch, Prize Update, Time Wars Update.
*AJ Sacher wrote a similar point about Magic, saying the key to success is using all your mana every turn. I don't buy that, because magic has two mana cards with the exact same stats as four mana cards, and top-tier five mana cards that get answered for two mana. I swear, I'm trying to cut back on all these comparisons to Magic. The first step is admitting I have a problem.
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