Influence of Magic the Gathering on POE design

I'm a long time Magic: The Gathering player and although I've only been playing POE for a little while it's pretty obvious that the devs have been influenced by Magic in the way that they have designed PoE. The most obvious examples to me are the occasional use of Magic terminology by the devs (for example, in one of the newsletters there is a reference to the "color pie" which is a MTG design concept) and the way that the league/race system mirrors the format system in Magic. To explain the latter concept for those of you who might be less familiar with Magic (which is a trading card game, for what it's worth).

Every year, Magic gets a new group of expansion sets. The "Standard" format is a way of playing the game that uses only the few most recently released sets. Therefore, the way the game functions is heavily influenced by the themes and mechanics of these sets. Also, "Standard" changes relatively frequently (every few months) as new sets are released. In Path of Exile terms, this is like the four month leagues. These temporary leagues strongly emphasize new mechanics (such as the Nemesis mods in Nemesis or the shrines in Domination). They also change over with relative frequency.

In addition to Standard, Magic also features "eternal" formats called Legacy and Vintage which use most or all of the cards ever printed. These formats are less influenced by the specific themes of the recent sets and tend to be influenced more by the most powerful cards available, many of which are no longer in print. These formats can be very expensive to buy into, but they also allow players the greatest freedom in gameplay. This is roughly equivalent to POE's Standard and Hardcore leagues, which include legacy gear that is both expensive and powerful. They also accumulate the mechanics from the temporary leagues over time, and these mechanics influence gameplay but no one mechanic dominates in the way that it does in the shorter temporary leagues.

Finally, Magic features another type of format called "Limited" in which players build their decks from a very small pool of cards -- usually the contents of a few packs -- rather than play with the collection that they have built over time. As a result, you have a tendency in these formats to play with and even get excited about cards that you would not normally even care about. This is roughly equivalent to races in PoE, where the shorter time frame emphasizes quick decision making and magnifies the value of even petty items that you barely notice in longer term leagues. Getting excited about an early coral or iron ring is a lot like getting excited about opening a powerful common in a Magic limited format. I could go into more detail here comparing specific race formats to Magic's Limited formats (Descent Champions = Cube Draft, for example), but I won't.


Anyway, I'm pretty curious if the POE devs have ever written about the ways in which Magic influenced their design choices. I've seen a number of oblique references but nothing super concrete. Anyone know?

You are right sir; MTG has a huge impact on how some of the game systems on POE are built. I have seen them mention it a few times, specially Johnny, Timmy, and Spike, in relation to item design.

If I remember correctly, the passive tree is based on the idea that you could build a mono-colored deck, or a multi-colored one if you choose to.

Editing as I go along.

You might be interested to know that one of GGG's founders is Brian Weissman, inventor of "The Deck". Richard Garfield was one of PoE's first alpha testers.

The classes of the game are organized in identical fashion to the MtG star -- the Duelist (Dex/Str) class is directly opposite of the Witch (Int) and allied with Marauder (Str) and Ranger (Dex) and so on. On many occasions GGG refer to "splashing" in the same fashion as Magic.

Map-only uniques, and the different rarities among Unique Items take inspiration from and are modeled after MtG Mythic Rares.

On a recent occasion Qarl and Rory have intimated that they consider the invetory as the "sideboard", especially in the context of PVP battles.

Notably, PoE differs from MtG significantly in its direct opposition of RMT/pay2win (the MtG equivalent of RMT being buying singles from stores). Charan also points this out below.

Chris and many other GGG members have expressed fondness for Vintage Magic, as well as other digital card games like SolForge and other games with collectible elements like Pokemon (speaking of digital I do wonder if they have played stuff like Sanctum, Arcomage and Spectromancer). They have also expressed some time back an affinity for likening Magic decks to a full character build (That is: class, active skills, support skills, passive skills, and gear and flask choices).

They are very much aware of the potential of confusion relating to the name Path of Exile. The name the game was "almost given" was One With Nothing. :)

Color pie associations are really not as tight as GGG likes to think. We see this most recently with the reveal of new Quivers. There is no new Cold Damage quiver, despite the fact that Cold Damage is associated with Dexterity, Dexterity is associated with Ranged Attacks and Ranged Attacks are associated with Quivers. Most Damage-dealing Spells in the game are Intelligence-oriented and thus Blue, despite the element associated with them. Reduced Mana, despite its universality of use, is Red because of its old identity as a gem that reduces Costs only (which is indeed Red). It's best to take color pie discussions with a grain of salt.

legit

I have often thought about the resemblance.

For example when people are asking: Why so many bad uniques? I think anout this question to Mark Rosewater :

January 4, 2002
Q: "Why does R&D print ridiculously bad cards in sets, particularly as rares?" --Elliot Fertik, Philadelphia, PA

A: From Mark Rosewater, Magic senior designer:
"This is a very complex question that I'm sure I'll discuss in greater detail in a future column. But the short answer is that weak cards are a fundamental part of the game. Richard Garfield has described Magic as a 'game of exploration.' Much of the fun of the game comes from players examining each new set to see what they can discover. Many players take great enjoyment in finding use of cards that others dismiss. R&D cannot make bad cards that are secretly good without also making bad cards that are actually bad.

"The history of Magic is filled with 'sucky' cards that later show up in high-profile decks (High Tide, Despotic Scepter, Lion's Eye Diamond, etc.). The reason that a large percentage of these cards are rare is that we tend to avoid making cards with narrow functions common or uncommon because they have no role in limited. One way to get a good appreciation of how cards rise in value as players find uses for them is to go back and look at a review of an old set."

Source :

https://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr5

Really interesting stuff! I didn't realize the connections to Weissman and Garfield. The skill tree/color system makes sense.

I do disagree a bit regarding Magic epitomizing pay to win. To me, the archetypal pay to win game is a game wherein financial resources are essentially fungible with player skill. Essentially, a person with enough money can just spend and make up for almost any skill deficit. In Magic, having access to a broader collection definitely confers advantages but it doesn't really make up for being skillful at all. You can hand a bad player a ridiculously expensive deck and they'll still lose all the time. This dynamic is especially true at the most competitive levels.

Path of Exile, on the other hand, is actually more pay to win from a certain perspective -- it's just that you are paying in game rather than IRL (assuming you are following the rules). Having access to more in game resources gives you a tremendous advantage over less rich players to an extent which likely eclipses player skill to a greater degree than is true in Magic. There is certainly an element of player skill in PoE (especially in races), but the skill aspect is dwarfed by the skill aspect of a game like Magic.

I think the real extreme examples would be something like a simplistic MMO where you can buy gear directly from the cash shop and gear is basically the only factor that determines outcomes. That would be the most extreme example of pay to win. The opposite end of the spectrum involves games like Chess or Starcraft which are mostly skill and basically ensure that both players have equal access to resources within the game itself. Of course even then you can pay to take lessons and such, which muddies the waters a bit.

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Juicebox360 wrote:

legit

I lol'ed.

From an interview on Hardcoregamer with Chris Wilson

http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2013/04/02/grinding-gears-about-path-of-exile-with-chris-wilson/35504/


[HG] From the outside looking in, some instantly see influences from Diablo in the gameplay and Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid for the leveling system. What are some of the influences that have helped you build Path of Exile to what it is today?

[CW] The direct influences we had we were inspired by Diablo, Titan Quest and Dungeon Siege, other action-RPGs, and especially Diablo 2 (that was the best one), but we also enjoyed the other ones and we we’re very inspired by a lot of the mechanics they have. We were heavily inspired by Magic: The Gathering, it might not be obvious, because it’s a card game, but a lot of the combination of character customization that we have are very similar to the types of the things you get in Magic: The Gathering. We even refer to a lot of internal things as, for example, if you play a strength character and pick intelligence nodes or skills, we call that splashing into intelligence, because that is what a Magic card player says when they are a blue deck and they grab a red card, for example. In addition to Magic: The Gathering, we inspired by Guild Wars for server architecture because we felt like Guild Wars was way ahead of its time for how the servers worked, so we looked into that in detail and we we’ve been actually talking to some Guild Wars guys at GDC and they do some amazing stuff. And as you say, there are some Final Fantasy influences. We really liked the materia system in Final Fantasy VII and that has definitely contributed, once we decided that we were going to go with skill gems that were supported by other gems, we realized that were similar to materia, so we looked at ways we can learn lessons from how they did it. And as you said, there is a comparison to the sphere grid. I haven’t actually played Final Fantasy X myself, but I’m sure other designers have on our team.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

I can tell you're not stupid but the amount of money I and many other MtG junkies, both past and present, have spent just to remain competitive, just to keep up with the metagame, refuses your rationalization.

No, you cannot pay your way to victory with MtG. But good luck staying in the game without buying boosters in relative bulk and then trading for/buying singles to fine-tune your deck.

Compared to PoE, which provides essentially free and unlimited booster packs, MtG is absolutely pay to win.

I think you are using "pay to play" and "pay to win" as essentially fungible terms. That's where I disagree with you. The degree to which a game is pay to play (and how expensive it is) is a measure of to what extent you need to pay in order to play the game effectively. Pay to win is the degree to which the amount of money spent determines the outcome of the game. Magic is an absurdly expensive game to play if you want to keep up with new releases, but I think that is a substantially different thing than pay to win.

Also, for what it's worth I've been playing Magic Online since the first day of its release (although I have taken a couple of years off here and there) and in total made about $5000-6000 profit in that time. I do not run a trading bot and my win % is high enough to fund pretty much all of my play with prize money. So, for a player of sufficient skill Magic IS free to play and can even be a source of income.

it is only really gambling if you buy boosters , i did no such thing , 100 % of my decks from the rares to the commons were bought individually online.

but it is most certainly pay to play , that game burns holes in wallets. all trading card games do