Discussion Forum

Not long ago I posted a speculative post about how clever people might be able to work out to decode the difference in manacurves between digital magic and paper.

Anyone who could crack that would be able to "translate" decks between paper and digital, but with the release of the next jumpstart new digital mechanics will be introduced that will muddle the waters a lot more, making it rather obscure what happens in certain situations.

For example the "perpetually" mechanic that sort of Mark's a card with some effect, so if the card is somehow replayed or shuffled into the deck or anything like it, the effect hangs on during that game, maybe even up to three games in best of one...

Perpetual will add a new layer of information to the game, as you will now have to mentally keep track if some of your creatures in your deck, because if you have 4 of the same creatures shuffled back into the deck you can no longer run ordinary statistics on your odds of drawing one of them, now you have to keep in mind the fact that there is now the odds that you draw one of those cards, but that it has a lingering damaging effect on it, or even a positive one.

Purely digital cards will favor people with extreme sensitivity to calculating odds on a whim, so anyone with the talent for that will start using more digital cards to gain this one advantage in the game that makes them better than others.

That advantage will cause a schism between ordinary paper and digital decks because people in the digital format will start using cards that confuses or manipulate the perpetual-minded playerbase.

These preferences will distort the meta so that paper and digital standard will be to alienated from each other to give anyone a chance to play standard in both kind of standard without becoming utterly confused.

You will now be forced to sort of choose between two types of standard, and I think this will divide the standard players into supporting just one of these standard formats.

What's your choice, standard or digital ?