In which I disagree with a prominent rationalist about an important issue

-- Zvi Moshowitz (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/02/10/eternal-and-hearthstone-economy-versus-magic-economy/)

Zvi is a professional Magic player, so perhaps it is unrealistic to expect an unbiased opinion on the subject of games, but this is absurd.  To be clear, Magic is a perfectly good game.  But it is by no means a great game.  I won’t say that skill isn’t important -- professional players will generally trounce other experienced players, who will generally trounce inexperienced players.  But the most interesting decisions in MtG don’t come during a game of Magic; you make the combos you can with the cards you draw.  The most interesting decisions in MtG come in between games, as players calibrate their decks to adapt to new potential combos and to the ways that other people are changing their own decks.  Had Zvi argued that MtG has the greatest metagame of all time, I wouldn’t be writing this post (which is not to say that he would necessarily be correct, but I am insufficiently familiar with Android: Netrunner or other meta-based games to offer a meaningful opinion on the subject).

I would argue that Go is the greatest game of all time, though certainly one that has a higher barrier to entry than does MtG.  Certainly, Magic has rather a ways to go to demonstrate the staying power Go.

Even if we confine ourselves to modern board games, there are still a lot of board games that I would argue can be replayed dozens or even hundreds of times and that offer better in-game play than MtG does, including a number of the ones I’ve reviewed here.  My favorite game, Dungeon Twister/Dungeon Twister 2, being almost-perfect information, offers the stragetic depth of an abstract like Chess while including the variability that comes from being able to play using dozens of different characters, items, and map tiles.  I’ve played more than a dozen times, as I have with my second-favorite game, Keyflower, and I’ve played my number 3, Race for the Galaxy thousands of times, despite no constant infusion of new cards.

Putting my personal tastes aside, I suspect the people who’ve played hundreds of games of various Age of Steam maps or 18XX titles would probably take issue, along with the Chess/Shogi/Xianqi/Go players, the poker players (to be clear, I’d strongly disagree with them because a good game shouldn’t require stakes to make it work), the lovers of various heavy euros and war games, etc.

I would regard Zvi as a domain expert on Magic, but not as a domain expert on games.  The claim quoted above suggests he hasn’t played enough of them.