I mostly post about fighting games, adventures outdoors, books and stories I’ve appreciated, cooking, and perhaps some art
man, doing a night of mtg cube drafting with friends, drafting an incredibly sweet deck, and then getting varianced out of the majority of my games sure does make me appreciate fighting games all the more.
fighting games: at least our bullshit can be learned and overcome.
in my experience it seems like there is a lot of overlap between FG and TCG/CCG players.
i like card games but the feeling of just having a game with bad draws, or your opponent getting the perfect draws or w/e, just never sat right with me. i can accept it as being how the game is by design but that doesn't mean i feel good about it!
Yeah, the classic defense of the variance of card games is "it helps make the game more approachable by letting newer players sometimes take games off more experienced ones, whereas skill gaps in low to no variance games can feel unassailable". And I think there's some merit to that. I've only recently started getting into fighting games despite having been real interested in them for quite a while bc of how intimidating they felt to start up with.
But at the same time, now that I am learning fighting games, it's really satisfying that if I take a couple games off someone more experienced, it's not just because they ran bad or I highrolled my draw or whatever, I can actually fully feel like I earned those wins through improvement in my own play. And it also lets me see a steadier line of improvement of going from "I'm just trying to survive" to "I can win rounds sometimes and that feels like a triumph" to "woah, I took a game?" to starting to be able to take games here and there more reliably. Whereas for beginners in card games, sometimes you run hot and 3-0 a couple drafts, then are back to slogging through 1-2s, and it's all a lot less clear in its feedback. I think "variance as way to keep things even" can be nice as an initial day 1 onramp, but gets less relevant pretty quickly.
And outside the beginner aspect, the variation in games it gives can sometimes be fun. Piloting a mediocre hand to a tight-fought win is extremely satisfying, but on the whole it's a thing I'm finding myself having less and less patience for. Especially when games of magic taking longer means that you get a pretty small sample size of games in any given draft and so it's pretty easy for a couple bad draws to dictate your night.
