Time for a hot take: with the advent of online TCGs, aggro as an archetype needs fixing.
Now that I’ve angered a significant portion of the people who enjoy trading card games (TCGs) and collectible card games (CCGs), let me placate you by saying that there is nothing inherently wrong with aggressive decks. Aggro decks play an important role in any given card game’s metagame, helping keep decks that revolve around high cost win conditions in check, while helping reduce the average game time. However, the existence of aggressive strategies do create a problem when allocating ranked rewards in competitive card games such as Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, and Legends of Runeterra.
The Archetypes
Before diving into the details about why aggro decks present a problem, and thoughts on ways to solve that problem, it’s important to understand the basic deck archetypes that consistently appear in competitive card games. While there are decks that do not cleanly fall into one of these four categories, these are the four most common types of decks, and they can be described as follows:
Aggro: Play an overwhelming amount of cheap creatures and damaging spells early, taking advantage of the limited amount of resources available to each player in the early turns of each match.
Midrange: Play cost-efficient creatures and spells each turn, creating a card advantage for yourself through careful resource allocation. Wins come through a combination of being slightly more aggressive than control/combo decks are able to handle, while being fast enough to survive aggro decks’ early aggression.
Control: Prevent your opponent from winning the game through a variety of removal and sustain tools, relying on a small amount of high-impact cards played in later turns to ultimately win the game.
Combo: Prevent your opponent from winning the game through a variety of removal, sustain, and card draw tools until all the pieces of your deck’s game-winning combo have been assembled.
The Problem
Right now, the most popular form of competition in competitive card games is the ranked ladder. Players choose a deck and enter into matchmaking to play against similarly-skilled opponents, with a win moving the player up the ranked ladder, and a loss moving them down. Gaining ranks through this system is typically incentivized through cosmetic rewards that players can equip after reaching certain ranks to visually showcase their skills to other players. At first glance, there is nothing wrong with this system. The issue arises when players’ time is taken into account.
People do not have an infinite amount of time, let alone an infinite amount of time available to play games. For players who want to climb the ladder as quickly and efficiently as possible, the optimal way to do so is to find an aggressive deck that has a winrate of >50%, and play as many games on the ladder as possible. This can lead to an over-representation of aggressive decks on the ladder, which in turn can contribute to players feeling like many of their games play out in similar fashions and hurting player retention. Even if slower decks, such as control or most combo decks, are competitively viable, players are disincentivized from playing these decks due to their relative inefficiency in terms of time spent vs. ladder progress.
So how do we fix it?
One possibility is to follow Hearthstone’s example: make the rewards gained from playing ranked proportional to the amount of time elapsed before one player wins. Making the reward for winning a 20 minute game roughly four times as valuable as winning a 5 minute game puts all archetypes on a much more level playing field as far as time-reward efficiency goes. However, this solution brought about its own issue: players began taking the full 90 seconds allotted for every single one of their turns, even if they only had a single card to play. This created frustrating situations where players were spending up to 75 seconds on each of their opponents’ turns essentially staring at a static screen.
There are several other metrics ranked rewards could be tied to, such as the number of cards played, the number of cards drawn, the amount of resources used, or the amount of damage done to opposing creatures. However, tying ranked rewards to a specific type of action taken during the course of an individual game will incentivize players to optimize their decks to do as much of that type of action as possible, while disincentivizing any playstyle that does not conform to this specific action (such as strategies revolving around destroying your opponent’s deck, called “mill” strategies).
Two ideas that I would be interested to see implemented instead of this are:
Making rewards proportional to the number of turns elapsed.
Making rewards proportional to a hidden “actions taken” value.
Number of turns:
This is an evolution of Hearthstone’s timer-based system: to put it simply, the more turns that have elapsed in a given ladder game, the larger the reward for winning. This does not create an incentive for players to stretch the length of their turns through inaction like the current timer-based system does. It could create an incentive for players to delay the game by as many turns as possible to maximize their ranked gains, but there are several systems that are already in place to counteract this, including the ability for players to surrender games they feel they have lost and giving opponents extra opportunities to steal the victory that their opponent delayed. This system also has the benefit of disincentivizing players who are trying to lower their rank by immediately surrendering games, though I believe there are already systems in place to discourage this behavior. Finally, this is a very simple system to implement, making rewards fall in line with
“Reward = turns elapsed * multiplier,” where the multiplier can be adjusted to accommodate a variety of ranked systems. The rewards can additionally be constrained with a minimum amount gained/lost to help encourage more aggressive strategies, and a maximum amount to help discourage the lengthier decks should they become too omnipresent.
Actions taken:
While making rewards proportional to individual actions taken during gameplay can have an unhealthy influence on deck construction, taking all the actions players take during gameplay into account can lead to a healthier rewards system. Each action players take could add to a hidden ‘action points’ value, with constraints placed on a per-turn or per-game basis to help curb outliers. For instance:
Each card drawn adds 1 to ‘action points’, up to 5 points per turn.
Each card played that started in the player’s deck adds 1 to ‘action points’
Each card played that did not start in the player’s deck adds .5 to ‘action points’, up to 20 points per game.
Each creature destroyed by the player adds 1 ‘action point’, up to 10 points per turn.
At the end of each game, the ‘action points’ can be used to help determine how far the player should rise or fall through the ranking system, with minimum and maximum constraints to prevent over-optimization or punishment.
One of the biggest strengths of this system is that it offers a wide variety of tuning levers once post-implementation tweaks inevitably become necessary. Action point amounts, minimums, and maximums can all be individually changed to ensure deck archetypes are gaining and losing similar amounts of ladder progress relative to the amount of time each game takes.
So which is better?
Since Hearthstone does not allow players to take actions during their opponents’ turns, making ladder rewards proportional to the number of turns elapsed is the preferable choice. Since the player who goes first would have more opportunities to take actions than their opponent, the second player would likely get fewer rewards should they win. In Legends of Runeterra however, since turns are shared, basing rewards off of actions taken would be an attractive option. This system would also have to be layered on top of existing systems that modify the ladder progress, such those that take the players’ relative Matchmaking Rating (MMR) into account. Either way, these systems should be an improvement over the existing system (in Hearthstone’s case), or lack thereof, and help encourage a wider variety of decks on the ladder. When a wider variety of decks are being played on the ladder, players are less likely to become frustrated with their ranked experience, and more likely to stick around for the next expansion.
In the meantime, may the heart of the cards serve you well!
-Mark
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