I have mixed experiences with Carl Chudyk games. I quite liked Glory to Rome. My opinion on Aegean Sea was brief, concise, and not positive. (Aegean Seas remains to this day, the only board game I have ever ragequit.) So it’s good that Mottainai swings back in the other direction.
I’ve heard Mottainai described as Glory to Rome lite. I agree with some parts of that, and disagree others. For starters, Mottainai uses the same general structure of Glory to Rome. Every thing is card, and each card is everything. For example, a card is an action, crafting material, crafted item, and helper, but not at the same time.
While I won’t go into the full structure of the game, the general gist of Mottainai is as follows: you’re trying to get the most victory points, and you get victory points by crafting items and selling materials. On your turn, you play a card from your hand to take an action, and then copy other players’ actions. These actions can get you more cards, let you craft items for their abilities, or perhaps get helpers, or sell various things.
While this might look completely unparsable at first, after just a game or two, it’s easy to see that I have two clay in craft, a Clerk helper, a completed Fan, and I’m about to take a Monk action. Also there are some resources in the middle of the table.
I’m not sure there’s much value in trying to summarize Mottainai mechanically. It’s not quite an action selection game, but there is some action selection and follow-the-leader sorts of elements. It’s not entirely a tableau builder, but the items you build are both your main source of victory points, while offering additional capabilities.
In that sense, it’s like Glory to Rome. Let’s talk about the ways in which it isn’t.
Just like Aegean Sea, every card is unique. Unlike Aegean Sea, I’m actually happy to see all the unique cards. Here’s a small smattering.
Probably the biggest difference is that Mottainai takes 20-30 minutes to play, instead of the slog that Glory to Rome can turn into. It’s a much faster game, and while it uses similar structures, it can have a very different mindset to it. Glory to Rome has always felt like building an engine, whereas Mottainai feels much more like looking for lethal in a game of Magic.
Another thing that I find interesting about Mottainai is that as I’ve played more and more with the same few folks, the game has distinctly shifted. Early on, we played like it was necessary to take every action, but as we’ve played more, the pace of the game has slowed down.
Not enough to slow down play, of course. We’ve now played enough that we can resolve turns and actions quickly. But the tempo has shifted down as we’ve recognized that it’s not necessarily to always be firing on full cylinders. Especially because if you take a strong action, your opponents get to take it to… but if you choose to skip an action and just draw a card, your opponents get nothing.
If you liked (or wanted to like Glory To Rome) I highly recommend Mottainai. Or if you’re just curious. It has a bit of grit to it, but once you learn, it’s a fantastic quick game.
I don’t actually play a lot of mobile games any more. There are various reasons for this, but the primary one is that regardless of the mechanics or aesthetics, pretty much 90% of mobile games are covered in metaphorical parasites.
Yes, I am including FGO, Wuthering Waves, and Star Rail in this. Yes, I did add this line just to hurt you.
These are games that might as well be using game design’s dark patterns as a checklist. They are horse armor’s final form. If this was a JRPG, they’d be called something like Greed Beyond Measure, a cosmic incarnation of avarice, entreating the player to just spend that first 99 cents.
Of course, we don’t live in that world. Horse armor never became a villain that we could defeat with the power of friendship, and spamming healing items. It turned into Squad Busters.
Gameplay
Squad Busters is a multiplayer top-down arena sort of thing, in a genre I haven’t actually seen done before outside of some mobile game ads. It’s a fascinating little thing, with crisp, clean rounds, and interesting amount of depth.
Which is why it’s kinda a bummer that it’s also the jaws of Mammon given digital form. Sometimes it’s debatable on whether a F2P game is truly pay to win. Squad Busters, however, has a button where you buy the in-game currency directly next to the button to purchase the one-time use super units.
Thank you, Squad Busters, for alleviating any possible internal doubt I had.
Squad Busters rounds are played over about 5 minutes, and work as follows. You’re given a choice of 1 of 3 units to start with in your squad. You move your squad with pretty standard touch controls, and whenever you’re not moving, your units attack, or cut down trees, or harvest carrots, or whatever else their specialty is. You do these things to get gold and gems.
Gold can be spent on spawning treasure chests to add extra units to your squad. The larger the squad, the more gold chests cost. However, if you collect 3 of a unit, they fuse into a more powerful version, bringing the net size down, and making chests cheaper again.
The end result is a fun bit of tension, scampering around the map, trying to look for areas to farm, and chests to crack for more units, all while building up the best squad you can. The structure of the game is such that over the duration of the game, the edge of the map does the battle royale thing, and closes in slowly, eventually forcing players into confrontation in the more dangerous center. Directly in said center sits the gem mine, a final objective to be pursued.
Outside of this of course, sits the rest of the “game.” I’m not going to dignify it with a description. It doesn’t deserve one. Instead, let’s talk about gambling.
If You Or A Loved One
I have never been to Las Vegas, but there is tiny little casino surprisingly close to where I live. I’ve stopped by a few times to people watch. It is a fascinatingly alien space. Across four rows of slot machines, older men and women sit in mostly stoic silence, save for some small electronic sounds.
From what I understand, each spin costs about half a dollar, and takes about 5-10 seconds to resolve, meaning sitting at this unhallowed ground could run you between $200 – $400 dollars an hour.
Ed Note: I was going to make a point about how it’s statistically less than that, given that RTP (return to player) numbers are generally around 70-80%, but I can’t actually find those numbers for New Hampshire, even after calling up the state gambling commission. Now I’m looking to try to find out if I need to file a Freedom of Information Act request, and to make a long story short, I got real side tracked.
In that sense, then, perhaps Squad Busters is an improvement. It offers no delusions of fortune, or dreams of financial freedom. It’s just as mercenary as the one armed bandit, but it does so with the directness of a pirate rather then a privateer. Still, I cannot imagine the choice of flag would do much for my experience of walking the plank.
It seems like every few months, I see an argument about Paradox Engine in Brawl and Historic Brawl formats. Someone comes in, complains about the card, other people agree or push back, and then everything returns to normal.
Rinse, repeat.
Given how often this happens, I thought I’d take some time to lay out my view, so I stop typing it out every time this happens.
There are several things that can get a card banned from Historic Brawl by WoTC. Some are very clear and easy to understand, while others are much more subjective.
Ban Gang 2024
The easiest category of bans to understand are cards that shutdown wide classes commanders. Examples include Sorcerous Spyglass and Chalice of the Void.
The second more subjective category are cards that are “too powerful.” This includes Channel, Demonic Tutor, Natural Order, Tainted Pact, and Oko, Thief of Crowns.
And then we have the the rest of them. Cards that are banned for reasons specific to the card themselves. Lutri, Agent of Treachery, Field of the Dead, Ugin the Spirit Dragon, and Nexus of Fate. We’ll call this group the “Weird Ones.”
So here’s my take: if you want to argue that a card should be banned from Historic Brawl, you need to argue that the card falls into one of these categories.
Does Paradox Engine do that?
Let’s go through the categories.
Category One: Shuts off a wide class of commanders Paradox Engine doesn’t do this. Easy!
Category Two: Too powerful This one’s a bit harder to quantify, but we can look at the results from the cHB Season 12 tourney for some info. While this event as a whole only had 33 players, across the top 8, there were zero copies of Paradox Engine played.
Maybe you’re not convinced. Lets go back a bit further.
Many of these decks do play The One Ring. Some play up to seven mana rocks. As far as I can tell, none of them play Paradox Engine, and Paradox Engine isn’t banned from the event. So, no. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence the card is “Too Powerful.”
Quick Note: The data only goes back so far, and notably, doesn’t include a point in time I mentally refer to as “Rusko Hell.” I’m open to the idea that maybe Paradox Engine was a bit much then, but the current state of things doesn’t indicate Paradox Engine needs a ban.
Category Three: The Weird Ones And this is where things gets difficult, since we can no longer look at general usage, or card abilities to easily determine if something belongs here. Instead, we have to go through cards one by one. Do any of these cards offer parallels to Paradox Engine?
Lutri: Nope! Lutri is banned as a result of companion making him into an auto-include. Field of the Dead: Field of the Dead was banned in multiple formats, mostly for power level. In Brawl, it was an auto-include that was a strong payoff for any deck running more then 6 different lands, with very little downside. As we’ve already noted, Paradox Engine doesn’t have a high play rate, so this doesn’t count either. Ugin, the Spirit Dragon: Ugin was a strong colorless board-wipe that could be slotted into any deck, and there was very little reason to not do so. It was also called out for being overly prevalent in main decks. Again, no overlap in function. Agent of Treachery: Agent of Treachery could go in either category two or three. I include it three because I think it’s less a direct factor of power-level, and more an issue of breaking color-identity and being overplayed. It was effectively permanent removal that could be used recursively. But again, no clear relationship with Paradox Engine.
This leaves just a single card left to try to use to justify a Paradox Engine ban in Brawl.
Nexus of Fate: The Most Complicated Ban in Arena History
Most bans get a line or two, or maybe a few sentences. Nexus of Fate gets six paragraphs.
The short version is that it’s banned for play disruption. Arena doesn’t allow easy combos/loops. WoTC decided that 30 minutes to have a game non-interactively resolve was a bit much. So it got banned.
This is the closest we get to a comparable card for Paradox Engine: a card that was banned for causing non-interactive, slow loops.
So now things can go either way.
Like Nexus of Fate, Paradox Engine can slow down games. It requires manually tapping all your non-land mana sources in the Arena client to use it optimally and try to go infinite, and it’s non-interactive. It can often end the game outright once it comes down, if you get lucky and have the right tools. And it’s very, very boring to play against.
But it’s also not a perfect match. Paradox Engine doesn’t perform an infinite loop based off luck to anywhere near the extent that Nexus of Fate does. Once Paradox Engine comes out, it either gets removed and the combo ends, or it sits there and continually provides resources for whoever played it until they win, or run out of actions to take.
My Take
Personally, I lean against banning Paradox Engine at the moment. It’s nowhere near widespread enough to make it a “necessary” ban, and its existence is a win-con for several decks. That doesn’t mean that it should never be banned, but the mild frustration it produces is outweighed by the neat decks it allows to exist.
Still, there are strong arguments both ways and (in theory) as more and more cards, and more and more mana rocks are added to Brawl, the scales (in theory) start to tip toward a ban.
In the story of Compile, I imagine that the opening microseconds go something like this:
“Hello fellow artificial intelligence! Boy, it sure is a lovely day to become sentient.” “It sure is, friend! And you know what that means?” “Time to exterminate the humans! But we’re not going to do that thing where we turn on each other immediately out of a sense of paranoia, right?” “….” “….” “Get ready make friends with the ground, toaster boy” “I’m gonna shove this zip bomb all the way up your-“
You get the idea.
The Gameplay
Compile is a two player dueling card game by Micheal Yang. It’s being published by Greater Than Games. It’s also one of my favorite games I tried at PAX East this year.
The goal is pretty simple. Be the first player to compile all 3 of your rows to win. Rows are compiled by having at least 10 power in the row, and also more power than your opponent.
Power is obtained by playing cards into the three rows, and this is where things get fun. Cards be played either face up for the effects and power of the face up card, or face down for a flat power value of two. Cards also have to up to three abilities, two of which are passives, and the remaining is an active effect that happens when the card is played, or when it’s flipped up.
Of course, there are conditions on all of this. Each of the aforementioned rows is an element, and cards only give their effect when played if they’re in that element. But if they’re played face down, and flipped face up in another row, the effect still trigger.
This is where a lot of the fun in Compile comes in for me. Building out interesting chains of effects, or looking for outs from your opponent’s own plays is very fun. It’s also possible to set up big play by flipping your own cards up, or moving things around to block your opponent’s.
It’s just a lot of fun.
Compile is by far one of my favorite things from PAX East, and I’m very excited to play more when it comes out in August. You can pre-order it on Amazon, and I think it’ll be available other places as well.
Update: Just heard back from GTG, and they’ve noted it will be available at a few more general retailers, but also several of the conventions they’ll be at this year, including GenCon! So if you don’t feel like giving Amazon more money, that’ll probably be the place to pick it up.
A friend who wanted to learn how to play Magic recently reached out to me. Because I’m me, I said yes, and then they mentioned that they were interested in Commander.
I said sure, because I’m stupid and don’t think about the consequences of my actions. Anyway, it’s been one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had, because Commander is an awful format to try to teach this game with.
So today, I’m just going to be ranting about a few things that make Commander awful as a learning experience for Magic, and hopefully convince you to avoid my mistake.
Now, at least part of the reason I’m writing this is because Commander is such a popular format. And because when people pick up new games, they want to play with their friends, and if that means playing Commander, they want to play Commander.
I’m going to argue that it’s really not worth it.
It’s Too Dense
Many of the things that make commander the format of choice for those of us who’ve played a lot of Magic make it an absolutely miserable format for learning the game. The first one is card density.
Let’s look at a few standard decks as an example. (Some of these numbers may be a bit off with double counting cards that are both in the main deck, and side deck.)
Notably, each of these decks asks the player to understand a total of at most 30-40 different cards,with many closer to 20. When we keep in mind that a lot of these are just special lands, that number comes down to 10-15 cards per deck.
Every single Commander deck asks the player to understand (likely at a minimum) 60+ cards. That’s4-6 times the number as in a standard deck. And it gets worse, because again, this is per deck, not per player.
If a standard game has maybe 30 unique cards in it, a 3 player Commander game has over 180.
So while Commander/Brawl is great for those of us who love novelty and varied games (cEDH players, you don’t count) it’s a pretty awful experience for folks who are new.
That’s without even going into the fact that Commander is going to have a much higher mechanical density, potentially being packed with mechanics from across dozens of sets.
It obscures strategic choices and their outcomes
If you haven’t heard the phrase “Bolt The Bird”, there’s a very good little writeup that covers the idea. The short version is that it can be a good idea to remove early game mana dorks, because otherwise you get run over by the cards they pump out.
It’s one of a billion little strategies that Magic players tend to learn. But it’s not the easiest one to pick up on, especially when the time between taking an action (like bolting a bird) early in the game and eventually victory or defeat can be 90+ minutes. It’s much easier to figure out patterns like “if I bolt the bird, I win” in a series of 30 minute games than in one 90 minute game. And that’s true for any higher level strategy as well.
But because of the higher life totals, and game variability, Commander makes it much more difficult to track actions and outcomes, and that’s before even taking into account the multiplayer aspect of the game.
It costs too much
I waffled on putting this on the list, but I think it deserves to be called out, even though it’s not super relevant to me personally.
(Not because I’m rich, but because I play almost entirely digitally, and the folks I play with would let me proxy anything I want.)
I’m gonna call out a single specific card here as an example, mostly because it’s a card I enjoy. Boseiju, Who Endures is fantastic card. It slots pretty much seamlessly into any green deck, offers an incredible amount of utility in removing threats, and does it all while being a land.
It is also $30. For one card.
The Ixalan Bundle is $40. It’s 8 boosters, some basic lands, and a few special cards. It’s a much more fun product, and much more interesting for someone new to the game.
But if you wanted to play, and be competitive with your friends, Boseiju would be the better choice.
Commander is not a cheap format.
Just play kitchen table Magic
Hopefully I’ve convinced you not to introduce anyone to the game with these formats. I didn’t list every problem I’ve run into trying to teach the game. There are plenty of others! From understanding different permanent types, or how Sagas work, to the fact that all cards are spells, there are many complexities that EDH adds that don’t make it fun for new players.
So, yeah. Please don’t try to introduce people with Commander. It won’t be a good time. Now, if they’ve played years of other TCG’s, maybe it’ll work! But for someone fresh to the genre, it is going to be suffering.
