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Jinx is a champion that has large lost meta relevancy. We all know she is fundamentally flawed in that you need to ditch your whole hand to get her pay-off, but then she can't be protected with an empty hand.

Jinx might benefit from a pick a card style card in PnZ, where you draw cards the next turn, so you could level her and then immediately refill. But we will never be able to print such cards with TF around. TF is most of the reason why each region is not allowed more than 1 generic draw card, to avoid a critical mass of draw.

Riot might want to print another flavour of an existing card. Maybe 6 mana draw 3. Or a decimate that did 6 but healed 3 right after. A slightly different spin on an existing idea. For general/toolbox decks they will be content with picking one flavour or the other that suits their need better. But there will exist synergistic decks that will choose to play both flavours, because the idea is so in-theme with the deck that they can never play too much of it. And that may allow them to hit a critical mass to become degenerate.

That is the idea of design space. Three (or 4 or 5: remember, without rotations, the library will only keep growing) cards that do similar things can coexist if they don't appear in the same deck and each deck picks their preferred flavour. They become problematic when they get ran in the same deck allowing a highly synergistic deck to run 9 copies of their best card. So the only option is to rotate out the old version and replace it to put a fresh spin on the game (think in 10 years time: trading card games can easily last that long).

Edit: To people mentioning that BW has enough good draw, eye is a relatively recent card and TF has in fact become much strong since its printing. Also, TF doesn't love draw as much as under-costed draw with downside, as leveling TF is so powerful that almost any downside is worth it. Rummage + stress testing, glimpse etc. Thankfully none of these draw has been printed that regions that can also protect TF well. IO arguably has cheap draw and also protection, and IO TF has been quite good, but even IO does not hit the critical mass of cheap draw to make leveling TF consistent.

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over 1 year ago - /u/Dan_Felder - Direct link

This is a really good summary of the concept of design space.

A good example from MTG might be how the card Dark Depths was an obscure land that did something pretty unique - it came into play with 10 counters and let you remove one for 3 mana. Once you removed all 10 it gave you a 20/20 super-powerful monster.

This design was cool, but it also restricted the space for designs that removed lots of counters from a card. Much later the card Vampire Hexmage was printed, a 2-cost card that could remove all counters from something. It was an interesting option for answering planeswalkers (a powerful cardtype that relies on counters). However, it ALSO was an insanely broken combo with Dark Depths, allowing a turn 2 summoning of the 20/20.

This combo was exciting in eternal formats, and is still played today. It's a classic at this point. However, it never broke standard; because Dark Depths had rotated out before Vampire Hexmage was printed. In standard, Vampire Hexmage just did its vampire things as intended.

This is a particularly good example because both cards of this combo were neat on their own; Dark Depths was a long-term mana sink that offered a cool challenge and payoff for casual players. Vampire Hexmage was a very interesting vampire for vampire decks and an unusual answer to planeswalkers. However, printing one would have made it impossible to print the other without accepting extreme power creep. Designing either one restricts the game's design space because the other one now probably can't be designed, unless the game has a method of rotation to keep both cards from meeting eachother in the standard format.

over 1 year ago - /u/Dan_Felder - Direct link

Originally posted by PixelPlus

Isn't that missing out on the entire benefit of having a digital cardgame though? It seems like the much simpler answer would be to just change the text of Dark Depths to mention it can't have counters removed in any other way. Every single thing that Rotation seems to solve can be fixed with careful balancing, unlike physical card games where banlists and rotation is the only way to fix the issue of design space being limited.

Digital cardgames have a lot more tools than physical ones, for certain. They also have other problems of course (don't run into as many bugs as physical cardgames, you don't need to make specialized UI flows for something like Fact or Fiction, etc.

However, adding text to cards to prevent combos as they arise makes them unmanageably complex real fast. The number of redesigns and exceptions that exist to prevent cards from comboing how you expect they would if you know the previous cards gets out of hand real fast, and isn't always apparent how you can do it in the first place.

On the other hand, in eternal formats Vampire Hexmage suddenly made a previously forgotten card super exciting. If it had been prevented from working as a combo with bonus text, Dark Depths would be getting complexity creep just to stay the same; still restricting design space but in reverse as you have to redesign old cards to make room for new ones... And often end up breaking many 'fair and fun' versions of the interaction in the process because of one outlier.