MTG: How many cards to keep track of max? [No Elotars]

[OgreBattle]

Like creatures/lands/enchantments/artifacts on the table with non french vanilla abilities. Activated abilities especially.

Is there any studies or estimates on how much people can keep track of before they need to recheck cards over and over

[Mask_De_H]

General data retention studies show people can remember an average of seven unique things, give or take two, without strain. Chunking things into groups helps increase the number of things people can remember, since remembering the group triggers memory of the elements in the group.

[Surgo]

I've only ever had this problem when playing in person with actual cards. Never had an issue when playing on xmage or octgn, because tooltips. That includes remembering to tutor answers out of my deck at instant speed -- only ever an issue irl.

[elotar]

Infinite - you should not keep track of individual cards, you should keep track of a table position.

[Leress]

Infinite - you should not keep track of individual cards, you should keep track of a table position.

Do you mean board state? Because you still need to keep track of things like 'Did I already add the lore counter to this saga?' Did I play a land already? Which creatures have summoning sickness?' etc. So no, it is not infinite.

[Chamomile]

The board state is made up of individual cards. The question is how many individual cards (and of what complexity) can be in a board state before players can no longer keep track of it.

[Iduno]

The board state is made up of individual cards. The question is how many individual cards (and of what complexity) can be in a board state before players can no longer keep track of it.

Wildly dependent on the player (edit: and what the cards are/do). For the types of people you would be willing to play with again, 5 cards should be no problem, at almost any reasonable level of complexity.

Innovation has 5 cards with different powers (1 or 2 each) for each player, and various symbols to determine who you can play them against. Because of the need to count your symbols and everyone else's symbols, and that number being able to change during anyone's turn, it can bog down slightly sometimes. The powers can be situational, can be somewhat complex (returning cards from one of the stacks you have in play reduces your power slightly, but may allow you to have a better card in play, may allow you to score points, and may benefit your partner/opponents).

Race for the Galaxy ends when someone has 12 cards played, but people generally do interesting things with between 5-10 cards. The abilities on the cards do play off each other, but are generally very simple. The symbology is arcane, but people who have played previously can do 3-4 actions per turn at the same time everyone else is acting, with very little confusion. In MtG terms, about half of those 5-10 cards would be lands (1 or 2 with special abilities), and the others cards you use the mana on.

You may also want to look at something like Arkham Horror card game, where the board is made up of 5-10 cards (2-3 that you care about at any given moment), each player has a board of up to 7-8 cards and a character, and some number (0-2) of enemies and negative effects attacking them. Everything there is simple, most things don't apply to most situations, and it's pretty much a puzzle game at heart (get the person who is good at this symbol there, while getting the person with the other symbol here, with the fewest actions).

[...You Lost Me]

Per Mark Rosewater, board states in Llorwyn were too much for most players, mostly because of the number of possible activated abilities players were asked to track. It's not a study, but I'd use that as a benchmark for too much complexity in MtG.

[elotar]

Do you mean board state? Because you still need to keep track of things like 'Did I already add the lore counter to this saga?' Did I play a land already? Which creatures have summoning sickness?' etc. So no, it is not infinite.

You don't need to keep track of any of it - you have just to put all cards with upkeep effects in line and make a habit to check them each turn, play lands at the first main and creatures at the second.

Sometimes you will need to do something out of this order, but it will be the first time, when you will need to spend any mental effort on this activity.

[elotar]

The board state is made up of individual cards. The question is how many individual cards (and of what complexity) can be in a board state before players can no longer keep track of it.

No, it's not. The board state is something like "My alpha strike will deliver 6 damage pass blocks, opponent got 12 life, I also got this activated ability to deal 2 damage each turn".

It's 3 numbers which you should be keeping track of. It doesn't matter, if this state is a result of 3 or 33 cards on the board.

[Chamomile]

The board state is made up of individual cards. The question is how many individual cards (and of what complexity) can be in a board state before players can no longer keep track of it.

No, it's not. The board state is something like "My alpha strike will deliver 6 damage pass blocks, opponent got 12 life, I also got this activated ability to deal 2 damage each turn".

So your argument is that you can remove half the cards from the board, chosen at random, and it won't affect how much damage gets past the blocks? Because otherwise you are describing a board state that is made up of individual cards, the complexity of which is tied to how many cards are on the table.

The only way to have infinite cards on the table and not also have infinite complexity is if you have infinity copies of a single card that does the same thing, and if your point is that you can theoretically have infinite cards on the table without increasing complexity provided they are all swamps then you are being a pedantic idiot who is refusing to engage with the actual question being asked. Creatures/lands/etc. with "french vanilla abilities" were excluded from the discussion in the very first post. Ignoring that is not insight, it's petty contrarianism.

[Leress]

Do you mean board state? Because you still need to keep track of things like 'Did I already add the lore counter to this saga?' Did I play a land already? Which creatures have summoning sickness?' etc. So no, it is not infinite.

You don't need to keep track of any of it - you have just to put all cards with upkeep effects in line and make a habit to check them each turn, play lands at the first main and creatures at the second.

Sometimes you will need to do something out of this order, but it will be the first time, when you will need to spend any mental effort on this activity.

That is literally the definition of keeping track. Grouping things by when they trigger is a form of keeping track.
You have excluded various cards that have different adjustment times, like pre-combat main phase triggers, post-combat main phase triggers. Sagas which get lore counters after you the draw step. End of turn triggers.

[deaddmwalking]

In a relatively recent game of Magic a friend and I were playing a Duel Deck of Elves versus Inventors. We're both experienced players but we weren't super-familiar with the decks because they were pre-generated. We played them quite a number of times, though.

First off, we did not ALWAYS play a land in the first main phase. There were times where I had a normal land in hand and a land that came into play tapped. If I needed the mana before the second main phase, I might have played the standard land; if I didn't, I would have played the tapped land so I could have the mana next round. Some of the lands had things like +1 counter to creatures played this round, so it might have needed to go first. Essentially, there is no blanket rule for whether playing the land at the beginning of the round was the smart play. Several times we had to check whether we had already played a land. Since we're not dicks (too each other, anyway) it wasn't a big deal. In tournament play it might have been.

There were also a number of cards that had cascading effects. For example, there is a land that can turn into a creature with power/toughness equal to the number of Elves in play. With multiple abilities triggering off of elves entering the field and number of elves in play, there were some things that got overlooked.

Essentially, when we had 12+ cards in play it was very difficult to keep track of what was possible. My opponent had a number of 'sacrifice this artifact to bring back that artifact' and 'sacrifice this artifact to do 2 damage' and thopter tokens, etc.

Most games didn't get to the advanced board state - one person would win before we got there. But when both players had a developed board state (it felt like WWI staring across the trenches) it took some figuring. It was very easy to forget to use an activated ability that would have been helpful.

Conditional abilities are the most complex.

Considering that you ought to keep track of your own abilities and our opponents, I'd posit that more than 5+ per side gets complicated. A virtually unlimited number of 'vanilla' creatures could be added to that - they don't really make things particularly complex outside of assigning blockers.

[Whipstitch]

One also has to consider that opponent's hand size and mana availability is also quietly taking up some of your mental energy every turn. Graveyards are another big issue, since some decks care what is in there and when you're sitting across the board from a full hand it feels pretty lame to signal your intentions by double checking the contents.

[Leress]

One also has to consider that opponent's hand size and mana availability is also quietly taking up some of your mental energy every turn. Graveyards are another big issue, since some decks care what is in there and when you're sitting across the board from a full hand it feels pretty lame to signal your intentions by double checking the contents.

Also if any cards that revel cards to other players. Keeping track of which ones you've show or which ones the opponent has shown.

[elotar]

Grouping things by when they trigger is a form of keeping track.

You don't get the point - if you organize them right and train a habbit of checking this zone each upkeep, than you will not be spending mental capacity on it - so number of cards there will not matter.

[elotar]

In a relatively recent game of Magic a friend and I were playing a Duel Deck of Elves versus Inventors. We're both experienced players but we weren't super-familiar with the decks because they were pre-generated. We played them quite a number of times, though.

First off, we did not ALWAYS play a land in the first main phase. There were times where I had a normal land in hand and a land that came into play tapped. If I needed the mana before the second main phase, I might have played the standard land; if I didn't, I would have played the tapped land so I could have the mana next round. Some of the lands had things like +1 counter to creatures played this round, so it might have needed to go first. Essentially, there is no blanket rule for whether playing the land at the beginning of the round was the smart play. Several times we had to check whether we had already played a land. Since we're not dicks (too each other, anyway) it wasn't a big deal. In tournament play it might have been.

There were also a number of cards that had cascading effects. For example, there is a land that can turn into a creature with power/toughness equal to the number of Elves in play. With multiple abilities triggering off of elves entering the field and number of elves in play, there were some things that got overlooked.

Essentially, when we had 12+ cards in play it was very difficult to keep track of what was possible. My opponent had a number of 'sacrifice this artifact to bring back that artifact' and 'sacrifice this artifact to do 2 damage' and thopter tokens, etc.

Most games didn't get to the advanced board state - one person would win before we got there. But when both players had a developed board state (it felt like WWI staring across the trenches) it took some figuring. It was very easy to forget to use an activated ability that would have been helpful.

Conditional abilities are the most complex.

Considering that you ought to keep track of your own abilities and our opponents, I'd posit that more than 5+ per side gets complicated. A virtually unlimited number of 'vanilla' creatures could be added to that - they don't really make things particularly complex outside of assigning blockers.

This is a good exempla of the wrong approach to the problem with logical bad results - you was trying to keep track of individual abilities, playing with unfamiliar decks and not trying to use any heuristics.

Solution to this problem is not in dumbing down the game (which was chosen by MaRo because he is quite dumb himself) but by understanding how really interaction in this environment works and structuring your play around it.

Look at the black jack card counting techniques for a hint

[deaddmwalking]

Elotar, you are a fucking prick.

The issue is not that I have to keep track of my own deck's abilities. It's that I also have to keep track of my opponent's decks abilities. By definition, I should be unfamiliar with my opponent's deck. If he plays a card on round 7 that interacts with his graveyard, but no other card played up to that point references the graveyard, I didn't have to spend a lot of mental energy keeping track of what ended up in there. Suddenly it becomes extremely relevant. Call it a paradigm shift - the board state changed. Graveyards were not particularly important - now they're very important.

I'm not advocating for making M:tG more simple - it's basically workable. But in some cases it gets more complicated to track than is easy. There are a ton of conditional abilities like 'if another creature has come into play this round' or 'if a creature left play this round'. There are abilities like Haste that make playing a creature BEFORE the combat phase a good idea; there are abilities like 'put a +1 counter on this creature as it enters the battlefield if another creature went to the graveyard this turn' that make sense to play after the combat phase. The whole time you're keeping track of how much untapped mana your opponent has; if you think he's holding on to a 'counterspell' do you risk your big play, or try to play two smaller spells that might tempt him to use it so you can hit it next round.

If you're playing the game RIGHT your'e keeping track of a ton of things without regard to card abilities. Some card abilities are conditional in nature and since they sometimes apply and sometimes don't, you're keeping track of multiple board states. If you want to say 'well if people were as smart as ME it'd be easy', fine, I'll grant you that. But I'm well above average in intelligence, knowledge of the cards, and experience in the game. If you think that keeping track of all the cards is EASY regardless of how many of them there are in general you're wrong.

[elotar]

By definition, I should be unfamiliar with my opponent's deck. If he plays a card on round 7 that interacts with his graveyard, but no other card played up to that point references the graveyard, I didn't have to spend a lot of mental energy keeping track of what ended up in there. Suddenly it becomes extremely relevant. Call it a paradigm shift - the board state changed. Graveyards were not particularly important - now they're very important.

You are just a bad player - knowledge of an available card pool and guessing possible contents of an opponents deck and hand is a key skill in a CCG.

As you was playing precons you even have not to guess - there are card lists online.

MTG promoting stupidity. VtES is back into print. The game is full of problems, but I'm recommending it for all MTG players just to feel other approach to decision making during the game.

[deaddmwalking]

So your argument is keeping track of the board state is easy because you already have a detailed knowledge of all the cards available in all rotations and know correlated cards well enough that if you see a Druge Skeleton of round 1 you're relatively confident that you know the entire deck so you're never surprised.

I don't think we agree on the definition of easy.

I would agree that if you learn all the cards in a set it is easier if you're playing that set - especially if you're playing draft and track the cards your opponent is claiming, but learning all the cards just puts the work before the game - it doesn't actually reduce the mental investment.

[elotar]

So your argument is keeping track of the board state is easy because you already have a detailed knowledge of all the cards available in all rotations and know correlated cards well enough that if you see a Druge Skeleton of round 1 you're relatively confident that you know the entire deck so you're never surprised.

I don't think we agree on the definition of easy.

I would agree that if you learn all the cards in a set it is easier if you're playing that set - especially if you're playing draft and track the cards your opponent is claiming, but learning all the cards just puts the work before the game - it doesn't actually reduce the mental investment.

Memorizing the card pool and understanding possible interactions is part of the "playing the game" in CCG. Actual "duel", especially in magic, is very small part of a whole experience.

Is it "easy" or "hard" I don't know, but as most sets are "solved" by pro community in days as I know, so...

[erik]

Grouping things by when they trigger is a form of keeping track.

You don't get the point - if you organize them right and train a habbit of checking this zone each upkeep, than you will not be spending mental capacity on it - so number of cards there will not matter.

You keep contradicting yourself. Organizing. Checking repeatedly. These are forms of keeping track and do require mental space. They make it easier via organization and make it less likely to miss something by having a routine pattern but it is fucking idiocy to suggest this requires zero attention.

You may know something about magic or you may not, but it doesn’t matter because you know absolute shit about what words mean and that disqualifies the rest of your arguments. I mean how do you discuss something with someone who says that thinking about something doesn’t require thinking? (Thinking being integral in checking organizing and mental capacity)

[elotar]

You keep contradicting yourself. Organizing. Checking repeatedly. These are forms of keeping track and do require mental space. They make it easier via organization and make it less likely to miss something by having a routine pattern but it is fucking idiocy to suggest this requires zero attention.

Fuck you are stupid - organizing requires attention, this attention just do not scale with the number of cards - there is no difference of checking upkeep effects when there is one card or 5, if they are in dedicated zone and you got a habit checking it each turn.

Understanding format also requires attention, but you should be doing it outside "the duel", so you got infinite time and access to the thoughts of brightest minds around the world.

Calculated parasitic effects like "number of elves" also requires effort, but if you are not counting them each time when thinking about next move, but have their number in front of you (dice, paper, phone) which you increment/decrement each time elf comes/leaves play then it does not interfere with your strategic decision making.

Ets...

So you are spending some mental effort on this activity but by it you make decision making during the duel much less demanding in any board position.

[Whipstitch]

I like how his argument is basically that you can have infinite space because everyone is going to netdeck super hard while the casuals eat shit.

[OgreBattle]

Most games didn't get to the advanced board state - one person would win before we got there. But when both players had a developed board state (it felt like WWI staring across the trenches) it took some figuring. It was very easy to forget to use an activated ability that would have been helpful.

Conditional abilities are the most complex.

Considering that you ought to keep track of your own abilities and our opponents, I'd posit that more than 5+ per side gets complicated. A virtually unlimited number of 'vanilla' creatures could be added to that - they don't really make things particularly complex outside of assigning blockers.

Been playing a lot of FFtcg and there's a 5 'land' limit, which does help with tracking stuff but it also means every 'land' has an 'interesting effect' like an enchantment or artifact.
"Plays from discard pile" stuff also slows down the game with the occasional "lemme look through my pile, lemme check yours 'cause I know you have cards to snatch from there..."

Having a good amount of french vanilla aiblities with key words seems... key to quickly assessing a battlefield. Say if you had 30 evergreen key words and also paired them together you have 1000+ cards that can be understood by remembering those 30.