Hello fellow May birthday haver! For my birthday trivia I'd like something about Hymn to Tourach or random discard in general, since it's my favorite effect in Magic. On a related note, I'm super excited to play with Crabomination!

The effect of Hymn to Tourach on the game soured us on random discard as it too often led to game losses to mana screw. It led to us making a rule that we only use random discard at a high enough mana value, that it most likely isn’t hitting land.Happy Birthday!

What if you started with no hand

It would eradicate certain strategies, and make mana screw a much bigger problem.

Having read your answer to a question about removing mana screw, this is my response to you. Being a big fan of both MtG and riot games' Legends of Runeterra, and having played Mojang's Scroll (may it rest in peace) I've found that resource generation and designing around the cost of creating that resource can be interesting. I find that LoR's system, by also using a region system similar to the color pie, but maxing out with 2 regions means it's more about resource management of cards in hand, and tools to use to advance the game plan of reducing your opponent's life to 0, and Scrolls was unique in that you had to give up scrolls to add to your mana cap to generate a resource, so it was interesting design. Overall, I've found that in games that use a universal mana system in which everyone gets an additional mana to spend each turn, it becomes a challenge of "how do we maintain a level of variance that ensures the game doesn't get stale?" I think that magic as it is designed now could never be changed to prevent mana issues. The game was always designed around the variance that lands provide. Games like hearthstone and LoR went with deck building restrictions and other systems to ensure enough variance is maintained. If a game is designed to provide mana to each player each turn, other design choices must be made to ensure variance is maintained. I personally think each system has its pros and cons, and each game I've played has done well to design around the pros and minimize the cons.

I think I forgot to make an important point in my answer. I was talking about making a trading card game that was designed to appeal to both enfranchised and non-enfranchised gamers. If you’re aiming at a more enfranchised gamer, like yourself, you do have more options open to you because that type of gamer is much more comfortable handling complex decision trees and tension. That style of gameplay though can drive away less enfranchised gamers. One of the big reasons players exit a game early on is being overwhelmed by it. They get too caught up in the choices they’re asked to make to enjoy the fun of the game. This gets into what I call lenticular design, where you create your game in such a way that the more complex decisions are hidden to the less experienced player. The mana system does that really well. I hope this clarification helps.

Random discard is bad, but would discard that separates a players hand into 2 or 3 plies at random and has them choose which to keep be doable?

Not at low mana cost as it still tends to mana screw players.

Thanks for answering my ask about legendary lands! I think it was hard for me to grok why the gameplay would be horrible, but I trust it's so. (I kind of like the consistency-power tradeoff in non-singleton formats, but that's probably a really narrow, spiky thing to like. Although, as you say, the variance in Magic's mana system and blaming mana screw can be one of its strengths...) Do you think the issue mostly pertains to premier sets? Or is it a volume thing? It seems like Yavimaya was fine.

No, Yavimaya caused issues. It just wasn’t visible to most players. You seemed to get mana screwed more and didn’t know why. Or you understood the issues and took steps to minimize it in deck construction, and this felt it less.

Do you think many newer/ less enfranchised players issues with seeing more "mana screw" has to do with weaknesses in deck building, understanding mana values to mana source ratios and how card draw, tutors,impulse and scry impact a deck in addition I have heard many pros say most players don't have proper mulligan skills( sone players mulligan too much looking for perfect hands other need to mulligan much more than they do? I am not saying this will eliminate mana source issues but there are many skilles to use to mitigate it.

Probably the biggest problem with the mana system is it punishes the least knowledgeable players the most. It’s why we make preconstructed decks/Jumpstart for beginners where we make sure the mana is correct.

Out of curiosity: What is you opinion on the mana system that Duel Masters uses (being able to play any card in the mana zone to tap for mana)? While I've grown accustomed to Magic using lands, I think Duel Masters quite elegantly solves the problem of mana screw/flood and allows people to simply play their decks.

I was on the original design team for Duel Masters, and we created the mana system because we thought we were improving it. Interestingly, it is through using the Duel Masters system that I realized why Magic’s mans system is so good. Always being able to hit your mana on a specific turn takes away so much of the excitement and drama of the game. The uncertainty is something you don’t miss until it’s gone.

Hi Mark! It's less than two hours until my birthday. Can I request trivia for either the plane of Zendikar or the Landfall mechanic? Thanks!

The precursor to landfall was a mechanic where you could spend your land drop as a resource to do other things. It ended up playing poorly and made players mana screw themselves. So, we said, what if we do the opposite, and landfall was born.Happy Birthday!

Could the effect of Mana Screw be done in black border?

It’s a bit too high variance for black border. It’s also probably broken with Krark’s Thumb.

Could you give a legendary land basic landcycling to help mitigate the mana screw?

Even better, we can take off “legendary”. : )