Pattern Recognition #314 - A Choice Must Be Made
Features Opinion Pattern Recognition
berryjon
29 February 2024
182 views
29 February 2024
182 views
Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!
And welcome back everyone! This week is going to touch on a small mechanic in the game, and while most of them are that in terms of numbers, I'm talking about a mechanic that has about two dozen cards for it in total across the game.
Voting is a Keyword action that appears in multiplayer sets, and it enables each player to have a say in the outcome of the spell or ability. It was first published in Conspiracy, where each player represented a mover and shaker on Fiora, who had representation on the Council, who tried to get things done or undone by their voting. In Conspiracy, it was a effect, representing how those were the three colors that would have an organized government that would hold such a vote as wasn't that big into politics.
In this set, all Voting cards were tagged with the Ability phrase Will of the council. This is not the actual mechanic itself, it is just there to provide emphasis that a vote is about to happen. Starting with you, the player who played the spell, each player votes for one of two options. Actually, no, that's not right. Of the nine cards that invoke the Will of the council, six of them are a choice between two options, while the other three are a bit more open-ended. You can choose a color for "Protection From..." on Council Guardian, or to see what gets exiles with Council's Judgment, a really fun card that is going to be a great example of a problem later on.
(The Worst Voting Card Ever. Also the Fastest to Resolve)
Voting came back in Cospiracy: Take the Crown, where the ability was rephrased as Council's dilemma; that being the choice was more divisive in nature, and less likely to have a positive outcome for anyone other than the spell's owner and controller. This naturally culminated in the above card, which has ruined more games for more people than I can count. Always vote to give your stuff away. Never give someone free turns!
Interestingly, started to get a couple of cards that cared about voting here, leaving poor out in the cold. Of course, with the stakes being raised thanks to the above card, and Capital Punishment, cheating becomes more important as players can sometimes be given an [[Illusion of Choice, while a Ballot Broker can help nudge things along.
Finally, we get the Secret Council as the newest spin on the archetype. You see, before this version of voting was implemented, all votes were public, starting with the player that cast the spell. You always knew what the people before you in the turn order had chosen, and you can see the outcome of the spell develop over time. And your choices can affect later ones as well. However, by making all votes secret, you remove this perfect information that all players are working with and instead have to trust or not-trust their opponents to vote as they say they are going to vote.
Voting is an interesting way to bring what seems like oft-needed interaction to a multiplayer table. Not to say there isn't any in the first place, but it can be a wildly swinging pendulum in terms of what is and isn't happening at the table.
Voting brings players back to the spells on the table, and have to think about what they want or don't want, and then try to negotiate, cajole, threaten or ask politely to get it.
Which leads into a very singular problem with Voting.
It Stops The Game Dead
With other cards, there might be responses, someone might want to read the card to see what the card does and how it interacts with things, but with this sort of mechanic, the game stops utterly as every player has to understand the consequences of their choices, and try to negotiate a least-harmful outcome to them. Unless the card is Expropriate or Plea for Power. Minimize the extra turns they get. Any other option is bad, and should not be discussed.
But when the choice isn't binary, when you're facing down a Council's Judgment or something potentially similar in the future, the decision making process becomes even more complicated for everyone involved. Sure, you may have a 'best result' vote that you would like to see through, but can the same be said of anyone else? Yes? No? Games stop when a vote hits the table, and everyone tries to figure out just what it going to happen.
Don't get me wrong, this can be very fun and very interesting, but I'm used to playing under a time limit for games at my LGS, and having people argue for a couple minutes about a Vote wastes precious time for the rest of the game. If you're at one of those tables where you can afford to set down your cards and negotiate the finer details, good for you. Sadly, I don't. So that does affect my preconceptions about all this.
So let me change tracks here for a couple moments. There are other pseudo-voting cards in the game, so I would like to talk about them a little. First let's talk about the Villainous Choice.
The Second-to-Last Doctor, before the Curator
This non-voting mechanic shares a few mechanical similarities with actual Voting. The important part is that for most of them, each opponent has a say in what happens. Except in the case of a Villainous Choice, each person who faces it chooses their own result, while knowing what the others who came before them chose. This could make a difference, this might not, you never know.
It only shows up in the Villains for Doctor Who Commander Precon, so don't worry too much about it.
The other sort of voting is found on Prisoner's Dilemma. And Vault 11: Voter's Dilemma. This non-voting (even though the latter does use that word) is a way to keep the card understandable. They don't use the relevant ability word, instead they just spell out what they do because the ability words are for Conspiracy sets.
This sort of choice making is faster, but it still stops the game as people decide what they want or don't want, and that leaves dead space for those who have made up their mind already.
...
Yeah, this didn't go the places I was hoping. Let's just go to the summary.
Voting and choice making is a neat way to add interaction and complexity to what would otherwise be a normal spell. We've all see modal spells in the past. Those where you as the spell's caster get to choose how it resolves. But by putting the choice on to the other people, and doing so when they don't have the card in hand, and are being put on the spot like that? I think that's the wrong sort of choice to make.
I don't see this sort of thing going away anytime soon, because it was in the last Commander Precons, and will be in the next, so there's really no way to get rid of it. Just... be sure you know what you're doing when you're calling a vote, and when you participate in one, OK? And Wizards? Maybe something nice for people to vote on instead of their Choice of Damnations? Please? We need more than the Illusion of Choice.
Thanks for reading. I know it's a little on the light side this week, but it is what it is. I'll see you all next week with Weeks 3 and 4 of the Slow Grow! Join me then!
Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!