A shower thought which applies not specifically to MTG, as it would obviously be a different game.
What problem does this idea try to solve?
Balancing. It is hard to balance every card during design phase (or even impossible, as can be shown), which results in some overpowered cards which make the game less fair.
How?
Supply and demand. A card which is played often (by many players, in many games) has it’s mana cost increased slightly. A card which is played rarely becomes cheaper.
Implications
This is probably not feasible with most mana costs sitting in the 1-digit-range. We can’t make a 2-cost card “slightly” cheaper. So we would either need a mana system which works with decimals (e.g. 3.1415 CMC), or raise the integer system to a higher plateau (e.g. 314 CMC)
It’s also only contemplable in digital versions, where a server can monitor every card drop, and adjust costs accordingly.
A big drawback is that your deck’s costs can change over night (or even between consecutive games), forcing players to edit their decks more frequently. A partial solution could be a notification system, and/or scheduling the recalculations to a slower frequency, like once per week or once per month.
A big advantage is that we now have an impartial Big Brother watching the balancing. Humans can err, crowds and echo chambers even more so. When people complain about an imbalanced card, is their cause justified or is it just a small but loud minority? Monitoring the cold hard data seems like a better way, and automated problem solving likewise.
What are your thoughts on this idea? Do you know another TCG which applies something similar?
Are you familiar with the MTGO format Penny Dreadful?
Basically, any card that was worth $0.01 or less in the preceding season is legal in the current one. It’s an interesting system that, in practice, works similarly to what you’re proposing, except with a ban list rather than mana cost. The cards aren’t likely to fluctuate in price based on external influences (it’s rare that a $0.01 card becomes such a breakout hit in another format that its price goes up, though it does happen on rare occasion) - usually it’s the Penny Dreadful format itself that causes those market fluctuations. If a card is popular enough in that format that it starts seeing heavy play, the price often dips up above $0.01 and it becomes illegal in the next season as a matter of course.
The rough analog to what you’re proposing would be making any card that saw more than a specific percentage of play banned, but if you’re determined to use mana costs, you could (hypothetically, not practically) increase all mana production and costs by a factor of 1000 (so a basic forest taps for 1000x green, and a llanowar elf costs 1000 green), and let costs fluctuate very slightly as a result, but it wouldn’t functionally change much. Spending (the equivalent of) 0.942 of a mana on something isn’t functionally different in almost all cases from spending 1 mana on it. By making prices only fluctuate on fixed intervals, say, weekly, you’d and only take play within the past, say, 2-3 weeks into account when determining cost, you’d be able to reach equilibrium while also not necessitating frequent deck changes (certainly not match to match).
I was not, thanks! Haha, yes, that is a pretty good implementation of the core idea, with very little overhead. It was funny to read about the implications this can have on real world market prices.
You’re right, it does not work so well with the current mana system. Because you still bring whole numbers of lands into play. When those lands produce 1000 mana, you still have either 1000 or 2000 mana, so the 0s are mostly redundant. It would still make a difference for carts which have a significant margin (so that you can play 3 unpopular cards for the cost of 2 regular, or 2 popular for the cost of 3 regular). But for small changes, as you say, it wouldn’t functionally change much.
I like the fine granularity of the cost-balancing approach. Though the binary ban/legalize mechanic of Penny Dreadful might be accurate enough.
If the mana produced by lands also fluctuated based on their usage, it might be more interesting. Things like enters-tapped uncommons might tap for like, 1.2 mana, whereas shocks and triomes might tap for 0.92 or something. You could bypass the downside of playing cards that were cost-boosted by playing a shitty manabase that had its output similarly boosted, or vice versa.