I don’t play Doomtown at all but this Mulligan man seems eerily similar to our own Jackson Howard. A Character Asset designed to improve an obvious flaw in Netrunners Game design. Would it be better for Netrunner if Jackson Howards ability to shuffle 3 Cards from Archives to R&D was part of the game rule set (limit 3 times per game). Is this accurate?
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Short Answer: No.
Longer Answer: I see what you’re getting at, but Jackson isn’t necessarily to “improve an obvious flaw in Netrunner’s game design”. Besides, he’s part of the game design. He does have a somewhat similar effect to some Grifters (there’s always the ol’ “Jackson Mulligan” where you mulligan into a bad hand + jackson and install-draw-draw), but I don’t think they’re that similar.
[quote=“Xenasis, post:40, topic:6251”]
What I was saying was that if you don’t have the mulligan guy, games have a higher chance of being uninteresting and there are less in-game decisions because you don’t have the decision to mulligan or not.
[/quote]Ah, ok, I see what you’re saying there now. A built-in mulligan is a built-in extra decision. So you have:
- A: the mullgan choice,
- B: a different effect choice
- C: the mulligan inclusion choice (proposed by Zeb).
Either it’s built-in (netrunner) and you have A + B, or it’s not (doomtown) and you have C + A or C + B depending on what you choose. In any scenario you get two of those choices. Your argument is two-fold: 1) that C is actually not a real choice as there will be an objective best option for the deck. Hmm. That may be statistically provable over time, but then you could argue the same for a large portion of your card slots and perhaps even deck-archetypes as a whole, and to accept that argument undermines the skill element of deckbuilding somewhat (e.g. how do you know it’s the best choice?) and sort of strikes at the core of these games which again is a bigger debate, though very interesting (“How much agency do we really have in deckbuilding?”). So I’m not sure I agree with that one. And 2) that C is not an ‘in-game’ choice it’s pre-game. Yeah I can accept that - I think there’s plenty enough pre-game choices in deckbuilding already so an extra in-game one might be preferable.
To be perfectly honest the grifters mechanic didn’t sit well with me when I read the rules, seemed a bit clunky, as do the Alliance effects in Mumbad - I think I kind of like in-game artifacts to be limited to in-game effects rather than effecting pre-game setup stuff (which the initial draw pretty much is). So I’m not so keen for different reasons.
In general I see your point a lot more clearly now, but I still think the debate is a little hyperbolic (“the addition of a mulligan makes a game incredibly more interesting a higher percentage of the time”). I also think we’re talking at funny angles when it comes to the “ultimate endpoint” - whatever the details, the way I read it wanting mulligans equates to wanting less randomness - fewer games being decided by bad dice rolls. I didn’t mean to suggest you wanted no randomness, and I also didn’t suggest that mulligan’s were the same as just choosing your starting hand, but “fewer bad hands” is just a different way of saying “more good hands” or “higher and more consistent quality of opening hand” or finally “less randomness”.
As for Andromeda - it was hypothetical, so the balance comment is kind of a straw man. I think my point still stands to some extent - the mechanics bear striking similarities. Also, I’m all for making it ‘better’, but that’s just it - we didn’t decide on the criteria (more competitive? more skillful? more fun? more entertaining to watch?), which gets as back to the discussion about the perfect balance point and why I mentioned the audience in that too. 
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I’m all for mulligan theories and stuff but keep in mind the other mechanics of the game which influence bad hands.
You may discard one card from your hand (or more via card effects) end of turn. You always draw up to your max handsize end of turn. There are several cycling card effects. Your discard pile becomes your library again when your library is depleted. The game is normally slower paced than most of the other LCGs (that’s just my opinion).
This game has a different game flow and in my opinion, if you consider all those things said before, the mulligan has no strong effect in this game.
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The game has a vastly different game flow, but that doesn’t stop your hand from mattering. As a small example, you’re not dumping the cards in your hand then you don’t draw as many cards after high noon. You can discard, but cards drawn over the course of the game are different to cards you start with. If you’ve not got the cards to cycle then you see cards slower. It’s harder to get the card flow ‘going’. If your hand didn’t matter at all, then the game would be no different if you could select five cards from your deck to be your hand (or if your opponent could see your hand and choose cards to discard). Your hand does matter.
Even if a mulligan doesn’t have a strong effect on a game, which is debatable and certainly not fact, it’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t have at least a small positive effect on the game. Why turn down a mechanic that improves your game and makes skill matter more than card draw (even if only a little bit)?
Ah, this was my fault for not properly explaining what I meant. What I meant by that was that was it stops really bad hands ruining games. Sometimes you finish games in any card game (or game with stochastic elements) and it was clear that luck favoured one player, I’ve said before to opponents “should we have a real game of Netrunner now?” after those sorts of games. I know that Doomtown isn’t Netrunner, but the incredibly more interesting bit was in regards to changing a game that would have been uninteresting to play for both parties. It doesn’t happen often, but a mulligan makes that even less likely (hence more interesting a higher percentage).
I’d say that it makes the game a tad more interesting all of the time (decision to mulligan), and incredibly more interesting some of the time (like 10% → 1% in the toy example). It would of course be ridiculous to claim that a mulligan makes a game incredibly more interesting all of the time.
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I have also lost track of the point of your point. Like a couple others here, I think I understand the argument that Grifters make the game statistically less interesting – but if that number is so small that you’d characterize it as a “why not,” then it’s probably just a matter of taste? I can think of several games where designing against skill-testing decisions makes total sense. Even if Doomtown skipped the traditional mulligan for some other reason, I think Grifters fit the character of the game quite well, and that’s a bigger deal to me than mitigating early-game variance.
That said – I empathize with your approach. At least, I think I do. I think it’s really frustrating to have a sense of those numbers and then see a design seemingly turn up its nose at what seems like an utterly straightforward improvement. It’s just more subjective than all that, which is a little disillusioning, but that’s the point where you have to phase and remember it’s just a game. That’s one of my least favorite sentences when I’m trying to take something seriously, but you probably get what I mean.
When just Travis Moone existed (mulligan man) I think asking, ‘why not just let people take a Mull?’ Was reasonable. Now multiple grifters exist e.g. Gina ‘discard 2 draw 3’ Tailfeathers it makes for choices during deck building too.
FWIW I think starting a grifter in Doomtown is almost always correct (but I’m not a good Doomtown player). Being strongly encouraged to start a cheap expendable dude seems pretty good design. Needing to boot them to use their Griftyness, maybe less so.
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Yeah I agree that being able to choose the type of mulligan you want is an amazing design idea.
Imposing an in-game cost for it (rather than a deck-building opportunity cost) is rather less so, as it means you’ll always take a hit from a bad hand similar to MtG’s mulligan always taking a hit. The latter case its part of the wizards business model (punished mulligans encourages players to invest in expensive variance reducing multicolour lands), but I’m not sure if its necessary in an LCG-type release model.
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I love to make potshots at WotC’s moneygrabs, and they are definitely there but I’m pretty sure the mulligan rules are not one of them. Set sales are currently impacted the most by the quality of the mythic rares in any given set, and multicolor lands are never mythic.
It’s more a function of the different design of the game and the outlandish potential power of mulligans. There’s just tons of decks that want “Oversight AI + Janus” opening hands, everywhere, in every archetype.
Since they want older formats with those crazy cards to use the same rules, they have no way to backpedal.
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AEG are killing Doomtown: https://www.alderac.com/doomtown/2016/06/21/riding-off-sunset/
Such a shame. The snippets of conversations with playtesters and community rules team people suggests it’s been a bit of a clusterfuck behind the scenes, but I’ve felt the game has been getting stronger and stronger with each release. Absolutely gutted that it’s not going to be continuing after the next big box.
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That’s too bad. Life is hard for living games these days. I really liked Doomtown. Couldn’t get others to like it, though. =-(
how many expansions were released to date?
AEG fatally mismanaged a card game? Well I never. 
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There have been 10 packs and 4 big boxes I believe. There will be a few more as they will finish the current story arc, but by the years end they will be done. Its a shame, I really enjoyed Doomtown as a secondary game. One thing I think they did particularly well was with the story. Its better than anything in Netrunner right now. AEG was really good about hiring writers to create short stories that dove deep into the world anytime they did a preview of a card.
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I give AEG shit for their approach to game mechanical balance, but I will say, they have the best and most fervent approach to the storylines for their games, hands-down.
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I don’t think there was a major mechanical mishandling this time. As I said, the game’s the best it’s ever been just now. But they seemed to be heavily reliant on community members doing things and just didn’t support the product well enough.
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Does this mean Doomtown: Reloaded just lasted barely over a year? That is a bit crazy to be killing it off so quickly.
While I did find it interesting and watched a number of interesting games, so many of the cards seemed overly complicated and the some of the mechanics were pretty contrived. It’s a shame too because the theme was really cool and the deck building seemed next level insane.
Two years.
I don’t know that cards were overly complicated per se, but the base design never quite felt as tight as Netrunner. This is probably a reflection of a lack of resource being put into it by AEG. It’s still mechanically extremely solid despite this, but with an even steeper learning curve than Netrunner. That’s always been a problem; the gulf between learning the rules and applying them in a meaningful, strategic way. Once you’re there it’s a great, great game.
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I’m not even mad, I’m just glad it got a chance to live a second life and get a full story-arc.
(Especially after pestering AEG employees at GenCon for years for it. I can redouble my efforts now on Phase!)
It may have been a little janky and hard to learn, but goddamn did it have soul. Something a lot of FFG game lines lack. I also did appreciate that they were quick to answer questions and add them to the the FAQ, and if something was truly terrible/a NPE they didn’t wait around for things to fester, they were always willing to slam something with errata.
At least PEG’s finally has the rights for it back, so if they ever want to reboot it themselves in the future, they could.
Might try to slap some sort of deck together and jump into one of the grinders on Thursday at GenCon to give it a send-off.
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As an indication for how clueless AEG have been: they’re running qualifiers for a tournament for a game that’s never had a >50 person event, and for which regular attendance at OP events only just about averages out in double figures.