ABOLISHMENT - Adroit Bricks Opposing Legacy-induced Simulation, Heedlessly Mythics Endure No Trials

Hi, we're Two! Today our topic is the mythic rarity in Magic. Because I got disappointed in people, repeatedly, and the more qualified people are dragging their feet on this. So I'm ranting about my disappointment; and making an easy to link article about it!

edit: to be clear since i've realized how to navigate back to the edit page instead of the new-post page, this article is bad, and is aggressive due to personal beliefs and disappointments. the article is bad and think the only parts that are particularly notable are that 1. 20% vs 32% is not that huge of a difference but it is a meaningful one and is the odds of a mythic and a rare showing up, 2. you can put cards of any excitement, complexity, or pushed-ness in any rarity as long as the rest of the set is able to accommodate that card.

First I will say that there is a large a selection of quotes to take, but I'm going to instead summarize the general principles from them instead to avoid pointing any fingers.

These things are all things people say about mythic cards. I'm not making any of these up, but a lot of them got paraphrased into the way I talk.

-"It should make you go 'it does what?'"

-"It's a mythic, it can break drafts when pulled."

-"Making it a mythic will make it not relevant to drafts."

-"Mythics have more free reign with mechanics than rares."

-"Mythics can be more complex than rares."

-"It's a mythic, so I don't care about complexity."

-"Mythics should be splashy"

-"Not strong enough for mythic."

Not a one of these is actually something about mythics.

They're about you* being a goddamn coward.
*as in a designer, not you-you. you're reading this footnote instead of quitting. you're probably a good person.

Let's go after the third one first, because it's provable due to being mathematics.

edit: to be clear, this is the part that I think matters. "you can, if you want, do whatever". the only thing that matters is making sure that when you do that, you build everything else around what you've already set up. print ancestral recall at common; but remember to print an equally-powerful card in each color and make sure that the other cards are remotely competitive in relation to that card. this is the thing that putting scary things at high rarity helps with: you can make high tempo answers at common and high value threats at rare, guaranteeing that players will have answers for threats while also having an exciting moment in their deck. etc etc; it's very much not a good article.

WARNING: MATH. Do a nice skip/find for "END MATH" if you want to not read it. It's in big text.

There are, in average sets, ~3 times the number of Mythics as there are rares (15-20 vs 53-60). The chances of a given "rare slot" being swapped for a mythic is 1 in 7.4. Therefore,

The odds of getting specific rare from a pack is 6.4 (chance of it being a rare) divided by 7.4 (possibilities), divided by 53-60 (number of rares to look at), equals 1.6 to 1.4%.

For a mythic, following the same pattern: 1 chance, 7.4 possibilities, 15-20 cards, for 0.9 to 0.6% chance of choosing a mythic and it being the mythic of a random pack.

A full sized draft pod has 24 packs running around. This means there is a fairly real chance for each card to show up once:

1 (total probabilities) minus 0.016 (chance of that rare coming up), to the twenty-fourth power; gives us the chance of that card showing up zero times. For rares, there's a 67.9% chance of it not showing up a single time.

But for mythics, there's an 80.5% chance of a given one having zero showings. The difference of these odds is fairly minimal. Far from invisible, but it simply isn't the "Oh, you can make a half dozen draft-ruining cards in your set, just put them at mythic and it'll be fine!" that it gets claimed to be.

Now, I am ignoring two fairly important factors when it comes to this.

First, I'm ignoring the possibility of it being rare- or hate-drafted out of a deck that can then play it.

Second, I've yet to talk about the chances of it actually getting drawn in your games.

Let's clear up that second one since it, also, can be addressed with math.

Suppose a three-round swiss tournament. I've never played a draft round like that but I'm told by basically everyone else that it's the most popular and the game store I went to before caring much about Magic did them that way so I have no reason to doubt it.

In this format, each pod plays a total of 36 games. Each player plays against three other players. 

Across a sufficiently large number of sample games, at rare, a hypothetical game-ruining card is in 32.1% of decks. At mythic, 19.5% of them. In limited games, it is not unlikely to see only around 16 cards from the deck. I would not call it likely to see so little but it is reasonable as an expectation. As a result, the chance of it showing up is over 33% (13 cards), but less than 50% (20 cards). 

I'd further argue that players with a "oh this wins the game" mythic are more likely to prioritize smoothing or searching effects and dig for that card, or having a plan that lets them get it more in some other way - bumping the chances of them showing up. For ease of math, let's call it a 40% chance to dig into the card.

In just 10 pods, there'll be 80 decks, playing 360 games. This game ruining card will show up in 25-26 decks if it's at rare, deciding ~46 games (12.77%); and 15-16 decks at mythic, deciding ~28 games. (7.77%) Do either of those really sound that acceptable to you? Because they don't to me.

"END MATH" - Read just the line above for the summary.

-"It's a mythic, it can break drafts when pulled."
-"Making it a mythic will make it not relevant to drafts."

As the math above shows, it is absolutely a problem if rarity matters. And if you're using this as an excuse, what you've really done is choose to not make a good design and are hiding behind an orange shield instead of engaging with problems in front of you. You are choosing, intentionally, to not become a better designer, and instead conveniently hide away an issue.

*For our purposes, rarity does not matter in constructed. Because we're not selling packs. Thus you have access to a playset of everything at the same cost.

*Additionally, this is not generically saying Mythics Are Bad; my point is that they don't intrinsically add something. Having Mythics versus just putting those cards in rare changes fairly little.

Alright, let's tackle the rest of those beliefs now. 

"Mythics make you go 'what?'", "Mythics should be splashy", and "Power level mythic" are all just... things you can put on rares. There's no reason you can't or shouldn't. You can make extremely splashy-feeling rares, and you can make extremely snappy but high power text boxes at rare. There's no difference between the two besides what you decided to put in the text box.

We can easily demonstrate this: 

These cover quite a bit of the range of "splash" that cards can have and are all rares that seem likely to me as plenty valid mythics.

My personal favorite example of Mythics Are Dumb And Bad is Brazen Borrower. It's a 3 mana 3/1 flash high-flier with a 2 mana bounce adventure. 

It's not splashy, complex, exploratory, nor extra fascinating. It doesn't do something wacky. It just makes you crack a lot of packs to get a very obviously best in class tool.

"Mythics can be more complex", "Mythics can play more with the mechanics", once again falls under the general umbrella that the only thing stopping you from putting them at rare is you. There's no magic bullet spirit of designing mythic rares that unifies them all, there's no intrinsic thing that they must be or are not allowed to be, not dissimilar from rares themselves.

"Complexity doesn't matter," - Funnily, actually, despite seeing this idea, the average mythic rare is much easier to parse than the average rare. Mythics in canon Magic prioritize the splashy impact moment so much more heavily that they tend to be slightly lower text, which adds a certain panache and flair to them.

"Not strong enough for mythic." -- To quote an old memetic; "That's just like, your opinion, man." To be more specific, there's nothing that defines mythic power level besides what you make of it.

Now I also want to point out that in addition to all of these crutch-like behaviors that mythics cause designers to do, there are also other benefits to not having them:

-It's easier to do math about how often something shows up. But making analysis isn't easy in the first place, so...
-You don't create exceedingly chase cards that basically amount to random chance, ie. lootbox/gambling; but Wizards does that because they've incentive to so your emulation of them will be less accurate (which is why this post is tagged "price-gouging" yo)

Now, there are also upsides to them.

-They do, minorly, reduce appearance rate. However, if you pulled every Mythic to being a normal Rare, you'd reduce the appearance rate meaningfully more than promoting a card from Rare to Mythic.
-They allow you to flavorfully distinguish between the importance of plot characters. I mean, you can do this by...writing flavor text?
-Some mechanics have awkward design space that you don't want to mislead people down. This property, just like draft-ruining-ness, however, isn't really mitigated.

Alright I'm tired of writing this because I'm more interested in being able to hotlink this and edit it later with more information and links pending some people smarter than me about this getting off their asses, so, yeah, just like

Don't do that. Don't make mythics.

Instead, skillfully design your set's components, and look at various pieces of analysis. You are not beholden exclusively to the decisions of your forebears even when you seek to mirror them, so make sure to re-evaluate the purpose of each decision to ensure that you're making ones that are agreeable.

Now that you've finally gotten to the bottom here, I'm going to defeat my own arguments.

Basically none of what I said is a reason to actively not design mythics. If you want to make mythics, make mythics! My complaint is levied specifically against the ideas that a given thing "must" be mythic, or that a mythic can/should be stronger than a rare, or that upshifting something to mythic causes design issues to go away, or various things along those lines.

You should do something because it serves you a purpose, as opposed to because it is directly copied from something you choose to not question. 

Wizards adding the mythic rarity did multiple things for them, and a big one was making more money, but also creating a feedback loop due to gambling-like endorphins and necessity of tournament players.

So I leave you with that: why do you have mythics?

If you have them because Wizards does, consider challenging that idea. What do they actually offer you, besides emulating Wizards' sets more closely? Can you explain why you want them?

If you move cards to mythic because they're not good for draft, consider redesigning or rebalancing the card instead. Shifting rarities is no excuse for not adjusting bad designs to be not bad.

If you make mythics to push power envelopes, why don't you do that at rare?