ec2-54-224-90-25.compute-1.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic A concept which manifests itself in contexts ranging far and wide.
The fact that if you balance a pencil on its end it will fall over is an example of symmetry breaking. At the moment when it's balancing, the gravitational forces are symmetrical all the way around the circle or hexagon. But the symmetry breaks (due to a slight gust of wind or whatever), and the pencil falls.
The concept is related-but-different in MagicTheGathering. The concept here is: a card like Earthquake (Deals X damage to all players and to all creatures without flying), or Armageddon (Destroy all lands), is symmetrical: It affects all players equally. However, there can be ways in which the symmetry can be broken, thus making the cards much more beneficial to one player than to the other(s).
Examples include:
Earthquake with X=4... most of the creatures on the board die, but mine have toughness 5 or 6 and stay alive.
Earthquake with X=6... most of the creatures on the board die, but mine have Protection from Red (from my MTG: Crimson Acolyte) and stay alive.
Earthquake with X=8... most of the players in the game take 8 damage, but I have a MTG: Circle of Protection Red and don't take any damage.
Armageddon... we all lose all our land. However, most of my deck only needs one or two land to use, so I'll be up and running again faster than you will. Plus I waited until I had a land in hand before playing it.
Armageddon... we all lose all our land. However, I have MTG: Llanowar Elves, MTG: Marble Diamonds and things, and so I have plenty of mana while the rest of you have none.
Armageddon... all lands are destroyed. However, I can regenerate my MTG: Spawning Pools to stop them going to the graveyard.
Wrath of God... all creatures are destroyed. However, my MTG: Still Life and MTG: Treetop Village aren't currently creatures, but they will be when I want to attack you next turn.
Some others which are viewed as "bad" cards because they're symmetrical are MTG: Warped Devotion, (add others here). ThoseWhoAreThatWayPerverted may like to consider how to break the symmetry of these cards.
Balance is not symmetrical. If I have four lands and my opponent has six, one creature and my opponent has ten, two cards in my hand an my opponent has three, it hurts me not at all and cripples him. Hardly symmetrical! Symmetry of effect and symmetry of result are funamentally different concepts and shouldn't be confused.
I suspect MTG: Balancing Act is the intended one, which was meant to be the "fixed" MTG: Balance. It certainly doesn't seem as broken as the original ;) --AC
It's usually harder to exploit a "symmetrically constructive" card, like MTG: Nantuko Shrine. Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar had lots of good things to say about trying this:
My goal in building around symmetrically constructive cards is similar to building around their destructive cousins: Find cards that ensure the effect helps me more (read: a LOT more) than my opponent, then use that advantage to pound him senseless.
A different kind of symmetry is provided by MTG: Shared Fate, where the issue is that you want cards which are more useful to you than to your opponents, even though they may end up "drawing" them. There are a surprising number of ways of doing this:
Alternative costs - in 5-colour star, only you will have the blue cards in hand to pay the alternative costs of MTG: Force of Will or MTG: Misdirection.
Advance warning - consider MTG: Cunning Wish (you have advance warning that you want your best instants to hand) or MTG: Fabricate (you have advance warning to put mana-fixing artifacts to exploit the cards you "draw" from others' libraries in your deck), or even MTG: Psychic Battle (you may well have an expensive deck if you include elements from all the categories listed here! And you may well have deck-stacking capabilities too).
Colour-hosing - certainly relevant to 5-colour star: MTG: Hydroblast in someone else's "hand" can't hurt you if you don't "draw" from the red library, and if the white player "draws" it, given that the red player will probably still have some real hand and some red permanents, they may well help your combined cause.
Or, indeed, if the black player "draws" the Hydroblast it might help, to kill off the green player's red spells and permanents. Wonderfully silly dynamics abound in 5-colour star with Shared Fate... it almost deserves to be a format of its own (where you have to assume the Shared Fate enters play after initial hands are drawn, and can't be destroyed after that). --AC
Based on a game recently had at GamesEvening - MTG: Shared Fate works nicely. You really want a card-drawing engine backing it up, though - not having one just got silly. --Requiem