Ok, after something like 14 years of absence I and Graham tried to play a game of MtG, to see how the game was.

We settled on Type 2 (Standard?) which seemed to us to be the mainstream tournament type.

After netdecking for "To beat" decks we fired up Lackey and tried three or so games, to get our feet wet.

Now, as a caveat, my perceptions could be skewed due to multiple reasons (I am not experienced with current Magic, I don't know if the deck we fished were real decks to beat or just local kings of the hill, and, even if they were really good, I didn't know the metagame), but I had the foolowing feelings:

1) In Magic, a deck live or dies to the manabase, in Cthulhu resourcing is much more lenient of mistakes or bad fate. Most of games ended when one of us could not playe one or more cards due to color mismatchings or too few lands. I had never the feeling of being using the deck to its fullest potential, but I felt constrained by the resources available. A lot.

As a sidenote, as soon as I started fooling around with the manabase composition to adapt it to my playstyle (and thus probably turning a fine tuned deck into a mishmash pile of random cards ), the pieces of the puzzle seemed to come together with less effort.

2) Magic games we played feeled slow motion, compared to Cthulhu: most meaningful action came from turn 4 onward, before most of turns were either empty or minor skirmishes. In Cthulhu most games I played in the last year or so were done by turn 5, and many were decided on turn 2 or 3, with a t4 closure. the three free resources Cthulhu "gifts" any player really do help getting into the thick of action fast.

3) Combo felt extremely late game, whereas in Cthulhu combo needs to be an early game aggression. I could fit "my" deck main combo by turn 5 the soonest and it would have required an amazing draw or overextention by Graham. I can understand why many MtG players seem appaled by Cthulhu turbocharged combo.

4) On the average Magic card design was a full head above CoC (pre-Nate CoC, comparing it to Grzbowski just hurts too much). There are interesting rules (multiple color cards, choose one between cards, pay either color) and sweeping effects. Turn structure and resourcing, however are much more primitive in Magic: essentially the game forces you to waste time and slots with a build-up phase which Cthulhu almost avoid completely. Since I am an action-movie-junkie two-minutes-attention-span-lenght dude, the quicker pace of Cthulhu feels better to me.

I would say, that overall CoC is the better game. It's not surprising though; Magic came from almost nothing, and was the first in it's genre (I think there where a few games that could be classified a 'CCG' before M:tG, but the scale, and focus on gameplay was unprecedented.)

Magic, in other words, can't be described as a crappy game, although later games have learned a lot from it's mistakes (and ofcourse, newer Magic sets have learned a lot from past mistakes as well. For example; the Flashback mechanic gave excess lands something to do - Magic learned from the limitations of their resource system and made cards and mechanics to compensate. Still, manascrew remains an important issue in Magic. Much has been said about it , and their current developer doesn't think it's all bad:

"it adds randomness to the game. Why is this good? One, it guarantees that every game is different. Two, it allows for dynamic situations. (“So, I was stuck at two land and three life.” “So you lost?” “No.”) Three, it ensures that no match-up is a foregone conclusion. To take the extreme, the best player in the world playing the strongest deck in the most powerful format could conceivably lose to a novice playing a pre-constructed deck. The fact that such a thing is possible, even if highly unlikely, speaks volumes."
- Mark Rosewater

While I understand the sentiment, ultimately I like to win due to me playing better then my opponent, not because the game randomly lets me win though. The land based system was a good solution, just not the best solution a game could ask for. Newer games know that, and get around it in various ways, so it doesn't feel like the game is holding your hand too much in deciding what to resource and what not. I've played some other games that had different solutions to this - For instance Versus System and World of Warcraft (both from Upper Deck) had a half-way solution: All card can be "resourced", though some cards function always as "resources." - It stil feels like the game is holding my hand though.

Card Look and Layout

Call of Cthulhu wins this hands down. Ok, the white borders make it a closer call, but in general CoC does the look and feel part better. In Black border land, it didn't even feel like the cards had borders, as -for example- the icon row flowed seamlessly into the border. I can get why white borders are choosen on some levels, but it reduces the elegance of the design a bit.

Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (Also from Wizards, the second "Deckmaster" game after Magic, designed by Richard Garfield) did the layout better - Icons on the left side, so the important information is easily visible if you fan the cards in your hand. CoC uses a similar layout, even putting the cost on the left for Magic doesn't do the layout anywhere near that efficiency. Magic's Future Sight set did have "Future Borders" that showed the mana cost on the left row, downwards, but this was a one-set temporary change, on a subset of the cards. Even when the card layout was changed a few years back, changes to the layout where relatively concervative in nature.

Pacing and mechanics

After playing CoC Magic feels a bit like trying to run underwater - You want more speed, but feel like the game holds you back. I can agree with Carioz here (Yay!) - This is because in CoC you're doing 3 things at time: Building 3 domains, instead of one general resource/land pool, and you're able to run 3 stories (or more, when you have a conspiracy) instead of attacking one player. Also, instead of having 1 conflict per run (power versus toughness) CoC runs 5 struggles in quick succession: Terror, Combat, Arcane, Investigation, Skill. - This makes it feel very dynamic, especially when you have a huge battle (or should I say: investigation?) on 3 or more stories at a time. Booster Icons make things feel more frantic, especially when multiple Combat Struggles happen.

The power/toughness dynamic works pretty well too though; Well, CoC has a sparkling of "Toughness +X" to deal with a lot of opposing Combat Icons.

CoC's fast pace makes it a quite unforgiving experience, though. And a lot of the time, having a singular defender with subpar stats doesn't do it for CoC. In Magic, you can easily find good chump blockers. New CoC cards like the Tcho-Tcho, and Cannibal Ghast deal with the "Better on defense" mechanic though. Ravager From The Deep is ofcourse, the ultimate example of this.

It certainly makes CoC more aggressive in general though; Often, the best defense is to attack. It's a shame that in CoC some cards are dedicated defenders though, where in Magic, most creatures can be used just as easy on offense and defense.

Since CoC had the chance to learn a lot from what went on in CCG land, and learn from that, CoC has the general edge though, from better mechanics and pacing.

Rules and Templating

One of the few catagories Magic can be depicted as a clear winner is in templating and rules. Well, that is if you bother to know all the rules in Magic . Because if you do, Magic is pretty much never ambigious in what happens in any situation. Wizards has taken card templating to a very high level of consistancy. Templating is pretty hard though - things that sound meaningfull and unambious can turn out to have some buts and ifs when released on an international player base. Cthulhu is a little more 'edgy' that way, but it's known that there is a need to improve on it. - Although Magic did take a long time to get it right too... I recently played an Ice Age Sealed Magic tourney, and the Ice Age templating was pretty bad.

This doesn't mean that Call of Cthulhu doesn't need to improve nor that noone cares though...

I generally prefer Cthulhu over Magic - there are just details in game design that are mutally exclusive, and I prefer most of the choices in Cthulhu, because it allows me the most choices per turn. Any kinks in the system will be ironed out eventually. Magic had more time to do this, so in some respects it may have a smoother gameplay. Magic suffers from The Law of the Braking Lead a lot, so given eventuality, Cthulhu will ultimately be the better game.