How Mage Wars Solves the Tutoring Problem

One of the most disruptive common mechanics in card-based games is "tutoring": searching a deck or discard pile for a card to add to your hand. Tutoring interrupts the flow of a game in three ways:

1. If the player searches a randomized pile, they must reshuffle it afterward, which takes time.
2. If the player does not know what they want, they must spend time reading each card.
3. If the contents of a pile are public knowledge, players feel compelled to search it before deciding to tutor.

Most games that use tutoring suffer at least one of these problems. Mage Wars addresses all three with its simultaneous-preparation mechanic. This shows how to solve the tutoring problem: restrict it to a simultaneous phase and target a non-randomized pile. Tutoring is disruptive only when a player's private optimization time forces others to watch.

The defining feature of Mage Wars is that you have access to your entire "spellbook" of cards without relying on randomized draws, unlike other dueling card games. Each round during the planning phase, you search and prepare two cards from your spellbook to play that round. If you decide not to play them, you return them. Since you don't need randomized draws, you never need to shuffle your spellbook.

To solve the problem of waiting for a player to read each card, Mage Wars makes its planning phase simultaneous. It doesn't matter if you take a long time to decide which cards to choose because your opponent focuses on their own spell preparation, not watching you think. Players may finish at different times, but the delay is less than searching in turns.

Restricting access to the spellbook to the planning phase removes the incentive to think about spells you might want to tutor. Since the planning phase happens every round, you know you will search your spellbook, so there is no reason to do so preemptively.

Most games fail by allowing tutoring to interrupt gameplay at arbitrary times, forcing everybody to watch the active player solve a private optimization problem. The major innovation of Mage Wars is to do everybody's tutoring simultaneously in the planning phase. Simultaneous phases are perfect for mechanics that require heavy private optimization.