Partitions are Hard

A couple weeks ago Day9 was talking about partitions on stream in relation to Magic and Hearthstone. I just wanted to express my thoughts on the matter. This relates very closely to the earlier work I did on Inclusive versus Exclusive games. Essentially, Day9 was saying how it was interesting that effects in Hearthstone are not partitioned between classes. Multiple classes have weapons, have access to power/toughness boosts, etc. In Magic, effects are absolutely partitioned. Red is the only color with burn, Blue is the only color with counterspell, etc. I know you can go back far enough to have this not be true, but in the era of modern design they just don't make cards like Pyroblast anymore. There are some interesting aspects here that I don't think were explored in the conversation that spawned. The first is that while effects are more loosely distributed in Hearthstone, what each class has access to is absolute. There is no way to cast a Warlock spell as a Paladin. Its just impossible. In Magic, you lean on the mana system. You can make a Blue/Red deck if you want access to both burn spells and counterspells. So in Magic you can't proliferate effects since one of the main balancing points of the game is resource management and distribution. You have to build your deck in such a way to support the cards you want to play. Its like the difference between buying books in a bookstore or buying them online. When you walk into a bookstore you have to buy from what they have, but things are a bit cheaper overall. When you buy online your options go from the relatively small number of books a bookstore has to essentially anything you want, but its a bit more expensive in both money and time so you have to plan accordingly. In much the same way, if they don't print cards in Paladin to kill large creatures, then you just can't kill large creatures. If they don't print any cards in Green to kill creatures, then you have the option of making your deck a little more unstable to add in Black cards to do that job for you. Hearthstone tries to overcome this problem by having neutral cards, which leads me to my next point. Lets say for the sake of experiment that an expansion for both games is coming out and its 100 cards apiece. The Magic expansion would likely break down into 10 artifacts and 18 cards of each color. Multicolor cards screw with this a little, but not a lot since the balance of mana symbols would still be around this ratio. A Hearthstone expansion has to make a number of cards for each class, and neutral monsters. If you made 10 cards for each class, then you would only make 10 Neutral cards and you would be cutting out the game's mechanism for accessing effects that your class normally can't get. Therefore, you have to make many fewer class cards than you do neutral cards. So a lot of the power of a new release of Hearthstone is going to be in the neutral cards. Take the most recent release of GvG. Playing with that expansion felt like everyone was playing mechs, and the class you chose was just about the cards you were supporting your mechs with. That's the problem with having so few class cards in the system. They essentially become just flavoring the linear strategy of the day. Magic had a similar problem on the first trip to Mirrodin with affinity. Affinity was mostly colorless cards that you flavored with a few chosen colored cards that you wanted. Unlike Affinity, this pattern of play is not going to be limited to a single expansion for Hearthstone since the inherent need to have so many neutral cards and support so many classes dilutes the card pool, letting linear neutral decks run away with the meta-game every time there's a new release.

TLDR: Partitioning classes leads to situations where the waters are very muddy and strong linear strategies overcome the much smaller pool of class cards. Partitioning effects and then using a resource system ensures that the increased power of your deck comes at the cost of consistency.