unintuitive design solutions in MtG

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>>51430920
The mechanics are built about procedural interaction at an autistic level. Until you understand the stack you can't even begin to comprehend the true amount of interactivity being exploited by the cardpool as a whole.

>Sickness being inherent opens up design space
>"restores health after combat" it's after endstep and that's very important
>lolol thinking mtg is worried about clutter, clearly never seeing enchantress go off in legacy

>>51430920
Having summoning sickness as opposed to every creature entering play tapped helps to slow down offense without hindering a player's ability to mount a defense. As a rule, creatures you just played can block, but not attack, so setting up blockers is faster than setting up attackers. Seems a pretty sound reason for doing it to me.

And I fail to see what the issue with creatures healing at end of turn is. It's not terribly simulationist, I suppose, but then very little of the game is -- it's a card game, after all, lots of abstraction involved. Seems more an arbitrary design decision as far as how survivable you want creatures to be, basically.

>>51431285
I guess the healing thing feels weird to me as a more RPG-centric person, or things like Advance Wars, where you can whittle down an opponent's large units through attrition, etc

I get why summoning sickness is there, but I don't really understand "how" someone would look at the prototype of the game and be "oh, the solution is to have this half-state for the first turn"

>>51431086
>Enchantress
Try to explain a midlevel player that dredge IS NOT a trigger and a replacement effect instead.

>>51431285
>>51431358
It's best not to think of it as healing at all, really. Creatures in MtG don't HAVE a "health" stat. They have a toughness stat, and I think that difference in name implies it's not about wounds and injuries but rather the ability to avoid them. If my creature with 1 power is blocked by a creature with 2 toughness, if I try to get into a simulationist view of imagining what the fight looked like, I see my creature failing to hit or seriously harm the other creature. But the fight tired out the opposing creature some, or made it use up some of its magic, or however you'd like to imagine it (this represents the fact that the "damage" sticks around until the turn ends, even though it's not literally damage in my mind). If I then cast a spell that deals a point of damage to that creature, it's too tired/weakened to survive what normally wouldn't be sufficient to kill it. But once it rests (IE, the turn ends) it's not tired anymore (in other words, the damage goes away).

This idea is supported in the game by the fact that damage isn't permanent but -1/-1 counters (which could represent injuries that actually weaken the creature) are. If I deal 1 damage to a creature and it survives, in fluff terms I might have failed to hit it at all but I tired it out now so it won't be able to dodge the Lightning Bolt I'm about to shoot at it. But if I give the creature time to rest, it'll be back up to full fighting capacity. Meanwhile, if I put a -1/-1 counter on it (fluffed as breaking a limb or something), that damage is going to stick around even as it rests from turn to turn.