Orb Of Insight

Orb of Insight

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Retrospectives, part 4 - Legions

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“He forgot that it’s not about badges and rank,
It’s supposed to be about the filing!”
-- from “How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back,” Futurama season 2

To some people, Magic is like a 1,000-piece Ravensberger puzzle: there is only one “right answer,” usually the best deck in the format. To others, Magic is like dancing: make the right step at the right time, and try and recover from any mistakes. And to other people yet, Magic is like base jumping: it doesn’t matter so much where you land, as long as you got a rush out of falling.

But to me, Magic is more like astronomy. We all walk along with our eyes fixed on a particular region of the sky, looking for the one thing that will make it all worthwhile, be it dark matter, or a Pro Tour trophy, or whatever. We look so hard for the perfect card, deck, or game that we don’t realize we’re sifting through – and often discarding – stuff that might be interesting, inspiring, or just really cool. Did you know that without the moon, there may have been no life on Earth? That the Path to Exile Gateway promo is a little like a scene from Tristan and Isolde?

Did you ever notice that when Chandra casts spells, her hair becomes fire – it doesn’t catch on fire, it is fire? Or that the sun sings? These little realizations are as much a part of the universe as anything that wins a Nobel Prize or a Pro Tour, and often much more profound.

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When will the hammer fall?

February 24th 2010 06:28

“Stop! Hammer time!”
-- MC Hammer

Magic slang, which I have in the past warned you against using too much, nonetheless managed to produce one phrase I actually like: banhammer. When a card is banned or restricted from a constructed format, people speak of “the banhammer falling on it.” You may note that we haven’t had cause to say that for a while now. The last cards banned in Standard were the core of the Mirrodin-era Affinity deck: Ancient Den, Seat of the Synod, Vault of Whispers, Great Furnace, Tree of Tales, and Arcbound Ravager, which faced the hammer in mid-2005. The last card banned in Extended was Sensei’s Divining Top, in September 2008.

Fun fact about me #395: I own zero copies of this card that are not from From the Vault: Exiled.

Wizards of the Coast has what seems to be a clear policy on banning cards. It is, after all, a serious step, a de facto admission that a certain card should not exist and that gameplay (at least, competitive gameplay) is better without it. If a card is some combination of drastically overpowered, drastically overused in competitive play, and/or drastically disruptive to running tournaments (like Sensei’s Divining Top, which pro players used to stretch out games where they were ahead and generally waste time), it is a candidate to be removed from the environment.

Fine. So why have there been no cards banned in Standard since 2005?

After all, both Umezawa’s Jitte and BItterblossom were both drastically overpowered and drastically overused. By the numbers, Alara Reborn’s Bloodbraid Elf is even more popular than the Affinity offenders. Arid Mesa and the other rare lands from Zendikar can be used to waste time almost as effectively as Sensei’s Divining Top, since they require their user to shuffle their deck, and people’s definition of “sufficiently randomized” becomes more stringent as the time left in the round decreases.

Fun fact about me #396: I don’t play in high-level tournaments, because high-level tournament decks are designed to be unfair by definition.

Affinity was banned largely because of popular demand, but popular demand was never strong enough for Umezawa’s Jitte or the Faerie deck. Those decks also had eloquent advocates and lobbyists in the community, who overstated their favorite cards’ beatability while downplaying their format-warping properties. Advocates of a more fair or balanced tournament environment have allowed their opponents to smear them as bad players or “scrubs,” while failing to point out that powergamers enjoy playing with overpowered cards precisely because they are overpowered and thus better for humiliating their opponents.

Now, as I alluded to above, I no longer have a personal stake in the tournament environment. Magic, to my mind, is more like art which there is a way to play with than a game with illustrated pieces. But if you are not quite ready to come over to my way of seeing things, and you care about this problem, you need to take action. You need to learn from your opponents, and you need to learn from the world outside Magic as well, because there is no shortage of examples of terrible messages which succeeded because of their superior marketing. And you, in fact, have a good message: fairness. Don't you think Luis Scott-Vargas and Chris Jobin are going to look like even bigger douchebags when they find themselves lined up opposing fairness?

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The rule of 572

February 11th 2010 01:43

“To maintain your confidence in the Magic game as a collectible, we've created this Magic: The Gathering card reprint policy. It explains why we reprint cards and lists which cards from past Magic sets will never be reprinted.”
-- Introduction to the Magic: the Gathering Reprint Policy and Reserved List

Like me, you are undoubtedly waiting impatiently for Duel Decks: Phyrexia vs. the Coalition. Like me, you may have seen a certain blurry photograph which, though most people haven’t realized it yet, will shake the Magic world to its core:

Yes, the card on the left is more than 95% certainly the wildly popular Urza’s Destiny rare Phyrexian Negator, and yes, Phyrexian Negator is still on the Reserved List.

A fun blast from the past, or a flagrant violation of a promise made to collectors? Before you tell me your answer, there’s another question you need to consider: does Twincast violate the Reprint Policy?

If you don’t get the reference, don’t worry. It’s to a red card so old, most people at your local store have probably never even seen one, much less played with it.

The Reprint Policy states that a reserved card will never be reprinted in a “functionally identical form.” The definition of functionally identical is, for these purposes, very narrow – it includes rules text and color and mana cost. If even one of these is different, even by one word, even by one colorless mana, the card is permitted under the Reprint Policy. Twincast does exactly the same thing as Fork (minus the color-changing clause, which is no longer as relevant as it used to be), for the same converted mana cost. It even has similar elements in its artwork – but by changing the little fireball mana symbols to droplets of water, it is kosher. Does it violate the spirit of the Reprint Policy? Probably. Should it have been printed anyway?

Here’s another conundrum for you. Does Clone violate the Reprint Policy?

Harmless-looking little card, isn’t it? But what most of us forget now is that until a few months before the release of the Onslaught expansion, Clone was also on the Reserved List, along with a host of other uncommons from Magic’s early expansions. Wizards of the Coast unilaterally removed all uncommons from the Reserved List, partly so they could put Clone in Onslaught just because it was cool. This paved the way for the return of other uncommons from the dawn of Magic, notably Psionic Blast in Time Spiral. Could this have been interpreted as a backhand to anyone uneasy about the value of their Limited Edition Clones and Psionic Blasts? Perhaps. Should it have been done anyway?

Most of us are concerned at least a little bit with the value of our cards. But why would the existence of new versions of popular cards affect the old version? The original Phyrexian Negator still has amazing art by John Zeleznik. It still has the Urza’s Destiny expansion symbol, and it is still in the old card frame, which may seem commonplace to old people like me but will fade from memory and become a novelty as time goes by. How do you know that people won’t play with the new Duel Decks, learn there’s another version of the Negator, and actively seek it out?

Don’t cry for the Reserved List. It’s already dead, buried, and forgotten.

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Abandonment

February 5th 2010 01:06

Remember when you showed up at the Worldwake pre-release this weekend past, and the organizers put you in an un-air conditioned room with only a couple of posters, made you sit still at little desks, and ordered you to “stop talking while the man at the front of the room is talking,” sending you on a long, psychotropic flashback to the hellish years of high school?

No

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Beyond Babel

January 19th 2010 02:20

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
-- Genesis 11:6-7 (King James version)

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Shut up and read

January 8th 2010 02:04

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign

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Quest for ancient (2006) secrets

December 21st 2009 23:49

I have here four of the last unopened Time Spiral boosters in Melbourne. One of the retailers I usually buy boosters from is all out, and the other (where I got these) has only three left. If I go back next week, they’ll probably still be there; 2006 is generally considered kind of old already, even though the cards are no less cool and no less fun. With Time Spiral, there’s also the problem that some newer players didn’t get all the references to older cards.

This one isn’t even from that long ago.

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Hell week

December 6th 2009 01:42

MagicTheGathering.com just finished “Spike Week.” If you haven’t been reading their content for a long time, that won’t even sound like English to you. The design team sometimes looks at players in terms of psychographics, specifically the reasons why they play Magic. This helps them decide which cards are likely to appeal to which players. Spike is the more competitive of the three psychographic profiles, referring to someone who gains enjoyment from winning games and, often, playing in tournaments. As such, Mark Rosewater had a section near the beginning of his article on Monday, encouraging Spike to be Spike:

“It's just Spikes? Good. Here's what I want to say. I know Spikes get derided a lot for taking things too seriously. ‘It's just a game’, they say. Exactly, it is a game. And what's the point of a game? What are you supposed to do by the very nature of a game's design? Win. There's no medal for the runner who has the most interesting gait or Poker bracelet for the player who has the best time. The point of any game is to prove your dominance by following the rules and achieving the objective, to be the best. That's what you're doing. You need make no excuses for doing what games were created to do. Embrace your Spikeness and make no apologies

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Don't you know about the word?

November 29th 2009 02:40

I’ve discussed Magic players’ predilection for annoying jargon once or twice, but I was reminded of the problem in Borders the other day. There was a book on sale which purported to help you uncover hidden or deeper meaning in the names of people, places, and things. Did you know that Clint Eastwood is an anagram of “Old West Action?” Yeah, I didn’t think it was relevant either.

But like a Rihanna song, the idea was stuck in my head, whether I liked it or not. Sifting through even one expansion for anagrams would take way too long, even for me, but my thoughts turned to one particular set that is everyone’s favorite

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The beginning

November 15th 2009 00:31

“In the beginning, Magic design was very much about the individual card. That is, attention was paid to make each card as rich as possible. The cards were flavorful, evocative, and created a sense of awe . . . The downside of this type of design is that it sacrificed larger connectivity. The color pie, the rules, templating, etc. all suffered from the problem of each issue being decided card by card.”
-- Mark Rosewater, State of Design 2005 article

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