Orb Of Insight

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Retrospectives, part 4 - Legions

Retrospectives, part 3 - Legends

Retrospectives, part 2 - Future Sight

Retrospectives, part 1 - Ravnica: City of Guilds

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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?

Must just have been Tom Haddy and the other judges at Melbourne High, then.

Magic tournaments have always had annoying aspects to them: waiting for stallers and illiterates to finish their games before you could go on to the next round was always my least favorite. But Melbourne’s pre-releases have gotten a lot worse since I’ve been going to them. It doesn’t help that they used to be at places like RMIT’s main cafeteria or the Abbotsford Convent, where you were shielded from the elements and there were things to look at and places to eat, and are now in a spare room at a private school where all the doors are locked and the Jam Factory is just far enough away to make you miss the next round if you walk over.

It’s more than that. We used to have door prizes – for about two sets, until the organizers apparently decided it was too much trouble. We used to have representatives of stores set up at tables where you could buy, sell, and trade – until Chris and Isaac decided Meta Games was just for them and their friends. We used to not even feel the time passing – until some of the players at these things decided that conversation distracted them from “optimizing” a deck whose contents are based 100% on luck.

I’m a longtime player with a huge investment in Magic, and even I am fed up. Can you imagine a new player turning up last Saturday? What would someone like that decide Magic is like? You don’t need an MBA to know that running tournaments as though they were a day camp for high school students is bad marketing. It’s time for everyone who’s a serious fan to vote with their feet and with their money, and not give any of it to Russell Alphey or any other Melbourne pre-release organizer until they decide to treat us like serious fans.

“I leave it in your hands.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen

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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)

As we all know, the non-serious Magic expansions Unglued and Unhinged were printed only in English. The ostensible reason for this was that the humor in the cards would not have translated well into other languages. But even regular Magic sets contain English humor – and other things that don’t translate so well into Chinese or Russian.

Consider, for example, the Tenth Edition uncommon No Rest for the Wicked.

The title refers to a well-known English proverb. I have no idea whether other languages even have an equivalent. The Spanish version, for example, has a title line that says “No hay reposo para los malvados,” which makes it one of the few card names that is a complete sentence, and one which is not even a proverb in that language.

Then there’s Guildpact. The Izzet guild’s defining identity was “impulsive learning,” indicated in many card names by either strange compound words or pre-existing words that just sound strange.

Schismotivate is basically “schism” plus “motivate,” which you can just invent in English and have most people understand what it means. At least the basic parts of this word exist in other European languages, but even so, it was transplanted nearly directly for most languages. Interestingly, some European versions of this card add one or two letters to make its name instead “schizophrenia” plus “motivate,” which suggests that the adaptation may have been based partly on the flavor text.

Finally, even serious sets always contain at least a couple of cards with humorous flavor text or presentations. One of the most famous and facepalm-inducing is the Urza’s Saga and Planechase uncommon Goblin Offensive.

But this card only works because the English words “offensive” meaning “attack,” and “offensive” meaning “offensive,” happen to be spelled and pronounced the same way. What if you need to print this card in a language that doesn’t have that quirk? Should you use the first meaning in the name, and change the flavor text? Should you change the name to something closer to whatever the equivalent joke in that language would be? I don’t know the answer, and I wonder what Wizards of the Coast would do if they ever reprinted the card in other languages.

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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?”
-- Five Man Electrical Band

I think the card Troll Ascetic is pretty cool, but it’s probably a good thing it’s no longer legal in Standard. As little as I understand some of Wizards of the Coast’s game design decisions, I do understand what the noted Magic writer Brian Moorhead was talking about when he commented that Zendikar’s Day of Judgment is even better than Wrath of God when you play your own regenerating creatures. Can you imagine how obnoxious a card like Troll Ascetic would be if even the resident four-mana white sorcery couldn’t get rid of it?

I have a more interesting Troll Ascetic story, though. The last time I played against one, the guy who controlled it blocked and activated its regeneration. As we moved to the end of combat, he picked up the Troll and set it aside, near his deck.

“Wait,” I protested, “I thought you regenerated?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “but when it does, you remove it from the game and then bring it back.”

“No, you remove it from combat.”

“. . . Really?”

“Yes!” I said. I peered over at his card, a copy of the Mirrodin version. Playing a hunch, I asked, “Do you have a Tenth Edition version? Look at the reminder text.”

The guy wasn’t dumb. He wasn’t a terrible player. But he was relatively new to the game, and had learned how regeneration works from reading reminder text. When the text wasn’t in front of him, he tried to remember what it said, and accidentally conflated one phrase with a similar (and common) one. This is the inevitable consequence of the dreadfully detailed reminder text used in modern Magic: instead of actually learning what abilities do, players can come to rely on always having the ability written out in front of them, and stumble when they don’t.

(And of course, there are situations where even having the reminder text in front of you doesn’t help.)

When can you suspend an Aeon Chronicler if you control Teferi? Answer at the end.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a week; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. By writing reminder text on cards, Wizards of the Coast is not only cutting off opportunities for flavor exploration. They’re giving us a fish. To build a community of players who are interested in the game, appreciative of its strategic nuances, and unlikely to reach overload after less than two years, they should be teaching us to fish – by taking the reminder text off the cards.

Answer to rules question
If you have Teferi, you can suspend the Aeon Chronicler (or any creature with the ability) whenever you could play an instant. The suspend ability replaces playing the creature normally, and can be done any time you could play the creature normally, which is modified by Teferi . . . but this isn’t written on either of the cards.

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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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Back to the future

October 30th 2009 23:43

It’s an odd time in the Magic world, the gap between the release of the last set and the beginning of previews for the next one. Some people are busy making new competitive decks, or still getting around to sorting the last of their Zendikar cards (guilty as charged). Some people are keeping an eye on new trademarks to see when Wizards of the Coast files new ones.

Yes, really. A few weeks ago a keen-eyed observer noticed two new Magic-related names: Mirrodin Pure and New Phyrexia. Usually when you uncover the name of a Magic set in development, you have to try and guess what it’s going to be about. In this case, though, both Mirrodin and Phyrexia are settings that the game has visited in the past, and people already have sort of an idea of what they involve

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The secret life

October 11th 2009 04:37

Developer interviews are a lot like the director’s commentary on a DVD, and equally variable. Sometimes they actually have something to say, and sometimes they’re the ones for Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season (“So, in this scene Buffy and Spike are sitting on the steps. This is the second-last scene of the episode”). There is precious little to learn in the one for Zendikar; I for one don’t care about what isn’t in the set, and I simply don’t agree that Time Spiral was “too cutesy-complicated” or whatever other Pittsburgh slang Aaron Forsythe uses to describe it. But I thought it was interesting that their only answer to the question about the old-school cards randomly inserted in Zendikar boosters was, and I quote

“Some combination of ‘I don't know’ and ‘We don't discuss collation

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Analyze this

October 4th 2009 03:35

To every thing there is a season, and for every new Magic expansion, there is the card assessment article series, at an average of 1.5 per website. Depending on your perspective, these are either an opportunity to find out what the game’s sharpest minds think about the new product, or the time when the internet’s biggest know-it-alls decide what you should be playing with.