Don't try this at home
July 18th 2008 05:50
When people go to buy a new car, they tend to take them more or less as they are. No-one says, “Y’know, I have some ideas about the right way to make these things! I’d put a fin on the roof and lose the seat belts altogether.” Most people are able to understand that designing and building a car is a specialty field, which they are most likely not experts in, and that if they tried to do it themselves, the results would be fatal. Unfortunately, it has escaped some people’s notice that game design is also a specialty field.
At some point, somebody overheard a fact about Wizards of the Coast’s card design department: most of them played Magic as a hobby in the past, and some even won early Pro Tours. Their interpretation of this fact was that “anybody like us can be a Magic designer!” The fact that those same designers also have PhDs in fields like marketing, English literature, and electrical engineering seems to have escaped them. As a result, people have set up sub-forums dedicated to “custom card creation” in nearly every Magic message board on the internet. A typical custom card creation forum has dozens of pages and hundreds of posts, and maybe three card ideas that could actually be printed. Most of them are either hideously overpowered (like Equistrike above) or ugly jumbles of tiny, overly-complicated rules text (like, er, Equistrike above). And then they wonder why Wizards of the Coast doesn’t advertize open positions in card design.
Designing awful cards is bad, but it doesn’t actually affect anybody, unless you happen into the wrong sub-forum or your friend is a wannabe with a color printer. Some people design awful formats and game variants, and then insist everyone play them. If they’re persistent enough they spread them all the way across the country and harangue local stores into hosting them, sometimes at the expense of real formats (y’know, the ones designed by people whose job it is to design them). This happened right here in Australia – if you hear someone talking about Highlander, that’s what they mean.
One day, a couple of Magic players from Canberra took a break from drinking themselves to death and decided it might be interesting to play in a format where every card was restricted. That’s right: other than basic lands, a Highlander deck can only contain one of each card with each name. Hence the name Highlander: there can be only one. Get it?
Yeah, I’ve never found it funny either.
The problem is that the format is alternately frighteningly weak and frighteningly broken. The restriction of every card is crippling in the abstract. Decks can mitigate its impact by using cards with similar in-game functions.
Mogg Fanatic and Kird Ape are among the best creature cards ever printed. Duergar Assailant is solid, but still not close to the level of the other two. Yet in a Highlander creature deck, you may find yourself compelled to run all of them – with no guarantee that you will have any of them when you need it. You’re essentially drawing blind, in a deck whose statistics predict you will draw any of these cards even less often than you would in the least consistent non-Highlander deck (with, say, two of each).
The more effective way to get around Highlander’s restrictions is to play cards that search for whatever card you want and give it to you. There are a depressingly large number of those.
Getting whatever card you want whenever you want it is better than getting one random card with the correct ability in the broad sense, but only in Highlander – in real Magic, a good creature deck that had four each of Kird Ape and Mogg Fanatic and was thus assured of having an early game would come blazing out of the gates and run roughshod over a deck that depended on “tutoring” for answers. This means that you can’t apply otherwise-universal principles of Magic strategy to Highlander, which in turn has led to some rude awakenings when people accepted an invitation to a “friendly” Highlander tournament.
I probably wouldn’t feel as bad if the format’s caretakers seemed to be concerned about trying to balance it. But instead of banning abusive cards the way most constructed formats do, they have adopted a points system where degenerate cards are assigned a certain number of points and each deck has a maximum number it can include. Unsurprisingly, this does very little to prevent unfair combos and decks from emerging.
You wouldn’t drive a car built by amateurs. You wouldn’t buy stocks chosen by someone you just met on the street. A game is a product the same way a car is. So why would you play with cards or formats that weren’t designed by professionals? Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of their expertise? They approach their work with balance, fairness, and fun (yes, fun) in mind. Forum dwellers and the current caretakers of Highlander (who happen to be the staff of Melbourne’s Meta Games on Peel Street) approach their work only with themselves in mind.
Fail.
At some point, somebody overheard a fact about Wizards of the Coast’s card design department: most of them played Magic as a hobby in the past, and some even won early Pro Tours. Their interpretation of this fact was that “anybody like us can be a Magic designer!” The fact that those same designers also have PhDs in fields like marketing, English literature, and electrical engineering seems to have escaped them. As a result, people have set up sub-forums dedicated to “custom card creation” in nearly every Magic message board on the internet. A typical custom card creation forum has dozens of pages and hundreds of posts, and maybe three card ideas that could actually be printed. Most of them are either hideously overpowered (like Equistrike above) or ugly jumbles of tiny, overly-complicated rules text (like, er, Equistrike above). And then they wonder why Wizards of the Coast doesn’t advertize open positions in card design.
Designing awful cards is bad, but it doesn’t actually affect anybody, unless you happen into the wrong sub-forum or your friend is a wannabe with a color printer. Some people design awful formats and game variants, and then insist everyone play them. If they’re persistent enough they spread them all the way across the country and harangue local stores into hosting them, sometimes at the expense of real formats (y’know, the ones designed by people whose job it is to design them). This happened right here in Australia – if you hear someone talking about Highlander, that’s what they mean.
That’s almost what I was talking about… except even less fun.
One day, a couple of Magic players from Canberra took a break from drinking themselves to death and decided it might be interesting to play in a format where every card was restricted. That’s right: other than basic lands, a Highlander deck can only contain one of each card with each name. Hence the name Highlander: there can be only one. Get it?
Yeah, I’ve never found it funny either.
The problem is that the format is alternately frighteningly weak and frighteningly broken. The restriction of every card is crippling in the abstract. Decks can mitigate its impact by using cards with similar in-game functions.
Mogg Fanatic and Kird Ape are among the best creature cards ever printed. Duergar Assailant is solid, but still not close to the level of the other two. Yet in a Highlander creature deck, you may find yourself compelled to run all of them – with no guarantee that you will have any of them when you need it. You’re essentially drawing blind, in a deck whose statistics predict you will draw any of these cards even less often than you would in the least consistent non-Highlander deck (with, say, two of each).
The more effective way to get around Highlander’s restrictions is to play cards that search for whatever card you want and give it to you. There are a depressingly large number of those.
Getting whatever card you want whenever you want it is better than getting one random card with the correct ability in the broad sense, but only in Highlander – in real Magic, a good creature deck that had four each of Kird Ape and Mogg Fanatic and was thus assured of having an early game would come blazing out of the gates and run roughshod over a deck that depended on “tutoring” for answers. This means that you can’t apply otherwise-universal principles of Magic strategy to Highlander, which in turn has led to some rude awakenings when people accepted an invitation to a “friendly” Highlander tournament.
I probably wouldn’t feel as bad if the format’s caretakers seemed to be concerned about trying to balance it. But instead of banning abusive cards the way most constructed formats do, they have adopted a points system where degenerate cards are assigned a certain number of points and each deck has a maximum number it can include. Unsurprisingly, this does very little to prevent unfair combos and decks from emerging.
Legacy: banned. Highlander: legal.
You wouldn’t drive a car built by amateurs. You wouldn’t buy stocks chosen by someone you just met on the street. A game is a product the same way a car is. So why would you play with cards or formats that weren’t designed by professionals? Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of their expertise? They approach their work with balance, fairness, and fun (yes, fun) in mind. Forum dwellers and the current caretakers of Highlander (who happen to be the staff of Melbourne’s Meta Games on Peel Street) approach their work only with themselves in mind.
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