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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Comment by Alacar Leoricar
Comment by Anonymous
Except that as long as there have been cars there has been hot-rodding. If you've never heard of this, I suggest you look it up. People like to do things their own way, personalize them. Computer cases, video game systems, video games, cars, board games, houses, movies, and web pages. It's just life sir.
Comment by Soronthebeast
Also, you seems to act as if the people at wizards are Gods or something. That no mortal could hope to achieve the level of creativity they have. Or that you need a PhD to make a magic card. (I mean, I am in a Phd program, does that count?)
My guess is that you played the FCC and lost, and are now mad about it. Some people like to have fun with magic, get over it.
Comment by Cantripmancer
But I have a confession: I am the arrogant, pompous, pathetic fool who created Equistrike, a card that, I concur, has only a miniscule chance of ever finding its way into print and probably has a more elegant execution if it did.
Fortunately for me, I wasn't attempting to seek gainful employment from the makers of the game, proposing that my card is any better than any given real card, or suggesting that Magic would be a better world if my card were the norm. I was competing with a group of like-minded amateur card designers who enjoy stretching their mental muscles and attempting to explore areas of a game that we enjoy playing. The competitive edge lends some excitement, but our "big prize"? A month of getting recognized as the "best (amateur (on that particular site (for that particular competition)))" and a digital trophy. Woo. I pursue the mental exercise out of a love for the game.
Much like some have mentioned above, I've printed and played with my cards a few times, usually to discover (without surprise) that many of my ideas are overpowered or overly complicated. I'm ok with that; it helps me learn and gives me insight into some of the decisions made by the "real" card designers. My friends get a chuckle out of the experience and we go back to playing real Magic.
I also find your thoughts on Highlander a little sad, as well. The concept of an alternate format is to create a different environment than that supported by the company that makes the game. Alternate formats create different trains of thought and allow an individual to see cards in new light. Seeing as how many alternate (but officially unsupported) formats are created, suggested, outlined, and recommended by the writers hosted by the site created by the company that created the game...I don't really see how you can justify saying that Wizards only wants Magic to be played one way: their way.
In any case, good luck on broadening your horizons...you're going to need it.
Comment by MP13
It is obvious that you have an inability to look at a topic from more than just one narrow viewpoint. This ultimately leads to a poorly constructed post which can't focus on a topic while simultaneously drilling into each reader how you prefer to criticize those who enjoy an aspect of the game that your creativity dream team also acknowledge as essential.
Obvious Example:
According to your post, your viewpoint on gaming is the only one that matters. It seems you believe that everyone who reads this will agree with you. This school of thought will lead you in directions that, should you step outside of the box, you would never consider.
Instead of displaying a lack of tolerance (and subsequently a lack of creativity since Maddox was the grandfather of intolerant blogging), you expand yourself and accept that other people have just as much fun for other reasons. Just because they do, doesn't mean they feel a superiority to wizards or anyone else. It is merely a way to have fun.
Cheers.
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Twilight Kiwi
Not everybody who plays Magic is concerned solely with making the strongest deck possible, full of playsets of the most powerful cards. And I don't know about you, but I certainly can't afford playsets of chase rares or dual lands.
I fail to see how this can be labeled "constructive criticism." The author is trashing a hobby that he thinks is stupid and pointless, and a format he doesn't like to play. Nobody's forcing him to participate in either activity (unless someone did? Maybe he was traumatized?).
This is just a nerd making fun of nerds he thinks are lower on the totem pole.
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Anonymous