Feature shock
November 10th 2008 03:56
Is Magic at this point? It’s rapidly getting there - if it isn't already. At the time of writing, Magic’s comprehensive rules were longer than the Constitution of the United States (including all amendments). They include things related to the structure of turns and the procedures of playing the game, but also entries that explain keyword abilities in detail, the “layer” procedure for determining what a creature’s abilities are if several effects are applied at once, plus a couple that don’t seem to serve any useful purpose whatsoever (“Creature abilities can be either beneficial or detrimental.” Oh, really?).
The nature of the game led, in a sense, to this point. Back in the Limited Edition, the rulebook and the back of the starter deck box promised a “multiverse of ever-changing adventures,” and the easiest way for Research and Development to do that is to provide new abilities and interactions. Even judging by competitive play, which tends to be more narrow and utilize a very small proportion of the cards available, gameplay has changed tremendously over the years, due to what abilities were printed and what sorts of decks they lent themselves to.
But so many new abilities need rules to govern them, and Magic’s practice for making these rules is explicit and detailed entries in the aforementioned comprehensive document. This is, again, completely understandable, as in Magic the rules are the game. If you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons and you don’t feel like rolling a second die to check whether that 20 your friend just rolled dealt critical damage, and just say that it does, the only difference is that you’ll get critical hits slightly more often. But it won’t affect the storytelling side of the game, and the players will still progress towards finding the Master Clock of Time. The only difference will be the details of what they did on the way there, which are generally of secondary importance. Fudging Magic’s rules is more like playing poker and saying “Well, I can’t remember what Jacks are worth, so I’ll make them the lowest card, under 2s.” The whole game falls apart.
The real problem comes when the card pool becomes as big as it has (more than 9,000 unique cards, at last count). Even the most broad-minded designers who were the biggest fans of Vintage or unrestricted multiplayer can’t keep track of how every new ability is going to interact with every past ability. The best they can do is keep other cards in the same set or block, or sometimes Standard or Extended, in mind. In fact, those two formats were invented with the intention of minimizing unforeseen interactions. As long as those remain the major formats for competitive play, their players won’t have to worry too much about feature creep.
Mixing cards like these is a little like smoking on an oil rig. You can do it if you really want to, but you might not like the results.
Many people, though, don’t adhere to any particular format’s deckbuilding restrictions, and the problems posed by feature creep are both clear and present. Unfortunately, there are few good answers in sight. There is no way to impose format restrictions or avoidance of complicated keywords and single cards on the casual world. Further wholesale changes and simplifications to the rules in the style of Magic’s Sixth Edition or the changes applied between the third and fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons are probably unavoidable - the question is, I believe, not of "if" but of "when."
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