Memory lane
December 11th 2011 00:47
You left heaven waiting down the Dixie road.
-- Lee Greenwood
Long before Gatherer existed, the responsibility for maintaining online lists of Magic cards belonged to private individuals. There was one site in particular that I visited often in the early days of the Magic internet sphere. I can still type its web address by heart. Watch:
http:// www.jura. uni-tuebingen. de/ ~zxmsj04/ magic
The site is long gone from the “real” internet, but if you go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and paste that address (minus spaces) into the area provided, you can read most of it. Its design and graphics look very primitive by modern standards, and the list only goes up to Urza’s Legacy, but it’s still interesting as a historical exercise.
The most fascinating thing about that guy? He very rarely had anything negative to say about a card. Unlike the sardonic armchair experts who post card comments on Gatherer or Essential Magic, his “combos and interactions” sections were serious and focused on what a card was able to do, rather than what it wasn’t able to do. It’s a comparison that indicates an attitude shift that seems to have taken place sometime early in the last decade: cards are now often defined in negative terms, either by their mechanical limitations or by other cards that trump them.
It seems to go along with the shift towards a mechanics-based approach to all forms of gaming, the same generational shift that brought us such soul-destroying heartlessness as: powerleveling in Oblivion; accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of actually making Resident Evil 5’s and Batman: Arkham Asylum’s challenge modes look boring; and 19-page arguments about whether Morrigan is A tier or B tier. Its influence on the internet brought us to the current design and development paradigm, where Wizards of the Coast’s R & D people would rather make something powerful than something cool (note all the glaring flavor misses in Innistrad, which was supposed to represent a new era of flavor-based design). The remnants of BobG’s website are a relic of a rather more innocent, to use a term that’s often misused, way of playing, and one that, for all our sakes, I pray the internet doesn’t manage to destroy.
-- Lee Greenwood
Long before Gatherer existed, the responsibility for maintaining online lists of Magic cards belonged to private individuals. There was one site in particular that I visited often in the early days of the Magic internet sphere. I can still type its web address by heart. Watch:
http:// www.jura. uni-tuebingen. de/ ~zxmsj04/ magic
The site is long gone from the “real” internet, but if you go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and paste that address (minus spaces) into the area provided, you can read most of it. Its design and graphics look very primitive by modern standards, and the list only goes up to Urza’s Legacy, but it’s still interesting as a historical exercise.
The most fascinating thing about that guy? He very rarely had anything negative to say about a card. Unlike the sardonic armchair experts who post card comments on Gatherer or Essential Magic, his “combos and interactions” sections were serious and focused on what a card was able to do, rather than what it wasn’t able to do. It’s a comparison that indicates an attitude shift that seems to have taken place sometime early in the last decade: cards are now often defined in negative terms, either by their mechanical limitations or by other cards that trump them.
That’s why we don’t see cards like this any more.
It seems to go along with the shift towards a mechanics-based approach to all forms of gaming, the same generational shift that brought us such soul-destroying heartlessness as: powerleveling in Oblivion; accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of actually making Resident Evil 5’s and Batman: Arkham Asylum’s challenge modes look boring; and 19-page arguments about whether Morrigan is A tier or B tier. Its influence on the internet brought us to the current design and development paradigm, where Wizards of the Coast’s R & D people would rather make something powerful than something cool (note all the glaring flavor misses in Innistrad, which was supposed to represent a new era of flavor-based design). The remnants of BobG’s website are a relic of a rather more innocent, to use a term that’s often misused, way of playing, and one that, for all our sakes, I pray the internet doesn’t manage to destroy.
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