Myth remembered
May 27th 2010 05:46
We’ve had a couple of blocks worth of rarer-than-rare mythic planeswalkers, maelstroms, and dragon riders, and the analyses and retrospectives are going up all over the place. Every angle has been discussed – well, almost every. I’m surprised nobody has made the obvious comparison: to Alpha.
There is one mythic card in every eighty or so boosters, strongly suggesting Mark Rosewater intended us to play with Jace, Gideon, Elspeth, and their friends the same way Richard Garfield intended us to play with Black Lotus: luck into them after a stopover at K-Mart, put them in a deck, tear up Dominia when they’re in your hand, and hopefully have something else to cast when they aren’t. Players raised in the “deck optimization” mindset, however, tend to react in only one way when they find a card whose effects they like: find four.
With Jace’s price in particular pushing triple digits based largely on his usefulness in Standard, it’s easy to wonder if Wizards of the Coast miscalculated. I tend to think, however, that encouraging creative play (in which I include not only “I have one Mind Sculptor. What else can I play that helps my deck in a similar way?” but also Planechase- or Archenemy-style pseudo-roleplaying) is never a waste. I consider the mythic rarity a resounding success partly because it extends the flavor elements outside the boundaries of the card. Nicol Bolas is the last elder dragon; Elspeth is a princess and a knight; both are movers and shakers of the Multiverse, and neither should be in every second booster pack.
Wizards of the Coast didn’t make Jace expensive; we did. They aren’t messing up the mythic rarity; we are. But there is still a way out: to step off the strategy forums for a minute, remember that the point of a game is not to win but to play, and do that - just that.
There is one mythic card in every eighty or so boosters, strongly suggesting Mark Rosewater intended us to play with Jace, Gideon, Elspeth, and their friends the same way Richard Garfield intended us to play with Black Lotus: luck into them after a stopover at K-Mart, put them in a deck, tear up Dominia when they’re in your hand, and hopefully have something else to cast when they aren’t. Players raised in the “deck optimization” mindset, however, tend to react in only one way when they find a card whose effects they like: find four.
With Jace’s price in particular pushing triple digits based largely on his usefulness in Standard, it’s easy to wonder if Wizards of the Coast miscalculated. I tend to think, however, that encouraging creative play (in which I include not only “I have one Mind Sculptor. What else can I play that helps my deck in a similar way?” but also Planechase- or Archenemy-style pseudo-roleplaying) is never a waste. I consider the mythic rarity a resounding success partly because it extends the flavor elements outside the boundaries of the card. Nicol Bolas is the last elder dragon; Elspeth is a princess and a knight; both are movers and shakers of the Multiverse, and neither should be in every second booster pack.
Wizards of the Coast didn’t make Jace expensive; we did. They aren’t messing up the mythic rarity; we are. But there is still a way out: to step off the strategy forums for a minute, remember that the point of a game is not to win but to play, and do that - just that.
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