No direction home
February 16th 2012 04:19
Without Earth to look back to always, without Earth to set up a god of the past, they will establish a galactic empire.
-- Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire
There’s a fact about the Call of Cthulhu living card game that remains not particularly well-known outside of its own fanbase: it started off as a collectible card game, and was distributed and designed much like Magic. Its designers changed it midstream, both to improve balance issues and provide an easy access point for new players. Increasingly, I find myself wondering whether it would be advantageous for Magic to do something similar.
Not necessarily the part about switching to the LCG model; the current format seems to be successful, and despite various complaints, players mainly seem to accept the rarity and distribution structure. But as for the other part . . . Magic is huge, and inconsistently designed. If you take it up as of Dark Ascension, sooner or later you’ll become aware of the fact that there are 56 other expert-level expansions, plus Planechase and Archenemy, plus the Un- sets, plus the Duel Decks, plus Commander; oh, and not all of them use the same card face, or the same wording for the rules text, even when they have the same abilities.
To a certain extent this is what Standard is for, but as we’ve seen many times, its competitive nature and short rotation schedule make it less than ideal for promoting a long-term fan base. Besides, cards may rotate but are never truly gone; Magic’s mistakes and successes alike cast a long shadow over modern design and play. Few people on the internet assess Cancel or Deprive on their own merits; they’re always “worse than Counterspell.” Rootbound Crag isn’t a beautiful and elegant dual land; it’s strictly worse than Taiga. As long as Magic remains nominally one continuity, unbroken from Alpha to Avacyn Restored with only arbitrary divisions for tournament convenience, this is how cards will be assessed, and how they will be designed, too.
However, if Magic were to have a continuity break, a real reboot, it would have to change almost everything. The card faces might have to be re-examined again: Planar Chaos’ timeshifted card frame has a lot of fans, and may be more inclusive due to its ease of reading even by the color blind. It would probably require at least a year of serious internal discussion and reform of design practices, and a willingness to maintain them consistently after the break – there’d be little point in re-launching Magic as an ostensibly better and more balanced game unless they could actually make it so. Would the payoff be worth all this effort, all this risk? It’s hard to know, but as the weight of years continues to increase, as fewer and fewer of Magic’s vast rainbow of cards are considered viable even in casual play, as the online community races towards a singularity that can solve Standard on a set’s first street day, it’s a conversation we need to have.
Follow the Orb of Insight on Twitter for even more insight in bite-sized packages.
-- Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire
There’s a fact about the Call of Cthulhu living card game that remains not particularly well-known outside of its own fanbase: it started off as a collectible card game, and was distributed and designed much like Magic. Its designers changed it midstream, both to improve balance issues and provide an easy access point for new players. Increasingly, I find myself wondering whether it would be advantageous for Magic to do something similar.
Not necessarily the part about switching to the LCG model; the current format seems to be successful, and despite various complaints, players mainly seem to accept the rarity and distribution structure. But as for the other part . . . Magic is huge, and inconsistently designed. If you take it up as of Dark Ascension, sooner or later you’ll become aware of the fact that there are 56 other expert-level expansions, plus Planechase and Archenemy, plus the Un- sets, plus the Duel Decks, plus Commander; oh, and not all of them use the same card face, or the same wording for the rules text, even when they have the same abilities.
To a certain extent this is what Standard is for, but as we’ve seen many times, its competitive nature and short rotation schedule make it less than ideal for promoting a long-term fan base. Besides, cards may rotate but are never truly gone; Magic’s mistakes and successes alike cast a long shadow over modern design and play. Few people on the internet assess Cancel or Deprive on their own merits; they’re always “worse than Counterspell.” Rootbound Crag isn’t a beautiful and elegant dual land; it’s strictly worse than Taiga. As long as Magic remains nominally one continuity, unbroken from Alpha to Avacyn Restored with only arbitrary divisions for tournament convenience, this is how cards will be assessed, and how they will be designed, too.
However, if Magic were to have a continuity break, a real reboot, it would have to change almost everything. The card faces might have to be re-examined again: Planar Chaos’ timeshifted card frame has a lot of fans, and may be more inclusive due to its ease of reading even by the color blind. It would probably require at least a year of serious internal discussion and reform of design practices, and a willingness to maintain them consistently after the break – there’d be little point in re-launching Magic as an ostensibly better and more balanced game unless they could actually make it so. Would the payoff be worth all this effort, all this risk? It’s hard to know, but as the weight of years continues to increase, as fewer and fewer of Magic’s vast rainbow of cards are considered viable even in casual play, as the online community races towards a singularity that can solve Standard on a set’s first street day, it’s a conversation we need to have.
Follow the Orb of Insight on Twitter for even more insight in bite-sized packages.
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