Put another way
May 7th 2011 01:36
If you look up any Magic card in Gatherer, you see an image of the actual card along with its “Oracle” wording: what the card would say if it were printed today. Many cards are almost the same, just replacing “in play” with “battlefield,” “play” with “cast,” and “remove from the game” with “exile.” But you also have cards like Sea Kings’ Blessing.
Seems simple enough. But scratch the surface, and this all-but-forgotten card exposes the inconsistencies of Magic’s printing and errata policies. First of all, the original text explains certain nuances of the card’s function in detail, but the Oracle wording doesn’t. Fine. But the original text is awfully similar to modern reminder text, both in the way it explains things that are arguably evident and in the way it takes up space that could be put to better use for flavor text. There is no card that deserves flavor text more than the one that depicts Poseidon watching over a ship full of lonely Viking wanderers. Ironically, by modern standards, it would probably be considered a candidate for reminder text, as it includes the verb “become,” which has caused more rules problems than almost any other.
I don’t envy the task of making sure 11,000 cards from 18 years of Magic have functional wordings – in fact, I’m not sure I’d wish it on my enemies – but the errata regime has a lot to answer for. Its stated approach has changed a number of times, from preserving original functionality to compliance with modern rules, and back again, and then back the other way, but each time things have been left behind. As a result, cards that were previously in the same design family have been violently separated in function (compare Winter Orb’s Oracle text with Static Orb’s), and others are different enough from their printed wording that the old decks that used them no longer work.
Surely, this last point is a serious problem. We’ve long recognized, for example, that it’s not right for one color to be far more powerful or have more mechanics than all the others, because you shouldn’t be disadvantaged for liking a particular color. We’re beginning to recognize that rarity should not always correlate with power, that Primeval Titan being in a different world than Yavimaya Wurm or Jace the Mind Sculptor being in a different multiverse than everything is wrong. How can we accept the inconvenience looking up Oracle wordings for multiple decks’ worth of favorite cards, the heartache of beloved cards that no longer do what they always have, and the strife that occurs between those who’ve read updated wordings and those who just want to have fun?
Seems simple enough. But scratch the surface, and this all-but-forgotten card exposes the inconsistencies of Magic’s printing and errata policies. First of all, the original text explains certain nuances of the card’s function in detail, but the Oracle wording doesn’t. Fine. But the original text is awfully similar to modern reminder text, both in the way it explains things that are arguably evident and in the way it takes up space that could be put to better use for flavor text. There is no card that deserves flavor text more than the one that depicts Poseidon watching over a ship full of lonely Viking wanderers. Ironically, by modern standards, it would probably be considered a candidate for reminder text, as it includes the verb “become,” which has caused more rules problems than almost any other.
I don’t envy the task of making sure 11,000 cards from 18 years of Magic have functional wordings – in fact, I’m not sure I’d wish it on my enemies – but the errata regime has a lot to answer for. Its stated approach has changed a number of times, from preserving original functionality to compliance with modern rules, and back again, and then back the other way, but each time things have been left behind. As a result, cards that were previously in the same design family have been violently separated in function (compare Winter Orb’s Oracle text with Static Orb’s), and others are different enough from their printed wording that the old decks that used them no longer work.
Surely, this last point is a serious problem. We’ve long recognized, for example, that it’s not right for one color to be far more powerful or have more mechanics than all the others, because you shouldn’t be disadvantaged for liking a particular color. We’re beginning to recognize that rarity should not always correlate with power, that Primeval Titan being in a different world than Yavimaya Wurm or Jace the Mind Sculptor being in a different multiverse than everything is wrong. How can we accept the inconvenience looking up Oracle wordings for multiple decks’ worth of favorite cards, the heartache of beloved cards that no longer do what they always have, and the strife that occurs between those who’ve read updated wordings and those who just want to have fun?
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