Reminder text adventure
July 19th 2009 01:17
If you’ve been sorting through your M10 cards this week, you undoubtedly noticed that the flying keyword no longer has reminder text written on the card, even on common cards. Neither does “Enchant (creature/land/whatever),” and I for one approve.
I’ve never been a fan of reminder text. I’m even less of a fan now that the fat pack comes with a “How to Play” poster which has a mini-glossary of the parts of the turn, the core keywords, and a few other things besides. Why have such a thing, much less the official rulebook, unless you’re going to encourage people to look at it? I do understand the motivation behind reminder text: anything which helps people play this extremely complicated game fluently and quickly certainly has good intentions. (Memo to that guy I met at Melbourne High last Sunday: yes, you were stalling, and yes, that does violate the floor rules.) But unlike pop-up hints in video games, you can’t turn them off. And you can’t always depend on the people who teach you to teach you correctly – you don’t know who taught them, after all. I once knew someone, a fellow survivor of the 1999 rules changes, who was so happy to see Chandra Nalaar in his first Lorwyn booster that he put her directly into his deck, without reading the rules on planeswalker cards first.
Core set keywords generally do more or less what they say they do – if you’d never played before, and I said the words flying, first strike, flash, haste, landwalk, vigilance, trample, deathtouch, and defender, I’d wager you could make a pretty good guess as to what they do. (Protection and regeneration are a little more complicated rules-wise; but if I were a betting man, I’d wager that at least one of those will be modified in the next core set, if not before.) I object much less to reminder text in expert-level expansions, where keywords are often more complicated. Even so, it sometimes goes a little overboard. Less reminder text means the card looks cleaner and neater – and has more space for that flavor text we love so much.
It’s freakin’ Pegasus. What do you think it does?
I’ve never been a fan of reminder text. I’m even less of a fan now that the fat pack comes with a “How to Play” poster which has a mini-glossary of the parts of the turn, the core keywords, and a few other things besides. Why have such a thing, much less the official rulebook, unless you’re going to encourage people to look at it? I do understand the motivation behind reminder text: anything which helps people play this extremely complicated game fluently and quickly certainly has good intentions. (Memo to that guy I met at Melbourne High last Sunday: yes, you were stalling, and yes, that does violate the floor rules.) But unlike pop-up hints in video games, you can’t turn them off. And you can’t always depend on the people who teach you to teach you correctly – you don’t know who taught them, after all. I once knew someone, a fellow survivor of the 1999 rules changes, who was so happy to see Chandra Nalaar in his first Lorwyn booster that he put her directly into his deck, without reading the rules on planeswalker cards first.
Core set keywords generally do more or less what they say they do – if you’d never played before, and I said the words flying, first strike, flash, haste, landwalk, vigilance, trample, deathtouch, and defender, I’d wager you could make a pretty good guess as to what they do. (Protection and regeneration are a little more complicated rules-wise; but if I were a betting man, I’d wager that at least one of those will be modified in the next core set, if not before.) I object much less to reminder text in expert-level expansions, where keywords are often more complicated. Even so, it sometimes goes a little overboard. Less reminder text means the card looks cleaner and neater – and has more space for that flavor text we love so much.
Do you know how many years I’ve been waiting for a passage from the Odyssey to show up on a card?
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