Requiem for a book
April 18th 2009 02:32
There’s a large paperback book sitting on my desk, its 800-odd pages not quite warping the flat surface. Its cover is a swirl of red and yellow that catches your eye from across the room, decorated with five familiar sigils: the white, blue, black, red, and green mana symbols. It’s the Complete Encyclopedia of Magic: the Gathering, and it remains the definitive one-stop guide to Magic’s early years.
That’s why no further updates have been released since the Apocalypse set in 2001.
. . . Wait, what?
The keyword here is “early” years. 2001 also happens to be when Wizards of the Coast launched the MagicTheGathering.com website. Back then, the dot-com bubble hadn’t burst yet, and we still harbored dreams of a world where everything was online and could be accessed from anywhere. The site was to be a sort of a one-stop emporium of articles, tournament results, card lists and images (presented through a database named Gatherer), and other content.
To be sure, Gatherer has certain advantages. It doesn’t take up space on your bookshelf. It has customizable search fields – the Encyclopedia doesn’t let you look up all the cards with “Squee” in the title. There’s . . . um . . . no risk of papercuts.
But are we really so lazy as a gaming community that turning a page is now too much to ask? You expend more effort shuffling your deck than you do reading the Encyclopedia – for that matter, you expend almost as much effort typing things in search fields and scrolling through Gatherer. The Encyclopedia lets you absorb the flavor of sets in the comfort of your bedroom (the new version of Gatherer is able to display more than one card image at once, but it just isn’t the same as opening the book and seeing half of the Tempest expansion’s amazing comic book-style art spread across the table). It also lets you design decks without your instant messenger beeping at you, internet lag dulling your senses, and Windows Update and Norton 360 demanding your attention like toddlers with short attention spans.
Ironically, they know very well that people liked the Encyclopedia. Each set’s player’s guide (which comes with the Fat Pack) has a section at the back with an image of every card in the set. It also contains a “Ten Coolest Cards” section and a storyline summary – just like the Encyclopedia did. So in a sense, it lives on, but even so, there are days when I wonder if it wouldn’t be nice if sets like Alara Reborn had somewhere to be truly immortalized, somewhere where they wouldn’t scroll off the bottom of the page after a couple of months.
That’s why no further updates have been released since the Apocalypse set in 2001.
. . . Wait, what?
The keyword here is “early” years. 2001 also happens to be when Wizards of the Coast launched the MagicTheGathering.com website. Back then, the dot-com bubble hadn’t burst yet, and we still harbored dreams of a world where everything was online and could be accessed from anywhere. The site was to be a sort of a one-stop emporium of articles, tournament results, card lists and images (presented through a database named Gatherer), and other content.
To be sure, Gatherer has certain advantages. It doesn’t take up space on your bookshelf. It has customizable search fields – the Encyclopedia doesn’t let you look up all the cards with “Squee” in the title. There’s . . . um . . . no risk of papercuts.
Yeah, I’m reaching here.
But are we really so lazy as a gaming community that turning a page is now too much to ask? You expend more effort shuffling your deck than you do reading the Encyclopedia – for that matter, you expend almost as much effort typing things in search fields and scrolling through Gatherer. The Encyclopedia lets you absorb the flavor of sets in the comfort of your bedroom (the new version of Gatherer is able to display more than one card image at once, but it just isn’t the same as opening the book and seeing half of the Tempest expansion’s amazing comic book-style art spread across the table). It also lets you design decks without your instant messenger beeping at you, internet lag dulling your senses, and Windows Update and Norton 360 demanding your attention like toddlers with short attention spans.
Ironically, they know very well that people liked the Encyclopedia. Each set’s player’s guide (which comes with the Fat Pack) has a section at the back with an image of every card in the set. It also contains a “Ten Coolest Cards” section and a storyline summary – just like the Encyclopedia did. So in a sense, it lives on, but even so, there are days when I wonder if it wouldn’t be nice if sets like Alara Reborn had somewhere to be truly immortalized, somewhere where they wouldn’t scroll off the bottom of the page after a couple of months.
Don't you forget about me.
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