Retrospectives, part 1 - Ravnica: City of Guilds
August 19th 2008 00:43
In September 2005, uncertainty hung over Magic players everywhere. The experiment of the Kamigawa block had ended inconclusively. Fan response to the block’s flavor, inspired by Japanese mythology, had been mixed, partly because of the creative department decision to make new creature tags for Ninjas and Samurai which made them largely incompatible with cards from outside the block. Believe it or not, there are some people who don’t find katanas and shurikens “omg totally badass” (especially people who have asked a materials engineer whether or not all the outlandish claims about their durability are true. FYI: they’re not). Tournament players were shaken; nine cards from the Mirrodin block had been banned in Standard, plus two more in Extended and one in Legacy. All three formats were still very fast, though, and still borderline degenerate, and speculation ran wild about what would be next to go.
Everyone was ready for a change, and the scent of change was heavy in the air. The ninth edition of the Core Set was released that summer, and contained some cards that had no-one expected to ever be part of Standard again. Art previews for Ravnica emerged, showing glimpses of a huge, bustling city with Gothic cathedrals and dark, foreboding towers. There had been one other block with an urban fantasy theme – 1999’s Mercadian Masques focused on a city of treacherous merchants and their unfortunate customers. But repetition in itself is a mark neither for nor against a set: it’s said that talent borrows, but the same people also point out that genius steals.
Ravnica’s mechanical theme emerged soon after, and it turned out to be multicolor: a high concentration of cards that belong to more than one of the five colors, and a high concentration of cards that encourage you to play more than one color in one deck. Again, this was a repetition: 2000’s popular Invasion block was the first to have multicolor as a major theme. Like with setting, repetition of theme is in itself neither a sin nor a virtue – the number of possible mechanical themes is finite and short of introducing a sixth color or fundamental changes to the mechanical rules, we will have to see all of them again at some point in the future.
So, how else to judge the set’s place in history? I could do something silly like count the number of cards from the block that were played in tournament-winning decks at various times since its release, but that would show little beyond pro players’ taste in decks. I could do something even sillier like assign a numerical value to the most powerful cards in the block and compare them to the most powerful cards in other blocks, but that would be forgetting that there are parts of a card other than game statistics. And one thing OrbOfInsight.com will never do is encourage you to ignore the art. I could do something objective like seek out Ravnica’s sales figures from Wizards of the Coast’s annual reports, but that would only tell us how it sold compared to other sets and not why. As it happens, it sold well, but was that because it was the best set ever or because lots of people felt like gambling on getting a money rare in their booster? There’s no way to know.
So I’m going to do something completely subjective, and look at Ravnica from the first, last, and most important measure of any game: was it fun? I don’t claim to speak for any large number of people, and I don’t pretend that I can know or even understand everything that would be fun for someone else. All I know is what I’ve observed, both in person and in the media and on the internet. And from those places, I’ve gathered a few points that may be surprising.
You see, multicolored decks are nothing new in Magic’s history. As long ago as 1996, there was an archetype nicknamed “5-color Green.” But through most of Magic’s history, there have been relatively few lands that can produce more than one color, and most non-land color “fixers” were green, both of which constrained the number of colors a deck could contain and still be reasonably playable. The Ravnica block, though, had a two-color land for all ten possible combinations, as well as what seemed like dozens of color fixers of other kinds, many of which were artifacts and thus can be played in any deck.
Where before even a two-color deck would inevitably encounter resource problems from time to time, now the tools for completely stable three- and even four-color decks were at players’ fingertips. They responded by designing archetypes with that “touched” two or three colors for answer cards, knowing that they would almost certainly be able to play them whenever they needed to. Hallowed Fountain and its cohorts on the rare print sheet are an order of magnitude better at what they do than nearly every similar card that has ever existed. A deck could play ten to twelve of them, plus a few color fixing artifacts as deck type and space permit, fill up the rest of the deck with 30 or so of the best cards in three colors, be very nearly as stable as a deck with only one or two colors, and outright steamroll its opponents. Invasion's time in Standard had very few such decks; yes, it had rare lands, and rare lands that produced more than one color, but they were both smaller in number and less brutally effective.
If all this sounds like it just opened a new dimension of gameplay, keep in mind that the heart and soul of Magic is the so-called color pie – the distribution of abilities, game mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses between the five colors. In a rainbow world like Ravnica's, its boundaries blur and fade. The color pie becomes irrelevant when every color and every combination of colors can access the specific answer to its weakness courtesy of a two-cost artifact.
It wasn’t only tournament-level deck construction that was affected by Hallowed Fountain and company: the cards’ usual retail prices on the singles market jumped straight up to $25-30 and have remained there ever since. There was a lot of complaining during Ravnica’s tenure in Standard about the fact that you might need to spend upwards of $150 just to get the lands needed to make a deck good enough for Friday Night Magic or some other low-level competition. Some people ignored the rare lands and tried to make viable single-color decks, but the three-color decks always had access to more answers and superior threats in other colors with near-equal resource stability, and in some locales one- and two-color decks disappeared entirely even until Lorwyn’s release.
So what? Shouldn’t people be allowed to play whatever deck they think is fun? An admirable sentiment on its face. But I’m a little concerned that the only definition of “fun” we seem to recognize on the Magic-playing internet is “throwing all the best cards in three different colors into a deck that turns into a well-oiled machine because I have more expensive singles than others and then annihilating said others without mercy.” Ravnica has even become a sort of litmus test of both new and veteran players; the answer to a comment like “Ravnica wasn’t to my taste” is usually something along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with you?” And that diametrically opposes everything that Magic has done and everything it needs to do in terms of attracting both new players and new types of players.
Don’t get me wrong – this card definitely needed to be banned.
Everyone was ready for a change, and the scent of change was heavy in the air. The ninth edition of the Core Set was released that summer, and contained some cards that had no-one expected to ever be part of Standard again. Art previews for Ravnica emerged, showing glimpses of a huge, bustling city with Gothic cathedrals and dark, foreboding towers. There had been one other block with an urban fantasy theme – 1999’s Mercadian Masques focused on a city of treacherous merchants and their unfortunate customers. But repetition in itself is a mark neither for nor against a set: it’s said that talent borrows, but the same people also point out that genius steals.
Ravnica’s mechanical theme emerged soon after, and it turned out to be multicolor: a high concentration of cards that belong to more than one of the five colors, and a high concentration of cards that encourage you to play more than one color in one deck. Again, this was a repetition: 2000’s popular Invasion block was the first to have multicolor as a major theme. Like with setting, repetition of theme is in itself neither a sin nor a virtue – the number of possible mechanical themes is finite and short of introducing a sixth color or fundamental changes to the mechanical rules, we will have to see all of them again at some point in the future.
So, how else to judge the set’s place in history? I could do something silly like count the number of cards from the block that were played in tournament-winning decks at various times since its release, but that would show little beyond pro players’ taste in decks. I could do something even sillier like assign a numerical value to the most powerful cards in the block and compare them to the most powerful cards in other blocks, but that would be forgetting that there are parts of a card other than game statistics. And one thing OrbOfInsight.com will never do is encourage you to ignore the art. I could do something objective like seek out Ravnica’s sales figures from Wizards of the Coast’s annual reports, but that would only tell us how it sold compared to other sets and not why. As it happens, it sold well, but was that because it was the best set ever or because lots of people felt like gambling on getting a money rare in their booster? There’s no way to know.
So I’m going to do something completely subjective, and look at Ravnica from the first, last, and most important measure of any game: was it fun? I don’t claim to speak for any large number of people, and I don’t pretend that I can know or even understand everything that would be fun for someone else. All I know is what I’ve observed, both in person and in the media and on the internet. And from those places, I’ve gathered a few points that may be surprising.
You see, multicolored decks are nothing new in Magic’s history. As long ago as 1996, there was an archetype nicknamed “5-color Green.” But through most of Magic’s history, there have been relatively few lands that can produce more than one color, and most non-land color “fixers” were green, both of which constrained the number of colors a deck could contain and still be reasonably playable. The Ravnica block, though, had a two-color land for all ten possible combinations, as well as what seemed like dozens of color fixers of other kinds, many of which were artifacts and thus can be played in any deck.
Where before even a two-color deck would inevitably encounter resource problems from time to time, now the tools for completely stable three- and even four-color decks were at players’ fingertips. They responded by designing archetypes with that “touched” two or three colors for answer cards, knowing that they would almost certainly be able to play them whenever they needed to. Hallowed Fountain and its cohorts on the rare print sheet are an order of magnitude better at what they do than nearly every similar card that has ever existed. A deck could play ten to twelve of them, plus a few color fixing artifacts as deck type and space permit, fill up the rest of the deck with 30 or so of the best cards in three colors, be very nearly as stable as a deck with only one or two colors, and outright steamroll its opponents. Invasion's time in Standard had very few such decks; yes, it had rare lands, and rare lands that produced more than one color, but they were both smaller in number and less brutally effective.
If all this sounds like it just opened a new dimension of gameplay, keep in mind that the heart and soul of Magic is the so-called color pie – the distribution of abilities, game mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses between the five colors. In a rainbow world like Ravnica's, its boundaries blur and fade. The color pie becomes irrelevant when every color and every combination of colors can access the specific answer to its weakness courtesy of a two-cost artifact.
It wasn’t only tournament-level deck construction that was affected by Hallowed Fountain and company: the cards’ usual retail prices on the singles market jumped straight up to $25-30 and have remained there ever since. There was a lot of complaining during Ravnica’s tenure in Standard about the fact that you might need to spend upwards of $150 just to get the lands needed to make a deck good enough for Friday Night Magic or some other low-level competition. Some people ignored the rare lands and tried to make viable single-color decks, but the three-color decks always had access to more answers and superior threats in other colors with near-equal resource stability, and in some locales one- and two-color decks disappeared entirely even until Lorwyn’s release.
So what? Shouldn’t people be allowed to play whatever deck they think is fun? An admirable sentiment on its face. But I’m a little concerned that the only definition of “fun” we seem to recognize on the Magic-playing internet is “throwing all the best cards in three different colors into a deck that turns into a well-oiled machine because I have more expensive singles than others and then annihilating said others without mercy.” Ravnica has even become a sort of litmus test of both new and veteran players; the answer to a comment like “Ravnica wasn’t to my taste” is usually something along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with you?” And that diametrically opposes everything that Magic has done and everything it needs to do in terms of attracting both new players and new types of players.
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