The long black cloud
July 5th 2011 02:32
Mama, put my guns in the ground,
I can’t shoot them any more.
-- Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
I’ve never been a fan of Jonathan Franzen and I would never recommend him to anyone I didn’t want to annoy, but he did write an interesting article in the New York Times last month about how people form intimate relationships with things like Twitter where they would have done so in the past with other humans. Like much writing of this type, his nostalgia is slightly off-target. The fact is, this kind of thing existed long before social networking: everyone knows somebody who refers to their car as their “baby,” and many others cried the day they stopped releasing games for the Neo Geo Pocket Color in the United States. I’ll confess that I was at the Borders branch in Chadstone last week to “say good-bye.” (Sometimes, there is only a fine line between sentimentality and schizophrenia.) We’d be here all day if I got started on how disgusting it is that a country like Australia that wants to think itself modern and cultured lets a chain like that close down, so I’ll leave it for another time. I have, however, been thinking about how this idea relates to Magic.
Every year, four sets rotate out of Standard to varying degrees of fanfare. This is a marketing strategy, nothing more and nothing less, and is not always presented in a negative way. Some writers, including Wizards of the Coast’s Noel DeCordova and the freelancer Abe Sargent, write about new sets in a style you could summarize as “Here are some cool new cards that are coming out. Here are some fun things you can do with them. Perhaps they combine well with some of your older cards.” Unfortunately, there is also a lot of discussion, especially in some of the more competitive-oriented fan forums, with a very different tone. Cards in the sets rotating out are “lost.” Decks that were based around those cards are “dead.” You have to follow the new cards, read and assess all five hundred of them, figure out which ones replace the “lost” cards and “dead” decks. It’s no wonder that every October I run into people at Mind Games or EB Games who say they just can’t keep up any more. Not only does the online community make it sound like work rather than play, they make you feel like time is passing faster for Magic than for the rest of the universe and, further, that your old cards are leaving the planet.
But if you think about it, this is crazy. First of all, once a card is printed, it exists until it’s physically destroyed, and you can play with it whenever you want. Second of all, even if someone only plays Standard or draft and thus might see certain cards as “lost,” they also have happy memories of those same cards, much like the memories people have of any other longtime possessions. Would you advise your friend to sell their old, reliable, comfortable car every year and buy one that was just released so they can keep up with the crowd? Would you tell someone to forget about Infinite Space and Mario Party because the Nintendo 3DS is out now? Of course you wouldn’t, because that would be insensitive. So why does the Magic community put its members through this every year?
I can’t shoot them any more.
-- Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
I’ve never been a fan of Jonathan Franzen and I would never recommend him to anyone I didn’t want to annoy, but he did write an interesting article in the New York Times last month about how people form intimate relationships with things like Twitter where they would have done so in the past with other humans. Like much writing of this type, his nostalgia is slightly off-target. The fact is, this kind of thing existed long before social networking: everyone knows somebody who refers to their car as their “baby,” and many others cried the day they stopped releasing games for the Neo Geo Pocket Color in the United States. I’ll confess that I was at the Borders branch in Chadstone last week to “say good-bye.” (Sometimes, there is only a fine line between sentimentality and schizophrenia.) We’d be here all day if I got started on how disgusting it is that a country like Australia that wants to think itself modern and cultured lets a chain like that close down, so I’ll leave it for another time. I have, however, been thinking about how this idea relates to Magic.
Every year, four sets rotate out of Standard to varying degrees of fanfare. This is a marketing strategy, nothing more and nothing less, and is not always presented in a negative way. Some writers, including Wizards of the Coast’s Noel DeCordova and the freelancer Abe Sargent, write about new sets in a style you could summarize as “Here are some cool new cards that are coming out. Here are some fun things you can do with them. Perhaps they combine well with some of your older cards.” Unfortunately, there is also a lot of discussion, especially in some of the more competitive-oriented fan forums, with a very different tone. Cards in the sets rotating out are “lost.” Decks that were based around those cards are “dead.” You have to follow the new cards, read and assess all five hundred of them, figure out which ones replace the “lost” cards and “dead” decks. It’s no wonder that every October I run into people at Mind Games or EB Games who say they just can’t keep up any more. Not only does the online community make it sound like work rather than play, they make you feel like time is passing faster for Magic than for the rest of the universe and, further, that your old cards are leaving the planet.
But if you think about it, this is crazy. First of all, once a card is printed, it exists until it’s physically destroyed, and you can play with it whenever you want. Second of all, even if someone only plays Standard or draft and thus might see certain cards as “lost,” they also have happy memories of those same cards, much like the memories people have of any other longtime possessions. Would you advise your friend to sell their old, reliable, comfortable car every year and buy one that was just released so they can keep up with the crowd? Would you tell someone to forget about Infinite Space and Mario Party because the Nintendo 3DS is out now? Of course you wouldn’t, because that would be insensitive. So why does the Magic community put its members through this every year?
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