We won't call you
January 30th 2011 00:41
Lisa: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Bart: Not if they called it stenchblossom.
Homer: Or crapweed.
Marge: I’d sure hate to get a dozen crapweeds for Valentine’s Day. I’d rather have candy.
Homer: Not if they were called scumdrops.
-- from “The Principal and the Pauper,” The Simpsons season 9
You can’t look a word up in the dictionary unless you can spell it. You can, however, play with Magic cards like Pithing Needle, Meddling Mage, and Memoricide if you don’t know the name of the card you want to stop with them. I am not kidding. As long as you know enough of the card’s characteristics to identify it uniquely, you can describe those and you will be considered to have named the card.
So, “the legendary dragon from Champions of Kamigawa” is not sufficient, because there are five legendary dragons in that set. “The red legendary dragon from Champions of Kamigawa who sets everyone on fire when he goes to the graveyard and was reissued in one of the Archenemy theme decks” is sufficient. Ironically, you might have noticed that while the creature in question has one of the longer names in Magic, that sentence is in fact much longer.
There’s no excuse as far as I’m concerned for forgetting legendary creatures or planeswalkers – they’re distinctive and unique characters, and their names are designed to be equally distinctive and unique. If you can’t remember a huge red dragon whose title is “the Falling Star,” I don’t know how much easier they can make it. However, spells and creatures that are lower-level, if you like, often have names based on more common patterns. I could understand it a little better if all the Lightning _______ and Zombie _______ and Dark _______ cards started to run together after a while.
Having said that, it really doesn’t fit with the spirit of the card to use Memoricide against Ryusei by describing all of his characteristics except his name. Neither does it fit with the card’s place in the meta-canon of fantasy magic, in which many forms of magic are based on language’s ability to shape subjective reality and on names’ uniqueness; nor with Magic’s developing focus on flavor gaming, which refers to the card Sarkhan the Mad as “he” and encouraged us to attend the Mirrodin Besieged pre-release in-character as a Mirran or a Phyrexian.
Bart: Not if they called it stenchblossom.
Homer: Or crapweed.
Marge: I’d sure hate to get a dozen crapweeds for Valentine’s Day. I’d rather have candy.
Homer: Not if they were called scumdrops.
-- from “The Principal and the Pauper,” The Simpsons season 9
You can’t look a word up in the dictionary unless you can spell it. You can, however, play with Magic cards like Pithing Needle, Meddling Mage, and Memoricide if you don’t know the name of the card you want to stop with them. I am not kidding. As long as you know enough of the card’s characteristics to identify it uniquely, you can describe those and you will be considered to have named the card.
So, “the legendary dragon from Champions of Kamigawa” is not sufficient, because there are five legendary dragons in that set. “The red legendary dragon from Champions of Kamigawa who sets everyone on fire when he goes to the graveyard and was reissued in one of the Archenemy theme decks” is sufficient. Ironically, you might have noticed that while the creature in question has one of the longer names in Magic, that sentence is in fact much longer.
There’s no excuse as far as I’m concerned for forgetting legendary creatures or planeswalkers – they’re distinctive and unique characters, and their names are designed to be equally distinctive and unique. If you can’t remember a huge red dragon whose title is “the Falling Star,” I don’t know how much easier they can make it. However, spells and creatures that are lower-level, if you like, often have names based on more common patterns. I could understand it a little better if all the Lightning _______ and Zombie _______ and Dark _______ cards started to run together after a while.
Having said that, it really doesn’t fit with the spirit of the card to use Memoricide against Ryusei by describing all of his characteristics except his name. Neither does it fit with the card’s place in the meta-canon of fantasy magic, in which many forms of magic are based on language’s ability to shape subjective reality and on names’ uniqueness; nor with Magic’s developing focus on flavor gaming, which refers to the card Sarkhan the Mad as “he” and encouraged us to attend the Mirrodin Besieged pre-release in-character as a Mirran or a Phyrexian.
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