killing a goldfish

non-magic writing is over yonder on medium

2019-03-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

Chances are, you're reading this because you're a Magic player. I'm so sorry. So am I.

This blog will contain all my MTG writing now and forever; all my non-Magic stuff is going on Medium, kind of as an experiment in whether I can get an audience on that site.

So far: nope

If you like my writing and want to read something that's not about this card game, check out my latest, a comedic essay about my suicidal ideation.

kill reviews: dominaria

2019-01-30T15:26:00.000-08:00

As with previous sets Richard Garfield worked on, I really want to know the internal dynamics of Dominaria, especially as they relate to his contributions. He worked on Tempest, Urza’s Saga, Odyssey, Judgment (we all have bad days), Ravnica, Innistrad, and Dominaria. Do they bring Garfield on when they really, really need a hit set, and he delivers? Or do they bring him on when they already have something great in the works? Is he really that brilliant of a designer, or does his mere presence inspire other designers to work longer hours to really deliver their best work?

Judging from the stories about the mechanics he’s actually designed, I’m on the side that Garfield really still is a great designer (at least as far as Magic; I played King of Tokyo and found it really dull). His playtest Sagas are beautiful, innovative, and led to one of the coolest mechanics Magic has had in years.

But let’s zoom out. Dominaria doesn’t just have a great mechanic. Dominaria is a great set. It is one of the great sets in Magic’s history. If Innistrad is Magic’s “Blood on the Tracks,” then Dominaria is Magic’s… whichever one of Dylan’s later albums my readers really like, I haven’t dug nearly deep enough into his discography to leave this analogy without embarrassing myself. I’m so sorry.

The set has two obvious precedents: Time Spiral, for its nostalgic setting, and Kamigawa, for its legendary theme. Wizards and I, of course, disagree on the merits of those past sets, but it’s encouraging to see them trying things that are so, so close to those blocks without rejecting them based on their ~marketing research~ or whatever. Dominaria doesn’t have the same adventurousness than defined Time Spiral, and it’s nothing like Future Sight, but it executes it better than any set in Time Spiral or Kamigawa blocks. And unless you’re a dork like me with a blog about Magic design, you’re probably gonna spend more time actually playing with these sets than just thinking about them in the abstract, and the execution is really what matters there.

Dominaria is delightful to draft. Wizards seems to be getting closer to having a formula down for archetype-based sets every year, and Dominaria, like Innistrad before it, strikes a fairly perfect balance between a set where you can draft a bunch of good cards and have them work together, and one that heavily rewards drafting a specific archetype. Dominaria, like other great draft formats before it, is fairly baffling the first few drafts into it; there’s a lot of stuff flying around as far as legendary and historic and various creature types and gold cards, but hardly any big, loud themes to really focus on. (My first time drafting it, I misinterpreted Dominaria’s focus on legendary cards as telling me to draft focusing on them; that didn’t work out very well for me.)

One trick that Wizards has had success with is uncommon signposts. That is: powerful gold uncommons that you open that basically yell at you, “hey, draft this archetype, dumbass.” Some of them are fairly straightforward in telling you what to do with them (draft Adeliz, then a bunch of wizards; draft Hallar, then a bunch of kicker spells), while others (especially Tatyova) are fairly open-ended. But in Dominaria, it doersn't stop at the gold signposts: it has perhaps the most interesting suite of uncommons ever put in a set. On my favorite Magic forum of GoodGamery, user Bracketbot put it nicely when he called The Eldest Reborn “the most mythic feeling uncommon ever.” It’s not just that they slapped a legendary supertype on it as a hashtag mechanic to support the set’s themes, they actually put in the work of making the uncommons feel legendary. (Or historic, in the case of the sagas.) Cards like Tetsuko Umezawa and Song of Freyalise aren’t just too complex to be uncommons from back in the conservative era, they’re too interesting to have been uncommons then. They’re cards you can really plan a game or an entire deck around, in both constructed and limited.

Sagas share something with Planeswalkers: they’re the first cards since Alpha that just look dramatically different than normal cards. (Of course, them sharing a lot of things in common with Planeswalkers isn’t coincidence, since the design was a modification of an early iteration on that card type.) They were a card that, when the set was leaked early, even with the full spoiler, we didn’t know exactly how they would work. If Magic is to continue going forward, if it’s to continue surprising us (at least occasionally), Magic really needs these kinds of cards: something so dramatically different that they don’t even look, at first glance, like something that’s possible in Magic.

That unique graphic design goes hand-in-hand with some truly excellent art on them across the board. They’re united by the theme of what the art from that culture would look like that portrays their own history, which gives space for individual artists to go outside of what fantasy art is “supposed” to look like. It’s kind of meta-fantasy art: in a fantasy world, what would art about their own legends look like?

While sagas have the artwork that pops the most obviously, the art on the set is overall very good; the game feels like it’s finally pulled out of the doldrums it’s mostly been in for many years and has some artists with some uniqueness, artists who can paint something other than “what would this spell look like if it was literally a real thing.” Both Palumbos are worth special attention as excellent artists newer to the game. The art is definitely not as weird and impressionist overall as, say, Mirage (still the best period for art in the game’s history, sorry Mike), but it feels like it’s actively encouraging artists like Seb McKinnon to have individually recognizable styles. Seb only got one piece in Dominaria, and I’m supposed to be writing this review about Dominaria, but… I just really like Seb McKinnon.

Dominaria has an important non-saga mechanic, of course: historic, its replacement for Kamigawa’s focus on legends. The cards in Dominaria that are necessary rather than exceptional by themselves are enablers for historic (mostly low-mana cost common artifacts). Basically, these fill the gaps when one basically wants to draft around legends, but there wouldn’t be enough legends to really be able to make that happen, so you throw some artifacts in and the deck works better. It’s basically a limited-only distinction between “legend matters” and “historic matters,” and I can’t remember any time that the “historic” designation has come up in my recent games of Standard. (Maybe that’s because mono-red, the deck I play against half the time, doesn’t build around anything other than making a life total equal zero.) I respect that historic was necessary for Dominaria to work in its emphasis of legends, but I think Rosewater exaggerates its importance; a lot of those cards that seem like the backbone of the mechanic aren’t even played often in draft. Players aren’t tripping over themselves to draft enough Powerstone Shard to make their decks function in the way that Lorwyn drafters consistently moved their ratings of Changelings (the gold standard of a limited backbone mechanic) higher and higher.

One easy way to tell the broad strokes of Magic history, as Rosewater has done, is to describe early Magic as being about card-by-card designs, then it was about set-by-set designs, then it was about block-by-block designs. As in, in early Magic every card was as cool as possible with little regard for what was in the pack with it, then sets had as cool a design as possible with little regard for what they were in the block or format with, then the scope finally broadened to be able to do things like break Ravnica’s block design into 4-3-3 or Time Spiral into past-present-future. (As I’ve lamented in my reviews of that era, the ideals of block design really broke down after Time Spiral block.)

Dominaria doesn’t just call back to earlier Magic with lore references, but by using its individual card designs to recall an era when the end result was just making one cool card. You were supposed to pick up a card at random and go, “whoa!” and want to do something with it. When sets started to have grander ambitions, more and more of a set had to be devoted just to providing the backbone for the rest of the set to flesh out. Instead of maximizing the coolness of every card, they had to do necessary-but-boring things like changing colors in Invasion, or providing a way to discard cards in Odyssey, or finding a way to bridge multiple creature types in Lorwyn (or Onslaught, a little bit). Dominaria doesn’t try to avoid this entirely, of course, but cards like the sagas aren’t just trying to make the set function on a basic level. They’re trying to excite the player and think about the best possible thing they can do.

Dominaria really impresses me with how it’s able to accomplish these dual goals of making individually amazing cards while keeping a set structure intact. Cards like Whisper, Blood Liturgist do a perfect balancing act of both being amazing to read individually while also playing into the set’s limited archetypes (mostly fungus-related, in Whisper’s case; also, Whisper is such a badass name for a legend, nicely done, flavor team).

Something I missed for a long time in Magic were the one-off cards that got the deckbuilding gears in my mind turning. Are there enough good Auras/Equipment and enablers to make a deck with Danitha Capashen and/or Valduk work? Is a mono-blue deck with Naban better than one without? (No.) In sets past, it felt like the deckbuilding was either on rails in building around The Mechanics You Are Supposed to Build Around, or you’re just supposed to throw all the individually-powerful cards together. All the cards that did unique, interesting things were purposefully priced out of ever being in a competitive deck. Kaladesh really fucked up in this respect, but god bless it for at least making weird-looking cards where you read it and go “hey, maybe that’s broken,” and there’s a chance it actually was. Dominaria doesn’t make the mistake of pushing the unknown too far in power level, but instead, it at least makes it look like unexplored territory might hold something valuable. It actually contained the text “exchange your life total with [cardname]’s power! And it wasn’t even a mythic!

Dominaria, to me, isn’t just a good set. It’s a set that finally, really, definitely puts the nail in the coffin of the conservative era of Magic that I mentioned earlier. I was fairly certain when seeing Kaladesh that era in Magic was dead, but when the bannings started to hit, I was nervous because the failures of Kaladesh could have triggered an internal backlash just like Time Spiral did, where its flaws are avoided to such a comical extent that nothing that experimented in the same sort of space as Kaladesh would get attempted. Then, Ixalan felt like a step backwards into not just conservatism, but cynical trendspotting and the exploitation of what small children want in market research surveys.

It’s difficult to define a design era that we’re living in the middle of, but they key points of the last era are definitely over with. Complexity has come back up in several ways (I was shocked that they let Adapt be usable at instant speed), and Dominaria gets to go “hey, Champions of Kamigawa had some good ideas in it” and still make it to print, where it’s been a huge success. A great document of comparison is Great Designer Search 2 (it’s unfathomably long, so don’t read it yourself, let James and I explain it to you), where the ideas of that bland era of Magic are pushed hard on enterprising designers. Great Designer Search 3 is obviously a lot more open to new ideas, which is a great sign for Magic.

Overall, Dominaria is the most inspiring set that’s come from Wizards in many years. It makes me want to draft different strategies I haven’t tried before, it makes me want to build new, terrible decks, and most importantly for me, it makes me think there’s still life and passion in the design of Magic. Because… god, have you tried to write a design review of Ixalan block? How am I supposed to do that without slamming my head into my desk over and over and just wishing that Ixalan was different, interesting in any way?

Circling back to how Garfield comes onto the game every few years, there’s something even more important in Dominaria’s role in Magic history. I’ve long held a vague theory that Magic avoids death by, every few years, coming out with something truly brilliant, something that unites both the casual players and the tournament players, something that both hooks newer players into devoting themselves to the game more and reminds more established players why we’ve devoted so much of our lives to the game in the first place. People might either ask whether Magic is dying, or bring up how it’s never actually ended up dying, but I think it’s only because of sets like Alliances, Invasion, Ravnica, Innistrad, and Dominaria that the game has persisted. If you substitute these sets with something mediocre, I don’t think the game would be around any more as we now know it.

But I also wonder if Wizards sees unique, innovative sets like Dominaria as something to do once a year (or less), similar to a core set. Their immediate follow-up to Dominaria was two completely fine but utterly by-the-books Ravnica expansions, which I can only read as a massive corporate hedge; a way to tell higher-ups that the year’s slate of expansions isn’t at all risky, when looked at as a whole.

magic: arena is great because magic sucks

2019-01-09T13:15:00.002-08:00

I genuinely love Magic: Arena. I played for less than a week before I earned the cards for mono-blue tempo, a deck that either wins or loses in about three minutes. Then, I press play and I’m immediately in another game. I had a game where, on turn two, my opponent tried to Lightning Strike my 1/1 with Curious Obsession, I responded with Dive Down, and they conceded. This, to me, is the ideal game of Magic.

Magic: Arena is more than just a digital implementation of Magic (which is what Magic: Online was). It is a large number of improvements to Magic. Years ago, I redefined the literary art form of the essay with the unfathomably great “why magic sucks.” To recap: the mana variance sucks, it’s expensive, there’s a conflict between its status as a collectable and as a game, and it’s old. Arena notably succeeds at tackling the first three issues, and makes a decent stab at the last one.

Arena is a free-to-play that doesn’t feel like a game that’s constantly trying to rip me off via microtransactions. Maybe it’s because I had a decent winrate in my early drafts, but I found it pretty easy to chain drafts together; I think I spent $5 or $10 on gems when I did poorly in a few drafts in a row, which is a more than reasonable price for the entertainment I got out of the product. Unlike paper or MODO which expect you to spend around $4 a pack, Arena gives newer players cards pretty readily. There are five starting decks, it’s easy to unlock new ones with daily quests, and playing games rewards players rather than charging them (one of my main gripes with MODO five years ago).

In a move that proved extremely unpopular with people who spend over an hour a day on Reddit, Magic: Arena generates two opening hands for players in best-of-one matches and invisibly chooses the hand with the more average land-to-spell ratio. This would be impossible (or at least extremely awkward and time-consuming) in real-life games, in addition to being wildly unpopular with “serious players,” but it in an online format where the games are quick, it makes Magic dramatically more fun. Instead of roughly 25% of games being decided by one player or the other not being able to play their spells, players interact with each other meaningfully far more often. As generally opposed as I am to interacting with Magic players (see the blog’s tagline), this seemingly-hacky solution makes Arena games literally more enjoyable than they would be on paper or on MODO, even if the interfaces were exactly the same.

As far as the game being expensive and collectable, Arena’s solution genuinely shocks me: it has no economy. It has no option to trade. Because players get “wild cards” on a predictable basis, there’s no mythic that’s a ton more important than another mythic; for a constructed deck, one just saves up enough wildcards for it and cashes them in. I was in a draft where I opened a mythic that wasn’t in my colors and instinctively went to raredraft it (since that’s what Magic has taught me to do). Then I realized that in Arena, unless I was specifically trying to build a constructed deck using that one specific mythic, I really did not have to give a shit. I took the common that went in my deck, because Magic is a game and I was selecting the game pieces to use. When I was trying to build that mono-u tempo deck, I just kept doing drafts and random games until I had earned the packs to get the wild cards I needed. Easy.

(This isn’t to say that building any deck in Arena is trivial; making ones with lots of rares and mythics seems like it would take a ton of time and/or money investment into the game. But games like Arena have to have some sort of progression, so I don’t think that’s unreasonable.)

Magic being old and out of ideas isn’t something that Arena addresses directly, since the cards are still the same that the paper game uses. But it’s fortunate that it exists in an era where Dominaria is around. I guess Dominaria drafts were just pulled and replaced with Guilds, but Dominaria is an absolutely delightful set, one that deserves its own Kill Review going into what makes it so much better than other recent sets.

Magic has a lot of baggage built up in its rules as a necessary part of having so many cards, and Arena does a great job ignoring all of it while still delivering accurate Magic gameplay. I’ve only had to hold ctrl for “full control” once instead of having Arena do all the busywork of land-tapping for me; I can remember one time it tapped my lands wrong, and I expected Charnel Troll to let me respond to its upkeep trigger by default, which it did not. That’s about the biggest flaws I can find with the ways Arena streamlines the game, which for me, means it’s doing a pretty good job.

One reason Magic sucks that wasn’t in the old essay, simply because I’m so used to it, is how slow it goes. It’s only when an app does all the busywork for me, without substituting its own busywork like MODO, that it’s truly obvious how much of our time spent playing Magic is spent physically manipulating cards, adjusting life totals, making sure your opponent isn’t cheating, etc. It’s only after playing Arena, which zips through games even when they get fairly complex, that I think about how tedious it is to play Magic in real life, requiring a couple minutes of shuffling before every game, and a lot of physical manipulation for untapping/spellcasting/attacking when boards get more cluttered.

Occasionally, I’ll want to play Cube on Magic Online. Sometimes I play one or two, then spent the next few days complaining about Magic Online. Since starting playing Arena, I’ve had next to no desire to ever touch that piece of shit again. I think Arena might have even somewhat spoiled me on wanting to play paper Magic; it’s that slick of a program. All the complaints I have about it are incredibly minor. It’s wonderful.

magical capitalism

2018-04-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

pt i: what is magical capitalism?

We’re used to the way Magic works. The cards come from packs, we buy the individual cards, we build decks with those cards. Or, we pay for the packs and draft with those. Easy.

Magic is like this because it’s always been like this. We assume that Magic has to be like this, that the game wouldn’t function any other way. But the reason we assume this isn’t that people don’t think the rules system of Magic would work if cards were available in a different way; it obviously still would. We assume that Wizards of the Coast just wouldn’t be able to make the game anymore, because the only reason Magic exists is to make them money.

The game doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We live in a capitalist era, and Magic is made as part of that. But of course, just about everything produced is made by a for-profit company, so that’s hardly unique. The unique part is that Magic isn’t just some random game made by a company trying to make money. It is the most capitalist game. The system, of players chasing after scarce resources (cards) to play with them, using other resources (their money, their other cards, their time) to acquire them, forces players to compete with one another before the “real” game even starts.

The way that Magic is both a product of capitalism and incorporates capitalism into how its players behave affects everything about it. This post is a tour through Magic through the lens of how the game is shaped by capitalism. Magic is not merely a reflection of the system around it: it’s become its own unique system, what I think of as “Magical capitalism.”

In Magical capitalism, it’s not just a company producing a product, and consumers giving them money for it. Those consumers, themselves, end up being incorporated into the system that makes Magic so expensive for players and so profitable for Wizards of the Coast and the intermediaries that buy and sell cards.

pt ii: history

It’s a well-known story at this point, but the initial playtesting of Magic gave those early players a small number of cards (about a Sealed Deck worth) and allowed trading between them, in order to simulate how people playing Magic in the real world would interact with each other. As the traditional narrative explains, those playtesters never imagined the game would be so successful that people would have access to the entire card pool. They wanted it to be cool and surprising when you saw some bizarre card like Chaos Orb for the first time.

After Peter Adkison introduced the game at Gencon in August, 1993, it was surprising seeing new cards… both because the game was brand new, and because getting more product was nearly impossible. Alpha sold out in a week. It wasn’t till October that Beta came out, and that set was sold out before the product even hit the continent. Then Arabian Nights was rushed out to keep something on the shelves while the base set was unobtainable, then Unlimited. In fact, there wasn’t a pack that could sit on a store shelf without getting instantly bought till the massive print run of Revised.

By that time, Wizards had learned to print as much of each set as possible, because it’ll sell out no matter what. This thinking served them well until The Dark, which was a bit overprinted, and nearly doomed the whole company with Fallen Empires. As I discussed in my review of early sets, stores would ask for many times the amount that they actually wanted, knowing they’d only get a small percentage. When Fallen Empires came out, Wizards just… printed the total amount stores asked for. That massive capital investment kept them from releasing any more sets until Fourth Edition, six months later.

Pretty early on in its history, information scarcity disappeared from Magic: magazines printed full card lists, and with only a few hundred cards in Alpha/Beta/Unlimited, it wasn’t that difficult to get a handle on which ones would be good to have in your deck. Price lists followed, which meant that the only barriers between a person and having The Perfect Deck were their ability to tune a decklist, their ability to find the cards in a store or from a guy on the nascent Internet, and their bank account.

People treat Richard Garfield misunderstanding how desperate people would be to get new cards as an amusing anecdote of the early days of Wizards, something to chuckle about as we think how naive they all were. There’s one big flaw with this, though: Garfield did anticipate some people spending a ton of money on Magic.

In 1995, Garfield wrote an essay for the 4th Edition Player’s handbook that touched on the inclusion of ante. He was concerned with what he called “rich kid syndrome,” where someone could spend vastly more than everyone else they played with and win nearly every time. He thought that this would be somewhat self-correcting (people would refuse to play against that person if their deck was too powerful), but he also wanted a game mechanic to help with it. Ante provided this: if you’re going to spend so much money on the game that your deck wins almost every game, you need to have more on the line if you do lose.

It’s the most meritocratic and anti-capitalist thing to ever be included in the rules of Magic. It tells players, “yeah, some people have really expensive cards, but if you’re a better player with a better-constructed deck you can take those cards away from people who don’t deserve them.”

I’m not defending ante as a mechanic. It’s really bad. But it proves Garfield’s awareness of the possibility of people spending too much money on Magic. It also shows that, rather than just encouraging players to spend more and more to compete with those rich kids, he thought of it as something that could be a problem.

The important part of Garfield not expecting most people to spend so much on Magic wasn’t that people’s decks were better than Garfield expected them to be, with more rares per player than he projected; it was that this meant Wizards made far more money per player than he anticipated. He really wasn’t trying to make a game that would attempt to maximize its per-player income, like modern-day microtransaction-based mobile games do. He just wanted to make a game with seemingly infinite space to explore. Just like in any art, though, once it’s out of the hands of the creator, artistic intent stops mattering. He was just trying to make a game without visible borders, one that players wouldn’t just be able to play and go “yep, I’ve seen everything in it.” Instead, he accidentally gave a lot of people jobs.

The origin of Magical capitalism is from this shift: when spending astronomical sums of money on more cards isn’t unusual but accepted or even necessary to play more.

pt iii: the economics of magic

The economics of Magic as a whole are different than the economics of Wizards of the Coast. They just sell packs and intentionally pretend that they have no idea that people resell their cards individually. (Just try to find a reference on magicthegathering.com to a card’s price; it’s most comical in the “building on a budget” articles that attempt to cater to a player type whose reality they inherently reject.[1])

[1] The best era of Building on a Budget was when they focused it on Magic Online, so that they could talk about decks in terms of how many tickets they were worth, even though a ticket is literally $1. This is one of those weird Wizards things that really encapsulates how nonsensical some of their policies can be.

What really sustains Magic are the in-between people and businesses whose livelihood depends on Magic. I used to work for Card Kingdom, one of the largest online retailers, and every set release, we would open and sort at least 400 cases per set. This is just the product we were opening; there were plenty of other cases that were being sold as boxes, or individual packs, or used for drafts in the retail space. The company is significantly bigger now than it used to be, so I expect that number is way bigger these days.

When a business is investing close to $200,000 in product from one set, they get pretty determined to make a return on that money. And obviously, Card Kingdom isn’t alone in that sort of investment. Everyone wants to get in the extremely profitable role of being in between people and the Magic cards they want. As a former coworker of mine once said about businesses like that one, “you have to try really hard to not make money off Magic.” All you do is just buy the product at wholesale prices, open it, and sell it. Then you buy people’s individual cards at pawn shop rates and flip those, too. Easy.

This system keeps the game expensive, and it means that Wizards has to do a minimum amount of design for the amount of product they sell. It’s been a financially successful model for everyone but the players. Plus, while consumers may be fickle from one season to the next, retailers can be counted on to buy a certain amount of product with every set release.

pt iv: we’re all capitalists now

But it’s not just the stores financially invested in new sets.

Anyone that plays constructed is required to intimately know the finance of Magic. It’s impossible to ignore unless you’re so new to the game that you just play with cards you’ve opened from packs and got from friends, or so Montgomery Burns-style rich that you see absolutely no difference between a $15 draft and a $3000 deck.

No one gets to just play Magic, if you want to play Constructed. You have to buy or trade for cards, and that means giving up some (large) amount of either your own money, or the cards you own already. Before anyone can be an expert in playing any deck, they have to be an expert on the availability of those cards, the price of the cards that they already own in order to acquire it, and the price of every other deck in the format, in case one of those other decks is more affordable.

All of this requires knowledge, research, expertise. Everyone has to become skilled at getting the most value for their cards and money, at trading for what they want from the guy with $100,000 worth of cards without getting ripped off.

And they have to do that instead of playing the game.

Even playing Limited, the format where no one needs anything other than to sign up for an event, people are more likely to be praying to open a foil of the set’s chase mythic. And why wouldn’t they? For most drafts, the highest reward for winning matches is enough store credit to be able to enter the next draft, whereas a card can easily be worth over $100 straight from a Standard-legal set. It’s teaching players that what matters isn’t the game, but the possessions they use to play the game.

Since the real rewards are in the hands of other players (what they opened from packs in that draft), players are all trying to play one another. They’re not trying to pull one over on Wizards, of course; that’s impossible, because Wizards is a level separated from the sales of cards, disingenuously refusing to acknowledge that these sales even exist. Just to have the cards to play the game, people want to scam one another out of small amounts of value.

Which is, to some degree, rational. There are two games going on here: the game of playing Magic, and the game of making money (or money-equivalent-cards) from other Magic players. Which would you rather be good at?

The best player in the room earns almost nothing, even from winning a relatively large tournament. The best players in the world can often barely squeak out a living from Magic, and a good portion of that is from third parties paying them to write or promote them. (And those third parties get their money from… selling Magic cards.)

The best people in Magic finance, though, get a significantly larger reward. The amount of money you can make with, for example, a successful speculation, or a buyout, or selling cards to a store with a mistakenly-high buylist price, is almost unbounded.

So of course, people want to become the Magic finance kings. They memorize the equivalent of enormous, multi-variable Excel spreadsheets, with numbers constantly changing from week to week. They invest their own money into product with the hope of making a return on it. In other words, they’re capitalists.

Well, sort of. By a traditional definition, a capitalist is someone who owns the means of production, and uses that to generate a profit for themselves. They purchase others’ labor power, which gives them a large amount of control over those people, since their employees depend on that job for their survival.

Someone buying and selling Magic cards isn’t in control of the means of production. Unless they own a store, they don’t employ anyone. But they’re not just consumers, because they’re all convinced that their investment will make them a return. The closest equivalent are stock brokers.

In my favorite nonfiction book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, author Daniel Kahneman describes doing a study for a financial institution. He proves convincingly that there is no correlation between how well a broker does one year with how well they do the next; that is, that it’s entirely random. That’s the best equivalent for how Magic players treat one another: they’re just trading back and forth, remembering that one time that they were a genius and bought four Tarmogoyf and flipped them for $400 in profit, conveniently forgetting when they bought Tarmogoyf again and lost the same amount. (Because it stayed in their binder, so they didn’t really lose money, right?)

Even in situations where no one really gets a long-term advantage over anyone else, it changes the dynamic of how players interact with one another. The capitalist’s goal is to use their financial resources to exploit other people to get access to theirs; in Magic, instead of a company exploiting a worker, it’s millions of petit-capitalists all trying to exploit one another.

Today’s Magic is not a game, nor a hobby, nor a way to get out of the house and chat with people who share a common interest. It’s an investment. Our enjoyment, our passion, has been commodified. We’ve been taught to not even bother spending an evening having a good time with friends at the card shop unless the EV of the event is sufficiently high. Think of people grinding constructed Magic Online events for small returns, just to get enough tickets and packs to be able to draft every now and then. If it wasn’t for the high cost, people could play what they really wanted to play all the time. In Magical capitalism, fun is no longer the goal of playing a game, it’s a byproduct of the attempt to acquire more cards.

This secondary game (or primary game, depending on how you look at it) splits players’ focus. Every minute spent haggling over cards or studying price swings is a minute not spent playtesting or discussing which cards are going to be viable in the format. People can’t focus on everything all the time; we have neither infinite time, nor infinite mental energy. It’s a certainty that, if every Magic player were able to focus exclusively on the game, the quality of play and deckbuilding would rise.

Similar to how even multi-millionaires still squeeze the last bit out of their tube of toothpaste, the incredible card-wealth that many of these players have doesn’t seem to inspire much generosity, and especially not any devaluing of what they have. When someone with $50,000 worth of cards in a binder looks over the trade stuff of a kid who started playing this year using their allowance money, the most likely result is the rich person saying, “thank you” and handing the binder back, not any selfless offer to help the younger person get the cards they want.

With true collective action, seeing each other as allies rather than as binders full of cards just waiting for us to reach out and pick from, players could accomplish so much more. There are so many multiples more copies of valuable cards than there are people who want to use them in decks; for every player just trying to get a playset of Noble Hierarch so they can play a weekly Modern event with their friends, there are ten players with pristine playsets of the cards, unwilling to give them up unless they get a good return on their investment.

This sort of selfishness is ingrained in us not just by the broader culture, but by Magic culture, starting with the randomized way we (supposedly) acquire our cards. When we see parts of our game not just as, well, parts of a game, but as physical manifestations of our wealth, it becomes nearly impossible for us to get rid of them without getting something we want in exchange.

Sure, Magic players should compete with each other: we should compete within games of Magic, and to make better decks to bring to tournaments. The sort of competition that happens because of Magical capitalism is a competition that makes it more difficult for people to even get decks and play in the first place.

pt v: kill reviews: masters 25

Nowhere is the tension between Magic as a game, Magic as a way for stores to make money, Magic as a collectable, and Magic as a capitalist enterprise more apparent than in reprint sets like Masters 25. The reason they exist is that even Wizards knows that Magic’s eternal formats (including Modern) are unsustainable without new cards being supplied to accommodate new players entering the format; but Wizards is also a game company, so outside of wildly expensive, few-cards-per-sale box sets like From the Vault, they’re going to print these cards in a way that allows and encourages people to play games with them.

And then the tension shows.

It was bad enough when Modern Masters had an MSRP of $7 a pack, and was a limited print run: they’d fly off the shelves in a way that was great for stores, but bad for people that wanted to draft the set, since the cards were going straight to people that were opening them in order to sell the cards inside for a profit. So Wizards raised the MSRP to $10 a pack and printed it like any other booster set, instead of in a limited print run.

So now, when stores hold drafts of it, just the cost of the packs is $30. And since stores usually charge a few bucks more to offer prize support, you’re looking at $40+ for a normal draft of a set. That is… a lot.

Wizards is straight up telling its players with its pricing, “these cards are better and more important than the cards we sell for $4 a pack.” And players, for good reason, expect it to be worth it. It’s unlikely that the draft environment is going to be so much more fun that it’s worth paying $20-$30 more for a draft, so they expect their money to go to good use somewhere else. That is… in the value of the cards. Duh.

Then, when you sit down to draft a Masters set, making back that $40+ is going to be your first priority. That’s just rational, and it’s not as though cards like Jace, Imperial Recruiter, Rishadan Port, or even a common like Nettle Sentinel were put in the set first and foremost for the fun gameplay they add to the limited environment. (That’s not why the set exists, remember?) So your first picks, hopefully, are going to be high-value cards. If you get $5 worth of cards for your $40, you’re going to be upset… even if you have by far the best deck at the table.

So… what are we paying for, with Masters 25? Are we paying extra for additional fun; that is, a more expensive product from Wizards isn’t just rarer, shinier, and more prestigious, but actually a more successful product as a piece of entertainment? This probably isn’t the case. It’s not the experience that you’re paying a premium for, but simply being left with somehow nicer possessions when you’re done.

Apply this to all of Magic, though. What are you paying for, when you draft any Magic set? Is the game so much more fun than any other game that’s ever been made that it’s worth $15 (or $30, or $40…) for an evening’s entertainment? Almost no one over the age of 12 wants to regularly spend substantial amounts of money getting a fleeting experience playing video games at an arcade, paying for a game without getting anything corporeal to show for it. A common objection is, “for that amount of money, I could just buy the game.” Which is what Magic does, in a way. It makes you feel better about paying so much for a game by telling you that it was the resulting game pieces that you were really paying for.

In a weird twist, the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Masters 25 led to a great result for players like myself: I actually got to draft it! Mox Boarding House is already selling packs for a buck below MSRP, and instead of the $40 per draft like it was as the set was released, they ran drafts for $30 each, including prize support.

I wasn’t expecting much, for a couple reasons. I’ve only done a couple drafts of previous Masters sets, and I absolutely hated them. Your first couple picks locked you into one of eight to ten archetypes, then you picked every card from your next packs that matched that archetype. There was no strategy, no creativity; you weren’t creating your own art, you were following paint-by-numbers instructions. Sure, your decks ended up looking sweet, but a deck is only cool to me if some amount of thought went into making it. The process of drafting has always been more fun to me than the actual games of Magic, and the drafts of those sets were mind-numbing.

Then, reading some early feedback online, people absolutely hated the format. They said that there were no archetypes, no signposts, that their decks ended up nearly random mishmashes of cards. Well that’s weird, I thought… maybe they reacted too hard to the previous feedback?

Then I drafted the set.

It’s… phenomenal. It’s brilliant. If you sat me down right now and made me choose between drafting it and Innistrad, I’d draft Masters 25.

What sets it apart from any other set I’ve drafted in paper in the last decade is its difficulty, right from the first pick. I’ve often complained about sets like Ixalan and Zendikar for the dropoff in card quality, and complemented Innistrad and Rise of the Eldrazi for how they use those late picks to support archetypes. Masters 25 seems to take this even further: the commons, while surely not equal in power level, are almost all tempting picks in one way or another.

Is it worth it first-picking Horseshoe Crab and trying to make a deck around it? Does the power level of Counterspell, an early pick in cube, make it a better option in a booster Limited format compared to its modern three-mana equivalents? Is Court Hussar good enough to commit to UW early on in the draft? Man-o-War is just better than trying any of those speculative strategies, right? Does the lower mana cost and built-in protection of Ghost Ship make it better than Shoreline Ranger, or is the flexibility to fix your mana better? How many landcyclers should make a final deck, anyway?

Those are commons in one color. Which ones are better, and under what circumstances? [2]

[2] At this very moment, within the first few picks, I think my pick order would be Man-o-War, Court Hussar, Horseshoe Crab, Counterspell, Shoreline Ranger, Ghost Ship. But really, I have no idea.

What separates Masters 25 even from other archetype-based draft formats is how the defining cards are at common. Even my beloved Innistrad’s most interesting draft archetypes, Burning Vengeance and Spider Spawning, are dependent on their namesake uncommons. Masters 25 shifts it down: from what I’ve seen so far, Fencing Ace seems like an archetype-defining card, with all the power-boosting cards in green (Giant Growth, Echoing Courage, Rancor, Invigorate), and it’s a card that feels uncommon based on how it makes you draft differently around it. But in order for it to function without absurd luck opening packs, it has to be a common.

When people say that there are “no archetypes” after a draft or two, they’re just wrong. The archetypes are just more subtle than “draft all of this mechanic” from previous masters sets, or “pick creatures with the same type” from Ixalan. There are multiple viable control decks. Actual control decks! Creature-light, heavy on removal, maybe even permission, Limited control decks!

One of the defining cards of the Masters 25 experience, to me, is Angelic Page. It’s not one that defines an archetype, and it’s hardly the best White uncommon in the set. It defines Masters 25 because it’s a card that Wizards would never print in a Standard-legal draft format: it’s too skill-intensive, leading to a ton of on-board interactions and complex decision trees during combat. It’s an entirely different card in the hands of a good player than it is with a mediocre one. But it’s not even a card that screams to players that it does that: most players are familiar with difficult spells like Fact or Fiction, Gifts Ungiven, and Brainstorm. But for the players that Masters 25 was made for—not the ones who buy it, but the ones it was made for—Angelic Page is a celebration. It’s telling them that their skill of learning the ins and outs of combat, of setting up specific lines of play, hasn’t gone unappreciated even in 2018. It just has a specific place.

I wish that more people could experience Masters 25 draft. I wish that I could play it more often. Specifically, I wish that I could play it at my local card shop and draft cards with the intention of playing them, with other people doing the same. But the $10 price point means that this incredibly deep Limited format that rewards people for drafting it repeatedly and learning its nooks and crannies… will have very few people with the extra money to do so, and even if some people do want to, they’ll have difficulty finding seven others.

Because of the impossible situation the set was put in, Masters 25 might end up as Magic’s great lost format. It’s as though an LP was released only to a group of Ultimate Frisbee enthusiasts, and they all complain it’s too heavy and impossible to catch.

pt vi: consumerism

It’s not just to play the game, or to make a few extra dollars, that people trade Magic cards. It’s a collectable, and something in the human brain makes us wired to appreciate unusual or prestigious things. I have to restrain myself from sneering at people foiling out their Legacy Lands deck, because I’ve certainly felt a certain way looking at an FNM promo Quirion Ranger, or an original copy of Nico’s Chelsea Girl, that makes me understand the impulse.

Collecting is about owning cool things, and playing Magic gives players the opportunity for the most important part of owning something: showing off to other people. Every class and subculture has their own version of conspicuous consumption, and every one of these groups thinks everyone else’s displays are tacky or ridiculous. Lots of male Magic players think people like Kylie Jenner are image-obsessed, shallow, without substance; then those guys play their EDH deck that they’ve spent a year and $5000 foiling out.

This is one of the most bizarre aspects: it’s a self-conscious display of expensive things for their aesthetic value, but most of these people seem to put no value on this in any other respect. It would make more logical sense if everyone who was showing off expensive foils was also walking around in tailored designer suits and driving an ostentatious car, but players don’t seem to care about any aspect of appearance other than when it comes to their cards.

The very fact that so many people, whether competitive or casual, care so deeply about the appearance and the rarity of their cards does a lot to expose how irrelevant the game itself is to so many people. There’s nothing that a foil does for you in a game, and the most reaction it can cause is for someone to go “whoa, cool card.”

As is often the case with this sort of consumption, it’s self-reinforcing in the community. If you spend $300 on some card you don’t really need and feel a twinge of remorse when you get it, that’s going to get washed away when you go to your store and people are spending ten times that much. Relatively, you’re a cheapskate. Then that purchase will lead you to justify more and more things, until you’re the guy that makes other players feel normal for their spending on the game.

pt vii: class

Of the people that are truly devoted to playing Magic, there are two distinct classes: those who have to spend extra time and effort to afford the decks they want to play (or the packs to draft with), just so they can play the game, and there are those who can voluntarily choose to spend more money than is necessary in order to show off. There are other economic models where these two can live in harmony: in free-to-play games, like League of Legends, plenty of people play endlessly without spending a cent (and even unlocking more things as a reward for playing more). Their playing is subsidized by the “whales,” those players who choose to spend a lot of money on cosmetics and other items in the game.

Magic, instead, gets money from everyone. In addition to those people engaging in conspicuous consumption, the average player still has to buy cards. Newer players comprise the third, lowest class in Magic. Rather than being cut a break and given some starting stuff for free like in modern free-to-play games, they’re punished for not even knowing how to buy cards. Their consumerism is, in some way, involuntary: sure, they choose to play Magic, but they don’t know that there are ways to acquire cards other than buying packs. They don’t know enough about Magic to know how to spend less money on Magic. It’s like a startup fee for learning the game, a tax on a lack of Magical knowledge.

pt viii: but what’s the problem? wizards’s incentives

Okay, so people like having expensive cards to show off. Wizards wants to make money on their product. It’s a capitalist system. As long as it makes a good game, who cares?

It affects the game. Alongside the blatant concessions to the nature of letting sets go out of print that are the Masters sets, the commercial nature of Magic is apparent in sets like Ixalan. “Pirates and Dinosaurs” is pretty obviously a concept that was made as something that would have mass appeal, especially to a younger demographic.

It’s the most egregious example of Wizards needing to have something “catchy” in order to sell a set. A set can’t just be a collection of cards that plays really well together and advances the design of the game; it has to be something marketable, something easily summed up with a tagline and represented with a couple of chase cards.

If, as players, we just want them to make sets that are fun to play, Wizards’s incentives are completely warped. They can pretty much print whatever set they want, and if it has a bunch of constructed-worthy dual lands or a really high power level… they’re pretty much set. To their credit, they’re very conscious of power creep and take strong action to let it go out of control, so the fact that Darksteel simultaneously destroyed every constructed format it touched and became the best-selling small set of all time is more funny than indicative of any evil plan.

The lands, though, they’ve been really blatant about. Worried that a set might not meet expectations? Throw some high-powered lands into it. Still concerned? Give it a gimmick like randomly inserting otherwise-unavailable cards.

Yes, everyone complains about the price of dual lands and how hard this makes it to build new decks. The frequency of these complaints doesn’t make them any less true: Wizards actively chooses to make constructed Magic dramatically more expensive by putting cards that are mandatory to play at rare, so that vendors and people looking for value will open more packs hunting them. There’s been an ongoing decision for them to make: do they take the side of players, and choose to (somewhat) lower the cost of constructed magic so that more people can afford to play, thus boosting their potential customer base and getting more people in tournaments? Or do they choose to raise the “expected value” of packs, so that they can sell more of them to fewer people? The last time they chose the former was Invasion, when they put the cycle of comes-into-play-tapped lands at uncommon. [3]

[3] It sounds strange now, but those were a big deal at the time. To that point, every multicolored land other than the original duals and the painlands in Ice Age had been pretty awful. Here’s Randy Buehler in 2002 writing about pitching the Invasion cycle when he was brand-new to Wizards::

"Why don't we just do 'comes-into-play-tapped' dual lands?"

They stared at me, so I elaborated. "They're just like Tundra except they come into play tapped and don't count as an island or a plains."

Their first reaction was "No way--that's way too good." In fact, R&D had already considered exactly those lands and decided on theoretical grounds that they were significantly better than basic lands, and thus we couldn't print them.

The whole article is worth a read, one of Buehler’s best (Buehler’s articles were notoriously short, and read like he was writing them for a school assignment rather than because of a genuine desire to communicate).

pt ix: but what’s the problem? sets going out of print

Even compared to other industries, where companies are trying to make money selling some form of art or media, the collectable/limited run nature of Magic warps what products are thought of as successful. In almost any other medium where artistic creations are sold, things aren’t just written off as massive failures just because they fail to immediately attract a mainstream audience. Movies are probably the closest, with studios wanting to make as much money at the box office as possible, but at least with movies, you can go back and watch stuff that came out years ago and the studio still gets some money. Fight Club (sorry to reference it, but it really does fit as an example) overcame studio executive nervousness, poor reviews, and a mediocre box office return to be a hit years later with its DVD release, prompting a critical reevaluation.

Magic, because it only prints sets that were released within the last couple years, has absolutely no use for sets that attract attention later, after the initial release. Wizards considered sets like Future Sight and Lorwyn massive failures due to their poor sales. Years later, boxes of those go for about $800 and $700, respectively. They’re two of the most historically important sets printed in the Modern era: Future Sight is still getting reprints from its “futureshifted” cards, with Steamflogger Boss literally inspiring an entire set. Lorwyn was the debut of planeswalkers, the first truly new card type since Alpha, and what came to define the entire identity of how the story works in Magic.

The financial model of Magic has made true historical analysis of the game nearly impossible, or at least, financially and logistically inaccessible to the vast majority of players. People give serious attention, academic or hobbyist, to media like film, literature, music, and visual art; it’s no more expensive to read a copy of Lolita than it is the latest bestseller. In fact, it’s almost always cheaper to get copies of old stuff than something brand-new. Companies keep old art in print, both because they can sell it year after year and keep making money, and as almost a point of pride: some works are too historically important to ever make them unavailable.

I was intrigued by a side event at the upcoming GP: Seattle, where over three days, people draft a dozen out-of-print draft formats. It’s $700.

Old art does more than just make money for the owners of the intellectual property; it informs and inspires people. Every medium has periodic revivals in some outdated or overlooked older genre, like the 60s with folk music and the early 2000s with post-punk. It can even lead to entirely original things, like when kids into rap music dug through their parents’ jazz records for the samples that comprised early-90s rap.

An often-asked thing among Magic players, especially as the game gets to 25 years old, is what certain formats were like (usually draft). In any system that valued its players over its economic model, it would be easy for a group of friends together and draft old sets for fun without spending a fortune. Maybe a specific old format even catches on at a store or in a specific community, and it builds from there.

The system as it is seems built to tell people that the present is all there is; if you don’t like a specific format, you can go to another current format, or you can stop playing. It is a denial of the history of the game. When the game does acknowledge its history, it’s always on the terms of the present-day Wizards: they pick and choose select cards, replace a bunch of art, put it on a new card frame, and package it in order to sell the allure of one or two chase cards. But history doesn’t work like this. Going back and watching movies from the 60s, they look different. They have different styles in everything, whether it’s visuals, acting, writing, or directing. And no present-day imitation that uses vintage lenses and apes a certain style is going to capture it; it just captures the modern memory of those old things instead.

What I’m saying is that Masters sets are not enough. If the game is really going to last for another 25 years, players’ memories are going to fade. The knowledge of what Odyssey block limited was really like won’t last; when Wizards tells us that a certain set was a design failure, we have no choice but to take their word for it instead of making our own conclusions. Different people are going to have different takes on design and art: that’s how it should be. I don’t want my reviews of old sets to become unquestioningly canonized any more than I want Wizards’s takes on them to be. Our memories of the past are always telling of our present.

pt x: but what’s the problem? who gets to play magic

Racing cars might be a lot of fun. I don’t know for certain, I’ve never done it. My parents weren’t mechanics, car hobbyists, or Jay Leno, so I didn’t have access to cars that I could drive around for no real reason. Plus, when I was the age most people start learning to drive, my family was living in the middle of Denver. I would have spent all my money just on parking.

It’s an obvious point, but not everyone has the opportunity to get into, or even try, every hobby. This makes sense for stuff like cars, where it’s physically necessary to have expensive equipment, or for things like football, which requires organized teams of at least 22 players and a lot of open space.

But Magic cards are goddamned cardboard. Card games are exactly as financially inaccessible as the creators of them want them to be.

Wizards has been making a big show of how they want Magic to be more diverse and inclusive, which is a good sentiment. But it totally ignores the inherent aspects of Magic that keep it from improving in these areas. They made a game with a fairly high initial cost and an almost unfathomably large recurring cost in order to continue playing the game. Who actually wants to spend that much money? Unsurprisingly, it correlates pretty highly with the groups of people that are more likely to earn significantly more money. It’s white people, it’s men, it’s people living in high-income countries.

Is there a solution to this? Not at this point, no. The game has its established playerbase, and the way that people learn the game is almost always from someone they know who introduces them. White men are mostly going to hang out with other white men, so the network of players spreads mostly through that. For the game to truly have a diverse playerbase, it would have needed to set up roots in communities years or decades ago; it can’t be made to happen top-down at this point.

Should Magic be made more inclusive? Of course. Magic players need to stop being assholes and making people who aren’t white men not want to play by being horrible to them. But even with perfect behavior, the huge number of white male players somehow acting perfectly toward everyone else, the combination of the structure of Magic with the economic realities of race and gender are going to make sure that, from now until Magic stops existing, Magic will always be overwhelmingly white and male. Just like the houses in my beloved Seattle are filled with pro-immigrant, anti-racist, anti-poverty liberals that would rather set their house on fire than live next to subsidized housing for poor people, Magic is filled with people who are for diversity, as long as it doesn’t require changing anything about the underlying reasons for the lack of diversity.

pt xi: the capitalist attitude

Capitalism isn’t just people making money, it has a specific definition: private ownership of the means of production, run for a profit for the shareholders. For Magic, Wizards of the Coast owns more than just the physical capability of making cards. It owns the intellectual property that is Magic. When players think about what’s good for Magic, players almost always translate it into their head: what’s good for Wizards.

I hate this.

Wizards might legally own the trademarks, it might employ the designers. It’s the company that makes Magic: the Gathering. That doesn’t mean that it is Magic: the Gathering.

No matter if they made your favorite set, or if you’ve never had more fun in your life than when you’ve been playing Magic lately, Wizards is not your friend. They are trying to maximize the amount of money they can get from you. I wouldn’t put it in terms this harsh if I felt like Wizards was interested in a truly symbiotic relationship with players, where they benefit from doing what’s in players’ best interest, but they gave up doing anything close to that a long time ago.

When there’s an argument about something in Magic (it does happen from time to time), someone always tries to take the side of what’s best for Magic long-term. This, in their mind, is the same thing as what’s best for Wizards long-term. Wizards doesn’t need anyone to argue on its behalf, though; it already does that quite effectively by making every decision about Magic. What players need to do instead is focus on what’s best for us, and accept that it will be different than what’s best for Wizards.

Demand high-quality products[4]. Demand the products that you want to see. Don’t try to justify it as something that would help Wizards out in some way or make them a lot of money; it’s enough that it would be good for you and players like you.

[4] Printed high-quality, please, it’s been awful lately.

Magic isn’t one group of people, and it’s sure as hell not just one corporation. Everyone at Wizards could be abducted and sent off to an alternate dimension, and it would certainly disrupt the logistics of coming out with sets, but Magic could continue. No one can go into our brains and remove all our knowledge about the game, or the relationships we have with one another that let us sit down with cards and play a game.

Wizards likes to exert control over every aspect of Magic, from the type of tournaments that can be run (no proxies!) to the language that players can use to talk about their game.[5] They see this as their right, their responsibility, because Magic is theirs. Any problem with the game needs a top-down solution, delivered from Wizards to the eager playerbase below them.

[5] Just mention “MODO” around a Wizards-employed true believer, or “EDH,” or refer to a deck as “Dredge” or “Affinity” when it doesn’t technically have any cards with those mechanics.

Fuck that. Hasbro owning copyrights over symbols and ideas pertaining to Magic, because they bought the company in 1999, doesn’t mean that Magic is theirs. Magic belongs to the people playing it. (The Magic was inside us all along!) When Wizards steps in and tries to change how people talk about something embedded in Magic culture, like trying to redefine what a “proxy” is despite how the term has been used by players since the game’s inception, just keep using the terms that players use, regardless of how Wizards wants us to talk about the game.

We’ve invested too much time in this game not to be its real owners.

i'm half of a podcast about the great designer search called The Lazy Goblins

2018-03-14T16:44:00.003-07:00

The first episode of The Lazy Goblins, where we talk about The Great Designer Search 2, is live.

Our podcast will be covering the entirety of GDS3, so think of this as a sort of preview or episode 0 before we dive into that. It's been super fun to record, but holy shit did I forget how much time it takes to properly edit audio.

The financial cost to us so far has been zilch, but if you want to compensate us for our time, you can do that through (what else?) my Patreon. If you add a note or otherwise indicate that you're supporting it because of The Lazy Goblins, I'll kick half of it back to James.

Hope you enjoy. I'm genuinely very receptive to feedback on it because I haven't recorded a podcast with other people in years (and I've never edited one that wasn't just me), so please talk to us on Twitter @TheLazyGoblins, or me individually @KillGoldfish.

iTunes? Coming soon. A non-default Twitter avatar? Also soon. Being able to stay under two hours per episode? No promises.

pauper: a format review

2018-03-07T13:00:00.001-08:00

One of the never-ending questions about “wide-open” formats is whether they really are that open, or whether not enough good players have invested time into solving the format.

I remember the Standard formats that used Ravnica extremely fondly, especially Champions-Ravnica, because of the huge number of different decks, and the feeling like someone could brew up something crazy and new, and there was a decent chance it would be a viable deck. But what if the format just didn’t have the proper amount of tuning? Maybe a deck like Tron, Heartbeat, or Zoo should have dominated the format, but people didn’t realize it?

In the case of that format, it probably was just a good format: tons of pro players put in months testing and tuning, and Pro Tour Honolulu ended up with seven decks in the top eight (the only repeat was Owling Mine, of all things). But this sort of concern is a lot more plausible when it comes to smaller formats like Pauper, ones that don’t have Pro Tours or Grands Prix, and the pros who play the format usually just take a stock list that they think looks good and play some matches (maybe some tweaking here and there).

To be clear before anything else: Pauper is a good format. Making Pauper decks is the first time I’ve been truly inspired to brew up a series of decks in literally years. But part of the reason so many brews are even somewhat viable is that a good percentage of Pauper players are also playing weird brews instead of the top-tier decks in the format.

When I was first looking into really playing in a Pauper, the obvious choice was Elves. The deck was the entire reason for making this blog back in 2010, so it’s a deck I have a good amount of experience with. But I avoided it, because it’s a deck I’ve perhaps played too much, and because it’s already accepted as one of the best decks in the format, and I wanted to see if something new and unique was possible. So I brought a mono-blue control deck to the tournament and scrubbed out. I thought it was due to the deck being unplayably bad, but then the original creator of the deck absolutely stomped me with it, so really the issue is that I’m not a good player.

Then I went home, goldfished Elves like I did when I was a teenager, and went “oh.” It’s absolutely busted.

Elves is one of three decks, along with Delver and Tron, that impose the harshest constraints on other decks. (I almost called it Pauper’s tier one, but I looked it up and somehow Elves gets much less play online than it does on paper around me, and the inverse is true of Kuldotha Boros.) That is, it’s very difficult to build any sort of creature-based synergy deck that isn’t straight-up worse than Elves, just like it’s difficult to build any sort of aggro-control that outdoes Delver, or anything lategame-focused that stands up to Tron.

Additionally, any weird brew is almost certainly going to have an atrocious matchup with at least one of the three: too non-interactive, Elves runs you over. Too dependant on specific spells (eg any combo deck), Delver counters it and beats you down with their remarkably fast clock. Too slow of a clock, Tron assembles their pieces and is casting 15 mana worth of spells a turn while you have six. One of the things about the format that surprised me the most was the lack of any Rock-type deck, the one that plays some interactive spells, some undercosted guys, and 50/50s every matchup. But the nature of the format is to have many powerful linear decks that interact on different axes, so it’s nearly impossible to have one plan to disrupt a wide array of them. Plus, there don’t exist the generally good, non-synergistic undercosted guys like other formats. If you want a 3/3 for two or a 4/4 for three, you have to put in some effort.

While there’s certainly tons of stuff to brew around in Pauper, the format is defined by a key thing it lacks: good mana. There are no painlands, and no viable alternative way to have a dual-colored land that can tap for mana the turn you play it. The closest is Ash Barrens (as of this writing, before the release of Masters 25, a frustratingly expensive “common”) which can make colored mana the turn you use it, but only if you have an extra mana available.

What bothers me about Pauper’s mana isn’t that it’s bad, exactly; it’s that it affects aggro decks way more than it affects control ones. Tron gets to be five color while still playing twelve or more lands incapable of tapping for colored mana, because it can play a dozen ETB tapped lands and some mana-fixing artifacts. Dual- or tri-colored control is almost trivial to build a manabase for, but anything aggressive kneecaps itself in the attempt. There are so many decks that just don’t get to exist because the concept mandates it be both multicolored and aggressive. Powerful cards like Qasali Pridemage and Putrid Leech deserve to be Pauper all-stars, and they just can’t be.

This is most obvious when looking at the two variants on Pauper’s most popular deck, Delver. The mono-blue version is worse in almost every way, other than getting to play Spire Golem (and often less than four)... but it has more consistent mana than its more interactive variant, UR Delver. With four Ash Barrens and a couple Terramorphic Expanse, it accepts that it’ll get to cast its Bolts and Skreds late, if at all.

Arguably, that’s the sort of trade-off that should be necessary to play powerful, low-mana-cost multicolored decks like that. But Delver is practically the only deck that gets to have both, because playsets of both Ponder and Preordain mean that your hands are several times more consistent than their opponents’.

Here’s my big concern with Pauper as a format, if its popularity not only keeps increasing, but tournaments and prizes get larger: UR Delver is just the best deck. I don’t mean that it’s necessarily the one that’s most likely to have the highest win percentage at my local card shop, but that in the hands of pro-quality players, it probably doesn’t actually have bad matchups. Ponder and Preordain are some of the most skill-testing cards ever made, and many players without top-tier skills are going to throw it away on the first turn as a spell that draws a card for U. I’m not smugly saying that everyone other than me is bad at those cards; I’m definitely even worse than the average Pauper Delver player. But I know that better play is possible. A deck that has tools to deal with just about anything, and has the card selection to see so much of its deck, gets better so much more in the hands of top-tier players than other decks.

This is the classic casual vs competitive dilemma that any game somewhat balanced around competitive play has to deal with. In League of Legends, it frustrates players when they want to play something like Rengar or Kalista, and because they’re so strong in the hands of professionals, they have to be tuned to a level where they’re nearly unplayable for the average player.

If Pauper stays at the level of focus it’s currently getting, then it’s pretty much perfect. It’s fun to create new stuff in, going to a tournament shows a huge diversity of decks and styles, and the games are interactive. But with more serious attention, those metagame-defining decks would be played by a larger percentage of people, and all the weird brews would get crushed in their first two matches playing against Delver. In a sufficiently developed metagame, Delver itself might need a ban; it’s a testament to the deck’s power that this would only somewhat weaken it, not actually kill it. It’s thought of as a bad card in plenty of matchups anyway.

Speaking of bannings, the banned list compared to a format like Modern seems relatively restrained. All of the banned cards are more than justified, with a couple outrageous combo decks like Infect and Storm needing to get kicked out of the format. (I do find it funny that they banned the best storm card, then that wasn’t enough, so the second-best storm card, then the third-best storm card, the previously-obscure Temporal Fissure. Storm is strong.) I’m honestly worried that, with additional attention from Wizards, they might feel the need to ban a card from like five different decks in a way that lowers the general power level of the format.

My favorite thing about Pauper is the most obvious: it’s cheap! This affects my decisions and my experimentation more than I thought it would. In the past, building decks for other Constructed formats, if you build a deck for hundreds of dollars, you’re kinda stuck with it. It’s not trivial to trade an entire deck for another one, or to just abandon it and start over if the metagame shifts. This made me a lot more hesitant to build decks, or even attempt brewing up new things. In Pauper, I had an idea for a UG Madness deck, so I just… bought it (well, almost all of it). A couple proxies, and I had a deck to play against a gauntlet. If I want to practice playing against Tron, I can just get the actual deck. If a friend needs a deck, or wants to try something different, I have two or three extras. It’s wonderful.

I’ve talked before about how ridiculously skewed our perceptions of value in games are as Magic players, compared to other games or hobbies. Paying $60 for one deck instead of $1000 is shocking, despite the fact that entire games sell for way less than $60.

It still saddens me that Magic is so finance-oriented that even the all-common format is still somewhat defined by its prices. This is my idealism shining through, but I’d like to see attempts at decommodifying large swaths of the format. Many of the most important cards are so, well, common that stores or players could keep a dozen decks on hand for whoever wanted to show up and use one.

If you’re reading this and somewhat thinking about trying Pauper: you should try Pauper. It’s different here in Seattle, where there are multiple places with large Pauper tournaments on a regular basis, but if a store near you has any sort of Pauper thing going, it’s well worth your time to play at least a couple times. It’s not a perfect format, but it’s the most fun I’ve had with Constructed Magic in many years.

okay fine i'm not going to stop writing about magic

2018-01-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

In fact, I'm recommitting to it:

I've relaunched my Patreon.

It's no longer pay-per-article, it's pay-per-month. All my writing for the blog is free, and always will be, but it's with the support of Patreon donors (like you?!) that allow me to take the tine and energy to write it. Plus, sometimes research means having to open booster packs! Those cost money!

gds3 essays

2018-01-22T17:28:00.000-08:00

Remember how I said I was done writing about Magic? I changed my mind. Kill Reviews will continue after a long hiatus, but in a different format then before, so check back in a couple weeks-ish.

I entered the Great Designer Search 3. Because the essay submission deadline is closed, I'm allowed to share the (obviously correct) answers; because of the last one, I doubt I will advance very far.

1. Introduce yourself and explain why you are a good fit for this internship.

Hi, I’m Jesse Mason. I’m where I am because of Magic. Literally. About five years ago, I was alone and feeling hopeless in rural upstate New York: I had just lost my job, had no real friends in the area, and all my potentially-productive time went toward playing Elves on Magic Online and writing about the game on my blog.

What I did have a network of friends that I knew from Magic. After being told, “you should move to Seattle!” over and over, I realized I had no real reason not to do that. So I did, and immediately fell in love with the area, its people, and its vibrant Magic community.

I was a hardcore tournament player, but really, those tournaments were just an excuse to live inside Magic: meaning testing it with friends, talking about it constantly, scribbling decklists on scraps of paper, trying not to get banned from MTGSalvation. (Well, I didn’t try super hard.)

Unusually for a tournament player, I could honestly take or leave playing the game itself. What I wanted was to demonstrate my complete understanding of the game, its theory, and its metagame.

After I moved, I got a full-time job staring at Magic cards for Card Kingdom. I used my off time to write Kill Reviews, a comprehensive review of the design of every Magic block, and my biggest personal source of pride (well, either that or hitting Diamond in League of Legends (Janna owns)).

There’s a difference between just having opinions about Magic design, and having experience writing long-form analyses of its design, researching it, defending those opinions (or changing them). I’d like to think that I’m the second most-read author about Magic’s design history, slightly behind Maro with perhaps 1/10,000th his readership.

I’ve already transformed from some guy who thinks about the game, to someone who writes about its design. I’d love the opportunity to go the final step into helping to design it myself.

2. An evergreen mechanic is a keyword mechanic that shows up in (almost) every set. If you had to make an existing keyword mechanic evergreen, which one would you choose and why?

Cycling.

One of the defining aspects of Magic is that players have some choice over their cards (by building decks), but never perfect choice of what’s in their hand. This gives the game its variance and therefore, its fun, but it’s also what makes some cards completely useless at different times. No one truly enjoys a game where one player has a hand full of spells they can’t cast, and holding two Shatter against a deck with no artifacts isn’t providing the thrill that keeps people opening packs.

In its simplest form (such as in Urza’s Saga), Cycling just helps those issues in a straightforward way. Sets like Onslaught take it further, making it into a mechanic that can do, well, pretty much anything: you have options of casting the card versus cycling it for a different effect, or you can build around it with cards like Astral Slide. One of the best parts of Shards of Alara was how everyone got cycling, but only Grixis had the benefit of tying it in with its incredibly cool graveyard theme. Its Future Sight-esque Viscera Dragger made a simple common with two keywords and no other text into a constructed staple.

Amonkhet used it again, and very well, but it didn’t push it in too many new directions: it had Cycling matters build-arounds a la Onslaught, and some graveyard tie-ins a la Shards, but mostly it just smoothed things. Abandoned Sarcophagus, which combines the two, deserves its own shout-out for brilliance.

Every set should have at least a few cyclers. Then, every now and then, when a set has a new “Cycling matters” variant, intrepid deckbuilders will go back and reevaluate every single card with the mechanic to come up with amazing Modern, Legacy, Commander, and casual decks.

This will lead to more fun games, especially limited, because tossing away useless cards puts people in better position to cast their spells. And casting spells is rather important in Magic.

3. If you had to remove evergreen status from a keyword mechanic that is currently evergreen, which one would you remove and why?

I’d like to offer a fistbump in solidarity to the person tasked with reading these answers, who’s going to pore over thousands of people ranting about Hexproof. I’ll go against the grain and say Reach.

Reach makes very little sense. It’s half of Flying, and not even the cool part. Defensive creatures are sometimes necessary, but not as many of them are needed compared to aggressive or utility-oriented ones; a set requiring a slot for a defensive creature that also hoses flying is rare.

It’s punishing to new players. If a player has a cool small flyer, and their opponent has something with Reach, our hero’s creature may as well lose flying as far as attacking is concerned. There’s not even a unifying look or theme to Reach: it’s Spiders, sure, but also Archers (which historically could also symbolize First Strike), and even a Cobra. A Cobra! It’s difficult to look across the table and know, at a glance, who has Reach. Not everyone has “Spider = Reach” burned into their brain, especially when there’s about one spider ever two sets now.

There’s so many other ways to hose flyers. You could make them lose flying, you could Jump creatures during other plays’ turns, you could deal damage… lots of things that aren’t Reach.

“But wait!”, I hear the Hexproof-rant-reader exclaim. “What identity will Spiders have without Reach?”

Honestly, Reach is holding Magical arachnids back. They’re so many things in fantasy: they’re scary, they trap and eat things, they come either as a mass of thousands or as one huge one. Spiders have symbolized malevolence countless times. Alpha’s Giant Spider ensnared these infamous invertebrates into the web of always being 2/4 Reach creatures. This prevents them from being the predatory, poisonous, nightmare fuel-beings they deserve to be. Magic should recast them as natural-born Vampires, sucking the lifeforce from their victims.

4. You're going to teach Magic to a stranger. What's your strategy to have the best possible outcome?

Get them into a game.

That’s only five of my 350, but that’s all that Magic needs to convince people it’s cool. I tell people the absolute bare minimum of information necessary to shuffle up and start a game, then explain everything else as it comes up: the phases of the turn, combat, spells, etc. Then we play a couple more games, with them internalizing more concepts as we continue.

Everything after that, I customize to what kind of person they are, and what most excites them about Magic. Just like elementary school teachers have to modify their teaching style to their students, because everyone processes information differently, those of us introducing Magic to others have to let them lead the way.

Magic has so many cool aspects to it: the flavor behind what’s happening, the strategy of cards interacting with one another, the probabilities behind what gets drawn, the before-game decisions about what cards to play, the incredible art on the cards… as a recovering tournament player, I can’t force someone to enjoy Magic exactly how I want to enjoy it.

If they’re interested in all the different things cards can do, and get excited about making something themselves, I guide them through making their first deck with some pre-selected piles of cards. If they’re more the technical type that enjoys the games themselves, I’ll just bring two new decks that we’ll trade off playing against one another, so that they learn more strategy each time. If they enjoy the fantasy lore more than anything, I’ll find someone else to teach them.

5. What is Magic's greatest strength and why?

John Peel was a legendary BBC radio DJ, and his favorite band was the long-running post-punk band The Fall. His famous quote about them was: “they are always different; they are always the same.”

Magic’s biggest strength is exactly that. Once you’ve learned Magic, you’ve learned Magic; you can come back to it a year or a decade after you quit, and a lot of things will be different, but the core gameplay will always be there.

There have been lots of times over the years that, for one reason or another, I set aside Magic for a while. Usually it was because another interest was occupying my mind at the time: a video game, basketball, or deciding to really try to get into ~film~. Every time I’ve gotten back into it, the game was constantly able to shock me. Even the most mainstream tournament Standard deck had jaw-dropping cards I’d never seen before, strategies that seemed unprecedented and unbeatable. In a way, that experience of seeing all of the game at once made me want to stop playing every now and then, just to get that sort of super-spoiler-season where I saw a year’s worth of metagame developments all at once.

But when someone does decide to get back into it, it’s so easy: you just show up to a draft, gasp at the cool cards, and pick whatever strategy seems fun and possible at the moment. Then with one draft, there’s no way you won’t be sucked into doing a second, and a third, then building a constructed deck around your favorite strategy.

Once you’ve gotten into Magic once, it’ll affect your thinking for the rest of your life. You’ll never truly leave it. Even when I went years between sanctioned formats, it still felt like Magic was there in my brain somewhere, like an old favorite book collecting dust on the shelf. Every game I tried, I would compare things in it to Magic. Long-time players can leave Magic, but it doesn’t leave us.

6. What is Magic's greatest weakness and why?

Cost, and ease of finding other players.

I used to think it was the learning curve of the game. Then I got into League of Legends. The learning curve of that game is like if the only way to play your first game of Magic was to enter into a thousand-person Grand Prix, and when you’re opening your first pack, everyone is telling you to hurry up and finish your mana base (or some other phrase you don’t understand). But somehow, League of Legends is the most popular computer game in the world. A hundred million people have overcome its learning curve, because if you have the time, you can always learn. It’s free, it’s a click of a button from finding teammates and opponents, and you’ll get better by playing more.

Magic doesn’t have those advantages. While experienced Magic players know how to build a Standard deck for under $100, inexperienced ones will be intimidated by people with a Cadillac worth of cards in a binder that don’t even get used. Others will see that $100 deck and be baffled at the idea that they can get a small fraction of a game for $100 instead of a complete experience for $60 (or $0).

Even if you have money, you have to be in physical proximity of a card store (or another place with tournaments), and have the time to go there. What if you work retail or food service late into Friday night, as many people in my generation do? What if you’re a social, fun-loving person, and you want to, well… have a Friday night? You’re out of luck.

This wasn’t such a big deal when Magic was newer. Now that Magic has competition from games that can be played for any price, anywhere on the planet, at any time, it really is.

7. What Magic mechanic most deserves a second chance (aka which had the worst first introduction compared to its potential)?

Champion.

Lorwyn was such a brilliantly design set that it gave itself a strange problem: it didn’t really need many mechanics. Champion is an incredibly cool idea, wasted in a nearly-flavorless Lorwyn implementation that just gave the caster Some Creature.

The idea of Champion, in its mechanical essence, is that something is completely consumed inside another thing. This doesn’t just have to be harmlessly making an Elf into a bigger Elf: what about the sci-fi trope of some alien consuming something else? In some Lovecraftian setting, you could have a Human championed into some twisted creature with a human somewhere inside it. Something like The Mimeoplasm could champion multiple creatures into one horrifying thing.

Not a single Lorwyn Champion got different abilities or stats based on what it Championed, and that’s huge untapped design space.

Not only could it be expanded out of a specific tribe, it could be expanded out of creatures entirely: a Legendary land could Champion a basic to symbolize a momentous battle being won on that land; similarly, a random equipment could become the signature weapon of a planeswalker. Why limit it to one type? Just like Ixalan had cards that transformed into other types, a non-creature permanent could Champion a creature to symbolize retaining the essence of that creature, but moving past its physical form. For example, a demon trapped in an adventurer’s sword.

Just like Fading begat Vanishing, the resulting mechanic doesn’t necessarily need to be called Champion. A body horror implementation could be Consume, a mechs-fitting-together implementation could be Upgrade, etc. People love Lego-esque mechanics almost to a fault, and Champion could be a great way to give them that feeling again.

8. Of all the Magic expansions that you've played with, pick your favorite and then explain the biggest problem with it.

Innistrad mishandled white in three different ways.

First, Innistrad is a horror set, and there was little horror in white’s cards. They were valiant vampire slayers, spirits, and angels. For Innistrad to really commit to horror, white needed to join in and be horrific. A look at The Dark shows just how to do it: Jesper Myrfors designed the white cards in the set to be about the evils of organized religion, and cards like Preacher, Tivadar’s Crusade, and Blood of the Martyr scare me more than any vampire can. This was the most notable time that Magic really showed us the evil that white could do. Innistrad should have replaced its noble fighters with paranoid, persecuting, intolerant zealots. It somehow made ghosts that didn’t even try to be scary!

Second, it didn’t have distinct enough themes to be as interesting in draft as other colors. Every color pair had some really cool synergistic archetype, but white mostly had aggro variants. A fliers deck with blue (Spirit tribal/fliers matter was underdeveloped), humans with green (which was really a Travel Preparations deck with no human synergy), scarier humans with black (the sacrifice theme didn’t work till Dark Ascension)... and red/white just got nothing. Rally the Peasants didn’t have the work put into the environment to make it draftable like Spider Spawning or Burning Vengeance did.

Third, its implementation in Innistrad handicapped the block’s narrative development. The story arc was supposed to be: things are bad, things get worse, Angels save everyone. But this was mishandled the whole way: very little distinguished Innistrad from Dark Ascension; the latter felt like Innistrad DLC. All of the “good guys” in white should have been moved from Innistrad to Dark Ascension, so that players notice a real shift. It would have felt like white’s gradual narrative progression of conquering evil (including in itself), rather than the deus ex machina that Avacyn Restored was in almost a literal sense.

9. Of all the Magic expansions that you've played with, pick your least favorite and then explain the best part about it.

Avacyn Restored did an amazing job of integrating its flavor themes with its mechanics.

In a huge percentage of sets throughout Magic’s history, the keyword mechanics are completely isolated from, or have a tenuous connection to, the flavor and the storyline: Buyback, Cycling, and Kicker are all amazing mechanics, but they are just words on cards. They mean nothing outside of what they do in-game.

I haven’t done the first bit of reading about the story behind Avacyn Restored, but I don’t need to; it’s right there on the cards: Everything Is Angels. Just like players are on the brink of death before they topdeck Bonfire of the Damned, Innistrad seems to be falling victim to all sorts of nasty things. Then, the Miracle happens and everyone is saved. Black’s non-keyword Loner mechanic tells players that the previously-insurmountable forces of evil now are all isolated and outmatched by Angels.

Where previously there were a couple Demons that were all upside for the player casting them, now the Demons require more, making players sacrifice their own creatures to continue on. This really makes players who choose to use them feel the trade-offs of enlisting the only things that can reasonably fight against Angels.

It’s rare for a set to fully incorporate any of its mechanics into its flavor like this. For a set to tell its entire story through nothing BUT mechanics is extraordinary. Later sets have tried to do this every time; they’ve certainly established themes using it (like Ixalan’s Explore), but only Avacyn could tell a narrative.

10. You have the ability to change any one thing about Magic. What do you change and why?

Make Magic less corporate.

Each layer of bureaucracy added to a company makes it harder to do anything; specifically, anything new. It’s like trying to pass a law in the Senate: you don’t just have to convince a majority of people that it’s good, you first convince them it’s worthy enough to discuss in a committee. And then three more committees. Then you convince 60% of people to back it, when half of them don’t understand what all the kids’ Itcoins and Fuddy Spinners are about.

It’s time that Magic doesn’t just follow trends (three years late, because of development cycles), but create them. Make something new and original without endless market research about how middle-aged Iowans will react to it. Let creative people make good sets, and get out of the way.

One response to this is “that’s not about Magic design,” but it absolutely is. Treating players like big bags of money waiting to get spilled affects everything about game design. You don’t have to make endless sequels because they’re sure-fire sellers. You don’t have to copy The Avengers because it’s a popular movie franchise. You don’t have to make memes into creature types because you think it’ll increase sales with tweens.

The change I’d make is the answer to the basic question of, “what is a good Magic set?” A good Magic set is one that players will not just buy because they still play Magic or because there’s a new card they want, but because it’s going to show them something original. A good Magic set is one that people will still be admiring 25 years from now because of how much it innovated.

Magic used to be like this. I’m not saying early Magic was better. It wasn’t. But a company can get bigger while still retaining its fiery, innovative spirit. One thing people search for now is the vague idea of authenticity. Authenticity drives what’s cool, and coolness drives sales. Anyone experienced in Magic can look at cards from the last five years and see that the game has lost that.

nazis? in MY magic???

2017-12-20T22:33:00.001-08:00

Slightly over three years ago, I wrote a post telling MRAs and other assorted bigots to get out of the Magic community. It became one of my only posts to get any attention from outside the tiny pond that is online Magic culture. Most of that was places like r/kotakuinaction (remember when they were relevant?) and r/redpill and... okay, it was almost entirely right-wing subreddits. Once every few months since then, someone reposts it and I get a bunch of people with anime avatars who are still mad about a woman's YouTube videos hopping into my mentions.

A few things have changed since then. First, all those different groups I had listed on separate lines (MRAs, PUAs, people spitting into their webcams about "cultural Marxism") have formed into one big tent of like-minded people who share an interest in yelling at women online and being dumb as shit.

Secondly, their anti-Magic tactics seem to have changed. When I published that post, a venture into the depths of that comment thread shows a lot of "oh yeah?? Well I've never PLAYED Magic, but now I WILL." Now, in the wake of some dude who made the intelligent pivot from making impossibly bland unboxing videos into the much higher-visibility world of making a hundred-part video series ranting about a specific woman, that big tent is claiming that they've always been huge Magic fans, and now they're quitting. Even Breitbart is getting into the action.

The small-time piece of shit Jeremy Hambly (aka MTGHQ), from that same tiny Magic pond, is getting used by the big-time piece of shit that is Breitbart and the broader alt-right reactionary movement.

I’m not going to bother responding point-by-point to that piece of shit (especially since Cassie did an excellent job in her response), but I can't resist taking a few shots. It's so long and blatantly unedited that an outline for the article would look like throwing Scrabble pieces at a map of highways in New Jersey. It opens with a declaration that "Magicgate" is happening, saying that it's an "ugly, scary power grab by the regressive left" before making a jughandled turn into revealing that this -gate is actually just about Jeremy Hambly not being allowed to attend DCI-sanctioned tournaments.

This apparently was "delivered out of the blue like a bolt from Zeus." I would compare it more to getting thrown into the ninth circle of Hell where he's condemned to make overly-emotional videos about not being allowed to play tournaments until the end of time, but that's more of a stylistic difference between us as writers.

Author James Delingpole says right at the beginning that he's "not among the 20 million people who play Magic: the Gathering," presumably five seconds after searching Bing for "number of people who play Magic: the Gathering."

It makes me wonder what the creator of this wordsludge is trying to accomplish here. James calls at the end of his article for his readers to threaten a boycott of Wizards or the entirety of Hasbro. (This is right after he quotes poet laureate @james_succ calling Wizards' community standards poster "thought police.") Yet Hambley, the victim of a left-wing power grab (???), titles one of his videos "Please Do Not Quit Magic" and argues that a boycott will deprive his fans of a great game that they love. The guy is even promising to still be a loyal Wizards customer!

Delingpole tries to obscure what happened by leading with a bunch of innocuous tweets from Hambly, but the real story is simple. Hambly makes a comically huge number of videos of himself opening packs, and doesn't get much traction other than a couple with clickbait titles like "GUY GOES NUTS OPENING $800 CARD!!!"

Somewhere along the line, he gets upset that he's putting in so much time and energy into pointing a camera at himself and overreacting to cardboard, so he puts his Sherlock Holmes hat on and gets to the bottom of it. Wouldn't you know it, someone is making real money at Magic without playing it! And it's... a woman!

This female has things so much easier than him that it's ridiculous. Here he is, waking up before noon some days, putting on his best (by default) hoodie, making his fingers slightly tired opening packs, then clicking "upload" on YouTube. All she does is dress up! Okay, it's cosplay as a bunch of really well-known Magic characters, but how hard can it really be to dress up in a really high-quality costume that no one has ever made before? And go to tournaments all over the country?

So, our hero Hambly has found his solution. If she's popular and makes money, all he has to do is make a video... about her. And another video. And a literally uncountable number more videos about her, because he went and deleted them all when tons of people rightfully called him out for continuous harassment.

But a year before that happened, something was clearly going wrong. The reason people are upset that he's become obsessive about one cosplayer is... the social justice warriors. So he goes and has a nice livestream chat with Sargon of Akkad, posted as a nearly two hour video which I am absolutely not watching.

Then recently, when he's finally successful in driving someone out of Magic, he does his best Urkel "did I do that?", except that he immediately concludes that no, he did not. The real culprit all along, his new sidekick Delingpole concludes, was of course the "cry-bullies." Delingpole reasons that Sprankle, like the Voldemort of Gamergate herself Zoe Quinn, wants this attention. That's why she's doing attention-seeking behaviors like quitting making costumes and other content, not going to large tournaments, shutting down her Patreon, locking her Twitter, and not making more public statements after the initial tweets.

It’s important that we don’t just throw names like Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Christine Sprankle around and think of them as just people involved in some online dust-up. There’s a clear imbalance of power and action here: Zoe and Christine were literally just living their lives, wanting nothing to do with internet fascists, when people like Hambly decided to start a campaign against them for no particular reason. Anita’s crime was making educational, intro-feminism type videos for a millenial audience that can relate to her underlying points more when they’re presented in a way that uses games they’re already familiar with.

What Hambly (and Gamergate before him) did is disgusting. Imagine going through continuous targeting on a daily basis, in a community that already treats you like an outsider, by some guy you don’t even know and his fanbase. Then, when he gets called out on it, he dares his accusers to point to one specific moment that crossed an arbitrary line. But that’s not what it’s about: it’s the volume, the death by a thousand cuts. Waking up every day, knowing that you have to deal with more bullshit from guys with 12 followers “just asking questions” about every aspect of your life; people prying into every relationship you have, every dollar someone on the internet gives you, trying to show there’s something insidious.

It’s one thing when people in politics or genuine celebrities are subjected to this kind of criticism; Ajit Pai certainly should have known what he was in for when he took his current job. But these are normal people, just trying to exist in male-dominated spaces. You annoy one YouTuber, or one ex gets mad at you, and bam: no more privacy, no more logging onto twitter without hundreds of hateful messages.

What's happening here is that, like the right used organized hatred toward Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian to create an opening to expose sad, angry men to their politics, Breitbart and the rest of them are using Hambly as a martyr to woo disaffected Magic players to their side.

They don't give a shit about Hambly. It doesn’t matter to the alt-right if he can't play in tournaments or loses a source of income or becomes entirely isolated from the Magic community that once welcomed him, because they'll hold up all of that as evidence that social justice warriors have infiltrated the business world and gaming culture.

He's already been cast out of the mainstream Magic community. Even Reddit of all places is completely sick of his shit and tells him to fuck off when he grovels to r/magictcg. All he has is now is the alt-right, who couldn't care less about him opening packs. What happens when his story is no longer new and interesting to Breitbart? What if he doesn't quite sympathize with their racism, white nationalism, and support for fascism? He'll have nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Nothing to do but open packs of cards he'll never play in a tournament, for an audience of people who recoil at the sight of his screenname.

The problem with what Wizards did isn't that they banned Hambly. It's that they reacted far too late, after the damage to the community was already done. The problem with posting a sign about inclusivity in stores isn't that it's "a safe space sign like we're in the Jim Crow South" (actual tweet quoted by Delingpole), but that it's in such corporate-speech vagueness that it means nothing. "No matter who sits down at the table with us, we make them feel welcome" needs an exception for people whose form of interaction with the community is harassing women and saying that whites deserve their own ethnostate.

Wizards has gone hard on the "few bad eggs" explanation of bad behavior. They think that if they just have rules and procedures for reporting misconduct to a judge, that their wheels of justice will swiftly make the community safe and welcoming.

Unfortunately, there's one aspect where I agree with the fascists: there are a lot of people involved in Magic that feel similarly to Hambly. It's not just a specific behavior that's unacceptable; there's an underlying hateful ideology fueling them. And as a community that's mostly white and preposterously male-dominated (a fact which, similarly, Hambly is absolutely correct in saying that Wizards has tried to cover up), it's going to have an overlap with the white-and-male-dominated sphere of the alt-right.

Of course, I don't think it's feasible for the DCI to issue a ban to anyone who's ever posted to to r/mensrights, but change can't just come from above. I stand by that post from three years ago:

If someone's a fascist, don't welcome them in.

It's up to the community to talk to one another, and not include Nazis in your drafts, playtesting, or EDH group. Even if they're nice to you.

Personal addendum/writing update:

A few thank-yous: Reddit user Rarermonsters, who incredibly good post about Hambly was my first introduction to what happened. Chas LaBelle, whose excellent Medium post made me shout with rage, because it sent a push notification to my phone right when I thought I was about done writing this. My significant other, who graciously agreed to copy-edit my unbelievably long sentences despite not giving a shit about card game drama and is reading this RIGHT NOW.

Yesterday, I published a rather grim look back on my history with Magic, and it coming to an end as far as playing on a regular basis or being able to name a single card from a new set. At the end, I said that there would be one more Magic-related post on this blog. This isn’t it; consider this an emergency addendum. I might be a jaded former player that’s barely talked about the game in years, but I’ll be damned if this game that I devoted 15 years to, that caused me to move to my current city and introduced me to my closest friends, is going to be hijacked by Nazis.

That’s a long way of saying: I’m still working on that last one. Expect it to piss off the right, but for very different reasons.

In the meantime, I’m trying to write non-Magic related stuff and publish it on Medium. To any fascists still reading this, I would feel incredibly owned and triggered if you went to those articles, shared them with all your friends to expose how bad they are, and clicked the hands at the bottom. That site is too politically correct to tell you, but they symbolize smacking a leftist around the face for trying to inject politics into Star Wars.

my last deck

2017-12-19T00:40:00.000-08:00

“I’ve been playing Elves in extended recently.” That’s the first sentence of my first post on this blog, from February 11th 2010. It encapsulates a lot of what was going on back then: old extended is my favorite constructed format ever, Elves is my favorite deck ever, and I was at the peak of devoting myself to Magic. I never became a good Magic player, really, but with dedication to grinding MODO Daily Events when I should have been looking for jobs or, well, doing anything else, I did become a very good Elves player. Three of my first five blog posts were about Elves, and the other two were about combo decks in a more general or theoretical way. That was when I was 20. I had never had a girlfriend, had sex, or had a job that paid more than $10 an hour. I probably cared more about Magic than anything other than the second one on that list. Earlier in my life, the reason I fell in love with combo decks was the feeling I got when I “went off.” People who only know me from writing these cynical, jaded blog posts would probably be surprised by what an expressive person I can be. And when I was 13, drawing my card for the turn and realizing I had the win right there with my Heartbeat of Spring combo deck (which I made before anyone else, fuckers), I couldn’t even attempt a poker face for more than a couple seconds. My inner excitement spilled out everywhere, my heartbeat (the real one, not the card) raced, and I could barely explain to my opponent what interactions I was even killing them with because I was having too much fun. In my early 20s, I played a shitload of MODO, but paper events were few and far between. Even when the deck transitioned from Extended to Legacy, I never made day two of a Grand Prix. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever even been in the finals of a single live tournament larger than an 8-man draft pod. But at least I had the paper copy of the deck built. It sat gathering dust, as most decks do. I was working at Card Kingdom at the time, staring at cards all day, thinking about how cool it would be to have one of those foil promo Quirion Rangers. I packed my Elves in one of the nice leather deckboxes that arrived in the mail with a sell order to Card Kingdom, and after work, walked downstairs into a small Legacy tournament. My deck was, of course, years out of date. I didn’t have any Gaea’s cradles, a card I used to dismiss and be confident I was right, since I was the One Keeper of Elven Combination Wisdom. By that point, I had conceded that yes, it was really good, but I didn’t have any because they were $160 each. I had next to no knowledge of what the metagame was like for Legacy, but whatever, it’s a local tournament with low stakes, so very few other people do, either. And in my second match of the night, I was finally in a position to combo off. There it was again: the thrill of realization. The racing of the heartbeat. But this time, it wasn’t the pure joy I had felt as a kid. It wasn’t even the steady coolness of the MODO grinder who had done this a thousand times from board positions way more difficult than this. It was a crippling physical sensation, the blood flowing to my brain too fast, my chest thumping so hard it made my t-shirt vibrate. Instead of feeling like a triumphant hero at the end of a fantasy movie, it felt like I was in a card going 120 on the highway and the driver said “you take it from here” and jumped onto the pavement. My hands were shaking so much I had trouble tapping and untapping Nettle Sentinels. I went 2-2 and ended up selling the deck when Card Kingdom fired me and I needed to make rent. All that’s left are commons and my favorite Forests that I’ve accumulated over the years: two from Zendikar (246), the Unglued forest with one of Terese Nielsen’s most under-appreciated paintings, a 2003 promo from back when they could make non-foil promos, an Alpha, a Revised one I grabbed when Christopher Rush was doing a signing that he turned into a Black Lotus (requiring me to clear it with every head judge in every tournament I wanted to play it in, but at least I got to announce it as “Black Lotus” when I played it), and my absolute pride and joy, the Arena foil forest from the first store I ever played Magic at. That’s the last constructed tournament I’ve entered. Sometimes I look at those KMC Super Purple sleeves and wish I could play it again, but then I remember that nervousness, that shaking, and I realize I don’t miss the deck one iota, because that deck doesn’t exist any more. Those formats don’t exist any more. Magic is a living, changing thing, as are the decks that exist within it, and what I missed wasn’t those 75 cards, it was the experience of living among the game, tweaking the deck by one card every two weeks, adapting the sideboard to other new decks, goldfishing for 15 minutes every night just to calm my mind. People ask me if I’m going to review newer blocks, and I can’t. I’m unqualified for the job, because you need to be a Magic player to review sets, and I’m not. I’m just a guy who plays cube every now and then and reminisces about the game with other nerds. I hate telling people I’m a writer, but not being able to show anyone my writing because it’s all about fucking Magic. Is the problem that Magic’s changed since I really enjoyed it? No. If anything, it hasn’t changed enough. But I’ve moved on. These sentiments shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, especially since I’ve written exactly two essays that relate in some way to Magic in the last two years. Anyone who knows me has probably heard variants of these stories already (sorry, my memory about who I’ve said what to is really bad, so I end up repeating myself and being really embarrassed and anxious when I realize I have). I might’ve even someone charged money for differently-written versions of this. After this, though, there should be one last post about Magic, one I’ve been thinking about for years. That will probably be it for me on the subject. But who knows? I’ll be a different person in the future.

retail music

2017-10-04T14:50:00.002-07:00

I'm trying out Medium for non-Magic related writing, so I moved this essay there. It's a good one.

review: generation decks, by titus chalk

2017-04-29T17:39:00.002-07:00

Hey, this book is pretty good.

Subtitled “the unofficial history of gaming phenomenon Magic: the Gathering,” Generation Decks is basically attempting to be three stories at once: the internal story of Wizards of the Coast making Magic, the story of the Pro Tour mostly from the vantage of the best players at any given time, and memoir-esque personal stories of Chalk’s movements around the world and playing Magic in those places. For me, the primary drama of reading the book was how he was going to fit all three narratives within a fast-moving 276 pages, when it’s still in 1995 halfway through and doesn’t get to Hasbro’s purchase until page 175.

A substantial portion of the book is spent talking about the creation of the game, its initial release, and the early days of Wizards. There’s a good reason for that: it’s by far the most tumultuous, weird, and outsider-y of the game’s history; plus, because it’s so long ago, people are more likely to speak openly about what happened. Titus Chalk gets great material from, and about, Peter Adkison: while most of the stories in the book are things I knew at least a little about, Adkison’s sex-related behavior at a ski lodge was genuinely shocking. The early part of the book is a wonderful narrative in the classic “few people against the world” genre.

Unlike other writers about Magic, Chalk makes it clear that he’s read a book in his life that wasn’t by Robert Jordan or published by the DCI. His literary references, like using Joseph Conrad’s quote that “being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men,” are a welcome departure from Magic writers that can’t reference anything other than Star Wars. However, this makes it even more painful when Chalk closes the first chapter by saying that “like the best of stories, Magic’s started a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

Initially buying the book, I was hoping for one of two extremes: either a pulls-no-punches exposé of the real dirt inside Wizards, which I would genuinely love, or something absolutely horrible that I could take glee in writing 3000 words taking down. It’s not on either extreme: Chalk is a talented writer who has obviously spent years doing extensive original interviews for the book, but his journalistic skepticism seems to wash away at certain parts. Late in the book, he acknowledges exactly this: “With every new player I met on my travels, every interview I conducted, every chapter I sweated over though, I felt my skepticism recede.”

Chalk’s skepticism doesn’t vanish entirely, thank god; he’s not a Rich Hagon-esque mouthpiece for Wizards and the pro scene. The issue is that he does extensively quote Hagon and people like him, and seems to take their statements at face value. For example, when Hagon is spitting hype about how many people watch the Pro Tour stream, he cites how Sky Atlantic (some sort of overseas streaming service for HBO and others that I have never in my life heard of) “is immeasurably dwarfed by the viewing numbers we get for Grand Prix and Pro Tours – by a distant order of magnitude.” The journalistic thing to do here would not be to print that in the book, since Hagon says he’s “not allowed to give specific numbers,” but to ask what the fuck Hagon is talking about.

The weakness of Chalk’s three-books-in-one format is how many things like that are just given a cursory mention, like each chapter is a separate magazine piece. Characters in the book are introduced well, with vivid personality descriptions, but they’re almost always dropped within 50 pages, replaced by the next subject. (One of the exceptions, a janitor investor who pops back up a hundred pages later, is one of the book’s most effective moments.)

When Chalk starts a chapter that connects Magic’s mercantile system as a uniquely American thing, as something only free market devotees could come up with, quoting someone calling it a “manufactured subculture,” I was so incredibly ready to nuzzle up to a long section indicting late capitalism through the lens of Magic. But that, like his discussion of the Reserved List, gets about half a page of discussion; it’s followed by unquestioning repeating of StarCityGames’s Pete Hoefling bemoaning people manipulating the market for their own profit. (As someone who’s worked in the business of Magic card retail, it’s laughable for StarCityGames to call out anyone else for things like buying out cards to raise their price when they’ve done that repeatedly for years.)

The limits of Chalk’s research really show themselves once the book enters the late 90s. The sourcing for the stories just doesn’t exist, so I don’t exactly blame him; everyone that knows anything relevant is either still employed by Wizards or bound by NDAs backed up by the enforcement power of the gods. (Just try to do any research into Wizards’s legal department and it’s gonna be foiled by, well, the legal department.) While it’s an understandable omission not to discuss what led to Wizards being purchased by an international juggernaut, that doesn’t make it great reading. As far as the telling in Generation Decks is concerned, Wizards’s acquisition by Hasbro is something that just passively happened at some point.

Things get worse the closer to present-day it is. Randy Buehler, former developer, was promoted to lead developer, then promoted to head of R&D, then promoted to Vice President of Digital Gaming. Chalk’s explanation for what happened next is that “challenges both internally and in the wider economy would see Buehler leave the company in 2008,” which is so bland and inoffensive that it borders on outright journalistic deception. What actually happened was that the “Gleemax” project, a comically ambitious attempt at a massive gaming-focused social media platform headed by Buehler, ended in such a catastrophic failure and Wizards laid off everyone who had ever even opened the card Gleemax from a pack of Unhinged. That’s the kind of story an “unofficial history” is practically obligated to tell, and Chalk seemingly actively avoids ever mentioning it.

If someone like Randy can’t talk about it (due to NDAs, and his current contract with Wizards, and his wife having worked for the company as an editor for 18 years) you have to do research around them and tell the real story. If you don’t, you become complicit in Wizards’s deceptive anti-history of their digital department.

He does mention Magic Online and its issues, but doesn’t go into it other than that the program exists, some people want the game to be online-only (*snicker*), and the program had its issues. Chalk says that the decision to pull control of the program away from Leaping Lizards might have been hubristic. If only there was, like, some journalist around to tell that story… someone perhaps writing a book about the company, who has done the research and interviewed the people necessary to tell us what actually happened to keep Magic Online in the dark ages of computing for so long.

While I can’t call Generation Decks an essential history of the game, because of its weaknesses around having information from the last nearly 20 years of Wizards, it’s certainly a good history of the early party, with good stories on related subjects, and well-written throughout. I’d recommend it, but I also recommend readers retain some of their skepticism that Chalk lost as he gets more into interviewing his heroes.

sensei's divining top: an even-handed and well-reasoned obituary

2017-04-25T13:19:00.002-07:00

Sensei’s Divining Top is banned, may it rest in hell. A hell of Commander games that give the card its rightful respect: people completely ignoring other players activating it as they go on pretending to play Magic. Its status as “Casual Staple” should be its tombstone.

Sensei’s Divining Top doesn’t even merit being called a card. It is a timesuck, a fun vampire, a piece of cardboard placed in packs for the same reason cyanide is slipped into the drinks of spies. The fact that it’s next to whiskey doesn’t make it whiskey.

This thing’s devotees, perhaps the most fun-averse people to ever ostensibly play a game, are in a furor that the card was banned both for being the lynchpin of the deck that’s been the best for aeons (as though such cards never get banned) as well as the statistically-provable fact that it made tournaments take too goddamned long (as though it wasn’t banned in old Extended for that exact reason).

These people, who clearly have a much shorter list of shit they want to experience before death than I do, will insist that no no no it doesn’t slow down games, anyone who’s GOOD can finish a match with it on time. Yes, and if you make everyone who plays Miracles enter a 100m sprint in real life, some of them will cross the finish line in a reasonable amount of time. But the race doesn’t end until the last asshole crosses it.

Playing against Top is like being trapped in conversation with some old white guy middle manager who has slightly too much money and more-than-slightly too high an opinion of himself. The fact that he’s further in his career than you shouldn’t give him the right to absolutely never shut up. Against Top, trying to do absolutely anything, just sliding in one small spell on your own turn when the opposing player has no interest in interacting with it, results in an interminable delay for them to furrow their brow and indulge in some personal fantasies for the next ten to sixty seconds. Then they finish up with that and your turn resumes as normal, showing they had no actual interest in whatever you were doing. Your turn to talk or cast spells isn’t about you, it’s about them, because they’re the Truly Important Person in the room. You’re just a supporting figure in their monologue.

More combative readers will accuse me of hypocrisy, since I’m railing against a time-hogging card on a blog that was created to talk about combo decks. The difference is that combo decks only take a long time when they’re trying to end the game; they play a land and pass, maybe casting a Llanowar Elves or a Remand here and there, until their One Big Turn that everything hinges on. Yeah, they take over the conversation too, in a West Wing-style “triumphant speech that everyone cowers and listens to because of how majestic it is,” but that’s their only real thing that entire game. Top, on the other hand, makes every single turn about the person playing Top. And it’s not trying to to do that to make the game go faster; it’s just stalling for the purpose of more Top activations for more stalling.

Of course Wizards circa Kamigawa is to blame for designing this shit in the first place, but post-Kamigawa design is to blame for it not fading into obscurity. Coldsnap’s Counterbalance, a loving callback to the recurring Ice Age theme of “fiddly shit no one could possibly enjoy unless they make statistical arguments defending The Bell Curve for fun,” elevated Top from something that takes forever and does nothing into something that takes forever and does everything. Avacyn Restored’s mechanic of “what if your topdeck automatically won the game” created the monster as it was.

But now it’s dead. Miracles players will have to go back to decks like Lands, or lobbying Wizards to unban Shaharazad, or replying to women on their 13-follower Twitter accounts with something like “[34] ...when this is a preposterous rejection of well-established scientific consensus of the biological secondary sex characteristics...”

To anyone who enjoys Top that is offended that I think you’re all MRAs: I’m sorry that you’re an MRA. Fuck Sensei’s Divining Top.

a design review of ivern

2017-01-14T23:17:00.004-08:00

alas, but our legal department has reservations

2015-12-30T14:07:00.000-08:00

A rat, held to a door by the knife of its recent demise, drips into the cracks of the wood.

“Another brilliant piece by Spencer. Can’t you just feel the eyeballs popping into your own skull? God damn he’s good. Mildred, get this thing out there. Promotional material, this one. Put it on the back of every sleeve that gets made from now until the factory collapses.” Mildred Greevil waits for the printer to finish replicating the image from her boss’s computer so she can walk it down to the tech department. She was enjoying the sound of the Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 4000, translating its drone into one of her favorite modernist compositions, when the tone of her boss again rose in volume equal to the 4000.

“Oh, and could you take this card I came up with down to the boys in the pit? I’m rather proud of it myself, I think it might be the highlight of my design career to this point.”

“Sure, I-“

“You know, they’re just not open enough to new ideas a lot of the time. Same thing happened with Return, I told them ‘you know we could do that again and it’ll be a smash hit,’ and no one listened to me, but you can’t just give up when you know, when you just know, that you have a good idea.”

“That’s certainly-“

“Just can’t let people shut you up, that’s what I’ve always says, you can’t let people keep you down like that, don’t let small minds drown out big ideas? And that was a big idea, and that set was a smash, a SMASH, and no one listened to me at the time, but they were all clamoring over each other to take credit for it afterward.”

“They really-“

“But this one, this one, I’m telling you, this is a special design right here, elegant, old-fashioned elegance like we used to make, but with a real current twist, it’ll blow their minds they didn’t think of it first, they’ll be listening to me after this.”

She takes the additional printed sheet that he hands her, the faded ink merging with a glittery hand-written series of addendums like bread that has cultivated an assortment of molds. The print, additions, strikethroughs, and re-additions are things something about numbers and “first strike” and “flying,” and she believes in her ability to successfully bring it to other people in the building, as assigned.

Mildred’s outfit today was simple, in a similar style to the one that her boss had referred to as being alluring but HR-appropriate, though she had set that particular outfit on fire immediately afterward. Her skirt was a slightly brighter red than the maroon of Alpert the Alpaca, her desk companion (squeezing his middle section in a specific way made his little legs appear to move back and forth in a run, which was a great comfort on many days).

She crossed into the darkened room of ‘Online,’ past the book on C holding the door open, and tried to attract the attention of the developers who were in some sort of violent conflict with their computers. “Come on! What a fail,” yelled one as he whacked a monitor with the fat of his hand, followed by repeated complaints that he hit a nerve. “Just turn it off and on again, dummy,” replied the other one.

“Hey, I brought the new-“

“We can’t help you,” sniffles the developer, cradling his hand, eyes peering around for bandages or painkillers, “someone took down the server. And it’s not even downtime day.”

“I was resetting it you doofus!“ and an amalgamation of scuffle and argument emerges from the two of them, encompassing debates regarding power cycling, proper coffee placement vis-à-vis computers, and who had been the originator of the ‘OFFline department’ joke.

“Okay, I’ll just leave the-“

“Hey! Hey wait, uh, Greevil. Could you…” his realization seems to have been cause for a truce, as well as a similar realization within his former combatant.

“Yeah, uh, look we need help with something.”

“They guys upstairs don’t seem to like us,” the uninjured party says crossing his arms.

“Yeah! They turned off our websites.”

“We can’t, like, do anything? We used to be on them… I mean we’d do stuff on… our breaks,”

“How am I supposed to manage my NeoPets with eight hours between visits?”

“Their mobile site is just awful,” as both nod.

“Just like, could you get them to turn the filters off? Pleeeeaaaase,” and a grumbling, “even tried to hack into it.”

Mildred is remembering the wonderful time she had in her imaginary bubble; the lovely isolation, the calm, the earlier tone of the 4000. She raises her eyes back up. “Okay, but could you scan the image-“

“Well someone unplugged it without turning the computer off first,” contests a developer toward his counterpart, leading to another historical discussion with contested facts, timelines, procedures, etc. etc. When they start clawing at one another’s ‘Prerelease Judge’ shirts, she decides to fade back out of the doorway.

The back staircase: its concrete, red railing, ceilings consisting of the stairs above which become the floor below; so different in texture from the publicly-used stairs toward the front of the building, their carpets, smooth Beleren Blue paint, but serving the same practical purpose, but for a different-though-overlapping audience. The efficiency of concrete. An adopted aesthetic, meant to convince users of decision to value utility over looks? This would make it just as much of a façade as the carpeted staircase, but with an opposite agenda (unless both are part of the same agenda, to provide a dichotomy between the public and the private, the consumer and the producer). Ornamentation only in the omnipresent red EXIT, the one that makes a little house between the E and the X if one’s head turns to the side. See the little door, the center nub of the E, that is this door to go through: go through the exit, here.

She does so and is promptly knocked on her ass by the most hulking designer in the building.

“Oh jeez! Oh jeez oh jeez. Oh I’m so sorry.” One of his folders is accessorizing her blouse.

“Ow,” concludes Mildred. She attempts a balance between lack of pain and lack of sitting on concrete just outside the second-floor door.

“Oh jeez I, um…” he motions to reach down for his folder, reconsiders the trajectory of his hands, reverses course, and goes back in for round two with the modified objective of helping her up. By this time, she has already separated his folder from her person, gathered it, gathered herself, rolled onto her hands before getting on her feet, and gotten her own papers.

“It’s okay,” she says, getting some dust out of her hair and holding out the folder. “Just didn’t-“

“So sorry,” and he hurriedly takes back his offered possession, “really sorry,” and continues on his way.

She sees a crumpled paper that most have ricocheted off: she can see it’s totally blank but for the purple text, “rejection due to Shadow.” Not wanting to pick it up, she kicks it attempting to flip it over. This doesn’t work until she kicks it into the wall, it having gained a large amount of dirt in the process, but revealing its flip side as entirely blank. To pick it up or… she concludes that bending back down seems awful.

-------------

The next day, she had barely finished tolerating the taste of office coffee before her boss comes in, sweating much earlier in the day than usual.

“Hey, so… you should go see Nick Mitchell. Upstairs. In the, um…” he looks around for something on the floor to address with the rest of his statement. “…legal department.”

The legal department, taking up the entirety of the fifth floor, is the only part of the building that requires its own specialized key card to access, via stairs or elevator.

“Ah, I guess you should follow…” her boss is now looking over at the legal department courier, waiting in the doorway to escort her upstairs.

“Did I do something wrong?” Mildred is checking her recent past for anything that may have offended this department’s interpretation of the law. Maybe it’s because she wasn’t authorized to go to Online. She technically hadn’t been, but it was also, slightly less technically, her job.

“I am uninformed of the current case,” says the courier. His dress shoes are far shinier than she had imagined anyone at this company wearing. His keycard grants them entry into this floor of the building that she’d never seen: mahogany and sandalwood furnishing give the floor’s foyer a darker hue, like a mobster’s private area in the back of a casino. He leads her next into the meeting room labeled Grand Coliseum.

Facing the door are three enormous desk/table/box things, resembling raised versions of witness stands, at which sit three different men in black suits nearly identical to the one worn by the courier. For her is an empty chair in front of a plain, though solid-looking, carved wooden table. Jittering the table from underneath is the leg of the hulking designer who ran into her yesterday.

“Oh! It’s, um-“

“Mildred! Please, please, tell them that wasn’t my card. I don’t know where it came from, was it yours, I mean, was it from your papers? Like an example or something, not a design? I know I didn’t design it, I know better…” his blubbering continues, less audible, until the soft rumble of amplified speech fills the room. The right-most person facing her speaks into his microphone.

“We have come across an issue with a design,” he explains lowly, “and the designer to which its creation was presumed has relayed that it might not have been his.”

“From the hall! We ran into… I mean our papers got mixed up,” the designer says.

Mildred feels like she is actually supposed to say something here. “Yes, we did,” and after a delay, “I fell down.” Several seconds pass after this before the interviewer even moves.

“Were any designs present on your person? Card designs, that is.”

“Oh, there was… I had one to deliver to the designers, yes. I never did so, that was a mistake. I was a bit rattled and forgot.”

“And is the nature of the design at all memorable to you? That is, would you know the design?”

“Um.” Mildred attempts this. “I’d know the paper? I guess? There was some handwriting. There was something about first strike. In handwriting.”

The panel in front of her confers. “This seems to be the design in question, thank you. And as for its origin: was it, by any chance, something of yours?” The panel makes no change in facial expression, but the designer looks over at her in terror.

“What? No. I don’t… I’m not actually that familiar with the game.” She shrugs. “It was something my boss gave me, said to show it to them, that’s all.” More conferring in front. “I don’t really understand what this-“

“Thank you, Mildred,” says the middle panelist. “You’ve been a huge help. If you need anything from us, just ring and ask for me: Nick Mitchell. Could someone show Ms. Greevil back downstairs?”

Mildred, a bit confused, vowed to have a conversation with her boss about what just happened. She set a goal of keeping the conversation under ten minutes. She walked up to his clean, empty desk, with only a chair neatly tucked in front of it. No scattered cards as earlier in the day, not even a computer, and certainly no loud instruction-giver.

An HR person happened to be walking by. “Hey!” She asks. “What happened to-“

“Well, he no longer works here,” was the smiling answer. He started to turn away, but Mildred’s sputtered protests gave him reason to stay.

“But he was just-“

“You know I can’t discuss personnel matters,” big theatrical wink, “but between us… it was…” Mildred held her breath for a moment. “There’s been a lot of, well, harassment complaints. You know? Sexual harassment?”

“After the-“

“Look, I’ve had a lot of training in this issue. Tons of classes. Really informative stuff. So what most people don’t know about this sort of harassment,” he elaborates, “is that it doesn’t just affect the person it’s directed at. It may not even be directed at one specific individual. What it does is create a toxic work environment. I definitely advise reading up on that, let me point you toward some books sometime.”

Mildred knows that nothing in this company ever turns around that quickly. Unless someone had complained about him last year, and they’re only now getting around to it. That’s plausible. Then she realized she didn’t have a boss any more.

“Wait wait wait!” She tries to stop the departing HR employee. “So what do I-”

“You’ll receive a memo about updated roles and responsibilities. So until then just continue as if you had a manager?”

She vowed to make lemonade out of this enormous bag of sugar. She now has that most-envied position within corporate bureaucracy: salaried freedom. There would surely come a day when people would confer amongst themselves, realize that not a single one of them knew what it was that she did, then conclude that, lacking that knowledge, the answer was that she did nothing. On this tragic day (or perhaps many weeks and months later, once knowledge somehow trickles up to the upper levels of the corporate structure), she would receive a generous compensation package for her years of service at the company. Everyone has dreams.

-------------

“What was so bad about that design, anyway?”

“Ahhh! Mildred, please don’t sneak up on me like that.” The designer couldn’t have possibly started sweating this quickly; it must have been pre-existing sweat.

“Sorry.”

“...”

“So. What was wrong with the-”

“There’s certain cards we don’t print. Okay? Well they’re cards we did print, once. But we can’t any more. They’re on the Reserved List. We can’t design cards that match them, and technically you’re not really designing them if they exist already.”

“Why are those designs reserved?”

“Because they’re old. And because we decided to reserve them.”

“Oh.”

“In 1995. So they’re reserved because back then they were reserved, and they still are.”

“And the legal department-”

“They enforce it. But please don’t ask me any more? And for god’s sake don’t ask them about it.”

It’s hard to tell if a currently-nervous man is in a constant state of nervousness (whether going on a blind date or drawing a hot bath), or if it’s a temporary condition. She did witness him getting taken up to Legal over something seemingly minor, but maybe he’s just being overly sensitive about it. Designers hate going to other floors when they’re not expecting it.

Mildred didn’t have to be afraid of Legal, though. She was her own boss, and nothing could touch her. If she wanted answers, she could just call a meeting and get them, if meetings were a thing that provided answers. Were they? She’d never actually called one. They just seemed to happen of their own accord, without anyone involved in them at any point wishing for them to occur.

“Oh one more-”

“Please, Mildred, don’t get me in trouble again.”

“No no real quick, I promise. What’s Shadow?”

“What?”

“You dropped a paper, it said something about ‘rejection due to Shadow.’”

“Oh. Um. That’s… an upcoming block. Shadow/Play. We cut a card because it didn’t work with the theme of Shadow.”

Mildred attempted to get back to her isolation when she accidentally passed by Online without intending on talking to the developers. Intent, however, is irrelevant.

“Mildred! Thank you so much!”

“Yeah great job, um… girl?”

She nodded, thinking about her upcoming sandwich.

“We’re back on NeoPets like whaaaat. You totally rock.”

Nod. Tofu banh mi with a side of miso soup. She then remembers that it’s possible these men have some form of usefulness to provide.

“Right, yes. I definitely did that, for you, is why that happened, was me doing it. Hey could you help me with something?”

The developers seem to be gazing into the eyes of a gorgon. One of them finds movement again in their mouth. “Sure… well… what do you need?”

She tries to smile up to her eyes, and makes it almost a third of the way. “Do you have any information about the reserved list?”

“Well, what do you want? Like a copy of it? It’s on our website, you know.”

Oh. And here she was imagining some grand conspiracy that unraveled everything she knew, its corruption spreading into the furthest corners of her personal reality. But there’s a website. “Well then that’s pretty easy. What’s the-”

“Oh, no, not the live website,” the other one corrects. “It’s on the archive. Not the current archive, the one that we stopped updating in 2014; the other archive. We don’t really know how to access it that well.”

“Of course we do, you dummy! It’s on the 20gb drive!”

“You threw that one away!”

“Did not, you-” and more scuffling that consumes both of them within a cloud of dust, and she backs out.

She Googles it and gets a copy from a fan-made Wiki, though. This game has the best fans in the world.

-------------

The texture of the building has changed for her. She walks around not as a subservient worker, not as one of the bottom blocks in the corporate pyramid, but as a free person with no one directly above her. She also had no one reporting to her: she had escaped structure entirely. She was no longer of the company’s workings, but orbiting it. She had no interest in commanding others to do things, anyway; mild requests, perhaps, with sincere explanations of why, exactly, she needed help with this, and it would be up to them to decide to do it rather than being commanded to. A sort of cooperation within the workplace, driven by mutual respect and cooperation.

“What? I’ll… yeah, let me uh… I’ll let you know.”

“Please, it would be a big help, it shouldn’t take-”

“I just have a lot to do right now, okay.”

There was only one possible solution: Mildred had to call a meeting.

-------------

“And as you know, our game has a predominantly male playerbase.” Mouse click to advance slide: a chart that shows graphs of income to the company via different demographics. “The blue part of the graph represents the money made by male buyers.”

“Uhh, Mildred? Those graphs are only one color.”

“Well…” Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. “The red part should be visible now.”

“Mildred, we’re all aware of the challenges that acquiring that demographic has posed. Bob, you worked on that, didn’t you?”

“Couldn’t make any progress at all, Bill. You remember that, Brendan?”

“Sure do, Bob, spent months on it. There’s just no way to do it.”

“Well,” Mildred continues, “that’s what I’ve been working on.” The other people in the room look at one another. “I’m sure you’re all familiar with…” The projected image shifts into that of a woman, hips to the side, her coloration a combination of purple and naked. Nods erupt around the room.

“One of our most popular characters,” Brendan interrupts his nodding to say. “And by far our most popular person to uh, dress up as? What’s the word for that, anyway I certainly appreciate when that happens.”

“Right. Well.” Mildred pivots on her heels back toward the screen to pause for a moment. “My idea wasn’t to replace this character, of course, but to…” as she sees furrowed brows in an orderly 3x3 formation. “Build on the success. So.” Slide advance.

A stylized sunburst appears behind the olive skin of the woman onscreen, its rays echoed in the symbol adorning her crown. One hand on her twirling metal staff, one hand on her hip, the sky behind her drifts into her armor.

The reaction of the room is heads pushed back on their necks, like dogs offered broccoli.

“We need to show the community that our women characters can be, um… different from what we’ve made before,” Mildred says. “I think we could make a big marketing push around her. Or some character like her, if this sparks any ideas for anyone?”

“Well, I’m… not really sure about this one. It just doesn’t reach out and grab me, you know? Just don’t see the appeal, personally. What do you think, Bob?”

“I’m with you, Bill. Brendan?”

“We’re on the same page, Bob. Just not really getting it. It seems like such a departure, why can’t we stick with what’s been working?”

-------------

“Of course, Ms Greevil. Wait here and I’ll get Mr. Mitchell.” Mildred skims over a magazine article about the return of pagers. Mitchell comes out a minute later.

“Great to see you again, Mildred,” he extends his hand. “We really owe you for helping us out before,” he says as they sit down in his office. The light in here is brighter than in the Grand Coliseum. There doesn’t seem to be a curved surface anywhere in the office; nothing but sleek lines of metal and wood.

“Well, I’m having difficulty gaining traction for my ideas with anyone.”

Mitchell nods solemnly in response. “I understand your frustration. This is another symptom of the larger problem in our organization: leaks.”

Mildred waits for him to continue, which he does not. “The… um… what about them? I mean, what leaks?”

Mitchell leans forward slightly, interlocking his hands and looking her dead in the eye. “Well, why did people not want to go along with what you said?”

“They didn’t understand what I was saying? I guess. It didn’t connect with them.”

“But how did they get the information to dislike what you said?”

“...”

“Leaks, Mildred. If they disliked something, it must have been because there was something else they liked better. And how did they get the information about that other thing? They probably weren’t supposed to.”

“...”

“Leaks.”

“Oh. Okay.”

-------------

“Oh, hi, Bill? Just wanted to follow up on that presentation-”

“Was a great presentation, Mildred, really was, thanks for it and all, just not what we’re looking for. You know, you did a great job, taking all that messy data and making it look really nice, you have quite the talent for that.”

“Right. Yes. Well I was just chatting with Nick. Nick Mitchell? Upstairs?”

Bill would be doing a spit-take across the room if he wasn’t entirely paralyzed with fear. He regains composure after only ten seconds of trembling.

“Oh, um… how’s he… doing? I mean, I know that he’s well. Always doing well, those legal- I mean, what a bunch of great guys. And girls… women! Great people. What… were you talking with him about?”

“Well.” Mildred smiles her ‘you are a preschooler’ smile that she also uses on moderately frightened dogs. “We were wondering about your previous experience with ‘the demographic,’ as you had put it.”

“Right! Yes! Great strides we’ve made, wonderful progress, trying to, um… did he say that specifically about me?”

“Actually, there was a slight, I guess you could say ‘concern’ because you’ve never actually been on one of those teams before, have you?”

In Bill’s eyes, the abyss opens. They are windows to the soul, if his soul is starting to fill up with water.

“Well, not technically, I mean, I’ve… tried to help, no I just… heard it around the- no not that, I mean, oh, no, no, no.”

Mildred brings the smile back for a brief sequel, building on the smile’s past success for any consumers that might be nostalgic for it.

“Bill. You know how seriously the company takes…” she makes a mental note of where his body is in the chair at this moment. “...leaks.” Approximately four inches downward motion. An impressive result. “So maybe, if you didn’t have authorization for the information you were consulting, you could leave decisions regarding this demographic to-”

Bill starts nodding aggressively. “Oh, definitely, of course, of course, I’m so- please go ahead with your proposal. Please. Please?”

Mildred’s genuine smile shows through for the first time in a while. She throws out one more thing on the way out the door:

“Did this have something to do with Shadow?”

She’s unsure what the sound she hears in response is, and closes the door.

-------------

Her long-held dream, which she had started pondering several days ago, was coming true. Alpert takes a triumphant gallop across her keyboard, helping her type a press release on the company’s new initiative to reach across demographics. All that was left was to deliver the summary meeting to people who would be working on the project. Her people, now.

This time, there is barely any motion throughout the room. She can take the longest pauses she wants, looking everyone in the eye one by one, without a questioning gaze returning to her. She makes sure to reinforce this helpful new attitude on the final slide.

“This is a triumphant moment for our company,” she triumphs. “Where in the past, we incorrectly thought of this as a game, we now know it is something so much more: it is an idea. Our idea. Our intellectual property.” She looks directly at the people who designed this former-game.

“A game has people that can show up, play it, and leave for the night, to go on with the rest of their lives. But an intellectual property is so much more.

“Our customers are not players. They are part of the company. They become one with us. They will still play the game, yes, but then go home and look at our officially-commissioned ‘fan’ art. They will read our perfectly timed releases on what is coming next. Will it be a film? Another game? We already have two more games using The Property in the pipeline.” As she says that, she catches a slight nod from someone near the back.

“Though of course, that information was, before just now, highly classified. If you know someone who was aware of it previously, immediately report this information to Legal.” No more nodding now.

“We are so much more than mere gamers now, or game designers. We are owners. And nothing, no one inside the company or out, will steal that away from us. We must all be ever-vigilant of thieves coming to take that from us.

“Our branded match-three game is live now. Please familiarize yourself with it. Owners dismissed.”

poppy: an oral history

2015-11-30T02:23:00.001-08:00

The first champion released in 2010, Poppy heralded in a new era of League of Legends.

Coronach (Poppy designer): there was a lot of pressure on us back then to make certain kinds of champions. There were only four Yordles at the time, and Corporate wanted more. Not many people know this, but most champions are coded as two minions, one on top of the other, like Muppets. But Yordles only have to be one minion, so they use half as many resources.

Ryze (co-founder, Riot Games): it was really a different vibe, then, back in the day, at the company that I founded, Riot Games. It’s my company. So if I went in, like, “hey I want everyone to have hamburgers today,” then we had hamburgers. I like burgers a lot. That’s the sort of whimsy you could expect back then, at my company: Riot Games.

Coronach: Ryze comes in with a kid, and the kid’s pretty cute. I don’t know where he got the kid; he’s not married, I don’t think he’s a dad, and we never saw the kid again. But no one questioned it, because he’s a co-founder, you know? Anyway, the kid’s yelling real loud “gonna make a big poopy” when he has to use the bathroom real bad, or “gonna make a small poopy” when it wasn’t that bad. Anyway, I heard Ryze repeating it back, saying “gotta make a small Poopy!” and I thought he was talking to me. So I made a small champion named Poopy, because an order’s an order.

Pendragon (director of community relations): the company wasn’t doing too well financially at that time, so we were reaching out to corporate sponsors to maybe get some product placement for extra income. Burger King was really excited about the game, but they didn’t like the idea of a guy who got strong by always lifting a hamburger with the same hand, so that became Tryndamere instead. But they asked us if maybe a champion could use a hamburger as a weapon, and we said sure. So that’s how the weapon “Whopper” came about.

Coronach: the kit was really cohesive: you would choose someone that you wanted to have a burger with, and you two would eat it together, because that was your Meal Time. But there were some things that BK didn’t feel great about: why did them having a delicious Whopper hurt them? Why couldn’t everyone on the team have some of the great taste of the Whopper at a reasonable price? And, why did the rest of the concept center around the digestive process of what happens after you’ve consumed 1200 calories in a few minutes?

Tryndamere (co-founder, Riot games): that wasn’t going to fly at MY company, Riot Games, which I put so much work into, myself. I had to do everything back then. I carried in the goddamned computers, I set up the internet, and had NO ONE helping me.

Ryze: would have helped you if you didn’t come in every day falling over drunk, Marc.

Tryndamere: well after you sell the company to fucking China of course I’ll have a drink, Brandon.

Zileas (head designer): frankly, the design was a mess. After we got rid of the Burger King tie-in, the champion walked around chopping everyone’s legs off to turn everyone into a short person like her. We didn’t have full VO work done yet, so all she’d say after turning everyone into a Yordle was “just like me” and “all will be united.” And it was way too soon to make another White Supremacist champion right after Nidalee.

Coronach: this is about when she got renamed to “Poppy,” which made the design way easier. So I went with this opium-based kit that was really appealing: instead of mana, she had money, and you’d spend it in order to feel something just for a few seconds. Our playtesters weren’t too happy with that, though; they said it made them think about spending all their time and energy doing something for years and years that they haven’t really enjoyed in a long time, but they can’t do anything else because the only people they know are from doing that thing.

Zileas: I came in late one day, saw that we were going live with this in fifteen minutes, and made up some stuff about a hammer. The ult makes you… invulnerable? Sure. Whatever.

Pendragon: the idea was that champions would go up and up in price: we were going to sell really nice ones for $50, $100, up to $1000 for the really intricate, flashy, hard-to-play ones. But we wanted a “budget” champion for people who weren’t ready to drop that much money on the game. So we chose Poppy to fill that role: you’ll lose to a really expensive champion, buy that one, everyone wins.

Tryndamere: I came in one day to buy a champion, which I certainly should be able to afford, as the most important founder of this company, my company, Riot Games. But I couldn’t even buy a champion made by my own company! So obviously, I needed to change something.

Ryze: you were broke because you had just lost all your money gambling.

Tryndamere: who kept the lights on? I did. Who paid all the bills those first years, made every payroll? I did. Am I proud of everything I did back then? No. I’m not. But it was necessary. Everything I did, I did for Riot Games.

Years later, the Champion Update project is in full swing. Next in their sights: Poppy.

Pendragon: you have to acknowledge the influence of CertainlyT in this era. Just the most amazing, incredibly creative designs, by which I mean they sold an ungodly large amount. Therefore: good designs.

CertainlyT (champion design): i made a ninja named No School Man and he doesnt go to school and if you try to make him go to school he moves away because he doesnt go. also hes really cool and he throws sharp stuff

Coronach: I was proud of Poopy/Poppy. I thought it was a great design. I still think that. But is it a modern design? No. I admit that. Does it stand up to Kalista? Of course not. No design will ever be as great as that. But I do my best.

CertainlyT: i made a ghost and she throws spears and they stick in people. shes really good at throwing spears. she keeps throwing them. she has a lot of spears like um. its so many spears. she throws them until shes thrown INFINITY spears. she wont go to school either she hops away she likes No School Man. theyre friends

Pendragon: Poppy had some issues with her, from a sales standpoint. First of all, we didn’t make any money on her, because you can’t keep selling the same champion over and over. Still working on that part. Anyway, we were trying to reach out to different sections of the community, and I found this great group of guys called “KotakuInAction.” And they didn’t like Poppy because of her ult: she’s a woman, and makes a choice.

CertainlyT: also shes dead and a ghost but not really dead. she has a spear that she pulls out. thats why shes a ghost, and dead

Solcrushed (design lead, Poppy re-release): the idea was that there's this champion who wasn't even supposed to be there and have to do all this bullshit, but everyone else is so goddamned incompetent that there's no one around other than, uh, them to do goddamned anything. It's like there's no one who even tries, like nothing happens for years and years and then they're the only person who can do anything. Holy shit.

Zileas: we gave Solcrushed a couple days to do the entire kit. Plenty of time for a talented designer like that. I asked him, "what's Poppy's ult going to be?" and he said "Fuck Off." What a great ability name! I followed up with, "and what does Fuck Off do?" and he said "makes everyone that shouldn't be bothering her fuck off immediately." Wonderful top-down design. That's why we give Solcrushed all the really intense, time-sensitive design challenges. He always comes up with something wonderful when no one thought it could be done.

Solcrushed: dashes? Fuck dashing. The concept of this champion is, “no one gets to dash and CertainlyT is an overrated hack.”

CertainlyT: i thought you were my friend :(

Tryndamere: what a wonderful champion for my game to release, now that it's a subsidiary of Tencent Holdings. Exactly how I wanted my life's work to end up.

Ryze: I'm surprised you're not in love with the new Poppy. She looks like that woman you met on your last bender. Did you get that annulled?

Previous League of Legends writing:

Vaynespotting

why i hate devourer

mordekaiser rework review

complexity creep

philosurrendering

do something useful while waiting for your team to give up: philosurrender

2015-11-22T20:07:00.000-08:00

At the dawn of season six, players are facing fundamental questions when they lose to yet another fed Graves, such as: “what are we doing here?” “Is this the only way things could be?” “Do my actions have any broader meaning?” And of course, the big one: “At what point is it preferable just to surrender entirely?”

Have no fear, intrepid summoners, for these are questions that philosophers have been grappling with for millennia. This season, be sure to take a few minutes to philosurrender: to think about humanity’s deepest questions while waiting for your team to give up.

With 20-minute games, five of which are completely irrelevant, and another five minutes of between-game time, that’s a solid 20 minutes of philosurrendering per hour of good ol’ League of Legends gaming time.

As an example: when a toplaner spends the first fifteen minutes of the game in their isolated cave, viewing other players only as announcements of “an ally has been slain,” they begin to think that those actually are simply the quadra kill that the opposing Miss Fortune just got. This happens through several layers of abstraction: there are actually champions behind that absurd multikill, and summoners behind those champions, and extremely homophobic 14 year-olds behind those summoners.

When your midlaner starts a surrender vote with some comment like “wtb a fukken jungler,” think about the objectification and commodification of that role. As a role, the jungler is essentially without possessions of their own; anything they have will always be freely plundered by the better-off laners with the justification that they need it more. When a jungler is taking a camp and the midlaner comes right up and takes all the minions, Marx would understand exactly what’s going on.

As previously detailed in my introduction to Vaynespotting, the support must frequently confront the absurd. The absurd can be summarized as the gap between our need for meaning and inability to find any. When the ADC gets caught out and asks “wtf y cant u group???”, they are working tirelessly for something that ends up being entirely pointless. Unable to come up with a reason for their own death, they blame someone else rather than accepting that their 80cs at 23 minutes is for naught.

Think of the distinction between the nature of something, and the word that we use to describe that thing. For example, there is a “support” who does nothing other than stand four Teemos behind the ADC in lane. Our word for the role does us no good in understanding the person; the word “support” instead functions to actively reduce our knowledge of the action, rather than increase it. This is commonly referred to as the signifier (the idea of the “support”) and the signified (the Lux who is outraged that she didn’t get mid as last pick).

Study questions:

Why is the jungler the most-relied-upon role by others, and the one that receives the most changes every season? Connect this to the plight of the working class during the Industrial Revolution.
You are a carry, and there is a runaway enemy Blitzcrank barreling down the lane. If you do nothing, it will continue down the lane, engage, and kill four teammates. If you take the hook for the team, the rest of the team will run away safely. Explain why you are reporting your team for feeding.
Are all Yasuo players colonialists?
Why is it called Summoner's Rift and not Summoners' Rift?

against "timmy, johnny, and spike"

2015-10-21T03:56:00.000-07:00

pt i: introduction

For a long time, being A Johnny was an important part of my Magical identity. As I got older, my Spike side showed itself more, as I got over my disinclination to play decks made by other people. My desire to build cool decks faded compared to a desire to play cool decks, regardless of whether I had made them.

But it was a long time after that before I started questioning the underlying model of the Timmy, Johnny, and Spike psychographics. They’re not useful for understanding the game.[1]

[1] They are, however, useful for erotic Mark Rosewater fanfiction.

This essay is going to have a lot of quoting Mr. Mark Rosewater, because it’s fundamentally about his ideas, so bear with me, for we are entering the land of Block Quotes.

Let’s hand it over to 2002 Rosewater to introduce the concept:

After numerous years, we’ve come to the conclusion that there are three basic types of Magic players. The fancy term for these categories is "psychographic profiles." A psychographic profile separates players into categories based on their psychological make-up. What motivates that player to play? What kind of cards do they like? What kind of things encourages that player to keep on playing?

You’ll note, here, that Rosewater doesn’t define what, exactly, a psychographic is. This can be forgiven, since it’s a slippery concept and definitions are almost always contestable and inexact, but I’ll cite the first one that came up in a Google search, because that’s the kind of research I’m comfortable with:

The study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research.

Psychographics, as the name implies, are the psychological equivalent of demographics. Demographics are the objective measures of a customer base, things like age, gender, race, and location. Psychographics are internal things that can be measured only inexactly.

Let’s go to 2012 Rosewater, via his podcast, to tell us how he came upon the concept:

So let’s start by saying “What are psychographics? And where do they come from?” Because one of the things I always said is that when I got to R&D, that R&D was very based on math. That most of the people who were working on it—Richard, Skaff, and Jim, all those people were math people. They had studied math. And that the game had a lot of math influence on the way it was created. And I kind of brought psychology to the picture. One of my lines is that I kind of shifted R&D’s thought processes from math to psychology. And so let’s talk about sort of what psychographics mean and how they impact what we do.

…

Now, part of being in the school was until you declared a major and stuff, you had to take stuff from all three parts of the school. So I had to take classes in journalism. I had to take classes in advertising. And in advertising, I learned about a thing called a psychographic. What is a psychographic? Well, the idea is, if I’m going to sell you something, I need to understand why you need the thing.

As far as layperson explanations of psychographics go, that last sentence is actually a pretty good one. He’ll deviate from it, as we’ll see, but the foundation is there.

The issues start to arise when we look at from where he gains the concept: he learned about it in one college class in 1985. In the origin story of Timmy, he talks about the creation of Verdant Force, which occured somewhere around 1996. The full TJS model was invented after that. Meaning: he’s taking a concept he remembers from over a decade earlier and importing it into Magic.

What I’m dancing around here is that Mark Rosewater has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.

pt ii: the psychographics that aren’t

Rosewater didn’t really bring “psychology” into making Magic; at least, not the science known as psychology. I say this because psychographics are not a concept that is native to the field of psychology. This should be clear even to Mr. Rosewater: he didn’t learn about them in a psychology class, they’re from an advertising class. More aptly, they are an advertising concept with attempts at being somewhat psychology-based.

Also, psychographics cannot ever be the full picture of an audience. Their initial utility is not to provide the entire picture of customers; they were invented to go along with demographics. Wizards is obviously never going to release real demographic information, so anything that Rosewater or anyone else says about Magic’s psychographics is inherently incomplete. I’d be fascinated to read someone from the company write openly about Magic’s demographics, but I doubt they want to admit that Magic’s sales are mostly North America, almost entirely white, and almost entirely male.

This next argument is a big one: Timmy, Johnny, and Spike are not actually psychographics.

Psychographic profiles are portraits of the buyers of the good; Rosewater invisibly tries to shift this to “player psychographics.” Since psychographics are, as he correctly states, descriptions of “why you need the thing,” that thing being sealed Magic product, descriptions of how people use the thing and which subsets of the thing they most like are different than why they are buying the thing. As soon as “psychographic” attempts to describe anything other than the groups of people buying the product, it is not a psychographic.

Just recently, Rosewater defended excluding Vorthos and Mel from the pantheon of player psychographics.[2] Part of his assumption:

“The point of a psychographic is to try to understand the psychological motivation behind why a person enjoys what they enjoy.”

[2] He also starts referring to Timmy and Johnny intermittently and interchangeably as Tammy and Jenny, which makes reading his newest thoughts on the psychographics more headache-inducing and reread-necessitating than the second half of 100 Bullets.

This is not the point of a psychographic. He is just wrong. The point is why they buy what they buy; psychographics can easily be used for things that people can’t really be said to “enjoy,” like toilet cleaner, fiber supplements, or Joy Division.

Rosewater went into their origin stories (of the psychographics, not Joy Division), and their utility in describing certain facets of cards and their relationship to the players that would use them. This isn’t how psychographics actually are supposed to get created, which is dedicated research and moving forward from what the numbers say. Instead, TJS were created as vague profiles (with Johnny just to fill the void and make it a nice number three) by non-marketing-employed people.

While Rosewater will undoubtedly claim that market research has granted statistical validity to this psychographic model, it’s still working in the wrong direction. It was invented first, as a sort of thought exercise for designers, and everything that’s come after has been fleshing out and working backwards to try to justify it. If these concepts are based on marketing, and marketing is based on psychology, and psychology is science, then somewhere along the chain, we have lost all scientific validity. Science does not start out with a hypothesis that is assumed to be true, with anecdotes and data obtained to attempt to make the hypothesis seem truer.

Since I’m making the case that TJS aren’t really psychographic profiles, what would real ones be? I don’t know, because I haven’t done market research into who buys Magic cards. That puts me on equal footing to the inventors of the TJS model, because hard data didn’t influence the creation of that either.[3]

[3] If pressed to make guesses about what the results would be: the biggest group by a mile would probably be people buying product and opening it in order to sell singles (or otherwise make money off of it). This isn’t just huge retailers like StarCityGames and Card Kingdom, but also one-person eBay shops and people that think they can turn a profit buying product at retail price and then selling the cards. After that would be the casual pack busters that just like buying product to add to their collection, drafters, and people buying it as a gift for Magic players that they know. Please note that these are all reasons people buy packs, not what they do with the cards once bought.

pt iii: the personality test

Okay, one might say, so Timmy, Johnny, and Spike aren’t actually psychographics in the sense of how psychographics are created and used in advertising. So what? Isn’t this all solved if we just rename them “player profiles?” This would, as Rosewater wishes, exclude Vorthos and Mel.^{^[4]}

^{^[4]} It doesn’t take the most tinfoil hat among us to theorize that a main reason Rosewater wants to exclude Vorthos from the psychographics is that he didn’t invent Vorthos.

What we have at this point is something closer to a personality quiz. Now, we’re on to something closer to the Meyers-Briggs test, but with all the scientific validity removed.

As any student of psychology (or self-identified “skeptic” who gets in very long internet arguments) will note, though, Meyers-Briggs isn’t on the soundest scientific footing itself. It was created not evidence-first and working backward, but on some vague theorizing from Jung and adapted by other people as a test to categorize people.

Timmy/Johnny/Spike has caught on as the predominant personality test for Magic players, along with color pie alignments.^{^[5]} Rather than merely being internal Wizards pseudo-marketing terms, once Rosewater explained them to the playerbase, people started self-identifying as one or more types. This was explicitly encouraged: when the articles debuted, the text itself was hidden behind a page that prompted a Magic personality test, with players asked to choose their favorite cards and reasons for playing.

^{^[5]} Color pie alignments are way more interesting, anyway, since they go so much deeper into motivation and are fairly balanced. They’re a million times better than Harry Potter houses, that’s for sure. By the way: mono-blue; Ravenclaw.

Even if these psychographics aren’t real psychographics, and their definitions have shifted over time… what’s the problem with using them as a fun quiz? If I’m a Spike, the thinking goes, it’s cool that someone has articulated that and explained how I’m a Spike.

One issue with this is the attempted psychological justification for why Magic players play in different ways, and care about different aspects of the game. As I said in the introduction, I’d certainly be classified as a Spike by this system. I can’t go to an evening cube draft without seriously attempting to win in the most efficient way, even if I’m hideously drunk at the time.[6]

[6] I was at a cube draft where a few proxies from the then-unreleased Battle for Zendikar were in the cube. I opened a pack and saw staring back at me, as the art on a proxy, the Facebook profile picture of my significant other. I was in the correct color to draft it. However, there was another card in the same pack with the same color, type, and mana cost that I thought was slightly better. So I drafted that instead.

Rosewater’s model explains that the reason I play Magic is to prove something. That’s just not why I play. My motivation doesn’t come from “showing what I’m capable of,” and I am certainly not going to have a bad time if I win nine out of ten games when I was capable of winning ten. I just simply think that Magic is the most fun when both players are drafting and playing in a way that reflects a sincere desire to win. I even play dumb games like Pokemon X in the same way, and I’m certainly not going to show off to a crowd of people my elite Battle Maison lineup. It’s just more fun, in my view, to try my best and be genuinely challenged.

What use is a personality test that sets out to explain my motivations for why I do what I do, but completely misses the mark? Am I a Timmy because I want to build decks for a dozen different formats, even if I’m trying my best to make optimal decks for all of them? The Timmy description is about “playing to have fun,” which sounds like me; I want to play the game that’s the most fun to play when approached with a competitive mindset. But that competitive nature completely goes against everything Timmy is about.

I don’t think these are nitpicks, or finding minute flaws with the descriptions of the archetypes. I think that the archetypes are arbitrarily made, nonsensically delineated, and describe players inadequately. Concepts like competitiveness, willingness to embrace new formats, wanting to do something huge in a game, valuing friendship and experiences over loss and victory, and desire to be unique are neither binary nor restricted to one player archetype. And no, the hybrid psychographics do not make up for this.

We are who we are, whether we’re playing Magic or doing anything else. One doesn’t become an entirely new person when they enter a card shop, just as people are still themselves when they’re at home or at work. Sure, it might bring out different aspects depending on what you’re doing, but there’s just no need for a Magic-specific personality test. Being a Spike at Magic means just as little as being a Spike in D&D or a Chaotic-Neutral Magic player or a White/Red OKCupid user[7] or a Dark/Grass musician.

[7] This budding relationship ended after three dates with the revelation that they had “a master” in another state.

pt iv: the re-definitions of timmy, johnny, and spike

Writing this essay against the concept of the psychographics is difficult, because each of them has changed over time since they were first invented; Rosewater issued clarifications and changes to his model that served to muddy the picture. The biggest change was from the 2002 to the 2006 version of these profiles. Let’s start with Timmy’s origin (2002 Rosewater quoting himself from the period around Tempest’s design):

“Imagine a kid goes into a game store. Let’s just call him… 'Timmy.' Now, Timmy doesn’t have a lot of money. So, he buys one pack of Bogavhati (Tempest’s codename). He rips it open and starts tearing through the cards to find the rare. And then he sees it. It’s a big green creature. Seven power. Seven toughness. It’s huge. Huge! He’s eyes keep moving. He glances up at the casting cost: 5GGG, blah, blah, blah. Boring. Move on. Timmy looks at the rules text. There’s a bunch of words. Timmy reads. Every turn Timmy gets another creature. Another entire creature. It’s small, but in ten turns, he’ll have twenty creatures. A 7/7 creature with twenty 1/1s. How does his opponent stop that? It can’t be stopped! Timmy finally exhales. He has found the Holy Grail.”[8]

…

Timmy is what we in R&D call the "power gamer." Timmy likes to win big. He doesn’t want to eke out a last minute victory. Timmy wants to smash his opponents. He likes his cards to be impressive, and he enjoys playing big creatures and big spells.

[8] Compare this quotation with what he recounts in the 2012 podcast, attempting to quote the exact same invention of Timmy:

“Well, you know, I think there’s a player out there. I’m going to call him Timmy. And you know what? When Timmy opens this pack, his eyes are going to bulge out, and he’s going to get really excited. And you know what? Timmy will be happy to put this in his deck. And when Timmy gets to cast it, he’ll be ecstatic. And when he gets to attack with it, he’ll be more ecstatic! And that this card isn’t for the tournament player, this card’s for Timmy.”

This tells me that Rosewater has internalized his revisionism; he sees the current incarnation of Timmy as the way it’s always been. This change in quotation reminds me of Rosewater’s famous article about the fallibility of memory, with the wonderfully executed concept that it was a “lost column” complete with out-of-date card art (and suitably Eastasia/Eurasia updates to the archive listings).

Compare that with Timmy’s description in 2006:

Timmy wants to experience something. Timmy plays Magic because he enjoys the feeling he gets when he plays. What that feeling is will vary from Timmy to Timmy, but what all Timmies have in common is that they enjoy the visceral experience of playing.

…

One of the great myths about Timmy is that he is young and inexperienced. I think this comes from the fact that a non-Timmy (particularly a Spike) looking at a Timmy play reads his choices as those of inexperience.

…

One of the stereotypes of Timmy is that he (or she; for the rest of this column just add “or she” whenever you see “he”) loves playing big creatures and big spells as he smashes his way to victory (my last column on Timmy really reinforced this image). This isn't true for all Timmies[...]

Mr. Rosewater does his readers a disservice when he talks about a “stereotype” passively existing for this profile that he, himself, created. He says that his last column “reinforced” the image, when there wasn’t any image before that column existed; he explicitly said that Timmies are power gamers, period. As far as the stereotype that they’re young and inexperienced, this seems innate to the profile from its inception: the name Timmy purposefully invokes childishness. Rosewater specifically calls him a kid that doesn’t have much money.

Basically: Rosewater invented the profile of the child who’s not very experienced, and then only later does he shift the definition from a person who knows very little about Magic to someone who likes raw power from his cards, and from that to someone who wants to “experience” something.

If we accept the introductory story as what a Timmy really is, then it’s very possible that this player wouldn’t even fit under the current profile of Timmy: what I see here is a player who wants to smash his opponents with his unstoppable, overpowered card; he simply doesn’t know enough about the game to understand that his eight-mana creature that gives him another creature every turn is, in fact, quite stoppable.

This is not a trivial distinction. There is a big difference between the newer player (who might be a small child) whose best attempt at winning games of Magic is with Verdant Force, versus a player who doesn’t want to win games of Magic as much as they just want to play their Verdant Force. One of these definitions looks at Timmy’s profile as a phase, something that all players go through, and the latter as something innate to the player.

Personally, I find the initial conception of Timmy as the most relatable. Not because the later definitions don’t describe certain people, but because I certainly remember being there, tearing my hair out that my friend’s Thorn Elemental was the best card ever printed, hunting through cards before stumbling upon Bribery. I could very easily have been the Timmy that spent his allowance on packs, and I would have been delighted at that time to get a Verdant Force.

I’d summarize the definitions of Timmy as:

Creation myth (circa 1996): Timmy as young player who thinks big cards are unstoppable.

2002 TJS: Timmy as power gamer.

2006 TJS: Timmy as player who wants to experience something.

By the time we get to 2006, some of the examples of Timmy are so far away from the 1996 or 2002 concepts as to be completely unrecognizable.

Due to its modular design and fanatical following, Magic has many different deck types and formats. Diversity Gamer Timmy wants to experience it all. Fun for him is this constant exploration. Each time he plays, he wants to try something different than what he did before. Yes, he occasionally returns to things he's done before, but only as a breather before he leaps once again into the great unknown.

This sort of change is perhaps even more obvious in the evolution of Spike. 2002:

You see for years, R&D just called them Timmy, Johnny, and "the tournament player." But at some point we explained the three profiles to the Magic brand team. They felt the tournament player needed a name, so they named him. Why "Spike?" The best I’ve been able to figure out is they felt Spike sounded like a serious, play-to-win-type name.

Spike is the competitive player. Spike plays to win. Spike enjoys winning. To accomplish this, Spike will play whatever the best deck is. Spike will copy decks off the Internet. Spike will borrow other players’ decks. To Spike, the thrill of Magic is the adrenalin rush of competition. Spike enjoys the stimulation of outplaying the opponent and the glory of victory.

2006:

...and yes, there are Spikes outside of the tournament environment…

The last thing I want to stress before I move on is that Spikes are neither limited to organized play nor are necessarily good. There are Spikes who play casually.

2012:

Now, you can be a Spike in collecting. You can be a Spike in story. You can be a Spike in whatever aspect you want, the key is you need to dominate in that area and show “Look what I can do. Look how I’m able to excel in this area.” Now, for most Spikes, that is understanding the game.

The definition of “tournament player” has shifted so much that it’s been redefined to include players who don’t play tournaments[9] and might not even play Magic. But doesn’t that contradict the idea that these are “player psychographics,” then? If Vorthos and Mel are excluded because of how they appreciate the game, then why isn’t Spike excluded because he appreciates Magic in a competitive way?

^{^[9]} Granted, one could make a “you can take the player out of the tournament…” type argument to say that they’re still tournament-type players even if they play casually, and anyone who’s ever been around people that are very serious about cube draft has seen this, but this archetype is, in my experience, exclusively people who were regulars of the PTQ/GP circuit but fell out of the lifestyle.

pt v: conclusion

There is, of course, no way for a community to instantly un-learn a concept or the resulting terms from it. I’m not going to be outraged when people refer to a decision as having a Timmy moment, or if they think of themselves as Spikes.

What I would ask, though, is some skepticism on the part of the community toward this model. It’ll be tough, since it’s fairly entrenched already, but when Rosewater talks broadly about “Jennies will love this card,”[10] please don’t take it as a certainty that Johnnies even exist, let alone whether they’ll like that card.

[10] See what I mean?

You are not beholden to these archetypes. If you think of yourself as a competitive person, as I do, then please use that to describe yourself. Magic has so many wonderful ways to describe what we like about the game, and the ways we play it. Vague models like these profiles are malleable, full of sub-archetypes that overlap with one another, hybrids, and people that oscillate wildly between multiple pillars because the model doesn’t actually do anything effectively.

Like the borders between countries, there are a few things that really do separate some people from others, but often, it’s just an arbitrary line in the sand.

Magic as a hobby is so enormous, so full of history and culture independent of whatever Wizards releases next, that there’s no need for us to bow to the wisdom of the Wizards thinking and align ourselves with them. When people buy into a Wizards model of player behavior, even using it to self-categorize, it serves to make our thinking and our way of speaking just that little bit closer to how Wizards is.

But Magic players aren’t Wizards employees. Why bother trying to act like we are?

the greatest threat to league of legends is complexity creep

2015-09-19T02:12:00.000-07:00

League is fucking difficult.

I’m a bit baffled when people argue about itemization or the like, saying that the game needs more options, more buttons to press, more complexity. I don’t consider myself a great League player, but statistically, as a proud Platinum 5, I’m in something like the top 15% of people that play ranked in North America. I find nearly impossible to make it through a game without ever making some enormous mechanical boner, and that’s playing low-mechanics champions like Nunu, Janna, and Talon.

When I started playing about two years ago, I was blown away by the strategic depth, the array of things I could learn about the game, and just how little I understood. What it made me wish, more than anything, was that I had been playing the game for longer: that way, I wouldn’t have to learn all 100+ champions at once, I could get them at a slow, controlled drip. When a new champion comes out, it’s impossible to go into a normals game for about a week without seeing that champion on one or both teams. Even for people that don’t buy them, this makes it pretty easy for experienced players to get a rough idea of what they do just via osmosis (and the continuous youtube clips showing off that new champion’s sick plays).

The issue is that champions enter the League, but they never leave. A released champion will never just get deleted entirely, despite my stern letters to the company on extremely official-looking letterhead threatening legal action unless they ban all Vayne players.

While the pace of new champions has slowed down to a reasonable six annually, the pace of champion reworks has upped significantly. Even if you learned what the originally incarnations of Sion, Fiora, Gangplank, and Mordekaiser did, hoo boy are you in for a surprise if you try to lane against them based on that knowledge.

I’m obviously not bemoaning the fact that the game changes over time. This is a wonderful part of any living game, and I get as hyped for new champions as anyone (and nerd out about their implied design philosophies significantly more, probably). What does concern me is that, as the number of champions continues increasing, the game’s complexity goes up and up. This is definitionally true; the more champions one can possibly see in a game, the more possibilities there are for strategic options, and skill interactions that players are expected to know about.

Champion reworks don’t sound like they should increase complexity, but in practice, they do. Champions have been getting more and more intricate as the game gets older, and when old, simple champions are remade in an era of complex designs, the game gets overall more complex. Think of Ashe, Ryze and Garen: the game thought so highly of them as simple, easy-to-grasp designs that it put those champions in the tutorial. All three have since been reworked to be much more complex. Ashe deals with critical strike in an entirely separate way from every other champion in the game. Ryze now has a stacking passive that gives some sort of supercharging based on how many points are in his Q. Garen has his whole “villain” gimmick.

And, of course, there are new items. Boring old auras and stat blocks are replaced with things that build up charges, create portals, make the holder of them speed up and slow down at various times, etc. etc. Champions will commonly have two or three different little colors and animations on them just from their items, in addition to whatever their skills do.

Okay, so the game is getting more complex. But why does this matter? As things get more and more complex, the risk that players (experienced ones, but especially new ones) simply throw up their hands and go “I don’t get it” increases. When someone loses a 1v1 in lane, they should at least know why it happened: stood in the minions. Got hit with a skillshot. Missed my own skillshot. Took too many tower hits. What can happen when things get too complex is that so many things are happening, they cannot pinpoint which of those things actually mattered.

Think about the first time you played against Ekko, Yasuo, or Zed. If your experience is like mine, what happened is: that dude dashed around eight thousand times, then I exploded, then they’re two screens away. Personally, I then tried to put in the work to learn exactly why that happened; what all those dashes do, why they can do them, and what I did wrong. But champions like Ekko (I’m singling him out as one of the most convoluted designs I can think of) run the risk of doing so much stuff that it can be difficult to comprehend. Okay, so he can make a bubble, and I shouldn’t stand in it, and his projectile thing slows down after he throws it, and he can dash a couple times, but how the hell did he end up over there? And why did he run away at eight hundred miles an hour?

Of course, spirited players might be able to defend Ekko’s design. You’d probably even make some good arguments that, really, it’s not that difficult to figure out what he’s doing, after laning against him for a while. But then think: what happens when you’re in a skirmish against two champions with the same complexity? What about a five-versus-five teamfight, where everyone has an Ekko-esque kit?

Personally, there’s a lot of teamfights in solo queue where I straight-up give up on understanding what’s going on. I try to focus on my champion, and using my abilities when I can use them, and hopefully everything works out okay. The fireworks of a full five-versus-five can take analysts minutes to break down what happens over the course of maybe ten seconds. On the fly, it’s just impossible unless you’re a professional player or savant of teamfighting. The complexity of all the abilities, champions flying around… it’s easy to get lost.

Further questions for readers who play this game: how much complexity is okay? Clearly, people are fine with it as is; it’s slowly dripped into them over months and years. But if Riot overnight added ten new champions, twenty new items, and reworked 40 other champions… how long would it take you to learn all of that?

Would you even bother?

Longtime readers of my Magic: the Gathering writing will recognize this problem as complexity creep. It’s something that Magic had to face head-on back around 2007 and deal with or (as Wizards saw it) face the possibility of the game dying.[1] But Magic’s problem was slightly different: instead of an ever-growing cast of game pieces that never left, Magic simply had a growing collection of ideas present in basically the same number of cards year-over-year, as the default way to play Magic is with cards from the last two years.

[1] These readers will also note the irony of positively citing Mark Rosewater ideas. Look: I know, okay? I know.

Basically, the idea of complexity creep is that, unless your designers are actively paying attention to removing complex elements, the game will, over time, become more complex. Each new concept builds on an old one, since everyone involved in the game knows those old concepts. No one ever wants to remove one of the existing parts of the game, since people know and love it. The game grows and grows, each new element swelling it fuller of more ideas, more mechanics.

I’d argue that League’s problem is actually far more severe. Unless Riot implements some sort of champion “rotation,” League will eventually spiral into more and more complexity, with no way to stop it. This is bad.

I opened by saying that League is fucking difficult. One of the reasons for it is that League is, at its core, fucking complex already: there are three different lanes, and multiple neutral objectives, and… well just try explaining the game to someone with no MOBA experience and see how much of it they can comprehend. Five champions, with three skills and a passive each, means that each game has 40 different skills interacting with one another.

The game is at no risk of being not complex by attempting to “cap” the complexity: it would simply be saying that the current level of complexity is the target, and any future changes have to simplify in areas in equal amount to the amount that the game grows in complexity in other areas.

First, let’s look at the areas where League should get more complex: new champions. It’s pretty obvious that, in order to excite players and design new things, the game needs to continually roll out new champions. There are a few ways to balance this out.

Possibility one: “retiring” champions for pro play/ranked solo queue. Hey, check out this cool new champion that replaces Volibear! This would be absolutely detested by players, especially the people that regularly play the retired champ, so I doubt this would ever happen.

Possibility two: reworking champions to reduce complexity. This would target champions with bloated, hard-to-track kits, and streamline them, giving them power in more prominent areas while removing things that were just extraneous. For example, Thresh losing half the text on his abilities while still retaining the same basic hook/flay/lantern/box functionality. The problem with this is that it would take beloved champions, things that players feel are perfectly fine (like Thresh), and make people who’ve sunk tons of games in them half to relearn everything about them. Again, I doubt this could happen.

Possibility three: reducing non-champion complexity. This would basically have to be the itemization system. There’s long been an undercurrent of discontent among players who prefer DOTA’s more active-heavy rather than stat-heavy itemization system. These people contend this makes the game more interesting and deep (with those Meaningful Choices that people at Riot love to talk about); this option would be specifically going away from that system.

The game already has started shifting from items with combat-relevant actives, and toward items that, while more interesting than stat blocks, do things kind of on their own without involvement from the player while in combat. Examples would be ZZRot Portal, Dead Man’s Plate, and Luden’s Echo.

What, exactly, is the purpose of itemization? That is: why not just have champions automatically get more powerful via levels alone, or just spend money to increase stats? What itemization does is let players dictate how they want to play out the game. The choice of champion is their Big Decision, but their smaller decisions throughout the game of itemization let them choose how that champion plays. They can go heavy on offense, defense, utility, etc. They also let the player react to what opponents are doing; building armor or MR against that type of damage is the most obvious example, but Riot absolutely loves the idea of “anti-siege” tools like Warmog’s, whereas ZZRot and Banner are specific buys for teams who want to group up without entirely conceding side waves.

The specific moments when one buys the perfect item for this exact moment are beautiful, but for the most part, players follow a specific build path. Infinity Edge into Statikk Shiv into Last Whisper. Sightstone into boots into Talisman. Devourer into Trinity Force into Blade of the Ruined King into Wit’s End, if you’re the 0/4/0 jungle Jax on my solo queue team.

This will inevitably be the most controversial claim of this essay, but I believe the itemization can be made radically simpler without losing much strategic depth. The armor/magic penetration system is *cough* impenetrable, and something that cleaned that up would be wonderful. Want to deal more damage? Build more damage. You shouldn’t have to pull up a calculator to tell you whether Deathcap, Void Staff, or Liandry’s Torment will be the highest DPS for Annie. There’s not really an interesting choice to make between damage items; one of them is mathematically correct, and the others are mistakes. A choice between damage and tankiness is infinitely more interesting, since it’s an actual choice.

I’m going to be a pessimist, though, and assume that at least for a while, the game isn’t going to make much of an effort to combat complexity creep. More champions will get released, existing ones will become tougher to get a handle on, and there will be 25% more items a year from now, and they’ll all have twice as much text as they currently do. What will be the result of this?

League, already a rather inaccessible game compared to newer rival MOBAS (and certainly less complex than any other genre on the planet), will become even moreso. In a game with 150 champions, new players will have even more games where they recognize few or none of the ones they see from their previous games. The itemization system will completely confuse them, and they’ll blindly pick from “recommended” items with no knowledge of what those items actually do. Teamfights will… well a bunch of stuff will happen, and then everyone is on the other side of the map. The cool new champion will be almost completely incomprehensible to someone who can only just remember to use their ultimate when they can.

It’s not just about newer players, though. As a relative “veteran” at two years of playing the game, I can barely understand what’s happening in skirmishes involving complex champions. If the game stays at about its current complexity… yeah, I can deal with that. If it continues increasing, I’m not sure.

People will accuse me of attempting to “dumb down” the game, when this really isn’t the case. I’m pretty much okay with the game as it is; I just recognize the trend, and see how it can continue in ways that are difficult to ever reverse. I don’t want the game to be less complex, other than to compensate for ways that it gets more complex. I want to preserve every ounce of League’s strategic choice, while making it an overall more comprehensible game to everyone who watches or plays it.

If I have one hope for League’s future, it’s that the champion design gets out of the current ideology of “more complex = better than.” League’s champion pool needs more Annies and fewer Ekkos. It needs champions that, while still having a ton of play and strategic depth, can be reasonably given to a newer (or bad) player and have them basically understand how to play them.

champion design review: mordekaiser rework

2015-09-15T21:58:00.002-07:00

Unlike most people shouting their thoughts about League of Legends design into the void, I consider myself a fan of CertainlyT. Zyra is a lot of fun, and the trio of Thresh, Yasuo, and Kalista are so flashy and high-octane to play (and so rewarding to practice) that they'll always be popular picks in solo queue regardless of viability. Sure, there's some stuff to poke fun at with his designs, like his proclivity for passives on top of passives, but his designs have made League a more fun game, and the open-endedness of the mechanics he makes have filled up countless YouTube montages.

Which brings us to his latest: Mordekaiser's rework. And holy hell did he fuck this one up.

The concept for the rework is centered around making him a melee mage that takes the place of the ADC in a duo lane. And he certainly works there, in the same way that a nuclear bomb can effectively kill a mouse in your grandparents' attic.

The most important change to make him function in this role is the passive on his W: as soon as he levels it up, he gets full XP from all minions, rather than sharing with his support (who still gets the normal amount).

This mechanic is dumb. It is a brute-force way to make a champion work in a duo lane when they otherwise would not. Outside of the game, just reading it, it seems inelegant; any damage-dealing champion could fulfill the role of the botlane carry if they had the same passive. There is nothing Mordekaiser-centric about it at all. Does Mordekaiser's extensive knowledge of 80s metal bands give him the experience needed to hit level six faster? Hey, I see that Riot wants to make sure that Lulu is primarily a support champion, and not an oppressive solo laner. Why not give her the same passive?

In the game itself, it just feels... wrong. No matter what team you're on, laning with Mordekaiser present has the inevitable, "oh now that just shouldn't happen" moment when Morde hits six and everyone else is either four or five. Seeing as Morde's ult is a point-and-click that does 25% of the target's max health as magic damage, that's a pretty big deal.

(Minor quibble: why is this passive on W at all, instead of just being... a normal passive? Everyone is obviously going to level W first to get it, so they have it all the time. Is that that the entire purpose, to force players to take W first in lane, which they might do anyway?)

Bot lane, more than anywhere else on the map, revolves around early leveling power spikes. Both duos aggressively push the first two waves, in order to hit level two off the third melee creep. Then, the ritual is repeated as level six approaches, to enable the Vaynes and Leonas and Threshes to show off their new skills. Even being level five instead of level four is an enormous deal, for the combined thousands of gold worth of stats that the experience-advantaged lane has over their opponents.

Morde being in a game means that your leveling power spikes are irrelevant, because he gets those first. Because... that's what his W's passive is. If you don't like that, you can attempt to make him unable to get any CS, to deny the W's experience. Good luck doing that, though, against a lane with double Relic Shield.

Being even one or two waves of experience up over an opponent matters a lot. A one-for-one trade in kills in top lane can be miraculous or atrocious, depending on who loses more minions to tower (and thus, their XP). Even if the lane opposing Morde somehow holds the fucker to just twelve CS to their 40, that's still two waves of XP he has as an advantage.

But of course, it's obvious that XP matters. What I haven't proved is that giving Morde this advantage in his kit is necessarily bad.

My issue is that Morde comes into this established metagame of ADC/support and completely disrespects what was present already. It's obvious he would do that, as a melee carry in a world of 500-650 range, but the way he does it makes him feel less like an outlier than an alien invader. He just has nothing to do with the duo lanes that don't include him. Anything that players learned laning against ADCs is now irrelevant, for the purpose of laning against him.

Let's move on to the rest of his kit. Well, really, let's dwell next on the part where his damage output is completely obscene.

A lot of the Morde hate has been directed as his pet dragon, but to be honest, I think this is one of the cooler aspects of him. He's taking the spot of the ADC, so it makes sense that he needs a tower-taking mechanic to compensate for his lack of range. Plus, it's gated behind a neutral objective that's already commonly warded and contested, so it's not like it's completely free for him all the time.

What I do have an issue with, though, is that Morde gives up nothing in order to get the ghost dragon beyond his team securing it. The fact that he can win a bot lane all-in with ult (which obviously he does; have you played this champion), move to dragon with his support, kill it, and get the ghost dragon... that's silly. He should at least have to ult the dragon in order to get the ghost. That way, if he really wants this super-powerful pet, he has to not use his ult for combat purposes. It would be a tradeoff between "more likely to get dragon" and "better once he has it."

Morde deals damage in a way completely unlike ADCs (and, really, completely unlike most mages). He gets up to melee auto range with someone, and they explode while his own health bar barely moves. The skill that's responsible for this is his Q, which to my knowledge is the only exponentially-scaling damage spell in the game.

The design logic for this is easy to guess at: it prevents him from being just another burst mage, who goes up to the range of his spells, presses buttons, and the opposing team is now dead in less than a second (Annie being the canonical example). Instead, Morde's Q needs to ramp up, so that it's his third Q that's worrisome, rather than the first two. In theory, this gives him some counterplay, in that it's okay to take one, maybe two autoattacks in melee, but really, if you can't move out of the way for the third, that's on you.

The way it plays out in practice is rather different. Here's two different scenarios that I've experienced:

"Oh, I can fight this guy, this isn't so WHY AM I DEAD WHAT JUST HAPPENED."

...and...

"Well, he just killed my teammate, but he's at low health and used his ult already so HOLY CHRIST HE JUST ONE SHOT ME."

(Minor quibble the second: I really dislike that Q scales off AD incredibly hard, but deals magic damage no matter what. It makes it super confusing and awkward to itemize against. It should be a truism that, if the opponent is stacking swords in their inventory, you build armor; if they have books and rods, you build magic resist. Against Morde, the more AD he has, the more magic damage he does; if he's building AP, he'll treat it instead like he was building spell vamp, via the heal on his W. What a champion.)

It's difficult to separate his power-agnostic design (that is, the ideas and mechanics before those pesky testers and developers fiddle with the champion to make them balanced) from the fact that Mordekaiser is, as of this writing (patch 5.17), super unreal next-level shit-yourself broken. But simply put, I don't think that a basic ability, attached to one single auto, should have a 2.6AP ratio. I also do not think that it should have a 3.9AD ratio.

A skill having those two, put together, on the same auto, isn't even overpowered or too good. It's so far beyond what other champions are capable of that it's just funny. It's also on a four second base cooldown. It also costs... 32 health. (32? Seriously? Why 32?)

When a champion is capable of dealing that much damage, people that die to it need to feel like it was earned in some way; that they got outmaneuvered, outplayed, or just walked right into the damn thing. But an autoattack is not a skillshot. Because Morde can build up the Q on other targets before it goes full apeshit (and rather quickly, once he has an item), the person that gets hit with the final Q in a teamfight might not have done anything spectacularly wrong. They might have just... been trying to dive the carry, like one does when the carry in question has been murdering fools the entire game (and has no real ways of kiting or escape).

The worst part about this broken champion is that he's not even that much fun to play. Well... in a specific sense he is. He's fun in the same way that turning on invincibility and infinite rockets in GTA is fun. You just run around murdering relentlessly for a few minutes, completely shrugging off everything. But after five minutes with no challenge whatsoever, you feel ready to do something else.

A recent solo queue player, who locked in Morde, summarized it rather well. You just walk up to people and hit Q. And that really is the extent of Morde's gameplay. His shield is triggered by dealing damage, so the best way to stay alive is to deal a lot of damage. Sure, you'll also occasionally use your other buttons, but they're so straightforward that it would require a pretty spectacular brain fart to mess them up. You press E when they're next to you, and since you're a melee champion, that's fairly often. You press W... when you're also pressing your other buttons. You never need to worry about whether it's the right time to walk away, because as an immobile juggernaut, that time is literally never: they'll kill you in retreat anyway, so just stand there and deal damage until you die.

Somehow, Riot has made a champion so weird and powerful that no one wants to play him. He's the third most-banned champion, available in fewer than 40% of games, but his pick rate is below 5%. Of the top 25 most-banned champions, only two of them are picked less frequently than he is, and those are very close to him in play frequency. From playing him myself in ranked a few times, and seeing him picked, I get the feeling that people aren't playing him out of desire, but necessity: "well, Mordekaiser is open, guess I have to play this broken thing if I want to win."

Despite absolutely crushing with him in my first two ranked games, I, too, want to play him very little. You just... walk up to people and auto in melee. Then they die.

I have nothing against simple kits, if their simplicity contains within it interesting gameplay decisions to make. What's bizarre about Mordekaiser, though, is how complex his kit is for how simple it plays out. It makes sense that the ability descriptions of intricate champions like Azir and Zed take some reading. But why do Morde's abilities have so much text? How much of it is even needed?

How much of the mechanic of gaining and losing shields (and one of his abilities gives a higher shield percentage; without looking it up, guess which skill this is) is necessary for "damage = shield?"

Why does he need a passive shield, a heal on a basic ability, and a heal on his ult?

Why does his ult...

Wait, his ghost gives him 25% of the target's bonus health and 30% of their AP? To plagiarize Trinimmortal: I didn't even know it did that! WHY?!

The truest sign that Mordekaiser's kit is bloated and needlessly complex is this: if you want to play him, you don't even need to read his kit, or even skim it. Here's the guide:

Level W first. Get last-hits. Get Q at level two. It's most of your damage. Use R when in all-ins. Use E and W whenever. Control your ghost with alt. Never run away from anyone ever, just stand there and attack. Build literally anything, because he scales perfectly well off AP, AD, attack speed, move speed, spell vamp, CDR, and tank stats.

That's it. That's all you need to know.

The biggest question moving forward is: when at some point, enough patches have come out that Mordekaiser is finally balanced, will he be interesting? Absolutely not. His power is condensed in his more-free-than-free stats via leveling up faster than everyone else. He puts a huge burden on his opponents to stop him, and little for the person piloting him to actually do to make him more effective. He's a champion in the "farm until late" role that dominates early and falls off super late, so his team is either going to force a surrender at 20 or completely fall apart because they have an immobile, auto-attack-based mage instead of a ranged carry for teamfights.

If I might project my thoughts inside the Riot offices, I imagine them thinking something about how the bot lane ADC/support metagame is really stale, so they should shake it up. This is a fine impulse. Then (my imaginary Riot strawman thinks), once one mage is viable in the bot carry role, players will realize that any damage dealer is viable there.

It didn't work out this way. Players now think that either they have an ADC, or they have this bullshit metal guy who somehow gets unkillable while dealing infinite damage. If they had wanted to shake up the metagame in a reasonable way, they could have given us a different sort of mage: someone who did the ADC things similarly (taking towers, sustained damage over time) while scaling harder off gold than experience, like ADCs do. This makes me wonder if Azir was ever a shadow-attempt, a sort of alpha prototype of Morde that was ADC-esque but dealt magic damage.

I can't summarize this rework as anything other than a complete failure. It's demoralizing to play against, it's boring and unfun to play, it's too complex to read and comprehend, and it feels nothing like a League of Legends champion should feel. It seems like someone copy/pasted a design from some budget ripoff of League, put it into this game, and now we have to deal with the fallout.

philosophers play multiplayer magic

2015-09-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

A: I play an Island and pass.

B: are you going to do anything this game at all?

C: why do you think she hasn’t?

B: because she’s played eight Islands and nothing else. She’s sitting there doing nothing.

A: I have played Islands. There is a distinction.

B: Islands do nothing. They are a means to an end; the end being the playing of spells with text. And let me check, ah yes, your Islands are literally textless.

A: no, they have a U. Your Recollect is textless.

B: Recollect let me cast more spells, which I used to advance my board position. It made an impact. The specific printing of my Recollect isn’t the point, you pedant, the point is that my card had an actual effect on the game.

C: what cards have a greater impact than lands? Clearly, I must be missing something, I don’t see how anything could happen without them.

D: is it to me?

A: it is, unless someone is going to respond to my Island going on the stack.

D: that doesn’t use the stack.

A: well then, we’ve found an answer.

D: okay. I’ll cast Primeval Titan.

C: and I will Mana Leak.

D: of course. Are you going to counter everyone’s spells, or just mine?

C: I’m fairly new to this style of play, I admit. What was I supposed to counter instead?

D: it’s not what you countered, it’s that you only counter what I’m doing.

C: was there another spell I was supposed to counter?

A: he hasn’t countered any of mine.

B: that’s because you-

D: I suppose you’re right. And anyway, the game is more of a challenge if I’m the only person trying to do anything.

B: bullshit, I’ve been casting-

A: well that’s the most accurate description of your deck I’ve-

D: I cast a spell, it gets countered. I accept the futility of my previous spell and move on to the next one, down to the bottom of the hill once again, pretending not to know that it won’t do anything either. Or do I even pretend? Do I just cast it anyway, because that’s just what I know I will do, even with the full knowledge that it will be futile?

C: why is that the only possible result you acknowledge?

D: I suppose someone could destroy it before it’s useful.

A: “Mother of Runes died this turn. Or maybe last turn; I can’t be sure.”

D: you really aren’t contributing.

A: I have contributed a flawless aquatic habitat to our play environment. Or have I destroyed a fragile ocean ecosystem with the spontaneous generation of landmass in the middle of it, eight times? I am unsure.

B: the purpose of a deck that’s nothing but countermagic is unclear to me. Why even play, when your purpose is to make people not play? Where is the enjoyment in anti-happening? My deck is constructed to make plays, to do things, to accomplish goals. What is yours? A roadblock? A double-sleeved Jersey barrier?

D: Magic is not, as you seem to believe, a solitaire game where rainbows erupt from the ceiling when you’ve assembled a suitably large Voltron. You could very easily make your deck “work” on your own, one hand drawing cards as you stroke yourself with the other-

A: I had assumed that was on the reserved list until-

D: -but by sitting down at a table with other human beings, you have decided instead to test your strength against three others who are here to stop you, well, supposedly we are, at least. The game of Magic is a struggle against everyone wanting you to stop what you are doing, it is a race to be the first one to dictate that we no longer play Magic.

A: we could still play chess.

B: if Magic was, as you seem to be proposing, a zero-sum game of one player stopping the other from doing anything, then no one would bother with it. Magic is about players advancing their own unique plans, which contain within them their own identities, their own hopes and dreams-

A: So does a Dorito-

D: I don’t think Jacques was invited, he was never a fan of constructed-

B: -but the essential aspect of Magic is each individual defining what Magic is to them and proactively accomplishing that.

C: what distinguishes your gameplan from mine?

B: yours is entirely negative. Your deck is nihilistic. It exists only to further separate a player from their goals.

D: and yours has a more complete plan? All I’ve seen you attempt is something with Doubling Season and making your enchantments into-

B: that is the first part, yes, that is what I’m attempting to-

D: but your spells might as well have no text, because they all just sit there. There is no purpose. You are not remotely attempting to advance the game toward any kind of victory; you are entirely opting out of Magic: the Gathering for something unrelated that happens to technically follow the rules of Magic: the Gathering with absolutely no respect for the purpose of Magic: the Gathering. The part where one player wins, and they win via overcoming obstacles placed in front of them by dedicated opponents, opponents looking out for their own self-interest, not opponents laying down their swords or assembling Rube Goldberg machines off in a corner.

A: hand me an eraser, I’ll help with the de-textifying. That sounds more fun.

C: why were you outraged that my deck challenged yours, then? What is the purpose of a deck if not to challenge another?

D: okay, fine. I was just upset. I blame the two of them sitting there doing nothing.

A: I resent your sideways glance. I have been dutifully and precisely keeping to the parts of the turn.

B: you’re both assholes. You, for pretending like you’re doing something, and you, for pretending like I’m doing “nothing” despite casting twice as many spells as you. How can “nothing” cost that much mana?

D: I’ve been wondering that on every single one of your turns.

A: it’s wonderful how you’re both trying to give purpose to a children’s card game. The purpose is to distract us momentarily while they make a profit off our distraction. We exchange a softer, more often-desired paper for another, stiffer, smaller yet somehow more expensive paper.

C: are you referring to the stickers on your cards as expensive?

A: certainly. The Kinko’s charged me almost three Americanos worth of currency for these.

C: did you… not own any Islands?

A: clearly I own Islands. They’re sitting in front of me.

C: what about the ones from booster packs?

A: I probably do.

C: then why print them as stickers?

A: why is the Wizards-sanctioned card assumed to be a priori superior to the home-printed one? Or Kinko’s-printed, thank you, wonderful chain business. If I had made you a gift of my own design, you would appreciate the thoughtfulness, the craft, the work ethic far more than if I had walked into a store and bought you a Hallmark. Yet somehow, the exact opposite is true for Magic. The bourgeois playerbase rejects the homemade in favor of the corporate. Why? Because the corporation who made the corporate-sanctioned card tells them that theirs is better, and others are not allowed anywhere.

B: you have white slips of paper with a big “U” in the middle.

A: what I have is the idea of Island. Same as if had somehow turned a token creature into an Island, or played a Gem Mint-graded Alpha Island, or an M15 Island. When someone plays an Island, from any printing, with any art, from any year, we do not see it for its collection of dots and bumps and curves. We see, in our minds, the essence of “Island.” I could do the same thing with nothing physical whatsoever, I could simply say, “I play an Island and pass,” and it has the same impact.

D: I’m done, by the way.

B: as am I, but I have a turn to take. During my upkeep, my-

C: with those triggers on the stack, I cast Time Stop.

D: what an inappropriate name for a spell that just saved us half an hour.

C: why do you celebrate half an hour less of the game? I’m confused at the idea of a voluntary activity being worse when it lasts longer.

B: that was your spell!

C: I’m questioning his reaction to it, not my own casting of it. You are advocating Magic as a game of competition among equal rivals, correct?

D: yes.

C: and what advances one of those rivals must therefore-

D: harm the others.

C: so if I successfully do something that helps me, shouldn’t you-

D: yes, yes, you’re very clever. I should bemoan anything you do that doesn’t help me win. But in this case, I’m happy not because it helped me, but because it pissed him off.

B: at heart, then, you are just like me, despite being in denial of what it is that you want. You pretend to aspire only to victory in the game, but you take joy accomplishing a personal goal. It just happens that your personal goal was, instead of attempting to cast Overwhelming Stampede for 700 additional power-

C: and you think that would resolve because-

B: -your goal was to see me get annoyed at the game, and maybe just stop playing. Welcome to the dark side. Welcome to not caring about “winning” one game. Welcome… to casual.

A: while you’re here, have you tried the cheese and the acknowledging the arbitrary nature of caring about this game for a lifetime instead of others?

D: no, I’m not going to abandon the purpose of Magic just because I didn’t have to sit through another one of your “synergistic” turns-

B: “synergy” is simply a more accurate label than-

A: your Llanowar Elf could really use a mustache.

D: -and since your turns have no purpose in progressing this game toward its conclusion, a fast forward is more than acceptable, it’s- put that down!- the only way we can get through this charade and onto something where every person in the game is at least trying. Because what is a game where some people aren’t trying to win? It is nothing. A game succeeds, as a design, when players get so wrapped up in it they forget all else but the strategy, the planning, the twists and turns in the gameplay; if one person is just dicking around, it destroys the possibility for everyone.

A: why do you view these cards as mere tools to help you accomplish a grander goal? You are skipping over the most important part of the game’s artistry, the part that separates Magic from Monopoly or any other “sit down and enjoy” game, the fact that each of us bring our own artistic creation to the table. Your ideology is like going to an art gallery and declaring that you’ve “won” by bringing the biggest sculpture. Your goal is victory in the game, but is anyone going to remember it tomorrow? A week from now? Your victory accomplishes nothing; creating something meaningful is more important than a deck that successfully ends a game.

C: which is why your last deck was-

A: I randomly picked 60 cards out of a box, yes. It was perfect.

B: it couldn’t cast spells.

A: traditional deckbuilding has failed. It says nothing. Affinity and Delver and Splinter Twin, all are irrelevant to this age. They are attempts to be the biggest fish in a pond with an incoming nuclear weapon pointed at it. One day, Magic will die, and they will be forgotten. A truly random deck is bigger than Magic.

C: this should bring it to my turn… I will play Watery Grave, lose two life, and pass the turn.

D: why did you… is that just to play more instants? There’s no way you have eight mana worth of instants that you needed to lose two life there.

C: how do you know that?

D: because you only have two cards in hand, so unless you… hmm… well I was going to…

A: what if he doesn’t have anything?

D: he clearly has something I need to play around.

A: unless he doesn’t. He could be bluffing you.

D: but he lost two life.

A: but he’s making you play differently. He has succeeded. By playing a card in way that you deem “worse” than it would have been to just play a basic land, he has altered your own course of action. It’s wonderful. Thank you. I am inspired.

C: you are quite welcome. You may play now.

A: I play an Island and pass. Wow, can you believe my luck? All lands again.

if people talked about books like they talk about magic the gathering sets

2015-09-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

It’s two weeks into spoiler season for the second Harry Potter book, and with one and a half chapters revealed, folks, the hype is REAL! While it’s only been a year since the release of the first Harry Potter, book lovers who didn’t get the chance to preorder that one at retail price are jumping all over Chamber of Secrets. Most financial experts (myself included) scoffed at the idea of paying $24.99 for a first-time author, but with even slightly-read copies now selling for over $100, no serious book reader is going to miss out on this one for $26.99.

The first book clocked in at 76,944 words, giving those lucky dogs who preordered it a respectable 30.79 words per cent. A leaked spec sheet for Chamber of Secrets puts it as 85,141 words, and if that’s to be believed (and personally, I’m inclined to), that would put this new one at 31.54 words per cent. Wow! An even better value than the last one?! Bloomsbury, please! How many can I buy?

Of course, retailers aren’t idiots, and that $26.99 price is tough to come by as of this writing. If you see it anywhere, obviously buy as many as you can. I have my eight from Amazon on the way at that price, and even if I can only trade them off for a few dollars more than that, it’s well worth it.

The risk, however, is that Chamber of Secrets just won’t be as well-received as Philosopher’s Stone. While that’s certainly a possibility, even if it steadies out at just $45, it’s a great investment at preorder price.

There have been some scared forum posts: one “source” puts the number of Weasley twin appearances at nine, down from seventeen in the first book. To this I say: hogwash. Rowling is well aware that the twin-per-page (TPP) shouldn’t go below 0.08, or she’d face significant community backlash. But even if it falls to just 0.06, the introduction of new major characters (like the already-spoiled Gilderoy Lockhart) should keep the price up.

Now, to address the question on everyone’s minds: is it worth it to camp out to buy extra copies, just for the dust jackets? As most financial sharks know, the price of the dust jacket plus the naked book is actually higher than the presale price for both together. The problem is that everyone is getting the same idea: that fabled $20 dust jacket has already fallen to a more modest $12. I’d advise staying away.

In summary, if you consider yourself a book finance guru and haven’t preordered this book, well… what are you waiting for? Personally, I can’t wait. Hopefully at some point I’ll have a chance to read it before the third one, but I'm intending on trying to trade up to an Infinite Jest. We all have dreams, right?

a reasonable discussion of the possibility that edh is bullshit

2015-09-07T11:39:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, competitive Magic just isn’t doing it for people. Instead of spending weeks tuning someone else’s deck, spending $25 at a tournament, and getting mana-screwed in a rigid bracket, some players want to chill out, play cards they enjoy playing, and not worry about if everything is the most optimal it could possibly be. In other words: play casually.

The issue is that casual sucks.

The solution to “pure casual” sucking is to create some direction for players to follow; that is, a casual format. This attempts to solve the “Just Play Whatever You Want” problem, where someone’s pile of leftover commons and uncommons run into someone’s tuned Affinity.

Casual formats, almost by definition, have to be weird and arbitrary. If they didn’t have bizarre rules and restrictions, they’d just feel like any “normal” constructed format. Hence, we get things like 5-color’s huge deck size, EDH’s singleton and color restrictions, and Tiny Leaders’s CMC rule. The point is not to be permissive enough to allow familiar decks, but to require players to create something entirely new, specifically for that format.^{^[1]}

^{^[1]} Tiny Leaders interests me more than any other casual format, and while I haven’t actually like played the format, I can 100% personally guarantee that Mental Misstep and Vedalken Shackles are absurd and it’s amazing that those weren’t immediately banned, what the fuck.

It is the nature of any invented format that, with enough time and attention from enough dedicated deckbuilders, a metagame of accepted best decks and strategies will emerge. I played in a small “manacost singleton” tournament, for example, where each player chose a specific mana cost and could only use cards with that exact cost. I built combo Elves (G), lost only to burn (R), and it’s tough to think of a deck that would have a good matchup against that deck without being comically dedicated to hating it out.

Once a format comes around to a phase when enough players have worked on it to develop its distinct metagame, players are faced with a choice: do they react to the metagame by tuning their own decks against it? Do they rally the format’s devotees into changing the rules or banning the cards that comprise the best deck? Or do they get all sullen and make passive-aggressive forum posts about people Destroying Are Format?

The more anti-competitive format supporters will be inclined to resist the existence of the metagame, believing that since their format is “for fun,” it should be immune to the natural progression of deck improvement. People on the more competitive side are more inclined to embrace it, and a well-designed format should be able to support a diverse metagame without either collapsing or turning into a one-deck navel-gazing format.

I don’t know exactly how EDH caught on as the only casual constructed format, but personally, I blame judges. This group generally has broad access to cards, wide-ranging knowledge of Magic, a large friend group of people that want to hang out with three-hour games, and very little interest in winning games of Magic.

EDH’s issues as a format spring largely from its non-restrictive nature. Beyond the 99 card singleton construction, if one chooses some generic 5-color general, you can pretty much play a singleton Legacy deck without much issue; because of the concessions to people’s favorite casual cards, there are lots of draws that can be significantly better than an average Legacy deck, because of completely legal cards like Sol Ring, Skullclamp, and Sedge Troll.

I’m not sure if everyone reading this has played games with or against turn one Sol Ring. If the player opposing Sol Ring is playing “fair,” and the Ringed player is doing anything at all reasonable (eg playing a decent four-mana spell on turn two), the latter player is going to win about 80% of those games.

The typical EDH response is to ignore this entirely, because that’s not the point of EDH, maaan. EDH doesn’t need to ban powerful cards like Sol Ring, because if someone’s deck is too powerful, they’ll be shunned from cardshops everywhere and have to wander the streets, Sharuum in hand, desperately seeking someone who will lose to their infinite combo.

Gotta ban Biorhythm, Sylvan Primordial, and Trade Secrets^{^[2]}, though, because those risk actually ending a game.

^{^[2]} Reprinted in the Commander expansion, ironically.

For deeper insight into what EDH is really about, I recommend reading articles from the former home of satirical Jesse Mason writing, GatheringMagic. Jason Alt wrote a piece introducing the concept of the 75% EDH deck, wherein decks are purposefully made to be not-optimal in order to fit in better with other peoples’ EDH decks. He explains:

“In a good night of Commander for my playgroup, I will win 1 ÷ X games, where X is the number of players at the table. It isn't about letting anyone else win, it's not about fetching mana dorks with your Tooth and Nail because finding Deadeye Navigator and Molten Primordial is going to make everyone upset, and it's not about being patronizing to your group. Winning that proportion of the games will avoid painting a target on your back or making anyone resent your involvement. You want to make decks that let you “do a thing” that will be fun to do and that don't prevent others from “doing their thing” on principle, but that may provide ways for you to actively stop opponents if they are getting out of hand.”

In short: his idea is that he does not want to win every game of EDH.

It is this attitude, among others, that fundamentally irks me about EDH people. They have constructed Magic decks, with actual Magic cards, each of which should have some sort of gameplay interaction with other Magic cards. But even from deck construction, no one is set out to win the games that they enter. Well, not any more games than anyone else at the table. So what, then, is the intent of EDH? Back to Mr. Alt:

“Some people like being able to play the big, Timmy cards, some people like making decks full of Japanese foil cards and keeping the deck together forever in a format where metagame shifts don't really happen because there is no metagame.”

As far as the big Timmy cards: it should be noted that the Commander banlist is full of big Timmy cards, so don’t go running around trying to cast one of those seven different spells that cost eight or more mana (and no goddamned Protean Hulks, either^{^[3]}). If the goal is to make a format that encourages this big-mana haymaker-type gameplay, there should really be a more elegant way to craft a format without just getting passive-aggressive at people trying to end the game swiftly. Rainbow Stairwell dictated a strict progression of mana costs; perhaps a format with an even higher lifetotal, or a cardpool that excluded the ways that games commonly end before nine mana, could do this.

[3] Protean Hulk/Greater Good aggro/combo was one of my favorite Standard decks that I’ve ever built, so this definitely prevents me from ever playing EDH.

The point about “decks full of Japanese foil cards” seems much more realistic. Basically, people want to spend a shitload of money on the game and force people around them to notice this. When making an efficient deck is socially discouraged, the real “winners” are the ones who have a $10,000 untuned deck, with a horrifically unbalanced manabase all in foils or black-bordered dual lands.

EDH is the best summary of conspicuous consumption I’ve ever seen. People aren’t trying to be good at the game, or build the most effective deck, or even win once they’re inside it. They’re just trying to show off the cool stuff they own.

If competitive Magic is auto racing, EDH is a bunch of people revving their heavily-modded Ferraris at each other in a parking lot without going anywhere.

Think about the standard story of the underdog against the antagonist: the antagonist has every advantage possible, with a privileged upbringing, all the flashiest gear and the latest tech. Our hero, though, through the virtues of hard work and friendship, practices [activity] in his backyard, in the alleyways, in his basement until he somehow overthrows the terrible reign of the antagonist. Egos are shattered, screams are heard, expensive things are thrown against the walls in denial and frustration.

Like most of humanity, I have a natural urge to root for the scrappy, skillful person against the rich egotistical one. In League, I love the idea of a cocky Gold-ranked player with the Championship Riven skin (est. value ~$300 while it was available for resale via third-party sites) getting stomped by some Challenger smurf using Galio because the champion was free that week.

EDH’s ideology seems to be the polar opposite of this. Don’t try to win more than the average number of games, but aggressively move to make your deck as ~pimp~ as it could possibly be. I constantly see people posting blatant brag pictures of their completely foiled-up, as-expensive-as-humanly-possible EDH deck, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone post an EDH gamestate and asking what the proper line of play was. This makes sense, because if people at all value playing optimally, as Mr. Alt says, “there are myriad formats people can play if they want to be Spikes.”^{^[4]}

^{^[4]} Oh wow, have I really not written the essay about how silly the Timmy/Johnny/Spike idea is? Huh.

EDH doesn’t make any sense as far as format design, because EDH doesn’t have to make any sense from a game design perspective. The purpose of EDH’s construction is to give people an excuse to build something as comically expensive as possible; formats that allow less financial showing off are therefore inferior. What are the most expensive cards? Black-bordered Alpha and Beta. Those have to be allowed.^{^[5]} A larger deck size allows more showing off.

^{^[5]} The only problem with this thinking is that EDH bans the power nine, as well as some pseudo-power like Time Vault and Library of Alexandria. I can rationalize this: the dual lands are the perfect cards to include in a format, because of their wide availability in their hideously ugly Revised printings. What’s better than playing a really expensive card? Playing a really expensive card available in other versions for 1/20th that price, and the common player still can’t afford it even in the cheapest possible version. On the other hand, if actual power was allowed, the only way the format could go on is tacitly allowing proxies (because something like 1/10th as many Black Lotuses exist as Underground Seas). A format with the purpose of showing off wealth couldn’t possibly allow proxies; that would defeat the point.

Mr. Alt’s statement that there “is no metagame” is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the term and the idea of a metagame. A metagame is not simply what decks people play (and even by that ceonceptualization, EDH certainly has a metagame with its ramp decks, its combo decks, its reanimator decks, its draw-my-entire library decks). A metagame is everything relating to the game outside of the actual game itself. EDH’s metagame is not just whether Derevi is absurd, but the styles of play that have become common in EDH. And we all know that EDH has a specific style to it: if I describe a non-EDH gamestate, even a 1v1, as looking “like EDH,” people will know what I mean.

EDH’s metagame is nine-mana enchantments that do nothing but combo with a six-mana enchantment. It is purposefully intricate synergies that revolve around copying Doubling Season. But it’s bigger than that, too.

EDH’s metagame is Mr. Alt’s article about the 75% idea (almost a dogma). EDH’s metagame is his idea that the format is appealing because it has “no metagame.” Ignoring the prevailing trends, player types, and tropes of EDH is EDH’s metagame.

Whenever I write something critiquing an aspect of Magic or the community, people will respond by asking whether I even like Magic. Since I certainly expect that response from EDH players, I’ll ask them: do you?

Do you actually enjoy playing games of Magic? No, not the part where everyone looks at your foreign foils. The part where your cards do stuff with the other cards. Are you really paying attention to how everything in the game is progressing? Or are you just waiting for your turn to do your super cool but definitely not infinite combo?

If you love Magic so much, why do you spend thousands on your EDH deck instead of giving away homebrew $20 decks to new players?

Would you play Magic if there were no foils, no promos, no rarity? Would you love your Temporal Manipulation if everyone had five copies?

Would you play Magic if you didn’t have any Magic cards?

To me, the ideal casual Magic format is cube. One person supplies all the cards; doesn’t matter if it includes every piece of power in its original Alpha printing, or if they just picked up the entire cube at Kinko’s yesterday. Everyone starts out at equal footing: you sit down with nothing but your knowledge of Magic, without spending anything. The cube designer gets to decide exactly what about Magic they find the most fun, and if everyone in the draft agrees with that perspective, they’ll have a great time.

Cube is also the most self-expressive way to play Magic. When you’re faced with a pack of 15 powerful cards and have a minute to make the decision, you swiftly find out what you, personally, think of as the “best” way to play. I didn’t think of myself as a devoted control player until I drafted cube over and over and went with a control deck eight out of ten times. Aggro players will find themselves with a higher number of Goblin Guides per capita.

Unlike constructed formats that require a deck built beforehand, cube requires players to build one on the fly. Even if you try to draft the same deck every time, in a well-constructed cube it’ll end up radically different from one draft to the next, by virtue of random card assortment and the natural variance of different drafters’ preferences. You’ll learn what happens when Magical Panic starts, as you find your intended two-color combination is completely absent after the first three picks. If you’ve always heard that Tangle Wire is way underrated, you’ll get a chance to try it for yourself when it wheels.^{^[6]}

^{^[6]} DO NOT PASS TANGLE WIRE.

Cube is an interesting exercise in multiple layers of creativity and expression: Wizards created the cards, and the cube designer expresses themselves via inclusions and exclusions in their cube. Then, each player expresses their deckbuilding artistry in a framework two layers deep. They will make things that even the cube designer had never thought of; they are simultaneously working with and against the designer on their own creation. They are indulging the designer while attempting to break the design, via an overpowered draft deck.

Magic is overall a good game, and a much better game than “acquire the expensive shiny cardboard.” But we should all agree about what the best game is: making EDH players angry on the internet.

why magic sucks

2015-09-02T03:58:00.000-07:00

Many serious Magic “issues” articles start with some feel-good introduction that reads something like:

“Magic is the greatest game in the world. Now’s our chance to make it even better.”

It’s written with the intention of being an easy crowd-pleaser, to get the audience on the writer’s side. Someone who’s so into Magic that they’re spending their day not just playing, drafting, and making decks, but reading meta-Magic pieces that don’t directly deal with the game itself are probably of the opinion that Magic is God’s finest creation.

I’ve always been rather offput by the “greatest game” assertion. First of all, it’s pretty obvious that people saying that have never played Gone Home. But it’s also contradicted by my experiences of all the ways that Magic sucks.

There are, of course, an equal number of reasons that Magic is great. I wouldn’t have put so many hours into it if that wasn’t the case. But I’m definitely alienated from the True Believers in Magic, as someone who puts Magic somewhere on the outer range of my top ten games, maybe, depending how I’m feeling that day about whether Elder Scrolls: Oblivion holds up.[1] These True Believers want to think that anything bad about Magic happens because of a Wizards misstep, or a development mistake, or something the community did, rather than there being any inherent weaknesses in the game itself.

[1] Totally does.

I am not among that crowd. There are bad things about Magic. So let’s discuss those.

magic sucks because: mana variance isn’t fun

One of my least-favorite player archetypes is the post-round tiltmonster, ranting to everyone in his vicinity (regardless of whether those people are listening, which hopefully they aren’t) about how he got so unlucky, couldn’t draw any land, mulliganed so many times, etc. Everyone who’s been around a group of Magic players for more than half an hour knows this type of complainer, and almost everyone learns to tune them out.

But doesn’t he kind of have a point?

Okay, sure, a lot of the time they just fucked up somewhere and didn’t see how. Maybe they kept a sketchy one-lander. But everyone’s lost games that were just mandatory losses by variance, because they couldn’t play any spells. One learns to stomach it, take the loss, and move on.

What percentage of games is it acceptable to lose just because of how Magic’s mana system inherently works? In online team-based games, one of the most commonly complained-about things is when a teammate spontaneously disconnects or AFKs in a ranked game. That happens about, if I had to guess, one out of every 20-50 or so games, depending on the title and the skill level of the players involved. This 2-5% of the time when basically no one’s play matters is a horrible experience.

Magic, on the other hand, probably has about 10-25% of its games completely dictated by one player not getting land to cast spells. And Magic designers like Rosewater defend this as a strength of the game, because it lets less-experienced players win sometimes.

Variance is a necessary aspect of games. Variance that imposes this game being one that you do not get to play at all, because you auto-lose or auto-win, really sucks. It sucks to make a phenomenal new deck for a tournament, show up, and lose the first two games because you mulliganed five times. It also kinda sucks when you have a fantastically competitive, back-and-forth first two games of a match with a cool opponent, and then the third game you win immediately because they never get more than two land.

Another online game analogy: you’re in a shooter game online, and at the beginning of the match, there’s a 10% chance that everyone on your team just does half damage. Fun gameplay! It gives the worse players a chance to compete!

This aspect of Magic sucking affects competitive more than casual. If you’re just throwing around cards with friends, sure, take that free mulligan. One game wasn’t close? Shuffle up immediately and only lose a few minutes of time. In a tournament setting, though, where one has to look for every possible opening to win, getting screwed by land is awful.

Magic has attempted to make some workarounds for this inherent weakness of the game, with things like Cycling, mulligans, and manaless dredge. When mulligans were found to not be enough, they became more powerful. But these workarounds don’t eliminate the problem in Magic, they acknowledge it. If Magic didn’t have this issue, mulligans wouldn’t be necessary.

Are the advantages to the mana system large enough to outweigh the percentage of games that just aren’t games? Probably. It’s very difficult to design a TCG without some card type that resembles lands without introducing even bigger issues in the process. The fact that practically every other attempted TCG has opted out of the lands-and-spells system, though, speaks to their desire to get rid of this problem.

magic sucks because: it’s horrifically expensive

Whenever a critic or newer player brings up Magic’s price, Magic’s apologists will jump in front of trains to downplay, make exceptions, give advice, and do everything but admit the truth.

“Just draft and you’ll get the cards.” Yes, if you spend $15 per play session, Magic swiftly becomes more affordable, because you’ve already spent the money.

“You can trade for everything you want.” You can exchange your $300 worth of cards for someone else’s $300 worth of cards, after you spend $300.

“Some decks are really cheap, you can play burn.” Magic’s introductory budget deck costs $100, which is only “budget” if you’re Montgomery Burns and cannot think of an amount of money below $1000, or you’re so ingrained in Magic culture that $100 for a single deck seems like a small amount of money.

“Just play cube, it’s free.” Yes, someone else paid for it instead of you. That doesn’t make it any cheaper. (Also applies to borrowing cards.) Good luck playing enough Magic for Vintage Cube to make a lick of sense without spending your entire bank account ten times over.

“It’s not really expensive, because when you’re done with the cards you can just sell them back.” This is perhaps the biggest bullshit of them all. Magic cards are an incredibly illiquid good, if you want to get anything resembling “retail” price. They’re a physical object, so to sell them, you’ll probably have to list the item on eBay, pay for shipping (and maybe insurance), give eBay the cut, and wait for the money. And that’s the highest percentage way to get money.

I worked for Card Kingdom for a year and a half. If it was easy for players to buy and sell cards just from one another, no one would use online retailers’ buylists. But, as I saw firsthand, a shitload of people do. So do I, because anything else is a horrific amount of hassle.

At a more basic level, if Magic wasn’t ridiculously expensive, Card Kingdom wouldn’t exist.

What’s a reasonable amount of money to pay for a new game? People gasp over brand-new $60 games that cost millions upon millions of dollars to make, and those people are outraged if they get fewer than ten hours of gameplay for their $60. People cancel their MMO subscriptions because they can’t afford the $10-$20 per month, or they’ll grind in-game in order to get items to play without paying.

But you don’t get all of Magic just by spending $15, or $100, or $1000. You can buy one deck for one format for a few hundred, and if you find out that it just isn’t your style… well, better spend more money, trade, or learn to tolerate what you have already.

In most games, no matter what kind of gamer or what style you want to play, the price is the same: you pay for the game. If you’re a hardcore raider or a casual player in an MMO, it’s $15 a month. If you devote your life to the intricacies of Skyrim, you just pay $60 once (when it was a new game). With Magic, if you only have $100 to spend and like Constructed… hope you like burn. What if you’re a teenager with a meager allowance, and the early-game-oriented big-play aspect of Vintage really appeals to you? Fuck off, go back to your poverty decks until you have a job as a programmer.

Something I really like about League of Legends is not spending money on it. I haven’t spent a dime on it in many, many months, and I’ve been doing very little else other than playing it. And what happens over time? Instead of spending $15 per draft, I’m actually earning more champions as I win more matches.[2]

[2] To be fair, I did this on Magic Online, too. I borrowed an Elves deck from someone, then grinded daily events until I’d made enough tickets that I had bought my own copy of it. Wizards responded to this by making it substantially more difficult to grind Daily Events for a profit.

I would enjoy League substantially less if there were one or two uninteresting “budget” champions for $50 or $100, and the really cool, weird, or new champions are $300 or $750.

While brand-new games are $60, one Scalding Tarn is $80.

For the price of the cheapest Standard deck (Ensoul Artifact, $75), you can buy five complete Final Fantasy games on Steam, or basically infinite games via Humble Bundle.

For the price of a Standard Abzan deck ($250), you could buy a 3DS and a game.

For the price of Modern Affinity ($350), you could buy an XBox One, which comes with a game.

For the price of Legacy Delver ($3000), you could do that eight times and still buy some extra games. Or build a top-of-the-line gaming computer, then save the money to build a new one next year, then again the year after.

Why is it that people do this? Why did I ever do this? Is Magic exponentially more fun than other games, so people will buy one deck for hundreds of dollars?

Or are Magic players just so flush with disposable income that they don’t know what else to do with it?

magic sucks because: it’s a collectable

The above problems with price were written with the assumption that people want to actually play the game of Magic: the Gathering, and that the purpose of Magic game pieces is to play games with them. Judging by others’ responses to new releases, this does not seem to be a widely-held opinion.

If Magic was just a card game, and not a collectable card game, it wouldn’t have these problems. But a huge portion of Magic’s culture is wrapped up around its status as a collectable, and Magic cards’ relationship with the secondary market.

Look at what happens when new cards get revealed; specifically, when old cards get reprinted. The reaction to the Zendikar Expeditions lands can be summarized by a few thoughts:

“Will this affect the price of the old fetchlands?”

“How much will these cost?”

“Alternate art foils! Gimme!”

The financial angle of Magic has basically taken over the community. Whenever a new set comes out, one can’t go to a local draft without someone hoping to open a foil mythic rare. Not because they want to play with the card; they just want to have something valuable. Nearly the entire excitement around Modern Masters (both versions) was price-related, in how it might make that format “more affordable,” and how people would purposefully drop from an expensive Las Vegas tournament because they opened a $400 card.

Maybe it’s because my last job had me so immersed in Magic finance for so long, but I’ve become completely sick of this non-game-related discussion. It seems like people don’t even want to play games, they just want to get the value from opening something expensive, selling it, and doing something else. Then they’ll spend hours grinding the trade tables to make money off people with less knowledge of Magic prices than them.

Price knowledge is ubiquitous among Magic players in a way that’s honestly really sad to me. When I would go to tournaments and buy cards for work, I’d have to use our database to look up the price on basically every card, because I couldn’t keep that enormous spreadsheet in my memory. But there is a huge population of Magic people (I hesitate to refer to them as “players”) with a mental database of every card’s price, foil and nonfoil, in retail, TCG player mid, and buylist price. They see Magic as a sort of secondary job, something they do in their off-hours instead of playing the stock market.

The other side of that group, of course, are the people who actually spend huge amounts of money on cards. When the foil judge promo Force of Will came out, it was close to $1000 for reasons completely unknown to me. People want things like that, and NM Power Nine, for… collecting, or something. The Force of Will didn’t even look good. It’s just… a Force of Will, and it’s foil, and extremely scarce. Therefore, expensive, because that’s how Magic works.

A NM Alpha rare is never ever going to go in a deck again, so it might as well just be a slip of paper with a smiley face on it. It has become completely separated from anything resembling Magic, other than technically being a Magic card.

Even in the realm of collectables, Magic is ridiculous. Alpha Lotuses can easily go for over $20k in top-notch condition. For comparison, there are only a handful of vinyl records I can find evidence of ever selling for that much, and those are things like 1958 records by The Quarrymen. Even famous “lost” albums that exist in quantities in the low double digits rarely go up to $10k, and that’s as expensive as record collecting can possibly get. Even in the famously-outrageously-competitive realm of collecting hardcore punk records, the most expensive ever was just over $6k. That’s about what a NM Beta Underground Sea goes for, and that’s not graded, not one of the Power Nine, and the third most-valuable printing of that one card.[3]

[3] Behind Alpha and the actually-scarce Summer Magic.

And think: a collectable LP is something one might actually, theoretically, listen to. You can frame it, too, if you want, whereas an Underground Sea is actually not that aesthetically pleasing.

A lot of these “collectables” aren’t even that scarce, which to me, would seem to defeat the purpose. Even while Wizards was actively printing more Modern Masters, a foil Tarmogoyf was hundreds of dollars. Because… foils are more expensive. Because they just are.

Sure, this might seem to be a complaint not against Magic as a game, but against the playerbase. And in some ways, it is. But really, the “collectable card game” is not a harmonious entity. The “collectable” aspect is in eternal conflict with the “game” aspect, in that people with little interest in playing make things more expensive for people that just want to play games of Magic. It’s fine for Wizards, of course, because the money goes to them no matter what.

magic sucks because: it’s old

This is a topic I’ve touched on in Kill Reviews. But it’s time to address it head-on.

Magic was one of the most influential games of the early 90s. Card games can be very easily grouped into pre- and post-Magic, with extremely evident Magic influence all over the latter games. Magic shrugged those imitators off in the best way possible: by continuously improving.

There’s a clear line of design quality improvement going from pre-block expansions to Ice Age to Mirage to the Rath Cycle. Then the game stumbled around for a couple years, retreated inward, and came out with the absolutely phenomenal Invasion. Then the cycle repeated, with some middling-to-bad blocks, until a new top-down vision of Magic block design led to its creative peak with Ravnica and Time Spiral blocks. Then another retreat inward, more updates on the formula, and we have New World Order design and the conservative era. Since then, Magic has just… kept going.

What has Magic really innovated in the last seven years? What are the great leaps forward that Magic design has made since 2008’s Shards of Alara? It’s kept making sets, it’s kept selling well, but it’s just been going through the motions.

Creators have their ups and downs as their careers progress, but for many artists, the first ten or so years of their output is what they’ll always be remembered for. Lou Reed wrote more classic songs that came out on The Velvet Underground & Nico than in the last 20 years of his career put together. Sure, every medium is different (writers are known to have long careers, and late-career classics are common), but creative people are more likely to create something innovative and brilliant in their first half of their career than in the years after.[4]

[4] Imagine, please, the world’s largest collection of caveats and exceptions amended to this sentiment. Instead of writing to me about how your favorite band is still great 79 years after they started, instead listen to the 2012 live album We Rose From Your Bed With The Sun In Our Head by Swans, a band intermittently active since 1982.

I feel like a similar thing has happened to Magic, if you think of Magic’s creative hivemind as though it was one creator. It had its early spark of brilliance, a steady improvement, and we’re in the middle of its creative decline.

It’s not that Theros or Khans or the upcoming Battle for Zendikar are bad. It’s that they have nothing to say. There is no innovation in a way that would make non-Magic designers sit up and take notice. Magic sets exist exclusively for people already playing Magic, they exist to make money, not to break new creative ground.

And that’s the main idea that’s inspired these Kill Reviews: that Magic has basically burned out. So have I.

magic sucks because: only wizards makes magic

I’ve referred to Magic design as art. An important aspect of an art form is that other artists can make new takes on one anothers’ art; one might be inspired by Jackson Pollock, Wire, and Nabokov and use those influences to draw dicks on the side of buildings. If you’re inspired by Magic, though, you have little recourse when it comes to making your own Magic-related things: you can be a collage artist of sorts and design a cube with extant Wizards-sanctioned cards, or you can get hired as a designer at Wizards, or you can work on other games, or you can design Magic cards that no one will ever play with. Making homebrew Magic sets will be low-popularity at best, because Wizards has a monopoly on the art that is Magic design.

I really wish this wasn’t the case. When an art form drifts in a direction some group of people are unhappy with (and this will always happen), people can just make different art. When rock music got too flowery and slow, people made punk. The collapse of punk led to a worldwide explosion in post-punk, hardcore, experimental music, synthpop, and a million other things.

What am I supposed to do if I don’t like a Magic set? Play with older sets. Play a different game.

I don’t want that, though. I want experimental punk Magic, but it’s logistically impossible to get people to play anything other than what Wizards makes.

[This article was originally written for supporters of my Patreon.]

battle for zendikar first look: #mechanics

2015-09-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

The first Return to Zendikar card I saw was an Eldrazi with "devoid," making it colorless despite having a colored mana symbol in the cost. This irked me, since what I thought was so cool about the Eldrazi is that they actually were colorless. You could play whatever color you wanted and still have the same core Eldrazi deck; you could even go crazier and have a completely colorless manabase.

But more than that, devoid immediately struck me as cheating. It's not a mechanic that actually does anything, it's just something tacked on to make it interact with other things in the way the designers want. Then something popped into my head: it's a hashtag mechanic. It's just stuck on the end, like "here's a huge blue monster #devoid"

The original hashtag mechanic, of course, was tribal. There's nothing that separates the basic gameplay of 1G 2/2 #bear from 1G 2/2 #elf, except that other cards might refer to whether something is a bear or an elf. Elvish Champion searches your creatures for #elf and makes those guys better.

Most other hashtag-enablers revolved around the type line. Kamigawa was about #Legendary, and Shards of Alara's Esper was #artifact (even though its creatures had colored mana symbols). Scourge got pretty close with its "CMC matters" theme, but only Scornful Egotist attempted to bypass the intended functionality of the converted mana cost (and this design is derided by conservative-era ideology, that posits newer players will be confounded when they see a 1/1 for eight mana). Ravnica and Invasion's "color matters" cards mostly played it straight-up, with the small exception of Transguild Courier.

Here's how to make a dumb hashtag mechanic: make your theme around something in the game that's basically been overlooked. For example, you could build a block featuring Imperiosaur's "only basics" mechanic, or have a subtheme play on Pendelhaven's idea of 1/1s mattering. Next, hashtag it by slapping on some cards that you want to act like they play well with your theme. In the Imperiosaur case, make a bunch of nonbasic lands or other mana sources with "this counts as mana produced by basic lands." That way, you get to have a theme with only some of your cards actually playing into it, while the rest put on a fake mustache and pretend like they're totally onboard.

That's why this take on Eldrazi bothers me. Rise of the Eldrazi was an amazing set, and it did Eldrazi in the right way: they don't look like other creatures (in art or in frame), they don't play like other creatures, they don't even get cast like other creatures. Now that colored creatures can just be #devoid and fit in with the cool colorless Eldrazi, a lot of what made Eldrazi unique disappears.