It's Magic!

"You playin' Cards again, Zac?"
- Grandpa

This post has been a long time coming, mostly because I've been spending all of my free time actually playing the game of Magic: The Gathering (or at least buying/interacting with the cards). As it stands, I have spent about 6-man-hours of work on this entry this past week or so, and about 20-man-hours of work on sorting and decking my cards. (If that says anything.) The rest after the jump.

Magic the Gathering has got to be one of the more sleeper-hit type "Trading Card Games" ever made, and by that I mean it seems that everybody I know who plays it now either played it in their youth, then abandoned it, only to come back to it years later, or were introduced later in life by their friends/family who were either just getting out of the game, or had hit the plateau after just getting back into it. Personally, I was first introduced by being given a digital demo for Magic Online, waaaay back in the early 2000's, and then didn't touch it for years until I was given a big bunch of cards by a friend of mine for a Birthday Present, and from that I built my first deck out of cards that were familiar to me, and writing off the rest of what I got as either too compicated or useless for me. It was only until later that I reallized that one of these cards at the local hobby shop for a bunch of cards that I could buy now for less than $5, was actually a Holographic Foil of the Mythic-Rare copy of Nicol Bolas (I'll explain further down,) which I could feasibly trade upwards of $20 worth of items now, and this isn't even close to the most valuable of these types of cards.

As I understand, according to the Brand Director at Wizards of the Coast (the people who make the game, along with stuff like D&D), they are the #1 product at Hasbro (the company that publishes the game), which is in turn the #1 table-top game producer in the world, and from that one can deduce that Magic is the most widely played game in the world, and it certainly has a lot to show for it. Magic the Gathering has a lot of things that attract people, and it got better at doing it as the years went on, not only through better artwork and advertising, but also through a deep appreciation for the communities that rise up around it. Apart from the intricate and complex mythos for us nerdy types, there's the competition, there's the strategy, there's the math, there's the potential for financial opportunities, and there's the fun of just sitting down and playing a game with your friends (or enemies). One of the few problems I run into when playing Magic with people I don't know, at tournaments and the like, is that because it has so much to offer, there are the occasional times when it's obvious that people I'm playing with are not playing for the same reason as me, and while that's jarring at first, it is fascinating to see other people enthusiastic for the same thing that I am for different reasons. I don't think I would necessarily gel very well with them, but I'm glad it's happening, all the same.
The thing that really hooked into magic, what got me enthusiastic enough to start paying money for booster packs and stuff, was a series of sketches from internet comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun, who make jokes on everything from NPR for Wizards to the fact that you will never own 3 PS3's. Sometime in between, they followed that same cycle of playing the game in 7th grade, felt like they grew out of it, were reintroduced to it, fell in love with the game, and before they knew it, they became the quasi-official comedians for Magic related content. Needless to say, they are my go-to visual shorthand on just about anything. They play magic because they find it entertaining, and it helped me realize that there are some basic reasons why people started playing the game, if not why they continue doing so to this day. From what I could discern in the 10 minutes or so I thought about it, there are 3 basic things that make this at first glance innocuous card game so compelling, I call them "the Three Funs":

Flavor - "Are you saying that I can make a deck entirely made out of KITTIES!?!?"

Magic is advertised, fantasized and galvanized because of it's flavor; the lore, the stories, the themes and the characters that are used as the paint job for the card game. Magic is, as one might expect, a game about Magic. You have a Library (your deck) in which you have spells that can do anything from summoning creatures to casting sorceries, and you gain the power to cast these spells in the form of Mana in any of the 5 colors of Magic (red, black, blue, white and green, each color governing a specific range of spells in tune with it. i.e. red mana is used in fire magic, blue in both flight and mind magic, green in nature, etc.) all gained from the world around you in the form of Land Cards. You then use these spells to do battle with other Magic-Users, testing your might, going against unprecedented odds, bragging rights, etc, etc. These Magic Users, including yourself, are referred to as Planeswalkers in the context of the lore; powerful mages who have the ability to "walk" between the planes of existence throughout the mythos' Multi-Verse, calling up magic from a world of their choice with ease (hence the fact that players can, in most cases, have cards from multiple expansion sets).

Flavor includes everything from the stories developed around the cards, the artwork, the themes and everything that doesn't have to do with the fact that it's a card game. It's actually what makes the game the most interesting for me, as it not only gives a fun distraction from the fact that you're playing a high-intensity, low-import strategy game, it sometimes gives an excellent context for the mechanics of certain cards, and even throws some humor in there as well. (For example, one of my favorite flavor-based cards is called "Azor's Elocutors," and at the beginning of your turn, you put a Fillibuster Counter onto the card, and if there are 5 or more of these counters on the card, you automatically win the game. You Win Because They Talk Your Opponent To Death!) Flavor is an opportunity for the player to try things that may not make sense according to the other two main attractions of the game, but can still create a rewarding experience.


Mechanics - "It's like building a gun from IKEA! Shut up and go with me on this: You gotta build it yourself and the directions are in Swedish, so most of the time it sort of backfires and blows up in your face, but once you finally find the allen-key and get all the pieces to fit together just right, it does exactly what it's supposed to do and looks awesome doing it."

In a game who's design is built around that of card-interaction, it's not surprising that if given the opportunity to create a deck with any combination of those cards, sometimes all somebody wants to do is spend a lot of time and effort creating one game-winning (or -losing) sweet combo. Often, cards in different sets have different abilities associated with it, sometimes restricting the ability to a specific card color or type. The most infamous example of mechanics and flavor colliding for the purpose of combining card effects were the Slivers.

Each Sliver had an ability, and each one had the effect of whenever there was another "Sliver" type creature on the board, all slivers gained that ability as well. It's been calculated that, if you had every single Sliver card on the board, the one Sliver that didn't have any abilities ("Metallic Sliver"), but still counted as one, would be.... Ridiculously Over-Powered, to say the least (it rarely happens that you can get more than a handful of them out at one time, but the possibility was still there.) This particular set met it's demise shortly after it's creation, as people either would refuse to play against it or would come up with equally clever combinations to render it useless. (I personally see this as part of the flavor, but maybe that's just me)

I also find a great deal of joy in creating a deck built around a single card, or single set of cards. I recently made one where it was all about getting as many of the Green Land cards, called Forrest, out of my deck and onto the battlefield as possible, often using cards and abilities that allow me to temporarily fore go the "one land per turn" rule, and then playing a card that turns all of my forests into creatures, essentially sending a gigantic swarm of trees to squash my enemies. Appropriately, I called the deck "Last March of the Ents."


Competition - "... And make sure you run all 4 of 'Dismember.'" "...Ok, why do I need to do that?" "Because all the Top-Tier decks are running 4 Dismember!" "....Ok. But what if I don't want to make a top-tier deck?" *beat* "I... don't... under... stand?"This is perhaps my least favorite "Fun" about the game. While I more than enjoy victory, creating a deck specifically designed to win games, often with the least amount of interaction between the two players as possible in mind, actually can detract from the fun of a game. But the temptation is certainly there, the game is designed around one person winning and the other losing, and that's just in 1-vs-1 games. There's fun to be had on the giving-end when you make somebody put the vast majority of their deck into their discard pile with little to no warning, but playing a game where the only purpose is to win before the game has even started, especially on the receiving-end, is probably what made some people stop playing the game their first time around.

That being said, it's a game about competition. People want to win, and sometimes they do it creatively (see above Ent example), sometimes they do it with a combo that literally takes minutes to pull off, sometimes they do it in less than 4 turns around the table. The people who started Magic were mathematicians with a love of fantasy, so they built their game around the numbers, and occasionally, they made a card that was more useful in the game of numbers than they ever could have anticipated. Jace, the Mind Sculptor, is probably the most famous example, seeing as while he is banned in most formats, the standard version of his card is still worth in excess of $140. Jace is one of the Planeswalkers described in the Flavor section, and one could assume that his power lies in mind manipulation magic. That is translated into his ability to not only draw cards for you while increasing his power, he can let loose most of that power by removing ALL of your opponents cards completely from the game, leaving only the cards they had left in their hand to play with.

Jace was, until his banning, the most used card in the extreme-high-stakes tournaments of Pro-Tours and Grand Prix's, because the people who wanted to win knew that if they had him, they had the numbers on their side. (Though some have come up with their own solution of numbers to turn the tables, often to the frustration of the Jace's Owner.)

 

Too many of the people who play magic specifically for the Tournament/Competition tend to look at Magic as "Serious Business!" Or worse, as checkboxes on a spread sheet. This is why, despite my love for the game and many of its little nuances, I cannot stand people arbitrating "that card is crap, that card is amazing, that card should cost 2 less to cast." Especially before it's seen any amount of play outside of a tournament atmosphere. One of the few times where it is enjoyable to listen to is when their doing it to a random set of cards that's at least 6-7 years old, because at that point it doesn't really matter, and the end result is mostly a combination of nostalgia and "oh, wow, that actually would work really well in my Commander deck." But I can understand that to some people, this is serious business, probably about as serious as sports. And yet I remember that this is a card game, with dragons and angels and bears and zombies, and it makes me wonder where their priorities are.

Well, that's what I think are the basic things that people find fun about magic. I've also heard of players being split up into archetypes of Johnny, Timmy and Spike, roughly approximating the 3 play styles here, respectively, but I think that the reasons that you play are more interesting than the archetypes you resemble. As I play the game from my Grandpa's basement (or at least interact with the cards), It not only makes me feel like a part of something I can participate at my leisure (and gas money) I notice that it draws me in. I allow myself to spend long hours thinking about what would got in good with which deck, and which decks are for me to play with, and which decks might be for me to play against. I'm currently stuck on a situation where an extremely rare set of deck boxes are for sale for something that used to resemble my price range, but now the likely hood of me getting them is next to none, seeing as I don't have a job and am not currently in a thieving mood, and so I have spent astounding amounts of time trying to figure out how to get around this issue. I'm pretty confident that this is just me using my occasional fits of geeking out to focus on a specific project, but the fact that I'm spending this much time and potentially money on a card game that I specifically enjoy "just for the fun of it" is astonishing. Somebody postulated the theory that "Being a nerd means taking something that's fun, and turning it into something that isn't. Or, alternatively, turning it into a math problem." And while I've long discarded that idea in favor of something more hopeful and appealing, that fandom is about a love of a body of work, and that that love can take a variety of forms, Magic the Gathering is one of those things where both idea's might be right. (edit: I'm getting very tired as I wrap this up, so apologies if I come off as a tad morose.)

Magic the Gathering is a fun game, one that you can immerse yourself into, if you choose, or just enjoy it as a thing that you play when you're not playing Apples to Apples or Munchkin. This was mostly intended as a primer for my thoughts on the game, so hopefully this will be background enough for folks who want to read the rest of my thoughts specific aspects of the game.
My next post will be the debut of my New Banner! Courtesy of Tominalley of Deviant Art! I thought it would be nice to have a slightly more official looking blog, with a logo and a banner and a character and everything. I'm still deciding exactly what I'll be posting about next, but I'll be sure to let whatever readership I have know about it when I whip out my brand spanking new piece of commissioned art. (Btw, if you want a cool drawing of anykind, just let Tominalley know, she's good for just about anything that's awesome to draw.) And remember, I'm always willing to chat about what I write about in the comments, on my Facebook, and on my Twitter. And on that note, I think I'm going to tap out... *tap-tap* and then concede.

(I have that shirt!!! Not that one, the other one!)

 Goodnight Everybody!