I'm Done

I started playing Magic: the Gathering, in some vague way, in late 1999.

It was a few weeks before Mercadian Masques came out, and of course that has coloured my perceptions of the game. My perceptions have grown, however, alongside this ever-evolving game. Multicoloured cards, when re-introduced in Invasion block, were virtually as new to me as they were to the rest of the world during Legends. My perception that a 4/4 for four mana was undercosted was gradually worn away as power did creep and dollars lined corporate Seattle wallets. I've been with the game for a long time, an extremely long time. I have changed and made concessions - I want it to be clear that I've not merely been a stick-in-the-mud from day one. I didn't like the new look for the cards in 8th edition, but I stuck with it. I didn't like the term "battlefield," but I hung in there. I didn't like the introduction of, and focus upon, Planeswalker cards, but here I still am.

Or, at least, was.

It is important to remember that Magic is not some divine property from on high, delivered to blind, groping, shivering masses of humanity as part of a sacred ritual three times a year. In every aspect it is made by people - bored, sweat-stained people who are just doing their job. What passes muster for being printed is ultimately The Gospel According the Mark Rosewater - and I don't know if I want to follow a prophet whose greatest pride is that he wrote for Roseanne.

My point is that Wizards of the Coast is only human, they're peddling a product, and I'm not obligated to stick with that product. I may feel that way after so long simply out of habit, but it gets to a point where enough is enough. Wizards can, and overwhelmingly does, make mistakes. They're willing to admit it, too, which is agreeable. But when every piece of writing they churn out is about how lousy Magic used to be and about how amazing they're making it now, one has to wonder. Time and again they're looking back with disdain at periods where they shrieked just as fervently that the game was the best it ever was. Nevertheless the game does constantly change, and it has been made overwhelmingly clear that the overall direction of its change is one I have no interest in attending.

I've disliked the direction for a long time now. I've really disliked the direction for a couple years, and now it's evidently intolerable.

The latest insult, the upcoming Dominaria set, is perhaps the final insult. I let myself grow a little excited by the prospect of returning to our old home - why, it was Magic at its roots! What if it recaptured some of that old magic? What if it was actually good?

Silly me. It's another mess, blurring character motivations and roles into some bog-standard bore as mandated by the company line. Old characters become strange outlines of their former self or, better yet, are replaced by vaguely-similar newcomers. The Weatherlight is dredged up again for... a pleasure cruise? It's hard to get excited when the stakes are nil. Only this time, rather than churning out yet another who-cares of setting and conflict, they're desecrating old work like a rabid latter-day George Lucas.

I feel like someone who's watched his home, maybe his life, taken from around him through glib deceit and worthless trinkets. One day you wake up, you look out at the city you've lived in all your life and you wonder "Where the Hell am I?" Wherever it is, it isn't home.

I'm tired of new planes, of planeswalker drama, of what new adventure Our Hero Jace will find himself in next. I'm fed up with the game forging ahead and discarding anything and everything it ever was with a self-righteous sneer. I'm sick of seeing the vestiges of things I've loved twisted into agents of frustration. Most of all, I don't give a cool cherry fuck where Chandra Nalaar grew up.

I'm done with keeping up with Magic. I haven't cared about what it was doing for a while now, but the truth of the matter has become so blinding that it can't be ignored. I can't imagine being bothered to keep up with what it's doing any more. To stick with it at this point is like keeping a "lifelong promise" to a friend who has since turned out to be an animal abuser and date rapist.

Before you panic too much, understand that I'm not washing my hands of the game completely. I still have all my thousands of cards, and they aren't going anywhere. I will still play and, heck, I know I'll even still buy cards. I'm even fairly certain that you'll see articles trickling out of here now and then, about old ideas that I've had kicking around and still want to put to words. But there will be a cut-off here, where I'm no longer going to claw for spoilers, learn what every card does, understand roughly where the metagame was at year by year.  Like with all things that change for the worse, I can cherish memories - and better than that, my card collection is a frozen image in time (gosh, why does that sound familiar.) I can always play with what I have and enjoy what it represents, and for that I still respect Magic.

But I'm done.

Card in Review - Overlaid Terrain

Between forums, up-to-the-minute strategy articles and online repositories for decklists, it's easier than ever to tap into the well of fine-tuned net tech. Everyone in a play environment will know the best cards, the strongest strategies and the most degenerate combos to look out for. More often than not, the top 8s in high-level play will be a series of mirror matches, with each player running a slight variation of the same damn deck once it's identified as the most optimal choice. We end up seeing the same cards over and over, always being used in the same ways as part of the same strategies.

By gum, one gets tired of optimized play after a while. I want to see some rubbish!

In today's episode of Card in Review, we're also dipping our toes into the well of Bad Card Made Good - a feature that hasn't been given a nod in a long time but which is often one of the most fun exercises in deckbuilding. So who's the lucky loser for today's feature?

Didn't You Already Say That?

Just wondering: how many times are they going to use this flavour text, exactly?

So sometimes Wizards re-uses flavour text with minor rewordings. We've got Krosan Avenger and Flame Javelin, or Foriysian Brigade and Tenth Edition's Manabarbs, or Daring Leap and Zephyr Sprite, or Hammer Mage and Goblin Gaveleer, or Saprazzan Outrigger and Goblin Raider, or Guided Strike and Fencer's Magemark (with Gilded Light as a sort of devil's advocate?) There's even the oddballs like Goblin Snowman and Winnow, who have nearly the same flavour texts yet somehow the opposite meanings. Okay, I get that they have a lot of different flavour texts to write and it can be hard to keep them all interesting. But did we really need this same bad joke four times? I'm seeing the imitation, all right, but nothing about it is sincere.

Art Direction, Take Two

Is there a database somewhere that tells you which artists are commissioned for which cards?

This is clearly a rejected, yet recycled painting of Prying Blade, but art direction and gestalts dictate that this image is more focused on other things aside from the subject

This was also true for Rampaging Hippo and Defiant Greatmaw, and many others I've seen throughout the last decade. What's going on here?

On the other hand, I know fully well they aren't going to commission multiple artists to do the same card, as it runs afoul of their long-standing policy of paying as little as they possibly can for art. This hypothesis has a lot of possible evidence, but it's hearsay evidence, and it's ultimately unlikely due to the fact that Wizards are goddamn cheapskates. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that you may have noticed a lot of Eastern European nobodies creeping into the artist lists in the past several years. And on top of that, Wizards micromanage art descriptions way too much for this to happen in the first place... which is of course its own huge problem.

 

Card in Review - Tamanoa

If you think of a burn deck, you've probably got a very specific picture in your head. Get as many 3-damage-for-1-mana spells as you can in a single deck and round it out with some classics like Fireblast and Ball Lightning: you're trying to go as fast as possible here. Cards like Jackal Pup, Flame Rift and Barbarian Ring damage you while you're at it? Hey, no problem, so long as your opponent's life total hits 0 faster. There might not be much in the way of complexity involved, but the purest burn deck is going to be speed, speed, speed - and to hell with the consequences.

Why only have one way of doing things, though? By gum, if No-mar decks can make do without Dromar and Necro decks can exist without Necropotence, then there must be a way to do Burn without a self-destructive bent.