Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Holy Strength (Eighth Edition, 2003)



Meat and potatoes. It's hard to think of a simpler Magic card than Holy Strength here. It was published in the first Magic set - 1993's "Alpha" - and remained a staple of the game's "core sets" for almost twenty years. It was never really a "good" card, per se, although there are definitely certain circumstances when you would want to play it. But it was a familiar sight for multiple generations of players, enough so that it - like many other underpowered staples from the game's early days - was nevertheless a welcome presence.

The concept behind Holy Strength is not just simple, but rudimentary in such a way that it serves as a useful teaching tool. Holy Strength is an Enchantment - that is, a card you can cast that becomes a static ability, one that stays on the board and continues to be in effect unless and until another effect removes or alters it. In this case, Holy Strength provides a small boost to one of your creatures: a +1/+2 boost, to be precise, meaning one additional point added to their strength (the amount of damage they can dish out) and another two points added to toughness (the amount of damage they can survive). Say, for instance, you have one creature on the board - let's go with another relatively weak but sentimentally favored Core Set staple, the immortal Grizzly Bears:



So if you cast your Holy Strength on your Grizzly Bears, your Bears go from a respectable, if not particularly exceptional, 2/2 to a 3/4. That's nothing to sneeze at. Under certain circumstances, as I said, this is a perfectly respectable play. For instance, if you're playing Limited, where your card pool is, um, Limited, and you have to construct a deck out of a random pool of cards, there are times when you'll need that stalwart Grizzly Bear to fill the mana curve on your Green / White Selesnya deck.

But more often than not, if you're playing Constructed - any format Constructed - you will have access to better cards than Grizzly Bears and Holy Strength. Maybe even a card like . . . Anurid Brushhopper.



There is nothing really exceptional about Anurid Brushhopper. It's got a weird ability that you can't imagine using unless you built an entire deck around taking advantage of it - either a deck that needed you to discard a bunch of cards, or needed lots of blinking creatures, preferably both. But what makes it useful for this exercise is its stats - it's a 3/4 for CMC 3, or to be more precisely, for one green, one white, and one generic mana. That's the exact same price you'd pay for a Grizzly Bear with a Holy Strength attached, only on one card instead of two. It's more powerful because it's strictly better - essentially, one card that can do the job of two. If you had a choice between playing one Anurid Brushhopper or a Grizzly Bear with a Holy Strength, you'd be a fool to pick the latter unless there were other circumstances at play.

Magic is a numbers game. The decisions you make while building your deck all contribute to, hopefully, creating some kind of numerical advantage. If you've only got sixty cards in your deck (the minimum for Constructed, which for reasons of maximum efficiency its usually not a good idea to go over), every card has to pull its weight. Every card has contribute to your advantage - and if one of those cards is devoted to giving a small buff to another card, well, that's a very inefficient use of that precious slot. This is why Auras in general - not just Holy Strength, but most Enchantment cards dedicated to boosting creatures - can be a dicey proposition. One card that can't even function unless you have a creature on which to put it is an inefficient use of a card slot, unless the effect granted by the Aura is sufficiently powerful to overcome that weakness. Holy Strength isn't very strong, and even though it's cheap at just one white mana, it's just not worth it in most instances.

But it is cheap, and it is simple, which make it a great card for illustrating certain facets of the game - such as the usefulness (or lack thereof) of Auras, and the importance of card advantage. And if you're playing Limited, and need a cheap white spell to fix your curve - well, there you go. You probably have ten copies of the card stuffed in a shoebox somewhere. Even if you've never played Magic, you've probably got a few copies stuffed in the insulation of your house.

The other interesting thing about Holy Strength is that it's one of a matched pair with another card from the game's earliest days . . . UNholy Strength.



In terms of gameplay, Unholy Strength is slightly better than Holy Strength, inasmuch as black is the color much more likely to play cheap and aggressive creatures that could benefit from the kind of early-game boost a cheap Aura like this can provide. But that's not why it's interesting. Can you guess why this card, of all the 295 cards that made up the first Magic set, caused a bit of a ruckus? In 1993? It may not have inspired a Tom Hanks-starring made-for-TV movie about the hazards of fantasy gaming, but Magic did it's part to upset conservative parents across the Bible Belt, too. (For more information on this topic, check out this longer piece by Magic's own Mark Rosewater.)

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Dwarven Ruins (Fallen Empires, 1994)



Ah, Fallen Empires. Memories!

It really is amazing, in hindsight, that Magic survived as long as it did, because the first few years of the game were defined by a series of garbage decisions on every level - business, creative, gameplay - any one of which would have derailed anything less than a bonafide phenomenon. Fallen Empires was a bad set in many ways but it wasn't bad enough to kill the game. By 1995 they couldn't have killed Magic if they wanted to - and they sure seemed to be trying.

Magic's success during this initial period is also significant because of the game's positive impact on the comics industry. The game first premiered in 1993, during the beginning of the end of the early 1990s boom-and-bust. Right about the time - late Summer of that year, actually - when stores across the country were beginning to realize just how badly they had been screwed by a perfect storm of bad market conditions, this weird little trading card game (there had never been such a thing before, so people didn't even know how to categorize it) with spotty regional distribution started to seep into stores. The first Magic sets were printed in laughably small numbers. No one, least of all the people who made the game, expected what they got: a phenomenon that would in short order create an entirely new category of games. Comic book stores sitting on hundreds of unsold copies of Turok #1 and Adventures of Superman #500 desperately needed something to keep the doors open, and the fact that people were actually buying Magic cards in large amounts - when they could be found at all - was more than enough reason for these stores to embrace the new product. Hundreds of stores across the country closed in this period, but many of the ones whose doors remained opened survived because they started selling Magic cards.

The first few Magic sets were all underprinted. Even after Wizards of the Coast had begun to realize the scale of their success, they still couldn't quite figure out how much product was enough to satisfy demand. From Wikipedia:

Because previous sets were underprinted, often making them unavailable very quickly after they went on sale, more Fallen Empires cards were printed than any previous set. Wizards of the Coast announced the print run of Fallen Empires to be 350-375 million cards compared to 75 million for its predecessor The Dark. Booster packs were thus available until 1998 despite the fact that Wizards stopped shipping cards in January 1995.

So how many Magic cards was enough? Somewhere between 75 million and 350-375 million.

This is why, when I first got into the game in 1995, Fallen Empires was everywhere. Along with Homelands and Chronicles, Fallen Empires was ubiquitous, overprinted, and soon discounted heavily by retailers who were trying to make up for lost time by loading up on as many Magic cards as the market could bear. The problem was that, like most of the other early expansion sets, Fallen Empires was weak. Not as weak as Homelands, mind you (still considered by universal consensus to be the worst Magic set ever printed), but weak enough that sales suffered.

I bought a lot of packs of Fallen Empires, though, for the simple reason that it was there. Stores still couldn't keep the core set (Fourth Edition, by then) in stock, but if you had money left over from comics burning a hole in your pocket and wanted to buy Magic cards, well, there were always packs of Fallen Empires on hand. It may not have been Mr. Right, but it was Mr. Right Now, if you know what I mean. When they pop up, it's worth pointing out that you can still to this day get a sealed box of Fallen Empires for around the price of a box of whatever the new product is.

Amazingly, all these weak, underperforming sets did little to lessen the insatiable desire for new Magic product. By 1995 there were other Collectible Card Games on the market, but Magic was still the one to beat. Ice Age was well-received and sold well, even if it was followed in short order by the aforementioned Homelands. As chaotic as the first three years of Magic production was, the market for the game only continued to grow, and those retailers who had embraced the game as a lifeline during a down period for the comic book industry. To this day it's rare to find a comic book store that doesn't at least carry new Magic product, even if they don't go so far as to support tournaments. (The fact that a pack of Magic cards has usually been around the price of a new comic probably helps.)

Anyway, Fallen Empires. It was a weak set in terms of gameplay but as far as flavor went it was actually pretty cool. There was a quite elaborate story behind the set, featuring a war among various factions on the Dominarian continent Sarpadia (I talked a little bit about Dominaria last week). The dwarves were fighting orcs and goblins, which is usually what dwarves do. Interestingly, despite their status as an evergreen fantasy race, dwarves have been largely absent from Magic for many years. Apparently there were various parties in Magic R&D who just didn't like dwarves, which seems weird considering that they're making a card game called Magic: The Gathering.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Haunted Angel (Apocalypse, 2000)



And here we go, because someone - at least one person - demanded it, the return of, well, a recurring feature. And boy, do we have a card for you this week, one of the most significant, format-defining cards in the history of the game -

Hah, no. This is Haunted Angel. This is a bad card.

This came out in 2000's Apocalypse. I wasn't playing Magic when this came out. This was the Summer 2001 set, meaning it was the most recent new set on September, 11th, 2001, when terrorists commandeered -

Fuck, shit. There has to be something more interesting to say about Haunted Angel.

OK. We can do this.

Haunted Angel is the kind of card no one in their right mind would play under normal circumstances. It's never been reprinted, which is usually a good sign of its forgettability. And yet, it's also a good example of a card that works within the context of its set, maybe not playable under most circumstances but intended to bolster the set's story and themes. Apocalypse was, as you might imagine from the title, a particularly significant set, story-wise. This set was the culmination of a years-long story leading to the invasion of the plane of Dominaria (the former default plane for every Magic set) by the evil extra-dimensional Phyrexians. The core storytelling gimmick at the heart of Magic - the conceit behind the game, really - is that the game takes place in a multiverse of different worlds that can only be traversed by magically gifted "Planeswalkers." You, as in the player, are a Planeswalker, able to take spells and artifacts from across many different worlds in order to wage magic duels. Dominaria was the game's home from its very first set (Limited Edition, retroactively labeled Alpha), back in 1993, although it's been only rarely seen in the last twelve or thirteen years as the game has focused on expanding its stable of worlds.

The Phyrexians are less a race than an infection, a kind of evil illness that spreads through a black bile (kind of similar to the black stuff in Prometheus, although over a decade earlier). The leader of the Phyrexians, Yawgmoth, invaded Dominaria in the lead up to Apocalypse, raising the dead of Dominaria to fill the ranks of his army. (Hence the name "Apocalypse," signifying an actual Biblical end of the world event.) The idea behind a card like Haunted Angel, therefore, is that even a pure creature like an Angel can be turned into an enemy after death: when Haunted Angel dies, your opponent gets a mirror image of the creature with which to attack you.

On it's own without that ability, this would be a good card - an Uncommon white 3/3 with Flying for 3 CMC is definitely playable. But giving your enemy a 3/3 flyer of their own to attack you with after losing the creature, that's a punishing drawback. The one situation where this card might come in handy would be in a multiplayer game: the card grants evil Angels to all your opponents, not just one, and there are lots of circumstances where giving free creatures to other players in a multiplayer game might come in handy.

Although Yawgmoth and the Phyrexians were defeated at the end of Apocalypse, that wouldn't be the end for the villains. A few hundred or so years later (here's a handy, if confusing, timeline for the Magic storyline, although it's a bit out of date) the Phyrexians regrouped on the artificial plane of Mirrodin. The last we saw of the Phyrexians was in 2011, so it's been a while. Recent changes in the game have been designed partly with the purpose of accelerating the occasionally moribund pace of storytelling, so hopefully we'll get some development there soon.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Plaguemaw Beast (Mirrodin Besieged, 2011)



Ladies and gentlemen, Plaguemaw Beast!

clap clap clap

How are you, Mr. Beast? It's been a few years since you were in the spotlight. What have you been up to?

Well, Jim, it's been a rough few years, but I'm hanging in there.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

Yeah, you know how it is. That's the way the world works: if you're a Magic card, even a good one, you really only get one shot. If you're lucky, you're good in limited, which means you get a year or so in the spotlight. If you're really lucky, you see a little tournament action. Only a few folks get to stick around for too long after that.

You do have an advantage over most green Beasts, though - you've got a very popular keyword on you - Proliferate.

clap clap clap

That's true, but honestly, Proliferate is as much a gift as a curse. Sure, people love it. They love being able to use me to sac tiny guys to put more counters on their Planeswalkers or their opponent's poison total. That's fun. Problem is, Proliferate - it was pretty powerful. Players like it but design has problems, you know. Not a lot of design space left, they say. Don't look at me, I don't know these things. And even if they did bring it back, they'd want to bring back something flashy like Thrummingbird. Not a five CMC Beast that dies to a Lightning Bolt. But hey, I'm not terrible. I even won a few games, back in the day. Say, for instance, you've got your opponent up to nine poison counters, but you've only got one creature - me. I can swing for four damage, yeah, but without another creature to sacrifice, I don't have Infect or anything. Your hand is empty. You opponent's itchy because he knows the game hinges on the next draw - then BAM you pull a card, slap down a Chimney Imp, tap me and BOOM, the fat fuck opposite you is poisoned.

Why . . . why would anyone be playing a Chimney Imp with you? No one plays Chimney Imp. You weren't in the same block as Chimney Imp, so you're implying someone would choose to construct a deck years after the fact with both you and Chimney Imp in it.

Look it was just a figure of speech, you know? That's what my ability did: no matter how crappy the card, I could bury it and Proliferate counters. Any counters, not just poison.

Also, in that scenario, couldn't you just sacrifice yourself to yourself to get the Proliferate effect?

. . .

What was that?

Next question.

Sorry?

I don't like to remind people I can eat myself to get the effect. Some guys forget, and that's OK with me.

Oh, I'm sorry if it's a sore -

It's unpleasant, you know? I've had to do it a bunch. It feels weird. It's not fun.

Well, er, let's move on then!

clap clap clap

Ah, which brings me to my next question - you've known some Planeswalkers in your time, haven't you?

Yeah, I knew 'em. I was in Standard with Zendikar, so I -

Jace.

Jace. Yeah. Everyone asks about Jace.

Is it a sore subject?

No, no. Jace is a nice guy. Real down to earth, you know? You wouldn't think so, I mean, being the first banned Planeswalker. The guy dominated. Dominated. People were hocking jewelry for a foil playset of that guy, you know? That's not the type of stuff that happens anymore. He still does well for himself, you know. Not very many cards get to go on to Legacy. I saw him a few weeks back, he dropped into the office to say hi to the old gang.

Of course, you weren't in Standard with Jace for long.

Nah. It's a shame, really - they should have known. Him and those Squadron Hawks and Batterskull - it was trouble waiting to happen. I mean, don't look at me, I don't have a lot of experience with tournament decks. It's Greek to me. I'm five mana so I don't usually get out until at least turn five, but those Caw-Blade decks . . .

It was a rough time.

Yeah. The ban wasn't a surprise, but at the same time, they should have seen it coming. Me, I still don't understand how those Hawks carried those damn Swords in their beaks like that. I mean, I've carried some equipment in my time, even though I don't have hands, but I'm big enough I can make it work. Gimme a sword and I can hold it in my mouth. Put an invisibility cloak over my shoulders, I'll make it work. But those birds, they're just too small. I don't get it. And now I see they're printing four-ability Planeswalkers again - it's like playing with fire. They never learn.

So what does a day look like for you now?

Well, some days are pretty quiet. It's cool, I took up gardening a few years back. I'm from Mirrodin, so you know, everything's metal there. It's a nice break to go home in the evening and put my feet in the soil. Soil that isn't filled with pieces of jagged steel because, you know, did I mention that Mirrodin is made of metal? I still see some action. Poison decks will always need something to fill out the mana curve in the mid-game. Maybe some idiot puts me in a green Superfriends deck - I mean, come on, let's be honest here, if you've got a mug like me defending your Superfriends, you're probably going to lose, but who am I to say. I do what I'm told. I eat little creatures and crap out counters. It's a living.

clap clap clap

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Hulking Cyclops (Sixth Edition, 1999)



The commander of the cyclops army paced back and forth in front of a desultory line of infantrymen. Dozens of soldiers lined up in imprecise rows, leaning on their clubs with their eye shut, or whittling spear-tips absent-mindedly while waiting for dinner. Cyclops are a disorganized and slovenly bunch as a rule. Circumstances had forced these cyclopses to turn against their natural disposition to solitude and band together to repel invaders. They were the last line of defense between their enemies and the ancestral homelands known to cyclops for generations since the Ancient Plunder.

The cyclops commander was an old, taciturn warrior named Bolgarad. He loved fighting in a way that stood out even in a race well known for their violent habits, and his thick, mottled skin was a map of twisting scars. He was general because he had something few other cyclops did: experience fighting in an organized military, based on years of service as a mercenary in the world abroad. Cylcopses were violent and disagreeable - to say nothing of being around ten feet of rippling muscle and iron bones - but their one saving grace was that they disliked traveling, and would rarely go far beyond their neighborhood to seek conflict. Bolgarad was an exception, and his expertise in the field of organized combat made him a rare authority figure in a community usually defined by its bearish resistance to organization.

"OK, men," he began with great solemnity, "we have only one chance left. We beat them at the pass, with heavy losses on both sides. We lost a lot of good cyclopses, and there are hundreds more who will be many moons recuperating from wounds received from the tainted spearpoints of the Necromonger's cavalry."

"They're hurting, but we're hurting too. We're all exhausted. All of you were there on the front lines. You fought like animals, and you're the reason why we have a chance to pull this thing out. The Eagle Lord tells us that the Necromonger is massing his army five clicks away for one more push at the base of Goblin Butte. If they make it through the peaks and into the valley they will overrun the lands, but if we break them at the bottleneck under the Butte we should be able to scatter them."

"We have three regiments of our freshest troops marching south at double time to outflank their army from below the Butte. Since we broke the Opal Mirror we know that their army has no aerial reconnaissance, so with any luck they should be able to surprise the rear of the Necromonger's column at the moment they hit the bottleneck."

"Our job is to hold the line. When they come streaming through that gate we have to stand and push back. We have to block them however we can until we can meet the other regiments pushing forward from the back. Then we will paint the canyon walls with the black blood of these inhuman revenants!"

The massed cyclopses registered their enthusiasm with the equivalent of a muted shrug. They had been fighting for days, and after a while even the hardiest and mightiest warrior must feel the weight of gravity pulling his tired form to the earth. They all knew what was at stake, though, if Thargull could plant a beachhead in the enchanted lands beyond the Lonely Canyons. Not just the ancient clanlands of the cyclops race, but every island and continent in the Hidden Archipelago beyond the sea of Snardoth.

A young cyclops leaned at the back of the cavern, just under a flickering brazier suspended by heavy chain from the cave ceiling. He appeared restless, and unusual for a cyclops, pensive. Bolgarad locked eyes with the soldier from across the room.

"You there," the commander called, "you lazy son of a tree! What is your name?"

The pensive cyclops answered meekly, "Me, sir?"

"Yes, you!"

"My name is Bah'rtl'bee."

"Bah'rtl'bee! You seem bored by our dire circumstances! Are you unwilling to block the enemy and protect our ancient homeland?"

"I would prefer not to."

"You would prefer not to?"

"Yes, sir."

Bolgarad raised his hand and brandished his club. It was eight feet tall, carved from the lightning-blasted stump of a one-thousand-year-old stone tree in his grandfather's time and cured with the oil of a finback whale purchased off a traveling sailor. It had been blessed by five oracles during his tenure in the peacekeeping army of Mulain the Blue. In the past week along it had cracked the skulls of hundreds of undead skeleton berzerkers. With a sudden speed that belied his size and age, Bolgarad flung the club through the air and hit the surprised Bah'rtl'bee squarely on his forehead, just above his eye.

"Make sure that Bah'rtl'bee wakes up on the frontline, won't you?"

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Unstable Shapeshifter (Tempest, 1997)



The reason this card exists would appear to be primarily to take advantage of a rule that no longer exists. Unstable Shapeshifter automatically changes to become a Clone of whichever creature enters the battlefield. There are certainly a number of circumstances you can imagine in order to help you exploit this card, but the primary usage was almost certainly for the purpose of hosing Legends.

What are Legends? Legends are a card type that specifies only one copy of said card can be on the board at any one time. Whereas most creatures are not specific characters, some creatures (as well as other permanents such as Artifacts, Lands, and Enchantments) are specific characters that represent figures from the storyline. For instance: you can have as many Grizzly Bears on the board as you want at any given moment (allowing for the fact that you can only have four in your deck). Conceivably, two players could have eight grizzly bears total on the table at any given moment, or create a device to generate unlimited Grizzly Bear tokens, and that would be fine.

But let's say you have a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir on the table.



Teferi isn't a generic creature or soldier, he's a specific person who plays a specific role in one of Magic's biggest storylines. As such, he has the adjective "Legendary" on his card type line. This used to mean only one of him could be on the table at any given time, and one of the consequences of that was the "Legend rule," which stated that if two copies of the same Legend were ever on the board at the same time, both of them would go into the graveyard. (Unless you had a Mirror Gallery in play.) This is intuitive: you can't have two of the same person on the battlefield at the same time. So you can see how a card like Unstable Shapeshifter was designed specifically to dissuade your opponent from playing powerful Legends. Why cast a card if it's going to be immediately sent to the graveyard?

The problem is that for a long time Legends were not regarded with fondness by many in Magic. They were considered a creative necessity in order to be able to use the game to reflect events in a storyline, but the Legend Rule also discouraged many players from playing even powerful Legend cards because of the chances of competitive cards becoming impossible to play. (If a card was tournament-viable and also a Legend, any opponent could sideboard the same card and be prepared to nullify that exact threat in the second match. It didn't make for fun play.) Compounding the problem was the invention of Planeswalkers, a new card type created in the late 2000s to represent certain very powerful characters from the storyline (characters who could walk between different planes, or different worlds, hence the name). Although they didn't call it the Legend rule when applied to Planeswalkers, they still operated under the same principle: no more than one version of Jace or Ajani could be on the board at any given time, for the simple reason that no more than one version of the same person can be in the same room as another version.

Two things happened that necessitated a change in the rules. One, Planeswalkers became an extremely popular card type, and a vanguard of the majority of tournament-viable decks. But the Legend weakness still meant that even the most powerful Planeswalkers could be countered simply by playing a version of the same character. Two, while Legends had never been the most popular card type, that changed with the invention of the Commander format (previously known as "Elder Dragon Highlander," or EDH). Without going into detail, Commander is a format built around Legends as a card type. The rise of Commander as a popular format meant there was a great deal of new demand for Wizards to produce more Legends, even though the restrictions of the Legend rule as it existed had historically made Legends unpopular with many players and designers.

So the rule was changed a couple years back. You can still only have one version of a Legend or Planeswalker on the table at any given time, but your Legends do not effect those of your opponent, meaning you can't be forced to put a Legend in the graveyard because your opponent was clever enough to have the same Legend in their deck. And if you do have two versions of the same Legend on your side of the table, both cards do not immediately go into the graveyard, only one. All of this means that Unstable Shapeshifter can't do one of the things it was designed to do. It can still do a number of other things - there are plenty of good non-Legendary creatures still hanging around the game that you might want to duplicate, after all. But at the time of its invention the card functioned as effective removal against a certain type of card, and that functionality doesn't exists anymore - unless you're stupid enough to play this before you play a Legend yourself, in which case this copy would just go into the graveyard. And while there may be one or two exotic circumstances when that might be useful, it's just not something that comes up very often.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Bant Sureblade (Alara Reborn, 2009)



According to Mark Rosewater, there are two kinds of Magic design, top-down and bottom-up. The difference between these approaches has to do with the set's relationship to theme and mechanics. If a set design begins with its theme - as in, the designers decide they want to do a block based around horror tropes (Innistrad) or Greek myth (Theros), they begin with that premise and design cards and mechanics to be resonant with those themes -- i.e., top-down. The other alternative is that the set design begins from some kind of mechanical basis - for instance, Ravnica, of which we've seen many examples so far, is based around the idea of pairing up each two-color pair off the color pie into specific "guilds," thereby opening up a whole raft of design possibilities based on the interactions of these two-color pairs.

The Shards of Alara block, of which Alara Reborn is the third set, was based on a similar mechanical challenge - putting together the colors into three-color shards. For those who don't remember, this is the color pie as seen on the back of every extant Magic card:



Each color is arranged around the wheel so that every color is next to it's two allies and across from it's two enemies. The symbols also betray the basic information behind each color's philosophy - a drop of water for Blue, a skull for Black, fire for Red, a tree for Green, and a sun for White. (Admittedly, you might not figure out what White's symbol is supposed to be just by looking at it.) Each shard is three adjacent colors - therefore, White, Blue, and Black form a shard called Esper. The challenge for the designers was how to figure out to make an entire year's worth of cards that built off this premise.

Our friend here Bant Sureblade belongs - as you may have guessed - to the Bant shard, which consists of Blue, White, and Green. Ergo, he is a small soldier - very much within White's color pie - who can also grow bigger if you have another multicolor card on the table. Not bad for two mana at common. There are circumstances where this guy could be a 3/2 on your second turn, which is nothing at all to sneeze at.

But the most important aspect of this card is the fact that the flavor text mentions a god named Asha, one of the patron gods of the Bant shard. Which of course means that there must be a Legendary Artifact called the Brimful of Asha, which you can tap to produce a bosom for a pillow.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Bloodletter Quill (Ravnica: City of Guilds, 2005)



So apparently the gimmick is that this is an evil pen that gives you access to forbidden secrets, at the measly cost of . . . your soul! Makes sense: you get to draw a card, pay some life, and then repeat. It requires blue and black to be used properly, which - since this is a Ravnica card (and Jesus, what's with all the Ravnica block cards? this is like the third one I've pulled for this) - means it belongs to the mysterious and sinister Dimir guild. Dimir is all about secrets, dwelling in the shadows and striking silently, so paying a high price for proscribed knowledge (read: extra cards) is well within their wheelhouse. From a purely mechanical standpoint, both colors are really good at increasing your card advantage, so it makes sense that an artifact built to support the color combo would enable you to draw more cards easier.

This card came out in 2005. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out in 2003 (my favorite of the series, incidentally). That book featured the introduction of Dolores Umbridge, the latest in a long line of Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, and one who took a particular dislike to Harry. Her preferred form of punishment was to write "I must not tell lies" over and over again onto his own flesh with a devilish torture instrument called the blood quill:



This motif originates most likely in Franz Kafka's 1914 short story "In the Penal Colony," built around a (fictional) method of execution that consists of inscribing / tattooing the body of a convict with his sentence repeatedly, until he finally dies after somewhere around 12 hours of excruciating pain. But that story does not feature a little eyeball and sac of blood sinking its tendrils into the Admiral's writing hand. (Why the Admiral? I don't know, but it sure looks like the dude is wearing an admiral's dress uniform.) Robert Crumb provided an excellent illustration of "In the Penal Colony" for his great book on Kafka:

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Kederekt Parasite (Conflux, 2009 )



Who's peekin' out from under a stairway,

Calling a name that's lighter than air?

Who's bending down to give me a rainbow?

Everyone knows it's Kederekt Parasite.

Who's tripping down the streets of the city,

Smilin' at everybody she sees?

Who's reachin' out to capture a moment?

Everyone knows it's Kederekt Parasite.

And Kederekt Parasite has stor-my eyes,

That flash at the sound of lies.

And Kederekt Parasite has wings to fly,

Above the clouds (above the clouds)

Above the clouds (above the clouds).

[Flute]

And Kederekt Parasite has stor-my eyes,

That flash at the sound of lies.

And Kederekt Parasite has wings to fly,

Above the clouds (above the clouds)

Above the clouds (above the clouds).

Who's tripping down the streets of the city,

Smilin' at everybody she sees?

Who's reachin' out to capture a moment?

Everyone knows it's Kederekt Parasite.

[Repeat And fade]

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Wrath of God (Tenth Edition, 2007)



Wrath of God is one of the game's more famous cards. It was first printed all the way back in Alpha and remained a staple of every core set until 2007's Tenth Edition. It does something remarkably simple: it destroys every creature on the table. Creatures with Regeneration cannot be regenerated - but that's not unusual. Regeneration is a useless ability, by and large - its seems as if half of all direct damage cards circumvent Regeneration in some way. And even when you can Regenerate, it's often too expensive to make a difference. I've played on an off for a long time and I can't actually remember ever using Regeneration once.

This is a very good card but it hasn't seen print in a core set or Standard-legal expansion since 2007. I suspect it might owing to the fact that, despite the card's iconic status within the game, it doesn't really fit with what has come to be regarded as white's color identity. To wit: white doesn't destroy. White removal is less violent: the color does not do direct damage. It prefers to exile creatures or banish them to the bottom of the deck - that is, flavorwise, getting rid of the offending creature without actually killing it. White doesn't slaughter. Which shouldn't be taken to mean that white is typically associated with "goodness," but it is associated with self-righteousness and religiosity, both of which can be dangerous under certain circumstances.

This is not Wrath of God's first art; this was, way back in 1993. The most recent art, introduced in 2001 with Seventh Edition, was produced by Kev Walker. If that name sounds familiar, it should - he's been drawing comics since 1989, beginning his career with 2000 AD:



And then moving on to Marvel, where he is perhaps best known for his lengthy run on Thunderbolts with Jeff Parker:



As well as his run on the controversial Avengers Arena, for which his art was the best part by a country mile:



But he has continued to produce illustrations for Magic, creating a few of the game's most indelible pieces of art.

Geralf's Messenger



Kitchen Finks



Llanowar Elves

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Scryb Sprites (Alpha, 1993)



This is another example of a strange coincidence. Just last week we had another green Faerie from the game's early days - way back when Faeries were primarily in green and not in blue - and this week Gatherer spits up another green Faerie. Most of what I said last week still applies here: Faeries were eventually moved out of green primarily because, with a few small exceptions, green doesn't do flying. In fact, green is the color that dislikes flying the most. Green doesn't have a lot of direct damage or creature removal, except in response to flying creatures.

Other than that, the most interesting thing about this card is simply the fact that it was one of the first Magic cards ever printed. This card hails from Alpha (AKA Limited Edition Alpha), the very first Magic set. Magic premiered at the Origins Game Fair in 1993. The game saw wide release in August of that year. Although Richard Garfield originally believed that the first printing would be sufficient to last a year, the had to return to press in October of 1993 - meaning that Magic sold out of its original print run in two months. People who were around in the game's earliest days describe the release as an overnight panic: one day there was no such thing as Magic, and the next people were driving hundreds of miles between comics and game stores in search of any stock that hadn't already blown out the doors. This is one major reason why quality control was so patchy in the game's first years. The demand for the first collectible card game was unprecedented, and the need for new product trumped the fact that they still barely understood what in the newborn game worked and what didn't.

I didn't start playing - the first time - until 1995, after the release of Fourth Edition. That was the core set on sale at the time I began. Ice Age was released around then, and Homelands was everywhere cheap and plentiful. (For that matter, Homelands is still cheap and plentiful.) I didn't really understand the game very well. I fell in love with the Lord of the Pit / Breeding Pit combination. On paper it's an elegantly simple combo, but in reality the intricacies of the game were simply beyond me, as I usually died well before being able to actually implement the strategy. My dirty secret - well, it's not so secret, since I've mentioned it before - is that I am actually terrible at most games. Even after I returned to Magic a few years back and played regularly (including a number of obsessive Magic Online binges), I just wasn't that good.

Part of this has to do with the fact that I simply refuse to invest the money necessary to be a good player. It's easy to believe - at least for a little bit - that you can still be a competitive player (at least in casual formats) without being willing to drop $100 on a playset of every new Planeswalker. But the reality is that in my experience "casual," at most stores and among many Online players, means something a bit different from what the world "casual" means to most people. You've got people test-driving expensive decks for tournaments, wannabe tournament players, and scrubs. I was and am a scrub. My favorite format was always League, which evens the playing field by restricting each player to a small pool of cards, but also enabling a short-term metagame to develop between different players with vastly different pools of cards. (In theory, I also like Commander, but in practice have never been able to find the time for games that can stretch out to two or three hours.) Since I've been in grad school I haven't had the time to commit to hanging out at a game store (even though there are two in Davis), and I deleted Magic Online off my computer because it enables compulsive and addictive behavior. There is an element of Magic that leans dangerously close to gambling, and for anyone with even a whiff of addictive behavior in their genes (such as myself) it's probably a good idea to avoid the game altogether.

Since the invention of the Mythic rarity in 2008, the game has reached new levels of popularity. It's hard not to see the two developments as connected: Mythic rares appear only 1/8 as often as normal rares, making them even more expensive on the secondary market. The cards printed at Mythic rarity are invariably the best cards in the game. People need to buy more cards now, it's as simple as that. Although the game had encouraged compulsive collecting since the early days (no different from sports cards in that respect), the addition of a higher rarity was like throwing gasoline on a bonfire. If you want to be competitive in most formats, you have to be willing to spend the money to make yourself competitive. No amount of skill can make up for the fact that the person opposite you is much more likely to win if they have four of each Planewalker in their deck. That's too bad, because the game at its heart is one of the best.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Faerie Noble (Homelands, 1995)



Ah, Homelands. Universally derided as the worst Magic set of all time, it came hot on the heels of similarly underpowered sets such as Fallen Empires and The Dark. It's interesting to imagine what might have become of the game if Wizards hadn't been able to follow Homelands with the beloved Ice Age. The learning process for Magic design was pretty steep, and the game's first few years are littered with failures that arose as a direct result of the company's inability to understand the new game's strengths and weaknesses. WIth one or two more bombs in the game's formative years, could Magic have weathered the unintended consequences of its early, runaway success?

Faerie Noble is a real stinker. I think I've mentioned in passing that Fairies have been one of the more dominant strategies of recent years, following their prominence in the Lorwyn / Shadowmoor block. They remain a staple of Modern. Our friend the Noble here hails from a time before Fairies were cool. To begin with, Faerie Noble is a Green creature, and Fairies have been primary in blue for many years - meaning even if you were looking for an older card to fill a hole in a Fairy deck, this guy would be useless unless you wanted to splash green. What's worse, even setting aside the negligible impact of his creature type, his stats are nothing to write home about: CMC 3 for a 1/2 flier who gives other Fairies a mild defensive boost. Yawn. Oh, and you can tap him for a minor offensive boost, which he can't even take advantage of because he's already tapped and therefore can't attack or block. The only reason why this card might be even vaguely playable is that green doesn't have very many fliers, aside from the occasional bird. But even given that, Faerie Noble is that most useless of cards: a meek tribal enabler without much of a tribe of which to speak.

Without wanting to get into details here (and really, you'd be better served by trolling Wikipedia if you are really interested), Homelands was built on an impressively complex storyline set on the plane of Ulgrotha. Placing the set in a separate plane allowed the designers to attempt to create a distinctive play environment built around the flavor and themes of Ulgrotha and its inhabitants. But the problem with Homelands isn't that it didn't have an immersive and interesting storyline, but that the storyline dictated gameplay to such a degree that the set was grossly underpowered. (Also, there was a desire on the part of Wizards to "fix" the problems of Fallen Empires, which was considered at the time to be an overpowered set. By any reasonable standard, however, Fallen Empires was also underpowered, so . . .)

Power level is a difficult thing to explain, and undoubtedly an even more difficult thing to design around. If cards are too powerful, too "good," they warp the game and create degenerate - that is, unfun - play environments. Imagine if there were special chess pieces that had super powerful effects which enabled your opponent to win the game easily. It might be fun for your opponent, but after a while it would be boring for everyone and disheartening for you. That's not even accounting for the probability that you would also invest in these super pieces, therefore creating a desperate arms race that would quickly transform chess into something very different from what it was originally intended to be. The Urza's Saga and Mirrodin blocks were both quite popular despite their status as the two most overpowered blocks since the original Alpha - the problem is that while in theory people love powerful cards, both blocks ended up decimating the tournament scene by enabling numerous absurdly powerful and woefully abusive strategies - the definition of "unfun." When tournament attendance flags, the game suffers - a trickle-down effect from the highest competitive level down to casual and occasional players. Conversely, a set with weak cards and unimpressive mechanics is just plain boring, and equally likely to repel players. Getting that balance right is tricky.

Magic managed to survive Homelands, however, just as it survived Urza's Saga and Mirrodin. The core appeal of the game - to say nothing of the enduring popularity of the pseudo-gambling collectors' model on which the game makes its money - is strong enough to endure despite occasional missteps. Homelands was one such misstep. So even though our pal Faerie Noble is a pitiful example of a creature, his very weakness represents an important lesson from Magic's history: it took a long time for them to figure out how to make this game, even years' after the game's genesis. There was a lot of trial and error along the way. Early success gave Wizards the momentum necessary to weather the game's earliest growing pains. Now we can look back at Homelands and laugh.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Torrent of Fire (Scourge, 2003)



Another mediocre card: neither good nor bad, useful in some circumstances but useless in many others. Although the rules text may seem complicated, what the card does isn't that hard to suss: whatever the highest converted mana cost is of all the creatures you control, you can do that much damage to any other creature or player. (Converted mana cost is the total cost of the spell - if a spell [such as this] requires two red mana and three uncolored, then the spell has a converted mana cost [CMC] of five.) In most circumstances, a variable damage spell for five CMC that you might not even be able to use is a pretty poor card. But it's not hard to imagine circumstances where you would want to use this card - a dedicated big-creature ramp deck, the kind of thing where you could be certain of having huge creatures on the table throughout the game. I'd be surprised if this card wasn't a big favorite on Commander tables.

But let's talk dragons.

Although Magic has made a policy of working to avoid a number of "traditional" (i.e., Tolkienesque) fantasy tropes, there are a few unavoidable constants which remain firmly ensconced in the game despite the general lack of pointy-hatted wizards along with many other familiar D&D character types. Dragons are perhaps the most sacrosanct creatures in the game. They've been around since the very beginning and have appeared in almost every set since in one form or another. Wizards does a great deal of market research on every aspect of the game, including the popularity of specific creatures and creature types. They always maintain that dragons are the most popular creatures in the game, so much so that they simply have to be present, even in sets where dragons might otherwise seem out of place. For instance, 2011's Innistrad block was devoted to the horror genre in general with an emphasis on gothic horror of the northern European type. You would not expect to see many giant dragons in this world, and yet dragons there were, for the very simple reason that there must be dragons in every set. (Best quote from the Gatherer comments: "My favorite part of Dracula is when they had to fight the giant dragon.") Players expect to see them, and a certain type of player would be very upset by a lack of marquee dragons in a major set.

Scourge was a good set for dragon fans. Onslaught block had a large creature theme - the middle set of the block was Legions, still one of the games more polarizing sets, composed entirely of creatures. Scourge continued the emphasis on creatures began in Onslaught and Legions, and introduced a a dragon sub-theme as well. That means both that more dragons were printed and that more cards were made to support dragons mechanically and thematically. This is a good example of that. Even if you didn't see a picture of a dragon blasting a little guy to oblivion with a blast of fire, what the card actually does is extremely dragon-y. Imagine a giant dragon - the kind of creature who is usually very expensive, with a large CMC - spraying an opponent with deadly fire. That's this card. All of which adds up to a card that, while not great by most measures, still serves a definite purpose in terms of supporting the specific mechanical needs of its block (that is, supporting creature-heavy strategies built around summoning large monsters), and does a good job of evoking the flavor of facing down a giant fire-breathing death lizard.

Torrent of Fire reminds of Eye Gouge, one of the more interesting designs to come out of the most recent set, Born of the Gods. If you look at that card, it seems to have a pretty limited use - after all, Gatherer tells us that there are only seventeen cyclopses in the entire game. But since Born of the Gods is part of Theros block - a block devoted to Greek myth - cyclops do play a larger role than usual. Four of Magic's cyclopses have been printed in Theros block, with one or two presumably waiting in the wings for this Spring's Journey Into Nyx set. Additionally, last year's Return to Ravnica block featured three cyclopses as well, so there was undoubtedly an awareness that this relatively obscure creature type would be playing a larger than usual role in the current Standard environment. (Reminder: Standard format features the past two years' worth of sets and cycles out every fall. It's by far the most popular Constructed format, partly because the barrier to entry is so much lower than formats dominated by older, rarer, and more expensive cards.)

Cards like Torrent of Fire are a testament to the fact that even the weakest or most limited Magic card is still the end product of a great deal of thought and work. It might suck most of the time, but it still serves a definite purpose.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Rivals' Duel (Morningtide, 2008)



This is the very definition of a mediocre card. It's not good by any means, but it's not really bad, either - you can imagine many instances where this card could come in handy. But they'd have to be the kind of specific circumstances that depend on your having built a deck in order to take advantage of certain interactions. Otherwise, yes, it's easy to see how this was a useful card in Lorwyn limited, but it's also worth noting that the Lorwyn block wasn't particularly popular.

Let's unpack all that.

Lorwyn block was built primarily around a strategy called tribal. There are many different kinds of creatures in Magic, and often similar creatures create powerful synergy when played in multiples. Since the beginning of the game there have been decks that focused on Vampires, Elves, Goblins, Merfolk, and any number of other tribes. Because similar creatures have similar benefits and encourage linear play, they can be very effective when played in tandem. For instance: goblins in Magic are traditionally small, cheap creatures who are individually weak and expendable but who gain power in large groups. Elves are also small, but they often produce mana-generating effects which can be used to quickly ramp up to larger creatures or game-ending effects. So while Lorwyn was not the first set to prominently emphasize tribal, it was definitely one of the strongest tribal sets ever created.

And therein lies the problem. While fielding armies of creatures is certainly a part of the game's appeal, it's not the only part. Lorwyn focused on tribal almost to the exclusion of any other theme, and therefore players who did not care for a play environment focused exclusively on tribal interactions found the set to be slim pickings. It's not that Wizards didn't succeed in their goal of creating a tribal-focused set. On the contrary, many of the tribes featured in the set proved popular and powerful: faeries, in particular, became one of the most dominant tribal factions in the game's history, and faery decks still see play in any format that allows them. While nowhere near as popular as faeries, kithkin, ouphes, and scarecrows also had their fans. (OK, I was the guy who liked scarecrows - I tried to put together a scarecrow deck for Commander once.) But the relentless focus on tribal as the block's dominant strategy nevertheless alienated a significant number of players.

Based on that, it's not hard to imagine the circumstances under which this card might be useful. If you were playing Lorwyn limited or standard, environments where most players would be playing creature-heavy decks, having a card specifically designed to hurt creatures controlled by players playing different tribes would come in handy. Say you're playing goblins and your opponent is playing faeries. This card will allow you to destroy one of their guys, providing you have a goblin with greater power than one of their faeries. Or - and this is crucial - you can have two creatures controlled by your opponent fight each other, providing they belong to different tribes. So this card actually supports the tribal theme in two ways: one, it encourages you to play a single tribe and increase the chances of being able to use the card's effect; and two, it discourages you from playing more than one type of creature type, thereby making your creatures vulnerable to this kind of removal. (Also worth noting, if briefly: Lorwyn block also featured a type of damage called Wither that didn't disappear at the end of each turn, therefore allowing for cumulative damage and proverbial "death by a thousand cuts" creature destruction. This card could allow even small creatures with Wither to make an impact against bigger and more powerful creatures.)

With that said, it's easy to see why this card was made in Morningtide, because it fit a very specific purpose and further served to direct players' attentions towards the set's dominant theme. But for that same reason it is of limited applicability outside its home block. At 4 CMC, especially considering it will only be useful sometimes , it's a bit too expensive and too specific to ever be very effective on its own. Because of its limited scope but occasional utility, it would be an interesting card to build around - that is, try to create a deck specifically designed to take advantages of interactions and combos stemming form the card. But again, while it might be possible, that kind of speciality tinkering is a challenge few would find rewarding.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Magma Jet (Fifth Dawn, 2004)



So far in the series we've mostly seen creatures - which is not at all indicative of the actual dispersement of card types. There are lots of cards besides creatures - Sorceries, Instants, Enchantments, Artifacts, Planeswalkers, Lands. (And Tribal, which is a supertype and I don't understand exactly what that means except that apparently no one else did either because it came and went very quickly.) An Instant like this can be played at any time you have priority - which means, it doesn't have to be your turn. You can play it during your opponent's turn at any point in which you are allowed to respond to his or her actions. This allows you to do things like counter their spells, "bounce" their creatures (send their creature card back to their hand or their deck), or perform various combat tricks (effects which change the outcome of combat).

Magma Jet isn't the fanciest card in the booster but it gets the job done. Red is the color of anger, impulsivity, immediate action, and direct damage. What this means is that cards which directly hurt either another player or one of their creatures belong mainly to Red, despite a few exceptions over the years. The first statement in the card's rule text is, "Magma Jet deals 2 damage to target creature or player." That is about as simple as rules text gets, such that even a complete beginner can easily grok the purpose of the card at a glance. Simple, in this case, is good: direct damage is a very important to the game, and even though there are certainly more powerful versions of this effect in existence, this is nonetheless a powerful and useful card in any many play environments. The gold standard for direct damage is still the original Lightning Bolt, which deals three damage to a target creature or player for only one red mana - extremely powerful and efficient, but not so much that it can't come back to Standard periodically (as it did in the 2010 and 2011 core sets, and as it undoubtedly will again at some point after enough time has elapsed for the return to be sufficiently special).

But direct damage isn't all this card does. The second bit of rules text says "Scry 2." Scry is another popular ability that comes back a lot even if it isn't quite evergreen (meaning, it doesn't come back for every set, but it comes back more frequently than just about any other non-evergreen mechanic which I could mention). Scry is an ability that allows you to peek at the top cards of your deck (to "scry" the future, in other words), and either place the cards back on the top or the bottom of the deck. It's an extremely useful ability even if it isn't very flashy, because it allows you to manage your card draws far more efficiently than otherwise. As I've discussed before, there is a large element of luck in Magic that comes from the nature of randomized card drawing. Scry helps cut down on a bit of that randomness by giving you the ability to predict and pick which cards you need most off the top of your deck. The number "2" refers to the number of cards you can look at for this Scry - you could also Scry for 1 card, Scry for 3 cards, or potentially even more (although I do not know off the top of my head if any Scry effect goes above 3).

One of the challenges with making Magic cards is coming up with new variations on old ideas. Direct damage is one of the oldest tricks in the book, dating back to the beginning of the game, and because it is so essential to Red's color identity there need to be different types of direct damage in every set. That means that the designers have to figure out the best way to do the same thing but slightly different over and over again - no mean feat. Magma Jet manages this by bolting on the Scry component to the basic direct damage effect. On its own, 2 CMC (converted mana cost) for 2 damage would be really steep - the industry standard here is Shock, with two damage at one red mana - strictly worse than Lightning Bolt, but in a play environment that lacks Lightning Bolt it does the job. Adding another mana to be able to Scry for 2 is a good deal.

Unfortunately it's hard to tell at this size and on the computer screen what's actually going on in the art here - it looks, upon close inspection, as if a little dude, possibly a goblin or wight or some such - is getting blasted by the card's titular blast of magma. The art is significantly better on the reprint they did for last year' Theros. (Also, if you really want to see people getting intense about Magma Jet, you can always click here - if you dare.)

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Herd Gnarr (Time Spiral, 2006)



Well, this is a pretty boring card. Oh, I'm sure it's somebody's favorite, under the same principle that every comic book character is someone's favorite. But on its own, out of the context of its block, our friend Herd Gnarr is just another in a long lineage of boring common creatures made to fill holes in the Limited environment but without much in the way of longevity outside of the most focused of decks. (If you had a deck filled with creatures and enough room in your curve for an overpriced 2/2, this might fit. Or if you have a deck designed to pump out lots of token creatures, that might actually make this card playable.)

While the card itself is nothing much, the story behind the card is actually much more interesting. Herd Gnarr was printed in 2006's Time Spiral block. Time Spiral is a unique block that remains wildly popular with experienced players but which sold poorly at the time. The reason for this was simple: it was a very complex play environment. Time Spiral was Magic for people with PhD's in Magic, and there wasn't a lot of room left over for casual players - in fact, the complexity of Time Spiral design is one of the leading factors in Wizards rededicating themselves to restricting complexity at common in order to create less alienating play environments for casual players. There's a phrase for this: New World Order. If you have any interest at all in game design or just design in general, I recommend you click on that link. Understanding the ways in which complexity is rationed in Magic is one of the most important factors in understanding the development of the game over the last twenty years, as well as the game's massive resurgence over the last five or six.

The premise of the Time Spiral storyline was fairly simple, even though the execution was exceedingly complex. It was an attempt to create a time travel story in the context of a card game. The block was composed of three sets - Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight. The first set which we're discussing here today was dedicated to exploring Magic's history, the second set was devoted to the idea of alternate universes and divergent timelines, and the third was focused the future. (I'll put aside any discussion of the second and third sets in the block, with the understanding that Gatherer will probably spit out cards from these sets at some point for future discussion.) There was also a prominent post-apocalyptic theme to the story, as the time distortions were a result of massive destruction wreaked on Dominaria (Magic's original plane) by the events of the game's original storyline, the Brothers War from Alpha, and the subsequent Phyrexian invasion that formed the metastory for the second half of the game's first decade. (If all that's Greek to you, don't worry, my knowledge is strictly secondhand as well.) So, because Dominaria had been almost destroyed a few times, and was facing a definitive end as the result of Teferi's hijinks, time went cattywompous, and Wizards got to play around with time travel for a year.

Since the gimmick for TIme Spiral was the past, every card had resonance with a part of Magic's history. Herd Gnarr may be unimpressive in isolation, but players with long memories may have appreciated the callback to Apocalypse's Glade Gnarr and Bog Gnarr. Of course, it is debatable whether or not this was a callback worth making: neither card is particularly fondly remembered, and it should be no surprise that the Gnarr creature type has not been since again. Gatherer assigns every card a rating based on community feedback, and the Magic community has not rated any Gnarr above a 2.7 (out of 5) - a ringing endorsement if ever there was.

Herd Gnarr is an interesting example of Wizards' storytelling ambition, even if the result is less than stupendous. Of course, it also needs to be said that not every card can be good - this is something else the company is surprisingly honest about: bad or mediocre cards have to exist in order for good cards to stand out. And even a seemingly bad card can be a good in the right context - as I said, this might be a perfectly fine card in a Limited pool, even if it has probably seen little play in the years since the release of Time Spiral.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Ajani's Pridemate (Magic 2011, 2010)



Ah, Ajani's Pridemate. A card I actually play, and a card that I return to fairly often. If you know anything about Magic, you can probably guess what kind of player I am: I am That Guy who loves Lifegain. Meaning, I'm really into non-interactive defensive strategies that win through attrition. Meaning, back when I hung out on MTGO I would get more than a few opponents rage-quitting after saying something to the effect of, "ur decks ghey."

For those of you who don't know Magic, every regular game begins with each player at twenty life. (Different formats change that, but twenty is standard.) Various cards and effects can raise your life total above twenty. It's not always a popular strategy because, as I implied above, Lifegain tends to elongate games and - in extremis - can contribute to static, non-interactive board states that can force a victory by pressing the opponent to concede. Admittedly, it's not fun to be on the other side of the table when your opponent is racking up ten or twenty or fifty extra life per turn and you're stuck swinging for what would under normal circumstances be lethal damage - but if you let me put a stable Lifegain motor on the board and can't deal with my Soul Wardens and Rhox Faithmenders and my Serra Ascendants, well, that's on you, really.

Anyway. I promised last week that I would spend more time talking about the development of story in Magic. This modest card here offers a perfect opportunity to talk about some of the important ways in which the game has changed in the last decade. The name of the card is Ajani's Pridemate, so the first question that should occur to you is, who is Ajani? The short answer is that Ajani is a humanoid lion with a lot of friends who also happen to be cat warriors. The longer answer is that Ajani is a Planeswalker, a powerful new type of card introduced in 2007 in Lorwyn. Planeswalkers are cards that represent powerful beings who you can summon to influence the game.

Magic owes a great deal of its resurgent popularity these past few years to the existence of Planeswalkers. Older fans (and periodically returned fans such as myself) may bewail the cards for being so powerful, for having warped the shape of the game through their ubiquity, and simply for representing perhaps the biggest change in Magic since its inception. But the reason why the Planeswalkers are so important is that they provide the one ingredient that was missing in terms of the game's mass appeal: faces and characters. Oh, sure, Magic had always had characters: they're the creatures on the cards, after all. And there were marquee characters, too, throughout the game's history - important creatures such as Gerrard Capeshan or Nicol Bolas or Teferi who served double-duty as powerful cards and as important players in the game's storyline. But Planeswalkers were different. Instead of being a character who could appear in one or two storylines before the setting changed, Planeswalkers possess the ability to "walk" between the "planes" of Magic's multiverse - thereby participating in long ongoing continuities.

So even though the last few years have seen the game switch settings between the Greek-myth inspired world Theros, a return to the city-planet Ravnica, and the Gothic-horror themed Innistrad - each a separate and distinct plot and play environment - the storyline now allows for a small group of characters to move across these worlds at will, thereby carrying across a larger meta-story from year to year. Since Magic really only gets to tell one major story per year, that means that the storytelling moves at a glacier's pace - we're still waiting to see how Rise of the Eldrazi ended, for instance, even after five years of seeing certain characters recovering from the cataclysmic events of that story.

It was announced last month that they are moving forward with a Magic movie, in the hopes of turning the Magic IP into Fox's Lord of the Rings. (This is especially important now since, you might recall, Disney bought Star Wars, and therefore Fox will never have another new Star Wars movie to distribute.) That this is even within the realm of possibility is due at least partly to the fact that the company has retooled so much of their branding to support popular Planeswalker characters like Jace (their Wolverine, as stupid as it sounds) and Chandra. The game now has faces to go along with it: imagine chess if the bishops were real rude dudes and you might get an idea of what we're talking about here. If making a movie out of Battleship represented the height of idiocy, a Magic movie actually makes a lot of sense: the game already has twenty-years of storylines and a pile of popular characters ready to be plastered onto lunchboxes across the planet.

All of which brings us back to Ajani's Pridemate. Ajani is a powerful Planeswalker, but the problem with Planeswalkers in terms of actual gameplay is that they are very rare. (I haven't discussed rarity yet, so suffice it to say that every Planeswalker card is a hard-to-get chase card.) Even though the characters are the face of the game, it's unlikely that the average amateur player will have much interaction with them. So the characters show up around the game in other ways: here, we see Ajani's friends palling around, here's some more of his buddies, here's his face in the clouds. Even if you never actually lay hands on Ajani himself, you know who he is because he makes his presence felt throughout the game, and then you go buy the t-shirt.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Simic Sky Swallower (Dissension, 2006)



One of the problems with Gatherer is that it posts the cards at slightly smaller size than they would be if you were holding it in your hand, which can sometimes make it difficult to ascertain exactly what the art is showing. I found a larger version of the art for this card here, courtesy of some old promo materials. Scary dude.

Last week saw a huge creature from the first Ravnica block, and in a stunning turn of events, this week . . . also features a huge creature from the first Ravnica block. Someone asked me on Twitter last week if I could spend more time talking about how the storylines are developed in Magic, and in particular how a trading-card game can be used as a vehicle for any kind of long-form storytelling. That's a good question, and I realize that so far in this series I haven't discussed the process in itself. So let's discuss it now, keeping in mind this is a big topic that will take time to cover adequately.

The first thing that should be pointed out is that because Magic is such a large game, it has a variety of different types of fans and players. (I won't go into Mark Rosewater's famous "psychographics" theory here, but leave it be said that the game takes its responsibilities to each different type of player very seriously.) Some players are naturally more involved with the competitive aspects of the game, and could be described as either serious duffers or aspiring Tournament players. At the far extreme of this "type" are folks who probably wouldn't be too upset if the cards themselves came without any art or story attached, just stats and rules. But on the far end of the spectrum from these are players who really deeply care about the storyline and know all the intricacies from the game's twenty years' of continuity. These types of players aren't necessarily unserious or noncompetitive - anymore than serious competitors can't be interest in the game's story elements - but these are the two main poles of Magic fandom. (In technical terms, you have "Melvin" and "Vorthos," which aren't really player types but fan types.) What this means is that you're trying to sell the same product to two very different audiences: on the one extreme, highly-competitive math-oriented nerds (if the shoe fits...) who have no vested interest in the game as story; and on the other, fantasy nerds (if the shoe fits...) who love the story, the art, and the characters, but who may even in some instances not even play the game, who might collect the cards for the art, and who have little vested interest in the story as a game. Most players fall somewhere in between these two extremes, but that should give you an idea of the different masters that must be served by each Magic release.

To their credit, this is a tightrope they have gotten very good at walking. The game's early years were split schizophrenically between overpowered sets with less attention paid to story elements and drastically underpowered sets with highly-developed storylines. 1994's ultra-powerful Arabian Nights was the game's first real expansion set, also the only set to take place ostensibly in the "real" world of Earth myths, and also a set without a storyline of its own other than a basic adherence to Arabian myths and culture (they fixed that a few years later when they retroactively grafted a new storyline onto the Arabian Nights setting in a comic, I believe). With a few other single-card exceptions from the game's early years, Magic has stayed far away from Earth since then. But just a year after that Magic also published The Dark, a woefully underpowered set with an overdeveloped storyline and setting.

Cut ahead over ten years to the Ravnica block and you see the product of an extremely sophisticated design and development system wherein both gameplay and storyline are given prominence, and - most importantly - are no longer seen as competing for valuable resources within the world of the game. Ravnica remains one of the game's most popular settings and sets - popular enough on both scores to rate a sequel. The key here is that they figured out how to make story and play compliment each other. From one way of looking at things, Ravnica is a setting built around the mechanical interplay of ten two-color pairs - each possible two-color combination on the five-color wheel that defines the game. The challenge for a designer is to figure out how to make each two-color pair more or less equal in terms of gameplay and mechanical value. But from another way of looking, Ravnica is a giant city world defined by unceasing conflict - in terms of both political and literal warfare - between ten evenly-matched guilds, each guild being in turn a locus of fierce internal strife and dangerous political machinations within its own power base. As the storyline develops the game designers find new ways to reflect the story in the cards themselves - and similarly, as the set's mechanical profile takes shape, the creative team must rise to the challenge of explaining new game elements in the context of the storyline.

All of which brings us back to our friend, Mr. Simic Sky Swallower. This card is blue and green, which means it belongs to the Simic guild. This is an extremely well-designed card because it plays into the mechanical identities of both colors: green (as mentioned last week) is traditionally the color of large creatures, whereas blue is the color of evasion and trickery. Sure enough, the Sky Swallower is a giant beast - technically a "Leviathan" with square 6/6 stats and Trample. But it also has Flying - something that Green, with its focus on giant earthbound creatures, rarely gets, as well as Hexproof (or at least the ability which was later keyworded as Hexproof in a more recent rules update). Hexproof is very powerful, because it means the creature can't be the target of any opponent's spells or abilities - meaning it can't be destroyed by anything but another creature, or a spell or ability that indiscriminately kills multiple creatures without specifically targeting any. Flying creatures can only be blocked by other creatures with Flying, or Reach (an ability that allows creatures without Flying to block Fliers - the ability is often placed on spiders, to give you an idea of how it works). All of which adds up to a giant flying monster that cannot be directly killed and evades most attempts to destroy or control it - definitely in keeping with the Simic's guild philosophy as being the home of "mad scientists" who concoct dangerous and unstable biological hybrids.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Autochthon Wurm (Ravnica: City of Guilds, 2005)



Now that's a big-ass creature.

For those of you who may never have touched a Magic card in your life, allow me to explain. I've mentioned previously that the numbers in the bottom right corner of creature are the creature's power and toughness. This means that our friend Autochthon Wurm can do nine damage and can take up to thirteen damage before dying. (Damage disappears at the end of the turn, when the creature "heals," unless you have another effect or ability that causes damage to stick around such as Wither or Infect.) That's huge. The biggest creature in the game (barring the ever-adorable B.F.M.) is the Marit Lage token that Dark Depths creates. The biggest non-token creature (prior to Return to Ravnica, for reasons that will become clear in a moment) is, I believe, our old buddy Emrakul. (My personal policy is that I scoop the moment Emrakul hits the table. I've been able to survive against other Eldrazi, but never Emrakul.) So, even if he's not the biggest monster in the multiverse, he's still pretty awesome. The Trample makes him especially appealing (Trample is an ability that allows the remainder of any damage directed to your opponent's creatures to be carried over to your opponent, instead of only killing the creature in question.)

At first I was confused as to why this creature was multicolored. We haven't seen a multicolored (Gold) card so far in this series, so I'll take a minute to explain: Gold cards are cards that require more than one type of mana to cast - in this instance, two White and three Green. Flavorwise (which means, essentially, conceptually), Gold cards have to draw equally from both (or more) of the colors that comprise their casting cost. (Gold isn't the only type of multicolor card, there are also Hybrid cards, which are - to my mind - a little bit more complicated in terms of design, in that I don't always understand the difference between Gold and multicolored, even though Magic R&D asserts that there is a difference.) White doesn't usually produce giant monsters - White is the color most commonly associated with smaller creature types like Soldiers and Warriors who can gang up en masse, with the most notable exception being Angels, their most prominent and iconic "big" creatures. Green is all about giant monsters - that's more or less Green's defining characteristic, and the Wurm is one of the color's defining creature types. So how does our friend here rate as both a Green and a White creature?

There have been two blocks devoted to exploring the plane of Ravnica: Ravnica: City of Guilds from 2005, and then (naturally) Return to Ravnica in 2012. The gimmick behind Ravnica is that the plane is a giant cityscape dominated by ten guilds - each guild representing a different two-color color combination. The challenge for designing these sets has been the difficulty of creating abilities that satisfy the needs of both colors involved in the guild. Convoke, which we see on Autochthon Wurm, manages to present itself as both a Green and a White mechanic by focusing on the number of creatures you have in play. Both White and Green tend to build strategies around playing many creatures, so the idea of a mechanic that rewards you for doing just that by making it easier to cast otherwise prohibitively expensive spells is a natural in terms of flavor crossover. As I mentioned above, Return to Ravnica printed another 15/15 creature to keep Emrakul company, the impressive - if slightly less psychotic - Worldspine Wurm, undoubtedly a callback to this earlier card. Let me just say, I bet it really sucks to live in a city that's constantly under threat of giant wurm rampages.

The word "autochthon" means that something or someone has emerged, parentless, from the earth itself - "chthon," from the earth, and "auto," self, or itself. The Spartoi of Thebes were supposedly autochthonic because they emerged from the ground after the fields had been sown with dragon's teeth by Cadmus. Similarly, Athens boasted of being an autochthonic nation because they believed that the city and its denizens had never moved or immigrated - hence, a warning to all potential conquerors or rivals that the city and its citizens were firmly rooted and could not be easily defeated. In this instance, however, the Wurm in question is a giant monster who apparently emerges from the depths of the city to fuck shit up. If you can't make it out from the tiny picture, the Wurm is demolishing buildings and completely outclassing the little winged people floating around its head. This is one wurm with whom you do not want to fuck.

Monday Magic

In which Tim explores the world of Magic: The Gathering one
card at a time, courtesy of Gatherer's "Random Card" button.

Renewing Touch (Portal Second Age, 1998)



Huh, another Portal card. Statistically speaking, the odds of two cards from the Portal sets popping up within a couple weeks of one another seems small. My challenge for myself in this exercise is to never gin the selection: whichever card comes up when I press the button - with the sole exception of basic lands, for obvious reasons (and if you don't know Magic, well, trust me that it wouldn't make for an interesting column) - I will write about that card. Just in case you were wondering.

Portal, as we discussed last time, was a series of beginner's-only set published in the late nineties. The sets had simplified rules, and the cards themselves had simplified effects. One of the side-effects of this simplification is that a few cards in the set appear to be significantly more powerful than they would have been had they been costed to be played in a normal environment.

Let me unpack that statement for any of you who may be lost. Magic is partly a game of resource management. You start off with the same amount of cards as your opponent (or opponents) and from that point it's a race to see who can build the best defenses or mount the biggest offensive threat. Every spell you cast has to be paid for, and the cost of that spell can be read in the little cartoon symbols in the upper right corner of the card. This is a green card, meaning that the casting cost must be paid in green mana - only one of them in this case. The number of symbols on the card is the amount of mana you need to pay to create the effect - that part, at least, is fairly straightforward. You get mana from lands - to which I alluded above - which can be "tapped" (turned 90 degree clockwise) to produce one mana of the kind that land produces. There are five types of basic lands - Plains (not to be confused with Planes), which produce white mana; Islands, which produce blue; Mountains, which produce red; Swamps, which produce black; and Forests, which produce green.

This is what a forest looks like, although every basic land has hundreds of different versions with different art. They all do the same thing, though.



Since this is a green card that requires one green mana to play, you would need one Forest in order to be able to play it. You can (usually, although there are effects which can change this) play only one land a turn, so it is extremely important to make sure you can place a land every turn, or almost every turn. Since Magic is also a game played with randomized decks, figured out how to ensure you pull sufficient mana can be challenging. For people with more time on their hands than I, figuring this out can even involve math. As much as Magic is a strategy game, there is also a significant amount of luck involved in terms of card draws. Figuring out how to manage and minimize this risk is one of the most challenging aspects of the game.

(Also, it occurs to me to point out at this point in the series that I was / am a terrible Magic player. Even though I know a fair amount about how the game works it's still very hard to implement these ideas effectively, which is why the top-level tournament players compete for many thousands of dollars - you can read all about the money prizes here, in case you think I'm joking. I quit the game again a couple months ago - I had quit in the buildup to my Prelims because I find myself prey to compulsive behavior, especially when I'm procrastinating doing something else - like studying - and having Magic on the computer was too much of a distraction. After my Prelim was done I put the game back on my computer and lost a solid week to it before I took a step back and realized, wait a minute, I don't have the impulse control to properly resist this temptation. So its gone, probably for good, and I don't plan on playing again soon unless I can find time to do it in real life. In case you're wondering, my "replacement" for Magic as something to do when I talk on the phone or watch TV is Civilization - which, um, maybe not the best idea to replace crack cocaine with heroin. Purely a lateral move.)

So, long story short: this is an extremely powerful effect put on an almost comically underpriced card. When creatures die or are otherwise taken out of play, they are put in the graveyard. There are a number of ways to get them back, but usually they require a significant investment. This card, however, just lets you shuffle them all back into your deck in one fell swoop. Say it's late in a long game and you're running a creature-heavy deck. Your opponent has good removal and has maintained a good tempo, so he's been able to effectively parry all your thrusts. Suddenly, whoops, these ten awesome creatures you thought were dead are back in my deck, and I may well pull one of them next turn. And since I'm only putting creatures back, and I've already pulled a significant amount of land and spells that aren't going back in the deck, the odds of me pulling a good creature are a lot better than they were ten turns ago. (Remember what I mentioned about math?)

"Renewing Touch" isn't the only card to have this effect, but it may very well be the cheapest. This is not a card I can see them reprinting in a Standard anytime soon.

Anyway, the other interesting thing about this card is that the art was produced by Rebecca Guay. She did a lot of art for the game in the last decade, although don't recall seeing her much in the last few years. She is very good, definitely a disciple of the Pre-Raphaelites - you can seen Rossetti and Waterhouse, as well as N. C. Wyeth, although he was too late to qualify as Pre-Raphaelite. (As well as being American.) Looking through her page I especially like this and this. Her more recent gallery work, if her page is any indication, appears to be moving away from the heavy Pre-Raphaelite influence - this could almost pass for Yoshitaka Amano. She is a talented artist and I wouldn't blame here if she had higher aspirations for her art than providing 2"x1.5" illustration for a piece of cardboard.