not me playing on the floor, lunch break, sophomore year of high school

December 7, 2022 8:08 AM

Narrative designer Bruno Dias (cf. Fallen London) presents: A [not yet] Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, an ongoing weekly series about the decades-long evolution of which kinds of decks competitive M:tG players were relying on in tournament play and exactly which stupid terrible broken cards were responsible for that before subsequently being banned from play forever. The story begins with Chapter 1: Magic as Dr Richard Garfield, PhD Intended.
posted by cortex (37 comments total)

Holy shit, what an extraordinary and ambitious undertaking. Excellent post. Can't wait to go through this.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:15 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oooh, a friend who had been involved in Fallen London introduced me to Bruno's social media presence but I'd missed this. A good thing to kill time with today.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:23 AM on December 7, 2022

FWIW, there are a couple of in-jokes in the titles that casual observers may not recognize:

"A Compleat History" is a reference on its own to a few other books, but also to one of the big bads in Magic, the Phyrexians. The Phyrexians are The Borg on an even greater body horror scale, and their version of assimilation is called "compleation" or "becoming compleat."

"Magic as Richard Garfield intended" is an often-repeated phrase used to describe the convoluted and often degenerate game play patterns that may emerge in games or metagames. Depending on who's saying it, it may be sarcastic or genuine; some people believe the game has deviated wildly from the creator's vision, while others (me included) believe that it was always intended to have ridiculous emergent gameplay.
posted by explosion at 8:30 AM on December 7, 2022 [10 favorites]

I am not the target audience for this—I remember a group at work that would gather at lunchtime in the early 90’s and I was completely disinterested. But now I find I can read a condensed history of thirty years of that and it is modestly fascinating. Kind of like how an individual ant is not terribly fun but an anthill is amazing.

Meaning no knock on gamers, it just isn’t my thing. Some of my best friends are gamers. Wait …

Seriously though, thanks for posting. This will be a lot more fun on a snowy morning than going out to shovel!
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 9:09 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

always intended to have ridiculous emergent gameplay

I'm not going to put any energy into figuring out whether this was a bug or a feature, but the first time I encountered a deck with cards later limited/banned was the last time I played the game. Intentional or not, it was an effective way of filtering out the people who weren't serious about it, like me. The guy who beat me that way tried to apologize and said he could play with a different deck, but I was like, "nah, I'm done."
posted by fedward at 9:16 AM on December 7, 2022

Yeah. Magic is at its best when it is wild weird Calvinball, but the problem is that both the cash-hungry CCG format and the competitive meta pretty much grinds the joy out of that; you're not winning most games unless you're paying real money for cards, and you're not winning anyway unless you're playing basically the same of the two or three decks that are dominating. Which is at the heart of this series: it's not just "what kinds of things were people able to do in Magic in 199x", it's "what decks were best arbitraging the gap between new cards coming in and the broken ones getting banned after defining this latest competitive meta".

Which isn't the most interesting thing to me personally because I'm very much on team Let's Just Get Weird and never played Magic competitively and basically not at all in about 20 years now. But Dias' breakdown of it and clear attention to the details of that whole scene and the interactions between the players and the designers as the game evolved has sucked me in anyway. Regulation Calvinball is a pretty doomed idea, fun-wise, but an accounting of Wizards attempts to regulate it, and the competitive playerbase's exploitation of every mistake or gap in that process, is a nice hot lunch.
posted by cortex at 9:27 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Is "Dr Richard Garfield, PhD" an inside joke or reference of some kind? Typically, you would only write "Dr." or "PhD." It's gauche in the U.S. to write both and I'm wondering if that is intentional; it's something I would expect either from someone who doesn't know that convention or is deliberately poking fun at someone who inappropriately flaunts that credential.
posted by ElKevbo at 9:33 AM on December 7, 2022

Intentional or not, it was an effective way of filtering out the people who weren't serious about it, like me.

If it was intentional they wouldn’t have to ban stuff. There’s just enough complexity to card interaction that it’s inherently hard to balance, and back in the day the designers had no idea how to balance it.

This seems like a place to mention that some years ago now WoTC famously came up with the idea that they should try to offer something to each of a few player “archetypes:”

“Timmy” - who is most excited by playing cool, powerful cards

“Johnny” - who is most excited by emergent card interaction and creative deck building

“Spike” - the competitive player, basically, who is excited by cards that are efficient and, you know, good

or of course people who fit some combination of those profiles.
posted by atoxyl at 9:38 AM on December 7, 2022

I appreciate crazy degenerate decks as a thought experiment and understand the fun of playing around with edge cases in rulesets. But I just wasn't that serious about the game and I was self-aware enough to know that trying to keep up with people who were wouldn't be healthy for me in at least one way. It came along after I'd gotten WAY into comics and caught myself making bad choices, so it was easier for me to identify MtG as another bottomless well and then get out before things took any further turns for the worse.

(Thank you, college obsession with a couple comic book series, for giving me the mental tools to recognize that I am not a person who can collect things).
posted by fedward at 9:39 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Do the postings/thread at any point start from first-ish principles of what's being assayed? I read the first few paragraphs and had the distinct feeling that part of me was trying to Sublime as I all-unknowingly accepted various "Tribal" "Onslaught" etc terminologies as indicative of various play styles. This seems to be coming in in the middle of things, rather than a history as such.
posted by aesop at 9:46 AM on December 7, 2022

I appreciate crazy degenerate decks as a thought experiment and understand the fun of playing around with edge cases in rulesets

If you’re talking about a combo sort of deck I bet somebody can guess which one by the year!

I think it was Jamie Wakefield (a writer and semi-competitive player known for his devotion to idiosyncratic creature-based decks at the height of that… not being the kind that was good) who coined the term “solitaire Magic.” I remember proxying out the “long.dec” Storm combo variant, arguably the most degenerate deck of all time (at least up to the point that I “retired” from playing, we’re talking a 60 percent first-turn win rate) and literally learning to play it out as solitaire. Which honestly was a lot of fun (there is skill involved in playing it optimally) but it’s different when you’re on the other side, of course.
posted by atoxyl at 9:50 AM on December 7, 2022

Do the postings/thread at any point start from first-ish principles of what's being assayed?

Not really; Dias does take a step back at a couple points to cover some of the jargon and tournament structures and whatnot, but it's written more at a level of assuming some overall familiarity with competitive Magic rather than offering any real introduction. Even as a one-time player I found some of it a little dizzying because my knowledge of the mechanics is twenty years out of date and I haven't paid any attention in the mean time.
posted by cortex at 9:53 AM on December 7, 2022

MTGA still pretty cheap, with less of a crap shoot to get cards. There are lots of different formats for when you don't want to play against whatever the "current Meta's" most common broken deck.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:00 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Apparently, word on the street is that most MTG players these days, by a large margin, are playing a "casual" version of the game known as Commander or EDH. It's a 100 card singleton (menaing no more than 1 copy of any card other than lands) deck format and it's an "Eternal" format so it includes a large percentage of all cards ever printed in the past 30 years with not a ton of banned cards either. Some cards that are banned in other "Competitive" formats are fine as a 1-of with a 1-100 chance of showing up in your hand. I personally don't play the format myself but if you were turned off by the hyper competitive metagames of organized play, you might very well fit in to a local Commander/EDH playgroup. They're more likely to exist than competitive events, statistically, is my understanding. Anyways Commander started off as a fan-created format but it is now officially supported by Wizards of the Coast and you can buy pre-made Commander decks wherever they sell magic cards now pretty much. OH did I mention Commander is multi player as well? So you could have like 4 people head down to the game shop, grab 4 different commander decks and start playing right away. In theory.
posted by some loser at 10:23 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Intentional or not, it was an effective way of filtering out the people who weren't serious about it, like me. The guy who beat me that way tried to apologize and said he could play with a different deck, but I was like, "nah, I'm done."

Even moreso nowadays, the best part of Magic is finding a group of people with similar ideas of "fun" and playing with them.

The variant formats and options are numerous. There are also any number of reasons why perhaps MTG won't appeal to you, but dismissing it based on a single game seems a bit hasty.

Commander is a bit daunting to jump into, because of all the potential interactions, but it's kept my local group playing together for 14 years now and everyone can u(se more or less) all their cards.
posted by Dark Messiah at 10:26 AM on December 7, 2022

Solitaire magic does reflect some of the ways MtG can be frustrating. Maybe the best kind of Magic games is a game where most of the features of the other sides cards matter? And the worst is when one side almost or completely ignores the other player's cards in play. This means that generic counterspell, discard, and instant-destroy type cards are the worst kinds of card, as they erase what makes the other card unique.
posted by NotAYakk at 10:49 AM on December 7, 2022

If you’re talking about a combo sort of deck I bet somebody can guess which one by the year!

Ha. I'm pretty sure we were playing with the Unlimited edition and I was out by the time Revised was released. I remember that the friend who beat me picked up a Black Lotus, although I can't be sure if that was before or after the game that did me in. His deck had a couple different Demonic Somethings (IIRC a single Demonic Attorney and a few of some other Demonic [Thing]) and I just remember him playing one card that allowed him to go through his deck and draw and play a different card that then allowed him to go through MY deck, and then play another card, and my game was over before it started. It was a moment of clarity where I could tell that I couldn't compete and had no interest in getting to the level where I could. It's not like I don't have games where I'm that guy. I just identified Magic as a game where the cost of becoming that guy was beyond what I was willing to put into it. This is definitely more about me than about the game.
posted by fedward at 10:53 AM on December 7, 2022

I played Magic in the early days, when it was a group game involving at least 3 players.
Nowadays it seems to be strictly one-on-one matches.
Anybody recall when that change came about?
posted by cheshyre at 10:56 AM on December 7, 2022

I just remember him playing one card that allowed him to go through his deck

Ah heck yeah, the Demonic Tutor. Notable both because it was a really useful card sometimes and because it caused a fucking scene at a youth group gathering one time when I was showing the game to someone and this one girl reacted like I was carving an inverted cross on people's foreheads and chanting in backward Latin. Tactical error on my part probably, but so was going to that youth group at all since I really just wanted to hang out with the girls from school who went to it and I probably could have, like, suggested literally any other social context. Anyway, that's Magic for you.
posted by cortex at 11:00 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

I quit playing Magic when the graphic design for the card frames was changed in 2003. I couldn't handle a shakeup of that magnitude.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:28 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

This means that generic counterspell, discard, and instant-destroy type cards are the worst kinds of card, as they erase what makes the other card unique.

Sort of, but those kinds of cards also provide a lot of both the tactical and “poker-ish” strategic decision-making in the game. WoTC has definitely tried to strengthen creature-based and “interactive” deck types over the years - but of those card types it’s probably counterspells that have been cracked down on the most. More or less gone are the days of the two-mana answer to anything that doesn’t even let cards enter play. Targeted removal is pretty essential, and discard effects usually present, well, a choice - they just become unfun when they can be repeated too often.

There are a lot of card types that I think one could argue are double-edged in terms of “fun.” “Lockdown” type cards, “engine” cards and of course combo win conditions are often pretty interesting from the standpoint of deckbuilding, but get frustrating to play against when they are too dominant.
posted by atoxyl at 11:31 AM on December 7, 2022

And the worst is when one side almost or completely ignores the other player's cards in play. This means that generic counterspell, discard, and instant-destroy type cards are the worst kinds of card, as they erase what makes the other card unique.

Exactly the opposite. Counterspells, discard spells, and removal spells are forms of interaction that address what your opponent is playing. You are right that Magic's no fun when two decks perform like ships passing in the night, but the game is best when players are incentivized to play many spells and other effects to answer their opponent's cards.

When someone plays a card that stymies your strategy, the response shouldn't be "that card is bullshit," but rather, "how do I play around that bullshit?"
posted by explosion at 11:31 AM on December 7, 2022

I quit playing Magic when the graphic design for the card frames was changed in 2003. I couldn't handle a shakeup of that magnitude.

This isn’t strictly the reason I quit playing seriously (it wasn’t until a couple blocks later, and I mostly just had other things to do) but I also, honestly, still hate the new card faces.
posted by atoxyl at 11:33 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

“new”
posted by atoxyl at 11:35 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

>I played Magic in the early days, when it was a group game involving at least 3 players. Nowadays it seems to be strictly one-on-one matches. Anybody recall when that change came about?

The base MtG rules are designed with the assumption of a 1v1 match. Playing with 3 players tends to result in frustrating/degenerate games. A typical situation with 3 players is that nobody attacks, because if player A attacks player B and both lose a creature as a result, player C benefits. So the best strategy is to just never attack. (There are variant rulesets that do work better for groups, like Commander, which is actually a very popular format for casual play)
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 11:38 AM on December 7, 2022

That question reminds me that the first time I played Magic we both drew out of the same deck.

(there have always been 3+ person casual games and formats but it’s never been the “standard” way to play)
posted by atoxyl at 11:42 AM on December 7, 2022

Though, I mean, at the very beginning a lot of what was “standard” was pretty up in the air - see the discussion in the linked history about the time before there were rules for the number of cards in a deck and the number of each card. And originally there was an idea that players would “ante” cards from their deck to be won by the victor, which was an official mechanic with cards manipulating it and everything.
posted by atoxyl at 11:45 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of the first time I went to a game store on a Saturday i think it was at the time.... they had a gathering spot upstairs from a bar called like "the dungeon" or something. SO anyways I'm playing my crappy trade binder draft chaff deck it's like a bunch of cards i somehow managed to collect I'm not even sure how really I only bought a few packs here and there. Anyways the guy I'm playing against has his deck all in hard sleeves like you'd have your Eric Lindross Rookie card in. man I sound old. so he's got this stack of 60 hard sleeves and its hard not to laugh watching him shuffle but when we play, I had a similar experience to some of the other folks in this thread. Turn one Mox Jet, black lotus, dark ritual, and then -- I still remember, he cast Greed. Then next turn he paid life to draw cards until he found his combo piece and killed me. I played a Land that game. To be fair to my opponent, even back then those cards were not cheap. My takeaway lesson though was more like "if I win the lottery one day, watch out Pro Tour!!". I was never able to afford the time or money to get on the pro tour but now days I still have time to play some Cube draft on MTG Arena whenever it comes around (its not always available).

In fact I just recently made an MTGO (MTG:Online) account so I can play the Vintage Cube draft starting 21 December. The draft pool of this limited time event includes all those cards I could never have afforded to play, and many more as well. Soon (hopefully) I'll be casting my own Black Lotus or Ancestral Recall (virtually).


Incidentally I realize now that Greed is kind of a bad card but at the time it seemed so OP.
posted by some loser at 12:59 PM on December 7, 2022

This is a fun trip down memory lane.

I actually just talked with Richard Garfield for an interview, and he noted that hoarding of cards nearly killed the game. A strong meta means a strong secondary market, and that meant speculation and hoarding. He said they made very intentional moves to dilute the secondary market, overprinting and reprinting, and while collectors hated it, the game took off.

He was showing me a game he'd just built (which can be played with a standard playing card deck but was being sold as part of some NFT thing) that was quite simple but fun, and I can't imagine how daunting it must be to have to build into decades of cruft and history. Breakage is inevitable, but breaking things can be fun!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 2:17 PM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Counterspells, discard spells, and removal spells are forms of interaction that address what your opponent is playing.

They are, but counterspell is kind of waaay too good, and sits in the same color as the "draw extra cards" effect does. So you control player counter threats 1:1, but draw more than their opponent will, which led to the old "draw go blue" decklists dragging the game out looking for a wincon. Force of Will even led to situations where "wait for your opponent to tap out" wasn't even viable. Even their attempt to fix FoW Mental Misstep is banned because every deck can afford to pay 2 life, and pretty much every opponent runs 1CC spells, especially in the early game where Misstep is the optimal counter. Episode 7 covers this at the end.

They've really had to take a marker to the counterspell effect to put enough conditionals on it to avoid sending the meta back there.
posted by pwnguin at 2:31 PM on December 7, 2022

“I do not play such games...with Jake.” - bmo
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:32 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Incidentally I realize now that Greed is kind of a bad card but at the time it seemed so OP.

Well you had the right idea that it’s a hair away from being extremely OP, as evidenced by its big brothers Necropotence and Yawgmoth’s Bargain.

Trix (Illusions-Donate) was pretty much the “pro” version of the deck you’re describing and was a huge deal.
posted by atoxyl at 4:54 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Even their attempt to fix FoW Mental Misstep is banned because every deck can afford to pay 2 life, and pretty much every opponent runs 1CC spells, especially in the early game where Misstep is the optimal counter.

Mental Misstep doesn't really resemble FoW except that it counters a spell. Force of Negation would be the analogy, and well, it's okay but not great.

As stated in the article, FoW broke what made counterspells balanced, which is to say, that it's the exception that proves the rule. Counterspells are not busted, free spells are the problem.

The actual card Counterspell was printed into Modern and promptly made no splash at all. It's much more effective at the kitchen table where the pace of play is slower, but at the tournament level, players are adept at playing around it.
posted by explosion at 6:16 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Anyone for a game of Dominion?
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:12 AM on December 8, 2022

you didn't tell the other half of the story tho, explosion, which is that they also printed five "free spell" cards in that same set (MH2) along with Counterspell. It could be argued that it is those five new "free spells" cards that have made Counterspell so lackluster in the format. Well that and the Channel lands...and Ragavan probably.
posted by some loser at 4:47 AM on December 8, 2022

Free spells are a problem, but without Force of Will there is no eternal format of any kind. It's not totally free, the life matters and having to have another blue card to exile is a resource. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the hall monitor that makes Legacy and Vintage more than just duelling glass cannons, where the die roll determines the victor.
posted by Dark Messiah at 9:09 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wish I'd been able to read this before I interviewed Peter Adkison, who published Magic, yesterday. Could have led to some interesting questions.
posted by Hogshead at 10:37 AM on December 8, 2022