Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Saturday, 22 September 2007
Thank You, Ravnica, Now Sod Off
(Note: the following article was written in England, so the word "colour" will be spelt correctly throughout.)
So there I was at the Ravnica pre-release, autumn 2005, hanging around with a bunch of near-strangers and swapping stories / excuses to explain why we hadn't done better in the Sealed Deck tournament. One member of the group - slightly too old to qualify as a "munchkin", but still too young to accommodate a convincing beard - was opening the Ravnica boosters he'd won in a raffle, and had just found his first Watchwolf. This was the "big" new card at the time, as you may remember. He started leering.
'Hah-hah-hah,' he said, attempting the kind of laugh that teenaged boys like to think of as "sinister". 'It's a 3/3 for only two mana. I can get this out on the second turn.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I think that's the point.'
'But I've got four Savannah Lions,' he said, as if this were a unique achievement. 'And I've got a load of dual lands. I can get tons of dead hard creatures out by the third turn.'
Note the particularly English use of the phrase "dead hard" here. It's generally used to describe big skinheads with tattoos on their necks, not small pieces of card bearing pictures of improbable wildlife.
'I can attack for, I dunno, ten damage after the first couple of turns?' he went on. 'Nobody's going to be able to do anything about it.'
'Mmmm,' I said. 'Of course, you do realise… other people have got this card as well.'
'What?' he said.
'It's a mass-produced object,' I told him. 'They've printed thousands of them. Other people have also got Watchwolves.'
'But if they're not playing green and white…' he began. He left this sentence unfinished, as if giving me a chance to complete it myself and then say "my God, you're right!".
'If they're not playing green and white, then they can use some of the other two-colour cards,' I said. 'Most of them look overpowered.' I thought about showing him the Putrefy I'd picked up in the Sealed Deck tournament, but decided that it might make the argument much too complicated.
He just shrugged, and pointed to the Watchwolf again.
'Yeah, but you can get this out on the second turn,' he said.
All Magic players have this problem, to some degree. We tend towards an instinctive selfishness, a need for pretend-glory that makes us think of "good" cards as our friends and nobody else's. It never strikes us, until it's too late, that they're only "good" as long as they're on our side of the table. Overpowered cards are like any other form of cruelty: they may seem funny when we're not on the receiving end, but we're the first to start whining when they're used against us. We like to imagine that we've done something terribly clever by finding a big, powerful rare card in a booster and putting it into our deck, when of course, congratulating ourselves for getting a dual land instead of a Moonlace is like congratulating the Queen for having a king as her dad. It's not an achievement, it's just the luck of the draw, yet the very nature of Magic blinds us to this. We get a rare dragon, and we feel… special.
Then again, what do I mean by a "good" card? These days, the word "good" is used in a purely Spike sense: "good" means "too powerful for its mana cost", "good" means "a card that allows Player One to deal obscene amounts of damage to Player Two without any comeback". It wasn't always this way. In the early phase of Magic, "good" tended to mean "interesting", whether the card was workable or not. Even Lich - a card which nobody ever, ever managed to use properly - was considered "good", because it was so bizarre that you just couldn't resist trying it. Black Lotus is often considered to be the "best" Magic card ever printed, but people who were actually playing the game in 1993-94 don't remember it that way. They remember it being the worst card ever printed, because they remember being the target of the Black Lotus / Channel / Fireball combo and losing the game before they'd even laid a single land. And what's the point even playing a game like that…? No, the equation's quite simple: all "good" cards are bad. All "good" cards either wreck the game, or just make it very, very dull.
Which is why I'm going to suggest the following proposition. Many (if not most) Magic players here in 2007 will disagree with it, but as we'll see, the evidence bears it out. The proposition is this:
Ravnica is one of the worst expansions, perhaps even the worst expansion, in the history of the game.
Steady, now. There's no denying that it looks nice; that it has the strongest world-story of any block in recent memory; that virtually every booster will contain at least one card which deserves a place in at least one of your decks; and that it has what the game-designers like to call, rather smugly, the "wow factor". But it's also driven Magic into a dead end, by encouraging repetitive, homogenised decks; by rewarding thoughtless, unimaginative play; and by promoting the version of Magic in which the player who spends the most money on rare cards has the greatest chance of winning.
The first problem - the most obvious problem - is the nature of the multi-colour cards. These have always been popular, though not always for the right reasons. Players think they like multi-coloured cards, because multi-coloured cards look shiny and exciting, especially if they feature the word "Legendary". In truth, however… multi-coloured cards make the game less varied, less dynamic, and less interesting. Not convinced? Well, think about it this way. Let's suppose that every Magic deck is either a mono-coloured deck or, more commonly, a two-coloured deck. (Yes, I know that's not true. But two-coloured decks are the bedrock of Magic, so let's take it as a model for now, and leave tricky tri-coloured dual-land-heavy decks for later.) This means that there are fifteen basic colour-combinations of deck: all-white, all-green, all-red, all-black, all-blue, white / green, white / red, white / black, white / blue, green / red, green / black, green / blue, red / black, red / blue, black / blue.
Now, supposing you open a booster and get - say - a reasonable-looking green card. In how many decks might you possibly be able to use it…? Easy: five out of fifteen. Any single-coloured card can theoretically be used in one-third of all decks, even if it doesn't necessarily "fit" there. But what if you get a green-and-black card? How many of the fifteen decks can that be used in? Easy: one. Any two-coloured card can only be used in one-fifteenth of all decks. In itself, this means that multi-coloured cards rob Magic of much of its diversity and unpredictability. The whole point of the game is that every deck reflects its owner's personality, that every stack of sixty cards is a unique combination. The number of possible Magic decks is vastly greater than the number of possible games of chess, vastly greater than the number of different human fingerprints that might ever exist on Earth. Two-coloured cards, by their very nature, are designed to reign in that diversity and narrow the options.
"A-hah," say fans of multi-coloured cards, "a-hah! But that's the whole point of multi-coloured cards. A green-and-black card can only be used in one deck out of fifteen, which is why multi-coloured cards are more powerful than mono-coloured cards. Because they're less easy to use. True?"
False. Because, like the beardless young man who was so excited about Watchwolf, this argument ignores an obvious point: every two-colour combination has its own set of two-colour cards. If you've got a green-and-black deck, then you see Putrefy, and you put it in your deck. Why wouldn't you? If you've got a white-and-red deck, then you see Lightning Helix, and you put it in your deck. Again, why wouldn't you? These cards aren't "harder to use", because if you're already playing a deck of those two colours, then they're as straightforward as any other cards. They're more specific than most, yet they're in no way more difficult to play. The justification for Watchwolf is that you need two specific colours in order to play it, but what does that really mean? If you're using those two colours, then it simply won't be a problem. If you're not, then you can use one of the power-obsessed two-colour Ravnica cards that matches whatever two-colour combination you happen to be using. The argument that two-colour cards "reward" two-colour play is nonsense, because the vast majority of decks have at least two colours already. All you have to do is add the "good" Ravinca cards that suit your colours, and your deck automatically becomes more powerful. You don't even have to think about it.
Pay careful attention to what I said in those last two sentences, because it's at the heart of understanding why Ravnica has made the game so repetitive over the last two years. Unlike lesser trading-card games, Magic isn't designed to have cards that every player "must" use. This is a game of diversity and unpredictability, remember. True, green has always been overly attached to Llanowar Elves and / or Birds of Paradise, but in general… in general, any particular two-colour combination can be a world of surprises. Even if you know that you're playing against a green-and-black deck, you're still not supposed to know what your opponent is going to throw at you. Even if you know that you're playing against a red-and-white deck, you're still not supposed to be able to name any single card that's guaranteed to be in your opponent's library. But with Ravnica, this essential surprise-element of Magic is removed. If you come up against green-and-black, then you can be 100% certain that your opponent will use Putrefy, because he'd be an idiot not to use it. If you come up against red-and-white, then you can be sure that your opponent will hit you with a Lightning Helix at some point, because it's too good for him to ignore. Far from being shiny and exciting, two-colour cards have made decks as bland and as faceless as low-cost housing-blocks. A player's deck is no longer an expression of his individuality, but a collection of the most efficient "good" cards of his colours. Magic has become homogenised.
Flash-forward to 2006, and I'm playing in a "proper" Standard tournament. By this point, I've become irritated by the way that card-dealers are exploiting Ravnica, and by the idea that nobody believes you can build a serious deck without buying sixteen dual lands at £10 each. Faced with this combination of greed and dullness, I decide to enter the tournament with a deck which contains no rare cards whatsoever. It doesn't do badly. I lose the first match, win the second, win the third, lose the fourth, win the fifth. I'm clearly not going to finish in the top five, but I can still take satisfaction in the thought that a deck which cost me £10 has beaten at least three decks where the rare lands alone must have cost more than £100. (I've refined my "cheap" deck since then, so that it fares rather better against more expensive competition. I might come back to this in another article.) The trouble is…
…the trouble is, I've noticed something disturbing. No, not disturbing: I've noticed something boring. Every single deck I've played against has followed one of two patterns. A couple of them have been decks that slap down white / green / red dual lands, bring out a Silhana Ledgewalker, put a Moldervine Cloak on it, then use the other two colours as support; but most have been "zoo" decks that slap down white / green / red dual lands and use them to play a succession of drab, overpowered weenies. In three matches out of five, every single game has begun with my opponent bringing out either Kird Ape or Savannah Lions, following it up with either Watchwolf or Scab-Clan Mauler, then… doing absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever. About 50% of the time, my deck manages to cope with this and goes on to win the game, but it all depends on my opening hand. Which means that I can basically just look at my opening hand and instantly say "win" or "lose".
Therefore, I'm bored. Christ, I'm bored. As with the old Black Lotus / Channel / Fireball knockout, there just doesn't seem any point in playing, since I can predict everything that's going to happen as soon as the first card hits the table. I seriously consider dropping out of the tournament, but this is against my nature. So I feel I have no option but to go to the bar, get drunk, and treat the last few games as the debacle they so obviously are. The next time I face a Watchwolf deck, I concede the game as soon as I draw a "lose" hand. My opponent looks at me as if I'm insane, but he's happy to take the win. Well, why wouldn't he be? If he's dull enough to play a "zoo" deck, then he's dull enough to want to win without actually playing. I notice the irony in this situation: he's looking at me as if I'm the mad one. I consider asking him how much money he spent on all those dual lands, just for the pleasure of playing identical games against other identical decks, but I decide that it might be considered impolite.
I later discover that of all the decks played in the tournament, more than 85% of them followed three basic patterns: the Watchwolf "zoo" deck, the Silhana Ledgewalker deck, and (less common) the Dragonstorm deck. Dragonstorm is obviously the bastard offspring of Time Spiral, but the other two are the inevitable consequences of Ravnica… the expansion-block which, I say again, has led to more tedious games and less creative Magic play than anything else in the last fourteen years. Even Mercadian Masques didn't leave the game in this kind of stasis. Even Homelands, unquestionably the worst expansion in terms of pure design, didn't push us towards this kind of impasse. (Homelands, for those who weren't there at the time, was the Magic equivalent of fan-fic: an entire expansion which left you wondering whether a bunch of geeky Magic fans with no design experience had broken into the Wizards offices and replaced all the cards with their own nerdy ideas. The tell-tale sign was the number of cards which included the names "Serra" and "Sengir", as if the people responsible wanted to bask in the reflected glory of the core set's most popular creatures.) I'm sorry, but it's true. Other expansions may have had less of a "wow factor", and almost all of them have contained less "good" cards, yet Ravnica introduced a whole new level of stagnancy to Magic.
But there's one other problem with multi-coloured cards, something so fundamental that it's hard to believe it's not better-recognised. Magic was, as we all know, designed by a mathematician: we might therefore expect modern Magic designers to have a fair grasp of mathematical principles, especially probability theory. Yet multi-coloured cards rely on a complete misunderstanding of the way probability works. Consider this…
Part of the justification for cards like Watchwolf is that it's harder to play a card which costs *W *G (my shorthand for "one white mana and one green", natch, because I don't have the proper symbols available to me here). As I've already suggested, this is nonsense in itself: if you're already playing a white-and-green deck, then the idea that it's somehow hard to generate one mana of each colour is clearly flawed. Yet the problem goes deeper than that. The fact is that statistically, it's actually easier for a white-and-green deck to generate *W *G than to generate two white mana or two green mana.
Just think about it for a moment. Suppose you've got a deck full of Watchwolves. Suppose you don't have any dual lands (you probably can't afford them), so you're playing with ten forests and ten plains in your deck. The first land you draw, while drawing your opening hand, is a plains. Now, is it more likely that the next land you draw will be a plains or a forest? Answer: it's more likely that it'll be a forest, because there are still ten forests left in your deck, but only nine plains. It works the other way around, of course. If the first land you draw is a forest, then it's more likely that the next will be a plains. But either way, the chance that your first two lands will be a plains and a forest is much greater than the chance that they'll be two plains or two forests.
Now imagine that you're playing with a load of Elvish Warriors instead. The Warrior costs *G *G for a 2/3. This is less impressive than the 3/3 Watchwolf, but we're led to believe that this is because the Wolf requires two colours of mana, and is therefore harder to play. So, you need *G *G. The first land you draw is a plains. Oh dear… that means you'll need to draw two forests. All right, let's suppose you're luckier, and the first land you draw is a forest. That means you need to draw another forest, but because there are ten plains left in your deck and only nine forests, you're actually more likely to draw a plains.
You see the problem? It's actually easier to find the *W *G you need to play Watchwolf than the *G *G you need to play Elven Warrior, and yet the Wolf is more powerful, apparently because the R&D department has completely misunderstood the nature of probability. So they make two-colour cards more powerful as a "reward" for being difficult to use, which means that they're giving a power-boost to cards which are already more efficient than mono-coloured cards. Now do you understand why so many Ravnica cards are overpowered? They're priced as if they've got a disadvantage, when in truth they've got an advantage. Putrefy is ludicrously better than any one-colour removal spell in black or green, and the justification is that you have to find 1 *B *G. In fact, if you're playing with forests and swamps, then it's a lot more likely that you'll have 1 *B *G than 1 *B *B. And again, if you're playing black but not green, then you'll just use one of the overpowered black cards with a secondary colour you are using. As we know from experience, the end result is a game environment in which everyone uses exactly the same clutch of cards.
It'd be nice to end this article by saying that Wizards of the Coast has learned from the tedium of the Ravnica era, and that it won't make the same mistakes again. It'd be nice, but… we all know it isn't true. Rather than being remembered as a terrible error of judgement, Ravnica is now considered exemplary: it's become so popular amongst drab, unimaginative players that the "raising of the creature bar" which started with Watchwolf looks likely to continue into the far future. Next week, Lorwyn will be here, and the official previews have already given us Doran, the Siege Tower. Even apart from his other abilities, he's a 5/5 creature for three mana, with no drawbacks. The excuse for this is that he's three-coloured, but this doesn't stop him hitting the table on the second or third turn, it just means that he'll be used exclusively by the same kind of over-funded, under-achieving player who insisted on playing "zoo" decks last summer. When Doran was unveiled as one of this year's Poster Boys - assuming he is a boy, and that Treefolk have genders at all - the newsgroups were full of arguments as to whether he's "broken" or not, but this misses the point. "Broken" and "overpowered" are two different things. "Broken" means "a card so ridiculous that it'll lead to inevitable victories", whereas "overpowered" means "a card so super-efficient that all decks which can use it will use it". Doran isn't "broken", he's just going to result in some very, very boring play.
But overall, the response to Doran, the Siege Tower was positive. Well, of course it was: he's a "good" card, which means that we're bound to love him, until he turns up on the other side of the table and we start complaining about his obvious unfairness. I'm reminded of an article I read in a trading-card magazine, more than ten years ago now, about made-up cards that had been sent to Wizards of the Coast by hopeful ten-year-olds ("dear Wizards of the Coast, this is my idea for a card, please print it because I think it would be good"). One of these was a spell that cost three mana, and read "you win the game". In his letter to the company, the child responsible had written: "If you use this card, please make it rare." It seemed funny, at the time, and yet… more and more, this seems like the state of modern Magic. If the designers did give us a card that won the game for three mana, then you can bet that the message-boards would be clogged up with players - perhaps mostly younger players, perhaps not - saying "wow, this card is made of awesome!". Forgetting, as ever, that everyone would have a copy.
Personally, I'd just like to be able to play "proper" Magic again. I don't exactly want it to be like it was in Ye Olden Days, because it's always been about change, and surprise has always been one of its prime selling-points. But that's just what's gone missing: surprise. I want to play a game in which every deck is a reflection of its owner, rather than a reflection of someone's ability to buy "must-have" rares. I want to play a game in which I have no idea what the opponent's planning, instead of being able to guess the exact makeup of his deck after he's played his first two cards. I want to play a game that lasts for more than five turns. And I don't think I'll be able to play that game this year, or next year, either. Ravnica actively discouraged this version of Magic, and after just a dozen preview cards, Lorwyn is already making the same mistakes. Because we've managed to convince ourselves that those mistakes are… "good".
So there I was at the Ravnica pre-release, autumn 2005, hanging around with a bunch of near-strangers and swapping stories / excuses to explain why we hadn't done better in the Sealed Deck tournament. One member of the group - slightly too old to qualify as a "munchkin", but still too young to accommodate a convincing beard - was opening the Ravnica boosters he'd won in a raffle, and had just found his first Watchwolf. This was the "big" new card at the time, as you may remember. He started leering.
'Hah-hah-hah,' he said, attempting the kind of laugh that teenaged boys like to think of as "sinister". 'It's a 3/3 for only two mana. I can get this out on the second turn.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I think that's the point.'
'But I've got four Savannah Lions,' he said, as if this were a unique achievement. 'And I've got a load of dual lands. I can get tons of dead hard creatures out by the third turn.'
Note the particularly English use of the phrase "dead hard" here. It's generally used to describe big skinheads with tattoos on their necks, not small pieces of card bearing pictures of improbable wildlife.
'I can attack for, I dunno, ten damage after the first couple of turns?' he went on. 'Nobody's going to be able to do anything about it.'
'Mmmm,' I said. 'Of course, you do realise… other people have got this card as well.'
'What?' he said.
'It's a mass-produced object,' I told him. 'They've printed thousands of them. Other people have also got Watchwolves.'
'But if they're not playing green and white…' he began. He left this sentence unfinished, as if giving me a chance to complete it myself and then say "my God, you're right!".
'If they're not playing green and white, then they can use some of the other two-colour cards,' I said. 'Most of them look overpowered.' I thought about showing him the Putrefy I'd picked up in the Sealed Deck tournament, but decided that it might make the argument much too complicated.
He just shrugged, and pointed to the Watchwolf again.
'Yeah, but you can get this out on the second turn,' he said.
All Magic players have this problem, to some degree. We tend towards an instinctive selfishness, a need for pretend-glory that makes us think of "good" cards as our friends and nobody else's. It never strikes us, until it's too late, that they're only "good" as long as they're on our side of the table. Overpowered cards are like any other form of cruelty: they may seem funny when we're not on the receiving end, but we're the first to start whining when they're used against us. We like to imagine that we've done something terribly clever by finding a big, powerful rare card in a booster and putting it into our deck, when of course, congratulating ourselves for getting a dual land instead of a Moonlace is like congratulating the Queen for having a king as her dad. It's not an achievement, it's just the luck of the draw, yet the very nature of Magic blinds us to this. We get a rare dragon, and we feel… special.
Then again, what do I mean by a "good" card? These days, the word "good" is used in a purely Spike sense: "good" means "too powerful for its mana cost", "good" means "a card that allows Player One to deal obscene amounts of damage to Player Two without any comeback". It wasn't always this way. In the early phase of Magic, "good" tended to mean "interesting", whether the card was workable or not. Even Lich - a card which nobody ever, ever managed to use properly - was considered "good", because it was so bizarre that you just couldn't resist trying it. Black Lotus is often considered to be the "best" Magic card ever printed, but people who were actually playing the game in 1993-94 don't remember it that way. They remember it being the worst card ever printed, because they remember being the target of the Black Lotus / Channel / Fireball combo and losing the game before they'd even laid a single land. And what's the point even playing a game like that…? No, the equation's quite simple: all "good" cards are bad. All "good" cards either wreck the game, or just make it very, very dull.
Which is why I'm going to suggest the following proposition. Many (if not most) Magic players here in 2007 will disagree with it, but as we'll see, the evidence bears it out. The proposition is this:
Ravnica is one of the worst expansions, perhaps even the worst expansion, in the history of the game.
Steady, now. There's no denying that it looks nice; that it has the strongest world-story of any block in recent memory; that virtually every booster will contain at least one card which deserves a place in at least one of your decks; and that it has what the game-designers like to call, rather smugly, the "wow factor". But it's also driven Magic into a dead end, by encouraging repetitive, homogenised decks; by rewarding thoughtless, unimaginative play; and by promoting the version of Magic in which the player who spends the most money on rare cards has the greatest chance of winning.
The first problem - the most obvious problem - is the nature of the multi-colour cards. These have always been popular, though not always for the right reasons. Players think they like multi-coloured cards, because multi-coloured cards look shiny and exciting, especially if they feature the word "Legendary". In truth, however… multi-coloured cards make the game less varied, less dynamic, and less interesting. Not convinced? Well, think about it this way. Let's suppose that every Magic deck is either a mono-coloured deck or, more commonly, a two-coloured deck. (Yes, I know that's not true. But two-coloured decks are the bedrock of Magic, so let's take it as a model for now, and leave tricky tri-coloured dual-land-heavy decks for later.) This means that there are fifteen basic colour-combinations of deck: all-white, all-green, all-red, all-black, all-blue, white / green, white / red, white / black, white / blue, green / red, green / black, green / blue, red / black, red / blue, black / blue.
Now, supposing you open a booster and get - say - a reasonable-looking green card. In how many decks might you possibly be able to use it…? Easy: five out of fifteen. Any single-coloured card can theoretically be used in one-third of all decks, even if it doesn't necessarily "fit" there. But what if you get a green-and-black card? How many of the fifteen decks can that be used in? Easy: one. Any two-coloured card can only be used in one-fifteenth of all decks. In itself, this means that multi-coloured cards rob Magic of much of its diversity and unpredictability. The whole point of the game is that every deck reflects its owner's personality, that every stack of sixty cards is a unique combination. The number of possible Magic decks is vastly greater than the number of possible games of chess, vastly greater than the number of different human fingerprints that might ever exist on Earth. Two-coloured cards, by their very nature, are designed to reign in that diversity and narrow the options.
"A-hah," say fans of multi-coloured cards, "a-hah! But that's the whole point of multi-coloured cards. A green-and-black card can only be used in one deck out of fifteen, which is why multi-coloured cards are more powerful than mono-coloured cards. Because they're less easy to use. True?"
False. Because, like the beardless young man who was so excited about Watchwolf, this argument ignores an obvious point: every two-colour combination has its own set of two-colour cards. If you've got a green-and-black deck, then you see Putrefy, and you put it in your deck. Why wouldn't you? If you've got a white-and-red deck, then you see Lightning Helix, and you put it in your deck. Again, why wouldn't you? These cards aren't "harder to use", because if you're already playing a deck of those two colours, then they're as straightforward as any other cards. They're more specific than most, yet they're in no way more difficult to play. The justification for Watchwolf is that you need two specific colours in order to play it, but what does that really mean? If you're using those two colours, then it simply won't be a problem. If you're not, then you can use one of the power-obsessed two-colour Ravnica cards that matches whatever two-colour combination you happen to be using. The argument that two-colour cards "reward" two-colour play is nonsense, because the vast majority of decks have at least two colours already. All you have to do is add the "good" Ravinca cards that suit your colours, and your deck automatically becomes more powerful. You don't even have to think about it.
Pay careful attention to what I said in those last two sentences, because it's at the heart of understanding why Ravnica has made the game so repetitive over the last two years. Unlike lesser trading-card games, Magic isn't designed to have cards that every player "must" use. This is a game of diversity and unpredictability, remember. True, green has always been overly attached to Llanowar Elves and / or Birds of Paradise, but in general… in general, any particular two-colour combination can be a world of surprises. Even if you know that you're playing against a green-and-black deck, you're still not supposed to know what your opponent is going to throw at you. Even if you know that you're playing against a red-and-white deck, you're still not supposed to be able to name any single card that's guaranteed to be in your opponent's library. But with Ravnica, this essential surprise-element of Magic is removed. If you come up against green-and-black, then you can be 100% certain that your opponent will use Putrefy, because he'd be an idiot not to use it. If you come up against red-and-white, then you can be sure that your opponent will hit you with a Lightning Helix at some point, because it's too good for him to ignore. Far from being shiny and exciting, two-colour cards have made decks as bland and as faceless as low-cost housing-blocks. A player's deck is no longer an expression of his individuality, but a collection of the most efficient "good" cards of his colours. Magic has become homogenised.
Flash-forward to 2006, and I'm playing in a "proper" Standard tournament. By this point, I've become irritated by the way that card-dealers are exploiting Ravnica, and by the idea that nobody believes you can build a serious deck without buying sixteen dual lands at £10 each. Faced with this combination of greed and dullness, I decide to enter the tournament with a deck which contains no rare cards whatsoever. It doesn't do badly. I lose the first match, win the second, win the third, lose the fourth, win the fifth. I'm clearly not going to finish in the top five, but I can still take satisfaction in the thought that a deck which cost me £10 has beaten at least three decks where the rare lands alone must have cost more than £100. (I've refined my "cheap" deck since then, so that it fares rather better against more expensive competition. I might come back to this in another article.) The trouble is…
…the trouble is, I've noticed something disturbing. No, not disturbing: I've noticed something boring. Every single deck I've played against has followed one of two patterns. A couple of them have been decks that slap down white / green / red dual lands, bring out a Silhana Ledgewalker, put a Moldervine Cloak on it, then use the other two colours as support; but most have been "zoo" decks that slap down white / green / red dual lands and use them to play a succession of drab, overpowered weenies. In three matches out of five, every single game has begun with my opponent bringing out either Kird Ape or Savannah Lions, following it up with either Watchwolf or Scab-Clan Mauler, then… doing absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever. About 50% of the time, my deck manages to cope with this and goes on to win the game, but it all depends on my opening hand. Which means that I can basically just look at my opening hand and instantly say "win" or "lose".
Therefore, I'm bored. Christ, I'm bored. As with the old Black Lotus / Channel / Fireball knockout, there just doesn't seem any point in playing, since I can predict everything that's going to happen as soon as the first card hits the table. I seriously consider dropping out of the tournament, but this is against my nature. So I feel I have no option but to go to the bar, get drunk, and treat the last few games as the debacle they so obviously are. The next time I face a Watchwolf deck, I concede the game as soon as I draw a "lose" hand. My opponent looks at me as if I'm insane, but he's happy to take the win. Well, why wouldn't he be? If he's dull enough to play a "zoo" deck, then he's dull enough to want to win without actually playing. I notice the irony in this situation: he's looking at me as if I'm the mad one. I consider asking him how much money he spent on all those dual lands, just for the pleasure of playing identical games against other identical decks, but I decide that it might be considered impolite.
I later discover that of all the decks played in the tournament, more than 85% of them followed three basic patterns: the Watchwolf "zoo" deck, the Silhana Ledgewalker deck, and (less common) the Dragonstorm deck. Dragonstorm is obviously the bastard offspring of Time Spiral, but the other two are the inevitable consequences of Ravnica… the expansion-block which, I say again, has led to more tedious games and less creative Magic play than anything else in the last fourteen years. Even Mercadian Masques didn't leave the game in this kind of stasis. Even Homelands, unquestionably the worst expansion in terms of pure design, didn't push us towards this kind of impasse. (Homelands, for those who weren't there at the time, was the Magic equivalent of fan-fic: an entire expansion which left you wondering whether a bunch of geeky Magic fans with no design experience had broken into the Wizards offices and replaced all the cards with their own nerdy ideas. The tell-tale sign was the number of cards which included the names "Serra" and "Sengir", as if the people responsible wanted to bask in the reflected glory of the core set's most popular creatures.) I'm sorry, but it's true. Other expansions may have had less of a "wow factor", and almost all of them have contained less "good" cards, yet Ravnica introduced a whole new level of stagnancy to Magic.
But there's one other problem with multi-coloured cards, something so fundamental that it's hard to believe it's not better-recognised. Magic was, as we all know, designed by a mathematician: we might therefore expect modern Magic designers to have a fair grasp of mathematical principles, especially probability theory. Yet multi-coloured cards rely on a complete misunderstanding of the way probability works. Consider this…
Part of the justification for cards like Watchwolf is that it's harder to play a card which costs *W *G (my shorthand for "one white mana and one green", natch, because I don't have the proper symbols available to me here). As I've already suggested, this is nonsense in itself: if you're already playing a white-and-green deck, then the idea that it's somehow hard to generate one mana of each colour is clearly flawed. Yet the problem goes deeper than that. The fact is that statistically, it's actually easier for a white-and-green deck to generate *W *G than to generate two white mana or two green mana.
Just think about it for a moment. Suppose you've got a deck full of Watchwolves. Suppose you don't have any dual lands (you probably can't afford them), so you're playing with ten forests and ten plains in your deck. The first land you draw, while drawing your opening hand, is a plains. Now, is it more likely that the next land you draw will be a plains or a forest? Answer: it's more likely that it'll be a forest, because there are still ten forests left in your deck, but only nine plains. It works the other way around, of course. If the first land you draw is a forest, then it's more likely that the next will be a plains. But either way, the chance that your first two lands will be a plains and a forest is much greater than the chance that they'll be two plains or two forests.
Now imagine that you're playing with a load of Elvish Warriors instead. The Warrior costs *G *G for a 2/3. This is less impressive than the 3/3 Watchwolf, but we're led to believe that this is because the Wolf requires two colours of mana, and is therefore harder to play. So, you need *G *G. The first land you draw is a plains. Oh dear… that means you'll need to draw two forests. All right, let's suppose you're luckier, and the first land you draw is a forest. That means you need to draw another forest, but because there are ten plains left in your deck and only nine forests, you're actually more likely to draw a plains.
You see the problem? It's actually easier to find the *W *G you need to play Watchwolf than the *G *G you need to play Elven Warrior, and yet the Wolf is more powerful, apparently because the R&D department has completely misunderstood the nature of probability. So they make two-colour cards more powerful as a "reward" for being difficult to use, which means that they're giving a power-boost to cards which are already more efficient than mono-coloured cards. Now do you understand why so many Ravnica cards are overpowered? They're priced as if they've got a disadvantage, when in truth they've got an advantage. Putrefy is ludicrously better than any one-colour removal spell in black or green, and the justification is that you have to find 1 *B *G. In fact, if you're playing with forests and swamps, then it's a lot more likely that you'll have 1 *B *G than 1 *B *B. And again, if you're playing black but not green, then you'll just use one of the overpowered black cards with a secondary colour you are using. As we know from experience, the end result is a game environment in which everyone uses exactly the same clutch of cards.
It'd be nice to end this article by saying that Wizards of the Coast has learned from the tedium of the Ravnica era, and that it won't make the same mistakes again. It'd be nice, but… we all know it isn't true. Rather than being remembered as a terrible error of judgement, Ravnica is now considered exemplary: it's become so popular amongst drab, unimaginative players that the "raising of the creature bar" which started with Watchwolf looks likely to continue into the far future. Next week, Lorwyn will be here, and the official previews have already given us Doran, the Siege Tower. Even apart from his other abilities, he's a 5/5 creature for three mana, with no drawbacks. The excuse for this is that he's three-coloured, but this doesn't stop him hitting the table on the second or third turn, it just means that he'll be used exclusively by the same kind of over-funded, under-achieving player who insisted on playing "zoo" decks last summer. When Doran was unveiled as one of this year's Poster Boys - assuming he is a boy, and that Treefolk have genders at all - the newsgroups were full of arguments as to whether he's "broken" or not, but this misses the point. "Broken" and "overpowered" are two different things. "Broken" means "a card so ridiculous that it'll lead to inevitable victories", whereas "overpowered" means "a card so super-efficient that all decks which can use it will use it". Doran isn't "broken", he's just going to result in some very, very boring play.
But overall, the response to Doran, the Siege Tower was positive. Well, of course it was: he's a "good" card, which means that we're bound to love him, until he turns up on the other side of the table and we start complaining about his obvious unfairness. I'm reminded of an article I read in a trading-card magazine, more than ten years ago now, about made-up cards that had been sent to Wizards of the Coast by hopeful ten-year-olds ("dear Wizards of the Coast, this is my idea for a card, please print it because I think it would be good"). One of these was a spell that cost three mana, and read "you win the game". In his letter to the company, the child responsible had written: "If you use this card, please make it rare." It seemed funny, at the time, and yet… more and more, this seems like the state of modern Magic. If the designers did give us a card that won the game for three mana, then you can bet that the message-boards would be clogged up with players - perhaps mostly younger players, perhaps not - saying "wow, this card is made of awesome!". Forgetting, as ever, that everyone would have a copy.
Personally, I'd just like to be able to play "proper" Magic again. I don't exactly want it to be like it was in Ye Olden Days, because it's always been about change, and surprise has always been one of its prime selling-points. But that's just what's gone missing: surprise. I want to play a game in which every deck is a reflection of its owner, rather than a reflection of someone's ability to buy "must-have" rares. I want to play a game in which I have no idea what the opponent's planning, instead of being able to guess the exact makeup of his deck after he's played his first two cards. I want to play a game that lasts for more than five turns. And I don't think I'll be able to play that game this year, or next year, either. Ravnica actively discouraged this version of Magic, and after just a dozen preview cards, Lorwyn is already making the same mistakes. Because we've managed to convince ourselves that those mistakes are… "good".
Monday, 10 September 2007
The Least Printable Magic Card in China
Well-known fact: although Wizards of the Coast supply Magic: The Gathering to the Far East, Chinese law prohibits pictures of skeletons (they're considered obscene... this is, of course, no more and no less strange than considering genitals obscene). The result is that any Magic card bearing a picture of a skeleton has to be vetted before it's shipped overseas, which is why the Chinese printing of Tenth Edition features the "human-bogey-tadpole" version of Terror from Mirrodin instead of the new "M.C. Escher coughs up his own insides" version.
With this in mind, I thought I'd create the most export-unfriendly Magic card imaginable, a card which couldn't possibly be passed by the Beijing censors. So here it is.
Personally, I find this sort of thing funny. Although I can see how its comic appeal might be rather limited, since it doesn't make sense unless (a) you know about the aforementioned no-skeletons rule, and (b) you have a reasonable understanding of international politics. Magic players aren't, on the whole, well-versed in global affairs. We tend to have a better grasp of where Urborg is than of where Eritrea is. However, I don't want to talk about politics, or skeletons, or even genitals, for once. I want to talk about the business of faking Magic cards.
Many, many years ago, I read a magazine article in which a journalist tried to make a perfect copy of a McDonald's Big Mac in his own kitchen, with exactly the same balance of mechanically-recovered cow-guts and semi-vegetable slurry. Getting the taste right wasn't difficult, but when it came to the presentation, he fell at the first hurdle: no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make the sesame seeds on top of the burger look as randomly-scattered as they do on a real Big Mac. Because as any forger will tell you, it's not the big things that trip you up, it's the tiny, fiddly details. Those petty, almost below-the-radar little points that tug at your instincts and tell you when something's just wrong.
With that in mind, consider the Drudge Democracy Protestor. Even if it had proper artwork (rather than a manky felt-tip cartoon), even if it had a proper artist's credit (rather than the artist's name that happened to be on the card I used as a template), even if it had a proper expansion symbol (rather than an upside-down, unlucky-horseshoe version of the one from Unhinged), and even if it didn't wildly overuse the word "skeleton"at every opportunity... even then, you'd still be able to tell it was a fake. It's the text, isn't it? No bona fide Magic card would have text like that. It's the right typeface, but ohhhh, just look at the spacing. The "k"s are much too close to the "e"s, the "e"s are too close to the "n"s. It's a difference of mere pixels, but as with the sesame seeds, it's enough to tip you off at a glance. Not even Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape would be able to foresee a thing like that.
This isn't the first time I've tried to fake a Magic card. The first time was in 1994, when Legends still seemed shiny and new and exciting rather than awkward and overpriced and full of Kobolds. Now, you have to understand... when I say faking, I mean "making a brand-new card that might actually fool people", not "making counterfeit copies of cards that already exist". There was a glut of counterfeit cards in the UK circa 1994-95, although most of them were just colour photocopies of rare Legends stuck onto Atogs. We were knee-deep in Atogs, in those days. Thirteen years on, this sort of illegal card-cloning is hard to understand, for various reasons. Firstly, it seems bizarre that anyone could have been fooled by the counterfeits for more than a few seconds (but then, in the early days of Magic, the print-quality of real cards was hugely variable... some Unlimited cards were barely even legible). Secondly, it seems bizarre that the card-pirates would bother to make copies of cards from a set that wasn't even four months old, rather than concentrating on the Mox end of the market (but Magic was a rarer commodity then, and it makes more sense when you remember that Legends sold out within two days of reaching Britain). Thirdly, it seems bizarre that the fake Legends tended to be clunky multicoloured creatures rather than anything useful like a Moat or a Mana Drain (but this was a more romantic age). Fourthly, it seems bizarre that anyone would rather have a Ramirez DePietro than an Atog (but that's youth).
No, no, no. This cheap, shameless kind of fakery was of no interest to myself and my like-minded associates. We wanted to create a card, to make something wholly absurd and then see if we could play it in a game without the opponent noticing that anything was wrong. Remember, it was less than a year since the game had arrived in the UK, a time when it was much easier to accept A Card You've Never Heard Of. In 1994, almost nobody had a 100%-complete Magic checklist. There were no magazines dedicated to the art of trading-card foppery, and hardly anyone outside of a university was on-line. For the first year or so, we simply didn't know how many different Magic cards there were in the world. My life in Magic began when someone - his identity has never become clear - left a plastic bag full of cards in a local off-license. An acquaintance of mine found them, and came 'round to my house to try them out. Faced with a huge assortment of creatures, lands and "mono artifacts", we could only make guesses at the size of this odd new cardboard universe. We concluded that in order for the game to work, there had to be at least a thousand cards in the set (there weren't... at that stage, there were less than five-hundred), and that a complete checklist would be almost impossible to assemble. The idea of A Card You've Never Heard Of wasn't just feasible, it was expected.
(Incidentally, I've always had my suspicions about the individual who left the cards in the off-license. For one thing, who leaves bags of trading-cards in shops, even accidentally? For another, why did he never go back and look for them? Even at the time, many of the cards were valuable, some of them discontinued. True, the rarest of them was a Lich rather than a Black Lotus, but even so... the fact remains that because he left his card-stash amongst the Cinzano bottles, two people immediately started playing Magic. Because we started playing Magic, the game infected at least half a dozen others, and probably spread outwards from there. Over the past thirteen years, those people must have spent thousands of pounds on card games, most of them published by the same company. You can see why I'm suspicious. Was that mystery-man a London-based agent for Wizards of the Coast, whose job was to leave "bait" in the vicinity of people who looked like potential gamers? Or possibly an agent of the nearest games shop, hanging around in places where teenagers are likely to be found, in much the same way that drug dealers are supposed to hang around outside secondary schools? After all, what's the price of a Lich compared to the long-term pay-off? You may mock, but I've heard stranger marketing strategies. It's certainly more effective than dressing up as a hot dog and giving out leaflets.)
In the early 1990s, forging your own card was harder than it might now seem. We'd never even heard of PhotoShop, so cut-and-paste meant actual cutting (with scissors) and actual pasting (with Prit-Stick). We realised, right from the start, that we could only make convincing Magic cards by re-assembling bits of other cards. And there was a colour photocopier in the local library, so I took along a clutch of well-known black spells and used them to create the Perfect Beast. Then, just like the "evil" card-pirates, I stuck the finished product onto the face of an unwanted common. An Unlimited-edition Dwarven Warrior, in this case, because the printing on it was awful and it was getting on my nerves.
The resultant atrocity looked something like this (although obviously, I've only just added the silver border):
Stats of a Lord of the Pit, rules text of an old-style Pestilence, an obvious cutting from Plague Rats, plus a picture cribbed from the front of a comic-book. Comic-book experts might now like to waste a small portion of their lives trying to figure out which one.
The first thing to point out about the Fake Plague Lord is that he's in no way related to the later Phyrexian Plaguelord (Urza vintage, 1999), who looks positively rational by comparison. But the more obvious points are that he's strikingly cheap for a 7/7 Pestilence-on-legs - look, it's not as if we really understood how cards were priced in those days, all right? - and that the text doesn't make a lot of sense. You don't discard / destroy him "if there are no other creatures in play", but "if there are no creatures in play", meaning that the Plague Lord is destroyed if... he's destroyed. This may well be the most redundant rules text of all time.
Bearing in mind these fairly obvious problems, would this monstrosity really be able to fool the average player in 1994...? Yes, of course it would. There were a lot of absurdly-priced cards in the game at that stage, and in the days before R&D tested everything to destruction, there were plenty of spells that didn't make sense. Need we consider the original Legends version of Blood Lust, with a text-box that read "target creatures get +4/-4" instead of "target creature gets +4/-4"? For a while, we seriously thought that Blood Lust could affect any number of creatures at the same time. Someone eventually discovered the truth by logging on to this newfangled thing called the internet and looking at the errata list, but there was a fortnight or so in which everybody played it the "wrong" way, and all goblin decks won on the fourth turn. So a little glitch like a card that said "no creatures", when it clearly meant "no other creatures", didn't seem like a big deal.
Except... the sesame seeds. In this case, the feel of the card was the killer. Nothing else on Earth has the exact weight and texture of what we used to call a "Deckmaster card". Plague Lord certainly didn't. Amusingly, the exact makeup of the cardboard used in Magic is now regarded by Wizards of the Coast as a Kentucky Fried Chicken-style secret recipe, and you're not going to get the same effect even if you stick a piece of paper to a Dwarven Warrior. We tried spraying the Lord with Letracote, a product that gives cardboard a glossy plastic finish, but it just wasn't the same. Furthermore, it didn't have the smell of the genuine article. The smell of Magic has always been an important factor in its success: smell is the most evocative sense we have, the most powerful trigger for the human memory, and the subconscious association between "newly-opened booster smell" and "getting a nice surprise, or at least a great big rare dragon" is the kind of thing that would have fascinated Pavlov. (Note that the keyword here is subconscious, since the effect of the smell is rarely acknowledged by the user / addict. This is what led many of the early Magic players to speculate that Wizards of the Coast were putting a trace amount of cocaine inside every booster, to give the consumer an addictive rush when it was opened, although it's got to be said that the people who suggested this theory had no experience of cocaine whatsoever.)
Yet despite all these things, and however improbable it may seem today... in the post-Legends era, the Plague Lord still managed to make it into play without anybody complaining. This was technically cheating on my part, although I'd like to point out that it wasn't a desperate attempt to win the game with a broken card - yes, I know now that it's wildly overpowered, but I didn't then - as much as it was a desperate attempt to get away with something very, very unlikely. I usually did get away with it. Whenever anyone asked why the Plague Lord was oddly discoloured and felt wrong to the touch, I'd explain that it was a "test card", hence the slightly glitchy rules text. This usually satisfied the opponent, who tended to assume that "test card" meant "a card from the earliest test edition of the game", whereas in fact it meant "a test of my ability to use a photocopier and some Prit-Stick". Today, it's hard to make younger players understand just how naïve we all were in the early days of the game, and just how much innocence Magic lost in the period between 1994 and 1995. Somewhere in the span of time between Antiquities and The Dark, checklists became mandatory; "rare", "uncommon" and "common" became accepted as official terms, rather than rough approximations of how often you'd seen a particular card; and Magic became, in a word, finite.
As early as 1996, Richard Garfield lamented the fact that the boundaries of the game had become so well-known, although he accepted that it was inevitable given Magic's success. Personally, I'm just sorry that we now have a gamescape in which there's no point trying to fake cards, because it's no longer possible to surprise anyone. Modern Magic players have special implants that download all the latest spoiler-lists directly into their nervous systems. As ever, it's not that I want to cheat, it's just that... I want to see how ridiculous I can get without anybody spotting the problem. These days, however, even ridiculous cards have an official status (in Unglued and Unhinged). The Drudge Democracy Protestor is positively reasonable, compared to some. The one consolation is that thanks to PhotoShop, we can at least make wholly fraudulent cards in the comfort of our own homes rather than looking suspicious by sitting in the middle of a library with a big pair of scissors.
There are two postscripts to this. The first is that once I'd got bored of playing with the Plague Lord, I put it in my stack of rare trades, where unwary new players would often come across it and stare at it for hours on end. One day I was offered £40 for it, by a collector who automatically assumed that it had to be some kind of rare early-edition card. I declined his offer; making a profit from it would really have been cheating. I have no qualms about stealing from greedy, corrupt or rude people (I see no moral problem with shoplifting from Tesco's, for example), but there was a higher principle at stake. Committing a Magic fraud for money, rather than for the sake of entertainment, is just against the way of things.
And I notice that the illustrator credit on the Drudge Democracy Protestor reads "Glenn Fabry". This is purely because the card I used as a template, Restless Bones, has a Fabry illustration. However, it's fitting that it's credited to the one Magic artist I've actually come into contact with. The first time I met Glenn Fabry was in the early 1990s, when I interviewed him for a fanzine about his 2000 AD work, and he talked quite freely about his notorious behaviour when drunk. The second time I met him was in the actual year 2000 AD, when he was hanging around the bar at a comics convention, as inebriated as I've ever seen a man. It's probably an insult to Glenn to suggest that the manky skeleton cartoon on Drudge Democracy Protestor might be his work, and yet I like the thought that if he should ever come across it while browsing the internet, he might still find himself thinking: 'Is that one of mine? Jesus, what was I drinking that day...?'
With this in mind, I thought I'd create the most export-unfriendly Magic card imaginable, a card which couldn't possibly be passed by the Beijing censors. So here it is.
Personally, I find this sort of thing funny. Although I can see how its comic appeal might be rather limited, since it doesn't make sense unless (a) you know about the aforementioned no-skeletons rule, and (b) you have a reasonable understanding of international politics. Magic players aren't, on the whole, well-versed in global affairs. We tend to have a better grasp of where Urborg is than of where Eritrea is. However, I don't want to talk about politics, or skeletons, or even genitals, for once. I want to talk about the business of faking Magic cards.
Many, many years ago, I read a magazine article in which a journalist tried to make a perfect copy of a McDonald's Big Mac in his own kitchen, with exactly the same balance of mechanically-recovered cow-guts and semi-vegetable slurry. Getting the taste right wasn't difficult, but when it came to the presentation, he fell at the first hurdle: no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make the sesame seeds on top of the burger look as randomly-scattered as they do on a real Big Mac. Because as any forger will tell you, it's not the big things that trip you up, it's the tiny, fiddly details. Those petty, almost below-the-radar little points that tug at your instincts and tell you when something's just wrong.
With that in mind, consider the Drudge Democracy Protestor. Even if it had proper artwork (rather than a manky felt-tip cartoon), even if it had a proper artist's credit (rather than the artist's name that happened to be on the card I used as a template), even if it had a proper expansion symbol (rather than an upside-down, unlucky-horseshoe version of the one from Unhinged), and even if it didn't wildly overuse the word "skeleton"at every opportunity... even then, you'd still be able to tell it was a fake. It's the text, isn't it? No bona fide Magic card would have text like that. It's the right typeface, but ohhhh, just look at the spacing. The "k"s are much too close to the "e"s, the "e"s are too close to the "n"s. It's a difference of mere pixels, but as with the sesame seeds, it's enough to tip you off at a glance. Not even Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape would be able to foresee a thing like that.
This isn't the first time I've tried to fake a Magic card. The first time was in 1994, when Legends still seemed shiny and new and exciting rather than awkward and overpriced and full of Kobolds. Now, you have to understand... when I say faking, I mean "making a brand-new card that might actually fool people", not "making counterfeit copies of cards that already exist". There was a glut of counterfeit cards in the UK circa 1994-95, although most of them were just colour photocopies of rare Legends stuck onto Atogs. We were knee-deep in Atogs, in those days. Thirteen years on, this sort of illegal card-cloning is hard to understand, for various reasons. Firstly, it seems bizarre that anyone could have been fooled by the counterfeits for more than a few seconds (but then, in the early days of Magic, the print-quality of real cards was hugely variable... some Unlimited cards were barely even legible). Secondly, it seems bizarre that the card-pirates would bother to make copies of cards from a set that wasn't even four months old, rather than concentrating on the Mox end of the market (but Magic was a rarer commodity then, and it makes more sense when you remember that Legends sold out within two days of reaching Britain). Thirdly, it seems bizarre that the fake Legends tended to be clunky multicoloured creatures rather than anything useful like a Moat or a Mana Drain (but this was a more romantic age). Fourthly, it seems bizarre that anyone would rather have a Ramirez DePietro than an Atog (but that's youth).
No, no, no. This cheap, shameless kind of fakery was of no interest to myself and my like-minded associates. We wanted to create a card, to make something wholly absurd and then see if we could play it in a game without the opponent noticing that anything was wrong. Remember, it was less than a year since the game had arrived in the UK, a time when it was much easier to accept A Card You've Never Heard Of. In 1994, almost nobody had a 100%-complete Magic checklist. There were no magazines dedicated to the art of trading-card foppery, and hardly anyone outside of a university was on-line. For the first year or so, we simply didn't know how many different Magic cards there were in the world. My life in Magic began when someone - his identity has never become clear - left a plastic bag full of cards in a local off-license. An acquaintance of mine found them, and came 'round to my house to try them out. Faced with a huge assortment of creatures, lands and "mono artifacts", we could only make guesses at the size of this odd new cardboard universe. We concluded that in order for the game to work, there had to be at least a thousand cards in the set (there weren't... at that stage, there were less than five-hundred), and that a complete checklist would be almost impossible to assemble. The idea of A Card You've Never Heard Of wasn't just feasible, it was expected.
(Incidentally, I've always had my suspicions about the individual who left the cards in the off-license. For one thing, who leaves bags of trading-cards in shops, even accidentally? For another, why did he never go back and look for them? Even at the time, many of the cards were valuable, some of them discontinued. True, the rarest of them was a Lich rather than a Black Lotus, but even so... the fact remains that because he left his card-stash amongst the Cinzano bottles, two people immediately started playing Magic. Because we started playing Magic, the game infected at least half a dozen others, and probably spread outwards from there. Over the past thirteen years, those people must have spent thousands of pounds on card games, most of them published by the same company. You can see why I'm suspicious. Was that mystery-man a London-based agent for Wizards of the Coast, whose job was to leave "bait" in the vicinity of people who looked like potential gamers? Or possibly an agent of the nearest games shop, hanging around in places where teenagers are likely to be found, in much the same way that drug dealers are supposed to hang around outside secondary schools? After all, what's the price of a Lich compared to the long-term pay-off? You may mock, but I've heard stranger marketing strategies. It's certainly more effective than dressing up as a hot dog and giving out leaflets.)
In the early 1990s, forging your own card was harder than it might now seem. We'd never even heard of PhotoShop, so cut-and-paste meant actual cutting (with scissors) and actual pasting (with Prit-Stick). We realised, right from the start, that we could only make convincing Magic cards by re-assembling bits of other cards. And there was a colour photocopier in the local library, so I took along a clutch of well-known black spells and used them to create the Perfect Beast. Then, just like the "evil" card-pirates, I stuck the finished product onto the face of an unwanted common. An Unlimited-edition Dwarven Warrior, in this case, because the printing on it was awful and it was getting on my nerves.
The resultant atrocity looked something like this (although obviously, I've only just added the silver border):
Stats of a Lord of the Pit, rules text of an old-style Pestilence, an obvious cutting from Plague Rats, plus a picture cribbed from the front of a comic-book. Comic-book experts might now like to waste a small portion of their lives trying to figure out which one.
The first thing to point out about the Fake Plague Lord is that he's in no way related to the later Phyrexian Plaguelord (Urza vintage, 1999), who looks positively rational by comparison. But the more obvious points are that he's strikingly cheap for a 7/7 Pestilence-on-legs - look, it's not as if we really understood how cards were priced in those days, all right? - and that the text doesn't make a lot of sense. You don't discard / destroy him "if there are no other creatures in play", but "if there are no creatures in play", meaning that the Plague Lord is destroyed if... he's destroyed. This may well be the most redundant rules text of all time.
Bearing in mind these fairly obvious problems, would this monstrosity really be able to fool the average player in 1994...? Yes, of course it would. There were a lot of absurdly-priced cards in the game at that stage, and in the days before R&D tested everything to destruction, there were plenty of spells that didn't make sense. Need we consider the original Legends version of Blood Lust, with a text-box that read "target creatures get +4/-4" instead of "target creature gets +4/-4"? For a while, we seriously thought that Blood Lust could affect any number of creatures at the same time. Someone eventually discovered the truth by logging on to this newfangled thing called the internet and looking at the errata list, but there was a fortnight or so in which everybody played it the "wrong" way, and all goblin decks won on the fourth turn. So a little glitch like a card that said "no creatures", when it clearly meant "no other creatures", didn't seem like a big deal.
Except... the sesame seeds. In this case, the feel of the card was the killer. Nothing else on Earth has the exact weight and texture of what we used to call a "Deckmaster card". Plague Lord certainly didn't. Amusingly, the exact makeup of the cardboard used in Magic is now regarded by Wizards of the Coast as a Kentucky Fried Chicken-style secret recipe, and you're not going to get the same effect even if you stick a piece of paper to a Dwarven Warrior. We tried spraying the Lord with Letracote, a product that gives cardboard a glossy plastic finish, but it just wasn't the same. Furthermore, it didn't have the smell of the genuine article. The smell of Magic has always been an important factor in its success: smell is the most evocative sense we have, the most powerful trigger for the human memory, and the subconscious association between "newly-opened booster smell" and "getting a nice surprise, or at least a great big rare dragon" is the kind of thing that would have fascinated Pavlov. (Note that the keyword here is subconscious, since the effect of the smell is rarely acknowledged by the user / addict. This is what led many of the early Magic players to speculate that Wizards of the Coast were putting a trace amount of cocaine inside every booster, to give the consumer an addictive rush when it was opened, although it's got to be said that the people who suggested this theory had no experience of cocaine whatsoever.)
Yet despite all these things, and however improbable it may seem today... in the post-Legends era, the Plague Lord still managed to make it into play without anybody complaining. This was technically cheating on my part, although I'd like to point out that it wasn't a desperate attempt to win the game with a broken card - yes, I know now that it's wildly overpowered, but I didn't then - as much as it was a desperate attempt to get away with something very, very unlikely. I usually did get away with it. Whenever anyone asked why the Plague Lord was oddly discoloured and felt wrong to the touch, I'd explain that it was a "test card", hence the slightly glitchy rules text. This usually satisfied the opponent, who tended to assume that "test card" meant "a card from the earliest test edition of the game", whereas in fact it meant "a test of my ability to use a photocopier and some Prit-Stick". Today, it's hard to make younger players understand just how naïve we all were in the early days of the game, and just how much innocence Magic lost in the period between 1994 and 1995. Somewhere in the span of time between Antiquities and The Dark, checklists became mandatory; "rare", "uncommon" and "common" became accepted as official terms, rather than rough approximations of how often you'd seen a particular card; and Magic became, in a word, finite.
As early as 1996, Richard Garfield lamented the fact that the boundaries of the game had become so well-known, although he accepted that it was inevitable given Magic's success. Personally, I'm just sorry that we now have a gamescape in which there's no point trying to fake cards, because it's no longer possible to surprise anyone. Modern Magic players have special implants that download all the latest spoiler-lists directly into their nervous systems. As ever, it's not that I want to cheat, it's just that... I want to see how ridiculous I can get without anybody spotting the problem. These days, however, even ridiculous cards have an official status (in Unglued and Unhinged). The Drudge Democracy Protestor is positively reasonable, compared to some. The one consolation is that thanks to PhotoShop, we can at least make wholly fraudulent cards in the comfort of our own homes rather than looking suspicious by sitting in the middle of a library with a big pair of scissors.
There are two postscripts to this. The first is that once I'd got bored of playing with the Plague Lord, I put it in my stack of rare trades, where unwary new players would often come across it and stare at it for hours on end. One day I was offered £40 for it, by a collector who automatically assumed that it had to be some kind of rare early-edition card. I declined his offer; making a profit from it would really have been cheating. I have no qualms about stealing from greedy, corrupt or rude people (I see no moral problem with shoplifting from Tesco's, for example), but there was a higher principle at stake. Committing a Magic fraud for money, rather than for the sake of entertainment, is just against the way of things.
And I notice that the illustrator credit on the Drudge Democracy Protestor reads "Glenn Fabry". This is purely because the card I used as a template, Restless Bones, has a Fabry illustration. However, it's fitting that it's credited to the one Magic artist I've actually come into contact with. The first time I met Glenn Fabry was in the early 1990s, when I interviewed him for a fanzine about his 2000 AD work, and he talked quite freely about his notorious behaviour when drunk. The second time I met him was in the actual year 2000 AD, when he was hanging around the bar at a comics convention, as inebriated as I've ever seen a man. It's probably an insult to Glenn to suggest that the manky skeleton cartoon on Drudge Democracy Protestor might be his work, and yet I like the thought that if he should ever come across it while browsing the internet, he might still find himself thinking: 'Is that one of mine? Jesus, what was I drinking that day...?'
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