On Magic Origins: The Mourning of the last Core Set

Well, I finally got caught up with Magic news.

Reading Mark Rosewater's articles are always entertaining. His enthusiastic tone has never changed, even if he keeps changing his mind about.. well pretty much everything. As the man who has been handling development of the card pool for the past 15-odd years, its amazing at how bad he is at it.

From the constantly broken mechanics, overpowered cards, completely useless cards, ever shifting colour pie, weird rules changes and so on - All of these can be laid as his feet. He may not be responsible for all of it, but he certainly is accountable. Being the public face of the game does come with its drawbacks after all.

I'll be honest: I always cringe when Rosewater speaks. All too often, its an attempt to try and sell some mistake as 'not a mistake', or to spin some new marketing directive as 'integral' (Mythic Rarity anyone?) to the game. Or, my personal favourite, to subtly mock critics of the last mistake that was made. After all, Magic continues to sell well regardless right? Of course - so does EA's Madden series....

This brings me of course now to Magic: Origins the last core set that will ever be printed. Or, as it really is, the cash grab that keeps on giving.

Let me explain.

For years, Magic operated on the idea that there would be a 'Base' slow rotational card pool, with more rapidly shifting 'Expansion' sets to keep things fresh. Another factor was that the 'Base' would consist of reprints from previous sets, which aided players in getting access to fun cards and also let the it gradually evolve over time - and let cards that were unlikely to see play at the time, actually see play.

From a design standpoint, its really a great idea. The game stays fresh enough, while remaining stable enough, to allow strategies and decks to develop without forcing players to have to play a constant guessing game. Likewise, it increases accessibility by keeping most pricing down on common stuff, while letting the more rare things hold a solid (but not unreasonable) value. Is card too powerful or too dominant? Just ban it, the let it rotate out. A card too weak or useless? Don't reprint it and let it rotate.

The real advantage is that it creates a stable metagame, where change can be moderated and new opportunities can be tested in real-time.

Of course that is the ideal, as R&D has never implemented that design. Base sets ended up being wildly different, often with completely arbitrary changes. Power-levels were adjusted constantly in a hap-hazard fashion. And heaven help R&D should actually BAN a card that was harming play in rotational format, over the fear that players would be angry if they should lose their investment in a card or pull it in a pack. (Ignoring the fact, they never seem to have any issue with players pulling crap rares no one would play anyway, and the fact rotations tended to kill card value.)

8th & 9th Edition were the worst base sets ever released. Dull, tedious, and boring - they were barely playable except in the weirdest of ways. Even worse, they reprinted cards ALREADY in rotation in 9th. 10th Edition was a redemption, as it was finally a playable base set, but offered nothing all that interesting to the discussion.

Then came Magic 2010...

Yeah, I get it. The Base Sets were terribly stale at that point, and adding new cards allowed there to be some freshness to offset that. But here is the problem: The state of the base sets was completely self-inflicted. There were plenty of already printed cards that could have returned to add that interest and let some players dust off their old cards and jump back in. Unfortunately, that does not drive sales.

Reprints have always been a sore point with Magic for lots of reasons. The more a card is printed, the easier it is to get, For collector's it's a bane as it drives the 'value' of their collection down (Magic as a collectible is a debate for a different article). For most players though, Reprints can bring previously unobtainable cards to their hands for considerably less cost then the secondary market.

Wizard's has a unique problem with it however. Reprints can certainly drive sales if demand is high and costs are high. But if many cards are widely available, there is much less reason to buy a base set with few interesting things in it that are cheap to get everywhere else. This was the 10th Edition problem in a nutshell.

So Magic 2010 and its successors added new cards - forcing players to buy new packs. And all was well in the Wizard's bank accounts, which had successfully found a new way to squeeze their players for more cash. But it wasn't good enough.

Fast forward to Magic Origins, and new coming set rotation strategy. The changes to the previous base sets had rendered them pointless from their original intent. They were just another set that had to be worked on and designed. But there were still reprints in there, and the last vestiges of card re-usability had to be squashed once and for all.

So everything is going to be an 'Expansion' Set now - all with mostly fresh cards unavailable on any secondary market. Add to this the shortened card viability thanks to a sped up rotation from 24 to 18 months. With Extended dead, and Modern hopelessly broken beyond repair, the only format that will be remotely playable for new players is Standard.

Can you say 'CHA-CHING!' - I know you could.

Wizards has succeeded in its overall goal: Make you pay to play forever. Forget the past, its just junk. Its all about THE FUTURE. Just like Rosewater said in his article, just the thing his overlords told him he had to sell. R&D does not operate in some vacuum - and delivery dates are likely out of their hands.

Of course, this says nothing about the complete bat-shit instability the Standard format will now enjoy. Constantly changing card pools, no real stability at all - No guarantee or any card replay-ability. There is no way to design for that - period. You can't build something in utter chaos. So more broken crap will be made, bad mechanics will come, and they will be doing the usual half-apology for those mistakes down the road. And somehow we will forget that the same guy has been doing this over and over again, for over 10 years, in an abusive relationship that keeps on taking.

Will we ever learn? Probably not.

After all, its just a game.

Playing like its 2004

"You're still playing like its 2004."

A good friend of mine and I had been playing several rounds of Magic, and I was losing badly. I'd thrown together an old school combo deck that had looked neat and worked it enough to have a decent idea how to play it. Even with my rough knowledge of the deck, I'd supposed I would be able to put up a decent struggle even with a few play errors on my part. Instead, matters had become a slaughter.

It wasn't that the deck wasn't working. Even with my inexperience in playing it, it wasn't the most difficult of decks to play. Nor was it the fact the cards were bad or slow, it was loaded with known highly effective plays. But none of that mattered, because the deck just couldn't handle what it was up against - a modfied current Standard Deck.

He looked up at me after the last match and said: "You're still playing like its 2004."

I thought about it and realized he was right.

The early 2000's were my golden years for Magic. I had been playing Vintage, and had managed to build up a decent card pool. Back then Dual lands were around $10, Force of Wills $4 and Power 9 could still be gotten for around $100 is you were lucky - Yeah, it was a different era. The big thing was that most formats were not terribly fast (except Extended - at that time was the most degenerate format in Magic), and while Vintage could have some incredibly powerful combo's - there were plenty of options to control them.

The biggest difference back then was Standard. In those days, Wizards had been reducing the power sharply of new cards, largely thanks to the insanity of the Urza's Block which had led to so many bans that the Standard banned list had been at the longest it would ever be. The power differential between old and new was at its sharpest.

I make no secret I really dislike Standard. Part of the reason was the resentment over being unable to play with the cards I already had and the wildly shifting play styles. But a larger part at it was the cost to keep up. Having to spend $3 per pack for maybe one useful card, had little appeal. I'd watched others spends hundreds of dollars on packs, only to toss out about 90 percent of the cards. Heaven help you trying to pick stuff up on the secondary market, since the prices would be immense - only for the cards to plummet like a rock after rotation.

So I stopped playing competitively.

Honestly, I don't regret this decision. It wasn't like I'd stopped playing magic at all, so moving over the casual sphere didn't bother me in the least. The downside was that I would miss out on the some of the new stuff coming out, but historically - a lot of the new stuff had just been under-powered junk in the overall game. So I figured I'd just keep playing how I liked to play and keep an eye for any new thing that might help.

Of course, I was dead wrong about the power level. The last few sets have been stupid powerful, with some of the most idiotic cards ever printed. Devotion, Prowess, Miracle - just a few mechanics transformed into complete ridiculousness. Undercosted multicoloured creatures with so much colour fixing available as to hardly be a disadvantage, Planeswalkers with overpowered abilities, and the virtual elimination of land destruction, have created a game where if you go past turn 5 - you probably did something horribly wrong.

And so my old school deck, chock full of the victors of yesteryear, lost badly to a deck just fresh out of Standard. All because, I just wasn't playing the same game anymore.

In retrospect, beating that deck was not terribly challenging. I could build several combo or control decks that certainly would have dominated it with very little hope of recovery. But in my post game analysis something else really bothered me. It was 'how' I could go about winning, and almost how easy it really was to do.

See, modern Magic is basically dominated by creatures and planeswalkers. A few good Instants & Sorceries will creep in, but largely Magic is a creatures game now and those creatures are amazing. But this also means that creature control is really what matters now. If you can go anti-creature, you'll win.

It was this realization that brought me to another problem - how boring and lacking in strategy and versatility Magic has become. Now, Magic has gone through these phases before - the infamous Draw-Go strategies being among the most repetitive for a time - and I had often scoffed at those who said Magic was getting dumbed down and more boring.

But now I'm not so sure - because all the top 8 Standard decks look to operate basically the same. Sure the cards can be different, and there are a few variations, but all in all they share a lot of the same cards - and most run an incredibly high number of creatures. Now do a Google search for the decks to beat back in 2000, with the almost 12 different decks all with different styles and approaches. Some of those actually require you to play them a few times before you can really get your head wrapped around them.

Magic has certainly gotten a lot less diverse and in many ways a lot less interesting. Decks like Tinker and Trix were absolutely brilliant in their design and ingenuity. The Deck and Counterpost were defining strategies for how to control the board. But each of those was different, and while they shared similarities in ideas and maybe a few cards, they were interesting and diverse. Modern Magic just isn't that anymore.

This is not say the old days were always great - Academy was terrible for the game, Draw-Go was dull to play against, and Storm.. The less said about Storm the better. But is it better to have a game with diverse strong strategies, or a game with the same tired over and over repetitive plays just with a different name?

So I guess I'll keep on playing like its 2004, since while its not perfect - its certainly a lot more fun.