why magic sucks

Many serious Magic “issues” articles start with some feel-good introduction that reads something like:

“Magic is the greatest game in the world. Now’s our chance to make it even better.”

It’s written with the intention of being an easy crowd-pleaser, to get the audience on the writer’s side. Someone who’s so into Magic that they’re spending their day not just playing, drafting, and making decks, but reading meta-Magic pieces that don’t directly deal with the game itself are probably of the opinion that Magic is God’s finest creation.

I’ve always been rather offput by the “greatest game” assertion. First of all, it’s pretty obvious that people saying that have never played Gone Home. But it’s also contradicted by my experiences of all the ways that Magic sucks.

There are, of course, an equal number of reasons that Magic is great. I wouldn’t have put so many hours into it if that wasn’t the case. But I’m definitely alienated from the True Believers in Magic, as someone who puts Magic somewhere on the outer range of my top ten games, maybe, depending how I’m feeling that day about whether Elder Scrolls: Oblivion holds up.[1] These True Believers want to think that anything bad about Magic happens because of a Wizards misstep, or a development mistake, or something the community did, rather than there being any inherent weaknesses in the game itself.

[1] Totally does.

I am not among that crowd. There are bad things about Magic. So let’s discuss those.

magic sucks because: mana variance isn’t fun

One of my least-favorite player archetypes is the post-round tiltmonster, ranting to everyone in his vicinity (regardless of whether those people are listening, which hopefully they aren’t) about how he got so unlucky, couldn’t draw any land, mulliganed so many times, etc. Everyone who’s been around a group of Magic players for more than half an hour knows this type of complainer, and almost everyone learns to tune them out.

But doesn’t he kind of have a point?

Okay, sure, a lot of the time they just fucked up somewhere and didn’t see how. Maybe they kept a sketchy one-lander. But everyone’s lost games that were just mandatory losses by variance, because they couldn’t play any spells. One learns to stomach it, take the loss, and move on.

What percentage of games is it acceptable to lose just because of how Magic’s mana system inherently works? In online team-based games, one of the most commonly complained-about things is when a teammate spontaneously disconnects or AFKs in a ranked game. That happens about, if I had to guess, one out of every 20-50 or so games, depending on the title and the skill level of the players involved. This 2-5% of the time when basically no one’s play matters is a horrible experience.

Magic, on the other hand, probably has about 10-25% of its games completely dictated by one player not getting land to cast spells. And Magic designers like Rosewater defend this as a strength of the game, because it lets less-experienced players win sometimes.

Variance is a necessary aspect of games. Variance that imposes this game being one that you do not get to play at all, because you auto-lose or auto-win, really sucks. It sucks to make a phenomenal new deck for a tournament, show up, and lose the first two games because you mulliganed five times. It also kinda sucks when you have a fantastically competitive, back-and-forth first two games of a match with a cool opponent, and then the third game you win immediately because they never get more than two land.

Another online game analogy: you’re in a shooter game online, and at the beginning of the match, there’s a 10% chance that everyone on your team just does half damage. Fun gameplay! It gives the worse players a chance to compete!

This aspect of Magic sucking affects competitive more than casual. If you’re just throwing around cards with friends, sure, take that free mulligan. One game wasn’t close? Shuffle up immediately and only lose a few minutes of time. In a tournament setting, though, where one has to look for every possible opening to win, getting screwed by land is awful.

Magic has attempted to make some workarounds for this inherent weakness of the game, with things like Cycling, mulligans, and manaless dredge. When mulligans were found to not be enough, they became more powerful. But these workarounds don’t eliminate the problem in Magic, they acknowledge it. If Magic didn’t have this issue, mulligans wouldn’t be necessary.

Are the advantages to the mana system large enough to outweigh the percentage of games that just aren’t games? Probably. It’s very difficult to design a TCG without some card type that resembles lands without introducing even bigger issues in the process. The fact that practically every other attempted TCG has opted out of the lands-and-spells system, though, speaks to their desire to get rid of this problem.

magic sucks because: it’s horrifically expensive

Whenever a critic or newer player brings up Magic’s price, Magic’s apologists will jump in front of trains to downplay, make exceptions, give advice, and do everything but admit the truth.

“Just draft and you’ll get the cards.” Yes, if you spend $15 per play session, Magic swiftly becomes more affordable, because you’ve already spent the money.

“You can trade for everything you want.” You can exchange your $300 worth of cards for someone else’s $300 worth of cards, after you spend $300.

“Some decks are really cheap, you can play burn.” Magic’s introductory budget deck costs $100, which is only “budget” if you’re Montgomery Burns and cannot think of an amount of money below $1000, or you’re so ingrained in Magic culture that $100 for a single deck seems like a small amount of money.

“Just play cube, it’s free.” Yes, someone else paid for it instead of you. That doesn’t make it any cheaper. (Also applies to borrowing cards.) Good luck playing enough Magic for Vintage Cube to make a lick of sense without spending your entire bank account ten times over.

“It’s not really expensive, because when you’re done with the cards you can just sell them back.” This is perhaps the biggest bullshit of them all. Magic cards are an incredibly illiquid good, if you want to get anything resembling “retail” price. They’re a physical object, so to sell them, you’ll probably have to list the item on eBay, pay for shipping (and maybe insurance), give eBay the cut, and wait for the money. And that’s the highest percentage way to get money.

I worked for Card Kingdom for a year and a half. If it was easy for players to buy and sell cards just from one another, no one would use online retailers’ buylists. But, as I saw firsthand, a shitload of people do. So do I, because anything else is a horrific amount of hassle.

At a more basic level, if Magic wasn’t ridiculously expensive, Card Kingdom wouldn’t exist.

What’s a reasonable amount of money to pay for a new game? People gasp over brand-new $60 games that cost millions upon millions of dollars to make, and those people are outraged if they get fewer than ten hours of gameplay for their $60. People cancel their MMO subscriptions because they can’t afford the $10-$20 per month, or they’ll grind in-game in order to get items to play without paying.

But you don’t get all of Magic just by spending $15, or $100, or $1000. You can buy one deck for one format for a few hundred, and if you find out that it just isn’t your style… well, better spend more money, trade, or learn to tolerate what you have already.

In most games, no matter what kind of gamer or what style you want to play, the price is the same: you pay for the game. If you’re a hardcore raider or a casual player in an MMO, it’s $15 a month. If you devote your life to the intricacies of Skyrim, you just pay $60 once (when it was a new game). With Magic, if you only have $100 to spend and like Constructed… hope you like burn. What if you’re a teenager with a meager allowance, and the early-game-oriented big-play aspect of Vintage really appeals to you? Fuck off, go back to your poverty decks until you have a job as a programmer.

Something I really like about League of Legends is not spending money on it. I haven’t spent a dime on it in many, many months, and I’ve been doing very little else other than playing it. And what happens over time? Instead of spending $15 per draft, I’m actually earning more champions as I win more matches.[2]

[2] To be fair, I did this on Magic Online, too. I borrowed an Elves deck from someone, then grinded daily events until I’d made enough tickets that I had bought my own copy of it. Wizards responded to this by making it substantially more difficult to grind Daily Events for a profit.

I would enjoy League substantially less if there were one or two uninteresting “budget” champions for $50 or $100, and the really cool, weird, or new champions are $300 or $750.

While brand-new games are $60, one Scalding Tarn is $80.

For the price of the cheapest Standard deck (Ensoul Artifact, $75), you can buy five complete Final Fantasy games on Steam, or basically infinite games via Humble Bundle.

For the price of a Standard Abzan deck ($250), you could buy a 3DS and a game.

For the price of Modern Affinity ($350), you could buy an XBox One, which comes with a game.

For the price of Legacy Delver ($3000), you could do that eight times and still buy some extra games. Or build a top-of-the-line gaming computer, then save the money to build a new one next year, then again the year after.

Why is it that people do this? Why did I ever do this? Is Magic exponentially more fun than other games, so people will buy one deck for hundreds of dollars?

Or are Magic players just so flush with disposable income that they don’t know what else to do with it?

magic sucks because: it’s a collectable

The above problems with price were written with the assumption that people want to actually play the game of Magic: the Gathering, and that the purpose of Magic game pieces is to play games with them. Judging by others’ responses to new releases, this does not seem to be a widely-held opinion.

If Magic was just a card game, and not a collectable card game, it wouldn’t have these problems. But a huge portion of Magic’s culture is wrapped up around its status as a collectable, and Magic cards’ relationship with the secondary market.

Look at what happens when new cards get revealed; specifically, when old cards get reprinted. The reaction to the Zendikar Expeditions lands can be summarized by a few thoughts:

“Will this affect the price of the old fetchlands?”

“How much will these cost?”

“Alternate art foils! Gimme!”

The financial angle of Magic has basically taken over the community. Whenever a new set comes out, one can’t go to a local draft without someone hoping to open a foil mythic rare. Not because they want to play with the card; they just want to have something valuable. Nearly the entire excitement around Modern Masters (both versions) was price-related, in how it might make that format “more affordable,” and how people would purposefully drop from an expensive Las Vegas tournament because they opened a $400 card.

Maybe it’s because my last job had me so immersed in Magic finance for so long, but I’ve become completely sick of this non-game-related discussion. It seems like people don’t even want to play games, they just want to get the value from opening something expensive, selling it, and doing something else. Then they’ll spend hours grinding the trade tables to make money off people with less knowledge of Magic prices than them.

Price knowledge is ubiquitous among Magic players in a way that’s honestly really sad to me. When I would go to tournaments and buy cards for work, I’d have to use our database to look up the price on basically every card, because I couldn’t keep that enormous spreadsheet in my memory. But there is a huge population of Magic people (I hesitate to refer to them as “players”) with a mental database of every card’s price, foil and nonfoil, in retail, TCG player mid, and buylist price. They see Magic as a sort of secondary job, something they do in their off-hours instead of playing the stock market.

The other side of that group, of course, are the people who actually spend huge amounts of money on cards. When the foil judge promo Force of Will came out, it was close to $1000 for reasons completely unknown to me. People want things like that, and NM Power Nine, for… collecting, or something. The Force of Will didn’t even look good. It’s just… a Force of Will, and it’s foil, and extremely scarce. Therefore, expensive, because that’s how Magic works.

A NM Alpha rare is never ever going to go in a deck again, so it might as well just be a slip of paper with a smiley face on it. It has become completely separated from anything resembling Magic, other than technically being a Magic card.

Even in the realm of collectables, Magic is ridiculous. Alpha Lotuses can easily go for over $20k in top-notch condition. For comparison, there are only a handful of vinyl records I can find evidence of ever selling for that much, and those are things like 1958 records by The Quarrymen. Even famous “lost” albums that exist in quantities in the low double digits rarely go up to $10k, and that’s as expensive as record collecting can possibly get. Even in the famously-outrageously-competitive realm of collecting hardcore punk records, the most expensive ever was just over $6k. That’s about what a NM Beta Underground Sea goes for, and that’s not graded, not one of the Power Nine, and the third most-valuable printing of that one card.[3]

[3] Behind Alpha and the actually-scarce Summer Magic.

And think: a collectable LP is something one might actually, theoretically, listen to. You can frame it, too, if you want, whereas an Underground Sea is actually not that aesthetically pleasing.

A lot of these “collectables” aren’t even that scarce, which to me, would seem to defeat the purpose. Even while Wizards was actively printing more Modern Masters, a foil Tarmogoyf was hundreds of dollars. Because… foils are more expensive. Because they just are.

Sure, this might seem to be a complaint not against Magic as a game, but against the playerbase. And in some ways, it is. But really, the “collectable card game” is not a harmonious entity. The “collectable” aspect is in eternal conflict with the “game” aspect, in that people with little interest in playing make things more expensive for people that just want to play games of Magic. It’s fine for Wizards, of course, because the money goes to them no matter what.

magic sucks because: it’s old

This is a topic I’ve touched on in Kill Reviews. But it’s time to address it head-on.

Magic was one of the most influential games of the early 90s. Card games can be very easily grouped into pre- and post-Magic, with extremely evident Magic influence all over the latter games. Magic shrugged those imitators off in the best way possible: by continuously improving.

There’s a clear line of design quality improvement going from pre-block expansions to Ice Age to Mirage to the Rath Cycle. Then the game stumbled around for a couple years, retreated inward, and came out with the absolutely phenomenal Invasion. Then the cycle repeated, with some middling-to-bad blocks, until a new top-down vision of Magic block design led to its creative peak with Ravnica and Time Spiral blocks. Then another retreat inward, more updates on the formula, and we have New World Order design and the conservative era. Since then, Magic has just… kept going.

What has Magic really innovated in the last seven years? What are the great leaps forward that Magic design has made since 2008’s Shards of Alara? It’s kept making sets, it’s kept selling well, but it’s just been going through the motions.

Creators have their ups and downs as their careers progress, but for many artists, the first ten or so years of their output is what they’ll always be remembered for. Lou Reed wrote more classic songs that came out on The Velvet Underground & Nico than in the last 20 years of his career put together. Sure, every medium is different (writers are known to have long careers, and late-career classics are common), but creative people are more likely to create something innovative and brilliant in their first half of their career than in the years after.[4]

[4] Imagine, please, the world’s largest collection of caveats and exceptions amended to this sentiment. Instead of writing to me about how your favorite band is still great 79 years after they started, instead listen to the 2012 live album We Rose From Your Bed With The Sun In Our Head by Swans, a band intermittently active since 1982.

I feel like a similar thing has happened to Magic, if you think of Magic’s creative hivemind as though it was one creator. It had its early spark of brilliance, a steady improvement, and we’re in the middle of its creative decline.

It’s not that Theros or Khans or the upcoming Battle for Zendikar are bad. It’s that they have nothing to say. There is no innovation in a way that would make non-Magic designers sit up and take notice. Magic sets exist exclusively for people already playing Magic, they exist to make money, not to break new creative ground.

And that’s the main idea that’s inspired these Kill Reviews: that Magic has basically burned out. So have I.

magic sucks because: only wizards makes magic

I’ve referred to Magic design as art. An important aspect of an art form is that other artists can make new takes on one anothers’ art; one might be inspired by Jackson Pollock, Wire, and Nabokov and use those influences to draw dicks on the side of buildings. If you’re inspired by Magic, though, you have little recourse when it comes to making your own Magic-related things: you can be a collage artist of sorts and design a cube with extant Wizards-sanctioned cards, or you can get hired as a designer at Wizards, or you can work on other games, or you can design Magic cards that no one will ever play with. Making homebrew Magic sets will be low-popularity at best, because Wizards has a monopoly on the art that is Magic design.

I really wish this wasn’t the case. When an art form drifts in a direction some group of people are unhappy with (and this will always happen), people can just make different art. When rock music got too flowery and slow, people made punk. The collapse of punk led to a worldwide explosion in post-punk, hardcore, experimental music, synthpop, and a million other things.

What am I supposed to do if I don’t like a Magic set? Play with older sets. Play a different game.

I don’t want that, though. I want experimental punk Magic, but it’s logistically impossible to get people to play anything other than what Wizards makes.

[This article was originally written for supporters of my Patreon.]