“I bet he thought, ‘nobody’s gonna get this far, I can put any old bollocks in here.’”
Bill Bailey, on A Brief History Of Time
Gamer culture is a fickle thing. There’s a better, more evocative version of that opening line, but I can’t even get Craig to let me name my articles, let alone let me get away with cussing up a blue streak (diaper biscuits!). Suffice to say, we are unique creatures, Gamers. Has anyone else suffered the fate that is, of a late evening, doing a Quick Check on Wikipedia, then found themselves following links, exploring exactly what the designers were thinking when they designed the Snark? Or that Gordon plays with it in an idle animation? That’s so cool!
Gamer Culture – despite what some players may like – is a culture spread from the young to the old. D&D is old enough that some people who read this may well have gotten into D&D thanks to their dads. At least one of my readers introduced his son to Magic. Mark Rosewater‘s dad plays. My dad introduced me to video games (though the non-electronic gamer culture I was introduced to by my then-girlfriend now-wife). It’s not even like gamer culture is a new, evolving things – H.G. Wells wrote the first book of rules on tabletop wargaming, and since then the rules have just gotten more and more byzantine.
Behind the rules we see, the rules we use, there’s another set of rules. Mark Rosewater talks about them all the time, and generally, we don’t really notice if they’re working or they’re not. After all, when the wheels fall off the apple cart, it’s often because someone didn’t follow one of the rules (like, “test cards before sending them to the print”). These rules, just like our play rules, are constantly being written and re-written. Once upon a time, a 2/2 for 1G was simply generic. Any abilities on that creature had to be paid for in some way, and that was all there was to it. Wizards had the rule: do not obviate any card previously printed. Now, in practicality, they did that all the time, because you’d rather a 2/1 that did something than a 2/2 that did nothing…
Or, if you were The Red Deck, you’d rather a 2/1 that did nothing for pure tempo reasons. Ah, memories.
Then came Sinew Muscle Sliver, Wizards finally breaking their rule in the hopes that they’d produce something the fans would like. And holy crap, did they like it. Even when Muscle Sliver wasn’t even playable in Extended, it still commanded decent prices for commons, out-pricing Basking Rootwalla and at times, even Arrogant Wurm, when those cards were playable in Standard. And since then, they’ve cautiously begun the process of shifting goalposts. Eventually, creatures will have to be compared wholesale to one another.
Somewhere out there, there’s someone wishing Ronom Unicorn (planted for Tenth Edition) were a soldier, so he could stop using Glory Seeker in that slot.
Part of our culture is how this game is alive; it’s a very slow-moving organism, really, but it is, in its odd way, a living entity, with an ebb and a flow. Flores’ example of Extirpate’s power is a good example of this (omg referring to Premium! Stone him!), where the card is suddenly overplayed (and blows out the small fraction of people who are weak to it), then pressures out the decks it feeds on, in turn forcing its own usefulness to dwindle. This is a simple food chain mechanism.
(This is in part why I believe there is no such thing as a Best Deck; there’s always a bigger fish, a better predator, a more finely-tuned specifically-gauged claw finger, or a wasp designed to perform impromptu brain surgery. The trick is to make sure you’re the lion amongst the wolves, to never be the sheep. This Girl was not The Best Deck In Standard For One Tournament, and saying it ever was is egocentric; it was just the right tool for the job.)
With all the rules involved in this game – both its design and its play – there’s another rule to deal with. The banned lists. Whenever a new set comes out, a crop of idiots – generally speaking – will come out and claim that several cards in the set need to be banned. Without Fail. I kid you not, we had people saying this about Coldsnap and Guildpact. This is working on the John Edwards model: You can guess wrong as many times as you like, provided you really make a noise about when you guess right. Now that Mirrodin’s a year out of Standard, we can say, with serious sincerity, that no, most likely, whatever card just kicked your ass in the casual room is not going to get banned. It’s one of the staples though: We will always have someone calling for something to be banned.
That we have a constant hubbub of cards being claimed as broken (Slivers? Seriously?) means that whenever anyone has a different or legitimate rationale for the banning of a card, it’s easier to dismiss them. After all, lots of people say things should be banned, right? And they’re not – so how is this different? I still remember claiming – after reading Aaron Forsythe guide on the “real culprits” of Affinity, that when it was announced they were Going To Ban Something, – that the artifact lands were the most likely things to hit, because that would gut the deck’s explosiveness. I was, of course, wrong – they banned even more than I thought they would. Consider, however, the rationale for what I said:
Wizards themselves had said they were going to ban cards in Standard
Wizards themselves had said Affinity was the problem
Wizards themselves had said the Artifact Lands were the power behind the throne.
I was still regarded as being unduly alarmist, and having no rational basis for my claims. This could be that the people who disagreed with me weren’t as clever as they thought, or whatever, the central point of it is that because we have a constant supply of Chicken Littles and Boys Who Cried Wolf, we have become inured to good reason in this regard. Even with good reason, claims for banning (from high sources, even: Zvi, Krouner, and Feldman have all suggested bannings lately, for the overall health of the game) are disregarded, and I think the rationale is because banning is not done to make the game healthier, but to prevent it from being unhealthy.
All of this is the puppet show, the dancing of the obvious. It’s quite interesting, and very cool, and I enjoy the discussion of it when I think it’s warranted. Unhealthy formats tend to be obvious, though, and rarely come up; while Meloku showed up a hell of a lot, he didn’t show up so commonly that he merited any attention. It should be a good mark for those of you who like these discussions, that of the Extended Banned / Restricted list, none of the cards cost more than one mana. When something costs four or five or six mana, chances are it’s never banworthy.
(I mean, Akroma? People, please.)
Behind this lies another layer of banning; of a swimming sea of cards that have found their equilibrium and stayed there. There are a lot of very, very good cards in Standard right now, but there are a lot of mediocre cards – cards whose only crime in this time and in this place is to not be as good. Amongst their number are some real old-school hits, like Crusade-a-like Lord Of Atlantis, or control juggernaut Whispers of the Muse. Spike Feeder? Who’s using it? Avalanche Riders or Orcish Librarian? Who gets used less? Even the Broken Akroma is being played less and less, purely because there are other strategies that don’t rely on having an eight-mana card occasionally.
I wish I knew to whom I could attribute the quote to, but I know I read it in a Jamie article: By not banning Masticore, you’re banning all these other cards in the format. The argument ran that Masticore, at its cost, outdid everything else in the format, power-wise; x/1 creatures were inherently bad against the big, bad, regenerating man. Four-mana creatures had to stack up against the ‘Core or be discarded. Strategies that couldn’t support the ‘Core were dispensed with because it was that good, and it could go anywhere.
In this morass lie the “banned” cards. Forgotten, ignored, barely so powerful as to be worth notice. Hilariously, most of the “overpowered” cards people talk about wind up in this place. Wizards are actually fairly good at their jobs, folks: When they print a card, they at least some of the time know what impact it will have, and it is with this knowledge that they dropped one of the big cats of Time Spiral amidst some very nervous pigeons.
Man, the caterwauling we did when this thing was spoilered. I remember thinking there had to be some major confusion. Blue burn? What the hell? This was… this was wrong! This wasn’t in the color pie! If Blue got burn, it should get worse burn than the other colors get, should get stuff comparable with Unyaro Bee Sting! By reprinting this card, they were validating every designer who said “well, it’s tricky, so it’s Blue!” or “it’s mental, so it’s Blue!” I couldn’t get past that, and I hated the card. Seems I wasn’t alone in seeing the card as splashy: as we speak, there is some poor schmuck on MTGO who swapped a foil Psionic Blast for a non-foil pernicious deed. The card’s value went through the roof, people scrabbling for ridiculous prices to get a playset of an ABU card.
The deck-builders got their hands on it, fiddled with it a bit and went, “Huh.”
Then they went back to playing with Char.
Psionic Blast was the second coming of Char, in Blue. It was not Fireblast in Blue. It was not a burn spell so grotesquely overpowered that it could somehow shift the color pie on its own. You want to give Blue a burn spell that will revolutionize things, you’ll have to give it Demonfire, or Ghitu Fire. Psionic Blast is just not a threatening card without a critical mass of burn. Char in Red does the job of two damage “packets” for the price of one; Char in Blue says “you need to find the other three of me, and four more damage somewhere.” By giving some aggro tools to Blue in Time Spiral, Wizards reminded us of those ancient days, of the time when Blue Did Everything… but somehow pulled back from the brink of letting it do everything.
Kinda embarrassing, really, that I got so tizzied up about Psionic Blast, isn’t it? At least I didn’t threaten to leave the game or anything, or write lengthy rants about Blue anywhere. Phew. That could have been really awkward.
Incidentally, this will, apparently, be my 53rd article. I haven’t introduced myself or told anyone my favorite bands. Anyone out there really hurting for that information? I mean this seriously, and it’s not meant to be a backhander on those who do such things (except maybe Zac Hill, who I still hold a grudge against for beating me at the weekly contest when we were both non-featured, the bastard).
That’s all for me, this week; next week, I promise to mention something really controversial (like my inability to back up that statement), and will complain, even more, about how Planar Chaos is yet another Week away. Lords, what an awkward time to be required to write consistently.
Hugs and Kisses
Talen Lee
talen at dodo dot com dot au