What is Magic: The Gathering?
I’ve written about games a lot, but I know the audience for this site isn’t gamers (though some of you may be gamers). I even debated on which site to publish this article on Magic: The Gathering on and ultimately decided here for a couple of reasons: First, no one asked me to review this game. Second, I’ve grown disillusioned by it.
In a nutshell, Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is a card game involving strategy, skill, and luck. The goal is to reduce your opponent’s life total from 20 to zero. Meanwhile, you have to protect your own life total. Each player starts with at least 60 cards. At their most basic, cards are broken down into two categories: lands and spells. Lands represent the magic needed to cast the spells.
Players cast up to one land card per round and however many spell cards their land pool allows. Sometimes a card allows for these rules to be bent. However, those are specific cases.
Most of the time there are two players, but there can be more. Players can play pre-built decks or they can assemble their own. There are entire websites devoted to MTG deckbuilding and teaching how to build a deck is beyond the scope of this article. Players begin a game by drawing 7 cards from their deck and deciding whether to keep that hand or to mulligan. If a player mulligans, he or she draws a new hand with one fewer card. They can do this a total of two times.
Steps within each turn:
- Untap Step: Any tapped cards are untapped in preparation for the upcoming turn.
- Upkeep Step: Some cards/effects require actions during this step or provide boons/banes.
- Draw Step: Draw one card from the deck.
- First Main Phase: The player can play lands, cast spells, or trigger the abilities on previously played spells (the ones that aren’t automatic from step 2). Casting spells or triggering their abilities requires paying the land costs (“tapping” the cards, shown by physically rotating the cards).
- Combat Phase: The player can choose to attack with creatures (a subset of spell cards). The opponent can choose which of their own creatures block the attack. Blocking is not required unless a card specifically says so (remember…some rules can be bent depending on the card in play).
- Second Main Phase: The player can continue playing lands and spells or triggering spells’ abilities so long as they have the resources for it and have not played a land card already.
- End Step: Sometimes cards require actions after all other steps.
That sounds like a lot to those who are unfamiliar and it can get chaotic in later rounds of the game. But in the first few, these steps go quickly. In fact, sometimes players can’t cast a spell until the third or fourth round of the game. These rounds continue until a player is reduced to zero life, loses the game, and swears to never play the game again. That’s my experience anyway.
Cards: Lands vs Spells
The land cards are pretty straightforward. They can be one of five colors: red, blue, black, white, or green. Some cards offer you a choice between a couple of colors when tapping them and others are colorless and are effectively wildcards. You play up to one land per round, but there are some cards that allow you to sacrifice them and search your deck for another land card to play. Additionally, sometimes other cards grant you the ability to play a second land in a single turn. Playing a second card gets you closer to casting spells quicker while sacrificing a land to play a land may sound pointless. However, some spells get a benefit each time a land card is played so playing a land, sacrificing it, and playing another can trigger an ability twice.
The spells are where things can get really complicated. There are Planeswalkers, Creatures, Instants, Sorceries, Enchantments, and Artifacts. There are other types of spells, but they are specific to different releases and further complicate the game. The previous six are in every release though.
Basically, Planeswalkers have abilities that players can trigger without the use of land (they still have to pay the land costs to put the card into play though). Creatures are the ones who do the fighting (they work to reduce life total and/or destroy Planeswalkers and other Creatures). Instants, Sorceries, Enchantments, and Artifacts can augment cards already in play, do direct damage to Creatures, Planeswalkers, or Players, or block the ability of some, or even all, cards in play.
I could go on, but I’m guessing that the only ones who’ve read this far already know all of this.
My history with Magic: The Gathering
If I could turn back the clocks to the early- to mid-1990s I just might do it and go have a long conversation with myself during the beginning of my grunge phase. The things I’d talk with myself about are too much to detail in this article. However, one thing I’d talk about is Magic: The Gathering (MTG). I was a purist back then and looked down my nose at anything but Advanced Dungeons & Dragons whenever it came to fantasy-themed games or even RPGs. I think one thing I’d tell myself that covers all aspects of my life would be to chill out with the preconception that if something were worthwhile, I’d already know about it. FFS, there’s a whole world of things out there to discover; you’ll never experience all of it. So open up your mind to new things.
I would definitely tell that mildly haughty boy to give MTG a chance. In general, MTG is a game with interesting mechanics and beautiful artwork. I didn’t play it for the first time until maybe 2014, about the time I was re-entering the tabletop gaming hobby, which also coincided with the release of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The thing that attracted me to MTG the most was the one-on-one play format, easy-to-learn rules, and the (primarily) fantasy vibe. I wouldn’t need a platoon of friends to play and I could teach the fundamentals to anyone within minutes. That’s a win!
Fast-forward to today and I’m all but weary of the game. I’ve been bitter towards the game and even nearly resentful for quite some time. I used to play on Saturday mornings with my oldest son and while his love for the game has only grown in the last few years, mine has depleted with each new release. What’s happening? Why am I growing so cantankerous over this game? And why do I want it off my lawn?
Why have I come to dislike Magic: The Gathering?
Mechanics
It’s hard to pinpoint any one reason for my growing distaste. But if a gun were put to my head I might choose mechanic bloat as the primary problem. I don’t know how many there are—some estimates are well over 100. Regardless of the true count, there are too many. I used to think this was a current-only problem. However, when I think back I suppose this has been an issue since I started playing; I just didn’t realize it at the time. At any rate, it seems that Wizards of the Coast thinks it needs a gimmick to produce sales for each new release. And maybe it does. Maybe new artwork alone isn’t enough to drive sales. What if a new release introduces a new mechanic along with new artwork?
As I understand it, the game used to retire mechanics, but I’ve read that there has been a move to make them evergreen. Even a move to bring retired mechanics back. I feel this is robbing the game of its simplicity and elegance. The basic rules don’t change, but it seems every card played needs a maintained focus when it’s played. Whether you played it or your opponent did, you have to be vigilant about it. It’s one thing when there are only a handful in play like this. But when each player has a dozen lands, artifacts, enchantments, creatures, etc. floating around, it gets hairy.
Furthermore, if I’m playing on Magic: The Gathering Arena I concede at least 95% of the games when my opponent produces a card that does Toxic damage. In my experience, it’s nearly impossible to overcome those odds and I’d rather lose in a couple of seconds than in 10 minutes of decisions from my opponent. It’s not that I dislike asymmetric games. It’s just that this game can get so asymmetric that it’s unequal. That’s what bloat is doing to the game.
Cost
This may be the very thing that makes MTG so successful year after year. It’s a trading card game, so you can spend a lot of time and/or money seeking certain cards. Wanna build a deck of insects? You could. Vampires and werewolves? Yep. Colorless artifacts only? Have at it! But I don’t have that kind of patience.
Like baseball cards (any trading cards, really), you don’t know what you’ll get when you buy your packs. Some people love the hunt of finding their prized cards. They spend a lot of time perfecting their decks. Some are chasing a theme like one of the examples I mentioned in the last paragraph. Others are exploiting the interplay of mechanics and building decks that are nearly unbeatable. Ultimately, success is determined by two things: the luck of the draw (in-game) and how good you are at building decks. The more time and money you put into deck building, the more the odds favor you. This is why some tournament plays put strict rules around creating decks.
Jumping the Shark
When I first encountered the Mysterious Limousine I immediately hated it. This card was released with the Streets of New Capenna deck in 2022. Streets of New Capenna is inspired by modern urban gangster movies and I despise the futuristic feel. The Mysterious Limousine card is an example of bloat as well as the expanding genre of the game (clutching at sci-fi). This is just one example.
Another example comes from the green decks and that is dinosaurs. These cards usually don’t cost enough land for the damage they can sustain and deal out. The Gigantosaurus costs only 5 forests/green but is a 10/10? That card can easily kill 3 creatures if it attacks and a defender would like to not only block the damage but destroy it in return. And the players I’ve faced who have this card usually have a few of them in the deck.
The dinosaurs are ridiculous. They’re simultaneously boring and too powerful. These uninspired cards feel like filler and like an appeasement to those without imaginations. “Ooh…a Gigantosaurus!” *guffaws*
But perhaps the best example of Magic: The Gathering jumping the shark is the introduction of Transformers into the universe. Again, I don’t dislike sci-fi, dinosaurs, or Transformers, but I despise the integration of them into this game. It’s unnecessary except to drive teens and young adults who have already spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on this game to spend even more.
Conclusion
Most of these issues are minimal at real, actual tables. I groan when someone asks me to play Magic: The Gathering and breaks out a Commander deck and I definitely don’t enjoy the latest cards that come with the newest mechanics and abilities. I’m okay with a couple of nuances. But unless you play the new releases regularly, this game gets out of hand. As such, it is not a good game for those with a casual interest in it. It seems you have to be a loyal devotee or avoid it altogether. I’ve been playing a lot on Arena in preparation for this article and all of these problems I’ve complained about are magnified there.
Playing against random people has very little social element to it at all. Players only get a handful of responses they can use with each other and those are lacking. You might as well be playing against AI. And I get that this is by design. We don’t want flame wars and insult hurling. But it makes for an underwhelming experience. Additionally, the computing power of the machines we play on exacerbates the exploitation of cards’ abilities and synergies to ludicrous heights.
I played with one player where it was clear he was an optimizer. He wouldn’t finish me off and I let him play his game. Mostly because I had some free time and I was curious how badly things could get. Two of his creatures had a power/toughness of 299/299 and he literally had hundreds of token creatures in play. His actions would trigger abilities which would trigger even more abilities. After 5 minutes of these cascading effects, the app crashed. I was able to get back into the game where his triggered abilities continued crunching for another 20 minutes before the app froze again and I had to let my morbid curiosity die.
Arena appears to be peopled mostly by power gamers such as this opponent and if you have a win rate of 25% here, count yourself lucky. Or count yourself as an optimizer/exploiter of the software. You can often see these people as soon as the game starts. First clue, they have over 200 cards in their deck. This would be too unwieldy “in real life” because if you lose in just a couple of rounds you likely don’t want to go through the trouble of shuffling that many cards only to potentially lose again in a few minutes. Here is an example where I used a green and white deck to exploit the game’s rules against a bot. There is no way I could have done this at a real table.
That’s another problem with Arena. It has removed a significant cost to playing. It comes with several free decks which is my preferred way to play. I don’t care one bit about deck-building. But the cost I’m talking about is there is always someone on there ready to play. In this virtual environment, there is no time spent gathering your cards, shuffling them, putting them away, or finding your other deck. Of course, there is computing time. But it’s only a tiny percentage of what it would be with real cards and real people. Unless you’re crashing the app like I did.
Another problem is there is no stat tracking within this app itself. There are ranked matches where you compete against people with similar track records. However, there are no means to see what your win percentage is or how many times you’ve conceded. You can’t see whether you have better luck with a blue and black control deck versus a red burn deck. You have to track your own metrics or use outside sources for that. Yet you don’t have to track your own counters or which cards are legal to play. Give us all the features or none, please.
I do have good things to say about Magic: The Gathering Arena. My favorite way to play is with a friend who is nowhere near me. We set up a FaceTime video and casually play while catching up. This is the best strength that Magic: The Gathering Arena has to offer. The second best thing it offers is it basically provides on-the-job training. Playable cards are highlighted and sometimes the app will ask “Are you sure you want to play that there?” which is usually a clue for something being legal, but a bad idea. Such as playing a +2 enchantment on your opponent’s creature.
But, in the end, Magic: The Gathering itself is still a game for ravenous fans and not for the casual player.
