In this post, I'd like to talk in broad strokes about what's changed in Magic, for better and worse, from my perspective. There are folks who've been in it since Revised (and before), such as Heather Dawn of the Planeswalker Asylum podcast, but they've experienced the transitions gradually. I on the other hand left one game and came back to a different one.
Thumbs up: modern card design
The new card design is amazing. I have some pre-modern cards given me by friends, and I almost can't stand to look at them, they're so godawful ugly by comparison. The new layout is easier to read, has a cleaner font (particularly for the titles), and the inclusion of rarity hints in the set icon is frickin' brilliant. I can't say how much more I love this layout than the old one.
Thumbs up: better art
Like the design, the art has seen a considerable upgrade. I should probably state outright that I'm not a model for art critics by any stretch of the imagination. I grew up on Tor Fantasy's line of Conan novels (many penned by Robert Jordan before he lost his mind and did all that Wheel of Time crap), and their Boris Vallejo covers defined my tastes. In short, if you wouldn't see it airbrushed on the side of a van, I'm not sure it's art.
Thus, the (9th?) M12 edition Llanowar Elves looks a whole lot better to me than the (Alpha) Revised Llanowar Elves, which looks "like a bleedin' Picasso" (free Llanowar Elves to the first person who can tell me where that's from). At the very least, most of the art has progressed to Larry Elmore quality (another great artist from my childhood), and some of it is hang-it-on-my-wall good. I particularly love the current art for the classic angel cards (Serra Angel, Archangel), the newer angels, and of course Doorkeeper is the most hilariously cute card I've ever seen.
Thumbs sideways: crossing the circle
I always liked the pairing of "allied" colors. I liked the flavor it gave the game. It seemed to me that the game had more personality when Red hated Blue, White hated Black, and so forth. The game mechanics are more interesting with the possibility of pairing opposed colors, but it seems to have come at the cost of a thematic component that was unique to Magic. And don't even get me started on this three-color nonsense.
Thumbs down: this three-color nonsense
This is no doubt just a cranky old player struggling to adjust, but I'm having enough trouble as it is building good two-color decks, and now it seems that adding a third color is almost expected. My first reaction to Nicol Bolas and his elder dragon buddies back in the day was that he was a joke card. Nobody would ever seriously play that, right? And besides, three colors means that two of your colors are opposed and working against each other… oh, right.
Then I saw Nicol's planeswalker variant played in all seriousness at FNM. I even heard one wag yapping about playing five-color control, and almost fainted from the absurdity. On top of that, mono decks are now a thing, which as I said in my last article, used to be the sole province of morons. What is the world of Magic coming to? Is there anything that didn't change?
Thumbs way up: lands are normal again
I remember opening my first Ice Age pack, seeing the new snow-covered lands, and thinking "what is this crap?" I'm completely thrilled to see that WotC has aborted that nonsense. So lands changed, then unchanged.
Thumbs down: power inflation
That was my first reaction. Now I've made my peace with the fact that creatures are bigger, generally cheaper, and their upkeep costs are smaller to nonexistent. It was quite a shock though to see my first Grove of the Guardian crank out a frickin' TOKEN that was every bit as powerful as the crown jewel of my old Revised collection, Force of Nature, with no upkeep. Which brings me to...
Thumbs up: tokens are a thing
As I wrote in my first column, my local Magic community didn't really know what to make of tokens back in Fallen Empires. Sure, you could crank out chump blockers, but it never really seemed like you were getting your money's worth as compared to straight-up creatures.
Now, there's tokens everywhere. I've seen Zombie tokens, Angel tokens, about a billion different versions of Human and Wolf and Ooze and Wurm tokens, and better still, they're semi-officially supported by WotC with token cards. Best of all, my favorite colors get Populate as an ability. I haven't figured out how to make it work competitively yet, but it's cool nonetheless.
Thumbs up: sleeves
Rumors of individual card sleeves were whispered during my first go-round with Magic, but we dismissed such rumors as the fevered rantings of potheads and folks who'd read the Necronomicon. Being manly men, we asserted our neanderthal primacy by proclaiming that anyone who'd use such things, if they even existed, was a nancy-boy who didn't deserve a seat at the table. Pull out your Moxes and your Black Lotus and shuffle them up like a man!
Now I see that sleeves are ubiquitous and generally expected. I momentarily resisted, remembering the testosterone-laden chest-thumpings of my past, then I visited a store where a box of random commons sat on the counter. I picked up a handful of them and started to flip through them, only to have my efforts foiled by the grotesque and multitudinous layers of schmutz on each and every card. My overactive imagination immediately conjured a montage of nose-pickings, zit-squeezings, food-fingerings, and other grossness now stratified and breeding pestilence on the very cards in my hand. I discovered I could scrape the crap from the cards with my fingernail and almost retched.
After a thorough hand-sanitizing, I asked for a pack of playing sleeves and got to work sleeving up my decks. Then I sleeved all my rares. Then I couldn't stand that part of my collection was sleeved and part wasn't (OCD ENGAGE!), so I sleeved every last card. My collection currently has around 5000 or so cards, and every single one of them is sleeved, most in cheap penny sleeves, but a fair number in playing sleeves. It keeps my inner germophobe placated. I try not to dwell on the fact that they're in different sleeves… it makes the CIA mind control lasers twitch.
Thumbs down: foil cards
Speaking of OCD, foils seem deliberately designed by WotC to inflame that obsessive collector part of me that can't stand not having a full set of anything. I have to work very hard at convincing myself that foils are actually flawed cards and that I don't like them (even though they're shiny and preciousssss). Thus, at the very least if I've got a foil and you've got the non-foil version of the same card, I will trade you straight up. No lie. And I don't want to know the price difference. Hell, if it's a common I might just give it to you.
Thumbs down: foreign language cards
I realize that any game with an international market will need to make international game materials. I really do. But I hate with a passion having some Japanese or Russian card played on me. The game is complicated enough without having to look up the oracle text for every card I'm unfamiliar with, IN THE MIDDLE OF A TIME-LIMITED MATCH. I mostly like the new rules layouts with the turn phases and the stack and all that, but holy crap do I wish there was some kind of meta-rule restricting cards to local languages, or forcing players of foreign-language cards to bring handouts consisting of photocopied English versions for their opponents to reference.
Thumbs down: Phyrexian mana
OMG I was so happy to see that rotate out, just a month or so after I came back to the game. Watching Blue players kill my dudes with Gut Shot by paying 2 life instead of having anything Mountain-like on the board was just infuriating. I came back in after Scars block was already settled and starting to collect dust, but just before it rotated out, and Phyrexian mana felt a lot like cheating from this newb's perspective.
Thumbs up: formats
As my last article should have made plainly clear, I love having officially sanctioned formats and variants. It means that everybody gets to play the kind of Magic they want to play, and (hopefully) reduces the opportunities for jerkwad arguments over what is and isn't allowed. I don't see myself playing Legacy or Modern any time soon, but I'm glad there's an avenue for players with appropriate collections to use them without resorting to the Magic equivalent of the MMORPG noob-slaughter.
Thumbs way, way up: computerization
Back in the day, the only things we really had for card lists and valuations were our local game store and the trade rags. It seems like one of them was called Scrye. Is that still around?
Anyway, today there are many ways to manage the vast swaths of data associated with the game, and that is an absolute godsend. I personally use Decked Builder for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I like being able to build a deck virtually, filtering for Standard-legal cards in my collection, instead of screwing with the physical cards and then having to vet them individually after the deck is built. The only thing that bugs me about it is that it doesn't include support for identifying foils, and the deck simulator doesn't support counters or tokens. Deckbox.org is a cool site that seems to do the same thing, but it doesn't look like it supports identifying the set a particular card came from (or identifying foils). I'd love to see something with an easy bulk import, foil support, and a deck simulator that allows you to battle it out with friends including full token and counter support. I've looked, but haven't found it yet.
On my iPad, I also have MTG Trades, an app that helps identify the going value for a card by using the prices published at various sites, and remembers your trades for you if you're anal like me and always need to have your inventory database up-to-date.
The internet is a stabilizing factor in individual card prices; when players can easily hop on the internet and order cards from 1200 miles away and get them in time for FNM, it tends to prevent local bubbles from forming.
The internet also means that net-decking is a thing, which tends to disappoint the consummate tinkerer in me. I like winning, but I really prefer winning with the deck that I built against the deck that you built. Net-decking may show one of us to be a better player, but it means that constructed formats don't really force a test of deck-building skills. I guess that's what sealed events are for.
Of course, I couldn't mention computerization without bringing up MTG Online, which in my book is either a cynical marketing scheme or a giant missed opportunity or both. I don't like having a separate, virtual inventory of cards that cost just as much as the cards I buy at the store. I haven't done much with MTGO because if I'm going to shell out $4 for a pack of 15 cards, I think I ought to have some cards in my hand at the end of the transaction. It bugs me. It feels like a TSR move. (Kids, TSR owned Dungeons and Dragons before Wizards of the Coast, and while they would let you buy the product, they would also sue you into poverty if you tried to do anything creative with it.) It seems like the program would be better as a promoter of physical card sales, by letting players try out deck ideas without regard to card price or availability, and learn how the game is played in a structured environment that demonstrates triggers and the stack and so forth for you.
The interface is also clunky as hell. It feels like it was written by a third-rate software shop, like something Electronic Arts would publish. Where's the modern HTML5 interface so we can just log in with a browser? Where's the cross-platform compatibility? Come on, we have 1st-person shooters releasing to all platforms with photo-realistic graphics and amazing physics models, pushing 100 frames per second -- why can I feel myself aging between "click on land card" and "land card graphic turns sideways to indicate it's tapped"?
All in all though, computerization is a huge boon to almost any tabletop game, and Magic probably benefits more than most. I'd love to hear about other collection management and deck building sites that folks know about, as well as software that you've found useful on any platform. Leave comments below or hit me up on Twitter, where I'm @smacketybap. Maybe next time I'll get around to talking about some decks…
Decked Builder: http://www.deckedbuilder.com
MTG Trades: http://www.mtgapps.com/mtg-trades/
