A quick story about the game Magic: The Gathering. Magic is a trading card game, the first game of its type: you collect the cards as if they were baseball cards, form them into decks, then play with them as if they were a card game. You can then take your favorite decks to shops, conventions, student union buildings, friends’ houses, and Taco Bells and challenge the people you meet to duels. The most interesting part of the game is that with the thousands of cards that have been printed, you never know exactly what sort of deck you will be facing.
The second most interesting thing is that practically no one knows how to play the game. I don’t mean people on the street don’t know how to play, I mean the people you play against don’t know how to play. It takes about an hour to learn the basics of the game, and after a couple weeks you should be fine with 99% of the card interactions. But that last 1% of card interactions takes years of intensive study to master. The Comprehensive Rules take up more than one hundred 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper. Most cards don’t do exactly what they say as there are extensive errata for the game. The casual players among you think I’m exaggerating. Quick: Name the six layers of Continuous Effects, the errata for the card Humility, and how to combine them to explain what happens with both Humility and Opalescence in play. If that’s too easy, what happens if you put a creature with morph into play with an Illusionary Mask?
In 1997 Wizards of the Coast decided to simplify the game for younger players. The sets called Portal, 1998’s Portal: Second Age, 1999’s Portal: Three Kingdoms, and 1999’s and 2000’s respective Starter sets were the result. Some of the simplifications made sense, but some were boneheaded. For instance, in regular Magic creatures can block incoming creatures. But to simplify the game for children, instead of talking about blocking, they renamed it intercept, which is probably a high school vocabulary word. The cards had regular Magic card backs — that is, face-down you couldn’t tell them apart from normal Magic cards — but were not allowed in standard Magic. The end result of this was that all the beginner-level cards kids bought turned out to be essentially worthless when they graduated to the next level.
For a long time I’ve been publicly advocating for the legalization of these sets. It actually simplifies things, as that would mean all white- and black-bordered cards would be legal for play, rather than having to memorize cryptic symbols to remember which are legal and which are not. And now it has happened: as of October 1st, Portal and Starter are legal in the formats I play. I’m very pleased.
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