#600114
Today's Friday Question is actually a challenge:
I have recently been learning Magic: the Gathering, the most popular CCG. I expected this to be easy, because I play First Edition, famously considered one of the most complicated and confusing games ever made.
I realize that I have been corrupted by several decades of "1E Brain," but I've come to believe this is a crock. MtG is way harder than First Edition. Setting up a "basic" novice game of MtG involves more overhead than a "basic" novice game of Trek. The stack is better defined in their rules, but more complex and counter-intuitive than 1E's chronological initiate-respond-resolve timing cycle. (It's also full of weird angle shots.)
Reading MtG cards requires you to memorize fifty thousand meaningless keywords that aren't explained on the cards (trample! vigilance! lifelink! horsemanship! flash! double strike! enrage! deposit!). First Edition never went too far down that deadly path, and has since reversed course anyway, so we only have like five total "magic words" left in the game. (Guramba, Cloaking Device, Intelligence, ???) Our cards actually say what they do; Magic wants you to memorize an annex first.
I think we developed a reputation for complexity in part because our rulebook was so disorganized. In fact, for many years we didn't have a rulebook; we had a Glossary, which you had to study like Talmud because information was disorganized and impossible to find. A good chunk of the game, for a long time, was handed down by oral tradition, rather than by any actual black-and-white rules. This lack of organization made our pretty simple game appear mind-numbingly complicated to outsiders, but actually we just needed to write things down better. Since the CC began, though, we've been moving in that direction, and now we're doing (in some ways) better than Magic. After all, there are like 90,000 card specific rulings in Magic, but they aren't actually collected anywhere, like in a document you can actually print out, (like our Glossary); they're just posted on database pages for each individual card, one by one. And there's bazillions of them, far more than in our rulings. We work hard to make cards say what they do, and errata cards that don't.
...which is another thing! Magic doesn't errata its cards when wordings get updated; it just announces a wording update and expects you to look it up in the card database whenever you need the correct wording! That's no way to run a card game! Let me print the correct gametext on my card!
Sure, 1E has plenty of strategic complexity. We can do all kinds of cool stuff on the spaceline, even stuff that's kind of weird, and our board state evolves to a point of high complexity much faster than Magic (because a lot of our complexity hits the table in the Facility Phase, rather than in the opening turns). But our complexity is, for the most part, printed right on the cards, in a relatively lightweight rules framework.
Don't get me wrong, Magic is fun. I'm enjoying my time as a planeswalker. It's not even necessarily a bad thing to be complex and hard to understand.
I am just coming to believe that 1E is not as hard to understand as Magic -- and, more broadly, that 1E is not nearly as complex as our community has spent decades convincing itself that it is. (I include myself in that.) To the extent that we still find it complicated, that's more because of bad communication by the rules documents (and thus the Rules Committee) than because we're doing anything especially Byzantine.
This week's challenge: change my mind! Convince me that, no, actually, First Edition, the so-called "CCG of Kings," really is harder to wrap your head around than the current card game market leader. Prove my unhinged rant wrong!
(Or, better yet, don't change my mind, just agree with my correct takes. )
I have recently been learning Magic: the Gathering, the most popular CCG. I expected this to be easy, because I play First Edition, famously considered one of the most complicated and confusing games ever made.
I realize that I have been corrupted by several decades of "1E Brain," but I've come to believe this is a crock. MtG is way harder than First Edition. Setting up a "basic" novice game of MtG involves more overhead than a "basic" novice game of Trek. The stack is better defined in their rules, but more complex and counter-intuitive than 1E's chronological initiate-respond-resolve timing cycle. (It's also full of weird angle shots.)
Reading MtG cards requires you to memorize fifty thousand meaningless keywords that aren't explained on the cards (trample! vigilance! lifelink! horsemanship! flash! double strike! enrage! deposit!). First Edition never went too far down that deadly path, and has since reversed course anyway, so we only have like five total "magic words" left in the game. (Guramba, Cloaking Device, Intelligence, ???) Our cards actually say what they do; Magic wants you to memorize an annex first.
I think we developed a reputation for complexity in part because our rulebook was so disorganized. In fact, for many years we didn't have a rulebook; we had a Glossary, which you had to study like Talmud because information was disorganized and impossible to find. A good chunk of the game, for a long time, was handed down by oral tradition, rather than by any actual black-and-white rules. This lack of organization made our pretty simple game appear mind-numbingly complicated to outsiders, but actually we just needed to write things down better. Since the CC began, though, we've been moving in that direction, and now we're doing (in some ways) better than Magic. After all, there are like 90,000 card specific rulings in Magic, but they aren't actually collected anywhere, like in a document you can actually print out, (like our Glossary); they're just posted on database pages for each individual card, one by one. And there's bazillions of them, far more than in our rulings. We work hard to make cards say what they do, and errata cards that don't.
...which is another thing! Magic doesn't errata its cards when wordings get updated; it just announces a wording update and expects you to look it up in the card database whenever you need the correct wording! That's no way to run a card game! Let me print the correct gametext on my card!
Sure, 1E has plenty of strategic complexity. We can do all kinds of cool stuff on the spaceline, even stuff that's kind of weird, and our board state evolves to a point of high complexity much faster than Magic (because a lot of our complexity hits the table in the Facility Phase, rather than in the opening turns). But our complexity is, for the most part, printed right on the cards, in a relatively lightweight rules framework.
Don't get me wrong, Magic is fun. I'm enjoying my time as a planeswalker. It's not even necessarily a bad thing to be complex and hard to understand.
I am just coming to believe that 1E is not as hard to understand as Magic -- and, more broadly, that 1E is not nearly as complex as our community has spent decades convincing itself that it is. (I include myself in that.) To the extent that we still find it complicated, that's more because of bad communication by the rules documents (and thus the Rules Committee) than because we're doing anything especially Byzantine.
This week's challenge: change my mind! Convince me that, no, actually, First Edition, the so-called "CCG of Kings," really is harder to wrap your head around than the current card game market leader. Prove my unhinged rant wrong!
(Or, better yet, don't change my mind, just agree with my correct takes. )
Rules Manager | Official Rulings in blue. All else opinion. | Rules Archive
"We pledge our loyalty to the Glossary from now until death."
"Then receive this reward from the Glossary. May it keep you strong."
~Iron Prime
"We pledge our loyalty to the Glossary from now until death."
"Then receive this reward from the Glossary. May it keep you strong."
~Iron Prime