The Game Without Rules: Magic the Gathering

Burning the Rulebook

Imagine you're sitting down to a nice game of Monopoly. You've acquired all three pink avenues (St. Charles, States, Virginia) and are ready to build some houses. Suddenly, your opponent whips out a Chance card. "Not so fast," they warn you. "I've got a Chance card that says I can forbid house-building on the color of my choice. I choose pink."

Flummoxed, you roll the die, and advance to the nearest railroad. "Oh goodie," cries the competitor to your right, "I have a Community Chest card that says if you land on a railroad you have to go to jail and I collect $500 and two extra turns." By the time you're out of jail, all your remaining possessions have been seized by the other players, and you are stuck with a "next five turns if you pass Go collect no money" penalty.

Hard to imagine, but that's essentially the feeling of playing the game "Magic: the Gathering," where you are barely in control of your own moves, and have absolutely no idea what rules your opponents will be playing by.

My nephew, bless his heart, got me interested in this game. This is the same nephew who introduced me to anime by getting me enthralled by One Piece, which (oh joy) happens to have 1,156 episodes as of this writing, so I will likely die before I finish watching it. Despite loving games as a sort of generality, I've managed to avoid the so-called "trading card games" (TCG), much as I'd never cottoned on to trading cards, period, except for a short spell investing in Wacky Packages in the 1970s.

I knew such games existed: Pokemon, of course, Yu-gi-oh, and so forth, but I assumed they would hold little appeal, expecting them to exude about as much charm as the card game "War", with its simplistic strategy of hoping you randomly had higher cards than the other person. My best guess at the rules of TCGs was that they would have power and defense points (e.g. 4/2) and if your power was higher than your opponent's defense, you beat them, and if their power was higher than your defense, they beat you, so that each round might involve both losing, one or the other winning, or both winning. Little did I realise the intricacies that could occur.

For Magic the Gathering, yes, there are creature cards that have exactly that: power/defense, in the bottom right corner of the card. But they also come with abilities, some fairly common, some incredibly idiosyncratic. Take the creature Helga, Skittish Seer. She's a frog on a leaf boat, waving her arm at some water ostensibly under her control. Her stats are 1/3, she's not terrifically powerful but she can withstand a few blows. But she has some nifty abilities. If Helga is in play, then whenever another creature gets played, if it's expensive enough, you get to increase Helga's stats by one each, you gain a life, you can even draw an extra card. Not bad, little froggie. She gets better: as she gets more powerful, she gives you extra currency (in this game, it's called "mana", 'cause it's all about casting spells) that you can use to cast more creature spells, thereby gaining more lives, increasing more stats, drawing more cards, and so forth. She's a pretty good card, even though her 1/3 at first didn't seem like much.

But you can't rest on your Helga laurels just yet. Your opponent might hold a card that says "destroy any creature" or "remove all abilities" or "return creature to controller's hand" ... they might enchant poor Helga so that she can't attack or defend any more, they might even play a particularly evil card that lures her over to the dark side so that she can attack her former owner for a turn, nasty stuff.\

There's a good online version of the game (Magic the Gathering: Arena) I play through Steam, which is handy because the computer can figure out what moves are possible and it sorts through all the painstaking arithmetic, which can get a bit much. If you have enchantments that add +1/+1 for every creature attacking this round, but an artifact that reduces its target creature's points by -1/-2 but grants the ability to fly (don't ask), while simultaneously ensuring that its controller gains a point of life for every attacking creature who did damage to their opposing player, you can be glad there's a computer keeping track of it all.

So I've been playing against real people who seem to know the game well, better than I, surely. I trained against bots at first, but they only take you so far. This is where the Real Fun comes in, because there are oodles of different decks available, all with different mechanics and rules, and individuals can pull from these different decks to build their own individual deck, so you really, truly, have no idea what the rules will be for the other player until they spring them on you. Some of these rules you won't even understand (thank goodness I can look things up swiftly on the internet) while they're happening to you.

Once I was losing catastrophically. I had one or two measly creatures left, and my opponent had what seemed to be a hundred or so spread out before him or her. They had enchantments galore, which seemed to produce some effect like "when a creature enters, draw a card," and another that went "when you draw a card, get life," and one that said "when you get life, create a token creature of 1/1", and one that said "when a creature enters, draw a card" (oops, back at the beginning again), and as their life went up and the creatures grew and their hand, my god, the size of their hand, and then suddenly they burst into flames and died, just like that. Because (I learned later) you only have 100 cards in a deck, at most, and they'd created an infinite loop they couldn't live up to: at one point they had to draw a card, there were no more cards, and that killed them. Hoisted by their own petard, as one says, especially if you're Hamlet.

I guess the pleasure comes from these surprises. You can be pretty chuffed with the deck you've built, you can gaze with pleasure at the top 7 cards in your hand, but you won't know until midway through the game if you're doing well or not, and you honestly can't count your chickens before they are hatched, and congratulating you on your victory.

The internet is rife with advice for how to build your own deck, optimising strategies, and such, but I like that you can throw caution to the wind and just make the kind of deck whose play appeals to you. There are cards called Sagas that do one thing, then the next turn they do a different thing, and after three or four turns they are done. This appeals to my craving for narrative, and I have crafted one deck that it almost entirely Sagas, and I love it dearly. You could revel in meanness and create a deck that was filled to the brim with "destroy the enemy's card" cards, and you could harass them over and over again, as they fruitlessly play a card only to see it crushed moments later. Or, like someone I know, you can specialize in raccoons and adjacent cute creatures.

The online game rewards wins with points in the form of coins, and you can trade in these virtual coins for more and better cards: you don't actually need to do any trading, if you don't want to, either in the real or virtual worlds, which was another reason I'd never got near to TCGs before: I expected you had to do some trading, and I'd rather just buy what I need and hoard it forever, I'm not a trader, not remotely. (Except for excess yarn, of course, which every serious knitter has oodles of).

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Notes and Links:

Magic the Gathering - the official site