Fussing About a Card Game

Mark Rosewater issues the final word on Universes Beyond

I read Mark Rosewater’s blog post about Universes Beyond. I can’t imagine the toll it takes to deal with Magic players online. It’s a miracle he’s not running people down on all fours, teeth bared. I enjoy his thoughts on Magic design.

To relate to his audience, he uses commander as an example of a change to Magic he had to choke down, much like UB to his audience of UB-haters. I can indeed relate; I enjoy commander, but I don’t like it as the foundation of the game. It’s bad for beginners, it’s annoying to calibrate decks to play expectations, and it’s far more variable than 1v1 formats. Nevertheless, I play it every week with my friends and enjoy it a lot. It’s a little more “the gathering” than “magic” to me, but I like tapping my little lands and so forth. Commander was a player-created format that caught on enough to be adopted by WotC. It was fan-driven and emergent. In that way, it’s a poor analogy to UB; Mark writes about it as though it was the result of the seasons changing, or a groundswell of player sentiment. People were at the doors of WotC HQ and their demands were clear: give us Furby cards!

Clearly it’s popular, and it’s not going anywhere. Love it or leave it, says Mark. Practically speaking, he’s correct. Of course those are the options. I can also go for a walk or eat an orange. The more salient question is: is UB bad or not?

In terms of sales: no, of course not. It’s been a screaming success. Final Fantasy was the best selling set of all time through presales alone. Lord of the Rings and Avatar were blockbuster sets, as well. UB brought in new players, and some undisclosed portion of enfranchised players enjoy it and continue to buy it. My limited and anecdotal sample of non-critical sentiment ranges from enthusiasm to indifference, from “I started playing Magic because of this set” to “I don’t care, the mechanics are what matters.” Some of these sets are license to print money. Rosewater has said that the reason in-universe sets are sticking around are business related; not to read too much into it, but that this is the go-to justification for keeping in-universe sets around tells me just how far the business concerns really go.

The art, science, and business of cramming other shit into your shit and mixing it up could be called Marvelism, although strictly speaking, their endless references were self-reference, and the crossovers usually had some kind of narrative significance, however dumb and shallow. It was a prototypical example of the form, along with pro wrestling. I think it’s more accurate to call it Fortnitism, where the pop culture unit is served strictly for itself. It’s decorative, but prominent. It’s secondary to the game, but occupies a prominent space in the marketing, presentation, and public image of the game. The specific Pop Culture Unit is close to irrelevant; as long as kids can see it in the shop without being scarred, it’s probably fair game. Whatever character you can imagine, that character can hold an AK-47 and shoot at other characters in a wacky, colorful world. The PCU serves to advertise those properties to the enfranchised players and to draw in new players with their favored PCUs. In other words, it’s selling out.

Even prior to UB, Magic was a hodgepodge of rip-offs and riffs on preexisting fantasy, not to mention the fact that it’s an acquisitive hobby for 30 something men with money to burn. In some ways, it’s as much toy bin material as Fortnite. Still though, I think it had an idiosyncratic, vital, and authentic core, and that core gets trampled by the inclusion of outside material. It makes the whole thing look even more cheap and venal, orients it more toward consumption than it already was. I don’t think it matters whether or not the sets are especially well-designed, or whether the art is especially good. That varies per set, as it always has—Final Fantasy was very well-executed, and Avatar looked and played like shit. No, players will hoover this shit up regardless. Commander players will play the cards, and power creep ensures these cards always make it into 60 card formats, for whatever that matters anymore.

I’ll give Rosewater this: Commander was indeed probably the beginning of the end. A big formless pile of cards that players shape to their liking, a blank canvas of a game that you and WotC can paint on, a game mediated by social norms and expectations, a game where you get to select your commander as you would your Fortnite skin. If you can run your favorite hippo or a flayed alien as your commander, why not characters from outside the game? The fact that the game has no real identity is a feature, because the point is to be able to shape the identity in the pod. That’s why the bracket system is so loose, that’s why the rules committee has had such a light touch. It is whatever you want it to be, and UB gives you the tools to really make it whatever you want. It can be a virtual world that eventually contains everything, like the Metaverse, Ready Player One, Super Smash Bros, or Fortnite.

Except, of course, it can’t do that. It’s a card game. It’s a card game where two wizards battle each other. While Commander is something of a blank canvas as far as Magic goes, it’s still much more idiosyncratic than the other examples. I can sort of see the temptation to slot any old shit into commander, but it’s not so formless that it ought to fit Calvin and Hobbes or whatever.

I’m not going to stop playing, so whatever. I even play a few UB cards! I know, I know, I’m really rolling in the mud. Anyway, the stakes are low. I don’t play to contact the numinous. I think it’s worth noting that something has left, though. The game lives, but it changed, and the change makes it qualitatively worse, worse in the way everything seems to be going—cheaper, uglier, dumber, more crass, and more ephemeral.