Beyond the Deck

Studies in Gaming
The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age:
Studies: Critical Essays (Matthew Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop
Wilhelm Kapell, editor, 2016) RPGs and Fandom (Stephanie Hedge
and Jennifer Grouling, editors, 2020)
Player and Avatar: The Affective Potential
of Videogames (David Owen, 2017) What Is a Game? Essays on the Nature of
Videogames (Gaines S. Hubbell, editor, 2020)
Speedrunning: Interviews with the
Quickest Gamers (David Snyder, 2017) Women and Video Game Modding: Essays
on Gender and the Digital Community
The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews (Bridget Whelan, editor, 2020)
with Cult and Classic Video Game
Developers (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2018) Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays
on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Mike
The Postmodern Joy of ­­Role-Playing Games: Piero and Marc A. Ouellette, editors, 2021)
Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium
(René Reinhold Schallegger, 2018) The Minds Behind Shooter Games:
Interviews with Cult and Classic Video
Responding to Call of Duty: Critical Game Developers (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2021)
Essays on the Game Franchise
(Nate Garrelts, editor, 2018) Playing with the Guys: Masculinity
and Relationships in Video Games
Storytelling in the Modern Board Game: (Marc A. Ouellette, 2021)
Narrative Trends from the Late 1960s
to Today (Marco Arnaudo, 2018) Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age:
Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop
Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the RPGs and Fandom (Stephanie Hedge
Digital Narrative (Amy M. Green, 2018) and Jennifer Grouling, editors, 2021)
Teach Like a Gamer: Adapting the Strictly Fantasy: The Cultural Roots
Instructional Design of Digital ­­Role-Playing of Tabletop ­­Role-Playing Games
Games (Carly Finseth, 2018) (Gerald Nachtwey, 2021)
Video Gaming in Science Fiction: Watch Us Roll: Essays on Actual Play
A Critical Study (Jason Barr, 2018) and Performance in Tabletop ­­Role-Playing
The Composition of Video Games: Games (Shelly Jones, editor, 2021)
Narrative, Aesthetics, Rhetoric and Who’s in the Game? Identity and
Play (Johansen Quijano, 2019) Intersectionality in Classic Board
­­Forum-Based Role Playing Games as Digital Games (Terri Toles Patkin, 2021)
Storytelling (Csenge Virág Zalka, 2019) The Minds Behind PlayStation Games:
Narrative Design and Authorship Interviews with Creators and Developers
in Bloodborne: An Analysis of the Horror (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2022)
Videogame (Madelon Hoedt, 2019) The Minds Behind PlayStation 2 Games:
The Pokémon Go Phenomenon: Essays Interviews with Creators and Developers
on Public Play in Contested Spaces (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2022)
(Jamie Henthorn, Andrew Kulak, Kristopher The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games:
Purzycki, Stephanie Vie, editors, 2019) Interviews with Creators and Developers
The Minds Behind Adventure Games: (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2022)
Interviews with Cult and Classic Video Game The Performance of Video Games:
Developers (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2020) The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays
The Minds Behind Sports Games: Interviews on the Game and Its Legacy (Jason C.
with Cult and Classic Video Game Cash and Craig T. Olsen, editors, 2022)
Developers (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2020) Beyond the Deck: Critical Essays
Rerolling Boardgames: Essays on Themes, on Magic: The Gathering and Its
Systems, Experiences and Ideologies Influence (Shelly Jones, editor, 2023)
(Douglas Brown, Esther ­­MacCallum-
Stewart, editors, 2020)
 Beyond the Deck
Critical Essays on Magic:
The Gathering and Its Influence
Edited by Shelly Jones
Studies in Gaming
Series Editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina
 This book has undergone peer review.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones, Shelly, 1983– editor.

Title: Beyond the deck : critical essays on
Magic: the Gathering and its influence / edited by Shelly Jones.
Description: Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2023 |
Series: Studies in gaming / series editor, Matthew Wilhelm Kapell
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023024618 | ISBN 9781476683164 (paperback : acid free paper) ♾
| ISBN 9781476649061 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Magic: The Gathering (Game) |
Collectible card games. | Fantasy games.
Classification: LCC GV1469.62.M34 B49 2023 | DDC 795.4—dc23/eng/20230602
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024618

British Library cataloguing data are available

ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-8316-4
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-4906-1

© 2023 Shelly Jones. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image © SimpleB/Shutterstock

Printed in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
To Keith, my favorite fellow nerd who fills
my life with magic every day.
 Acknowledgments

Many thanks to our fellow gamers, family, and

friends, who supported this project through many hours
of discussion, proofreading, and, perhaps most impor-
tantly: playing with us.

vi
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsvi
Introduction
Shelly Jones1

Magic: Design and Performance

Interview with Mark Rosewater
Aaron Trammell 9
Waiting for Player
Michael Nixon 21

Economies and Esports

Understanding the Magic: The Gathering Card Market:
An Ethnographic Approach Toward a Market Strategy
Eugenio Luciano and Alexander di Re 43
Spoiling the Future Metagame: The Promotional Logic
and Reception of Card Previews in Magic: The Gathering
Jan Švelch 66
“Cracking” Players as Packs: Finding Speculative Value in Magic:
The Gathering Through Play on Magic Arena and Twitch
Justin S. Schumaker 91
Wasn’t in the Cards: The ­Proto-Esport of Professional Magic
Matt Knutson 112

The Communities of Magic: Ethnography and Education

“Who wouldn’t want to summon dragons and trolls?”
Constructing Communities at Friday Night Magic
Rachel Guldin and Brandon C. Harris 147
vii
viii   Table of Contents

Gathering Understanding: Subcultures, Hierarchies, and Norms

Calvin Liu 168
Student Creation of Magic: The Gathering Cards
as ­Cross-Disciplinary Pedagogy of Writing and Mathematics
Wendi Sierra and Kris Green 181

Reinterpreting Magic: Narratives Beyond the Deck

Pacifism as Epic Recomposition in Magic: The Gathering
Roger Travis 217
Gay Play: The Queer Possibilities of Magic: The Gathering
Aaron Aquilina 233
The Call of Eldrazi: The Lovecraftian in Magic: The Gathering
Valentino Paccosi 251
From Magic to Gwent: Magic’s Impact on the Gaming Industry
Jiwon Ohm 273

Conclusion
Shelly Jones 289
About the Contributors293
Index297
 Introduction
Shelly Jones

I was first introduced to Magic as a middle school student in the ’90s.

My 7th grade English teacher would invite students to stay after school
once a week if we wanted to read, write, or work quietly on other projects.
In retrospect she was creating a safe space for us nerds who needed an out-
let for creativity, who needed to know we weren’t alone in the world. She
ultimately succeeded in creating an inclusive community where students
could feel comfortable being themselves. It was in that classroom that I
discovered Magic. A few of the boys (yes: of course they were boys playing
Magic in the ’90s) would bring their decks, turn two desks to sit squared
off, face to face, and proceed to deal out their hands. Sometimes I would
watch, sitting on a nearby desk looking over them, eating green apple Air-
heads, a journal or book in my lap. I did not know what they were doing
and, regrettably, at the time I never took them up on their offers to teach
me the rules. I was too shy to try my hand at playing a Planeswalker, but
I remember being intrigued by the epic combinations of cards, tapping
powers to chain reactions to defeat an opponent. The boys would recite
endless factoids about the different cards: their powers as well as the lore
that surrounded them. “You’d love it,” one classmate told me, knowing my
penchant for stories and mythology. But at the time I was happy to merely
observe. In hindsight, the rapid play of cards and the players’ ingrained
knowledge of the sequence of cards overwhelmed me, intimidated me
into the role of silent observer. Despite their exuberance for sharing the
world of Magic, I felt an imperceptible barrier that kept me from exploring
more. Not only were there rules to learn, but a whole lore system, lots of
new terminology, different card types, different play styles, different for-
mats of play. In discussing her own experience learning to play Magic, lit-
eracy expert Autumn Dodge (2018) notes that her “limited understanding
of specialized and ­c ontext-specific uses of vocabulary overwhelmingly
hindered [her] ability to play strategically” (p. 168). All of these different

1
2  Introduction

aspects of the game need to be synchronized and intuitively acted upon by

the player in order to successfully play.
The boys would bring binders full of cards to sort and look over, dis-
cussing how much they had bought each card for, how useful each card
was in a specific type of deck. The breadth and depth of knowledge one
needed to have just to play Magic (let alone be good at it) seemed insur-
mountable at the time. Now I regret not getting more involved, not being
willing to learn the game, to tackle all the prerequisites like a diligent stu-
dent. But as Dodge (2018) argues, “Magic rests on the notion of learning
as socially situated” (p. 172). As a teen I had been a bit of a recluse, more
content doing homework and scribbling away in a journal than engaging
in social activities like playing games.1 I had yet to fully understand the
importance of gaming as a community-building mechanism, as a cogni-
tive device for learning strategy, critical thinking, and communication
skills. As an adult who fell into the world of analog games in college (and
who eventually realized she could study the games she enjoyed playing), I
have come to appreciate games for all that they can offer.
In 2019, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, saw in
Magic: The Gathering what I could not see as a teen: its significance as a
game and its transformative power on the world of hobby gaming. The
Strong Museum inducted Magic: The Gathering into their Toy Hall of
Fame, noting that its “novel mechanism for play” and “random variabil-
ity” in cards gave rise to the entire CCG (collectible card game) genre. In
discussing the rationale for Magic’s induction, museum curator Shannon
Symonds stated, “Magic: The Gathering changed the landscape of collect-
ible card gaming with its introduction more than 25 years ago, and it’s
become a part of pop culture—leading to book series, electronic games,
and even a series on Netflix. The fact that it continues to maintain pop-
ularity is a testament to its revolutionary gameplay and constant evolu-
tion, making it engaging for beginners and experts alike” (The Strong
Museum of Play, 2019). One of the key elements of this particular style
of game is the combination of player agency in cultivating a “winning”
deck through strategic understanding of card powers along with the ran-
domness of when the cards are drawn. As Owens and Helmer (1996) note
in their introductory text cataloguing CCGs, “Collectible card games are
two games in one: playing the cards and collecting the cards. Both games
depend on the luck of the draw, as well as your skill in playing the hand
you’ve been dealt” (p. 16). Though randomness is certainly an element of
nearly any ­card-based game (i.e., a player might have some control in card
positionality within the deck due to special cards, but typically a player
doesn’t know exactly when a card will be drawn), Magic emphasizes a play-
er’s skill and agency in crafting and designing their deck. In her study
 Introduction (Jones)  3

on the semiotics of Magic, Csilla Weninger (2006) notes that in collect-

ible strategy games “creativity is evidenced in how players combine and
manipulate available cards each turn in order to win” (p. 74). Players vie
for particular cards in the market, buying booster packs or individual
cards, because they understand how key mechanics can function not only
in isolation (e.g., the mechanics of the single card), but how they can inter-
act with other cards in their ­self-designed deck (e.g., the mechanics of a
card set up a cascading effect for other cards played in sequence).
Moreover, Magic is composed not only of the unique mechanics of
the cards, but also each ­play-through emphasizes a synthesis of mechanics
and narrative, of game play and lore. The fundamental concept of the game
illustrates how the mechanics and narrative are interwoven: “The game
was developed on the premise that decks of cards represent the mental
repertoire of sorcerers who duel with each other for supremacy on a fan-
tasy world called Dominia. Because every sorcerer’s repertoire is the result
of her/his unique life experiences, no two deck of cards is likely to be the
same” (Williams 2006, p. 79). Weninger (2006) reminds us that “what is
happening in the ongoing game is registered on the cards and can be read
at any point” (p. 74). Had I understood the signifiers as a teenager look-
ing over my friends’ games, I could have understood exactly what had hap-
pened both mechanically (e.g., in terms of who was winning, who had a
better defense, whose ­land-based engine was producing more mana, etc.)
and narratively (e.g., what spells each Planeswalker had used, what crea-
tures or weapons had been summoned to their aid in battle, etc.). Magic’s
ability to tell stories and incorporate familiar characters and tropes into
its Multiverse from various mythos and literary traditions provides a space
for the players to craft their own epic tale while playing, a phenomenon
that Roger Travis examines further in his essay.
While other books dedicated to Magic: The Gathering have explored
the history of the collectible card system or offer strategic guides on how
to create a winning deck, this collection of critical essays explores Rich-
ard Garfield’s ­g round-breaking game from a variety of scholarly view-
points including gender studies, economics, education, game studies, and
more. The essays herein critically examine how Magic: The Gathering has
changed and challenged the ways we view analog gaming, particularly as
the advent of ­esports has begun to blur the line between analog and digital.
Though, as Aaron Trammell (2019) would note, this bleed between analog
and digital happens beyond the obvious extension to electronic platforms
of gaming. Magic cards in particular, and most collectible card games over-
all, require the use of digital tools for their creation, thus suggesting that
such digital labor practices situate analog gaming “within the complex
networked space of the digital economy” (Trammell 2019). Indeed, Magic
4  Introduction

continues to pioneer navigating the ­a nalog-digital divide, finding pur-

chase in both arenas. According to a 2020 Washington Post article,
between the ­i n-person and online populations, an estimated 40 million
people play Magic and Magic cards are published in 11 different languages
(Edwards).
The essays in this collection examine the myriad ways in which Magic
is performed across multiple realms: in a local game store, online, and even
in the classroom. The first section of this book, “Magic: Design and Per-
formance,” focuses on the mechanical aspects of the game itself. We begin
with an interview with Mark Rosewater, the head designer for Magic at
Wizards of the Coast. Rosewater comments on his creative process and the
significance of balancing mechanics with flavor in designing Magic. This
­i n-depth interview by Aaron Trammell with one of the key designers of
Magic provides us with a foundational understanding of how game design
can go beyond the cards. Bridging the gap between analog and digital play,
in his essay, Michael Nixon explores the role of time when playing Magic
both in person and online. In particular, Nixon focuses on the nuances of
the online interface and how the MTGO display can affect a player’s rhythm
and state of engagement. This essay underscores the challenges of recreat-
ing an analog experience in a digital medium and how digital mechanisms
can potentially inhibit the player in ways unique to that modality.
In the section “Economies and Esports,” essays explore the capitalistic
and competitive world of Magic online. Eugenio Luciano and Alexander di
Re examine the economic intricacies of the Magic card market. Focusing on
the market history of “Oko, Thief of Crown” as a case study, they use empir-
ical evidence to create a theoretical framework for understanding the Magic
market and develop potential market strategies for players. Looking at the
reception and promotion of new cards, Jan Švelch examines the discursive
stances and rhetorical themes present in “spoiler” preview content. Švelch
then discusses how this metagaming not only affects the consumer interest
for certain products, but also the secondary market value of existing cards.
In his essay, Justin S. Schumaker analyzes the speculative potential of cards
as commodities in online Magic. Noting the lack of secondary card markets
in Arena, Schumaker explores how value is produced online through the
transmedial marketplace for play and labor via Twitch and other platforms.
Examining the trajectory of Magic as an esport, Matt Knutson argues that
Wizards of the Coast missed the opportunity to fully establish Magic as a
professionalized entity. He suggests that Wizards’ stuttering approach in the
early 2000s ultimately relegated Magic to a ­pseudo-esport, never realizing its
full potential in the arena of professional play.
The next section, “The Communities of Magic: Ethnography and Edu-
cation,” examines the role of Magic in community building in multiple
 Introduction (Jones)  5

contexts: the classroom, the local game store, and the larger fandom as a
whole. In their essay, Rachel Guldin and Brandon C. Harris take an ethno-
graphical approach to Friday Night Magic as they interview members of a
local gaming community in order to further understand its access points
and barriers. Based on their observations, Guldin and Harris argue that local
game stores play a large part in establishing and constructing an inclusive
atmosphere that can appeal to both new and established players. Focusing
on the fandom of Magic and paratexts such as Reddit threads, Calvin Liu
looks at the hierarchies and norms established within the player community,
particularly surrounding the Commander multiplayer format of Magic. Liu
examines the friction that can happen in play between the player expecta-
tions and the game’s descriptive norms. Finally, using Magic cards as an edu-
cational tool, Wendi Sierra and Kris Green discuss the pedagogical potential
of the collectible card game in both composition and mathematics curric-
ula. Their ­game-based learning community integrated Magic as a means to
understand mathematical modeling as well as graphic literacy and design.
The essays in the last section, “Reinterpreting Magic: Narratives
Beyond the Deck,” explore Magic’s epic and fantastical roots as well as its
­far-reaching influence in the larger world of gaming. In his essay, Roger
Travis examines Magic as a collaborative storytelling activity, much like
the Homeric tradition of oral recomposition. Focusing on the card “Pac-
ifism,” Travis underscores the collaborative nature of Magic and thus its
epic roots. Next, Aaron Aquilina examines the inclusion of queer narra-
tives in Magic and discusses the transformational representation of the
cards themselves. Further, he argues that the mechanics of Magic provide
for a method of play that he terms “gay play” that embodies the very idea
of queer selfhood. In his essay, Valentino Paccosi explores the integration
of Lovecraftian elements into Magic both in terms of the lore as well as the
mechanics. Focusing on the Eldrazi cards, Paccosi analyzes the destruc-
tive nature of these monsters as faithful to the Lovecraftian gestalt as well
as potentially ­game-breaking in play. Finally, Jiwon Ohm illustrates the
influential nature of Magic beyond the world of tabletop gaming by analyz-
ing other popular collectible card games such as Hearthstone and the pop-
ular ­game-within-a-game, Gwent. Gwent, a card game developed for the
video game The Witcher, as Ohm argues, is inspired by Magic, and serves
as a reminder of the ­far-reaching influence of Magic beyond the deck.

Note
1. Childhood friends who know me now are amazed that I study games as part of my
work, remembering my (vehement) reluctance to play Cranium at the rare party I attended
in high school.
6  Introduction

References
Dodge, A. (2018). Examining Literacy Practices in the Game Magic: The Gathering. Amer-
icanJournal of Play, v10 n2 p ­169-192.
Edwards, G. (2020, July 29). Strange Magic. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.
com/magazine/2020/07/29/­a fter-nearly-30-years-game-magic-gathering-is-bigger-
than-ever-best-players-may-also-be-teaching-us-about-heroism/
Owens, T, and Helmer, D. (1996). Inside Collectible Card Games. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook
Press.
Rosewater, M. (2013, December 3). Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. Magic: The Gathering.
Retrieved from https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/­m aking-magic/­t immy-
johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03.
The Strong Museum of Play. (2019, November 7) 2019 National Toy Hall of Fame Induct-
ees Announced: Matchbox Cars, Magic: The Gathering, Coloring Book [Press release].
Retrieved from https://www.museumofplay.org/press/releases/2019/11/­5 690-2019-toy-
hall-of-fame-inductees-announced.
Trammell, A. (2019, March 10). Analog Games and the Digital Economy. Analog Game Studies,
VI(I). Retrieved from https://analoggamestudies.org/2019/03/­a nalog-games-and-the-
digital-economy/.
Weninger, C. (2006). Social Events and Roles in Magic. In J.P. Williams, S.Q. Hendricks,
and W.K. Winkler (Eds.), Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience
in Fantasy Games (pp. ­57-76). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Williams, J.P. (2006). Consumption and Authenticity in the Collectible Strategy Games-
Subculture. In J.P. Williams, S.Q. Hendricks, and W.K. Winkler (Eds.), Gaming as Cul-
ture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games (pp. ­7 7-99).Jefferson,
NC: McFarland.
 Magic
Design and Performance
 Interview with Mark Rosewater
Aaron Trammell

In early October 2020, I had the opportunity to interview Mark Rose-

water, the lead designer of Magic: The Gathering. Mark took over design
of Magic in 2003 after the game went through a series of more experimen-
tal phases with Richard Garfield, Joel Mick, and finally Bill Rose over-
seeing many of the early designs. Since becoming lead designer of Magic,
Rosewater has had a tremendous influence on commercializing the game,
imbuing the design with thematically rich content, understanding play-
ers motivations through psychographics, trailblazing a vocabulary of card
game design, and standing at the ­avant-garde of media presence through
his blog, Blogatog, his weekly column Making Magic, and now his pod-
cast Drive to Work. Few games have had the ­long-term success that Magic
enjoys, and this success, in so many ways, is due to Mark’s innovations in
the field of game design.
In our conversation, I spoke with Mark about a broad array of topics
including his relationship with Richard Garfield, his childhood interest in
science fiction and fantasy, his interest in psychology, and the secret to cre-
ativity 25 years into his career. The insights in this interview span the per-
sonal and the professional, and speak to Mark’s skill in developing one of
the longest running and most exciting franchises in the history of gaming.
Aaron Trammell: I know that in many ways Richard Garfield, the original
designer of Magic: The Gathering, was your mentor. Can you tell me what
you think you learned the most by working with him?
Mark Rosewater: The thing that I enjoy about Richard is that he’s
really good at tapping into what makes the game fun. One of the things
that I took away from him is the idea of the “fun center.” And the idea is
that it’s your job as the game designer to figure out what’s the cool part of
your game, what’s the fun part of your game, and then make your game
such that your audience has to hit that.

9
10  Magic

What makes your game enjoyable? What makes it something that

people will connect with? Make sure it’s not something that they may hit,
make it something that you force them to hit. Richard really drummed
into me the idea that gamers are going to do what gamers are going to do.
They’re going to play the game. If the way to win your game is not the way
that’s fun, they will play it that way and they won’t have as good a time
with it. They’ll lead you where the game leads you. Richard really taught
that the idea of a game is understanding where you want to lead your play-
ers. Structure your game such that you lead them where you want them to
be.
There’s a lot of elements to the games, but there always is this chewy
center, this fun center that really is what the game is. What makes your
game the thing that people really connect with? If you don’t understand
why other people would like your game, you can’t build your game. That’s
my biggest takeaway from Richard. A kind of understanding about how
and why you build things such that it allows that.
Another big thing that I learned from Richard is the value of what
I now call piggybacking. It’s a term that I came up with, but it really was
borrowed from a lot of stuff Richard had done. King of Tokyo is a great
example where it takes this cool element of Yahtzee—dice rolling—and
says, “Okay, I’m going to repurpose that. But because people know it, I
don’t need to teach it to them. They kind of already know it.” I love the idea
of using the audience’s preexisting knowledge as a means to make your
game easier to access. I think that’s really important and Richard does that
really, really well.
There’s no person on the face of the earth that I’ve ever met that is
more a historian of games than Richard. Richard just wants to play every
game ever known to existence. He taught a class on the history of games
and when we were working together every night we’d stay late and he
would say, “Here’s a game from Germany you’ve never heard of that’s in
German. And here’s the game from Japan….” Just exposing us to all of
these games.
Richard really, really loves just the language of games. That’s one of
the things that you see in all his game designs. He borrows from other
people and finds ways to mix and match. It’s like saying, what are the cool
things you can do with games and how can we combine them into some-
thing new?

Aaron: So what is the “ fun center” of Magic?

Mark: Magic is complex. Magic has multiple fun centers to it, because
everybody gets to be the game designer. Magic has this special quality
to it where the game becomes whatever you want it to be. Because you
 Interview with Mark Rosewater (Trammell)  11

can do that, you identify with it in a way. The ego attachment is so strong
that you’re not just playing a game, you’re playing your game. There are so
many different ways to play Magic. Magic really isn’t a game as much as it’s
a rule system that all connects a lot of games together. Every expansion is
kind of its own game. You can learn it fast because you already know most
of it … you’re just learning the new rules.
Magic speaks to the player in a way where the player feels like it’s
theirs and nobody else’s. It can do this because it is so adaptable. I think
one of the reasons our community is so big is that Magic really speaks to
people this way, and that is super powerful.

Aaron: Tell me a little bit about your background. What did you read and
watch as a kid?
Mark: Well, let me start with my gaming background. My father,
Gene Rosewater, was a lover of games. He was a gamer. My mom would
play party games and stuff. She enjoyed games, but for my mom it was
more social. For my dad, my dad just loved to game. He introduced me
very young to all the games in our house. We played games all the time.
When we had events, when we had parties or people over at the house, we
would pull out games. So we as a group would play games all the time.
I am very much influenced by pop culture. I’m a fan of pop culture
and my original plan for a career was to create more pop culture. I’m a
writer in background. I studied what at the time they called broadcasting
and film—which means TV and movies—in school. The internet wasn’t a
thing yet so we didn’t study it.
Literally on my 10th birthday, May 25 of 1977. I was born May 25, 1967.
I went to the opening of Star Wars as a birthday present. Basically it was
my birthday, and my parents said, “It’s your birthday. What do you want
to do?” And I’m like, “I want to see that movie.” I really love Star Wars. I
got very into Star Trek when I was a kid. I especially liked science fiction.
Interestingly enough, not that I dislike fantasy, but I was really much more
of a science fiction fan than was a fantasy fan. I enjoyed fantasy enough
that I read the Hobbit and had some exposure to fantasy, but science fic-
tion was really the thing that I fell in love with.
It’s funny by the way, people get on my case that I didn’t study
game design in school, that I somehow came to this as an amateur game
designer. I tell them, “25 years ago, there was no studying game design in
school, it wasn’t a thing you did.” In fact, I studied entertainment. I stud-
ied communications and back then it was a relatively new thing. I think
there were four schools that specialized in it when I went to school. My
school was one of four schools that specialized in communications. All
they taught was communications and broadcast, movies, and TV. That’s
12  Magic

what they did. All of the communications stuff and was kind of unique at
the time.
My mom was a psychologist. She really imbued in me this kind of love
of psychology, of caring about why people did things and understanding
that. It is not enough to know what people do, but why do they do it? And
so, for example, I’m intrigued by emotions. I wrote a play in college and
that was all about emotions long before Inside Out came out. I wrote a play
about all these emotions inside someone’s head telling us what the person
should be doing.
The one game I’ve made on my own has never been published. I
made a game called Mood Swings, which is an emotion-based game. All
the cards are emotions and stuff. I love emotions. I like finding the com-
mon bond between people and I think the two common bonds that I have
found, are that people tend to be linked by emotions and by pop culture.
It’s the nature of our brain and how we function. There’s a very universal
quality to what it means to be happy or sad or angry. Pop culture also is a
shared kind of experience, everybody experiences the same thing inside
because we’re human.
And so as a game designer, if you want to get to the heart of what I
care about, it’s how do you make your game connect with the game player
in a way that they feel that it speaks to them. The secret sauce basically has
been psychology and resonance. That’s my secret sauce right there. If you
do those two things, then you will make people connect to and bond with
your game in an emotional way. One of my truisms is, “If everybody likes
your game, but nobody loves it, it will fail.” It has to be, I love this game.
In order to do that, you have to evoke something. And the way you evoke
something is either by tapping into psychology or by tapping into reso-
nance, or usually both.

Aaron: So how would you say that your interest in popular culture influ-
enced the development of Magic?
Mark: So, here’s the story of how I get to Wizards. Magic comes out
in 1993, I started freelancing for Magic in 1994, and I started working full
time for Magic in 1995. So early on, I was a player before I was an employee.
When I first got to Wizards, R&D [Research and Development] was wall
to wall mathematicians and scientists. Everybody in R&D had studied
STEM. I was the first “word person” to walk in R&D. I was all about psy-
chology. My whole attitude was just very different because I wasn’t a sys-
tems person—I wasn’t an analytical person. So the biggest thing I think
I’ve done on some level for R&D is that I created a culture of language
where I just said, “Whenever I find a concept I think it’s important, I’m
just going to name it and give it a word.”
 Interview with Mark Rosewater (Trammell)  13

And so a lot of R&D speak came from me just going, we need a name
for this because as a “word person,” I know that if I give a word to it, we’ll
talk about it. There’s a lot of studies about how the existence of a word,
affects how you think about things. If a word doesn’t exist, you can’t really
wrap your brain around it because there’s no word for it. And that I really,
really believe in the power of words. So I came in and just started labeling
everything. I started using words.
Richard had done a little bit of this, but I really ramped it up. And
now there’s an infinite Magic vocabulary, a lot of which I either coined
myself or I that I found and then I popularized.
The other big thing I did was trying to understand the psychology of
our players. In communication school they make you take an advertising
class. So I was taking an advertising class and they gave us this assignment
where, you would pick a product and then you would figure out who you
want to advertise to? One of the tools that you use is what’s called a psy-
chographic. And the idea essentially is, if you want to sell something, you
ask who am I selling to? If you really want to be successful as an advertiser,
well you have to know who you’re selling to.
And so when I got to Wizards I said, “Okay, here’s this tool that I
liked in advertising. I’m just going to sort of, jury rig something and make
my own version of that.” I called them psychographics, borrowing the
term from advertising. I didn’t make them all of them at once, but when I
noticed something, I would name it.
The first psychographic that existed was the tournament player, what
we now call Spike. We didn’t name it at first. It was just, “…like the tourna-
ment player, right?” The second one was Timmy/Tammy. I realized that we
were making cards that were useless in tournaments, but there was some-
body who was excited by it. Who plays this giant creature that you would
never put in a deck because it’s not good enough to play in the tourna-
ment? And then the third one, ironically the last one for me to identify,
was myself—Johnny/Jenny. The player who likes the idea of ­self-expression
says, “I’ll show you something about me by showing you what I can
do.” I realized as we played that most players kind of fit into these three
groupings.
Now at the time, I hadn’t read Richard Bartle, so I just kind of
made my own system. I just wanted terms so we could talk about play-
ers. So I would identify them, and then I would name them. After some
time I finally realized there were three big, main categories. It just went
from there. A lot of my influence on Magic has been me finding some-
thing I think is important, building a structure, and then letting it organ-
ically grow so that other people can make use of it. When I look back at
my ­t wenty-five years of Magic, I think my biggest contribution has been
14  Magic

helping advance the structure of it so that other people can then build
upon it.
Aaron: Can you tell me a little more about how you envision the design
structure of Magic?
Mark: There are two major forces that you kind of wrestle with in
game design. One is mechanics and one is flavor. Every game is going
to have some mechanics and some f lavor. Now some games are more
mechanics than flavor and some are more flavor than mechanics, but those
are two components. When you’re designing, you really have to start from
one end and work toward the other end. I call this ­bottom-up or ­top-down
design. Either you start with mechanics, and then find flavor for it, or you
start with flavor and find the mechanics for it.
The way we do it now, there’s a lot of back and forth. If we do our job
correctly, you might not know where we start. But you have to start some-
where. Now very early on, we jump back and forth and start making flavor
and mechanics get closer to each other until they sort of overlap. I think there
are people that—kind of in their hearts—the mechanics are what drive them
as a player, and there are people for whom flavor is that which drives them. I
call this the aesthetic value. It isn’t about who you are as a player, it’s not about
the psychology that drives you, it is more about what you appreciate.
One of the things that makes Magic very popular is the association
between the deck and the player. If I play a game of Monopoly, I don’t have
a lot of associations. It’s not like, “Oh, Baltic, that’s my property.” Maybe
you play Monopoly so much that you always buy a certain property and
start associating with it. I only play the race car, so maybe I associate with
race cars. Every game gives you the opportunity to do some bonding. But
in a general sense, when I play Monopoly, it’s Monopoly. It is what it is. Bal-
tic’s Baltic.
The thing that Magic does that that Monopoly doesn’t do to the same
extent is let you make something. When I have a deck, it’s not like, “Oh,
this deck belongs to Magic,” it’s like “This deck belongs to me, I made this
deck.” The amount of association you have plays into this kinds of ego
investment, it just really means something to you. When you win with that
deck that you spent weeks crafting the sense of personal victory to it is so
large because the ego investment is so high. It is an extension of you. I’m a
big believer that the key to success in game design is understanding peo-
ple. All of my game design lessons are pretty much, “Oh, humans do this,”
and “Oh, well, if you do that, then they’ll be happier.”
Aaron: One of your big contributions to Magic has been developing a lan-
guage for the concepts in the game. Can you give me some examples of the
work you’ve done there?
 Interview with Mark Rosewater (Trammell)  15

Mark: When you make Magic cards, creatures are a big, big part of
the game. Every creature has a power and a toughness, but some creatures
… that’s all they have. In game design, it’s important that you have a cou-
ple of these very basic creatures, because you don’t want things to get too
complex. So, we didn’t have a name for them, and so I started calling them
vanilla creatures. But that’s not enough … what if I have a vanilla creature,
but it has one ability and it has an evergreen keyword 1 on it? It’s almost as
simple as a vanilla creature, but it has one ability rather than nothing. So I
said, “Okay, those are French vanilla.” It’s like a vanilla just a little fancier,
but it’s close. I started calling them French vanilla … but then sometimes
you have cards that do something on the first turn you play them, but then
for every other turn they don’t do that. So I said, “Okay, well, that’s virtual
vanilla.” On the turn I play it, it does something, but for every other turn
it’s a vanilla creature. And then that led of course to virtual French vanilla,
which does something when you play it, but after the first turn it’s French
vanilla.
I started naming things like that. Once I did that, I gave the rest
of R&D this terminology and as we do things, we make use of it. Now I
should stress, sometimes they come up with the language and other times,
I just recognize somebody who had a word for it, and I popularize the
word. I do a lot of outreach to the audience. I have a weekly column. I have
a weekly podcast. I have a daily blog. I have a daily comic. I do a lot of stuff
right, interact with the public. So not only did I invent this terminology
and share it with R&D, I also shared it with the world.
A whole bunch of people grew up believing that if you’re a game
designer, you’re supposed to write about what you do. I like to believe that
I was the influence. I just love the fact now that so many people are open
and sharing their ideas. The communication of game design is a more open
thing now and that really wasn’t true when you go back many years ago.

Aaron: So you’ve really worked to develop a lexicon both through R&D and
through your more public facing writing. Is that right?
Mark: I wanted to build an infrastructure for the game I was mak-
ing so that all the people I worked with had the same tools and knowledge,
so that we were speaking a common language and that we were building
something together. A lot of my contributions have been words. It’s really
interesting now to watch my terminology show up in other places. For
example, I came up with a concept called lenticular design.
I was trying to solve a problem. The problem was: we have players that
are very inexperienced players and players that are very experienced. Is
there a way to make a card that lets the more experienced player get more
out of it, and it doesn’t confuse the inexperienced player? Lenticular design
16  Magic

was where you hide something—if you hide the strategy, the part that the
beginner can’t see—it seems really simple. And to the advanced player, it
seems very complex. And once I solved this problem, I named it because
that’s what I do. Then I wrote a whole column about it saying, “Hey, here’s
a problem,” and I wrote about it because I have a weekly column. Once I
named lenticular design and I explained it, other people could then take it
to their games.
People write me letters. I have game designers send me letters all
the time. They say, “I have a game coming out,” and “You did this thing
and that really influenced me, and it really made me rethink how we did
things, and I took those lessons and I applied it to my game.” It makes me
happy. So as a communicator who’s now in game design, I’m trying to do
as much as I can do share all my game design tips. Anything I can do to
advance game design and build more structure and terminology so that
people can talk about it and share.
Aaron: This is very different paradigms of game design work, isn’t it? Sort of
like in open source programming where things are open, people and concepts
move around, and information is assumed to be free.
Mark: Gaming is slowly advancing in that direction. I like to believe
I’m one of the pioneers of trying to get people more open. I kind of started
doing it where there was nobody to tell me not to. By the time some-
body asked the question, “Should Mark be doing this?” I had done it long
enough and Magic was successful enough, they felt, “Well, it doesn’t seem
to be hurting things.” And so no one stopped me. Wizards is very good at
is letting people kind of move toward the direction of where their skills lie.
For example, I’m probably the biggest spokesperson for the company as far
as like faces that people recognize. And that came about because I was a
communication guy. I liked writing and I liked talking to people, and so I
just did a lot of outreach.
There are two places where I seem to be recognized. One is Magic,
I’m obviously know by Magic players. So if I go to a Magic convention or
Magic tournament, people recognize me. The other one is GDC (The Game
Developer Conference), partly because Magic is catnip for game designers.
Aaron: I love that you bring social and political philosophy to your design
practice. Can you tell me about this process?
Mark: Well, let me explain it. I’m going to use the rules as a parallel
metaphor here. When Richard made the game he just wanted to make a
game that people would buy, right? He wasn’t trying to make a system that
would last forever. He was just trying to make a game that people would
want. And so he prioritized the cards in a vacuum. Meaning, every deci-
sion he made was, “How do I make this card the best that this card can
 Interview with Mark Rosewater (Trammell)  17

be?” This decision took an awesome game and made it an exciting game.
It took off. I think if he hadn’t done that, I don’t know if Alpha would have
become what it would today. The problem is when you shift from, “I’m just
trying to sell the initial game” to, “This is a game system and we are going
to make infinite of these. We’re going to make set after set after set.”
The problem with the card by card system is that it breaks down on a
system level. I’ll take the rules as an example. Well, every card, how does
it work? What is it? Let’s just make the decision that makes sense for the
card. But the problem is when you start applying this, now you have a
whole bunch of cards. It’s really troublesome for a game, if the cards that
mechanically are similar don’t work the same. And so a couple of years
into Magic, we called them “Sixth Edition rules,” but we really revamped
the rule system. It was the game Richard made, but it evolved into some-
thing bigger. Rather than each card, individually, choosing whatever it
needs do, the rules are going to make the same decision. So if you run into
something, it always works the same. That there’s a consistency the way
the game works. And so a lot of time was spent making the rule system
cohesive so that we could build the whole structure. Not just a single game,
but an infinite game.
We made Magic into what it is today. In order to do that, we needed to
build structure into it because without structure, it kind of falls apart. You
can have 300 cards in which every card works differently, but after 600,
900, or 2000, at some point it just falls in on itself. When Richard intro-
duced the concept of the Color Pie, the basic concepts of the Color Pie were
very strong. To this day, the general philosophy has not changed. What
White is, has not fundamentally changed, but if you make a ­c ard-by-card
decision on the Color Pie, it’s not cohesive anymore.
You have to be consistent. So I did the equivalent of the Sixth Edition
rules to the Color Pie. I said, “Okay, we need to clean this up a little bit and
just make it more cohesive, and then let’s be structured with that.” Early
Magic was like, “Well, I’m going to have Black destroy an artifact because
this is a flavorful thing to do.” Like it’s Black! Don’t do that! [laughs] I said
let’s understand the philosophies, let’s understand what they have in com-
mon. Why they like their allies, why they hate their enemies—let’s figure
it out mechanically.
I did a bunch of shifting. There’s definitely some abilities that changed
colors because I tried to make everything make sense. Today we have a
Council of Colors, which is a whole team of people working that makes
sure the system stays true. I did a lot of work to sort of finesse and just
get the Color Pie into shape so that we could replicate over time. A lot of
that work was like, “Okay what exactly is the White, Black conflict? What
exactly is it?” And not just in a vacuum but like, “How do I define the five
18  Magic

colors in such a way that the Black conflict with White and the Black con-
flict with Green mean something different?”
When you look at the relationships between the colors it all comes
together. What the colors believe and what they do and what they care
about … once you see it, it is just this beautiful thing. I call it the secret
sauce that everything in Magic is built around it. The mechanics are built
around it and the flavor is built around it. Color philosophy is this thing
that sits in the center of Magic and it has this psychological pull. Why does
White do this? Why does Green do this? Why doesn’t Black do this? And it
really gave this gravitas to the Color Pie. It draws you into the game.
As you start bringing to life all these different things, people can con-
nect to it and identify with it. One of the reasons that I think Magic is so
compelling is that it has baked psychology into the Color Pie and it has
resonance baked into the structure—how we make the game and all the
flavor that we add to it. I think that’s what draws people in.
Richard had created this very cool thing and I was just trying to
understand it. I didn’t define White I just said, “What is White?” Then I
started understanding it. One of my exercises was the formula, “This color
represents this ultimate goal through this means.” I’ve been evolving that
formula for years—I’m a word person, right? So finally I did it. White, for
example, is the idea of peace through structure. It’s end goal is to look out
for the whole, everybody. White thinks that we all can be happy if we use
our resources and divide them accordingly. If we think about everybody as
a group, we can live in a world where we can live in peace.
White knows that there’s a lot of reasons people won’t do that, so it
uses a structure as a way to make laws—moral laws and civil laws. It makes
religion to get people to act for the good of the group. Blue is the idea of
perfection through knowledge, Black is power through opportunity, Red
is freedom through action, and Green is growth through acceptance. I did
a podcast from a point of view of each color, so that you could see from
that color’s perspective what they think of the other colors.
When you’re writing every character thinks they’re the hero. That the
best villains don’t think they’re a villain, they’re doing it for their own rea-
sons and they have a reason to do what they’re doing. A good character feels
justified in what they’re doing. No matter how they justify it, they’ve come
up with a justification. When you take the colors and you listen to them in
a vacuum you go, “That sounds pretty good. Yeah, that makes some sense.”

Aaron: How do you stay so creatively engaged after working on the same
game for 25 years?
Mark: My own definition of creativity is that it’s the ability to connect
things that other people didn’t connect. I’m devoted to find connections
 Interview with Mark Rosewater (Trammell)  19

between things. A lot of creativity is saying this thing exists and this thing
exists, and there’s a way to connect them and that no one else ever thought
of. I just have been really good at connecting the dots. I’m a big believer
in learning as much as you can about as much as you can. And then when
you’re trying to solve problems, don’t be afraid to go anywhere you need to
go to get that thing. Don’t be afraid to go outside your realm to solve your
problem.
One of the tips I’ll give people is, “If you’re stuck on something just
approach it in a different way.” If I’m designing a card and I’m stuck,
I’ll just come up with a random thing and say, “Okay, we’ll make a card
inspired by a toy.” And that’s a sketch. The way the brain works is that it
solves problems the same way, because it’s better for you to do it that way.
If it solves the problem once, well hey, no reason to figure it out again—it’ll
just take the same path to solve it. And for most part that’s great. If I solve
a problem I don’t want to have to solve it again. But creatively you don’t
want to solve it the same way.
You have to learn how to approach a problem from different ways so
that your brain is thinking of it differently. A lot of what I’ve learned is that
if you just force yourself to approach a problem from a different perspec-
tive you’ll make different things. I have a job where literally I keep making
the same game. I make Magic game after Magic game. I’ve been it doing for
25 years, so how do I make them different? The answer is that I never start
from the same place. The part I do is called vision design and vision design
is making the bullseye.
What’s the goal? As long as every goal is different, you’ll do some-
thing different because you just have a different goal. And a lot of my job
is asking what’s the goal this time? How do I make the goal something
we’ve never done before? I look for resonance, I look for psychology and
ask, “What’s the most resonant thing here?” For example, we came up with
a set called Ikoria that was a monster set. And so let me learn everything
I can about monster tropes. Let me go to TV Tropes and read about every
monster trope I can find. Monsters fighting monsters—that’s a trope!
Growing monsters in your lab—that’s a trope! Raising monsters—that’s a
trope! Just fit it all in. Where in pop culture do all the monsters show up?
In Monsters Inc., in Godzilla. Just grab them from wherever you can. Now I
have this new filter, then all of a sudden I’m making cards I’ve never made
before and making mechanics I’ve never made before. All because I never
started from there before.
Originally when I took my job at Wizards I was like, “Oh my God! I’m
throwing away all my work. I spent years studying communications and
I’m going to throw it all away to be a game designer.” And now I realize
looking back, I threw none of it away! I used all of it. People ask me, “What
20  Magic

do I need to study to become a game designer?” Study anything you want.

Just study something interesting. Play games. There’s value to understand-
ing how games work, because much like writing to be a good writer you
need to understand how writing works. Bring to the table something that’s
uniquely your own thing. If you make a game and have a background that
no one else has, you’re going to make games no one else has made.

Note
1. Evergreen keywords are single word abilities that are commonly used in Magic.
 Waiting for Player
Michael Nixon

Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is a ­t urn-based collectible card game

whose strategies and internal logics are strongly related to time. When
played in organized tournaments, players must not only play the best com-
bination of cards to succeed, but must do so in a timely fashion to avoid
running out of time for their games. While adding a “ticking clock” is
normally something added to a game’s integral mechanics to add extra
tension (LeBlanc, 2006), the addition of a literal clock changes MTG’s
dynamics considerably. The ability to adapt the analysis of move sequences
under time constraints has already been recognized as a major factor in
tournament chess skill (Holding, 1992, p. 12); however, playing MTG in
­i n-person tournaments or in online play requires the strategic use of time
as well as consideration of various ­out-of-game implications, including
etiquette and strategic concessions. These additional considerations add
a layer of metagame strategy that dictates deck choice, since some styles
of decks require more complex move sequences that are avoided by newer
players. Since tournament matches can result in drawn matches, which
are worth considerably less than a win, when the clock runs out and there
is no declarable winner, a player’s reputation in the community can be
affected by how these occurrences are handled given unspoken etiquette
conventions and the personal desire to maximize rankings.
This essay will analyze the ways that time limits alter the underly-
ing game of MTG. First, I will examine how the flow of analog gameplay
is affected in tournament settings, with implications to how the game is
adjudicated and how players are expected to behave. Next, I will consider
the two main digital adaptations of MTG—Magic: The Gathering Online
(MTGO) and MTG Arena (Arena)—and how their differing means of add-
ing time limits distinguishes them from the analog game and each other.
Then, I will consider three major categories of observed ­t ime-related
gameplay effects: changes to strategy due to clock considerations, bluffs

21
22  Magic

and tells that arise due to clock implementations, and demonstrations

of poor etiquette related to time. This is also an examination of a hybrid
analog/digital game, that occupies “a liminal position between the two
in order to capitalize on the recent board game renaissance” (Trammell,
2019). As Wizards of the Coast is currently maintaining two different dig-
ital clients along with their tabletop mainstay, it is evident that they are
trying to appeal to a wide range of players, especially with Arena’s mobile
release. Overall, I will demonstrate how much of MTG’s gameplay is
affected by the time constraints introduced in the digital clients and how
new ­t ime-based strategies arise accordingly.
My methods for conducting my analysis of MTG are grounded in
close reading and autoethnography, that is, through play that pays detailed
attention to the experience on the screen and within myself. Close read-
ing originated with Ransom and the other “New Critics” in the late 1930s
and early 1940s (Bizzocchi & Tanenbaum, 2011, p. 289). The New Critical
approach suggests that text may be analyzed as an object itself and, thus,
that it is best understood in terms of its central elements (Inman, 2003).
Accordingly, I focus on the formal qualities of the game, separating the
game mechanics, and understanding the dynamics that arise from them
(Hunicke et al., 2004). This follows the observation that playing the game
oneself is key (Aarseth, 2003, p. 3). My focus during gameplay was on what
Consalvo and Dutton (2006) call “interface study” and “interaction map-
ping” to examine how the games present possibilities to the user in their
user interface (UI) and how gameplay proceeds from this.
­Auto-ethnography is defined by Ellis (2004) as “research, writing,
story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the
cultural, social, and political” (Ellis, 2004, p. 48). This focus on personal
gameplay is closely related to microethnography, which has been adapted
to game studies by Giddings and Kennedy (Giddings, 2009; Kennedy &
Giddings, 2008). As such, it is important to position my historical expe-
rience with the game as well as my recent ­research-oriented gameplay. I
have played MTG competitively since 2006, and have been a certified
Magic Judge since 2008. I was experienced with MTGO for several years,
but started playing Magic Arena specifically for this research, which pro-
vided me with a newcomer’s perspective of the interactivity of the different
platform while retaining a familiarity with the rules, content and game-
play. The gameplay used for analysis took place in the first half of 2020.
Specifically, I played about 500 matches of Ranked Play on Arena, along
with fewer MTGO leagues (5 match sets). To record a variety of gameplay
experiences, I took notes, copious screenshots, and reflected on my expe-
rience of the games—particularly my awareness of time during them. As a
result, I will present what Geertz (1973) calls “thick description,” a detailed
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  23

account of what it’s like to play MTG competitively on these different dig-
ital platforms.

Analog Magic: The Gathering

MTG was designed as a physical ­deck-building game by Richard Gar-
field in 1993, intended for players to carry out its actions in a material fash-
ion. The original set released, Alpha, included ­dexterity-based mechanics
such as flipping cards, like Chaos Orb or Falling Star, onto the battlefield
from at least one foot high. While use of this mechanic was discontin-
ued (Rosewater, 2012), it illustrates how MTG was originally conceptual-
ized with a full range of uses for the cards involved. More subtly, but even
more relevantly to its eventual digital recreations, the game was designed
around the idea that players could typically respond to the actions of other
players. New ­online-only card designs take this to another level, innovat-
ing with mechanics that would be impossible in analog play, such as copy-
ing a card in another player’s deck into one’s hand of cards.
The idea of responding to another player in an orderly fashion was
solidified in the game rules as “the stack” during the Sixth Edition rules
update (1999), whereby the last action taken by a player resolves first even
though the currently active player took the initiative to start the game
action in a ­t urn-based fashion. This was much more vaguely defined in
the original rules, and the current lead designer Mark Rosewater consid-
ers that it would be the most important game mechanic to “go back in
time” and add to the original iteration of the game since it provides clarity
regarding the effectiveness of a player’s actions and reactions in the order
in which the cards are played (Rosewater, 2006). This interactivity is part
of what makes MTG as engaging and dramatic as it is: a player must always
consider the optimal time to take a game action, since another player can
respond—often to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of their play. Accord-
ingly, common strategic advice to players is to wait as long as possible to
act so they know what their opponent will do and can use that informa-
tion to make the best play available in response (Roberts, 2017). A result-
ing common play pattern is for a player to wait for their opponent to make
their only play for the turn, or even until the end of their turn, to ensure
they have learned all they can before acting. This demonstrates the stra-
tegic advantage of using cards of the “Instant” type or with the roughly
equivalent ability “Flash.”
This level of interactivity comes at a cost of gameplay time as players
take every opportunity to consider what to do about their opponent’s lat-
est action. To restrict this, physical tournaments are played with fixed time
24  Magic

limits for matches, and digital recreations of the game have added a variety
of timers in order to maintain a reasonable pace of play. These limits are
used both for practical reasons and to make the game more ­skill-testing so
that players don’t have an indefinite period of time to consider their next
move. Players are therefore rewarded for studying the likely strategies that
their opponents will use in response to their own, their likely responses to
the original responses, as so on; just as in Chess, players learn a large vari-
ety of gambits and counterplays. MTG is already a considerably complex
game with an ­ever-changing set of playable cards, so this becomes a matter
of some tension, particularly as the stakes rise and prizes are on the line.
This is even the case even in relatively casual play, since boosters and other
assorted prizes are often paid out to winners.

Game Flow and Engagement

Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow (1990) is a major, albeit contested
theory in game studies, which attempts to explain how players immerse
themselves in activities. Essentially, it indicates that the major factors in
becoming deeply engaged include the ability to concentrate deeply on
tasks with clear goals and feedback, with a strong sense of control that
their skill will allow them to overcome meaningful but not insurmount-
able challenges (1990). Mostly significantly to me is Csikszentmihalyi’s
indication that during such events, players’ sense of time passing melts
away.
As such, the flow state is considered immersive as well as engaging
(Douglas & Hargadon, 2000, p. 158), and is theorized to largely subsume
the player and their senses, making them less aware of their surround-
ings and altering their experience of time (Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005, p.
6). However, games that incorporate timers to increase the intensity of
the experience or ensure an inevitable conclusion seem to challenge the
degree to which lacking awareness of the passing of time is a major threat
to the flow state, as some have claimed (Douglas & Hargadon, 2000, p.
158). Thus, it seems important to question how important this component
is, or at least what the nature of this altering may be on the effectiveness,
­user-engagement, and evolution of gameplay.
MTG provides a case study in how players in the flow state are none-
theless deeply attentive to the passing of time. MTG players think a lot
about time in different ways. They consider how long they will have to wait
in queues for opponents to play more games. They build their decks to beat
their opponents in as few turns as possible and modify their deck if they
have trouble finishing their games in either the desired number of turns or
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  25

within the dictated time restraints. They watch the clock to make sure they
have enough time to find food before playing another game, in the case of
tournament play with ­back-to-back games. While the hours pass unno-
ticed for the immersed players, they are nonetheless deeply aware of the
passage of time in each individual match.
Time is an essential component of games, particularly competitive
ones, although it often goes unnoticed. As a baseline, game designers are
advised to “avoid dead periods that create boredom among the players”
(Vernes, 1965, p. 38). At the physical level, this includes those created by
unnecessarily long operational activities such as fetching an errant ten-
nis ball or counting out banknotes, tasks which are often moved from
the responsibility of the player to a person specifically designated for this
task, thus eliminating the break in gameplay. At the strategic level, this
includes planning moves and countermoves, using simultaneous think-
ing (planning while the opponent takes their action) as the best strate-
gic response (Vernes, 1965, p. 39). Ultimately, designers typically strive to
minimize operational activities and strategic pauses that detract from a
player’s emotional engagement with the ongoing action. This has been a
strong trend in the design of MTG cards; for example, card designers now
remove the concept of “searching one’s library for a card” whenever possi-
ble. Naturally, digital play provides an alternative solution where there are
no operational activities such as shuffling after a search.
MTG also provides an example of the division between what Juul
calls play time and event time (Juul, 2004, p. 1). He helpfully defines game-
play as player interaction that changes the “game state” using their play
time. Under his categorization, MTG is a ­t urn-based abstract game, where
changes to the game state only result from specified moves in allotted peri-
ods. In this style of game, Juul indicates that overall play time limits are
left to tournament rules and social pressure (Juul, 2004, p. 3). Gameplay
correlates to event time and is itself is distinct from play time—a spell cast
in three seconds works the same as one cast in ten seconds, and moves
the game forward equivalently—but contextually, play time limits make
major changes to how these quanta of gameplay proceed. In analog MTG
play, players can take a lot of play time thinking about their strategy before
advancing event time only a little. Alternatively, they can quickly verbal-
ize a long sequence of gameplay that will advance event time considerably.
Throughout this essay I will examine how both operations and strate-
gic considerations affect MTG. Both consume play time without advancing
the game state, so keeping them within limits will allow games of MTG to
finish in a reasonable time. Indeed, I will examine how players are advised
to minimize the time their operations take, and the differences that mani-
fest between physical and digital play.
26  Magic

Magic: The Gathering Online (MTGO)

MTGO was released in 2002 and provides a thorough digital re-
creation of the paper game, including a complete rules engine to provide
faithful gameplay and a secondary economy wherein players can open
booster packs, build decks, and trade cards. It was designed to attract
lapsed players rather than replace MTG (Garfield, 2005), although it
quickly became a venue for building skills and competitive practice.
Matches can be played normally in casual and competitive queues, as well
as occasional premier tournaments that ladder into further ­h igher-level
play. Within games, players can perform the full range of MTG actions,
including playing lands and spells, activating abilities, and creature
combat.
In MTGO, the ability to take priority as per the underlying game rules
is further restricted by setting “stops” at a point when it would be permit-
ted. Setting a stop means that a player can take an action at a predefined
point in a turn, and is achieved by clicking on the turn bar in the appropri-
ate position. Players need to anticipate gameplay and customize their stops
such that they can take actions at the times implied by their cards, as well
as reacting to their opponent’s actions. What would be accomplished sim-
ply with a phrase in analog play—e.g., “before combat on your turn…”—
requires ­pre-planned configuration here. Each available point of action
can be set to allow action or ignore it altogether. This can also be config-
ured ­on-the-fly during game play, although the interface is more finicky
and must be done at the same time as playing the game.
In MTGO, time limits are handled through the incorporation of
“chess clocks” 1 so that each player has a specified and equal total time
to take actions, which is 25 minutes in most game play modes (half of
the total traditional analog match time for each player). Once this runs
out, they lose the match regardless of their current standing or potential
outcome based on the cards they would have been able to play. Accord-
ingly, “passing priority,” which is already significant in the game rules
for determining whether a player may take an action, becomes the key to
determining how much time a player has used. Passing priority is accom-
plished by clicking the “Ok” button, by using the F2 hotkey (pass pri-
ority once), or the F6 hotkey (pass the turn without regaining priority
as normal). Thus, the more stops that a player uses, the more time they
will inevitably use, even if they quickly pass priority again. Each time the
player passes priority, the “Waiting for Player” message will appear until
their opponent takes an action or passes priority back. A text log record-
ing each game action in a linear fashion also provides a means of follow-
ing game play.
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  27

MTG Arena (Arena)

Arena entered its Beta release in 2017 (full release in 2019) as a mod-
ernized digital recreation of MTG, with a more colorful UI, snappy game-
play (Barrett, 2017), and a freemium economic model (Švelch, 2019, p. 10),
including purchasable pets and card styles. This was intended to be more
suitable for streaming and Esports play, and during the ­C ovid-19 pan-
demic, it was pressed into use for all premier play when physical game-
play become impractical and ­i nternationally-attended tournaments were
impossible (What’s Next for the Magic Esports 2020 Partial Season, 2020).
While the focus on Esports doesn’t seem to be sustained going forward,
it is nevertheless considered the company’s premier digital platform for
competitive play.
Arena’s interface was designed to be more visually attractive and
interactive than MTGO; players can drag spells into place and have them
take effect—often with a fancy animation—rather than relying on a text
log to clarify exactly why an outcome occurred. When necessary, a visi-
ble stack of spells is assembled on the side of the screen, with the ability
to review actions currently waiting for resolution. Zones such as exile or
the graveyard begin the game as compact icons that must be expanded to
become visible. Overall, the design of Arena avoids showing players irrel-
evant details to simplify their visual experience; due to the speed at which
players must play and the importance of simultaneous thinking, com-
bined with the focus on simplicity in the UI, this attempt at simplification
leads to an awkward ­t rade-off where important deck details are harder
to find and complex ­decision-making is slowed by the additional steps of
opening and closing additional zones. No record of previous game actions
is presented, as MTGO has.
Arena also implements several features to try to speed up games. One
of these was the introduction of single game (­best-of-one) matchmaking,
accompanied by a ­mana-smoothing algorithm to promote shorter, more
exciting games of MTG. These single game matches have been used for
both casual and competitive events, alongside the traditional ­b est-of-3
matches. Within the interface, the same ­25-minute per player chess clock
used by MTGO was carried over to Arena; however, a player action time
clock was also added, which is similar to ­action-specific time allotments in
other ­deck-based digital games, such as Hearthstone, a major competitor.
When a player takes more than two minutes for an action, a burning rope
shows up; if it burns down completely and the player has earned no exten-
sions for their time bank by playing previous turns without such delay,
then their turn is passed automatically with no further actions possible.
Deliberately taking extra time to “grief ” your opponent is therefore called
28  Magic

“roping” due to this animation and it is a common expression of frustra-

tion and anger.

Playing the Clock

Within paper MTG, gameplay proceeds as a flow of verbal and non-
verbal communication. Due to the way the Magic Tournament Rules
(MTR) lay out legal shortcuts, players can communicate their inten-
tions very easily and the formalities of the rules are often ignored—in
particular, players can specify when they want to do things, rather than
announcing each step they are taking within the game’s turn structure.
Additionally, hand gestures take on additional meaning such as indicating
which card is currently being referenced and passing the turn. This is not
the case for digital recreations, which must embed the full precision of the
game’s rules within them.
Fundamentally, MTG is a game whose strategy revolves around time.
Adapting to the frame of the turn as the unit of “game progress time”
(Hitchens, 2006, p. 58) is the main way that a player’s sense of time is
altered during MTG play. While it varies with format of play (format is the
term for the published sets of cards players can use to build decks, vary-
ing from three recent sets to using cards exclusively from historical sets),
the average competitive game of MTG is over within about seven turns.
Accordingly, Mowshowitz theorized that each format has a Fundamen-
tal Turn by which the most powerful deck available is expected to win or
takes over the game; in Type II (now called Standard), that was (and has
remained) the fourth turn (Mowshowitz, 2000). Games don’t end imme-
diately on the Fundamental Turn of course, just as chess games don’t end
immediately after the “beautiful move” (Vernes, 1965, p. 41). As an example
of game length, Karsten crunched the match results on MTGO and shows
that one Modern format had an average turn length of 6.7 turns (Karsten,
2015), even though the Fundamental Turn of the format would take place
earlier due to the expanded card pool and more powerful options available
to players. As a result, competitive players strategize how to overcome this
temporal limitation by sacrificing cards to accelerate their plays, putting
additional lands into play, or stopping their opponent from taking actions
for a turn.
Each turn, players have the opportunity to add one land to their
board, which increases their ability to cast increasingly powerful spells
through mana generation; there are five colors of mana that can be cre-
ated at 1:1 ratio for basic lands, while some more complex lands will pro-
vide ­multi-colored or colorless mana. Both the basic and complex land
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  29

types produce the energy required to introduce creatures and cast spells,
so making the most of their mana each turn is critical. Thus, many strong
strategies revolve around the idea of tempo—a term seemingly borrowed
from chess strategy (Fine, 2012, p. 405)—making plays that uses mana effi-
ciently while denying the opponent the use of theirs. Negating an oppo-
nent’s plays, even if only temporarily, provides an important strategic
advantage given that the game is ­t urn-based. Therefore, it is important to
realize when returning a resource to hand may be as powerful a strategy as
removing it from the game altogether.
The tournament player’s “playing time” (Hitchens, 2006, p. 58) is
strictly limited—fifty minutes shared between the players per round in
paper play or ­t wenty-five individual minutes in digital play—with reper-
cussions if it is used up. Since players are trying to win their games within
the allotted time, players must therefore select a deck for a tournament
that they can play well both strategically and in a timely fashion. Certain
decks that don’t have deterministic outcomes are implicitly banned by the
slow play rules, e.g., the “Four Horsemen” deck (Elliott, 2012; Sable, 2016),
while more ­t ime-consuming ones may be explicitly banned. For example,
key cards in the “Eggs” deck were banned due to the time it took to play—
up to 15 minutes per turn (Lauer, 2013). Control decks, such as “Miracles,”
that are powerful but lack the ability to present a win condition and end
the game may be eschewed; “Miracles” had its key card banned due to the
amount of time it took as a result. These considerations lead to variations
in tournament metagames. The metagame is defined as “what everyone
else is playing” by WotC (Cunningham, 2007) , and more formally as “the
player’s consideration of the context of their game (i.e., what cards other
players might be using in their deck)” (Carter et al., 2012). If a deck is rec-
ognized as contributing to frequent match draws, only stubborn or brave
players will pilot them; purposefully playing a deck known the have sig-
nificant and consistent flaws can lead to a breach of etiquette as opponents
can be resentful if they are matched against a deck known for this kind of
outcome.
In digital play, the metagame of deck choices is still affected by time
limits. A distinct positive difference in digital play over paper play is that
shuffling doesn’t take any time, which is otherwise a major time waster.
One of the most powerful sets of land cards in MTG allows players to
search for and “fetch” a land from within their deck, which requires shuf-
fling afterwards. These lands have been controversial for the amount of
time shuffling consumes when performed repeatedly over the course of a
game, and were almost not printed because of this issue (Buehler, 2003) in
spite of their ­i n-game utility. The significant negative difference in digital
play is that a player must press a button or key to pass priority; whereas this
30  Magic

could be accomplished in paper play with a single word (usually “Go!”) or

a ­well-crafted utterance, in digital play repeated clicking becomes the nor-
mal play pattern.
This has significance for all players, since repeated clicking can lead
to a bad user experience by becoming annoying, lead to carelessness, or
cause physical harm due to the physical stress of a repetitive motion. For
players with disabilities, the switch to digital play can be an unexpected
hindrance. Gilmore provides a pertinent example as he describes a deck
archetype called “Bomberman” with a combo win condition requiring 330
clicks. At a click per second, this takes five to six minutes of constant and
precise clicking (Gilmore, 2020). Gilmore ultimately takes the “rules max-
imalist” position that players are only entitled to have a computer game
that follows its own rules, so players should make choices about their deck
based on their personal abilities and limitations. I believe this misses the
obligation for WotC to make an accessible user interface, particularly
given the precedence set in paper play for ease of play and shortcuts. Thus,
the ongoing status quo is that the way game’s UI is implemented creates
its own set of restrictions that players must simply deal with. Still, play-
ers routinely argue about whether there is an obligation to concede once
they perceive a game sequence that will lead to their defeat (Etiquette for
Infinite Combos: MTGO, 2016).

Bluffs and Tells

In paper MTG, the player’s continual ability to respond to an oppo-
nent leads to a corresponding need to behave as if the player can respond
meaningfully so as to not reveal the strength, or lack thereof, of their
hand. As previously described, players spend most of their gameplay time
­decision-making and ensuring that they are maximizing their available
time; however, immediately letting an opponent take an action indicates
that the player has no possible response, which will inform the oppo-
nent’s strategy. This means a clever player is faced with the task of trying
to respond in a fashion that communicates consideration of ­i n-hand pos-
sibilities without absorbing too much time. While this is a step removed
from the core strategies of MTG, it nonetheless provides observant players
with extra information as time use becomes a “tell” regarding their oppo-
nent’s capabilities.
Similarly, the amount of time spent sideboarding between games in a
match can be a tell regarding a player’s ability to counter their opponent’s
strategy. Sideboarding is a process whereby players use an extra 15 card pool
to reconfigure their deck between games in a match. Since powerful strategies
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  31

tend to become well known, reserving cards to attack them is very important.
However, individual players vary their sideboard based on their anticipation
of the metagame as well as personal opinion about card strength. Thus, eval-
uating how long their opponent spends on the process can provide players
with valuable information. As a result, professional players recommend shuf-
fling the entire sideboard together with the main deck and then removing 15
cards in order to hide this information (Da Rosa, 2017). Due to the inconve-
nience, this is rarely seen in practice outside of ­high-level professional play.
In MTGO, configuring stops takes on a similar role in communicating
information about a player’s capabilities. A turn meter is displayed during
play to indicate what step of the turn it is currently, with small arrows indi-
cating where the player’s stops are set. Setting a stop to occur reminds the
player to take an action and so enabling more stops allows for greater flexi-
bility; however, when the stop is unnecessary for that turn’s play, bypassing
the set actions requires another button press. Thus, a player must balance
the desire for ease of use setting steps as a reminder to act and the impres-
sion this implies to an opponent. During gameplay, when I reduced the
number of stops accidentally and realized too late that I couldn’t act when
I wanted to, I was forced into not playing effectively and missing out on
possible effective actions. Ascertaining where one’s opponent has stops set
allows a player to determine when they could take actions without opposi-
tion and generally what skill level of opponent one faces.
The F6 hotkey is worth special mention due to its role in speeding up
gameplay on MTGO: once pressed, the rest of the turn is passed automat-
ically, and no time is taken off the player’s clock. This makes incorporat-
ing hotkeys into a player’s routine essential to clock management, adding
a physical and technical component to the ­decision-making process sim-
ilar to chess (Fine, 2012, p. 407). I routinely change my finger positioning
to cover the F2 and F4 hotkeys when I play on MTGO, just as a FPS player
covers the WASD keys for quick movement. Furthermore, if players are
low on clock time, they may start to F6 more often, losing the chance to
react to their opponent in exchange for the likelihood to retain enough
time to win the game on their own turn.
In rare situations where both players are low on time, players may sim-
ply F6 continually, hoping they can do so faster than their opponent. This
degenerates into a cat and mouse situation where if one play switches to
winning conventionally (e.g., attacking with creatures), they may win sur-
prisingly since the other play doesn’t react appropriately (e.g., with a kill
spell or a blocking creature). But they then go back to risk running out of
time. Experienced players will gauge their ­match-up as early as possible in
order know whether they need to sacrifice some percentage chance of win-
ning in order to play more rapidly. A resulting common gameplay pattern is
32  Magic

for players to pass priority from a first main phase to the second main phase
before casting an important spell to try to gauge the opponent’s setup. This
is conducted early in the game to see what stops the opponent has set ini-
tially and later on, before casting an important spell, to test whether the
opponent has used the F6 hotkey already. This is particularly relevant if the
opponent’s deck has reactive spells that would counter a player’s spells.
Overall, this makes it necessary to play precisely on MTGO in order to
succeed, as is noted by Trammel’s analysis of how players perceive offline
versus online play (Trammell, 2010). MTGO walks players through each
available step so game triggers are less likely to be overlooked or forgot-
ten (a common type of misplay); but on the other hand, players believe that
MTGO also teaches you the nuances of the rules through repetitive action
(Trammell, 2010, p. 18) so that reminders are redundant. Not only do play-
ers repeat turns while MTGO visually reports precise details on its UI and
in its gameplay log, MTGO also required players to customize their stops
in order to take game actions at appropriate times. Thus, MTGO players
must pay attention to details that they could otherwise have glossed over
in analog play, or they will lose games because of it.
In Arena, the game still uses ­25-minute chess clocks for each player.
While stops like in MTGO are still present, their role is downgraded to
­single-use, and the game passes automatically as much as possible. The
downgraded stop functionality used in conjunction with the “autotapper,”
a feature which automates tapping lands for spells based on the needed
mana cost, speeds up gameplay considerably. However, the autotap-
per’s “guessing” also leads to automatic mistakes where a specific land is
tapped although it is needed for another card and a gameplay opportunity
is missed. For example, the Mystical Dispute counterspell has a reduced
cost against blue spells, but the autotapper algorithm doesn’t try to leave
appropriate mana available to account for that possibility arising. Another
example of not being able to customize the stops as granularly using Arena
arose when an opponent played a Legion Warboss, a card that makes an
extra goblin before combat each turn to attack me. I couldn’t find a way to
correctly time returning their Legion Warboss to hand, and took damage
from the additional attacker; in paper MTG or MTGO, I could have speci-
fied that I wanted to act in their “Beginning of Combat” step to avoid this.
To combat ­auto-passing, players can activate “full control” mode (by
pressing the Ctrl button by default). This prevents sending a signal to the
opponent that a player has no responses, as well as allowing the player to
act when possible. Players may evaluate their strategic choices at each point
without the additional tell. However, this “full control” strategy requires
many additional clicks and is usually only done temporarily as a result.
Another opportunity arises for this temporal tell to be seen when a
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  33

player runs out of time extensions and is forced to ­auto-pass the rest of
their turn. In those cases, one can attack into good blockers or play a spell
even if it would normally be futile. While Arena’s use of time banking
keeps gameplay moving, it fails to provide enough time to overcome sys-
tem issues that arise, such as the need to reboot a computer or restart the
program to overcome bugs. MTGO’s ­10-minute timeout period is much
better in those instances, although its existence allows frustrated players
to deliberately disconnect as a more significant grieving method.

Taunts and Etiquette

In paper MTG, most points of etiquette relate to social interactions
such as acknowledging the opponent’s actions meaningfully or shaking
the opponent’s hand after a match. Holding a lethal spell in hand until a
later point (e.g., reserving, rather than playing, a Lightning Bolt when the
opponent has three life remaining to give the opponent false hope) is an
­i n-game example of poor etiquette, even though the action itself is legal.
However, temporal misconduct, such as playing slowly, is a much more
common issue and regarded very poorly, due to the poor consequences of
drawing a match in tournament play.
Games in MTG tournaments are played in a match until a player
has won two games. A match win is worth three points towards a play-
er’s standing, a loss is worth zero points, and a draw is worth one point.
This means that, except in exceptional circumstances, a draw is compara-
ble to a loss due and so should be avoided. Draws arise intentionally when
players decide, somewhat controversially, to take the single point instead
of playing in those narrow circumstances where it is considered desirable;
more often, draws are unintentionally the product of time limitations.
Intentional draws are typically used by players in tournaments that cut
to a Top 8 playoff. A player would choose to intentionally draw having done
the math and realizing that they only need one more point to lock in their
standing; rather than risking a loss, which would give them a ­z ero-point
score for the match, the player would attempt to convince their opponent
into a draw giving them the one point necessary to clinch a spot in the
finals. This is considered controversial, since it yields finishes that are not
the result of gameplay, but rather finding an agreeable opponent. This means
that opposing players who are both aware of the potential outcomes will
shake hands on a result, while ignorant players often face awkward ques-
tions or run afoul of the rules on bribery (Sperling, 2013). Ultimately, inten-
tional draws are considered an awkward ­side-effect of timed tournaments; if
both parties agree to the draw, players could sit staring at each other or fake
34  Magic

playing for the duration of the match time to mimic real gameplay, if such
draws were prohibited. To get around these outcomes, the digital versions of
MTG have removed intentional draws or not implemented draws at all.
Unintentional draws are the result of players unfamiliar with the
game or those unable to play their strategy to completion within the time
limits. Players can play slowly in either a mechanical sense (such as the
aforementioned requirement to shuffle decks adequately) or in a strate-
gic sense (a player who is overwhelmed or paralyzed with their options).
Either way, this can lead to ­i nter-player conflict if a match is about to end
in a draw once time in the round has been called. Players will appeal to
their opponent’s mercy and reason to concede based on the game state and
the predictable winner, or even illegal means such as flipping a coin. In my
early days of tournament play, I faced such a situation where the winner
would advance to the second day of a Grand Prix tournament if they had a
definitive win. Neither of us would concede our position as being inferior,
no generosity was shown by either party, and so we both earned a draw;
our tournament was over and the frustration was palpable.
There are conflicting attitudes in the MTG community regarding
how a player should respond to unintentional draws. First, many compet-
itive players recognize that a draw is typically equivalent to a loss for both
players, so one player should be more sporting and concede in such cir-
cumstances. In this school of thought, players are encouraged to reflect
on their personal pace of play and game state to recognize whether they
are the party that ought to concede. In some circles, such players would
implicitly expect to be rewarded materially after doing so, even though it
is illicit and a disqualifiable offence to make such arrangements ahead of
time. On the other hand, some regard “natural” match results as fair and
equitable, and thus desirable. This school of thought regards intentional
draws as unfair and undesirable as it does not reflect the results of actual
gameplay. Both sides of the argument are often made in public forums
(When to Concede?, 2010). Conflict can therefore arise when two players of
the first school of thought disagree on who should concede, or when two
players from opposing schools of thought are involved.
To combat unwanted draws, the MTR section 5.5, stipulates that slow
play is not permitted.
Players must take their turns in a timely fashion regardless of the complex-
ity of the play situation and adhere to time limits specified for the tourna-
ment. Players must maintain a pace to allow the match to be finished in the
announced time limit. Stalling is not acceptable [MTR, 2020].
Due to the subjectivity in this language, adjudicating slow play is consid-
ered one of the most challenging areas of Magic Judging (Da Rosa, 2015).
Significant training resources are therefore created and distributed to
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  35

prepare judges for recognizing and dealing with slow play (Desprez, 2007;
Ladstätter, 2012). Distinguishing unintentional slow play from its illicit
counterpart, who takes advantage of the time limits of the tournament
to purposefully end in a draw or to coerce their opponent into conceding,
provides a further level of complexity as the judge must interpret the play-
er’s intent—which can be hard to discern without overt indicators.
In MTGO, unintentional draws can’t happen as players lose the match
if their personal clock runs down, and the ability to draw games intention-
ally has been removed by WotC to prevent players from making outside
deals to resolve matches. Nonetheless, players are able to concede by per-
forming a “salty disconnect.” When a player is upset at the turn of events,
they simply close the program, showing a disconnect message in the game-
play log. While internet problems may lead to random disconnections, the
intent becomes more obvious when the player is about to lose. This then
results in a loss for the disconnected player once they exhaust MTGO’s
­10-minute ­t ime-limit for not taking actions. WotC threatens to ban such
players but it remains a prevalent practice due to the difficulty in deter-
mining what happened to cause the disconnection.
Within Arena, there are two main components that touch on etiquette:
the use of emoticons and slow play resulting in roping. Online multiplayer
games are known for their “toxic potential” (Adinolf & Turkay, 2018), which
leads designers to decrease opportunities for deviance to avoid negative
effects on retention (Shores et al., 2014). This is evidently the reason for remov-
ing MTGO’s full chat feature from gameplay and replacing it with a smaller
palette of short phrases, including “Hello!,” “Nice!,” “Your Go.,” “Oops,” and
“Good Game..” Essentially, any available channel of communication (Harper
et al., 1978) within a game can pass messages of varying valence.
Players can use emoticons to communicate with each other by click-
ing on their own avatar and then selecting an option. Starting a match
with “Hello!” and ending with “Good game” follows natural patterns
established in paper MTG. These messages become negatively charged
when they are timed ironically or spammed repeatedly. If a player resolves
a powerful spell that will win the game, or at least dramatically change
the course of the match, they may spam “Oops” or “Good Game.” A pre-
mature “Good Game” is considered unsporting, although it does increase
the satisfaction if one goes on to beat the offending opponent after such an
occurrence. On the other hand, after a match is over, players can’t commu-
nicate unless they’ve “friended” each other, so there’s a narrow window for
a sincere “Good Game” to be communicated before the end of gameplay
removes the possibility of further communication.
The second issue is that of deliberately playing slowly, known as
roping. Since the end result of roping is automatically passing priority
36  Magic

through a turn, only a dedicated “griefer” (Johannesson, 2014, p. 15) keeps

it up for a sustained period by allowing the game to rope then recover and
roping again each subsequent turn. Much more common is roping at the
end of a lost game or match, allowing the automatic loss feature to resolve
the match in the same way the natural outcome would. This apparently
yields some catharsis for the loser. Roping is recognized as an annoyance
by the broader Esports community (including in other major games like
Hearthstone), but since technical issues and legitimate strategic consid-
eration can both lead to players taking some time in a game, it remains a
difficult problem to solve for game designers. WotC provides a reporting
feature for players to bring corporate attention onto ropers, although it’s
unclear to what degree perpetual violators are punished.

Conclusion
This essay has described how players play with time in MTG. Players
choose decks that work within the time limit. Players optimize the game’s
UI to provide precise control over when they can act. Players are acutely
aware of time, and how it can become a weapon (Fine, 2012, p. 404) used
both for and against them. When frustrated, players are able to waste their
opponent’s time to grief them. This seems to demonstrate that the clock
becomes another challenge to overcome, rather than an aspect of game-
play that can be ignored. It is yet another skill that requires education and
growth, and playing well becomes not solely reliant on the search for the
best possible play but rather one that satisfices the perceived game state
(Horgan, 1987, p. 5) under the given time constraints.
As mentioned, the flow state has been theorized as one of intense
focus, bringing relevant skills to bear on emerging challenges. This com-
bines the properties of immersion and engagement, so players experienc-
ing flow are “in the zone” of the game, somehow apart from the real world.
In MTG, as in many games, the need to constantly be aware of time com-
plicates the understanding of the flow state, as I have described.
MTG is a game that revolves around time and making the best use
of it in different ways. In physical tournaments, players are advised to
sit facing a clock or otherwise ensure they can keep track of time. Play-
ers who play slowly will be rebuked by their opponents or a roving
Magic Judge. The digital versions of MTG heighten this awareness, pre-
senting the player with a literal clock that ticks towards their automatic
loss unless their strategy is efficient in both game time and actual time.
Therefore, even to play fairly, players must attend to the clock as much as
they do the game.
 Waiting for Player (Nixon)  37

The Arena client differs from the MTGO client in providing a

smoother and faster play experience, albeit one that makes examining cer-
tain game details more difficult. Arena lives up to its stated design intent
this way and allows players to mainly drag and drop cards. This suffices
for the majority of gameplay experiences; as older card sets are not imple-
mented on Arena, some of the more complex interactions in MTG are not
yet integrated into the interface. MTGO, in contrast, provides more detail
about gameplay with its full gameplay log, customizable persistent stops,
and advanced hotkeys. This raises the skill floor required to make game-
play transparent and thus immersive for the player.
While digital gameplay disguises the nonverbal behavior usually
associated with “tells,” ­t ime-related behavior also makes possible different
kinds of bluffs and tells. In MTGO, with its emphasis on precise methodi-
cal gameplay, players can attempt to discern their opponent’s attentiveness
and ability through their configuration and speed of play. To counter this,
players can reconfigure on the fly or alternate their behavior. In Arena,
the UI makes it harder to detect these kinds of details due to the increased
automation, so there are fewer opportunities for these kinds of tells to
arise.
Finally, time limits on MTGO and Arena are integrated into game
etiquette, with corresponding taunts if a player wishes to be rude. When
frustrated or angry, players on either client can stop taking game actions
to deliberately stall the game. MTGO’s clock system allows only a maxi-
mum ­10-minute limit before a player loses the match. Arena has a more
modern and unforgiving “rope”-based ­t ime-out system intended to pro-
mote quick gameplay. Despite these efforts to decrease ­t ime-related strate-
gies, Arena remains vulnerable to abuse by griefers who delay their actions
every turn for maximum annoyance.
Ultimately, time is as important to MTG as its formal rules, and play-
ers must learn to wield it to be successful in both analog and digital play.
This requires mastery of each platform’s interface and an awareness of
temporal etiquette.

Note
1. Chess clocks are sometimes recommended for use in physical games of MTG; how-
ever, since priority is technically passed 23 times per turn (if creatures are in play), this
produces too many switches for players to keep track of, and there is increased room for
human error. Additionally, the cost of the devices can be prohibitive (chess clocks range
from US$15–100), and they increase the possibility of strategic ­t ime-wasting (stalling), so
they have never become a serious alternative to ­e tiquette-based time sharing (Hayashi,
2009).
38  Magic

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Economies and Esports
 Understanding the Magic:
The Gathering Card Market
An Ethnographic Approach Toward a Market Strategy
Eugenio Luciano and Alexander di Re

Introduction
The history of success of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is closely tied
to its diverse gameplay, granting players a vast spectrum of formats and
deck customization options. Gameplay is not, however, the only source
of entertainment for many of its more than 20 million followers (Duffy,
2015). ­Non-competitive card collection is another major source of enter-
tainment. Collecting cards may arise from a wide range of possible moti-
vations. The MTG Multiverse—namely, the fantasy reality wherein the
histories and events of MTG take place—is represented through the art-
work of more than 400 artists. The cards’ illustrations reflect their con-
cept and provide visual entertainment that, whether linked to each artist’s
style, the card type (creature, land, artifact, etc.), or the lore surrounding
that card (e.g., “spotlight” cards), may as well constitute a reason in itself
for card collection. The collection of vintage cards, characterized by their
distinctive artwork and by their rarity, is perhaps the most common type
of card collecting among “­old-school” aficionados. This type of collection
has also a unique financial aspect: in 2019, the famous Black Lotus, consid-
ered the strongest and rarest MTG card ever printed, auctioned for 166,000
USD on eBay (Hall, 2019).
While Black Lotus represents a ­stand-alone case, the financial world
gravitating around MTG can be easily considered another source of enter-
tainment. The MTG card market (the center of gravity for a constellation
of MTG products) centers around players speculating on the price fluctu-
ation of single cards, and eventually investing in them. This activity has

43
44   Economies and Esports

similarities with the trading of commodities in modern financial markets,

where traders can engage in financial activities through the trading strat-
egies they adopt. For example, traders might expect the market value of
a commodity or stock to rise, in which case they would buy shares of the
commodity or stock and hold their position until their value has increased
satisfyingly enough to be sold (a practice called “going long” in the finan-
cial jargon). Conversely, traders might expect the market value of a com-
modity or stock to decrease, in which case they would sell their securities
with the intent of repurchasing them at a lower price (“going short”).
Longing and shorting commodities or stocks are basic strategies for trad-
ers in financial markets. Similarly, these strategies are replicated with the
purchase of what we assume to be the most basic asset for MTG traders:
individual cards.1 Recently, an article published on the website EDHREC
also estimated the market capitalization—that is, outstanding shares of
stock (i.e., copies of cards) times the market price for one share (i.e., the
market value of individual cards)—for the top cards across the MTG Com-
mander format, including the popular card “Mana Crypt” (whose finan-
cial history we discuss in this essay) with an estimated capitalization value
of $23,551,142 (MTGDS, 2022).2
Investing in MTG cards may result in considerable profit, although
hardly comparable to the level of monetary flows of the world’s stock mar-
kets. Beyond the economic aspect, being able to predict which card will
rise in price at what time and by what margin implies knowledge of those
qualities that make a specific card valuable. In other words, it requires
knowledge of how to assess the contextual “strength” of a card and knowl-
edge of the broader market and gaming landscape attributing financial
value to a card. In this essay, we seek to explore the MTG trading land-
scape as a source both of entertainment and economic gain, considering
possible general heuristics for developing a market strategy for MTG trad-
ing. While describing the trading landscape (i.e., descriptive analysis), we
also seek to provide essential guidelines for developing a market strategy
based on why, where, when, and how to get what knowledge about MTG
cards (i.e., normative analysis).
Because of the multiple similarities between the MTG market and
the stock market, we argue that the MTG market landscape can be under-
stood within basic financial concepts. Our primary focus is on printed
cards, hence leaving aside the monetary value of the newly introduced dig-
ital counterpart—that is, MTG Arena and MTG Online. The relationship
between the online and the paper market is left out, as it is explored by
other contributions to this edited volume.
In what follows, first we outline our research methodology. Then,
we divide the development of a market strategy analysis into three stages
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   45

by discussing the market landscapes, framing the resources and data-

bases available, and finally providing case studies for the market histories
of selected cards. Lastly, we draw our conclusions and highlight possible
future research points to be addressed.

Methodology
The application of mathematics informs most of today’s approaches
to modeling, understanding, and forecasting the insatiable amount of data
(and money) flowing in and around financial markets. If the MTG trading
zone exhibits similar properties to the world’s stock markets, then readers
might expect a similar ­mathematically-based analysis to develop guide-
lines for developing MTG trading strategies. However, our selection of
methodology steers away from this choice for two main reasons.
First, we believe our analysis to be complementary to existing math-
ematical research on the MTG market and gaming landscape. Academic
literature on MTG is generally scarce: only very few mathematical analy-
ses exist, some of which do not focus on the financial and trading aspect
of the game but rather on internal characteristics (Bosch, 2000; Chur-
chill et al., 2019; Hau et al., 2015). A master’s thesis study on ­multi-asset
trading in connection with machine learning for MTG Online (MTGO)
by Di Napoli (2018) offers an interesting quantitative analysis, delineat-
ing a basic terminology for addressing the MTG trading landscape. Other
seminal attempts have been conducted similarly by Pawlicki et al. (2014)
and Perkhounkov et al. (2015) as projects within the Machine Learning
study course at Stanford University. Like Di Napoli, both studies borrow
the financial jargon, finding degrees of similarity between MTG cards and
financial markets. Their selected methods—to our knowledge, not yet cor-
roborated in further research from the authors—are based on machine
learning techniques, through which they attempted to extract an algo-
rithm via modeling some endogenous (card abilities) and exogenous (card
frequency in tournaments) variables from a pool of selected cards. These
are prototypical approaches that could be further developed from a quan-
titative viewpoint but are not further explored in our approach.
Second, we believe ethnographic knowledge of the game—namely,
knowledge of both endogenous (game and card rules, game strategies,
­meta-gameplay, etc.) and exogenous (primary and secondary markets, data-
bases, card bans, etc.) variables—largely supersedes any ­stand-alone math-
ematical analysis in predicting card prices. Our belief is grounded in over
a decade of direct experience in MTG gameplay as well as in the trading
arena from the authors and their MTG community (physical and virtual).
46   Economies and Esports

The heuristics we developed have been corroborated over multiple years,

especially during set “spoilers,” namely, time windows preceding set releases
where players can access information regarding upcoming cards.3 Although
we do not preclude mathematical analyses of the possibility of developing
MTG trading strategies from a quantitative standpoint (Fink et al., 2015),
we are skeptical about the practicality and reliability of any such existing
approach; they require a knowledge pool that, unlike ethnographic knowl-
edge, is not necessarily shared by the MTG player and trading base. To this
end, we find an ethnographic approach is better suited to understanding
the variables determining card prices—besides also being more accessi-
ble for the readers regardless of their backgrounds. Our skepticism toward
attempts to predict the value of MTG cards through mathematical model-
ing does not imply an a priori rejection of any such mathematical analy-
sis. As stated, we see this approach as complementary to the ethnographic.
Nevertheless, the literature surveyed approaching the MTG market land-
scape through mathematical modeling hints that ethnographic knowledge
is implicit in the analyses. For instance, Perkhounkov et al. (2015) based
their machine learning approach on their personal “knowledge of the game’s
microeconomy, and the factors which influence the price of traded commod-
ities more generally” (p. 1, emphasis added). We consider this knowledge not
merely a precondition to understanding the market landscape, but rather
the knowledge required to delineate a market strategy.
To strengthen our methodological base we drew from a few
­ethnography-based studies on the MTG cultural landscape. For instance,
a study conducted by Švelch (2019) on the digitalization of MTG and its
impact on the analog form uses an ethnographic method based on the
author’s field experience as part of the virtual and material MTG commu-
nity. A second example is research conducted by Trammell (2010, 2013),
whose methodology is based on weekly attendance at local tournaments
for almost two years, combined with ­c yber-ethnographic work. Both stud-
ies assume direct experience with, and knowledge of, MTG as a game, and
use this experience as a direct source for ethnographic work—something
we also apply for our contribution. Specifically, our approach is grounded
in our personal field experience (e.g., participation in tournaments,
card trading, online gameplay) with the MTG culture, combined with a
­c yber-ethnographic study (Hine, 2015; Murthy, 2008; Ward, 1999) of the
virtual MTG ­u ser-generated content inspired by Trammell’s (2010) study
on virtual landscapes. As we shall illustrate, information gathering—a
key step in investment processes—is largely achievable through online
resources, most of which are accessible for free. Ultimately, the methodol-
ogy we develop does not just seek to understand the MTG card market but
also aims at outlining basic guidelines for developing a market strategy.
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   47

Notably, scholarly inquiry on the MTG trading aspect as well as its

overall impact as a recreational phenomenon remains largely unexplored
in academic, ­p eer-reviewed research contexts. Most of the work on the
financial side of MTG has been conducted by either bloggers and forum
users, or by students through assignments or graduation theses (Mlodzik,
2018). Nevertheless, consistent with our methodological approach, these
sources cannot and should not be disregarded easily, as they provide
insight from an active and constantly engaging community of players and
traders whose market knowledge is grounded on ­f irst-hand experience
and expertise.

Delineating a Market Strategy I: Knowing the Landscape

The first step in delineating a market strategy is understanding the
market landscape being considered. It is important to recognize the two
markets that comprise the entire MTG economy. These markets are usu-
ally addressed as primary and secondary markets, and are in principle sim-
ilar to the primary and secondary stock markets in financial trading—the
former being a space where new securities are issued in the form of Initial
Public Offerings (IPOs), the latter seeing investors trading issued securi-
ties that they own.
MTG’s primary market gravitates around the production, distribu-
tion, and selling of products (e.g., booster packs, accessories, etc.) from
Wizard of the Coast (WotC)—the official game’s publisher and a subsid-
iary of Hasbro since 1999—to retailers. The business history of WotC has
been a success since the release of the first Alpha set. A total of 2.5 million
cards were printed for its opening to the public at the 1993 Gen Con game
convention, expecting to match the demand from August until the end
of the year. Contrary to expectations, the print run sold out over the very
release weekend (Tinsmann, 2008). Along with its success in the gaming
industry, MTG’s increasing popularity engendered an international busi-
ness characterized by a vast array of card- and ­non-card-specific products,
from booster packs, booster boxes, preconstructed decks, and limited edi-
tion cards (e.g., judge reward promos, showcase, full art, etc.), to playmats,
card sleeves, books, and various accessories.
Individual cards are not sold on the primary market. Retailers pur-
chase sealed boosters where cards are ­s emi-randomly distributed. The
­semi-randomness is because boosters have a fixed number of cards (gen-
erally fifteen playable cards plus a marketing card since 2007), and fixed
distribution of rarity—namely, ten “common,” three “uncommon,” and
one “rare.” Since the release of the expansion Shards of Alara in October
48   Economies and Esports

2008, “mythic rare” was introduced as the highest level of rarity for a card
(included in about one in every five to seven booster packs). Rarity is one
of the most basic variables affecting the price of a card because it generally
reflects supply and card complexity (i.e., a relative parameter for a card’s
strength), and thus overall impact on gameplay (Rosewater, 2018) which
generates higher demand from players. Notably, players often speculate
that some cards with the same rarity level are printed less often than oth-
ers, although no official statement or data from WotC seems to support
this.4
The secondary market is where the price of individual cards is set by
retailers and consumers and is thus unrelated, in principle, to the orig-
inal issuer (WotC). This is in principle because WotC may decide to
reprint certain cards because of their low supply, hence affecting the price
of reprinted cards. While it is intuitive to assume that WotC knows the
secondary market, it is an object of debate whether certain actions are
directly aimed at affecting the secondary market. In market terms, the dif-
ference between the primary and secondary markets can be paraphrased
as the difference between primary offerings and secondary offerings.5 As
recognized by Di Napoli (2017), the most impactful factor in determin-
ing a card’s price is ultimately consumers’ willingness to pay. Being closely
linked to willingness to pay, the law of supply and demand plays a central
role in determining the price of a card.
The vast majority of individual cards are sold for a value of <$1.00
(U.S. dollars). A study at Cornell University from an unspecified author
(2015) shows that out of the 18,000 individual cards printed by the time
the study was conducted, only 2,155 were sold for a value of >$1.00. The
remainder of <$1.00 cards (whose price can be as low as $0.01) are often
sold in “bulk” (Perkhounkov et al., 2015), namely, large quantities of ran-
domly assessed cards that are generally sold for less than the cumulative
value of each. This also means that most MTG cards are financially worth-
less to speculate on: most (though not all) very ­low-valued cards (e.g., $0.01
cards) are unlikely to experience a steep increase that makes them finan-
cially worth considering or investing in. The challenge, therefore, is being
able to predict which cards will be worth speculating on.
But where exactly are cards sold on the secondary market? What con-
stitutes the MTG trading landscape? Whereas local game stores still main-
tain their role as retailers of individual cards (and most importantly, as
hubs of social interaction), the advent of large scale ­e-commerce has mas-
sively impacted the overall trading economy of MTG products, possibly
contributing to the game’s increasing popularity and financial success
in recent years. Many online platforms now exist across the world where
consumers can easily and rapidly purchase their desired cards—from
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   49

multinational ­e -commerce companies such as eBay or Amazon to ded-

icated gaming and collectible cards websites of local game stores. Some
online marketplaces (some examples are given in the following section)
are geographically localized, meaning that each offers online services gen-
erally restricted—in terms of shipping availability, or due to high costs of
shipping—to specific countries or geographical areas (e.g., North Amer-
ica, Europe, East Asia). Each market is affected by virtually the same vari-
ables in determining card price, hence showing high degrees of similarity
in timings: steep upward or downward trends will be reflected across all
markets. We observed, however, certain differences in card prices between
the North American and the European markets reflected in a mismatch
of the currency conversion rate between the U.S. Dollar and the Euro—
with the latter exhibiting higher converted prices than the latter. Never-
theless, there are no reasons to infer that equal market heuristics should
not be applied to all markets as they exhibit the same general market
behaviors.

Delineating a Market Strategy II: Database

and Resources
Information gathering is an essential component of any investment
process (Felix, 2016), whether it involves a ­multi-billion investment, the
purchase of a new TV, or MTG cards trading. Generally, “[g]athering or
processing information is costly, in terms of money, time, and effort”
(Bar-Isaac et al., 2010, p. 376). However, many databases and resources
available for free on the Internet allow interested MTG traders to dramat-
ically minimize, if not nullify, the monetary aspect and reduce the time
for information gathering. But where and how can information be gath-
ered, besides merely Googling it? Through an ethnographic study of the
MTG virtual communities and ­u ser-created content (Hine, 2015; Švelch,
2016, 2019; Trammell, 2010), we identified an interrelated network of con-
tent discernible in at least five clusters, each representing a pool of specific
information useful for market research, and ultimately for developing a
market strategy. These clusters are defined according to the type of service
each source provides. Notably, it is not uncommon that multiple types of
services to be offered by the same source. For instance, the popular web-
site MTGGoldfish could as well fit in each cluster by providing what is
perhaps the most comprehensive pool of information on cards concern-
ing the existing and most successful and played decks. Nevertheless, we
believe our classificatory scheme usefully compresses the vastness of the
MTG virtual landscape.
50   Economies and Esports

Search Engines and Databases

The most basic sources of information for MTG cards are search
engines and databases. These deliver results from search queries and
provide essential ­c ard-related information. The most popular ones are
Gatherer (the official WotC search engine),6 and Scryfall (formerly Magic-
cards.info). The latter constitutes the most comprehensive search engine
for cards, providing a hub of information ranging from explanations of
cards’ rules and text, reprints, and format legality, to languages, estimated
price (in USD, EUR, and MTGO’s currency, TIX), and links to card anal-
ysis websites useful for further information gathering. The former has
seen criticism from the online MTG community, which lamented that the
engine is buggy,7 or overall worse8 than Scryfall. Search engines by them-
selves provide only minimal information for developing a market strat-
egy. Information in search engines is mostly redundant—namely, it does
not contain anything beyond what is already implicit in the overall “sta-
tus” (e.g., price, rulings, legality, etc.) of a card. Nevertheless, it provides
fast and bundled basic information from which successive information
gathering can take place. In particular, databases provide explanations of
the functioning of specific cards whose rules or interactions may gener-
ate ambiguity or doubts. They also provide the updated text of cards whose
original text and/or rules have been modified by WotC—an aspect we
tackle again in Section 5.

Card/Deck Statistics Analyzers

Endogenous information about MTG cards is perhaps the most fun-

damental variable influencing willingness to pay, as we shall illustrate in
the following section. Any MTG trader should be able to answer the ques-
tion “Why is this card strong?,” which often (though not always) translates
into the question “Will this card gain market value?” Answering this ques-
tion is, expectedly, one of the most daunting tasks.
The performance or “strength” of cards cannot be assessed in isola-
tion. This is also clear from a purely mathematical viewpoint. A study by
Hau et al. (2015) states that “a Magic deck’s strength is based not only on
cards that are powerful individually, but also are synergistic with the other
cards in the deck” (p. 1). The authors suggest that the “synergy” of a card
(i.e., the degree of possible interaction with other cards) can be quantita-
tively assessed. In fact, some websites such as EDHREC provide a numer-
ical value of synergy expressed in the percentage of a card in a given deck.
If synergy is a parameter of strength, then it may seem logical to infer that
synergy should also affect market value. However, this is not necessarily
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   51

the case because other variables, most notably supply, may offset the price
impact of high synergy. This is the case for a card such as “Sol Ring,” a sta-
ple for any Commander deck which has been printed in 36 expansions (as
of April 2022), so that performance is vastly outweighed by the number of
copies available on the market.
Strength assessment is intimately tied with deck performance analysis
because the “strength” of a card is necessarily related to the deck the card
is being played in. That implies that “strength,” and thus possibly market
value, is not an independent parameter. For instance, a seemingly “good”
card may not fit into the current “metadeck” (or simply “meta”) scenario,
namely the most successful decks in sanctioned tournaments in a given for-
mat, during a specific time. The card is “tested” against the extant “meta,”
and this test alone can dramatically influence the price of a card.
Information on card/deck performance can be extrapolated through
deck builders, most of which are freely accessible on the Internet. These
­web-based software allow players to create and customize decks while
also gaining quantitative information about them (e.g., the “mana cur-
ve,”9 single card price, overall deck price, mana color distribution, card
type distribution, etc.), and receiving feedback from the users’ commu-
nity. Among the many existing deck builders on the web (and also on
mobile apps), we found TappedOut to be the most practical and resource-
ful pool of information for deck building. The TappedOut intuitive inter-
face provides players with easy visualization of overall statistics of a given
created deck through pie or column charts, from ­m ana-wise card cost,
land mana, mana curve, to converted mana cost (CMC), and card type
distribution. Additionally, the website provides automatically gener-
ated suggestions for possible cards to introduce to a deck, card and deck
prices (in USD and TIX), a comment section for users, and the possibil-
ity of ­single-player playtesting. The number of decks uploaded as well as
the visualization and “upvotes” (i.e., likes) received by the most popular
decks on the website suggests that TappedOut is the most popular among
available ­deck-building software.
Alongside deck builders, additional (online) analysis software allows
players to further focus on individual cards. For instance, EDHREC pro-
vides information on individual cards based on a database of decks built
for the Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH) or Commander format. Depend-
ing on the type of card searched for, information can be extrapolated on
how often that card is played, what percentage of synergy it generates, or
with which other cards it is played. A second example is MTG Deck Ana-
lyzer, where certain cards in a regular deck can be assigned a “strategy,”
and statistics can be extrapolated about the chances that the strategy will
work in a selected amount of turns.
52   Economies and Esports

Once again, these databases and resources alone are not sufficient
to delineate a sound market strategy. Nevertheless, they constitute a
resourceful pool for information gathering based on quantitative statistics
of cards and their performance in decks.

Playtesters
While ­d eck-building software equips users with useful tools to
analyze and improve MTG decks, deck testing or “playtesting” is often
restricted to simulating drawing an opening hand, or ­single-player test-
ing—meaning that decks cannot be tested against other players’ decks
simulating a “real” competition. Intuitively, playtesting is a fundamental
step in assessing the strength of decks and cards, hence a crucial moment
of information gathering. Through MTGO, MTG Arena, and MTG Duels of
the Planeswalkers, WotC has enabled players with online gameplay. How-
ever, as explored in other essays in this edited volume, this mediatization
(Švelch, 2019) of MTG often severely limits deck customization because of
limited card databases or ­i n-game reward systems (i.e., the ­i n-game cur-
rency to spend for purchasing cards), or it follows a ­pay-to-win model—all
choices that restrict the possibility of playtesting the wide range of formats
available.
To overcome the financial burden of purchasing what are often
expensive cards, tested cards are usually “proxied” rather than purchased
by either marking substitute cards or printing them. However, different
computer software has been developed allowing players to build and play-
test their decks virtually, escaping the ­pay-to-win or ­i n-game currency
models of WotC digital variants. Two examples are Cockatrice and Untap.
These ­browser-based simulations allow players to create their decks and
compete online against each other while avoiding any form of restriction,
either monetary, ­format-wise, or in terms of cards availability. This free,
­u ser-generated content sparked friction with WotC by rivaling the busi-
ness’s ­pay-to-win online modeling (Boon et al., 2016).
One of the greatest advantages of these simulators is that cards
revealed during spoilers can be immediately uploaded to the card data-
base and quickly playtested. Since format legality (e.g., what cards can
be played in a specific format) is enforced by players rather than autom-
atized, as in WotC’s online variants, cards that are still technically
“illegal” can instead be played before their official introduction into
sanctioned tournaments and the MTG market. Repeated playtesting
can verify or falsify the strength of a card, hence increasing confidence
that the card will see major gameplay in a given format. In market terms,
this brings to speculation, and thus a rise in market value. Therefore,
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   53

playtesters constitute an additional valuable source for information

gathering.

Price Trackers
As hinted in the introduction to this study, the financial aspect of
MTG has become both a source of financial gain as well as entertainment.
Throughout our experience and encounters with player groups, the pre-
diction of card prices is often a powerful trigger for social interaction as
well as a hub of discussion. As also outlined in the following section, we
find the critical exchange of opinions concerning card speculation to be a
crucial moment of information gathering.
While online trading platforms (Cardmarket, for instance) can pro-
vide price history snapshots, ­i n-depth market analysis is provided by
“price trackers,” emerging in the wake of a growing general interest among
players in the MTG market landscape. Three examples are MTGPrice,
MTGStocks, and Quiet Speculation. Each of these web resources enables
users to access detailed price charts with degrees of customization. How-
ever, as future price trends are not necessarily reflected in price history,
price graphs only provide visual aids requiring additional information
extractable from articles, podcasts, or additional analytics features pro-
vided by price trackers. For instance, MTGStocks releases “weekly win-
ners” where the top three cards with the highest percentage increase are
analyzed and discussed. This is not just an excellent source of information,
but also a valid source for critically learning and assessing what variables
may affect card prices.

Knowledge Networks
Lastly, a heterogeneous body of virtual platforms constitutes the
final cluster of crucial importance for information gathering. This diver-
sified and scattered body articulates through the vastness of mainstream
social networking available on the web, from YouTube and Twitch, Insta-
gram, Twitter, and Facebook, to forums communities like Reddit, 4chan,
or MTGsalvation.10 All constitute important networks for MTG knowledge
production and sharing.
For instance, a streaming platform such as Twitch allows traders to
hear live or recorded opinions of professional MTG players or experts. This
is a great source of information mostly concerning endogenous variables
because professional players have empirical knowledge enabling them to
provide strong reasons to consider a certain card “good.” During spoilers,
professional players, who are expected to possess expertise and knowledge
of the game, can provide a detailed and contextualized analysis of a card’s
54   Economies and Esports

strength in an existing format, hence stimulating (either directly or indi-

rectly) MTG traders to invest (or not) in a specific card. YouTube channels
such as SplitSecond, Playing with Power MTG, or Play to Win have a strong
focus on the competitive aspect of the Commander format (known as
cEDH), providing viewers with ­f irst-hand testimony of the performance
of certain cards in a format.
Forum communities are a growing section of the virtual world and
constitute hubs for knowledge collaboration as well as social interaction
(Faraj et al., 2011; Phang et al., 2009). Through online communities, people
sharing the same interests “obtain knowledge and feedback from others
and to express opinions” (Ye et al., 2015, p. 34). This is a crucial compo-
nent of information gathering, in that forums provide a vast array of opin-
ions that can be weighed against one’s personal heuristics for a market
strategy. For instance, Reddit hosts a community of 67,000 members dedi-
cated to discussing the financial aspect of MTG. The community (“Magic:
The Gathering Financial Discussion”11) sees users engaging in discussions
concerning possible investments in MTG products, including individual
cards. The exchange of knowledge and opinions is essential in developing
heuristics for a successful market strategy.
While not strictly social networks, ­spoiler-focused websites such as
Mythic Spoiler or Magic Spoiler have plugins that allow online visitors
to express their opinions on newly printed cards during spoilers. Like-
wise, Twitter and Instagram host dedicated channels where new cards are
released, and followers can comment on these cards. This is an essentially
“live” process that provides insight into players’ general feelings toward a
newly printed card. As obtaining information quickly during spoilers is
essential in deciding not to invest when the demand curve is already at its
highest, this kind of information pool represents a valuable resource for
information gathering.

Delineating a Market Strategy III: ­Card-Context

Analysis
Discussing case studies of popular cards with insightful market his-
tories can further aid in framing those exogenous and endogenous vari-
ables affecting card prices. This analysis used primarily two online
marketplaces, namely, Cardmarket (the main platform for the European
market, headquartered in Berlin), and Cardkindgom (one of the pre-
ferred platforms for North American buyers, headquartered in Seattle), to
retrieve information concerning card price and fluctuations. ­L ong-term
data on the market history of individual cards were retrieved from
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   55

MTGStocks and correlated to Quiet Speculation and MTGPrice (all being

­t rading-focused tools) for verifiability. We do not consider “foil” or “lim-
ited edition” cards: the price for these types of cards, while still being fun-
damentally determined by the willingness to pay, follows aesthetics and
rarity parameters that are hereby not taken into consideration.12 Card con-
dition and language, which also affect the price of single cards, are also left
out as our focus is primarily on the card’s features regardless of its condi-
tion and language.
We mentioned in the previous section that no card is either “good”
or “bad” in isolation. Since card performance is a parameter of willing-
ness to pay (and thus card price), understanding the context of a card is
paramount in conducting a thorough card analysis and thus delineating a
successful market strategy. MTG cards are played in customizable decks,
usually containing a minimum of 60 cards (with a maximum of four cop-
ies of a unique card allowed), constituting the “main deck,” and additional
15 cards composing the “sideboard,” namely, cards that can be changed
with the main deck between games. The number of cards and gameplay
depends on the format—that is, a set of rules determining ways in which
MTG decks can be constructed and played. For instance, in the Com-
mander format, a deck is composed of 99 cards plus an ­ex-ante designated
“commander card” (or 98 cards plus two commanders under certain cir-
cumstances), and only one copy for each unique card is allowed (except for
“basic lands” cards).
Formats are usually distinguished between official (i.e., recognized
by WotC) and casual. Causal formats do not follow any “official rules,” but
are rather spontaneous ­u ser-generated ways that MTG games are played
(WotC, 2008). A further distinction is between sanctioned and unsanc-
tioned formats—that is, between formats that are recognized in WotC
sanctioned tournaments. WotC further distinguished two types of sanc-
tioned (paper) formats, namely limited (i.e., by definition, limited to a spe-
cific pool of cards drafted and played in situ) and constructed (­pre-built
decks).13 Constructed formats are additionally divided into eternal (i.e.,
allowing all ­non-banned MTG cards) and ­non-eternal. Lastly, ­non-eternal
formats differentiate between rotating and nonrotating. “Rotation” con-
sists in the release of new “blocks” of expansions which replace older ones,
hence changing the card pool available for deckbuilding. Figure 1 summa-
rizes the format tree.
Knowledge of formats is crucial in developing a market strategy.
Some formats exert more market influence than others, and casual formats
may one day become officially recognized by WotC, hence affecting mar-
ket prices. In the same way, the introduction of new sanctioned formats
(such as Pioneer and Historic in 2019) can easily generate spikes and affect
56   Economies and Esports

Fig. 1. Classification of MTG formats. (*Commander has become a sanctioned

format among some local games stores, although no WOTC-sanctioned tour-
naments still exist.)

the market price of individual cards. Unlike limited formats, where decks
are built ­e x-post from cards drafted from booster packs usually within an
expansion set or a block (i.e., a group of expansions of the same flavor and/
or mechanics), constructed formats require ­pre-game deck building, thus
the ­ex-ante purchasing of individual cards. Therefore, constructed formats
(either casual or sanctioned) are generally those formats most affecting the
price trend of individuals cards.
Among constructed formats, some enjoy more popularity than others.
Standard, Modern, and Commander (a very popular official but unsanc-
tioned format) ranked among the top five formats among all MTG formats
in 2018. In the last three years, Commander has become the most popu-
lar format, hence driving a large increase in price among a certain pool
of cards. In the secondary market, popularity translates into increased
demand and thus higher prices for individual cards. The popularity of
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   57

certain formats also entails higher popularity for certain types of decks
recording ­h igh-winning percentages in official tournaments. These decks
are often labeled as “metadecks” (or ­top-tier/­t ier-one decks), and they con-
stitute the “metagame,” namely, the most competitive decks assembled
for a given format according to their winning ratio and player base use.
Knowledge of the metagame is necessary for developing a market strategy,
in that it provides essential insight regarding existing trends, card syner-
gies, and strategies in gameplay and deck building. Most importantly, this
knowledge is sensible to the context of cards, thus providing key informa-
tion in forecasting card value. For instance, when a new, seemingly power-
ful card has been printed, it might not gain reasonable market value due to
the “lack of space” in the existing metagame. It is reasonable to believe that
card market value is always “holistically” tested against the existing meta-
decks. Understanding how this holistic network is affected by market vari-
ables is one of the most painstaking tasks in developing a market strategy.
Whereas popularity might translate into increased demand in the
secondary market, in the primary market high popularity may induce the
reprinting of unique cards—that is, a card from a previous set is reprinted
in a new set. Indeed, WotC clearly stated in their reprinting policy that “(a)
the cards we reprint make for enjoyable gameplay, and (b) all Magic play-
ers deserve an opportunity to play with these cards” (WotC, 2016). When
unique cards are reprinted, the available quantity of a unique card (i.e., the
supply) increases, and thus its price decreases.
Our first case study considers the card “Mana Crypt” as emblematic
of popularity and reprinting as market variables (Fig 2). “Mana Crypt” is
often considered one of the strongest MTG “artifacts” (i.e., a card type)
and “­ramp-type” (i.e., cards that speed up your game strategy) cards ever
printed, and is the cornerstone of every competitive Commander deck.
Due to its strength, the card is restricted (meaning players can only have
one copy of each in their main deck and sideboard instead of the canoni-
cal four copies) in Vintage and banned in Legacy. Originally printed as a
promo card only available with the purchase of one of the HarperPrism
MTG books released on September 1, 1994, the card saw reprint again
only on June 10, 2016,14 with the release of the set Eternal Masters (Symon,
2020). While its market value remained fairly steady throughout 2016 and
2017, ranging from $59 to $90, the rise in popularity of the Commander
(the only format where the card is legal) since 2018 boosted a “rediscovery”
of this card, generating high demand on a very limited supply that spiked
up to $240 by April 22, 2019. However, by December 7, 2020, the card more
than halved in value, reaching an average price of $95. This can be largely
ascribed to the card’s reprint in the Mystery Booster retail edition, released
on March 13, 2020, and in Double Masters, released on August 7, 2020.
58   Economies and Esports

This downward trend shows that reprinting is a major variable in deter-

mining a card’s price on the secondary market. Following a further focus
by WotC on the Commander format, and thus an increase in demand, the
card gradually regained value, reaching a market average of $187 on April
11, 2022.
A second case study we analyzed is the card “Gilded Drake,” first
printed on October 12, 1998, with the release of the set Urza’s Saga (Fig.
3). The card is widely recognized as a “must” for any competitive Com-
mander deck including blue mana color, providing a powerful abil-
ity for a very low CMC. Its price history has seen a slow increase from $5
on November 30, 2010, to $31 by April 24, 2018. Following the release of
Dominaria on April 27, 2018, the card doubled in value, jumping to a mar-
ket average price of $60. On January 25, 2021, the card reached its high-
est recorded with an average market price of $493, settling at $340 as of
April 11, 2022. While the underlying increasing trend can be attributed
(again) to a growing interest in the Commander format, where the card
sees major gameplay, 15 this sudden increase in value can be traced to
rules text changes that increased the card’s performance (Shiffrin, 2018).
This corresponds to changes in the text (and thus functioning) gener-
ally aimed at cards that have not been and will not be reprinted that are
officialized by WotC via the Oracle—namely, “the reference that con-
tains the ­u p-to-date wordings (in English) for all ­t ournament-legal
cards” found on the Gatherer (rule 108.1 of MTG’s Comprehensive
Rules).

Fig. 2. Price graph for “Mana Crypt” (Eternal Masters edition) from
MTGstocks.com. The black symbols along the X-axis correspond to the release
of new sets (retrieved on 21 April 2022 from https://www.MTGstocks.com/
prints/30938-mana-crypt).
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   59

Fig. 3. Price graph for “Gilded Drake” from MTGstocks.com (retrieved on 21

April 2022 from https://www.MTGstocks.com/prints/9002-gilded-drake).

Gilded Drake also confirms that reprints affect card market value
by not having been reprinted due to being part of a Reserved List. The
Reserved List (or Reserved Policy) is a list of cards set by WotC that will
not see reprints in future sets. The goal of this list is to safeguard traders
investing in the secondary market. This policy came about with the release
of Chronicles on March 4, 1996, as a response to complaints from retailers
that saw card prices plummeting in the secondary market after cards such
as “Carrion Ants,” “Killer Bees,” “Mishra’s Factory,” “Erhnam Djinn,” or
the legendary elder dragons were reprinted (Buehler, 2002b). The list was
revised in 2002 and 2010 and has seen much criticism from the MTG com-
munity, which shares the belief that the list no longer functions as origi-
nally intended (Buehler, 2002a). Being part of the Reserved List is a major
factor contributing to cards’ prices. The focus on the Commander format
by WotC, the card’s popularity in Commander, the changes in its text, and
being part of the Reserved List synergized to contribute to the astonishing
increase in the price of “Gilded Drake.”
Rules changes related to cards’ abilities are a crucial exogenous vari-
able in inf luencing cards’ market value (for the better or worse). For
instance, changes to the “legendary rule” for Planeswalkers (“legendary”
is a supertype allowing each of this supertype to only exist as one copy in
the “battlefield”) were leaked before the official announcement with the
release of Ixalan on September 29, 2017. As a consequence, the card “Cap-
tain Sisay” (Fig. 4) spiked from $5 to $35 overnight on June 19, 2017, settling
for an average of $18 in the following days.16 After the official announce-
ment, the card spiked again up to $60 on August 29, 2017, and settled to
a $35 average in the next few days (Johnson, 2017), slowly decreasing and
60   Economies and Esports

Fig. 4. Price graph for “Captain Sisay” from MTGstocks.com (retrieved on 21

April 2022 from https://www.MTGstocks.com/prints/7690-captain-sisay).

fluctuating around $20 as of April 2022. Although limited gameplay in

formats outside Commander affects this particular card’s overall market
status, this example shows just how important rule changes are in affect-
ing a card’s market value and contributing to market spikes.
Rules changes may also negatively affect a card’s market value. The
release of the set Ikoria introduced the “Companion” ability, which orig-
inally allowed players to cast once in the game a selected creature card
(i.e., the chosen companion) for their CMC directly from their sideboard.
On June 1, 2020, the rule was changed, allowing players to have their
chosen companion in their hand from the sideboard by spending three
colorless mana (Duke, 2020). It is feasible that the card “Lurrus of the
­Dream-Den,” which saw an initial good reception in the market as well as
the play arena, might have been negatively affected by this. Whilst a gen-
eral decrease in its market value from its highest value ($25) was already
on its way, 17 changes in the companion rules are an evident decrease in
the card’s potential.
The banning of “Lurrus of the ­Dream-Den” in multiple formats was
certainly a major factor in its market history. A similar fate was met by
“Oko, Thief of Crowns,” released with the set Throne of Eldraine on Octo-
ber 4, 2019 (Fig. 5). The card saw immediate gameplay in ­non-eternal for-
mats such as Standard, Modern, and Pioneer, but also in the eternal format
Legacy (Mengucci, 2019) as well as Commander. Its high opening market
price fell quickly, from $40 to $20 by mid–September, only to rise again
to $40 with the official set release. The card then spiked to its historical
highest on October 22, 2019, when it reached an average market value of
$64. “Oko, Thief of Crowns” largely dominated the metagame, seeing
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   61

“70% of decks at Mythic Championship Richmond including the card,”

and reducing “metagame diversity and diversity of gameplay in Standard”
(Duke, 2019). It was obvious among the players’ and traders’ communities
that a ban was imminent. The banning of a card (i.e., making a card not
legal in a given format) is a strategy adopted by WotC to ensure the over-
all game experience is enjoyable, and not polarized toward specific (and
usually ­h ighly-priced) cards and decks. For MTG traders, it is key knowl-
edge underlying any market strategy: the banning of a card from a for-
mat (especially when popular) implies less demand, thus a price decrease.
Being able to foresee impending bans (or unbans, namely, previously
banned cards made legal again) is fundamental to investing wisely in MTG
cards.
As many predicted, the card was banned from Standard and Brawl on
November 18, 2019—just a month and a half after its original release. Rea-
sonably, the ban and the fear preceding it can be attributed as the cause for
the steep downward trend that thereafter followed. The card tried to rees-
tablish its peak market value in December by setting a new metagame in
other formats. However, the “ban hammer” struck again on December 16,
2019 (Pioneer), on January 13, 2020 (Modern), and finally on March 9, 2020
(Historic). Since February 2020, Oko, Thief of Crowns settled between $14
and $16, slowly trending downward to $12 as of April 2022. Its market his-
tory is emblematic of the role that banning (and conversely, unbanning)
has on the MTG trading landscape.

Fig. 5. Price graph for “Oko, Thief of Crowns” from MTGstocks.com

(retrieved on 21 April 2022 from https://www.MTGstocks.com/prints/49965-
oko-thief-of-crowns).
62   Economies and Esports

Conclusions
Our analysis attempted to combine our personal experience and
expertise in the game with cyber ethnographic research and basic con-
cepts and terminology borrowed from finance and economy to deliver a
preliminary snapshot of the MTG secondary market. Such effort is dif-
ficult to ground on preexisting academic research, as MTG remains a
largely unexplored phenomenon in the research literature. This is neces-
sarily a weak point in terms of the methodological strength of our effort.
However, if considered successful, this study may provide fertile ground
for further research in understanding the MTG financial and trading
landscape.
Notably, translating ­i n-game knowledge (what we sporadically
defined as “endogenous” variables) is one of the most difficult tasks. That
is because whether MTG players and traders ultimately perceive a card as
strong, and thus as possibly of considerable market value, is dictated by
years or decades of game experience that can hardly be grasped by a schol-
arly study. Yet this form of perception is embedded into a knowledge of
the game that nowadays is cultivated vastly, though not exclusively, in the
digital world. The epistemic clusters outlined in Section 4 provide a raw
translation of how this knowledge articulates through virtual outlets. Our
case studies demonstrate that this knowledge network reveals patterns
that seem necessary to develop any successful market strategy. Without
necessarily promoting one strategy or the other, we articulated what may
constitute a common framework of variables, parameters, and knowledge
resources for understanding the MTG card market, and developing suc-
cessful market strategies. Summarized, these variables are popularity (of a
card or a format), contextual performance, rules changes (of a card’s text or
the game), supply, banning and unbanning, and Reserved List.
We also recognize that further variables should be considered for a
fully comprehensive analysis of the MTG market landscape. As we antici-
pated, our analysis did not include ­sub-markets related to limited edition
cards, language, card condition, reserved list cards, or other aesthetic (i.e.,
altered, foil, or signed cards) and ­r arity-related factors that may engen-
der different strategies when approaching these submarkets. Moreover,
a thorough analysis should incorporate exogenous variables relating to
WotC’s business directions (i.e., moving toward digitalization of MTG;
see Schumaker and Nixon in this volume) as well as to events of global
reach that may impact the gaming industry at large. A notable example
is the outbreak of ­C ovid-19, which caused a pandemics and an enforced
lockdown around the world. It is unclear, and largely underdocumented,
if and how the virus has impacted MTG’s primary and secondary market.
 Understanding the Market (Luciano & di Re)   63

Feasibly, initial governmental restrictions and social distance may have

impacted negatively the market (especially local game stores), forcing a
general decrease in card prices. On the contrary, our personal experience
with the trading landscape suggests a general increase in card prices at
least since 2021, which we tentatively associate with the popularization
of the Commander format (and perhaps with the first administration of
vaccines), but also to the mediatization of MTG. Assessing the impact of
­C ovid-19 on the MTG secondary market most certainly deserves its own
study.
Acknowledging the limitations of our analysis, we encourage further
research in understanding MTG’s financial aspect from an interdisciplin-
ary standpoint. Particularly, more research on the relationship between
primary and secondary markets should be conducted. Our skepticism
toward mathematical models previously highlighted is only restricted
to existing efforts, but we believe ethnographic knowledge as well com-
bines with this approach to provide further insight into MTG’s secondary
market.

Notes
1. The situation with going short is more problematic. Di Napoli (2018) considers it
impossible (at least for MTGO), in that short positions are based on borrowed stocks, and
there is no possibility of selling cards that you do not possess. However, as cards can be
sold on commission, this might still represent a form of shorting in the MTG market.
2. Some of the assumptions behind these estimates could be challenged; for instance,
the fact that all decklists (the share stocks in the market capitalization equation) used for
the analysis have a ‘real’ (viz. ‘paper’) counterpart.
3. Set spoilers are often accompanied by high speculation as new cards are introduced,
old cards are reprinted, and new interaction and potentially new combos (i.e., synergies
among cards generally considered powerful) among cards are discovered that bring about
changes in the existing “metadecks” or “meta” (i.e., the ­top-tier decks played in sanctioned
tournaments for each format).
4. A Reddit thread on the matter: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/
54zd5n/are_certain_rares_or_mythics_considered_more_rare/, Accessed 31 March 2022.
5. A clear explanation of the difference between primary and secondary offering is
available at http://thegeneralzone.blogspot.com/2015/02/­i n-general-MTG-economics-
part-2.html, Accessed 31 March 2022.
6. https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Default.aspx (Accessed 31 March 2022).
7. User “VidarThor” expressed this criticism on https://www.MTGsalvation.com/
forums/­m agic-fundamenta ls/­m agic-genera l/­7 63594-good-online-search-engines
(Accessed 31 March 2022).
8. User gumgodMTG expressed this criticism on https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGO/
comments/4tt7xg/useful_magic_the_gathering_websites/. Accessed July 16, 2020.
9. The mana curve is the distribution of “mana” cost, one of the basic concepts of the MTG
gameplay. Usually, any playable deck follows a ­Gaussian-like curve in its mana distribution,
although this is not always the case. Mana is a fundamental aspect of deck building (R. Duke,
2015), hence the reason why many statistics provided by deck analyzers revolve around mana.
10. The website MTGsalvation closed on July 8, 2019, although its material can still be
accessed.
64   Economies and Esports

11. https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGfinance/.
12. Another notable exclusion from our analysis is the ­s o-called vintage market,
namely, the trading of early and very highly valued MTG cards. This market follows
parameters that are different from most of the newly and relatively recent printed cards.
For more on the topic, see https://www.youtube.com/user/gradedmagiccards.
13. On this distinction, see https://magic.wizards.com/en/­game-info/gameplay/­r ules-
and-formats/formats.
14. Excluding the DCI 2011 promo and the 2016 “Kaladesh Inventions” editions, both
special editions with overall higher prices due to their rarity and distinctive artwork.
15. Together with Vintage and Legacy, Commander is the only format where the card
is legal. While appearing in sideboards for competitive Legacy decks, the card never saw
­top-tier presence in any other format other than Commander, hence why we consider the
latter the format to influence its price the most.
16. Captain Sisay’s ability allows players to search for legendary cards in their decks.
By transforming (by new rules) all Planeswalkers into legendary cards, the ability became
even more significant, luring players especially interested in the Commander format,
where the card sees most of its use.
17. A Reddit thread offers an interesting insight on why the card’s price began to
decrease. Multiple users feared an imminent, ­multi-format ban (discussed later in the sec-
tion) that could drop the card’s market value. Indeed, the ban occurred first on May 18,
2020, with the banning of the card in Legacy, and almost two years in Modern and Pio-
neer, on March 7, 2022. The thread in question is available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/
MTGfinance/comments/g4woi8/speccing_on_lurrus_of_the_dreamden/.

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 Spoiling the Future Metagame
The Promotional Logic and Reception
of Card Previews in Magic: The Gathering
Jan Švelch

The last few weeks leading up to a release of a new Magic: The Gath-
ering (MTG) expansion regularly make up for one of the most exciting
periods in a player’s calendar. As new cards are being revealed day by day,
forums and social media fill with discussions and speculations about the
impact of new cards. In this rare moment when metagames are soon to
be in flux, players use this opportunity to explore new directions before
the competitive scene again settles on a few approved top tier decks. Con-
tent creators also amp up their activity and are sometimes invited by the
publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC) to participate in card reveals from
the new expansion. The resulting hype that leads up to an eventual launch
can fuel ­pre-orders and increase viewership and readership numbers for
streamers and websites offering deckbuilding advice.
In this essay, I explore the promotional campaign of Ikoria: Lair of
Behemoths, MTG’s Q2 2020 expansion, focusing on card previews and
their audience reception. I begin by contextualizing the role of expan-
sions within the monetization model of MTG, its many playable formats,
and their respective metagames. Every year, WotC usually puts out around
four major expansions, each containing upwards of 200 cards. This steady
rhythm of releases and the consequent sales of booster packs constitutes
the core economic model of the game. I then show how card previews,
related discussions, and strategy resources can be understood using the
concept of spoiler (Gray & Mittell, 2007; Jenkins, 2006), which I expand to
account for ­non-narrative (and ­non-linear) cultural commodities by com-
paring them to walkthroughs and strategy guides (Consalvo, 2007; New-
man, 2016). In the analytical part of the essay, I first analyze the formal
aspects of the promotional campaign, including WotC’s collaboration
66
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  67

with content creators. Second, I investigate player discussions to show how

card previews and consequent theorycrafting (Paul, 2011; Wenz, 2013) hint
at future metagames (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017; Garfield, 1995) by evaluating
previewed cards in terms of their suitability for existing and new decks.

Monetizing the Metagame

While other essays go into more detail about MTG’s economy, look-
ing, for example, at secondary markets (Luciano and di Re) or Magic: The
Gathering Arena (Wizards of the Coast, 2019) as a proprietary platform for
further monetization (Schumaker), the financial value of individual cards
is also relevant for how the game is promoted and how expansions are
teased literally card by card. MTG is officially distributed in randomized
booster packs,1 which can be considered predecessors to loot boxes (Niel-
sen & Grabarczyk, 2018). While loot boxes have been extensively criticized
in the context of video games due to their randomized contents (King &
Delfabbro, 2018; M.E. Perks, 2019), booster packs have come to be some-
what accepted by MTG’s players, perhaps because consumers do not need
to rely on them as the only source of cards. Anyone searching for a sin-
gle card can buy it through various card resellers, at least in the tabletop
version of the game and in Magic: The Gathering Online (Leaping Lizard
Software & Wizards of the Coast, 2002; further referred to as MTGO). In
contrast, Arena follows a more centralized model and prohibits any card
exchanges or ­t hird-party purchases (Švelch, 2019; see also Schumaker’s
essay of this volume).
Although WotC does not directly set individual card prices, it influ-
ences them through game design and artificial scarcity (Altice, 2016; Ham,
2010), established primarily by four different card rarities: Common,
Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic Rare. While many cards have a negligible
price on secondary markets, some, usually Rare and Mythic Rare cards,
sell for tens and hundreds USD (see also Trammell, 2013), based primar-
ily on their utility in competitive play. This unequal distribution of value is
replicated on a smaller scale in each expansion. Only a portion of Ikoria’s
274 core cards would ever see persistent competitive play and reach any
significant value on secondary markets. These features of MTG’s business
model lead to a ­so-called ­pay-to-win scenario in which financial resources
have an undisputable impact on player’s chances of winning (Maisen-
hölder, 2018). While the cost of a deck varies across formats and different
versions of the game (i.e., tabletop, MTGO, Arena), it can be prohibitively
expensive to actively engage in competitive play.
Under normal circumstances, cards of higher rarities can be expected
68   Economies and Esports

to be more powerful and therefore also more relevant for competitive play.
Consequently, it can be hypothesized that not all card previews have the
same impact on the discussions about future metagames, nor do they gen-
erate comparable interest among players. Yet, an important exception are
the ­set-specific Limited formats, such as Booster Sealed or Booster Draft
(see Elias et al., 2012; Švelch, 2019). These game variants, which rely on the
composition of a whole expansion as opposed to the few strongest cards,
see players assembling their decks on the spot from booster packs. In this
context, even otherwise weak cards have their use due to the card pool
limitations.2
Individual cards are thus evaluated based on multiple criteria as they
are situated in multiple formats and ­so-called metagames at the same time.
The term metagame itself has several meanings, ranging from a general
observation of the social context of play in which individual matches are
treated as a larger series of games (Garfield, 1995) to various ­player-created
goals and rules (see Boluk & LeMieux, 2017). As terms, metagames and
metagaming emphasize the practices of players and how they transform
games in the sense of cultural commodities into “instruments, equip-
ment, tools, and toys for playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading,
making, breaking, and ultimately intervening in the sensory and polit-
ical economies of those technologies responsible for the privatization of
play” (Boluk & LeMieux 2017, p. 4). This approach suggests that activi-
ties of players imbue games with new meanings that go beyond what is
inscribed by designers and developers in rules and fiction. In this essay,
I use the term in its vernacular meaning to denote the cards and decks
played on a competitive level of a given format (e.g., Standard, Modern) at
a specific point in time. Metagames evolve over time and can differ signifi-
cantly across formats based on the size of the card pool, special rules, card
bans and restrictions, etc. While these types of metagames are influenced
by game design and political economic aspects of the game, such as arti-
ficial scarcity or ­pay-to-win monetization strategies, metagames emerge
from the activities and preferences of players.
Any major expansion, including Ikoria, aims to provide new relevant
cards for its respective formats without making the older cards feel obso-
lete. WotC originally introduced formats to MTG to accommodate the
game to the rhythm of new releases (Garfield, 2019 [2003]; see also Švelch,
2019). Even at the cost of fragmenting the player base, formats were sup-
posed to prevent (or at least mitigate) the ­so-called power creep—a term
used frequently by both players and designers to refer negatively to func-
tionally similar, but stronger new cards (e.g., with improved numerical
stats or lower mana cost). By creating game variants that, for example, only
allow cards from the last two years of expansions, which is how Standard
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  69

currently operates, new cards designed for such a format compete within
a smaller card pool (see, for example, Hawley, 2019). This scheduled “rota-
tion” of playable sets in Standard introduces a logic of obsolescence and
the need for constant upgrading (Švelch, 2019), but it does not necessarily
have to be connected to general power creep, which would have implica-
tions for ­non-rotating formats. While power creep can work as an incen-
tive to obtain new cards, it devaluates players’ prior financial investments
in cards, possibly undermining their trust in the collectible aspect of the
game. Although MTG’s creator Richard Garfield (2019 [2003]) publicly
opposed power creep, WotC has nonetheless implemented it in certain
areas of the game, such as in the increased power and toughness of crea-
tures relative to their mana cost (see also Stoddard, 2013). However, many
of the most powerful cards, even by today’s standards, were printed in the
early days of MTG. For example, the ­so-called Power Nine (first printed in
1993) are banned or restricted in most official formats. What ultimately
drives the sales of an expansion is the viability of at least some of its cards,
preferably those of higher rarities, for popular formats, although sets like
Ikoria are designed primarily with Standard in mind. As mentioned, the
majority of Ikoria’s cards are unlikely to affect metagames of formats with
large card pools such as Modern or Legacy, but they will be at least tempo-
rarily relevant for Standard and Booster Draft (see Švelch, 2019). The role
of card previews is to hype up the expansion and persuade players that the
new cards will help them stay competitive. In other words, previews are
supposed to motivate players to use the new cards in their decks and thus
include them in competitive metagames, increasing desirability and mon-
etary value of new cards in the process.

Conceptualizing Game Spoilers

Spoilers are both vernacularly and academically associated with nar-
rative media, such as TV and film (Gray, 2010; Jenkins, 2006; L.G. Perks &
­McElrath-Hart, 2016, 2018; Scott, 2017; Völcker, 2017), short stories (John-
son & Rosenbaum, 2015; Levine et al., 2016), or comics (Hassoun, 2013).
To spoil something, in this context, means to break the natural progres-
sion of a storyline via “any revelation of ­yet-to-unfold narrative develop-
ments” (Gray & Mittell, 2007, sec. The Epistemology of Spoiler). While
many games include linear narratives, MTG is essentially a database of
cards, which all ­co-exist in a timeless continuum despite sometimes refer-
ring to different historical events from the fictional world. As such, the
narrative aspect of MTG is not told by the cards themselves, but rather
by transmedial extensions, such as ­t ie-in short stories and novels. While
70   Economies and Esports

there is no central story to be prematurely revealed in MTG through its

cards alone, game experiences in general can also be spoiled by the means
of strategy advice, tips, and solutions. In this regard, walkthroughs (De
Grove & Van Looy, 2014; Newman, 2016) and strategy guides (Consalvo,
2007) have been seen as potentially cheapening the challenge associated
with games.3 In player meritocracies (Paul, 2018), relying on these external
sources of information leads to accusation of cheating (Consalvo, 2007) or,
in card games, netdecking—copying decks from other players.
Card previews, including Ikoria’s promotional campaign, are planned
and scheduled by WotC (aside from occasional leaks, which have, how-
ever, not occurred during Ikoria’s preview period). The sequence of pre-
views usually ignores the collector number order, which by itself has no
value for metagame discussions and does not influence the strength of a
card. In terms of their function as spoilers (as they are also often referred
to by players), especially the early reveals highlight the speculative nature
of partial information. Similarly to how story spoilers usually discuss a
plot resolution without elaborating in full detail on the events that led up
to it, card previews provide only a peek at a part of an expansion without
the full context based on which the cards and in extension also metag-
ames are evaluated. As more cards get previewed, these predictions and
speculations can become more precise. At the same time, the fact that an
expansion is being revealed card by card potentially lessens the surprise or
suspense about further previews.
Previews are often accompanied by commentary about the poten-
tial applications of a given card. By pointing out card synergies and com-
binations, these materials of various modalities (written text, video, etc.)
serve as strategy guides of sorts. While the suggestions provided by these
resources might be tentative and not become a part of competitive metag-
ames, they still offload deckbuilding as an activity from players towards
the writers of these guides. In that sense, this theorycrafting—both the
analytical approach to finding optimal strategies and its results (Paul,
2011; Wenz, 2013)—spoils the process of discovering efficient card com-
binations for oneself. It can be arguably hard to come up with unique
deck ideas if player communities engage in theorycrafting even before the
cards become officially available, although successful decks often emerge
later from competitive play and iterative deckbuilding. Despite its com-
plex rules, MTG provides most of the necessary information for theory-
crafting on the cards themselves. Players can thus easily reconstruct (or
simulate) gameplay of previewed parts of a set without having physical
access to such cards or their digital versions on Arena and MTGO. On the
other hand, even when a story of a game with a diverse range of gameplay
mechanics like The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020) leaks online,
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  71

such mechanics can be fully experienced only upon launch. Because

MTG’s mechanics can be effectively communicated verbally, relatively
elaborate metagame discussions can appear as soon as the first cards are
previewed.

Methodology
In this essay, I use a ­mixed-methods approach consisting of a descrip-
tive quantitative overview of Ikoria’s card previews and a qualitative
analysis of online user discussions and related strategy resources. This
combination of methods aims to cover the formal aspects of Ikoria’s pro-
motional campaign, as well as the audience reception and the themes of
­user-generated content related to the card previews.
Regarding the quantitative part, I was tracking individual previews
during the promotional period between April 2–10, 2020, using the official
list provided by WotC on their website (Wizards of the Coast, 2020b) and
the preview aggregator site MythicSpoiler. For each card, I coded its main
formal qualities (rarity, color, and card type), the number of comments
on MythicSpoiler, the media channels that had been used for the preview
(e.g., official website, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube), and whether these chan-
nels were directly affiliated with WotC or not. Similarly to expansions
from 2019 and the following years (see Rasmussen, 2019a, 2019b; Wizards
of the Coast 2022), card previews during Ikoria’s peak promotional period
(April 2–10) were distributed among WotC’s own online channels, con-
tent creators, the specialized press, professional players, card resellers, and
other ­t hird-party sites. Although it could be possible to more closely dis-
tinguish between the parties involved, these categories in practice often
overlap. For example, players can retire from their professional careers
and start creating strategy resources or streamers can qualify for tour-
naments and focus on becoming ­semi-professional or professional com-
petitors. Many others juggle multiple roles at once because tournament
earnings are only able to sustain a small group of players (Švelch, 2019), see
also Matthew Knutson’s essay in this book. For the sake of methodological
clarity, I focused on variables that can be identified using objective criteria
and thus constitute technically trivial content analysis coding without the
need to measure intercoder reliability (Krippendorff, 2004). This descrip-
tive overview highlights MTG’s promotional logic and the scheduling and
distribution of individual cards among official ­WotC-affiliated channels
and third parties.
This dataset also served as a foundation for the sample for a subse-
quent qualitative analysis. As the whole expansion consists of 274 cards
72   Economies and Esports

and each preview can generate online discussions with tens or hundreds
of user comments, it was necessary to limit the breadth of the available
empirical material to make it manageable for qualitative analysis. To con-
struct the sample, I focused on chronology of the previews and card rar-
ity as the two selection criteria. Regarding chronology, I excluded the last
day of previews (April 10), when a bulk of 94 cards (out of them 85 Com-
mons) were all revealed on the official website at the same time, resulting
in less exposure for the respective cards. Out of the remaining 180 cards, I
randomly selected one third (rounded down) of each of the rarities, result-
ing in the following composition of the sample: 5 Mythic Rare, 16 Rare,
25 Uncommon, and 13 Common cards. For these 59 cards, I collected
user comments from MythicSpoiler and the channels that were used for
the preview if they contained persistent user comments discussions (e.g.,
Twitter or YouTube); the latter concerned 35 out of the 59 cards. I chose
MythicSpoiler due to its singular focus on card previews and the high-
est Alexa ranking4 among this type of websites, including a relatively high
audience overlap score with another preview site MagicSpoiler.5
Altogether, these sources added up to 3105 comments (1851 from
MythicSpoiler and 1254 from other sites), which I then manually sampled
using the logic of data saturation (Morse, 2018) by looking for repeating
themes and collecting a series of examples for each of them. For the final
thematic analysis (Ayres, 2008), I considered a sample of 541 user com-
ments (441 from MythicSpoiler and 100 from other sites). Again, the ratio-
nale for the creation of the sample was to construct a dataset suitable for
qualitative analysis as the entirety of 3105 user comments would be too
unwieldy for an ­i n-depth exploration. The process of the sampling itself
revealed that the themes of the discussions were recurring across the indi-
vidual card previews. While they differed in the specific cards and strat-
egies they discussed, the underlying approaches and stances, such as the
scope of the discussion and criteria for card evaluation, were frequently
identical, suggesting that the sample was sufficiently saturated in terms of
qualitatively unique comments. The themes were identified both deduc-
tively based on the literature review, including various perspectives on
metagames and theorycrafting, but also emerged inductively when read-
ing through the empirical material, for example in terms of how cards
were evaluated in relation to existing cards, card combinations, decks,
and deck archetypes. Following recommendations of fan studies scholars
(Busse & Hellekson, 2012; Dym & Fiesler, 2020) as well as qualitative Inter-
net researchers (Beyer, 2012; Sveningsson, 2009), quotes from user com-
ments are presented anonymously and are slightly paraphrased to protect
the privacy of users and limit the possibility of reverse online search,
which could connect the quotes to individual user profiles.
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  73

Ikoria’s Promotional Campaign

Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, MTG’s 84th expansion, was first offi-
cially announced in September 2019 along with a complete ­l ine-up of
­Standard-legal sets for 2020 (Magic: The Gathering, 2019). The release
date had been initially specified in October 2019 (Magic Europe, 2019),
but had to be later adjusted due to the ­COVID-19 pandemic (Wizards of
the Coast, 2020a). In consequence, Ikoria’s tabletop version had two sep-
arate release dates for different geographical regions: April 17 for China,
Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; and May 15 for Australia, Bru-
nei, Europe, Indonesia, Latin America, Malaysia, New Zealand, North
America, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The set, how-
ever, launched worldwide on Arena and MTGO on April 16. Ikoria’s release
coincided with the Commander 2020 set (C20), whose cards were specif-
ically designed for the popular casual format Commander (see Švelch,
2019) and are only allowed in the ­so-called eternal formats.6 Unlike pre-
vious editions of the Commander product line, C20 was thematically
connected to Ikoria as it was set on the same eponymous plane of MTG’s
fictional multiverse.
The ­s o-called preview season kicked off with a video broadcast on
YouTube and Twitch (Magic: The Gathering, 2020a). The broadcast had
three main parts: (1) a ­CGI-animated trailer, (2) a ­pre-recorded promo-
tional video featuring card previews and designer interviews, and (3) a
live episode of the MTG Weekly show on Twitch (Magic: The Gathering,
2020b). The trailer showcased the fictional setting of the new expansion
and the returning character of Planeswalker Vivien. It closed with the first
card preview.7 The promotional video was hosted by Josh Lee Kwai, per-
haps best known as the ­co-founder of the YouTube channel The Command
Zone, and Becca Scott, a host for multiple board game shows on the Geek &
Sundry and Good Time Society YouTube channels, actual play performer,
and a reporter for MTG’s official tournament coverage. Despite their fre-
quent collaborations with WotC, Kwai and Scott can be considered inde-
pendent content creators (or at least contractors) as they are not directly
employed by the publisher. From this position, they interviewed two WotC
representatives who worked on Ikoria and C20 (Mark Heggen, product
architect, and Doug Beyer, principal creative designer). During the video,
they previewed 13 cards from these two expansions (8 from Ikoria, 5 from
C20). The MTG Weekly episode then expanded on these reveals, with two
of Ikoria’s lead designers, David Humpherys and Mark Rosewater, dis-
cussing the design process behind the revealed cards and explaining new
gameplay mechanics (see also Tabak, 2020). During this livestream, two
additional cards from Ikoria were previewed.
74   Economies and Esports

Still on April 2, content creators and other third parties started

revealing additional cards. The preview season was bookended on April
9 by another episode of MTG Weekly (Magic: The Gathering, 2020c),
which unveiled five Rare lands from Ikoria—often the card type with the
highest demand due its utility across many decks—and by the aforemen-
tioned bulk reveal on MTG’s official website on April 10, which contained
94 cards. As can be seen in Figure 1, Ikoria’s card preview frequency was
highest at the beginning and the end of the preview period. Both on April
2 and April 10, WotC was taking the lead in revealing the cards. The non–
WotC previews reached its daily peak on April 3 with 50 cards. The sig-
nificant decrease between April 4–5 was caused by the scheduling of C20
previews, which are not reflected in Figure 1.
The initial reveal on April 2 focused on higher rarity cards, designed
to be more impactful for various metagames and to drive sales of booster
packs thanks to artificial scarcity. As Figure 2 shows, roughly half of
Ikoria’s Mythic Rare cards (8 out of 15) were previewed on the first day.
These included two Planeswalker cards, which generally depict key fig-
ures from MTG’s fictional storyline. These characters possess magical
abilities that allow them to move between different planes of MTG’s mul-
tiverse and thus frequently ­re-appear across expansions. In this case, it
was the returning character Vivien (Vivien, Monsters’ Advocate), also fea-
tured in the CGI trailer, and the ­brand-new Planeswalker Lukka (Lukka,

Fig. 1: The chronological distribution of Ikoria’s card previews among WotC

and non–WotC channels (N = 274). The vertical axis represents the number of
previewed cards. Figure created by the author.
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  75

Coppercoat Outcast). The third, final, Planeswalker card from the expan-
sion was revealed on April 8 (Narset of the Ancient Way; a returning char-
acter). In comparison, many Common cards were left for the final day of
the preview period, suggesting that WotC did not consider them suitable
for promotional purposes. This also applies to reprinted cards—cards that
previously appeared in a different set and were included to influence the
Limited formats and possibly also to return to the Standard format if they
had rotated out. Out of the total 21 reprints of ­non-land cards,8 only 7 were
previewed before April 10.
Based on the data for all 274 cards from MythicSpoiler, rarity also
seemed to influence the average number of user comments. Mythic Rare
and Rare cards generated much more active discussions with approxi-
mately 72 (SD = 27) and 60 (SD = 35) comments on average, respectively,
than Uncommons (≈22; SD = 15) and Commons (≈10; SD = 12).
Other main formal qualities of cards, i.e., color and card type, did not
exhibit any clear trends regarding the scheduling of previews besides those
that were tied to their rarity. For example, multicolor cards tended to be
revealed earlier in the promotional period, but this can be explained by the
fact that Ikoria’s Commons are all ­single-colored or colorless. Concern-
ing the card type, two out of three Planeswalker cards, which generally

Fig. 2: The chronological distribution of card previews broken down by rar-

ity proportional to the total number of cards of a given rarity (N = 274, nCom-
mon = 126, nUncommon = 80, nRare = 53, nMythic Rare = 15). April 4 and 5 are
excluded from the figure due to the low number of preview cards. Figure cre-
ated by the author.
76   Economies and Esports

occupy the Mythic Rare slots in an expansion, were previewed on the first
day. Reprinted Common lands were left for the bulk reveal on April 10.
Other major card types, such as Creature, Instant, Sorcery, Enchantment,
appeared throughout the preview period relatively evenly.
The form of card previews varied across parties and platforms. WotC
itself used several different approaches besides the trailer, reveal video,
and livestreamed episodes of MTG Weekly on Twitch. Some of Ikoria’s
cards were previewed and discussed in articles on WotC’s official website
(e.g., Humpherys, 2020; Rasmussen, 2020; Styborski, 2020). These texts
usually provided extensive context for the previewed card by comparing
it to cards from older expansions or by sharing ­behind-the-scenes infor-
mation about the design and development process. In contrast to these
relatively ­long-form written texts, Ikoria’s product page (Ikoria: Lair of
Behemoths, 2020) revealed three cards on April 3, 6, and 8 without any
additional information. The same approach was used for the bulk preview
on April 10 on the card image gallery page (Wizards of the Coast, 2020c).
Additionally, WotC revealed cards on social media platforms, including
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Weibo. In this case, the extent
of additional information largely depended on a given platform. In this
area, WotC also mobilized its non–English branches, including Japan,
Korea, and Latin America (e.g., Magic: The Gathering, 2020d; Magic: The
Gathering LATAM, 2020; MTG アリーナ日本公式, 2020).
­T hird-party previews made use of similar forms and channels. The
article format was generally preferred by the specialized press, including
GameSpot (Elfring, 2020a, 2020b), IGN (di Alessandro, 2020; Skrebels,
2020), io9 (Whitbrook, 2020), or Kotaku (Walker, 2020), and some strat-
egy sites, such as MTGGoldfish (SaffronOlive, 2020a, 2020b). Twitter was
the platform of choice for many content creators, professional players, and
some card resellers. For example, the former competitor and member of
MTG’s Pro Tour Hall of Fame, Brian Kibler, who in 2020 primarily lives-
treamed the digital card game Hearthstone (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014),
previewed three cards by first photographically recreating their artwork by
posing with his dog. In the same Twitter thread, he then showed the actual
cards (Kibler, 2020). Twitter posts tended to be short and informative or
sometimes humorous (see also Amy the Amazonian, 2020) without much
discussion about a given card’s expected power and utility, although some
previewers offered at least short predictions (e.g., Deathsie, 2020; Wheeler,
2020). In comparison, video content, including both ­pre-recorded YouTube
videos and Twitch livestreams, offered more depth in terms of theorycraft-
ing (e.g., AliasV, 2020; Good Luck High Five, 2020).
While it is impossible to completely reverse engineer the ratio-
nale behind the allocation of individual preview cards, at least in some
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  77

cases the assigned previews seemed to align with the expertise or inter-
ests of a given content creator. For example, Marshall Sutcliffe, a ­co-host
of the Limited Resources podcast dedicated to Limited formats, revealed
two Common cards, which might be considered underpowered for Con-
structed formats, but are relevant for Booster Draft and Sealed (Sutcliffe,
2020). In this regard, Common cards, which, as I have shown, are generally
dismissed during the preview period, might be interesting for this specific
community of MTG players. This audience might then understandably fol-
low content creators focused on the respective formats. Another example
was the preview by The Vorthos Cast, a podcast about the lore of MTG
(The Vorthos Cast, 2020).9 In this case, another two Common cards
achieved a spot in the promotional campaign despite their low rarity by
depicting two Planeswalkers Lukka and Vivien, who are both central to
Ikoria’s storyline.10 Still, the lower value of Common cards for generating
hype is further supported by the quantitative distribution of these cards
among content creators. Out of 123 cards previewed by third parties, only
27 were Commons. On the other hand, WotC was left with revealing 99
cards of the lowest rarity, most of which were posted on the last day.
A notable aspect of ­t hird-party previews were expressions of grati-
tude towards WotC, which highlighted that the cards were provided for
free. While this acknowledgment aims to prevent potential legal concerns
about paid promotion from either of the two parties—WotC paying content
creators for advertising the game or creators paying for the opportunity to
reveal a card—these statements emphasize the coordinated nature of the
promotional campaign. It can be assumed that third parties can decide how
they want to approach the preview, for example, whether they post it on
Twitter or show it during a Twitch livestream.11 The assignment of individ-
ual cards and the scheduling is, however, decided or at least negotiated by
WotC in advance before the preview period with the full schedule being
published several days ahead of first card reveals (Wizards of the Coast,
2020b). Players and fans can then use the official resources (Wizards of the
Coast, 2020b) or unofficial aggregators, such as MythicSpoiler to track the
previews. In this sense, WotC curates the spoiler experience by creating a
linear sequence within the expansion. In the next section, I explore how
audiences use the information provided by previews and how they discuss
an upcoming expansion while it is being revealed piece by piece.

Discussing Card Previews

Official previews are the first stage of hype that is being built around
a new set of cards. Although some of these reveals already come with
78   Economies and Esports

strategy advice attached to them, as preliminary and tentative as it may be,

more extensive theorycrafting follows in other venues and separate arti-
cles. In other words, content creation during the promotional campaign
does not end with the previews themselves. Afterwards, creators are no
longer limited by the cards they were assigned by WotC, but are free to
explore any revealed parts of the expansion and they can choose from
diverse perspectives of various formats and metagames to distinguish
their ideas from other members of the player communities. This is also the
chance for those who did not receive any card previews to participate in
the discussion.
While I have not systematically mapped the landscape of strategy
resources that were created during the preview season, they can range
from ­i n-depth explorations of singular cards to suggested decklists using
the new cards, or even playtesting with a partially revealed set. Regarding
the latter, the Twitch and YouTube show Vs Live, which was produced by
the card reseller, tournament organizer, and strategy site Star City Games
until February 2022, dedicated its three episodes during the preview
period (on April 3, 7, and 9) to experimentation with the preview cards
in the context of the Standard format (e.g., Star City Games, 2020). In the
course of these broadcasts, the hosts tried 18 different decks, some of which
could be considered modifications of existing decks, while others were
new creations and relied more heavily on Ikoria’s cards. In order to play
with cards that have not yet been released, producers of VS Live printed
temporary substitutes, which are generally referred to as proxies and are
commonly used in internal playtesting by WotC (Forsythe, 2004).12 This
can be a relatively ­t ime-consuming process for individual players and it
can be assumed that it is quite an exceptional approach for engaging in
speculations about an upcoming set, although Vs Live regularly undertook
this effort whenever a major expansion was being previewed.
In this section, I focus on more immediate reactions to card previews.
These discussions cover a variety of topics, which I have, for the sake of
presentation, divided into three analytical categories: (a) card evaluations,
(b) deck building, and (c) set predictions. These groups are not mutually
exclusive, instead illustrating the different scopes of preview discussions
even if they often appear together in comments. In this regard, card eval-
uations refer to the assessment of a previewed card based on multiple cri-
teria ranging from metagame considerations to artwork and lore. Deck
building relates to a broader scope of player discussions that concerns
new deck ideas and modifications to existing decks using the previewed
cards. Lastly, set predictions use the available information about the set,
including the already previewed cards, to engage in speculations about
­yet-to-be-revealed cards.
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  79

Card Evaluations
Given that the empirical material was collected in sites and social
media posts related to individual card previews, card evaluations expect-
edly appeared in large numbers in the analyzed user comments. How-
ever, there are many ways how cards can be assessed, showcasing their
different value in specific metagames and formats. Ikoria as a Standard set
could potentially affect all formats and players considered a wide range,
including the established Standard, Modern, and Booster Draft as well as
the more recently introduced Pioneer, Historic or the casual ­fan-favorites
Commander (and its variation Brawl) and Cube, and the relatively niche
Pauper. Taking into account the different restrictions of these formats,
players discussed which cards were “playable.” Often used in conjunction
with a specific format, this expression translates to an expectation that
a given card could see play in the respective competitive metagame. The
larger the card pool of a format, the higher the power level such a state-
ment usually implies. For example, the Rare ­black-white creature Lurrus
of the ­Dream-Den was by some commenters declared as “Legacy playable”
and even “busted [powerful] in Legacy,” while others were more conser-
vative and predicted that the card could see play in Modern and Pioneer,
which are much smaller formats than Legacy. After Ikoria’s launch, Lur-
rus of the ­D ream-Den in fact proved to be such a strong card that it was
banned in Legacy and Vintage (Duke, 2020a) and one of its abilities was
later “nerfed” across all formats (Duke, 2020b).13
On the other side of the spectrum of power level are cards that are
evaluated within the constraints of Limited formats. Due to the small
card pools, even arguably inefficient cards that have better alternatives in
Constructed formats can be deemed “bombs” due to the relative power
vacuum. For Ikoria, such Limited bombs included Blood Curdle (a Com-
mon black removal spell) or Primal Empathy (an Uncommon ­blue-green
enchantment). Conversely, one of the harshest possible criticisms is declar-
ing that a card would not even be played in Booster Draft. For example, the
Uncommon white creature Majestic Auricorn was to a disappointment of
one commenter seen as “barely playable in Limited.”
A special consideration is reserved for Pauper, which only allows
Common cards. This specific constraint creates an additional criterion
for the evaluation of cards that might otherwise seem uninteresting. In
the analyzed sample, the Common black creature Cavern Whisperer and
Common blue sorcery Of One Mind were both noted as potential play-
able cards in Pauper, while one commenter wished that the Uncommon
­black-green creature Skull Prophet was instead a Common because it was
“exactly what BG [­black-green as a color combination] wants.”
80   Economies and Esports

Besides the context of a specific format, a common approach to

card evaluation is by a direct comparison to an existing card. Consider-
ing the extensive card pool that MTG has amassed over the years, new
cards often resemble older ones in terms of their gameplay effects. In this
regard, players tend to assess the power level of a previewed card based
on their previous experiences with a mechanically similar card. This
type of card evaluation demonstrates the knowledge and gaming cap-
ital of the commenter, but also creates an entry barrier for new players
who are not familiar with older expansions. Among a dedicated com-
munity, these comparisons can serve as efficient heuristics, although the
specific ­make-up of a format can problematize these seemingly straight-
forward comparisons. A phrase that encapsulates this approach to card
evaluation is “strictly better,” which is meant to communicate that the
new card will make an older one obsolete. For example, the Uncommon
blue ­C ounterspell-variant Neutralize was directly compared to several
other cards with a similar effect: it was considered a “­straight-up better
card” than Censor, a “strictly better” version of Cancel (“Cancel has been
cancelled”), but still, at least to some, weaker than Absorb and Sinister
Sabotage.
Overall, the user discussions showed an eagerness to speculate about
the previewed cards and their place in various metagames even before the
whole set was known. Players were quick to declare certain cards as “bro-
ken” and “busted” and anticipated bans, which in the case of Lurrus of the
­D ream-Den later came true, showing that these quick evaluations based
on incomplete information can have predictive power.
Notably, a card’s metagaming utility is but one of its distinguishing
qualities. Cards can be also appreciated (and collected) for their artwork
or flavor text. For example, users frequently praised the visual presenta-
tion of certain cards and discussed whether the fictional representation of
a card fit its game mechanics. Sometimes commenters lamented the low
power level of “cool” looking cards such as the aforementioned Majestic
Auricorn. On the other hand, some wished that a card whose artwork they
liked would “be unplayable in standard so I can afford the full art [a col-
lectible variant of the card with an extended artwork].”

Deck Building
In general, card previews seemed to provide an incentive for deck
building, whether it was driven by optimization or experimentation. In
this regard, card evaluations organically evolved into discussions about the
application of previewed cards. These can range from card combinations to
decks and deck archetypes. Card combinations or “combos” represent the
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  81

­m icro-level of deck building by identifying powerful synergies between

a few cards. This tentative form of theorycrafting suggests future direc-
tions for deckbuilding but is generally limited to two- or ­t hree-card com-
binations that are not yet fully developed as optimized deck components.
In Ikoria, the Mythic Rare red Planeswalker Lukka, the Coppercoat Out-
cast and the previously mentioned Lurrus of the ­D ream-Den both caught
attention of players thanks to their “combo” potential. Commenters listed
several card combinations involving Lukka and Lurrus, respectively and
separately, demonstrating the power of these preview cards in ideal sce-
narios. A logical next step in deck building is slotting the previewed cards
into decks, either already existing ones or new ones. Regarding Lukka, one
commenter in detail discussed how this Planeswalker could fit into the
popular Jeskai 14 Fires of Invention deck (named after one of its key cards)
and what further adjustments would be needed:
I know that not many [versions of the deck] run The Birth of Meletis [an
Uncommon white enchantment from the Q1 2020 set Theros: Beyond Death]
but the wall token it generates can be fuel for Lukka to fetch Cavalier of Flame;
Kenrith, the Returned King; Dream Trawler; [powerful creature cards from
previous sets] etc.
This description of the suggested cards was followed by an example turn
sequence by which the commenter demonstrated how much damage could
Lukka facilitate in the deck. Such detailed accounts were not uncom-
mon, and examples of turn sequences accompanied several deck building
discussions.
A broader approach to deck building was identifying how pre-
viewed cards fit into established deck archetypes. Archetypes represent
a more generalized playstyle, such as aggro, combo, control, midrange, or
tempo (see also Dodge, 2018). Individual decks can be categorized into
these groups, although some might qualify as borderline cases. Evaluat-
ing a card in terms of its suitability for an existing archetype marks a less
concrete contribution to deck building discussions. Nonetheless, such
comments engaged in theorycrafting about the future metagames by spec-
ulating about the relative power level of specific archetypes.
Deck building discussions covered both iterative and innova-
tive approaches. The iterative side was represented by upgrades to exist-
ing decks and deck archetypes. Within this perspective, previewed cards
were treated as more efficient replacements for older cards. The inno-
vative side took the form of novel card combinations and entirely new
decks. The latter is sometimes referred to as “brewing” as it is believed to
involve experimentation with untested decks. Compared to playing estab-
lished metagame decks, brewing emphasizes deck building as an import-
ant part of the player enjoyment of MTG. Players who identify as brewers
82   Economies and Esports

use the preview period as an opportunity to explore new deck ideas in a

format of their choice before the rest of the community has the chance
to settle on approved metagame strategies. This approach to deck build-
ing further expands which cards can be considered noteworthy as brewers
might deliberately try to focus on underestimated or otherwise overlooked
cards. For example, the arguably niche Rare red enchantment Unpredict-
able Cyclone was praised by one commenter for its potential applications
in older formats: “I have no idea what to do with this card, but it makes me
want to dig through all the old Magic cards and start brewing mad she-
nanigans.” At the same time, Lurrus of the ­Dream-Den was also considered
by some “a brewer’s card,” even though it turned out to be a staple across
multiple formats before its eventual banning and the subsequent nerf.
The analyzed comments suggest that Ikoria’s promotional cam-
paign at least partially succeeded in convincing players that the new cards
would become relevant to the game and its specific metagames, although
some cards sparked more interest than others. By including the previewed
cards in their deck ideas, players took a step further from card evaluation
towards suggesting their concrete application. This process of theorycraft-
ing can be understood as a first step in shaping the ­p ost-release metag-
ames, although these new ideas and iterations of existing decks then have
to be tested in actual matches.

Set Predictions
During Ikoria’s promotional campaign, players not only discussed
the previewed cards but also speculated about the ones that were yet to be
revealed. In general, such predictions leverage the information about the
set and previous expansions in terms of quantitative distribution of card
types, colors, and rarities. As a preview period progresses, players can thus
piece together which spots in the set have yet to be filled.
For Ikoria, this was, for example, a batch of five Rare lands, which
WotC saved for the MTG Weekly episode on April 9, near the end of
the preview period. In the comments, players discussed how the new
­t hree-colored lands subverted their expectations:
I was certain they’d finish their Amonkhet [Q2 2017 expansion] cycle, but now
we have partial cycles from Battle for Zendikar [Q4 2015 expansion] block,
Shadows over Innistrad [Q2 2016 expansion] block, Amonkhet [Q2 2017 expan-
sion] block, Battlebond [Q2 2018 expansion] lands, Horizon lands, Ikoria lands
[…] I’m really not sure why WotC start cycles without finishing them.

A key point in this comment is the notion of a “cycle,” which refers to a

group of cards that share similar game mechanics but are spread across
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  83

different colors or color combinations. Cycles are frequently used in

MTG’s expansions to ensure basic parity among colors even though indi-
vidual cards from one cycle can differ regarding their power level and
price on secondary markets (Bleiweiss, 2002; Rosewater, 2002). Based on
this logic of cycles, some players expected that Ikoria’s Rare lands would
be a continuation of some of the unfinished cycles from previous expan-
sions. Instead, WotC introduced a new cycle, which was completed in
Streets of New Capenna (Q2 2022 expansion).
As a whole, Ikoria featured 22 card cycles, making it into a highly
structured set whose individual cards could often be inferred in terms of
their general qualities, such as card type, color, or rarity. One of the most
visible cycles was the group of five Mythic Rare ­t hree-colored legendary
creatures. Based on the first three previews from this cycle, some players
were able to successfully predict the creature types of the remaining two
cards. While this speculation did not have any major impact on metag-
ame theorycrafting, it nonetheless illustrates how previews can effectively
spoil the ­yet-to-be-revealed parts of the expansion due to observable pat-
terns. By revealing parts of a cycle, WotC arguably lessens the surprise
of its remaining pieces. While players can hardly predict an entire card
using such information, they can narrow down the possibilities and focus
their speculations. Therefore, WotC must consider how much one card
can say about an entire cycle and plan the previews accordingly. In prac-
tice, this might mean revealing a whole cycle at the same time (this was,
for example, the case of Ikoria’s cycles of five Rare lands and five Uncom-
mon artifacts) as any further previews from the same cycle would have
been already predicted by players. For WotC, cycles can thus decrease
the number of individual cards suitable for previews. For players, cycles
can raise the awareness of design patterns and contribute to design lit-
eracy, possibly leading to more accurate card predictions and theory-
crafting.
In Ikoria, commenters also managed to identif y the third
Planeswalker Narset before her card was revealed using another card
(Uncommon ­blue-red instant Channeled Force) that depicted the same
character in the artwork and mentioned her in f lavor text. For the
record, Channeled Force was previewed five days before the Mythic Rare
­blue-red-white Planeswalker Narset of the Ancient Way. One player also
correctly guessed the color of the card, perhaps based on the ­t hree-color
theme of the entire expansion. As Planeswalker cards tend to be power-
ful and appear only in limited numbers in a regular set (three in Ikoria),
the information about any ­yet-to-be revealed Planeswalker can be consid-
ered a spoiler as it narrows down the possibilities of what such a card can
be.
84   Economies and Esports

Conclusion
Card previews facilitate the first encounter with a new expansion and
directly tie into MTG’s monetization’s model. With Ikoria: Lair of Behe-
moths, cards of higher rarities were revealed early and dominated the pre-
view period, suggesting a highly curated and deliberately chosen sequence
of revealed cards. The data from the aggregator site MythicSpoiler also
showed that Mythic Rare and Rare cards on average generated more active
user discussions. Considering that many retailers offer ­pre-orders of
booster packs but also single cards, player discussions and strategy content
about previewed cards can arguably influence the prices on the second-
ary market. WotC itself offers ­pre-order bonuses on Magic: The Gather-
ing Arena for players willing to buy pricy bundles ahead of time instead
of waiting how the metagame evolves with the release of a new expansion.
Content creators can also benefit from the promotional hype, especially if
they receive preview cards. In that sense, many stakeholders in the MTG
communities might have interest in emphasizing new powerful cards.
In online discussions, players addressed various aspects of the pre-
viewed cards, engaging in card evaluations, deck building, or set predic-
tions. Operating with incomplete information, such type of theorycrafting
is highly tentative, even if some speculations turn out to be true. Several
commenters have, for example, noted the high power level of the Rare
­black-white creature Lurrus of the ­D ream-Den, which was later banned in
Legacy and afterwards nerfed across all formats. The uncertain future of
metagames caused by a new expansion arguably sets the preview season
apart from the regular periods of MTG’s lifecycle. While theorycrafting
with a ­half-revealed set is bound to be flawed, it affords players the excit-
ing opportunity to explore a newly shaping metagame before it devolves
into netdecking.
Although expansions are organized as databases with no signif-
icant order or linear sequence, various patterns, such as cycles of simi-
lar cards, can be used to predict ­yet-to-be-revealed cards. In that sense,
early previews can indeed behave as spoilers. However, the entire card is
still hard to guess beforehand. Information inferred from cycles and other
cards often only hints at general qualities of cards, such as card type, color,
or rarity. It can be hypothesized that WotC limits these speculations by
revealing key higher rarity cards in the early stages of the preview period
or by previewing a whole cycle at the same time. If previewed card by card,
players would be easily able to predict the rest of the cycle based on its
design pattern.
As a promotional logic, card previews highlight the deeply medi-
atized nature of MTG (Švelch, 2019; see also Hepp, 2013; Hjarvard, 2013).
 Spoiling the Future Metagame (Švelch)  85

On the one hand, the game can be played in several mediated ways, includ-
ing MTGO and Arena. These online platforms became particularly con-
venient during Ikoria’s release due to the ongoing ­COVID-19 pandemic,
which limited players’ access to local gaming stores. At the same time,
MTG as a whole has been accommodated to the logic of the digital media
environment even if a player prefers the traditional tabletop version. For
Ikoria and many other expansions, card previews were embedded into
social media posts and streaming schedules in an attempt to create a
steady ­build-up of hype, which eventually culminated on the day before
the digital launch in a livestreamed preview event on Twitch. Here, select
content creators and MTG personalities tried out new cards before and
in front of the general audience. In this sense, card previews are as much
marketing tools as media content in their own right. In this context, the
decision to prioritize ­i n-person physical play as the first opportunity to
experience Streets of New Capenna (Q2 2022 expansion) and schedule dig-
ital release a week later (Styborski, 2022) feels even more significant and
shows the complexity and opposing forces of the mediatization process.

Notes
1. The few exceptions to this distribution model are ­pre-constructed decks and various
collector sets (most recently the Secret Lair series) that have fixed contents.
2. In Booster Draft, for example, successful strategies often revolve around Common
and Uncommon cards, which appear in larger numbers in booster packs compared to
higher rarities.
3. In games with linear storylines, strategy guides can inadvertently also spoil the nar-
rative (Consalvo, 2007; Newman, 2016).
4. Alexa ranking is a commercial index that measures a popularity of a website based on
average viewership and other factors.
5. Other websites, such as the strategy site MTGGoldfish or the card search engine Scry-
fall, also aggregate card previews, but have less active user discussions. Another potential
venue could be the relatively active r/MagicTCG subreddit with more than 400,000 mem-
bers. However, its upvoting/downvoting system clearly privileges certain cards over oth-
ers in how they appear to viewers, resulting in a much more skewed representation of card
previews. The additional discussion sites included Twitter, YouTube, and websites with
embedded user discussion functionality.
6. Eternal formats, such as Commander, Legacy, Pauper, or Vintage, allow cards from
all of MTG’s sets (with certain restrictions).
7. Zilortha, Strength Incarnate (alternative name Godzilla, King of the Monsters) is a
­B uy-a-Box promo and as such this card does not count among the 274 core cards from
the expansion. It is only available as a reward for purchasing an entire booster box con-
sisting of 36 booster packs. Its collector number is 275. It is also one of the 19 Godzilla
Series cards, a set of alternative versions Ikoria’s creatures inspired by kaiju films (Turian,
2020).
8. Ikoria, like any major expansion, also included reprints of basic lands (with three
unique artworks for each). Furthermore, it also reprinted 10 ­dual-color Common lands,
the ­so-called gainlands, which come into play tapped and give the player one life.
9. The term Vorthos refers to one of the ideal player types as conceptualized by MTG’s
86   Economies and Esports

designers (Cavota, 2005; cf. Rosewater, 2007). Vorthos players are believed to care about
the fictional aspects of cards.
10. While these cards might not be considered noteworthy in terms of their mechan-
ics, they might appeal to players interested in story and characters. Ikoria’s narrative is
presented in a ­t ie-in novel, which was published as a paid ­e-book by WotC (Wexler, 2020).
11. Occasionally, commenters praised how a content creator had handled the preview
and congratulated them on receiving the free preview card from WotC (e.g., AliasV, 2020).
12. Due to the delay in Ikoria’s tabletop release caused by the ­COVID-19 pandemic, VS
Live used proxies also for other broadcasts until May 15, 2020.
13. Lurrus of the ­D ream-Den is one of 10 cards from Ikoria with the new mechanic com-
panion, which was changed on June 1 (Duke, 2020b). The new rules decreased the power
level of all 10 cards, including Lurrus of the ­D ream-Den.
14. Jeskai usually refers to the color combination of blue, red, and white. The term is
based on a fictional clan, first introduced in the expansion Khans of Tarkir in 2014.

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Stoddard, S. (2013, August 9). Dealing With Power Creep. Magic: The Gathering. https://
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Styborski, A. (2020, April 3). Wrath. Judgment. Mythos. MAGIC: THE GATHER-
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Styborski, A. (2022, March 3). A First Look at Streets of New Capenna: Where Family Means
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90   Economies and Esports

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 “Cracking” Players as Packs
Finding Speculative Value in Magic: The Gathering
Through Play on Magic Arena and Twitch
Justin S. Schumaker

Opening booster packs is an integral part of the Magic: The Gathering

experience. Tearing through the silver foil provides a visceral and mate-
rial connection to the cards it contains. Once the pack is opened, players
sift through the fifteen cards in search of joy from new, rare, or valuable
cards or disappointment from the ­e ver-present bulk and chaff. Opening
booster packs represent opportunities of potential speculation for players.
They seek new and valuable cards from the process, but these moments
of delight are fleeting, as random packs infrequently reveal the desired
cards. Ultimately, these opened cards then form a player’s collection or
become parts of trades or transactions. While these random packs repre-
sent speculative opportunities for players of Magic: The Gathering, Wiz-
ards of the Coast performs a similar process through Magic Arena, their
most recent digital iteration of Magic: The Gathering. They appear con-
stantly speculating on the possibility of value through opportunities man-
ufactured by Magic Arena. Instead of opening packs for valuable cards,
Wizards of the Coast attempts to acquire a collection of players willing to
produce endless value for the developer.
In this essay, I examine how the development of Magic Arena and
supporting systems use the logic and potential of digital platforms to cre-
ate a contained experience aimed at generating perpetual revenue from
play and spectatorship. While Wizards of the Coast uses and devel-
ops content on several platforms for their various properties, this essay
emphasizes the company’s recent development and launch of the Magic
Arena software and how Wizards of the Coast’s use of the streaming
platform Twitch for broadcasting esports curate profitable play experi-
ences for Wizards of the Coast beyond the purchase of cardboard. This
91
92   Economies and Esports

play experience emerges through the general users of Magic Arena, pro-
fessional members of the Magic Pro League, and partnered content cre-
ators. Instead of providing a complete mapping of Wizards of the Coast’s
platforms and engagement, I want to examine how Wizards of the Coast
designs Magic Arena as a platform managing players and how their use of
Twitch supports that endeavor. Ultimately, the relationship between Magic
Arena and Twitch may gesture toward a predominantly digital future for
Magic: The Gathering.
First publicly released in September 2018 as an open beta product,
Magic Arena is a digital iteration of the card game designed to be faster
than physical Magic: The Gathering. Magic Arena owes some of its features
to earlier digital versions of Magic: The Gathering, which are discussed later
in this essay. Magic Arena operates more as a contemporary computer game
ref lecting design philosophies and meeting the player expectations set
by games like Blizzard Entertainment’s Hearthstone. While Magic Arena
remains at its core a Magic: The Gathering computer game, it offers more
than adapting the rules engine or offering the game’s various formats to a
new digital environment. For example, to make the game feel alive, many
cards feature animations taking advantage of the game’s digital possibil-
ities; summon a dragon, and one might emerge from the card to breathe
fire at an opponent. These moments aim to make the game more interest-
ing than analog play by emphasizing the digital affordances of Magic Arena
through card specific animation. Part of Magic Arena’s design is to create
a product that is as watchable as it is playable; Magic Arena produces con-
sumable content in multiple ways for various participants. As I examine
Magic Arena and the programs around it, I see Wizards of the Coast driv-
ing users toward Magic Arena hoping to create a contained and sustainable
platform aimed at generating constant revenue and activity.

Theoretical Considerations of Platforms

This essay relies on a critical conceptualization of platforms to rec-
ognize the potential management platforms offer Wizards of the Coast of
players and Magic: The Gathering. For my analysis, Wizards of the Coast’s
development and use of platforms presents economic and social implica-
tions; Magic Arena transforms how players participate in the economy
of Magic: The Gathering, and Wizards’ use of Twitch and other networks
redefines how play represents source of potential revenue for the devel-
oper. As a platform, Magic Arena reconsiders what it means to play and
consume Magic: The Gathering and unpacking the influence of platforms
clarifies the transitions I see for the Magic: The Gathering.
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  93

One of the general intentions of platforms concerns data collection

and management. The rising valuation of data encourages platforms to
harvest or acquire that information from its users. Nick Srnicek (2017)
suggests “capitalism has turned to data as a way to maintain economic
growth and vitality,” and “the platform has emerged as a new business
model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data”
(p. 6). For Srnicek, platforms represent the next development for capitalist
production where the acquisition of data has greater value than previous
modes of production, and platforms become systems producing and con-
trolling data as a commodity. Wizards of the Coast relies on digital plat-
forms, professional competition, and partnered creators to generate data
around Magic: The Gathering.
Wizards of the Coast has long collected data from play. Sanctioned
paper tournaments provide information on what cards are being played
and what cards are most impactful at a given time.1 Magic: The Gather-
ing’s other digital client, Magic Online, collects and distributes data about
what cards and decks users play across the game’s many formats. While
much of this information remains internal, Wizards of the Coast releases
curated lists of successful decks from Magic Online; however, they do not
release every deck. Prior to 2018, Wizards of the Coast would release five
random decks that went 5–0 in Magic Online throughout the week, and
with the release of Kaladesh in 2018, they transitioned to weekly releases
of each type of deck that went 5–0. In a Reddit discussion expressing frus-
tration with the overwhelming nature of releasing more decklists, play-
ers still found the larger list to be part of Wizards of the Coast’s efforts to
concoct “their false narrative” (Midguy2, 2018). For the players, the false
narrative appears through the promotion of decks that had momentary
success rather than giving defining which type of decks were the most
consistently successful. With decklists, data exists to control and manage
player perceptions to promote engagement. Wizards of the Coast wants to
avoid the perception of one or two decklists dominating a format and ulti-
mately suppressing player engagement. Wizards of the Coast’s attempts to
highlight diverse decks suggests players can still use a variety of cards and
conceals which cards or decks might be overused by players.
In September of 2020, Wizards of the Coast sought to curtail the
domination of the other platforms disseminating their data by releasing
Magic Arena decklists accessible through their esports website and the
Magic Arena client. This change by Wizards of the Coast recognizes the
potential lost value that comes from not releasing their own set of deck-
lists and allowing other parties to fill the void. Dave Humpherys of Wiz-
ards of the Coast R&D (2020) writes they will publish “decklists that have
put together long win streaks at Platinum rank or higher in Magic: The
94   Economies and Esports

Gathering Arena’s Ranked Play ladder. The goal is to supplement deck-

lists from tournament results and social media with additional promising
decklists for inspiration.” Their goal with these decklists is to “condense
information, highlighting a mix of both strong and varied deckbuilding
options” (Humphreys 2020). The position presented here reaffirms the per-
ception players have of the decklists curated by Wizards of the Coast as
being aimed at managing perception of the platform’s constructed for-
mat. By not releasing the total number of decks that might qualify for the
list and only showing an example of an archetype, Wizards of the Coast
does not present a complete representation of the format at a given week,
and while these lists occasionally include information from Wizards of
the Coast’s tournaments, other events produce meaningful data that could
influence players. The increase in Magic Arena data has allowed other ser-
vices to emerge to collect and disseminate this valuable data outside the
purview of Wizards of the Coast.
With the ascension of Magic Arena, other companies and platforms
have emerged with the purpose of acquiring and publishing Magic Arena
data. The predominant source of non–Wizards of the Coast data related
to Magic Arena comes from tournament website MTGMelee. MTGMelee
provides players and tournament organizers a tool to run tournaments,
and while this is useful to the growth of Magic Arena’s competitive cir-
cuit, it also provides MTGMelee and the community information about
what decks and cards are being played in Magic Arena tournaments not
run by Wizards of the Coast. In effect, MTGMelee demystifies some of the
data integral to Wizards of Coast’s approach platform management. Shar-
ing data allows players to make their own conclusions about the state of
Magic: The Gathering. While the control and value of data is essential for
Wizards of the Coast’s platform management, Magic Arena generates an
assortment of data and information that escapes Wizards of the Coast’s
authority. With platforms, their ability to control and manage user expec-
tations appears fundamental toward perpetual use and consumption. In
essence, Magic Arena produces more data than Wizards of the Coast dis-
seminates, but entities like MTGMelee provide missing information to
players. There also exists the amount of data produced by content creators
outside of competitive play, and as discussed later in this essay, Wizards of
the Coast develops a partnership program through the StreamElements
platform to manage data acquired from partnered content creators.
While Srnicek predominantly explores platforms as economic con-
trol and sites for manufacturing data as a commodity, platforms also pro-
vide social organization and management for developers. Jose Van Dijck,
Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal (2018) understand platforms as hav-
ing, “penetrated the heart of societies—affecting institutions, economic
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  95

transaction, and social and cultural practices” (p. 2). Platforms cannot be
extracted from the social relations they reinforce or create, and it would
be ineffective to just understand them as a new economic paradigm. For
them, “platforms do not reflect the social: they produce the social struc-
tures we live in” (Van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 2). Seeing social management
and control made possible will be necessary to having a more complete
understanding of implications platforms have for Magic: The Gathering.
Understanding the platforms of Magic Arena and those emerging around
it requires an examination of the kinds of social relationships Wizards of
the Coast wants Magic: The Gathering to produce.
For Wizards of the Coast, social control and management via plat-
forms occurs through their content creator partnership program and their
professional esports leagues. These programs aim to turn players into
potential sources of continual revenue. These programs seek to support
public and potentially profitable play on streaming websites like Twitch
and YouTube. The work of T.L. Taylor (2012 and 2018) helps frame Wizards
of the Coast’s approach to esports and Twitch. Taylor (2012) shows how
esports have ­community-centric roots that give way to a professionaliza-
tion of the players and esports. Systemically, esports provides a template to
transform play into a professional activity. While Wizards of the Coast’s
Magic Pro Tour has long been invested in the professionalization of play-
ers and play, Magic Arena affords Wizards of the Coast the opportunity
to intervene in the overtly digital word of esports. In tandem with com-
petitive play, Wizards of the Coast has used Twitch to broadcast through
events and promote streamers central to the Magic Arena brand. For Tay-
lor (2018), “live streams [offer] tremendous grassroots marketing opportu-
nities,” and there is clear “corporate commercial work” embedded into the
design of Twitch (p. 256). As discussed later, Wizards of the Coast’s efforts
on Twitch cultivate a network of unpaid or ­u nder-paid marketers, and
their process of acquiring them is like their own users opening of booster
packs. It appears random and speculative, just hoping to find excess value.
Turning the public play and labor of users into consistent content and
potential revenue for Wizards of the Coast drives the development of the
programs. Trying to turn fan labor into corporate revenue has its roots in
the early days of computer gaming mod culture. Julian Küchlick (2005)
argues modding, or fan created modifications to a game or new game
modes developed within a games engine, is an “important sources of value
for the game industry” and prolongs the lifespan of a given game. Funda-
mentally, game developers trying to turn fan labor into value is not a new
issue, but what is new is how developers, like Wizards of the Coast, Bliz-
zard Entertainment and Riot Games, have sought to normalize these prac-
tices through partnership programs of paid and unpaid opportunities. In
96   Economies and Esports

tandem with these dreams of profitable play, these programs allow Wiz-
ards of the Coast to influence how they want their game being played.
Instead of being a piece of software like Magic Arena, the social manage-
ment of players exists outside the primary platform and takes the form of
codified esports leagues and formalized content creator partnerships.
Recognizing the expanding ways Wizards of the Coast uses platforms
to manage players to generate profits relies on recognizing the various
restrictions created by Magic Arena. Previous digital iterations of Magic:
The Gathering shift from open economies toward controlled flows of cur-
rency and management, and Magic Arena offers a platform of sustained
engagement with Magic: The Gathering sans the potential speculation
on cardboard by players. Instead, Wizards of the Coast speculates on the
value of digital esports and content creators. The transformation of profes-
sional play made possible by Twitch influences Wizards of the Coast’s pro-
ception of players as potential streaming assets, and Twitch’s dominance
in the streaming marketplace sees Wizards of the Coast develop a net-
work of partnered streams to grow the Magic Arena. These moves toward
a closed platform of play and development of Twitch streamers speculate
on the profitability of the play of Magic Arena beyond the simple act of just
buying digital cards.

Prior Digital Iterations

Magic Arena emerges from a long history of attempts at develop-
ing Magic: The Gathering computer games and digital iterations, and it
owes some of its infrastructure to those products. While there have been
­non-card game adaptations of the Magic: The Gathering,2 the most rele-
vant precursors to Magic Arena are the Magic Online, Duels of Planeswalk-
ers franchise, and Magic Duels. Magic Online serves as Magic Arena’s most
prolific precursor based on its ability to reproduce multiple aspects of the
Magic: The Gathering experience. While I will not explore a comprehen-
sive development history of Magic Online, understanding how it oper-
ates offers a template for recognizing the value digital platforms provide
the Wizards of the Coast. Released in 2002, Magic: The Gathering Online
offers a digital version of the card game; in many respects, rather than sim-
ply adapting Magic to another medium, Magic Online attempts to emulate
the paper experience in a digital space. Actions are slow, and users must
go through every aspect of playing Magic: The Gathering. Users frequently
refer to Magic Online as MODO, which is short for the game’s original
name “Magic Online with Digital Objects.” Unlike Magic Arena, Magic
Online recreates the majority of the Magic: The Gathering experience,
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  97

which includes all of the game’s various formats, the open card economy
and ­player-to-player trading. While other essays in this collection explore
the nuances of Magic: The Gathering’s card economy, it is only important
for this essay to recognize that Magic Arena’s development opts against
an open and unmanaged card economy. This decision signifies how Wiz-
ards of the Coast’s approach to platform design has evolved; Magic Are-
na’s designed economy offers more regulations and control than Magic
Online. The shift towards greater restriction on player action emphasizes
how Magic Arena represents a platform of control, creating a more consis-
tent digital Magic experience.
While Magic Online aims for a more authentic simulation of paper
Magic: The Gathering, Magic Arena borrows from other digital products
including Duels of the Planeswalkers and Magic Duels. These digital iter-
ations of Magic: The Gathering embodied a restricted approach to digital
Magic: The Gathering that informed some aspects of Magic Arena. Pub-
lished annually from 2009 to 2014, Duels of the Planeswalker was a video
game franchise allowing for users to play quick games, and these games
served as an introduction to rules. These games sought to limit player
agency and curate a specific experience. As players completed matches,
new cards would be added to existing decks and unlocked additional pre-
constructed decks. As platforms, these games struggled to deliver an expe-
rience that sustained a playerbase, and as sites of data production, they
accrued skewed information failing to accurately reflect a complete under-
standing of Magic: The Gathering due to the dictated experience of play-
ing with preconstructed decks. With Magic Duels, Wizards of the Coast
moved closer to a dedicated platform aimed at sustaining users with a
steady stream of content and generating data.
Released in 2015, Magic Duels became a spiritual sequel to the Duels
of the Planeswalker franchise. As a next step in the development of an
accessible digital Magic: The Gathering platform, Magic Duels featured a
deck editor, consistent content releases, and a contained economy replete
with virtual currency. Like Duels of the Planeswalker, Magic Duels imple-
mented an overly curated play experience by enforcing deck building con-
straints on the player; these restrictions made decks weaker by limiting
the number of rare and powerful cards a player could utilize. Decks found
on Magic Duels did not reflect the decks played on Magic Online or in
paper. Again, these early attempts to develop platforms struggled to reflect
the actual experience of playing Magic: The Gathering as they sought to
influence what users could do within the software. These prior attempts
recognized the potential platforms to manage and control players as sug-
gested by these early attempts to curate a particular experience of Magic:
The Gathering.
98   Economies and Esports

Magic Arena transitions away from restricting the Magic experi-

ence through arbitrary constraints on game experience and aims for more
deliberate economic control. Magic Arena presents a faster Magic: The
Gathering experience keeping players engaged in constant cycles of play
and consumption. While these early digital versions of Magic: The Gath-
ering offer insight into the development of the Magic Arena experience,
they predominantly serve as a template for thinking about potential goals
for digital Magic: The Gathering experience. Whether attempting faith-
ful emulation or heavy curation, Wizards of the Coast initially sees digital
Magic: The Gathering as a potential supplemental experience for the phys-
ical game. However, Magic Arena aims for a less supplemental experience;
instead, Magic Arena is cohesive, contained, and engrossing.

Magic Arena’s Economic Engagement as Managed

Consumption
Unlike the more open Magic Online ticket economy, Magic Arena
relies on contemporary theories of virtual economies and ­f ree-to-play
game design. Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova (2014) suggest the
primary goals of contemporary virtual economies are “providing content,
attracting and retaining users, and earning revenues” which are more eas-
ily attained via unfree markets (p. 84). Lehdonvirta and Castrova’s sug-
gested goals align with the Magic Arena experience. Wizards of the Coast
wants users to consume content, remain engaged, and spend currencies
while interacting with Magic Arena.
To retain users, Magic Arena cultivates habitual play and consump-
tion through daily quests and sales in the store. These systems create dig-
ital currency “faucets” and “sinks” for users to routinely acquire and
spend digital currency on digital cards and other goods (Lehdonvirta and
Castronova, 2014, p. 197). In this model, daily quests provide players an
opportunity to earn a daily allowance of ­i n-game currency by complet-
ing a task playing Magic Arena; they include casting spells of a certain
color, eliminating a specified number of creatures, or playing a cer-
tain number of lands. Quests can reward either 500 or 750 gold, which is
the game’s earned currency, and quests serve as one faucet slowly offer-
ing players consistent currency. Other sources include weekly and daily
rewards for winning games, which can only be earned fifteen times.3 As
with all ­f ree-to-play games, players can also purchase ­i n-game currency to
acquire what they want. When it comes to potential sinks in Magic Arena,
players can buy packs of cards, entry fees for events, cosmetics upgrades,
seasonal passes, or use the daily sales to find discounts. Multiple “sinks”
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  99

offer users economic agency concerning how they want to consume Magic
Arena. These various “sinks” create opportunities for revenue generation
aside from just purchasing digital cards. The effectiveness of this economic
design relies on Wizards’ ability to restrict access and reduce the number
of participants.
Managed markets restrict the number of agents able to fully par-
ticipate in economic activity and eliminate potential uncertainty. While
Magic Online allows cards to be exchanged for virtual currency amongst
users and external services, Magic Arena relies on restrictions to create
a ­s elf-sufficient platform with limited entry points into the economy.4
Lehdonvirta and Castronova (2014) suggest the simplest way to regu-
late a developing virtual economy is by restricting the number of active
participants. In Magic Arena, Wizards of the Coast creates a monop-
oly over the economic activity as the only seller of cards and other vir-
tual goods. Monopolistic digital economies dominate the design of virtual
card games, but as other work in this collection discusses, it represents a
departure from Magic: The Gathering as a collectible and tradable product.
Eliminating the number of participants in the economy affords greater
control over the cost of cards. Magic Arena seeks to offer a contained eco-
nomic experience for Magic: The Gathering by isolating the game from
the spheres of finance and speculation outside of Wizards of the Coast’s
purview.
The economy of Magic Arena relies on two currencies in gold and
gems; it is a standard model for many ­f ree-to-play games and exists sepa-
rate from the economy contained within a game of Magic: The Gathering.
Instead of having to manage resources like mana and cards while play-
ing a game, Magic Arena tasks players with managing a currency econ-
omy outside of the game to acquire cards. Players acquire gold through the
daily quests and as rewards for winning. If playing constantly and meet-
ing all weekly and daily goals, players can average approximately 10,000
gold per week, 5 which equates to ten booster packs or one premier draft
entry fee. Players can exchange gold for most virtual commodities avail-
able in the Magic Arena store, with exceptions being the seasonal pass,
gems, and specific cosmetics. While gems are earned as rewards from cer-
tain events, purchasing them through the store for “­real-world”6 currency
is most common. Gems can be purchased in scaling amounts with larger
amounts providing bonus gems. Gems and gold are largely interchange-
able and feature consistent purchasing power between them with 10,000
gold representing 1,500 gems. The presence of the two currencies creates
multiple manageable resources for players designed to retain and engage.
As currency forms, gold and gems represent token money, and “they
obtain [their] value due to the fact that someone pledged to redeem them”
100   Economies and Esports

in the store Wizards of the Coast maintains in Magic Arena (Lehdonvirta

and Castronova, 2016, p. 188). Integrating currencies with limited applica-
tion allows Wizards of the Coast increased control of the cost and profit-
ability of the Magic Arena platform. As a platform, Magic Arena seeks to
limit the circulation of currency and eliminate profitability for other par-
ties, players included.7 Wizards of the Coast designs Magic Arena econ-
omy activity to constantly generate revenue for Wizards of the Coast
through consumption; they disseminate currency at a specific rate and do
not allow value to leave the platform. By restricting the activity, the plat-
form creates a model for how Wizards of the Coast envisions consumption
for Magic: The Gathering without a secondary market and tradable cards.
Players simply acquire cards with virtual currency aimed at creating a sys-
tem of endless consumption driven by perpetual play.
Magic Arena’s “sinks” emerge through the game’s store and ­high-cost
events. The store offers various cosmetic goods and booster packs in
exchange for the game’s currencies. While acquiring cards is the most log-
ical “sink,” the emergence of digital cosmetics throughout Magic Arena’s
development to provide player expression and generate additional revenue
for Wizards of the Coast. While these virtual goods allow players more
personalized experiences, they also offer players more ways to spend their
gems and gold. These cosmetics include digital card sleeves to change the
appearance of the back of the cards and simulates the physical card sleeves
players use. In addition to virtual sleeves, players can acquire alternate art
for their cards, new avatars for their accounts, and virtual pets that sit
on the game board. These digital cosmetics reflect the physical secondary
purchase many players opt for with analog Magic: The Gathering as they
similarly allow for player expression via customization. The most notable
difference is how Magic Arena excludes other manufacturers from the sec-
ondary purchases; this market of player expression exists solely by Wiz-
ards of the Coast to profit from ancillary purchases. Creating inviting,
­t ime-limited and multiple “sinks” creates more revenue for Wizards of the
Coast and allows greater options for producing a steady source of content.
While events typically only offer virtual currency for players as
rewards, Wizards of the Coast has recently started to host events in Magic
Arena with cash prizes called Arena Opens.8 These events take place over
two days, with performance of the first day aimed at qualifying players for
the second day. This even costs 20,000 gold or 4,000 gems, which equals
approximately $25. The structure of this event uses ­best-of-one matches
of the chosen format on the first day, and “Each entry is valid until 7 wins
or 3 losses, whichever comes first” (Wizards of the Coast 2020b, para. 9).
The second day is ­best-of-three of the chosen format, and players play until
seven wins or two match losses. Unlike the first day’s multiple entries,
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  101

players only have one opportunity on the second day of an Arena Open.
In terms of prizes, players receive gems until they have six or seven wins
on day two. If they reach that milestone, they will receive $1,000 or $2,000
respectively.9 As a currency “sink,” players can enter the first day of the
event as many times as they want until they qualify for the second day of
the event. Wizards of the Coast creates a tournament structure encourag-
ing multiple entries so that players have an outlet for excess virtual cur-
rency and provide players an opportunity to transform virtual gems and
gold into U.S. dollars. Despite the high barrier for players to profit from
this event, the possibility of earning money from playing Magic Arena
drives revenue through multiple entry fees and reduces the amount of vir-
tual currency players may be accumulating.
Virtual goods and events allow players to spend their currencies in
Magic Arena, but the organization of this economy has a rigid flow of cur-
rency in contrast to Magic: The Gathering’s paper economy. In many ways,
Magic Arena’s economy rejects the financialization of cards emerging
around the collectible aspect of the physical card game and Magic Online
for restrictive token currencies and limited participants. Financialization
sees players understanding the cards as commodities with fluctuating val-
ues. As Randy Martin (2002) suggests, financialization is an “invitation
to live by finance [that] is being extended to players beyond the corporate
world” (p. 3). For Magic: The Gathering, financialization aims to make the
game more about managing value and risk management.10 Magic Arena
appears designed as a rejection of this element of the experience. The era-
sure of a secondary card market reaffirms the platform as ­self-sustaining
and eliminates potential profits for users and other third parties. Stepha-
nie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux (2017) describe systems like Magic Arena as
“videogame software [that] ceases to operate simply as a game and trans-
forms into service platforms … and online platforms for another type of
play: a massive ­million-dollar moneygame in which ­f ree-to-play is actually
a code word for ­f ree-to-pay” (p. 216). Eventually the sole goal of the system
will involve the constant internalized consumption that only generates
value for Wizards of the Coast. While the game rejects the overt financial-
ization of cardboard found in the paper economy and discussed in other
essays of this collection, the moneygame of Magic Arena remains with the
platform and aims to be infinite and ­self-sustaining.
These design choices in Magic Arena’s economy construct a model
for how Wizards wants users playing and consuming 21st century Magic:
The Gathering. Players are constrained and trapped within the Magic Are-
na’s economy as there are only entry points. Exiting the platform does not
offer an opportunity to recover sunk costs like time or currency. In effect,
Magic Arena encloses players within the platform’s endless cycle of daily
102   Economies and Esports

quests and sales. The platform encourages this constant pattern of slow
rewards for consistent play like other digital card games like Hearthstone.
However, it signifies a departure from Magic: The Gathering’s analog econ-
omy and Magic Online. In both of those instances, players could purchase
booster packs and open them until they found the cards they need, or they
can purchase or trade for them from other parties or players. This poten-
tial management of economic activity limits the loss of value that occurs
once physical booster packs are opened; this platform exists to prevent
others from extracting value. While it might create opportunities for prof-
itable play on Twitch by being a more visual compelling product, Magic
Arena overtly closes off card acquisition from other markets; the platform
forces players to acquire cards through the economy driven by continual
play. Play on Magic Arena appears profitable by awarding players incre-
mental amounts of virtual currency. However, Wizards of the Coast uses
the platform to speculate on the possibilities of profitable play. In their
speculation on profitable play, Wizards of the Coast expands how they
hope to use platforms to control players.

Supporting Magic Arena: Professional Play

and Content Creation
With Magic Arena providing a seemingly compelling and inviting
experience, Wizards of the Coast has been attempting to leverage its ris-
ing popularity on Twitch as another way to control and manage players.
Wizards of the Coast’s use of Twitch attempts to build its esports brands
and cultivate a collection of unpaid streamers through its Magic: The
Gathering Creator program. These attempts rely less on development of
a platform and more on understanding the potential value of commod-
ifying play. The launch of content creator initiatives and changes to its
esports program appear in conjunction with the development of Magic
Arena and the perception that it may serve as the primary service to play
digital games of Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast uses these
programs to legitimize playing on Magic Arena and aid in the growth of
Magic Arena as a platform. These programs support and grow the plat-
form by leveraging the potential labor of other’s public play for Wizards
of the Coast’s benefit. This trend of speculating on the value players can
add through their play is part of the transformation Wizards of the Coast
sees enabled by the Magic Arena platform, which due to the increased
quality over other iterations, produces a cleaner, more watchable product
for the audience. In charting the initial development of esports, T.L. Tay-
lor (2012) suggests esports frequently develop from ­community-oriented
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  103

efforts instead of being initially administered and curated by the devel-

opers themselves. As discussed below, Wizards of the Coast has long
invested in the potential of profitable play from professional Magic: The
Gathering and sees their Pro Tour as a consumable product made more
of a spectacle by the digital affordances of Magic Arena. With the rise of
streaming and Twitch, Taylor (2018) notes “the distribution of competi-
tions has always been a part of esports, but the current approach focuses
on the creation of media events…[that] for a range of media technologies
… and emerging business models” (p. 158). Magic Arena and its animated
cards make for a more engineered event than analog Pro Tours that his-
torically feature ­m iddle-aged men sitting across a table from one another
or events using Magic Online’s dated program. Wizards of the Coast
has long seen competitive play as an opportunity for speculative value,
and Magic Arena’s faster pace of play and the potential of card anima-
tions lend itself easily toward the production of media events in Taylor’s
terms.
Started in 1996, the Pro Tour draws players from around the world
to compete in various events throughout the year. In his writing on the
Magic professional’s lifestyle, Magic: The Gathering professional Christo-
pher ­Morris-Lent (2020) reveals a common joke among players in which
the “Pro” in Magic Pro Tour stands for “Promotional” and not “Profes-
sional.” As ­Morris-Lent (2020) notes in his conversation with an employee
from Magic’s publisher HASBRO, “The [Pro Tour] is Magic’s advertis-
ing budget” (para. 7). Recognizing the convergence of interests in esports
offers a starting point for thinking about the potential roles and func-
tions of esports’ influence on Magic Arena. The company has made several
shifts over the last couple of years aimed at supporting competitive play
on Magic Arena and developing greater control over professional players.
While these changes do not signify the end of ­i n-person analog tourna-
ments, they aim to make Magic Arena a far more integral component of
the Magic: The Gathering experience. This transition fundamentally sup-
ports Magic Arena through produced content and creates a valued group
of professional players capable of streaming and playing the game at high
levels. Much like players randomly opening booster packs in search of
value, Wizards of the Coast elevates select professional players aimed at
speculating on the potential of recurring value for the brand.
Despite Magic: The Gathering’s rich history of professional compe-
tition, Wizards of the Coast redefines what it means to be a Magic: The
Gathering professional in 2018. While there is plenty of minutiae in these
changes via rebrandings, renamings, and reclassifications of organized
play, I want to primarily explore a few of the major changes Wizards of the
Coast implements to benefit and support Magic Arena. These changes aim
104   Economies and Esports

to support Magic Arena as a platform for competitive Magic: The Gather-

ing and enable the production of more content to promote and distribute.
Formed in 2019, the Magic Pro League was made up of 32 players
receiving a base salary of $75,000 before tournament earnings (Webster,
2018). As part of their contracts, they competed in weekly league games
to secure benefits in future competitions. These matches were broadcast
on Twitch with games played on Magic Arena. These ­f irst-year contracts
included streaming requirements for these professional players (Forster,
2019). These changes to what signified a Magic: The Gathering professional
were aimed at generating content for and with Magic Arena. The develop-
ment of the inaugural Magic Pro League leveraged the potential of Twitch
by creating a constant flow of content for consumption. Whether it was
weekly content of streamed league matches or the streaming required by
contracted players, Wizards of the Coast provided players an opportunity
to make a career out of Magic: The Gathering in exchange for the produc-
tion of content supporting Magic Arena.
The apparatus around professional play on Magic Arena presents the
platform as a hub for competitive and serious play. Making the platform
a place of serious competition creates greater engagement from potential
users, and the inclusion of cash tournaments to the platform have given
engaged players a more tangible goal. Part of the professionalization Wiz-
ards of the Coast requires of its competitors aims to make players aspire to
high standards of competitive play. The members of the Magic Pro League
streaming perform the task of offering ­non-professional players profes-
sional standards they can emulate. Attempting to construct Magic Arena
as a central point of professional play aims to make some of its users more
interested in their performance and motivate constant and prolonged use.
Cultivating a professional experience for amateur players informs how
Wizards of the Coast wants people to potentially play Magic: The Gath-
ering on the platform. Wizards of the Coast’s attempts to reorient profes-
sional play around Twitch and streaming was not immediately successful
during the 2019 season. As they made changes for the Magic Pro League’s
second season in 2020, weekly league matches on Twitch were canceled,
ending one component of the media event Wizards of the Coast sought to
produce. Members of the league were also no longer required to stream as
part of their participation in the league.
To return to the metaphor Wizards of the Coast seeing players as
speculative value akin to cards, requiring professional players to stream
is one form of randomly opening booster packs to find potential value;
Wizards of the Coast speculates on the possibility of these professional
players producing sustained value outside of the tournament setting. For
Wizards of the Coast, this effort wants to manufacture Twitch stars and
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  105

communities out of their designated professionals. However, esports pro-

fessionals do not come with prescribed audiences or communities, and
while some, like Ben Stark and Reid Duke, found success, others never
found sustained audiences. The goal of using esports stars to grow the
platform appears sensible but struggles to produce immediate results.
As the Magic Pro League struggles and the professionals lack stream-
ing obligations, Wizards of the Coast reaffirms the role of other content
creators on Twitch and YouTube with the goal being the development of
an apparatus to support Magic Arena and create value from play. With the
previously discussed professionals, Wizards of the Coast sees their play
as a constant source of consumable content through Wizards of the Coast
produced broadcasts. Professional play becomes something to be repack-
aged as media experience, but it only reflects a competitive experience.
However, with partnered content creators outside the Magic Pro League,
Wizards of the Coast aims for diverse content that develops community
instead of just recognizing ­h igh-level competition. Twitch and YouTube
communities afford Wizards of the Coast to highly interactive groups
of fans, and as Henry Jenkins (2006) notes “economic trends … demand
more active modes of spectatorship” (p. 136). These communities pro-
vide engaged and active consumers organized around a content creator.
As Wizards of the Coast tries to manage the potential of content creators,
they develop programs and hone a management style aimed at drawing in
these interactive and engaged audiences.
During Magic Arena’s open beta period from November 2017 until
September 2019, Wizards of the Coast launched the Wizards of the Coast
Content Creator program, and it represented the first iteration of a Wiz-
ards of the Coast sanctioned creators program. This program was run
solely by Wizards of the Coast and used metrics to determine admittance
to the program. As Magic Arena moved closer to its official release, this
program ultimately became the Magic: The Gathering Creator program,
but much of the underlying architecture of the program that governs par-
ticipants remained intact from the Wizards of the Coast Content Creator
program.
Officially launching in early 2020, the Magic: The Gathering Creator
program serves as Wizards of the Coast’s primary program to develop
and promote sanctioned content creators. While Wizards of the Coast has
been paying for segments with streamers with large audiences, this pro-
gram hopes to recruit and support smaller streamers playing Magic: The
Gathering and building communities around it. The program is a part-
nership between Wizards of the Coast and StreamElements, a company
developing software for streaming and supporting streamers. By partner-
ing with StreamElements, Wizards of the Coast has a partner to manage
106   Economies and Esports

and collect data on the play patterns of streamers through StreamEle-

ments’ software. The content creator program is a “platform giving
streamers directed Challenges to help them create engaging content with
and for their communities—and reward them in the process” (Wizards
of the Coast, 2020a, para. 4). In their own announcement, Wizards of the
Coast describes it as a platform for streamers. While it may not mirror the
understanding of a platform like Twitch and Magic Arena, the content cre-
ator program serves as a force to organize and control the social struc-
ture of streaming Magic Arena. Since the program is ultimately managed
by Wizards of the Coast, participants must meet standards for admission
to the program and maintain them. While the program appears to hope-
fully grow various communities across digital platforms, it seems more
interested in recruiting creators in an effort to use their public Magic: The
Gathering play as an extension of the company’s marketing and promo-
tional apparatus.
Wizards of the Coast and Stream Elements limit access to the pro-
gram through an application and review process, and it provides them
an opportunity to review applicants to see how they would best serve
the Magic Arena brand. To apply, applicants provide links to their social
media profiles, their Twitch or YouTube channel, and a description of the
channel (Stream Elements). Joining the program requires creators to apply
through the Stream Elements website, but Wizards of the Coast ultimately
decides who to admit to the program. The application requires an exam-
ination of an applicant’s social media profiles, like Twitter and Facebook,
and answering questions about the applicant’s Twitch or YouTube channel.
These applications provide Wizards of the Coast the opportunity to exam-
ine the already developed communities creators have on surrounding plat-
forms. While this program appears to recruit developing communities,
this screening process seeks to ensure the creators admitted are capable of
performing the public work of streaming and using social media to pro-
mote their channels. In this application to the partner program (Stream
Elements 2020), Wizards of the Coast appears interested in seeing how
creators are using social media in conjunction with the development of
their Magic Arena content.
Once a member of the program, creators are subject to the terms and
conditions of the program and standards set by Wizards of the Coast.
These conditions for affiliation become a tool for Wizards of the Coast to
manage the creators. While there are a number of legal restrictions placed
on creators, the “Wizards Creator Program Terms and Conditions” docu-
ment sets the parameters of the relationship between Wizards of the Coast
and content creators in the program. Content creators are subject to con-
tent monitoring, forced into arbitration and makes it clear content creators
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  107

are not employees (Wizards of the Coast 2018). This document exists to
create consensual systems of control for content creators. While the appli-
cation allows these programs to be optional, Wizards of the Coast is using
this consent required by the application to create systems of invisible con-
trol for their content creators to develop a version of play and streaming
centered on growth and profit generation for their platforms.
While not considered a paying job per the program’s terms and con-
ditions, the Magic: The Gathering Creator program being admitted to
the program provides creators with access to goals and challenges. These
tasks and challenges include streaming for specific periods of time, a
certain number of days or completing ­i n-game tasks (Yosilewitz, 2020).
These challenges reward streamers for completing certain tasks and hope
to develop varied and interesting content. In a sense, Wizards of the
Coast and Stream Elements suggest how to play Magic Arena. When first
announcing the program, Wizards of the Coast (2020) describes the pro-
gram as a “ ­f irst-of-its-kind platform giving streamers directed Challenges
to help create engaging content” (para. 5). These challenges provide players
with items that include ­i n-game rewards, exclusive content, or community
giveaways (Stream Elements, 2020a). This arrangement relies on the logic
of gamified quests on this platform to obscure the potential labor per-
formed by creators. Wizards of the Coast rewards its sanctioned content
creators with ­i n-game virtual goods and currency; it reinforces the logic
of Magic Arena as a ­self-contained platform. A creator’s activity with the
platform as part of the program accrues more virtual commodities only
useful within the platform. Wizards of the Coast restricts any possible
exit from the platform and uses creators to attract more users. For Wiz-
ards of the Coast, Twitch represents an instrument of labor; it enables the
transformation of labor into a consumable product through the produced
streams. In exchange for this labor, the partnered content creators receive
virtual goods and occasional promotion from Wizards of the Coast, which
includes a potential spot on their website and the occasional social media
post. Minor promotion makes up the Wizards of the Coast contribution
for a partnered creators’ efforts.
The discussion about how Wizards of the Coast provides exposure
to streamers and content creators has been entwined in their manage-
ment of the community. Michelle Sutterfield, a former influencer mar-
keting and community manager for Wizards of the Coast, describes the
value of small streamers and communities as essential because “they’re
often more invested in your game than a ­big-time streamer, so much so
they may even (if you’re comfortable with it) be willing to stream it with-
out being paid” (Wavro 2019). Reaffirming Taylor’s (2018) suggestion about
grassroots marketing and streamer management, Sutterfield describes the
108   Economies and Esports

goals of partnered influencers being rooted in growing the game and the
brand; she boasts “We had 400 streamers be part of [a recent early access
event to promote new content], and none of them were paid. They did it
because they love the game, they love the event, and they love the commu-
nity” (Wavro 2019). While she was criticized for this position by streamer
Jeff Hoogland who suggested Wizards of the Coast pay people for their
work (Hoogland, 2019), her defense shows how Wizards of the Coast aims
for other forms of compensation like “community giveaway items, net-
working opportunities, and additional community support” (Sutterfield,
2019). This public position of Wizards of the Coast’s employee reaffirms
their logic of amassing a volume of streamers to support the brand; in
booster pack logic, it is about opening as many packs as possible to find the
valuable card, and from Wizards of the Coast’s perspective, if you do not
have to pay for the booster packs, value is more likely.
With these programs, Wizards of the Coast uses multiple platforms
as mechanisms of control aimed at managing players and attempting to
accrue revenue from the play of its participants. Creating a series of sys-
tems around Magic Arena supports the growth and development of the
communities. They all serve to provide Wizards of the Coast with more
tools to manage their chosen users and determine who they want to ele-
vate with these programs. Wizards of the Coast uses the work of privileged
professional esports competitors and sanctioned members of the creator
program to build interest and engagement with the platform. If Wizards of
the Coast values Magic Arena as a potential future for Magic: The Gather-
ing, they have sought to tie play within the platform to its potential ability
to generate revenue and value. While Magic Arena is designed to control
how its users play, the programs supporting it capitalize on the play of
others.

Conclusion: A Digital Future of Magic: The Gathering

as Speculation
Wizards of the Coast deploys Magic Arena as a system where users’
play and spectatorship never separate and aim to create a subjectivity
rooted in the perpetual consumption of Magic: The Gathering content.
Writing through Deluze and Guattari, Richard Grusin (2010) examines
how media assemblages create and maintain “affective feedback loops” (p.
100). For Grusin (2010), the subjectivity of users of ­t wenty-first-century
media is rearranged by their relationship to machines and objects. The
relationships users create with media inform affective interaction and
 “Cracking” Players as Packs (Schumaker)  109

redefine their subjectivity based on their relationship to media, and a con-

stant engagement with Magic: The Gathering through Magic Arena serves
to develop a particular kind of relationship for its users. As other essays
in this collection explore, Magic: The Gathering represents a diverse game
with varied experiences, but Magic Arena constitutes a digital interven-
tion aimed at perpetual value generation for Wizards of the Coast made
possible by players constantly engaging with the platform. While every
Magic: The Gathering player may not use Magic Arena, Wizards of the
Coast’s efforts to support the platform indicate the importance they see in
the platform.
Magic Arena operates within this context to develop more engaged
consumers and players, and Wizards of the Coast’s intervention into
esports and Twitch create an unending series of shareable content. In
this transmedia system, Wizards of the Coast constructs every playable
moment of digital Magic: The Gathering as an opportunity for consump-
tion. Underlying all these activities are transfers of money or value; spend-
ing is never neglected in the Magic Arena ecosystem. By engaging with
Magic Arena, value and profit are extracted from users’ mundane actions,
and the platform’s need for growth rewrites what it means to play Magic:
The Gathering. The constant engagement with play as profitable creates an
ecosystem where all participants serve the imperative of value generation
for Wizards of the Coast. Commodities are produced and immediately
consumed, whereupon new opportunities for consumption constantly
confront the player and spectator, streamer and viewer—assuming those
distinctions still hold. Communities and affective affiliations flourish with
esports and content creators, but always and only in the service of profit-
able play, the main objective of Magic: The Gathering’s digital future. The
thrills of opening booster packs and finding a rare card for a trade binder
or a deck are replaced with a banality of digital interfaces. Magic Arena
transforms the thrill of extracting any value from a player’s cards into a
process that serves Wizards of the Coast.
The future of the game industry appears fully committed to creat-
ing platforms aimed at endless consumption, and Wizards of the Coast’s
development and support of Magic Arena aligns with that trajectory.
Developers must recognize the potential for game play to be finite, and
that constant and habitual play does not equate to quality engagement
with a game. Platforms and the digital future they portend for Magic: The
Gathering signal an unending cycle of Wizards of the Coast attempting to
manufacture profitability and value from user actions and engagement.
While players may always have other alternatives to play Magic: The Gath-
ering, Wizards of the Coast hopes the platform becomes an essential com-
ponent of the Magic the Gathering experience for its players. As Magic
110   Economies and Esports

Arena extracts whatever value its users produce and lurches after poten-
tial profits, Magic: The Gathering will continue to see users through its lens
of endless digital consumption. It may cease to be possible to separate the
consumption so integral to the platform of Magic Arena from the game it
supposedly allows users to play. In the same way that platform cultivates
endless consumption, each new user represents a new potential booster
pack for Wizards of the Coast to open. Players and users represent fresh
opportunities for Wizards of the Coast; they just need to be cracked open
to see if they have the potential to work for free as part of the endless con-
sumption made possible by platforms.

Notes
1. The information about cards in paper tournaments is often a contributing factor in
the price of paper cards. While important for a larger understanding of Magic’s economic
impact, it is not of primary concern to my examination of Magic’s digital platforms rela-
tionship to data.
2. While there are other adaptations of the Magic: The Gathering IP, I am concerned
with examining the development of digital iterations of the card game.
3. Playing in certain game modes on Arena can also serve as a source of ­i n-game cur-
rency, but the outcome of these events is tied to player performance. They have a closer
relationship to a tournament’s prize payout than a consistent faucet that users can rely on
for currency.
4. Companies, like MTGOTraders and CardHoarder, buy and sell cards on Magic
Online for a profit much like they are the paper commodity, and their currency is event
tickets. For a longer discussion on Magic Online’s Tickets, see Wildcat Currency by E. Cas-
tronova (2014).
5. This calculator is based on always completing the daily and weekly achievements and
having most of the daily quests reward their highest possible gold value.
6. The distinction between “real” and “virtual” currency is potentially meaningless,
but when I say “­real-world currency,” I refer to currency not earned via play or purchased
within the confines of Magic Arena’s store.
7. While not robust or prolific, there is a small number of users attempting to sell Magic
Arena accounts on eBay and other websites. These transactions violate the end user license
agreement and can be banned.
8. As of August 2020, there have been two of these events that serve as replacements of
premier ­i n-person tournaments suspended during the ­COVID-19 pandemic.
9. These events also have a participation reward. The first event offered card cosmetics
for playing in the event.
10. There is an entire subculture formed around Magic finance. For a more detailed
examination of the paper economy, see the “Understanding the Magic: The Gathering Card
Market” essay in this collection.

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ing opportunities, and additional community. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/
MishyFishyWhoo/status/1202016111287525377.
Taylor, T.L. (2012). Raising the Stakes. MIT Press.
Taylor, T.L. (2018). Watch Me Play. Princeton UP.
Wavro, A. (2019, March 19). ‘Care more about your streamers’ advises Magic: The Gathering
Arena dev. Gamasutra. https://gamasutra.com/view/news/338988/Care_more_about_
your_streamers_advises_Magic_The_Gathering_Arena_dev.php.
Webster, A. (2018, December 6). Magic: the gathering is getting a pro league with $10 mil-
lion in prizes. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128822/­magic-MTG-
gathering-esports-pro-league-prizes-game-awards-2018.
Wizards of the Coast (2018, April 12). Wizards creator program terms and conditions. Wiz-
ards. https://company.wizards.com/wizardscreatorprogram.
Wizards of the Coast (2020a, January 23). Announcing the magic: the gathering creator
program. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/­a nnouncing-magic-
gathering-creator-program-2020-01-23.
Wizards of the Coast (2020b, May 19). The arena open terms and conditions. https://magic.
wizards.com/en/articles/archive/­a rena-open-terms-and-conditions-2020-05-19.
Yosilewitz, A. (2020, January 23). Magic: the gathering creator program now open to appli-
cants. StreamElements. https://blog.streamelements.com/­magic-the-gathering-creator-
program-now-open-to-applicants-899a65ecaa90.
 Wasn’t in the Cards
The ­Proto-Esport of Professional Magic
Matt Knutson

With the release of Magic: The Gathering (hereafter “Magic”) expan-

sion “Ravnica: City of Guilds” in the fall of 2005, players discovered a new
insertion in certain sealed products1: a Pro Tour Player Card (Figure 1).
Modeled after sports trading cards, Pro Tour Player Cards featured pho-
tographs of accomplished competitive Magic players like Kai Budde and
Bob Maher, complete with statistics such as net winnings, Pro Tour top
8 appearances, and biographical information. Players not already famil-
iar with the Pro Tour may well have wondered what was “pro” about it
and how a select few had apparently made six figures in prize money at
competitive Magic. By 2005 the Pro Tour, first organized in 1996 by Skaff
Elias (a friend of and collaborator with Magic’s creator, Richard Garfield),
had already established itself as a tournament series with a history of fifty
events that had paid several million dollars in prizes.2
The pros themselves and the ­a spiring-pros already familiar with the
Magic tournament scene viewed these cards as a welcome method of pro-
moting the Pro Tour and celebrating the accomplishments of top com-
petitors.3 For the wider community of Magic players, the presence of the
Pro Tour Player Cards prompted an unexpectedly negative and confused
response on forums, as Randy Buehler (Director of Magic’s R&D at the
time) wrote: “Now I will admit that I was surprised by the size and volume
of the reaction in the forums … the feedback was loud enough that we’re
not just chalking it up to a bad first impression.”4 What were these trading
cards of casually dressed guys doing packed in with a fantasy trading card
game? Did these cards displace any actual Magic cards from these packs?
The cards were a visual misfit across several dimensions: photographs
instead of paintings, contemporary rather than otherworldly appear-
ance, the kinds of faces one would expect to see at a card shop rather than

112
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  113

Fig. 1: The back (left, enlarged) and front (right) of Kai Budde’s Pro Tour Player
Card, released in 2005 (image posted to Ask Wizards, September 2005).

the images of fantastic escapism that the other cards in the pack offered.
Moreover, what did it matter that there were professional players making
money at Magic when the game’s intrinsic appeal for most players presum-
ably had nothing to do with the prospect of professionalization?
Buehler’s explanation for why Magic would promote Pro Tour play-
ers on these cards helps to describe one moment in Wizards of the Coast’s5
support for the professional scene:
We use the Pro Tour to help market the game because of its symbolic value—
it’s much easier to show that Magic is a game where creativity and intelligence
are rewarded when the rewards are measured in dollars. The Pro Tour lifestyle
also shows off how much fun Magic can be, how many friendships it creates,
etc.….
At the end of the day, we are in the business of selling Magic cards and we
thought this was a more useful way to spend our time and money than yet
another ad in Inquest.6

As with many games’ professional scenes, Magic’s Pro Tour was financed
as a means of promoting and advertising the product for an audience of
players to both broaden and deepen engagement: existing players might
get more serious about the game if they know their “creativity and intel-
ligence” could be monetarily rewarded, and new potential players might
notice the media spectacle of high profile events with cash prizes.7 The
exchange between Buehler and forum users also highlights the struggle of
satisfying Magic’s notoriously difficult fanbase8: these cards were included
for free in the packs, they did not displace anything, and still Buhler
implicitly flatters these ­complaint-prone Magic players as being “creative”
and “intelligent.” As Adam Arvidsson describes, brands motivate their
114   Economies and Esports

consumers toward particular behaviors through the “provision of partic-

ular ambiences that frame and partially anticipate the agency of consum-
ers.”9 Arvidsson explains that “With a particular brand I can act, feel and
be in a particular way” 10; just as Nike connotes coolness or athleticism,
Magic as a brand prompts its consumer to identify as creative and intelli-
gent. To use Aaron Trammell’s phrasing, Magic as an analog game evokes
a brand identity more sophisticated than that of digital games: “craft beer
instead of Mountain Dew; wooden toys and conversation, as opposed to
headsets and Discord.” 11 Just as Nike communicates its brand identity
to consumers with no aspirations in professional athletics, the Pro Tour
Player Cards were meant to convey intelligence and creativity for Magic
as a brand even to players who had no intention to participate in the Pro
Tour.
Whether or not the players were justified in their dissatisfaction with
these Pro Tour Player Cards, the cards were permanently discontinued
in 2007. Afterwards, Magic would continue to support its Pro Tour with
yearly and seasonal events, a Hall of Fame (with perks for Hall of Famers
who keep playing), and eventually a Twitch channel, among other means.
But toward the end of the 2010s, Magic would rebrand the Pro Tour as
the Magic Pro League (MPL) and restructure how top competitors earned
points and rewards. During the same time, Wizards released MTG Arena
(2019), a substantially more ­user-friendly platform for playing Magic than
MTGO (2002–present). These two changes together, as Švelch has shown,12
moved competitive Magic away from a tabletop focus and towards esports.
However, the two years following the creation of the MPL proved to be a
period of whiplash for fans and competitors alike; Wizards announced in
May of 2021 that they would sunset the MPL at the end of its second sea-
son. The venture into esports that Wizards had proclaimed in 2019 as the
company did away with the ­t wo-decade legacy of the Pro Tour was itself
abruptly over.
The present essay examines the Pro Tour Player Cards as an unusual
artifact from a past era in Magic’s history. Their discontinuation marked
a missed opportunity for Magic to seize upon the esports trend that was
building momentum in Korea, Europe, and (as will be discussed in the
most detail) North America at the time. In 2005, Wizards possessed the
world’s most popular trading card game, a digital version of this game
with online matchmaking, an infrastructure for organized competi-
tive play (with a potential for professionalization for those at the top), an
invested professional (and ­aspiring-professional) player base, and a proven
savviness with broadcasting—in other words, the necessary precondi-
tions for establishing a flourishing esport. Why did esports pass Wizards
by at this time, regardless of the fate of the Pro Tour Player Cards? Wizards
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  115

had held every opportunity to realize the esports potential of trading card
gaming prior to competitors such as Hearthstone (2014–). When esports
did eventually come to Magic in 2019, what effects did it have on the game’s
established professional scene? Lastly, why did Wizards’ attempts at mold-
ing competitive Magic into an esport fail within two years? To pursue
these lines of inquiry, the essay first interprets the Pro Tour Player Cards
as expressive visual objects; it then analyzes the wider context surround-
ing Magic from 2005 to 2007, and the movement toward esports evident in
other sectors of competitive gaming; it subsequently discusses Magic’s dig-
ital offering at the time, Magic: The Gathering Online (hereafter “MTGO”);
it then examines Wizards’ late (2019) commitment to the esports scene
and its eventual embrace of the esports media paradigm; finally, the essay
offers an esports autopsy to identify causes of death in both the game’s
inherent characteristics as well as execution issues in the running of the
MPL. The essay demonstrates that Wizards’ hesitation in esports owed
in part to the company’s historically limited proficiency with its digital
products, but this delay also resulted, paradoxically, from being ahead of
the curve in certain respects of organized competitive gaming. In mak-
ing its argument, the essay draws on esports scholarship as well as inter-
views with current and former professional players and Magic community
members, including some who were featured on Pro Tour Player Cards
themselves.
The interviews for this piece were conducted in the summer of 2020,
and I first made contact with the interviewees (current and former profes-
sional players and content creators, as well as former Wizards employees13)
through diverse means: messaging them during their Twitch livestreams,
contacting them on social media, and making introductions to new peo-
ple through those I had already interviewed in “snowball” fashion. These
interviews, all of which were qualitative, were mostly conducted on Zoom
as video calls, while others were done by phone (or through solely audio
on Zoom). The ­socio-political context hanging over these interviews was
the ­C ovid-19 pandemic, which may have both normalized video calls as
a medium of daily communication and produced a state in which peo-
ple who might have otherwise had busier schedules instead were surpris-
ingly flexible about making time for interviews within a few days after the
request. Along this essay’s path to publication, Wizards announced the
sunsetting of the MPL, which prompted me to follow up with some previ-
ous interviewees and expand my correspondence to others I had wanted
to speak with. The tenor of many of these ­follow-up interviews was notice-
ably changed: many interviewees were fed up with Wizards’ mismanage-
ment of professional Magic and appeared more candid in their criticisms
of the company. While the esports experiment may be over for Magic,
116   Economies and Esports

competitive events are not, and there may still be opportunities for com-
petitors to make a living playing the game. (At time of writing, Wiz-
ards unveiled details of its new model of Organized Play just one month
ago.) As such, I will not be attributing any of the most scathing criticisms
of Wizards to any specific players; moreover, I will not be providing an
exhaustive list of players who agreed to speak with me.
The vast majority of interviewees were already known to me as a long-
time player of Magic who would occasionally catch coverage of Pro Tours
and Grand Prixs. Moreover, as someone who had casually collected some
of the Pro Tour Player Cards when they were in print, I appreciated the
interviewees’ microcelebrity (to put their fame modestly) status and their
reputations as skillful players of the game. I made no attempt at an exhaus-
tive survey of MPL and Rivals members, nor do I claim that this sampling
of interviewees is necessarily representative of the whole of professional
Magic players. But I did make an effort to speak to people with different
perspectives on competitive Magic, including current MPL members, at
least one current Rivals member,14 a professional Magic content creator,
former professional players, a former contractor for Wizards, and several
former directors at Wizards.15 Lastly, I should acknowledge that, owing to
the current and historical overrepresentation of cisgender men in profes-
sional Magic, interviewees were all male.16

The Faces of Pro Magic

The Pro Tour Player Cards convey an aspirational potential in
competitive Magic: behold the fame, money, and achievements of these
renowned players, which someday the interested player might themselves
accomplish. The cards also offer snapshots (in multiple senses) that cre-
ate expectations for the kinds of faces one might see at a tournament. 17
Whether these faces are representative of (or ought to be representative
of) the competitors one might have encountered at a sanctioned Magic
tournament between 2005 and 2007, these are nonetheless the faces that
Wizards presented in promoting its professional scene.18 Taking the 2005
series as an example, each card presents a photograph of a young cis-
gender man dressed comfortably in a tee or ­long-sleeved shirt. They are
shown addressing the camera, perhaps with a simple direction (“fold your
arms”) or prompted to strike their own pose. Some cards feature more
expressive body language than others: Brian Kibler’s card shows him
making a “finger guns” gesture, and Antonino de Rosa sticks his tongue
out mockingly at the camera. All photos are credited to Craig Gibson,
the official Pro Tour photographer who would set up a studio backstage
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  117

at each Pro Tour event.19 In the 2005 and 2007 series, each player is out-
lined in white against a dark blue (2005) or red (2007) graphic; the 2006
series drops this outline in favor of a sort of corona of light made to look
as if emanating from behind the player. 20 In each photograph, the back-
ground has been edited out of the image, leaving each subject decontex-
tualized from their environment. In the 2006 and 2007 series, a subset of
special “Hall of Fame” cards celebrated the induction of five players each
year into professional Magic’s Hall of Fame. These cards feature a simi-
lar kind of corona with a ­golden-yellow background; both 2006 and 2007
have this color scheme but with different variations for the two years.
The subjects in the Hall of Fame cards were evidently asked to dress up:
instead of casual outfits, each player dons formal wear, typically a coat
and/or tie. In the case of Hall of Famer Jon Finkel, dressing up formally
for his induction photoshoot was unusual enough in the context of Magic
that he neglected to bring a suit with him to the event in Yokohama, Japan
and had to buy one abroad.21
Across the series, the Pro Tour Player Cards present a scene that one
might have encountered walking into a card shop on a Friday night in
the aughts (2000–2010). Taking just the Americans represented on these
cards, competitive Magic was a space predominantly occupied by white,
cisgender men in their 20s (or, in the case of Dave Humpherys and Gadiel
Szleifer, 30s and teens, respectively). From 2005 to 2007 an increasing
number of international players claimed Pro Tour Player Cards; these play-
ers represented Canada, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Italy, Germany,
Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil,
Japan, and Malaysia. None of the depicted players represented African,
Caribbean, Central American, Middle Eastern, Oceanic, or Eastern Euro-
pean nations. The Pro Tour had long been an international competition,
but it decidedly skewed towards developed countries; this owes in part to
Wizards’ timeline of translating Magic22 and, to be certain, nations’ rela-
tive access to socioeconomic wealth and English language education. As
Aaron Trammell has described, “Analog games are the products of a neo-
liberal creative economy shared primarily between ‘developed’ nations”;
such is the case with Magic.23 Nations of the Global South are and have
historically been underrepresented in the Magic player base, especially
at the top of competition. Disparities in access to tournaments across
continents are a particularly influential factor. As Paulo Vitor Damo de
Rosa (PVDDR) comments, “I think [Magic is] ‘global’ with an asterisk.”24
PVDDR himself had gained acclaim in competitive Magic from a periph-
eral nation, Brazil, and when he started competing internationally, he was
accused of cheating out of discrimination; when Wizards started covering
airfare, this was a breakthrough for international players like him.25 But
118   Economies and Esports

even in digital tournaments for competitive Magic, PVDDR explains that

the game is less than truly global:
[With] online tournaments, people play from all over the world, but they are
for US time zones, so people who are in Japan have to start playing at 11:00
p.m., and they play all [through] the night, whereas people from the US are just
playing in their time zone.26

While the Pro Tour Player Cards showcase an international contingent

of accomplished competitors, the limits of this breadth establish a back-
ground of “‘global’ with an asterisk” for the game still present today.
Beyond nationality, gender representation is another ­s elf-evident
aspect of the Pro Player Cards that manifests wider cultural issues in com-
petitive Magic. Švelch (2019) synthesizes the available information on gen-
der and Magic players in his analysis of ­l ive-streamers:
[This study’s] demographics align with previous research on streaming (Usz-
koreit, 2018) and the perceived gender composition of the MTG community
(Orsini, 2016; Wolff, 2015). In contrast, WotC’s market research data suggest
that 38% of all players identify as female (Rosewater, 2015). However, their rep-
resentation among tournament participants has been estimated at 1%–5%
(Wolff, 2015). This distribution can be partly attributed to structural causes,
such as hegemonic and toxic masculinities within game and geek cultures
[Paul, 2018; Salter and Blodgett, 2017].
Švelch’s note about the extreme gender disparity in tournament play is
borne out in the composition of Pro Tour players of yesteryear and the
late MPL. Prior to 2019, every Pro Tour and World Championship win-
ner had been a cisgender male; it was not until Autumn Burchett’s victory
at Mythic Championship I that year that a ­non-binary transgender player
had won a tournament of that level. Before that, Melissa DeTora in 2013
made top 8 at Pro Tour Montreal, becoming the first woman to achieve
such a placement. In 2015 DeTora began working for Wizards and eventu-
ally joined Magic’s Play Design team, thereby making herself ineligible for
future competitions and leaving the question open as to what accomplish-
ments she might otherwise have added to her career as a pro. It is beyond
the scope of this essay to account fully for why cisgender men have been
overrepresented at the top of professional Magic almost to the exclusion
of all other genders.27 Wizards, to be certain, has acknowledged the gen-
der disparity in competitive Magic, and has in the last few years has sought
to address by promoting women and nonbinary competitors and content
creators, especially through invitational events and Twitch partnerships.28
The scope of this inclusion in competitive events tends toward telegenic
women with many Twitch followers, or as Finkel describes it, “what [Wiz-
ards’] marketing department thought would sell best,” rather than a boost
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  119

for members of underrepresented groups who have played near the top of
competitive Magic but never broken into the upper echelon.29 While the
spirit of inclusivity is something that brands can and do get vocal about
within competitive gaming, the scope of that spirit and the terms of the
deal continue to be fraught.
Returning to the cards themselves, unlike the subjects of sports trad-
ing cards that the Pro Tour Player Cards would appear to be modeled after,
the men in these photos overall do not display the objects or parapherna-
lia of their activity. There are no uniforms,30 no mitts, no helmets, no balls
or pucks, no athletic wristbands, no shoulder pads, no mouth guards, no
bleachers, and no stadiums. The front faces of the cards overwhelmingly
do not even depict the Magic cards these players are avowed to be experts
with.31 Without the accoutrement, we are left with what T.L. Taylor refers
to as “geek masculinity.” The research for Taylor’s Raising the Stakes, an
anthropological study of esports communities, took place between 2003
and 2011, encompassing the time during which the Pro Tour Player Cards
were photographed, printed, distributed, and discontinued. In Taylor’s
description:
[Geek masculinity] is not just about gender identity, but often gets con-
structed around a much broader rebuttal of mainstream culture. Geek mas-
culinity often provides a means for opting out of sports and athletic culture.
This refusal is just as often about not wishing to participate in the entire set of
social activities that surround a sport (and athletic subcultures) as it is about
the physical activity of the sport itself. Facilitating an interest in competition
or fraternal relationships but via activities like playing computer games thus
becomes a powerful alternative modality for geek masculinity.32

Reading these images through Taylor makes clear the alterity of compet-
itive tabletop play and its distinction from the sport of more traditional
forms of masculinity. This description applies just as well to tabletop pros
as it does to esports competitors (and of course in Magic’s case these two
would merge significantly). As Taylor goes on to describe:
The guys at these tournaments definitely aren’t, for the most part, conform-
ing to the mainstream athlete/sports star masculine identity. […] There is awk-
wardness, and the ongoing construction of personal narratives as they skill up
as a pro […] You also still find a real diversity of body types at tournaments.
Unlike traditional athletics, which weeds through physicality and segregates
(and excludes), within pro gaming you will find short and tall, skinny and
chubby, fit and not. There is no classic male physique dominating the scene.33

The “awkwardness” of geek masculinity indeed comes across in more

than a few of the Pro Tour Player Cards. Messy hairstyles, adolescent pos-
ture, ­i ll-fitting clothing, and pubescent mustache hair abound in these
120   Economies and Esports

images. The pros of Magic then and now do encompass a broad range of
physiques.34 In most esports, where the ­m icromovement-focused manual
dexterity in games such as ­Counter-Strike and StarCraft signifies a sporty
physicality of play (as Emma Witkowski has shown), 35 teams hire sports
psychologists and physical therapists to keep their players healthy. Magic,
by contrast, is a game specifically designed not to test dexterity, so physical
fitness is even less commonly focused on in this context.
The back sides of the cards also evoke the conventions of sports
cards.36 All feature shots of the player at the table, typically in the mid-
dle of a game. In these smaller images we see Magic cards in hand and/
or on the table, expressions of focus, hands in the act of play. Unsurpris-
ingly, players are dressed with equal informality in these candid shots.
Craig Gibson was responsible for these photos as well, 37 which were mostly
taken during Pro Tour matches (aside from a few apparently taken in
between games). Recalling the convention of sports cards’ backs, Pro Tour
Player Cards display statistics about each player, including Pro Tour top 8
appearances, Pro Tour median finishes, highest constructed and limited
ratings, ­DCI-sanctioned 38 matches played, and winnings in U.S. dollars.
This last statistic attests to the “rewards” that Buehler emphasized in his
defense of the Pro Tour Player Cards: the cards constitute an aspirational
appeal for serious Magic players because of an enticing sum. By making
an appeal to players to play more Magic, the cards differ in tone signifi-
cantly from traditional sports cards, which are neither conceived of nor
funded by their leagues as a marketing device. Moreover, unlike in sports
cards, where statistics are laid out in grid format by year, each statistic on a
Pro Tour Players Card is a cumulative total. In the Pro Tour system, there
was no such thing as a rookie year; players gained Pro Tour invites based
on their performance at recent Grand Prixs and Pro Tour Qualifiers. For
many nonprofessional players this meant that they would qualify for a sin-
gle Pro Tour in a career of competitive Magic, and others would qualify off
and on, attending what they could based on fluctuations in performance.
While professional sports compensate players with contracts, Magic in the
Pro Tour era was a more precarious affair.39 It would not have fit with this
compensation system to keep track of stats by year; nonetheless, the stats
on the back recall the conventions of sports cards.

Impact, Reception, and Discontinuation

The cards’ uneven reception seems to offer one explanation for their
discontinuation in 2007. In interviews with current and former pro play-
ers, the most commonly used descriptor overall for the cards was “cool.”
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  121

Independently of each other, Luis ­Scott-Vargas, Raphaël Lévy, Osyp Lebe-

dowicz, John Finkel, PVDDR, and Reid Duke all used that word to describe
the Pro Tour Players Cards. The contrast between the general enthusiasm
from the pros and ­a spiring-pros (such as Duke and ­Scott-Vargas) and the
confusedly negative reaction in the forums that Buehler responded to in
the September 2005 Ask Wizards column speaks to the difficulty of appeal-
ing to the whole of Magic’s player base. As Brian ­David-Marshall, Wizards’
former Pro Tour Historian (2005–2019), described,
Wizards has always struggled, I think, with the competitive player versus the
social player. A lot of people want to say “casual,” but I don’t think that’s the
right term. I really prefer the term “social,” because those people care about
Magic in a way that could never be described as “casual.” But they don’t play
the game to be the most successful player in the world. […] And I think social
players opened up a pack, and there’s Osyp Lebedowicz looking at them, and
they’re like “I don’t—who is this? Why isn’t this a goblin token?” […] And so
there was I think a disconnect from the competitive and the social players.40
­David-Marshall’s explanation provides some insight into the disappoint-
ing public reception that Buhler was tasked with responding to after the
Pro Tour Player Cards’ announcement. But it should come as no sur-
prise that the players who participated in having their photographs taken
and seeing themselves as cards were enthusiastic at the time and look
back on these cards fondly. Nor should we expect any different from the
­t hen-aspiring players who would eventually break into professional Magic.
However, not even all ­a spiring-pros saw the cards in equally positive
terms. As former pro Sam Black emphasized, though he was well aware of
the Pro Tour Player Cards before he went pro around 2010, it was actually
an invitational card (Figure 2) that he most wanted to bear his image.
Invitational cards were printed in ­s tandard-legal41 Magic sets like
most other cards, but each was originally designed by the winner of the
Magic Invitational, a yearly ­16-person ­i nvitation-only tournament that
ran from 1997 to 2007. The winner of each Magic Invitational would sub-
mit a design for a card they wanted to see become part of the game, which
would then go through phases of development and tweaking (as any other
card would) to ensure that the card would not be ­game-breaking. After
development but before printing, the Magic Invitational winner would
themselves be illustrated for the card they designed, as Finkel was on his
card, Shadowmage Infiltrator (Figure 2). As Black described, “design-
ing a card was the height of officially making your mark on the game as
a player,” whereas the Pro Tour Player Cards were “a bit sillier.” As Black
elaborated, “when you buy a pack of Magic cards, you’re buying a game,
not baseball cards. It was kind of apparent that [the Pro Tour Player Cards]
felt a little out of place.”42 Black’s comments highlight a contrast between
122   Economies and Esports

Fig. 2: Shadowmage Infiltrator, Jon Finkel’s invitational card.

 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  123

invitational cards and the

Pro Tour Player Cards (Fig-
ure 3). Both acknowledge
the achievements of some
of the game’s top com-
petitors by representing
a ­r eal-world person on a
card sold inside of a Magic
product, but the invita-
tional cards do so subtly,
in a way that social play-
ers would not find confus-
ing or wasteful. While the
Magic Invitational is no
more, starting in 2019 with
the release of the expansion
set “Throne of Eldraine,”
Wizards began printing
Player Spotlight cards. As
Rosewater described, “we
will be involving the cur-
rent World Champion in a
new player spotlight card. Fig. 3: Finkel’s Hall of Fame Pro Tour Player
While they won’t design Card (2006).
it, they will consult with
R&D on its selection and will appear pictured in the art.” 43 PVDDR, who
won the 2019 World Championship, is the only player to be depicted on
both a Player Spotlight card (Elite Spellbinder) and a Pro Tour Player Card
(2007). Comparing the two, he stated that his Player Spotlight card is “not
just an ad, this is a real card with me in it that I was part of, so it means a
lot more to me than the previous one.” Like the invitational cards, Player
Spotlight cards are illustrated instead of photographed; fantasy instead of
mundane reality; game pieces rather than promotional products. Coinci-
dentally, the last Magic Invitational was held in the same year that the Pro
Tour Player Cards were discontinued. Mark Rosewater, Head Designer for
Magic, explained that the Magic Invitational stopped due to “a bunch of
things” but singled out that “the people at Wizards (the ones making the
decisions about events) at the time didn’t really get the event.”44
We might be tempted to question whether the moment for profes-
sional Magic had passed with the discontinuation of these two ways (the
Pro Tour Player Cards and the invitational cards) of “making your mark”
on the game, but a number of Magic professionals continued to play in
124   Economies and Esports

relative financial stability from 2007 to the Pro Tour’s end in 2019. Play-
ers like Sam Black, Reid Duke, and Luis ­Scott-Vargas would continue on
to professional careers in the game post–2007, making money through
tournament winnings, Pro Players Club rewards45 for their consistency at
the game, content creation, and jobs in both online and ­brick-and-mortar
Magic retail. Others such as Gabriel Nassif and Jon Finkel took hiatuses
from the game (for poker, in both their cases) before returning in the
2010s; Nassif would eventually take a spot in the MPL, and Finkel works
for a hedge fund. Raphaël Lévy, the player with the record for the most Pro
Tour appearances (99) and later an MPL member, rose to the top of pro
Magic and has managed to stay there since 1997.46 This sampling of player
experiences illustrates that it was still very much possible to be a Magic pro
between 2007 and 2019; whether the path to professionalization was egali-
tarian or reasonably sustainable is another question.47

Parallel Timelines: Esports in the Aughts

In the time between the Pro Tour’s advent and the discontinuation
of the Pro Tour Player Cards (1996–2007), esports such as ­Counter-Strike,
StarCraft, and DotA were organizing competitions, creating spectacle for
audiences, and attracting sponsors. In the early history of esports,48 com-
munity members were grappling with issues around how to coordinate
spectatorship, whether careers could spring forth from competitive gam-
ing, and whether communities should appeal to game developers to get
involved. For each of these topics, the history of the Pro Tour parallels the
development of North American esports.49 In pursuing this essay’s central
question of why esports passed Wizards by after the disappearance of the
Pro Tour Player Cards, I address each topic in turn.

Spectatorship
Esports in the aughts initially relied more on replays and videos on
demand than on live broadcasting. As Taylor describes,
Regular competitive titles, including ­Counter-Strike, Warcraft, and Starcraft
(to name just a few), actually have embedded within them the functionality for
any given match to be recorded, saved, and reviewed.50

These replay functions were central to early esports spectatorship (as well
as speedrunning and machinima, as Lowood 51 and Krapp52 have noted)
because they involved relatively small files suitable for download on com-
paratively limited bandwidth in the aughts. Instead of trying to view a
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  125

match live, one could download a replay, open it up in the game’s client,
and watch the recorded action using a fraction of the data necessary today
for ­l ive-streaming. Accompanying these replays, one could download an
audio track from sources such as SHOUTcast to synch it with the replay.
As Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham described at GDC 2018:
These spectator tools were also serving as the cameras to you if you were
watching, so you could connect to HLTV, connect to Quake GTV, and then
you could actually listen to the audio shoutcast, pause it right when it was
about to start, and then unpause it when the spectator client came up.53
Magic even before this time had broadcasted competitive events such as
a few World Championships and Pro Tours on ESPN2 between 1997 and
2000. Chris Galvin, Head of Organized Play (2000–2009) recalled that
“Curiously enough it [Magic’s coverage] stopped airing on ESPN2 shortly
before televised poker became a giant craze. […] Clearly people will sit
around and watch a magazine format television show of people playing a
card game; we just got there too early.”54 The ratings for these events were
not high enough for ESPN or Wizards’ satisfaction, and after the part-
nership stopped Wizards kept producing video for competitive events
but searched for alternative means of distribution. In the late 90s, Wiz-
ards began converting recorded video into RealPlayer’s format and post-
ing downloadable clips to Wizards’ website. For Pro Tour Brussels in 2000,
Wizards undertook its first truly livestream production in collaboration
with RealPlayer.
It was ancient and the quality was terrible. The number of viewers that we had
was usually in the hundreds. And we didn’t do it consistently. So it’s like, we
would do it for one show, and then we’d be like “Well, I mean we’re spending
an awful lot of effort and we got three hundred people to watch, is that really
worth it?”55
Magic streaming had gone “in fits and starts” in this early experimenta-
tion as Wizards attempted new ideas with its stream. But the 2003 World
Championship in Berlin marked two changes: Wizards was able to host
the stream on Wizards.com without routing viewers through RealPlayer,
and from this tournament on, Magic would stream every Pro Tour, World
Championship, and U.S. Nationals event in part or in whole. Magic con-
tinued streaming in this way for years before the advent of Twitch.
Two Pro Tour Player Cards acknowledge the game’s broadcast his-
tory: Osyp Lebedowicz’s 2006 and Gabriel Nassif ’s 2007 cards. Lebedo-
wicz’s bio mentions that “he’s been featured in Magic segments on cable
TV” (emphasis in the original), referring to interviews he gave on Play-
boy TV, NBC, and G4.56 Lebedowicz reflected that at the 2004 Magic Invi-
tational, Wizards “made us go through media training” for hours and that
126   Economies and Esports

he and Justin Gary were the only ones who “passed” this media training,
leading to them giving interviews about Magic. Lebedowicz went on,
[A] lot of that stuff back then, even [Attack of the Show!], they were basically
making fun of us Magic players, […] today it may be a little bit more in the
norm, but back then it was more just like they would poke fun at us for being
gamers and stuff like that because, again, [professional] gaming really wasn’t
like it is today.57

The venues for these appearances, such as Playboy TV, speak to the gen-
dered presentation of pro Magic: pro players connote a geek masculin-
ity in contradistinction to Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity,
and as such Lebedowicz recounts a certain tone of fascination and scorn
from these interviewers. Meanwhile, Nassif ’s card states that his “impres-
sive finish [at the 2006 World Championships] led Pro Tour commenta-
tor Randy Buehler to dub him the ‘number three ­a ll-time’ player in the
game.” (Buehler was implying Jon Finkel and Kai Budde as the first two.)
Buehler, the same person who had responded to the September 2005 Ask
Wizards column announcing the Pro Tour Player Cards, was a frequent
commentator at Pro Tour webcasts and among the most recognizable per-
sonalities from this period in the game’s broadcast history. Most cards do
not explicitly mention the broadcasts, but all Pro Tour players would have
been aware of them.

Professionalization of Play
Perhaps the most famous professional gamer of early North Amer-
ican esports history is Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, who achieved fame
in twitchy ­f irst-person shooters of the late 90s and early aughts. As T.L.
Taylor notes: “Fatal1ty was reported to have won $300,000 in total prize
money, $150,000 of that from a single Cyberathlete Professional League
tournament,” as of a 60 Minutes piece that covered his story in 2006. 58
Making ­h igh-performing players visible to a broader audience has long
been used as a means of promoting a game and inspiring other players to
achieve distinction for themselves through increased engagement with the
game. Even before the beginning of the esports era in the aughts, figures
of competitive arcade game play in the 1980s such as Walter Day partnered
with the game industry to raise the profile of ­h igh-achieving competitive
players (see, for example, Kocurek’s ­Coin-Operated Americans).59
The Pro Tour Player Cards illustrate by example Wizards’ history of
commitment to the professional scene and willingness to promote pro play
as one way to market the game. Skaff Elias, former Brand Manager for Magic
and characterized by Sam Black as “the original visionary of the Pro Tour,”60
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  127

described the promotional media as about “building up stars for the aspi-
rational aspect of the Pro Tour, which we felt was very important. I mean,
from before the Pro Tour ever launched, we felt that was one of the keys.”61
Comparing Fatal1ty’s 60 Minutes profile to Kai Budde’s card from the year
before (see Figure 1), Budde had by 2005 already made more than Fatal1ty in
his competitive career: $349,345. Budde would go on to become part of the
Rivals league for competitive Magic by 2020 after taking a hiatus from the
game for most of the interim between 2004 and 2019. Budde’s grand total
of winnings is exceptional within Magic, and it entailed winning seven Pro
Tours very early on (a record which has stood since his last Pro Tour win in
2003); his closest competitor, Jon Finkel, has won three. Just because Bud-
de’s Magic winnings came to such a great total, that does not mean that pro
Magic was sustainable for many in the aughts. So it is with Fatal1ty’s contem-
poraries; investment in esports increased from the end of the aughts into the
2010s, and with this increased investment came wider opportunities for pro-
fessional play than for just a ­single-digit number of players. Magic and early
esports share much in common in this regard.

­Community-Developer Partnership
At the heart of any new esport is a negotiation between grassroots
­community-building and developer support. Early esports such as DotA
and ­Counter-Strike started as mods before drawing the attention of game
development studios 62 ; up to that point, the stakes of tournaments were
pride, or recognition, or enough money to cover travel expenses. As
chronicled in the ­community-focused documentary The Smash Brothers,63
Super Smash Bros. Melee spent about ten years of its competitive history
as a grassroots scene without investment from Nintendo. On the contrary,
Nintendo actively suppressed competitive Melee despite a ­community-led
charity drive leading up to EVO 2013.64 Most developers were not averse to
esports in the way Nintendo chose to be at the time, but many of the most
successful esports proved themselves first as grassroots movements before
developers stepped in to take more direct roles in promoting the competi-
tive scene. In Marcus Graham’s words:
At the start of esports, obviously, publishers/developers were not thinking
about their own leagues. In fact, many of the tasks that were assigned to people
who were just passionate about esports early on, were trying to do everything
you can to get the attention of ID Software, Epic, Valve—whoever it was, like
“This is happening, support it!”65

This relationship between community and developer can be fraught, but

when an entity like Valve Software puts tens of millions of dollars into
128   Economies and Esports

an annual prize pool (through crowdfunding) for a tournament like The

International, it does much to raise the profile of the esport and bring in
a wider player base for the game, as well as a wider audience of spectators.
In this regard, Magic was well ahead of digital game developers in
North America in its appreciation for the competitive scene. Communi-
ties in Magic have existed in countless forms—some competitive, some
social.66 But from an early point in Magic’s history, Wizards supported a
competitive scene for its game, investing several hundred thousand dol-
lars in prizes across five Pro Tour and one World Championship events
in 1996. With the game having only debuted in 1993, the rapidness of the
development of a Pro Tour both speaks to the game’s aggressive growth
in these years and the keenness of its appreciation for competitive play
as a way to promote Magic. Elias persuaded Wizards to make this invest-
ment early, which is why the Pro Tour holds such a legacy among current
and former players and why by 2006 there was already a Hall of Fame for
a ­13-year-old game. Moreover, the 2006 and 2007 series of Pro Tour Player
Cards themselves celebrate the first two classes of Hall of Famers because
the pro scene had already been established for so long by that time.
In all these dimensions—spectatorship, professionalization, and
­community-developer interaction—Wizards’ growth of the Pro Tour more
than kept pace with North American esports. Imposing terminology from
the present on the past retrospectively is, of course, fraught; nonetheless,
several interviewees offered distinct conceptualizations of what competi-
tive Magic is, exactly. Skaff Elias and Rick Aarons (former Vice President
of Trading Card Games at Wizards) had conceived of the Pro Tour as an
“intellectual sport” in the vein of chess and poker, for example.67 The pros
themselves did not happen to use this term during the interviews. As Luis
­Scott-Vargas described,
I think that Magic kind of was the original esport in a lot of senses, I guess
StarCraft is the actual original esport, but like Magic had—well, a ­brief-lived
stint on ESPN, but aside from that it had a very robust competitive scene and
circuit since the 90s. And it had, you know, many, many thousands of people
who kind of dreamed of this.68

Interviewees had differing views on how to classify their careers in

a primarily tabletop game after Wizards had embraced the esports par-
adigm in 2019. Raphaël Lévy identified esports as a recent “branding”
move for Magic rather than ­self-identifying as an esports player; Jon Fin-
kel described a qualified distinction between tabletop Magic and esports:
I think the problem with Magic is that it was a really, really good tabletop
game, and it’s just sort of, like, an okay electronic game. Obviously the old
Magic Pro Tour by definition if we’re calling “esport” an “electronic sport,” it
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  129

wasn’t. But I think, sort of, thematically and in terms of what it was getting at,
it was very, very similar. And if they’d chosen a slightly different term than
esport, you know, it’d probably be an easy “yes.” But as it is, maybe it was like a
­proto-esport or something else.69
As with Finkel, Lévy, and ­S cott-Vargas, no interviewee painted compet-
itive Magic as an esport without qualification. Brian ­D avid-Marshall
offered a term that addresses the question that Finkel raised in suggesting
that Magic may be “something else”: “There’s always this push that it has
to be a video game. I’ve heard people call it “­T-sports” for when you turn a
tabletop game […] It does sort of capture the distinction but also the simi-
larities [of the two].”70
Calling Magic an “intellectual sport,” a “­T-sport,” or a “­proto-esport,” or
another turn of phrase, illustrates that competitive Magic anticipated much
of the development of an esports scene in the 2010s. Before every microce-
lebrity (in and outside of esports) had a verified Twitter account and brand
presence on social media, there were the Pro Tour Player Cards, an analog
showcase of achievement for a principally analog game. Digital Magic, along
with its potential for growth into esports, existed long before 2010, but Mag-
ic’s digital development was significantly limited by MTGO (2002–).

A Day Early and a Dollar Over: The Troubles of MTGO

By releasing MTGO in 2002, Wizards expanded the game’s reach to
players in remote locations or who otherwise would not be able to access
local card shops to find ­i n-person opponents. At the professional level in
particular, Magic remained a primarily tabletop experience up to Arena’s
release in 2019. Pro Tour events never went fully ­computer-based in the
way that esports at this time conducted LAN tournaments,71 but the Magic
Invitational ran its ­16-player event through MTGO multiple times in the
aughts.72 While contemporary video games like StarCraft II and League
of Legends featured polished user experiences and slick graphics, MTGO
was showing its age as a ­17-year-old program by the time Arena was fully
released. In Raphaël Lévy’s phrasing, MTGO “looks like it could be run on
DOS, which is not what you want to be in like 2015 or 2020.”73
Beyond limitations of polish, scalability was an issue: for competitive
tournaments larger than the Magic Invitational, MTGO did not have the
confidence of those at Wizards who made the decisions concerning Orga-
nized Play. ­T hen-Head of Organized Play Chris Galvin commented that
“Magic Online was never stable enough for us to run the Pro Tour on it. We
talked about it periodically during my tenure.” Galvin further explained
the game’s stability problems:
130   Economies and Esports

A game like Magic Online desperately needs to be a ­service-oriented

architecture. Magic Online was not a ­service-oriented architecture. […]
­service-oriented architecture as a concept was only a year or two old at the
time we started working on Magic Online. […] So we made this sort of very
old school, ­IBM-like monolithic architecture. And that’s what Magic Online
[version] 1 was. It was fairly stable up to about eight thousand, ten thousand
concurrent users. Something like that. But since literally all the games are hap-
pening just on a box sitting underneath Bob’s desk, you get real serious scal-
ability problems.74

Promoting such a program on the stage of the Pro Tour would pose serious
risks. For one, any crash during a Pro Tour would compromise the integ-
rity of the competition and throw the results of any ongoing matches into
uncertainty: what if it crashes during game seven of the finals and there is
no way to recover the game state to continue play from the moment of the
crash? When tens of thousands of dollars separate first from second place,
any blemish on the game’s integrity may have ­far-reaching consequences.
Moreover, an eventuality of this kind would be a public embarrassment for
Wizards.
Though the Pro Tour itself did not run on Magic Online, a few of the
Pro Tour Player Cards mention the service. The bio on Terry Soh’s 2005
card, for example, begins by asserting that his “success is a testament to the
power of Magic Online.” A resident of Kuala Lumpur, Soh relied on MTGO
to “draft, play, and chat with anyone and everyone, improving his game
little by little,” a point that fellow international pro Magic player PVDDR
corroborated, emphasizing that MTGO made it possible for people around
the world to compete at a higher level.75 Richard Hoaen’s 2006 card simi-
larly claims that his “rash of recent successes can be attributed to ­d ie-hard
levels of Magic Online practice.” And Sam Gomersall’s 2006 card describes
his “devotion” to the game: “When Gomersall isn’t logged on to the Magic
Online game, he’s on a plane to some ­far-off locale to visit friends and play
in another tournament.” Cards such as these assert a smooth flexibility of
MTGO to simulate a tabletop experience anywhere and train players to
be the best in the world. But without question, the tabletop experience of
“paper” Magic remained the lucrative one and the final proving ground of
skill; players are not photographed at a computer on Pro Tour Player Cards
but at tables onsite at Pro Tour events.
Outside of the Pro Tour Players Cards and other forms of commu-
nication from Wizards, MTGO had a spotty reputation. The recipient of
many rants and jokes from players across the game’s history, MTGO was
perhaps not the best foot to put forward in a hypothetical push for esports
had Wizards pursued such a move earlier in the 2010s. Ethan “LordTup-
perware” Saks, a Magic ­l ive-streamer and cohost of the weekly Lords of
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  131

Limited podcast, described MTGO as “the definition of function over

form, and even then perhaps ‘function’ is not what you want to use to
describe it.” Saks went on:
it’s very new ­player-unfriendly, like you open up that client, and what the hell
are you—what do you do? Like, where do you go? “Oh, I want to play limited,”
Well then you have to buy tickets, “Well what are tickets?” There’s no, like—
they should have a like Clippy that comes in and is like ‘Hey, I’m Magic the
­C ard-y, and here, like, here’s how you navigate this stupid program.’ But they
don’t have that, so there’s, like, nowhere for you to figure that out.76

When asked what has been lacking and could be improved in MTGO,
Sam Black simply replied “Everything?” Both Saks and Black (as well as
other interviewees) identified Arena as an improvement in many respects,
with Black asserting that “Arena gave [Wizards] a product they could try
to promote and not be embarrassed by, whereas I don’t think that’s how
they felt about Magic Online.” 77
A recurring problem for Wizards in the aughts was that, counterintu-
itively, the company had been a little too far ahead of the game for its own
good. The Pro Tour Player Cards exemplify Wizards’ early commitment to
professional play. Beyond those, Wizards broadcasted on ESPN2 shortly
before poker blew up; it got into ­T-sports (to borrow ­David-Marshall’s bor-
rowed term) well before esports had taken off in North America; it pio-
neered ­l ive-streaming before the available video quality was capable of
making the game legible to anyone but players already familiar with the
cards; and it developed a digital card game before ­service-oriented archi-
tecture’s widespread use. This last development ended up shackling any
of Wizards’ intended innovation to an already outdated infrastructure
and creating a chasm between Magic and its counterparts in competitive
gaming. As Galvin described, if Wizards had tried to create a new digital
Magic from scratch,

we knew that we probably were not going to be able to transfer people’s exist-
ing collections from Magic Online for a variety of reasons. And that was always
the anchor around our neck, was “Oh man we’ve got thousands and thou-
sands and thousands of players who have spent thousands and thousands and
thousands of dollars, and are we really just going to turn this thing off at some
point?” That is such a screw job.78

Consequently, Wizards kept MTGO going through to the present, despite

the forum rants and frequent complaints from players. Had Wizards hap-
pened to delay the development of MTGO by a few years, in Galvin’s view,
many of the structural problems with the game such as ­service-oriented
architecture would have become more readily solvable.
132   Economies and Esports

Entering the Arena

In the years leading up to the release of Arena in 2019 and the sweep-
ing structural changes to Organized Play that soon followed (ending the
Pro Tour, discontinuing the World Magic Cup, removing the Pro Players
Club rewards, installing the Magic Pro League, etc.), Magic found itself
with new digital competitors. Wizards had known tabletop competitors
such as the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and ­Yu-Gi-Oh!, but until 2014 few
serious digital competitors had challenged Wizards within the competi-
tive online trading card game genre. Hearthstone’s release marked a change
in landscape, however.79 The game from Blizzard distinguished itself as
everything that MTGO was not: slick, intuitive, and ­streaming-ready, it
was designed to welcome new players and featured overwhelmingly bet-
ter polished sound and visual design than MTGO. Moreover, from early
on it staked out a territory for digital card games within esports. Hearth-
stone saw a competitive debut before its official release at BlizzCon 2013,
and its BlizzCon 2014 tournament boasted a $250,000 prize pool.80 Bliz-
zard was, by this time, quite familiar with the potential of esports to publi-
cize its games; its StarCraft had sold 4.5 million of its 9.5 million copies in
Korea,81 where the game achieved a status akin to a national sport. As such,
Hearthstone expanded the digital trading card genre in ways that blind-
sided Wizards. Galvin, whose time at Wizards ended in 2009 but whose
chief responsibilities there had included MTGO, and who would go on
to Amazon to work on a game engine optimized for esports play, looked
back on Blizzard’s release of Hearthstone with “jealous […] admiration”:
“I mostly thought ‘Damn, this is what it cost us to not be technically better
than we were during my tenure.’”82 In the eyes of some interviewees, Wiz-
ards had been coasting on MTGO as a digital counterpart to tabletop Magic
that was functional enough, but MTGO had not been persistently innovat-
ing its product to retain its dominant position within the digital card game
market. Instead, Hearthstone arrived as a wakeup call. MTGO may have
simulated Magic well enough for pros like Terry Soh, Richard Hoaen, and
Sam Gomersall to level up and succeed such that they were recognized on
Pro Tour Player Cards, but for the wider consumer base and for the game’s
potential as an esport, Wizards needed a totally new program.
With Arena’s release, Wizards appeared intent on correcting its past
mistakes and seizing what it could of the esports moment. Arena navi-
gated a third option for Wizards rather than either (1) keeping MTGO
afloat as its sole digital product83 or (2) terminating MTGO altogether. As
Švelch has noted, “WotC is technically selling the same content in three
incompatible forms.”84 Indeed, Arena does not interfere with MTGO and
its deeply invested player base; inventories are not transferable between
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  133

Arena and MTGO, and unlike MTGO, Arena is designed not to have a
secondary market for the private buying and selling of cards. While ser-
vices continue for MTGO as it receives inventory updates with the release
of new Magic sets and even some cosmetic upgrades, Arena became the
clear focus for Wizards as it pursued an esports profile for the game. In
­S cott-Vargas’s account, when Arena debuted it very rapidly altered the
course of professional Magic towards an esports paradigm.
Arena came out, and everyone was just, like, “Magic Arena, Magic Arena,” and
they’d even said Arena was so successful so quickly that they pivoted and the
MPL was supposed to be a year later than it was. And they kind of had to rush
it out the door.85

As another interviewee noted, while Arena enjoyed great initial success, sales
were declining until the onset of the ­COVID-19 pandemic, a boom period for
digital games of all kinds. Arena is not the runaway success it may have ini-
tially appeared to be, and overall it has been closer to fine than phenomenal.
To its credit, Arena did offer “a cleaner, more watchable product” for Magic
viewers, as Schumaker’s essay in this collection attests. The new client also
marked a set of competitive consequences; Black, who retired from profes-
sional Magic after the change to Arena, critiqued the new system’s emphasis
on Arena as a necessary component of the professional experience: “Mak-
ing it impossible to play at the highest levels of paper Magic without Arena
is a mistake.”86 In his view, the Pro Tour had established a legacy and legiti-
macy for tabletop Magic that Arena then borrowed from in the new system
to encourage people “to take Arena seriously.” This new direction, along with
sweeping changes to professional compensation and the discontinuation of
Pro Players Club rewards, discouraged many pros and ­aspiring-pros from
pursuing their professional goals in the game. Moreover, the move to Arena
altered the core brand identity of Magic: returning to Trammell’s phrasing,
the “craft beer” and “conversation” connotation of Magic as a tabletop game
moved suddenly toward the “Mountain Dew” and “headsets” of digital games
and especially esports.87 This change in the game’s brand identity exacerbated
the sudden revisions in prize structure to make Magic suddenly unfamiliar
to some of the game’s most dedicated competitors. Esports arrived in Magic a
few years later than it might have and with ­far-reaching consequences for the
pros who had been in the game for its ­twenty-year history.

Sunset: An Esports Autopsy for MPL and Rivals

As noted above, the first round of interviews for this essay took place
when the MPL and Rivals, having replaced the Pro Tour model, were the
134   Economies and Esports

sole means of playing Magic professionally. Within a year after these inter-
views, however, the MPL and Rivals were sunset in an announcement in
May of 2021, effective at the end of the current season (spring of 2022).
After this announcement, with the end of the MPL and Rivals in sight and
without any specific details about what system(s) might be replacing those
leagues, I followed up with several interviewees and conducted additional
interviews. As this essay has shown, Wizards has at times stumbled over
itself when adapting to, coexisting with, or emulating the esports para-
digm. The professional players, many of whose careers demonstrate a life-
long love for the game, have themselves experienced some of the greatest
frustrations among any players regarding how the competitive scene has
been managed (and mismanaged) since the ejection of the Pro Tour model
and sudden shift into esports. As such, these more recent interviews were
often forcefully worded and direct in their criticism of Wizards. Inter-
viewees offered pointed comments explaining how the MPL failed, and
while such remarks are of course subject to the bias of hindsight (and col-
ored by personal feelings of being burned by Wizards), they nonetheless
have validity. They are, first of all, valid accounts of how a community of
players experienced their livelihoods being suddenly upended; moreover,
as one interviewee noted, the pro players’ expertise as “people whose pro-
fession is to find holes in systems” (competitive environments in Magic)
uniquely qualifies them to articulate the problems of Wizards’ embrace of
the esports paradigm in the MPL and Rivals.
When it first began, the MPL marked a cutoff point between the top
32 performing players and the rest of the competitive community, as mea-
sured by Pro Points at the end of the 2018–2019 season. Up to that point,
professional and ­s emi-pro Magic players had, through the Pro Players
Club, widely been able to grind out a living with consistently strong per-
formances. In the change to the MPL system, the state of affairs became
“so much money for the few” and “scraps left for the rest,” as one inter-
viewee described it. Moreover, how to get into the MPL was complex to an
opaque degree. As one interviewee described it, Wizards “created a system
that made you feel like you could never be part of it because it was so hard
to get into.” As Magic YouTuber Brian Lewis, creator of Tolarian Commu-
nity College, remarked: “The MPL and Rivals leagues failed because no
one could understand how they worked, and I made a video about how
they worked, and I still didn’t understand.”88 An immediate consequence
from all this change to an opaque system was that the aspirational qual-
ity of pro Magic, which Skaff Elias and Rick Aarons had labored to instill
in the pro scene since the 1990s, was effectively dead. Even longtime pro-
fessional players had at best a remote hope of making the MPL; viewers,
who under the Pro Tour system could imagine themselves sitting across
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  135

the table from a pro at a Grand Prix, no longer had a plausible aspiration
to professional Magic, and this had secondary negative consequences for
viewership of streamed pro events.
The streaming product Wizards offered at this time exacerbated the
situation. To explain why, as Schumaker notes in this collection, Wizards’
“attempts to reorient professional play around [T]witch and streaming
[was] not immediately successful,” at the start of the MPL, Standard (the
most widely played competitive environment) suffered from the smoth-
ering ubiquity of overpowered cards such as Once Upon a Time and Oko,
Thief of Crowns (both from expansion Throne of Eldraine). Arena, whose
initial success prompted an expedited rollout of the MPL system, was (and
still is at time of writing) incapable of a true spectator mode, unlike many
popular esports such as League of Legends. Since Magic is a game with hid-
den information, spectators necessarily want to see the board state from
both sides, including the contents of each player’s hand. The inelegant
solution to this lack of spectator mode is to splice together two players’
feeds of the game through video call and present them together in a sin-
gle stream. When one player’s connection experiences a hiccup, or when
two players display cards in different languages, the seams of this produc-
tion conspicuously show. Moreover, the tournament schedule frequently
and inexplicably showcased formats that interviewees described as “dead”
or “lame duck.” Because Magic observes regular seasonal releases, formats
change several times per year. But when MPL competitions were sched-
uled shortly before, rather than shortly after, a new set’s release, the com-
petition provided little interest to prospective viewers whose minds were
already on recently spoiled cards from the upcoming set. This scheduling
issue, as several interviewees emphasized, happened repeatedly.
Cedric Phillips, longtime commentator and skilled player in his own
right, described a critical flaw of the MPL and Rivals system as a failing of
making viewers care. “In my opinion, [Wizards] didn’t make the players
relatable at all, they didn’t make the tournaments matter, at all.”89 Describ-
ing the unlikely success of Matias Leveratto in Mythic Championship III
(June 2019), Phillips noted that Leveratto, an as yet unknown player, qual-
ified through Arena events to enter the Championship, there battling his
way to the grand finals to face Brad Nelson, a widely known and respected
pro. Leveratto’s ­match-saving draw at the end of game two produced an
electric moment for the underdog and scintillating viewing material—
evocative, in Phillips’ view, of Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 win in the World
Series of Poker, with that likewise unknown amateur contributing to the
poker boom of the aughts as a “this could be you” story. Phillips explained:
This is the dream, Leverato should be everywhere now. He should be on
Weekly MTG, he should be on websites writing, when you open Arena, you
136   Economies and Esports

should see a big trophy shot of him, he should be everywhere to the point
where you’re tired of it! “I don’t want to see him anymore!” Right? He was
nowhere. He was nowhere to be found. And that, to me, kind of symbolizes
everything that went wrong with this. Is that you actually, as far as under-
standing what you’re trying to accomplish and what the goals are, right?
Because you actually got giftwrapped a ­best-case scenario. You couldn’t draw
it up any better. And, if I’m being honest, it was a player from Argentina, not
even a United States player, so it’s like “Hey, we’re global too! You can do it
anywhere,” right? And they didn’t capitalize on it at all. And if you’re not going
to capitalize on that, then what can you capitalize on? And the answer, obvi-
ously, was nothing.
If the Standard environment was lackluster for players and viewers alike,
if the pros were made to play lame duck formats, if the viewing experience
fell short of industry standards, if the larger consequences of a pro match
were opaque, if the viewing experience had lost all its aspirational appeal,
and if Wizards was unable to capitalize on ­best-case scenarios to present
champions as relatable underdogs in an esport with global reach, then why
indeed should viewers care? Viewership numbers of MPL matches proved
to be underwhelming, often fewer than 10,000 concurrent, and soon the
writing was on the wall that the MPL was failing to meet expectations.
Understandably, the pros were as frustrated as anyone else with the
disappointing performance of the MPL and Rivals. After the announced
sunsetting of the MPL and Rivals leagues, one interviewee offered this
lighthearted comparison:
The whole thing is kind of like that meme where that guy who sticks the stick
in his own wheel in his bike, you know? […] And then he falls, and I feel like
that’s Organized Play. It’s like, “Nothing we could have done, you know? Just
bad luck and it didn’t work out.”

Another interviewee was more cutting in their remarks:

On the one hand, this is what I do best. I play Magic, that’s what I’m good at,
and I can give that knowledge to others, and I can entertain people. That’s how
I make my money, I need Magic to live. On the other hand, I really hate Wiz-
ards/Hasbro/whoever did this to us and treated us like shit, to just throw us
away like this and completely shit on a ­25-year legacy—that’s insane. I don’t
know how the people supposed to take care of us accepted this.

Both capture the exasperation with Wizards and deep doubt that Orga-
nized Play might be restored to what it was in the Pro Tour era. It is, of
course, possible that a number of interviewees will see themselves as pro
Magic players in the near future, but after going through whiplash only to
get burned by the MPL’s wreckage, the pros seem to have little goodwill left
for Wizards.
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  137

Conclusion
Reexamining the Pro Tour Player Cards with the benefit of hindsight,
these strange objects from Magic’s professional history signify a seemingly
passed era that eventually proved to have anticipated wider trends to come
in esports. We might wonder what competitive Magic would have looked
like had Arena arrived “on time” in the same year as Hearthstone, but the
Pro Tour Player Cards illustrate that games like Magic do not develop lin-
early or with the knowledge of future trends and the potential pitfalls of
missed opportunities. The young men photographed in these cards could
not have known where the game would take them as individuals (some
would stay with the game; others would drop off). But within these objects
is a point of reflection found nowhere else among Magic’s collectible cards:
an inward look at the players and the mundanity of even the game’s fore-
most performers. Their hoodies and ­T-shirts, their adolescent awkward-
ness, their preposterousness in striking a dominant pose for a collectible
card game, their unkempt hair—these cards tell some brutally honest
truths about who has played the game, and more specifically, who has his-
torically received recognition for playing the game (as well as who has not
been afforded that visibility). Some of the game’s issues then remain today:
­u nder-representation of women especially at the game’s top level, an image
problem of being a nerdy hobby for socially challenged players (the flip-
side of Magic’s brand identity as an endeavor for the creative and intel-
ligent), the association of such an audience with poor personal hygiene
with hundreds of players packed into an indoor space, etc. The Pro Tour
Player Cards point away from Magic’s awesome fantasy and instead hail
the person who opened a sealed product only to unexpectedly encounter
a collectible of a different kind. Arriving just slightly too early, the cards
signified a ­proto-esport with a professional path only partially open—one
that would close off in favor of another after a few years when the game
caught up with itself. And in turn, the MPL and Rivals, too, would close
off, ostensibly for a system more closely resembling the original Pro Tour.
(This system is just beginning at time of writing.)
For about two years, Magic committed its (aspiring-)professional
players to an esports model. These changes were at once too sudden (pull-
ing the rug out from under those trying to earn Pro Players Club tier
rewards ­m id-season and jumping into Arena ahead of schedule) and
long overdue (establishing a digital product that improves on the online
play experience of its ­17-year-old predecessor). For those two years, the
game’s competitive scene embraced esports in all its promise and precar-
ity. The MPL’s execution has been widely criticized, both by the pro players
themselves and by the wider competitive community. But the game also
138   Economies and Esports

showed itself to be ­i ll-fit to esports to begin with. Legibility of card text

was a known issue for the game’s prospective viewers since Magic’s days
on ESPN 2, and both Aarons and Elias suggested that to make Magic suffi-
ciently ­spectator-friendly would require a sweeping redesign of the game.90
Without such a redesign, shoehorning Magic into the esports paradigm
felt, to Phillips, “so much like Magic wanted to be a part of this thing that
was going on instead of just be who you are.” Phillips described this as
a total mess, but […] if you’re looking for the symptom of it, or the cause, it’s
a fundamental misunderstanding of what the game is competitively and what
players who play Magic competitively care about. That was the biggest prob-
lem. No one needed this game to be an esport, no one was clamoring for it to
be an esport.91
Manifestly, not all games are League of Legends, nor do all esports have
the same core appeals, nor should all esports scenes necessarily strive
for the same goals; Magic spectatorship, judging from viewership num-
bers, may offer more for retention of current players than recruitment of
new ones. The history of professional Magic offers some reason for cau-
tion to other games with competitive scenes: the esports paradigm is not
­one-size-fits-all, and strongly favorable conditions for success are moot if
the identity of the game is misaligned with an esports model.

Notes
1. Specifically, theme decks, tournament packs, and Fat Packs, but not booster packs. In
subsequent sets, a rules card, product promotion, and/or token card would be inserted as
the sixteenth card to booster packs.
2. This includes the World Championship as part of the Pro Tour series.
3. Personal interviews.
4. Ask Wizards—September, 2005. (n.d.). MAGIC: THE GATHERING. Retrieved July 6,
2020, from https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/­a sk-wizards-september-2005-
2005-09-01.
5. Shortened hereafter to simply “Wizards.”
6. Ask Wizards—September, 2005. (n.d.). MAGIC: THE GATHERING. Retrieved July 6,
2020, from https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/­a sk-wizards-september-2005-
2005-09-01.
7. As will be discussed below, Magic was broadcast on ESPN2 (­1997-2000) through
an early ­l ive-stream through RealPlayer (­2 000-2003), on Wizards.com, and eventually
through Twitch.
8. As noted in Aaron Trammell’s interview with Magic’s Head of Design Mark Rose-
water in this collection, Rosewater has responded to over 130,000 questions from Magic
fans. While the project appears to be a labor of love for Rosewater, when one user asked, “In
what ways are Magic fans better and worse than fans of other games,” Rosewater replied
that “They are better in that they play Magic (thus helping feed my family). They are worse
in that the fans of the other games never send me mean letters.” By responding to such an
enormous volume of comments, Rosewater has sustained an ­up-close dialogue with fans
through every unpopular decision, minor gripe, MSRP adjustment, and inane request; his
cheerful acknowledgment of hate mail denotes certain ambivalence.
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  139

9. Arvidsson, A. (2006). Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (1st edition).
Routledge, p. 74.
10. Ibid., 8.
11. Trammell, A. (2019). Analog Games and the Digital Economy. Analog Game Studies.
http://analoggamestudies.org/2019/03/­a nalog-games-and-the-digital-economy/.
12. Švelch, J. (2019). Mediatization of a card game: Magic: The Gathering, esports, and
streaming. Media, Culture & Society, 0163443719876536. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437
19876536.
13. I also had some correspondence via email with current Wizards employees to verify
information given by other sources, but no current employees were interviewed.
14. Until recently, the MPL was the most prestigious and lucrative position paid by Wiz-
ards, and Rivals was the league directly beneath the MPL, where players have a chance
to place into the MPL next season, much like other professional esports such as Rocket
League. In Rivals member Luis ­S cott-Vargas’s view, professional Magic was best thought of
as those two leagues put together, not just the MPL by itself (personal interview).
15. I also contacted the current director of Organized Play, but they declined the inter-
view after receiving my interview questions, stating that the topics I was asking about were
not in their wheelhouse.
16. I did reach out Autumn Burchett, a ­non-binary trans player in the MPL who won
the world championship in 2019. They declined the interview because their schedule was
already swamped at the time.
17. For a gallery of Pro Tour Player Card images, please see https://www.magiclibrarities.
net/­851-rarities-pro-tour-player-cards-english-cards-2005.html.
18. The original concept for the cards was credited to Joe Hauck, former VP of Wizards
Owned TCG Brands (personal interview with Chris Galvin, personal correspondence with
Blake Rasmussen).
19. Personal interview with Brian ­David-Marshall.
20. Players such as Nassif appeared in multiple series, so the changes in color scheme,
background, and/or outline from one year to the next help to distinguish a given Player
Card from the last year’s version. These aesthetic choices were evidently not coordinated
with major set releases.
21. For the 6’3” American in size 13 shoes, this proved to be a major hassle (personal
interview).
22. Since Core Set M12 (2011), Magic has been printed in 11 languages: English, French,
German, Italian, Chinese Traditional, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese
Simplified, and Russian. Russian was the last to be added; Chinese Traditional and Korean
were suspended for a number of years before they were ­re-added to printed Magic. Not all
Magic products are printed in every available language. And there exist special printings
of individual cards in languages such as Latin and Arabic, but only the aforementioned 11
have ever been printed on the scale of full sets.
23. Trammell, A. (2019). Analog Games and the Digital Economy. Analog Game Studies.
http://analoggamestudies.org/2019/03/­a nalog-games-and-the-digital-economy/.
24. Personal interview.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Švelch’s emphasis on hegemonic and toxic masculinities in game culture is well
placed. Accounts abound regarding the multiple layers of gatekeeping that discourage
women and nonbinary players from identifying as gamers, question their intentions for
playing, exclude them from social relationships that mentor male players, harass and dis-
criminate against them based on their gender, and threaten their safety for participating.
As two examples of writing on this topic, please see Romine, M. (2019 June 24). Wom-
en’s Esports Competitions: A Path to Equity. Medium. https://medium.com/@rhoulette/­
womens-esports-competitions-a-path-to-equity-65edbc7c6b29 and Women in Gaming at
UCI. (2017, February 9). UCI Esports. https://esports.uci.edu/­women-in-gaming-at-uci/.
28. As Elaine Chase announced through Wizards’ Magic.gg website, the MPL added
“sixteen discretionary slots to each of the MTG Arena Mythic Championships for the
140   Economies and Esports

2019 season” to “invite a broader representation of the Magic competitive community to

­h igh-level play.” MPL adds Janne “Savjz” Mikkonen and Jessica Estephan—News. (n.d.).
MAGIC: THE GATHERING | ESPORT. Retrieved December 11, 2020, from http://magic.
gg/news/­mpl-adds-janne-savjz-mikkonen-and-jessica-estephan.
29. Personal correspondence.
30. At this time in Magic’s pro history, sponsorship and team affiliation was limited,
making the clothing choices for most players particularly nondescript. An exception to
this general rule is Mark Herberholz’s 2007 card in which he wears a black polo with small
yellow text on the left breast: “R.I.W. Hobbies Livonia, Michigan.” Sponsorship and team
affiliation would become much more widespread in pro Magic years later, leading to team
jerseys, card sleeves with sponsored logos, etc.
31. With two exceptions: Antoine Ruel’s 2005 card and his brother Oliver Ruel’s 2006
card, both of which show their respective subjects handling Magic cards on the front images.
It would appear coincidental that these two brothers and no one else are shown this way.
32. Taylor, T.L. (2012). Raising the Stakes: ­E -Sports and the Professionalization of Com-
puter Gaming. MIT Press. p. 111.
33. Ibid., p. 116.
34. Infamously, in March of 2014 a Grand Prix Richmond attendee photographed
from behind a number of competitors whose cracks were exposed during the tournament,
posting the photo set to Reddit. The post went viral and drew attention and criticism for
fat-shaming people on social media using photos taken without consent.
35. Witkowski, E. (2012). On the Digital Playing Field: How We “Do Sport” With Net-
worked Computer Games. Games and Culture, 7(5), 349–374.
36. Outside of the traditional sports cards produced by companies such as Topps, Fleer
(until 2005), Upper Deck, etc., ­smaller-scale printings have created cards for chess (includ-
ing a series by Svijet Sporta from the former Yugoslavia), poker (including series in 2006
and 2007 from Razor Poker), and even classic arcade gaming (Walter Day of Twin Galax-
ies continues to produce cards for this series, among other series on an eclectic range of
topics). The Svijet Sporta cards feature prose instead of statistics on their backsides; Razor
Poker cards list minimal stats such year of birth and career tournament winnings; esports
cards in The Walter Day Collection feature high scores as well as short biographies for
arcade game competitors.
37. Personal interview with Brian ­David-Marshall.
38. Or “Duelists’ Convocation International,” the body that, until 2020, sanctioned
tournaments for Magic and other games. Having an event sanctioned (as opposed to play-
ing a tournament among friends or card shop patrons for private stakes) facilitates a rela-
tionship between Wizards and local game stores. Sanctioning gives those stores access to
new products ahead of release, prize support provided by Wizards, etc. While DCI identifi-
cation numbers have been sunsetted, Wizards continues to sanction tournaments through
their Companion app.
39. As former pro player Sam Black describes it, playing Magic competitively “is a way
to earn the credentials to be a Magic journalist, essentially” (personal interview). That is,
becoming recognized as a pro in the Pro Tour era created opportunities for one to write
content for sites like Channel Fireball and Star City Games. This content has been for many
pros the bread and butter to complement tournament winnings and make professional
careers sustainable, especially before these players could stream on Twitch.
40. Personal interview.
41. That is, the regular seasonally released sets that can be played in Standard format
tournaments. In any given year, Wizards is liable to make a number of other releases,
including new Commander products, special sets like Jumpstart, Duel Decks, etc., that
are not ­Standard-legal. But the invitational cards were all designed to be playable in all for-
mats, especially Standard.
42. Personal interview.
43. Rosewater, M. (2019 July 21). Project Booster Fun. MAGIC: THE GATHERING.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/­m aking-magic/­p roject-booster-fun-
2019-07-20.
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  141

44. Rosewater, M. (n.d.). Blogatog. Blogatog. Retrieved July 28, 2020, from https://
markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/170748653133/­d o-you-know-why-the-invitational-
stopped-i-assume.
45. The Pro Players Club (­2005-2019) was a system designed to reward players’ competi-
tive achievements by compensating them with “appearance fees” for attending major tour-
naments. In this tiered system, players who consistently placed well and attended many
large events would qualify for these rewards. One need not place first overall in a tourna-
ment to earn points; because Magic is a ­h igh-variance game in which “anyone can miss
their third land drop” (in Luis ­S cott-Vargas’s phrasing, personal interview), this system
enabled many “grinders'' of professional Magic to keep themselves financially stable. It was
discontinued in 2019 when the MPL was announced.
46. This is not to say that Lévy did not also experience great precarity as a Magic pro.
He failed to make the MPL in its first season because during the qualifying year he “had by
far [his] worst season ever.” Due to the shift to the ­p ost-Pro Tour system which weighted
professional compensation heavily at the top, for Lévy making the MPL in 2019 meant the
difference between “not making anything from Magic” and “[having] a bright future in
Magic.” He described his path to the MPL as a “rollercoaster” (personal interview).
47. I should also acknowledge that because interviewees were already known for their
successes in professional Magic, any claims about professional stability based on their
experiences alone would be very much subject to survivor’s bias. In Nassif ’s words, “I
always wonder what I would have done if I had failed or if it hadn’t worked out, but it
always worked out, so I never had to worry about anything really. I was making money at
Magic, I was a profitable Magic player and then I was a profitable poker player. I just figured
I’d be fine some way somehow. Just really fortunate I guess” (personal interview).
48. Competitive gaming existed in other forms prior to the late 1990s. Arcade gaming,
for example, had a competitive scene in the 1980s in which winners competed for prizes
such as personal arcade cabinets. For the purpose of this essay, “esports” connotes a set of
practices beyond the act of competition itself, including spectatorship and professionaliza-
tion. In this sense, esports is a ­t wenty-first century phenomenon.
49. I specify North America here because, as Dal Yong Jin has described in Korea’s
Online Gaming Empire, the development of esports in Korea happened well ahead of the
rest of the world. Magic cards were not even printed in Korean between 1998 and 2011,
much less was Korea a center of competitive Magic during this time; therefore the closer
point of comparison is North American esports.
50. Raising the Stakes, p. 199.
51. Lowood, H. (2006). ­H igh-performance play: The making of machinima. Journal of
Media Practice, 7, 25–42.
52. Krapp, P. (2011). MACHINIMA AND THE SUSPENSIONS OF ANIMATION. In
Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (pp. ­93-112). University of Minnesota
Press.
53. Graham, M., Romine, M., Smith, S., & Williams, P. (2018). Esports Day: Esports Is
How Old?? Stories and Lessons from Those Who Were There. GDC 2018.
54. Personal interview. As noted above, this essay’s reference point is North American,
rather than Korean, esports. By 2000, OGN in Korea was broadcasting StarCraft matches
on cable, but North American esports did not have this type of media coverage.
55. Personal interview with Chris Galvin.
56. Personal interview with Osyp Lebedowicz.
57. Ibid.
58. Raising the Stakes, p. 267n2.
59. Kocurek, C.A. (2015). ­C oin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video
Game Arcade. University of Minnesota Press.
60. Personal interview.
61. Personal interview.
62. Boluk, S., & LeMieux, P. (2017). The Turn of the Tide: International ­E-Sports and the
Undercurrency in Dota 2. In Metagaming: Playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trad-
ing, making, and breaking videogames.
142   Economies and Esports

63. Beauchamp, T. (2013). The Smash Brothers. East Point Pictures.

64. Most recently, a Twitter user by the name of “anonymoussmash2” posted a Twit-
Longer detailing Nintendo’s ­y ears-long suppression of competitive Melee, keeping
the scene down by scaring off interested sponsors through actions such as withholding
­l ive-streaming rights. The veracity of the users’ claims have been corroborated by numer-
ous prominent Melee players and community members such as Mang0, Armada, and The
Crimson Blur. @anonymoussmash2. (2020 November 24). How Nintendo Has Hurt the
Smash Community. https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srfu4r.
65. Graham, M., Romine, M., Smith, S., & Williams, P. (2018). Esports Day: Esports Is
How Old?? Stories and Lessons from Those Who Were There. GDC 2018.
66. One such community that parallels ­Counter-Strike and other games that started as
mods is Elder Dragon Highlander, or “EDH.” Wizards ­c o-opted the format in 2011 and
rebranded it as Commander while still consulting with the Commander Rules Committee,
an entity that remains external to Wizards.
67. Personal interviews.
68. Personal interview.
69. Personal interview.
70. Personal interview.
71. I should note the existence of the Magic Online Championship Series (MOCS), a
tournament series for MTGO that from 2009 to 2019 paid out in ­f ive-figure sums to
the winner of the annual Magic Online Championships. Reid Duke won in 2011, earn-
ing a $25K “windfall” that supported his professional efforts. Though he won that tour-
nament, he did not then consider himself an esports player (personal interview). Duke
emphasized that the MOCS “was a prestigious tournament, but it was not as prestigious as
the World Championship that was played with paper cards or even the Pro Tour [which]
had this legendary status.” In 2019, the MOCS was combined with the Players Tour Qual-
ifier system to create the Champions Showcase, decreasing the size of the overall prize
pool from $250K to $70K but including an invitation to the Players Tour Finals to the top
winner. (2019 MAGIC ONLINE CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES. (n.d.). MAGIC: THE GATH-
ERING. Retrieved December 15, 2020, from https://magic.wizards.com/en/content/­2 019-
magic-online-championship-series.) (Kiritz, C. (2019 December 5). Introducing the New
Magic Online Premier Play Program. MAGIC: THE GATHERING. https://magic.wizards.
com/en/articles/archive/­m agic-digital/­i ntroducing-new-magic-online-premier-play-
program-2019-12-05.)
72. Rosewater, M. (2004, May 10). ­All-Star Studded. MAGIC: THE GATHERING.
73. Personal interview.
74. Personal interview.
75. Personal interview.
76. Personal interview.
77. Personal interview.
78. Personal interview.
79. Other competitors include SolForge (­2 016-2019) and Eternal (2016-).
80. Macy, S. (2014, May 23). Hearthstone BlizzCon Tournament Prize Pool is $250,000
USD—IGN.
81. Olsen, K. (2007, May 21). South Korean gamers get a sneak peek at ’StarCraft II’—
USATODAY.com. USA Today.
82. Personal interview.
83. Other Magic video games were released before Arena, most notably Duels of the
Planeswalkers. It debuted in 2009 with many audiovisual and user interface improvements
to MTGO, but it was not intended as a complete replacement for MTGO given its limited
deckbuilding options and modes of play. Duels offered no limited formats and a very sim-
plified version of constructed Magic, and as such it served more as an introduction to
Magic for new players than a full online Magic experience.
84. Švelch, J. (2019). Mediatization of a card game: Magic: The Gathering, esports, and
streaming. Media, Culture & Society, 0163443719876536.
85. Personal interview.
 Wasn’t in the Cards (Knutson)  143

86. Personal interview.

87. Trammell, A. (2019). Analog Games and the Digital Economy. Analog Game Studies.
88. Tolarian Community College. (2021, May 17). Wizards Of The Coast Ends Pro Magic
| What This Means For Competitive Magic The Gathering’s Future. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=zi4WLi9fHIs.
89. Personal interview.
90. Personal interviews.
91. Personal interview.

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The Communities of Magic
Ethnography and Education
 “Who wouldn’t want to summon
dragons and trolls?”
Constructing Communities at Friday Night Magic
Rachel Guldin and Brandon C. Harris

Game scholars have demonstrated the ­community-building power

of video games (Ducheneaut et al., 2007; Taylor, 2009; Nardi, 2010), but
less research has examined the same potential in collectible card games
(CCGs). And while some research on CCGs’ community building
potential exists (Bisz, 2009), even less is available on hyperlocal com-
munity formation practices at events like Friday Night Magic (FNM),
which is organized globally by Magic: The Gathering (MTG) makers Wiz-
ards of the Coast (WotC) but hosted at local game shops (LGS). This
study fills that gap by analyzing the community formation practices of
booster drafters (more simply, “drafters”) at one LGS in the Pacific North-
west United States through a brand community lens (Muñiz & O’Guinn,
2001).
The purpose of this study is first, to understand how the FNM draft-
ing community at a LGS in a midsize city in the Pacific Northwest United
States identifies itself, and second, to identify the visible and invisible
access points and barriers to the drafting community. Access points refer
to things that make it easier for someone to join the FNM community.
Barriers refer to things that prevent others from joining the community.
We posed three research questions:
RQ1: How do drafters at a local game store’s Friday Night Magic tournament
define their community?
RQ2: What are the visible and invisible barriers to entry for community
membership?
RQ3: What are the visible and invisible access points to entry for commu-
nity membership?

147
148  The Communities of Magic

Because these questions seek to understand a specific context, assess

how participants make meaning from what is happening (Lindlof & Tay-
lor, 2011) and “discover how the respondent sees the world” (McCracken,
1988, p. 21), we used qualitative methods to collect data and applied a
grounded theory approach to analyze our findings.
First, we conducted participant observations during FNM over the
course of five months in 2019. One researcher attended the tournaments,
spoke with store personnel, watched the draft and gameplay, asked ques-
tions, and carried on ­research-focused and casual conversations with
drafters. Participant observations continued over the course of five months
in 2019 at which point saturation was reached, meaning new data pre-
sented no new insights to the study. To supplement participant observa-
tion and add nuance, we conducted eight ­semi-structured interviews with
seven drafters and the shop owner, who also drafts at FNM. Because rap-
port was already established, the same researcher who conducted partici-
pant observations invited players who seemed interested, present at most
FNM tournaments, and known at the LGS to be interviewed. After all data
were collected, the other researcher, an expert in game studies and brand
community theory, supported data analysis. We qualitatively coded our
data using constant comparison (Corbin & Strauss, 1998; Glaser & Strauss,
1967; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) “to build an understanding of the phenomena
under investigation through the lives, relations, actions, and words of the
participants themselves” (Freeman, 2011, p. 81). This allowed us to distill
community identity, barriers, and access points. Before publication, inter-
view participants received our manuscript to review and respond as a form
of member checking. Three participants responded, and their comments
are integrated into our findings.
The interviewed drafters (addressed herein with ­researcher-selected
pseudonyms) include Archie, a ­4 3-year-old white male data analyst and
­semi-pro MTG player; Billy, a ­34-year-old white male graduate student at
the local university who finds time to play between classes and research;
Bryan, a ­21-year-old white male undergraduate at the local university who
loves mythos; Debra, a ­57-year-old white female psychology researcher
and casual drafter; Ethan, a ­3 4-year-old white male web developer who
has played Magic for five years; Jake, a ­24-year-old white man who works
as a biotech researcher and is a MTG newbie; Sam, a ­59-year-old white
man who serves as a jurist and is a ­self-proclaimed nerd; and Sydney, the
­30-year-old white woman who ­co-owns the LGS with her husband.
While research on affinity groups, or informal social groups orga-
nized around a shared hobby or passion, have been useful for understand-
ing the educational benefits of video game communities (Gee, 2007) and
could be a useful tool for investigating the access points and barriers of
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   149

entry into the LGS community, the fact that these affinity groups are orga-
nized around a specifically branded product calls for a theoretical per-
spective that centers the relationship between commercial brands and
their fans. According to Muñiz & O’Guinn (2001), a brand community
is a set of social relations that guide, influence, and shape the actions of
brand admirers. These specialized communities are organized around a
commercial product, so for drafters, MTG becomes the focal point around
which the rest of their specialized community is organized. In addition,
brand communities resemble traditional communities in that both “[are]
marked by a shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of
moral responsibility. Each of these qualities is, however, situated within a
commercial and ­mass-mediated ethos, and has its own particular expres-
sion” (Muñiz & O’Guinn, 2001, p. 412). Participation in a brand com-
munity has the potential to create powerful emotional experiences and
connections with a brand itself and with other ­l ike-minded individuals
(Muñiz & Schau, 2005; Schau et al., 2009; Brodie et al., 2013). Essentially,
brand communities rely on members that exchange their stories and expe-
riences with one another. This reaffirms their social relations with both
each other and the brand. However, marketing narratives are consumed
by community members and woven into their individual and commu-
nal identities, meaning that “consumers also manipulate and hybridize
­marketer-created brand narratives and work them into their lives” (Muñiz
& Schau, 2005, p. 738). Since our participants’ community was organized
around a weekly FNM at a single LGS, brand community theory guided
our efforts to answer if and how drafters incorporated the MTG brand into
their identities, and which aspects of the event acted as access and barrier
points.

Heading to FNM: Location and Place

On dark, midwinter evenings of the Pacific Northwest, the large pic-
ture windows of the LGS in this midsize city glow, allowing passersby
to see tables surrounded by players. The LGS stands at the corner of two
major thoroughfares in the heart of downtown with wide sidewalks and
bright streetlights. It’s located close to food options like pizza and wraps,
and public parking is nearby and free after 6 p.m. The public buses’ central
station is located directly across the street from the LGS, allowing con-
venience and accessibility for local players to attend; not all LGSs in the
greater community have this accessible transit nearby. So according to
Billy, Archie, and Bryan, this central location is a major access point for
attending this LGS.
150  The Communities of Magic

To enter, players walk up the ramp and through the glass doors.
Immediately, evidence of the LGS as a space for branded communities
becomes clear. Straight ahead are shelves and displays of board games,
CCG accessories, an oversized calendar of all the month’s gaming events,
and years’ worth of photos of players at MTG ­pre-release events on the
walls. These artifacts, acting as both items for sale and decoration, display
evidence of the role of the MTG brand within the LGS and the LGS’s use of
that brand to attract and retain brand community members.
The sales counter is to the left, and the gameplay room is to the right.
The gameplay room is also filled with accessories, like figurines, deck
boxes, dice, and card sleeves. The room is packed with 10 folding tables
covered in ­M TG-branded playmats and surrounded by eight or more
chairs at each. MTG promotional materials are prominent decorations,
including cardboard standees on the floor, posters on the walls, decals
of planeswalkers—powerful characters from game—stuck to the win-
dows, and ­3 -D cardboard pirate ships on the ceiling. The walls bear elab-
orate dragons, hand painted in the style of MTG artwork and colors. Even
though other CCGs are played here, including ­Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card
Game and Pokémon Trading Card Game, the prominence of ­MTG-branded
decorations and merchandise in the gameplay area indicates that the MTG
brand community drives the store’s activities and sales.
The atmosphere on Friday nights is “bustling” and filled with “antic-
ipation,” according to Archie. It’s also “a little chaotic” in Billy’s esti-
mation, and it’s sometimes loud enough to trigger Debra’s migraines.
Between the sales area and the gameplay room, players stand around,
catch up, talk cards, and watch MTG tournaments streamed from Twitch
on a ­wall-mounted flat screen. Every now and again a judge’s voice comes
over the loudspeaker to instruct players which format is moving to which
stage of their tournament. Bryan says the LGS’s “vibe” varies depending
on the number of people and the timing of the card set’s cycle, from loud
and high energy at the start of a cycle to laid back and casual toward the
end. Yet among the noise and movement, Debra says the store is “fairly
welcoming” with its friendly store employees. She has no problem allow-
ing her son to play unsupervised at this LGS because it has a “safe feel-
ing,” a sentiment likely shared by other parents based on the number of
unsupervised middle school boys who scamper around, cracking packs
and fawning over new cards together. In Sam’s words, here players can let
their “nerd flags fly.” Feelings of safety are, however, highly dependent on
individual players’ identity, privilege, and positionality in the community.
At the sales counter, MTG players buy, sell, and trade single cards and
packs, and drafters sign up for the draft and pay their entrance fee. Draft-
ing costs $12 weekly and pays for one’s deck and spot in the tournament;
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   151

winners receive store credit. While any entry cost for an entertainment
activity can function as a barrier, FNM drafters view the $12 entrance fee
for their tournaments as an access point to enter the MTG community.
Archie, an economist and FNM regular, noted that drafting has a higher
entry fee than the other formats at FNM, but unlike the constructed for-
mats that can require building decks that cost hundreds of dollars to play
competitively and could become obsolete, paying for the draft is ultimately
more economical because it buys new cards that make up a player’s deck,
social activity for three to five hours, and a chance to earn store credit for
the winners. Jeff, a ­middle-aged drafter, likes drafting because he can show
up with nothing but $12 and participate. Plus, there is always the chance
for players to open a card that is highly valued on the secondary market.
For example, one week, Sam drafted a card worth $15, and Wes, another
regular at FNM, drafted a card valued at $12, the same cost as his entry fee.
Archie has drafted at FNM in multiple LGS across the country and
sees $12 as reasonable compared to other shops, especially considering
the price hasn’t risen in a few years. In his interview, Ethan said he didn’t
want to spend lots of money on building decks to play in other formats
and that drafting puts you on “closer to equal footing with other players.”
Ethan also said after more than four years of drafting, he still never gets
his hopes up because drafting is unpredictable. Jake corroborated Ethan’s
first sentiment, saying that he likes drafting because people are on a level
playing field “so we can all relate.” Brett, another drafter, expressed his
appreciation for a more even playing field because “it’s good to see what
you can do [to build a deck] on the spot.” Acknowledging that needing dis-
posable income for entertainment is a barrier for some, players see draft-
ing’s low entry cost—compared to the sunk costs of constructed decks and
other formats—and the “equal playing field” it creates among players as an
access point for the drafting community.

Among the Players: Demographics and Stereotypes

of the Community

Stereotypes and Stigmas

Our participants described a stigma that surrounded the MTG brand
community as a barrier for entry. Based on their descriptions, this bar-
rier stigma is similar to the “nerd” stereotype associated with Dungeons
& Dragons players. According to Ewalt (2013), “This prejudice has some
root in reality. The game does tend to attract fans of fantasy literature,
mythology, mathematics and puzzles—in other words, nerd” (p. 26).
152  The Communities of Magic

While FNM participants didn’t always phrase this nerd stigma as a part
of their identity or use the term nerd, many players at this LGS acknowl-
edged the stereotype as a problematic barrier for recruiting new players.
Billy said the MTG player stereotype is a “pretty darn ­a nti-social” man
who lacks hygiene, spends lots of time inside, and has no social skills or
other interests. Debra echoed this, saying the stereotype is “geeky guys
that don’t have the best hygiene.” Sam added there’s some social awkward-
ness among players because they are “at times, hygienically questionable.
Someone needs to give them the gift of antiperspirant. That’s not where
their focus is. But this isn’t generally true.” Sam’s last statement corrobo-
rates our observations and interviews: generally, drafters at this LGS didn’t
fit the stereotypes ascribed to their local community of players. This sug-
gests these are stereotypes that are held about MTG players and not direct
representations of their community members. Unsurprisingly then, this
stereotype acts as a barrier to the community because the notions of who
and what the community are may be unappealing or intimidating to new
players while not accurately reflecting the players present in the LGS.
While this stereotype was described by most as a stigma, one partic-
ipant proved an exception to the norm within the brand community. Sam
saw the nerd identity as one that creates community, a sense of belong-
ing, and even explains some of the antisocial stereotypes: “It’s hard to
have peers when you’re a screaming nerd.” This feeling isn’t unique to
the local LGS: Brian Lewis, the Professor on Tolarian Community Col-
lege, an ­MTG-focused YouTube channel, stated, “We’re all freaks here,
and we’re all friends here” (Jahromi, 2018, n.p.). Locally, Steve suggested
that the players may be “misfits,” but “they seem to coexist through their
mutual nerdom.” According to brand community theory, that these par-
ticipants defined their identities through their involvement in a com-
mercially branded game demonstrates their commitment to MTG. This
commitment can be better understood as a form of religiosity (Muñiz
& Schau, 2005), in which ­marketer-created metanarratives are internal-
ized by brand community members that value and privilege the “nerd”
(Sam), “freaks” (Bryan), or “misfits” (Steve) identity, further increasing
their commitment to the FNM LGS community. That is, brand commu-
nity members leverage the narrative force of the stigma as a way to bond
with others and to understand their identities as MTG players.
Participants failed to form a complete consensus on the stigma asso-
ciated with MTG, but our observations clearly demonstrated that they all
managed their expectations surrounding this “mutual nerdom” before
comfortably taking pleasure from FNM activities. Members of this FNM
brand community developed strategies to manage their understanding of
the nerdish stigma as a part of their identity before being able to enjoy
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   153

FNM, similar to Dungeons & Dragons players (Ewalt, 2013). For those who
viewed nerdom as an access point, the pleasure from deep knowledge of
MTG becomes a bonding experience. Those who view it as a barrier tended
to discuss the boundaries between their MTG friends and their social
friends. But what they both share is that members of the FNM brand com-
munity incorporate their enjoyment from a stigmatized activity into their
identities.

Race and Gender

Through our observation and interviews, it seems that the LGS lacks
racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. In the LGS game room, the crowd of
drafters themselves can act as a barrier to entry. The room is usually filled
with mostly white men, the number of women and people of color count-
able with one hand. A few high schoolers occasionally draft, but drafters
are mostly adults, ranging from young undergraduates to ­m iddle-aged
­blue-collar workers to sexagenarian professionals. All of our interview-
ees identified as members of the middle class with varied occupations and
levels of education but little socioeconomic diversity. Like socioeconomic
status, racial demographics also lack diversity. A few faces of color are at
the drafting tables, but most drafters appear white. This is complicated
because the LGS is located in the Pacific Northwest, which has historically
been a racially white region (Berger, 2015), but whiteness is compounded
even further when dealing with gaming and nerd cultures that have been
normalized as white (Nakamura, 2012; Gray, 2012). Recognizing this, it is
unsurprising that when our participants discussed diversity, they focused
on gender and sexuality.
Despite women’s involvement in the early stages of MTG’s game
development (Jahromi, 2018), women’s presence in this LGS is limited,
revealing a major and common barrier for membership in the commu-
nity and participation (Fournier, 2017; Miller, 2018; ­Scharlin-Pettee, 2016;
Winkie, 2019). This reflects the homogenous audience that WotC catered
to during the late 1990s and early 2000s, namely an audience of “estab-
lished gamers” and boys 14 years and older (Jahromi, 2018). Little infor-
mation is publicly available about MTG’s current player demographics;
however, the most recent market research available shared in 2015 by Mark
Rosewater, MTG’s lead designer, indicated 62 percent of players identify as
male and 38 percent are female (markrosewater, 2015). Yet MTG continues
to be seen as a game for young white men, despite some improvements in
diversity among players and intentional diversity and inclusion measures
taken by WotC (Elliotte et al., 2019; Jahromi, 2018; Orsini, 2016; Orsini,
2020; ­Scharlin-Pettee, 2016; Winkie, 2019).
154  The Communities of Magic

Even with these global improvements, unnoticed “invisible ropes”

(Hova, 2014, n.p.) continue to keep players from playing. Local players like
Bryan acknowledge that the biggest barrier for women’s membership in the
community is the LGS. Billy notes misogyny and homophobia are known
issues within the larger MTG community, and he “can’t imagine what it’s
like for women to come into that space, sort of new and unfamiliar. It’s
such a masculine space with some pretty problematic assumptions by the
larger male community.” Although there are MTG- and ­WotC-branded
artifacts that reflect homophobia and misogyny in characters and card
art (Kleinman, 2018; Stang & Trammell, 2020; Trammell, 2014), this LGS
did not have this type of problematic imagery in their branded displays
or shop décor during our observational periods. Additionally, opportu-
nities for ­non-male players were available at the LGS: Sydney organized
a local chapter of the Lady Planeswalker Society, a global group commit-
ted to creating an inclusive playing environment, and hosted ­women-only
LPS events. But, according to Debra, they were poorly attended and had
to open up to male allies in order to work. Despite these local inclusion
efforts, Archie estimates the ratio of men to women at this LGS is 10:1. This
poses challenges for women even entering the LGS space, much less being
community members.
Some drafters suggest that women who are interested can get around
this by having accompaniment into the LGS: Bryan said “social assur-
ances of having a friend there or going with someone” make entering the
shop easier, and Debra corroborated that most women have some kind of
connection to other people who go to events or play so it’s clear to male
players they are “not fair game for harassment,” demonstrating similar
findings to Cote’s (2020) video game research and showing that both ana-
log and digital gaming spaces develop androcentric norms. In observing,
we found multiple instances of women coming into the store with men;
few came to the draft unaccompanied. Lyndsey, an energetic undergradu-
ate woman, and Jessica, a gender diverse woman and MTG judge, attended
alone. Other participating women attended with male friends: Debra came
with her fiancé Archie, who taught her to play and created decks for her,
and Jenny, a friend of Archie, shared that her boyfriend taught her to play
before she started attending FNM drafts.
Additionally, women articulated facing a subtle bias during the draft
tournament: having their skill underestimated. Jenny explained she some-
times plays against men who don’t think she knows what she is doing or
expect her not to play well because she’s a woman, which she uses to her
advantage as a “trap” to beat them. Debra said this has happened to her
on a few occasions and she feels vindicated when she beats a male player
who doubts her. This creates a double barrier for women drafters: the first
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   155

is entering a space that players have identified as masculine with a history

of misogyny, and the second is having to prove one’s competence, which
is questioned due to being a woman. These findings parallel issues found
in the online video game community (Cote, 2020). Men also share expe-
riences of comfort in attending with a friend or learning to play at home
first, but the double barrier of entering the shop that has historically been
defined as a masculine space populated with male players and then still
needing to prove oneself appears unique to women.

Questioning Diversity
Issues of diversity among MTG are not new or unique; Salter &
Blodgett (2017) outline similar androcentric norms throughout comic
books, video games, and other traditionally nerdy spaces. However, one
interesting trend emerging from our research found that players in this
LGS tend to comment on how diverse the community is without actu-
ally citing real experiences with diverse people—that is, ­n on-white,
­n on-men—in the community. Ethan described this phenomenon as
“imagined diversity.” This “imagined diversity” reflects a hyperlocal inter-
pretation of diversity that is centered in MTG itself. When asked about
the players and how they can be described, Bryan said MTG players are
diverse not necessarily in their demographics, but in the reasons they play
the game and what they get out of it. That is, diversity reflects aspects of
the game, such as playing style, instead of the more common association
with demographics. Interestingly, players were not necessarily conscious
of this. For example, Billy shared in his interview that FNM has a “a pretty
diverse group,” referring to the few gender ­non-binary players who are
regulars. Then, he paused a bit and said, “Now I’m not sure how diverse the
group is,” following up that the community is made of three groups of peo-
ple, “kids, hard nerds, and normal people,” and what makes them diverse
is that MTG is just a part of their identity. After more thought, Billy added,
“Maybe it’s not that diverse, speaking in those mechanical [demographic]
terms.”
WotC has made efforts at the global level to make MTG a more inclu-
sive game for more diverse players with statements on bullying and harass-
ment (Chase, 2017), an explicit code of conduct that outlines disciplinary
measures for online and ­i n-person gameplay (Wizards of the Coast, 2014),
and the removal of racist and sexist cards (Kleinman, 2018; Orsini, 2020).
Brand communities internalize the narratives that brands supply for them
(Muñiz & O’Guinn, 2001). Yet, despite WotC’s efforts to promote a more
inclusive narrative for their brand community, the demographics at the
156  The Communities of Magic

LGS do not reflect those efforts. Especially within the hyperlocal LGS
community, MTG players are overwhelmingly white, cisgender men.
It would be easy to say that diversity is a barrier because of the hetero-
geneity of the players and leave it at that. There are numerous ways for peo-
ple to play MTG in person and online, but the LGS is a space for the FNM
brand community to meet on a weekly basis. That is, while women may
reject ­male-dominated spaces such as the LGS, they are still a significant
portion of the MTG player base. While the overwhelming male presence
acts as a barrier preventing new members from joining the LGS commu-
nity, our goal was to understand the LGS community, so we didn’t extend
our research to home or online spaces where female MTG players may feel
more comfortable because the barriers of the LGS are removed. Despite
this kind of heterogeneous community, those drafters we observed, spoke
with, and formally interviewed seemed open to engaging with diverse
players, particularly regarding gender and sexual orientation diversity.
This is why the LGS is central: Jenny and Bryan agreed that global efforts
are important, but the LGS sets the tone for inclusivity. And players, like
Lyndsey, feel that. She shared during a tournament, “This community
is a lot more progressive than I expected. A lot.” Thus, while the lack of
diversity embodied in community members presents a potential barrier
to joining, the imagined diversity of the community represents a poten-
tial openness and willingness to have a more diverse group of players in
the drafting pods.

In the Pods: Establishing Community Identity

Our participants have varied understandings of what it means to be
in this community, but their dedication to these FNM tournaments mir-
rors Hebdige’s (1979) findings that subculture members didn’t have to hold
a shared definition of community to participate in this subculture. Some
players, like Jake, pointed out that simply playing MTG doesn’t create a
community or establish membership, but microcommunities, as Bryan
called them, develop at the LGS during events like FNM. Billy and Sam
agree that a shared interest in the game develops unique language and cul-
ture, Billy calls it an “activity community,” while Sam named it a “nerd
niche group.” Despite the varied nomenclature, our participants’ remarks
demonstrated how shared characteristics like encouraging deep knowl-
edge of the game, economic and temporal investments, and enjoying the
live nature of FNM can act as both access points and barriers into the LGS
brand community.
Deep knowledge summarizes the drafters’ desires to learn the game’s
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   157

various features, economics of the secondary market, MTG historical evo-

lution, metagame, and/or mythos. Many players have a rich and thorough
understanding or expertise in one or more aspects of the game. Sam and
Archie provide strong examples of deep knowledge of gameplay: Sam uses
the draft and complex mechanics as ways to keep his brain active, while
Archie likes “to see if drafting works” in how his deck plays against oth-
ers. Archie also demonstrates deep knowledge of WotC history, storylines,
and current ­pro-player stats and rankings. Participants described vari-
ous applications for their deep knowledge of the game, including MTG
lore and metagame strategies. This shows members of this brand commu-
nity didn’t enact deep knowledge uniformly, reflecting the broad appeal
of MTG. For example, Jenny knows history and facts about the cards’ art-
ists; Lyndsey enjoys shipping, or discussing imagined romances between
planeswalkers; and Bryan is invested in WotC’s player psychographics and
MTG mythos.
Another characteristic of this MTG brand community of drafters is
the economic investment of both time and finances. These both act as bar-
riers to joining the community. Drafting requires a substantial investment
of time. FNM generally takes four to five hours weekly, and many players
engage in MTG activities outside of FNM, meaning that there are signifi-
cant weekly, monthly, and yearly investments in MTG. This tends to be a
more invisible marker; most of the players interviewed in this study have
played for years, and Ethan told us “playing for four to five years isn’t that
long” for drafters.
Financial investment is another identity marker of the drafters at this
LGS that functions as a barrier to play. This LGS’ $12 weekly FNM entrance
fee was explained earlier as an access point. However, many drafters who
are integrated into the community spent more on gaming accessories, or
artifacts that enhance playing while demonstrating an investment in the
brand and community. One such artifact is card sleeves, which protect
the monetary value of the card, assist functionality for gripping and shuf-
fling while playing, hide card irregularities that could be used to cheat,
and support personal expression with different colors and images printed
on them. Similarly, playmats protect cards and make them easier to lift
off the table, while also providing a source of personal expression. Deck
boxes and card binders, many of which are branded, help organize cards,
while dice and phone apps act as life and token counters. These addi-
tional accessories mark material investment in the game and in the MTG
brand. Newer players, like Jake, or casual players, like Jeff, did not have
these accessories; this visibly marks their community membership differ-
ently than others’, like Wes and Kevin, both ­m iddle-aged drafting regu-
lars, who show up with a backpack filled with branded accessories. While
158  The Communities of Magic

participants made it clear these artifacts are not required to participate

in the community, many thought that regulars make some investment in
the brand through card sleeves and other products. That is, lacking these
playing materials is not an explicit barrier to entering the community, yet
owning them functions as an access point, signaling to other players one’s
dedication to the game.
Participants also expressed some consensus on core characteristics of
FNM drafting community members, or drafters. First, drafters like com-
petition. Archie says this “competitive but respectful spirit” is fostered
by the LGS in long and competitive prerelease tournaments and a store
motto that encourages relentless competition. Second, FNM drafters enjoy
complex thinking in their recreation. From deciding how to play cards,
to strategizing a few moves ahead while not knowing what spell might
be played or what card might be picked up, to visualizing a path to win-
ning based on the possibilities of the cards in one’s deck, MTG requires
­real-time analytical decision making, continual analysis, and strategic
adjustments. This affinity for highly analytic entertainment can act as a
barrier to those who do not want high cognitive engagement in their free
time. However, this barrier exists even within MTG between those who
draft and those who construct decks.
Drafters distinguish themselves from constructed format players
through their ­real-time deckbuilding and decision making, while con-
structed players have time to assemble a deck at their own pace. As Bryan
put it, this requires “a variety of decision trees” because “it’s like a puz-
zle every time, just to figure out. It’s so much fun for me.” Billy expressed
a similar idea, saying drafting is “a brain puzzle to work on” whose players
need “some level of appreciating intellectual activity of some sort.” Sam
and Steve also acknowledge the mental work that goes into playing. Sam
values drafting at FNM because “you’ve been using your brain actively for
four hours,” while Steve adds that drafting is “a brain exercise” that allows
him to think about probability, statistics, and game theory in a relaxed,
applied setting outside of his studies as a ­t hird-year PhD student. Jenny
simply loves strategy. This suggests that the FNM drafting community is
a subculture within the greater MTG brand community, distinguishing
themselves through their cognitive labor at FNM tournaments.
Like other hobbyist or gaming communities, FNM has regulars. The
first characteristic of regulars, and according to Bryan and Ethan the only
characteristic, is frequency of attendance. Billy suggested that regulars
play in the store at least once per week for consecutive weeks. This sets up
Archie, Ethan, Jeff, Bryan, Kevin and a few others as regulars. These are
the players who are likely to continue to show even as a new card set’s nov-
elty wanes. Next, regulars know how events work at the LGS. According
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   159

to Archie, regulars know when events fire, what steps need to be taken to
participate in the event, and the mechanics of the event. Wes added that
regulars are fluent in MTG jargon. All of these vary slightly by LGS, so
knowing the local practices for FNM indicates a regular. Finally, regu-
lars are the ones other players know. Their pictures hang on the walls for
attending ­pre-release events and other LGS tournaments. Players know
who regulars are and, according to Billy, LGS staff are likely to know and
recognize regulars, too. Bryan believes that being a regular at FNM drafts
provides the infrastructure to develop friendships outside of MTG. Thus,
based on player’s insights, regulars are defined as knowledgeable and
recognizable frequent attendees in the FNM drafting community. This
significant intellectual, temporal, and economic investment in MTG ulti-
mately acts as a barrier for newcomers, while potentially offering an access
point for advanced players, such as Archie and Sam, who sought out LGSs
upon moving to new cities to make new friends.

In the Tournament: Drafting and Playing at FNM

Where entering the draft may be seen as an access point for its rela-
tively and comparatively low cost, actually playing in the draft is a poten-
tial barrier. First, drafting at FNM is complex. Drafting requires making
­real-time decisions to create a playable, competitive deck. This requires
understanding a variety of factors, including card mechanics, how cards
work together, and balancing the deck based on card types and mana
costs. In addition, drafters need to adjust based on the drafting pod itself:
in drafts with smaller pods, the packs pass by players more often, giving
them more information to work with regarding what cards they might
have access to, whereas in larger pods, the packs pass by only once, maybe
twice. Patrick and Jere, drafters at this LGS, shared their dislike for draft-
ing with larger pods because it means more unknown information while
building a deck and this, as Jere said, means “each pick counts more.”
Once a deck is built, playing the game is also complex and strate-
gic requiring knowledge of all the cards in an expansion as well as game
mechanics, like utilizing spells and land cards efficiently, while under-
standing the nuances of sideboarding. Archie shared this complexity goes
a step further for players who want to win. There is internal strategy, know-
ing how to play against your specific opponent, and a ranking strategy,
knowing when to agree to a draw instead of playing for a win/loss outcome.
The complexity of the draft and playing, with all the moving pieces and
strategic components, is not lost on players: Jake was adamant that draft-
ing is more complicated than playing in standard format. Billy added that
160  The Communities of Magic

among drafting, moving around to check the pairings, and reseating for
games, the overall structure can make playing feel chaotic and complex.
This complexity is a barrier in and of itself: there is a lot for players to
manage during the tournament. But the complexity adds another barrier:
despite having a roomful of knowledgeable players, FNM is not the place
to learn how to play. With one exception—Sam, who walked into a FNM
tournament in a major city and learned how to play—all the interview-
ees learned to play at home before attending the store. This suggests that
without having an external MTG community to learn from, FNM is not a
learning environment for brand new players. The expectation for attend-
ing is that players already know what they’re doing and understand how
rituals of the tournament function.
Jargon is another barrier to outsiders that simultaneously identi-
fies community membership and informs a player about their competi-
tors. Wills, a drafter who drifts among other formats at FNM, and Sydney
said they can predict a person’s insider status based in part by their mas-
tery of MTG jargon. Some jargon, like milling, scooping, sideboarding, and
topdecking indicates a player’s understanding of the game mechanics,
but being able to engage effectively in that manner also signifies commu-
nity membership. For instance, Sydney and Wills said terms like wombo
combo, mana curve, and pack 1 pick 2 all indicate expertise, ability, and
focus in drafting and playing. Because of the complexity of the game and
its mechanics, players need to be able to articulate their steps and choices
to their opponent. This keeps things organized and reduces disputes, Syd-
ney shared. While successful use of jargon marks community member-
ship, it doesn’t necessarily reflect a player’s skill at the game, meaning that
speaking the language of MTG acts as an access point into the hyperlocal
brand community at the LGS.
Players also establish community membership by discussing their
gameplay when appropriate. Much like halftime recaps during football
games, drafters spend their time between rounds recapitulating and ana-
lyzing what happened during the games they just completed. They use dis-
cussion to learn from each other, asking more knowledgeable players to
recommend deck adjustments and strategies. Talking provides an access
point in this LGS for getting ­real-time help from other players. Ethan said
that his drafting improved because he consistently gets help from other
players. This benefit of playing at FNM in a LGS community is being able
to get immediate and personalized feedback that might not be available
in the same way in other spaces, such as at home or in the more restrictive
environment of a larger professional or ­semi-professional tournament.
But conversation can get sticky, especially when it does not seem
authentic, occurs in a competitive environment, or is unsolicited. Sydney
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   161

said it’s bad form to give advice immediately after winning, and Wills
agreed its best to give advice when asked. Steve said that it can be awkward
to get to know people during the game since some players are strict and
any kind of conversation can be interpreted as a strategy against an oppo-
nent, whereas other players’ banter during FNM is an indicator of commu-
nity membership and belonging. Talking—not only knowing what to say,
but also when to say what and to whom—acts as both a barrier to commu-
nity membership, but also as a marker of community once one is able to do
so adeptly.
If language is an audible indicator of brand community membership,
norms and etiquette are its embodiment. According to Sydney, etiquette
forms around the rules of the game. Etiquette’s function is to maintain
civility, respect, and cordiality throughout the FNM ritual. Some of these
are clearly articulated by WotC, like narrating play. Others, according to
Ethan, are “unspoken rules” and expectations. Sydney noted that breach-
ing etiquette is highly contextual and variable, based on the norms of the
LGS, players’ skill, established interpersonal relationships, and even the
stakes of the tournament. Because of this, the local etiquette acts as an
access point at this LGS, where there is a great deal of flexibility in com-
munity practices. For example, the official standard in WotC tournaments
is to prohibit talking during a draft and limit it to narration during game-
play. This LGS’s norm is more flexible; the etiquette is to keep the talking
minimal during the draft and relatively focused during gameplay, but
sometimes drafting pods will be more or less talkative than others.
Another norm is allowing a redo. Where WotC rules would not sanc-
tion this, the LGS allows it based on an individual player’s willingness to
grant a ­do-over for their opponent. It is typical to see more casual players
allow this. One Friday, Steve and Sam were competing, and Sam pointed
out an alternate way to keep track of a triggered spell during the upkeep
phase. Steve asked Sam if he could redo to try that method, and Sam
responded, “Sure, this is a friendly game.” Steve replied, “See, this is what
I like, when people are nice.” This flexibility works to establish goodwill in
the community and an access point to the community.
While it may seem as though etiquette and norms are complex, this
LGS’s flexibility and lack of serious repercussions to violations make this
an access point. The shop norm is that some table talk during drafts is
acceptable, so when drafter Allen, a mid–20s man with shaggy hair and
glasses, abruptly asked ­m id-draft, “Can we keep the table talk to a min-
imum?” the other drafters responded with surprised silence. It was only
after Allen got up to build his deck at another table that Kevin, a drafting
regular, responded to the violation: he was “just kind of annoyed with the
guy next to me. He didn’t want any table talk and was kind of an ass about
162  The Communities of Magic

it.” And that’s where discussion of the violation ended. In another exam-
ple, Lyndsey disrupted the pacing of a draft when she selected a land card
for her deck that someone failed to remove before passing packs. There
was discussion among the table to determine the correct number of cards
for each player, and eventually it worked out that Jeff and Kevin would
come up a card short. Instead of calling a judge for an official ruling, Kevin
assured Lyndsey, “It’s not a big deal,” and they completed the draft. The
remainder went without a hitch.
The LGS brand community distinguishes itself as a subculture within
the greater MTG brand community through their own informal etiquette
system. The LGS is a business, so they restrict players from buying and
selling single cards with each other inside the store, yet this is not strictly
enforced. In a few observations, drafters left the store to sell cards on the
porch, while others indiscreetly sold cards in the store. For example, one
­non-drafter entered the store, sold a card for cash to a drafter, and left.
Additionally, the LGS sells snacks and drinks on site; a sign hangs on the
wall prohibiting players from bringing in outside food and drink. How-
ever, during many observations, one or more drafters brought in snacks
or meals. That these violations were not enforced even though they took
place within the LGS demonstrates the cavalier nature of the store and
LGS brand community. This may be due in part to players’ varied interpre-
tations of the flexibility or rigidity of the norms themselves, as we found
in observations and interviews. There were no discernable repercussions
from staff or other drafters for these violations that were far from covert,
creating a relaxed air in an otherwise bustling atmosphere that stands
somewhat in opposition to the store’s reputation as a highly competitive
shop and ultimately demonstrates how the lax environment acts as an
access point into the LGS brand community.

Connecting with the Community: Interpersonal

Relationships
While the importance of interpersonal relationships to the longevity
of the LGS drafting community has been alluded to throughout this essay,
this section is dedicated purely to how interpersonal relationships func-
tion as both access points and barriers. We begin with a prominent bar-
rier: the social isolation or discomfort felt while attending FNM the first
few times. Jenny shared that playing in person at first is “overwhelming”
no matter who you are because you are in an environment with all new
people. Bryan recalled that he did not know anyone at this LGS the first
few times he attended FNM: “It was very uncomfortable. […] I assumed
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   163

everyone was better than me, so it was something I didn’t do very often.”
Similarly, Ethan shared he was intimidated when he first started attend-
ing; he came alone because his friend who drafted at home did not want
to attend FNM. He sensed the presence of cliques, making it easier to
feel like an outsider. In retrospect, Ethan shared that he most likely felt
­self-conscious and feared committing faux pas.
In their interviews, both Bryan and Ethan mention bringing dis-
tractions, like homework or books, to occupy their ­non-gaming time in
the FNM tournaments early on in their LGS attendance. Archie said hav-
ing someone to commiserate with at FNM is much better than knowing
no one, and that the change between knowing even one person is stark.
Because of this, Archie agrees that not knowing people is a potential bar-
rier. When he first began attending FNM at this LGS, Archie said the shop
wasn’t unfriendly compared to other stores he’s played at, but it is on the
competitive side, which can be intimidating for someone coming alone.
Part of this discomfort in establishing social ties may come from trying to
do so while competing with other players who, like Steve shared, may get
upset or rude if they don’t do well.
But players like Bryan and Ethan developed relationships at FNM.
One of the most significant interpersonal access points was the social
anchor, or as Bryan described it, the people who he was most looking for-
ward to engaging with every week. Social anchors were described dif-
ferently by different participants, but this concept distilled to a friend,
colleague, family member, or romantic partner that invites you into the
LGS community. Anchor friends serve as intermediaries for newcom-
ers and help them integrate into FNM. As mentioned earlier, the level of
investment required to become a regular community member is already
extensive and identified as a barrier by some participants, so having a
companion there who can guide one’s first experiences drafting or facili-
tate introductions with others can make a newcomer feel included.
While the anchor friendship in the LGS is centered primarily around
the draft and tournament, Archie, Sydney, Sam, and Bryan provided exam-
ples of friendships originating at the LGS that moved beyond the FNM
brand community. For example, Sam moved into town before his wife.
While waiting for her to join him, he began attending FNM and met Nate.
Nate became Sam’s anchor friend, and meeting Nate allowed Sam a chance
to make friends in a new city; later their wives also became friends. Not all
anchor friendships blossom into dedicated friendships. Brett, a young pro-
fessional at the draft, described playing MTG as a child but losing touch
with it for almost 20 years until Chad, another young professional and his
wife’s coworker, invited him to a prerelease event. They attend FNM more
regularly now, sometimes together, sometimes separately.
164  The Communities of Magic

Conclusion
At its core, the drafting community at this LGS functions as a brand
community that allows individuals invested in the MTG brand to develop
and share a local culture centered on that brand, but also expanding
beyond it. Community identity is evident but not unified among its mem-
bers. They see themselves in different ways: some as belonging to a global
community, others as belonging to their LGS’ community, or more spe-
cifically to the format community. However, the MTG brand is the central
factor of the shared community identity.
This drafting community, a group of mostly white men, described
their community diverse, basing their notions of diversity not on player
demographics, but on their play style and interests. In supplanting
­MTG-related markers over demographic markers of players, the impact
of the brand and its supplied narratives within the community is evident.
Identity was performed through deep knowledge of MTG and metagame,
investment of time and economic resources in playing, drive for competi-
tion, and enjoyment of the complex, cognitive engagement that is MTG’s
hallmark. For an even smaller group, drafting regulars’ identity is situated
in frequent and reliable attendance at the FNM draft, knowledge about the
game and the format, and recognizability among other players in the com-
munity. The role of the brand becomes central to gathering, defining, and
understanding the community.
Our second goal in this research was to understand the barriers and
entry points to this brand community. Findings demonstrated that the
FNM drafting community at this LGS is filled with complex, overlapping
systems and structures. Some barriers shift to access points as a player
spends more time and resources on the game: initially, they may be a bar-
rier but after sufficient investment, they function as access to the commu-
nity. As such, some community characteristics, like paying $12 entry fees,
owning branded artifacts, using jargon, and having deep knowledge act as
both barriers and access points to the hyperlocal FNM community at the
LGS. At $12, the entry fee is a financial barrier for some, but it also pro-
vides an access point for players to engage without deep financial invest-
ment. In another example, owning artifacts requires a financial investment
that initially is a barrier, yet having these artifacts demonstrates investment
in the brand and supports access to community membership. Similarly,
jargon and deep knowledge act as barriers because of the amount of time
required to develop them, yet once acquired, they demonstrate that invest-
ment grants access to the community. Specifically, in these last two exam-
ples, we see a degree of performativity in which others see what one is doing
(or not doing) to demonstrate belongingness within the brand community.
 “Who wouldn’t want...?” (Guldin & Harris)   165

There were also pure barriers, such as a lack of racial and gender
diversity and the perceived “nerd” stigma that prevented new members
from joining the FNM community. Lack of diversity serves as arguably
the most visible barrier. While women and people of color do participate
within the shop, their numbers are few and these groups are not repre-
sented at every draft. MTG, as a brand, battles this barrier; in this way, the
LGS as a hyperlocal brand community is connected to the global MTG
brand community. The stereotype of gamers as socially stunted men adds
to this barrier. Conversely, the flexible interpretation of rules and etiquette
norms and the role of the anchor friend were found to be universally ben-
eficial for incorporating new members into the ­F NM-LGS community.
Overall, many participants formally reference the personal challenges of
entering a tournament without knowing anyone else; the culture of the
community is complex and going into that space alone may be difficult.
Social anchors make entering this community easier, and little push-
back or intervention for violation of local norms and etiquette appears
to encourage comfort within the LGS and support the development of a
hyperlocal culture for the community.
Understanding the barriers and access points to LGS MTG commu-
nities, as well as how these hyperlocal communities define themselves, is
meaningful in a few ways. First, it was evident in our interviews that ste-
reotypes surrounding MTG and its players are rife. This research dispels
some of those stereotypes by painting a more nuanced portrait of MTG
drafters at their LGS. Next, this research contributes to the conversation
on why gaming is important in its attention to community identity and
barriers and access points to community membership. It also gives spe-
cial attention to the impact that the place of play—the LGS—can have on a
gaming community. Lastly, it contributes to the concept of brand commu-
nity by applying this structural framework to analog gaming, specifically
drafting at FNM, an event that creates a brand community in hyperlocal
locations across the globe.
Research about MTG beyond the addictive nature of collectible
card games and rhetorical analyses of cards and card art is limited, so
the opportunity for future work on the lived experiences of MTG com-
munities is ripe. Based on our observations and findings, future studies
should continue to investigate how hyperlocal MTG communities iden-
tify themselves. WotC sets some global parameters, yet as our informants
told us, the LGS has a central role in setting the tone for the community,
which influences its identity and the experiences of the players. Next,
this research was limited by only looking at drafters; our informants
were clear that identities were different among players of the other for-
mats. Thus, similar studies could consider Commander players, Modern
166  The Communities of Magic

players, and so forth. In addition, we focused specifically on drafting at

FNM tournaments. Future research could consider the impact location,
such as comparing ­i n-store drafting to ­at-home drafts, may have on com-
munity identity or barriers and access points. Lastly, we identified various
domains or areas as barriers and access points to the community. Because
our goal was to identify each of those areas, our understanding is broad,
not deep. Future research should go deeper into these areas, exploring the
nuances to better explain how these domains function at other LGSs and
examining if our interpretation of this LGS is similar to the structures of
other stores.

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 Gathering Understanding
Subcultures, Hierarchies, and Norms
Calvin Liu

Introduction
Fandom studies present lenses to interrogate cultural phenomena
through participatory practices and subcultural understandings (Jenkins,
2013). Through analyzing the ways that fandom practices may incorporate
elements of hegemonic powers and how these hegemonic powers shape
subcultural interactions, we may better understand these processes in
larger contexts (Close, 2016; Chin, 2017; Scott 2019). While there has been
much work done in fandom around media and literary subcultures, there
is room to explore game fandoms (Jenkins, 2006). Studies on games have
traditionally focused on ­psycho-sociological and human computer inter-
action models (Williams, 2006; Palvas et al., 2010; Shen et al., 2014; Meng
et al., 2015). Furthermore, studies in games have primarily been on video
games, yet there is a ripe corpus of tabletop games that could provide valu-
able insights from a fandom perspective. For this study I engage in a dis-
course analysis of the trading card game Magic: The Gathering (MTG)
and interrogate the how subcultural norms and hierarchies are negotiated
through differential practices and physicality.

Magic: The Gathering and Commander

Magic: The Gathering, also known as MTG or simply Magic, is a high
fantasy trading card game created by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in
1993. Normally, Magic is played with two people. Each player constructs
a deck from their personal collection and aims to defeat the other player
through a variety of means. However, WotC has encouraged players to

168
 Gathering Understanding (Liu)  169

engage with Magic their own way and has sanctioned a variety of different
rulesets and styles of play, known as formats (Wizards of the Coast, 2019).
I focus on the Commander format in this study. Commander is currently
one of Magic’s most popular formats (Rosewater, 2019). Commander was
originally named Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH) and was a commu-
nity created format conceived by volunteers at officially sanctioned MTG
events in the early 2000s (­David-Marshall, 2016). WotC would officially
sanction the format and rebrand it as Commander a decade later (Rose-
water, 2011).
Commander is a format of interest as it is a community created prac-
tice that was sanctioned by its governing body. Yet, WotC still maintains
a distanced relationship in terms of regulating Commander. Unlike other
formats, the rules of Commander are managed by a group independent
of WotC. This rules committee is composed of the founding members of
the format. When asked why regulation was led by a community body,
lead designer of Magic, Mark Rosewater (2015), stated the following: “It’s
not our format. We didn’t create it and wanted to let it stay in the hands of
the people that made and nurtured it into what it’s become.” Rosewater’s
comments feed into a narrative of Commander being defined by its practi-
tioners. This philosophy is further reflected in the rules committee’s stated
goals for the format. An excerpt from the rules committee’s (2019) philos-
ophy on Commander is as follows:
It is played in a variety of ways, depending on player preference, but a common
vision ties together the global community to help them enjoy a different kind
of magic. That vision is predicated on a social contract: an agreement which
goes beyond these rules to includes a degree of interactivity between players.
Players should aim to interact both during the game and before it begins, dis-
cussing with other players what they expect/want from the game.
The format itself has many unconventional rules compared to the rest of
Magic. Notably, Commander is an ­a ll-out ­f ree-for-all, multiplayer format
whereas traditional games of Magic only involve two players competing
head to head. While many formats emphasize defeating your opponent,
the ­f ree-for-all environment and social nature of this format leads to dif-
fering forms of interactions. Players act in accordance to visible and invis-
ible social contracts, where bargains, alliances, and betrayal are negotiated
through in game actions.
These new social dimensions are balanced with Commander still
being a game of Magic: The Gathering. The rules dictate player victory
by outperforming and eliminating others. The rules encourage certain
courses of action that ensure success. Yet, these rules interactions are
balanced with the social contracts drafted between players. This study
looks at how players of the Commander format negotiate these differing
170  The Communities of Magic

norms and interrogates the roles of hierarchy and physicality within those
negotiations.

Norms and Subcultural Hierarchies

Norms are a multifaceted subject in general parlance and in academ-
ics. Psychology argues for normative influence as “an influence to conform
with the positive expectations of another” (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955, p. 629).
These influences have been identified as being injunctive or descriptive.
Descriptive norms are “what is typical or normal. It is what most people
do, and it motivates by providing evidence as to what will likely be effec-
tive and adaptive action,” whereas injunctive norms are “rules or beliefs as
to what constitutes morally approved and disapproved content” (Cialdini
& Kallgren, 1990, p. 1015). Stanfill (2015) observes how these norms conjoin
within the affordances of technological systems. Norms on these systems
operate off a combination of what the believed (injunctive norms) use of a
system is, combined with the hardcoded elements (descriptive norms) of
the system. Stanfill’s work considers how systems and rules can be proxies
for creating normative hierarchies. As both a practical game and a social
activity, Magic represents a space where these two types of norms intersect
through game actions.
From a fandom perspective, norms may manifest through a mixture
of participatory practices and pressures from hegemonic powers. Chin
(2017) notes how fandoms adopt their own fan capitals. These fan capi-
tals mimic more macro forms of cultural hierarchies built on the exchange
social capital and taste distinctions. Close (2016) examines how norms
in cosplay are managed by systems outside of fandoms. In Close’s case,
cosplay that did not conform traditional ideas of gender roles were per-
mitted within the fandom yet articulated in ways that conformed to hege-
monic structures of gender. In these cases, the injunctive norms of fan
practices brushes against the descriptive norms set by hegemonic powers.
This intersection promotes subcultural divisions. Within Magic these fric-
tions can be seen in the interactions between player generated practices,
the administrative practices of the rules committee, and practical game
rules of the Magic: The Gathering.

Subculture Hierarchies and Differential Practices

Hierarchical structures in fandoms also manifest through differ-
ential practices of meaning making. Bury (2017) frames participation in
 Gathering Understanding (Liu)  171

fandoms as existing on a continuum. Fans engage in a scaling form of sub-

cultural visibility based on cultural production. The knowledge, experi-
ence, and orientation a fan has to a subculture is not unilateral and reflects
a complex series of relationships between the fan and their object of fan-
dom. These relationships enable individualized fan habitus where “[f]ans
discriminate freely: the boundary between what falls within their fan-
dom and what does not are sharply drawn” (Fiske, 1992, p. 34). Subcul-
tural hierarchies are embedded in the negotiation of differences in a fan
continuum.
These negotiations may create practices where fans balance discrep-
ancies between a shared cultural identity and the breadth of relationships
to that identity. Practices such as othering, may aim to legitimize certain
relationships to fandom through the delegitimization of other relation-
ships (Duffet, 2013). Paratextual assemblages, where groups claim under-
standing of a text solely from paratextual sources rather than the actual
corpus, represent another practice for how fans may negotiate the breadth
of relationships to a fandom (Scott, 2019). Within Magic, these negotia-
tions strategies of fan habitus play out through discussions of player arche-
types, the philosophy of the game versus the function of the game, and the
physicality of Magic cards as tangible objects.

The Physicality of Practice

In looking at these negotiations of differences, it is important to con-
sider the role of physicality in enforcing and constructing subcultural
norms and hierarchies. Fan habitus is embodied not only in practice but
through the physical artifacts attached to those practices. Holland et al.
(1998) argues for the idea of figured worlds which are “socially and cul-
turally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters
and actors are recognized.” Figured worlds become “evoked, collectively
developed, individually learned, and made socially and personally power-
ful” through artifacts. In this model, artifacts become a mode of discourse
that evokes individual orientations to a fandom.
In his study of collectors of baseball cards, Bloom (2002) notes the
ability for such physical practices to construct symbolic orders where
“general arrangement and understanding of cultural symbols in a soci-
ety in a way that gives that society and the universe surrounding it an
appearance of unity and coherence” (p. 83). In contrast to figured worlds,
symbolic orders position the artifact as a common mediator of practice.
Rather than evoke the differences in orientation, artifacts serve as unify-
ing points to a shared cultural understanding. These models are ways in
172  The Communities of Magic

which different spectrums of fan habitus are engaged and how the phys-
icality of fan practice may simultaneously encourage unification and
hierarchy.
As a physical game, Magic engages with both Bloom (2002) and Hol-
land et al.’s (1998) lenses. At once, Magic cards represent a shared social
reality embodied by the cards’ practical applications as game pieces. The
physical cards enforce a shared reality about their function through the
game’s rules. Conversely, individual cards evoke varied political and
cultural understandings based on how a player is oriented to the Magic
fandom.
I draw on this varied swath of theory to analyze how Magic engages in
interweaving discourse of fan practices through norms, subcultural hier-
archies, and physicality.

Method
I performed a discourse analysis of the r/EDH subreddit, a subreddit
board dedicated to the Commander format. The subreddit vaguely posi-
tions itself as “Reddit’s #1 source for EDH and Commander content” (r/
EDH, 2019). This subreddit was chosen as it is not connected to WotC or
the Commander rules committee. While the subreddit has its own admin-
istrative oversight, it is not subject to the management of the official gov-
erning bodies of Commander or Magic: The Gathering. Furthermore,
Reddit as a platform encourages a constant refreshing of discourse, as the
structure of the platform constantly pushes old content down and high-
lights newer posts.
However, Reddit’s refreshing of discourse is influenced by the rat-
ing systems, which highlights popular ideas with high amounts of agree-
ment. This system does not necessarily front the most contested ideas
where divisive discourse would take place. To compensate for this, I did
not consider upvotes in my selection of threads and instead focused on the
comment count, analyzing threads that had at least 30 posts. For this dis-
course analysis I performed searches on the terms “casual,” “competitive,”
“fun,” “contract,” and “cedh” (competitive EDH). From the results I chose
threads that engaged in conversations of group rules, the appropriateness
of certain forms of play, and how to define rules between groups and play-
styles. In total, I collected 8 viable threads and analyzed their opening
posts and their responses.
 Gathering Understanding (Liu)  173

Results

Injunctive Norms Through Descriptive

Rules and Physicality
As Magic is a game that is tied to physical collection of cards, an indi-
vidual player’s collection has a great effect on their performance and inter-
actions with others. In Commander this relationship is exacerbated as it
allows more lax use of cards. Many formats of Magic restrict players to
cards printed throughout a certain timespan. Commander, however, per-
mits cards to be used from the game’s entire history, with a few exceptions.
This permits a large variance in decks which creates gaps in performance
and efficiency between decks. These gaps can lead to conflict between play-
ers. One thread noted:
My playgroup is mostly just new and very casual players, most people try to
make their deck is powerful as possible but end up being a little worse than
the 75% decks that me and a few others play (no ­i nstant-win combos though,
since we don’t find it fun), trying really hard to not be too oppressive. But there
are a few people who only have a few decks that are tier 1–3 and just join ran-
dom pubs to ­pub-stomp, which I don’t get, but whatever. They pretty much win
every time and this annoys me, since everyone else pretty much accepts it and
just continues to play with them […]
The quote notes “pubstomping,” deliberately taking powerful decks to
play against weaker players. Pubstomping highlights a frustration in fac-
ing uneven gaps between access to cards and the relative performance of
their decks. Here, there is an interaction between resource availability and
social contracts. The speaker admits that their companions lack the means
to optimize their decks. This leads to frustration when they play another
player with more honed resources. The physical availability of certain arti-
facts evokes symbolic orders and figured worlds. The frustration with the
physical possession of powerful cards and the willingness to use them in
unfair circumstances indicates a misunderstanding of a perceived sym-
bolic order. Implicitly, this symbolic order points towards players under-
standing when there are uneven gapes between resources, knowledge,
and expertise. The misunderstanding of this symbolic order is actualized
through the possession and use of powerful cards.
However, this quote also points to differing figured worlds, as the
speaker imposes a ­self-limitation on how they use their cards. Their insis-
tence of “no ­i nstant-win combos” and “trying really hard to not be too
oppressive,” point towards opportunities of enhancing their performance
that they are aware of but choose not to pursue. The speaker clarifies this
discrepancy later in the thread:
174  The Communities of Magic

I don’t mind losing at all. But I come here to play magic, interactive games of
magic where everyone has a chance, and got to do awesome stuff. Losing turn
three 8 games in a row isn’t what I define as playing magic. Same for my play-
group, they just don’t see how unfair it is, and they don’t realize they should
just not let pubstompers join.
Here we are given an interpretation of what it means to “play magic.” It
presents an individualized understanding of the game as centered in inter-
action between players. To the speaker, Magic is “where everyone has a
chance, and [gets] to do awesome stuff.” This figured world becomes
evoked and realized through the speaker’s physical use of their cards, by
choosing to use cards that would be deemed suboptimal from an efficiency
standpoint. When confronted by a player whose own cards represent a dif-
ferent figured world, a different interpretation of what it is to “play magic,”
friction occurs.
This friction is a conflict between injunctive norms that come into
play through descriptive norms. The speaker’s way of enjoying Magic con-
flicts with the agenda of the competitive players. Neither the game rules
of Magic nor the game rules of Commander prohibit interactions where
resource and knowledge gaps are apparent. The rules in fact encourage
such discrepancies as they are more optimal routes towards winning the
game. The rules are thus descriptive norms as they are apparent and sub-
scribe actions that would yield optimal results. Yet, the speaker’s sense of
what it means to “play magic,” their injunctive norms towards the game,
are violated through how the other players performed according to the
descriptive norms.
These dynamics also manifest when individual player strategies meet.
This post notes a player’s experience with playing an “aggro” deck, a strat-
egy that relies on the quick elimination of other players through aggres-
sive play:
I’ve gotten a fair amount of push back in games from players who are the tar-
get of this strategy. They complain that I should spread damage around and/
or that knocking people out of the game is not fun. This complaint seems to
amount to saying I should not play my deck since its only reasonable path to
victory is to be aggressive. The deck is Boros. There is no value engine to sit
back and construct while I wait to combo off on turn 12. Beating down is my
path to victory.
The game interactions encourage eliminating other players as a way of
managing threats. As such, the game prescribes a descriptive norm to
remove other players from the game early. Yet this causes friction with
players’ social experiences, as one response to this post noted:
“My experience has been that knocking a single player out early is a
negative thing because then that player has to sit around for the next 30
 Gathering Understanding (Liu)  175

minutes.” By removing a player early, they are removed from the social
experience of the game. This creates an injunctive norm that discourages
strategies that may be effective from a gameplay standpoint but unde-
sirable from a social standpoint. These differing norms create friction as
players navigate their strategies and expressions in gameplay against social
contracts in and outside of the game context.

Codifying the Injunctive

The popularity of Commander promotes frequent intersection of
differing norms as strangers attempt to assimilate into unfamiliar play
groups. Players are conscious of these interactions and have developed
practices to negotiate the differing norms such as assigning power ratings
to decks:
When I sat down, one of the players asked what level of deck we were all play-
ing. One said 6, another said 4, and I said yes. He explained, and I understand
the concept of the power level of decks, but my question is how you calculate
them. How can I tell if my deck is a 3 instead of a 7?

Power levels refer to a scale from 1 to 10 that rates the efficiency, ability to
win, and power of a deck. This scaling is far from universal, as each num-
ber on the scale refers to a heuristic. Assessment of these levels also relies
on individual judgement and experience. However, this scale represents a
process in which the Commander players codify elements of practice into
a system for regulating injunctive norms between groups. This heuristic
acknowledges the complexities of individual group dynamics. By leverag-
ing the game rules, players have developed this scale to abstract articula-
tion of these dynamics through practices found within the game. Notions
of “what is permissible” are actualized as a mixture of descriptive game
norms and the physicality of the decks. Thus, the features and affordances
of the system become the means through which players enforce relation-
ships between each other (Stanfill, 2015).
These heuristics also manifest through more ephemerally defined
systems, such as the distinction between casual and competitive Com-
mander. The terms casual and competitive are meant to heuristically
define certain injunctive norms. As one player states, “Competitive EDH
is a multiplayer format with the same rules as normal commander, shar-
ing the same ban list. It differs from casual commander in that it does not
have budget, power level, or social contract restrictions on the strategies
it employs.” Here, competitive Commander is positioned as the suspen-
sion of social contracts in favor of pursuing optimum strategies. It is a sus-
pension of injunctive norms and hones on the practices built through the
176  The Communities of Magic

descriptive norms of game rules. However, these heuristics may still be

mapped within personal levels of understanding. One player’s idea of a
power level of 7 may translate to a power level 10 to another player. Simi-
larly, the characteristics of casual versus competitive play may be relative
to individual playgroups or players. “Once I was going out of town and the
LGS near where I was traveling said they had a regular cEDH group. How-
ever after about a game and a half I realised what they said was cEDH was
very powerful magic but not quite the legacy lite EDH I tuned the deck
for.” These discrepancies are further complicated by practices of paratex-
tual assemblages and othering. For example, one thread voiced frustration
towards a group of players pubstomping. A response in that thread was as
follows: “cEDH players and being jerks, name a more iconic duo I’ll wait.”
cEDH refers to “competitive EDH.” Of note, cEDH is often differ-
entiated from “normal” Commander. Many conversations around Com-
mander do not typically specify if they are casual, yet cEDH tends to be
much more explicitly labeled. There is an implicit othering of the “c” or the
competitive relationship that some players may have with Commander.
The quote above demonstrates a much more explicit othering of the prac-
tice, articulated through a paratextual understanding of the term “com-
petitive.” Here, competitive is understood through its relationship to
achieving victory and is not engaged through the more nuanced under-
standings that some players construct for cEDH. For the speaker, the oth-
ering creates a unified vision between their paratextual understanding of
cEDH and the discrepant practices of cEDH players which suspends “bud-
get, power level, or social contract restrictions on the strategies [cEDH]
employs.”
The othering of competitive play also brings up negotiations of priv-
ilege and class. Magic cards are typically acquired on the secondary mar-
ket, where individual cards have their price determined by demand,
power, and supply. Cards that perform well or are known to be powerful,
typically demand higher prices on the secondary market. One character-
ization of cEDH decks is their access to a collection of the most powerful
and most expensive cards. The following post is a response that explained
why the speaker felt their opponent was playing a cEDH deck: “Yeah, they
are cEDH, might not be tier 1, but still. Teferi chain veil, narset turns/com-
bat steps, sisay, tazri food chain, proosh food chain and selvala combo (all
with duals, LED, mana crypt and stuff like that).” Of note, the speaker
chose to highlight that their opponent had “duals, LED, mana crypt and
stuff like that.” This jargon refers to the names of extremely powerful and
rare cards that individually command hundreds of U.S. dollars on the sec-
ondary market. The post represents a frustration that the differential prac-
tices between players is contingent on privileges in class and accessibility.
 Gathering Understanding (Liu)  177

The othering of cEDH in this context means to delegitimize and inter-

rogate how these inequivalences detrimentally effect orientation towards
the community. These tensions are abstracted to the possession of certain
powerful cards and semiotics drawn from those cards.
The constant renegotiation of dissonance between player expecta-
tions is thus embedded in complex interactions between individual partic-
ipatory practices and system features of the Magic. These interactions are
further compounded by the narrative and “spirit” of the Commander for-
mat set out by its governing bodies.

Governing Narratives of Community and Play

Commander originated as a community practice. It was informally
constructed by players who had limited governing authority over Magic:
The Gathering. Historically, the Commander rules committee has pushed
towards individual sociality as part of the play experience, encouraging
players to develop their own house rules for their play groups. Even after
WotC officially adopted and rebranded the format, their stance has been to
allow the community to ­self-regulate. This narrative of ­self-regulation was
expressed in their 2019 philosophy doctrine:
Commander is for fun. It’s a socially interactive, multiplayer Magic: The
Gathering format full of wild interactions and epic plays, specifically designed
as an alternative to tournament Magic. As is fitting for a format in which you
choose an avatar to lead your forces into battle, Commander focuses on a res-
onant experience. Each game is a journey the players share, relying on a social
contract in which each player is considerate of the experiences of everyone
involved—this promotes player interaction, ­i nter-game variance, a variety of
play styles, and a positive communal atmosphere. At the end of an ideal Com-
mander game, someone will have won, but all participants will have had the
opportunity to express themselves through their deck building and game play
[Sheldon, 2019].

As the rules committee acts as the governing body for Commander,

their policies (or lack thereof) have reverberating effects on how these
“resonant experiences” are negotiated. By creating a narrative around
­community-based solutions and drafting social contracts, the injunctive
norms of individual play groups become the processes to achieve these
resonant experiences.
That is not to say the rules committee is a passive agency. The com-
mittee is responsible for maintaining a banlist of what cards, and by
extension what strategies, are legal within Commander. This complicates
how resonant play experiences are managed as Commander players do
178  The Communities of Magic

not represent a homogenous population. The existence of labels such as

“casual” and “competitive” Commander alone indicate a group with var-
ied expectations and goals. Yet, these groups share a space governed by
the rules committee. One post noted the overlap as such: “I realize the ban
list is expressedly not for regulating competitive balance in EDH, and I’ve
seen arguments that if we ban flash, what are those crazy doofuses play-
ing cEDH going to break next and then force us to ban?” This post refer-
ences a community anxiety of how the differing expectations and goals
between players may not be accurately represented or considered in pol-
icy and practice. This anxiety represents the continuum of fan habitus.
Different players orient themselves to Magic based on their player expe-
rience, playstyle, accessibility to cards, and social relationships to others
within the Magic community. Players also approach Magic with differing
goals and stakes. Yet in sharing the same game space, the various relation-
ships and stakes are not immediately visible between players until a viola-
tion occurs.
Magic then becomes the means through how these violations are
translated and perceived between groups. The descriptive norms of Magic¸
the rules of the game, become a proxy for resolving differing cultural and
social relationships. These relationships are not only encapsulated through
play, but also through deck building and the physical element of the cards.
Magic as a practice becomes a text that translates these interactions into
statements of intent, decorum, and experience.

Discussion
This study examines the intersection of fan continuums, physical-
ity, and norms. The implications that system features act as proxies that
articulate community norms through codified practices can be expanded
beyond game contexts. These interactions are indictive of a spectrum of
relationships that users have to systems and institutions. Such relation-
ships may be embodied and enacted through practice and physical arti-
facts. These practices and artifacts negotiate how differing orientations
to communities are articulated. This is readily applicable to political/
social institutions, particularly in comparing systems with varying affor-
dances and rules. For example, social media platforms have differing pol-
icies on what content is acceptable and the means to how that content is
expressed. Users could orient themselves to these systems differently,
based on a variety of experiential differences such as community, class,
race, gender, etc. Each platform and its rules provide a different lens for
how these orientations are expressed through that platform’s particular set
 Gathering Understanding (Liu)  179

of constraints and affordances. Similar analyses can be expanded broadly

to spaces where interaction between community norms and constraints
take place, such as political communication, public discourse, and com-
munity building.

References
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for a Presexual Past,” in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.), Hop on
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 Student Creation of Magic: The
Gathering Cards as ­Cross-Disciplinary
Pedagogy of Writing and Mathematics
Wendi Sierra and Kris Green

Games pedagogy commonly cites playfulness, exploration, and

engagement as key reasons for using games in a classroom setting for
learning disciplinary content. However, as Shultz Colby (2017) has
observed, “the complexity of teaching with games makes many teachers
apprehensive about using them.” Indeed, Johnson and Colby’s 2013 survey
of composition instructors finds games are rarely used as artifacts to ana-
lyze, and produced by students even less. In this essay, we explore using
Magic: The Gathering as both an artifact to be interpreted and analyzed
and as a system to be creatively explored and modified.
Throughout our two-course Learning Community (LC), we used
MTG as a common ­game-based experience for meeting course objectives.
These included game design principles and mathematical modeling, as
well as standard first year composition requirements. Students encoun-
tered probability in various contexts related to card frequency and deck
design, and used the interconnectedness of rules, cards, and players as a
model for understanding system interactions. In this way, MTG acted as
a “trigger system,” as defined by Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen (2009), a
lens through which they could explore these new concepts and apply them.
The experience culminated in an assignment requiring students to create
original Magic cards representing themselves and to contextualize their
design choices in a paper. This offered students the opportunity to demon-
strate mastery of course objectives, explore a space of creativity, and reflect
on and communicate their growing ­s elf-knowledge, drawing on player
types (Bartle, 1996; Rosewater, 2006) and the characteristics of the color
pie in MTG (Rosewater, 2017). Thus, in this assignment the game acted
as a ­low-tech authoring system (Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen, 2009). This
181
182  The Communities of Magic

essay will explore the context of the learning community, the anticipated
and realized benefits of our creative ­MTG-based project, and the chal-
lenges we faced introducing a complex game to novice players, many of
whom ­self-reported as ­non-gamers.
This essay is organized around the phases of playing a turn in MTG.
We begin by “Constructing the Deck” of ideas and themes for our courses
to provide the context for our MTG assignment. The remainder of the
essay discusses our LC experiences. In “Shuffle and Draw Seven” we dis-
cuss our theoretical framework for the LC and the experiences we planned
for the students, drawing on ­games-based learning principles and peda-
gogy. The events leading to the “Ourselves as Magic Cards” assignment
are laid out in “Untap, Upkeep, Draw.” The assignment itself is detailed in
the “First Main Phase” of the turn. Our “Combat” with the assignment—
reading the papers and reviewing the cards to look for themes that emerge
will lead naturally into “Second Main Phase” where we will discuss the
changes we made to the LC and the assignment in the second iteration.
Then we will wrap it all up with a discussion in the “End Step.”

Constructing the Deck: A Math Professor

and a Rhetoric Professor Walk
into a Course Design
This section contextualizes the use of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) as
a key course text, system to analyze, and tool for composition. All learn-
ing is contextual, and the assignment presented existed within a particular
context, taught by a particular set of professors, for a particular audience.
The paired courses described herein were part of the freshman LC experi-
ences at our small liberal arts college. Our institution’s LC program pairs
faculty from different disciplines in a ­t wo-course, writing intensive expe-
rience with a cohort of incoming students. The LC goals include stan-
dard freshman composition topics, information literacy, and engagement
with various issues and with others. Since we both enjoyed games, par-
ticularly MTG and Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), we took the LC oppor-
tunity to explore how our two perspectives on games (mathematics and
rhetoric) could form the basis for an LC. We each had previous experi-
ence both researching and teaching with games that we drew from for this
new course. Kris Green, a mathematics professor, had previously explored
looking at games as mathematical models of a world in which the players
act and interact (Green, 2012). Wendi Sierra, a rhetoric professor, had pre-
viously explored the value of having students analyze and create games
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   183

and ­game-based artifacts as multimodal compositions (Sierra 2017, 2016).

Thus, we had our “bisociation” (Koestler, 1964) to form the seed for this
creative LC: games as both mathematical models and multimodal texts.
This LC was taught twice in consecutive years. While the title, course
objectives, and general course goals remained the same across both offer-
ings, some important changes were made between offerings. These will be
discussed as they become relevant.
LCs follow many different models at different institutions. At our
institution, they take the place of a standard freshman composition course
and are taught as separate but paired courses. Students must enroll in
both courses and cannot drop one without dropping the other. Students
receive three syllabi as part of their LC. Each individual course has its own
syllabus; each professor is the instructor of record on one of the courses
and has full responsibility for selecting materials, teaching, and grading
for that section. The LCs also include an LC syllabus, one that describes
the theme, points of collaboration, and shared assignments for the two
courses. The reasoning behind having three syllabi for each LC is to help
make clear for students both the points of cohesion or overlap between
the two courses and the points of divergence. In our example, while some
activities and even a major assignment were shared across the two courses,
Green was the instructor of record and handled all logistics for Math and
Popular Culture, his section of the LC. Sierra was the instructor of record
and handled all logistics for Writing in and Around Games, her section of
the LC. For the shared assignment, students received separate assignment
sheets and rubrics from each course, as each professor was evaluating dif-
ferent aspects of the work product.
With a central theme decided, the topics for the mathematics course
in the LC quickly fell into place. First, an overview of the modeling pro-
cess was needed, and it was deemed best if this drew from a common set of
experiences for the students to run in parallel with the concepts of simpli-
fication/abstraction, quantification, analysis, and interpretation (Green,
2012). Green designed this course as a mathematical study of complex sys-
tems with the games as the main example. In complex systems, various
interacting inputs, reservoirs, and outputs can lead to emergent behav-
iors that are not derivable from purely reductionist approaches. As objects
of study and as objects to create, it was necessary to explore the concept of
balance in game design from several perspectives, including both the basic
concept of fairness and the idea that players need balanced experiences.
Since most games incorporate randomness for resolving situations, all of
this would be tied together with a basic understanding of probability.
In the second course, Sierra had students explore games as mul-
timodal compositions. This involved a ­t wo-pronged approach. First,
184  The Communities of Magic

students were introduced to a common framework and set of terms used

to analyze texts. This included basic principles of rhetorical analysis:
the rhetorical triangle (author, audience, text), rhetorical appeals (ethos,
logos, pathos), and general instruction in visual design. Additionally,
students read chapters three and four of Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design
Workshop, which included vocabulary defining the formal and dra-
matic elements of games. Between the introduction to rhetorical analysis,
meant to have more broad applicability, and the readings in design the-
ory, students came to a common vocabulary which would help situate and
scaffold later discussions.
We knew from the outset that talking about games abstractly,
divorced from a specific example, would not work for our LC. Students
were assigned into our learning community, so we could not assume that
any of the students would be avid game players or would even ­self-identify
as gamers. The lack of ­self-selection led us to focus on a few specific games
for our course and require students experience them as anchor activities
for learning experiences. The basic plan evolved to teach them a game, and
then use that game to illustrate and explore the mathematical and rhetori-
cal elements in it. After careful consideration, we settled on MTG as one of
the games to spend substantial course time with. MTG is rich in mechan-
ics and narrative. It provides insight into the game world in a variety of
modalities, including but not limited to card art, card text, and a substan-
tial amount of official game paratext in the form of short narratives, video
trailers, and printed ephemera. It uses particular methods of randomiza-
tion and provides interesting decisions both in the deck construction and
game play aspects of the game. Thus, MTG offered a rich text that could be
explored, tested, and used to generate text. The complexity of the game’s
rules, its artifacts (the cards), and the media surrounding it provided a
wealth of material for each course to explore from different perspectives.

Shuffle and Draw Seven: Learning with Games,

Learning Games
Games and composition have a rich history that cannot be fully sum-
marized here, nor is it fully relevant for our discussion of MTG as a peda-
gogical tool. Nonetheless, we will in brief present some of the foundational
frameworks that guided our thinking as we outlined our course and its
assignments.
Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher, in their foreword to Rhetoric
Composition Play, identify four common approaches to game studies in
the field of composition:
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   185

1 . Enriching conventional composition classrooms by adding

lessons from the gaming world
2 . Focusing on computer games and public writing about
computer games as course content
3 . Fundamentally changing composition courses to more closely
resemble games themselves
4 . Extending our understanding of rhetorical practices by
studying the representational and compositional practices in and
around gaming environments
Each of these different approaches brings with it different possible ben-
efits and logistical concerns. Our approach in this LC aligns primarily
with the second focus, “focusing on computer games and public writing
about computer games as course content.” Robinson notes that there are a
number of advantages with this perspective, particularly in a composition
class. Games, Robinson, argues, “are just as much about process as they
are about product” (2008, p. 360). Thus, thinking about the composition
process through the lens of gaming and game design can provide an excel-
lent way to defamiliarize composition, and provide a new perspective. As
Robinson (leaning on Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of game design)
notes, both academic writing and game design/play involve ­r ule-bound
systems balanced against meaningful choices (2008, p. 368).
Thus, games in general felt a good fit for our paired courses, and MTG
in particular offered many advantages for both the rhetoric course and the
math course. However, we should briefly address the “fun” element. Colby
and Johnson describe the issue thusly:
One seeming reward in introducing video games into the classroom, writing
or otherwise, is actually a challenge, given that it is based on an assumption—
and an inaccurate one: that somehow, a pedagogy that utilizes video games is
inherently fun. But it is not (either from the teacher’s or the student’s perspec-
tive, potentially), and this introduces particular pedagogical challenges [2013,
p. 91].

Colby and Johnson highlight that, like many courses which use popular
texts as course material, courses studying games are sometimes dismissed
as frivolous and shallow fun. This assumption takes for granted that stu-
dents will be innately biased toward a ­games-based curriculum. While it is
true that, as gamers ourselves, we brought a substantial amount of passion
to these courses, the overwhelming majority of students had not played
MTG. Indeed, the majority had not played any sort of trading card game.
Thus, overcoming both students’ lack of familiarity with MTG and their
general perception of games as frivolous, ­non-scholarly material was an
important part of our course and the assignments described herein.
186  The Communities of Magic

Our particular LC design (a math course and a rhetoric course paired

together under the heading of games with shared goals about writing and
composition) led us to consider the various ways that a single game could
be used to support multiple types of assignments and outcomes. As a com-
plex game taking a substantial amount of time to learn, we agreed that the
payoff for using MTG (in terms of its relevance to the course and the qual-
ity of assignments we could design with and for MTG) had to make the
amount of time we would need to scaffold student learning to be effective.
Thus, in each class multiple ­low-stakes assignments involved interpreta-
tion and analysis of MTG cards, mechanics, and play. Klopfer, Osterweil,
and Salen (2009) provide a list of twelve different ways instructors can use
games, highlighting the variety of purposes that instructors might have
when they assign games. While we used MTG for many of these purposes,
we will spend extended time here on MTG as simulation, MTG as text, and
MTG as an authoring system.
In the math section of the LC, learning objectives included an under-
standing of the basics of math modeling and systems thinking (inputs,
outputs, interactions), etc., and of games as mathematical models. This
maps nicely onto Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen’s explanation of games as
simulations, a perspective in which games are used as “dynamic systems
with which students can test theories about how systems work, as well as
how certain principles of dynamic systems can be observed and played
out” (2009, p. 23). Of course, this is not an entirely novel idea with regards
to MTG. There exist several studies of building mathematical models
for the analysis of MTG, including analyzing card collecting strategies
(Bosch, 2000), automating deck building with genetic algorithms (Bjork
and Fludal, 2017), making decisions during game play (Cowling, Ward,
and Powley, 2012), and showing that the game is Turing complete (Chur-
chill, Biderman, and Herrick, 2019). But these are not what Green wanted
to explore, since all of those both presuppose a thorough knowledge of
the game and get highly technical. Given the course audience, freshman
students with unknown mathematical background, it was important to
explore how the design elements of the game (the mechanics of the rules
and the cards) create a model that represents a fantasy conflict. This is
discussed in the context of ­role-playing games like DnD in Green (2012)
which are the direct antecedents of collectible card games like MTG.
In the English section, learning objectives included rhetorical analy-
sis of multimodal text and analysis of games using ­design-specific vocab-
ulary. These objectives primarily map onto Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen’s
definition of games as text, though there are shades of games as context
as well. The games as text approach is described as having a strong ideo-
logical bent: “games are ‘read’ as texts that express certain underlying
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   187

ideologies, values, beliefs, etc.” (2009, p. 24). Crutcher’s (2017) “Magic the
Gathering a Literary Text” provides a scholarly model of this approach to
MTG specifically. In addition to basic textual analysis, students used visual
rhetoric to examine the interplay between author, audience, and text, to
analyze the intended audience for MTG, and explored how the mechanics
encourage particular forms of player interaction. Indeed, one of the pro-
gram’s learning goals for all LCs includes a requirement that “Students
will approach an issue from multiple perspectives.” Students wrote weekly
journals on their experiences, and some of these included treating MTG
and related ephemera (developer blogs, fan communities, and the written
short stories) as a text through which to explore different perspectives and
audiences.
In many ways, games were also used as a trigger system in both
courses. Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen describe this approach as using
games “to create an experiential context for understanding around
a topic, issue, or principle that a teacher can build on” (2009, p. 23). In
Sierra’s English course, MTG was a trigger system for particular vocab-
ulary about both rhetoric and games. Students demonstrated mastery of
rhetorical concepts, including ethos, pathos, and logos through material
related to MTG. Students also deployed new game design vocabulary as
they learned about and analyzed MTG, using terms like objectives, pro-
cedures, challenge, and play, to name but a few. Similarly, in Green’s math
course, elements such as randomization and probability were explored in
deck construction.

First Main Phase

The “Ourselves as Magic Cards” writing assignment (see Appendix
A) was introduced early on, so that students could understand how their
experiences in the course were preparing them. Essentially the assignment
had two components: First, design three original MTG cards that repre-
sent who you are. Second, explain your designs in a paper, with attention
to both modeling yourself as a set of three cards and how you designed
the cards to fit into the system of existing MTG cards. Additionally, we
required that one of the cards be a creature and the other two be different
types chosen from artifact, enchantment, instant, or sorcery. Our thinking
on this was that students would typically create a creature card for them-
selves, and we wanted to challenge them to think about other card types
that could represent other important aspects or items. We also wanted to
avoid students creating multiples of the same card type, so that they would
have to confront the unique game balance issues for each type of card.
188  The Communities of Magic

To prepare students for the assignment, we assigned journal prompts

to stimulate ref lection on aspects of mathematical modeling and sys-
tems thinking that would be useful. Students would then receive com-
ments from whichever LC instructor had assigned the prompt, pushing
them to think about other factors or deepen their thinking. For example,
one ­modeling-related prompt required the students to look at the various
reservoirs (e.g., life totals, cards in hand) and exchanges between them
during an MTG duel, applying the concepts of systems thinking to a typi-
cal game. Another ­systems-thinking prompt asked students to think about
how changing one rule would impact the game at different levels. This
started at the immediate impact on the ways duels between players would
be affected by the rule change. This would, in turn, alter the metagame—
the environment of players and deck design and their interactions—as the
new rule makes some cards better and some cards worse, changing the
interactions among the decks. At the highest level, they needed to address
how this might impact the business system of MTG: how the values of var-
ious cards or sets of cards or participation in events might change as the
new rule changed the dynamics and affected player enjoyment. Students
were asked to consider and speculate on these various impacts, and could
investigate deeper (i.e., examples of this in MTG finance or design history)
if they desired. Later, students were asked to demonstrate systems think-
ing in a prompt about how combinations of cards can produce effects that
are more than the sum of the effects of the individual cards involved.
At the same time, students were exploring various ways to think
about themselves in their journals, using both general ­game-related con-
cepts and those specific to MTG. The former included the player types
introduced by Bartle, while the latter included a deeper analysis of the
color pie in MTG and the player types popularized by Mike Rosewater
(2006, 2017). Some of the journal prompts here involved explaining which
card they like the most and why and thinking about which colors repre-
sented them the best as people versus as players. While they may not have
had enough familiarity with the MTG player types described by Rosewa-
ter, they were easily able to reflect on the Bartle player types (which apply
to games more broadly.)
Throughout all of this, students were assigned to regularly play duels
with each other and keep notes regarding what cards they played, when
they played them, why they played them, and how this affected the game.
Later, we provided them with additional cards from a collection of spare
cards we had to incorporate into their decks. They journaled about why
they wanted to use particular new cards and how they thought those
would improve or change their experience in the game, then reflected on
the actuality of it after testing. Thus, students were exposed to a fairly large
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   189

range of cards and mechanics before the major writing assignment was
due.
Vital to the assignment was applying the modeling tools students
were developing an understanding of. In the first days of the mathemat-
ics course in the Learning Community, students explored the classic card
game War as a system of rules. One of the first journal prompts was to con-
sider why it is called “War” and how the game might be made more like
“Guerrilla War” or “Predators and Prey” through tweaks in the rules. This
experience provided a foundation for thinking about the rules and game
elements (cards, their numerical values, and the symbols on them for the
suits) could provide a model for different elements in the real world related
to the game’s flavor. This became an iterative activity, as students progres-
sively made changes to War, letting the cards represent spells, using the
suit symbols to represent different types of magic with various strengths
and weaknesses (ala ­rock-paper-scissors), and allowing players choice in
which cards they played. Thus, War became a prototype for MTG, provid-
ing students a foundation for understanding how MTG can be viewed as
a mathematical model. With our exploration of War as ­low-stakes assign-
ment scaffolding, in their MTG paper students were asked to both delve
deeper into the main aspects of modeling in the context of the game and to
explain these in their paper about the cards they designed. Thus, students
needed to consciously draw upon these modeling elements as they created
the cards and then capture that thinking in the paper. So what would that
look like?
The first step of mathematical modeling is to apply abstraction and
simplification to decide which elements of the real world (or the imag-
ined, fantasy world) are relevant to the model and which can be left out.
There are countless ways that this appears in MTG. To begin with, once
they have been summoned to the battlefield, two of the key elements of a
creature card are the power and toughness. Unlike DnD, the mathemati-
cal model of MTG does not try to represent a creature’s wisdom, charisma,
intelligence, or dexterity, all of which are surely relevant to the real crea-
ture or person, in addition to many more. But none of these matter when
the goal is to give players a simple way to compare two creatures in combat.
Instead, these other elements are often abstracted with qualitative descrip-
tions: a particularly nimble creature might have the keyword “first strike”
or the text “can’t be blocked” added to their card. A particularly intelligent
creature might have other abilities so that they are good for more than
just basic combat, such as allowing their controller to draw an additional
card when they enter the battlefield.1 But the designers do not add keyword
descriptions or text for every aspect of a creature: designers don’t worry
about whether it is furry, whether it is particularly friendly, or if it likes to
190  The Communities of Magic

take long walks on the beach at sunset. For a game like MTG, these charac-
teristics would not, typically, have an impact on the game and would sim-
ply clutter the mechanics of the game with unnecessary details, since all
of these aspects in ­non-mechanical ways could be captured through the
name of the creature or the flavor text on the card.
One of the key differences between mathematical models and other
models (physical, statistical, or conceptual, for example) is the level of
quantification involved. Putting numbers into the model instantly allows
for comparisons to be made and scales to be created. Two of the obvious
quantities are the power and toughness of the creatures, but the converted
mana cost (total number of mana needed to play the card), the number
of specific colored mana needed to play the card, the number of cards
in a player’s hand, the size of the libraries (the decks of cards), and play-
er’s starting life totals are other key quantities that matter. A more subtle
quantity is the restriction of only having one legendary creature of a par-
ticular type in play at a time per player, which represents the uniqueness of
that creature. Or restricting players to no more than four of each nonbasic
land card in their starting deck.
In typical mathematical modeling, the analysis portion of the proj-
ect is when the modeler puts all of their planning into action by solving the
model equations or running the simulation and collecting data, for exam-
ple. The parallel stage for playing MTG is the point at which a player moves
from adjusting the rules, designing new cards, and building a deck to now
playing the game. As the games unfold using the newly designed elements,
the player/designer can keep data on the interactions and the way every-
thing plays out. Even if a player is not designing new cards or adjusting the
rules, they are still exploring how a particular deck performs in the game.
The final phase in mathematical modeling is the interpretation phase.
For traditional mathematical modeling, this is when the results from the
analysis stage are compared to the original information available and the
outcome desired. In traditional modeling, this outcome is related to how
well the model captures something real and helps you make predictions
or study its behavior, such as when modeling the spread of an epidemic
through a population to make decisions about mitigation approaches.
This is often where the modeler returns to the first stages of the process to
reconsider the simplifications and other choices made, adjusting these and
proceeding through the phases again (and again…) until the model lines
up with what is being modeled to an acceptable degree. For MTG, this
involves looking at both the story of the game (in its narrative context and
how well that worked) as well as interpreting the data with respect to how
well the model of the game worked. One would then refine the model—
change the deck or the cards or the rules—to push the results closer to
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   191

the desired outcome. In the game world, there are really two unspoken
hypotheses being tested with the model: That your deck will win and that
the players will have a good time playing the game.

Combat Phase
It should be emphasized here that, because our focus was not the
game itself but rather what students could learn about rhetoric and math-
ematical modeling through MTG, students needed to learn more than
just how to play. In addition to being novice MTG players, students were
learning about themselves, about writing, about college, and about many
other topics in this project. Thus, while we scaffolded game learning as
much as we could, there definitely remained gaps in their knowledge as we
approached the card design assignment. For this reason we endeavored to
provide ample templates and models, both for ideas and for game balance
comparison. As the card errors section will show, the students’ ability to
make use of these ideas and transfer them to their own card designs was
uneven. The idea of “balance” in particular proved to be challenging. Of
course, it should be noted that balance seems challenging for MTG game
designers themselves (Rosewater, 2020).
In this context, game balance encompasses several aspects. Mathe-
matically, a game is balanced or “fair” if neither player has an inherent
advantage over the other. This sense of fairness is critical to helping bal-
ance the experience of the players so that both have an equal chance to
engage in the game and have fun, which is, after all, the goal of playing
a game usually. These two aspects are enacted through both the rules
and through the cards used to play the game; so students had to consider
how to design fair cards that demonstrated both quantitative and qual-
itative aspects of balance. On the quantitative side, a card that is cheap
to cast should have a proportionally small effect on the game (although
the player’s skill at choosing when and how to play it might give it more
impact.) Students needed to use existing cards as models for the cards they
designed in order to set their mana costs in a fair and balanced way. We
also spent time in class gathering data on the cards and their effects to
build a mathematical model to help estimate the appropriate cost of a par-
ticular card. Qualitatively, each color of magic in MTG also has its own
slate of connected effects, such as green’s focus on trampling and ramp-
ing to more mana and blue’s focus on drawing cards and tapping the oppo-
nent’s creatures. Thus, the students needed to balance the effects of their
cards with the qualitative aspects of each color as well.
In addition to collecting the papers and the cards from students, we
192  The Communities of Magic

also solicited their opinions about the cards designed by the rest of the class.
We posted images of all of the ­class-designed cards, and then asked stu-
dents to complete a survey. We asked students to choose the cards of each
type (sorcery, creature, etc.) they found most interesting as a proxy for fla-
vor and how well the card modeled the intended concept. Other questions
asked them to select the card of each type that seemed the most balanced.
The results of the survey from the Fall 2016 cohort are shown in Appen-
dix B and the selected cards are provided in Appendix C. This survey was
an effective way to close the assessment loop and evaluate the integration
of their skills, since we could observe their ability to understand the vari-
ous concepts, apply these concepts to create new cards, and analyze other
cards using this framework. For the most part, their choices demonstrate
some of the critical reasoning skills we hoped to see. Several of the popu-
lar choices were not ones that we would have chosen as “best balanced” or
as “most interesting” but class discussions brought out rich conversations
about the cards, suggesting that there is more to be gleaned from this kind
of ­360-assessment, but we were not able to follow up on this.
One of our favorite cards was “Insulin Pump” (Figure 1). We felt it
had an interesting design that captured the flavor the student wanted to
communicate and also gave insight into the student.
What this student wrote about the card in the accompanying paper
explained how it modeled an important aspect of the student’s life:
I have worn an Insulin pump for 10 years. I only increased the power by one
and the toughness by three because I do not want to change the course of a
game too much. However, I wanted to emphasize the importance of the insu-
lin pump. The condition in the card that exiles a creature when the artifact is
removed from the creature emphasizes the [importance] of the pump. Essen-
tially, that is what would happen if I did not take insulin every day. Thus, I am
abstracting the importance of the insulin pump by demonstrating that with-
out insulin I would not be able to live. The important distinction which makes
this abstraction, partly simplification, and not just making a statement is less
immediately obvious. I did not discuss the eventual change in Ph that would
occur. In fact, there was no direct mention to any physiological process that
would be shut down with a lack of insulin. I simplified the disease itself by only
demonstrating the necessity of insulin. Additionally, quantifying the impor-
tance was necessary to make the object functional in the game world. The arti-
fact adds +3/+3 power and toughness to a creature. This addition can reap
major benefits to a player in combat.

Regarding the student’s work to balance the card against other cards, they
wrote:
To prevent the propagation of unfair combinations with “Insulin Pump”
the card must be internally balanced. Fullerton (2014) states, “Sometimes a
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   193

combination of rules creates

an imbalance. Sometimes it
is a combination of objects,
or even a ‘super’ object that
unbalances play” (p. 308).
At first, this card appears
extremely unbalanced. For
example, “Bonesplitter,” an
artifact, has an equip and
mana cost of one. “Bone-
splitter” gives an equipped
creature +2/+0 power and
toughness. “Insulin Pump”
has a similar equip and
mana cost. However, “Insu-
lin Pump” gives a creature
+3/+3 power and toughness.
Therefore, I needed to add a
limiting ability to the arti-
fact. The card is transient
for this reason. After three
turns the creature and arti-
fact are discarded. The card
can be used as a short burst
of dominance, but a player
cannot create a major dis- Fig. 1: Student-generated card named “Insu-
parity throughout the entire lin Pump.” As submitted, the card included an
game. actual image of an insulin pump, but for this
essay, all images have been removed to respect
MTG equipment cards are intellectual property.
artifacts that can be played,
then attached to a creature using the “equip” cost. This cost can be played
to move the equipment to another creature. The student who designed
the “Insulin Pump” card is attempting to use this as a way to model the
real world, where an insulin pump is not actually detachable and movable
to another person. They have also cleverly used this in the balance of the
card as well, since normally one would not expect to see such a ­low-costed
(both casting cost and equip cost are one) item; but the temporary nature
of the equipment provides a balance tradeoff among the scale of the effect,
the cost of the effect, and the time that the effect is available to the player.
Wording the card so that the counters are placed on the creature, not the
equipment itself, was intended to ensure that the creature will still feel the
effects of getting down to zero counters, even if the equipment is moved.
However, the wording on the card makes it unclear what to do when the
equipment is moved to attach it to another creature. The explanation
194  The Communities of Magic

makes it clear that the student wanted the removal of insulin counters
once per turn to continue, even if the equipment were attached to a differ-
ent creature or not attached to any creature. This is likely due to an incom-
plete understanding by the student regarding how equipment works. But
we suspect that the wording to deal with that case would have been chal-
lenging even for experienced card designers.2

Declare Attackers: The Creature (Self) Cards

One requirement of this assignment was for students to create a crea-
ture card to represent themselves. As Table 1 shows, students demon-
strated different approaches to this card. While we expected more students
to make themselves legendary, many did not, and a significant portion of
the students chose to use a pet or their car as “who they were.” In retro-
spect, we should have asked students why they did/did not add the leg-
endary supertype. In general, the papers tended to focus on the choices
of what they included on a card, rather than what they omitted/did not
include, so it is difficult to know if avoiding the legendary supertype was
conscious choice (i.e., “I don’t feel that special, so I did not make myself
legendary”), an accidental omission, or confusion about the game.

Table 1: Distribution of Creature Types by Cohort

for the Card Representing Themselves

Type Line of the Creature Card 2016 2017 Total

Legendary Creature 4 1 5
Creature—no subtype 5 5 10
Creature—Human or Human {subtype} 10 7 17
Creature is ­non-human (pet, car, etc.) 6 7 13

It’s worth observing that while the term legendary has become a syn-
onym for the greatest, strongest, or best in other games, this is not the case
in MTG. In World of Warcraft, player gear is ranked common, uncommon,
rare, epic, and legendary, with legendary being both the best and the most
rare. In League of Legends, a player can become legendary by making six
kills in a row without being killed themselves. Thus, in other games the
association with the term legendary might lead one to believe that there
is something exceptional about the supertype. However, for creatures in
MTG, the term legendary simply refers to being a particular individual.
Indeed, while many legendaries are powerful cards at mythic rarity (like
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   195

Jace, the Mind Sculptor), there are also legendaries that have a much lower
power level and appear at uncommon rarity (like Arvad, the Cursed). Both
of these cards refer to a specific person rather than an undifferentiated
type of person. ­Sakura-Tribe Elder does not refer to a specific person, but
rather the role of Elder in the Sakura Tribe; however, Arvad, the Cursed
refers to a specific person named Arvad.
It is also interesting to see how the students internalized a generic
fantasy setting and unspoken conventions of naming cards. Table 2 pres-
ents a summary of how the students framed the name of the card that
represented themselves. The standard convention for MTG cards that rep-
resent unique beings (legendaries) in the multiverse is basically of the
form “Name, Title” such as “Muldrotha, the Gravetide.” Although all
card examples students had were from sets that were in standard rota-
tion in 2015–2017 (so that they followed the current design philosophy
and naming conventions) this was not explicitly discussed in class. None-
theless, students picked up on these ­genre-specific elements and incor-
porated them into their cards either directly (10 out of 45, 22 percent) or
very closely with a reverse ordering (15 out of 45, 33 percent). However,
their design literacy proved somewhat incomplete, as students frequently
demonstrated naming mismatches. Generic, ­non-legendary creatures
were frequently given specific names that would suggest uniqueness (i.e.,
“Pudge” rather than “Hiding Hound”) or vice versa. This demonstrates
an interesting tension as students internalized the naming convention,
demonstrating one kind of literacy, but did not seem to possess enough
game knowledge to apply it accurately.

Table 2: Distribution of the Naming Conventions

Demonstrated in the Students’ Creature Cards

Style Examples 2016 2017 Total

Phrase Got Hops, Horde of Humans 4 4 8
{Adjective} {Noun} Golden Knight 7 8 15
{Name} / {Nickname} Pudge / Deadshot 5 4 9
{Adjective} {Name} Grandiose Gus 3 0 3
{Name}, {Title} Hecuba, Master of Hounds 6 4 10

Examination of the color identity of the creature cards also pro-

vides further insight (Table 3). By far, the majority of the students cre-
ated ­s ingle-colored creatures, and only one student ventured into a
­t hree-colored creation. But again, without further information, it is
unclear whether the students chose a single color because it really captured
196  The Communities of Magic

what they wanted to say about themselves at that time, or whether it was
perceived as simpler to make it ­mono-color, or even if the choice was moti-
vated by impressions of which colors were “stronger.” What we can say is
that the choices were not entirely random. If the choice of color were ran-
dom, then among 45 cards we would expect to see about 9 cards of each
color in ­mono-colored cards. But students shied away from White and
Black in their choices, leaning more toward the other colors. Students did
journal about color identity before designing their cards, using Rosewa-
ter (2017) as a starting point to understand the colors and what they are all
about. In retrospect, it seems obvious that this reading is focused entirely
on the mechanical ways in which the color identities are built and rein-
forced through the card design. The results might have been considerably
different if the students started with a more holistic and descriptive expla-
nation of the “color pie,” such as Sabien (2018), which also provides exam-
ples of fictional characters that exemplify each of the colors.
Limiting ourselves to one and ­t wo-color cards, there are 15 combi-
nations of one- and ­t wo-color cards. Thus, we would expect to see almost
three cards of each combination (dropping the ­t hree-color card leaves
us 44 cards and 44/15 is about 2.93) with about 15 ­mono-colored cards.
Instead, there are over twice that many. And three of the ­t wo-color com-
binations do not appear on any cards at all (White/Red, Blue/Red, and
Black/Green). One combination (Blue/Black) appears four times, and the
rest only once or twice. Statistical tests would suggest that these choices
are significant, but without specific additional information, we cannot
speculate as to cause.

Table 3: Distribution of the Number of Colors

in the Cards Created by the Students in Each Cohort

Number of Colors 1 2 3
F16 Cohort 17 7 1
F17 Cohort 16 5 0
Total 33 12 1

For example, the color choices frequently included Blue. Many stu-
dents did describe their being impressed with Blue’s association with fly-
ing, which they felt was powerful. This may indicate that they were less
concerned with representing themselves honestly, and more about hav-
ing good, effective cards. It is also possible that the tendency toward
­mono-colored cards is attributable to journal prompts that had them think
about their color identity but did not explicitly prompt for combinations
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   197

of colors. We also note that Black is ­u nder-represented in the color distri-

bution; we suspect that the darker associations in the game with death and
sacrifice did not resonate with our students, based on a few comments in
the journals about color identity and the papers about their cards. How-
ever, we only have information about the choices the students did make;
this analysis has highlighted, for us, the need to have students explain not
only why they made a particular choice, but also why they did not choose
the other options.
The converted mana cost of the creature cards is another way to gain
limited insight into the students. This cost represents a combination of a
measure of their ­self-worth in tension with game balance issues. Thus, it is
not purely about their perceived ­self-value. The 2017 set has a higher aver-
age cost (4.5 vs. 3.76 with variances of 2.02 and 3.32), with a range from 2 to
9 in converted mana cost (vs. 1 to 6 for the 2016 cohort).
Again we are left with questions, such as: How much of the differ-
ences we see (mana cost, more blue in 2017, etc.) is attributable to inten-
tional choice, or lack of familiarity, or some of them just getting a blue
starter deck, or randomly losing a lot to blue decks and therefore chose
blue as “more powerful?” Are they drawn to blue for color identity or due
to misunderstanding some aspects of other colors (as the journals and
game play made clear)? For example, experienced players of MTG gener-
ally consider green a strong color due to ramp effects (which allow players
to have quicker access to more mana and thus play higher mana cost cards
more quickly than their opponents) and trample (which allows any excess
combat damage to be dealt to a player even if the attacker is blocked).
However, many of our students maintained the mistaken idea that all
creatures have trample, and thus did not view that aspect of green as spe-
cial. Similarly, our students did not appreciate ramp effects; is that why we
see fewer green ­self-identity? One possible explanation might be that stu-
dents enjoyed turns that felt more active and viewed ramp effects as doing
nothing (as if a player just waited another few turns they would have more
mana anyway). For more experienced players, ramping into more mana is
part of an overall strategy with a goal of ramping to a particular level of
mana in order to play a particular card early enough to take advantage of
the opposing player.

Declare Blockers: The Noncreature Cards

­Two-thirds of the created cards were ­non-creatures. What can we
learn from studying these? Table 4 shows the type distribution for the pair
of cards each student made.
198  The Communities of Magic

Table 4: Distribution of Card Types

for ­Non-Creature Cards Created by the Students

2016 2017 Together

Artifact & Enchantment 3 2 5
Artifact & Instant 9 4 13
Artifact & Sorcery 1 1 2
Enchantment & Instant 9 5 14
Enchantment & Sorcery 0 1 1
Instant & Sorcery 3 7 10
Total 25 20 45

Note that one of the “Instant and Sorcery” pairs in 2017 was actu-
ally submitted as two sorceries, although either one of the two could have
been recast as an instant, and the students were required to create two dif-
ferent types. With 6 combinations here, we expect to see about 7.5 of each
pair overall (45/6 = 7.5). The distribution shown seems quite far from this,
and that deviation is significant, based on a ­chi-squared test. The ­p-value
for the overall distribution is 8.­1E-4, which is far below the usual 0.05 level
of significance. Thus we can reject the hypothesis that students randomly
chose (with equal weights for all pairings) the types of cards to make. This
significance carries to each cohort as well, with p = 0.0024 for 2016 and p =
0.1173 for 2017.
In particular, the number of instant cards made seems significant:
21/25 made an Instant in 2016, and 16/20 in 2017. Since we would expect
about half to make an instant (3 of the 6 possible combinations include an
instant) if they chose card types randomly, this is significant (­p-value for
­chi-square gives 6.­74E-4 in 2016, 7.­29E-3 in 2017, and 1.­54E-06 for the com-
bined data). Why were they drawn to the “instant” card type? Is it because
it’s more flexible? Did they perceive it as more powerful? We speculate here
that familiarity with other game systems may have played a role. Early in
the semester we asked students about experience with games in general
and with trading card games specifically. Several students indicated they
had familiarity either with Hearthstone or Pokémon, other popular card
games. In both of these games, players cannot play cards on their oppo-
nents’ turns. If students had already internalized not playing cards on an
opponent’s turn from other games, instants as a card type could be seen
as an exciting addition to strategy and play. Alternatively, students may
have appreciated the flexibility that comes with making a card an instant
(instead of a sorcery), but not realized that this flexibility is often paid for
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   199

as part of game balance. In MTG, an instant card with the same effect as
a sorcery will typically either have a weaker card effect or have a higher
mana cost in exchange for the flexibility it provides.
One of the many instants students created, “Crushing Student Loan
Debt,” demonstrated how students often wrote about the choices that they
made, but did not (and were not prompted to) write about the roads not
taken. In writing about why they made “Crushing Student Loan Debt” an
instant, rather than a sorcery, the student wrote:
It is an instant type card to represent my hope for the future. I felt that there
was not better representation of my internal dependence on the hope that
the future promises improvement than my impending debt from my student
loans. Simplifying my student loan debt and what it represents resulted in the
conclusion that, even though there is hope for the future, the present will be
rough. Abstracting this idea into the world of Magic: The Gathering was gen-
erally ­straight-forward. The promise of improvement from currently poor
circumstances is easily represented in temporary hindrances of abilities of
creatures. This means that the card would need to do something that would
hurt a target creature for the extent of a single turn. A card that I found that
represents this is “Bewilder.” It is an instant card that gives a target creature
-3/-0 until the end of the turn. This could be used to make any creature less
of a threat. This I felt was a fair quantification of crushing student loan debt
since it hurts but it could be worse. For example, the card could be more pow-
erful and have the opponent put the target creature directly into the graveyard
but instead it just deflates it. The casting cost is 3 total mana which was already
appropriate given the other ability that the card has. It also lets the player who
uses the card, draw a card. This could represent that the entities that distrib-
ute student loans are making money, but in an attempt to be less cynical, I am
choosing to describe that extra perk as something that adds value to the card.
Considering the two abilities that the card offers, I felt that a total mana cast-
ing cost of 3 was balanced. Especially since that could be an appropriate cast-
ing cost for a creature with 3/3 power and toughness. 3/3 being the amount of
power and toughness that Crushing Student Loan Debt would be able to neu-
tralize. Following these considerations, I felt that the card was balanced and
ready to crush.

Notice that in this explanation, the student has missed several connec-
tions between the card and the chosen theme: Blue is considered the color
most related to knowledge, so connecting this to getting a college degree
would have been an important link to discuss. The fact that the spell is a
cantrip3 could have been imagined as representing the knowledge gained
from the college degree, as cards are a proxy for knowledge in the general
MTG universe. The student discusses this cantrip effect, but fails to con-
nect the ideas fully, simply viewing this as a good way to add balance to the
card and represent an “extra perk.”
200  The Communities of Magic

Deal Damage: Card Design Errors

Some general types of issues we found with the cards fell into one of
the following three categories:
1 . Errors in Coding: These are attributable to lack of familiarity
with the game or the software tools.4 Some may be more about attention
to detail. This could manifest as a mismatch between the card frame
(i.e., color) and mana requirement or between the card frame and card
type, or as missing flavor text or missing subtypes for creatures.
2 . Errors in Manipulating the System: These affect the balance
of the system itself and can be difficult for even experienced players.
These manifest as over- or ­u nder-costed cards (in terms of mana cost),
unclear mechanics, or mechanics based on an incorrect understanding
of the game.
3 . Errors in Illustration: These involve mismatches between
the concept of the card and the implementation of the card. Perhaps
the type choice doesn’t match the description of what it is meant to
represent, or the card violates the traditional color pie, or was just
overly complicated.
Overall, there were approximately 0.97 errors per card, on average across
the two cohorts (0.81 per card in 2016, 1.17 in 2017). However, out of the 130
cards created by the two groups, 47 (36%) of them had no real errors. Of
course, 38 (28%) of the cards had 2 or more errors, so things weren’t per-
fect. The most common errors were ­system-related (type 2).
Note that many of the cards considered ­error-free are still not quite
how they might appear as finished MTG cards. But they did not necessar-
ily violate any rules of design or development. For example, some of the
cards had their mana costs listed “backwards” so that a cost of one blue
and one generic mana, normally written 1U, was written as U1. Most of
the cards are clever and interesting, and almost all—when taken with the
explanatory papers—provided a look at students in a way that was hon-
est and enlightening. See Appendix C for some of the same cards selected
by the 2016 cohort for various reasons (the survey questions are shown in
Appendix B.)

Second Main Phase

The first version of the LC was a part of our institution’s Science
Scholars program, an ­honors-type scholarship for STEM students that
requires students to take certain classes, including the LC, together as a
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   201

cohort across their four years and participate in a ­t hree-semester research

project in their final two years. Our students thus had no choice in their
LC, as they were required by their scholarship to enroll in ours. Ulti-
mately, in this first version of the LC, we tried to do too much. We ended
the LC with a final game design project that was meant to allow students to
bring in their different disciplinary backgrounds, but ended up being quite
­t ime-consuming. This led to a lack of balance elsewhere in the course; to
work around the scaffolding for the game design project we wound up
with two MATH papers on MTG and none on DnD. We also attempted
to accomplish more breadth by exploring additional games to demon-
strate how other trading card games and tabletop roleplaying games han-
dle similar design challenges in different ways. However, this exploration
spread our time even thinner. Finally, we found it awkward that, due to
the rushed nature of the schedule, students worked on the “Ourselves as
Magic Cards” paper during weeks we as a class were no longer playing
MTG in class or talking about it. Still, we were excited by the work our stu-
dents were doing. Thus, after our first offering of the LC, we knew we had
to try it again if we could. In planning the second iteration, we had a list of
issues that we needed to address:
1 . We expected a different audience the second time;
2 . We wanted different cards/resources for the students;
3 . We needed to schedule the paper to align better with the
experiences in class;
4 . We wanted to simplify the experiences, going deeper into
fewer games; and
5 . We needed to include more journal prompts and ­pre-writing
to build up to the paper.
Our 2017 course offering was no longer exclusive to Science Scholars; it was
open to all freshmen, but with a caveat. Students did not select the partic-
ular LC that they wanted. Instead, the all LCs were grouped into five main
areas, and students ranked the main areas that interested them. Then they
were scheduled for the LC from that group that best fit the rest of their class
schedule. Our LC was placed, with a little input from us, in the grouping of
LCs around “Identity, Privilege, and Power,” as the other options did not
seem to connect well with our planned experiences. This required some
rethinking on our part; however, the “Ourselves as Magic Cards” fit nicely
under the heading of “identity.” And the idea of game balance gave us a ten-
uous connection to looking at privilege in the math course in the context
of fairness, while the English course explored the artistic representations of
characters as described below. The modeling aspect and ­system-thinking
gave natural connections to power and imbalances in power.
202  The Communities of Magic

We decided in this second offering to focus exclusively in DnD and

MTG, providing us with more time to scaffold our concepts and have pay-
off for the work put into teaching each system. We also added a major
paper to use DnD as a framework for modeling oneself. The basic idea was
for them to design a resume that was not just a list of things—the way a
traditional resume—but rather was more of a character sheet, where the
blanks that get filled in are relevant to the world today.
Many significant changes were made to Writing in and Around
Games, the English course in the LC. In the first offering the course was
designed to scaffold into the final game design project. While dropping
that project (based on the challenges described above) was a simple choice,
doing so meant finding new focus. Reviewing our goals, renewed empha-
sis on MTG and DnD, and assigned LC grouping, it seemed visual literacy
would be the most appropriate center for the revamped LC. The students
continued to read and learn about traditional first-year composition rhe-
torical concepts (rhetorical appeals and the rhetorical triangle), but also
did readings on visual literacy. This led to a greater focus on graphic ele-
ments of games, thinking about how they convey meaning and play a part
in the game itself, that was not present in the first iteration of the LC. Sier-
ra’s new focus on visual literacy as it relates to games also helped us align
the courses more strongly with the new overall LC theme of “Identity,
Privilege, and Power” by exploring the different representations of char-
acters and players in the two games over time. For example, the depiction
of female characters has evolved quite a bit in both, moving away from
exploitative, ­m ale-teen fantasy imagery and into more balanced treat-
ments of the genders. One of the main activities in the DnD section of
the 2017 version of Writing in and Around Games involved doing a visual
analysis of race and gender as depicted in Player Handbooks, Campaign
Guides, and Modules from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to 5th edi-
tion materials. While our class analysis was guided by our readings in
visual rhetoric, representation of gender in tabletop roleplaying (and DnD
specifically) is a problem that has been explored in more depth elsewhere
(Trammell, 2014). Since these classes were taught, Wizards of the Coast
has taken proactive steps to address these issues both in their forthcoming
material and in their previous publications (through the release of “mods”
for those works).
We also chose to have students purchase ­g ame-related materi-
als in the second iteration, with each student buying one of six selected
“Planeswalker Decks” that were in standard rotation at the time. They also
bought three sealed booster packs of cards so that they could customize
their decks slightly after gaining some familiarity with the game. Addi-
tionally, these sealed packs allowed us to simulate a draft experience so
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   203

that they could see how changes to the game—in this case, creating a deck
on the spot rather than crafting it ahead of time—can change the game
experience. This played into the complex systems theme of the MATH
course.
As we have alluded to in the card errors sections, we found a great
deal of value in the student journals and also observed how topics covered
in journals were reflected in major assignment papers. Thus, we wove in
additional journal prompts throughout that were meant to serve as clearer
preparation for the students in designing their cards and connecting them
to MTG. For example, one of the new journal prompts asked them to gen-
erate a list of ten words/short phrases that represented themselves, and a
later prompt asked them to think about how these might translate into
specific cards or mechanics in MTG. We shifted this paper and card design
project to be the first main project in the LC, and made sure the MTG por-
tion ran in parallel with the project. This made it easier to generate exam-
ples of the course concepts, and it was easier for the students to pair up
and play—especially outside class or while waiting for class to start—than
DnD.
Notice that the scores on the MTG card design paper were stronger in
the second group (see Appendix A). This is in spite of (a) scholarship stu-
dents in the first cohort and (b) the first cohort having more time to adjust
to college and ­college-level writing (as the paper was assigned later in the
semester in 2016). Note also that the scores for modeling and game bal-
ance were actually lower in the second group (they had less time with these
ideas when the paper was written and did not really revise much about
this in the final version after they had worked with these more extensively)
and the scores on these categories exhibit much more variability from stu-
dent to student. Oddly, though, in many areas there were more of particu-
lar types of errors than in the first group. Although there were two areas in
which the error rate decreased substantially: 1C (missing elements) and 3B
(color pie violations).

End Step
In this second iteration, due to various issues, we were not able to imple-
ment some of the things that we liked from the first pass of the LC. Unfortu-
nately, this included the survey in which students evaluated and ranked each
other’s cards. And in revisiting the LC to write this essay, we have stimulated
a number of additional questions that we are unable to answer.
There is a difference in asking people to design game elements
for playing a game (and presumably for either winning or having more
204  The Communities of Magic

fun) and what we have done. While quite a few of the cards that students
designed would be playable, our focus was more on the rhetorical elements
and ­self-reflection involved in design. We did not attempt to have them
play with their cards or design cards to enhance their current decks or
make playing more fun. Moreover, we did not approach the card design
holistically as a set of cards intended to have unifying themes and mechan-
ics. This is the way new sets of MTG cards are developed (Rosewater, 2015),
so cards are not designed in isolation and can provide for playable expe-
riences in a variety of formats. None of these considerations underpinned
our motives. Obviously, given more time for this assignment, playtest-
ing and viewing the cards as a set would extend the elements of math-
ematical modeling students were learning about and allow them to put
their game design vocabulary into action. Given another few weeks, this
could even allow for an additional revision activity, as students tested their
cards, revised their cards, and reflected both on the balance and thematic
impacts of the changes. Nonetheless, with the other demands of the course
this would have required too much additional development.
It is not hard to imagine refocusing the courses in a way to make this
type of deeper development possible. Similar to the way the designers and
developers at Wizards of the Coast work, the assignment described above
could be the starting point for generating a large number of cards. Then
the students could work together to develop them into a coherent set—
revising cards to fit the themes or developing new cards to fit into the gaps
as needed. They could have also built a class theme and implemented it
in their own cards—something appropriate to college life—and possibly
introducing new win conditions on cards. (For example, the “level up”
mechanic certainly fits, and one could envision having a land representing
the college that gives a player an automatic win if some specified number
of creatures have fully leveled up. ­Double-faced transform cards or the flip
cards could also be used to represent a creature graduating to a new ver-
sion of itself.)
We also now recognize many lost opportunities for gathering addi-
tional data, such as which students had which specific starting decks. We
also did not keep a log of who they played or what the outcomes of their
matches were. It is possible that this random selection in both the cards
they received and the cards they played against influenced how they chose
to represent themselves on the cards. But without knowing which decks
they had, or which they played against and won or lost to, we cannot really
explore this connection.
Likewise, we have reflected on the possible power of incorporating a
more meta conversation about learning jargon to play these games (Dodge
2018 makes it clear how rich and ­jargon-filled they are!) and its similarity
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   205

to learning the technical language of a discipline. For example, there are

often words and phrases from common language that have been expropri-
ated for very specific disciplinary purposes, often with conflicting defini-
tions or usages. This might be as simple as a logical comparison like “or”
which in daily language is exclusive, but in mathematics and computer
science is inclusive. So while a phrase like “Your mother is either upstairs
or is outside” makes sense logically as one or the other alternative but not
both, in mathematics “A or B” is true if either A is true and B false, A is
false, and B true, or if both are true. Just as MTG players must learn spe-
cialized meanings of common words, so to do academic disciplines ask
students to develop a more specific disciplinary vocabulary. Exposing this
parallel would allow us to invoke the Games as Content Systems approach
more, and would possibly help motivate students who are not gamers by
giving them a reason—the games then become a practice domain for “the
real thing.”
Throughout the process of compiling the data and reviewing the cor-
pus of student cards for this essay, we had one final observation. Many
of the trends and patterns revealed in terms of card errors, card types,
and color preferences, only became visible to us in our work on this essay.
During the semester, as these courses were taught, we looked at our stu-
dents’ work in a sequential fashion, as we graded, commented, and sup-
ported student learning. While the sequential fashion makes sense from
a grading perspective, it obscured many of the interesting patterns found
when looking at the cards as a set. It was only when we stepped back and
looked at the aggregate that certain questions became apparent. Many of
our questions are about the “negative space” around their choices: while
we asked them to reflect on the choices they made, we did not ask them to
reflect on why they rejected the alternatives.

Appendix A: Paper Assignment: Modeling Ourselves

as Magic Cards
The Assignment
Your task is ­t wo-fold: First, design three Magic cards that model aspects
of yourself. One must be a creature card; the other two must be different types
of cards, selected from Enchantment, Sorcery, Instant, or Artifact. No Land or
Planeswalker cards. You will need to include images of these cards (see below
for information on a good site to make the cards, once you have the idea and the
details.) Each of the cards should be complete and should have all rules and fla-
vor text included. If you use keywords that already exist, you will need to explain
them in the paper; if you create new keywords, you should include, on the card,
some reminder text about how it works, and describe the keyword in the paper.
206  The Communities of Magic

Second, you must, in a paper of 4–5 pages, explain what real world abilities
and aspects of yourself are being represented on your cards within the mathemat-
ical model of the game. Be sure to demonstrate your knowledge and understand-
ing of the process of mathematical modeling, with a focus on the first three steps:
simplification, abstraction, and quantification. Discuss how you checked for game
balance in the cost and ability of the cards. For example, you could use the Gath-
erer database to identify similar cards and explain how you used those cards to
benchmark against.
Grading
Grading will be based primarily on the following factors:
• How complete and creative your cards are
• How well you have applied and explained your application of the
modeling ideas of Simplification, Abstraction, and Quantification
• How well you argue for the game balance of your cards—this is
essentially your thesis
• Flow and organization of the paper
• Grammar and mechanics
Extra credit may be given for particularly creative cards and mechanics, or
for particularly flavorful cards.

Resources for You to Draw Upon/Cite

Bartle, R. (1996) Players who suit MUDS
Bender (1978) What is modeling?
Blau (Mr. Awesome). June 2011. How to Design a Magic Card. Available at
http://pureMTGo.com/articles/­how-design-magic-card
Kim, D. (1999) Introduction to systems thinking [packet]
Rosewater, M. (2017) The mechanical color pie [online]
The discussion at http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/11343/­
looking-for-the-magical-formula discusses the complexity for balancing MTG
converted mana cost (and why there is no magic formula for it)

Making Your Cards

The website “MTG Cardsmith” has a nice interface for making your cards.
So when you’ve finally tweaked things the way you want with the cost, text, image
idea, etc., you can go to the site online (http://MTGcardsmith.com/ ) and create
your cards.

Grading Rubric and Results

Area Below Expectations Meets Expectations Above Expectations
(0–2) (3–4) (5)

Card design Cards are incomplete Cards are complete Cards are complete
(double or are just copies of and demonstrate and very creative
points) existing cards (0–4) some creativity (5–8) (9–10)
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   207

Area Below Expectations Meets Expectations Above Expectations

(0–2) (3–4) (5)

Math Explanations of the Paper attempts to Paper explains how

Modeling cards are very poor explain the cards but the cards model
and do not convince is lacking in detail, aspects of you through
the reader of the failing to address all simplification,
connection to you aspects of the cards abstraction, and
through modeling (color, effects, etc.) quantification

Game Cards are not well Cards are a little Cards are balanced
Balance balanced at all and over- or ­u nder- and the paper explains
the paper does not powered or they how your cards fit
convince the reader of do not quite fit the into the game system
their fit to the game game system; paper in a balanced way,
system attempts to explain citing specific cards as
the balance but falls examples
short
Flow and Paragraphs are Paper could be better Paper is well
Organization too long or too organized to support organized and reads
short; paper lacks the argument and/ smoothly
transitions; overall or the flow is a little
structure of the paper choppy
is hard to follow

Grammar Paper has so many A few grammar or No significant errors

and errors that it is mechanics issues that in grammar or
Mechanics difficult to read disrupt reading the mechanics interfere
paper in places with reading the paper

The grading rubric we used for this assignment.

Appendix B: Survey from Fall 2016

In Fall 2016, we shared all the ­student-generated MTG cards with the class
and had them complete an anonymous survey. This consisted of the questions:
1 . Which {type} is the most interesting?
2 . Which {type} is the most balanced?
Students were asked these two questions for each {type}: Artifact, Creature,
Enchantment, Instant, or Sorcery. In addition, students were asked the following
overall questions:
1 . Which card is the most flavorful, overall? Explain.
2. Which one card do you most want to jam into a deck and try out? Why?
3 . Are there any cards you don’t quite understand? If so, which one(s)?
Why?
4 . Which one card would you LEAST want to see your opponent play
against you? Explain.
208  The Communities of Magic

Highest Vote Getters

Card Type Most Interesting Most Balanced
Artifact Vast Knowledge & Wonder Ferocious Hound
Boy (tie)
Creature Swinger of Fury Pudge

Enchantment Music to the Ears Swift Feet

Instant Crushing Student Loan Debt Michelle Obama ­Side-Eye

& Revenge of Finney (tie) & The Hunting Hound (tie)
Sorcery Get That Degree Family & Get That Degree (tie)

Cards with the most student votes.

Most Flavorful: Michelle Obama ­Side-Eye & Big Tones (tie)
Most Want to Jam: Big Tones, Foresight, Catch and Release (tie—all at only
2 votes)
Most Confused By: Radioactive Replenishment
Most Avoided: Big Tones

Appendix C: Some of the ­Student-Generated Cards

Below is the text of the ­student-generated cards referenced in Appendix B.

Big Tones
Type: Legendary Creature—Human Beast (Power 4, Toughness 4)
Cost: 2GG
Text: When Big Tones dies as a result of combat, Big Tones deals 5 damage to each
creature that dealt damage to him this combat.
Flavor: A competitor that hates to lose more than he loves to win. Determined
that if he goes down, his opponent will soon follow.
Image: Male in football uniform with helmet off, drinking water

Catch and Release

Type: Instant
Cost: 1U
Text: Detain (Stop a permanent from attacking, blocking, or having its activated
abilities activated.) Permanent must be returned to owner at the end of turn. No
damage is dealt to permanent.
Flavor: He was violently ripped from his home, only to be set free yet again.
Image: Hand holding a large fish and removing a hook from its mouth.
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   209

Crushing Student Loan Debt

Type: Instant
Cost: 2U
Text: Target creature gets -3/-0 until the end of the turn. Draw a card.
Flavor: “I got summoned and I was ready to go. Then I was reminded of my debt. I
got sad and went home.”—Everyone.
Image: Statute of a student in “The Thinker” pose on a pedestal with overlarge
backpack labeled “debt” weighing him down.

Family
Type: Sorcery
Cost: 2RRR
Text: Target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn. Put a creature with combined
power and toughness less than 4 onto the battlefield.
Flavor: Family fights for each other and dies for each other.
Image: Group of people gathered to support each other.

Ferocious Hound
Type: Instant
Cost: R
Text: Return target creature to your opponent’s hand.
Flavor: Gracie is loving and sweet but has a hidden side to her.
Image: Small black dog staring out at you.

Foresight
Type: Instant
Cost: BB
Text: Search your opponent’s library for any two cards and remove them from
their deck, then shuffle your deck.
Flavor: He who sees all knows all.
Image: Close up of an owl’s eye

Get That Degree

Type: Sorcery
Cost: 1B
Text: Look at the top 7 cards of your library. You may do one of two things: Do not
pick up any cards and shuffle your deck, or Discard your entire hand into the
graveyard and draw the top 7 cards.
Flavor: Watching all eight seasons of “House, M.D.” more than four times should
be enough for a person to go straight from high school to medical school.
Image: Laptop with image of title card from “House, M.D.” on the screen

Michelle Obama ­Side-Eye

Type: Instant
Cost: 2
210  The Communities of Magic

Text: Michelle Obama ­Side-Eye deals 2 damage to target creature or player.

Flavor: You know you wish she ran for president so she could look at Trump like
this.
Image: Michelle Obama glaring out at you.

Music to the Ears

Type: Enchantment
Cost: 2WW
Text: Whenever a sorcery of instant deals damage to you, prevent that damage
and deal twice that damage to the spell’s controller.
Flavor: “You’re the sound of redemption, the faith that I’ve lost, the answers I’m
seeking, no matter the cost.”—Goo Goo Dolls.
Image: Guitarist/vocalist from Goo Goo Dolls on stage.

Pudge
Type: Creature—Hound (Power 2, Toughness 2)
Cost: 1G
Text: 5G: Pudge gets +5/+5 until end of turn.
Flavor: A wild Pudge is peaceful and complacent. That is, until he is provoked.
Then there is no stopping him.
Image: Dog looking out from a hiding place under drapes in a living room.

Radioactive Replenishment
Type: Instant
Cost: 1G
Text: Energy has been recharged for player and +3/+3 is added to target creature
until end of turn. Flashback: 2G.
Flavor: Whether on the battlefield or the kitchen table, replenishment is essential
to take on the world.
Image: Collage of food images, the radioactivity symbol, and Blinky the
­T hree-eyed Fish from The Simpsons.

Revenge of Finney
Type: Instant—Team
Cost: XBR
Text: Search your library for a creature card to battle your opponent’s creature
that defeated one of yours in a previous turn.
Flavor: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.
Image: Basketball game.

Swift Feet
Type: Enchantment
Cost: 1U
Text: When Swift Feet enters the battlefield put a +1/+1 counter on a target crea-
ture. 2U: Return target attacking creature to owner’s hand.
 Student Creation of Magic (Sierra & Green)   211

Flavor: Only the quick survive.

Image: Runner’s feet on a ­cross-country course.

Swinger of Fury
Type: Creature (Power 3, Toughness 4)
Cost: 2GR
Text: Intimidate. RR: Until end of turn, swap the power and toughness of one tar-
get creature.
Flavor: She may be small but she will shock.
Image: Female volleyball player in midair about to hit the ball.

The Hunting Hound

Type: Instant
Cost: WW
Text: Target creature you control gains protection from the color of your choice
until end of turn.
Flavor: I will protect my owner at all times.
Image: Face of a hound dog starting out.

Vast Knowledge
Type: Artifact
Cost: 6
Text: 6{tap}: Search your library for a card, then shuffle your library. When Vast
Knowledge leaves the battlefield, target opponent sacrifices a land.
Flavor: None
Image: Shelves of books in a library.

Wonderboy
Type: Artifact
Cost: 4
Text: When a creature holds Wonderboy their attacks cannot be blocked.
Flavor: A swift tool that can change the tide of battle.
Image: A lacrosse stick and ball.

Notes
1. Cards explicitly represent knowledge in the game. This is exemplified by referring to
the players’ decks as their “library” and the various spells with the word “knowledge” in
their title that allow players to draw extra cards or look ahead at the cards in their library.
2. There are equipment cards that do remove the equipped creature from play when
the equipment is destroyed, such as “Oathkeeper, Takeno's Daisho” and “Captain’s Hook”
which have ­s tory-related reasons for this effect. But this student has added a timer to the
card so that the removal is more certain, creating a unique combination of these effects.
3. Any spell with “Draw a card” added to its effects is referred to as a “cantrip.”
4. We had students use MTG Cardsmith, a ­browser-based tool at https://MTGcardsmith.
com/.
212  The Communities of Magic

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 Reinterpreting Magic
Narratives Beyond the Deck
 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition
in Magic: The Gathering
Roger Travis

The idea that a precise and very revealing analogy exists between
systems of certain kinds of narrative ­v ideo-game mechanics and the
­oral-formulaic tradition that gave us the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey has
now attracted some attention in scholarship both in game studies and in
classics. In this essay I outline the equally fascinating analogy between
the narrative ­performance-mechanics of Magic: The Gathering and that
Homeric system of oral recomposition. The reification and granulariza-
tion of narrative through the medium of the card, whether on the table
or in a digital image, make MTG a fascinatingly different kind of ludic
recompositional epic from a video game like a digital RPG: in brief, I con-
clude in this essay that the emergent epic narrative performed in a game of
MTG emphasizes the ­player-performers’ virtuosic mastery of the game’s
systems as, paradoxically for a competitive game, a collaboration.
My methodology in this essay, and in particular my definition of
collaboration for the purposes of my discussion, draws on several differ-
ent fields: classical philology, first and foremost, as odd as that may seem,
in scholarship to be introduced immediately in the first section; cultural
anthropology a la Huizinga’s (1998, originally published 1938) and Cail-
lois’ (2001, originally published 1961) seminal works about play and games,
which connect the ancient world to the modern one through comparisons
of play practices; and performance studies, which has begun gradually to
make its influence felt in the loose amalgamation of approaches that goes
by the name of game studies in our current academic context.
I am inspired to develop this methodological approach to games as
performance in particular by Clara ­Fernández-Vara’s 2009 DiGRA paper,
“Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance.”
She notes the same confluence I note here, among cultural anthropology,

217
218  Reinterpreting Magic

performance studies and game studies, and also that “we still have not yet
fully realised the potential of studying videogames as performance” (2009,
p. 1).
What is true of videogames is lamentably even truer of the study of
other sorts of game, including card games. That circumstance forces the
critic to cobble together their approach, above all when attempting to
bring a potentially contested word like collaboration into a conversation
that has enough complexity already in simply analyzing a single player
game.
By collaboration in this essay, I mean a ludic process analogous to a
theatrical collaboration, of the sort captured by Bickerstaff in his discus-
sion of collaborative theater: “[O]n the level of the creative group, the con-
fluence of individual processes becomes truly synergistic, greater than the
sum of its constituent parts. Likewise, the group too is a part of the broader
field and domain in which it practices, and the field and domain are in turn
part of an influential cultural discourse” (2011, p. 52). I hope in this essay
finally to introduce the idea of ­c ollaboration-in-creative-performance
as a possible avenue for future studies not only of MTG but of table-
top and videogames more generally. In so doing, perhaps I can further
­Fernández-Vara’s cause as well as introducing MTG enthusiasts to a new
way of looking at their game.

Recompositional Epic
Since the late 1930s, we have known, thanks to the work of classicist
Milman Parry (1938), that the Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey, originated
in a tradition of oral formulaic poetics. Parry’s student Albert Lord (2000)
carried this work into the comparative study of Homeric poetry with the
analogous oral formulaic poetics of the South Slavic guslars, whose sim-
ilarity to the Homeric bards gave birth to a new school of Homeric criti-
cism (Nagy, 1979), as well as to the comparisons with ­game-systems that
have begun to emerge.
The ­neo-analytic critics of Homer, following in Parry’s and Lord’s
footsteps, have uncovered the ­w ide-reaching effects of the epics’
­re-compositional genesis on their cultural impact both in the ancient
world and today. Most importantly, composition by theme, as Lord (2000,
p. 4) called the process by which bards assembled their songs anew on
each performance occasion, allows for compelling direct comparison with
­game-mechanics, as Janet Murray (1997, p. 184) recognized.
Simply put, the “interesting choices” that Sid Meier so memorably
made essential to our understanding of games’ basic appeal and meaning
 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition (Travis)  219

(Rollings & Morris 2000, p. 38), applied in equal measure to the Homeric
bard. Professionalized from his youth in a system of ­pre-literate memory
that made the Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, his inspiring divinities,
he could not have sung the same song twice, just as we cannot play the
same game of MTG twice.
As the player of a game makes decisions within the ruleset of the
game, the Homeric bard sang the original songs upon which the Iliad and
the Odyssey were founded. At some point, through agents unknown to us,
versions of the songs of that living tradition were transcribed, and the idea
of a poet named Homer (the name almost certainly began as a title mean-
ing “the one who puts the song together”) came into being (Nagy, 1996, p.
91–92). The players of MTG might by the same token be called “the ones
who put the game together”—they have the same kinds of choices to make.

Pacifism
One of those choices, for a player running White cards in their deck
at least, is the classic card I have chosen as an example for analysis: Pac-
ifism. The card has appeared in many different versions over the years
since its first appearance in the Mirage block in 1996. Notably (and very
entertainingly), the card’s artwork has featured several inspired depic-
tions of monstrous enemies rendered suddenly peaceful, along with vari-
ous humorous pieces of ­f lavor-text and the heart of the card—its powerful
mechanic: “Enchant creature. Enchanted creature can’t attack or block.”
I will argue that several key ludic and narrative elements of Pacifism
present strong analogies to the ancient epic tradition known to us most
prominently in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It may seem odd to claim that
a card from a competitive game—as well as the game itself—has such an
essential relationship to a system of narrative performance, but I hope
this essay’s most important contribution will lie in my suggestion of how
natural the connection actually is: on the one hand because recomposi-
tional epic like that of the Homeric bards has always thrived in competi-
tion, singers competing one with another to sing the most pleasing song;
on the other because Pacifism, a paradoxically aggressive card that keeps
an opponent’s creature from attacking (Figure 1), demonstrates in the end
that MTG is in fact a collaborative performance form, in which the play-
ers work together to play out the story of their contest (for collaboration in
performance studies, see Barron [2011]).
Two essential points of comparison between Pacifism and key ele-
ments of Homeric epic performance will lead to a surprising and fairly
grandiose conclusion: (1) ­c ard-art and ­f lavor-text as the epic trope called
220  Reinterpreting Magic

ecphrasis, and (2) playing of an enchantment on enemy creature as an

embodiment of epic’s essential ­t urn-taking, competitive nature, will lead
(3) to the idea of MTG’s contest between players as a kind of ­meta-epic
confrontation. The comparative description of the card’s narrative and
ludic mechanics thus serves as a foundation for an analysis of Pacifism’s
contribution to the game’s essentially (and perhaps surprisingly) collabo-
rative nature.

Ecphrasis
Homeric epic has as one of its more unexpected building blocks a
trope called ecphrasis. The easiest way to think of ecphrasis is probably as
elaborate description, usually of an object, like a scepter or a shield. “Elab-
orate description” hardly does justice, however, to the importance of ecph-
rasis in the epic tradition or, especially, to the essential function it serves
in the performative mechanics of recompositional epic (Squire, 2013).
The most famous example of ecphrasis in the whole epic tradition is
probably the description of the newly forged shield of Achilles in the eigh-
teenth book of the Iliad. Here’s a sample:
First of all he was making the Shield, huge and massive, fashioning it from
inside out in every direction, and around it he was putting a rim that is radi-
ant, having three folds and radiant. And he [made] a silver sling that was hang-
ing from it. He made the shield in five thicknesses. And he was making many
variegated things with his knowledgeable thinking. In it he fashioned the
earth, in it the sky, in it the sea, and the sun that does not wear out, and the
moon in her fullness, and in it he [fashioned] all the celestial signs—the Pleia-
des, the Hyades, huge Orion, and the Bear, which men also call the Wagon and
which turns round ever in one place, facing Orion; she alone has no share in
the baths of Okeanos.
On it he [= the divine smith Hephaistos] wrought two cities of mortal men.
And there were weddings in one, and feasts. They were leading the brides along
the city from their maiden chambers under the flaring of torches, and the loud
bride song was arising. The young men were dancing in circles, and among
them the pipes and the lyres kept up their clamor as in the meantime the
women, standing each at the door of the courtyard, admired them.
Meanwhile the people were gathered in assembly, and there a quarrel had
arisen, and two men were quarreling about the ­blood-price for a man who had
died. One of the two claimed that he had the right to pay off the damages in
full, declaring this publicly to the population of the district, and the other of
the two was refusing to accept anything. Both of them were seeking a limit,
in the presence of an arbitrator, and the people took sides, each man shout-
ing for the side he was on; but the heralds kept them back, and the elders sat
on benches of polished stone in a sacred circle, taking hold of scepters that
 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition (Travis)  221

the heralds, who lift their voices, put into their hands. Holding these [scep-
ters] they rose and each in his turn gave judgment, and in their midst there
were placed on the ground two measures of gold, to be given to that one among
them who spoke a judgment in the most straight way [Homeric Iliad, 18.478–
508, tr. Butler, rev. Kim et al.].
Though over the centuries scholars have found many compelling thematic
ways to relate the shield (and the many other ecphraseis to be found in
epic) to the overarching plots of their epics, one of the hallmarks of the
trope is that no obvious relationship exists. A bard sang an ecphrasis as
a display of virtuosity, a means of demonstrating his skill and creativity.
Here, the city at peace on the Shield of Achilles provides a perfect
example of the pleasing paradox: the bard suggests that he could tell us all
about the brides and the dancers and the judges, but chooses rather to go
on with his central tale—Achilles’ withdrawal from the fighting at Troy,
and that decision’s tragic aftermath.
Similarly, the versions of Pacifism found in various sets of MTG
demonstrate the virtuosity of their artists and designers, while also sug-
gesting stories untold.
Each of their ­f lavor-texts provides its own delights, and each serves
an identical function while also providing a pleasant variety that in itself
shows the system’s inherent virtuosity. No ­f lavor-text for this card, how-
ever, can excel the classic version: “For the first time in his life, Grakk
felt a little warm and fuzzy inside.” To focus on that example, Grakk—
whose sole appearance in the legendarium of Magic: The Gathering, such
as it is, is on this card—represents a moment of ecphrastic diversion in the
onflowing narrative of a game.
Just as the world depicted on Achilles’ shield suggests a narrative just
over the horizon, the untold story of Grakk allows the ­player-performers of
a game of MTG a kind of fleeting immersion in a tale adjoining the narrative
they themselves enact in their contest (for ­game-players as performers, see
­Fernández-Vara [2009]). The images on the various versions of Pacifism do
the same thing as only a picture can do—there’s good reason that so many
classical ecphrases present descriptions of artistic depiction, as the Shield
of Achilles does. (Other famous examples include the extended descrip-
tion of a bedspread in Catullus 64 and the description of ­sculpture-adorned
doors in the sixth book of the Aeneid.) From the perspective of literary
and ludic narrative—both of them by nature ­non-visual—a picture like
the classic image of Grakk with a floral wreath and a floral belt adjoins the
ongoing narrative performance, like a window onto a vista just out of reach.
What heroic planeswalker put those flowers on Grakk? How did the wood-
land creatures arrive? Perhaps above all, when we combine the art with the
­f lavor-text, what has happened to Grakk in his villainous life, up to this
222  Reinterpreting Magic

Fig. 1: Wizards of the Coast 2018).

 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition (Travis)  223

moment—what dark feelings and dark deeds led him to this moment, when
a planeswalker has taken away his martial prowess entirely?
None of those questions, or their possible answers, has anything to do
with the mechanics of the performative contest currently being enacted by
the players through their planeswalker characters. Even if we were to try to
­re-tell a game of MTG as if it were a duel of wizards rather than a tabletop
card game, Grakk’s story would not feature as a scene in that tale.
The importance of ­f lavor-text in particular to the essential experi-
ence of playing MTG, however, should not be underestimated. An article
like “Top 20 Flavor Text” by Adam Lee, posted in 2013, makes clear at least
how seriously the designers of the game take this ecphrastic aspect of their
work. “[F]lavor text,” writes Lee, “is like the mortar that holds the story
together. It’s in the cracks between the other storytelling venues that we
have, and it fills in—bit by bit—story information and planar flavor that
you can’t get anywhere else” (Lee, 2013).
If we may define a ­game-mechanic as a bundle of rules that controls
the relationship between ­player-choice and ­game-state, then the ecphras-
tic dynamics of ­card-art and ­f lavor-text like that found on Pacifism do not
seem to partake of the more obvious facets of MTG’s ­game-mechanics.
If, however, we expand our understanding of the ­game-state in a perfor-
mative direction, the entire situation begins to look very different. Lee
calls flavor text, in an evocative metaphor, mortar—that is, an essential
building element of the storytelling accomplished by the more obviously
mechanical elements of MTG.
The metaphor helps us observe how the ­game-state in a given con-
test of MTG means a great deal more than how many hit points each player
has remaining, or how much mana is in front of them. In an MTG con-
test, the ­game-state always includes that mortar, contributing above all to
the immersion of the players, their identification with their planeswalker
characters and indeed with the mechanics of the duel itself.
The fundamental importance of ecphrasis to classical epic, recog-
nized from the very beginning of Homeric scholarship in the Library of
Alexandria (though the term ecphrasis itself does not appear until later),
should alert us not just to the continuity with literary culture to be found
in this mortar filling the narrative cracks for the past 2500 years but also
to its rather sneaky power. As Lee writes in another rather delightful met-
aphor, “If ­long-form writing is the awesome dinosaur that rules the liter-
ary wilderness, then these little snippets of flavor text are the ­hot-blooded
mammals that are kicking ass in the shrubs.”
A recognition both of the value added by ecphrastic art and flavor text
to the overall performative experience of MTG, and of that value’s con-
nection to the tradition of ­re-compositional epic performance only serves
224  Reinterpreting Magic

to make us wonder about the similarities and differences to be found

between the mechanics of the two kinds of epic. As I discussed at the start,
the ek part of ­ek-phrasis indicates that these bits of narrative “mortar” and
“ ­hot-blooded mammals” live outside the main, ongoing thrust of the epic
story. In the cases both of Homeric epic and of MTG, that story gets told
through mechanics, whether the thematic mechanics of the bard’s profes-
sionalized poetic system or the ludic mechanics of a collectible ­card-game.
The very nature of ecphrasis can make it difficult to hold Grakk’s ­semi-told
story in mind when we turn to the function of Pacifism in the epic system
of MTG, just as it is difficult to hold in mind the Shield of Achilles when
the bard narrates the tale of Achilles’ encounter with Priam in Book 24.
Nor does it make a truly decisive difference, I would suggest, to our
appreciation of the moment of playing Pacifism to stop a threat dead in its
tracks whether or not we even glance at the flavor text as we say, perhaps,
“Boom,” and drop the card after gleefully tapping the necessary lands. A
listener in the bard’s audience for a singing of the meeting of Priam and
Achilles who had perhaps never heard a rendition of the Shield of Achilles
would not miss much of the meaning of the exquisite balance of peace and
war to be found in Achilles’ tent, as the heart of the killing machine soft-
ens at the prayers of a grieving father. The connection between these two
elements of epic performance in both performative platforms is not nec-
essary, but it possesses nevertheless a remarkable power. As I move on to
the mechanical side of Pacifism and its connection to the ­re-compositional
mechanics of Homeric epic, Grakk’s story may seem to fade in impor-
tance, but I urge the reader to try to bear in mind the crucial role played by
mortar and by the mammals in the shrubs.

Collaborative Competition
The first mechanical fact about Pacifism, which is true of many cards
of various kinds in MTG and most of all of enchantments, is that one
player plays it on a card already played by another player. For example, if
Player 1 has played even a very powerful creature—a Harvester of Souls,
say, with 5/5 power/defense, at a cost of six mana—Player 2 may play Paci-
fism at a cost of two mana and prevent the creature from ever attacking, or
ever blocking to defend Player 1 from damage.
To put it more schematically than is probably necessary, Player 1’s
choice to play Harvester of Souls enlarged their range of choices in the
game’s ­possibility-space. On the current turn, they could tap the Harvester
to block and, on the next, after the Harvester had recovered from sum-
moning sickness, they could tap it to attack.
 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition (Travis)  225

The choice of Player 2 to play Pacifism restricted Player 1’s choices

within the ­possibility-space, however. Player 1 can no longer either attack
or defend with the Harvester on which they spent so much mana.
On the one hand, that mechanic simply represents the essence of a
competitive game: each choice of one competitor modifies the range of
choices available to the other(s). Even if another competitor decides not
to respond directly to the first competitor’s choice, the change in the
­game-state brought about by that choice through the relevant mechanic
has changed the range of possible effects. In a chess game, 1. e4 alters the
range of choices available to Black because each response creates a very
different tactical situation from the one it would create if White had played
1. d4. In a game of League of Legends, one player’s choice of gear, utterly
unknown to his opponents across the map, subtly changes the range of
action available to them since the fabric of the ­possibility-space has under-
gone a tiny transformation.
Viewed through a performative lens, however, what can otherwise
seem an ordinary interplay of contested goals becomes something quite
different. The nature of the interaction between players in MTG dictates
that when Player 2 plays Pacifism, the card goes down onto the table (or the
virtual playspace, in the game’s digital versions) in a strong, visible relation
to Harvester of Souls. Usually, Player 2 would go so far as to put Pacifism on
top of Harvester. The visual aspect of the mechanic is not inconsiderable in
itself, but it cues the observer as to something more important in the fun-
damental operation of the mechanic of the game—something with a fasci-
nating analogue in oral recompositional epic.
We have lost almost the whole of the competitive context for the
development of the Homeric epics, but a few tantalizing traces remain,
and some of those traces have crucial ramifications for the cultural effects
of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days, and
the beloved but extremely ­shadowy-in-origin Homeric Hymns. Briefly
put, and without involving this essay too deeply in some of the most con-
tentious debates of Homeric scholarship, which are by no means as enjoy-
able as the contests of MTG, important early performers (perhaps the very
earliest performers—the ones we call the bards) of the Iliad and the Odys-
sey competed with one another for prizes at festivals (Collins 2004). It
is very possible, though highly speculative, that in the passage I quoted
above from the Shield of Achilles the competition of the judges actually
provides our best, most precious view of what a bardic competition looked
like.
Meanwhile the people were gathered in assembly, and there a quarrel had
arisen, and two men were quarreling about the ­blood-price for a man who had
died. One of the two claimed that he had the right to pay off the damages in
226  Reinterpreting Magic

full, declaring this publicly to the population of the district, and the other of
the two was refusing to accept anything. Both of them were seeking a limit,
in the presence of an arbitrator, and the people took sides, each man shout-
ing for the side he was on; but the heralds kept them back, and the elders sat
on benches of polished stone in a sacred circle, taking hold of scepters that the
heralds, who lift their voices, put into their hands. Holding these [scepters]
they rose and each in his turn (amoibēdis) gave judgment, and in their midst
there were placed on the ground two measures of gold, to be given to that one
among them who spoke a judgment in the most straight way [Homeric Iliad,
18.497–508, tr. Butler, rev. Kim et al.]

We need not go that far in interpreting (and perhaps ­over-interpreting)

the evidence to be found in epic poetry—the very earliest documentation
we have of the culture from which the epics sprung. The point I hope to
make about both Homeric epic and MTG lies in the way ludic competition
leads finally to a collaborative performance.
With regard to this ­c ompetitive-collaborative dynamic the most
important word in Homeric epic is arguably amoibēdis, which is fascinat-
ingly enough closely related to the relatively familiar name of the proto-
zoon amoeba. The ­single-cell organism got its name from the central idea
of change, though those who named it missed another essential part of
the Greek word, at least in archaic and classical usage—not simply change,
but rather exchange: the word for “answer,” in Homeric Greek—as in one
speaker answering another—is also closely related.
Amoibēdis, usually translated “in turn” is the key word in the pas-
sage about the judges from the shield of Achilles. It is also a word used fre-
quently of the Muses when they sing in chorus. We might even go so far as
to call it the smoking gun of the fundamentally ludic nature of Homeric
epic. The scene of judgment depicted on the shield, when read as anal-
ogous to a poetic competition, gives us the fundamental dynamic that
would have applied equally well to bardic competition: the various opin-
ions of the elders do not cancel one another out; despite the strange and
­often-written-about prize of gold for the straightest judgment the scene
on the shield does not depict a ­zero-sum game. The various speeches made
by the elders with their scepters (and it is well worth noting that a sort of
scepter called a rhabdos gave the rhapsodes who carried the Homeric tra-
dition into the historical period their name) clearly combine, collabora-
tively, to set what the bard calls, a little cryptically, a “limit.”
The implication of the basic ludic dynamic of ­t urn-taking for the per-
formance of Homeric epic on the ­now-forever-lost occasions when the
bards recomposed the tradition into what we know as the Iliad and the
Odyssey—as well as for the fossilized works as we have them—has a pro-
fundity that belies its apparent triviality. Indeed a comparison like this
 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition (Travis)  227

one with MTG can help us grasp elements of the Homeric tradition that we
might otherwise overlook.
­Turn-taking in a competitive game, especially when realized into
a mechanic like that of Pacifism, might be called the essence of the
game’s mechanics. Without the simple notion of handing control of the
­game-state from one player to another, the players simply would not have
a game to play. That alternation of control leads, in MTG, to Pacifism’s
ability in the hands of Player 2 to transform a very specific part of the
­game-state—the creatures put on the battlefield by Player 1. In Homeric
epic, the ­t urn-taking so strongly implied by the use of amoibēdis in the
judgment scene on the Shield of Achilles leads to the tension between epic
traditions that gives us both Achilles and Odysseus, both the Iliad and
the Odyssey. To move from the judges on their benches to the internal evi-
dence of the Odyssey itself, at a crucial moment, Odysseus takes turns with
the bard (­super-bard, really) Demodocus to begin to tell his story.
King Alkinoos, ­pre-eminent among all people, this is indeed a beautiful thing,
to listen to a singer such as this one, the kind of singer that he is, compara-
ble to the gods in the way he speaks, for I declare, there is no outcome that
has more pleasurable beauty than the moment when the spirit of festivity pre-
vails throughout the whole community and the people at the feast, through-
out the halls, are listening to the singer as they sit there—you can see one after
the other—and they are sitting at tables that are filled with grain and meat,
while wine from the mixing bowl is drawn by the one who pours the wine and
takes it around, pouring it into their cups. This kind of thing, as I see it in my
way of thinking, is the most beautiful thing in the whole world. Now, however,
since you are inclined to ask the story of my sorrows, and rekindle my own sad
memories in respect of them, I do not know how to begin, nor yet how to con-
tinue and conclude my tale, for the hand of the gods has been laid heavily upon
me. Firstly, then, I will tell you my name that you too may know it, and that
one day, if I outlive this time of sorrow, I may become a ­g uest-friend to you,
though I live so far away from all of you. I am Odysseus son of Laertes, and I,
with all my acts of trickery, ­I-am-on-the-minds-of all humans, and my glory
reaches all the way up to the sky [Homeric Odyssey 9.2–21, tr. Butler, rev. Nagy
et al.]
A few moments before, Demodocus had sung the story of the Trojan
horse at Odysseus’ request. The king had caught Odysseus weeping at the
tale, and asked the ­as-yet-unknown guest to take a turn. The bard of Book
8 of the Odyssey calls attention to this ­t urn-taking as a collaborative com-
petition and a competitive collaboration. Above all, Odysseus must make
himself known, if he is to win his hosts’ assistance in conveying him home
to Ithaca—and he must (as is demonstrated later in Book 11, when Odys-
seus stops his tale and only continues it when his hosts promise him lavish
gifts) do it in style.
228  Reinterpreting Magic

­Meta-epic confrontation
With this admittedly simple idea of ­t urn-taking as foundational to
the mechanics of recompositional epic, we can move onto its surprisingly
profound ramification in the interplay between the Iliad and the Odyssey.
To make sense of this argument it is necessary to think of the two great
Homeric epics rather counterintuitively to our modern sensibility. In the
recompositional oral formulaic tradition of Homeric poetics, the two epics
developed alongside one another, rather than as would seem natural to us,
with the Iliad preceding the Odyssey. Not only could the bards of the Odys-
sey respond to the bards of the Iliad, but the converse could also occur:
elements of the famous Choice of Achilles in Iliad 9, as it has come down
to us, show clear signs of having developed in tension with the Odyssean
tradition (for the details of the choice, see below). Just as Player 1 can play
another creature once Player 2 has hit their Harvester with Pacifism, the
bards of Iliad 9 have Achilles pointedly condemn lying—Odysseus’ métier
in the Odyssey.
Because of the paucity of our evidence, I have no choice but to make
the next point suggestively rather than concretely. Though the scale of
Pacifism’s mechanic may differ from what the bard of Odyssey 12 does to
the notional Player 1 who sang the Choice of Achilles that has come down
to us as Iliad 9, however, the spirit and the basic amoebēdis nature of the
mechanic are precisely the same.
The Choice of Achilles probably represents the most famous moment
of Homeric epic. (It is perhaps worth noting in a ­general-interest essay like
this one that its principal competition, the Trojan horse, doesn’t actually
appear as a scene in and of itself: the Iliad’s plot does not even make it that
far.) When Odysseus leads an embassy to Achilles’ tent to ask the absent
warrior, on Agamemnon’s behalf, to return to battle, the most memorable
thing Achilles says is,
My mother Thetis, goddess with silver steps, tells me that I carry the burden
of two different fated ways leading to the final moment of death. If I stay here
and fight at the walls of the city of the Trojans, then my safe homecoming will
be destroyed for me, but I will have a glory that is imperishable. Whereas if I
go back home, returning to the dear land of my forefathers, then it is my glory,
genuine as it is, that will be destroyed for me, but my life force will then last me
a long time, and the final moment of death will not be swift in catching up with
me [Homeric Iliad 9.410–416, tr. Butler, rev. Kim et al.].
Famously, he chooses not to leave. He remains at Troy and, after the death
of Patroclus, returns to battle. In the Odyssey, Odysseus recounts to the
Phaeacians, in the stories introduced at the amoibēdis moment I quoted
above, having met Achilles in the underworld, and hearing from him a
 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition (Travis)  229

retrospective reflection on the choice of Iliad 9 that I want to suggest bears

an important resemblance to the operation of Pacifism in MTG.
[T]he spirit of Peleus’s son, Achilles, came up to us with Patroklos, stately
Antilokhos, and Ajax, who was the finest and best man of all the Danaans
after the ­swift-footed son of Peleus. The psūkhē of the fleet descendant of Aia-
kos knew me and spoke piteously, saying, “Resourceful Odysseus, noble son
of Laertes and seed of Zeus, what deed of daring will you undertake next, that
you venture down to the house of Hādēs among us inept dead, who are but the
spirits of them that can labor no more?”
And I said, “Achilles, son of Peleus, foremost champion of the Achaeans, I
came to consult Teiresias, and see if he could advise me about my return home
to Ithaca, for I have never yet been able to get near the Achaean land, nor to
set foot in my own country, but have been in trouble all the time. As for you,
Achilles, no one was ever yet so fortunate as you have been, nor ever will be,
for you were adored by all us Argives as long as you were alive, and now that
you are here you are a great prince among the dead. Do not, therefore, take it
so much to heart even if you are dead.”
“Say not a word,” he answered, “in death’s favor; I would rather be a paid
servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among
the dead. But give me news about my son; is he gone to the wars and will he be
a great warrior, or is this not so? Tell me also if you have heard anything about
my father stately Peleus—does he still rule among the Myrmidons, or do they
show him no respect throughout Hellas and Phthia now that he is old and
his limbs fail him? Could I but stand by his side, in the light of day, with the
same strength that I had when I killed the bravest of our foes upon the plain of
Troy—could I but be as I then was and go even for a short time to my father’s
house, anyone who tried to do him violence or supersede him would soon feel
my strength and invincible hands.”
“I have heard nothing,” I answered, “of stately Peleus, but I can tell you the
truth about your beloved son Neoptolemos, for I took him in my own ship
from Skyros with the ­strong-greaved Achaeans. In our councils of war at Troy
he was always first to speak, and his judgment was unerring. Godlike Nestor
and I were the only two who could surpass him; and when it came to fight-
ing on the plain of Troy, he would never remain with the body of his men, but
would dash on far in front, foremost of them all in valor. Many a man did he
kill in battle—I cannot name every single one of those whom he slew while
fighting on the side of the Argives, but will only say how he killed that val-
iant hero Eurypylos, son of Telephos, who was the handsomest man I ever saw
except Memnon; many others also of the Keteioi fell around him by reason of
a woman’s bribes. Moreover, when all the bravest of the Argives went inside
the horse that Epeios had made, and it was left to me to settle when we should
either open the door of our ambuscade, or close it, though all the other lead-
ers and chief men among the Danaans were drying their eyes and quaking in
every limb, I never once saw him turn pale nor wipe a tear from his cheek; he
was all the time urging me to break out from the horse—grasping the han-
dle of his sword and his ­bronze-shod spear, and breathing fury against the foe.
230  Reinterpreting Magic

Yet when we had ransacked the city of Priam he got his handsome share of the
prize wealth and went on board (such is the fortune of war) without a wound
upon him, neither from a thrown spear nor in close combat, for the rage of
Arēs is a matter of great chance.”
When I had told him this, the spirit [psūkhē] of Achilles strode off across a
meadow full of asphodel, exulting over what I had said concerning the prow-
ess of his son.

I quote the passage at such length because I want to include Odysseus’

full description of Neoptolemus’ (Achilles’ son) prowess. Though the
story told by Odysseus, the hero of homecoming, to Achilles, the hero of
glory—remember that Achilles frames his choice in exactly those terms
in Iliad 9—could never be called an ecphrasis in the technical sense, it
has an essentially ecphrastic quality, and its relationship to the immedi-
ate narrative context of Odysseus’ visit to the underworld bears an import-
ant resemblance to the appearance of our friend Grakk on Pacifism: just
as the tiny story of Grakk’s first “fuzzy” feeling intrudes into the ongoing
narrative of the contest between the notional wizards, Player 1 (presum-
ably playing a Black deck) and Player 2 (presumably playing a White one),
the story of Neoptolemus intrudes into the notional contest between Bard
1 (Iliad) and Bard 2 (Odyssey).
Recalling Bickerstaff’s formulation of the role of collaboration in cre-
ative performance may help clarify how we can describe the apparently
competitive moment as a synergy from a broader cultural standpoint.
“[O]n the level of the creative group,” Bickerstaff writes, “the confluence of
individual processes becomes truly synergistic, greater than the sum of its
constituent parts. Likewise, the group too is a part of the broader field and
domain in which it practices, and the field and domain are in turn part of
an influential cultural discourse” (2011, p. 52). Though it may on the face of
it seem strange to adduce a theory theatrical performance to a card game,
a look back at one of Johan Huizinga’s evocative formulations in Homo
ludens may help bridge the gap: “Social life is endued with ­supra-biological
forms, in the shape of play, which enhances its value” (1998, p. 45).
One of those “­supra-biological forms,” of course, is the bardic tra-
dition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Another is Magic: The Gathering.
Another, to be sure, is Hamlet. Huizinga’s emphasis on social life, above
all, points us to the essentially collaborative, performative, and creative
nature of them all.
As a final analogy between Homeric epic and MTG to put these syn-
ergies into context, one might imagine an immense work of fan fiction
that turned a series of ­forty-eight games of MTG into works on the scale
of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Each game might occupy the narrative space
taken in those epics by what we call a book, and probably in the tradition’s
 Pacifism as Epic Recomposition (Travis)  231

early history represented a song—that is, an evening’s entertainment

by a Homeric bard. The duels of the first ­t wenty-four games might occur
among players who ran mostly Black and Green decks, those of the sec-
ond ­t wenty-four among players running mainly White and Blue. At a cru-
cial moment in the MTG Odyssey, in a game between a Player 1 with a Black
deck and a Player 2 with a white one, Grakk’s ­confused-looking face might
appear, and Player 2’s wizard might tell a spellbinding tale of an orc who
decided to become a peace activist. One doubts that Player 1’s planeswalker
would be as happy about the outcome as Achilles is to hear of Neoptolemus.
The thought experiment has a certain appealing mix of grandeur
and silliness, I suppose, but we need not go to such lengths to discover
the potential benefits of a discussion like this one, bringing together the
world’s leading collectible card game and the classical world’s most endur-
ing tales of heroism. The combination of ecphrasis and a fundamen-
tally collaborative mechanics to be found in Pacifism illuminate on one,
­classical-epic, side the importance of our nearly vanished evidence about
the amobēdis performance of Homeric epic, and how the resulting tension
led to several of the Iliad’s and the Odyssey’s most sublime moments. On
the other, ­modern-ludic, side, the discovery in these famous, fundamen-
tal works of such parallels to Grakk’s little story and Pacifism’s own amoi-
bēdis mechanic serves to inspire players and designers alike to appreciate
MTG on a different, more ancient level.

References
Bickerstaff, J. (2011). Collaborative Theatre/Creative Process. Communication and Theater-
Association of Minnesota Journal, 38, ­4 2-54.
Caillois, R. (2001). Man, Play, and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Collins, Derek. (2004). Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry.
Hellenic Studies Series 7. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
­F ernández-Vara, Clara. (2009). “Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videog-
ames as Performance.” In Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Prac-
tice and Theory. Proceedings of DiGRA 2009. http://www.digra.org/­d igital-library/
publications/­plays-the-thing-a-framework-to-study-videogames-as-performance/.
Homeric Iliad. Translated by Samuel Butler. Revised by ­S oo-Young Kim, Kelly McCray,
Gregory Nagy, and Timothy Power. Published under a Creative Commons License 3.0 at
https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5286.
Homeric Odyssey. Translated by Samuel Butler. Revised by ­S oo-Young Kim, Kelly McCray,
Gregory Nagy, and Timothy Power. Published under a Creative Commons License 3.0 at
https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5287.
Huizinga, J. (1998). Homo Ludens: A Study of the ­P lay-element in Culture. London:
Routledge.
Lee, Adam. (2013). TOP 20 FLAVOR TEXT. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/
­u ncharted-realms/­top-20-flavor-text-2013-08-06.
Lord, A.B. (2000). The singer of tales. Second edition. Ed. S. Mitchell and G. Nagy. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
232  Reinterpreting Magic

Murray, Janet Horowitz. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyber-
space. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Nagy, G. (1996). Homeric questions. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Nagy, G. (1999). The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry.
Revised Ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Rollings, Andrew and Dave Morris. (2000). Game Architecture and Design. Scottsdale, Ari-
zona: Coriolis.
Squire, M.J. (2013). Ekphrasis at the Forge and the Forging of Ekphrasis: The Shield of
Achilles in ­Graeco-Roman Word and Image. Word & Image 29: 157–191.
Parry, Milman. (1987). The making of Homeric verse: the collected papers of Milman Parry.
Ed. Adam Perry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Travis, R. (2012). “Epic Style: Recompositional Performance in the BioWare Digital RPG.”
In Gerald Voorhees, Josh Call, and Katie Whitlock. Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital
Denizens: The Digital ­Role-playing Game. New York: Continuum. ­235-256.
Travis, R. (2020). “The Open World RPG as Formulaic Epic.” In C. Rollinger, Classical
Antiquity in Video Games: Playing with the Ancient World. New York: Bloomsbury Aca-
demic. ­127-139.
 Gay Play
The Queer Possibilities of Magic: The Gathering
Aaron Aquilina

Introduction
It goes almost without saying that “fantasy” and “reality” are not as
dichotomous as we might presume them to be; one often shapes the other.
Like all other games that situate themselves on this spectrum, Magic: The
Gathering plays with the real and familiar to offer up the new and fantastic.
This is accomplished through several means, from expansive transmedial
narratives and stimulating visual representations to diverse adaptations,
translations, and promotional materials (video trailers, online articles,
­cross-branded marketing, and so on). Crucially, as it shall be argued here,
this transformation of the familiar is also carried out through the game-
play itself.
As a tabletop card game that debuted nearly three decades ago,
Magic’s relation with the familiar has changed over the years. Dragons,
sphinxes, and powerful sorcerers are both ­ever-present and to be expected;
on the other hand, for instance, the ­i n-game quotations of the Bible, the
Arabian Nights, and the works of William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bar-
rett Browning, and Lewis Carroll, among others, are much less expected.1
While Wizards of the Coast (henceforth WotC) has nowadays moved away
from such explicit references, even recent expansion sets have nonethe-
less often remained within the realm of the common literary imaginary,
whether European medieval folktales or Greek and Egyptian myth, allow-
ing for an ease of access and level of familiarity that helps new and veteran
players alike in recognizing the tropes at play.
It is also fair to state, however, that Magic’s incorporation and adap-
tation of the common imaginary transforms as much as it borrows:
S.T. Coleridge’s lines from “Recantation,” for instance, are given novel

233
234  Reinterpreting Magic

interpretations (“Plague Rats” [LEA, 1993]); the tragic and feminine (and
thus, ostensibly, “weak”) figure of Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid is
turned vengeful and fearsome (“Wishful Merfolk” [ELD, 2019]). In view
of these multifaceted transformations—from the real to the novel and
back again—this essay aims to explore the reconfigurative potentialities of
Magic’s ­ludo-narratives (including transmedia lore and ­i n-game mechan-
ics), and this specifically in terms of queer representation and modalities.
The central question here, then, is whether WotC’s inclusion of queer
narratives can be read as one that plunders queer tropes for the sake of
credibility, popularity, and recognition, or whether these narratives
might instead be understood as transformational, expanding the (often
­pre-determined) horizons of what it might mean to be queer. This essay
will thus be divided into two parts. The first will look at the issue of gen-
der diversity and queer representation in Magic, chiefly through the cards
themselves but also considering other ­world-building techniques. The sec-
ond half of the essay shall turn to gameplay, and how the game of Magic
in itself—as a game that is first and foremost played—allows space for the
experiential possibilities and expressions of queer selfhood.

The Limitations of Queer Representation

How does one even begin to represent the queer when, by its very
definition, what is queer evades clear circumscription? Indeed, debates
about the subject of queer theory have repeatedly presented themselves in
academic discussion, and Tasmin Spargo’s description is apt: “Queer the-
ory is not a singular or systematic conceptual or methodological frame-
work, but a collection of intellectual engagements between sex, gender and
sexual desire” (Spargo, 1999, p. 9). Commonly summed up as that which
undermines “the binary and hierarchical reasoning” usually associated
with concepts of sexuality and gender, queer theory shall here be used to
investigate representations—and, importantly, creations—of the queer
self (Marinucci, 2010, p. 105).
This approach necessitates, first of all, a conceptual distinction
between a self that is queer and one that is homosexual. Although both
terms are often used interchangeably in popular culture, and while “there
are no universally agreed definitions of the terms ‘gay’ […] and ‘queer,’”
the term “homosexual” can be said to appropriate a ­juridico-medical
definition which “queer” does not (Clarke et al., 2010, p. 5). Terms of
­s elf-identification—such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, or inter-
sexual—each correspond to a specific identity category. On the other
hand, queer theory (if understood as following a Foucauldian vein of
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  235

argumentation) looks at the internal differences within each of these iden-

tifications, and would see such categories not only as “instruments of
regulation and normalisation” but also as open metaphysical constructs
which claim impermeability and belie a false conviction of closure (Clarke
et al., 2010, p. 5). As such, while gender identities are widely considered
useful in cultural and legal politics, the letter “Q” in “LGBTQI+” is used
“to signal [the] inclusion of both these perspectives”: that is, the practical
usefulness of gender identities, and the opposition of such diagnostic cate-
gorization by queer theory (Clarke et al., 2010, p. 5).
What this means is that queer theory frequently concerns itself with
the marginal, the nameless, and the notion of an identity that lacks either
definition or circumscription. Queer theory thus looks at what are, in Jack
Halberstam’s words, “subjects who cannot speak, who refuse to speak;
subjects who unravel, who refuse to cohere; subjects who refuse ‘being’
where being has already been defined as a ­self-activating, ­self-knowing,
liberal subject” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 126). As a mode of thought, then,
queer theory disrupts our “tendency to stick with identity categories that
we ourselves constructed [and use] to describe complex forms of life even
when our embodiments, relations, intimacies, and social forms far exceed
the range of those categories” (Halberstam, 2017a, p. 190). Moreover, as
Bonnie Ruberg explains, “queerness isn’t just confined to the flesh. More
abstractly, queerness means both desiring differently and simply being
differently (or, in this case, playing differently)” (Ruberg, 2017, p. 200). This
connection is not unidirectional: it is not just that being different entails
playing Magic differently, but it is also the case that playing differently
results in being differently. In sum, “[q]ueer studies offer us one method
of imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives
to hegemonic systems,” and so queer theory, distinguishable from gen-
der studies more proper, seeks to critique normative systems that extend
beyond sexual identity and into ontological identity more generally (Hal-
berstam, 2011, p. 89).
It would be well beyond the scope and aims of this essay to further
delve into a deconstruction of gender categories and their bearing on our
relation to the world; as such, it might be more useful to begin refracting
this discussion through Magic itself. By way of initiating, one may refer to
a recent online response made by Mark Rosewater, Magic’s head designer
since 2003, to a question concerning “Throne of Eldraine” (a set situated on
a plane based on Arthurian legend and broadly European medieval folk-
tales). The original poster queries the use of the term “Syr”—an unconven-
tional and ­purpose-built spelling of the honorific “Sir”—when applied to
female characters, suggesting instead the lexical possibilities of “Lady” or
“Dame.” Rosewater’s response is interesting: “On Eldraine anyone, make
236  Reinterpreting Magic

[sic], female or otherwise, can be knighted and become a Syr” (Rosewa-

ter, 2019). At first, such a response seems encouraging and inclusive, pro-
moting a healthy and accepting environment for not only women but also
divergent sexual identities and corporealities. Upon scrutiny, however, the
six depicted individuals on Eldraine who bear the title of “Syr” fail to rep-
resent the “otherwise” of Rosewater’s response; nothing that falls beyond
the remits of the male/female dichotomy is discernible in either artwork or
lore. While these cards depict both men and women clad in shining armor,
proud of their knighthoods, the player is given no opportunity to imagine
other ways of being a knight on Eldraine (through either card art, flavor
text, or supplemental lore) beyond the “surprising” possibility that women
can be knights too; as such, what is “otherwise” remains hidden. Putting
to one side the inherent danger of the revisionist idea that feminine power
in the medieval era is the pure stock of fantasy,2 Rosewater’s claim might
appositely fall within the realm of queerbaiting: an exploitative “indus-
try tactic” which “often takes the form of pledging an allegiance to issues
of queer visibility without actually delivering on such an allegiance in any
tangible way” (Brennan, 2019, pp. 1–2).
Indeed, as shall be seen, there is not much in Magic that appropri-
ately satisfies diverse sexual representation beyond its occasional visibili-
ty.3 In War of the Spark: Forsaken, for instance, the ­same-sex relationships
between Ral Zarek and Tomik Vrona—and, more controversially, the one
between Chandra Nalaar and Nissa Revane—are either underdeveloped
or acutely mishandled.4 While, in card art, Ral and Tomik are each given
a strip of colored cloth to symbolize their loving connection (despite the
guild politics and the overarching war raging around them), this is a detail
that escapes many players given that their relationship is only more thor-
oughly explored in the supplementary novels.5 There are other examples of
sexually nonconforming characters who are lacking in holistic represen-
tation: nothing in Alesha’s art, mechanics, or flavor text suggests that she
is a ­male-to-female transgender individual; similarly, Oviya Pashiri’s card
does nothing to reflect her lesbianism, and nor does Hallar’s reflect their
nonbinary status.6 One might also here mention Alena and Hal, werewolf
trackers on Innistrad and a loving couple who are considered “other” by
their ­Gothic-inspired community.7 Recently represented on cards, “Alena,
Kessig Trapper” (CMR, 2020) and “Halana, Kessig Ranger” (CMR, 2020)
are tied together in name (the repeated mention of “Kessig”) and flavor
text: as Alena’s card states, “Halana and [her] have a bond that’ll never be
broken.” However, this could just as easily signify sisters from the same
town, or family members, or very good friends. The “Partner” ability of
both cards is not irrelevant, but this means that Alena and Halana are as
likely to pair up with a legendary golem or bird as they are with each other.
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  237

Once again, queerness remains only alluded to, something to be sought

out, and never unquestionably presented.8
This essay is not here proposing the impossible—one cannot, after all,
either “look gay” or “act gay” (although this latter phrase shall be brought
in to bear on this discussion further on). Instead, what is at this point
being pointed out is a certain lack of integration between the cards—the
primary object of the game—and the transmedial, supplementary narra-
tives. Alesha’s transgender identity is foregrounded in an online article;
Oviya’s wife, deceased, is mentioned only in a short lore graphic, and Hal-
lar’s preference for the genderless pronoun is likewise highlighted in a brief
expositional graphic.9 Here used in its Derridean senses, the term “supple-
mentary” denotes both “a surplus, a plenitude enriching another pleni-
tude,” as well as that which “intervenes or insinuates itself ­in-the-place-of;
if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (Derrida, 1997, pp. 144–145).10 In short,
the fact that WotC seeks to ­extra-textually expand on what the cards rep-
resent in itself marks a lack in the cards’ representational capacities.
This is not to say that there have been no laudable efforts made by
WotC, the most prominent of which being “Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis”
(C16, 2016). The card depicts two men of different races standing close to
one another, with one running his hands through the hair of the other.
In this case, their sexual orientation is not made clear solely in blogs or
articles or paratextual media; rather, the artwork of the card makes clear
what an earlier card foreshadowed: two “peaceful lovers, their story lost to
the ages” (“Guardians of Meletis” [ORI, 2015]). Indeed, “Kynaios and Tiro”
not only acknowledges a long ­real-world history of ­non-heterosexuality—
from which the couple’s plane, Theros, takes most of its inspiration—but
the card art was also utilized by WotC as one of the five principal prod-
uct images of their 2016 Commander release. In consequence, the image
of an interracial homosexual couple was brandished across retail outlets
globally, and this queer visibility has been further augmented by what is
currently the most recent Dungeons and Dragons campaign sourcebook,
where they are described as lovers and “lifelong companions.”11
There are other examples of queer characters, among them Karn,
Xantcha, and Ashiok. 12 Their discussion, however, would entail going
down the route of fantastical speculation, seeing as how none of these
individuals are biologically human, or even ­human-like (though this
would not be a dialogue without its merits). It might be more useful, then,
to stick to a closer analysis of “Kynaios and Tiro.” The fact that the card is
aligned with four of the five colors of mana—white, blue, red, and green—
is not insignificant, namely in that what is left out is the black mana sym-
bol. WotC have long stressed the integral relation between color identity,
lore, and ­i n-game function, and this is something that has been reflected
238  Reinterpreting Magic

throughout the game’s development in card art, flavor text, and mechan-
ics.13 In Magic, black is the color that is most readily associated with evil,
death, overreaching ambition, and general villainy. While WotC has gone
to some lengths to represent villains in all color identities, and at times
present ­black-aligned characters as tragic (or even traditional) heroes, it
remains fair to state that what is lacking in the (color) identity of “Kynaois
and Tiro” is any degree of malevolence. This is especially represented in
the card’s functional gameplay, often at the helm of a playstyle termed
“group hug”—where, contrary to other playstyles, it is all players at the
table who benefit (rather than simply the card’s controller).
What does this say of “Kynaois and Tiro”? Their function and identity
may be read as emblematic of the societal benefits—benefits for all—that
comes with the visibility of diversity. Unlike cards that seek to benefit only
their controller while asserting the identity of that player’s deck, cards
like “Kynaois and Tiro” instead subvert this individualistic tendency and
reclaim a more social playing field, so to speak, through highlighting their
own different mode of playing while simultaneously enabling the strate-
gies of other players at the table. As such, when ­non-normative identities
and capabilities are allowed their spaces and potentials, Magic reveals its
capacity to become a different game entirely, one that reflects not the cap-
italistic and hegemonic self, focused solely on the victorious assertion of
one’s own identity, but rather a more ­socially-oriented group progression
that comes only when the invisible is allowed to be visible. After all, while
queerness allows for the assertion of all sorts of identities, it is not neces-
sarily the case that hegemony does so in turn. These modalities of queer-
ness, as they intersect with Magic gameplay, shall be further elaborated in
the next section.
On the other hand, though, this particular playstyle encouraged by
“Kynaois and Tiro” may be interpreted in line with a significant change
in the media’s trajectory of queer representation. In, for instance, Western
television programs of the 1960s and ’70s (and, to great degree, the ’80s),
“it was considered taboo for writers and producers to include any con-
tent in their scripts that appeared to condone homosexuality or to present
gay men in positive ways,” a taboo that only generally began to be lifted in
the ’90s (Hart, 2004, p. 243). In its wake, the media of the noughties and
the years following have battled against this negative and flat portrayal of
queer characters, at times going so far as “implicitly suggesting that gay
men are actually superior—rather than inferior—to heterosexuals” (Hart,
2004, p. 246). While ­Kylo-Patrick Hart writes this in relation to Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy, and in fact celebrates this notion of superiority, this
reversal—where queer representation is and must be always positive—
seems as ­one-dimensional, and unrepresentative, as the queer portrayal of
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  239

previous decades. In conjunction, the aforementioned absence of the black

mana symbol in “Kynaois and Tiro” may be reflective of this same trend,
where queer individuals are always and only to be represented as beneficial
and in no way threatening. Indeed, it is worth bearing in mind the names
of the other four Commander decks released concurrently with “Kynaios
and Tiro”: “Entropic Uprising,” “Open Hostility,” “Breed Lethality,” and
“Invent Superiority.” The negative connotations created by the semantic
field of “uprising,” “hostility,” “lethality,” and “superiority” are clear. The
name of the deck fronted by “Kynaios and Tiro,” on the other hand, is the
definitively positive “Stalwart Unity.”14 Consequentially, in their uniquely
positive representation—which I must here stress is nonetheless a move
in the right direction—the gay couple Kynaois and Tiro are still made to
stand apart from the rest, marked by their difference.
Furthermore, the group hug mechanics of “Kynaois and Tiro” fail to
reflect the two eponymous characters as a couple. One can look, in contrast,
at other famous pairings, such as the siblings “Gisa and Geralf ” (EMN,
2016), whose card clearly combines the two: in their individual cards, Ger-
alf is ­blue-aligned and Gisa is ­black-aligned, but the card representing them
together is both blue and black. “Firesong and Sunspeaker” (DOM, 2018),
two members of the Hurloon clan on Dominaria, clearly reflects—through
both art and mechanics—the clanmates’ individual yet complementary
abilities. The same can be said of “Rin and Seri, Inseparable” (M21, 2020).
In terms of romantic relationships, one finds the married couples “Tibor
and Lumia” (GPT, 2006)—whose card reflects both individuals while also
mechanically demonstrating their harmonious teamwork—as well as “Pia
and Kiran Nalaar” (ORI, 2015), Chandra’s parents, whose card reflects their
unity not only through art and naming but also mechanically; while “Pia
Nalaar” (KLD, 2016) creates one Thopter token, the couple, together, create
two. In light of cards such as these, therefore, we can see how the mechanics
of “Kynaois and Tiro” open up queer modes of playing while decentralizing
the fact that the two figures are indeed romantically engaged, abstracting
queerness away from its embodied forms, forms that the game has demon-
strated it can demonstrate mechanically.
Not all of Magic’s pairings demonstrate what “Kynaios and Tiro”
lack; cards such as “Mina and Denn, Wildborn” (OGW, 2016) and, espe-
cially, “Anax and Cymede” (THS, 2013) come to mind. However, what this
analysis of “Kynaios and Tiro” has made clear is that a card’s art, flavor,
and, crucially, mechanics, are all important factors in terms of represen-
tational capabilities. Moreover, when it comes to queer representation—
here focused through “Kynaois and Tiro,” but keeping in mind all other
characters discussed thus far—there is still more to be done if the card is to
appropriately and holistically reflect its characters’ queerness.
240  Reinterpreting Magic

It was earlier mentioned, for instance, that Oviya (an artificer on

Kaladesh) has lost a wife. This event had a significant impact on Oviya’s
life, as “she took to working on her own designs in secret” after this par-
ticular personal tragedy. The loss of a significant other has several reso-
nances in Magic, not least with that of another legendary artificer: “Feldon
of the Third Path” (C14, 2014). In this case, players need not look to sup-
plementary materials to understand Feldon’s personal story: the art and
flavor text make his backstory explicit, and the card’s mechanics (that of
“reanimation” and ­making-artifact) clearly reflects Feldon’s lost love and
his great efforts to magically return her to life. The failure of representa-
tion in the case of Oviya’s card, especially when compared to such a paral-
lel character, is painfully evident.
In this light, cards which depict moments of intimacy—such as
“Lobotomy” (INV, 2000), “Serra’s Embrace” (10E, 2007), “Kiss of the Ame-
sha” (BBD, 2018), or “True Love’s Kiss” (ELD, 2019)—make clear both
the possibility of queer romantic representation (so far depicted only on
“Kynaios and Tiro”) as well as the fact that this opportunity is time and
again left untaken. The only card in which Nissa and Chandra are repre-
sented together, for instance, is “Deadlock Trap” (KLD, 2016), which does
nothing to represent their interest in one another (unlike the cards of cou-
ples mentioned above). While it is certainly the case that not all heteronor-
mative couples in Magic are depicted as couples (with a recent example
being Lukka and Jirina, from Ikoria), perhaps this aloofness should be
suspended when it comes to queer representation if WotC is to avoid
queerbaiting, empty platitudes, f lat/unrealistic characterization, and
­queer-exclusive romantic representation.15 All this might be one way, for
instance, to depict Rosewater’s claimed queer potential of the knights on
Eldraine; were the cards’ art, flavor texts, or mechanics to give some indi-
cation of how the plane’s knights can indeed be “otherwise,” then such
claims would have found the ground on which to stand.
Magic—with its vast array of unique creatures, cultures, and personal-
ities—brings to life an ­ever-expanding multiverse with fewer clear catego-
ries and more markers of complexity, diversity, and continuums of identity
in every direction. This continuous development is an important contribu-
tion in terms of helping its players understand and accept the world we live
in, one characterized by diversity and mutability. Nevertheless, it is import-
ant that the tree is not missed for the woods; clear and particular represen-
tation, beyond general concepts, is important. If WotC is to be truly and
not just generally supportive of queer representation, then the company
must seek to make equal the ­in-card visibility of queer and ­non-queer real-
ities alike. How this visibility can be explored and furthered, apart from
what has been discussed above, shall be discussed in the following section.
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  241

Failing to Succeed; or, In Praise of Jank

The second half of this essay shall focus less on issues of representa-
tion and more on the gameplay of Magic itself, seeing within the game an
inherent possibility of further developing the modalities of queerness.
Magic is a game that takes several shapes (through formats such as
Standard, Sealed, Draft, Brawl, Commander, Penny Dreadful, and so on)
that each comes with its own set of rules. On the most recent online plat-
form version of the game, Magic Arena, these rules are frequently bent
or suspended (as with “workshop” events that allow for more than four
copies of a card in a deck, or which have customized ­ban-lists). Addition-
ally, in what is termed “tabletop Magic,” a playgroup can make up their
own rules (ranging from ­non-standard library sizes, starting life totals,
banned/restricted cards, and so on) independently of WotC’s official rules
for playing the game. As such, both codified and uncodified forms of the
game reveal Magic to be an extremely flexible and adaptable gaming expe-
rience, one that is customizable according to the players’ wishes.
What remains a constant throughout this mutability is the game’s
­ludo-narrative, which, like that of many other games, is aimed at con-
cluding with a victory. Each player (narratologically encouraged to think
of themselves, in game, as a planeswalker) attempts to defeat their oppo-
nent/s, most commonly through reducing their life total to zero. What is
odd—or queer—about Magic is that there are myriad ways of playing the
game that thwart this archetypal narrative of winner/loser, or success/fail-
ure, thus situating the game as a fruitful object of study within the remit of
queer game studies.
As Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw describe the field:
[A]s a paradigm, queer game studies stands as a call to action, an argument
for the scholarly, creative, and political value of queerness as a strategy for
disrupting dominant assumptions about how […] games should be stud-
ied, critiqued, made, and played. […] [R]ather than understanding games as
­r ule-based structures (ludology) or just in terms of representation (narratol-
ogy), we can view games as spaces where we play within and against the rules
and explore representation beyond explicitly named queer content [Ruberg &
Shaw, 2017, p. x].16
It is this notion of disruptive playing—that is, of playing ­non-normatively
“within and against the rules” in order to explore the potentialities of
­s elf-representation beyond what is stated—that this essay terms “gay
play.” This act of playing differently—earlier described as “acting gay”—
brings to light how Magic in itself can be queered beyond its (rather lim-
ited) representation of diversity, revealing how “queerness represents far
more than a niche issue or an untapped demographic” (Ruberg & Shaw,
242  Reinterpreting Magic

2017, p. xiii). Queerness in Magic, therefore, is not just limited to the vis-
ibility of diversity in its art, transmedia narratives, or marketing; rather,
queerness in Magic can be experienced through the very act of playing
the game.
At this point, before moving into further theoretical understanding,
it might be apposite to go over some examples of “gay play.” It is import-
ant that one keep in mind the idea of playing, first and foremost, within
the rules. With this, the wider implications of ­non-normative play begins
to take some shape (one cannot, for instance, count the act of using Magic
cards to build a house of cards as “playing Magic”). Even within the rules
of the game, however, one finds unexpected mechanics that stress the idea
of deviant play,17 such as throwing a Magic card from a distance in order to
determine ­i n-game results.18
Such ­non-normative actions were, however, either discontinued or
moved out of sanctioned Magic and into the ­s o-called “­u n-sets”—that
is, printings that are counted as noncanonical and which emphasize fun
over the typical narrative. Indeed, “­u n-sets” (these being Unglued, 1998;
Unhinged, 2004; Unstable, 2017; and Unfinity, upcoming in 2022) are
interesting from the point of view of queer play. The cards within these
sets include references to other games, metafictional elements, ­self-parody,
whimsical artwork, puns, immersion breaks, and ­non-canon mechanics
(such as emphasis on watermarks, flavor texts, and contraptions). All this
allows for an experience that is more ­self-reflexive than the typical game
while also queering the typical. If gay play is understood as an intended
disruption of the failure/success narrative, then “­u n-sets” are indeed a site
in which one could locate the acting out of queerness.
It is also true to say, however, that ­u n-sets are often overlooked or for-
gotten; none of the cards are legal in sanctioned tournaments or online
play (whether on Arena or MTGO), and their existence is limited to four
sets out of the well over a hundred core and expansion sets that have been
printed thus far. It would be more fruitful, then, to interrogate this queer
capacity in more popular avenues of play.
When looking at widely followed and ­h igh-level events—such as
Pro Tours/Mythic Championships and Grand Prix—one does not find
much variety in the decks that are played, with players favoring, instead,
­t ried-and-tested builds. While this sense of competitiveness is under-
standable (significant rewards are associated with winning, and even just
participating), this sameness of decks serves to underline the implicit
emphasis on winning that is involved in Magic gameplay. “Deckbuild-
ing”—that is, the act of building one’s own deck according to one’s style,
preferences, and/or innovative ideas—becomes, in the competitive scene,
merely an act of reiteration lacking in both variety and ­self-expression, a
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  243

means towards a defined goal (winning) that misses out on, and willfully
ignores, any potentialities of difference.
On the other hand, it is this same component of Magic—deck-
building—that begins to truly reveal the game’s queerness, as players
may choose to build a deck that adheres to and is within the rules while
also evidencing a disinterest in winning the game or participating in the
game’s usual narrative. By way of example, one may cite a popular You-
Tube video series, called “Against the Odds,” where the series’ content cre-
ator, Seth (probably better known as Saffron Olive), builds decks around
cards often left unplayed due to their perceived lack of competitive edge. In
one episode, Seth’s opponent plays a card (“Slaughter Games” [RTR, 2012])
in order to remove the underutilized card that Seth built his deck around
(“Warped Devotion” [PLS, 2001]). His reaction is revealing:
Wow! Well, you know you built a good “Against the Odds” deck when your
opponent is Slaughter Gaming your unplayable namesake card. [Laughs]. So
that’s a win. I mean, it might not be a win as far as winning the game … but
forcing our opponent to Slaughter Games a Warped Devotion—that’s a win.
That’s definitely a win [MTGGoldfish, 2019, 22:12–22:34].19

The idea of “unplayable” is of direct interest here. This designation is often

allocated to cards that are clearly trumped by others, and decks that uti-
lize them are often called “janky”—with “jank” being defined by WotC
as “[u]nplayable cards, or cards that are cheesy. It can also be used to sim-
ply mean bad” (Knutson, 2006). The association is clear: cards that do not
lead to victory are “bad,” and what is “good” is winning. This playstyle—
where one prefers jank to what is considered competitive—has a long his-
tory in Magic, and those who play it are often given the marketing profile
of a “Johnny” (as opposed to “Timmy” or “Spike”):
Johnny is the creative gamer to whom Magic is a form of ­self-expression.
Johnny likes to win, but he likes to win with style. […] As such, it’s import-
ant to Johnny that he’s using his own deck. Playing Magic is an opportunity for
Johnny to show off his creativity. […] What sets Johnny apart from the other
profiles is that Johnny enjoys deckbuilding as much as (or more than) he enjoys
playing. […] For example, let’s say Johnny builds a new deck that has a neat but
difficult way to win. He plays ten games and manages to get his deck to do its
thing … once. Johnny walks away happy [Rosewater, 2013].20

Let us consolidate what these examples have revealed thus far: winning, in
Magic, is considered desirable, and is achievable through a select few cards
that the community discerns as competitive as opposed to janky. How-
ever, Magic allows for another experience that, according to the Johnny
player, amounts to what can be considered as “definitely a win” but which
does not necessarily entail a victory in the typical narratological sense.
244  Reinterpreting Magic

Moreover, Magic also—rather uniquely—allows for an enjoyment of the

game that comes for a space outside and beyond the margins of the match
itself: that is, the act of deckbuilding.21 As such, Magic’s queer elements do
not only come from purposefully playing ­non-competitive decks—such as
ones that rely on coin flipping, or decks themed around an unsupported
creature type—but also from the very framework or foundations of the
game, in constructing decks that are considered “unplayable” and that are
not meant to win but rather play around and with the rules and narrative
of Magic itself. Queerness, in Magic, can thus come through in trying to
disassociate what the term “unplayable” combines: playing and winning.
In order to better understand why these elements can be termed
queer, one can turn to queer theorists Halberstam and Ruberg. Let us start
with Halberstam, who in his work The Queer Art of Failure thinks of alter-
natives to archetypal narratives of victory, and this through what he terms
“low theory”: that which “tries to locate all the ­i n-between spaces that save
us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony” and leads us to “ways
of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings
of success” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2). Indeed, Halberstam’s critique of pos-
itive thinking leads him to notions of undoing and unbecoming—after
all, as discriminated and abject subjects who have always failed to adhere
to societal norms and laws, “[f]ailing is something queers do and have
always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style […] or a
way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim sce-
narios of success that depend upon ‘trying and trying again’” (Halbers-
tam, 2011, p. 3). Halberstam’s interrogation of “the logic of failure,” as one
that “deatch[es] queerness from the optimistic and humanistic activity of
making meaning,” thus allows us to view a lost game of Magic in a dif-
ferent light (Halberstam, 2011, p. 106). Through this lens, failing to win at
the game is not to be quickly and offhandedly viewed as something nega-
tive (or, if it is a negative experience, it is not one that should necessarily
be avoided, especially if one is dissatisfied with the restricting options of
either success or failure). Rather, failure proposes “a different relation to
knowledge” and becomes a mode of freedom from the ­ludo-narratalogical
circumscription which “jank” plays within but also against (Halberstam,
2011, p. 23).
Gay play (or winning without winning, or playing the unplayable, or
playing for one’s own narrative rather than the game’s prescribed one) is
thus a mode through which queer subjects—who, as distinguished ear-
lier, are not to be equated solely with subjects who are ­non-heterosexual—
can “hack straight narratives and insert their own algorithms for time,
space, life, and desire” (Halberstam, 2017a, p. 187). It is where, as Halber-
stam writes, the space of the game becomes a site “where we don’t just try
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  245

to change what we think, but how we think,” and where the normative and
predictable is shunned in favor of “the ludic and the loopy” (Halberstam,
2017a, pp. 188, 190).
Magic is thus queer in that its structure, loose and free underneath
its multiple formats, sanctions, and rules, allows for such modes of play
that go against the grain of normative gameplay and narrative. As such,
the idea of failing to succeed may be read otherwise, where failure instead
becomes the only means through which one can succeed—not through
some notion of practice, improvement, or tenacity, but rather as a success
at relating to the dialectic of winner and loser in innovative, and liberat-
ing, ways.
Before beginning to play one’s deck, through deckbuilding, the Magic
player is thus perennially invited “to rethink the concept of losing/win-
ning as the point of the […] game altogether” (Halberstam, 2017a, p. 195).
This is a point that Ruberg reiterates (in relation to video games, but none-
theless applicable here): “to play queerly means to play the wrong way
around, to jump our unsuspecting, pixelated avatars into pits instead of
over them,” or to abandon “ ­hard-fought unsaved games” (Ruberg, 2017,
p. 203). WotC defines a “Johnny” as a player who still likes to win, but
such a characterization fails to take into account the possibility of play-
ing without any desire to win, instead playing only with the will to cre-
ate and experience a narrative of one’s own (such as attaching beneficial
auras to enemy creatures, or never playing a land card, or milling yourself
out with no associated win condition, or to make opponents think about
janky/unplayable cards they would never have seen before). Nowhere is it
more clear that one is deviating from the prescribed narrative as when one
tries, on Magic Arena, to bestow a beneficial enchantment on an oppo-
nent’s creature, or to willfully destroy one of your own; when this happens,
Arena triggers a worried prompt, asking: “Are you sure?”
There is also the possibility of enjoying one’s loss, “to lie down will-
ingly under the blows of our opponents”—a possibility every so often
glimpsed when Magic players do not immediately concede the game at
the likelihood of their loss and instead let the opponent enjoy their vic-
tory (Ruberg, 2017, p. 197). Another option highlighted by Ruberg is that of
“commit[ing] suicide after you’ve already won,” assuming the queer posi-
tion of “both victor and failure”—which, in Magic, might mean casting a
card that drains your last life points away instead of swinging for lethal,
or conceding the match instead of letting your opponent lose after milling
out (Ruberg, 2017, p. 205).
Seeing in failure an alternative, ­non-normative, and queer enjoyment
of the game—and supporting this modality—would be one way for WotC
to make queerness visible beyond a scattered cast of ­non-heterosexual
246  Reinterpreting Magic

characters. With this in mind, we may nonetheless revisit “Kynaois and

Tiro” in much more optimistic terms, seeing in their group hug mechan-
ics a queer rejection of winning by oneself, or of playing to show off one’s
deck, or of playing to win at all; it is indeed a card that encourages gay play,
allowing the Magic player, whatever their sexual identity, to act queer.
As a final point on this notion of acting queer, the “Johnny” profile
again leads us to some necessary refinements (perhaps, at this point, a
new and queer player profile must be created, uncommon and invisible
as it sometimes is). The reality that Magic, in both deckbuilding and play-
ing, can be viewed as “a form of ­self-expression” is an exciting and praise-
worthy facet of the game, but this can be taken further if ­self-expression
becomes ­self-creation. Michel Foucault, for one, sees the self not as some-
thing always already posited, there inside us ready to be expressed, but
rather is of the view that “we have to create ourselves as a work of art,”
where the self is produced rather than productive (Foucault, 1984, p. 350).
One should aim, Foucault argues, “not to discover in oneself the truth,”
but instead to continually transform what truth constitutes our being:
“it’s the work that one performs on oneself to transform oneself or make
the self appear which, happily, one never attains” (Foucault, 1997, p. 137).
In this light, Magic’s invitation to build our own decks and construct our
own narratives is not merely an opportunity for ­self-expression, but also
for ­self-creation: that is, an act through which one may decide to embrace
­non-normative routes of play, atypical cards, and narratological aims; ulti-
mately, a different approach to the concepts of winning and losing.

Conclusion
There are other aspects of queerness that I have not had the space to
present here, such as Magic’s unique level of variance that, at times, itself
precludes you from playing the game at all (such as when a player draws
no mana sources). A game that, randomly, does not allow you to play it is
indeed queer. Even queerer, perhaps, are decks that use this variance to
gain ­i n-game advantages while eschewing this very foundation of game-
play (mana), such as “Manaless Dredge” (in the Modern, Legacy, and Vin-
tage formats) or “­One-Land Spy” (in the Pauper format).
Custom cards made by fans of the game evidence, too, a certain reluc-
tance to participate in the game’s predetermined narrative. Indeed, it is
through fans and players that novel experiential narratives can be forged;
games do nothing by themselves. While this essay did not undertake thor-
ough or sociological research on the Magic community, and nor did it
investigate the experiences of queer gamers or their feelings on Magic’s
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  247

representational capacities, it did work with some select examples in order

to demonstrate how queerness in Magic emerges not only at the level of
representation but also through the experience of gameplay. This was
done, in the first section, through an analysis of Magic’s textual and meta-
textual content, and in the second through a theoretical understanding of
what gameplay has the capacities for.
I refrained from engaging in design studies or making suggestions
for how queerness can be supported at the company and marketing lev-
els; a tournament starring professional players but where only jank can
be played, for instance, is unlikely. Instead, the aim of this essay is to
reveal how queer elements in Magic are always present even if there are no
LGBTQI+ characters represented on any card; while the representation of
diversity is crucial, and more of it needs to be introduced to the game, it is
ultimately up to the player to embrace the queer modes of play that Magic
offers. To this there are some precursors, such as cards that encourage you
to destroy your own cards and come close to committing ludic suicide—
like “Barren Glory” (FUT, 2007)—or ones that turn what is usually a loss
into a win, like “Laboratory Maniac” (ISD, 2011).
While, as Halberstam writes, “we cannot make binary oppositions
disappear,” we can nonetheless allow ourselves to fail and dethrone the
concept of winning (Halberstam, 2017a, p. 197). As he states in a conver-
sation with Ruberg and Jesper Juul: “This idea that you want to play to
win, and that only winning will do, is not simply wrong about games, it’s
wrong about the human. This feels to me a very queer insight” (Halber-
stam, 2017b, p. 204).22 Ruberg phrases this particularly well: “[t]o the extent
that no game can exist without failure, no game can exist without queer-
ness,” and that, furthermore, “[w]hen we embrace failure, we also queer
success” (Ruberg, 2017, pp. 209–210). While failing necessarily comes with
negative feelings—of frustration, annoyance, and despondence, which
Juul and Ruberg extensively write about—the idea that games are—if not
about winning—about fun, is something that “masks the true affective full
complexity of play: its messiness, its playfulness, its kinkiness, its queer-
ness” (Ruberg, 2015, p. 110). In sum, Magic is a game with inherently queer
potential beyond its representational aspects, and approaching it solely as
a game that one is supposed to win, or be good at, or even just enjoy, would
be to reduce its complexity—and our own.

Notes
1. See, for instance: “Durkwood Boars” (LEG, 1994); “Ali Baba” (ARN, 1993); “Squall”
(7ED, 2001); “Ball Lightning” (G01, 2001); and “Diminish” (M11, 2010). Henceforth,
in text and footnotes, card details will list card names and provide, in parentheses, the
248  Reinterpreting Magic

conventional code abbreviations for the relevant set name along with the year of print-
ing. In the case of multiple identical printings, only the first edition printing shall be ref-
erenced. All card images and versions are available via the official card database: https://
gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Advanced.aspx.
2. Several studies have been conducted on the relation between the “real” and the “fan-
tastic” medieval. See, for instance, William Woods (2004) and Nickolas Haydock (2008).
3. In terms of female representation, Magic art has long since refrained from going
down the route of cards like “Earthbind” (LEA, 1993), “Mana Prism” (MIR, 1996), or
“Vitalizing Cascade” (MIR, 1996), among others.
4. See Greg Weisman (2019). While it would be too tangential to dive into a deep anal-
ysis of the novel and these episodes, see, for instance, Aimee Hart (2019). In short, the
character development of Chandra and Nissa—which had, over three years, opened the
possibility for the representation of their queer identities through mutual romantic inter-
est—was cut short, and “retconned,” in Weisman’s work, where Chandra is definitively
­self-described as straight and as someone who “had never been into girls.”
5. See “Ral, Izzet Viceroy” (GRN, 2018) and “Tomik, Distinguished Advokist” (WAR,
2019).
6. This includes all cards where Alesha, Oviya, and Hallar are quoted or depicted. See
“Alesha, Who Smiles at Death” (FRF, 15), “Oviya Pashiri, Sage Lifecrafter” (KLD, 2016),
and “Hallar, the Firefletcher” (DOM, 2018). With these, one can include all cards that
depict the Aetherborn, a transient and hedonistic race that prioritize pleasure and trea-
sure. Most use ­gender-neutral pronouns, but, once again, nothing in the cards themselves
reflect this (with the only exception being, perhaps, the nuanced flavor text of “Rush of
Vitality” [KLD, 2016]).
7. See Kimberly J. Kreines (2016).
8. This essay was written prior to the card “Halana and Alena, Partners” (VOW, 21)
coming out (in multiple senses). This is a fantastic example of queer representation that
would have made for great analysis alongside “Kynaios and Tiro,” with some aspects of the
card—such as its aggressive gameplay—providing interesting contrasts to the group hug
mechanic of “Kynaios and Tiro.” This is a great step on behalf of WotC, and more of this
representation should be given its space.
9. For Alesha, see James Wyatt (2015). For Oviya, see Story/Planes: Kaladesh, “Legend-
ary Creatures”—Panel 5. For Hallar, see Wizards of the Coast [online blog post].
10. For the development of this concept more generally, see Derrida (1997), pp. 95–316.
11. See Wizards of the Coast (2020, p. 15).
12. Another queer character introduced to the multiverse of MTG is Niko Aris, a
­non-binary planeswalker. However, since the card has not yet been released at the time of
writing, this cannot be discussed here. See Zambrano (2020).
13. See, for instance, Mark Rosewater (2017).
14. See Blake Rasmussen (2016).
15. See “Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast” (IKO, 2020) and Jirina Kudro (C20, 2020).
16. Emphasis added.
17. The word “deviant” is here rescued and ­re-appropriated from its negative connota-
tions, following the tradition of queer studies which “borrowed its account of difference
from deviance studies,” where deviant behavior is understood as a political and conscious
resistance to the norm (Love, 2015, p. 75).
18. See “Chaos Orb” (LEA, 1993) and “Falling Star” (LEG, 1994), two official Magic
cards that are banned in every sanctioned format due to dexterity being determined a skill
extraneous to the game. See also “Clay Pigeon” (UGL, 1998) and “Slaying Mantis” (UST,
2017).
19. Emphasis added.
20. Emphasis added.
21. With this notion of enjoyment of the game outside the game, one may also add card
collection, though this is slightly different and is not as unique a factor.
22. Bonnie Ruberg, moderator, “The Arts of Failure: Jack Halberstam in Conversation
with Jesper Juul,” in Queer Game Studies, pp. 201–10, p. 204.
 Gay Play (Aquilina)  249

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 The Call of Eldrazi
The Lovecraftian in Magic: The Gathering
Valentino Paccosi

From the 1970s onward the works of American writer H.P. Love-
craft have been a huge influence over different media. The author’s fic-
tions inspired films such as Alien (Scott, 1979) and ­Re-Animator (Gordon,
1985); graphic novels such as Lovecraft (Rodionoff et al., 2003) and Provi-
dence (Moore & Burrows, 2017), videogames such as Call of Cthulhu: The
Official Video Game (Cyanide, 2018) and several tabletop games, the most
famous among them being the Arkham Horror (Launius & Wilson, 2018)
board game. These texts are very different, yet they all present elements
that identify them as Lovecraftian texts. The Lovecraftian is in fact highly
versatile and flexible, so much so it is more appropriate to define it as a
mode than a genre. While Science Fiction can be considered a genre, the
Lovecraftian is instead a mode as its flexible nature gives other genres a
very specific flavor. When discussing the nature of modes, Alastair Fowler
explains that “when a modal term is linked with the name of a kind, it
refers to a combined genre, in which the overall form is determined by the
kind alone” (Fowler 1982, p. 107). Fowler uses the term “kind” to describe a
“fixed genre” (Fowler 1982, p. 56). A film such as Alien can then be defined
as a “Lovecraftian Science Fiction” text, where the “kind” is represented by
Science Fiction and the Lovecraftian acts as a mode that enriches the kind
with specific elements.
Fowler also notices that “modes have always an incomplete reper-
toire, a selection only of the corresponding kind’s features, and one from
which overall external structure is absent” (Fowler, 1982, p. 107). What
Fowler means is that a mode cannot exist by itself as it lacks a strong exter-
nal structure, as modes assume the structure of the kind they bond with.
Defining the Lovecraftian as a mode is a way to suggest its extreme versa-
tility and flexibility, as a mode not only is capable of adapting to different

251
252  Reinterpreting Magic

genres, but it can also change them. As I will demonstrate in this chap-
ter, the Lovecraftian mode can combine with the core elements of Magic:
The Gathering (henceforth MTG) and, at the same time, can reshape sev-
eral elements of the game. The Lovecraftian mode possesses a few key ele-
ments, which I will illustrate in the next section, that differentiate it from
other modes. In my essay I will look at how the Lovecraftian mode and the
Lovecraftian monster have been adapted into MTG. My chapter will ana-
lyze how Lovecraft’s creatures can maintain their unsettling and writerly
nature when becoming part of MTG and how they avoid being normalized
and tamed when put into a card frame. Moreover, my analysis will also
demonstrate how the flexible nature of the Lovecraftian mode has been
maintained in MTG thanks to the creation of the Eldrazi and their brood
lines.

The Lovecraftian Mode and the Writerly Monster

Before looking at how the Lovecraftian was adapted into MTG, it is
necessary to introduce some key elements of the Lovecraftian mode. One
of the most defining aspects of this mode is the alien nature of Lovecraf-
tian monsters. The nature of Lovecraft’s creatures is so ­m ind-bending
that those who have the misfortune of witnessing their appearance run
the risk of losing their sanity. Lovecraft’s monsters are the embodiment of
the “Unnamable,” that is what cannot be described and should not exist.1
When faced with an Unnamable monster, the text is usually incapable of
fully describing it, as human language is not equipped to deal with such
radically alien entities. Nevertheless, Lovecraft’s texts still try to describe
the Unnamable and overcome the impossible task of representing what
should not exist. The result is that Lovecraft’s Unnamable monsters are
“writerly.” The term writerly is used by Roland Barthes to describe those
literary texts that “make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer
of the text” (Barthes, 1974, p. 4). Lovecraft’s Unnamable monsters are then
writerly because readers, in order to grasp the creatures’ alien nature, need
to become active readers and engage with the text on a deeper level. Love-
craft’s texts require readers to fill the gaps in the monsters’ descriptions,
thus writing the text while reading it, as suggested by Barthes. Therefore,
the text does not provide a clear picture of the Unnamable monster, as it is
up to readers to figure out the monster’s appearance.
One of the most famous examples of writerly descriptions can be
found in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928). The most famous among the
author’s creatures, Cthulhu is mostly described indirectly in this short
story. The narrator produces a convoluted description of the monster:
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  253

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pic-

tures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaith-
ful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque
and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the
whole which made it most shockingly frightful [Lovecraft 2011, p. 357].
The description of Cthulhu is what Barthes would define as “writerly,” as
it is up to readers to determine the “general outline” of the monster. The
description contains several details giving readers a sense of what Cthul-
hu’s appearance may be, but the text also strongly suggests that what
makes the monster particularly disturbing is something that cannot be
fully grasped and, most importantly, put into words. Cthulhu, and most
Lovecraft’s monsters, possess a writerly nature and, therefore, are the
embodiment of the Unnamable. Passages such as the one about Cthulhu
require readers to be active in their reading practices and put together the
scattered information provided by the text, thus completing the writerly
description of the monster.
However, which kind of strategies can MTG use to maintain the
writerly nature of Lovecraftian monsters? The techniques employed by
Lovecraft are more suited to literary texts and the creators of MTG need
to elaborate new strategies to convey the writerly nature of Lovecraftian
monsters. Visual media such as film have dealt with this problem in vari-
ous ways. For example, the film Alien maintains the writerly nature of the
monster keeping the creature partially hidden in the shadows. Alien’s cin-
ematography, using low lighting and smoke, reveals only small segments
of the monster’s body. The film is then capable of playing with the inter-
pretive strategies of viewers, keeping them guessing the appearance of
the monster. MTG, being a completely different kind of visual media than
film, needs instead to find a different way to represent the writerly Love-
craftian monster.
MTG has different obstacles to overcome in order to depict writerly
monsters, as on the surface MTG is the opposite of the writerly, which is
what Barthes defines as “readerly,” that is “what can be read but not writ-
ten” (Barthes, 1974, p. 4). Players need to be able to understand the abil-
ities of each card and each creature and how they work in relation to
­pre-existing game pieces. In the next section I will look at how MTG tries
to overcome the readerly nature of the card game and introduces writerly
Lovecraftian creatures into the game. In my analysis I will focus on the
Eldrazi as they are a whole species of Lovecraftian creatures featured so
far in four MTG sets. In the game there are other cards inspired by Love-
craft’s fictions; however, these cards were created “in a vacuum” and are
not linked to the main characters and story of the MTG universe. Instead,
the Eldrazi belong to the same species, present similar game mechanics
254  Reinterpreting Magic

and abilities and are an important part of the narrative world of MTG.
In my analysis I will look at how the Eldrazi adapted the writerly nature
of Lovecraftian monsters into MTG. To do so, I will look at the MTG sto-
ryline involving the Eldrazi, at the art depicting the monsters and at the
new game mechanics introduced with this new kind of creatures.

The Eldrazi in MTG’s Story

MTG has always found a way to provide a narrative background to
the characters and events depicted in the cards of each expansion set. The
Eldrazi were introduced for the first time in the MTG set called Rise of
the Eldrazi (henceforth ROE, released in April 2010) and they returned
in Battle for Zendikar (BFZ, October 2015), Oath of the Gatewatch (OGW,
January 2016) and Eldritch Moon (EMN, July 2016). The story of all the
aforementioned MTG sets was published in weekly installment on the offi-
cial MTG website and is still publicly available (MTG Story Archive, 2021).
The story behind ROE tells the reawakening of the Eldrazi on the plane
of Zendikar. The Eldrazi are introduced in this set as three titans, named
Ulamog, Kozilek and Emrakul. The three titans have no color alignment
and their goal seems to be that of devouring the mana and life energy of
each existing plane. The three titans were imprisoned on Zendikar in a
sort of ­force-field and put into stasis by the three planeswalkers Sorin Mar-
kov, Ugin, and Nahiri. However, the land around them was contaminated
by their presence and, thanks to a secret cult that worshipped them, some
of the Eldrazi ­extra-dimensional power seeped out of their prison, giving
birth to a spawn of Eldrazi drones that brought havoc to the land before
being stopped by the three aforementioned planeswalkers (Li, 2015).
There are already several similitudes between the Eldrazi and the
various creatures depicted in Lovecraft’s fictions. For example, the mon-
ster Cthulhu is described in “The Call of Cthulhu” as one of the Great Old
Ones, a race “who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to
the young world out of the sky” (Lovecraft, 2011, p. 366). The Eldrazi, like
Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, seem to predate any of the characters in the
universe of MTG, thus destroying any anthropocentric vision of the uni-
verse. Moreover, the Eldrazi originate in the Blind Eternities, an unhabit-
able ­non-space located between each Plane. The negative space where the
Eldrazi come from is similar to that inhabited by Azathoth, described in
The ­Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943) as a ­creature-god that “gnaws
hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time” (Love-
craft, 2011, p. 410). The presence of a secret cult worshipping the impris-
oned Eldrazi is also a nod to the Cthulhu Cult described in “The Call of
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  255

Cthulhu” and the contamination of the landscape of Zendikar by the

trapped Eldrazi is reminiscent of the nightmarish mutations caused by
the meteorite—and the alien color that inhabits it—in Lovecraft’s “The
Colour Out of Space” (1927). Wizard of the Coast, the company behind
MTG, seems eager to highlight the influence of Lovecraft’s fictions over the
Eldrazi and the elements surrounding them. The article titled “The Color
Out of Space,” published on the official MTG website, explicitly mentions
Lovecraft’s short story as a source of inspiration for the setting of BFZ and
the Eldrazi (LaBelle, 2015). While this article may have been published to
attract the interest of fans of Lovecraft’s fictions, it is undeniable that there
are several similarities between the Eldrazi and Lovecraft’s monsters.
The similarities between Lovecraft’s fictions and the Eldrazi do not
stop here. For example, the Eldrazi, as most Lovecraftian monsters, are
not destined to stay dormant forever. The presence on the plane of Zend-
ikar of a group of powerful planeswalkers allows the three Eldrazi titans to
reawaken and escape their prison after thousands of years. The destructive
power of Ulamog, Kozilek and Emrakul unleashes on the plane of Zend-
ikar, and each one of the three Eldrazi titans produces a brood lineage that
carries some features of the progenitor. The rest of the story, published on
the official MTG Website, focuses on the battle between the Gatewatch,
an ­Avengers-like group of powerful planeswalkers, and the horde of the
Eldrazi. The battle comes to an end when Gatewatch member Nissa Rev-
ane manages to channel the energy of the plane of Zendikar into the pyro-
mancer Chandra Nalaar, who completely burns the Eldrazi titans Ulamog
and Kozilek (Oath of the Gatewatch Story Summary, 2016). While the
Eldrazi are at first introduced as creatures that, like Lovecraft’s monster,
cannot be fully comprehended and are the embodiment of the Unnam-
able, the events narrated in the online chapters of BFZ and OGW tend to
drastically reduce the writerly nature of the Eldrazi.
This process of normalization of the Unnamable monster is in line
with Fred Botting’s study on the concept of monstrousness. Botting, elab-
orating over Barthes’s idea of myth conceptualized in “Myth Today” (Bar-
thes 1957), notices that in several contemporary media “the threatening
Other is incorporated within safe and recognizable limits” (Botting, 1991,
p. 193). The Eldrazi’s power then seems to be containable and their writ-
erly existence can be stopped by the combined efforts of the Gatewatch.
Both the lesser Eldrazi and the three titans have physical bodies that can
be damaged by weapons and spells, and Ulamog and Kozilek are defeated
by the good heroes. Instead, creatures from Lovecraft’s fictions such as
Cthulhu and ­Yog-Sothoth can only be banished but not defeated, thus
indefinitely maintaining their threatening level.
Nevertheless, in “Zendikar Resurgent” the dragon Planeswalker Ugin
256  Reinterpreting Magic

points out that the Eldrazi titans Ulamog and Kozilek are not completely
dead and that they may somehow become a threat again in the future (Lev-
itch et al., 2016). While the physical defeat of the Eldrazi titans reduced the
threat level of the Lovecraftian monsters, the text points out that the mon-
sters’ demise may only be temporary. Even more temporary is the defeat
of the third Eldrazi titan, Emrakul, which is narrated in the online story
of EMN (Eldritch Moon Story, 2016). The third Eldrazi titan manages to
escape to Innistrad, a plane inspired by Gothic Horror texts.2 After several
fruitless battles, the Gatewatch manages to seal Emrakul into the magi-
cal moon of Innistrad. The monster is then not defeated, but only momen-
tarily incapacitated. Moreover, the online chapter titled The Promised End
reveals that the Gatewatch is successful in trapping Emrakul only because
the Eldrazi titan decides to temporarily surrender: “I just no longer want
to play” (Troop, 2016), she says to Jace Beleren, one of the members of the
Gatewatch.3 Emrakul then, more than the other two Eldrazi titans, avoids
being normalized as she cannot be permanently defeated. “It is not my
time. Not yet” (Troop, 2016), Emrakul says, implying that she will come
back at some point in the future.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out that one of the most important char-
acteristics of the monster is that “The Monster Always Escapes”: after
bringing havoc, it vanishes only to reappear later, thus being intrinsically
uncontainable (Cohen, 1996, p.4). While Emrakul can be temporarily con-
tained by the heroes of the Gatewatch, the ­moon-prison will not be capa-
ble of holding the Eldrazi titan forever. The temporary disappearance and
imprisonment of Emrakul is similar to that of Cthulhu: at the end of “The
Call of Cthulhu” the monster, hit by a speeding boat, explodes only to
immediately start recomposing its appearance. Yet the mysterious island
from where Cthulhu emerged sinks again into the Ocean, leaving no trace
of the monster. However, in the last paragraph, the narrator warns the
reader that “Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone
which has shielded him since the sun was young” (Lovecraft, 2011, p. 379).
Certain aspects of Emrakul in the MTG story may reduce the mon-
strousness and writerly nature of the Eldrazi titan—for example the fact
that Emrakul can telepathically speak with Jace—yet this monster is far
from being incorporated into safe limits as suggested by Botting. The
fact that Emrakul, like Cthulhu, is “intrinsically uncontainable” (Cohen,
1996, p.4) and bound to reappear again denies Botting’s idea of the com-
plete normalization of the monster. Emrakul is still a threat for the heroes
of MTG, as her imprisonment was voluntary, almost a truce offered for
unknown—and possibly unknowable—reasons. The Eldrazi titan cannot
be defeated and will likely reappear in future MTG storylines and, pos-
sibly, even be physically ­re-released again on new MTG cards. Emrakul
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  257

then is the most Lovecraftian among the Eldrazi creatures, as this monster
refuses to be defeated and normalized, thus remaining a constant threat
looming over the worlds and Planes of MTG.

The Eldrazi in MTG’s Art

One of the most distinctive elements of MTG is the art of each card.
While the illustrations on each card are not functional to MTG’s gameplay,
the illustrators are often striving to depict creatures, landscapes and scenes
that represent the flavor of the card and its mechanics. As demonstrated
by the description of Cthulhu, a literary text can suggest the aspect of a
writerly monster. Instead, visual media have a much harder time creating
Unnamable monsters. The artists working on the Eldrazi cards developed
different approaches to maintain the Unnamable nature of these Lovecraf-
tian creatures. One way in which part of the Eldrazi’s Unnamable nature
is maintained is through the use of an element that appears across all the
Eldrazi cards: the tentacle. The tentacle is the biological embodiment of
something that is extremely hard to describe and is, by its nature, writerly.
China Miéville highlights the importance that the tentacle has in contem-
porary Weird texts and notices how “fundamentally it [the tentacle] does
not ‘mean’ at all” (Miéville, 2009, p.112). The tentacle then does not carry
any meaning and thus is the perfect element for representing Lovecraftian
creatures, such as the Eldrazi, which are beyond any representability and
whose existence is hard to grasp for our human brain. However, the tenta-
cle is not the only means through which the Eldrazi’s writerly appearance
is maintained. In this section I will focus on the depiction of the three Leg-
endary Eldrazi titans, which are depicted in six cards, and on the main
characteristics of the brood lineage that spawned from each of them.4
The Legendary Eldrazi Ulamog is depicted in the cards “Ulamog, the
Infinite Gyre” (ROE, 2010) (see Figure 1) and “Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hun-
ger” (BFZ, 2015). Despite having different mana costs and different mechan-
ics, the two cards present a similar depiction of the monster. Ulamog presents
a torso protected by an exoskeleton of bones with two pairs of humanoid
arms and thick tentacles instead of legs. The most striking feature of Ulamog
is its head, which appears to be protected by a sort of ­skull-shaped helmet.
Many of Ulamog’s features are ref lected in its brood lineage,
which presents Eldrazi with two sets of humanoid arms and featureless
faces covered by bone plates. However, while Eldrazi creatures such as
“Eldrazi Devastator” (BFZ, 2015) are extremely similar to Ulamog, oth-
ers such as “Pathrazer of Ulamog” (ROE, 2010) are slightly different as
they are bipedal. The appearance of Ulamog’s brood lineage is then fairly
258  Reinterpreting Magic

Fig. 1, “Forerunner of Slaughter” (BFZ, © Wizards of the Coast, 2015).

anthropomorphic. In his web article Joey DiZoglio notices how similar the
illustration of the card “Forerunner of Slaughter” (BFZ, 2015) is to the ana-
tomical image of the musculatory system drawn by ­seventeenth-century
artist Andreas Vesalius (Vesalius, 1543) (see Figures 1 and 2).
Fig. 2, drawing of the musculatory system drawn by seventeenth-century artist
Andreas Vesalius (1543).
260  Reinterpreting Magic

Despite the monster’s extra set of arms and complete lack of facial
features, the resemblance between the two illustrations is quite striking.
Both figures have their muscles exposed and depicted in minute details.
DiZoglio notices that the artists working on the BFZ set “clearly wanted to
access the idea of eldritch horror but they achieve visual dread by depict-
ing the human interior instead of the alien Other. While Lovecraft’s horror
can never truly be pinned down, the Eldrazi creatures represent animated
autopsies parading in the light of day” (DiZoglio, 2016). I agree with DiZo-
glio’s idea that Ulamog’s brood lineage closely resembles animated autop-
sies. However, I disagree with his claim that these living autopsies cannot
represent Lovecraftian monsters.
The Eldrazi creature “Forerunner of Slaughter” is not a writerly mon-
ster, as we get a good idea of its overall appearance. Nevertheless, this mon-
ster possesses another key feature of monstrousness described by Cohen,
as it is “The Harbinger of Category Crisis” (Cohen, 1996, p. 6). “Forerunner
of Slaughter” and the Eldrazi in Ulamong’s brood lineage “are disturbing
hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them
in any systematic structuration” (Cohen, 1996, p. 6). These Eldrazi possess
incoherent bodies that look like ­i nside-out human bodies. The illustration
by Andreas Vesalius has a clear pedagogical purpose, as it shows an aspect
of the human body that can only be seen when performing an autopsy.
Instead, “Forerunner of Slaughter” is a monstrous hybrid as it is a living
being that looks like a skinless human being. This Eldrazi titan and its lin-
eage then defy any human category system, as they are, at the same time,
dead and alive. In Lovecraft’s fictions there are several examples of mon-
sters being the harbingers of category crisis. For example, the inhabitants of
Innsmouth from The Shadow Over Innsmouth possess incoherent bodies,
as they are grotesque ­human-fish hybrids. The protagonist of the novella is
disgusted by their appearance, as the inhabitants of Innsmouth are a per-
version of the human race as they defy any category system. It is import-
ant to point out that in Lovecraft’s fictions creatures such as the ­human-fish
hybrids of Innsmouth are the product of the author’s fear of miscegenation
and overt racism. The horror evoked by Ulamog’s brood lineage is instead
provoked by the monstrous incoherence of these Eldrazi, whose grotesque
but powerful bodies resemble butchered human corpses.
Kozilek and its brood lineage present a slightly different kind of inco-
herent bodies. Kozilek is depicted in the cards “Kozilek, Butcher of Truth”
(ROE, 2010) (see Figure 3) and “Kozilek, the Great Distortion” (OGW,
2016). Once again, the illustrations on the two cards are very similar:
Kozilek presents a bulky body with a ­c arapace-like upper torso, a set of
humanoid arms and a small dome where the head should be. Like Ulamog,
Kozilek has huge tentacles instead of legs. Kozilek’s aspect is similar to
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  261

Fig. 3, “Kozilek’s Translator” (OGW, © Wizards of the Coast, 2016).

262  Reinterpreting Magic

that of Ulamog, yet slightly less anthropomorphic as the Eldrazi titan

lacks a defined head and the almost cylindrical upper torso becomes one
thing with the rest of its body.
The Eldrazi belonging to Kozilek’s brood line slightly differ from its
progenitor, as they present bodies that appear much more alien and inco-
herent than that of Kozilek. Eldrazi such as “Kozilek’s Translator” (OGW,
2016) (see Figure 3) and “Broodwarden” (ROE, 2010) present several spi-
dery legs, multiple thin arms and their upper torso is surrounded by float-
ing shards.
The appearance of the brood line of Kozilek is more writerly than that
of Ulamog, as their illustrations contain what Graham Harman calls “hor-
izontal gaps.” Harman notices how in his fictions Lovecraft describes some
monsters using horizontal gaps. In these descriptive passages “language
is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing”
(Harman, 2012, p. 20). Harman presents as an example of horizontal gap
the description of the dead body of Wilbur Watheley from “The Dunwich
Horror” (1929):
Above the waist it was ­semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the
dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of
a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly
suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though,
it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy
began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdo-
men a score of long ­g reenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths pro-
truded limply [Lovecraft, 2011, p. 649].
While the description of Cthulhu is an example of language failure where
the narrator is incapable of grasping the appearance of the “general out-
line” (Lovecraft, 2011, p.357) of the monster, here the text presents a long
and detailed list of the different aspects of Wilbur’s body. This description
demands readers to piece together all the different details into a somewhat
coherent picture. However, the task is almost impossible, as the different
elements of Wilbur’s body are so diverse that it is difficult for the reader to
imagine a coherent picture of the monster. Harman believes that in Love-
craft’s descriptions using horizontal gaps “the power of language is no lon-
ger enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality” (Harman, 2012, p.
20). For Harman, passages such as that describing Wilbur demonstrate that
in Lovecraft’s fictions language can grasp the complex nature of the mon-
ster’s body and provide a complex yet understandable image of it. Never-
theless, Harman does not seem to notice that the use of horizontal gaps in
this passage still marks the presence of a language failure. In this passage
Lovecraft is deconstructing the subject of its description, listing specific
but dissonant details in an attempt to convey the horror of the monster’s
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  263

body. This process results in a description that is still deeply writerly as

it demands readers to fill the gaps between several dissonant elements.
Despite the narrator’s effort at rationalizing the monster’s aspect, language
is still incapable of describing the monster’s writerly appearance.
The illustrations depicting Kozilek’s brood line attempt to commu-
nicate the Unnamable nature of these monsters adapting the concept of
horizontal gaps into illustrations. In literary texts a horizontal gap is pro-
duced by an accumulation of dissonant details the reader is asked to put
together into a coherent image. Instead, in an illustration the discordant
details are already put together into the image of a creature that, despite
having a defined appearance, is still difficult to read. For example, the
card “Kozilek’s Translator” presents a detailed rendition of each append-
age of the monster, from its multiple arms and bifurcated legs to its horns
and floating shards. This Eldrazi creature is even leaving a multicolored
trail, whose nature is as mysterious as the monster itself. While a reader
faced with a literary horizontal gap struggles to piece together the various
details of the writerly monster, in an illustration the viewer faces instead a
different kind of problem. A visual horizontal gap asks the viewer—in this
case the player—to figure out how the monster’s discordant features can
possibly work together as an organism. The accumulation of details in the
illustrations depicting Kozilek’s brood line makes players wonder about
the nature and biology of these monsters, thus contributing to the writerly
nature of the Eldrazi creatures.
The third Eldrazi titan, Emrakul, is depicted in the cards “Emrakul,
the Aeons Torn” (ROE, 2010) (see Figure 4) and “Emrakul, the Promised
End” (EMN, 2016). Emrakul is the only one out of the three Eldrazi titans
to be depicted in two different ways on the two cards. The card “Emrakul,
the Aeons Torn” depicts the Eldrazi titan as a floating ­upside-down cone or
mountain with a cracked side from which emerges a mass of tentacles. In
this depiction the creature looks more like a lifeless object than a powerful
monster. Instead, the card “Emrakul, the Promised End” depicts a more
active and menacing version of the Eldrazi titan: the gigantic cone that
constitutes Emrakul’s main body floats over a town, and from a vaginal
gap sprouts several enormous tentacles that envelope the town’s buildings.
Emrakul appears as the most writerly and Unnamable out of the three
Eldrazi titans, as she does not present any humanoid traits. While Ulamog
and Kozilek which can be seen as giant monsters such as King Kong or
Godzilla, Emrakul is instead depicted as an enigmatic entity floating in
the sky. The creature’s aspect reflects the writerly nature of her narrative
counterpart: Emrakul is deeply alien and her physiology is completely oth-
erworldly. In a certain sense, Emrakul is even more writerly and Unnam-
able than Cthulhu, the most iconic Lovecraftian monster. While the
264  Reinterpreting Magic

Fig. 4, “Emrakul, the Aeons Torn” (ROE, © Wizards of the Coast, 2010).
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  265

description of Cthulhu in Lovecraft’s short story is extremely writerly, the

monster has now acquired in popular culture a ­well-defined appearance
that partially deprives him of his Unnamable nature. Cthulhu is in fact
depicted as a green bipedal creature with a ­d ragon-like body and wings
and an octopoid face. Instead, Emrakul’s aspect is, in both cards depict-
ing her, absolutely writerly, being a conglomerate of tentacles attached to a
floating rock. When looking at this creature, we have to ask ourselves how
this monster “works”: where is her face supposed to be? Is the rock just a
shell or part of her body? Why does her body float? The illustrations do
nothing to answer those questions and it is up to players to figure out how
the Emrakul writerly body functions.
The brood line of Emrakul is also quite unique as several of these
Eldrazi do not resemble their progenitor. For example, the ­c one-like
shell of “Vestige of Emrakul” (BFZ, 2015) resembles the main body of the
Eldrazi titan. Instead, “Hand of Emrakul” (ROE, 2010), despite having a
name that links it to the Eldrazi titan, does not resemble Emrakul, looking
more like a very twisted version of a mole. The reason behind the differ-
ence between Emrakul and her lineage may be that the creators and artists
behind MTG wanted to preserve the Unnamable nature of Emrakul, keep-
ing the Eldrazi titan as the only truly writerly monster of her lineage.
More interesting than Emrakul’s brood lineage are the lifeforms con-
taminated by the Eldrazi titan. Emrakul is the only Eldrazi creature to
survive the battle with the Gatewatch on Zendikar and escape to the plane
of Innistrad, where she manages not only to influence the minds of its
inhabitants, but also to cause the aberrant mutation of several humans,
animals and even other monsters such as Innistrad’s werewolves. The crea-
tures under the influence of Emrakul become Eldrazi themselves, yet they
also maintain their previous creature type. Similar to the Eldrazi crea-
tures belonging to the brood line of Ulamog, the ones created by Emr-
akul are creatures that defy any systemic structure. However, the latter
are even more radically monstrous in their hybridity. While the Eldrazi
belonging to Ulamog’s lineage are walking autopsies, the Eldrazi mutated
by Emrakul are closer to the hybrid bodies of the inhabitants of Lovecraft’s
Innsmouth.
Emrakul’s mutations are what Kelly Hurley would define as abhuman
body as they are “continually in danger of becoming ­not-itself, becom-
ing other” (Hurley, 1996, p.3). The unique nature of the cards representing
these Eldrazi helps communicating this mutation process. For example,
cards such as “Lone Rider” (EMN, 2016) and “Grizzled Angler” (EMN,
2016) are ­double-faced cards. Some creatures can transform when some
specific circumstances are met. At that point, the player can flip the card
and the creature becomes the one on the back of the card. “Lone Rider,” a
266  Reinterpreting Magic

Human Knight depicted as a cloaked person riding a dark horse, trans-

forms in “It That Rides as One,” an Eldrazi Horror that is a monstrous
tentacular fusion of the knight and its mount. The transformation of
“Grizzled Angler” is even more disturbing: the old fisherman becomes
“Grisly Anglerfish,” an Eldrazi Fish in the shape of a monstrous anglerfish
having a human head as its lure.
The Eldrazi created by Emrakul are the embodiment of the abhuman,
sometimes even more than Lovecraft’s ­human-fish creatures. In the term
“abhuman” “the prefix ‘ab-’ signals a movement away from a site or con-
dition, and thus a loss. But a movement away from is also a movement
towards—towards a site or condition as yet unspecified—and thus entails
both a threat and a promise” (Hurley, 1996, p.4). The Eldrazi created by
Emrakul are hybrid entities whose identity is mutable and deeply alien,
as they escape any category system. Nevertheless, as suggested by Hurley,
this monstrous change contains a promise of something new and excit-
ing—what Julia Kristeva would define as “jouissance” (Kristeva, 1982,
p.10). While for most characters in Lovecraft’s fictions the prospect of a
change into an abhuman body is something to fear, for the creatures of
MTG this monstrous change presents positive aspects, as when a creature
transforms it acquires new abilities and usually gets more powerful.
The art of the Eldrazi cards then manages to maintain various ele-
ments of the Lovecraftian monsters. The designers and artists of the
expansion sets analyzed in this section managed to highlight different
aspects of the Lovecraftian mode through the creation of the brood lines of
the three Eldrazi titans. While the anthropomorphic appearance of some
Eldrazi tends to normalize the aspect of these Lovecraftian monsters, sev-
eral key cards maintain the Eldrazi’s writerly nature through the depiction
of creatures that are monstrous hybrids that defy our category systems and
possess an overall aspect that is extremely hard to piece together.

The Eldrazi in MTG’s Gameplay

It is also very important to consider the way in which the Eldrazi
introduced elements of the Lovecraftian mode into MTG’s gameplay. I
have already mentioned how the “transform” mechanic communicates the
instability of the bodies of the creatures contaminated by Emrakul. How-
ever, this mechanic was originally introduced in the Innistrad set, well
before the coming of the Eldrazi. In this section I will analyze the game
mechanics and keyword abilities introduced for the first time in the four
sets containing the Eldrazi. Moreover, I will also look at the most played
Eldrazi cards and the effect they had on the metagame.5
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  267

It does not come as a surprise that, among the five most played
Eldrazi cards are three of the six cards depicting the legendary Eldrazi
titans. Those cards are “Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger,” “Emrakul, the
Aeons Torn” and “Emrakul, the Promised End.” These three cards are
extremely powerful when compared to the parameters of the average MTG
creature cards. “Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger” is a huge indestructible
creature that allows the player to exile two permanents of their choice. It
is significant that the exile effect does not trigger when the Eldrazi crea-
ture enters the battlefield, but when it is cast: even if the dreadful Ulamog
is countered and put into the graveyard (or even exiled), the opponent has
to lose two precious cards sitting on their side of the table. The abilities
on “Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger” are an interesting way to depict the
­m ind-shattering qualities of the monster: as soon as the card is cast the
player facing the creature loses important resources, without being given
any chance to avoid the effect. Moreover, when this indestructible crea-
ture attacks, the opponent permanently loses the top twenty cards of their
library—which is one third of the initial number of cards in a player’s
library. Once again, the Eldrazi titan does not have to deal damage to a
player, but simply attack in order to cause a severe loss of resources for the
opponent. While the abilities on “Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger” may not
be representative of the creature’s writerly nature, they manage to com-
municate in MTG’s gameplay not only the physical power of the monster
but also the destructive effect the monster has on those who witness its
appearance.
The game mechanics on the two cards representing Emrakul are
instead more representative of the creature’s writerly and Unnamable
nature. “Emrakul, the Aeons Torn” is not only the Eldrazi card with the
highest converted mana cost, but also one of the biggest creatures in all
MTG history. The text box of the card is also one of the longest, as this
creature comes with a plethora of abilities. The most straightforward
among those is that Emrakul cannot be countered, meaning that when
the creature’s mana cost is paid, the opponent has no means to stop any
of the card’s effects. The card’s ability to take away from the opponent the
possibility of preventing the monster’s ­enter-the-battlefield abilities is a
clever way to translate Emrakul’s writerly nature into a game mechanic.
Moreover, as soon as the Eldrazi titan is cast, the player can take an addi-
tional turn. The opponent is then temporarily incapacitated and put into
a position similar to that of the characters in Lovecraft’s fictions that have
the misfortune of facing Unnamable creatures: “In that second look Wil-
lett saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was
undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite’s private hospital”
(Lovecraft 2011, 571–572).
268  Reinterpreting Magic

“Emrakul, the Aeons Torn” is indeed a creature whose abilities can

easily scare any player facing the monster: she’s a huge flying creature and
has protection from colored spells, which means that no spells with a color
identity (which are the majority of them) can hurt or interact with Emra-
kul. Emrakul is also as unkillable as she is in MTG’s story: instead of going
into the graveyard, Emrakul is shuffled back into the player’s library. The
creature has also “annihilator 6,” an ability that appears only on a small
number of Eldrazi cards. The annihilator ability triggers when the crea-
ture attacks and causes the opponent to sacrifice six permanents of their
choice. Similar to “Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger”’s ability to exile per-
manents and cards from a library, “Emrakul the Aeons Torn” deprives the
opponent of resources before dealing damage to them. The power of the
Eldrazi titans is so great and incontrollable that their mere appearance in a
game of MTG is bound to cause one player to lose a great deal of resources
and, very likely, a game.
One aspect of the Lovecraftian mode that is very hard to replicate in
the mechanics of MTG is the chaos that an Unnamable creature causes
with its appearance. In MTG it is only the opponent that must face the
consequences of playing against an Eldrazi titan, while the player casting
it is instead in control of the monster. Undoubtedly, in a game as complex
as MTG it is difficult to replicate the madness caused by Lovecraftian mon-
sters. The closer any Eldrazi card gets to depicting the chaos caused by the
apparition of a ­reality-defying creature is “Emrakul, the Promised End.”
Similar to the other two Eldrazi cards discussed above, the strongest abil-
ity of Emrakul cannot be prevented as it happens when the creature is cast.
When that happens, the player casting “Emrakul, the Promised End” takes
control of the opponent during their next turn. This is a unique ability as,
while “Emrakul, the Aeons Torn” allows a player to take an extra turn,
“Emrakul, the Promised End” lets the player who cast the card take con-
trol of the opponent. The opponent then not only is disabled, but they are
also “possessed” by the other player, who can use the opponent’s creatures
and cards as if they were their own.
However, if the victim survives Emrakul’s ability, they get an extra
turn—that is they are given the chance to respond to Emrakul. The ability
of “Emrakul, the Promised End” to take control of a player and then give
them an extra turn is the closest any Eldrazi creature gets to the unpre-
dictability and “writerliness” of Lovecraft’s Unnamable creatures. This
embodiment of Emrakul is, gameplaywise, the most writerly. The player
casting “Emrakul, the Promised End” needs to “fill the gaps” in the game-
play, as they are required to play not only their turn but also that of the
opponent. Emrakul’s card demands the player to make their play and
respond to it, thus engaging with the game at a deeper level, in the same
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  269

way as Lovecraft’s readers are required to read and at the same time write
the Unnamable monster.
Surprisingly, the most played Eldrazi creature is not one of the leg-
endary titans. “ ­T hought-Knot Seer” (OGW, 2016), an Eldrazi creature
from the Kozilek’s brood line, may appear unassuming at first, yet it is
a very efficient creature. While the creature’s power and toughness are
much lower than that of the three titans, so is its mana cost, which means
“ ­T hought-Knot Seer” can be played early in the game. The Eldrazi crea-
ture comes with a powerful disruptive ability, as it allows the player to
look at the opponent’s hand and exile one card. It is almost inconsequen-
tial that the opponent gets to draw a card if “ ­T hought-Knot Seer” dies, as
the player casting this creature has already permanently removed the most
powerful card from the opponent’s hand. This Eldrazi creature is not as
powerful as the three titans and is less writerly than the previously men-
tioned cards. Nevertheless, “­T hought-Knot Seer” deprives the opponent of
their resources and disrupts their strategy, an ability that is similar to the
shock and confusion provoked by the appearance of the Unnamable mon-
ster. Moreover, this creature necessitates the player to spend three generic
mana and one “Wastes” to be cast. Wastes, which appear only in OGW,
are lands that produce colorless mana and represent a land that has been
drained of its color identity.
Wastes are writerly lands as, while they may be considered MTG’s
sixth color, they are also a ­non-color. Moreover, while the mana they pro-
duce is identical to the one of other colorless artifact lands in the game,
Eldrazi such as “ ­T hought-Knot Seer” require the specific mana produced
by Wastes to be played. Therefore, “ ­T hought-Knot Seer” forces play-
ers to include Wastes in decks that play this creature, introducing a sixth
­non-color and altering the mana system of the game. “ ­T hought-Knot Seer”
then manages to bring into MTG an element such as the “Wastes” that,
similar to the alien color in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” is pro-
foundly alien and impossible to understand.

The Eldrazi in MTG’s Metagame

It may seem slightly controversial to present the Eldrazi as an example
of Lovecraftian monsters maintaining the Unnamable nature of their lit-
erary counterpart. The fact that players get to cast and control these crea-
tures may suggest a complete destruction of their monstrousness. Quoting
Roland Barthes, “the Other”—in this case, the Eldrazi monster—“becomes
a pure object, a spectacle, a clown. Relegated to the confines of humanity,
he no longer threatens the security of the home” (Barthes, 2009, p. 180).
270  Reinterpreting Magic

The Lovecraftian monsters are contained in the card frame and become
objects we can own, collect and play with. However, the flexibility of the
Lovecraftian mode allows the Eldrazi to present various degrees of “writ-
erlyness,” while still being a functional part of a collectable card game that
needs to have clear rules and mechanics.
In MTG’s story, art and gameplay, the Eldrazi simultaneously appear
as titanic beasts, writerly creatures and abhuman bodies. Instead of focus-
ing on one depiction of the Lovecraftian monster, the Eldrazi present
different readings of the Lovecraftian which are compatible among them-
selves. The flexible nature of the Lovecraftian mode is reflected in the var-
iegated nature of the three blood lines of the Eldrazi, which present unique
readings of the Unnamable monster. While Emrakul is a writerly monster
that is closer to the ones found in Lovecraft’s fictions, Ulamog’s brood line
and the mutated Eldrazi found in EMN present a different kind of writerly
that confuses categories and disturbs the order of nature. Despite being
game pieces of a collectable card game, the Eldrazi are not normalized and
their threat level can never be erased. Moreover, while the Eldrazi do not
have the power to “threaten the security of the home,” they surely threat-
ened that of MTG tournaments.
The period between the weekend of February 5, 2016, and April 4, 2016, is
known by MTG players as the “Eldrazi Winter,” as the metagame of the Mod-
ern format saw a very high percentage of players using the same Eldrazi cards
in their decks (What Was Eldrazi Winter?, 2017). For example, at the Oath of
the Gatewatch ­Pro-Tour, taking place in February 2016, 75 percent of the Top
8 decks were using some variant of the Eldrazi archetype (Magic: The Gath-
ering—The Eldrazi Winter, 2016). The reason behind the popularity of Eldrazi
decks was that in the Modern format the high mana cost of these creatures
was not a real problem: not only the ­so-called Tron lands (“Urza’s Tower”
[8ED, 2003], “Urza’s Mine” [8ED, 2003], and “Urza’s Power Plant” [8ED,
2003]) could generate large amounts of colorless mana early in the game, but
lands such as “Eldrazi Temple” (ROE, 2010) and “Eye of Ugin” (WWK, 2010)
in particular helped lowering the cost of Eldrazi creatures. Moreover, “Eye of
Ugin” allowed players to search their library for colorless cards, thus mak-
ing the Eldrazi decks extremely effective in putting big creatures on the bat-
tlefield very early in the game. As a result, “Eye of Ugin” was banned from
the Modern format in April 2016, where it remains banned to this day (Wiz-
ards of the Coast, 2016). However, MTG’s metagame was not safe from the
Eldrazi menace for long, as in January 2017 “Emrakul the Promised End” was
banned from Standard. As pointed out by the official announcement from
Wizards of the Coast, “Emrakul faced too little resistance and ended games
too easily. She was the ­world-ending, ­a ll-powerful monster she was in the
story, which was too much for Standard” (Wizards of the Coast, 2017).
 The Call of Eldrazi (Paccosi)  271

At the time of writing this essay, there are no official plans from Wiz-
ards of the Coast to bring back the Eldrazi. The only nod to the Love-
craftian monsters can be found in the Legendary Artifact “Forsaken
Monument” (ZNR, 2020), which depicts a landscape of Zendikar where
the remains of the Eldrazi titan Ulamog are visible. The card boosts the
stat of colorless creatures, yet the Eldrazi are not mentioned anywhere in
the text of the card. However, while the creators of MTG seem to have put
the Eldrazi on a hiatus, these Lovecraftian creatures are still alive among
players. Eldrazi Tron and Eldrazi Aggro are still ­fan-favorite decks in the
Modern format, and several Eldrazi creatures are played in ­Tier-1 decks
in Legacy, a format favoring powerful cards (MTG Metagame Breakdown,
2020). The Eldrazi, not unlike Cthulhu, are not dead: they are still “wor-
shipped” and feared by players, and are waiting to rise again to bring
another wave of Lovecraftian flavor in MTG.

Notes
1. I am purposefully choosing the wrong spelling of the word “unnamable” as it is the
one used by Lovecraft in his fictions.
2. The name Innistrad is also suggestively similar to that of Innsmouth, the town pop-
ulated by ­human-fish hybrids found in Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936).
Moreover, one of the MTG expansion sets featuring the Eldrazi is called “Eldritch Moon”
and is another nod to Lovecraft’s fictions. The adjective “eldritch” is used several times in
the author’s fictions and is often associated with the kind of Horror depicted in his works.
3. Emrakul is referred to using the pronouns she/her, as found in the flavor text of sev-
eral cards. One example is that of “Boon of Emrakul” (EMN, 2016): “All around Emrakul,
life ­re-formed in her image.”
4. Legendary creatures are unique creatures that cover an important role in MTG’s lore.
Moreover, a player cannot control two or more legendary permanents with the same name.
5. To determine the most played Eldrazi cards I will use the list contained in the You-
Tube video titled “MTG Top 10: Eldrazi” (Nizzahon Magic, 2018). I am using this source as
not only this is a popular MTG channel, but mostly because it is the only one basing its lists
on relevant data. Nizzahon Magic gives a numeric score to each card, based on their inclu-
sion in decks that placed in the top eight positions in competitive MTG tournaments across
all formats and across MTG history.

References
Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z. Blackwell.
Barthes, R. (2009). Mythologies. Vintage Classics.
Botting, F. (1991). Making monstrous: Frankenstein, criticism, theory. Manchester Univer-
sity Press.
Cohen, J.J. (1996). Monster Culture (Seven Theses). In J.J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster theory:
Reading culture (pp. 3–25). University of Minnesota Press.
Cyanide. (2018). Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game.
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DiZoglio, J. (2016, March 18). Of Eldrazi And Elder Ones. The Ontological Geek. http://
ontologicalgeek.com/­of-eldrazi-and-elder-ones/.
Eldritch Moon Story. (2016, June 17). Magic: The Gathering Website. https://magic.wizards.
com/en/content/­eldritch-moon-story.
Fowler, A. (1982). Kinds of literature: An introduction to the theory of genres and modes.
Clarendon.
Gordon, S. (1985). ­Re-Animator [­Blu-ray]. Second Sight.
Harman, G. (2012). Weird realism: Lovecraft and philosophy. John Hunt Publishing.
Hurley, K. (1996). The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de
Siècle. Cambridge University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Columbia University Press.
LaBelle, C. (2015, October 20). The Color Out of Space. Magic: The Gathering Website. https://
magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/­my-favorite-flavor/­color-out-space-2015-10-20.
Launius, R. and Wilson, K. (2018). Arkham Horror. Fantasy Flight Games.
Levitch, A., Beyer, D., Digges, K., and Kreines, K.J. (2016, February 24). Zendikar Resurgent.
Magic: The Gathering Website. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/­m agic-
story/­z endikar-resurgent-2016-02-24.
Li, M. (2015, December 23). Battle for Zendikar Story Summary. Magic: The Gathering
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story-summary-2015-12-23.
Lovecraft, H.P. (2011). H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction. Barnes & Noble.
Magic: The Gathering—The Eldrazi Winter. (2016, August 19). TechRaptor. https://
techraptor.net/tabletop/opinions/­magic-gathering-eldrazi-winter.
Miéville, C. (2009). M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus
and/or and and/or or? IV, 105–128.
Moore, A., and Burrows, J. (2017). Providence. Avatar Press.
MTG Metagame Breakdown. (2020, November 6). MTG Top 8. https://www.MTGtop8.
com/format?f=MO.
MTG Story Archive. (2021, January 7). Magic: The Gathering Website. https://magic.
wizards.com/en/story?source=MX_Nav2020.
Nizzahon Magic. (2018, January 26). MTG Top 10: Eldrazi. YouTube. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Pa84QJjk9yU.
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03-02.
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news/ ­banned-and-restricted-announcement-2016-04-04.
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 From Magic to Gwent
Magic’s Impact on the Gaming Industry
Jiwon Ohm

Magic Was Born

Magic is a trading, collectible card games (TCG/CCG)1 created by
Peter Adkison and Richard Garfield in 1993. Similar to Gary Gygax and
Dave Arneson’s ­t abletop ­role-playing game (RPG) Dungeons & Dragons
(DnD) (1974), it is a ­fantasy-based game which was able to step into the
newly established fantasy market in the 20th century—due to the colossal
success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—and carve its own niche
within it. It is therefore not surprising that Adkison was a fan of Tolkien,
as well as DnD which he “stumbled on … in a local games store where he
was drawn to the unfamiliar product by a nascent fascination with J.R.R.
Tolkien’s fantasy works” (Chalk, p. 8). Adkison states that when he walked
into a store with $30 on Christmas in 1978 looking for a new game to play,
he “had just read J.R.R. Tolkien and there was a dragon on the cover of the
game so I said, why not?” This casual day was to become one of the most
important days for Adkison, as this “game with no rules” inspired him to
begin his own company, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) (Adkison as cited
in Seattle Times). In fact, the phrase “Wizards of the Coast” is the name
of a very powerful guild in a DnD campaign Adkison participated in with
his friends (Adkison as cited in Gen Con, 2019). The impact of Tolkien and
DnD prompted Adkison to create his own ­tabletop RPG years later.
This decision, however, almost ruined both WotC and Adkison. The
book which almost cost WotC their whole company was The Primal Order
(1992) which “offers a scheme for modeling and quantifying the interac-
tions between gods and mortals in roleplaying campaigns” (Rolston, Rev.
ed. 1995, p. xiii). WotC had been working on this book before and during
the planning of Magic. To WotC’s dismay, Palladium Books, whose RPG

273
274  Reinterpreting Magic

was one of the many used in The Primal Order, filed a lawsuit against WotC
for copyright and trademark infringement, putting the young company
“on its knees” (Chalk, pp. 26–7). Fortunately, Adkison had Magic and its
designer Richard Garfield to rescue the company.
Garfield, who is a mathematician as well as a DnD player, met Adkison
when he and Mike Davis, the ­co-creator of their boardgame RoboRally,
were introduced to and explained the game to Adkison. When Adkison
declined the distribution of RoboRally because of the cost, the unyield-
ing Garfield asked Adkison what he was looking for in a game (Chalk, pp.
8–9). According to Titus Chalk, Adkison was envisioning “a game for the
convention circuit: something portable, something quick, something that
jaded ­role-players could distract themselves with during their ­down-time
or while waiting for a tardy dungeon master. As a fan of the fantasy art….
Adkison wanted a vehicle for great illustration, too. The solution, he felt,
was some kind of card game” (Chalk, p. 9). When the two met a month
later, Garfield introduced a card game he had created, inspired by games
such as Cosmic Encounter (1977) (Garfield as cited in Fullerton, 2008, 2nd
ed, p. 191). Adkison reminisces that he was so enthusiastic about the game
that he was “dancing around, whooping and hollering” (Adkison as cited
in Chalk, p. 10), and thus magic—or Magic—was born.
Once Adkison and Garfield were able to get the ball rolling, with
clearly targeted consumers and a market, Magic quickly gained a great
number of followers with its combination of strategic ­c ard-playing and
assemblage, the gratification of collecting and finding of rare cards,2 the
familiarity of fantasy races and characters, beautiful illustrations, as well
as the publication of novels and stories based on the images and brief
descriptions on the cards that gave life to the inanimate objects, creatures
and characters on the cards. Magic’s uniqueness consists of the fact that
the original source of its lore was the game itself rather than other sources
such as books, as it was the opposite in most cases. Thus, being unlim-
ited to an “original source” by being the original source in itself allows the
world of Magic to remain vibrant, dynamic, and creative, either contest-
ing or adapting to both the social and technological changes in our world.
Indeed, with new cards and expansion packs follow the stories and side
stories of new races or peoples from different worlds and backgrounds,
thereby making the world of Magic full of infinite possibilities and rel-
evance.Such qualities, as well as its gameplay, are what makes Magic
alluring. The popularity of Magic, like any other popular work, opened
a completely new sphere in the world of popular culture, not limited to
the ­table-top games, but also animations and digital games. Consequently,
many people influenced and inspired by Magic started creating their own
games to build the TCG market as we now know it.
 From Magic to Gwent (Ohm)  275

The TCG Market: From Magic: The Gathering

to ­Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon
Although it may seem like Magic’s popularity was confined to a small
niche market made up of “geeks” and “nerds,” its influence reached as far
as Japan and it inspired many others to create games and animations. One
of these creators was none other than Kazuki Takahashi, the creator of
the manga ­Yu-Gi-Oh! (1993–2004), which eventually became the source
of another popular and successful TCG in the market. ­Yu-Gi-Oh! is com-
monly known in the western countries where the anime had been adapted,
as a story which revolves around a kind, small teenage boy named Yugi
Muto, his friends and enemies and, of course, a card game called “Duel
Monsters.”3
The anime which was created based on the “Duel Monsters” is spe-
cifically titled, ­Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, and is but one adaptation, aired
in the year 2000, of the many derived from the original manga ­Yu-Gi-Oh!.
The plot of the original manga version of ­Yu-Gi-Oh! can be summarized
as follows:
A young timid boy who was often bullied solves an Ancient Puzzle causing his
body to become host to the spirit of an ancient gambling pharaoh. Whenever
himself or his friends are in trouble the Pharaoh would show himself and chal-
lenge the opponent of the week to a Shadow game with the loser having a fit-
ting, sometimes lethal punishment for the loser. Initially, the series was a game
of the week ranging from Card games, RPGs and even jigsaw puzzles against
delinquents, teachers, and even prisoners. Most episodes ended with a cruel
punishment. This introduced most of the main characters of the series includ-
ing Seto Kaiba, Ryo Bakura and Shadi whom would play more important roles
later [Reed, 2016].
Originally, the card game “Duel Monsters” only appeared in a few chap-
ters of the manga, not playing much of a role other than being one of the
many games Yugi plays against opponents. Duel Monsters was inspired by
Magic, and Takahashi acknowledged this by naming the game “Wizards
and Magic” in the initial manga, with “Wizards” coming from “Wizards
of the Coast” and “Magic” from “Magic: The Gathering.” Despite the brief
and few appearances of the game, so many readers of the manga expressed
interest in the card game to the publisher that Takahashi decided to cre-
ate a ­stand-alone series, which is ­Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Reed). Thus,
without Magic, the original ­Yu-Gi-Oh! would not have had “Wizards and
Magic” and consequently Duel Monsters, which means that it would not
have gained the global popularity it has attained.
One only has to watch the first episode of ­Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters
with the most basic knowledge on Magic to notice the influence of Magic.
276  Reinterpreting Magic

First of all, as mentioned earlier, Yugi is a “young timid boy” whose per-
sonality is visualized through his frailer physical appearance compared
to his peers, which aligns with the stereotype assigned to Magic play-
ers. Many boys and men who played Magic at the time were associated
with the geeks and nerds. As Mark Justice, former pro player of Magic,
once remarked, “There was definitely a nerd stigma to Magic back then”
(as cited in Chalk, p. 129). In addition, Yugi’s grandfather is the owner of
a game shop where, like in any LGS, he sells and trades the Duel Mon-
sters cards. In the first few episodes, the ­Yu-Gi-Oh! anime spends a lot of
time introducing and explaining the cards, whose designs are very simi-
lar to those of Magic’s with an illustration of the character, its description
underneath the image, its power written on the card, along with the rules
of the game, which become more complicated as the series progresses.
What is most remarkable about the first episode is that, by showing Yugi
win the World Champion of Duel Monsters, and given that he also owns
three legendary cards through a deck compiled by his grandfather with
cards that can only show their full potential by strategically organizing
the deck, the episode emphasized the fact that although rare and powerful
cards exist and one could own many or even all of them, what really mat-
ters in the card game is strategy with a bit of luck. This showcases the com-
plexity of not only Duel Monsters itself, but also its ­role-model Magic in
which deck building and game playing skills with a sprinkle of luck over-
ride card rarity. Unsurprisingly, the card game in the anime was adapted
into the ­Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game (­Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG), first in Japan in
1999, and then in North America in 2002. Like Magic, and partly due to
the fact that the earlier game had already established a market, ­Yu-Gi-Oh!
TCG’s popularity caught on quickly so that according to ICv2, the game
ranks 3rd out of the top 5 sales in the category of Collectible Games as of
spring 2019 (ICv2, 2019).
While Magic remains the 1st in ranking, it is followed by none
other than the famous Pokémon: Trading Card Game (Pokémon: TCG),
adapted from Nintendo Game Boy’s ­role-playing video game Pokémon
Red and Green,4 which was released in 1996 in Japan just a few years prior
to ­Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. Pokémon: TCG is arguably even more indebted than
­Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG to Magic and its company, WotC for two reasons: (1) WotC
was the company in charge of distributing the Pokémon: TCG in Amer-
ica and (2) WotC’s workers were hired to work at The Pokémon Company
once the U.S. division was established. According to Chalk, Japan was one
of the biggest markets for WotC in the 1990s, where WotC was making 30
percent of the profit for Magic, so that the company was shocked and dis-
mayed when they received the news that Magic was no longer the bestsell-
ing TCG in Japan because Pokémon: TCG had taken its place. Although
 From Magic to Gwent (Ohm)  277

Adkison was critical of Pokémon: TCG, believing that “It’s ­mass-market.

It’s dumbed down. It’s got ugly anime artwork. And there are cartoons!
This is not a serious game like Magic is,” he did not decline the proposition
made by Pokémon: TCG’s producers that WotC be the official partner for
the American market (as cited in Chalk, p. 173). Thus, with the experience
and expertise they had earned from leading the first and most successful
TCG, in 1998, WotC triumphantly released Pokémon: TCG to a new group
of consumers in America: children (Chalk, pp. 172–3).
WotC profited tremendously, at least in financial terms, from being
in charge of the Pokémon: TCG. Just six weeks after its release, the game
had sold ten times more than WotC had estimated, while by the end of
the same year, a million packs of the game had been sold. However, this
alliance was broken when The Pokémon Company established a divi-
sion in the U.S., and WotC was no longer tasked to distribute Pokémon:
TCG (Plunkett, 2011). Furthermore, according to WotC, the relationship
“turned sour” between them and The Pokémon Company, as WotC filed a
lawsuit against The Pokémon Company which, according to The Pokémon
Company, was filed the first day after the distribution agreement ended:
alleg[ing] patent infringement, breach of contract, misappropriation of trade
secrets, tortuous interference with a business relationship, unjust enrich-
ment and other claims … at least nine employees were hired by Pokémon USA,
including Rene Flores, vice president of marketing, and Richard Arons, senior
vice president of non–Magic trading card games [Cook, 2003].
The lawsuit was later dropped after the two companies reached an agree-
ment. Although the terms of the agreement were undisclosed, one can
assume that WotC received a generous settlement from The Pokémon Com-
pany (Plunkett). What is most important is that both the ­Yu-Gi-Oh! and
Pokémon TCGs, which have the highest sales following Magic, owe much
of their success to Magic as their histories are closely intertwined, unlike
the many TCGs that never received such spotlight. Although ­Yu-Gi-Oh!
and Pokémon TCGs have become powerful competitors for Magic, Gar-
field saw this competition in a more positive light in 2003, suggesting that
“Magic has grown stronger with each successive year—as the game itself
is improved and as more people are brought into trading card games from
products such as Pokémon and ­Yu-Gi-Oh!” (Garfield as cited in Ful-
lerton, p. 199). Indeed, one only needs to Google “Magic, Pokémon and
­Yu-Gi-Oh” in order to find the numerous comparisons of the three games
in articles and TCG player forums. Thus, there is a possibility that—Mag-
ic’s main demographic being 18–34 years old (Marder, 2014) while Pokémon
and ­Yu-Gi-Oh! are for 6+ years old 5 (Konami n.d.; Nance, 2014)—Pokémon
and ­Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG players who grow older transition or extend to Magic.
Whether or not Garfield is correct in assuming that Magic profited from
278  Reinterpreting Magic

­Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon TCGs, the fact that WotC created a game which
has forever changed the gaming industry is undeniable.

Magic’s Influence on the Digital Gaming World

Many successful TCGs other than Pokémon and ­Yu-Gi-Oh! borrowed
Magic’s mix of ­role-playing—derived from the original ­t able-top fantasy
RPG DnD—with card gaming. Garfield highlights the thought he and
the designers of Magic had put into integrating the ­t able-top ­role-playing
aspect in the game: “In its structured flexibility, this game environment
is much like a ­role-playing world…. [Magic’s] more ­f ree-form game duel-
ing with friends using decks constructed at whim embodies some inter-
esting elements of role playing” (as cited in Fullerton, 198). Accordingly,
many popular digital online TCGs such as Blizzard’s Hearthstone (2014)
stemming from their digital fantasy RPG Warcraft (1994–), Bethesda’s
The Elder Scrolls: Legends (2017) from their digital fantasy RPG The Elder
Scrolls (1994–), CD Projekt (CDPR)’s Gwent: The Witcher Card Game
(2016) from their digital fantasy RPG adapted from Andrzej Sapkow-
ski’s The Witcher books (1993–2013), and Riot Games’ Legends of Rune-
terra (2020) from their ­role-playing fantasy world of League of Legends
(2009–), are not all digital RPGs and fantasy genres with stories behind
the cards and decks by chance: though there is no denying that these are
good games, their successes relied on the market ­pre-established by Magic
with the blending of ­tabletop RPG, ­tabletop card game, and fantasy.
Additionally, according to Peterson, Magic had influenced not only
­tabletop TCGs, but also the conceptualization of digital RPG itself:
A critical influence on the economy of early massively multiplayer ­role-playing
games must be Magic: The Gathering…. By setting different levels of common-
ality for cards (common, uncommon and rare) and forcing players to pur-
chase allotments without knowing what cards they would find within, Magic
established an ad hoc economy for rare cards, which might be traded or sold
in a secondary market as players tried to assemble the most powerful decks….
Thus all of the Magic players in the world effectively competed for a finite and
small set of resources, typically through sheer spending power, despite the
intention of the designers that players would exchange cards through ante
mechanisms. The ­meta-game of Magic therefore can be seen as a pioneering
massively multiplayer game…. Online successors did borrow heavily from
its commonality systems: both in setting different commonality for treasure
dropped by foes, and by establishing ­player-driven auctions to set the valua-
tion for that treasure [Peterson, n964].
As such, Magic shaped and normalized the system of the classification
of item values based on rarity in a wide variety of games. For instance,
 From Magic to Gwent (Ohm)  279

many people playing ­multi-player online RPGs, be they on consoles, PC,

or phones, trade items with one another, using real and/or virtual worlds’
currencies or other items within the game. This may also indicate that
many ­single-player ­role-playing video games using the item commonal-
ity system may also have borrowed from Magic. Similar to Tolkien’s books
and DnD, Magic is the originator of many concepts that are normalized
in the gaming world that we now take for granted. Furthermore, some
­top-selling RPGs such as Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VIII (1999)6 and The
Witcher 3 adapted the ­Magic-like game as minigames in their games.
Although Magic has transformed the ­t abletop TCGs as well as the
digital gaming world, its position as the pioneer of ­table-top TCGs would
not have been enough to survive the newly flourishing market of TCGs.
While it is true that its continued existence is partly due to other success-
ful TCGs such as Pokémon and ­Yu-Gi-Oh, which expanded and strength-
ened the TCG market, Magic is also responsible for its own survival since,
as Garfield wrote a decade after the initial release of Magic, “Magic was
anything but a static game since [1993]” (Garfield as cited in Fullerton,
p. 199). While Garfield mostly elaborated on the card designs on the new
booster packs and rule changes, he also writes of other creative ways in
which Magic marketed the game: the creation of the Magic tournament
and the adaptation to Magic Online. Indeed, the notable reason for Mag-
ic’s continuing success is its endeavors to adapt to changes in the modern
world, one of the most important of which is the development of technol-
ogy and the flourishing of the virtual market made possible by the inter-
net and video games.
WotC’s creation and release of a virtual Magic dates all the way back
to 2002 when they created Magic Online, as they quickly followed the path
of the first online card games such as ChronX (1997) and With Author-
ity! (2001) (Villoria, 2001). Magic Online functioned as a rather faithful
adaptation of the physical TCG onto the virtual, including WotC’s coor-
dination of Magic Online championship games, and players having to buy
the online booster packs while also being able to trade, buy and sell these
cards with, from and to other players. Multiple virtual TCGs subsequently
came onto and left the market until 2014, when after discontinuing the
physical World of Warcraft TCG in 2013, Blizzard introduced Hearthstone
on multiple online platforms including Microsoft Windows and Apple
Mac as well as smartphones and demonstrated that the virtual world was
a lucrative platform for TCGs. In the same year that Hearthstone was
released, Cryptozoic Entertainment introduced the Beta version of Hex:
Shards of Fate, which led to WotC filing a complaint “for Copyright, Pat-
ent and Trade Dress Infringement,” 7 which was officially released in 2016
after Cryptozoic Entertainment and WotC settled the issue in 2015. Other
280  Reinterpreting Magic

popular ­Magic-inspired online card games that were put out in the market
include the aforementioned The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Legends of Rune-
terra and Gwent: The Witcher Card Game.

Gwent as the Magic of the Witcher World

CDPR, a Polish company, created The Witcher digital RPG series
based on the lore of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher books
(1993–2013). The Witcher books’ first adaptation into a video game was
released in 2007 as The Witcher. Its sequels were released as The Witcher
2: Assassins of Kings in 2014, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its expan-
sions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine were released in 2015–16.
CDPR’s Gwent is different from the other digital TCGs listed above in that
it was not intended to be a ­stand-alone game: it was originally a minigame
within the digital ­semi-open-world RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This
“mini” game is a side quest which the player can choose to accomplish or
not, but was important enough that if the player chose not to, they would
miss some ­c ut-scenes as well as items. Although missing a few ­c ut-scenes
and items is not a big issue for some gamers, this is not the case for com-
pletionists—gamers who must complete every single quest/mission/chal-
lenge and attain all possible items. Thus, by making the ­m ini-game a side
quest, the game was designed so that even those who initially did not enjoy
it to continue playing so that hopefully they would understand the rules
and eventually enjoy it.
Gwent is an original game designed by Damien Monnier and
­co-created by Rafal Jaki—both big fans of TCGs (GameSpot, 2018)—when
they were part of The Witcher 3 team. Gwent was inspired by the dwarven
card game mentioned in just one of Sapkowski’s The Witcher books—Bap-
tism of Fire (1996)—which, in the original Polish version, is called “Gwint,”
and translated as “Barrel” in the English version. As Sapkowski does not
offer enough details about the game to create an actual one from the book,
Monnier and Jaki were able to design an original game only using the
name “gwint” and the fact that it is a card game. In Baptism of Fire, Sap-
kowski writes:
The fundamental principle of dwarven Barrel was something resembling
an auction at a horse fair, both in its intensity and the volume of the bid-
ders’ voices. The pair declaring the highest “price” would endeavour to win
as many tricks as possible, which the rival pair had to impede at all costs. The
game was played noisily and heatedly, and a sturdy staff lay beside each player.
These staffs were seldom used to beat an opponent, but were often brandished
[1996/2014, pp. 1408–1411].
 From Magic to Gwent (Ohm)  281

Other than this description, and the fact that the dwarves who play it are
extremely passionate about the game, the only other information given is
that its players use the term “spades,” “diamonds” and “hearts”—at least
in the English translated version—calling to mind the more ­well-known
standard ­52-card deck. Monnier stated that the description in the book
was “assez vague”—vague enough—to create an original game out of
(Monnier as cited in OgamingTV, 2015). Being fans of TCGs, Monnier and
Jaki’s ­t wo-player card game, Gwent, turned out to be much more similar to
Magic’s decks and gameplay than those of the standard deck.
Prior to Gwent, The Witcher 1 and 2 included a ­m ini-game more
called “Dice Poker.” Dice Poker was a game faithful to its name: dice
throwing fused with poker. Although some enjoyed the ­m ini-game, it did
not stand out to the players enough to become popular. The Witcher 1 also
included “romance cards” which the player attained as a prize every time
they slept with a female ­non-player character (NPC). This collectible card
“game” did not make it to The Witcher 2, most likely because of the contro-
versy surrounding its objectification of women. For The Witcher 3, CDPR
asked Monnier to create a completely new ­m ini-game which would last at
least 10 minutes per round and something which derived from the origi-
nal books. While choosing Gwent as one of the aspects of the game he was
most proud of, Monnier stated that he did not want to make a game which
was too simple, but required the players to really think (as cited in Ogam-
ingTV). As a result, Gwent came to be.
According to Monnier, the design of Gwent was inf luenced by
­tabletop games; even though he does not name Magic specifically, it is very
difficult to not think of Magic when one reads the descriptions Monnier
gives about Gwent before The Witcher 3 was released. When asked whether
there “was anything [Monnier/ CDPR] took from ­tabletop fantasy gaming
to put into this game [The Witcher 3] specifically” (Hershberger as cited in
Gaming Oblivion, 2020), instead of focusing on the main portion of The
Witcher 3 game, Monnier brought up Gwent:
I’m a massive fan of—as a [game] designer I believe that if you want to be a
designer you need to have a look at ­t able-top…. I designed Gwent with a bunch
of cool friends. Gwent is a card game that we have in the game … we do have
this thing where you can go around collect … cards and you can build your
own deck and we have full factions and it’s a very quick game, it’s like 10 min-
utes maximum, … you can win money playing it, you can buy new cards, you
can win some of them, you can even enter a tournament, and there is a big
tournament with all best Gwent players in the realm and there are quests link
to that as well [as cited in Gaming Oblivion].
This description of Gwent is very similar to Magic: (1) Gwent is a card
game, (2) the player has to collect cards by buying or winning them, (3) the
282  Reinterpreting Magic

players must build their own decks, and (4) there is a big tournament “with
all the best Gwent players in the realm.” Of course, there are many kinds of
card games, but the card designs are similar to that of Magic.
Despite some minor differences in the designs such as the placements
of the cards’ power and category, the general design mirrors Magic’s. In
addition, derived from the concept of Magic which, as Peterson suggested
also conceptualized the rarity of items in digital RPGs, Gwent also added
the existence of normal and rare cards. For example, the rarest “Hero”
cards can only be earned by winning against the strongest Gwent playing
NPCs. Furthermore, even the rule that the player wins the opponent’s card
is equivalent to what was the original prize for winning a game of Magic
when it was initially released—a rule that was swiftly dropped by Magic
players. Other than earning cards by winning against NPCs, the player can
buy cards at shops like one can buy Magic cards at LGSs. Finally, the idea
of the Gwent tournament, in which the player must win against the most
skilled Gwent playing NPCs from the Northern Realm of The Witcher
world in a tournament also comes from Magic s pioneering of TCG world
tournaments. This tournament in The Witcher 3 is a ­side-quest called
“High Stakes.” Just like a real TCG tournament, once the player loses a
game with one of the NPCs participating in the tournament, the player
loses the whole tournament. If the player had not played Gwent through-
out the game, it would be impossible to participate or win it, as they would
lack both good strategies and a strong deck. Losing the tournament would
mean the loss of prize money, as well as ­cut-scenes and failure to complete
the “High Stakes” and also another ­Gwent-related ­side-quest titled “Col-
lect ’Em All,” for which the player must collect all the 199 cards available in
the game since, as previously mentioned, winning Gwent means earning
a card from the opponent, so that losing the tournament would result in
failure to earn cards by beating all Gwent playing NPCs. All these similar-
ities exemplify the influence of Magic on Gwent, whether or not they were
direct influences. In other words, Magic has become so normalized as the
model for TCGs that its influence is both direct and indirect.
There are, of course, multiple ways in which Gwent differentiated
itself from Magic and other ­fantasy-based TCGs inspired by Magic such
as not using the concept of mana, being ­t urn-based so that a player cannot
take action during the opponent’s turn, being more strict with the division
between factions when creating decks, having three rows—melee, ranged,
siege—, including weather cards that could affect the whole game, hav-
ing to win twice in order to win the game so that it may take three matches
to complete a round, having to gain the higher number in order to win
instead of having to attack the opponent’s leader until their power reaches
zero, and obviously, being based on The Witcher lore.
 From Magic to Gwent (Ohm)  283

The uniqueness and strengths of Gwent as a ­mini-game in The Witcher

3 allowed it to become so popular that many players of The Witcher 3 began
to joke about being primarily invested in playing a game of Gwent in its dark
and gloomy world. For example, just four days after the game was released,
Redditor aleco247 posted a thread titled, “Gwent honestly is one of the best
things in this game,” writing: “I know this has been said a lot, but Gwent is
… awesome. I just spent the last hour playing it with the innkeepers. I would
pay top dollar for a mobile version of it” (aleco247, 2015). Indeed, just a week
after the game’s release, players were “spamming” CDPR’s mailboxes inquir-
ing about whether the company planned to release Gwent as a standalone
game (GameSpot), and according to Monnier, two months later The Witcher
inbox was receiving thousands of emails mostly related to Gwent (Tach,
2016). Building on this momentum, CDPR’s The Witcher team quickly
released the closed beta version of Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, a digital
TCG, in September 2016 on Xbox One and Microsoft Windows.
In 2018, another Gwent game was released: Thronebreaker: The
Witcher Tales. In this standalone ­single-player digital RPG, the player does
not play as Geralt the Witcher, but Queen Meve, the queen of Lyria and
Rivia in which all battles revolve around Gwent. Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz,
who was the lead quest designer of The Witcher 3, writes that when he
was asked to work on Thronebreaker, he thought of many games he had
encountered when he was younger including Magic. He also writes, “I also
had multiple ­r un-ins with other digital card games—different editions of
Magic: The Gathering, Duels of Champions, just to name a few” (Tomasz-
kiewicz, 2018). Thus, even while branching out into different forms of
games, Gwent continued to be influenced by Magic. Gwent continues to
develop in the competitive online TCG market as it continues to adapt
to users’ responses and needs, expanding to different platforms includ-
ing iOS in 2019, and finally Android in 2020. Thus, Redditor u/aleco247’s
wishful thinking about a mobile version of Gwent had become a reality.

The Future of TCGs

However long Gwent and other online TCGs such as Hearthstone,
The Elder Scrolls: Legends and Legends of Runeterra will last, it is indisput-
able that Garfield’s game design has completely altered the path of gaming
and its market. Without Magic, the animation ­Yu-Gi-Oh!, the physical and
online ­t abletop TCGs such as ­Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon and Hearthstone, and
the mini-games in Final Fantasy VIII and The Witcher 3 would not have
existed. In other words, Magic has the same status in the world of gaming
as DnD does in fantasy genre gaming.
284  Reinterpreting Magic

Although one could argue that WotC’s openness to other forms of

Magic inspired TCG is debatable—with their suing of both Pokémon
Company and Cryptozoic—looking at the diversity of TCG in the mar-
ket that were untouched by WotC, there is little doubt that WotC has
taken on Garfield’s idea that “Magic … itself is improved … as more peo-
ple are brought into trading card games from products such as Pokémon
and ­Yu-Gi-Oh!” (Garfield as cited in Fullerton, p. 199). In other words, it
is possible that as long as a game does not completely rip off Magic, other
TCGs could be beneficial to Magic’s continued existence and growth.
For example, the proliferation of online TCGs such as Hearthstone has
prompted WotC to design and release Magic: The Gathering Arena (Magic
Arena) in 2018, which at long last became available on Apple Mac in the
summer of 2020 while Magic Online is still only available on Microsoft
Windows. Magic Arena is a less complex version of Magic Online, sim-
plified and made adaptable for new players as well as players who have
been introduced to TCGs through other TCGs than Magic and Magic
Online. Though Magic players are still debating whether Magic Online or
Magic Arena is “better,” statistics show that Magic Online was declining 8
when Magic Arena was released and that Magic Arena’s release has further
affected the number of Magic Online players (Koch, 2018).
Magic is able to maintain its ­long-standing presence in the TCG mar-
ket thanks to not only its appealing gaming and its technological adap-
tations, but also the endless creative possibilities its concept allows. As
aforementioned mentioned, Magic releases new cards and expansion
packs with the stories and side stories of based on them so that WotC can
continue to revise and create worlds pertinent to the real world, instead
of relying on an unchangeable original source such as Gwent which relies
on Sapkowski’s world. For example, WotC was recently able to remove
and ban seven potentially racist cards—Invoke Prejudice, Cleanse,
­Stone-Throwing Devils, Pradesh Gypsies, Jihad, Imprison, and Crusade
(­O recchio-Egresitz, 2020)—because doing so did not affect the worlds
Magic has established and will expand and create.
Being the pioneer of TCG, having an appealing gameplay which no
games can imitate, and continuously innovating the game are some of
the reasons why Magic remains first in rankings in top Collectible Games
(ICv2) and evermore influential in a diverse range of games and other cul-
tural productions such as animations. Because of the success of Gwent in
The Witcher 3 game, fans of The Witcher 3 have been looking forward to
another digital TCG in CDPR’s much anticipated digital RPG Cyberpunk
2077. This anticipation was fueled by the rumor that Netrunner (1996),
a CCG which was designed by no other than Richard Garfield based on
the ­t abletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020 (1990), could be part of the game: a
 From Magic to Gwent (Ohm)  285

collaboration between the designer of Magic with the producer of Gwent

would be a dream come true to many TCG fans. The anticipation height-
ened to the point that this rumor had to be debunked by multiple game
sites (Gibson, 2019; Hara, 2019; Maskell, 2019) as well as on the Netrun-
ner Reddit fan forum by Rafal Jaki, the ­co-creator of Gwent who also par-
ticipated in designing Cyberpunk 2077 (as cited in SomewhatResentable,
2019). Although Cyberpunk 2077 does not feature a card ­m ini-game, the
expectations of gamers reveal both the persistent interest in TCGs as well
as the relevance of Garfield as the creator of Magic. Thus, from Pokémon
to Gwent and even Cyberpunk—a game which did not even include a card
game—Magic continues to remain not only relevant, but also an influence
in the world of gaming.

Notes
1. While some differentiate the two terms, claiming that trading card games involve the
actual trading of cards with other players or with/at the local game stores (LGS) on top of
the gaming itself, while collectible card games do not involve the trading aspect, the two
terms are often used interchangeably. Rather than differentiating the two terms, I will use
the term “TCG” as was preferred by Magic: The Gathering’s creator Richard Garfield (Gar-
field as cited in Fullerton, 2008, 2nd ed, pp. ­199-200).
2. With the development of the digital/online version of Magic, Magic: The Gathering
Arena (Magic Arena), trading has become less common.
3. Later in the series, a game called “Dungeons Dice Monsters” plays a great role. The
original name of the game is “Dragon, Dice & Dungeons,” possibly paying homage to
“Dungeons & Dragons.” Despite the importance of the game in the anime and adaptations
to ­t able-top and video games, it did not become as popular as “Duel Monsters.”
4. Pokémon Green was only released in Japan. In other countries, the first two Pokémon
games were Red and Blue.
5. On the Konami ­Yu-Gi-Oh! “information [page] for parents,” Konami appeals to par-
ents to buy the ­Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG for their children as, according to Konami, it “forces kids
to use simple math and reading skills, while exercising the social skills necessary to play
against other kids.” They then write that “The ­Yu-Gi-Oh! TRADING CARD GAME is
designed for kids ages 6+. As long as your child can do basic addition and subtraction cal-
culations and read the text on his or her cards, your child will be able to play the game”
(Konami, n.d.).
In 2014, a Pokémon TCG player, Erik Nance, wrote an analysis on the Pokémon cards
after the company decided to change the target audience of their cards from 10+ years old
to 6+ years old. This change was explicitly made on the label of the packs. Nance argues
that after the change in the target demographic, the game became “undeniably simple”
(Nance, 2014).
6. The minigame was titled “Triple Triad.” The director of Final Fantasy VIII, Yoshi-
nori Kitase stated that the inspiration behind Triple Triad was Magic: “This time around, I
wanted to make a minigame that was persistent throughout the entire world and could be
played anywhere. At the time, Magic: The Gathering had just come out and was very popu-
lar, so we thought, “Rather than add a card game as a minigame, what if we added in a card
game that all of the people in the world played? Some sort of tradition or cultural element
that had been carried on from years past?” And we thought by adding that, it would add to
the development of the world. We also wanted to add elements like, when you play Magic
with your friends, you might trade cards so you both have better decks. Even with regular
286  Reinterpreting Magic

playing cards, say there’s some sort of a game I play here, but the rules I have are differ-
ent from the rules someone in Osaka might have. Adding elements like that makes it seem
more realistic” (as cited in Juba, 2019).
7. According to Barbara Finigan, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Has-
bro, “Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast vigorously protect our intellectual property. This
infringement suit against Cryptozoic demonstrates that while we appreciate a robust and
thriving trading card game industry, we will not permit the misappropriation of our intel-
lectual property…. We attempted to resolve this issue, but Cryptozoic was unwilling to set-
tle the matter” (as cited in Wizards of the Coast, 2014).
8. This was probably not unaffected by platforms such as Cockatrice, which allows
Magic players to test and play cards for free and online with other players.

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Gibson, A. (2019, August 5). Cyberpunk 2077 Won’t Feature a Digital Card Game of Any Kind.
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card-­game-of-any-kind/.
Hara, R. (2019, August 5). Cyberpunk 2077 Will Not Feature Netrunner. GameRant.
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ICv2. (2019, July 31). Top Collectible Games--Spring 2019. ICv2. https://icv2.com/articles/
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Koch, F. (2018, December 3). MTG Arena is Killing Magic Online. ChannelFireball. https://
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cryptozoic-entertainment-and-hex-entertainment.
 Conclusion
Shelly Jones

The preceding essays explore the many ways in which Magic: The
Gathering has changed and continues to change the world of hobby gam-
ing. Designed by Richard Garfield nearly thirty years ago as a game to
keep convention goers from becoming bored while standing in long lines,
Magic has transcended its humble origins. Now a game played by 40 mil-
lion players worldwide, Magic is a behemoth in the gaming industry. Its
enduring strength is perhaps due to its individualized nature; after all,
as Mark Rosewater contends, with Magic “everybody gets to be the game
designer.” Through the previous essays, we discovered that the collectible
card game Magic: The Gathering is ultimately constituted by:
1 . An interwoven narrative of fantastic tropes that are, much like
the players themselves, pitted against one another in the mechanics of
play
2 . An active and increasingly diverse community of players that
gather physically or digitally to compete
3 . A robust capitalistic market as players (and collectors) vie for
cards to create powerful decks or ­second-market killings in trade
4 . An opportunity for (a) learning numerous skills including
literacy and critical thinking, and (b) applying these skill sets to
players’ own lives.
Given the prolonged nature of any academic endeavor, much has
developed in the (­pandemic-riddled) months since we began this proj-
ect. The myriad ways the ­C ovid-19 pandemic has and will change the
world, including the niche hobby of gaming, including Magic, are still
unfolding. In particular, the pandemic has already caused a shift in how
Magic: The Gathering is played (e.g., more online platforms as opposed
to ­i n-person matches). Magic tournaments were cancelled by Wizards
of the Coast and Friday Night Magic was banned in stores in order to

289
290  Conclusion

prevent the spread of ­C ovid-19. Moreover, the move to more regular

online play meant a change in the cards available for play, as Wizards of
the Coast banned the use of several cards due to their overpowered nature
and/or cumbersome mechanics to perform electronically (Gault 2020).
Though Magic often releases new cards and rotates out overpowered or
­over-popularized cards, a practice discussed at length by Jan Švelch, these
unexpected nuances discovered with the expansion of online play reiter-
ate Michael Nixon’s discussion delineating the experience of time in ana-
log versus digital play.
While over ten years ago, Trammell’s (2010) ethnographic study of
Magic suggested “a prioritization of offline play for community and mate-
rial reasons” (pg. 20), a finding reiterated by Rachel Guldin and Brandon
Harris’s study here, it will be interesting to see if, in a ­post-pandemic gam-
ing world, this itch for a physical deck and a Friday night tournament at
a local game store are still what drive MTG. As Calvin Liu contends, the
norms of this subculture will ultimately be determined by a confluence of
the fandom itself (e.g., their participatory practices) and the hegemonic
powers (e.g., Wizards of the Coast, local governmental codes regarding
­i n-person play, etc.). But as Aaron Aquilina’s essay indicates to us, there
are myriad ways to interpret and perform Magic beyond regulatory stan-
dards. Indeed, as Wendi Sierra and Kris Green have illustrated, Magic
need not be about competition, but about ­self-discovery and expression.
One unexpected result of the pandemic was the frantic buying of
physical trading cards as folks either searched for something to replace
traditional sports entertainment or simply felt nostalgic for the once
­i n-person gaming (Mina 2021). Due to an unfortunate altercation over
Pokémon cards in May 2021, Target temporarily suspended the sale of
MLB, NFL, NBA and Pokémon trading cards in an attempt to avoid future
violent clashes between their customers (Gault 2021). Though not on the
suspended list, Magic cards have also seen a surge in popularity since the
pandemic. For example, a perennially popular card, a Black Lotus, sold on
eBay in 2020 for over $500,000, highlighting just how much players (and
collectors) are willing to spend for their Magic cards (Mueller 2021)—a
phenomenon that Eugenio Luciano and Alexander di Re explore ­i n-depth
in their ethnographic look at market strategies. In his essay assessing the
state of Magic in 2020, Gordon takes a bleak view of the popular CCG over-
all, and especially during the pandemic, focusing on the iterative cost of
booster packs as a significant barrier to access. He bemoans that “the prob-
lem with the game comes down to cost; if you want to keep up—especially
during the ­COVID-19 era—you’ll need money” (Gordon 2020), an obser-
vation that reiterates Justin Schumaker’s detailed discussion of the eco-
nomic model of Magic Arena. Indeed, despite the economic downturn of
 Conclusion (Jones)  291

the pandemic and the mandatory social distancing, Magic is more popular
than ever. Though the pandemic forced the cancellation of Friday Night
Magic tournaments at local game stores, Wizards of the Coast reported
that its Magic profits were 27 percent higher in 2020 than in 2019 (Parlock).
These profits are likely to continue to rise, as WotC reignites fans’ interest,
capitalizing on their own ­pre-existing fanbase of Dungeons and Dragons.
More and more we have witnessed Wizards of the Coast embracing trans-
media and ­cross-medialization of its products such as the Dungeons and
Dragons: Acquisitions Incorporated book or the Dungeons and Dragons vs.
Rick and Morty box set adventure. This incorporation of popular culture
is a natural offshoot of Magic’s inclusion of literary tropes and motifs such
as Lovecraftian monsters, as Valentino Paccosi explores here. While some
of these products, like the Dungeons and Dragons Monopoly game, feel like
something of a cash grab for Hasbro, others, like the first D&D and Magic
crossover set of cards, feel like a harmonious blend of mechanics and lore
(Hall 2021). Perhaps in the future there could even be an officially sanc-
tioned Witcher themed Magic deck, an embodiment of Magic’s significant
influence on other CCG’s as Jiwon Ohm explores here.1
The ­pandemic-era has induced significant change in the world of
hobby gaming, including, it would seem, the end of Magic as a profes-
sional esport. As of yet, it is unclear what Wizards of the Coast’s May 2021
announcement to cancel professional Magic: The Gathering tournaments
will mean for the future of the collectible card game. Perhaps in a world
so severely still in the grasp of a pandemic, WotC has decided to shift its
focus away from the professionalization of the game in favor of emphasiz-
ing online play and, when safe, the return of local Friday night matches.
In an attempt to emphasize the gathering nature of the game, we may be
witnessing a shift toward Roger Travis’s understanding of Magic as a col-
laborative, epic experience. Or perhaps more cynically, as Matt Knutson
has argued here, WotC has realized they missed their opportunity in fully
professionalizing Magic.
In closing, there is a continued need for dedicated research into the
expansive world of Magic, both in its lore and its communities of play. We
provide these essays here as a foothold into this vast multiverse and hope
that it may foster further scholarship into Magic: The Gathering.

Note
1. Indeed, some fans of The Witcher and players of MTG have already designed their
own decks as homages to Geralt (Krenum). One ­pre-crafted deck is currently selling on
MTGgoldfish.com for over $1,600 (Fumeli).
292  Conclusion

References
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Gordon, K. (2020, July 30). In the Pandemic Era, This “Gathering” Has Lost Some Of Its Magic.
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­era-this-gathering-has-lost-some-of-its-magic.
Hall, C. (2021, May 7). Your first look at the Dungeons & Dragons Magic: The Gathering
crossover set. Polygon. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/22424684/­dungeons-
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Results [Press release]. Retrieved from https://investor.hasbro.com/­news-releases/­news-
release-details/­hasbro-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2020-financial.
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Wizards of the Coast. (2021, May 13). ­E -Sports: Transitions and Getting Back to Gath-
ering [Press release]. Retrieved from https://magic.gg/news/­e sports-transitions-
and-getting-back-to-gathering.
 About the Contributors

Aaron Aquilina is affiliated with the University of Malta. He is the author of The
Ontology of Death: The Philosophy of the Death Penalty in Literature and has also
published on indifference, posthumanism, suicide, and the queer essay, alongside
several interviews and book reviews. He is the founding general editor of antae,
an ­open-access, refereed, and international online journal.
Alexander di Re is an occupational therapist from Rome. He graduated from La
Sapienza University of Rome in 2015, and is an employee at the Bambino Gesù
Hospital at Santa Marinella. He has been playing MTG since 2006, developing an
interest in EDH and Pauper, and has several years of experience in trading MTG
and Pokémon cards.
Kris Green earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Ari-
zona in 1999, and has been teaching at St. John Fisher College ever since. He works
to integrate writing and computing into mathematics classes and has supervised
numerous student research projects, including a cluster analysis of Magic decks
based on card interactions. His favorite format is casual Commander.
Rachel Guldin is a Ph.D. candidate in communication & media studies at the
University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Her research
examines neoliberal capitalism and racism in media literacy education and pop-
ular culture.
Brandon C. Harris is a Ph.D. candidate in media studies at the University of Ore-
gon’s School of Journalism and Communication. His research focuses on new
media and digital labor with a special interest in digital platforms, community
formation, and game studies.
Shelly Jones is a professor of English at SUNY Delhi, where they teach classes in
mythology, folklore, literature, and writing. They received a Ph.D. in compara-
tive literature from SUNY Binghamton. Their research examines analog, digital,
and role-playing games through the lens of intersectional feminism and disabil-
ity studies.
Matt Knutson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Kinesiology & Esports pro-
gram at the University of North Dakota. His scholarship focuses on esports, game
studies, media temporality, and gender and sexuality in digital spaces.

293
294   About the Contributors

Calvin Liu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School of Communication and

Journalism at USC. His work specializes in qualitative methods and applies fan-
dom studies to the intersections between communities and systems. His disserta-
tion examines how communities and developers negotiate relationships through the
trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
Eugenio Luciano is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in history and
philosophy of science and environmental studies. He obtained his Ph.D. at LMU
Munich (Germany) in 2022. He is a player researcher at Solsten and a visiting
postdoctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Ber-
lin. He has been playing MTG since 2006, and particularly enjoys playing EDH
and cEDH.
Michael Nixon is an assistant professor in the Institute of Communication, Cul-
ture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. His
research interests include how to make virtual characters more believable in
interactive narratives, digital games, and training simulations through the use of
better cognitive models and procedural animation. He has been a certified Magic
Judge since 2008.
Jiwon Ohm is a Ph.D. candidate at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses
on the formation of the modern fantasy genre, as well as the imagining and form-
ing of national identities through twentieth- to ­t wenty-first-century neomedie-
valist fantasy. She is particularly interested in the history behind the publications
of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works and the ways in which they have shaped the trajectory of
the fantasy genre in popular culture.
Valentino Paccosi was awarded his doctoral degree in English at Lancaster Uni-
versity, where he teaches film studies and English literature. He is researching the
fictions of H.P. Lovecraft, their readings and their influence on different genres in
contemporary media such as film, TV and graphic novels.
Justin S. Schumaker, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Milwau-
kee. His research explores the intersection of video games, currency, and criti-
cal economic theory. Outside of teaching, he has run tournaments and events for
Magic: The Gathering at a local game store.
Wendi Sierra is an associate professor of game studies at Texas Christian Univer-
sity, where she teaches about a variety of topics related to games studies. Her book,
Todd Howard: Worldbuilding in Tamriel and Beyond, analyzes the worldbuilding
style that has made Howard’s games critical and commercial successes. Her game,
A Strong Fire, teaches select vocabulary in the Oneida language through interac-
tive narratives and ­m ini-games.
Jan Švelch is a game production studies scholar at the Faculty of Social Sciences
at Charles University. He is the coeditor of Game Production Studies (Amsterdam
University Press, 2021). His other research interests include video game voice act-
ing, monetization, software updates, paratextuality, and analog games. He has
more than ten years of experience as a freelance journalist covering video games
and music for various Czech magazines.
 About the Contributors  295

Aaron Trammell is an assistant professor of informatics and core faculty in visual

studies at UC Irvine. He writes about how Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gath-
ering, and board games inform the lived experiences of their players. He is the
­editor-in-chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the coeditor for the Table-
top Gaming series at University of Michigan Press.
Roger Travis is an associate professor of literatures, cultures, and languages,
and of digital media and design, at the University of Connecticut. He received
his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley in
1996. His research concerns the intersection between the reception of Homeric
epic in classical Athens and modern gaming culture.
 Index

Aarons, Rick ​128, 134, 138 Budde, Kai ​112–113, 126–127

Absorb (card) ​80 Buehler, Randy ​112–113, 120–121, 126
accessibility ​30, 176 Burchett, Autumn ​118, 139
Achilles ​220–221, 224–231
Adkison, Peter ​273–274, 277 Caillois, Roger ​217
Aeneid ​221 Call of Cthulhu (game) ​251
Alena, Kessig Trapper (card) ​236 Cancel (card) ​80
Alesha, Who Smiles at Death (card) ​248 Captain Sisay (card) ​59–60, 64
Ali Baba (card) ​247 Captain’s Hook (card) ​211
Alpha ​17, 23, 47 card artwork ​43, 76, 83, 154, 219, 221, 223,
Amonkhet (set) ​82 233–250, 254, 257–266
Anax and Cymede (card) ​239 card market ​4, 43–65, 67, 97
arcade gaming ​126, 141 card previews ​4, 66–90
Arkham Horror ​251 Carrion Ants (card) ​59
Arvad, the Cursed (card) ​195 Cavalier of Flame (card) ​81
Cavern Whispers (card) ​79
balance ​ see ​game design Censor (card) ​80
Ball Lightning (card) ​247 Channeled Force (card) ​83
banning ​29, 60–62, 64, 69, 79, 82, 84, 110, Chaos Orb (card) ​23, 248
175, 178, 270, 284 Chess ​21, 24, 26, 28–29, 37, 128, 140, 225
Barren Glory (card) ​247 Chronicles (set) ​59
Bartle, Richard ​13, 188 ChronX ​279
baseball cards ​171, 290 Clay Pigeon (card) ​248
Battle for Zendikar (set) ​82, 254–255, 260 Cockatrice ​52, 286
Battlebond (set) ​82 collaboration ​5, 217–232
Bewilder (card) ​199 collectible card game (CCG) ​2, 3, 5, 43, 147,
Beyer, Doug ​73 150, 186, 273–287
The Birth of Meletis (card) ​81 color pie ​17, 18, 83, 86, 181, 188, 191, 195–197,
Black, Sam ​121, 124, 126–127, 131, 133, 140 200, 203; see also mana
Black Lotus (card) ​43, 290 The Command Zone ​73
Blizzard Entertainment ​76, 92, 95, 132, Commander format ​5, 44, 51, 54–60, 63–64,
278–279 73, 79, 85, 142, 165, 169, 172–177, 237, 239,
Blood Curdle (card) ​79 241
Bomberman (deck) ​30 Commander 2020 (set) ​73
Bonesplitter (card) ​193 community building ​4, 147–167
Boon of Emrakul (card) ​271 converted mana cost ​see ​mana
Booster Draft format ​68–69, 77, 79, 85, Cosmic Encounter ​274
147–167, 202, 241 Council of Colors ​17
Booster pack ​24, 26, 47, 56, 66–67, 74, 84–85, Counter-Strike ​120, 124, 127, 142
91, 99, 103–104, 109, 138, 202 Covid-19 pandemic ​62–63, 73, 85, 86, 110,
Boros (deck) ​174 133, 289–291
Brawl format ​61, 79, 241 Cryptozoic Entertainment ​279, 284, 286
Breed Lethality (deck) ​239 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly ​see ​flow
brewing ​81–82 Cthulhu ​ see ​Lovecraft, H.P.
Broodwarden (card) ​262 Cube format ​79

297
298  Index

Cyberpunk 2020 ​284 fan labor ​95, 107–108

Cyberpunk 2077 ​284–285 fandom ​4–5, 168–180
Feldon of the Third Path (card) ​240
David-Marshall, Brian ​121, 129, 139–140 Final Fantasy VIII ​279, 283, 285
Davis, Mike ​274 Finkel, Jon ​117–118, 121–124, 126–129
Day, Walter ​126 Fires of Invention (deck) ​81
Deadlock Trap (card) ​240 Firesong and Sunspeaker (card) ​239
deck building ​24, 26, 51–52, 78, 80–82, 84, flavor text ​83, 200, 219, 221, 223, 236, 238–
158–159, 178, 187, 242–246 240, 242, 271
de Rosa, Antonino ​116 flow ​21, 24, 36
de Rosa, Paulo Vitor Damo ​117–118, 121, 123, Forerunner of Slaughter (card) ​258, 260
130 formats of play ​55–57
deTora, Melissa ​118 Forsaken Monument (card) ​271
Diminish (card) ​247 Four Horsemen (deck) ​29
Discord ​114 Friday Night Magic ​5, 117, 147–167, 289–291
diversity ​116–118, 153–156, 164, 202, 233–250;
see also gender representation; queer; race Galvin, Chris ​125, 129, 131–132, 139
representation game-based learning ​5, 181–213
Dominaria ​58, 239 game design ​9–20, 181–213
Dominia ​3 Game Developer Conference (GDC) ​16, 125
DotA ​124, 127 gamer stereotypes ​151–153, 165, 276
Double Masters (set) ​57 Garfield, Richard ​3, 9–10, 13, 16–18, 23, 69,
Dream Trawler (card) ​81 112, 273–274, 277–279, 283–284, 289
Duel Monsters ​275–276 Gary, Justin ​126
Duke, Reid ​105, 121, 124, 142 Gatherer (official MTG search engine) ​50, 58
Dungeons & Dragons ​151, 153, 182, 186, 188, gay play ​5, 233–250
201–203, 237, 273–274, 278–279, 283, 285, Geek and Sundry ​73
291 geek masculinity ​119; see also gamer
Durkwood Boars (card) ​247 stereotypes
Gen Con ​47
Earthbind (card) ​248 gender representation ​202, 233–250; in
ecphrasis ​220, 223–224, 230–231 MTG artwork 236–230, 242, 248; of MTG
EDHREC ​44, 50, 41 players 116–119, 153–156, 165; see also
Elder Dragon Highlander ​51, 142, 169, 172, diversity
176–178 Gibson, Craig ​116, 120
The Elder Scrolls: Legends ​278, 280, 283 Gilded Drake (card) ​58, 59
Eggs (deck) ​29 Gisa and Geralf (card) ​239
Eldrazi ​5, 251–272 Godzilla ​19, 85, 263
Eldrazi Aggro (deck) ​271 Gomersall, Sam ​130, 132
Eldrazi Devastator (card) ​257 The Goo Goo Dolls ​210
Eldrazi Temple (card) ​270 Good Time Society ​73
Eldrazi Tron (deck) ​271 Grakk ​221–224, 230–231
Eldrazi Winter ​270 Grisly Anglerfish (card) ​266
Eldritch Moon ​254, 271 Grizzled Angler (card) ​265–266
Elias, Skaff ​112, 126, 128, 134, 138 group hug ​238–239, 246
Elite Spellbinder (card) ​123 Guardians of Meletis (card) ​237
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn (card) ​263–264, Gwent ​5, 273, 278, 280–286
267–268 Gygax, Gary ​273
Emrakul, the Promised End (card) ​263,
267–268, 270 Halana, Kessi Ranger (card) ​236
Entropic Uprising (deck) ​239 Halana and Alena, Partners (card) ​248
epic ​5, 217–232 Hallar, the Firefletcher (card) ​248
Erhnam Djinn (card) ​59 Hand of Emrakul (card) ​265
esports ​3–4, 27, 36, 43–144 harassment ​154–156
etiquette ​21–22, 33–37, 161–162, 165 Harvester of Souls (card) ​224–225, 228
evergreen keywords ​15, 20 Hasbro ​47, 136, 286, 291
Eye of Ugin (card) ​270 Hearthstone ​5, 27, 36, 76, 92, 102, 115, 132,
137, 198, 278–279, 283–284
Facebook ​53, 76, 106 Heggen, Mark ​73
Falling Star (card) ​23, 248 Hex: Shards of Fate ​279
 Index  299

historic format ​79 Lobotomy (card) ​240

Hoaen, Richard ​130, 132 Lone Rider (card) ​265–266
The Hobbit ​11 loot box ​67
House, M.D. ​209 The Lord of the Rings ​273
Huizinga, Johan ​217, 230 Lords of Limited podcast ​131
Humpherys, David ​73, 93, 117 Lovecraft, H.P. ​5, 251–272; “The Call of
Cthulhu” 252–256; “The Colour Out of
Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths ​60, 66–90 Space” 255, 269; “The Dream-Quest of
Iliad ​217–232 Unknown Kadath” 254; “The Dunwich
Innistrad ​266, 271 Horror” 262; The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Inside Out ​12 260, 271
Instagram ​53, 54, 76 ludo-narrative ​234, 244
Invent Superiority (deck) ​239 Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast (card) ​74–75,
invitational cards ​121–123 77, 81, 248
It That Rides as One (card) ​266 Lurrus of the Dream-Den (card) ​60, 79–82,
Ixalan (set) ​59 84, 86

Jace, the Mind Sculptor (card) ​195 Magic Duels ​96–97

Jaki, Rafal ​280–281, 285 Magic: The Gathering Arena ​4, 21-22, 27–28,
jank ​241–247 32–33, 35, 37, 44, 52, 67, 70, 73, 84–85,
jargon ​159–160, 176, 204–205 91–92, 94–110, 114, 129, 131–133, 135, 137,
Jenkins, Henry ​105 142, 241–242, 245, 285, 290
Jeskai ​81, 86 Magic: The Gathering Creator Program ​102,
Jirina Kudro (card) ​248 105–107
Johnny/Jenny (MTG player type) ​13, 243, Magic: The Gathering Duels of the
245–246 Planeswalkers ​52, 96–97, 142
Justice, Mark ​276 Magic: The Gathering Online ​4, 21–22, 26–
28, 31–33, 35, 37, 44–45, 50, 52, 63, 67, 70,
Kenrith, the Returned King (card) ​81 73, 85, 93, 96–99, 102–103, 114–115, 129–133,
Khans of Tarkir (set) ​86 142, 279, 284
Kibler, Brian ​76, 116 Maher, Bob ​112
Killer Bees (card) ​59 Majestic Auricon (card) ​79–80
King Kong ​263 mana ​17–18, 28–29, 51, 58, 60, 63, 83, 84, 159,
King of Tokyo ​10 189, 199–200, 206, 237–239, 246, 267; see
Kiss of the Amesha (card) ​240 also color pie
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth (card) ​260 Mana Crypt (card) ​44, 57, 58, 176
Kozilek, the Great Distortion (card) ​260 Mana Prism (card) ​248
Kozilek’s Translator (card) ​261–263 Manaless Dredge (card) ​246
Kwai, Josh Lee ​73 Meier, Sid ​218
Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis (card) ​237–240, metagame ​21, 29, 31, 57, 60–61, 63, 66–90,
246, 248 157, 188, 266, 270
Mick, Joel ​9,
Laboratory Maniac (card) ​247 Mina and Denn, Wildborn (card) ​239
Lady Planeswalker Society ​154 Miracles (deck) ​29
The Last of Us Part II ​70 Mishra’s Factory (card) ​59
League of Legends ​129, 135, 138, 194, 225, 278 modding ​95
Lebedowicz, Osyp ​121, 125–126 Modern format ​28, 56, 60, 64, 68–69, 79, 165,
Legacy format ​57, 60, 64, 69, 79, 84–85, 246, 246, 270–271
271 Moneymaker, Chris ​135
Legends of Runeterra ​278, 280, 283 Monnier, Damien ​280–281, 283
Legion Warboss (card) ​32 Monopoly ​14, 291
lenticular design ​14–15 Monsters Inc. ​19
Leveratto, Matias ​135 Morris-Lent, Christopher ​103
Lévy, Raphaël ​121, 124, 128–129, 141 MTG Weekly ​73–74, 76, 82, 135
Lewis, Brian ​134, 152 Muldrotha, the Gravetide (card) ​195
Lightning Bold (card) ​33 multiverse ​3, 43, 73–74, 195, 240, 291
Limited format ​68, 75, 77, 79 Murray, Janet ​218
Limited Resources podcast ​77 Mystery Booster ​57
livestreams ​95, 104, 107, 125, 135; see also Mystical Dispute (card) ​32
Twitch; YouTube Mythic Championship ​see ​Pro Tour
300  Index

Narset of the Ancient Way (card) ​75, 83 race ​153–156, 164–165, 202; see also diversity
Nassif, Gabriel ​124–126, 139, 141 Ral, Izzet Viceroy (card) ​248
Nelson, Brad ​135 rarity ​47–48, ​67, 72, 74–77, 82–85, 91, 176,
netdecking ​70 194–195
Netflix ​2 Ravnica: City of Guilds (set) ​112
Netrunner ​284–285 Reddit ​5, 53–54, 63–64, 93, 172
Neutralize (card) ​80 Reserved List ​59, 62
Nintendo ​127, 142, 276 Rin and Seri, Inseparable (card) ​239
Riot Games ​95, 278
Oath of the Gatewatch ​254–255, 269–270 Rise of the Eldrazi (set) ​254
Oathkeeper, Takeno’s Daisho (card) ​211 Rivals League ​116, 133–137, 139
Obama, Michelle ​208–210 RoboRally ​274
Odyssey ​217–232 Rocket League ​139
Of One Mind (card) ​79 Rose, Bill ​9
Oko, Thief of Crown (card) ​4, 60–61, 135 Rosewater, Mark ​4, 9–20, 23, 73, 123, 138,
Once Upon a Time (card) ​135 153, 169, 188, 196, 235–236, 240, 243;
One-Land Spy (card) ​246 Blogatog 9; Drive to Work 9; Making Magic
Open Hostility (deck) ​239 9
Organized Play ​116, 125, 129, 132, 136, 139; Ruel, Antoine ​140
see also Pro League; Pro Tour; professional Ruel, Oliver ​140
play; Rivals League; tournament play Rush of Vitality (card) ​248
Oviya Pashiri, Sage Lifecrafter (card) ​248
Sakura-Tribe Elder (card) ​195
Pacifism (card) ​5, 219–225, 227–231 Sapkowski, Andrzej ​278, 280
Pathrazer of Ulamog (card) ​257 Scott, Becca ​73
Pauper format ​79, 85, 246 Scott-Vargas, Luis ​121, 124, 128–129, 133,
pedagogy ​5, 181–213 139, 141
Penny Dreadful format ​241 Scryfall (website) ​50, 85
Phillips, Cedric ​135, 138 Sealed format ​68, 77, 241
Pia and Kiran Nalaar (card) ​239 Serra’s Embrace (card) ​240
Pioneer format ​60, 64, 79 Shadowmage Infiltrator (card) ​121–2
Plague Rats (card) ​234 Shadows Over Innistrad ​82
planeswalker ​1, 3, 59, 73–75, 150, 157, 202, Shards of Alara ​47
205, 221, 223, 241, 254 sideboarding ​30, 160
Play to Win ​54 The Simpsons ​210
player agency ​2 Sinister Sabotage (card) ​80
Player Spotlight cards ​123 Skull Prophet (card) ​79
Playing with Power MTG ​54 Slaughter Games (card) ​243
Pokémon ​132, 150, 198, 276–279, 284–285, 290 Slaying Mantis (card) ​248
poker ​124–125, 128, 131, 135 Soh, Terry ​130, 132
power creep ​68–69 Sol Ring (card) ​51
Power Nine ​69 spectatorship ​91, 105, 109, 124–125, 128, 138;
Primal Empathy (card) ​79 see also livestream
The Primal Order ​273–274 Spike (MTG player type) ​13, 243
Pro League ​92, 104–105, 114–116, 118, 124, SplitSecond ​54
133–139; see also Pro Tour; professional spoiler ​46, 53–54, 63, 66–90
play; Rivals League; tournament play Squall (card) ​247
Pro Tour ​95, 103, 112–144, 242; see also Pro Stalwart Unity (deck) ​239
League; professional play; Rivals League; Star City Game ​78, 140
tournament play Standard format ​56, 60–61, 68–69, 73, 75,
Pro Tour Hall of Fame ​76, 114, 117, 128 78–79, 135–136, 140, 241, 270
Pro Tour Player Card ​112–144 Star Trek ​11
professional play ​4, 91–144, 291; see also Star Wars ​11
Pro League; Pro Tour; Rivals League; StarCraft ​120, 124, 128–129, 132
tournament play Stark, Ben ​105
pubstomping ​173–174, 176 StreamElements ​94, 105–107
Streets of New Capenna ​83, 85
Queer representation ​5, 233–250; see also Strong Museum of Play ​2
diversity Super Smash Bros. Melee ​127, 142
Quiet Speculation (website) ​53, 55 Sutcliffe, Marshall ​77
 Index  301

Sutterfield, Michelle ​107–108 Untap (website) ​52

Szleifer, Gadiel ​117 Urza’s Mine (Card) ​270
Urza’s Power Plant (card) ​270
Takahashi, Kazuki ​275 Urza’s Saga (set) ​58
TappedOut ​51 Urza’s Tower (card) ​270
Taylor, T.L. ​95, 102–103, 119, 124,
theorycrafting ​70, 72, 76, 81–84 Vestige of Emrakul (card) ​265
Theros: Beyond Death (deck) ​81 Vintage format ​57, 64, 79, 85, 246
Thought-Knot Seer (card) ​269 Vitalizing Cascade (card) ​248
Throne of Eldraine ​60, 123, 135, 235–236, 240 Vivien, Monster’s Advocate (card) ​73–74, 77
Tibor and Lumia (card) ​239 The Vorthos Cast ​77, 85
time ​21–40 VS Live ​78, 86
Timmy/Tammy (MTG player type) ​13, 243
TIX ​50–51 War (card game) ​189
Tolarian Community College ​134, 152 War of the Spark: Forsaken ​236
Tolkien, J.R.R. ​11, 273, 279 Warped Devotion (card) ​243
Tomaszkiewicz, Mateusz ​283 Weibo ​76
Tomik, Distinguished Advokist (card) ​248 Wendel, Jonathan ​126–127
tournament play ​21, 23, 25–29, 33–34, 36, Wishful Merfolk (card) ​234
46, 52, 57, 61, 73, 93, 101, 104, 110, 112, 116, The Witcher ​5, 278–284, 291
129–130, 147–167, 177, 242, 270; Grand Prix With Authority! ​279
34, 116, 120, 135, 140, 242; judging 34, 36; Wizards of the Coast ​4, 12–13, 16, 19, 22, 29–
Magic Tournament Rules 28, 34; see also 30, 35–36, 47–48, 50, 52, 55, 58–59, 61–62,
professional play 66–71, 73–78, 82–84, 86, 91–110, 112–118,
toxic masculinity ​118, 154; see also 121, 123–125, 128–136, 142, 147, 153, 155, 157,
harassment 161, 165, 168–169, 172, 177, 202, 204, 233,
trading ​ see ​card market 237, 240–241, 243, 245, 248, 255, 270–271,
True Love’s Kiss (card) ​240 273–279, 284, 286, 289–291
Twitch ​4, 53, 71, 73, 76–78, 85, 91–92, 95–96, World Championship ​see ​Pro Tour
102, 104–107, 109, 114–115, 118, 140; see also World of Warcraft ​124, 194, 278–279
spectatorship
Twitter ​53–54, 71, 76–78, 85, 106, 129 Yahtzee ​10
YouTube ​53–54, 71, 73, 76, 85, 95, 105–106,
Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger (card) ​257, 152, 271
267–268 Yu-Gi-Oh! ​132, 150, 275–279, 283–285
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre (card) ​257
Unpredictable Cyclone (card) ​82 Zilortha, Strength Incarnate (card) ​85