Thursday, February 3, 2011

Hasbro and the Death of Magic the Gathering

This is a post from a couple years back that appeared on a blog called the 7th Evening. This guy has many of the same criticisms of what has/is happening with Magic the Gathering. Check back on my post "Mythic Rares are Ruining Magic' and you'll see many of the same thoughts. This post, and the one to follow both deal with the same ideas.

For anyone that doesn’t know, Wizards of the Coast has been the biggest name in trading card games and tabletop RPGs, namely Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons.  Even people who aren’t tabletop gamers know of these two brands.  For quite some time, Magic the Gathering was a very balanced and very effective card game, something that no other could boast.  It was balanced and more fair than any other card game, and it is still the longest running game.

For non-players, or new players, the game as it is today is not like it was when I began playing back in the dark ages (Eleven years ago).  After Hasbro bought Wizards, the game slowly began to change. While the effects were not immediate, in fact, not for a few blocks, some of the long standing rules began to decay.  Where the balance shift was easily noticed was Scourge but far more in Mirrodin.  Mirrodin is where I really draw the line, because it’s plainly visible to anyone who looks at it.  Even the card format changes there.
Mirrodin took artifacts, a card type that was less common and typically coveted by old players, and turned it into something extremely common.  This made artifacts widely used and almost a nessity to continue playing.  It made some cards that were bad from old sets fantastic because they could single handedly destroy decks built around artifacts.  The block following that, made legends extremely normal and common.  I remembered when legends were something rather special to casual players.  Now there are several of them released for each set.  Richard Garfield said Legends would never be reprinted, nor would storyline related cards.  This rule no longer exists.  Legend re-printing is common.  The lore behind Magic is gone.  Gerrard is dead. The elegant powerbase is shattered.  Originally, skill and luck made Magic a complex game that took a lot of thinking and skill with deck building. With each new set the game gets closer to Yu-Gi-Oh, a game that can only be won by owning the most expensive cards and requires no skill.

I have a decade of experience with the game, and have always been a skilled player.  Now it doesn’t matter.  I can easily be beat because I use pre-mirrodin cards. Anyone owning cards from Timespiral can easily stomp me into the ground simply because they’ve bought cards more recently.  This is why yugioh and card games like it are bad.  Because the powerlevel increases with each set, it forces players to spend much more money.  It makes old cards worthless.  While Magic isn’t nearly at yugioh level, the depth of the game is gone.

And as a person who’s been playing it since childhood, someone who has played the game for more than ten years, I feel betrayed.  Legends, which were something special, are no longer special at all.  The lore of the game has been violated and destroyed.  Promises Richard Garfield made have been broken. Many valuable cards that were collected over the years were “Timespiraled” into the game, reprinting them and destroying their value.  For these reasons, Magic is doomed.  The powerlevel can’t be repaired after it’s broken, and all it can do is continue to go upwards until is spirals out of control like yugioh. I may be misguided in my finger pointing, but I blame Hasbro for the betrayal.  Most cardgames exist as fads that don’t have any hope of lasting, but pull in money from fans really quickly, and then burn out (specifically anime based card games) due to faulty mechanics and fucked up powerlevels. While these games are sometimes fun, it becomes an expensive hobby that finishes with you holding a shoebox full of worthless cardboard.  Unfortunately, the most stable card game lost it’s stability.  I’ll continue to play casually with friends, but I’ve been betrayed.  I won’t buy another Magic card ever again.

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