Christopher Morris-Lent
6/22/2012 9:30:00 AM
Birthday Bannings

I have a disclosure to make. As I have written columns for this site over the last six months, some of them good and others dashed off pre-emptorily, to ensure the deadline does not whoosh by, I have been teetering on the precipice of something inexorable, something relentlessly approaching, something wicked this way waddling. This all came to an end in the wee hours on Tuesday, when I fell off that precipice, and became a mid-twenties person. As one ages, one's birthdays become incrementally less meaningful and more depressing; one's subjective perception of time accelerates, so that fewer things happen, and happen more quickly; meanwhile, pressures accumulate, and one eventually has to become a legitimate member of society. I find this prospect to be frightening and alienating, so I take refuge in Magic cards; so do lots of people that are my age, which is, as of Tuesday, twenty-four. Good for us.

Having had, for my entire life, a birthday that struck during summer vacation, I am no stranger to modest gatherings of people and trivial loads of loot. I guess I was spoiled last year, though, when they banned Jace and Stoneforge. What a sweet birthday present! Subsequently, Modern became a thing, Extended died the ignominious death it deserved, and Magic was once again exciting. So I had high expectations for this one. My pet Standard deck, cheesy UG Poison, has exactly one bad matchup. But that bad matchup - Delver - is a bad one to have. It's one of the few decks in the format that not only does the interaction thing, but does it with spot removal, and spot removal at instant speed. Wild Defiance is great against Gut Shot, but not so sweet versus Vapor Snag. With a flipped Insect, these popinjays can also race all but our nuttiest of nut draws. It's not horribly unfavorable - oftentimes, they won't have it - but taking the average win percentage of our matchups, weighted for how often decks appear, the presence of Delver does make poison quite a bit worse.

This year, I wanted several things for my birthday - win the nostalgia draft at my LGS, eat Ezell's fried chicken (the best in the world) while drinking Franziskaner Weissbier (tastes like bananas and heaven) - but there were two things I wanted more than the others. I wanted the Vichy Sonics to lose, and I wanted Delver of Secrets to be banned. The first is a wish shared by all the righteous, but not everybody agrees with the second. I will explain. In the eyes of the punditry, there were three candidates for banning: Ponder, Snapcaster Mage, and Delver of Secrets. Ponder is not the issue. In fair decks - that is to say, in every Standard deck - it is far, far worse than Preordain, and we were fine with that sticking around until rotation. Snapcaster is more dangerous than Ponder, in that it provides card advantage and redundancy for 1U, and has a ludicrous power level. It also restricts design space, but not nearly as flagrantly as did Stoneforge. Taken together, Ponder and Snapcaster form the backbone of most every Blue deck in the format - and "traditional" blue decks, like Solar Flare and U/B Control, need the smoothing and advantage to compete with the stupid punish-you-for-trying-to-interact mechanics, Hexproof and Undying. Snapcaster and Ponder are also classic Blue cards, in the sense that they do traditionally Blue things.

This brings us to Delver. Delver is not a traditional Blue card; it's a flying Wild Nacatl. It adds variance; for the next year, all of us are stuck playing the asinine sub-game of "Will it Flip Blind?" What I've learned from my forays into Standard is that the problem is not that Blue can do control very well; it really can't. It's that it can do control passably, while beating down for three in the air every turn. Most of this analysis is courtesy of Nick Rosas, who convinced me that banning Delver, and not Snapcaster and Ponder, was the thing to do. Again, it's not that Blue is over-powered; it's more that Blue is not diverse, because you should really be playing Delver.

Enough of this. My birthday celebrations started early. The wee hours of Monday bled into the wee hours of Tuesday as we drafted my Cube. Cube, I have learned, is devilishly difficult to design correctly; it's so hard to not just festoon your pool with sweet, flavorful rares that cost three; and yet, in order to encourage diversity, you'll need to cut those Loxodon Hierarchs for Blood Knights, those Hellriders for a Squadron Hawk that comes with three others. I eked out a 2-1 record, went to sleep at four, woke up at noon, and started playing Civilization V: Gods and Kings. At six P.M. I drove to the bar that adjoins my LGS. The game was going badly; the Vichy Sonics were looking dynamic, energetic, unbeatable. We lingered until the waning minutes of the second quarter, then went to draft triple Rise of the Eldrazi. Rise, I think, provided much of the template for Avacyn Restored - a large set, with large creatures - but, in Avacyn, they took out two of the things that made Rise so great: lots of removal, to deal with the bombs; and a tangible reward for "drafting the deck" and not just a pile of powerful cards that may or may not curve out. In doing so, basing much of their design on the best limited format within recent memory, they made the worst limited format within recent memory.

But I digress. I convinced my first-round opponent to play the round before the round started; after notching a quick 2-0 victory, I went back to the bar, growler in hand. The Heat were up by five. I went back to the LGS to palliate my agitation, but then I decided the only thing worse than watching was not watching.

I went back to the bar and proclaimed, in a stentorian slur, "The pride of Seattle hangs in the balance." "Quiet down back there!" yelled someone else. I didn't care. It was tied at 94. The Heat had the ball. Some perimeter passing was looking fruitless. LeBron stepped back and took a three. It went in! Then the Vichy Sonics coughed it up and the Heat went up by five. The game was all but over. The final score was 104 to 98; the mood in the bar was not so much ecstasy as it was profound relief. I clinked growlers with a friend of mine, then went back to the LGS and shouted, "The battle is over. We have won!"

It was 8:30. The ban announcement impended. I won the next draft round, then went outside and lit a cigarette. From the chaos of the game shop there emerged Nick Rosas. "No changes to Standard," he said. "But hey, they unbanned Land Tax in Legacy!"

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"Eff my birthday," I said, and lit another cigarette.

This leads me into the meat of the article. My thesis is this: Magic is doing well, but it can be doing better. Here are five ways how.


1: Use bannings more liberally.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is nothing that makes a format intrinsically diverse, or even fun, or even playable. I am not saying that bannings should be used ham-fistedly or haphazardly; that would be the mark of a poorly designed game, and would piss people off besides. But I do think the ban-hammer should be used more liberally than is currently the case. Cards like Delver are perfect targets; they are "mistakes," bad mistakes, and nobody has spent any money acquiring Delvers (unless they happen to be foil fetishists).

In the B&R announcement that came out there were two justifications for "standing pat." The first was that Delver can be beaten. Sure, fair enough; but you still need to get the right pilot with the right deck; and it's still so prevalent as to be metagame-warping, and therefore boring. The second was a straw man: "More people are playing Standard than ever before." Reading this pissed me off; it should piss you off, too. It's great that Magic is more successful than ever before - along with the soccer team, it's one of the most profitable enterprises in Seattle - but shrugging off legitimate complaints because something is selling well is the exact sort of corporate mentality that Wizards shouldn't have. It's like saying Avacyn Restored is a "good set," because it's best-selling; it's like a parent justifying an atrocity with "Because I said so;" it's the exact kind of corporate mentality that Wizards shouldn't have. This mentality is rigid and it is myopic; power-creep and complexity-opposite-of-creep alone cannot sustain sales. But you wouldn't know it from reading the B&R announcement.


2: Raise the stakes and up the ante.

With the unprecedented commercial success of Innistrad block, Wizards has got to be flush with cash. Last year saw the re-vamping of the Pro Players Club benefits, and this was a huge step in the right direction; a friend of mine estimated that Wizards had infused an extra $1,000,000 into the game, which I imagine they made back immediately. So why stop now? Toss in some more seven-figure sums; profit; benefit. High-stakes Magic would legitimize the game in the same way that the poker boom legitimized poker in 2003; because there was more money in it, it was more popular, so there was more money, so it was even more popular, etc. The online game grew exponentially, until the United States DOJ cruelly decapitated it last year; it was possible to make a good living sitting in your room and in your boxers.

(An aside: we all know MTGO is lots of fun, but it's so badly designed; can we also hire some real programmers to drag the thing into the twenty-first century? There's no reason it shouldn't be ten times as popular as it currently is.)

As things stand, Magic is more of a hobby than it is a professionally viable enterprise, rather like skiing, or poker before the poker boom. But Magic is much more like poker than it is like skiing. Why does professional play have to be such a chimera? Why do LSV and Brian Kibler have to seek gainful employment, and E-Fro and David Williams turn to poker?

Card prices would go up, sets would sell more, FNM attendance would burgeon, and so on; it would be a tremendous boon for everyone involved in the game. You put good in, you get good out; is this so hard to understand?


3: Hire hilarious commentators.

... by which I mean myself, for the World Magic thing, which is conveniently taking place four blocks from my day job. But not really; we can do better than me. The main thing keeping Magic from exploding in popularity is the whole marginalized sub-culture gestalt; it's like poker before the boom; it's growing, but it could be much bigger. The most significant part of this issue is that the emissaries for the game, as they are, cannot communicate to the general public. So why not get Gabe Kaplan? Why not get Adrian Peterson, running back extraordinaire, Magic player? What we need to show is that Magic isn't just for maladjusted nerds; it's for well-adjusted nerds as well.


4: Replace the die roll with Rock-Paper-Scissors.

The die-roll is a time-honored tradition, but, like most traditions, especially martial traditions, it sucks, and has no reason but inertia to still be around. A 50/50 chance, completely divorced from the skill aspect of the game: sounds kind of like the whole "Will it Flip?" Delver sub-game. We can do better. I propose Rock-Paper-Scissors, an elegant yet multifarious contest that is psychological warfare stripped down to its bare essentials. I should specify that it ought to be best-two-out-of-three, or best-three-out-of-five. And it's "one-two-shoot," not "one-two-three-shoot." The latter, I hear, is a West Coast phenomenon; it's probably the only part of life where we lag behind the rest of the nation.


5: Award a sweet jacket to major tournament winners.

The Masters is the most pretentious competition in existence; it is not just steeped in tradition, it is saturated in it, and that makes it laughable to any progressive-minded person. But we watch it anyway. This is the last step; once Magic has more money in it, gains mainstream acceptance, and has the competitive kinks worked out of it, then we can start awarding jackets for winners of PTs and even GPs. These will be a mark of pride, kind of like high-school letterman's jackets, but without the whole "I peaked in life at age seventeen" problem.


Conclusion

"I don't have all the answers. But I have most of them!" I forget who said this, and, sitting in the humid heat of Texas as I write this, I am too lazy to get the bar's WiFi password and look it up. Distractions abound. I'll be playing Poison in protest. What will you be playing?

Thank you for reading!
CML