Since Secret Lair: The Walking Dead was announced, there has been a fairly strong sense of discontent within the Magic community. I constantly see different people arguing different reasons, and see people having different lines of “how far” they will accept.
I think however the community in general is missing the biggest issue here — If a part of the community is being alienated, even if that’s not you, those issues are still valid. In this article, I hope to try and help everyone understand eachother, and what the root of this discontent is.
What is a Game?
Tabletop games in general tend to comprise of three main factors — Rules, game pieces, and flavour.
- The rules are the functional game system, and dictate how the game operates. They explain how the game is played, the win condition, restrictions, and mechanics.
- The game pieces are an implementation of those rules, designed to create interesting and varied gameplay.
- The flavour is there to give interest to the game pieces, to add a sense of tangibility to the rules and systems.
These three core elements are true of almost any game. For example, let’s look at Chess.
- The rules are the game system. They explain the attributes of the board, the layout of the pieces, the win condition, turn order, and various other things such as Castling.
- The game pieces are an implementation of those rules, with specific interactions based on how they can move and how they take other pieces.
- The flavour is there to give interest to the game pieces, all being members of a royal court with the goal of capturing the opposing King.
I believe that one of the the fundamental causes behind the discontent with Universes Beyond is figuring out how important that third factor is — Is flavour necessary?
How Necessary is Flavour?
This is a fairly complex question to answer.
Without either the rules or the game pieces, you have no game. However without the flavour, you can still functionally play the game. Magic would work perfectly well without any flavour at all, with simply unique identifying string followed by a series of rules being all that is necessary to functionally play a game of Magic.
However, Magic: The Gathering is more than any one of these components. It is of course the core ruleset, but it extends to both a series of game pieces as well as a rich fictional universe created over the last 27 years. While anyone could concievably create their own card that worked within the Magic ruleset, nobody aside from Wizards of the Coast can create their own card that is a part of Magic: The Gathering.
So now we have two different concepts — One is Magic as a game system, and the other is Magic: The Gathering as a collection of specific game pieces using that game system.
The Sliding Scale of Flavour
Over the years, Magic has taken a number of different approaches with how it handles the flavour of cards. I’ve tried to categorise the core approaches as best I can, though this is fairly subjective.
In-Universe, Unique
This is everything unique to Magic. It’s characters and their personalities, the lore and histories of the specific planes, Planeswalkers as a concept, things like this that are core to the MTG brand identity.
In-Universe, Inspired
This is everything that is fairly unique to magic, but isn’t entirely novel. This includes race archetypes like Elves, flavour bases for settings such as Ancient Egypt, Greek Mythology, or Lovecraftian horror, and more general concepts such as Wizards or Dragons.
In-Universe, Borrowed
This is everything fundamentally taken as a reference or homage, while still having it’s place within the universe. This includes things such as the overt fairytale references in Eldraine, Maro, and various other references to real life that have been given a place within the Magic universe.
Out-of-Universe, Ascended
This is a complicated one, and one which tends to exist as a grey area for a lot of players. This includes Arabian Nights, and the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons set. The implication with these both is that they exist within the MTG universe, but they’re a wholesale existing IP without any direct spin taken by MTG itself.
Out-of-Universe
This is everything that exists outside of the universe, and doesn’t directly intersect with the established lore. This includes the promotional tie-in Hascon cards, as well as the Godzilla card skins and soon Universes Beyond.
In-Universe, Non-Canon
This is almost exclusively reserved for the un-sets. It exists within the mythos of the Magic universe, but it’s not considered canon. There are some other notable examples such as the SDCC zombie planeswalkers.
Where you draw your line on what is acceptable to you differs wildly on how much you care about flavour.
For some, it doesn’t matter at all. A card is a game piece, and all they care about is good gameplay. For others, they could be fine with homages, but draw the line at actually representing anything that exists outside of the MTG universe. Even then, there are some people who find sets like Theros or Amonkhet as going too far away from the core mythos of Magic.
Regardless of where you draw that line however, when you cross from In-Universe to Out-of-Universe, there is a fundamental paradigm shift in cohesion of the game. The ideas no longer belong to Magic: The Gathering, they belong to their respective universes.
Conceptual Abstraction
An important point needs to be made here about Conceptual Abstraction as opposed to Intellectual Property.
Magic has clearly had characters and races inspired by fantasy works, a recent notable example being Eldraine and the direct influence of both Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales and Arthurian Legend. The important difference between this and a direct use of IP is a certain level of abstraction.
Compare, for example, Arthurian Legend and The Lord of the Rings. Both are fantastical stories about Knights, Wizards, and Dragons, and both have a well known cast of characters and stories. However, they both have fundamentally different core levels of abstraction.
Arthurian Legend exists as no one text, from the mind of no one writer. There are characters and a basic plot that exists whatever the source, but the actual specific detail is often left up to interpretation. It’s rare that you’ll see a faithful adaptation of Historia Regum Britanniae as written, it will always be used as a basis for a retelling. In addition, Eldraine abstracts this one step further, creating it’s own characters based on the archetypes rather than the characters themselves. Algenus Kenrith may be based on King Arthur’s archetype, but he is not King Arthur.
In contrast, The Lord of the Rings is a specific literary work. It’s extremely rare that the characters are left up to interpretation, and adaptations are often extremely faithful to the source text. Comparing the character of Gandalf to Merlin shows this quite clearly, in that while no two depictions of Merlin are the same, Gandalf is a cohesive and distinct character everywhere he has appeared. He isn’t an archetype, he is a very specific and detailed character.
The more layers of abstraction that can be added, the easier it is to intergrate concepts within the world. This results in early historic, folk, and mythological texts being a much stronger basis for adaptations. Which leads on to…
What about Arabian Nights?
Arabian Nights exists as an extremely difficult precedent. The core flavour of the set is based on One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales from the 8th-14th century. Concepts and characters are taken wholesale, such as Aladdin, Ali Baba, the Bazaar of Baghdad, and the Library of Alexandria. These characters and places are established outside of the MTG universe, and have no direct place in the lore.
There’s no simple answer to this, frankly. If it were made today, it would certainly be handled differently. It would probably have characters and places changed to exist more cohesively within the universe with an additional layer of abstraction, such as Alrund in Kaldheim being an interpretation of Odin.
Arabian Nights does however exist as an outlier, with that same concept not being repeated in over 25 years and most of the direct reference cards not being reprinted in the modern era. Due to the nature of it existing before MTG even had a cohesive identity, it can be accepted as simply a learning experience for the team.
In addition, it has the benefit of being a much softer IP by nature of it being folk tales. No one entity owns the rights to the stories or the characters, they exist as myth and legend.
Universes Beyond, a Fundamental Paradigm Shift
Aside from Arabian Nights, Universes Beyond is the first time that characters and stories not unique to magic have been overtly and directly used with the game system. This marks a huge paradigm shift for the first time in 25 years, and fundamentally brings into question what Magic: The Gathering is.
Earlier, we established that there are two different approaches. Magic as a game system, and Magic: The Gathering as a cohesive game. The unique issue with Universes Beyond is that it causes two separate but important issues that differ depending on what matters more to you.
For the game system purists who don’t care about flavour, the issue becomes accessibility. Often, other IPs require complicated licensing agreements, and it could be that some mechanically unique game pieces become unavailable and expensive in the future. This is already an issue with the Reserved List, and has caused a multitude of issues for both Legacy and Vintage, practically killing them in paper. It’s an extremely realistic anxiety, and one that is absolutely justified based on past evidence.
For the other players who do care about flavour, this conceptually absolutely decimates one core pillar of the game for them by redefining what Magic: The Gathering is. It dismantles the idea that the world and universe is intrinsic to the game, and arguably states that the mechanical purists are “correct” in that Magic is just fundamentally a series of rules.
So who is right?
Everyone, and no-one. Whether you play the game now or may in the future, whether you love Warhammer 40k or hate Warhammer 40k, whether you play competitively or just on the kitchen table — Everyone’s thoughts on this situation are valid, but nobody speaks absolute truth.
It’s not correct to state that the feelings people are having towards these products are wrong or that they don’t matter. To the people who are disappointed with these announcements, it fundamentally matters to a huge degree, no matter how you may personally feel.
It doesn’t matter if the argument is right or wrong, because there is no objective truth here. How people feel is ultimately subjective, but ultimately what matters.
The one facet that does matter is that there is a serious air of discontent, and a lot of players are feeling extremely disenfranchised with the announcement. It’s everyone’s responsibility to want for a game as many of us as possible can enjoy, even if you don’t care either way.
Even if you’re content with the fire, help put it out for the sake of everyone else. It’s silly to complain about the firefighters.
To use a simple analogy, imagine a plain chocolate bar. Plenty of people love that chocolate bar, but the manufacturers want to try and attract a bigger audience. To do this, they decide to add nuts. While this may attract new consumers, by doing this you’re alienating the people who don’t like nuts, the people who are allergic to nuts, and the people who simply want a chocolate bar.
It’s not reasonable to say that the people who don’t like nuts are wrong, because liking nuts isn’t an objective truth. What is meaningless to some is a dealbreaker for others.
You’re fundamentally changing what the chocolate bar is, with no recourse for the people you’re alienating. It begs the question, why not make both?
The Universes Beyond cards are absolutely game pieces that implement the Magic ruleset, but why should they have to be Magic: The Gathering cards?
Together Apart
Carrying on as the game has progressed for 27 years won’t directly alienate anyone who already plays Magic: The Gathering. However, there is no situation where you can print an MTG legal, non-MTG IP card without fundamentally disenfranchising a substantial portion of the playerbase.
One interesting aspect of this is that for both camps, this is heavily predicated on the idea of tournament legality in competitive play. Neither the game system purists nor the flavour purists have any real issue with the mechanically unique silver bordered promotional cards that we’ve seen in the past. They exist as a functional game piece within the rules of Magic, but they don’t impede on the game Magic: The Gathering. This means that their availability isn’t an issue for competitive play, nor is their breaking of the core lore universe an issue.
Considering this, to me the solution to this is fairly simple — Even though they use the same game system, they’re different games and should be treated as such within the sanctioned tournament structure.
Two Games, One System
Magic: The Gathering comprises of every card that exists within the universe of Magic: The Gathering, all of which have a cohesive flavour and concept behind them. Magic: The Gathering fundamentally includes the flavour as an intrinsic part of the game.
Magic Universes Beyond should comprise of everything, aside from Silver Bordered cards for balance purposes. Any card that has been printed that functionally works within the rules of the Magic game system should have a home here. Be that a card from Alpha, Mirrodin, Commander 2014, or Secret Lair: The Walking Dead.
One of the most interesting facets of using them as fundamentally different games is that it actually allows for far more freedom while still using the Magic game system. If they really wanted to, Wizards could design their own unique Sci-Fi IP and basically run a parallel game that uses the same core system. Would the world be better with both Magic: The Gathering and Magic: The Galaxy? Absolutely yes!
Both games could exist within their own ecosystems, and players who wanted to push the system to it’s absolute limits could play with everything. It’s impossible to deny that it would be a better result for everyone, since you’re broadening the appeal without contaminating it for others.
I love Magic: The Gathering. I’ve spent years absorbing everything I can about the world, and improving my skill at the game. I’ve played multiple different formats from Pauper to Legacy, and can see myself playing the game for as long as I am able to.
I can’t wait to play the Lord of the Rings set — I’m absolutely the target audience for something like that. I love Lord of the Rings dearly, and would absolutely love to be able to play my favourite game with one of my favourite worlds. But if it came to it, I’ll get no joy in having to play Legolas in Legacy Elves.
I sincerely hope Wizards will listen, and sanction these correctly. Magic can be anything, but Magic: The Gathering is precious.
