Magic: The Gathering within limits

I have played Magic: The Gathering for over twenty years. It is probably my favorite game, but, like many long-term players, I have struggled with disenchantment toward it.

When I first got into Magic (at age thirteen), I had a box of Revised-era cards that my brother gave me. Out of those, I made some really terrible, naive decks to play against each other, and I had a blast. Over time, I learned more and more about the game, until I started playing Standard FNM, at the time a relatively casual tournament format, at my local game store. I began with pretty awful "home-brew" decks before taking the game increasingly seriously and developing a deep understanding of Magic and all of the associated resources whereby one came to understand what decks and strategies were optimal. Since 2012, however, I have scarcely played the game competitively. I have only recently put more energy back into the game and tried to find the source of my dissatisfaction.

This is a story that long-term Magic players may recognize—a combination of a love for the game and a malaise toward actually playing it. The game has very much changed: Wizards of the Coast releases a staggering six new sets per year, and half of them are third-party tie-ins that erode the traditional high fantasy character of Magic. Beyond these decisions made by Wizards, the community has also changed, moving away from sixty-card two-player formats and toward the hundred-card four-player semi-casual "Commander" format—a format that I find to be mired by enormous complexity, and whose games consist of board politics and "parallel play." Magic just isn't "what it used to be."

However, I'd like to interrogate this feeling and not fall back into easy nostalgia. Nothing is what it used to be, and things may always have seemed better in the past.

To step back for a second, it's worth asking: what is Magic for? In Magic creator Richard Garfield's original vision, the game was meant to be played at Dungeons & Dragons events, as a brief diversion between long sessions. Until the introduction of Commander, most Magic games were two-player and only took about fifteen minutes.

Garfield also intended for people to discover the game incidentally. Most "serious" Magic players only trade as an economic exchange, but in Garfield's vision, trading would be the primary mechanism for actually acquiring cards. Nowadays, players build a deck before getting cards and use websites like TCGplayer to get the exact cards that they want for a deck. The naivete that Garfield imagined is gone in the internet age—the only scarcity is price, rather than incidence of exposure (early sets didn't even publish a list of cards).

There still exists a form of Magic consistent with Garfield's original vision, referred to as kitchen-table or "cards I own" Magic. In this unstructured format, people make bricolage sixty-plus-card decks out of whatever they or their friends have around and play now and then. According to head designer Mark Rosewater, it is how 80 percent of players still play the game. Most long-term "serious" players like me originally got into the game this way, but none of us play Magic like this anymore.

There is a strange irony to this—"cards I own" is Magic as it is meant to be played, the primary end toward which it is designed, but it is never how long-term players play the game! Rather, they develop an encyclopedic knowledge of all cards ever printed, scouring databases to find the exact optimal strategies for their decks.

In my view, this, more than anything, is the source of many players' malaise—the endless desire to transcend Magic's limits, for a game harder, more complex, more optimized, and more skill-testing than it can ever promise to be. What's lost in approaching the game this way is a sense of fun, serendipity, and play. Cards become tools to be optimized—in constructed, databases like MTGDecks tell you exactly what decklists are the most powerful in any given format. In limited, 17Lands will tell you which cards you should play in which decks based on aggregate statistics. In either case, a format becomes quickly "solved," pushed up against whatever limits may exist.

Commander has a different problem. Commander, ostensibly "casual," has strong social norms that discourage optimal deckbuilding and play; it is instead a four-player social format. The limit Commander is trying to transcend is complexity—turning a quick, two-player game into an all-afternoon affair with hundreds of distinct cards and games with so much going on that most people have only a vague sense of the board state. Magic card design has pushed in this direction as well, with cards often having two or three separate abilities to keep things endlessly "novel" and "fresh."

The ultimate problem, in my view, is in refusing to accept Magic as a game that can, and should, have limits. The issue comes back to limits that no experienced player imposes, the limits of Magic's original vision and of "kitchen table" casual: limits of card acquisition and knowledge.

When I used to play Standard FNMs, there was a slight (but at that point dying) taboo around "netdecking," that is, copying decklists you found online. Obviously, within a format, good strategies will tend to converge, and it's worth knowing what strategies are successful. Among competitive players, the netdecking taboo is thought of as a kind of regressive mindset you have to drop if you want to be successful. But the taboo has a sort of truth to it, which is that netdecking in some ways destroys what Magic was originally meant to be: a trading-card game, one where you are exposed to new cards by physically seeing them and make decks out of what you have, each one being an original combination of your creativity and the cards that you happen to have access to.

Kitchen-table Magic requires high social cohesion; it's not even a format that one could play these days at a game store with strangers. It is one where the social aspect comes before the competitive format. It produces a manner of play and design that is particular and idiosyncratic, that simply could not be standardized into a "format."

In any Magic set, there are a lot of cards that are "filler." These cards often get played in limited, but sit in "bulk bins" beyond that. In "cards I own" Magic, cards that would otherwise sit collecting dust might become well-loved due to personal attachment. This is the kind of thing that taking an "optimization" attitude toward Magic obliterates. For a naive player, each card inspires wonder, inventiveness, and creativity.

Playing without optimizing—accepting the limits of acquisition and of knowledge—can, I think, lead to a far greater enjoyment of the game, one based on personality, happenstance, and style. A "cards I own" player doesn't have to love every set, because they can simply ignore most, or even all, new sets, if they already have a reasonable collection. A "cards I own" player is not grinding on Arena every day and reviewing stats and strategy guides, and they probably aren't playing Magic more than on rare occasion. But when they do, they are, unlike many experienced players, almost certainly having fun.

For me, the most fun I had was playing with cards from my favorite era: Kamigawa through Lorwyn, with a sprinkling of whatever I happen to acquire through other means. To play, I'll have to either convince my experienced Magic friends to accept these limitations or bring new people into the game. I recently purged my Magic collection, and I'm going to try to get some random batches of cards from that era on eBay. I think one of the problems I had when I tried to teach people Magic is that I viewed "cards I own" Magic as an "inferior" format, a stepping stone to "real" (i.e., competitive, optimized) Magic. But after playing the game for twenty years, I'm starting to realize that it may be the best thing that there is.