Oversoul
The Tentacled One
This is a long article. You’ve been warned. At the most abstract level, this one has been a long time coming. A very, very long time. But I don’t think I’d have made the effort to string these words together and come up with something coherent if not for the (relatively) recent article by Bryan Hawly about the “F.I.R.E.” philosophy. That can be found here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/play-design-lessons-learned-2019-11-18
It is probably required reading for what follows…
I envisioned a few different lofty titles for this piece and none of them felt right. Eventually I decided that I was really indebted to the excellent YouTube video “Humans Need Not Apply” by CGP Grey. I’ll link to that as well (
), but it’s not required viewing for our purposes. Not even close, really. It’s on a different subject entirely. However, I am kinda indebted to the video for making one crucial point. And so, lacking anything better, I’ll borrow from it for a title. The crucial point is that sometimes a new development is critically different from old developments and that dismissing it with “We’ve seen this before” is folly.
Someone astutely following along might reason at this point something like, “New changes might be importantly different from old changes, but it’s more likely that the new changes seem more drastic because they’re fresh, in contrast to the familiar changes we’ve grown accustomed to.” And I would concur. Good reasoning. Good job. You’re right. At this time, I do not ask for you to grant that what’s happening now is bigger, more dire, more drastic, or more important than past developments in the game’s history. All I ask is that you acknowledge that such a development is possible. I have the rest of this whole article I’m writing to support that thesis. It would be unreasonable of me to expect you to be on-board before we’ve even started!
And in case anything I’ve said so far has left the mistaken impression that this is about an “end of Magic” scenario, let me note that while the reasoning I’ve outlined above does apply to such a scenario, my argument is actually predicated on the continued long-term existence of Magic. I bring this up because doomsaying “this will be the death of the game” is a kind of popular quirk in rants about Magic. While historically such doomsaying was wrong, eventually it might be the case that someone points to a real sign of impending doom. Dismissing this correct observer because “We’ve seen this before” would be, nay, will be folly. But that’s not why we’re here. I suspect that we’re relatively near the beginning of a total upheaval of Magic, a process that might continue for many, many years. We’re not at the starting gate. It’s already underway and has been commented on in various terms. But what I want to try to do with this article is define what we’ve all been seeing and talking about lately (OK, not all of us, of course). I’m trying to crystallize the essence of the series of shakeups the game has been experiencing, particularly in the past year. When we try to make sense of what’s going on, try to categorize it, there’s a temptation to capture it as part of some established trend or to compare it to other events in the game’s past. And as I’ve hopefully driven home by now, nope, this time it’s different. But first, we’ll need to review some background information.
Some years ago, in discussions of other games (mostly video games), complaints about power creep in games would generally give Magic a pass, if not some outright laudatory comments. I saw this a few times without ever really looking for it and the circumstances varied, but the general story was, to paraphrase, something like this:
The company that makes Game X wants to sell the latest installment in its product line. If players already invested money into previous installments, they will need some special incentive to buy the latest installment instead of just continuing to use the older installments, which they’ve already spent money on. To sell the latest installment, the company can make its contents more powerful than the contents of previous installments. Then they’ll have to do the same thing with the next installment and the one after that. This is power creep, and it becomes unsustainable if not handled properly. An example of a game that has solved the problem of power creep is Magic: the Gathering. The Standard format, the game’s flagship format, rotates, so Wizards of the Coast can pull different levers, tweaking the power upwards in some ways but not others, and design new sets so that they contribute valuable new resources to players without making the previous set obsolete. Once sets leave Standard, newer sets can reset power levels to keep power creep held in check.
I think I’ve done justice to the original idea with that paraphrasal. And the people making the comparison were generally correct anyway. Power creep has evoked predatory business practices in the gaming industry, but Magic, for whatever flaws it does have, has risen above that particular issue. And that’s not by accident. Wizards of the Coast have gone on record stating that they deliberately emphasize whichever aspects of the game they’re increasing the power of with new sets, while quietly lowering the power level of other aspects, likened to an “Escher Stairwell.” It’s clever, perhaps even ingenious. The one aspect of this narrative that might be misleading is that it presents power levels in Magic design as smoothly oscillating. We might imagine a bunch of overlapping sinusoidal waves charting different types of card “power” over time. Actually, I’m pretty sure I saw someone depict it in just that way. And the reality has never been that clean. For one thing, it’s not generally sinusoidal. It’s full of plateaus as WotC left some things essentially the same for years at at time, and sudden, sharp drops where they found something to be too strong and then corrected or overcorrected. And it’s not periodic with Standard rotations either. Ask a hundred players to map out relative power levels of Magic sets over time and you might not get a hundred meaningfully different maps (depending on the granularity of your system), but you’d at least get a couple dozen irreconcilable discrepancies. Your average longtime Magic player would probably class Urza’s Saga or Mirrodin as overpowered, with Prophecy or Saviors of Kamigawa being underpowered. But where does Guildpact rate? Somewhere in the middle, right? But in which part of the middle?
I know I’m belaboring the point that this is subjective, but it’s also an area where we, as players, have a lot of common ground. And there are very real and important trends, even if they are tricky to capture. A comprehensive analysis of this subject would be interesting, but I’m afraid that sort of thing is beyond me. So let’s go back to about a decade ago. 2009. By then, we were already seeing a certain kind of permanent power creep already well underway. This power creep in Magic was different from the existing “Escher Stairwell” in which various game mechanics were deliberately made more or less powerful in each set. Instead, this power creep was meant to effect a lasting change, to correct a perceived problem with the game. Creatures were deemed too weak relative to noncreature spells. The poster child for this was the brand new Baneslayer Angel, a clear response to years of Serra Angel as a benchmark for the power level of a certain kind of creature. A shot across the bow in the new saga of ratcheting up the value of creatures. Now you could get more for your mana. This probably started before a decade ago, but it’s impossible to pinpoint, especially with the heavily experimental stuff in the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor megablock followed by Alara Block. Baneslayer Angel drove the point home in 2009 to anyone who wasn’t paying attention. And Sam Stoddard wrote about it explicitly in 2013: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/dealing-power-creep-2013-08-09. This wasn’t without controversy, but I think that the overall response by players was more positive than not. People were tired of weak creatures. Most players would have agreed with Sam Stoddard that it was important to find the right balance.
It is probably required reading for what follows…
I envisioned a few different lofty titles for this piece and none of them felt right. Eventually I decided that I was really indebted to the excellent YouTube video “Humans Need Not Apply” by CGP Grey. I’ll link to that as well (
Someone astutely following along might reason at this point something like, “New changes might be importantly different from old changes, but it’s more likely that the new changes seem more drastic because they’re fresh, in contrast to the familiar changes we’ve grown accustomed to.” And I would concur. Good reasoning. Good job. You’re right. At this time, I do not ask for you to grant that what’s happening now is bigger, more dire, more drastic, or more important than past developments in the game’s history. All I ask is that you acknowledge that such a development is possible. I have the rest of this whole article I’m writing to support that thesis. It would be unreasonable of me to expect you to be on-board before we’ve even started!
And in case anything I’ve said so far has left the mistaken impression that this is about an “end of Magic” scenario, let me note that while the reasoning I’ve outlined above does apply to such a scenario, my argument is actually predicated on the continued long-term existence of Magic. I bring this up because doomsaying “this will be the death of the game” is a kind of popular quirk in rants about Magic. While historically such doomsaying was wrong, eventually it might be the case that someone points to a real sign of impending doom. Dismissing this correct observer because “We’ve seen this before” would be, nay, will be folly. But that’s not why we’re here. I suspect that we’re relatively near the beginning of a total upheaval of Magic, a process that might continue for many, many years. We’re not at the starting gate. It’s already underway and has been commented on in various terms. But what I want to try to do with this article is define what we’ve all been seeing and talking about lately (OK, not all of us, of course). I’m trying to crystallize the essence of the series of shakeups the game has been experiencing, particularly in the past year. When we try to make sense of what’s going on, try to categorize it, there’s a temptation to capture it as part of some established trend or to compare it to other events in the game’s past. And as I’ve hopefully driven home by now, nope, this time it’s different. But first, we’ll need to review some background information.
Some years ago, in discussions of other games (mostly video games), complaints about power creep in games would generally give Magic a pass, if not some outright laudatory comments. I saw this a few times without ever really looking for it and the circumstances varied, but the general story was, to paraphrase, something like this:
The company that makes Game X wants to sell the latest installment in its product line. If players already invested money into previous installments, they will need some special incentive to buy the latest installment instead of just continuing to use the older installments, which they’ve already spent money on. To sell the latest installment, the company can make its contents more powerful than the contents of previous installments. Then they’ll have to do the same thing with the next installment and the one after that. This is power creep, and it becomes unsustainable if not handled properly. An example of a game that has solved the problem of power creep is Magic: the Gathering. The Standard format, the game’s flagship format, rotates, so Wizards of the Coast can pull different levers, tweaking the power upwards in some ways but not others, and design new sets so that they contribute valuable new resources to players without making the previous set obsolete. Once sets leave Standard, newer sets can reset power levels to keep power creep held in check.
I think I’ve done justice to the original idea with that paraphrasal. And the people making the comparison were generally correct anyway. Power creep has evoked predatory business practices in the gaming industry, but Magic, for whatever flaws it does have, has risen above that particular issue. And that’s not by accident. Wizards of the Coast have gone on record stating that they deliberately emphasize whichever aspects of the game they’re increasing the power of with new sets, while quietly lowering the power level of other aspects, likened to an “Escher Stairwell.” It’s clever, perhaps even ingenious. The one aspect of this narrative that might be misleading is that it presents power levels in Magic design as smoothly oscillating. We might imagine a bunch of overlapping sinusoidal waves charting different types of card “power” over time. Actually, I’m pretty sure I saw someone depict it in just that way. And the reality has never been that clean. For one thing, it’s not generally sinusoidal. It’s full of plateaus as WotC left some things essentially the same for years at at time, and sudden, sharp drops where they found something to be too strong and then corrected or overcorrected. And it’s not periodic with Standard rotations either. Ask a hundred players to map out relative power levels of Magic sets over time and you might not get a hundred meaningfully different maps (depending on the granularity of your system), but you’d at least get a couple dozen irreconcilable discrepancies. Your average longtime Magic player would probably class Urza’s Saga or Mirrodin as overpowered, with Prophecy or Saviors of Kamigawa being underpowered. But where does Guildpact rate? Somewhere in the middle, right? But in which part of the middle?
I know I’m belaboring the point that this is subjective, but it’s also an area where we, as players, have a lot of common ground. And there are very real and important trends, even if they are tricky to capture. A comprehensive analysis of this subject would be interesting, but I’m afraid that sort of thing is beyond me. So let’s go back to about a decade ago. 2009. By then, we were already seeing a certain kind of permanent power creep already well underway. This power creep in Magic was different from the existing “Escher Stairwell” in which various game mechanics were deliberately made more or less powerful in each set. Instead, this power creep was meant to effect a lasting change, to correct a perceived problem with the game. Creatures were deemed too weak relative to noncreature spells. The poster child for this was the brand new Baneslayer Angel, a clear response to years of Serra Angel as a benchmark for the power level of a certain kind of creature. A shot across the bow in the new saga of ratcheting up the value of creatures. Now you could get more for your mana. This probably started before a decade ago, but it’s impossible to pinpoint, especially with the heavily experimental stuff in the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor megablock followed by Alara Block. Baneslayer Angel drove the point home in 2009 to anyone who wasn’t paying attention. And Sam Stoddard wrote about it explicitly in 2013: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/dealing-power-creep-2013-08-09. This wasn’t without controversy, but I think that the overall response by players was more positive than not. People were tired of weak creatures. Most players would have agreed with Sam Stoddard that it was important to find the right balance.