Breaking the Rules of Magic - May 14, 2004
How Fifth Dawn Changes Everything
by Jeff Zandi


When Fifth Dawn debuts next weekend in prerelease events all over the world, it will be more than the premiere of Magic’s ten thousandth expansion set, it will be the beginning of the end of Magic as we know it. Every once in a while, Wizards of the Coast decides that the rules that govern their Golden Goose of a game need to be shaken up. This time, the boys in Research and Development may have gone too far. Am I overreacting? Probably. Am I going over the edge? Possibly. Do I have serious mental issues? Of course! Is Disenchant a green spell? I simply do not know anymore!

Ever since Naturalize a year or so ago and Disenchant disappeared from the basic set, I have been pretty sure that there simply WERE NO IMPORTANT RULES at Wizards of the Coast. Mark Rosewater will throw the color wheel/color pie argument out there, but I think the grand old man of R&D is just kidding himself. There are no rules anymore. Even though I have not seen the new set in its entirety, what I HAVE seen has me a little worried.

MORE RATS THAN NORMALLY ALLOWED

Relentless Rats has me more worried about the great game of Magic than any other card that I have heard about so far. For 1BB you get a 2/2 creature that gains +1/+1 for every other Relentless Rat in play. Oh, by the way, this card says that it’s okay to play with any number of Relentless Rats cards in your deck. If the number you picked was zero, one, two, three or four, then you and me aren’t going to have any trouble. However, I’m afraid the real point of this card is to allow a player to play, say, twenty-five or so of these darling little rats in their deck. Creative? Yes, breaking the rules of Magic is very creative.

The rule being broken here, of course, is the very old rule limiting the use of any non basic land card to four copies. I completely GET why breaking this rule makes Relentless Rats a more interesting card. On the other hand, you could say that about A LOT of cards that have been printed in the past.
I think I could build a pretty good deck with sixteen Birds of Paradise. Ten Wild Mongrels? Sounds good to me.

WHY BREAKING THE RULES IS BAD

Why does Zanman hate creativity? I don’t hate creativity, I love it as a matter of fact. When it comes to Magic, however, there will always be a thin line between interesting new ideas for cards and the traditions in the rules of the game that need to be protected. Rules that handle basic things about the game need to stay the same, year in and year out. Rules like how many cards you can have in your deck, how many of one particular card you can have in your deck, rules like how many cards you draw each turn and when, rules dealing with how you win the game. Yes, I recognize that Magic has had many different ways to win the game, from having ten poison counters to running out of cards to failing to win the game the turn after you play Final Fortune. In the end, however, having your opponent’s life points drop from twenty to zero has been the most popular way to win BY FAR.

One thing that makes a game great is simplicity. Part of me truly believes that Magic would be a better game, a simpler, more elegant game if there were only 350 cards or so in the entire game. Imagine, playing with just the original Beta set of cards forever. Boring? I doubt it. Chess has managed to last a millennia or so with a very tiny number of different pieces. In poker, the pair of aces that was good a hundred years ago is still good today. Well, Magic: the Gathering, as it turns out, is not a game based on such a limited number of cards. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of different Magic cards with hundreds added every year. The game of Magic will never have the elegant simplicity of some other classic games simply because of the continued flow of new cards.

Even though part of Magic’s appeal is the new cards that come out each year, the game retains some of its elegant simplicity by having some things remain the same. When a card like Relentless Rats comes out, a little more of that elegance is lost. If you love baseball, you may understand a little bit better what I am talking about. Baseball has simplicity and elegance in that some parts of the game can be understood by someone new to the game right away. Hit this thing with that thing and run around those things as quickly as you can. Simple and elegant. Like Magic, however, baseball has lost some simplicity over the years. Quick, explain to a new fan to baseball how a balk is called, explain how a save is determined. For that matter, simply try to explain the strike zone…

If Magic: the Gathering is to continue to be one the greatest games in the world, we need some things to stay the same. How do you win a game of Magic?
Well, you reduce your opponent’s life points from twenty down to zero, of course, there are the following exceptions, etcetera etcetera. Until Relentless Rats, we didn’t have this problem with deck construction rules.
It was simple, put four of any legal card into your deck if it isn’t a basic land.

When you DO break the rules as a developer, then please make sure it’s for a good reason. Ask yourself, is Relentless Rats a GOOD ENOUGH reason to break the four-of-a-kind rule in Magic? I doubt that it is. In retrospect, were poison counters a good enough reason to add more exceptions to the question of how do you win a game of Magic?


LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT THE CREATIVE TEAM

The development team for Fifth Dawn is an unusual one, as Lead Developer Mark Rosewater explained last week on magicthegathering.com. There is a theory that when you want to put together a team for an unusual Magic task, you start with Mark Rosewater. Granted. No one in the current WOTC world knows more about Making Magic than Mr. Rosewater. Working with Maro on this project was Randy Buehler, Director of Magic R&D and Aaron Forsythe, first time Magic set developer but longtime Magic expert. Rounding out the creative team for Fifth Dawn is a name you’ve never heard before, at least, I had never heard it before. Enter Gregory Marques. Apparently, Mark Rosewater ran into Greg at Pro Tour Chicago in 2003, where Mark broke his usual rule (MORE rule breaking, I’d like to point out) of not looking at unsolicited Magic card ideas. Mark checked out a set of cards for play with Magic that were entirely the invention of Gregory Marques. Rosewater did not necessarily see Card Creating Genius in Marques’ work, but what he DID SEE was promise. Marques’ promising skills are at work in Fifth Dawn. Of course, MANY OF US would love to have been plucked out of the crowd and put to work on a Magic set, so some measure of envy must be at work when I consider Greg Marques’ work.

This is certainly an innovative team, no doubt. Many of the cards we have been able to sneak an early peek at seem very interesting. When it comes to Relentless Rats, I have to start wondering what are the goals of Research and Development? Does every new card add to the game? Does breaking a ten year old rule with a new card make the game better, or a little bit worse?

With Fifth Dawn, is Wizards of the Coast taking care of their Golden Goose, or just laying an egg?
We will soon see.

As always, I’d love to hear what YOU think!

Jeff Zandi
Texas Guildmages
Level II DCI Judge
jeffzandi@thoughtcastle.com
Zanman on Magic Online