Subject: Das Glasperlenkartenspiel Date: Wed, 14 Oct 98 19:56:48 +0100 From: alexander blumke To: "Frank Kusumoto" * * * Not a long time ago, I stumbled upon "Das Glasperlenspiel" ("The Glass Bead Game") by German novelist Hermann Hesse, a novel written in 1943, shortly after which he was given the Nobel prize. This novel features a game which started as a simple glass bead game, but which in the course of time started to include the arts, music, philosophy, mathematics and then sciences in general to evolve into The Game played by most learned people, a game through which even discoveries could be made in any of the fields which composed it. The analogy of the Glass Bead Game's beginning with M:tG struck me. After all, Magic also started with combinatory mathematics and pictural art, and later added a narrative thread (the cycles) to it - and now physical skill (Charm School), artistic knowledge (Squirrel Farm) and music (Clam Session) also made their appearance through Unglued. Thinking about the way M:tG is built, I started to think that it could very well become the Glass Bead Card Game of the next - let's have delusions of grandeur - 1000 years. But how's M:tG built, after all? Cards. What's on the cards? Instructions. Of course, there's a rule booklet which defines the basics and explains the symbols on the cards, but basically every M:tG card is a *chunk of rules* of the game it is part of. That is why every new expansion modifies the whole game, from Classic to Standard: add 300 chunks of rules to a game, and the whole game will be modified. Thus Magic is some kind of Gaia game, alive through each and every of its components - exactly like Hesse's Glass Bead Game. The similarities don't stop there. WotC keep adding new mechanics to the game which are found in the world around us. A few examples off the top of my head: Illicit Auction, which introduced an economic stock exchange bidding rule into M:tG; Ghazban Ogre, which introduced (political) opportunism; Orgg and Orcish Conscripts, which introduced cowardise; Slivers, which introduced the phenomenon of symbiosis found in nature (lichen, made of an association between an algae and a mushroom, allowing it to survive in an environment where both separated would die, is an example); Squandered Resources, which introduced the possibility of using up one's land like the most environment-careless governments (the Aral Sea and the Amazon Forest come to mind). Many others may come to your mind. Wizards seem on the right way to make M:tG a truly universal game, then. But what would be the next steps? Although you certainly know what your next steps are (Wizards don't seem to be toppling over to me :-)), let me point out the two I see anyway, each one as important as the other. The first would be to explore outside this niche of exclusive role-playing fantasy universe. This has actually been done to some extent with Arabian Nights and Mirage, which pictured a very African world. Now, including settings like the Greek Mythology, French Camelot, German Nibelungen, Cyberpunk, yes even American basketball into M:tG would not only help it reach a wider audience, it would also slowly make M:tG assimilate the world as a Gaia-like game. These settings would not necessarily be included in the M:tG which is "tournament legal". They could be games of their own, but the important thing would be that each is *compatible* with M:tG as a whole. To make my point clear, I'll take the most absurd example of my list above, and show how the American Basketball edition of M:tG could look like. Cards would come in starter decks and booster packs - all editions should have a same distribution system. The basic variant for M:tG - American Basketball would be Rochester Draft, of course. Basket players would be drafted from 5 regions of the US: Pacific Conference, Central Conference, Eastern Conference, etc. During the game, they would be brought on the field (into play) by tapping the lands representing the regions they come from (and, by the weirdest of coincidences, Pacific Conference would be represented by islands, Central Conference by mountains, and so on). And we'd have player cards like this: "Charles Barkley 2/2 UU1. U: Flying until end of turn (jump). If Charles Barkley is attacking and unblocked, gain 2 points." In the American Basketball edition of M:tG, that would mean that Barkley's team scores 2 points if he is unblocked. The goal of the game would be to score a maximum number of points in a given number of rounds, and the team (played by 1 person) who'd have scored most would have won. The goal of the metagame (league, tournament or whatever series of games) would be to win the NBA season. In M:tG as a whole, Charles Barkley would have a use also: he'd be a 2/2 making you gain 2 life if attacking and unblocked. That's what I mean with compatibility. Compatibility would be the key characteristic of the different M:tG editions (or expansions, or settings, or whatever): this would allow people to play with cards from D&D, the Stock Exchange, the Roman Empire, Nuclear Physics and the Dada artistic movement mixed up in one deck, in one game, just as all these things coexist in our universe. I want to emphasize that this would not only make sense artistically (in the sense that creating a game which reflects the diversity of the whole world is an artistic challenge to which few other artistic undertakings can compare), but economically also: to the question of how Battletech or Netrunner would sell if they were compatible with M:tG, guess what is the only adjective which comes to my mind? More. And the thought of seeing Charles Barkley pitted against a Shivan Dragon is too funny to pass over. The second important step I see is the crucial importance of introducing alternative ways of winning. What I think is that trying to bring the opponent from 20 to zero is not... well, universal enough for the universal game Magic could become. For such a game, victory should be written on the cards, not in the general rules. This already exists, actually, in an embryonic state. There was Poison, and now there is The Cheese. Only two yet, but I think this is the way to go. New victory condition cards should be made until the 20-to-zero is only one way of winning among hundreds of other ones; these victory conditions could reflect how one can win in the real world. They could be on any type of card, permanent or spell. As a concrete example, let's picture a game in which one opponent plays a poison deck, while the other plays a deck focused around the alternative-way-of-winning card: "Mayor 1/1 WWW Summon Citizen. If ever you have 6 or more Citizens in play, you get elected. If you get elected, you win the game." Of course one could also play such a deck as a White Weenie with lots of Summon Citizen or Icatian Towns and Crusades and try to knock the opponent down to zero, but basically it would be a game in which one player would try to poison the other who would try getting elected. In the same way, you could have games in which one player would try to find three elven rings lost in his deck while the other would try to control enough of his opponent's lands (with cards like Conquer or Political Trickery) to satisfy the "Conquistadores 2/2 RR1. If you control three or more of target opponent's lands, you win the game." he is playing with. This might seem like fun Magic, but R&D could very well decide to make alternative-way-of-winning cards competitive with fast 20-to-zero decks. In any case, victory possibilities could be made infinite. The complexity of tournament play would be enhanced, for one would not only have to worry about what strategy the opponents will adopt for winning, but also about *what* their "winning" would be. There would be victory condition cards around which decks could be built, but there could also be "surprise victory" condition cards with a narrow but game-winning use, like the interrupt "Retaliating Rescue UU1. Counter target spell played by target opponent. If that spell originally targeted two of your creatures, you win the game." Well, these were some of my thoughts about M:tG's future after 1 and a half years away from the Net. And when, in 200 years, Magic: the Gathering has gathered a significative part of the world into its playing system, it will indeed have become the "Glasperlenspiel", the game of all games, and it will have reached the full meaning of its name at last. - Magic: the Gathering. What is it? It's the card game. - How do you play it? It's in the cards. - How do you win it? It's in the cards. But what do you do with it? What does it contain? It's all in the cards. All is in the cards. Es ist das Glasperlenkartenspiel. That was it. Bye, Frank, and thanks for all your efforts for this game. We both know that there's no need to be competitive to be a good player :)... Alexander Blumke "Existence is an exploration from which no one ever comes back alive." -Kevin X