MTG: Notstalgia

Look, I know it’s Magic: The Gathering‘s 25th birthday. I know that it’s a year when the game is going to do a massive victory lap for its own persistence. I don’t mind that. I celebrate that! I love that this game has shown that its particular combination of components and concepts has underneath it all, longevity and excellence in design. I love that I can show my students this game and they can come up with whole games that just use one of the mechanics in Magic. It’s a dizzyngly deep game, and it deserves to spend some time thumping its chest.

There have been, in this year three major dips into the well of nostalgia, between Masters 25, Dominaria, and the hype of returning to a Core Set, yielding Core Set 2019 with a headline of classic Elder Dragons. Woo, 1995!

One of the all-purpose lazy content vehicles you can get out of Magic: The Gathering is the set review. I liked doing them back in the day, in part because new cards excited me but also because I had a gimmick that not many other folk I was reading did: I ignored a lot of cards. There were a lot that weren’t good enough to play with in a deck in the formats I liked.

Since doing this on my blog, however (and I have been doing it now for a bit over a year), I realised I kind of don’t want to do these set reviews in a big part because I don’t want to be too negative. I like Ixalan’s flavour, but my set reviews of it yielded a disconcolate grumpiness, a dispassionate disinterest in the cards themselves. I’ve since shifted a little bit on Ixalan – I certainly regard it more fondly than I did at the launch, and there are still cards from Ixalan I haven’t played with yet that I wanted to.

Yet here I am, looking at the now of Magic, that’s focused on the past of Magic, and remembering that I’ve been there. That wasn’t great. I wanted to leave.

It’s just awkward. Right now, a lot of Magic: The Gathering is about reverence to the past that I hold in disdain. Even my favourite set of the time, a home of some beloved cards, cards that are out of even modern for being Too Something, Onslaught block, has been shown over and over to be full of mistakes. It would make me happy to see the cards of Onslaught brought back to thrive without the pressures of Psychatog, Counterspell, Astral Slide or Goblin Warchief, and yet, those aren’t the parts of the past we remember.

Then again, they brought back Goblin Warchief from that block.

It reminds me of Time Spiral, a block about the history of Magic. A block where we were told we could see anything, see anywhere, we could get a glimpse of Magic’s future, and I hated it because it didn’t show me the future we are in now. I didn’t get to see things like Bestow, or the mindset behind the creature removal of Murder, or the new, interesting and fun ways games can be about stuff other than the draw step.

It’s weird. I love this game but the things of the past five years have shown me greater and more fervent love than anything before it.

I guess what I’m saying is Khans rule.