This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Seth: Since there isn't a standard that i can find on this site i think we should use the wikipedia rule of thumb and leave spellings in the dialect of the person who started an article. There is a U in colour.
Ununnilium: On the other hand, Magic is an American game, so perhaps we should use those spellings. ``
Anyway, good article!
Brickie: I must admit, having read this, to being none the wiser about the game except for the fact that it's a fantasy game played with cards.
Is there any chance of a brief introduction to some of the game concepts, or something?
Ununnilium: Comin' right up!
Ununnilium: Took out...
(Of course the Mirrodin "Artifact heavy" deck is exempt from this as "affinity for Artifacts" and various "For every artefact you have add +?/+?" abilities make this a powerful and very hard to beat deck - Even with time spiral)
...because that's way too specific for the entry right now.
Ununnilium: What with the deletion of the Badass and MagnificentBastard examples? They're pretty accurate, if you read the novels.
Later: Re-adding those, since there was no response.
Deus Ex Biotica: Look, I know there's no such thing as notability and all, but is a detailed explaination of game mechanics at all pertainent to the tropes of fiction?
Tanto: Read the effing discussion. Someone requested more detail, so we added it.
Deus Ex Biotica: Thanks for the vote of confidence, my sharp and honorable friend. As it happens, I have read the discussion, but not the part where someone explains why we cannot simply post a link, either to the wikipedia description or the Wizards site. This is not "details about all things nerdy" wiki, at least not last I checked.
Ununnilium: Well then, look at Video Game Genres. Certainly there's no lack of explaination of game mechanics there. If we're going to have game tropes, we're going to have to get into the mechanics for them to be at all explicable.
Seth: We only cover tropes of fiction! Well fuck i guess we better destroy the whole meta tropes index then. We don't just cover fiction. We cover lots of media. Games tell stories (making them media) part of how they do this is via their mechanics (Making them notable).
Deus Ex Biotica: I can see that I'm outvoted here, but I haven't seen any video game's mechanics given this kind of detailed breakdown. Sure, they'll tell you that, say, Final Fantasy VII falls into a number of classic tropes of console RP Gs (and list them), but it won't spend several screens explaining the controller configuration and the different types of character special abilities - because those aren't tropes, or even particularly interesting to read. If there's enough interest here to justify actual pages about CCG tropes ("tapping", flavor text, color/faction/alignment pie, etc.), then I have no problem with that (and would enjoy helping), but the specifics of a single instance in this level of detail seems more than a little odd to me.
Seth: But if you read all those tropes listed it would tell you everything. If we had 6 games that used it we would have a page called "The Stack" or "The Graveyard" or "Tapping" and this would be a lore page with the element descriptions. If more games used the identical element descriptions we would have a trope for that. Videogame Tropes are the similarities between systems, Magic:The Gathering is more original than most our other games (By virtue of being the only CCG we have an article for) we have an article of so it has to be covered on the same page rather than be disseminated between multiple pages that multiple games can link to.
Deus Ex Biotica: But that's just it: are the highly unique elements of any given thing "tropes"?
Seth: No, but they are still necessary. So rather than create tropes, we outline them in the main entry.
My point was that we do outline just as much about most other games, we do it by linking to dozens of tropes. In a situation like this we aren't including more information it just isn't disseminated.
goldhero: the page almost gets into a tutorial on how to play. Mechanics are important if they are relevant to tropes or the clarification of terminology, but if the reader wants to know more on "tapping" "permanents" and "instants" or interesting cards that serve as exceptions (unless it's a subverted trope), they can look at the wikipedia, or official site. Another point, this page shouldn't be an advertising hook to interest readers into magic, A good rule of thumb I think to keep in mind is keep it to the tropes.
Ununnilium: (Moved goldhero's comment down here.) I really wish you'd talked about this before making such a huge and drastic change. That said, your changes really did make it much nicer and simpler. However, I'm putting some of it back in; most notably, the different card types. (They're both terminology crucial to understanding the game and relevant to tropes.)
IMHO, this is a better place for such details than Wikipedia. Wikipedia's supposed to be a general encyclopedia. TV Tropes is supposed to be geekier, more media-based, more freeform.
goldhero: I am sorry about the card types. I did not realize it was a bulleted list. But my intention would have been to just make them consise anyway. My only concern was the giant block of text with no trope links in it.
Ununnilium: No prob. It's good to get an outside view of this sort of thing; knowing so much about it, it's harder for me to tell what's useful for a beginner and what's not.
Ununnilium: Taking out the middle of the ante paragraph; too much detail, IMHO:
Some cards even made it more dangerous, such as one that gave the opponent a choice of either immediately conceding the game or having both players add a card to the ante. One card had the interesting ability of taking place of all your ante cards.
Also:
- Mind you, that's not even counting the myriad of rules changes that have gone through the game. Due to many older cards having their text based on the older rules, "errata" (basically stating what the card's wording would be if it were printed today) is frequently issued, which is used for all official rulings. For example, Black Lotus (one of the oldest and most valuable cards) was originally a "Mono Artifact" with the ability "Adds 3 mana of any single color of your choice to your mana pool, then is discarded. Tapping this artifact can be played as an interrupt." Its errata changes it to an Artifact with the ability "Tap, Sacrifice Black Lotus: Add three mana of any one color to your mana pool." Many of these are just to streamline the rules, but some cards have actually had their power increased or decreased due to rule changes.
This isn't a Retcon; this is a change in the rules of the game. We don't have an Errata trope — but we really should. I'm gonna propose that on YKTTW.
And:
- This editor thinks that currently the most important things is that playing the game doesn't change the multiverse, and that you can imagine a creature to be a magical copy or not.
- This editor thinks that the weatherlight saga, that started with the set of the same name already had Phyrexia, Rath, and Urza already in it.
Damn, doesn't anyone read Conversation In The Main Page?
Anyway, as for the first, from MTG Salvation Wiki:
"The modern idea of summoning involves both, prerevisionist way and the creation of a faux entity based on the concept of that creature, which is pulled from the Æther. These summoned creatures have no will of their own, and vanish when no longer needed. This concept is described in The Eternal Ice by Lim-Dûl to Jodah. Though Jodah is not in fact summoned, as Lim-Dûl suggests, the explanation is still valid and continues to be the best flavor related description of the summoning process."
And as for the latter, yes, it did, but as part of the history of Dominaria; the idea of Phyrexia and Yawgmoth being behind Rath, and Urza being behind the good guys, was grafted on later.
sawblade I'm not sure about the evil of Lorwyn's elves being due to their black tendentices.
They are firmly conviced of their natural superiorty and conviced that they embody the best of nature. The black comes from the willingness to be sneaky about it.
In short, the elves being jerkasses is not due to their blackness.
Ununnilium: But wanting to be the best individually? That's, like, the antithesis of green.
sawbladex: I don't think so. Also, the elves think they as a group are perfect. Ruthlessness isn't not green. Law of nature is all that. Blackness in the elves comes from their willingness to do assassin's and underhanded stuff like moonglove.
One way to reslove this difference in thought is to make the entry less differenative to what makes the lorwyn elves not lovable.
(Yes, this is yellow is the closest that is used to represent white in the game. It certainly isn't gray.)
Tanto: It's also nearly impossible to read, which takes precedence. Changing it back.
Ununnilium: Thank you.
Caphi: Page says that enchantments never tap. I want to mention Flowstone Embrace, but I'm not sure how to do it without eating too much page space.
Ununnilium: I say don't. It, and the less-well-known Witch's Mist, exist only to be an exception.
Squirle: I removed the "Rath linked to Phyrexia, Weatherlight linked to Antiquities" bit from the Ret Con explanation. Rath was linked to Phyrexia from the very beginning, we just didn't know it yet, but there was foreshadowing in the flavor text of several Rath block cards. The Weatherlight Saga was more a continuation of Antiquities than a Ret Con of it.
Magic DID have a huge Ret Con story-wise though, in the "Revision". I'll add that in a moment.
Ununnilium: I've heard that the intentions of the original creators of the storyline (whose stuff appeared in Tempest) were to have the whole Rath-invades-Dominaria thing be completely unrelated to Phyrexia, and that it was forced on them somehow. (It makes sense to me, since Urza's Saga seemed really randomly shoved into the natural flow of the storyline.) The Phyrexia references had been around for years; Phyrexian Boon, Phyrexian Dreadnought, and Phyrexian Walker, among others, appeared in the years between Antiquities and Weatherlight.
Dae Khar El: I've removed "tribal" from the list of types, as it's not a type but a supertype (along with Legendary and [IIRC] Basic). If we wanted to list those, we'd have to get further into the rules of the game than we already are.
Micah: Tribal actually is a type
(see also rule 205.2a in the Comprehensive Rules). It's just a type that behaves a lot like a supertype. On the other hand, what's currently written is literally true (since there are no cards whose only type is tribal) and probably less confusing than listing tribal.
sawblade: I honestly don't think that Energy Field is an iconic card of blue by any streach of the imgaination
sawblade: Looked up spellfire's history, found it younger then M:tG. removed older then they think
Magus: Doesn't World Half Empty apply to every shard of Alara? Just because Grixis is the more obvious one doesn't mean they all lack something. Probably the second most startling one would be Esper, which, without any forces of chaos, turned into a semi-robotic world.
Which trope would one use to describe the Depowering and bus-despositing of every pre-Time Spiral Planeswalker? Which sucks, by the way, especially how Jaya Ballard didn't even get the dignity of an onscreen death.
