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Webcomic / Cardboard Crack

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Cardboard Crack is a webcomic about Magic: The Gathering and its players. It has a simple black-and-white Stick-Figure Comic format and chronicles the trials, struggles and joys of playing Magic. It frequently pokes fun at players' habits, as well as how Wizards of the Coast are handling the game.

This webcomic provides examples of:

  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In "Emergency Landing", the passengers all have serious concerns like "am I going to die?" and "who will take care of my kids?"... except for the last one, who's worried about his Magic cards.
  • Bait-and-Switch: "Finding the One" has a son ask his father when you know you've found "the one". For the first part of the response, it sounds like he's describing the feeling of being in love... but he's actually talking about finding the perfect Magic deck.
  • Crack is Cheaper: The comic frequently references the cost of playing Magic, such as this strip citing "You hate money" as a reason to play it. Even the comic's title is a reference to how addictive and expensive Magic can be.
  • Eleventy Zillion: In "Infinite", a player can make an arbitrarily large number of creature tokens. When told that he has to pick a number (not just "infinite"), he says he wants to create a "gazillion" tokens.
  • Embarrassing Tattoo: This strip has a character get a tattoo in Phyrexian only for Elesh Norn, a Phyrexian leader, to ask why it reads "splendid cow fart".
  • Fan Dumbinvoked: "Quitting" features the kind of fan who constantly complains about the franchise and threatens to abandon it, but never actually leaves.
  • Flipping the Table: The Hypocritical Humor in "Sophisticated" comes from a player talking about how "sophisticated" Magic is, then flipping the table in frustration after getting mana screwed again.
  • Game Night Fight:
    • Implied to be common in "Commander Night", where a player decides to show up to a game night with a dagger, a brick, shoulder pads and a helmet.
    • This playmat features four players fighting over a game of Commander.
    • This strip has a player declare that a Commander night is a success when "everyone but myself is fighting".
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: This strip highlights a particularly amusing interaction regarding a Lord of the Rings set: you can make your One Ring the Ring-bearer... which is supposed mean a creature holding the One Ring.
  • Hypocritical Humor:
    • In "So Annoying", a stickman keeps complaining about their opponent using "low-skill" or "annoying" strategies... but has no problems using these strategies himself.
    • "Sophisticated" has a player talk about how "sophisticated" Magic is, which leads into the punchline of him Flipping the Table after getting mana screwed again.
  • Lame Pun Reaction:
    • In "Kitchen Finks", a player tries to joke that a set included "everything but the kitchen finks" after noticing that the titular card didn't get a reprint. The opponent is not impressed.
    • Invoked in "Izzet", where people keep making lame "Izzet" puns to get someone to stop playing Izzet decks.
  • Serious Business: Some of the characters take Magic a bit too seriously:
    • "Wedding" has a female player put "And I promise to never touch my wife's Magic cards" in the wedding vows.
    • In "Dating a Magic Player", the boyfriend tries to give his girlfriend a Magic-themed cake... only for her to complain that the colors are not in the correct order.
    • In "Contract", a player tries to get another player to sign a contract to prove he's serious about an in-game deal.
    • In "Dangerous", a woman declares that she likes men who live dangerously. She's with her current boyfriend because he runs 41 cards in draft, which is one more than the minimum deck size and slightly lowers consistency.
  • Take That!: Many strips make fun of how Wizards of the Coast is running the game. For instance, "Never Better" has a player lament how he feels Magic is changing for the worse while a character representing Wizards is just ignoring him and bragging about profits.
  • Tempting Fate: In "Drafting", a player keeps ranting about his opponents' supposed lack of skill. He ends up going 0-2.
  • Vanilla Unit: Discussed in "Vanilla", where the characters are impressed that after years of increasing complexity, creatures with no rules text whatsoever still exist.

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