In August of 1993, Magic: The Gathering was released. I was 10 at the time, and it was a year or so later that I was introduced to the game, I believe somewhere in between the release of the Antiquities and Legends expansion sets. Magic was obviously a huge hit, though it didn’t reach its peak of popularity until a while later. The experience of a kid discovering it then, though, when it was relatively niche, was rather different I suspect from how most people encounter it now.
Magic is a complex game – and was in some ways even more so at the time, since they’ve found a few ways to streamline the rules in the meanwhile. Every box of cards came with a tiny dense little instruction booklet, and while it was fine for understanding the basic flow of play and most common interactions, edge cases and peculiarities were resolved by vigorous debate about what made the most sense. At times it was difficult to sort out the differences between what cards did and what they seemed they ought to do – it takes quite a while for a child to wholly internalize the idea that even though the Frozen Shade is clearly flying in its illustration, it still doesn’t have the flying ability.
There was, then, a sense of magic – so to speak. A feeling of imagination and wonder imbued the cards, and the illustrations, which were often crude by the standards of more recent cards, still spoke tantalizingly of an exciting fantasy narrative behind the game. In the decades since, they’ve released novels and reams of lore fleshing out this fantasy narrative, which I guess is fine too. It probably would have excited me at the time, but isn’t interesting to me now. As well, in the decades since, the mechanics have been thoroughly explored, dissected, and optimized. There’s general consensus now what the good cards and bad cards are, how to best use them, how to construct a deck, how to win. This is great, it’s fun to see a game I once loved have such a long and varied life, but it is completely different now from the game that I once played.
Magic is a game of seemingly infinite possibilities. The cards are so many and so intricate that it seems that you can build anything, build fantastic impractical contraptions or lean hard tournament-winning decks, can go wherever your imagination can take you – if you have the money. Every card has to be bought, and the more useful it is the more it will cost you. It’s a pay-to-win game in a very literal sense, and people probably would dismiss it as such if it were released now in the same format. However, at the time it was the first of its kind, and in so being it paved the way for the modern mobile game as well as every other title that sells itself in bits and pieces, components of a satisfying experience instead of a creation unto itself. Even the biggest AAA titles now have elements of Magic in their DNA.
It is a legacy one hesitates to admire, but the mark has been made.
Computer game versions of Magic have since been released, along with competing games like Hearthstone. Hearthstone has much simpler rules, but more importantly those rules are all formalized by the programming of the game. There is no room for debate, there’s no opportunity to call in judges, the game works in the way the game is made – which, again, probably removes some of the mystique, but makes it far more approachable for beginners.
All of this brings me to Slay the Spire, which I’ve gained renewed enthusiasm for after taking a long hiatus from playing. This is, first of all, not a perfect comparison – Slay the Spire is a dedicated single-player experience instead of a head-to-head dueling game, and the rules are substantially simpler, though the interactions can become extremely complex. While Magic aspires to a sort of free-market egalitarianism, Slay the Spire is overtly unfair. In Magic, it’s impossible to create a perfect deck that never loses because the rules constrain it from being possible – in Slay the Spire, it’s (nearly) impossible to create a perfect deck that never loses because you don’t know what you’re going to be given to build it. Some Slay the Spire runs are cake walks; some are walking on thin ice. Because you’re improvising with what you find, though, there’s an opportunity to discover weird edge case interactions you never would have found if you were building something with specific intent – and, indeed, there must certainly some wild and undiscovered interactions between the vast library of Magic cards released, over 10,000 separate cards, that will remain unfound indefinitely because no one ever has cause to use most of those cards.
A similar work-with-what-you-find ethic can be found in some special draft formats of Magic, where players break up a box of new cards and take turns pulling the cards they want and try to build the best deck they can out of what they get – and though this is an expensive way to play in its own right this at least helps eliminate the pay-to-win factor. When money is eliminated as a factor, the playing field is relatively level, and the game is deemed fair once more.
What interests me about the relationship between a card game released in the 90s and a card game released now, though, is how our perception of fairness has changed over time. With the popularity of Slay the Spire specifically and roguelikes, a genre where vast swathes of the gameplay experience is left to brutal chance, in general – and the explosive popularity of the battle royale genre, a genre where circumstances as much as skill determine your chances of success – it appears that the modern understanding of fairness is shifting. The belief that underpin Magic as a game is that every player should be equal in the eyes of the rules – if not necessarily economically equal. It’s a meritocracy, as long as we assume merit to equal money… And that’s usually what we mean when we say meritocracy. There’s random chance, but it usually gets ironed out for the most part by keen strategizing and the law of large numbers. However, modern games are much more willing to cede that not everyone starts on a level playing field, that some people are born dead, screwed from the start, and pose the challenge of how to do the best that you can under the worst possible circumstances.
I would hesitate to infer too much from this shift. These axioms could come from a belief that the world is unjust and that the human struggle is one of creating justice. These axioms could just as easily come from a belief that anyone can succeed no matter where they come from, the old American Dream – as opposed to the new one, where anyone might not merely succeed but become wildly wealthy. It is a fascinating shift in the way we talk about and think about games, though: Fairness is, as a tenet of game design, becoming rather passe.