As I write this, the sun is shining down on the incredibly blue water outside. The air is salt and sweet as the ship sails across the ocean and girls in bikinis slather themselves with suntan lotion, while fatter men belly up to the bar and order outrageously overpriced drinks that are sopping with alcohol.
Needless to say, nobody is playing Magic.
You guessed it; I’ve spent the last week on a tropical cruise in the Caribbean, spending my days snorkeling, scuba diving, kayaking, tubing, and diving through every bit of fish-filled waves that I can. Barring the jet skis, if there’s a way to get across water that’s fun, I’ve done it. Already, I’m regretting my inevitable return on Monday morning.
Magic really isn’t a priority on these trips. I tried to get my ass to a draft the day before I went, but technical issues on the site kept me stuck at home while I tried to reboot a recalcitrant server. So while the rest of you have been experimenting wildly with Planar Chaos and Draft and Sealed and Constructed formats galore, I’ve been…
… well, enjoying myself. So I don’t have a lot of strategy to share this week.
But I do have a rant. And some housekeeping. Which shall we do first?
Okay. The maid just knocked on the door to my room, and she just called it:
“Housekeeping!”
So according to Craig, I have to choose an official title for this column. This will be difficult, because I not only had a lot of good suggestions, but I’ve become overly attached to one of them.
The funniest one, bar none, is Lord Gort’s suggestion of “I Won A PTQ Once.” This would sum up my skills in one hysterical sentence, but I have issues with using it all the time for two reasons: First, it’s hard to actually pair with anything. It stands on its own, telling a story all by itself, which would conflict with the other titles I have. I like long titles that also tell stories, and “I Won A PTQ Once: From Hell’s Heart, I Stab At Thee” seems like two people are battling it out to tell you different tales.
But more importantly, it’s slightly limited. If I decide to, say, branch out briefly to write about an issue or a multiplayer topic (as, you know, might happen — hint hint), then “I Won A PTQ Once” would sound like it was somehow relevant.
So. Funny. Not a good title, but damn funny.
Vrax thinks he’s funny by suggesting “Old Man Of The Sea” — which would be very appropriate today, given the wonderful water-filled week I’ve had and my decrepit ancient status in the Magic field, but no. I don’t have that much of a sense of humor about myself.
NJX suggested “Flagrant Self-Promotion.” Wow! A truly accurate description of the contents of every article I write! I can only assume that NJX is a devoted fan of Home on the Strange and my articles at Magicthegathering.com! But not so much with the interesting.
Someone emailed me privately to suggest “Weasel While You Work” (and I’d give you his name, but his email didn’t transfer to the laptop that I’m using out here in the shiny seas), whereas Craig The Editor suggested “This Here Column Here.” Both are darned fine.
But you know what? I’ve become attached to “Insert Column Name Here.” It’s flexible, it’s meta-humor, and it can be anything I want since it means nothing. If I want to write about Limited, it counts. If I want to discuss my flagrant self-promoting nature by plugging Home on the Strange again, then that works, too. It’s a little long, but I might well go with it.
… unless, of course, Craig shoots me down. In which case I would choose “Weasel While You Work,” which is a good title… But it doesn’t quite cover the audience I write for, since the itinerant youth I am pounding the keys for these days don’t exactly work. “Weasel While You Skip Class” might be a more appropriate title, or perhaps “Weasel While You’re Surfing The Internet On Company Time.”
I’ll let Craig tell you what the official column name by allowing space for a snarky comment right…
… here.
[Much as I’d like to choose my own suggestion of “This Here Column Here,” I gotta go with “Insert Column Name Here.” After all, it’s what we’re all used to now. — Craig.]
The Rant
There is a rule in Magic that is the most awful, poorly-constructed, poorly-thought-out rule in all of Magic. And no, I’m not exaggerating; not only does the rule in question go against everything else that Wizards is trying to teach us about Magic, but it makes the game both less fun and less strategic.
You wanna know the rule? Okay. Here.
600.4a. When a player leaves the game, all objects (see rule 200.8) owned by that player leave the game, all spells and abilities controlled by that player on the stack cease to exist, and any change-of-control effects which give that player control of any objects end.
Yup. When a player dies in multiplayer, all of his spells get removed from the stack.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I dig that multiplayer is complex enough as it is. When the official rules for multiplayer came out, I heard people complain about the permanents rulings — “If you stole Dave’s creature with a Control Magic and he gets killed, it should stay on your side until it gets killed! That’s stupid that his guy just blinks out of existence!”
But you know, that’s a matter of bookkeeping. When I’m out of the game, I want to take my cards with me — and otherwise, I might inadvertently leave my handy-dandy Spiritmonger in the hands of another player. That’s a ruling that keeps my cards safely in my deck, and I appreciate that.
But the stupid “Players die, their spells vanish” rule. That’s capital-“D” dumb on every level, so lemme explain just how catastrophically bad that is.
First, let’s just give the mechanics: Dave is at one life, almost out of the game, but clinging on by his fingers. Phil has a Prodigal Sorcerer on the table, untapped and ready to use.
Dave is now Phil’s slave.
This doesn’t happen in duels, because in a two-man game the optimal strategy would be to destroy Dave ASAP — just end the game post-haste. But as I’ve seen happen in any number of games, it’s sometimes good to leave Dave on the table for a bit because then Dave can do your bidding.
“I want my Jamie, my third opponent, dead,” says Phil. “So Dave, you’d better attack him with that Avatar of Fury, or I’ll kill you.” And assuming that attacking with the Avatar of Fury won’t put Dave in a situation where he’d get killed ASAP as well — because if Dave’s going to die either way, he won’t care and will just attack Phil and put him out of his misery — then Dave becomes an extension of Phil.
That’s stupid. Suddenly, the lowly pinger is a Mindslaver. But wait, there’s more.
I don’t mind the fact that Dave is out of the game at Phil’s whim. That’s the way multiplayer works sometimes, and perhaps Dave might want to include a Sudden Death or a Stifle to help stop such matters.
But the “remove all of Dave’s spells stacks from the game” rule means that Dave is effectively out of the game, yet he’s still playing. He is a ghost, only able to cast spells that Phil agrees with. He cannot harm or affect Phil in any negative way whatsoever.
That’s not fun, being under Phil’s thumb so thoroughly.
Let me go to cinema for a moment to bring you one of the greatest moments in movie history: Captain Kirk has just bested Khan in a long, drawn-out duel. Khan’s ship is crippled, drifting aimlessly…. But he has the Genesis Device. The atom bomb. Deadly and wide-ranging.
Bloodied, Khan crawls to the Device and puts his hand on it. He looks at the static-clogged monitor, and hisses. “From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee,” he says, pressing down on the trigger….
…Then Kirk fires the phasers and removes Khan from the game. The Genesis Device vanishes into nowhere, because with Khan dead there’s no bomb left to explode. Spock’s all right, and the Enterprise goes back to the space dock for tea and cookies.
What the hell?
Multiplayer Magic should have politics. As it stands, with the current rules, there is no penalty for Phil abusing Dave so heartily. Dave might have a mittful of spells he could cast (some at Sorcery speed) that would devastate Phil, so if Dave decides he’s had enough of the tyrannical Phil Regime he can go out with a bang…
But the current rules allow him to only go out with a whimper. If he steps out of line, he will be neatly whisked out of the game, and the Dave-hosing spell on the stack will never arrive in time to resolve.
I say thee nay!
Dave’s Phil-hosing spell should be allowed to resolve, and wreck Phil. Phil should fear Dave. Red players toting Shocks should fear players at less than two life, because even the lowliest player should have the chance to take someone down with him before he goes. He can’t win, but he should at least be able to influence how the rest of the game goes with his dying breath!
“Yeah, you can kill me,” the two-life chumps should say. “But if you aim that Shock in my direction, you’ll pay dearly for it. Don’t hit me yet.”
“Meh,” the Red guy says. “The rules say you can’t do squat. See ya!” And so Dave dies, powerless and stupid and without any strategy at all. Should you keep Dave in the game? Absolutely! You can kill him whenever you feel like without penalty, so why the hell not?
Some of you may not be distressed by this lack of revenge. “That’s the way the game works,” you say.
Except it bloody well doesn’t.
Okay, so you kill Dave, his spell never resolves. That’s good gameplay, right?
So if I kill your Prodigal Sorcerer, his spell never resolves, right?
Oh. Wait. That’s not the way the rules work?
There’s a metaphor I’ve heard judges use a thousand times to help new players. This exact metaphor is even in our official “Ask The Virtual Judge” FAQ. “If I throw a hand grenade at you and you shoot me while the grenade is still in mid-air, does that stop the hand grenade from going off?” This is intended to show players that destroying the source of an effect does not prevent the effect itself.
Except that’s exactly what happens when you kill Dave. It’s contradictory. If Dave places a spell on the stack, it should stay on the stack regardless of what happens to Dave, because that’s the only way that’s consistent with the rules as they are currently written.
So what you wind up with is a rule that makes people at low life utterly powerless, makes enslaving low-life players a no-brainer strategy for anyone with multiple kill spells in hand or on the board, and is out of line with the rules as they’re currently written.
That’s a trifecta. And that, my friends, is the Dumbest Rule In Magic.
The Weekly Plug Bug
Yes, Home on the Strange is back — maybe you heard that earlier, I don’t know – and this week we’re exploring more of what happened with Tanner while Izzy was on her disastrous date with Seth! Tanner has committed the cardinal sin of drunk dialing, and now his evil ex-girlfriend Ann has arrived to soothe his fevered brain.
This can only go well.
Signing off,
The Ferrett
The Here Edits This Here Site Here Guy
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com