Storytelling with Cardstock 1

I’m preemptively numbering this bit because I’m sure I’ll come back to it again.

My expensive hobby of choice is Magic: the Gathering. Most people have an expensive hobby, and usually just the one. Football games, concerts, cars, whisky, Warhammer 40k, Magic: the Gathering; all of these cost money to have fun, but it’s worth it. Recently, I’ve become more observant of every part of the card, and this has lead to a greater appreciation of the game.

In order to continue, I feel like a primer of Magic might be in order. If you want to learn how to play, this video is a silly, technically accurate summary, and this video is a shorter, more official version. If you don’t necessarily want to learn, that’s fine. Take a look at this example card here.

Each part of the card is important, but for when you play the game, some parts are more important. For example, the top-right corner is the cost, just like at the store. The more stuff is up there, the more resources is costs. The bottom-right corner is how big this card is once you have paid the cost to have it. These are both pretty important. Things that are not very important to gameplay include the artwork, the name (top-left), and the flavor text (the stuff in the lower box in italics). However, if all that mattered was the cost and size, why put the art and the name on the card? Just call it Flying Guy and knock off for lunch.

But the art matters. Each expansion to this game takes place in a defined world, with characters and stories. Some of those characters are larger than life, and their stories shape the world around them. Some of those characters are like this Suntail Hawk: just a part of the world, but how they interact with the world defines them both. A few years ago, Magic’s expansion was set in the gothic horror world of Innistrad for the second time, and the stories in the cards were excellent.

A few things about Innistrad. The world was designed to be Humans vs Bela Lugosi’s Greatest Hits. There’s vampires, werewolves, zombies, and ghosts, and the humans are beset on all sides. In order to denote the changing nature of werewolves through gameplay, as well as other important changes, Magic introduced double-faced cards. Instead of having the uniform card back like every card game has, some cards had two fronts. Through gameplay, these cards could turn over, transforming from one side to the other, but remaining the same creature.

The art for the werewolves had to show that it was the same entity from front to back, but that their transformation was affecting their world. For example, here’s Hinterland Logger. On her front, she’s a beefy human with some splintered logs. This makes sense; she’s a logger, after all. But if we look to her flavor text below the art, we see an anecdote about how she refused to buy axes. That’s odd. When she transforms to her other side, we see the secret to her logging: she’s a massive werewolf that rumbles through the trees. The flavor text now refers to the axes as “inferior”, and I’d believe her.

Two other strong werewolves: Breakneck Rider (both a pun about being a Neck Breaker as a werewolf, and you can see the horse he was riding dead on the ground) and Village Messenger (he has some bad news, and the news is he’s coming to get you).

On the second visit to Innistrad, there was a new threat. Gothic horror was being invaded by Lovecraftian horror. Tentacles and mind intrusion everywhere. It settled into the werewolves quite nicely. After all, they were prone to changing forms; what’s a few extra tentacles and body horror? Originally, the werewolves could turn back into humans, but these new werewolves, once possessed by tentacles, could not change back. Kessig Prowler is the best example of this. The flavor text tells the story in two sentences, and the art makes it very clear that something has gone wrong.

There’s so much more art and story to talk about. I’ve got a list as long as the video game to-do list. If anyone reads this, what’s your favorite Magic story-in-a-card? If you don’t play Magic, what are other places that have little contained stories like this?