On August 11, 1998, Wizards of the Coast released a new expansion called Unglued for the trading card game Magic: the Gathering. Unlike previous expansion sets for the game, this was an “Un-set” — it consisted of joke cards that were not legal for tournament play. Cards might require the player to rip the card into little pieces, roll dice for a random effect, or perform out-of-game actions like complementing an opponent. In this post, I’d like to use one of these cards in particular — Ashnod’s Coupon — to investigate the role of Huizinga’s magic circle in Magic: the Gathering and to see what can happen when the lines of the circle get blurred in different ways.
I think that the intended use-case for this card (if you grant that people are playing with it according to the “rules” despite the card being illegal in official formats) would force your opponent to grab you a glass of water or a soda from the vending machine. But even without trying too hard, we can start to cause very real issues with this card.
Suppose I’m playing against someone under 21, and I ask them to get me a beer. Within the rules of the game, what are they supposed to do? We can make a pun about the ability having an “illegal target” and rule that no drink must be fetched, but there’s still a serious issue here. Alternatively, what happens if I ask my opponent to fetch my water bottle that I left at home? Should they call an Uber and ask for my address? What if I the drink is in another state? Another country? Even if we rule that I have to pay secondary costs associated with getting the drink (like, for example, the airfare), who really expects my opponent to run off to the airport just because of joke Magic card? But the alternative is only a little bit better — my opponent’s only other choice (within the rules of the game) is to just concede the game when I use the ability.
Here we can invoke the Magic Circle. It seems obvious at first that the effect of the card is asking the player to do something that leaves the traditional circle for a game of Magic. After all, most people enter a game of Magic expecting to sit at a table and play cards. And since grabbing a drink (especially one that’s far away or illegal to purchase) lies outside of the circle, we can obviously conclude that it has no real business being on a Magic card that anyone plays with.
But I could argue that the “nice” use of grabbing a drink from a vending machine is still with the circle for most players, especially if they knew from the start that we were playing with this sort of “Un-card”. If we all play nice, it’s just a way for me to be a bit lazy while we play. Anyways, the card isn’t that useful within the game, so chances are that I’ll end up losing the game as the price for my laziness.
But even being this generous to Ashnond’s Coupon starts to raise some real complications with our concept of a Magic Circle. After all, what happens if my opponent doesn’t agree that there’s a fair way to use the ability? There’s a very reasonable argument that I have to respect my opponent’s wishes here — the card isn’t strictly legal in official Magic play. Now it’s starting to sound like I need to have conversation with every person I want to play a game of Magic with.
“Do you mind if I have an Ashnod’s Coupon in my deck? What about this other card? What about …”
So now there’s a little bit of a problem. If I’m not exhaustively asking about every way that the rules of the game might bend before I begin a single game of Magic, it seems like I’m going to be coming into the game with a different understanding of the Magic Circle than my opponent is. Often, this isn’t a huge deal. Maybe my opponent is going to keep track of life totals and other information in a way that I’m not used to. Or maybe my opponent brought an automatic card shuffler to the table to aid them when they have to shuffle. Clearly these don’t cause an issue so unless we’re dealing with things that are really against the rules of the game (like the Un-cards), is there really a problem if the boundaries of my Magic Circle are slightly different than my opponents?
In my opinion, Ashnod’s Coupon was never really the problem. At most tables, your opponent will just tell you that the card’s banned in every format and as you to put it away. The real issues come up when we start causing problems within the rules of the game. The card Armageddon is legal in several very popular formats of play, but it is a near-universally hated card. If you aren’t familiar with Magic, your lands are what allow you to play almost every other kind of card in the game — having all of yours destroyed in the middle of the game can be impossible to come back from. But on the other hand, if I’m planning around the card, it isn’t too difficult to make a strategy that isn’t as affected by Armageddon, making it not only an instant-victory for me, but offering my opponent no reasonable counter-play. Many players would simply concede if someone played an Armageddon, even if they were ostensibly winning the game beforehand.
For this reason, a lot of play-groups have an implicit (or often explicit) agreement about what strategies are frowned upon in their group. Major land destruction, infinite combos, extra turn combos, and other degenerate strategies that many consider “un-fun” often fall under this category. This definitely solves the problem for these groups, but it opens up a whole new can of worms. What falls under “un-fun”? If one person just has a really good deck, are they going to risk getting “banned” from the group just for playing the game?
I think I’ve gone on for too long already about random aspects of Magic: the Gathering, but I’ve been fascinated by these complications in the Magic Circles present at the Magic table and I definitely don’t think there’s a clear answer. Who gets to decide the boundaries of the circle? What happens when you try to formalize this sort of decision into a competitive tournament environment? How should a group deal with someone who refuses to respect what is and isn’t allowed within the Circle?
Oh man! The Unsets are great. I remember playing Unstable with my brother on release, and reading the cards in Unhinged on gatherer.wizards.com, and chuckling the entire way through the comments section.
Here’s the FAQ for Unglued, where they answer some of the important questions you raised.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/unglued-qas-questions-asked-sometimes
“Can I use Ashnod’s Coupon to force my opponent to go to Hawaii for a special drink that’s only available there?
No. The rules governing unsportsmanlike behavior still apply. A player should ask only for something that can be reasonably acquired.
Can I force a minor to get me a beer?
For years we’ve tried to avoid acknowledging this fact, but I guess it’s time the truth finally came out. Your national government’s laws actually supersede all Magic rules. I just hope some nations don’t pass new Mulligan laws.”
That said, nobody reads these, and similar shenanigans still abound with this set. For example, people can literally pay to make their creatures stronger by buying copies of Cardboard Carapace from the store mid-combat!
You raise some interesting questions about the “magic circle”, defining boundaries, what’s fun, not fun, what should be allowed, who should decide it… and all in all, you’re curious as to what external forces are necessary to stabilize a “game environment”. What elements, cultural norms, legal boundaries and rules outside of the game can/should influence the game? What about the internal forces that stabilize a game?
Let’s put a little thermodynamic twist on that: I would argue that you can apply the First Law of Thermodynamics to any game system, in terms of the internal balance generated by those participating in the game. Let’s take your Magic the Gathering example, and think of the game and the community that plays it as a closed isolated system. A box with boundary conditions, and particles inside. If enough people start playing Armageddon such that the meta of the game changes, we can think of that as the spontaneous movement of certain particles in the box in the negative x-direction. This strategy might be perceived as un-fun to other players, who will act in a way to counter this motion. Perhaps they will include more instant “Counterspell” cards in their decks, which we can think of as particles moving in the positive x-direction. As the “meta”, or contemporary playstyles, evolves it eventually equilibrate, and inside our box, the net internal momentum and center of mass will remain unchanged. Thus, there is no need for an external force to re-establish equilibrium in a system, given enough time, a natural system should equilibrate itself.
If anyone can think of an game system example that disobeys thermodynamics, I would be very interested in investigating that system closer to elucidate why it does that…
I love the perspective on the way playstyles would react to some kinds of degenerate strategies! I think that for a competitive environment like a lot of sanctioned Magic play, your conclusion is exactly right. If everyone is motivated to win as much as possible, they’ll develop strategies to counteract the other dominant play (or just join the bandwagon themselves).
However, I think what I was considering when I wrote this was a more casual Magic environment where people aren’t necessarily playing to win as frequently as possible, but playing to have fun. In that case, an equally reasonable response to an Armageddon deck would just be to walk away and find someone else to play with. This violates your assumption of a closed system, but I think it is a pretty realistic scenario. The other factor is that even if they switch to a counterspell-heavy deck, this might push them away from playing Magic the way that they want to play and the way that they can have fun. In that case, we’ve reached a new equilibrium but it is one where fewer people are having fun. I’m not enjoying my new counterspell deck, and you’re not having fun because you can’t play the Armageddon deck successfully.
Trying to formalize methods for all players to have the most fun in a game (of Magic or anything else) is always going to be ridiculously hard, and I definitely don’t feel like I have any sort of right answers.