Lands - What Even Are They?
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- čas přidán 9. 05. 2024
- We sat down to talk about the art of the Thunder Junction basics, and got distracted by the bigger picture. If you like Venn diagrams and primary sources, this episode is for you! We'll get back to the Thunder Junction next week, we promise...
And speaking of promises, here's where you can check out the Pocket Players Guide from 1994 on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/magicgath... - Hry
I've always thought Catan's resource system looked a lot like Magic's system. Yes, the tiles do more and they actually represent a map for the board pieces to go on. But basically everywhere you have a settlement, you can pull resources from. And it's not like the players of a game of Catan are the representation of a settlement or city. The player controls multiple settlements, and like in Magic, will get to make plays that expand the land they cover, increasing their resources.
I think I see what you're getting at, but the...weirdness, if you want to call it that...that I perceive in Magic's system is that, while your lands (and I suppose a vague concept of "territory") increase over time, there's no interplay between your creatures and that happening. Well, there's an interaction between them, but it's usually in one direction only - once you get more lands, you can cast more creatures, but the creatures never really help you get more lands (there are exceptions, like Fertilid and Burnished Hart, but those are unique card functions, rather than the general role creatures play in the game). Whereas with Catan, it's more of a feedback loop. You use the resources generated by the lands to physically expand your presence on the gameboard, allowing you to use more land, allowing you to generate more resources, etc. I don't view Magic's setup as a *problem*, by any means - its a lighter-weight game design, and obviously I love the design as a whole. I view it more as an interesting quirk.
@@ManaCritics So casting permanents using the mana resources you get from land isn't a physical expansion of your presence of the board then?
@@Dynoboot It's just one directional - more lands means you can cast more creatures, but more creatures doesn't help you play more lands (again, with a few exceptions, but not as a rule). Whereas in Catan, and I think most games where land/territory is a factor, it's in more of a self-reinforcing system - more lands help you get more resources, AND more resources help you get more lands. I suppose you COULD argue that more creatures means increasing your likely number of future turns, and hence opportunities to DRAW more lands, but that's a bit more abstract.
EDIT: Rereading your comment, maybe this is more what I'm trying to get at...it seems like, if you're playing a game most of the metaphorical actions in game are taken by creatures, and where getting more lands is one of the major mechanisms of the game, its just kind of funny that you never send the creatures TO the lands. If someone was pitching the concept of the game to me in the first place, I might have assumed the creatures were used to go discover/conquer new lands.
Very interesting video. Two things that came to my mind: The Middle Earth CCG uses lands/locations heavily both as a base for playing certain cards (e.g. certain artifacts can only be played in certain locations) and the aspect of travelling through the land (much like the idea of both the Hobbit and LotR) and each area you travel through influences what cards can be played (a sea serpent would require travel through locations that are themed "Sea"), and as a matter of fact, this CCG was often played with the use of a map of the game world.
Second: There is a very old D and D setting, Dark Sun, where magic is worked by drawing energy from the land/environment. Each time, a spell is cast, the environment is depleted and destroyed a little more (although there are exceptions to it). So, when I first thought about "lands" as providing "mana" years ago, it really reminded me of that. And again: Super video!!!!
I've actually got a bunch (well, few hundred?) of the Middle Earth CCG cards in my closet! Never found anyone to play against, so I just collected them at the time. I didn't actually manage to find a DnD playgroup for the first time until like 2017, so I never played Dark Sun, but I definitely remember seeing books for it and Spelljammer at the bookstore, and thinking they looked incredibly cool. My parents got a little caught up in the Moral Panic over DnD in the 80s, so wouldn't let me have them at the time. Just glad they got over it by the time Magic rolled around...
Lands are resources rather than settings, even in the part of the story you read out. The cards represent the memories of the lands available to the duelist. They don't represent the setting where they're fighting. I think I mentioned on a previous video, in the Arena novel, they're little sachets of dirt the duelists pull out of their satchels. That was why they got rid of Islandhome - it didn't fit with the idea that you and your opponent are each using memories of islands, not actually transporting islands and seas to the battle. Landwalk - I believe - works by having a creature that can infiltrate the enemy's energy lines rather than "sneaking through the terrain." It tends to feature on creatures that are so intrinsically linked to that type of land that they can manipulate the enemy's connection to that kind of land to evade their defenses.
That dark interpretation of the beings fighting each other against their will is canon, at least early on. Apart from the start of the Whispering Woods novel, which you read, there's a story in one of the original anthology books of two beings who are friends with each other - a Black Knight and something else, I forget what - summoned to the same fight on opposite sides, and the Black Knight is forced to kill his friend in the fight. He comes back after to bury him.
Yeah, I just reread The Brothers War, and I had *thought* they'd abandoned this model of lands powered spells worked after they moved the novel publishing in-house, but was surprised to find the passages where Hurkyl is discovering Magic echo the same concept.
Anyway, I agree that you've described what lands represent in the narrative correctly, but I now think my thesis statement should have "...and isn't that weird?" Or, perhaps not "weird," but "unique" or "interesting." I mean, this is a game full of land cards and creature cards, where the creatures never go to, encounter, reside on, defend, or attack the lands. There is indeed an explanation for that, but it still really stands out.
It occurs to me that, in addition to is obvious origin in leylines and other beliefs in the land being a source of power, lands as the ultimate resource make sense from a very material standpoint too as they are the origin of, like, pretty much all forms of resource extraction. Food? Comes from the land (or the animals that are part of said land). Metals? They come from the land. Textiles? Wood? Oil? Freshwater? Even the people of a city (for lands that aren't wilderness environments) are a resource representing their workforce or manpower. Whether it's intentional or by coincidence, it works out pretty well.
I think its definitely coincidence, in that Garfield's original design as told through this short stories implies a duel/game being something that occurs on the scale of minutes, maybe hours. But, from where we stand now with tens of thousands of cards, and the work of hundreds(?) of different designers, there's a definite ambiguity to what any given thing represents that, as you suggest, can imply a lot of different stories - and that's just really cool.
Sorcery tcg is similar to magic in its resource system, with the addition that your "sites" (lands) actually make up the battlefield and your creatures exist on them.
I've heard Sorcery mentioned a few times on Reddit, but this might be the detail that piques my interest enough to investigate further.
5:50 Lor mentioned!!!
We take it you're a fan? Julie's played it, but Derek hasn't. Would you recommend getting into at this point in time?
I think none of these ludonarrative interpretations are mutually exclusive. "Tapping" a Land can mean different things for different mages. To a boros mage being there to rally his summons might matter while a Dimir mage might more easily pull from far off places with no care for consent. At the same time it's easy to imagine a Planeswalker summoning entire landscapes into different planes.
Valid, and the more I think about this, I think this is an interesting aspect...possibly a strength, possibly just a neutral attribute...of a game designed at this level of abstraction. Similarly, you could come up scenarios to plausibly explain a turn as representing minutes, or years. The scope of a given duel might be the size of a football field, or move across planes (as evidenced specifically by Battlebond and Planechase, respectively). In any case, "ludonarrative" was not in my vocabulary, and now I'm following that rabbit hole, so thanks for introducing me to it.
@@ManaCritics I'd say at least in Commander this malleable scope is not just a strength but possibly a major part of why it's as big as it is and why all the IP crossovers kind of work. Each player gets to create their own narrative lense with their deck. Each game will in effect create four different stories that are equally valid. Nobody sits down afterwards to agree on what that game represented but those who care will have a story in their mind.
First !!
I wish we could include images in comments, because I would absolutely reply with the Unfinity "Blue Ribbon." Alas, I cannot, but the sentiment is there.