August 10, 2021

Fish Food

This one’s about a Magic: The Gathering card. I’m sorry.

Not too long ago, a card was banned from a Magic: The Gathering format.1 This event isn’t the most common thing in this game and as such usually garners some sort of attention, but never enough to trend on Twitter - until this time at least. The ban this week hit with such force and reaction that it wasn’t just a big deal on the Magic social media sphere - it broke through to top Twitter trends. 

Obviously I’m not interested in talking about the Twitter algorithm but it is a great indicator of just how big of a deal this banning turned out to be - and I think looking at the how’s and why’s of it happening is a great chance to look at the truly bizarre relationship between designing a living game and the audience who plays it.

The part where I must curse you with understanding of Magic: The Gathering

Stripped down to the basics, Magic: The Gathering is mechanically about managing resources and actions to reduce the opponent’s life total to zero. The resource Magic uses is “Mana,” which after being generated from a source can be used to pay the play costs of other types of cards, generally referred to as “spells.” Think of it as a magic gauge or ammunition in other games - it’s a system intended to prevent the player from being able to extend infinitely. Pretty simple on paper. 

Now throw all of that out, because in practice Magic uses a lot of different resources. Mana doesn’t exclusively come from Magic’s primary resource cards (called Lands), it can effectively be generated from any other card type provided its effects are right. Often this comes in the form of trading something for Mana, such as the player’s life total or other cards. Some effects even generate cards that can be converted into Mana from thin air via those aforementioned effects. What this has created over Magic’s lifetime is a system in which basically everything is a resource, and the game is about arranging these resources in such a way to ensure victory.

So with that understanding, let’s look at the convicted. Meet Hullbreacher: 

For now, we don’t need to really consider the statistic details around the border of the card, we’re going to focus in on the plain text below the card: 

Flash

If an opponent would draw a card except the first one they draw in each of their draw steps, instead you create a Treasure token. (It’s an artifact with “{Tap}, Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color.”)

Knowing what we now know about the game, it’s easy to determine what Hullbreacher is supposed to do. This is a card designed to deny an opponent from obtaining excess resources (in this case, more cards) by creating a scenario in which attempting to do so instead provides resources to the opponent (a way to generate more Mana.) On top of that, it has an ability called “Flash”2 which allows it to ignore normal timing rules this card would have and for our purposes means it can come out at literally any moment the game might call for. 

Now that we’ve spent over 300 words understanding the mechanical details, we can now start to examine the context in which Hullbreacher was designed and played with.

Smörgåsbord

Magic is a long running and dense card game filled with thousands of already printed cards and continues to expand and reinforce this deep bench regularly. Magic is at the same time several smaller games that utilize the same rules engine but use unique ban lists and limitations on the available card pool. These changes create entirely different play metas and patterns that would otherwise never be experienced. 

And then there’s Commander. 

Unlike most other formats3 officially supported by the owners at Wizards of the Coast, Commander modifies the rules engine instead of limiting the card pool. There are several ways this manifests: instead of being a one on one affair, Commander is a multiplayer free for all, players have to use 100 card decks and cannot run any duplicates of cards that aren’t the basic Mana generating lands, and each deck is restricted further by the details of their deck’s “Commander,” a type of card that serves as the face of the deck. What can be a Commander is based on a few criteria, but for our purposes all that matters is that only cards that match the colors on a Commander can be used in that deck. And most importantly - Wizards of the Coast didn’t invent this variant of play.

Commander creates a conundrum that is somewhat unique and also not that much so. On the one hand, most people who casually play a card game often do so at home with close friends and often do so without consulting the rulebooks all the time. (Seriously, ask yourself if you ever actually played the Pokémon TCG correctly back when having Pokémon cards to play with was a thing you could do.) On the other hand, Commander wasn’t just being played on a kitchen table - it was being picked up by players all over the world, and was designed by long-time players with a deep familiarity with the complexities of the rules. However, this still isn’t how the game was meant to be played, so not everything fit completely, and designs and ideas that work excellently in other formats were completely dead in the water within the context of Commander. If you’re WOTC, you pretty much have to take notice of the situation eventually, because you’re going to start hearing from players to design cards that help balance a format you don’t design for - and having more than two people playing a game at once tends to mean more people are playing your game. 

So WOTC decided to acknowledge the format outright, not just by designing cards for it, but entire product lines. Riding that wave, it’s now generally believed this format is the most played constructed Magic variant. 4 But they never took control of it. To this day, the decisions about Commander’s rules, how they work, and what cards get banned happen completely independently of the folks designing and releasing said cards. And it is into this scenario that Hullbreacher leaps from the depths. 

What exactly IS a Hullbreacher?

Hullbreacher comes from one of the aforementioned Commander-targeted products called “Commander Legends,” which means we don’t really have to take other variants of the game into account when looking deeper at its design, but we do have to consider the card first and foremost as a product. It was designed to target the Commander audience, to be something they’d want to get their hands on and play with. To be so, the card has to be able to make some kind of an impact on Commander, which is a different context than the other formats and designs the company uses. 

Whereas most Magic formats feature low resource, optimized, quick, and efficient deck designs; Commander rewards mechanics that reward outpacing players over the course of more turns via resource amassing. This usually comes in a couple of different strategies, but easily one of the most potent is to create reliable and recurring means of drawing multiple cards a turn. This makes plenty of sense - the more cards you have, the more options you have to play, and as we discussed before, everything is a resource in Magic. It is pretty clear that in this context, Hullbreacher was designed as a means to fight back against that strategy - and on paper it makes sense. Turning an opponent's draws into a resource for yourself is both great for advantage and gives the game a certain “why are you hitting yourself” vibe. 

That’s not the only thing that impacts this particular card - it was a card in a set designed to allow Commander fans to build decks exclusively using cards found within its booster packs (this is referred to mechanically as “limited” gameplay), which means the designs of the cards had to be able to synergize with each other and also be balanced against each other. To make a point - the ability to do this even remotely well is one of the most fascinating and impressive aspects of Magic’s design, the kind of thing deserving of its own piece another day. 

To understand how this other aspect impacted Hullbreacher’s design, it’s time to bring back the other details of the card we’ve ignored until this point: 

Now, note both the color of the card and its “typeline” - the text between the image and the effect text we called out before. Hullbreacher is Blue, which means it needs to be included in decks that utilize blue colored resources. It’s also a “Merfolk Pirate” which means it has synergies with other Merfolk and/or Pirates. The Pirate detail is most notable here, because “Pirates” was one of the synergies included within Commander Legends.5 If you pulled enough Pirate cards like Hullbreacher, you could build your own crew. The Pirate’s mechanical gimmick was the generation of “Treasure,” the Mana generating token mentioned in Hullbreacher’s effect. On top of that, due to existing Pirate cards in Magic, the archetype was nested between the colors of Red and Blue for their identity. 

Side note - the colors of Magic are not just one of the ways to introduce limitations and complexity to cards but are also the vehicle Magic uses to present its philosophies, stories, atmosphere, and lore. This “color pie” has different identities to set them apart and allow for player expression - especially in Commander. I could do a whole series on it but Alex Barker at Draftism.com already has, in a single article nonetheless. Check that out here if you’re interested. For our purposes, ew just need to understand that it is a combination of the color’s identities and the designed archetypes of the limited format that led to Hullbreacher’s details. 

Now, you know what Wizards of the Coast made, but now it’s time to see what people did with it. 

Make It Rain

One of the most interesting things about analyzing game design is trying to, like I have in this piece for far too many words, understand how exactly a game designer landed on the choices they made. However, often it is just as difficult for a designer to try to predict and react to what a player will do with a game once they get their hands on it. In the case of Hullbreacher, two major things happened:

• Players immediately identified an extreme case in which combining this effect with cards that make players discard and redraw their hands would create a near-unbreakable lock of dominance over the game state. 

• Many of these players immediately began integrating this combination into their decks. 

To be clear - I have no doubt in my mind that the design team at WOTC were very much aware of the possibility for abuse of the resource advantage Hullbreacher provided, but for whatever reason decided the benefits outweighed the risks. It isn’t too hard to hypothesize why that was, either; Commander is a self-regulating casual format. By design, most players in this format tend to play what they find to be fun, rather than optimizing their decks for the greatest win/loss ratio.

But for some reason, Hullbreacher’s potency was too tempting to avoid for the community, despite the side effects to the player base. In an interview with Commander content and aggregate site EDHRec.com, content creator ManaCurves (real name Chase Carroll) spoke candidly about playing the card: 

“I love Hullbreacher. I am of the mind that it’s super cool. Hullbreacher is really, really potent...because we run cards like Winds of Change, Wheel of Fortune, Wheel of Fate, and Windfall. So, we’re going to be making everybody draw a lot of cards. Normally, that’s a very scary thing to do in Commander, but Hullbreacher shuts this down. Yes, this is amazing and gives you a huge advantage, but it also leads to a lot of feel-bad moments. I actually only just recently put my Hullbreacher in my Locust God deck after owning it for a month or so, just because I felt guilty running it in there. I’ve played it in previous decks and it led to a lot of “this isn’t good” moments. I think that kind of ties into the whole concept of when you should pace yourself playing games. I feel like I would only play my Hullbreacher if I knew I was about to win, rather than playing it in the middle of the game and then robbing everybody of their chance to play, and that’s a lesson that I’ve learned recently. So, Hullbeacher is definitely good...but I recommend playing it very carefully.”6

Despite being a card that punishes value-engines, in the hands of players Hullbreacher was applied as its own unshakeable value-engine. An engine so powerful it caused players to ignore their own better angels on top of being particularly potent. No one likes sitting down to play a game and subsequently not being able to play, especially in a tabletop situation. Can’t just quit and requeue up in that situation. The playerbase began pushing back against the pirate hard, including pushing back against indications that other mechanics or factors could also be a part of the problem (even when it was true - Hullbreacher was a combo piece, remember), and the card’s name became mud. It threatened to impact the important interactions between players keeping the game going. And sure enough, the community’s representatives stepped up and broke the “In Case of Emergency” glass - leading us back to the beginning of all this.

Ship to wreck

Hullbreacher is both a unique case, and also one we see incredibly commonly. Unique in as much as when it came time to take the wind out of Hullbreacher’s sails, the community was able to do so on its own, without going through the game’s owners. Common, in that you’d have to try really hard to spit and not hit a game’s community bothered by some mechanic or change that game recently made.

Remember that time Epic Games put the titular weapon from it’s (ironically now) iOS exclusive game Infinity Blade into Fortnite? The design of the blade, which was meant to be incredibly powerful, overshot the mark so far that Epic was forced to pull the damn thing in under a week and issue a mea culpa. When discussing the intentions behind implementing the Infinity Blade, Epic cited a desire to shake up the gameplay7 - something that has basically become the reason to play Fortnite. Live services are hardly the only place a developer’s intentions end up rubbing some players the wrong way. Ask ten people what they think about Breath of the Wild and you’ll almost certainly get one of them complaining about the game’s breakable weapons (it’s me, I’m the one.) 

These choices don’t have to be game breaking or ruin the experience to have players bounce off of them, but it is fascinating to see in real time all the same. Games are designed by humans as much as they’re played by them and the relationship often ends up like sailing the ocean without a compass. These designers are often gazing out to the horizon and left to try to visualize what it looks like, what will be “fun” for players, without any idea of what’s actually out there. Mistakes can happen, the ship can run ashore, or even go in the opposite direction, and the waves of response can be relenting.

However, often those same mistakes add flavor and history to the experience, and become vivid memories of their own. Design is a reflection of the creative process, in both the wins and the losses. I like to think that this is one of the things that makes games and art specifically compelling - even if it leads to a couple of unfun games of Magic along the way.