Flavor and Simplicity

During the selection process for our set design project (which ended up as Tesla), there was a lot of discussion about worldbuilding, story, and appropriate flavor for a Magic set. Many readers voiced interest in "combination" worlds; that is, Mummies vs. Cowboys, or Victorian steampunk + Egyptian archaeology. I don't find these visions compelling as themes for a marketable Magic set. In fact, when Magic goes top-down, it's safest to stick to the Theme Park Version.

The first reason to keep things simple is audience familiarity. People who care about worldbuilding tend to be hardcore genre fiction nerds. By contrast, most of Magic's audience has only passing familiarity with many genres. On average, they've seen Kung Fu Panda, and perhaps Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but have never heard of Wong Fei-Hung. They likely know something about cowboys and zombies, but nothing about Deadlands. Going too deep into flavor obscurities makes it difficult for the players to connect to the source material. Kamigawa block made this mistake; players enjoyed samurai and ninja, but didn't know a kodama from a baku.

What's more, Magic is a constrained storytelling medium. Unlike a novel or video game, a CCG has no guarantee that the players will view a high proportion of the material. Nor does Creative have any control of what order the information arrives in. This was the major failing of the Weatherlight Saga. It told an interesting and complex story through art and flavor text. But that story was largely incoherent from the players' perspective, because they didn't view all the cards, and they didn't know what order to put them in. Reading the cards in Tempest was a bit like hitting the "Random" button on a webcomic archive; you got assorted ideas about the characters, but only the vaguest clue of the chronology, setting, and plot. 

That's why complex stories are a thing of the past. The plot of Innistrad block, easily the most successful top-down block of all time, is roughly: "Monsters are bad and scary. Then they get worse. Then Avacyn comes out of the Helvault, and the humans win! Yay!" Painting the story and world in bold, broad strokes is the only way to ensure that a player who cracks a booster will immediately get the correct message. An intricate setting or plot is not going to come through in the random assortment of cards that a player picks up.

For example, the main conflict of Kamigawa is the Kami War; that's something that you can pick up from flavor text in several places. One can safely assume that the Kami are on one side of it, and the humans are probably on the other. But where are the Moonfolk, Akki, Nezumi, Oni, Ogres, and Kitsune in this conflict? I haven't the foggiest, and neither do most people who played with those cards.

But in Innistrad, we can pick up virtually all of the relevant flavor of the set from one card! A single look at Abbey Griffin, Clifftop Retreat, Elite Inquisitor, Slayer of the Wicked, Victim of Night, or Voiceless Spirit will make the central conflict clear. And although Clifftop Retreat only mentions fighting vampires and demons, nobody would be surprised to learn that werewolves and zombies are also antagonists. That's because Innistrad's cosmology is so simple as to be predictable. In short, the advantage of using extremely well-known tropes is that players don't need to see many cards to figure out the world.

Of course, the safest choice need not be the best. Why, you might ask, shouldn't Magic take more risks in worldbuilding? In my view, the right venue for innovation and risk-taking is in design and development. Magic has done well first and foremost by generating the best gameplay experience possible. Other CCGs with far more well-developed, complex, and unique IPs (Star Trek, Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, etc.) have failed to capture this degree of success. The best way to continue Magic's growth is to let flavor be a straightforward and even predictable element of the game, and use mechanics to push the boundaries of gameplay.