Beyond the Norm: May 2018 MTG Mailbag

Q: Hey, Ryan! I just recently got into Magic, and have enjoyed playing some more competitive events. However, my last event tournament me with a bad taste in my mouth. After handily defeating my opponent, I extended my hand and said, “Good game,” as polite humans are taught to do in competitive endeavors. Oh my god, you would’ve thought I’d threatened to murder the guy! My 42-year-old opponent glared at me, snorted, and said, “No it wasn’t.” They then stormed off. Were they making up for the lack of Storming they did in our match? Is there some unspoken rule about this in Magic? Was I, contrary to my intensions, being rude?

Signed,

Bad Sportsman?

A: Hey, Bad Sportsman?, don’t get too down on yourself. Remember how after high school sports games, your team would all line up and handshake/high five the opposing team? Do you also remember how the opposing team would consistently respond by assuming that your good manners were actually passive-aggressive attempts to belittle them and assert your dominance? Or how, on the rare occasion that the coaches decided it was best if the teams skipped this ritual, it was because they didn’t trust their team of immature, hormone-fueled 16-year-olds all hopped up on adrenaline and Gatorade to act like mature, rational adults?

Well, Magic is a lot like high school sports. Nothing gets your adrenaline pumping and your fight/flight response going more than top-decking your way out of game that you should’ve lost. And of course, it’s irrational to expect an opponent to be polite to you after they… *shudder*… lost a card game. Particularly a card game centered around dragons and weird fungus pods.

In conclusion, you probably need to lower your expectations. Expecting adults to behave in a mature way in a public setting when playing a card game is no more realistic than expecting raging teenagers to get along with each other post-sports games. Wait, what’s that? The teenagers actually do get along after the vast majority of all games? And when they don’t, it’s embarrassing and shameful? Ah, well, I guess I’m not the best at comparisons.

Q: Over the last month or so, I’ve noticed that a lot of Magic cards have spiked in price by an enormous amount. What is this Reserved List that I keep hearing about? Should I switch over my retirement savings from a 401K and BitCoin to a portfolio of Reserved List cards?

Signed,

Elf of Wall Street

A: The Reserved List is a list of cards that Wizards made a super-duper-pinky-promise to never, ever reprint. Except when they kind of did in different ways a bunch of times, but now they even follow the spirit of their super-duper-pinky-promise. As such, cards such as 1WW 2/2 Flying First Strikers and 2R 2/2’s with Flying and Toughness-Firebreathing will remain the prized gems of collectors everywhere.

Now, these cards might sound like draft chaff, but you need consider that there are very few of these pieces of garbage out there. It’d be like finding a rotting banana peel from an endangered species of the fruit in the dumpster: something you would happily dumpster dive in order to collect and then place on the market for an absurd amount of money. 

Even though there has been near-zero demand for these cards, some people have decided that they don’t want to miss out on the next big RL spike, thus blasting our 2/2 flyer to $135. Now, some idiots out there with little pieces of paper called “economic degrees” claim that the trading of an asset at a price that strongly exceeds the asset’s intrinsic value is an “economic bubble.” But let’s be real; you only ever blew bubbles as a kid to pop them. And when people realize that they can’t actually offload these pieces of trash at exorbitant prices, we may see the prices of these glorified banana peels crash.

So to answer your question regarding reinvesting your 401K and BitCoin into RL cards, I’d say it depends on how much money you have. If you have enough to form a nice, strong cushion on the ground to protect yourself when everything comes crashing down, then go for it! And besides, if you’ve stuck with BitCoin, you’ve already demonstrated that you enjoy graphs of your money’s value that look more like roller coasters.

Q: If my opponent cast Ixalan’s Binding on my Squee, the Immortal, am I able to cast the exiled Squee?

This is a really tricky question. You see, the rules of Magic state unequivocally that you can absolutely cast Squee from under a Binding. Buuuuuuuut… on MTGO and MTGA, you can’t. So is this just one of the many bugs from which MTGO is literally built, a mindless hive mind of bugs? Luckily, we live in an age in which the primary mode of communicating policy is Twitter, so the rules manager chimed in.

Well, actually, one of the rules manager’s friends chatted with him and posted what he was told on Twitter, which is that the intent of the rules is for Squee to be able to be cast from underneath Binding. Apparently, the MTR is a document that is very open to interpretation by the Supreme Court of Magic: the Gathering. Keep that in mind the next time a judge tries to deliver a ruling that doesn’t fit with your interpretation.

For example, as a generous, open-minded individual, I believe that when the rules tell me to start with seven cards in hand, the spirit of the rules is for me to start with as many cards as I want in my opening hand. After all, the MTR was written a long time ago, and there’s no way the Framers could ever have imagined that the game would grow to the size that it is today. Seven cards simply aren’t enough anymore. Similarly, the MTR states that I have a right to bear a Commander, as long as I’m playing in a regulated game of Commander. My interpretation, however, allows me to just ignore the restrictions that are inconvenient to me. That’s why I carry all of my Commanders openly wherever I go, whether Standard, Modern, or even Pauper.

Now, some bold students of the MTR asked the rules manager whether the letter of the MTR might be changed in the future to reflect the spirit of the rules. To this, the rules manager wisely replied that, “Answering questions about possible futures creates paradoxes. Let’s not destroy space and time.” This is a stroke of genius from the rules manager. Finally, we understand that people who answer questions in an obtuse way are not actually trying to obfuscate anything; they’re just looking out for space and time.

Am I going to pick up dinner on the way home? Sorry, dear, there won’t be a home if I answer that question. Will I ever agree to settle down and get married? Again, hard to say without accidentally ending up killing my own grandfather or something. Do I even value this relationship? I wish I could answer that question, but it’s starting to sound like you don’t value our entire universe and the spacetime continuum. Geez. Let this be a lesson: there’s nothing more dangerous to spacetime than questions about the future that you would rather not answer.

That’s all the time we have for my mailbag this week, folks! When will I do another one? Hard to say without collapsing the very fabric of reality, so I’ll choose not to answer that one.

Ryan is a grinder from Boston with SCG & GP Top 8’s and a PT Day 2. His fragile self-esteem is built on approval from others, so be sure to tell him what you think of his articles on Twitter @RyanNormandin and in his Twitch chat at twitch.tv/norm_the_ryno.