What's The Frequency, Kenneth?

So there was this recent article by Kenneth Nagle on MagictheGathering.com. Seems like Nagle has been given the task of championing bad cards, possibly because no-one wanted to read one more such article by Mark Rosewater. This is somewhat amusing because back when Nagle wasn't yet a Wizards employee, he wrote an article named Winning With The Worst Card Of All Time. But anyway. I'll admit that I've been itching to write something about bad cards in general and bad rares in particular, and this is as good a time as any. I don't buy into Rosewater's articles (and now also Nagle's article) because I simply do not believe that Magic must have bad cards (as in bad-bad) in order to flourish as a game. Furthermore, the articles come across like a sales pitch. The point is not to be informative, the point is to convince the players/buyers that Wizards is doing the right thing.

Having said that, both Rosewater and Nagle do have some points that I find myself agreeing with. That leaves a lot of points that I don't agree with. In the interest of keeping this post reasonably short, I won't respond to all of them, but only to those with which I disagree the most. I'll also make some points of my own, so that this post isn't all one-sided. They probably won't be points that everyone will agree with, but they certainly are true for me. But first...

What Is a Bad Card?

I imagine Wizards hear a lot about how many bad cards they make, so it is understandable that they are defensive about it. I personally don't mind weak cards. Rosewater mentions the Iron Star cycle, and Nagle defends Cylian Elf. The latter might be a little unassuming, but I would definitely not mind adding it as filler in a Limited deck. The former... well, I would probably not put them as filler in any Constructed deck (possibly as a build-around), but I know for a fact that I have won matches with preconstructed decks due to such cards, so they can't be entirely bad.

So no. When I talk about bad cards, I don't mean cards like those. I speak of real stinkers. Cards that make you think why, oh why could I not have got a Gray Ogre instead? Cards like One with Nothing.

So with that out of the way, let's move on.

The Someone Likes It Defense

Nagle says that 'No one would ever play with this card.' is simply a way of hiding the more selfish statement that 'I would never play with this card.' That's pretty unfair. We all know that no one is hyperbole, but it does not have to be an unqualified statement. If I ran a poll for all Magic players, and got a hypothetical result that 95% would never play seriously with One with Nothing, would Nagle's reaction just be to decry that 95% for being so selfish? That's a pretty simplistic world view there; anybody that doesn't agree with you is just selfish.

Both Rosewater and Nagle mention the Über-Johnnies, the guys that like playing with the stinkers. Fair enough, they probably exist. However. I'm going to make some assumptions here. Assumption one is that even Über-Johnnies will find pleasure in cards other than stinkers. In other words, it is quite possible to design cards that appeal to that demographic without resorting to stinkers. If I'm right, you don't have to make stinkers for the Über-Johnnies' sake. Assumption two is that sometimes a stinker is just a stinker, and at some point the Über-Johnny will move on without having been able to break the card. If I'm right, there are stinkers that don't even appeal to Über-Johnnies.

The same goes for Nagle's comment that all cards see play in the casual MtG:O room. I'm sure there is someone that takes every card he gets out for a whirl before concluding that wow, it really did suck as much as I thought it did. Nagle doesn't mention numbers, so we don't know how much stinkers are played, only that they are. My guess is that it doesn't happen particularly frequently, or Nagle would have mentioned it.

The Power Balance Defense

Rosewater goes on about how Wizards can't just make more and more powerful cards. Nagle says Wizards can't just drop the weakest cards all the time. Welcome to the wonderful world of asymptotes. More seriously though, no-one says (or at least I don't say) that you should increase the power level. What we're saying is, could you please stay away from the cards that, given the absolute 0.0-5.0 pointing system that you guys use, would end up at 0.0? Keep the lower end around stuff that most people at least sometimes could consider using as filler.

And Rosewater... speaking of the pointing system, you realize that it can't be used without reservations to buy a set, right? A 200-card set where half of the cards are 5.0 and the other half is 0.0 would not equal a 200-card set at 2.5; it would effectively equal one 100-card set at 5.0 and another 100-card set at 0.0. So all stuff at evening it out doesn't really fly. Sets are defined by their stronger cards (or at least the cards that go into decks). You only hear about the lower end when there are so many low-point cards that players start objecting.

Rosewater also asks how does R&D keep the more powerful constructed cards from being ruining (sic) limited? The answer to the problem is to make troublesome cards rare to minimize their effect on limited. But that is exactly the wrong way to go about it. If you mix bombs and stinkers (or fine, bombs and so-sos), the disadvantage of not getting a bomb grows as the number of opportunities decreases. It's as with coin flips: If you only flip one coin, you'll get heads 50% of the time and tails 50% of the time. But if you flip two coins, you'll get two heads 25% of the time, one head and one tails 50% of the time and two tails 25% of the time. And so on. As the number of coins increases, the probability of getting approximately the same number of heads as tails grows. And if heads is a bomb and tails is a so-so, then evidently you'd get a more even Limited environment by using more coins, because then the probability that everybody is on a similar footing would be higher. The current solution is to dilute any heads you get by shuffling them into a stack of tails. That works, too--at least until someone has to play with a stack of all-tails against someone else that has three or more heads in their stack--but don't make it sound like that is the only solution, or even the best one from a strict mathematical point of view, unless you're actually ready to put down some proof behind your reasoning.

The Hidden Gems, Discoveries and Skill Defense

These are mostly fair points. In some cases, yes, narrow cards can be hidden gems, it might take skill to notice them, it can be a sense of discovery to the process. But sometimes, a stinker is just a stinker. And players will notice. Other than Über-Johnnies, I don't really think that anyone cares for cards like One with Nothing. I don't care that the rare Gray Ogre-variant that you made that costs 9R but is otherwise functionally identical works so wondrously well with Riddle of Lightning. It does not take skill to understand that it is sensible to replace that with a Greater Gargadon, it only takes common sense.

Counterpoint: Price

It may be true that some shops have boxes with discount rares that go for US $1 each, but that is not the case everywhere. At the Magic shop nearest me that sells singles (a mere 100 miles away), One with Nothing goes for 5€. Why? Because it is a rare card. If I want to go Über-Johnny and buy a playset to try out with my friends, it'll cost me 20€. Because although the nearest shop of mention is 100 miles away, it is also by far the easiest and most convenient way for me to get singles. And if the choice is between a single Overgrown Tomb and four One with Nothings, well, it's not a hard choice really.

Counterpoint: Starvation...

One thing that annoys me particularly much is when the stinkers are rare. I would prefer them to be at other rarities. Rosewater points out that when it comes to people like me, There's some irony to the fact that so many players essentially said, 'I hate this card; you should have printed more of it.' He does have a point, but he also misses half of the issue.

Fact is that bombs tend to come as rares. Rosewater says this is intentional, because bombs are disruptive to Limited. It is an imperfect solution, but none the less, that's the way things are. Let it also be said that Wizards also makes a fair number of great commons. But bombs still tend to come as rares. Given that, every stinker rare I get is a bomb I didn't get. The stinkers starve out the bombs, and that is true both in Limited and Constructed. It would be less irritating to get a common stinker because the probability is quite high that I only lose out on a so-so card. If all rares were stinkers, or if power truly was equally distributed between the rarities (as in, the average common is as powerful as the average uncommon is as powerful as the average rare) and only then would a slew of stinkers be added.... in that case, yes, I would much prefer to have the stinkers at rare so that I would see them as little as possible. But such is not the case. Wizards is working on equalizing the power level between the rarities, and I applaud that, but we aren't there yet and frankly I doubt we'll ever be. I mean, take a look at just about any recent set's rares: even now, could you ever conceive of (for instance) Battlegrace Angel at common?

Counterpoint: ... and Saturation

Furthermore, there's also the issue of saturation. Even if I lost out on a great common and got a stinker common instead, I will likely get that common from another booster, even if I buy relatively few boosters. I get eleven commons from a booster after all, but I only get one rare.

Let's consider a 80/80/80 set, and an equal split between colors (just single-color cards, no colorless cards). If I buy a booster display (36 boosters), I get 36x11=396=99x4 commons. I might not have four of each common, but it is quite probable that I am quite close, and I might also be able to trade the 80 or so surplus commons away for the commons that I'm missing. However, I just have 36x3=108 uncommons, which is a long way from 80x4=320, to say nothing of my 36 rares. Now, if 25% of the commons were stinkers, it would not matter to me... because since I have a full set of all commons, I will also have full sets of the non-stinker commons. I'm saturated and have 75%x80x4=60x4=5x12x4 common non-stinkers, or 12x4=48 of each color--more than I can fit into any single 60-card deck, even if I used just the commons and made it mono-color. But if instead 25% of the rares are stinkers, that leaves me with 75%x36=27 rare non-stinkers, or 5.4 (on average) of each color. In this case, the stinkers directly cut into the amount of rares that I can put into my decks, because if there had been no stinkers I would have had 7.2 rares (on average) per color. And if the non-stinker rares are bombs, I obviously would like to have as many as possible in my decks.

If I just bought a few boosters from every set, and the power truly was equally distributed among the rarities, then sure, it would make sense (in some way) to put the stinkers at rare. But you don't have to buy that many boosters to saturate your commons--for a set with 80 commons it takes 30 boosters, or ten drafts, or five Sealed deck tournaments, and you're there. After that, all you can do is collect more uncommons and rares, and at that point you don't want any stinker rares.