A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 14: EOTFOFYL
Last time, I wrote about the history of Masques block in Constructed, such as it is. This time, we're going to do something a little different. We're going to talk about the overall arc of Magic history. We're going to talk about Magic's players. And then we're going to talk about exactly one card.
The Ages of Magic: the Gathering
Mark Rosewater divides the history of the game into 'stages of design', which line up with big changes to Wizard's process for making new card sets. I propose a chronology based more on player experience of the game and its role in the culture:
- The Archaic Age from Alpha (1993) through Alliances (1996). Wizards has no clear process either for its design or for its release schedule; individual cards are the object of design, not card sets; players are still working through the elementary principles of strategy, and expectations for what a TCG even is are being set.
- The Heroic Age from Mirage (1996) through Prophecy (2000). Wizards has figured its release schedule out, but the set design process is still messy and unpolished. The player experience is one of discovering deck archetypes – and, often, of the metagame being defined by a small number of broken cards.
- The Golden Age from Invasion (2000) through Scourge (2003). This is the template: the block release schedule, the idea of blocks having well-defined and clearly presented themes. The three blocks that comprise this age correspond to three block themes that would be done over again in the Silver Age: Multicolor cards, the graveyard, and 'tribal' synergies.
- The Silver Age from Mirrodin (2003) through Avacyn Restored (2012). This is the longest age and the bulk of Magic's history. The patterns of how new sets are released and how things work become well-worn; the quality of the product is high; competitive play has a rhythm and a seasonality to it that gives rise to a yearly cycle of events not unlike a sports season.
- The Bronze Age from Return to Ravnica (2012) through Dominaria(2018) – The product model breaks down as Wizards endeavors to solve lingering problems with how the game is published, generally with mixed results. Creatively, Magic revists and reuses its history more and more.
- The Dark Age from Guilds of Ravnica (2018) through now – Some of the worst design and business decisions in the history of the game get made at a time when Magic is more popular than ever before.
Invasion is Magic at a very special point in its history: Mature enough to be recognizable as what Magic would be for the following 20 years; but still young enough that all the low-hanging fruit is unpicked and all the ideas are fresh. The card we will talk about is one of those key recurring ideas that will show up again and again in Magic.
But before we talk about that card, let's talk about player types.
Psychographics
In game design, especially in an ongoing game, it's useful to classify your players into archetypes – grouping them based on why they play and what they pursue in the game. The Bartle taxonomy (Killer, Achiever, Socializer, Explorer) is probably the best-known such classification, but Wizards has its own set of player archetypes (or 'psychographics,' as they call them) that they use:
- Timmy plays the game to experience something. They want to cast Goldspan Dragon because it's a kick-ass dragon.
- Johnny plays the game to express something. They view deckbuilding as the most important part of Magic – building a deck is like preparing a performance, and playing lets them show off their creativity or cleverness. They want to put Goldspan Dragon in their deck because it enables a combo with all their other Treasure cards, or because it's a Sarkhan theme deck and so it obviously needs dragons.
- Spike plays to prove something. They view the game as an arena to demonstrate their competitive prowess. They put Goldspan Dragon in their deck because the card is disgusting and people tend to die quickly when it resolves and you attack with it.
Naturally, this being a series about the game's competitive history, we focus on Spike. But Spike gets short shrift. People talk about Timmy cards: big creatures, high-variance effects, moments of high spectacle. People talk about Johnny cards: unique lines of rules text, support for quirky themes, combo pieces. But people tend to view 'Spike cards' as simply those cards that are good on rate; the Ancestral Recalls of the world.
This is not true. Spike wants to prove something. They want to outsmart their opponent. They don't just want cards that are good (though they do want that, because playing the good cards and not the bad cards proves you can tell the difference). They want cards that are even better in their hands, because they know how to wield them.
The card we are talking about
Reveal the top five cards of your library. An opponent separates those cards into two piles. Put one pile into your hand and the other into your graveyard.
Fact or Fiction is one of defining cards of Magic. It's format-defining. It's era-defining. And it's player-defining.
Remember Intuition? Intuition was powerful, but it was also disappointing. The intended minigame of choosing three cards and trying to trick your opponent into giving you the one you want never happened – you just always chose three copies of the same card. Boring. A letdown. We'll meet a properly 'fixed' Intuition a few years down the line.
But Fact or Fiction is already what Intuition wasn't. Fact or Fiction does lead to mind games. It's a double-sided opportunity to prove that you're the smartest person at the table. Splitting FoF piles is a rarefied art, and casting FoF immediately puts your opponent on the spot – they have to perform that art, and well. Every pile is different; there's never a precedent for what exactly to do. It's a game of not only understanding the cards and the format better than the opponent, but better evaluating the game state. Who's actually ahead? What does your opponent actually need? What are they likely to already have in their hand anyway?
You can always guarantee getting the one card you want the most – so however your opponent splits the pile, you never feel too bad. But the player with the most leverage in the situation (the pile splitter) is also the one with the least information; they have to split the piles not knowing what their opponent has in hand, and thus whether any of the cards revealed by FoF are redundant. There's a give and take of bluffing and counter-bluffing. Do you split the piles to suggest to the opponent that you overvalue the threat you can answer? Or do you try to split them rationally so you expose yourself to the least risk?
To split a FoF pile correctly is to bring every strand of the game to mind – what your opponent played every turn, which lands they tapped, what you know about their deck, how you plan to win the game, how you think they plan to win the game – and use them to tie a knot around your opponent's throat.
But, in a masterful trick of design, it's all an illusion. The knot never binds the person casting FoF. Casting FoF always gives you an advantage, often an enormous one. After all – if the card wasn't good, Spike wouldn't put it in her deck. And if Spike wouldn't put the card in her deck, she wouldn't be able to enjoy the pleasure of proving how correct they are about how it should be played.
Fact or Fiction is not the only card in Invasion with this 'pile splitting' mechanic, but it will be by far the most popular. Like so many things in to come out of this brief golden age, it is both perfect in its own right and a seed of many things to come.
In Standard, FoF was a staple of blue control decks as long as it was legal. But like I said – we're not here to talk about decks. We're here to talk about exactly one card. Michelle Bush – the first woman ever to win money at a Magic Grand Prix – is credited with coining the acronym 'EOTFOFYL', which encapsulates the card's dominance. To me, it expands into a poem:
End of your turn
Fact or Fiction
You lose
Next time
We look at the actual decks of Invasion-era Standard – which was not actually dominated by FoF decks.