Well, I’m more than on-record as a long-standing Magic: the Gathering geek. But that’s the paper cards. When it comes to the electronic offerings of Wizards of the Coast trying to replicate their paper game in video media, there’s no point in trying to be nice about it: They all stink on ice. After a token attempt to get MTG Arena to run on ANY device I own by ANY means necessary, I lost interest, as I have so many times before. So dismissed has been the video game interpretations of MTG from my consideration, that this is my first time talking about them at all, anywhere.
But have you seen this new MTGArena ad? I saw it on YouTube and was too paralyzed with horror to hit the ‘skip’ button. Good GAWD, people, what the WTF were you THINKING???
There’s so much gone so wrong to unpack here, I barely know where to start…
Can you even count this ad’s f***-ups?
First mistake: A whole ad that does not show the product at all! Not a screenshot, not a card, not even the iconic planeswalker characters that have been plastered all over the game packaging for 25+ years. Without the name and the mana symbols, I would not even know what this ad was for.
Second mistake: Convey absolutely nothing about how the game is played. Rectangles, of a sort, are abstractly drawn and the mana symbols with associated colors are talked about without any reference to their function! So viewers are left puzzling, yes, but what about the colors? How does the game use them? What is the objective? You show somebody cutting somebody else’s card with a pair of scissors and saying “I win,” is that the objective? Somebody puts cards on their head, is that how you play?
Third mistake: Tying the name of your product with a negative reaction. Right from the opening, this magician character casts a puff of Lucky Charms into a guy’s face and whispers “Magic!” The other guy reacts with a gross coughing sound! And this is done REPEATEDLY throughout the video, like it was that good a gag. With his face all hideously contorted every time. That’s great marketing, the name “Magic!” will now be forever associated with somebody going “cough gag retch!”
Fourth mistake: Invoking death, demons, and witches all in one ad. As if there weren’t enough negative stereotypes about this game already. Actual quote: “Magic hasn’t been this fun since the witch trials!” What kind of bent, twisted appeal is this? Showing a person being burned at the stake, hey, in an ad clearly aimed at young kids, makes great sense! You could have gone for the angle of wizards (as in Merlin and Gandalf, familiar harmless archetypes with far less controversy attached), but you went straight for the Satanism angle. Right when a bunch of politicians are sharpening their pitchforks again about video games causing violence!
On a side note, the color wheel descriptions are on-target – for twenty years ago. Maro (who can’t take a hint and buzz off already) has been purging red’s burn spells and blue’s counter-spells until there’s nothing left of them. The whole game is “big stompy creature turn sideways,” in one of five decorator colors (or colorless when an Eldrazi set comes out). But I can’t count that as a mistake of the ad itself, so much as a misrepresentation. WotC clearly didn’t communicate to the ad creator that MTGArena allows only Standard format, and the days of actual variation in strategy are long gone.
While I’m here, let’s talk about the product itself…
MTG video games have done nothing but fail…
The most successful implementation, going by the name of the gross-sounding name of “MODO,” makes playing the video game just as expensive as playing the paper stuff, only – attend me carefully here – when you get the paper stuff YOU OWN SOMETHING.
As for the rest… count ’em, that’s fourteen or so attempts to get a video game implementation of MTG going. All have fallen. Duels of the Planeswalkers was what I tried on my previous attempt, and it crashes screaming on every Android device I can find. And can you believe there was once an arcade game made by Acclaim? A whole four cabinets.
Of course, MTGArena runs on Windows and Windows ONLY. Allegedly.
Copying Hearthstone is not the answer!
From what I’ve seen of MTG Arena, they’ve come the closest ever to cloning Hearthstone. Now I know that Hasbro (puppetmasters of WotC) and Blizzard Entertainment have been locked in this abusive codependency relationship, where Blizzard rips off MTG with at least a few cards and mechanics, and even pokes fun at it otherwise. But WotC ripping off so many core mechanics from Blizzard is a hundred times more daring. They rip off the crafting system, daily quests, quest re-rolling, hero portraits, EVERYTHING!
Which is the wrong thing to do, not because Blizzard would sue (they’ve given far too many of their cards identical names to MTG cards for that to work now), but because poorly imitating the best features of Hearthstone while still bringing the worst aspects of the WotC electronic experience to the table just makes everybody ask the great, big obvious question:
WHY NOT JUST PLAY HEARTHSTONE???
I mean, Hearthstone is far from perfect, I’ll grant that. But a good game with some flaws, copied by cluster-foobar-idiots who couldn’t pour pee out of a boot if instructions were printed on the heel, just makes a worse game. At least Hearthstone runs on Android and can be coaxed onto Linux. I’ve done it before.
WotC has had a two-decades-and-counting record for being clueless, blind, and tone-deaf when it comes to making anything but a collectible trading card game. This ad just marks their extended tone-deafness in the advertising realm as well.
This ad is not only cancer and blight on MTG history, it’s trying its damnedest to ruin all games everywhere forever.
