Well Kaladesh Spoiler season is in full swing and we have a lot of unusual stuff coming down the pipe! I don’t know about you, but the 2016 Spoiler Season seems to never end. It’s crazy! I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but it seems like half of the year has been spoilers and new stuff.

Anyways, are you familiar with Strengths Finder and Strengths Quest? It’s a positive psychology approach to your personality. It was put together by some folks, including Gallup, and it’s been very popular across colleges and businesses for a while. I’ve taken, taught, and used the stuff.

My top five strengths are (listed in order from #1 to #5) Context, Positivity, Ideation, Strategic, and Connectedness. When you look at my positive strength, you are always seeing me talking about how people and stuff is great, and good, and has a lot of potential. In writing, I’m more comfortable telling you about a cool, strong card that you might not know about rather than the guy in the corner bashing stuff. I’m a builder, not a demolisher. Take a look at my various projects here in my writing, and you’ll see Positivity invested in them. (Like Underused Hall of Fame or the Top Ten Cards I Need to Remind You Exist; articles like Capricious Efreet Does Not Suck and stuff like that).

And due to my top Context strength, I wanted to give you that Context, so that you will truly understand what I am about to tell you. You need to feel that I am a positive, forward thinking, always see the bright-side-of-stuff guy. Because that matters to set the stage for what I am about to tell you.

I honestly think that Energy could be one of the worst mechanics in Magic.

Pow.

I looked at it on the spoiler sheet, and it just hit me. Right in the gut. “What the . . . ?” And not one of those good, awesome, “What the . . . ?” moments either like I got with stuff like Coldsnap or Conspiracy: Round One.

Now I’ve always tried to be the person to talk about how good something is. We have way too many Doomsayers in our hobby. Too many people think the sky is falling. We need to mix it up. We need the change. Folks, Magic without new sets, new ideas, and new blood is going to stagnate and die.

Having stated my dislike for Energy, I still want to wait until I can actually play with it. Obviously my opinions might change, but they have little to do with how the mechanic works, but that it exists at all. I have to admit that I have never been struck as badly as I have by Energy. Let’s set this thing up, by looking at the game we all know and love.

My basic point is going to be this: Magic has gotten too many fiddly bits in it now. We’re crossed the line. Let’s see why and where!

When Magic was introduced, we had just your basic core game. You already know and love it. Good stuff! Creatures and instants, enchantments and lands, Blue Ward and Serra Angel. We had it all. And the game worked. Sure, there were some things we had to fix, like the mono / poly artifact stuff, but it worked.

And ever since then we’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that’s been wonderful. Now it’s true, we have removed a small amount of stuff, like the damage prevention sub-phase or the interrupt card type. But we’ve added so much more . . . 

Legendary Permanents

The first major addition to the game came in Legends with legendary permanents. This was a new type of card. The supertype! Now the original restriction was that you couldn’t have more than one in your deck, nor could more than one be in play at the same time. Over the years we’ve relaxed those rules considerably. But we added a new type of permanent to the game in the 3rd expansion set (and we added gold cards too, but that was a natural progression of the game)

Poison Counters

Legends also introduced a new way to kill someone — poison them. Over the years we’d get a few poison cards here and there. Until it was deemed overly un-good, and then they took a break from the game for more than a decade before coming back in a big way in Scars of Mirrodin block. When you smash someone (or something else happens with infect) they have to keep track of poison, in addition to normal stuff.

Equipment

It was a while until we got our next major subtype for the game (unless you count snow from Ice Age, but I really count it from Coldsnap later) Equipment, a subtype of artifacts. We get equipment and can equip creatures. Now, equipment is a great addition to the game, and removes the awkwardness of cards like Ashnod's Battle Gear or Tawnos's Weaponry. It makes sense. But it adds another layer of card subtype to the game.

(Future Sight)

While the next major addition is not until the next set, don’t forget that Future Sight held a lot of odd, wonky, and changes to cards. We were given the Fortification subtype of equipment, for example. Or odd combinations like Land Creatures and Enchantment Creatures. And there was a Tribal card here as well. Although most people think Tribal debuted in the next set, Bound in Silence says otherwise.

Planeswalkers

This is the next, and biggest, addition to game, and it’s one of the biggest of all time. We got a brand new card type. With a brand new way of working. Loyalty counters are new, and we have another type of card mucking up the battlefield and keeping things increasingly complex. The ‘walkers were the most complex addition we’ve ever seen, and require a lot of mental space.

Emblems

Some Planeswalkers give you (or your team)a permanent bonus. These cannot be targeted or destroyed in any way. They are interaction-less. These emblems are in your Command Zone, and you need to deal with them and remember they are in play.

Tribal

Oh, and don’t forget that the same set that gave us Planeswalkers also fleshed out the Tribal type as well. That massively increased the interactions of cards that like certain creature types. From creature tutors getting better to recursion and more, there were a lot of major changes we saw from this new addition to the game. It didn’t stick around long, and only was called back for one set, but the effects are still out there because a card like Crib Swap is still in existence.

(Commander Damage)

Just as a quick little reminder, if you play Commander, then you need to keep track of Commander damage, in case you take enough to die. It’s one more thing you need to take care of.

The Proliferation of Tokens

In the early days of Magic, we had few token making cards. Fun cards like The Hive, Serpent Generator, and Dance of Many were certainly out there, but in very few number, and making very few creatures. Since Fallen Empires made token creatures of considerable number, such as Saprolings and Goblins, the mechanic has become increasingly popular and common. Now you see token creatures all over. Many different creatures, many different types, and many different fiddly bits.

Non-Creature Artifact Tokens

In addition to the proliferation of token creatures, we’ve seen the addition of non-creature artifact tokens, at first in small numbers with Gild or Goblin Kaboomist. Then we had the recent invasion of clues, and all bets are off.

Colorless Mana

In a recent set, Colorless Mana was made a pertinent thing. We have cards that require colorless mana. It was sold as a sixth color without needing the addition of a sixth color. So now colorless mana is a new color and dynamic to the game.

The Monarch

There was this set just released that you might have heard of. It’s called Conspiracy: Take the Throne. It introduces a card that people wrestle over in order to push the game. So now, we have the Monarch as an actual thing to fight for.

(For casual Magic, lots of stuff like Vanguard, Conspiracies, and Planes. )

And this does not include morph, flipping creatures, transform, meld, the snow supertype, and more. Bizarre ways to make permanents stand out in new ways. We’ve seen it all.

We have too many fiddly bits.

Do you remember Lorwyn? Coming out of the super complex Time Spiral Block, things were really intricate. And we were told that this new set and block were about to arrive that would dial back the complexity. And instead we got an extremely complex tribal block with new types, tons of verbiage, and interactions so complex that drafts and Limited made Time Spiral Constructed seem tame.

We got the same promise — Kaladesh is going to ease things up a bit. Are you kidding me? A whole new sub-class of artifact, the vehicle, which only becomes a creature when its crew or something else activates it? It’s like Equipment again. And now, layered on top of that, is a new mana-ish resource? Could we not find a way to push the colorless mana concept from Oath of the Gatewatch? Were we unable to find a mana-ish way to do the same thing? More resource management? Was this the best way to do that?

We have too many fiddly bits.

When will it end? Is the visit to Amonkhet next going to feature Pyramids on the battlefield that you can loot by tapping and sending at least 6 power of creature to raid and plunder? Are we going to have Mummification Counters that act like the poison ones, but if you get 10 then you can’t play anything rather than die? You get the point, I’m sure.

And let’s not forget that Magic is increasingly pushing the +1/+1 counter theme for support.

So kitchen tables everywhere are getting massive amounts of cards and effects that are represented by dice, coins, business cards and plastic dinosaurs. And no, I have not yet found the perfect token. I have to keep track of poison counters, Commander Damage, my own life total, and now Energy. Emblems. Tokens. Clues. Counters on my Stuff. Planeswalkers. The Monarch. There is just too much stuff going on right now.

The massive amount of fiddly bits that one card created was tough to deal with, administratively. Even if you grabbed a paper and pencil and wrote down the colors and amount each time you made more, you were adding a lot to the game with Upwelling. Luckily Upwelling isn’t played much anymore. Although there are a few hold-your-mana cards since then, like Omnath, Locus of Mana. And we’ve all seen the additional tracking of Green mana Omnath Commander decks require. I’m sure you could imagine the difficulty with Upwelling writ large across all of the players and colors.

Energy feels like the next stored mana. It’s mana-ish. You get it, and you spend it for effects and spells. It’s mana of a different sort. But we just got mana of a different sort (colorless). And given all of the things added to Magic over the years, I genuinely feel like Energy is one too many. It feels like the needle breaking the camel’s back.

Nobody can bring just a deck to play Magic anymore. They have to bring a bag of stuff with them. It used to be something you could bring because it’s fun. But it’s so prolific. And you have to keep track of so many things. The infrastructure has become too big. It’s egregious.

I don’t want to spend more time shuffling my deck than playing the game. At the end of the day, I shouldn’t have to spend more time on ticking my stuff (life total, counters, loyalty for planeswalkers, energy, tokens, etc) than I spend actually playing the turn. And we’ve gone past that.

I play this game to flip cards, not keep books.

I’m a Johnny, and I love interactions I can exploit and push, but I feel we’ve gone too far with this stuff. There are tons of ways we could have made Kaladesh unusual and unique without energy. There are a lot of cards and concepts that have never been made.

So what do you think? Have we pushed overly much into complexity creep? Is the amount of administrative bookkeeping starting to become noticeable? Or do you totally disagree with me?