Chandra's Outrage. Jace’s Eraser—er, Erasure. Jace's Ingenuity. Sorin's Thirst. Gideon’s Frat Brothers. How about MJ’s Ire?

In the forums and on Twitter, there’s been a bit of discussion on whether these “planeswalker-branded” cards are a good idea. While there are exceptions, in general I have to say my position, delicately put, is: No, they’re awful.

There are three main reasons for my dislike.

1. This naming trend is ham-fisted, implying Magic players are dumb brutes who can’t actually look at the art in the cards or make observations about context and flavor.
2. It puts unnecessary—and unwarranted—emphasis on the planeswalkers.
3. It actually undermines any flavor goals it might be trying to accomplish.

In his article “Planeswalkers’ Signature Spells” from July 2010, flavor guru Doug Beyer speaks of the precedent for this cycle as laid out in Urza’s items (sunglasses, etc.) and states, “Mentioning a storyline character in card names has power.” He also claims, “Planeswalkers showing up in card art has power, too, but a different kind of power. It’s not as effective as name-dropping card names, in terms of penetrating the mind-circuits of casual flavor fans.”

From these statements, we can gather that the Magic creative team is interested in “flavorizing” the brains of non-Vorthoses. We can also gather that they want us to be interested in the planeswalkers. This discussion could get pretty big and deep, and may warrant more than one article—certainly by other writers besides me—so I will take my column space this week to just point out a few issues with the signature spells and the planeswalker-based marketing in general.

Intent is not in question, but execution in some specific ways falls short.

This is not about naming cards. When creating characters, one is always playing God. It’s not just about extrapolating abilities to mechanics and matching art to the appropriate piece of the color pie. This is about building worlds and lives. It’s about imbuing cardboard with a heartbeat. It’s about engineering realism and relatability into made-up people and places and making us feel bat-poop crazy fantasy as something familiar while we roll D20s and talk trash. It’s about making the real world a better place through the power of a card game.

Ham-Fisted

I’m not sure this needs much explanation, but it’ll probably be fun, so let’s talk critically about it anyway. Dictionary.com only had a definition of ham-handed:

ham-hand•ed

– adjective

clumsy, inept, or heavy-handed

So, just imagine that you take the ham-hand and ball it up into a ham-fist. Now smash it down on a new player’s or poor Vorthos’s skull. That’s what I’m talking about.

Note: Upon a second look, I found the relevant dictionary entry: Also, especially British, ham-fist•ed. Apparently the English have been punching Vorthos since forever.

It must be taken into consideration that there are probably practical reasons for using the “Jace’s”—“Chandra’s”—whoever’s—naming convention. For example, there’s a Sisay's Ingenuity already, so the card couldn’t just be called Ingenuity . . . I guess. Same for Garruk's Horde; there’s a lot of other Horde references running around, and in this case, we’re talking specifically about a tangible asset of Garruk’s, so it makes some sense.

But simply “Ingenuity” with Jace doing something ingenious would have been much more elegant. “Firebrand Phoenix” would be tied to Chandra but just a tad more subtle. And Sorin's Thirst clearly should have been “Sorin’s Lust” . . . okay, that’s just for my personal enjoyment. In seriousness, though, it’s important that the planeswalker names be used sparingly (more on that below) and that the usage not feel like a shortcut, or redundant, or . . . ham-fisted.

Let’s just stop and take a moment to agree to tread delicately here, before the cycle gets engorged and we’ve got Chandra’s Bad Date, Jace’s Lukewarm PBR, Gideon’s Scientologists, Nicol Bolas’s Bieber Fever, and Sorin’s Legion of Twi-hards on our hands.

Clearly a Bolas minion.

Planeswalker Overload

The planeswalkers are only partially fleshed-out characters, not strong, but not terrible. They function as visually recognizable and splashy spokesmodels for Magic, but don’t have true depth or traction as icons—yet. But they continue to show up everywhere, from product packaging to event banners to mothership pages to book covers. Recognizable doesn’t equal meaningful.

A lot of players do not read the books and do not follow the Vorthos content. Using ’walker names repeatedly does not change the fact that they’re underdeveloped. It does not develop them. A flashy name is also not a substitute for meaning. The foundations of meaning must be built properly, because in the end, the celeb name is simply a vessel. Old Spice, and the original Mustafa ad, is a great example. They did it right—we had no idea who the shirtless guy was, but we believed in his meaning, and a public christening followed: The Old Spice Guy.

Overexpose your celeb and use a name too much, and you lose. The name and the face become a commonality, something expected, something boring. Again, look at the Old Spice example. The subsequent installments of Mustafa ads, produced to capitalize on the success of the first, were less and less stimulating. Magic should be aiming for sustained interest in its planeswalkers and manage their growth carefully.

Flavor Is Yummier When You Work a Little

Silly rabbit – if you ever do get that cereal, it’ll taste like pure win.

Let’s look at Gideon’s dudes.

Gideon is a Spikey ’walker and he’s been in one book. These guys both have whip-type weapons, they’re white cards, they’re soldiers. How much nicer for development in Vorthos awareness among the general community would there be if these had been named something like “Heliud’s Lawkeeper” and “The Order’s Avenger”?

It’s not our main concern here, but I also have beef with the fact they both seem to wield Gideon’s supposedly unique weapon, the sural. Maybe future Gideon stories will somehow bring out how every soldier got a sural, but if not, it makes no sense.

The signature spells undermine flavor development because they’re too easy. There’s no mystery or intrigue; the ’walker names are being reduced to run-of-the-mill adjectives on (generally speaking) so-so cards, and the non-Vorthos will simply read the card and ignore the name, while Vorthoses will continue to be irritated by the lack of nuance and apparent laziness in the naming.

Wait . . . how’d you get free again? Oh god, I have to read that Wintermute novel? Um . . .

While we may not want the overly detailed and character-saturated flavor of old, when you knew Mirri’s entire life by just opening packs, the fact that in today’s environment you cannot follow a character’s story without religiously reading comics and novels is felt by many players. The current usage of ’walker names isn’t adding to their development or allowing players to keep up with their stories—it’s just functioning as flash and glitter.

So the signature spells and ’walker branding end up being both more heavy-handed and more generic at the same time. “Chandra's Phoenix” doesn’t tell us anything other than that Chandra at one point in her life summoned a fire-phoenix. It could have been during a pivotal life moment like when The Order of Heliud burned her childhood home, or it could have been when her breakfast last Saturday at International House of Pancakes arrived with the eggs done wrong. Who knows? Not us.

Yes, she’s angry. We’ve got it. Now gimme a Lightning Bolt.

To say Urza has sunglasses is inherently more intriguing than saying Jace has ingenuity. Why? Sunglasses are sexy, and tangible, and of course Urza would have them—he’s a batty old man with eccentric tastes who also just happens to be the greatest artificer ever. Jace is ingenious? Yeah, who isn’t? Every single character in the history of literature has shown ingenuity at some point. Only a few of them had sunglasses.

Okay, not exactly literature, but still hot.

To quote Beyer again,

Did we really need to name so many cards after storyline characters that the underwhelming, flavor-questionable Tahngarth’s Glare came to be? So we need to be judicious with using planeswalkers in card art and card names, so as not to blunt the impact when we do it.

Yes. Be judicious. Use ’walker names sparingly, on awesome, flavorful spells only. Don’t force their faces down our eye-holes at every opportunity. Let them simmer and mature in our minds so that as we grow as players and fans, so do they.

And my final thought for the day: Why are all the main characters ’walkers now, across the board? Magic is a game for the everyman and everywoman and everythingbetween, and there used to be significant focus on nonsparked folk . . . like Jhoira, and nonsparked nonhumanoid folk, like Squee. . . . Are we all to believe we’re superspecialsexy Jaces and Lilianas, when really we’re goblins?

Diversity makes life tasty. Embracing an approach that showcases more real diversity and better reflects the diversity that makes up the Magic community can only make our pantheon of iconic characters and their stories more interesting. Riveting, in fact. Can I please see Sorin after he gets fat? How about a card for Josu? Who is that? Why is Liliana in the art? What’s Liliana’s Regret? Why is it tied to infect? Wouldn’t it be fun to have a goblin ’walker? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some of the cute ladies escape from Kamigawa and have Asian-on-Asian action dueling Sarkhan the Mad? I, for one, would love to see a story develop around some random scrub—a zombie lackey, or a skite—after all, we’re just average Joes and Jills, and our commoner stories are what bind us all together . . .

’Til next time, rock those fly shades, take your gin martini stirred, and remember that true Vorthoses want Cedric to come back to Magic strictly for the flavor.

— MJ

@moxymtg on Twitter

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