Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and while my wife and I don’t celebrate it in the formal sense, we at least have a meal together. There exists a Wisconsin pizza chain called Rocky Rococo Pizza & Pasta that sells deep-dish, rectangular slices. It’s a big deal if you’re ever in Wisconsin for a Grand Prix or driving through to hit Chicago or Minneapolis. It’s not Culver’s, a must-visit, but it’s a good second option.

My wife is from Wisconsin, and every Valentine’s Day, they have special, heart-shaped pizzas that come with free balloons and M&Ms. I don’t buy jewelry or flowers, but if there isn’t heart-shaped pizza, ain’t nobody happy. A happy spouse is a happy house, so we traverse to Minneapolis’s northernmost suburb, nearly farmlands, and pick up the cherished slices.

My wife with Phillip Jenkins, in tiger cosplay.

The problem this week lies in that my wife Emily is heading to Madison this weekend. She’s going to see a symphony with her father, and due to my job, I can’t leave early on Friday with her. Here lies a problem. Will she go alone to acquire said pizza? Will dachshunds be dressed up in Madison or in Minneapolis? Will Snapchats be shared?

We aren’t lavish people in buying flowers and crap, but we do show (manifest?) our love in quite different ways. We buy pizza, and it works.

Ant and I had a chat with MJ Scott on Snack Time with Mike and Ant this week on whether our spouses also play Magic. My wife doesn’t, but her spouting Monty Python quotes solidified date number two for me—and the rest of our lives. One day, Emily will pop in for an article, talking about Magic, but until that day, let’s talk about love.

I wrote about love, in an imperfect article, a good year and a half ago in trying to explain how Magic can exhibit love in designing cards. Explaining black is always the hardest—how can selfish people love? It’s a fun exercise to postulate what can be possible, but today, let’s look at what has been done. As searching databases doesn’t have image tags yet, we only have flavor text to look upon. This leads us to . . . 

THE BEST FLAVOR TEXT EVER WRITTEN AND NONE HAVE SURPASSED ITS AWESOMENESS IN TWENTY YEARS

The Love Song of Night and Day, from Mirage, is the one example of love in Magic. If you don’t know about it, it’s well worth fully reading. That sort of oversight is pretty tough with the creative team using seventeen cards to tell one story. It was a love story, and a decent one at that.

Images via SirZapdos via reddit

Magic hasn’t been creating overarching, multi-card, flavor-text stories anymore, but we do see some tropes that allow us to gain insight into love in planes—or aspects of it. With the help of April King, who has been able to . . . find ways to mine flavor text data, offered her help in finding stellar examples of love. She was also the one who organized the artist panel at Grand Prix Omaha, which is well worth a read or listen. Dive in with me:

Family Love

Gerrard finds Sisay to be more sister than captain.

Splendid Genesis, while not a “real” card of sorts, shows an addition of a family member.

Everyone loves the family pet—I know I do. (Milk Dud’s nickname is the Dud Muffin, for what it’s worth.)

Adopted children deserve love, too. It’s sad that it takes a gorgon to have that in Magic.

If she brought you into this world, she can take you out of it, too!

When you see your ancestors, friends, and recently departed kin, you come back changed, and the mechanic shows it as such.

Why is this familial love? Well, ask a stellar reddit user named Sniper076, who wrote a great post on how Barrin’s family needed a tomb:

Betrayal

Being hurt by a past loved one, in all three cases of these cards, sticks with you. It burns within you, and you become bitter and resentful.

Love for Country

While you may fail in all else in life, your honor may be gone, but you can always be redeemed by helping others.

Being betrayed sucked, but when it affects everyone you know and loved, it’s much worse.

Jacques sacrificed his honor to be the guard of his people.

Using Love to Show Sacrifice

Sacrifice effects in Magic are often to force someone to sacrifice something. Very rarely does white get to sacrifice something for the greater good. I wish we’d see more mechanics on that end.

Losing a Loved One

Regenerate effects are to stave off death, from losing a loved one. I hope I never have to be in this situation.

To immediately mourn with a reference or a sudden realization of feelings of love are crippling, even pulling people into depression. Put into the wrong hands, losing thoughts of a loved is are even worse. Concussions give you the fogginess for hours to days, but good memories flood back in. To sever a memory, suppress something light and loving, is a life without happiness.

Notice how the same card can show intense grief—a lost love in two different ways—and also show how complex emotions made no sense to Phyrexians. That changed in New Phyrexia. To showcase how the color red works with Phyrexia, intense emotion and passion don’t quite compute. Passion of forging works out, even with passionate belief in doing what’s “right” but the intense, fiery love didn’t work out with the Phyrexian ethos except in one case: mercy. Urabrask, the praetor, was merciful to the hiding Mirrans near his forges. They didn’t meddle with him, but he also didn’t seek them out. Creativity and forging needed no interruptions, and searching out humans and elves who have nothing to do with their motives was frankly a waste of time.

Hurting a Loved One Instead

Sometimes, you know how to hurt a loved one—or someone else’s loved one. Other times, you don’t.

Love in What You Do

Some love is hard to comprehend. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—even selfish evil people find beauty in their work.

Love from Reading Between the Lines

Liu Bei knew what he was looking for in a woman.

Elves don’t love war, they love their family and lineages.

Purphoros, the red god of Theros, loved. He did, but he no longer does.

Magic used to have to hide non-heterosexual, cis relationships. This has changed.

Religious Love/Overtones

Notice how old these images are. The religious imagery and symbolism that ties them together is falling out of favor. Notice that I haven’t written an article on depicting saviors or spiritual warriors to biblical parables in Magic. Frankly, I don’t see much deliberate hiding of symbols, and also, it would take an immense amount of conviction and effort in 2015 to put religion into cards.

I really looked hard for marriages, courtship, and dating depictions. Nothing really came to light. While searching, I didn’t find examples of something I’ve seen in other collectible card games, normal synonyms for love:

• Adore
• Affection
• Endearment
• Fondness
• Grieve
• Intimacy
• Tenderness
• Weep
• Yearning

The word beloved has only been used once, and that aspect of Magic, the real-world option of love, emotion, and human attachment isn’t largely apparent yet. In a card game of combat and war, daily life of love and peace seem to be out of place. Though, as Planeswalkers are mortal and largely human, omitting entirely an aspect of the human condition has become odd. If it’ll slip in either way, why not design for it?

I hope more love can be shown in the future, even humorous interpretations.