July 31, 2020
oppressive – adjective : unjustly inflicting hardship and constraint, especially on a minority or other subordinate group
Nobody believes Teferi, Time Raveler is a fun or interesting card.
Hyperbole? Quite possibly not.
Like most of the strongest planeswalkers, the entire game changes the instant Teferi appears. Except Teferi’s static ability actually changes a fundamental aspect of the game for as long as he survives. If you’re facing one, you assuredly have to find a way to get rid of it. Swing for Teferi or swing for the face? Unless you’ve got lethal, it’s not even a consideration. And truth be told, there are times I have lethal and I still want to just slug my opponents’ Teferi in the throat instead.
Casual players universally appear to hate the card, and calls for its banning have been frequent and vociferous since shortly after War of the Spark was released over a year ago. And while most such arguments revolve (and inevitably fall flat) around the way the card alters how Magic is played rather than the its overall power level, I’ve never seen anyone claim the card is enjoyable to play with or against.
For competitive players Teferi is a necessary evil or an infuriating nuisance. I’ve never seen any argument that it leads to anything but a miserable game experience.
And it’s among the most common cards I face in the Play queue on Arena.
Why?
No, seriously, WHY?
Because many players would rather win than have fun.
Except that’s not a fair argument. Many Magic players will argue that it’s the winning that makes the game fun for them. The archetype they select, the strategies they employ, the cards they use…all of that is secondary, if not completely incidental, to the only goal they have: to win.
Many competitive Magic players, including some of the best players in the world, will play whatever they perceive to be the best deck in the format. And the best decks are those that are fully optimized. If the whole thing is a total bore to play, or creates a miserable experience for the opponent…oh well. To many players winning is everything, and winning is fun, and the rest is inconsequential.
And in competitive contexts, all of this is fine. People climbing the ladder on Arena should have a pretty good idea of what they’re agreeing to when they queue up. Teferi is a huge part of the Standard meta, so they should expect to see him. A lot.
Outside of tournament play, though? In a more casual, “fun” atmosphere, why play cards like Teferi? (Why indeed.) That question leads to others:
When playing non-competitively:
- Do you owe your opponent anything?
- How much should you value your own fun over anyone else’s?
- Why play cards you don’t think are fun?
- Why play cards you know make for a miserable play experience for others?
- How much optimization is too much?
I’ll be riffing on these topics in the coming weeks, but I’ll close today’s post with a possibly-illustrative story.
I occasionally enjoy watching streamers play Arena on Twitch. Earlier this year I found a small-ish streamer who was a great player and a joy to watch. He almost exclusively played ranked games on the ladder, with a variety of meta decks. Though that’s wholeheartedly not my scene, I genuinely enjoyed watching this streamer. Not wanting to play competitive-level Magic doesn’t forestall me from enjoying watching others do it now and again. And this streamer was not only a capable player, he was also a good guy – funny, kind, rarely salty, always engaging with people in the chat.
One afternoon this streamer asked chat to help him build a new deck, and anything was fair game. Wanting to see him out of his element, I suggested “Big Butts” – a strategy that involves playing cheap creatures with zero or low power but high toughness, along with enablers that allow damage to be dealt based on toughness rather than power.
The streamer picked my idea and asked chat to throw out card ideas. And we gladly did so. Yoked Ox. Arboreal Grazer. Deputy of Detention. Gilded Goose. Merfolk Secretkeeper. Riptide Turtle. Fae of Wishes. High Alert. Huatli, the Sun’s Heart. Tower Defense.
The streamer added it all in, assembling what looked like a silly but fully on-theme big butts deck. I was ready to see what he could do with it (if anything.)
But then the streamer did something puzzling. He started taking creatures out, replacing them with copies of Nissa, Who Shakes the Metagame and T3feri.
Only after he’d added 8 planeswalkers to the deck did he queue up. And, perhaps not surprisingly, he won his first match not through a rump-enhanced beatdown but by Nissa-animated lands made indestructible through her ultimate.
I haven’t watched that streamer much since this experience. I’m still not sure exactly WHY, but I was substantially disappointed to see the streamer gut a silly, thematic build he asked his viewers to build with him, in order to stuff it with powerful planeswalkers.
In my eyes, he optimized much of the fun out of the deck.
That said…I’m aware he traded what I considered fun for what he considered fun. Which is why I write this little casual Magic blog and he grinds to mythic rank on Arena while people watch.
Next time…hone sweet hone.
Casual Magicking 