When did Magic "jump the shark"?
10 Feb 2005, 4:06 am
Every Magic player is familiar with the "old skewl vs. new skewl" debate, what what exactly separates the two in your opinion?
(note: "Jump the Shark" means to do something that signals the beginning of a descent into suckiness)
Up through Alliances, everything was pretty peachy. When WotC created new sets, they created only as many cards as they thought were interesting, and released the sets only when they felt that the sets were ready to be released. They weren't always right, but they were doing it the right way. And every new keyworded ability was meant to become a permanent part of the game.
Mirage changed all that. Mirage ushered in the era of "we must come up with X new cards by this date," and the era of keywords that were only meant to last for 3 sets. The Mirage Cycle also introduces us to the bane of many Old Skewlers: the Weatherlight and its crew. But all things considered, it wasn't too bad. Though it introduced disposable rules, previously introduced rules like Cumulative Upkeep were still utilized, especially in Weatherlight with cards like Psychic Vortex. It was still the same Magic.
The Rath Cycle was basically like the Mirage Cycle, except moreso. Starter decks were shipped with Storybooks instead of rulebooks, and Cumulative Upkeep and Enchant World were left in the dust. But perhaps most disturbingly, Stronghold would spend many years as the last set to have any multicolor cards.
And then Urza's Saga came along, and Baby Jesus cried. The fact that stand-alone expansion sets would no longer come in Starter Decks was overshadowed by the fact that people were building decks with 4 Tolarian Academies. An entire Pro Tour was determined by the coin flips that decided which player went first.
Sixth Edition... you all know the story. Portal-ified lands, "Summon" spells replaced with "Creature" spells, removal of cards from the base set for no particular reason, etc. Easily describable as the brick that broke the camel's back. One of the few justifiable decisions that they made? They stopped printing Dark Ritual because it was too powerful.
And then in Mercadian Masques, they reprinted it. Dark Ritual. The card that they stopped printing two sets ago because it was too powerful. And this was in a set that was deliberately watered-down and suckified in response to the overwhelming awesomeness of the Urza's Cycle. What a bunch of rocket scientists they must have been...
The Invasion cycle rocked pretty hard. What other trilogy of sets would give you a 6/6 regenerating un-Banishable monstrosity for just five mana and no drawback? They even brought Multicolor cards back to kick around! I don't think anyone quit Magic during this time period...
But the promises of the Invasion cycle were not lived up to by its successor, the Odyssey Cycle. With the death of the Weatherlight story arc came the death of any good backstory, and with that seemingly came the death of good cards, at least in significant quantities. No deck could compete in Type 2 without either 'Tog or Dog (Psychatog and Wild Mongrel). Merfolk, the traditional blue weenie creature of the past ten years, was axed in favor of the much-hated Cephalids. Then, Torment and Judgement started breaking some of the game's most sacred rules by (a) having inequal numbers of cards from each color and (b) reprinting cards in non-stand-alone sets.
When WotC announced the Onslaught Cycle, they also announced that they would no longer be releasing updates for the MTG Interactive Encyclopedia, which was the only means by which many people could build good decks and find other players. To heavy users of the Encyclopedia, anything from the Onslaught cycle onward might as well have never happened. Also in this set, WotC decided that Wizards would be the new blue weenie creature... three sets before axing Wizards as a creature type entirely. And in Legions, WotC brought back Slivers, but butchered the idea horribly by having widely varying casting costs and power/toughnesses in each rarity cycle. Some Uncommon slivers were more expensive than the Rare sliver of the same color! Legions was also the set to have a 1/1 creature with Trample and a Wizard with no abilities whatsoever (nicknamed "David Copperfield"). The last set of this blcok, Scourge, promised that Double Strike would remain part of the game forever. To my knowledge, the last Double Strike cards to see print were from Scourge. Every Onslaught Cycle card was written proof in WotC's own words that they had, at some point, completely lost touch with reality.
After that came the 8th Edition fiasco. I will not comment on the "Magic XP" look, because that was not the greatest sin. The biggest sin was that while 6th and 7th Editions at least pretended to have some respect for the game, 8th contained only about a dozen cards from the original lineup. Such famous, sacred, untouchable, iconic cards as Llanowar Elves, Disenchant, and Counterspell were removed for reasons ranging from stupid to nonexistent. By the time the WotC butchers were done, only the five basic lands, Stone Rain, Shatter, Wrath of God, Birds of Paradise, and maybe two or three other cards were left. Lands, instead of having simply "Land" as their card type, now had crap like "Basic land - Island," as if players were too stupid to remember that Islands counted as Islands. And when Mirrodin rolled out, it broke records by having THREE AND A HALF TIMES the number of throwaway keywords introduced in any previous set.
The Kamigawa sets came next, fully Japanifying the game to appeal to Pokemon fans, but by this time, Magic had long since died.
