So, recently, I started digging out and sorting my collection of Magi-Nation Duel cards. Magi-Nation Duel, hereafter MND as long as I remember, was one of the many attempts in the late 90s and early 2000s at jumping onto a trading-card-games gold rush; everyone was trying to replicate the success of the Pokemon TCG. And to an extent, Magic, too, but that was a different target audience by a couple of years of age, whereas many of the late-90s TCGs were explicitly aimed at kids (and this, alongside Americans’ perspective of animation inherently being for children until proven otherwise thanks to those pricks at Disney, was a big part of why Yu-Gi-Oh! was aimed at seven-year-olds and you’re no longer allowed to have "Trial of Hell," unless you pulled it from a first-edition Legend of Blue-Eyes White Dragon pack). Of course, what they should have done was try to replicate Pokemon as a whole franchise, because most of the success of PTCG in the West was almost assuredly because of Pokemania as a whole.
I think on some level, Interactive Imagination was kind of angling to do that anyway, albeit aimed at more of a preteen demographic than eight-year-olds (and certainly not at the teenagers that were Magic’s target demo). Magi-Nation had a Game Boy Color game made after it (two, in fact, although Keeper’s Quest was a seemingly-unfinished puzzle game that just recycled the engine of MNGBC), and there were... attempts to get an animated series off the ground. I don’t think they got anywhere but my information on this has always been in conflict a little. Given its animesque art style, for a TCG that saw its first releases in about 2000, to be trying to make an animated show, it could be called an innovator because it predates the modern attempts by Western animation studios to ape Japanese animation in a way that isn’t a crass joke. It’s also something of an innovator in that it’s a non-Big Three TCG that’s actually fun. Maybe that’s a little mean, but my recollection of the small number of gold-rush-era TCGs is that they were crass cash-grabs and weren’t all that enjoyable to sit down and play.
MND’s rules are... a lot to get into here, but here’s what you need to know: decks consist of 40 cards along with a trio of Magi cards that are kept separately; you pick what order you play the Magi in and they basically represent the player. When all three are defeated, that’s it, you are donezo. Your Magi get energy, which represents both health and mana; you spend it to play creatures (who get the spent energy, which they use defensively as health, and offensively as attack power), spells and relics. Creatures are good because they defend your Magi. When your Magi runs out of energy and has no energy on creatures on the board, they are defeated. Yes, a typical game of MND involves huge amounts of either dice or counters. Some years ago I saw someone write on the front of card sleeves with dry-erase markers. I don’t know if that’s as good of an idea as it looked if you should ever forget to wipe it off, but that might be a better approach in case someone knocks the table.
There’s a ton I could talk about with MND on the whole, but today I want to talk very specifically about how I accidentally fumbled into a deck idea for this formerly-dead1 TCG... then realized that the format of the turn itself kind of kicked its legs out from under it a little.
The turn in MND is split into six phases:
So, you’ve probably noticed the first thing this does: it eliminates the need for a direct "summoning sickness" rule. For the non-MTG folk, "summoning sickness" is a nickname that was used (that rapidly became an official term, before being retired, before working its way back into reminded text) to describe that a creature was unable to attack or use any ability that had the tap symbol (or untap symbol, remember that?) in its cost until you started one of your turns with it under your control2. MND circumvents this by making you play your creatures after combat. As a consequence, there is also no true analogue to the "haste" ability, and it makes cards that let you play a creature pre-combat, like the Warrior’s Boots relic, very valuable indeed. In fact, Warrior’s Boots is one of, like, five or fewer original-set cards printed as a promo because it was so widely-played.
However, it also managed to stymie a deck idea I had before I could even try to brew it.
Meet Giant Parathin. At ten energy, it’s an obscenely expensive creature that also comes with a pretty incredible power that still manages to make it look like a one-card value engine. You sacrifice it to send your current Magi away to be played later, and bring in the next one with full starting Energy, keeping all of your stuff. You unfortunately don’t get your next Magi’s starting cards, so it’s not really a crazy card advantage engine, but who needs that when you basically recoup the cost (and then some), get a sacrifice trigger, and keep all your stuff? There’s a fair bit of fun you can have with this in the right circumstances, even with so much limitation.
What I was looking for at first - and this would be hard to pull off, which is probably why I don’t think this was ever a deck - was some way I could do this multiple times in a turn easily. Making the most of interchange spam would obviously necessitate looping the deck to make it truly as funny as possible, but I could figure that out later. I just wanted a skeleton for this. Unfortunately, one big bottleneck here is only having one opportunity to play creatures; any others would require I use something like Warrior’s Boots (which I would then, like a total goober, be using in my second PRS phase, but it would be well worth it if I could make this work). So I really would want someone who can sneak these out at other parts of the turn. O’qua is pretty much the most obvious choice here; she can just pull it out of the deck for four energy. But with a pretty low starting energy, I’d want to use her later, which is fine. Whall is the other Magi that would actually be useful for this, because he could make Giant Parathin noticeably cheaper without my having to draw anything except a junk creature that’s allowed to die anyway - even better if I have a Sphor in play to get fueled by all these sac plays.
Unfortunately, here’s where I run into the whall; Wall needs crea
Unfortunately, here’s where I run into the wall; Whall needs creatures to be effective. This isn’t really very sustainable because I wouldn’t have a chance to play those creatures. Keeping this combo going as a persistent thing doesn’t feel doable, and having that be a side section of the deck doesn’t feel like it works because that’s a lot of investment I’m making into utilizing this stupid-ass combo, that I basically need to keep going otherwise I’m left in the late game with very mediocre Magi. There are some others who can add things to the loop (M’rika looks promising), but ultimately I think this idea is blocked off at too many places. The turn order is only one of them, but I think it goes a long way to show that the design is very good in that simple-yet-effective style if it’s partially killing this unfinished deck basically without much outside assistance.
Besides, this is just theorycrafting anyway. I have nowhere to play this and no group for that purpose. Plus I don’t even have all the cards.
1. ↑ I should probably note that I am mega nervous about the return of Magi-Nation Duel. I'm terrified it'll turn into every other TCG. Even for the fact that I can only presume 2I wants to stay fairly low-key and indie, I'm still afraid of a realm of rarer-than-one-per-pack rarities, more treatments than just the original and fairly basic foil, serialized cards, opportunities for investor-collector types to get in on things... I don't want this to turn into every other game. Even some of the more indie TCGs seem to have that shit. I want this to be done "for the love of the game" - by people who love the game, for people who love the game. Unfortunately, we live in capitalism, so I have to say thiings like this right off because there's always a distinct possibiliity that this just turns into everything else.
2. ↑ That said, MND lacks tapping entirely, so we only care about this with regard to attacking. Why they did this, I don't know, but whatever.
