Forum:MTG Minutiae

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Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

Opening post

So this is... Weiiiiiirrrrrddddddddd. Since we've decided that non-narrative sources can be valid, we should probably talk about this one. There's no, like, intentional lore additions that we need to add to the wiki - Gavin Verhey has talked about how he tried to coordinate with The BBC to avoid giving the Weeping Angels "flying" since they don't fly according to internal policy. But things have still fallen through the cracks that we should talk about. Firstly, "Lupari" now seems to be both the singular and the plural. Astrid Peth is apparently now a human, as is Idris. And Nyssa is human as well as a trakenite. (Does this imply all trakenites are actually human? - Edit: Similar situation with Adric exists that I didn't catch.) (Note here that it's not the case that every humanoid alien in this set that's not a Time Lord is just referred to as a human. The Sisterhood of Karn has no racial creature type, nor does Vislor.) Also River Song has been declared explicitly to be both Human and Time Lord, solving a longstanding disagreement on this wiki.

But these are pieces of text that are present, in part, for game mechanical reasons. So while there's ramifications for our pages, we might not want to actually place these things on the relevant pages, we might consider this to be not fictive content at all. idk.

In addition, regardless of what we decide, I'd like to bring up a suggestion I made on Talk:Universes Beyond: Doctor Who. Instead of having every card art uploaded, it might instead be better to borrow the card template from the mtg wiki which links directly to scryfall and also allows to distinguish between art choices. It would, however, really only be useful for this one page, unless mtg and Doctor Who ever did another collaboration in the future. As stated there the one downside is that it doesn't preview the cards as full images - you have to hover over the links to see them. I'm not sure if this is tweaked on mobile at all (my suspicion is that it's not). Najawin ☎ 02:57, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

Okay, I don't really have an opinion on the card template, but for the other stuff you mentioned, it seems to me like it would just be simple enough to note the discrepancies on their respective pages. It's not as though a single card calling Nyssa human is any more world shattering than the handful of times the First Doctor has referred to himself as such. Time God Eon ☎ 03:28, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Although I am altogether unfamiliar with Magic: The Gathering (I will be buying a few packets later though), I don't think information outside of flavour text and illustrations should be taken as "in-universe" information; for example, the MtG card for Sea Devils is titled "Alien Salamander". Doesn't take an expert of Who to know that that title is just wrong.

This seems to harken back to the Gameplay/Cutscene principle we established in Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein. However, I could be missing something about MtG that should be valid.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

12:35, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Well it's not titled "Alien Salamander", but it does have those creature types, yes. And this is the problem. The creature types are supposed to actually tell you something about the in-universe reality of the thing, but they're also game mechanics, which as discussed in that thread are necessarily an approximation to that IU reality. (And as such they've caused controversy before, see here and here for one example I'm aware of.) (And the Sea Devil one is even weirder when Vastra is appropriately typed as a lizard. The entire thing is just a mess.) Najawin ☎ 17:10, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Welp, two visits to shops that stock MtG and immeasurable disappointment later, it seems I won't be purchasing any of these cards at all because £22 for a packet of twelve cards is daylight robbery. I was honestly hoping to look at the cards first hand and try to learn a bit about them, but it seems Wizards of the Coast's greed has made them not care about anyone who isn't already a MtG collector who has sunk hundreds into the game.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

17:19, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

So to clarify, both for you and anyone else who's interested and reading this thread, MTG sells various kinds of booster packs and other products. The Doctor Who cards are coming as commander decks, which are ready to play right out of the box for a specific game format called commander. (I believe it's like £50 for the full deck, 100 cards.) They're also being released as collector boosters. As Epsilon has discovered, collector boosters are... expensive. They only have foil and alternate art versions of the cards, which is how Wizards of the Coast justifies charging the additional amount. On a normal set, these would also have set boosters and draft boosters, and these would be more like, uh, £5, I think, for 12 cards. But Doctor Who is a Premium Set^tm, so you don't get those. (It has also had two "Secret Lair" drops, which is where you order a set of cards that are print to demand online directly from WotC and they ship them to you. There will be a third that will have at least 14 and 15.)

If you want specific cards for the artwork or something, there's a robust secondary market that sells individual cards at places like cardmarket and tcgplayer. But it's best to wait a few weeks for prices to settle.

But the boosters for this are, I'm just going to be blunt here, for large corporations to buy and mass open so that these foils and alt arts enter the secondary market, as well as for the select few individuals who want to gamble on getting cool art and foils. For people just getting into the game, your intended onboarding experience is with the decks, not the boosters. (And it's cheaper to get all the cards by just buying all four decks or getting them from the secondary market.)

We now return to your regularly scheduled thread. Najawin ☎ 19:08, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Regarding various characters' designation as "human", I suspect that they are simply using the old, old convention (also seen in The Daleks) of using "human" to mean "humanoid", as a catch-all term for extremely Earthling-like aliens, as opposed to specifically the species designation of Homo Sapiens. Untidy, I know…

(Although Najawin, I am fairly sure that BotW indirectly implies that the Trakenites are posthumans, for what that's worth.)

Will ponder the rest of this later. --Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:21, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Again, Vislor and Sisterhood of Karn are directly counters to that option. Otherwise it would be how we'd get around this, yes. (Edit: As is Nardole, who's just listed as an "artifact" to reflect that he's a cyborg. And artifact humans do exist.) Najawin ☎ 20:29, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

So long as we have no case of them actively using other species designations I think the hypothesis still has merit.

Anyway, I should also note that the validity of this whole thing is not trivial. If we call it a weirdly-printed 'reference source' I could see how you'd get there, but it seems to me like a trading-cards game is much more of a, well, game; I would presume it to fall within the same "we need a second thread to establish theory of coverage" area as Battle for the Universe. --Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:48, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Right, depends on if you consider the cards individually or as a whole, imo. As a whole we need another thread, but individually I think they either fall under current precedent or are so close to current precedent that it's a real headache. (Davros uses the "Alien" type, but that's more complicated.) Najawin ☎ 21:59, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm planning to get into the primary discussion here but, regarding the MtG wiki's card template, it does work on mobile somehow. This really surpises me as I assumed that the template worked with JavaScript which doesn't work on mobile. In fact, I disabled JavaScript and it still worked. I need to look into it more, but it's highly likely that we could adapt something for that page. It could also be used on the pages of the things that have received cards. Bongo50 ☎ 11:47, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

I found out how it works: it uses Extension:ScryfallLinks. I'll speak to Spongebob about this. It's an extension brought over from Gamepedia which makes it iffy as to whether it can be enabled here, but we've had other Gamepedia-original extensions enabled here as well ({{cite source}} is powered by one of them!). Bongo50 ☎ 11:55, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Spongebob has been able to enable the required extension and I've adapted {{MTG}} from the MTG wiki's card template. Here are some examples: The Fourth Doctor, Davros, Dalek Creator, The Fourth Doctor! Bongo50 ☎ 19:18, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

"And Nyssa is human as well as a trakenite. (Does this imply all trakenites are actually human?)" This is just good FP lore!

I agree with Scrooge that validity here is non-trivial, but in the meantime, I would really love for us to be able to use the gorgeous MtG artwork as illustrations on relevant pages. I think LegoK9 and Nadimo have done a wonderful job with our coverage at the page Universes Beyond: Doctor Who, and Bongo has laid all the necessary technical groundwork in excellent fashion as usual, so really now it just comes down to the decision. Did we ever get around to establishing the promotional images precedent? – n8 (☎) 14:43, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Not universally, no. The current policy is that promotional images for Big Finish audios can be used, cited to the audio story they correspond to. Even if we extended this principle to other stories (e.g. a Radio Times cover advertising a given special could be used as an image cited to that special), it would, I think, be considerably difficult to extend to Universes Beyond, because it's not always clear what specific story is being "promoted". That's just not the right way to thin about this source. I really think we should just try to wrap our heads around validity, enabling us to cite Universes Beyond in the image caption and include it on LOAs. Again, for me it comes down to whether the veeeery loose framing narrative of "interdimensional wizards going around collecting fighters" is actually intended to be operational for this (in which case we would discuss its cred as a valid narrative), or if it's just a complete nonstarter in which case we might think of it as simply an long anthology of non-narrative GRAPHICs. --Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:19, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Technically Forum:Temporary forums/Overhauling image policies doesn't specify that our promotional images need to be for BF audios. (And, arguably, slightly conflicts with the next section on missing episode promo images. But for obvious reasons that's nuanced.) But I'm not convinced that these are even promotional images, for the basic reason you mention.

The DW Magic set is probably not supposed to be viewed in that framing device. All "Universes Beyond" sets are "non canon", effectively. The cards are game pieces. (Whether or not this means that we shouldn't view them through this framing device at all, or just that they don't reflect on the rest of the Magic multiverse I guess is up for debate. But I think it gives credence to the idea that ultimately this approach isn't going to be that successful and it was never intended to be.) Najawin ☎ 15:35, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Oh, so if a promo image for a Big Finish audio is published in DWM, we cite it to AUDIO: Audiostoryname rather than the DWM issue? Yeah, that's super weird. I agree that the card art image captions should obviously cite Universes Beyond: Doctor Who rather than individual episodes. – n8 (☎) 15:52, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, to be exact, what you do is that you use {{cite source}}, citing Audiostoryname as the thing-that-it's-a-part-of but specifying "Illustration in DWM Whatever", or "YouTube trailer", etc. as the specific source via namedpart (or some other field; I'm not up on the minutiae, I admit). The whole essence of the closing post was that DWM previews, etc. may as well be illustrations included in the box set, which just so happen not to be printed in the physical box set, but are on the same level of paraphernalia relative to the audio itself. I don't think it's so strange at al. "The Decayed Master wearing his golden mask. (AUDIO: Dust Breeding)" as the default uncollapsed citation is more useful to the reader than "The Decayed Master wearing his golden mask. (GRAPHIC: DWM 367)", you feel?

I'm aware that Magic: The Gathering designates Universes Beyond to be "non-canon", but then, the Star Trek bigwigs designate Assimilation^2 as non-canon as well, don't they? It doesn't mean that within the diegesis of the crossover the elements aren't crossing over! I don't think the canonicity status tells us very much. The question is "is the intended play-method here one where players are acting as their wizardly player characters and pretending to be doing aroun the Whoniverse snatching up Davros and the Doctors and so on like a living Time Scoop", not "do they intend for this narrative to be acknowledged in future pure-MTG works". --Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:09, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what my parenthetical says. The standard framing device is that you're a specific type of wizard who summons creatures/casts spells, but that these spells/creatures actively exist in some MTG multiverse. By specifying this is non canon, it could either be saying that these spells/creatures simply don't exist in this MTG multiverse, or that this framing device itself doesn't quite work for the product. (And I don't think the "intend to reference again" framework works here for their view of canon.) At minimum the first applies. And I think the answer is that they really didn't even think about the distinction. They've acknowledged that the concept of this type of wizard doesn't even make sense for most (read:all) properties. The comment was about card types, but it seems to me that there's simply no intent here to keep the framing device in mind when making these non canon cards. We did have someone from the MTG wiki offer to help out though, we could ask for input from their community. Najawin ☎ 19:07, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I had a brief chat over on the MTG wiki about this and the user who offered to help us and the suggestion seems to be that the creature type stuff might be something we need to think about and might not, but the framing device of the game probably is something the designers didn't intend. But they're writing up a more in depth response it seems. Again, my position on this is that I suspect WotC just never really thought about the framing device in detail in relation to UB. It's honestly a really weird angle to approach the subject from to a MtG player, I think, and I suspect that we're the only UB community that would ever care about this. Both for reasons of our infamous pedantry and for our position on canon. Najawin ☎ 04:52, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

So more cards have been revealed for the final secret lair. The Toymaker is not listed as an alien or a human, (and doesn't have a racial type at all) so I think Scrooge's idea is wrong if we focus on external appearance. And I don't know if I'd call the Sisterhood of Karn humanlike on any other scale. Najawin ☎ 20:17, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

No news of that "more in-depth response" from the advanced gatheringologists? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:58, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

They never got back to me after the last message. I'll ping them asking for an update. Najawin ☎ 23:03, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Still nothing, 2.5 weeks later. Najawin ☎ 08:48, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Very frustrating. I must admit that in the absence of "expert testimony" I still don't fully understand by what logic the game, taken on its own terms, could somehow distance itself from the framing distance… What are you meant to do with those cards, if not play as your wizard characters collecting them and doing battles with them? Are they just purely collector's items that you're not actually meant to ever use in gameplay, just something to stick in a binder and brag about? Surely that couldn't be the overt authorial intention even if that's the effective reality with most buyers…?…Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:05, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

The cards still contain all of the mechanics used to play the game and I think this comes down to the divide between gameplay and narrative. You can play the game without worrying about the lore (and this is how I have played in the past, and how I imagine most tournament players would think about it). I think that this set is intended to be viewed in this way in its entirety. Bongo50 ☎ 19:36, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

But then why have pictures of in-universe things and details about them on the cards at all, if there isn't meant to be a loose role-playing element to it? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:37, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

The cards can represent IU things without us thinking that the broader framing device of us being planeswalkers interdimensional wizards literally casting spells and summoning things is what's going on in the game. Najawin ☎ 19:42, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

[edit conflict]

For the same reason that a Top Trumps card has an image and a brief blurb? Another thing worth considering is that the Doctor Who cards are not legal in standard tournament play. They're not intended to mix with the standard cards in the default rules. As such, I think that it is acceptable to look at these cards as existing separate from the main narrative of Magic. Bongo50 ☎ 19:43, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin: I suppose that's one way to look at it, but then what is going on? What is the narrative being simulated? Who are the players?

@Bongolium, regarding your latter point, that just feels like another, more BTS-focused prong of the same point as the intent on the MTG side not being that these things are "canonical". It doesn't really answer my concern about the fictional dimension of playing with these specific cards on their own terms. And looking at some of the cards, I'm als not… really convinced by the idea that there's no fictional dimension and the pictures are just there for show? The flavour text on The Celestial Toymaker, for example, says "Whenever the Celestial Toymaker attacks, do [XYZ]". That doesn't prove there's a coherent narrative there, but it does seem to me like the intended gameplay experience is that when you use that card, you are to some degree pretending that you're getting the actual Toymaker to use his powers to do stuff.

EDIT: Doing some research of my own, the blurb of the main page on the Doctor Who game-pack-thingie on the official Magic website certainly sounds like it's hawking some kind of role-playing experience, not just a purely mechanical game with Doctor Who aesthetics:

Explore all of time and space in this wibbly wobbly set! Meet companions, defeat foes, and travel in the TARDIS through the universe!https://magic.wizards.com/en/products/doctor-who

Lower down, we find this:

Planechase to anywhere (and anywhen!) with TARDIS Showcase cards, a whole new perspective on Doctor Who's most iconic characters and events.'Ibid

Now I'm no expert, but "planechase" sure sounds like the MTG word for the flavour of dimension-jumping that the MTG wizards are supposed to be doing when they travel somewhere, no?

And the Lord of the Rings equivalent, which has a title of its own (Tales of Middle Earth), I think emphasising that these can be looked at as individual games even if this one happens to just be called Doctor Who, similarly advertises itself as "a whole new adventure". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:47, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

There... isn't a narrative? I specifically said that this would fall under our non-narrative sources expansion, if we were to consider them valid at all. The cards represent an assemblage of facts about things IU, complete with picture and abstracted numbers and abilities for the card game.

Bongo's point there is misleading. There are multiple formats in MtG. Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Vintage, and Legacy are the competitive 1v1 formats. (Well, okay, Pauper. But they're legal in Pauper.) These cards were designed for an alternative 4 person free for all format, Commander, but they are legal in Vintage and Legacy. These formats are just largely not supported by WotC for a variety of reasons. But they do technically count. They're just the redheaded stepchild of the family.

Re:UB marketing, it's a kettle of fish, let's just say that. And Planechase is another alternative format, one that's hardly supported. It is one that's, theoretically, built off of planeswalking, but it was used to simulate traveling in a TARDIS here, Gavin Verhey is on record as saying that. Najawin ☎ 20:04, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't mean that the cards as presented amount to a narrative that would have passed muster under the old Rule 1. I'm saying that I think a game played using these cards, by specific people, seems to be supposed to amount to a given narrative. If Alice uses the Rose Tyler Card and Bob uses the Toymaker Card and and so on, or however playing this game goes, then they are using the cards to on some level simulate a story in which Rose Tyler is fighting the Toymaker, or being made to fight the Toymaker, or something. That specific narrative wouldn't be valid, because it's contingent. But the game would be an engine for telling such stories — albeit still too freewheeling to fall within the theory of coverage established in the Rule-1-revamping thread, which is what we need to have another thread about. (Regardless of validity, how to cover fictional information from such games is a mess. I mean, we can't just say "this character may or may not have at some point in any of a zillion circumstances battled any of [list of all the other possible characters in the game]" on every character's page under #Undated_events, can we, or #In_non-valid_sources as the case maybe… I mean we could, but it's not… helpful).

So my question is, if I'm right about that basic point of what gameplay "represents", what is the sort of narrative that those cards allow you to simulate, exactly? The blurb I quoted kinda makes it sound like the player is the Doctor. ("travel in the TARDIS, meet companions") Alternatively there was the theory that you were supposed to bring your preexisting interdimensional-wizard player characters with you, and play as them, but apparently that's not the idea? Maybe? This is what I'm inquiring about. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:12, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

But this is directly counter to my earlier point of:

The cards can represent IU things without us thinking that the broader framing device

What I'm saying with this is that these are game pieces, for a game, period, and that the game pieces represent IU things in the Magic Multiverse (or, as it happens, the DWU). The act of playing the game doesn't represent anything. There is no narrative. Is there technically a loose framing device around the generic MtG game that doesn't use UB? Yeah, sure. But they barely talk about it. I don't see why it would transfer to our policy here about a slightly further afield issue. Again, I think these two answers on Mark Rosewater's Blog are gonna be the best we get unless we specifically ask him or Gavin, and I think this is too in the weeds for them to comment on, not least because it might end up commenting on larger WotC policy that they just haven't thought about. Najawin ☎ 20:31, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Your claim that gameplay "doesn't represent anything" seems both at odds with what's written on the cards themselves ("when the First Doctor enters the battlefield…") and, as I said, with the opening blurb of the page on the official website. I don't really see where you're getting this notion from, even as I remain confused as to the exact nature of the in-universe events that are being represented! The blurb frames the whole thing as a role-playing experience, and the individual cards talk about the characters/monsters doing stuff in combat situations. I have no idea whether the resultant mess would pass Rule 4, Rule 1 aside — nor if the intended simulated narrative involves the usual MTG framing device at all; maybe not! — but it does seem to me that there's a fictional element at play by all public accounts, just not one that's viewed as canonical to "the story" of mainline MTG. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:39, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Regarding "when the First Doctor enters the battlefield…", that's an entirely mechanical statement. "The First Doctor" is the name of the card and "the battlefield" is one of the game's zones which are refered to in the rules. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bongolium500 (talk • contribs) .

Oh, okay. There's some confusion here. The marketing is a mess for UB products and we can discuss that if you really want, but I don't think it shows what you think it shows. But "when [CARDNAME] [X]s" is not a roleplaying-esque description of events. It's a relatively well defined thing in the games rules that has been watered down into shorthand for the players on the card. See here for the full text, the specific example you give uses rule sections 110, 201, 403, 405, 601, 603, and 608. At least. Probably more. Is there some flavoring over the entire affair so that people aren't just waving spreadsheets at each other? Yes. But I don't think that flavoring means that there's any intent that individual games were to be engaging in this framing device. Najawin ☎ 21:14, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Hmm. Okay. This is helpful, and I better see where you're coming from. But I'm still unsure. Looking back at that Tumblr answer you linked, that Rosewater character tells us:

Planeswalker cards in Universe Beyond sets won’t represent actual planeswalkers as that concept doesn’t exist in most properties. We explored choosing a new word, but decided the confusion in gameplay wasn’t worth it as the cards act in a game sense like planeswalker cards.Mark Rosewater

Doesn't this imply that in point of fact MTG cards do normally represent the in-universe thing they're named for, in a sense that goes beyond the fact that that is in fact what they are called? He seems to be saying that UB Planeswalker cards aren't "diegetically" planewalkers even though in a regular MTG setting you would expect that to be the case… which implies that there is a question of diegesis to be asked. Ditto with him saying that the cards still "act in a game sense like planeswalker cards": that he specifies in a game sense seems like an acknowledgement that there are other relevant senses along which to judge whether the card is a planeswalker or not.

Like, wouldn't the natural continuation of what he's saying here be "But for example, the Toymaker card does represent the actual deity, because that is a concept that does exist in that particular property"? Isn't he essentially apologising for breaking the fourth wall by having mechanicalplaneswalker cards that aren't "actually" planeswalkers, which implies that there is a fourth wall there to be broken with respect to other cards? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:49, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Gah. I'm not saying that the card only represents the IU thing insofar as they have the same name. The card's name, creature type, ability, color, power toughness, etc, are, ideally, all abstractions of the in-universe thing. (Assuming it's a creature. If it's something else this gets more complicated, what does it mean for Three Visits to represent something IU? I dunno, how is this green, a sorcery, why does it get a forest - it's just a reprint of this card with this art and flavor text imo.) So, yes, planeswalker cards represent planeswalkers in the actual "canon" of the MtG multiverse. Even if they never appear in stories. But text on cards referring to combat, or entering the battlefield or what have you, these are purely mechanical descriptions of the game pieces' abilities which may happen to be abstract representations of actual traits of the characters or may not. (Compare, for instance, River Song with Peri Brown. One of those is fantastic. The other makes zero sense.) The stuff in the actual text box, the ability, is effectively purely game-functional. It's so abstracted from the original source and often not even relevant that it's not useful imo. (As is the power/toughness. I don't think this is true for creature types, as I explained in the opening post, but it's definitely arguable.)

And, yes, in that instance he was "apologizing" for having planeswalker cards in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, even though that technically wasn't UB branded. It was still a crossover set and it did feature planeswalker cards for characters who weren't "canonically" planeswalkers. (Though that's another kettle of fish, as WotC owns that IP as well.) Najawin ☎ 23:54, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

I think we're starting to get into a fiddly semantic confusion here that I'd like to clarify: represent vs. depict. People sometimes say "represent" to mean "depict", but in this case they're very different. The "just the same name" thing was an oversimplification, but what I meant was that you seem to be saying that a card might depict an in-universe thing (via the drawing, the name, and game-abilities that loosely translate how the original thing is meant to 'work'), as distinct from representing it the way I understand the term when we talk about a game, i.e. stand in for it in a wider context of some sort. "Represent" it the way that in a playthrough of Basil Brush goes Rent Collecting, whatever pawn you're using to physically play the game "represents" Basil Brush's movement through the landscape.

I was interpreting Rosewater to be saying that a MTG card normally represents the thing it depicts/is named after, in the context of the loose diegesis symbolised by gameplay. Normally a planeswalker card represents an interdimensional wizard, i.e. when you're using that card you're meant to be imagining that your usage of game mechanics simulate such a wizard battling something-or-other. Again I wholly acknowledge that the text on the cards is specific game-mechanics lingo whose in-universe flavouring isn't actually diegetic per se (i.e. referring to the First Doctor going to a particular literal battlefield), and I thank you for that clarification. But it does seem to me like the object of theming the cards and mechanics in these specific ways, and, you know, of building an entire constructed world and "Story" with a capital-S that everything is rooted into, is that the game is to some extent a role-playing one; that you're supposed to imagine these planewalkers and creatures doing battle when you're playing the actual game. "Ouch, my wizard just got beat-up real bad by your giant scorpion", etc.

And I am saying that I think this seems to also be operational, on its own terms, with the crossover sets. That when your Donna Noble or your Aragorn is pitted against a Toymaker or an Orc, the names aren't just themed shorthand for sets of game-mechanics (the way I think few people playing chess are imagining an actual battlefield when people talk about their "knights" and "kings"… though certainly the game started out that way, centuries back, and it's still entirely possible to anthropomorphise your pieces that way!), but instead intended to on some level replicate the experience of being out there in the Doctor Who universe or Middle-Earth, battling monsters. Just as the website blurbs have it. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 00:44, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Again, the nuance to this is that the actual framing device is that the player themselves is a planeswalker and they're summoning things and casting spells. Planeswalkers do not exist diagetically in these crossover products; the card type "planeswalker" here simply refers to something that they want to use those mechanics for, so the framing device unravels. I don't believe that people at WotC ever even thought about this issue. The framing device has been on the backburner for so long, and this is so niche, that it probably never came up. Najawin ☎ 01:04, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

The mind boggles. But even if this is so, I don't think that means the framing device fundamentally "unravels". "But like… who… is the player characters, how are they enacting these situations" is a foundational plot hole, but I don't think it necessarily negates the lingering fictional resonance of the gameplay, it just becomes the game equivalent of the "wrong" type of fourth-wall-break, the kind that posits a fictional world whose rules are incoherent and which is certainly not the conventional DWU. I don't think the makers of It's Showtime ever considered the logistics of how it is that the Doctor exists as a living fictional character in the BBC backlot and needs to be in position for the broadcast of The Snowman (…live?) to go smoothly. There could be an explanation if you tried, but I don't believe for one moment that they thought it through. It's just what happens. I think it might yet be the case that "player character the Fourth Doctor summons the Menoptera to fight the Toymaker" is (an example of) "what happens" in this game, even though there just isn't a diegetic answer to how the Doctor is, for the duration of gameplay, imbued with the ability to do planewalkery things like that, exactly.

And this might seem academic given that such a thing wouldn't be valid even if we worked out a theory-of-coverage for radically-multiple-choice games like this in the general case… but I don't think it is! Because it's the difference between recording this game on the relevant /Non-valid_sources pages in some sense — considering it an appearance in a work of fiction that happens to fail T:VS — and simply considering it a bunch of items of merchandise with free-floating pieces of artwork on them. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 01:16, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Again, I think the appropriate approach is to consider the cards as non-narrative works. They pass R2 and R3 clearly. They seem to pass R4 by their attempting to get text on the card to be accurate to the IU reality and through failing to really think about this issue particularly in-depth, imo. (Since R4 requires affirmative intent to be invalid.) And they do seem to have fictional elements for R1. I don't think that the game, mechanically or through the framing device, was even thought about on the level to qualify for treatment as an invalid source. I'm pretty sure that absolutely no care was put into lining up the framing device with the UB cards, and I'm not even sure how we'd cover the thing as an invalid work of fiction, given that each deck has multiple different options for who even serves as the commander, and while the Planechase mechanic is included, you don't have to use that in game. Najawin ☎ 01:33, 23 December 2023 (UTC)