Forum:MTG Minutiae

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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? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:47, 22 December 2023 (UTC)