Grip.Cards

State of the Game 2024 — Magic

From cardboardbythenumbers.com

A vessel for other IPs, a trick it learned from so many xCGs of Japanese lineage. A floating buoy in a sea of red, propping Hasbro all by itself. Our lingua franca, the shade outside the window that we know, without speaking, we will have to contend with every time we step out of the door. The barometer of past and future for the form, and now it's swinging hard into casualness, into churn, into acquisition, into an uncertain future.

Nothing made me more aware of just how small everything else is than the relative Google search volume infographic in that article:

We are puny in this land of exponential capitalistic excess.

State of the Game 2024 — Legends of Runeterra

From dotesports.com

It's been a pretty crappy year, honestly.

You may have noticed some hiatus. The truth was not that the form was quiet — tho, honestly, it was some, and where it moved it did so in a way that felt like problems repeating and reasserting themselves more than any change or shift. I needed the time to recharge, not that even it truly happenied in the end. 2023 came to a screeching halt and I took that moment to be quiet and be by myself, with my loved ones, and find a moment of respite.

There's a temptation, in all that we do, to take it for what it is, one slice at a time. But the world, bit by bit, is coming to what feels like a collision. The art and the artist and the audience become the effort and the person and the world. The personal is — in truth, always was — the political.

Take Runeterra.

I've never liked liked the game. I'm public in my distaste of 'yet another take on the Magic: the Gathering dudebasher' games, and Runeterra is uncomfortably closer to Magic on the spectrum of digital card games than most of its brethren, perhaps only rivaled by the brazenness of Eternal amongst the successful ones. I will bore your head off your neck with my irritation at the way it makes the battlefield an afterthought in its user interface, and the reading of the game harder than it should be by far.

And yet, I feel the terror and sadness in seeing the Riot layoffs. Not because of how it affects the card game, of course — though, despite what I didn't like about it, it was done with care and smarts, and it actively tried to at least do some right by its monetization model.

When you see talented people lose their livelihood, when it reminds you of the people around you who have to circulate 'hire me' posts like we pass the proverbial same ten dollars around, when you hear about unionization and how it didn't happen, when you know that what you see on Layoffs.fyi is just a pale reflection of how seismic forces are taking the bottom out of several types of workplaces, especially in the U.S., people's ability to survive butchered to balance a worksheet…

What's coming in 2024 needs to be in large part a rethinking of why we do what we do, how we relate to labor, to climate, to each other, and to our time and ability to survive. Art and play have a big part in it. These little cardboard pieces I am too in love with, the form of the extensible card game — I want all of it to be part of my life and I love thinking of it as a way to build stories, satisfy competitive cravings, measure one's wits and sharpen one's cleverness.

But my life, and what I write and think about, cannot and will not be just cardboard. And in the world we live in, talking about extensible card games — about the intersection of play, craft and commerce — must also mean thinking about how they're made, by whom, and how they happen to hit on the levers of the many crises we are living through.

Edited to add: An evisceration of the Riot layoffs letter from GameIndustry.biz, of all places.

Star Wars Unlimited ships March 8th, 2024

From dicebreaker.com

Star Wars Unlimited is probably one of the designs I'm most interested about, since basically no other shipping games use a no-response pass-and-play setup at the moment.

It's going to go up on a bit of a busy season: against the third Lorcana set, the regular-cadence Standard set for Pokémon, and between two higher-interest releases for Magic — right against their audience play with their Universes Beyond Fallout collaboration, and immediately before the highly anticipated Wild West-themed set Outlaws of Thunder Junction.

Null Signal publishes the Netrunner Worlds 2023 Schedule

From nullsignal.games

The larger xCG competitive season is coming to a close, just a handful of days after the biggest of its events — with Jean-Emmanuel Depraz taking the Magic World Championship in Vegas.

I think it's almost time to sit down and think about summing up the year, with the Netrunner Worlds tournament as a very nice stopping point as we start a cycle anew with the holiday season to come.