The Tragedy of Magi-Nation

Hello hello!  I meant to have another post up last week, but time kind of got away from me.  I don't mean to make excuses, but I've got everything on a new schedule now and I'm still getting used to it, so I guess there will be some slip-ups here and there.

Now, I had originally planned for today's post to be a sequel to last week's post, detailing more of my recent history with tabletop games, but I decided to push that to later this week.

Instead, I decided to slide this article in today as a sort of interlude or segue from that last post to the next one.  I'm going to be talking about my favorite trading card game of all time: Magi-Nation Duel.

All images in this article courtesy of Blue Furok

There was a period of time in the early 2000s that I was absolutely enamored with Magi-Nation Duel.  It's the first property for which I can ever remember writing (or at least developing) my own fanfiction.  It's also, unfortunately, the first thing I can ever remember loving and losing.  Magi-Nation died way too soon and, unlike most things, I was still a fan when it went away.  But before I get into all of that, let me tell you a bit about it.

Sorry, Tony.

Magi-Nation Duel was a somewhat story-driven trading card game originally released in October of 2000.  The story involved a world known as the Moonlands, so named because the world was actually the moon of a larger planet.  The Moonlands are divided into a dozen or so regions, each one themed after a particular natural biome (swamplands, forests, mountains), some more fantastical than others.  The important characters residing here are known as Magi, people possessed with the ability to use magic, as well as summon and control monsters known as Dream Creatures.  For the life of me I can't remember if everyone is a Magi, or if that's just the only characters we see and there are mundane folks too, but I guess it's neither here nor there.  Oh, also sometimes people from Earth (that is to say, the real world?) find themselves pulled into the Moonlands and are then stuck there.  Woops.

Two players would go head-to-head, each playing a team of Magi and using a deck of cards built to (hopefully) maximize the strength of their selected Magi.  Players would take turns summoning Dream Creatures, casting spells, and just generally trying to take down their opponent.  As one Magi runs out of health, the controlling player removes them from the game and switches in their next Magi, and play continues until someone has lost all three of their Magi.  The player left standing is the winner.

Now, aside from some minor differences here and there, you might think that sounds a bit like Magic: the Gathering, the original, evergreen TCG that's still going strong to this day.  Well, that's because it was a lot like Magic, except for one very big detail: Magi-Nation was better.

Now before someone decides to burn something down due to that statement, first understand that I love Magic.  Admittedly, I don't really play it anymore, but that's mainly because I don't play TCGs (or any randomly-collected games) anymore.  I can be really bad about wanting to collect absolutely everything there is to collect when it comes to things I like, but I just can't afford that with a TCG.  Even if Magi-Nation still existed, I probably wouldn't be playing it anymore due to that fact alone.

So make no mistake, Magic has always been and continues to be a great game.  I was raised on it, and I can vividly remember when I was finally old enough to understand how to play.  I still own my old Magic cards, and I'll one day inherit my dad's collection.  Just last week I was ecstatic because I found my set of the five Basic decks from 2009.  I hadn't seen them since I moved a couple years ago, and I was worried they were lost.  And if there are decks to play, I will play.  I really like Magic.

So let it be understood that I do not proclaim anything to be "better" than Magic on a whim.  And I don't mean to imply that Magi-Nation was somehow perfect, since it clearly wasn't or it might still be around, and I think it's obvious that it never could have existed without Magic existing first.  But the simple fact of the matter is that Magi-Nation was, in my opinion, just a stronger game, mechanically speaking.

There are a few specific things that I could point to as things I like better about Magi-Nation, not the least of which being the Magi themselves.  See, each Magi was an actual character in the lore of the game, and each came with their own set of strengths and weaknesses.  Each Magi had their own specific amount of health/energy (we'll come back to that), as well as their own abilities and, best of all, a list of cards they start with in addition to their randomly-drawn hand.  Having an actual character (or set of characters) to represent you in the game, giving you special things you can do that the opponent can't, goes that extra step towards making you feel like you're actually playing a story rather than just laying cards down.  But maybe that's just me.

Speaking of the story, I didn't know all that much about it, ironically, mostly because I didn't keep up with (and later couldn't find) the original fiction the creators of the game would release on the official website.  But that didn't stop me from loving the setting, which I did and still do.  Like I said, this is the first franchise I can ever remember creating my own fanfiction for.  I had a favorite character, Gar, and since I didn't really know much about the actual story, Gar became the main character.  It was actually a really good writing exercise, since I would base the events of the story around what cards existed, and how later cards would change the feeling of certain things.  All of these things came to me more or less without context, and so I gave them context.  I can still remember a lot of the details to that story I came up with and never wrote down sixteen years ago so it just goes to show how important it was to me.

In fact, so fascinated was I with the whole setup of each region being themed around a particular element (also present in Bionicle, released the same year, which I'm sure I'll talk about at some point) that I still want to find a way to use it in a story or something nowadays.  I am unhappy with how rarely I see it.

Now, all of that is really just window dressing and flavor, and doesn't necessarily add up to a better game.  But that's okay, because now I come to my absolute favorite aspect of the game itself: the energy system.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, I'll just quickly explain about how you play cards in Magic.  See, the most important kind of card in Magic is what's known as Land.  There are five major types of Land cards, each connected to one of the five colors of mana in the game (blue islands, black swamps, etc.).  Land costs nothing to put into play (usually), and can then be used every turn as energy to cast spells or summon monsters.

So this is a fine system, and it's undoubtedly a classic, but I've always felt like it made the game just a bit too reliant on luck.  It seems like it happens far too often that an otherwise skilled player can be brought down by too little (or too much) land in hand.  There are ways around this, but they're iffy and still usually rely on luck.  To be fair, I haven't played with any new Magic cards in a very long time, so maybe this isn't such a problem anymore, but I highly doubt that.

My point is that Magi-Nation avoided the problem altogether by way of its energy system.  Each Magi begins the game with a certain amount of energy points.  This energy serves basically the same purpose as mana in Magic, but it also serves as the character's health pool.  To spend energy is to spend health, and to lose health is to lose energy.  It is absolutely possible that you could kill yourself by overspending your energy, but it's not quite as dangerous as you might think.  That's because every turn, during the "energize phase", your Magi regains a set amount of energy.

This system is, in my very humble opinion, so much more elegant and refined than the mana system in Magic that it's a little bit ridiculous.  Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that this is no longer unique, since there have been plenty of Magic-type games that have come up with various ways of avoiding the issues that come with mana.  One of the main ones I think of is Duel Masters, a game from a few years after Magi-Nation, which was set up so that any card could be used either for its intended effects (like summoning a monster) or as energy instead.  Hell, Hearthstone has a set amount of energy build up over the course of the game.  But keep in mind that Magi-Nation came out in 2000.  That's years before World of Warcraft came out, much less Hearthstone.

Again, I don't mean to belittle or insult any of these games, I only mean to bring across just how great this Magi-Nation was, and how much it deserved more time than it got.  After it petered out in 2002, there were a few attempts and there to bring it back, but these never got very far outside of a cartoon series a full five years later.  I've never seen the cartoon itself, but what I have seen of it leads me to believe that it failed to capture the spirit of the world.  But I'm not here to tear down things I haven't actually seen, so I don't have much to say about it.

I know that at least some of my feelings about this game are nostalgia, personal bias, or both.  But that doesn't change the fact that this property had real potential, which ultimately went untapped.  The fact that a website, the stalwart Blue Furok, still exists out there with a gallery of every card printed (and some not printed) goes at least a little way towards proving that I'm not the only one that loved it.

I've gone on record as saying that if I ever become one of those people with tons and tons of money, I will buy the rights to Magi-Nation and see to it that it gets re-released in some form or fashion.  I stand by that, but it's not the most likely thing in the world.  Hell, I'd be happy with a new Netflix animated series that more accurately captures the feeling of the world.  And I'd be ecstatic if, in some sort of dream scenario for me, Greater Than Games acquired the rights and started releasing the game again, with Adam Rebottaro doing the artwork.  And if you're unfamiliar with those names, hang around and you won't be for much longer.

Honestly though, I know that none of those things are likely, or even probable, and I've come to accept that.  Still, Magi-Nation is something that will always be with me, rattling around somewhere inside my brain.  I've still got my fanfiction in my head, I've got my own personal downloads of all the cards just in case Blue Furok ever goes down, and I even have ways to play the game now, albeit by proxy, so it's not all bad.

But if anyone out there is a millionaire and wants to #bringback Magi-Nation, just do me one favor: make Gar the main character.  He uses fire to heal people!

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Lofi hip hop radio
Playing - Sentinels of the Multiverse (2011)
Reading - Island 731 (Jeremy Robinson, 2013)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)