Where/when are you publishing this? I enjoyed Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me and was quite disappointed when it was cancelled.
'Publishing' is an interesting term these days, with ebooks and print-on-demand services; but as a more immediately practical answer, I'm keeping a copy of my current draft of "S.I." in a set of Google Docs to allow readers to post corrections, comments, and other suggestions. The first one is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AU8o3wSAiufh-Eg1FtL-6656dNvbCFILCi2GbeESsb4/edit, and has links to the others.
If you liked Myou've, then you may want to look for similar stories at Rational Reads and /r/rational.
I've just finished the first draft of the 4500-word section of the story which has MTG. I would appreciate any suggestions on filling out the mechanics and details of the parts of the game that I currently just gloss over, or any other constructive criticism.
-----8<-----
S.I., Book Ten, Chapter Nine
Apparently, to a wizard, 'neutral territory' was code for 'a bar'.
It was a nice bar, given what I could tell with my extraordinarily limited experience with such places, with electric lights and polished wood and chalkboard signs and clean everything, but was still a place designed to extract the contents of people's wallets in exchange for making them stupider. Given that Elmer had been walking around with a flamethrower, once I set foot within I started second-guessing whether I should set my second foot within; and, even when I did, started counting the escape routes. The one saving grace of the place wasn't the careful amount of space the other patrons left around the table of robed figures, or the vases of flowers that hadn't been smashed by drunken brawlers, or even the shotgun mounted prominently behind the bar and within the bartender's reach; it was that on one of the chalkboards, prices were listed for tea. Not herbal tisanes, or some post-Singularity caffeinated beverage that was almost, but not entirely, unlike tea; but 'green tea' and 'black tea' and several variations thereof.
That, and I recognized the card game the wizards were already playing.
Well, kind of. I'd never actually played "Magic: the Gathering" myself, but had absorbed a lot about it through osmosis ever since their publisher bought out "Dungeons and Dragons". Taking a closer look as I neared their table, it seemed from the individual cards' copyright dates that the past-time had lasted at least until twenty forty-nine, and had probably kept going all the way to the Singularity itself.
One of the players said, "I've been trying to think up a good joke about 'play the red queen on the black king'. But it just doesn't work right without a standard deck of cards."
"I've got one of those," I said, pulling the unmarked deck from a pocket. (I left the marked deck right where it was.) "And I can run through some solitaire until you're done, though I'd rather watch."
"Mm," another grunted, and set a card from his hand in the middle of the table. "Three mana to enchant my forest with Squirrel Nest. I've got Earthcraft down, so I can start spawning all the tapped squirrel tokens I want, unless one of you wants to stop me?"
"Yeah, no," said a third, "I don't feel like losing by being nibbled to death. Counterspell."
The fourth added, "I don't mind if he takes you two out with squirrels, because thanks to Angel's Grace," he slapped a card of his own down, "I can't lose, he can't win, and no more spells can be played this turn. And I'll use a non-spell Planeswalker ability to counterspell your counterspell."
It was ridiculous, arbitrary, had no relation to anything in the real world, and I couldn't stop grinning as I watched the game progress.
--
These wizards had, I gathered from snippets of conversation in between game-talk, collected every last Magic card that had survived the Singularity anywhere near the city - and had even paid ridiculous amounts of money to inter-city traders who could find any more. (And had toaded a few inter-city traders who had tried to pass off fake cards.) I actually felt a little unsettled, flipping through a box of carefully wrapped cards, realizing that these could very well be the only Magic cards that would ever be played again. No more paying a buck for a basic land and thousands for a rare Black Lotus - each and every one of these cards was now a unique artifact, and if lost, wouldn't be replaceable at any price. And this was just the one game that these people had agreed with each other to play tonight - between themselves, they had the last remaining pieces of more than one collectible franchise, not all of which still had enough parts to actually play a full game.
"Would it be safe to guess," I said aloud, "that if Elmer came in her with that fire-shooting staff of his, you'd do /something/ horribly uncomfortable to him before these cards went up in smoke?"
"Let's just say," said the wizard playing mostly green cards, and held one up to my view, "this would be the least he could expect." The card's title was 'Graphic Violence'. "I don't know if Walter's going to show up tonight. Part of the point of having an apprentice is teaching them restraint /before/ the flashy stuff, so things like that never happen. I've got a few harsh words for both of them, next time I see them."
"Does this sort of thing happen that often?"
They exchanged a few looks, then greenie turned back to me. "If that had been /my/ apprentice, I'd have told him not to, and fired him if he tried it anyway."
The red-player asked, "Fired, or fire-fired?"
"Let's just say if he wanted to get back in my good graces, I'd probably want him to walk through the ironic punishment zone until something happened to him."
I piped up, "What sort of zone's that?"
Blue-y leaned back, pulled out a pipe from somewhere, lit it, puffed, and pontificated, "Not all zones are small enough to fit in a building. Some stretch over large areas, and interact with each other in interesting ways - I have some theories about fractal placements, but can't hire enough mundies to gather the data I need. The zone we call 'ironic punishment' is fairly close to the storybook zone, and may be connected to it, only instead of turning everyone into something out of a children's book, it seems to figure out the worst things you've done and inflict some appropriate response for the retributive theory of justice. Mind you, this is extrapolating from a very messy set of data, given how hard it is to pin down the zone's shifting borders, and how few people tend to be willing to admit a crime whose most appropriate punishment involves some sex-based Change."
The player who'd been setting down white cards grumbled, "That's overkill, and you know it. We should just get a wizard's court together and follow the rules."
Blue shrugged. "According to the rules, to bother with a court, the victim would have to be an acknowledged wizard, and while our guest may be many things, and may have claimed wizard-hood, she hasn't actually been acknowledged by the /rest/ of us as one."
There was a brief silence of card shuffling, and I barely resisted rolling my eyes. "And what, if it's not too much trouble to ask, would it take to be 'acknowledged' as a wizard?"
White said, "Oh, that's simple. Do the impossible."
Green added, "Have a familiar."
Red commented, "Be flashy."
And Blue contributed, "Show you can keep secrets."
"Hunh," I hunhed. "That's surprisingly close to, and annoyingly different from, 'to know, to will, to dare, to keep silent'."
White said, "It's probably like the number twenty-three, or five. If you go looking for the pattern, you'll find it. Doesn't mean the pattern means anything - we're human, or close enough, and tend to divide any idea up into a small number of sub-ideas. There's only so many sub-ideas to go around, so two related ideas' sub-ideas are going to overlap more often than you might think, but trying to force a correspondence between the other sub-ideas is likely to get you into trouble."
Blue tapped his chin. "I'm curious where you got your foursome from, though. It's not a bad aphorism, as I think about it."
I winced a little, and shook my head. "It's part of a whole esoteric body of complicated but false knowledge. There were plenty of books on the topic published pre-Singularity, but it's honestly one topic I wouldn't mind leaving to history, if I had the chance. Or, at least, keeping it out of the hands of people who don't understand that just because it's written down doesn't mean it's true."
"Even so," Blue continued, "to the prepared mind, even falsehoods can reveal the truth."
"Welp," I said, tapping my toes in an irregular pattern, "if you really want to read something like that, I can get you a copy of something relevant."
"You can arrange physical deliveries from your university on the other side of the lake? Or will you have a copy transmitted over the heliograph for transcription?"
"Even better," I said, as the bar's door opened, and all the patrons went silent. "There are advantages to being the 'royal' of the 'royal mail service'." Bear Joe paused in the doorway, lifting his head to snuffle at the air - and, coincidentally, nudging Alphie and the tricorder inside the building with a hindfoot - then, with nobody shooting at him, trundled his oversized way towards us. I stood up to wrap one arm around his neck, and use the other to remove the text from his mouth, freshly-printed by Internet. "I call this guy Bear Joe, though that's not his name. I'd call him a great big teddy bear, but that's just because he makes a great pillow, and I'm not sure if it would be politically incorrect to use the term with live plushies around now. And here's, hm, let's see - "Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries, Volume One", by Pat Zalewski. Wouldn't have been my first choice, but should cover a lot of their secret society's, um, stuff."
Green asked, through the gradually-recovering bar-noise, "Wouldn't something smaller have been more convenient? Maybe a cub?"
I patted Bear Joe on his shoulder. "There's convenient, and then there's useful, and then there's friendly, and then there's just plain old doing the best you can with who you've met." Bear Joe dropped down next to my seat, which I found just a teensy bit reassuring, given he was still a full-sized grizzly.
Blue flipped through the text, stopping at a few of the diagrams. "And what would you have done if I'd asked about some obscure pre-Singularity cuisine? Nudged the conversation to some food-related topic you actually have a book on?"
I spocked an eyebrow. "Wouldn't answering that go against your 'keep secrets' thing? But no, this trick is much more impressive than that... well, if anyone's willing to bother this comfortable-looking bear to have him go out and grab another book."
Red smiled, "I'm willing. What's the trick?"
I didn't hide my eye-roll. "To start with, we order something from the bar he'd enjoy for when he gets back. Honey's always a fave."
White nodded, and waved to the barkeep. "I'll take care of that. You do your trick."
I shrugged, keeping a perfectly straight face. "What do any of you want to read about?"
Green jumped right in, "Elephant husbandry."
Red wasn't far behind with, "Exothermic chemistry."
White asked, "Bringing back the dead?"
Blue pretended he didn't already have one book and finished with, "Memory improvement techniques."
I just nodded, and ruffled the fur on Bear Joe's head. "Whaddaya say? Up to stepping outside to grab their books, and then relaxing with a nice treat?"
He just grunted, and dropped his head to the floor.
I sighed, and gave the quartet a tentative smile. "Sorry, fellows - looks like he's done for the night. Guess I'll have to go out myself."
Blue looked up from his book at me, skeptically. "You really need to work on your presentation. Even if you need an excuse to step outside for some part of your trick, making it this obvious you have to is just plain shoddy showmanship. You should at least have gotten us to say what we wanted as part of a larger conversation, come up with some other excuse to go out, and then, say, slipped the books under our chairs to reveal to us at a good moment."
Red rolled his eyes. "Oh, don't be such a nitpicker. One of the oldest tricks in the books is to pretend to blow a trick, or just be a bumbler, and then show off even more impressive ones than the ones that failed."
White nodded, "Yes, but we haven't seen a recovery yet."
I sighed a bit, and stood. "While you all work that out, I'll go get you your books. Here, your pipe's gone out." My arm-bots followed the pre-programmed routine: I held out my fist to Blue, flicked the thumb, and applied the small flame on its tip to his pipe.
As I started walking away, I heard a bit of a babble from them, "Impregnated gloves?" "-no gloves, maybe a fake thumb?" "-watching, and if she can palm a thumb that fast she can deal herself a straight flush every time-" "-painted it with foxfire?" "-no, it was actual fire..."
Inside Munchkin, while waiting a few moments for Internet to print out fresh books, I reviewed Alphie's report on the bar, then made my way back in. I handed each one their texts - on exactly their requested topics - and smiled tightly. "I'm sorry that having an infinite library of books you can't get anywhere else isn't enough of a trick for you all. I've had to focus my efforts on finding out ways of, well, accomplishing things, instead of having the luxury of looking for ways to accomplish them with fireworks. Thanks for watching my seat for me, Joe."
Red looked up from his table of contents and glared at me. "You're just /giving out/ the instructions on how to make FOOF from scratch? Are you /trying/ to kill me?"
"You wanted exothermic, that's about as exothermic as it gets. And that book's data is a lot more reliable than the Anarchist's Cookbook, which I was thinking of just because it's such a classic. Besides, chemistry is easy - do you have any idea how hard it was to dig up accurate information on breeding pachyderms?" I gestured at Green, who seemed happy enough.
White lifted a hand. "Objection. This book is only about how to freeze people, not how to bring them back to life."
"Vitrification isn't a secret. But even without your clique's thing on secrecy, I wouldn't feel like spreading info on revival to someone who can't at least get this bit right."
Red exploded, "Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane!?", as he rose to his feet.
A couple of voices chorused, "Gesheinduit?"
Looking up at Red's furious face, I felt a bit of relief that Bun-Bun seemed to have our adrenaline turned down low, but I still dropped my left hand onto Bear Joe's head for a bit of reassurance. "You said you wanted flashy," I tried to talk him down. "I gave you flashy. You want less flashy?" I lifted my right arm and waved it, "Look behind you."
He turned, and much of his body twitched as he saw the mystic sigils made of fire on the walls of the bar - which had presumably been painted by some other wizard previously for their own trick reveal, which Alphie had noted and pointed out to me, and which I'd just lit with the maser hidden in my robo-arms' right palm.
White grumbled, "You, sit down, and you, stop scaring the mundies."
I pitched my voice a bit high to whine, "He started it," mostly to use up the few seconds the chemical-impregnated wallpaper would stay lit.
Green opened up another box of cards, and set a stack in front of my chair. "We're all playing with monocolour decks tonight. Want to continue the theme? Got a deck already built for a fifth."
I shrugged. "As if I know what I'm doing? I'm willing to play along."
The table was cleared, decks shuffled, initial hands dealt, and as I started reading the ones in my hand, White announced, "I win."
"What?"
He held out one card, spouted some gamer-babble, then more of his hand with similarly incomprehensible words, until the others nodded and Blue said, "Good game." They gathered their hands back into their decks and started shuffling again.
The next few games didn't end /quite/ so fast, but while one player pointed out a few of the basics to me - such as 'you can put down one land card per turn, unless a card says otherwise' or 'the rules changed a few times, so what's on the card isn't always how the card actually works - for example, 'Instant' used to be a separate card type instead of a subtype of 'Sorceries' - another would be assembling some ridiculous combination of card effects to produce an infinite number of soldiers, or directly inflict infinite damage, Blue used three cards to give himself infinite turns, White invoked an alternate loss condition by forcing us to draw all the cards from our draw decks, and I was generally lucky if I could play a single card.
After a particularly egregious example, in which Red spawned an infinite number of copies of a super-powerful avatar, I just set my hand down and pushed back from the table. "So," I asked. "This deck that you prebuilt for me. By any chance, is it the only one that doesn't have all these insta-win things?"
Red asked, "What fun would that be? Lemme see your deck. Here - a nice simple two-card combo, Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood. Put them down, and as soon as anyone takes any damage, you win - the one gives you as much life as someone loses, and the other makes someone lose as much life as you gain, and they cycle around and around until everyone else is dead."
"Okay," I reluctantly admitted. "But each one needs five mana to cast - how am I supposed to get that before you all wipe the board clean, or whatever? And there's, what, sixty cards in the deck? I'm supposed to rely on them both showing up in my starting hand?"
"Well, that's just one combo, there's plenty of others. And plenty of other tricks that other cards let you do, like digging through your library to pick up the card you need. You can rebuild your deck if you want, just remember that you can't have more than four each of any card, or one of a legendary. Unless the card says otherwise, like Relentless Rats."
I thoughtfully tapped my toes, and my arm-bots noticed and helpfully started me tapping my fingers. "And you're playing with the most recent rules published by Wizards of the Coast, right?"
"You've got it. We managed to snag print-outs of the most up-to-date rulings from just before the End Times."
"Okay," I said, and nodded to myself. "I need to check on something. I'll be back in a few minutes, you go ahead and keep playing in the meantime.
I stood, made my way back out to Munchkin, and as promised, was back at the wizards' table in a few minutes, now carrying a few sheafs of papers. As the quartet gathered up their most recent game and gave me curious looks, I handed them around for their inspection.
"Right," I said. "Top page. As a head-of-state, I'm issuing a royal proclamation which re-incorporates the pre-Singularity company of 'Wizards of the Coast' as a Crown Company, with myself as director. Second page. Me, wearing my hat as head of the Wizards of the Coast, issuing an update to the rules of 'Magic: the Gathering', announcing the first release of a new card to the game in decades. Third page, a picture of the card."
Said picture had a card titled "Queen Bunny Wins", with a picture of myself, and rules text reading, "A deck can have any number of cards named Queen Bunny Wins. If Queen Bunny Wins is in your opening hand, tear Queen Bunny Wins into pieces and win the game."
I pulled a pack of sixty freshly-printed 'Queen Bunny Wins' cards out of my pockets and set it in front of me. "Shall we play a game?"
The four of them were looking at the papers, then at each other, with a variety of expressions crossing their faces.
White finally said, "I wasn't here when the game nights started, so someone remind me - are we playing by the rules published as of twenty fifty, or the most recent rules, which happen to have been the ones from twenty fifty?"
Blue answered, "It's been so long, I don't think anyone remembers.
Green added, "Even if anyone did, I'm not sure that the spirit of the enterprise would have let us make that distinction, until now."
Red grunted. "What, all of you are seriously considering letting her try this? We've /got/ the rules we play by. Why should we let her change them, just because she wants to win?"
I threw in, "That's not /quite/ my goal. I went easy with the card - I didn't have to include the Blacker Lotus tear-it-up mechanic, which puts a strict limit on how long the new card can affect your usual game-playing. The sixty-card deck minimum means that the more times the card is used, the more other cards have to be added to the deck each time a 'Queen Bunny Wins' is activated, reducing the odds that one will /be/ in the opening hand."
Blue said, "Before we decide either way, I'd like to point out that the Bunny Gambit opens up certain possibilities for us. The rules from twenty fifty include a few quirks that have haunted all our games ever since - the update to emblem cards was controversial even among players at the time. Bunny probably doesn't care either way, but we could have her issue a few new rulings to pin those last few issues down for us."
Red glared at him. "And you're probably already thinking of how to get her to pick the rulings you prefer, aren't you, instead of the ones that are best for the game experience?"
White was frowning thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling. "I'm not sure that this approach is even legal in the first place. Wizards of the Coast was an American company, and Bunny is queen of Lake Erie, Canada, and the Commonwealth. Does she even have the authority to nationalize a foreign corporation?"
I responded, "If you ask the government of Lake Erie, I'm also the head-of-state of Mars' moon, Phobos. The question isn't whether I have the authority - it's who has the ability to tell me that I /don't/? The old American government appears to be defunct, and de facto, unable to file any lawsuits disputing the company's transfer of ownership."
Green spoke, "I don't know that I approve of setting the precedent that lets her say she owns whatever she wants."
I took that as a cue to reveal my trump. "Before I derail game night entirely over arguing about arcane legal principles, I have an alternate suggestion. I take these sixty cards and put them back in my pocket. And then, instead of everyone here aiming for slam-dunks all the time, at least a bit of focus is put on basic ball-handling. Land management. Putting creatures down to actually fight each other, instead of being part of some infini-combo. Having games that make sense according to the game's backstory and fluff, instead of being nothing more than running through arcane interpretations of rules like a computer. You know - /playing a game/."
"Hm," said one, and "I could live with that," said another. A few more exchanged glances, then some nods at me, and I started to put the deck away. But then Blue held up one hand. "Before we do that, and without committing one way or another about whether it's legal or not - I want to play one game against that deck. Two-player or multi-player, either way."
Shrugs all around, both of us shuffled (me rather unnecessarily), I put the deck on the table, and we started.
I lost the freaking game.
I'm pretty sure Blue cheated by some fast shuffling of his deck, but it was still absolutely ridiculous. ... At least I didn't have to tear up any of the cards.
After that little debacle, as new decks were quickly assembled for a new set of games, White commented to me, "Congratulations on being a perfect embodiment of your colour."
"Er, pardon? How does fiddling with meta-rules have anything to do with vampires and zombies?"
Green said, "Black isn't about the undead, specifically - that's just one set of tools. And in case you've gotten the wrong impression, black isn't evil, either, nor is white good."
Blue spoke up, "Each of the colours is based around a philosophy. White's is 'peace through structure', blue has 'perfection through knowledge', black is 'power through opportunity', red is 'freedom through action', and green is 'acceptance through growth'."
"White and blue sound more like my speed than black. After all, I've been building up the structure of a whole nation, and am a confirmed bibliophile."
"Ah," said Red, "but you decided on what you wanted - a back-to-basics set of games - saw that you had a way to seize power to cause that to happen, regardless of how it affected our current rules, and you took it."
I didn't answer right away, frowning to myself, as I found myself thinking about a number of my larger-scale activities in that light - in much the way I'd been thinking of them in new ways while watching Macbeth. I had my goals, and had decided that they were important enough to use any means I could think of to reach. So far, I'd been able to work towards them via means that were at least arguably moral, but if I ever decided that the best way to achieve my goals was to do something less pleasant, such as committing sacrilege on the dead to raise their mindless corpses as my tools? Or if the only way to keep myself in the running was to, as the first infinite combo for black I'd been shown had done, drain the lives of competitors in unethical ways? I couldn't say that I /wouldn't/ do any of that - I didn't think it was likely that any such actions would make enough of a difference to offset their downsides, but avoiding the permanent extinction of sapience was important enough that if I /were/ faced with that choice... I could very well see myself acting completely 'Black'.
To try to avoid an uncomfortable conversational pause, I grumbled, "Who picked /five/ colours, anyway? A lot of historical symbolism would match up better with /six/ - white, black, and four elements. I can match up red with fire, blue with water, and green with earth, but what about air?"
"Actually," said White, "The classical element of air is mostly part of Blue."
Blue added, "If you really want a six-colour version of the game, there /were/ some proposals for a variant which added 'Purple', with caves as the basic land..."
I've gotten suggestions on Instant being a subtype, that any card-type can have any subtype, and a new type is emblems.
All three of these seem very unlikely.
1) Changing Instant would break lots of old cards.
It's been 22 years since Magic was first published; I'm assuming that it's going to stay in print for the next 35. Having one or more rules changes which requires revamping old cards seems well in line with the MTG tradition, given how often the officially legal text for a card can already differ substantially from what's actually printed on it.
2) Subtypes don't work the way they'd need to in the rules for that to work (see Tribal).
The person who suggested that said it would eliminate the need for Tribal as a subtype at all, as you could have a Sorcery with the Goblin subtype.
3) The point of emblems is to not be part of the game that can be messed with.
The proposal was that such cards would go straight to the command zone when played, and be unable to be interacted with.
And, with all that said, I'm not particularly tied to any of these changes. As long as I have some description of how Magic could have changed between now and Halloween of 2050, I'll be happy. So far, the three changes I've mentioned are the only ideas I've been able to collect - if anyone reading this has any alternative proposals, I'd welcome them.
Also if you actually use MtG in a story and try to sell that story, you might get sued. Idk American legal systems well enough to be sure. Maybe there's a fair-use defense.
You could probably make a thinly veiled MtG analogue and use that with no problems tho.
The novel "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline is strong evidence that referring to existing media franchises can be done without significant legal complications. MtG is only going to be a small part of my overall story, and I'm going to be referring to people playing the game in the real world, as opposed to incorporating any of the fictional elements of MtG's multiverse, so I'm confident I'm in the clear.
(In addition, I'm also confident that my story is going to be entirely unpublishable, outside of self-publishing. I still think it's worth the effort of writing it.)
A recurring theme of the story involves extinction risks, and what price is worth paying to reduce them. I haven't been able to think of a way to tie Magic directly to that theme, though I'd like to.
Character has a spell to turn life into cards, has locked into paying half their life and not dug into a win, but has put themselves in range of a loss next turn. Best strategic move is burn all but 1 life point and dig through more of their deck to find the win condition.
Whether you decide to have them win or lose, have them (or other characters) explain why they did what they did. Have it echoed a few times in more serious contexts.
I think I can add a sequence like that; thank you very much for the suggestion.
Good luck with your story. I've been writing recently and it's really hard work.
I was once told that the first million words anyone writes will be terrible, so they might as well just start writing to get all the bad words out so they can move on to the good stuff as soon as possible. So: just keep writing, and it'll be worth the work.
If Bunny plays first, then the other blue mages might be packing Mental Misstep or Force of Will, assuming they're playing casually or in a powered format.
In any case, it wouldn't exactly be an exciting plot event to have her attempted win foiled by just a counterspell.
A counterspell, followed by an infinite combo to mill through Bunny's library so she loses individually before another player wins, could work.
After a bit of thought, though, it would be a nice bit of foreshadowing for a later plot point if at least one of Bunny's "I win" cards was essentially stolen in-game, and applied by one of the other players for them to win with. As soon as I have time, I'll try searching through Gatherer for a card whose effects allow that. (Though, as usual, I'd still appreciate all the suggestions and advice I can get.)
With the background from this thread, I'd like my protagonist, Queen Bunny, to try to build a card that would let her win, when playing with a group who've been showing off with infinite combos, first-turn wins, and similar annoyances. I'd also like the group, upon seeing this card, to band together to keep Bunny from winning with it anyway.
I'm thinking of starting with Relentless Rats, so she can fill her deck with the 'I win' card; though wouldn't object to some other method to dig through her deck to get that card on her first turn.
There seem to be a few cards on Gatherer with alternative win conditions. Bunny wouldn't want to wait until 'at the beginning of your upkeep', so maybe, based on Maze's End and Biovisionary, a simple, "If you control at least one card named 'Queen Bunny Wins', you win the game."
Another option could be based on the 0-mana Blacker Lotus: "Tear 'Queen Bunny Wins' into pieces. You win the game.", with Instant or Flash to be able to try to pre-empt another player's first-turn win.
I'm less familiar with first-turn ways to counter cards, so I'm not sure if any of these card ideas would have suitable flaws to exploit, or what those exploitation methods would be.
In a rather long, rather weird science-fiction story I'm writing, a Singularity-like apocalypse arrives circa 2050. In my current plot draft, a number of decades later, my protagonist, Bunny Waldeinsamkeit, putative monarch of Canada (due to a lack of other claimants), is going to be invited by a group of self-proclaimed "wizards" (who are more stage magicians) to a night of snacks, drinks, stories, and games in a neutral location; and I'd like to use Magic: the Gathering as a tool to help highlight a few aspects of my story's setting, theme, and characters.
I know enough of the basics of Magic to cover what I'd like to say - but if I can get any advice here on more advanced topics that would be even more relevant, I would be very happy.
For example, I am planning on the 'wizards' using the "most recent" available rules for the game, as of Halloween of 2050; does anyone more familiar with the game's long-term development than I have any thoughts on what the state of the game might be like by then? (I've gotten suggestions on Instant being a subtype, that any card-type can have any subtype, and a new type is emblems.)
Besides Queen Bunny showing off her more obvious personality traits by having a preference for a white pacifism deck (her usual day job is archaeological research of the First Singularity to try to learn how to prevent a Second Singularity from eliminating all sapience in the universe), possibly with a minor in blue (for the cards with the theme of mind-improving rationality, and because she's technically the head-of-state of some sapient squid living in Lake Erie), I'm thinking of having the wizards show off a bit with some first-turn infinite-cycle instant-win routines. Upon seeing which, Queen Bunny would soon try to return the favour by taking a moment to go outside to her vehicle with its printers, returning with some royal proclamations re-incorporating Wizards of the Coast as a Canadian crown company with all of its previous intellectual property and herself in charge, and a freshly-printed card whose effects are basically "Bunny wins" (which I've started a thread in 'Custom Card Creation' about)... and, very likely, /still/ losing. But being a good sport about it, leading to more ordinary games which the wizards can use to evaluate Bunny's learning capacity, ability to cooperate, strategic sense, and other such info.
A recurring theme of the story involves extinction risks, and what price is worth paying to reduce them. I haven't been able to think of a way to tie Magic directly to that theme, though I'd like to. The closest I've managed is to bring up how Magic can be Turing-complete, to show how hard it is to prevent a dangerous piece of software from ever being run again; but I'd like to do better than that.
I have played a total of three kitchen-sink games, tried to put together a White Soldiers deck, have read some fanfiction set in the MTG multiverse, and rather like the fact that MTG can build a Turing-complete machine. I'm also in the middle of writing a long, weird science-fiction story, plan on mentioning MTG, and intend to start a thread or two on some details of that.
'Publishing' is an interesting term these days, with ebooks and print-on-demand services; but as a more immediately practical answer, I'm keeping a copy of my current draft of "S.I." in a set of Google Docs to allow readers to post corrections, comments, and other suggestions. The first one is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AU8o3wSAiufh-Eg1FtL-6656dNvbCFILCi2GbeESsb4/edit, and has links to the others.
If you liked Myou've, then you may want to look for similar stories at Rational Reads and /r/rational.
-----8<-----
S.I., Book Ten, Chapter Nine
Apparently, to a wizard, 'neutral territory' was code for 'a bar'.
It was a nice bar, given what I could tell with my extraordinarily limited experience with such places, with electric lights and polished wood and chalkboard signs and clean everything, but was still a place designed to extract the contents of people's wallets in exchange for making them stupider. Given that Elmer had been walking around with a flamethrower, once I set foot within I started second-guessing whether I should set my second foot within; and, even when I did, started counting the escape routes. The one saving grace of the place wasn't the careful amount of space the other patrons left around the table of robed figures, or the vases of flowers that hadn't been smashed by drunken brawlers, or even the shotgun mounted prominently behind the bar and within the bartender's reach; it was that on one of the chalkboards, prices were listed for tea. Not herbal tisanes, or some post-Singularity caffeinated beverage that was almost, but not entirely, unlike tea; but 'green tea' and 'black tea' and several variations thereof.
That, and I recognized the card game the wizards were already playing.
Well, kind of. I'd never actually played "Magic: the Gathering" myself, but had absorbed a lot about it through osmosis ever since their publisher bought out "Dungeons and Dragons". Taking a closer look as I neared their table, it seemed from the individual cards' copyright dates that the past-time had lasted at least until twenty forty-nine, and had probably kept going all the way to the Singularity itself.
One of the players said, "I've been trying to think up a good joke about 'play the red queen on the black king'. But it just doesn't work right without a standard deck of cards."
"I've got one of those," I said, pulling the unmarked deck from a pocket. (I left the marked deck right where it was.) "And I can run through some solitaire until you're done, though I'd rather watch."
"Mm," another grunted, and set a card from his hand in the middle of the table. "Three mana to enchant my forest with Squirrel Nest. I've got Earthcraft down, so I can start spawning all the tapped squirrel tokens I want, unless one of you wants to stop me?"
"Yeah, no," said a third, "I don't feel like losing by being nibbled to death. Counterspell."
The fourth added, "I don't mind if he takes you two out with squirrels, because thanks to Angel's Grace," he slapped a card of his own down, "I can't lose, he can't win, and no more spells can be played this turn. And I'll use a non-spell Planeswalker ability to counterspell your counterspell."
It was ridiculous, arbitrary, had no relation to anything in the real world, and I couldn't stop grinning as I watched the game progress.
--
These wizards had, I gathered from snippets of conversation in between game-talk, collected every last Magic card that had survived the Singularity anywhere near the city - and had even paid ridiculous amounts of money to inter-city traders who could find any more. (And had toaded a few inter-city traders who had tried to pass off fake cards.) I actually felt a little unsettled, flipping through a box of carefully wrapped cards, realizing that these could very well be the only Magic cards that would ever be played again. No more paying a buck for a basic land and thousands for a rare Black Lotus - each and every one of these cards was now a unique artifact, and if lost, wouldn't be replaceable at any price. And this was just the one game that these people had agreed with each other to play tonight - between themselves, they had the last remaining pieces of more than one collectible franchise, not all of which still had enough parts to actually play a full game.
"Would it be safe to guess," I said aloud, "that if Elmer came in her with that fire-shooting staff of his, you'd do /something/ horribly uncomfortable to him before these cards went up in smoke?"
"Let's just say," said the wizard playing mostly green cards, and held one up to my view, "this would be the least he could expect." The card's title was 'Graphic Violence'. "I don't know if Walter's going to show up tonight. Part of the point of having an apprentice is teaching them restraint /before/ the flashy stuff, so things like that never happen. I've got a few harsh words for both of them, next time I see them."
"Does this sort of thing happen that often?"
They exchanged a few looks, then greenie turned back to me. "If that had been /my/ apprentice, I'd have told him not to, and fired him if he tried it anyway."
The red-player asked, "Fired, or fire-fired?"
"Let's just say if he wanted to get back in my good graces, I'd probably want him to walk through the ironic punishment zone until something happened to him."
I piped up, "What sort of zone's that?"
Blue-y leaned back, pulled out a pipe from somewhere, lit it, puffed, and pontificated, "Not all zones are small enough to fit in a building. Some stretch over large areas, and interact with each other in interesting ways - I have some theories about fractal placements, but can't hire enough mundies to gather the data I need. The zone we call 'ironic punishment' is fairly close to the storybook zone, and may be connected to it, only instead of turning everyone into something out of a children's book, it seems to figure out the worst things you've done and inflict some appropriate response for the retributive theory of justice. Mind you, this is extrapolating from a very messy set of data, given how hard it is to pin down the zone's shifting borders, and how few people tend to be willing to admit a crime whose most appropriate punishment involves some sex-based Change."
The player who'd been setting down white cards grumbled, "That's overkill, and you know it. We should just get a wizard's court together and follow the rules."
Blue shrugged. "According to the rules, to bother with a court, the victim would have to be an acknowledged wizard, and while our guest may be many things, and may have claimed wizard-hood, she hasn't actually been acknowledged by the /rest/ of us as one."
There was a brief silence of card shuffling, and I barely resisted rolling my eyes. "And what, if it's not too much trouble to ask, would it take to be 'acknowledged' as a wizard?"
White said, "Oh, that's simple. Do the impossible."
Green added, "Have a familiar."
Red commented, "Be flashy."
And Blue contributed, "Show you can keep secrets."
"Hunh," I hunhed. "That's surprisingly close to, and annoyingly different from, 'to know, to will, to dare, to keep silent'."
White said, "It's probably like the number twenty-three, or five. If you go looking for the pattern, you'll find it. Doesn't mean the pattern means anything - we're human, or close enough, and tend to divide any idea up into a small number of sub-ideas. There's only so many sub-ideas to go around, so two related ideas' sub-ideas are going to overlap more often than you might think, but trying to force a correspondence between the other sub-ideas is likely to get you into trouble."
Blue tapped his chin. "I'm curious where you got your foursome from, though. It's not a bad aphorism, as I think about it."
I winced a little, and shook my head. "It's part of a whole esoteric body of complicated but false knowledge. There were plenty of books on the topic published pre-Singularity, but it's honestly one topic I wouldn't mind leaving to history, if I had the chance. Or, at least, keeping it out of the hands of people who don't understand that just because it's written down doesn't mean it's true."
"Even so," Blue continued, "to the prepared mind, even falsehoods can reveal the truth."
"Welp," I said, tapping my toes in an irregular pattern, "if you really want to read something like that, I can get you a copy of something relevant."
"You can arrange physical deliveries from your university on the other side of the lake? Or will you have a copy transmitted over the heliograph for transcription?"
"Even better," I said, as the bar's door opened, and all the patrons went silent. "There are advantages to being the 'royal' of the 'royal mail service'." Bear Joe paused in the doorway, lifting his head to snuffle at the air - and, coincidentally, nudging Alphie and the tricorder inside the building with a hindfoot - then, with nobody shooting at him, trundled his oversized way towards us. I stood up to wrap one arm around his neck, and use the other to remove the text from his mouth, freshly-printed by Internet. "I call this guy Bear Joe, though that's not his name. I'd call him a great big teddy bear, but that's just because he makes a great pillow, and I'm not sure if it would be politically incorrect to use the term with live plushies around now. And here's, hm, let's see - "Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries, Volume One", by Pat Zalewski. Wouldn't have been my first choice, but should cover a lot of their secret society's, um, stuff."
Green asked, through the gradually-recovering bar-noise, "Wouldn't something smaller have been more convenient? Maybe a cub?"
I patted Bear Joe on his shoulder. "There's convenient, and then there's useful, and then there's friendly, and then there's just plain old doing the best you can with who you've met." Bear Joe dropped down next to my seat, which I found just a teensy bit reassuring, given he was still a full-sized grizzly.
Blue flipped through the text, stopping at a few of the diagrams. "And what would you have done if I'd asked about some obscure pre-Singularity cuisine? Nudged the conversation to some food-related topic you actually have a book on?"
I spocked an eyebrow. "Wouldn't answering that go against your 'keep secrets' thing? But no, this trick is much more impressive than that... well, if anyone's willing to bother this comfortable-looking bear to have him go out and grab another book."
Red smiled, "I'm willing. What's the trick?"
I didn't hide my eye-roll. "To start with, we order something from the bar he'd enjoy for when he gets back. Honey's always a fave."
White nodded, and waved to the barkeep. "I'll take care of that. You do your trick."
I shrugged, keeping a perfectly straight face. "What do any of you want to read about?"
Green jumped right in, "Elephant husbandry."
Red wasn't far behind with, "Exothermic chemistry."
White asked, "Bringing back the dead?"
Blue pretended he didn't already have one book and finished with, "Memory improvement techniques."
I just nodded, and ruffled the fur on Bear Joe's head. "Whaddaya say? Up to stepping outside to grab their books, and then relaxing with a nice treat?"
He just grunted, and dropped his head to the floor.
I sighed, and gave the quartet a tentative smile. "Sorry, fellows - looks like he's done for the night. Guess I'll have to go out myself."
Blue looked up from his book at me, skeptically. "You really need to work on your presentation. Even if you need an excuse to step outside for some part of your trick, making it this obvious you have to is just plain shoddy showmanship. You should at least have gotten us to say what we wanted as part of a larger conversation, come up with some other excuse to go out, and then, say, slipped the books under our chairs to reveal to us at a good moment."
Red rolled his eyes. "Oh, don't be such a nitpicker. One of the oldest tricks in the books is to pretend to blow a trick, or just be a bumbler, and then show off even more impressive ones than the ones that failed."
White nodded, "Yes, but we haven't seen a recovery yet."
I sighed a bit, and stood. "While you all work that out, I'll go get you your books. Here, your pipe's gone out." My arm-bots followed the pre-programmed routine: I held out my fist to Blue, flicked the thumb, and applied the small flame on its tip to his pipe.
As I started walking away, I heard a bit of a babble from them, "Impregnated gloves?" "-no gloves, maybe a fake thumb?" "-watching, and if she can palm a thumb that fast she can deal herself a straight flush every time-" "-painted it with foxfire?" "-no, it was actual fire..."
Inside Munchkin, while waiting a few moments for Internet to print out fresh books, I reviewed Alphie's report on the bar, then made my way back in. I handed each one their texts - on exactly their requested topics - and smiled tightly. "I'm sorry that having an infinite library of books you can't get anywhere else isn't enough of a trick for you all. I've had to focus my efforts on finding out ways of, well, accomplishing things, instead of having the luxury of looking for ways to accomplish them with fireworks. Thanks for watching my seat for me, Joe."
Red looked up from his table of contents and glared at me. "You're just /giving out/ the instructions on how to make FOOF from scratch? Are you /trying/ to kill me?"
"You wanted exothermic, that's about as exothermic as it gets. And that book's data is a lot more reliable than the Anarchist's Cookbook, which I was thinking of just because it's such a classic. Besides, chemistry is easy - do you have any idea how hard it was to dig up accurate information on breeding pachyderms?" I gestured at Green, who seemed happy enough.
White lifted a hand. "Objection. This book is only about how to freeze people, not how to bring them back to life."
"Vitrification isn't a secret. But even without your clique's thing on secrecy, I wouldn't feel like spreading info on revival to someone who can't at least get this bit right."
Red exploded, "Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane!?", as he rose to his feet.
A couple of voices chorused, "Gesheinduit?"
Looking up at Red's furious face, I felt a bit of relief that Bun-Bun seemed to have our adrenaline turned down low, but I still dropped my left hand onto Bear Joe's head for a bit of reassurance. "You said you wanted flashy," I tried to talk him down. "I gave you flashy. You want less flashy?" I lifted my right arm and waved it, "Look behind you."
He turned, and much of his body twitched as he saw the mystic sigils made of fire on the walls of the bar - which had presumably been painted by some other wizard previously for their own trick reveal, which Alphie had noted and pointed out to me, and which I'd just lit with the maser hidden in my robo-arms' right palm.
White grumbled, "You, sit down, and you, stop scaring the mundies."
I pitched my voice a bit high to whine, "He started it," mostly to use up the few seconds the chemical-impregnated wallpaper would stay lit.
Green opened up another box of cards, and set a stack in front of my chair. "We're all playing with monocolour decks tonight. Want to continue the theme? Got a deck already built for a fifth."
I shrugged. "As if I know what I'm doing? I'm willing to play along."
The table was cleared, decks shuffled, initial hands dealt, and as I started reading the ones in my hand, White announced, "I win."
"What?"
He held out one card, spouted some gamer-babble, then more of his hand with similarly incomprehensible words, until the others nodded and Blue said, "Good game." They gathered their hands back into their decks and started shuffling again.
The next few games didn't end /quite/ so fast, but while one player pointed out a few of the basics to me - such as 'you can put down one land card per turn, unless a card says otherwise' or 'the rules changed a few times, so what's on the card isn't always how the card actually works - for example, 'Instant' used to be a separate card type instead of a subtype of 'Sorceries' - another would be assembling some ridiculous combination of card effects to produce an infinite number of soldiers, or directly inflict infinite damage, Blue used three cards to give himself infinite turns, White invoked an alternate loss condition by forcing us to draw all the cards from our draw decks, and I was generally lucky if I could play a single card.
After a particularly egregious example, in which Red spawned an infinite number of copies of a super-powerful avatar, I just set my hand down and pushed back from the table. "So," I asked. "This deck that you prebuilt for me. By any chance, is it the only one that doesn't have all these insta-win things?"
Red asked, "What fun would that be? Lemme see your deck. Here - a nice simple two-card combo, Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood. Put them down, and as soon as anyone takes any damage, you win - the one gives you as much life as someone loses, and the other makes someone lose as much life as you gain, and they cycle around and around until everyone else is dead."
"Okay," I reluctantly admitted. "But each one needs five mana to cast - how am I supposed to get that before you all wipe the board clean, or whatever? And there's, what, sixty cards in the deck? I'm supposed to rely on them both showing up in my starting hand?"
"Well, that's just one combo, there's plenty of others. And plenty of other tricks that other cards let you do, like digging through your library to pick up the card you need. You can rebuild your deck if you want, just remember that you can't have more than four each of any card, or one of a legendary. Unless the card says otherwise, like Relentless Rats."
I thoughtfully tapped my toes, and my arm-bots noticed and helpfully started me tapping my fingers. "And you're playing with the most recent rules published by Wizards of the Coast, right?"
"You've got it. We managed to snag print-outs of the most up-to-date rulings from just before the End Times."
"Okay," I said, and nodded to myself. "I need to check on something. I'll be back in a few minutes, you go ahead and keep playing in the meantime.
I stood, made my way back out to Munchkin, and as promised, was back at the wizards' table in a few minutes, now carrying a few sheafs of papers. As the quartet gathered up their most recent game and gave me curious looks, I handed them around for their inspection.
"Right," I said. "Top page. As a head-of-state, I'm issuing a royal proclamation which re-incorporates the pre-Singularity company of 'Wizards of the Coast' as a Crown Company, with myself as director. Second page. Me, wearing my hat as head of the Wizards of the Coast, issuing an update to the rules of 'Magic: the Gathering', announcing the first release of a new card to the game in decades. Third page, a picture of the card."
Said picture had a card titled "Queen Bunny Wins", with a picture of myself, and rules text reading, "A deck can have any number of cards named Queen Bunny Wins. If Queen Bunny Wins is in your opening hand, tear Queen Bunny Wins into pieces and win the game."
I pulled a pack of sixty freshly-printed 'Queen Bunny Wins' cards out of my pockets and set it in front of me. "Shall we play a game?"
The four of them were looking at the papers, then at each other, with a variety of expressions crossing their faces.
White finally said, "I wasn't here when the game nights started, so someone remind me - are we playing by the rules published as of twenty fifty, or the most recent rules, which happen to have been the ones from twenty fifty?"
Blue answered, "It's been so long, I don't think anyone remembers.
Green added, "Even if anyone did, I'm not sure that the spirit of the enterprise would have let us make that distinction, until now."
Red grunted. "What, all of you are seriously considering letting her try this? We've /got/ the rules we play by. Why should we let her change them, just because she wants to win?"
I threw in, "That's not /quite/ my goal. I went easy with the card - I didn't have to include the Blacker Lotus tear-it-up mechanic, which puts a strict limit on how long the new card can affect your usual game-playing. The sixty-card deck minimum means that the more times the card is used, the more other cards have to be added to the deck each time a 'Queen Bunny Wins' is activated, reducing the odds that one will /be/ in the opening hand."
Blue said, "Before we decide either way, I'd like to point out that the Bunny Gambit opens up certain possibilities for us. The rules from twenty fifty include a few quirks that have haunted all our games ever since - the update to emblem cards was controversial even among players at the time. Bunny probably doesn't care either way, but we could have her issue a few new rulings to pin those last few issues down for us."
Red glared at him. "And you're probably already thinking of how to get her to pick the rulings you prefer, aren't you, instead of the ones that are best for the game experience?"
White was frowning thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling. "I'm not sure that this approach is even legal in the first place. Wizards of the Coast was an American company, and Bunny is queen of Lake Erie, Canada, and the Commonwealth. Does she even have the authority to nationalize a foreign corporation?"
I responded, "If you ask the government of Lake Erie, I'm also the head-of-state of Mars' moon, Phobos. The question isn't whether I have the authority - it's who has the ability to tell me that I /don't/? The old American government appears to be defunct, and de facto, unable to file any lawsuits disputing the company's transfer of ownership."
Green spoke, "I don't know that I approve of setting the precedent that lets her say she owns whatever she wants."
I took that as a cue to reveal my trump. "Before I derail game night entirely over arguing about arcane legal principles, I have an alternate suggestion. I take these sixty cards and put them back in my pocket. And then, instead of everyone here aiming for slam-dunks all the time, at least a bit of focus is put on basic ball-handling. Land management. Putting creatures down to actually fight each other, instead of being part of some infini-combo. Having games that make sense according to the game's backstory and fluff, instead of being nothing more than running through arcane interpretations of rules like a computer. You know - /playing a game/."
"Hm," said one, and "I could live with that," said another. A few more exchanged glances, then some nods at me, and I started to put the deck away. But then Blue held up one hand. "Before we do that, and without committing one way or another about whether it's legal or not - I want to play one game against that deck. Two-player or multi-player, either way."
Shrugs all around, both of us shuffled (me rather unnecessarily), I put the deck on the table, and we started.
I lost the freaking game.
I'm pretty sure Blue cheated by some fast shuffling of his deck, but it was still absolutely ridiculous. ... At least I didn't have to tear up any of the cards.
After that little debacle, as new decks were quickly assembled for a new set of games, White commented to me, "Congratulations on being a perfect embodiment of your colour."
"Er, pardon? How does fiddling with meta-rules have anything to do with vampires and zombies?"
Green said, "Black isn't about the undead, specifically - that's just one set of tools. And in case you've gotten the wrong impression, black isn't evil, either, nor is white good."
Blue spoke up, "Each of the colours is based around a philosophy. White's is 'peace through structure', blue has 'perfection through knowledge', black is 'power through opportunity', red is 'freedom through action', and green is 'acceptance through growth'."
"White and blue sound more like my speed than black. After all, I've been building up the structure of a whole nation, and am a confirmed bibliophile."
"Ah," said Red, "but you decided on what you wanted - a back-to-basics set of games - saw that you had a way to seize power to cause that to happen, regardless of how it affected our current rules, and you took it."
I didn't answer right away, frowning to myself, as I found myself thinking about a number of my larger-scale activities in that light - in much the way I'd been thinking of them in new ways while watching Macbeth. I had my goals, and had decided that they were important enough to use any means I could think of to reach. So far, I'd been able to work towards them via means that were at least arguably moral, but if I ever decided that the best way to achieve my goals was to do something less pleasant, such as committing sacrilege on the dead to raise their mindless corpses as my tools? Or if the only way to keep myself in the running was to, as the first infinite combo for black I'd been shown had done, drain the lives of competitors in unethical ways? I couldn't say that I /wouldn't/ do any of that - I didn't think it was likely that any such actions would make enough of a difference to offset their downsides, but avoiding the permanent extinction of sapience was important enough that if I /were/ faced with that choice... I could very well see myself acting completely 'Black'.
To try to avoid an uncomfortable conversational pause, I grumbled, "Who picked /five/ colours, anyway? A lot of historical symbolism would match up better with /six/ - white, black, and four elements. I can match up red with fire, blue with water, and green with earth, but what about air?"
"Actually," said White, "The classical element of air is mostly part of Blue."
Blue added, "If you really want a six-colour version of the game, there /were/ some proposals for a variant which added 'Purple', with caves as the basic land..."
And the game went on.
----->8-----
It's been 22 years since Magic was first published; I'm assuming that it's going to stay in print for the next 35. Having one or more rules changes which requires revamping old cards seems well in line with the MTG tradition, given how often the officially legal text for a card can already differ substantially from what's actually printed on it.
The person who suggested that said it would eliminate the need for Tribal as a subtype at all, as you could have a Sorcery with the Goblin subtype.
The proposal was that such cards would go straight to the command zone when played, and be unable to be interacted with.
And, with all that said, I'm not particularly tied to any of these changes. As long as I have some description of how Magic could have changed between now and Halloween of 2050, I'll be happy. So far, the three changes I've mentioned are the only ideas I've been able to collect - if anyone reading this has any alternative proposals, I'd welcome them.
The novel "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline is strong evidence that referring to existing media franchises can be done without significant legal complications. MtG is only going to be a small part of my overall story, and I'm going to be referring to people playing the game in the real world, as opposed to incorporating any of the fictional elements of MtG's multiverse, so I'm confident I'm in the clear.
(In addition, I'm also confident that my story is going to be entirely unpublishable, outside of self-publishing. I still think it's worth the effort of writing it.)
I think I can add a sequence like that; thank you very much for the suggestion.
I was once told that the first million words anyone writes will be terrible, so they might as well just start writing to get all the bad words out so they can move on to the good stuff as soon as possible. So: just keep writing, and it'll be worth the work.
A counterspell, followed by an infinite combo to mill through Bunny's library so she loses individually before another player wins, could work.
After a bit of thought, though, it would be a nice bit of foreshadowing for a later plot point if at least one of Bunny's "I win" cards was essentially stolen in-game, and applied by one of the other players for them to win with. As soon as I have time, I'll try searching through Gatherer for a card whose effects allow that. (Though, as usual, I'd still appreciate all the suggestions and advice I can get.)
I'm thinking of starting with Relentless Rats, so she can fill her deck with the 'I win' card; though wouldn't object to some other method to dig through her deck to get that card on her first turn.
There seem to be a few cards on Gatherer with alternative win conditions. Bunny wouldn't want to wait until 'at the beginning of your upkeep', so maybe, based on Maze's End and Biovisionary, a simple, "If you control at least one card named 'Queen Bunny Wins', you win the game."
Another option could be based on the 0-mana Blacker Lotus: "Tear 'Queen Bunny Wins' into pieces. You win the game.", with Instant or Flash to be able to try to pre-empt another player's first-turn win.
I'm less familiar with first-turn ways to counter cards, so I'm not sure if any of these card ideas would have suitable flaws to exploit, or what those exploitation methods would be.
Do you have any suggestions?
I know enough of the basics of Magic to cover what I'd like to say - but if I can get any advice here on more advanced topics that would be even more relevant, I would be very happy.
For example, I am planning on the 'wizards' using the "most recent" available rules for the game, as of Halloween of 2050; does anyone more familiar with the game's long-term development than I have any thoughts on what the state of the game might be like by then? (I've gotten suggestions on Instant being a subtype, that any card-type can have any subtype, and a new type is emblems.)
Besides Queen Bunny showing off her more obvious personality traits by having a preference for a white pacifism deck (her usual day job is archaeological research of the First Singularity to try to learn how to prevent a Second Singularity from eliminating all sapience in the universe), possibly with a minor in blue (for the cards with the theme of mind-improving rationality, and because she's technically the head-of-state of some sapient squid living in Lake Erie), I'm thinking of having the wizards show off a bit with some first-turn infinite-cycle instant-win routines. Upon seeing which, Queen Bunny would soon try to return the favour by taking a moment to go outside to her vehicle with its printers, returning with some royal proclamations re-incorporating Wizards of the Coast as a Canadian crown company with all of its previous intellectual property and herself in charge, and a freshly-printed card whose effects are basically "Bunny wins" (which I've started a thread in 'Custom Card Creation' about)... and, very likely, /still/ losing. But being a good sport about it, leading to more ordinary games which the wizards can use to evaluate Bunny's learning capacity, ability to cooperate, strategic sense, and other such info.
A recurring theme of the story involves extinction risks, and what price is worth paying to reduce them. I haven't been able to think of a way to tie Magic directly to that theme, though I'd like to. The closest I've managed is to bring up how Magic can be Turing-complete, to show how hard it is to prevent a dangerous piece of software from ever being run again; but I'd like to do better than that.
Do you have any other suggestions?