How a Magic Activity Network Functions Rhetorically
RQ1a: How does the functionality of an activity system/network emerge through rhetorical action?
As a unique game, as an analog game, and as a complex system of activity networks, Magic operates in a number of rhetorical dimensions that reflect the varied goals, expectations, affordances, and motives of its players and the communities they comprise.
Certainly, the difference between strategy planning/anticipation and realization tends to differ significantly in many cases, with that difference signaling an important quality of the system: at no time is any player fully aware of their opponent’s available resources. Unlike conventional card games using a single 52-card deck, Magic decks may (depending on the format) draw from the thousands of cards produced in the game’s 25-year existence. Further, there may be little to no overlap between two players’ decks, meaning that the cards each player is familiar with (the contents of their own deck) may not be especially useful knowledge in regards to understanding how one’s opponent plans to use their own deck. As a result, each game serves to teach players how to respond to specific emerging variables and the general unknown inherent in Magic play.
With the conventional expectation of a rhetor to anticipate and respond to particular audience considerations when developing and delivering an argument, Magic (and, for that matter, other complex activity systems, analog and digital alike) both reifies and defies convention in its facilitation of procedural activity. Like many analog games, Magic functions only when all participants have agreed upon similar interpretations of rules and seek similar outcomes through play activities. Like many systems (of varying kinds), different actors involved may seek different goals and activate system components in radically different ways in order to achieve them, with tensions and contradictions arising when they intersect. Magic may defy convention in that its player communities attempt to maintain equilibrium (or at least tolerant coexistence) among its millions of fans who support one or more of its diegetic narrative, casual play philosophy, and higher-stakes competition. Indeed, the scale of Magic’s popularity may allow conclusions drawn from individual games to suggest much more generalizable insights about complex analog systems than other objects of study might.
The decks constructed by our participants reflect some of the major rhetorical decisions made for potentially effective gameplay within the participant group. For example, Trevor designed his life gain deck, Blessed Grove of Recovery, after seeing the mechanic successfully used in the Price of Glory starter deck, and so he focused on maximizing the low-cost, life gain-focused cards available to him, specifically the combination of Ajani’s Pridemate, Soulmender, Sungrace Pegasus, and Staff of the Sun Magus. Ideally, each attack by Sungrace Pegasus would increase Trevor’s life total, which would put an additional strength and toughness on Ajani’s Pridemate, and both life total and Ajani’s Pridemate would be bolstered by tapping Soulmender in the second main phase. Because they were plentiful and inexpensive, these three cards provided a useful early game strategy. Additionally, once Staff of the Sun Magus was in play, each additional white spell would work for life gain, and increasing the power and toughness of Ajani’s Pridemate further. However, while this life gain combination was brilliant in theory, there were too many moving parts and not enough redundancies to prevent early missteps and slip-ups from affecting its overall success.
In the Price of Glory starter deck, life gain functioned as one mechanic in concert with others, one action among others. For example, life gain also would increase the power and toughness of Wall of Limbs, which would become more powerful, if purely defensive, as the game progressed, but with the option of sacrificing it to do damage to opponents’ creatures. By focusing on this one mechanic, life gain, and stripping away what he saw as unnecessary, Trevor ended up removing from his deck elements that were integral to the overall successful strategy of Price of Glory. Trevor had a single focus on outlasting opponents, making his design function, but without anything much beside life gain, lacking early turn, inexpensive creatures, and overloading with expensive ones, Trevor’s simplistic and heavy-handed strategy, if clever in its own right, was ultimately unsuccessful for winning games. Indeed, he was much more focused on seeing his designs realized rather than effective gameplay.
This sort of practice was not an obstacle during the starter deck games, as particular play styles had already been chosen by designers employed by Wizards of the Coast (which, in turn, served as a different sort of obstacle). However, as Table 1 on the Results page shows, some starter decks tended to be more likely to win over others, especially in the hands of some participants (who may, like Trevor with Price of Glory, found a style that they enjoyed playing). Similarly, the starter deck games occurred before participants had a chance to scrutinize each card and understand how it worked; the nodes of the Magic activity network, then, emerged as each of us came to learn how it might be useful rather than knowing confidently that it would (or would not) be in a particular gameplay situation.
In essence, the rhetorical function of a network like Magic or any of its individual game iterations (or even any of its specific player strategies/actions within a game) is that of a continually, reflexively, self-constitution informed by the anticipations, actions, and responses of all participants and available game actors (e.g., cards, rules, social conventions). In many ways, this activity assumes an orientation toward what John R. Gallagher (2017) called an "algorithmic audience" in which one writes "with different expectations, purposes, and discourses for each algorithm" (p. 28). In the case of Magic games, the act of writing is specifically that of performing game actions, of inscribing meaning into the game scenario by attempting to realize or avoid particular algorithmic outcomes to pursue certain paths to victory; Gallagher described this (in a more general sense) as writers "interact[ing] ... with specific reading patterns and procedures" (p. 29). Over time, each participant in our group attempted to learn (seemingly) useful patterns and test the boundaries of specific procedures’ likelihood for success. As this happened, we discovered new ways of engaging one another and the game’s material and rule components, learning new methods of reading, of associating certain concepts with others for combinatory results, and of pursuing victory in risky, as well as reliable, ways.