by Rob Bockman
“In 1985, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” –“Random Rules,” David Berman (1967-2019)
“In small proportions we just beauties see/And in short measures life may perfect be.” –“To the Immortal Memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morison,” Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
“The suns of Mirrodin have shone upon perfection only once.” –Mox Opal (2010–)
There is no such thing as a perfect work of art.
Art can’t be perfect because it’s made by artists. There’s a tremor in every artist’s hand, a worm of doubt in every artist’s heart. Every work of art is filtered through the pathologies of the artist, in the frailty of their body, in the lessons or the traumas ground in by their society and their culture.
Furthermore, if works of art are created by the imperfect, then they’re judged by imperfect observers. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lydon got muted reviews, while David Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me was outright panned. Moby Dick was called “absurd” and “preposterous” in 1851 reviews, Slaughterhouse-Five as rife with “fatuousness” over a century later. “Perfection” is a purportedly objective word, but the thing is: just as there’s no such thing as apolitical, there is no such thing as “objective” in the realm of art production and art critique.
Personally, I’ve never seen a movie, read a book, or played a game that I would call a 10/10 masterpiece without a misstep. Mad Max: Fury Road has that tawdry 3-d shot that was de rigueur back then. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has “The Fool.” I’ve seen the Sistine Chapel; I’ve also seen tourists faking fainting spells so they can get a verboten photo of the frescos from the ground.
Still, artists can approach perfection. Sometimes, that approach looks like a deluge of technique, like overloading your circuits until you succumb to the vision. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian works by drowning you in imagery and archaic vocabulary, Belá Tarr’s Satantango by exhausting your understanding of time, ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium through a torrent of worldbuilding details and shotgun blasts of pathos. This is where I would file cards like Crackle with Power or Mathemagics. They require–and reward–multiple readings and are open-ended in their potential. Approaching perfection can also paradoxically look like simplicity. With some media, the briefer the work, the closer it can get to perfection. Some people call this elegance—the art of compressing information down to a single point until it’s hard and sharp as a diamond. Case in point: Dark Ritual’s current Oracle text simply reads “Add BBB,” the Magic equivalent of “I am.” Maybe perfection is in that tension between maximalism and minimalism. Maybe perfection requires external pressure, whether that’s the context of its time or the universal awareness of the ephemerality of life. Magic can be eloquent and prolix within the same booster pack–the tension between Limited and Commander all but require this in modern Magic sets, for Wanderwine Distracterto exist right next to Loch Mare.
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Magic is a form of communication and, like all forms of communication, nears perfection when it rules out misinformation. This is why my vote for Magic’s most perfect card is Lightning Bolt: insofar as any Magic card can provide perfect information, Lightning Bolt comes closest. It’s all there on the card: the cost can’t be misconstrued, as “1R” could theoretically be misconstrued (“is that one AND a red? Or one that has to be Red?”). Likewise, it’s painstakingly clear as to what it can deal damage to. “Any target.” Anyone who has played non-Standard Magic is familiar with it and, even outside of the gameplay aspects, Lightning Bolt is conceptually understandable. It’s a bolt of lightning. It deals damage, killing Grizzly Bears or unsheltered Soldiers. It can’t kill an Angel or a Demon, as they are rarified beings. It maps a real-world phenomenon to Magic’s aesthetic palette with a minimum of adaptation. Lightning Bolt is a perfect card, perhaps Magic’s only perfect card. It was powerful in 1993, was powerful in 2013, and is powerful today—indeed, it’s still too powerful for Standard, although it’s tantalizingly close to reasonable in Standard.
Is a perfect card a card that requires the least amount of rules knowledge to comprehend? This is a seductive heuristic that lets us count Dark Ritual as a perfect card and Panglacial Wurm as one of Magic’s least perfect cards, which I think is essentially accurate, but it’s overly simplistic. Plus, many players adore complexity in their cards and want to demonstrate their mastery of Magic’s more arcane rules. Blood Moon is almost as old as Lightning Bolt and its text is just as elegant, but the rules ramifications of Blood Moon are more complex than those of Lightning Bolt.
So, for a card to approach perfection, it needs to meet certain criteria:
- It must represent an understandable concept.
- It must minimize confusion for a reasonably expert player.
- It must solve a problem in the game.
There are corollaries to these criteria, but this is how I generally analyze a card. A card like Cori-Steel Cutter fails by these standards, as it creates more problems than it solves (the problem it solves is “how do I get my opponent dead faster?”) and plays more powerfully than it reads. It’s a great card from a play perspective, but as an artifact of Magic and as a piece of art, it’s flawed. This is why I love Magic, though–knowledge of the game is incomplete without embracing its imperfect moments, from Urza’s Block-era Combo Winter to Eldrazi Winter to tournament formats wrecked by Hogaak or Nadu or Vivi. More than a mode of communication, Magic is a relationship, both in the sense of an environmental dynamic between the cards and in the relationship we each have to the game.
Personally, I like imperfection in art and in my relationship to art. I like to see people work and what they left behind of themselves in the art. I like to see the seams where some talented hand stitched something together or the little abraded patch where they tried to scrub the blood out. A well-phrased few words of sage advice is nice, but so is a sprawling, drunken monologue on kitchen tiles. Lightning Bolt is beautiful in its elegance, but Graveyard Trespasser//Graveyard Glutton is beautiful in its clunkiness, like a knife versus a Rube Goldberg machine.
Maybe what we’re searching for isn’t “perfection,” but “elegance.” Yet even that has its pitfalls. Withered Wretch is a more elegant card than Scavenging Ooze–and certainly more than Keen-Eyed Curator–but the later iterations are better cards within the context of Magic as a game. Likewise, Mutable Explorer is inelegant to parse, but if you’re familiar with Magic’s legacy of creatures with Changeling and with Mutavault, it plays much better than it reads. Someone who is new to Magic will likely have to read the card multiple times, while those of us who ground infinite Lorwyn block drafts almost twenty years ago can go “cute, it’s a Changeling that makes a Mutavault” and grasp it instantly. Hexing Squelcher has an absurd amount of rules text, but the Squelcher package is simple: your things can’t be countered and have “Ward–2 life.”
A friend, when asked for his perfect Magic card, pitched Farseek. I pushed back initially, as Farseek was printed twenty years ago and people still try to fetch basic Forests with it. But is that Farseek’s fault? It’s not called “Nearseek,” so why should you expect to be able to pay 1G to fetch a basic Forest when you could explore a Hedge Maze or a Stomping Ground? By our definition, then, yes, Farseek is a perfect card. It was good twenty years ago and will hopefully be good in another twenty. Someone who hasn’t played Magic since Homelands can pick it up and understand its functionality. It can be easily committed to memory and plays just as well in kitchen table “play what we own” casual, booster pack Limited, and lower bracket Commander games.
As machine learning/“AI” trains itself into seamlessness, we’re going to have to learn to mistrust perfection. Wizards of the Coast, to their credit, have promised not to use these technologies in producing Magic: the Gathering—a laudable promise, but I don’t believe corporate promises, tied as they are to market performance. Magic has always prioritized top-tier art and fostered relationships with artists; I don’t think they’ll burn those bridges lightly, but they’ll happily burn bridges if they think it’ll make space for more permanent infrastructure. I also don’t think Wizards’ design team will embrace LLM technologies until Mark Rosewater and his mentees are out of the picture, simply because they don’t need to: Wizards R&D is exceptional at creating cohesive Magic sets. That said, as society shifts towards accepting AI products and Hasbro leans on Magic as a profits engine, we can’t imagine what aesthetic mutations await us. My credo in recent years has been “make uglier art in the same room as each other,” as so many of my artist friends are now required to do the auxiliary labor of process videos and AI mission statements. AI art is poreless, seamless, waxen—the eye slips over it without engaging. It is the aesthetic of corporate logos, of billboards, of unconsidered and all-consuming commerce. Increasingly, it is the aesthetic of neofascism. Unfortunately, to a lot of people, it also appears perfect. Resist that pull towards perfection. If making errors is a fundamental part of being human, then perfection is another word for “inhuman.” Find joy in that imperfection, and more importantly, find joy in how your relationship deepens as you familiarize yourself with the cards–I remember being unimpressed by Deceit upon first reveal, but having now ground round after round of Sultai Reanimator over the last two weeks, I’m fully in love with it and the lines of play it enables.
At the end of the day, Magic can’t be perfect, because perfection smothers nuance, and Magic is all about nuance. Last Gasp is a near-perfect Magic card, as a sort of Black Lightning Bolt, but if all it did was shrink a creature by -3/-3, it wouldn’t be nearly as worthwhile. Instead, you level up as a neophyte Magic player the first time you realize you can block their 5/5 with your puny 3/3 and Last Gasp it before damage. That’s the feeling we all chase when we shuffle up–the minor revelation that you can swing this situation to your advantage. When we pursue perfection, we forget that all of the best parts of humanity (and thus, the best parts of humanity) are tied up in friction and in nuance. Magic may have approached perfection once on day one, but it’s in the three decades since of Okos and Uros and Vivis that we see how overrated perfection is.
Rob Bockman is a writer and long-time resident of the Carolinas. He has written about Magic since 2017 and has been a Golgari aficionado since before that had a canonical name. He has a background in comedy writing, Southern Gothic literature, and dramaturgy, all of which, weirdly enough, comes into play with his Magic writing.