Magic: The Gathering - Tactics

~ the obit ~

Magic was never in my orbit. What I played on Turkish connections through the 2000s was Counter-Strike in internet cafes and Ultima Online on private servers, and a collectible card game wants a table and people sitting at it, which is a kind of distance you cannot close with a modem. So this one is reconstructed from the record rather than remembered.

Sony Online Entertainment released it on 18 January 2011 for Windows. SOE at that point was the studio behind EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, a company that knew how to run a persistent world and had decided to spend a Wizards of the Coast license on something that was not one. A PlayStation 3 version was announced and then canceled. The Steam release came in February 2012.

It was free to download. You got starter decks that could not be traded, and everything past that ran through an auction house where players sold cards to each other, or through Station Cash, SOE's own currency, which unlocked the single-player campaign chapters. Two storefronts pointing at the same game, which is roughly how free-to-play worked in 2011.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the grid ~

Here is the design decision that defines it. Your planeswalker was a figure standing on a square grid, your creatures were figures too, and you moved them around a map and positioned them against each other the way you would in a tactical role-playing game. You won by killing the other planeswalker, and the life total that governs every game of paper Magic did not come into it.

To make that work they took out the land cards. No mana screw and no mana flood, and no deckbuilding argument about how many lands to run. Your available mana simply went up by one every turn, automatically, forever. Ask a Magic player what the game is actually about and a good number of them will tell you it is resource management under variance. Tactics deleted the variance and kept the figures.

~ the last six months ~

SOE posted the closure notice in October 2013, about five months short of the game's third birthday. Sales of in-game items stopped on 18 November 2013, which is the date that really matters, because after it the auction house was a market with nothing new entering it. The servers ran on for another four months with the shop dark.

They went off on 28 March 2014. SOE itself had under a year left as a Sony company by then, sold to Columbus Nova in February 2015 and renamed Daybreak, so Tactics died on the front edge of a much larger wind-down.

~ what the license took ~

Plenty of dead online games get a second life from people who care enough to rebuild the server. Someone reverse-engineers the protocol, somebody else hosts it, and the thing runs quietly for another decade in front of two hundred people. That route was closed here before anyone tried it. The cards, the art, the names and the rules were licensed from Wizards of the Coast, and a private server does not get to keep using them because the original operator stopped.

So there is no Tactics emulator and there is not going to be one. The figures on the grid were rented from a company that still sells the real thing, and when the rent stopped, the map went with it.

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