Lessons Learned: Magic: the Gathering
Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new series on Screaming Into the Void! For the month of July, I wanted to push myself to upload some weekly SEO-friendly content instead of writing one massive essay every few months. For this series, Lessons Learned, I wanted to write about some ways I’ve grown as a composer by engaging with the non-music world, and how we as composers can learn from other creative media. Stay tuned for new content every Monday in July, and if it works out and people like it, I might commit to a more regular posting schedule going forward. With that out of the way, on with the show!
If you’ve spoken to me or seen what I do in my downtime at work (sorry boss!), you’ll know that I’ve become deeply interested in the trading card game Magic: the Gathering over the past year or so. There are a couple reasons I think I glommed onto Magic so strongly: first, it’s a competitive tabletop game-cum-critical thinking puzzle box that is deep and complex enough to sustain decades of interest. Second, it’s the oldest-running trading card game I’m aware of, with tens of thousands of cards and dozens of formats. Third, it’s an outlet for creativity that I desperately needed after I finished my Master’s and required time away from composing for mental health reasons. Magic fosters and requires creative thinking within a strategic framework, quick learning of card details and game rules, and research skills (i.e. combing through hundreds or thousands of individual card designs online and identifying the ones that best synergize with the strategies of a particular deck). It’s a game played both for fun and for large cash prizes, so it has a rulebook that reads like a citation style manual in its rigid, consistent definition of game terms such as card types and keywords as well as its drive to account for every possible wrinkle that might turn up in play, no matter how unlikely.
There are many lessons composers can glean from Magic, but I’m going to focus here on two that I’ve taken from deckbuilding. Brewing, or building decks, is by far my favourite way to engage with Magic: it’s a relatively structured creative activity which allows for a wide range of strategies and card types within different constraints. My first lesson will talk about how deckbuilding has affected my composition process; my second will discuss the importance of forming beneficial relationships within and across musical elements, and how Magic’s intellectual framework has helped me do so.
Lesson 1: Process
Even this early into my special interest in Magic, my deckbuilding has crystallized into a consistent process. There are certain elements that any Magic deck needs in order to be successful: cards that allow you to cast your spells, spells that draw you more cards, spells that interact with your opponent, and cards that win the game. The balance of each of these categories can vary from deck to deck, but aside from some wholly unique fringe strategies, all of them need to be present if the deck is to be effective. When deckbuilding, I always begin with the latter category: what is the overall strategy of the deck? What cards am I going to use to win the game? For instance, if I’m building a Hardened Scales deck for the competitive and fast-paced Modern format, I’m going to need spells that put +1/+1 counters on creatures, thus increasing their power very rapidly, and low-cost creatures to receive those effects. Everything follows around that strategy: if there are spells that grant me surplus mana and place +1/+1 counters on a creature, they might be included over spells that do the former but not the latter. The idea is to make the deck as lean and efficient as possible using resource-efficient cards that fulfil multiple roles.
In composition, this way of thinking has considerable benefits. In my composing process, I need to have an idea of a piece’s structure before doing anything else. Where are emotional peaks and valleys going to happen? If there are changes in tempo or intensity, where do they occur? If musical motives recur, where do they do so? My pieces tend towards blocky, sectional forms because it lets me divide a piece into increments of time and slot in my materials section by section. This approach creates a framework that makes shaping the moment-to-moment details of a piece very easy, and I’ve found it useful to categorize and group my materials like I do when brewing a Magic deck. I’ve taken to asking: what does this particular piece need in order to be successful? What role does a given element or group of elements fulfil in this phrase, section, or the piece as a whole? These questions are helpful at all stages of composition - for instance, when I was writing grass blooms under the wind for two saxophones and piano, I was given a stipulation by the commissioning ensemble that the piece be relatively easy to digest by an audience of non-musicians. From there, I determined several things the piece would need in order to fit this paradigm: an exciting rhythmic framework, euphonious harmonies, and songlike homophonic textures with identifiable melodies. Later on, as I was assembling my elements and placing them into phrases, I found that one extraneous motive - a dancelike four-measure phrase in 9/8 - kept cropping up in my sketches. I eventually found myself asking whether or not it was necessary given the goals of the piece, breaking the idea down into its constituent elements and considering how each of those could benefit or dectract from the rest of the piece. Ultimately, I decided that this motive’s metric stability and different character from my other materials allowed it to offer an interesting contrast. This ended up being the right move: the piece was exciting both to play and listen to, and all it took to make it that much better was asking the same questions I would of my Magic decks.
Lesson 2: Synergy
One key aspect of any Magic deck is synergy – how beneficially do the deck’s individual pieces interact with each other? Despite the fact that synergy is very easily achieved in Commander due to the presence of a single card to guide the deckbuilding process, there exists a prevalent deck archetype called “good stuff” which aims to simply collect the most high-impact and efficient cards from any colour combination regardless of synergy. I despise “good stuff,” both because it’s an ineffective strategy and because, to me, the most exciting decks are ones that contain niche cards which work best in that particular deck. For example, a favourite creature of mine from last year’s Streets of New Capenna expansion is Henzie “Toolbox” Torre, who lets you cast expensive creature cards at a discount and gives them haste, allowing them to attack on the turn they are played, with the drawback that creature cast this way dies at the end of the turn. You do draw a card when a creature dies this way, but this condition makes it so that not every creature will synergize with this commander – you want to gain as much value as possible in a single turn, so creatures like Grave Titan that slowly accumulate value won’t be as useful.
One important creature in a Henzie deck is Seedguide Ash, a five-mana green creature that lets you search your library for two land cards and put them on the battlefield when it dies. On its own, this card is awful – in most decks, it’s five mana for a weak creature that may accelerate your mana base after you’ve ramped to five mana, at which point many games of Magic have already been decided. With Henzie, however, the card becomes much more efficient – instead of five mana, it’s four mana to deal combat damage to an opponent, draw a card, and gain two lands, which is incredible value for the cost. Since Henzie only costs three mana, it means that you can play Henzie on turn three then cast Seedguide Ash on four, going from four lands to six plus drawing a card and advancing your board state. There are cards in my Henzie deck that would work in others – for instance, the card “Ravenous Chupacabra,” a four-mana black creature that destroys another creature when it enters the battlefield, fits into many sacrifice or graveyard strategies – but I think it’s those niche inclusions that make a deck special.
This concept of synergy isn’t new to creative fields – I learned it from a book on architecture and visual design when I was just beginning to learn to write music. When I compose, it’s important to me that each piece has a clear objective, a thesis statement of sorts that will guide my efforts going forward. This would be analogous to a commander in Magic: it’s the thing you want to build around, and that will help you decide whether any given element is superfluous or ineffective. I almost always aim to design my materials so that they work best with each other – and interact in a way that furthers the goal of a piece – rather than just cobbling together a bunch of cool sounds. I’ve had this philosophy for quite some time, but Magic has taught me to think of each element as a discrete entity, giving a clarity and structure to my thinking that I didn’t possess before.
Two sections of grass blooms that vexed me were transitions: I couldn’t figure out how to fluidly and coherently tie two very different ideas together without adding a completely new element which risked overturning the balance of ideas and drawing undue attention to itself. Looking at the music before and after the transition, I realized that both were lively and vigorous, the former being the end of a gradual ramp-up in intensity and the latter being the 9/8 section discussed before. I then figured that a cooler, enervated feel would heighten the contrast between the two bookending sections, so I cobbled together a quick hocket using leftover materials I hadn’t yet used. Later on, I found another spot where lower energy was necessary, after a false climax and before the ramp-up to the piece’s emphatic ending. This time, I didn’t need to write any new music because I already had a template in the prior transition: all I needed to do, then, was adapt the previous material into something similar but which more directly related in mood to its surroundings. The result was a tightening of the piece, a beneficial relationship between these two transitions which improved the work’s coherence and created a sense of inevitability around the second transition: because they had heard similar material before, they had expectations which could then be fulfilled or subverted. While these elements were unremarkable in and of themselves, the context within they were placed and their interactions with other materials made them extremely helpful in constructing the work.
Conclusion
Above all, building decks in Magic has taught me new ways to structure my composing process. I’ve always liked to have an organized approach when writing music, but deckbuilding brings into focus the importance of asking specific questions of my materials, of ensuring that every element has a clear role and matches with the elements around it. Of course, it’s quite a lot easier to compose a Magic deck because the frameworks are given to you: you have a prescribed budget of cards, and a metagame that dictates the inclusion of certain cards over others. Us composers need to decide for ourselves whether or note our materials suit the objective of our piece and know how to change them if they don’t. It’s difficult work, but I find that a structured approach that imposes just a few constraints has done wonders for the quality of my work, and Magic has been a fantastic template for structures that are flexible and which can accommodate almost any kind of piece.
That’s all for this week’s installment of Lessons Learned! If you learned something new or just enjoyed the read, please feel free to leave a comment or send this to a composer in your life. Have a great one, and I’ll see you again next time.