I was playing Magic Online not long ago. I was down to 1 health, and one more turn would kill me. Fortunately, on my next draw I drew Glimpse the Unthinkable, a card that puts 10 cards in his draw pile (or Library) into his discard pile (or Graveyard). Running out of cards in your library is an alternate win condition, one which rarely happens, but since he only had 7 cards in his library, he was defeated. He was furious.

“Did you just topdeck that card?” he asked me. I responded that I had. He went off in a huff, while I pondered this new verb, which previously I hadn’t noticed but now I see in MTG message board posts all the time. Topdeck is interesting because at first glance, it’s synonymous with draw. But it’s not.

Schadenfreude is an interesting word, which means more than delight – it means delight in a specific instance, specifically when an enemy suffers. Similarly, Topdeck is a situational word. It means more than draw – it means to draw the right thing at the right time. Most commonly, topdeckhas come to mean you drew the only thing that could save you. It’s implication is that you would have lost had you not drawn that card. In its purest form, topdeck is an epiphet thrown in derision by a sore loser – it’s implication is that your win came from luck, not skill.

Given how often a random draw can affect your game experience in MTG, one can see why the community would need to invent a word. Draw just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve long been fascinated by lingo in games, and MMOs of course have their own strong one. Camping. Spawn. Mobs. Zerg (okay, we borrowed that one). The interesting thing about Magic Lingo is that it’s changed as the game has evolved. Prodigal sorcerers used to be Tim, named for the mysterious wizard in Holy Grail. Now that the Prodigal Sorcerer has left the basic set, only old timers use the term, and only nostalgically.

Some of the lingo still sticks around. Mana screwed is still mana screwed (which is to say, it’s still the polite way to say mana fucked). Some terms return: when the Hypnotic Spectre returned in 9th edition, many strategy guides immediately began using the term Hippy as if the card had never gone out of style.

And some lingo is all-new – at least I don’t remember it. Scoop is one of them – it means to give up (as in you start scooping up your cards – an interesting term to be used online given we don’t physically have to pick up our cards in the online version of the game). Example sentence: “He had just brought a 12/12 flier into play, when I converted it to my side with a Control Magic. Then he scooped.” Until I figured out what the term meant, I couldn’t figure out why the story teller ended his story so abruptly.

Of course, the most interesting new terms that I found were Johnny, Timmy and Spike, three words that players on boards regularly used to describe themselves or their opponents. After much confusion on my part and some investigation, I found the source of the terms – it turns out that these are the personality types that play Magic: they are the terms their designers throw around when trying to describe how different players play the game (for my money, I like ‘Achiever’, ‘Explorer’, ‘Killer’, ‘Socializer’ better). Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic the Gathering, has an article here describing the player archetypes, including a quiz to determine which category you are in. The rough breakdown is as follows:

  • Johnny:Player driven to make the most creative decks with the wackiest combos possible. Roughly equivalent to a Bartle’s Explorer.
  • Spike: Highly competitive player, determined to win at all costs – will play low cost, ‘boring’ decks that still manage to win most of the time simply by playing the percentages. Roughly equivalent to a Bartle’s Killer, perhaps Achiever.
  • Timmy: Player wow’d by the big monsters and big effects that often are impossible to bring out in practice. Roughly equivalent to all those guys who buy MMOs based on pretty screenshots.

(For the record, I’m a Johnny, which is a good thing, as my MTGO rating hasn’t budged, upwards or downwards, since I started playing leagues and tournaments).

Of course, the interesting thing about Mark’s article is noting how the different players innately have different resistances to losing. Johnny is there to pull off the impossible combo. He know’s it’s impossible, but if he manages to pull it off once and win one game out of ten, he’ll be happy. Timmy just wants to bring his big bruising monster out. If he can get it out occasionally and win 3 times out of ten, he’ll by happy. By comparison, Spike is so competitive that he’ll get mad if he doesn’t win pretty much every time.

So anyway, those are my MTGO explorations. If anyone happens to find themselves playing, shoot me an email and I’ll give you my handle.