Pattern Recognition #225 - Exile and the Graveyard

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

27 January 2022

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Hello everyone! This is Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series as written by myself, berryjon. I am something of an Old Fogey who has been around the block quite a few times where Magic is concerned, as as such, I use this series to talk about the various aspects of this game, be it deck design, card construction, mechanics chat, in-universe characters and history. Or whatever happens to cross my mind this week. Please, feel free to dissent in the comments below the article, add suggestions or just plain correct me! I am a Smart Ass, so I can take it.

Today's article, for the second week in a row, is the result of you, my lovely readers (I assume there are multiple of you at this point), making a request of me! And that request came from Pheardemons who wanted me to help explain what Exile is, and was, to newer players who may not have been living in the bad old days.

Well, you see, Exile is a place, deep underground. Caverns used as a dumping ground by the Empire. Wait? What's that? I'm getting a message... Wrong Exile? Poor form to advertise your LP's here? Meh, whatever.

Exile, as we know it today, didn't start with a name. In the beginning of the bad old days of Alpha, there were four zones for cards. What we now call the Battlefield, your Library, your Hand and your Graveyard, and all of these were mirrored by your opponent. This was in the days before the Stack, mind you. Cards moved from the library to your hand, from there to the battlefield then to the graveyard. Sometimes card when from your graveyard to your hand or to the library or the battlefield, but that was more the exception than the rule.

But sometimes, when a card got removed from the battlefield, Wizards designer, Richard Garfield, Ph.D. intended for it to get removed for the rest of the game. And so, something was given to that it still has its toe in with Modern Magic, but has been shared with all other colors to one extent or another. got this little card in Alpha called Swords to Plowshares.

As part of the initial division of the color pie, was given a unique ability. Well, one shared by , but they really had to pay for it. was allowed to remove a creature from the game. They could point to something and send it away. Not to the graveyard, but literally removed from the game.

In the early days of the game, the Graveyard was seen as the end location for most cards in a game, once something hit there, it was going to stay there. Resurrection not withstanding, of course. However, there was always the possibility that something might come back, especially with future sets. So why not build into the game a way to permanently remove one of those pesky creatures?

This is what Swords to Plowshares did. It took a creature and it removed it from the game.

For at that point in the game, being removed from the game really did mean that. It was gone until the game was done and you were packing up your cards. Because you always left with the same cards you started with, and we don't talk about Ante.

Removed From the game existed in this nebulous zone of the game that was past the graveyard, and you really couldn't interact with anything there. Graveyard interaction was allowable, of course. But once you were removed from the Game, that was that. You lost it. And what made Swords to Plowshares so palatable was that it gave you, being the controller of the creature about to be terminated with prejudice, life equal to its power, a sort of reward or consolation prize for losing out on a powerful high-power creature.

Which ... didn't mean much in the long run really. As the real value of Creatures came from their abilities, and not just their stat line. Which is something that wasn't learned for far too long, but that is a story for another time.

But as the game evolved, certain things needed to be codified and defined. In addition to the creation of the Stack, one of the smaller changes was that the location of 'Removed from Play' was defined, and given the name of 'Exile', so that cards could be Exiled, rather than removed from play. It was a choice for ease of understanding to define 'Exile' as 'Outside of the Battlefield and associated zones', and the verbage to get there. It changed nothing in the game, but it clarified and defined certain aspects of the game.

It also gave us AWOL.

In which we get the best way to get rid of a card now. Not only does it Exile its target, it also removes it from Exile and puts it into the absolutely-removed-from-the-freaking-game-forever zone! Which is awesome and hilarious.

However, this led to two new developments. First was that as being able to Exile things became more prevalent, the Graveyard gained new prominence as a resource to be tapped. Recursion became easier, if not automatic in some cases, and this culminated in the original Ravnica Block, with the dreaded Dredge Mechanic.

I'm going to summarize a rather large debacle in Magic design, one that should never come back to the forefront of the game again. That being, this mechanic allowed for your graveyard to become an extension of your hand, and made it easy to put cards in your graveyard at the same time.

Because of this, Exile became the new Graveyard, the Graveyard's Gaveyard if you will. But I mentioned two aspects, and the other was that with the codification of Exile as a Zone, people at Wizards became to see it as a potential resource.

This first experiment came in the Time Spiral Block, and wow has it been forever since I've mentioned that. In that block, we got the Suspend Mechanic. Something I've found constant use for since its publication, Suspend trades mana for time in terms of casting a card. Rather, instead of casting a card normally, such as with Corpulent Corpse. You can wait until you have available to cast this creature, or you can pay and wait for five turns, getting it later at a lower cost now.

I still run into people who can't understand how the exchange works, sad to say.

Here we see how Exile is now used more and more often. As a storage space for cards that have yet to be cast, or are waiting for some condition to trigger. For after Suspend proved you can keep stuff in Exile, then bring it back, well, why not just do that straight out? Yorion, Sky Nomad is a creature than blinks/flickers other cards when it comes into play, and temporarily stashes them in Exile until they come back. And this is something does a lot now, as it seems each set has their own version of Borrowed Time or Banishing Light or GO TO JAIL or plenty of cards to that effect. They can exile something, holding it just out of reach until you break the lock on it, metaphorically speaking.

Of course, that wasn't the end of it. A couple of years ago, we got the Adventure mechanic, which allowed you to cast a non-creature spell that was attached to a creature, putting the whole card into Exile, or On an Adventure. From there, you can cast the creature itself from Exile, as you would normally. Or if you wanted, you could cast the creature straight away, bypassing the whole 'Adventure' thing in the process.

And last year, we got Foretell. This ability let you exile a card by paying a cost of , and then exiling the card. You can then cast the card from Exile by paying its Foretell cost on a later (but not the same) turn.

More and more, Exile is becoming a sort of 'storage' Zone. Where things can go temporarily until they are used, and not as much as a 'lost forever' zone. Which is why I would love a Pull from Eternity reprint in a set that has that sort of theme going to it. Because being able to de-exile something like that isn't common. Yes, the Eldrazi Processors can do it, but that's part of a theme of them exiling something, then de-exiling it for a benefit to themselves.

This isn't a bad thing, but I think it's something that needs to be kept an eye on as the game goes forward. We've already reached the point where the graveyard can be an extension of the hand, and so Exile has had to pick up the slack in terms of what the Graveyard used to mean.

There are very few ways to keep cards out of the game now, and this is something Wizards wants as they would prefer that people be able to play with their cards - stealing them for their own use with regularity, of course - and taking something away for good isn't seen as good play.

It is, however. When players no longer have to worry about where their cards are, they can take risks and make plays that become more and more... uninteractive. That we need a place to send cards so they can't be reached without going through hoops and dedicated resources is healthy for the game as it encourages playing with what you have at hand, and not with everything you have. It's a limitation in its own way.

The Graveyard has failed. And Exile is being pushed into. There's still room to grow for Exile, sure, but things that go there should stay there, in the long run.

Join me next week when I finally do something Kamigawa related, assuming I don't start talking about the impending Slow Grow and my plans for that. Because that starts next Friday, and I can't use my plan for Teferi, Temporal Archmage as Infinite Combos are an auto 1-point game. And I've been meaning to buy the Strixhaven deck from last year to get access to Ruxa, Patient Professor. I think I can have fun with that one!

Until then please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!