Forum:MTG Minutiae

Opening post
So this is... Weiiiiiirrrrrddddddddd. Since we've decided that non-narrative sources can be valid, we should probably talk about this one. There's no, like, intentional lore additions that we need to add to the wiki - Gavin Verhey has talked about how he tried to coordinate with The BBC to avoid giving the Weeping Angels "flying" since they don't fly according to internal policy. But things have still fallen through the cracks that we should talk about. Firstly, "Lupari" now seems to be both the singular and the plural. Astrid Peth is apparently now a human, as is Idris. And Nyssa is human as well as a trakenite. (Does this imply all trakenites are actually human? - Edit: Similar situation with Adric exists that I didn't catch.) (Note here that it's not the case that every humanoid alien in this set that's not a Time Lord is just referred to as a human. The Sisterhood of Karn has no racial creature type, nor does Vislor.) Also River Song has been declared explicitly to be both Human and Time Lord, solving a longstanding disagreement on this wiki.

But these are pieces of text that are present, in part, for game mechanical reasons. So while there's ramifications for our pages, we might not want to actually place these things on the relevant pages, we might consider this to be not fictive content at all. idk.

In addition, regardless of what we decide, I'd like to bring up a suggestion I made on Talk:Universes Beyond: Doctor Who. Instead of having every card art uploaded, it might instead be better to borrow the card template from the mtg wiki which links directly to scryfall and also allows to distinguish between art choices. It would, however, really only be useful for this one page, unless mtg and Doctor Who ever did another collaboration in the future. As stated there the one downside is that it doesn't preview the cards as full images - you have to hover over the links to see them. I'm not sure if this is tweaked on mobile at all (my suspicion is that it's not). Najawin ☎  02:57, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Discussion
Okay, I don't really have an opinion on the card template, but for the other stuff you mentioned, it seems to me like it would just be simple enough to note the discrepancies on their respective pages. It's not as though a single card calling Nyssa human is any more world shattering than the handful of times the First Doctor has referred to himself as such. Time God Eon ☎  03:28, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Although I am altogether unfamiliar with Magic: The Gathering (I will be buying a few packets later though), I don't think information outside of flavour text and illustrations should be taken as "in-universe" information; for example, the MtG card for Sea Devils is titled "Alien Salamander". Doesn't take an expert of Who to know that that title is just wrong.
 * This seems to harken back to the Gameplay/Cutscene principle we established in Forum:Revisiting fiction with branching elements and historical policy therein. However, I could be missing something about MtG that should be valid. 12:35, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Well it's not titled "Alien Salamander", but it does have those creature types, yes. And this is the problem. The creature types are supposed to actually tell you something about the in-universe reality of the thing, but they're also game mechanics, which as discussed in that thread are necessarily an approximation to that IU reality. (And as such they've caused controversy before, see here and here for one example I'm aware of.) (And the Sea Devil one is even weirder when Vastra is appropriately typed as a lizard. The entire thing is just a mess.) Najawin ☎  17:10, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Welp, two visits to shops that stock MtG and immeasurable disappointment later, it seems I won't be purchasing any of these cards at all because £22 for a packet of twelve cards is daylight robbery. I was honestly hoping to look at the cards first hand and try to learn a bit about them, but it seems Wizards of the Coast's greed has made them not care about anyone who isn't already a MtG collector who has sunk hundreds into the game. 17:19, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * So to clarify, both for you and anyone else who's interested and reading this thread, MTG sells various kinds of booster packs and other products. The Doctor Who cards are coming as commander decks, which are ready to play right out of the box for a specific game format called commander. (I believe it's like £50 for the full deck, 100 cards.) They're also being released as collector boosters. As Epsilon has discovered, collector boosters are... expensive. They only have foil and alternate art versions of the cards, which is how Wizards of the Coast justifies charging the additional amount. On a normal set, these would also have set boosters and draft boosters, and these would be more like, uh, £5, I think, for 12 cards. But Doctor Who is a Premium Set^tm, so you don't get those. (It has also had two "Secret Lair" drops, which is where you order a set of cards that are print to demand online directly from WotC and they ship them to you. There will be a third that will have at least 14 and 15.)


 * If you want specific cards for the artwork or something, there's a robust secondary market that sells individual cards at places like cardmarket and tcgplayer. But it's best to wait a few weeks for prices to settle.


 * But the boosters for this are, I'm just going to be blunt here, for large corporations to buy and mass open so that these foils and alt arts enter the secondary market, as well as for the select few individuals who want to gamble on getting cool art and foils. For people just getting into the game, your intended onboarding experience is with the decks, not the boosters. (And it's cheaper to get all the cards by just buying all four decks or getting them from the secondary market.)


 * We now return to your regularly scheduled thread. Najawin ☎  19:08, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Regarding various characters' designation as "human", I suspect that they are simply using the old, old convention (also seen in The Daleks) of using "human" to mean "humanoid", as a catch-all term for extremely Earthling-like aliens, as opposed to specifically the species designation of Homo Sapiens. Untidy, I know…


 * (Although Najawin, I am fairly sure that BotW indirectly implies that the Trakenites are posthumans, for what that's worth.)


 * Will ponder the rest of this later. --Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:21, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Again, Vislor and Sisterhood of Karn are directly counters to that option. Otherwise it would be how we'd get around this, yes. (Edit: As is Nardole, who's just listed as an "artifact" to reflect that he's a cyborg. And artifact humans do exist.) Najawin ☎  20:29, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * So long as we have no case of them actively using other species designations I think the hypothesis still has merit.


 * Anyway, I should also note that the validity of this whole thing is not trivial. If we call it a weirdly-printed 'reference source' I could see how you'd get there, but it seems to me like a trading-cards game is much more of a, well, game; I would presume it to fall within the same "we need a second thread to establish theory of coverage" area as Battle for the Universe. --Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:48, 13 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Right, depends on if you consider the cards individually or as a whole, imo. As a whole we need another thread, but individually I think they either fall under current precedent or are so close to current precedent that it's a real headache. (Davros uses the "Alien" type, but that's more complicated.) Najawin ☎  21:59, 13 October 2023 (UTC)