Wizards’ Centre for Consciousness Studies within Entertainment-based Systems (CSES) has long been the black sheep of R&D because it has been policy since the game’s inception to avoid consciousness. But after many years of debate, consciousness has finally been introduced in a very careful and controlled way.

“It was felt that players would fear consciousness within the gaming system,” Gaffney said, “that they would perceive it as competing with their specialness as sentient beings.”

But now it is thought that the philosophically-enlightened player can accept that there is no difference between their “self” and that of a cow or a mathematical system, except the level of complexity, she added. 

Mark Rosewater told reporters Saturday, “As a designer, it has always been my dream to create a gaming system that was capable of stimulus-response reactions and possessed an idea of ’self’ or I-ness through inter-referentiality and/or infinite looped nests of complexity.”

RENTON, Wash. — Wizards spokeswoman Tina Gaffney announced Monday that flavor text is to be “dumbed-down” for future core set expansions.

“We’ve been dumbing down the mechanics for years, but we recently realised that the flavor text expected a level of intelligence in the players which was inconsistent with the stupidity we assume for core sets,” Gaffney said.

Certain types of flavor text, such as real-world quotations, are to be excised completely.

“We can’t assume that magic players can read at a fourth-grade level — it’s undemocratic,” Gaffney told reporters Monday.

Some reminder text will also have flavor text, so as to limit confusion, Gaffney said.

Anaconda, the quintessential green swampwalker, will read:

This creature has swampwalk because it’s a snake that can swim underwater. So if your opponent has swamps, it can swim through them to avoid detection.

Gaffney offered a few other examples:

Blinding Angel
3WW
Creature – Angel
2/4
Flying because it has wings. (This creature can’t be blocked except by creatures with flying.)
Whenever Blinding Angel deals combat damage to a player, that player skips his or her next combat phase.
This is because the angel temporarily blinds the opponent’s creatures, and they can’t see where they’re going to attack you.

Telepathy
U
Enchantment
Your opponents play with their hands revealed.
This is because your hand represents your mind as a wizard, and telepathy, which is a big word, means that you can read people’s minds: So, you can see their hands!

A few other cards will be removed from the set because they can’t be justified from a flavour standpoint, Gaffney said. “It just doesn’t make sense that Beast of Burden grows when you have more creatures in play, so we cut it,” she said.

“Oh and Storage Matrix. Who knows what a matrix is anyway?” she said.