Faith

What is faith?

  

Faith is the belief in an unfalsifiable claim, something you accept knowing that you can't prove it false with whatever method of proof is most natural. It's most commonly used in a religious context-- if you have faith in a god, you interact with them as if you have proven that god is real, while being comfortable with the idea that such a proof cannot exist. But faith is not exclusive to religion. Mathematics, for example, requires faith-- mathematical proofs are all rooted in axioms like "all right angles are the same" or "every natural number has exactly one number right after it".¹ All worldviews, scientific, literary, religious, or otherwise, are built on a core belief that seems obvious, but can't be proven with the same tools provided by the worldview. This isn't a bad thing-- it's merely a fact of how worldviews work. 

This is why the “faithlessness” in Faithless Looting is red. If you don't have faith in anything, it's hard to apply any sort of method (scientific, critical, or otherwise) that builds from base principles. Red is the common enemy of blue and white, the colors most disposed toward method, so it follows that faithlessness is red.

Let's examine the card text. At first glance, "Draw two cards, then discard two cards" only mimics the the art, mirroring a process of destruction. After casting Looting, the player has two additional cards in the graveyard and (if they didn't use its Flashback ability) one fewer card in hand. However, what if we view a card not just as "material", but as a fact or a belief? After all, if a strategy is an argument about the game², then a card is a link in the chain of logic you're using to prove that argument. In this case, Faithless Looting models the process of throwing out old facts and acquiring new ones. Notice also that the "facts" that remain in hand replace the old ones, rather than building upon them; Faithless Looting does not privilege the existing worldview over the potential one. (If anything, the fact that you're casting Looting means you want to throw out the old cards in your hand in favor of something else!) Under this reading, every time you cast Faithless Looting, you are literally reassessing the core beliefs about how you're going to win the game, and thus reassessing your faith in the bomb rare in your opening hand.

Hilariously, our interpretation of the card text clashes with how the card tends to be played. We imagined the post-Looting player as having just reassessed their plan, probably down material, graveyard filled with shattered beliefs about what the game was going to look like. But historically, Faithless Looting has accomplished the opposite. The deckbuilder has a very clear idea of what should happen when they cast Looting-- discard extra lands or cards that like being in the graveyard like Arclight Phoenix, and draw two new cards. In this situation, the player gains material in any sense that isn't "how much literal cardboard is immediately in front of me". More importantly, though, while the player may have to face tough choices about what to discard in some situations, the deckbuilder does not get the sense that Looting will be played as an anti-methodical rewriting of the hand. If anything, Looting is a tool that confirms which facts go into the graveyard and which stay in hand.

None of this is to say that Faithless Looting is unfun or skill-light. (There are lots of factors at hand-- I'll leave sticky situations like "discarding a spell instead of a Phoenix to play around Rest In Peace" to you.) But if Faithless Looting artistically represents the process of reforging the links in the chain of your worldview, it's beautifully dissonant that it is one of the most steadfast of links.

Beautiful dissonance

What do I mean by "beautifully dissonant"? Clearly I mean that two facts about Faithless Looting clash and I find that beautiful-- but what is the connection between that dissonance and that beauty?

One suggestion is that I'm touched by the game seeming to defy the cards printed within it. Here is the card, telling me that the people depicted within are reevaluating their worldviews. And yet it's commonplace to see the game object that very card represents as the core of an argument! This makes me re-evaluate whether the card is being truthful. Is the man in the art burning a book because of a lack of faith, or because of a deeper faith in something the author doesn't recognize? Should I see red as the color of anger at Avacyn, or as the color of liberation and scientific anarchism?³ (And if both, in what combination?) Doubting the author is fun, and this is a prime opportunity to do so.

Another suggestion is that this dissonance is a sort of satisfying commentary on Magic card analysis. The fields of analyzing Magic card flavor and formalizing how to win with them are largely separate. There is some overlap-- Village Rites' flavor text in Kaldheim hints that sacrifice effects pair well with stealing your opponent's permanents, for example-- but for the most part, deep realizations about lore are not deep realizations about how to win. Perhaps the play pattern-flavor dissonance is amusing because it demonstrates the incompatibility of these fields. After all, despite learning a lot about Looting, have we learned anything about when to cast the card?

In any case, though, this dissonance doesn't detract from my experience, as is a common assumption about "ludonarrative dissonance". Rather, it opens up new conversations, both on a player-to-player level and a card or game design level.

Ongoing Dialogue

Speaking of "new conversations", recently a card was spoiled from Midnight Hunt that forms a very interesting dialogue with Faithless Looting:

 

 

 

Faithful Mending agrees with Faithless Looting about a lot of things. For example, both cards posit that "faith" is a primarily WU concept-- a concept of method, a sturdy rock on which to build worldviews. This didn't have to be the case. For example, on Innistrad I could argue that faith comes from community, and is thus GW. I could also argue that faith is a freeing construct that enables us to do powerful things without having to waste time proving the obvious (BR), or that it's fundamental to any sort of scientific or creative process (UR). It's delightful that these "opposites" agree on the color pie nature of faith.

 

What's more striking, though, is that Faithful Mending and Faithless Looting have very similar text. "Silly Looting," chuckles Faithful Mending, "you think draw two, discard two represents faithlessness? You couldn't be more wrong." It is not just a reference to Magic's past (or, as has been claimed, a lazy rebalancing of Looting)-- it fully discourses with it, a cheeky jab at the flavor-play dissonance of Faithless Looting.

 

The life-gain is interesting, too, despite admittedly feeling "tacked on". Recall the naive view of Faithless Looting's effect, where we look only at the amount of cardboard in front of the player, and recall that on the first cast of Faithless Looting the caster decreased their "cardboard count". Within this lens, the first cast of Mending trades cardboard for life-- the caster is making sacrifices to keep themselves afloat. When they flash it back afterwards, they have the same amount of material in our hand but have gained life, out of nowhere! The flashback of Mending, more clearly than Looting, builds something out of nothing.

If anything, the tension in Faithful Mending is between its flavor text and its role in the conversation. "What has been looted can be restored," claims an anonymous Innistradian-- but haven't we already seen through the cards' matching game text that looting and restoration are the same continuous process, collecting more ideas and discarding the ones that are least coherent with each other? Mending claims to be different, to make something out of nothing where Looting does not, but any Izzet Phoenix player knows the feeling of making virtual cards and mana out of nowhere off a patient Looting!

 

Faithful Mending may be a mechanical "fix" of its predecessor, but it is not so flavorfully. It should not be seen as an attempt to remove the ideology or tension from the greater "draw two, discard two" concept, or as an attempt to counter the meaning of Looting. It, too, has a worldview of its own, grounded in the people describing it and the history of the plane it is on.

The Trauma of Planes

Zendikar, the plane, is traumatized by the Eldrazi, among other things. Zendikar Rising, the most recent set on Zendikar, explores this only glancingly. The dialogue ZNR cards seek with older sets tends to be "wow, Plated Geopede was powerful" or "Converge is a good mechanic in small doses". We never see a worlding of the plane as a community recovering from a major traumatic event, only a (successful) continuation of its "D&D tropes plane" logline.

Wizards of the Coast tends not to really care about the long-term effects its all-powerful beings have on the planes themselves. When Mark Rosewater says that we'll be seeing the long-term effects of the events of WAR for a long time, he's talking about the planeswalkers, and the printing of cards like Professor's Warning⁴ and Confront the Past. But the marketability of the plane must remain intact, and WotC seems to believe that Zendikar being "the adventure plane" is more important (more comforting? more accessible?) than its history outside that trope.

 

Innistrad, the plane, is also traumatized by the Eldrazi, among other things. Last time players were here, the planeswalkers trapped Emrakul in the moon, with dire consequences for the werewolves, vampires, and other spooky creatures native to the plane. And Innistrad has even earlier trauma-- in the original Innistrad set, the archangel Avacyn disappeared temporarily, weakening the magic that protected Innistradian humans and justified their faith. (This disappearance is what prompted the events depicted in Faithless Looting.)

 

I'm not holding my breath that we'll get to see Innistrad solve this problem for itself. First of all, we've already seen cards previewed depicting the planeswalkers stepping in, to the point of referencing loyalty counters in their text.

 

 

And even if we hadn't seen these cards, this sort of outsider-hero story is fundamental to how Magic works. The planes of Magic are sealed off from one another culturally and materially, save a select few super-people who can travel from plane to plane and solve problems. "Great man history" underpins the game, because the alternative-- that masses on Theros can change life throughout the multiverse-- is against the rules of the setting.⁵ And Wizards has no reason to break them. Since these transplanar wandering cowboys sell well, Magic has a financial incentive to continue viewing its own planes through this colonial "great man" lens, constantly asking: What problem does this plane that its inhabitants can't fix, but that more "advanced" outsiders can?

 

 

 

Faithless Mending doesn't fix this problem, nor does it direct address the fact that Magic will be the story of planeswalker tourism for the foreseeable future. When taken in dialogue with its predecessor, however, it does present an acknowledgement that the "restoration" of Innistrad is the same process as its "looting", and that this process is something that happens within the plane rather than because of an outsider. Nissa Revane doesn't understand the non-dichotomy of looting and restoration, nor is she willing to understand the "sour", "blighted" soil and bloodthirsty werewolves as a part of the plane rather than in opposition to it. To be fair, neither does Faithless Mending, at least not as an isolated card (its flavor text says so). But once we take these cards in conversation, they understand more than their parts and than Magic's cast of characters.

Footnotes

(1) One cool thing about math is that one can contribute to it while only believing things like "If the axioms of geometry were true, then XYZ" rather than just "XYZ". Very few people do this; I don't know of anybody who earnestly believes that counterevidence for the axioms exists.

(2) An assumption I wrote a whole blog post about!

(3) By "scientific anarchism" I'm talking about the belief that there are no useful, concrete rules that govern "progress", popularized by texts like Against Method.

(4) I maintain that, in terms of flavor text, this card is the modern-day Ancient Grudge.

(5) Credit to Jay Dragon, of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast fame, for this insight.

(6) I hate Nissa Revane so much. Okay, that's out of my system now.