“Listen, kid. I need your help. My nest is full of treasures, but these treasures can’t last on their own. They need to be loved, they need people to spend time with them. This evening, while I scavenge for new treasures, will you come to my nest and tidy up? I’ll make it worth your while.”
I have a particular fascination with creative projects that involve permanently leaving your mark on an object, and the accumulation of those marks over time reshaping this object into something completely new. Like droplets of water running down a cave wall, over the course of hundreds or thousands of instances, our actions can reshape the world around us to reflect our natural engagement with it. For people familiar with my other work, this is probably a familiar topic, but if you’re new here — hi! My name is Jay Dragon, and I like it when people take a game and reshape it into their own image.
My other fascination is with Magic: The Gathering. It’s been a childhood love, its designers helping inspire me to become a game designer myself, and its competitive scene being a familiar way for me to spend my free time. M:TG has a number of interesting properties, but the most important for us right now is the way the game itself exists on the physical cards themselves. The “Comprehensive Rules” of M:TG are an interpretive guide for navigating the esoteric interactions between the pieces of cardboard which, together on the table, form the true game architecture.
Closed systems of cards will develop their own metastructures — from the strategy of formats like Modern or Legacy, to the rules changes of Commander or Two-Headed Giant, to the aesthetic archeology of Old School ‘94. The relevant concept for this project is the construction of my own personal closed ecosystem, where the players can dynamically change the cards, introduce new material, and self-select for a constantly-evolving environment.