Wizards of the Coast has found another new way to make Magic: The Gathering cards unreadable! I’m kidding, of course, but only kinda, because it turns out the upcoming Star Trek set has cards written entirely in Klingon. A card featuring the alien alphabet was shown off at the STLV: Trek to Vegas on August 9 and quickly did the rounds on social media.
Devised by American linguist Marc Okrand in the 1980s, Klingon is up there with Middle Earth’s Elvish when it comes to well-realized fictional tongues. The trekkiest of trekkies have even learned to speak or write in the language.
Of course, what that means in a practical sense is that only a very minute number of fans will be able to actually read these cards. Wizards has done this kind of thing before, with Phyrexian cards and Elvish Sol Rings. It’s even making a host of Dwarvish cards for The Hobbit. There’s no compromises made for the sake of readability here, though, as even the statline has been translated. That’s right, not only will you have no idea what the Klingon cards’ abilities are, you won’t even be able to determine their power and toughness.
I realize I’m coming across as a party pooper, but I’m not a fan of this sort of thing. It already annoys me the number of textless Magic cards WotC produces, turning the old adage ‘reading the card explains the card’ into a complete lie. I don’t even like Secret Lair cards with wacky, unclear text. There’s enough going on in the most popular format already, and if someone slaps down a card I can’t read, it either slows everything down or forces me to sacrifice understanding the game for the sake of speed.
It makes a certain kind of sense to have these variants for a staple everyone already knows like Lightning Ring or Sol Ring. One might argue, however, that this is still nothing but a way to sort ingroup from outgroup and makes an already intimidating game just that little bit less welcoming to newbies. And in recent years, Wizards has become entirely too comfortable stripping the text from brand cards with numerous, complex effects.
Language isn’t everything, I suppose. At Magiccon Amsterdam this year, I played one game where there were Japanese, Spanish, English and Italian cards at the same table and we all muddled along okay. I think. Maybe my opponents were cheating like crazy, I don’t know – that, I think, is sort of the point.
We don’t know how many Klingon script cards there will be in MTG Star Trek, nor how rare they will be. The one example shown so far is General Chang, Cold Warrior – unsurprisingly, a Klingon.
As down as I am on the idea, I will say the Klingon black mana symbol is great.
Source: Wargamer
