r/magicTCG • u/DefeatedPanda • 21h ago
General Discussion Controversial take: Unreadable cards should be banned from competitive formats.
I am Brazilian and have been playing MTG for years (Started way back in mirage) being off an on the game over the years, played Standard a long time ago (Ravnica/Bolas block) and recently a friend of mine tried to convince me to play Pauper with him on tournaments. I tried and hated the experience to the point that it made me give up on MTG competitive formats entirely and here's why:
I played against a couple of people running Japanese Mystical Archive cards, cards I can't read or validate, I don't give a shit if it's a staple card like Opt or Thoughtseize, it's important to me to read the cards that are played against me even if it's the 100000000 time I am reading the same card I have been playing against for over a decade, if you play a card against me I should be able to read it, and I shouldn't be expected to just go with the guy playing a card in japanese and saying, oh it's thoughtseize dude. On the second guy playing japanese cards on the round right after I scooped and dropped out of the tournament. The discussion came from the fact that I went to the store to play EDH on the same day of a pauper tournament a few weeks later and when I went in they were excited to see me because apparently there was not enough people to run the weekly tournament and they thought maybe I went there to play, but I told them I dropped the format and had no interest in playing and why, the two guys that ran japanese cards were mad and the others were just disappointed. I like playing card games and reading is essential to play the fucking card game, why would I play a text based game that has text I can't read???
My opinion is that on competitive tournaments players should only be allowed to play cards in their native language or english. If I am playing against a french guy using french cards it's fine, I would not have a problem with that. I have no problem with UB or anything or alt arts in general, for casual play it doesn't really matter and it adds collection, I think a lot of "normal" cards would be more expensive if there wasn't a much more expensive version of it and that is good. Not in competitive play tho.