Flavor Text's Dramatic Reversals
On figures of speech and familiar flavor
These articles often begin with a little germ of experience, and this one is no exception. This time it came when, nursing a hangover, I was shuffling through Magic cards using the “Random card” function on Scryfall—and my riffling movement froze when this version of “Last Chance” appeared.
What first arrested me, as is often the case, was the card’s startling art: Daren Bader (whose catalogue I tore through after I was done with “Last Chance,” and who I’ve now come to believe is an unsung hero of Magic worldbuilding) here represents, with astonishing intricacy, a frozen moment, a pause before an explosive release of energy.
But given this incredible illustration, imagine my surprise that, in fact, the art is the second-most memorable thing about the card.
The part that has stuck in my head is the flavor text.
“No reinforcements. Nowhere to retreat. Nothing to lose.”
If you react like me, the line gives you chills. It further articulates the sense, already programmed in the card’s art, of a buildup of energy before a dramatic explosion of conflict. Harmonizing with the card’s effect—which gives the player an extra turn and then forces them to lose—it evokes the sense of a last-ditch effort, indeed recasts a nigh-on unplayable card as an act of heroic defiance rather than foolhardy folly. If I had this card in my hand and had no chance of winning, even with an additional turn, I’d play it anyway.
And yet, I reflected, why do I get the vibe that a lot of flavor text is written like this?
There is no shortage of commentary on Magic’s flavor text, from stellar analytical surveys to invitations for collective celebration. For that reason, I can’t, and won’t, propose to offer a totalizing analysis of Magic’s flavor text.
Instead, I’d like to be more finely particular about the effects of different kinds of flavor text. I’d like to think on one of the stylistic patterns that seems to proliferate in some of Magic’s greatest (and not-so-great) flavor texts: reversal.
I do so for two reasons. First, taking this granular view of writerly style helps us see how different flavor text works even across common categories for understanding flavor text; even though narrative snippets, quotations, and informational description are often categorized differently, language based on reversal actually appears across all these categories (and whatever other categories you can dream of).
Second, because, as I go to great lengths to stress in these articles, every single part of a Magic card works, or can work, to sculpt our experience of the game, no matter how minor. Flavor text gives character to a card, but it also acts upon the player reading it, and perhaps the table playing it; it helps inhere sense in what would otherwise be arbitrary game pieces. “Last Chance” is not a Uno Reverse Card, but an experiential happening.
And for this reason, the commonplaces in flavor text style can matter quite a lot. They can give us a sense of an individual card or a game action as deeply meaningful, or dramatic, or ironic, or even cringy. And they can do so at the level of the sentence.
Potential Energy
Let’s return to the flavor text on “Last Chance.”
“No reinforcements. Nowhere to retreat. Nothing to lose.”
The electrifying effect I described earlier comes not just from the content—what the words are saying—but also from their form, the style in which they’re written: buildup, buildup, reversal. All three sentences follow the same grammatical pattern (all of them are fragments beginning with a negation) but there’s a subtle and important development over their duration. “No reinforcements” has no grammatical subject, serving instead as a very brief description. The next sentence, “”Nowhere to retreat,” is structurally similar, also beginning with negation, lacking a grammatical subject, and running the same number of syllables (five).
But something important happens.
The second sentence introduces a gerund verb (“to retreat”), gently shifting our attention from an inert situation to one in which action is conceivable. A similar buildup happens rhythmically: both sentences have only two stressed syllables, but the second sentence shifts the emphasis from the middle of the sentence to the very last syllable, from “No reinforcements” to “Nowhere to retreat.” The effect is that we seem to be primed with a kind of anticipatory energy, a charge waiting to explode.
And the explosion comes in the climactic third sentence: “Nothing to lose.” It has one fewer syllable (four instead of five) and has less space between the stressed syllables, offering us a kind of affective climax in its force and brevity. More noticeably, the phrase concludes the inversion that the second sentence began. It, too, uses a gerund verb that evokes for the reader the possibility of action. The same happens in the semantics of the sentence, which replaces the initial generic, ad-hoc phrases (“No reinforcements”) with a familiar figure of speech (“Nothing to lose!”), suddenly drawing a call to action out of seemingly inert language.
The point I’m trying to make here is that it’s the linguistic process of reversal itself that imparts the flavor text of “Last Chance” with special force. On its own, “Nothing to lose” might have been a cute or interesting bit of text, but it’s specifically the reversal that affects us, and, in turn, inflects the way we experience the card and the game state it co-creates.
And, as I suggested above, it’s hardly the only card whose power operates through semantic surprise or syntactic inversion.
Oblation: “A richer people could give more but they could never give as much.”
Rancor: “Hatred outlives the hateful.”
Reckless Cohort: “‘You have a family. Mine died at Sea Gate. You go to yours, and I’ll go to mine.’”
Processes of parallelism and reversal operate in each of these lines. I’m not a scholar of classical rhetoric, so I won’t embarrass myself by claiming to enumerate all the devices here definitively— but, relying on my trusty copy of Arthur Quinn’s Figures of Speech, I feel reasonably confident that these flavor texts use figures including isocolon, polyptoton, chiasmus, antithesis, antanaclasis, and zeugma. All these are, essentially, ways of arranging sentences that repeat words, phrases, or patterns, often with a surprise twist or double-meaning at the end that blows up our expectations.
Knowing the terms isn’t so important as noticing the semantic, logical, and affective patterns that the language is trying to organize. Repetition and reversal act on our bodies and minds—think of that state of energized excitement in “Last Chance”—and work specifically by rejiggering the seemingly stable categories of meaning we bring to them. What seems familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar.
We can see this in the examples I offer above.
“Rancor,” works both by repetition and reversal: it repeats variations on the word “hate,” but it also deploys two meanings of the word “outlive:” where “outlive” at first appears seems to metaphorically mean “persisting,” halfway through the sentence it suddenly refers to literal bodily life. Besides echoing the card’s ability, the text also, in keeping the function of an Aura, recodes our sense of the relationship between feelings and the bodies that feel; perhaps it is feelings, not us, who are eternal.
The impressive tragedy in “Reckless Cohort” hinges on the gradual development of a contrast between two people’s fates, which is punctuated by two wildly different meanings of an injunction to “go to” one’s family. The text here is especially fascinating, though, because it actually recasts the card’s mechanical function. The image and flavor of the card gives us the impression of a foolhardy brute charging headfirst into battle—but the flavor text gives the impression of a depressed, self-destructive would-be martyr. There’s an onus, if only a fictive one, to send in another Ally so that Reckless Cohort doesn’t have to destroy itself, so that it doesn’t have to be alone.
And, most beautifully to my ears, the text of “Oblation” rewrites the logic of “more” and “much” to put, with an implicit and powerful force, an accent on the quasi-transcendent value of self-giving. Its reversal thus elevates its effect from a quirky variation on the “tuck” mechanic to a moving ode to existential kenosis.
These cards offer ample evidence of why repetition and reversal, as flavor text techniques, can be deeply effective. They invert the mental vocabulary through which we know the world, and in so doing they dynamize the experiential encounter with a given card. Cards like “Last Chance” appear not as mechanistic game pieces but as surprises, contradictions, processes—dynamic events that engage and perhaps alter our sense of the world even as we play them.
These effects, I want to insist, are immanent to the form of flavor texts’ language. They stimulate our bodies and minds and imaginations in such a way that they refigure the conceptual apparatus through which we navigate the world. In this way, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, they “open[] up a new way of being for us.” This is not to say that we necessarily have a revelatory experience when we look at “Rancor”—but it is to say that the specific force of the flavor text, that which makes us possible for us to imagine hatred as a magical force unto itself, comes from the particularity of its poetic form. It’s not just that the lines sound nice, but rather that their specific way of sounding nice works on our very being.
But for all that metaphysical contemplation about the power of language, I have to wonder: what happens when it gets old?
Old Words
You might have felt a certain melancholy in my anecdote above, when I noticed that the startling apparent originality of “Last Chance” is actually common to quite a few Magic cards.
In Tarkir Dragonstorm, linguistic reversals—of the kind in Agent of Kotis, Bearer of Glory, Bone-Cairn Butcher, Desperate Measures, Dragonback Lancer, Host of the Hereafter, Qarsi Revenant, Sandsteppe Citadel, Wind-Scarred Crag, and many more—appear on around 32 cards, nearly a fifth of all cards in that set with flavor text. In Aetherdrift, there were around 54 such examples, representing over 30% of the set’s flavor-texted cards. (Keep in mind that these are cursory estimates, based on my impression of different cards as I scrolled through Scryfall results). Not all of them are structured in the same way, and not all of them are good, but each uses some form of parallelism or linguistic reversal to evoke a kind
And this isn’t a bad thing, per se. Indeed, many of these reversals work quite well. The aphorisms on Mardu cards work, sometimes self-consciously, to give us the impression that Mardu culture is built on epigrammatic lyricism. And Bone-Cairn Butcher just whips.
But just as repetitions and reversals inflect cards, so too can the repetition of repetition take a toll. Figures of speech are often effective when they thread familiarity with novelty—and so the more you hear, the more the effect dulls. This is especially true given that, obviously, not every reversal is equally good; at a certain point, you can only hear so many corny reversals before the affective response of cringe can pollute even well-constructed flavor text.
This is not a call for a mass movement against Magic’s parallelisms and reversals. On the contrary, the game would be much poorer without these lines often sharp, sometimes goofy, usually memorable wit. (And for that matter, people don’t need any invitation to complain online about flavor text).
But there’s a poignant irony here: the very figures of speech that so often disrupt our received vocabulary can so easily become that vocabulary. Disruption becomes the norm.
This is a condition of language itself, to be sure. One response to linguistic staleness, echoed from Flaubert’s parodic dictionary of cliches to Virginia Woolf’s insistence on the necessity of “combin[ing] the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth,” to Olga Tokarczuk’s call to “create a library of new terms…new maps as well as the courage and humor of travelers who won’t hesitate to stick their heads outside the sphere of the world-up-to-this-point, beyond the horizon of existing dictionaries and encyclopedias.”
But with Magic, it’s different. Flaubert and Woolf and Tokarczuk are speaking of prose in general, in which anyone can conceivably write. But not everyone, by virtue of trademark officiality and all, is able to write flavor text (the solution, I suppose, would be for Wizards of the Coast to contract me to write some; you know where to find me, Wizards). This means that, from the perspective of the non-WOTC-employed player, there is only so much we can do; we live more or less within the scope of the cards we receive, able to bring them alive in aftermarket interpretation and celebration but not in creation itself.
And so until that time when you’re employed to write flavor text in Magic or any other venture—an endeavor I strongly encourage—I might recommend you two things. First, take stock of this muddy, ambivalent position, of living in a language that cracks with newness but that has not yet burst open. Savor that position; savor the melancholy that might exist in it. And second, cultivate those habits of mind that allow you to be jolted to awareness by a Magic: The Gathering card.
As the old saying goes: “No reinforcements. Nowhere to retreat. Nothing to lose.”
So glad that zeugma's role in Magic: the Gathering flavor text is getting its due!
The turn in this got me, I was thinking while reading the first half that Last Chance's flavor text is very similar to Akroma, Angel of Wrath's. Focusing on the repetition in patterns in flavor text writing opened this piece up to me. Thank you for posting!
Love it although the greatest example of repetition/twist in flavor text is the original Mogg Fanatic