Dan Barrett Said It ...

[Thomas David Baker]

... flavor text is CRAP!

Seriously, it's just awful.  Someone write a Devil's Advocate defense for me?  I hate it!

[Dan Barrett]

I wasn't joking when I said I found none I liked - went through my whole box and folder of Innistrad, nothing I liked or that got me "into it" more. 

In general it adds nothing for me, but I am sure there are people out there who appreciate it. *shrug*

[Crispin Bateman]

I initially read this and saw "Dan Barrett said it so it MUST be crap!" and I was going to simply +1 it, but then I looked a bit deeper and was only disappointed. Ah well.

As for flavour text, when I'm heavily into the game and getting into it all (which happened a lot around Ravnica and Time Spiral for me) I loved the flavour text and poured over it. Now it's there on the cards and does nothing for me, but that's not to say I won't get back into it again in the future.

[Ben Titmarsh]

From the top of my head I can't remember a single piece of flavour text.  I guess this means I never look at it so it's pointless to me!

[Nathan Gotlib]

there are few good ones though, mostly in older sets... something with bowels....

[Philip Dickinson]

lots about magic has gotten steadily worse every year and the flavour text really shows this - flavour text more or less became universally awful around the time of lorwyn, from my perspective

there's that absurdly good bonsai article about flavour text somewhere on scg - if anyone finds it, please link it here

[Daniel Royde]

Wearbear, Indigo faerie there are others But in general it's not interesting

[Crispin Bateman]

You have to bear in mind that flavour text hardly has the tournament player in mind, lol. It's there to provide extra storyline depth to those that enjoy such things. The people that like the flavour text are the same people who will buy the (awfully written for the most part) books and get into the whole story and there is definitely some fun to be had doing so. Noticing that a quote on the bottom of a card has been said by a certain character who did a certain thing and then finding another reference on another card IS good fun and slightly satisfying.

If you play Magic purely because you like a competitive game of skill and logic, then you are so far from the demographic flavour text is designed for that of course you don't get it. I think it happens less now (because collecting up mythics is so ridiculously far from financial sense these days) but remember there are people who collect magic cards who NEVER play, and they pour over the artwork and devour things like flavour text because those are the things that make the collecting fun for them.

You know all this anyway. 

[Thomas David Baker]

I actually hadn't really thought of it like that.  I do occasionally realize these people exist when they say things like Innistrad is terrible and I am sitting it out on the Wizards boards (I am guessing they don't mean "as a competitive draft format").  But mostly I remain ignorant of them.  I do have a friend in San Diego who knows a guy who has basically every Magic card ever but no DCI number.  Weird.

[ross miles]

imagine this the other way round - that's wierd

Thomas David Baker said:

has basically every Magic card ever but no DCI number.  Weird.

[James Mills]

That's Gary

ross miles said:

imagine this the other way round - that's wierd

Thomas David Baker said:

has basically every Magic card ever but no DCI number.  Weird.

[Crispin Bateman]

I actually knew a guy who (as of Kamigawa) owned one of every card barring a few bits of power etc. and he DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THE RULES. Think that one out! He loved looking at the artwork, reading the flavour text and collecting up every card and popping them into folders, but he had no clue how the game worked. I taught him how to play during Kamigawa era and though he politely learned, to my knowledge, he never actually bothered to play with the cards he owned.

[Philip Dickinson]

for what it's worth, part of the reason that flavour text is so fucking bad is that the flavour in general is awful now. the weatherlight saga (aka magic's storyline) was completely sweet and had a ton of memorable and well-written characters. it spanned almost a decade, the majority of the game's history... nowadays you get a new "story" every three sets that is tangentially related to previous ones but is populated by a cast of extremely unengaging characters that we are supposed to care about. honestly the idea of the modern planeswalkers as central characters has always baffled me because they don't really have any features that make them interesting. 

think back to all the classic moments for magic's [old] principle characters... crovax being given squee so that he can murder him again and again. urza being forced to restrict karn's memory because his ability to remember all the friends he has seen slain over the decades was causing him such misery. gerrard discovering urza's millenia-long manipulation of the benalish civilization and decapitating him in the arena. even the tail end of the "good" magic storylines had a lot of great components - laquatus' ambitions for otaria, for example, or ixidor's grief leading to the creation of akroma. magic had some of the best narratives in contemporary fantasy for a long time and now it's a heap of shit