Mocking Magic: Vorthos, Mel, Chase, and Bofa
On the 7th of May, 2007, Mark Rosewater formally introduced the ‘aesthetic profiles’ in an article entitled “Melvin and Vorthos.” This article, and its later companion piece “Vorthos and Mel” sought to identify and categorize the different aesthetic appreciations that players harbor for Magic: the Gathering. They outline two different profiles of Magic players, the ways they appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the game, and their overlap. In both articles, Mark defines Vorthos as the aesthetic profile that finds beauty in the flavor of a card (the relative strength of synergy between the narrative of a card and its gameplay mechanics) and Mel as the profile that finds beauty in the cleverness and simplicity of those mechanics on their own merit.
This is all lovely, but you may be wondering, dear reader, why I am bringing all of this up. Well, in my previous article on the topic of psychographics, I wrote this idea of ‘aesthetic profiles’ off as a sneaky and dishonest ploy on Mark’s behalf: Mark needed to section away the recent introduction of a new psychographic that another had created (Matt Cavotta’s ‘Vorthos’) and redefine it into his own framework so as to not disrupt his perfect Golden Order.
Upon reflection, however, I do think MaRo has a point: Magic is a game, and all games are art. It is worth interrogating where Magic players find beauty, and what drives them to aesthetically appreciate one card above another. Further, as Magic aims to position itself not only as a Trading Card Game, but as a Collectable Card Game, it is in WOTC’s best interest (and according to some damning financial news, Hasbro’s best interest) to ensure that Magic cards are not only fun game pieces, but beautiful ornaments for collection as well. Given Mark hasn’t written a dedicated Making Magic column about the aesthetic profiles for over a decade now, I want to take a moment to audit his work and see if it still rings true today.
An Introduction to Aesthetics
So let’s start with what an aesthetic profile is meant to be. What are aesthetics, and what separates them from the psychographic profiles?
In MaRo’s own words:
Vorthos and Mel, on the other hand, are about appreciating the “what.” These two profiles are not psychological in origin, but aesthetic. They focus on how players appreciate elements of the game. How are those two things different? Aren’t aesthetics an element of psychology?
“Perhaps I can best explain with an analogy. Let’s take an art museum. Suppose the people that ran the art museum wanted to create psychographics of their audience. What they would figure out is why people wanted to go to an art museum. Why did they psychologically get something out of it? Is it escapism? Is it inspiration? Is it motivation? Why does their audience come to the museum? Now, they also have to figure out the aesthetics of their audience. Do they like more modern pieces? Do they like brighter colors? Do they like bolder brush strokes? What makes them appreciate the paintings?”
So what Mark is articulating here is that Magic R&D understands Magic cards to be art pieces as well as functional game pieces. While we have the psychographic profiles to categorize why players buy Magic cards, the aesthetic profiles are necessary to determine what particular elements of a card are appealing to a player. So, if a Johnny wants to express themselves with cards, they might build a really intricate combo deck around a niche, sub-par engine like Trading Post. But if you ask this Johnny why they like Trading Post specifically and not any other card, they might say they like how playing it feels like they are actually a cutthroat black marketeer, pulling their strings to secure lucrative discounts or upsell stooge customers to actually rig a market to their advantage in-game. This is classic Vorthosian aesthetic appreciation of a card.
Mark crafts here a very well-articulated psychological distinction between the why and the what, and does so with a metaphor that is easy to grasp for the uninitiated. The distinction also works very well as far as corporate design frameworks go; the customer is drawn to your product to fulfill an innate desire or need, but the tools by which they differentiate your products by preference are based on a more surface-level aesthetic drive. What this understanding lacks, however, is nuance; treating the player as a passive visitor in a museum drastically oversimplifies both how players engage with game pieces as functional tools and how aesthetic desires in players are actually facets of longer-standing aesthetic traditions that we can pull knowledge and theory from. To really get at what is motivating players to find different cards beautiful, we have to dig deeper.
A More Robust Understanding of Aesthetics
We’re gonna get real crunchy here for a bit, but if you hang out I promise I have a treat at the end of the article for you. So bear with me as I walk you through perhaps the most patrician and obnoxious interrogation of Magic: the Gathering aesthetic theory you will ever read, and hopefully it will all be worth it in the end.
I want to start with an assumptive question Mark asks in his article, and then provide for it an answer that gets at my first disagreement with him:
Aren’t aesthetics an element of psychology?
Yes, Mark, we can understand aesthetics purely through a psychological lens, but the nature of topics as ethereal, complex, and subjective as aesthetics is that they are multifaceted and can be understood in multiple different frameworks. While the modern world is rather obsessed with psychology as some kind of objective bridge between subjective human experience and concrete biological reality, historically humans have understood aesthetic perception to be more esoteric. Speaking from the perspective of having taken 4 years of my adult life to secure a degree in Psychology myself, I can tell you that while oligodendrocytes and SSRIs are about as hard science concepts as organic chemistry, other psychological concepts like the phrenology and the MBTI are a hodge-podge of theories built on white supremacy and 1970s experimental studies so against IRB ethics they would make the minds behind MKULTRA blush. All psychological study lies somewhere on this continuum, and unfortunately our current psychological understanding of aesthetics is closer in veracity to Blanchard & Freud than to Ramón y Cajal & Bandura.
So I ask, might there be a more appropriate framework through which to understand aesthetics? I can think of two, actually: philosophy and artistic movements. By shifting our lens away from corporate psychographics and toward formal aesthetic philosophy, we can see that these player profiles aren’t arbitrary market segments but instead living reflections of historical aesthetic movements. In doing so, we capture both the theory that grounds the appreciation for beauty, as well as the historical practice of manifesting the ideals. If we want to understand how players find beauty in cardboard, it would be fitting to start where both Magic aesthetics and philosophical aesthetics were born: with the earnest, romantic pursuit of representation, immersion, and narrative truth.
Vorthos: Romanticism, Mimetic Beauty, and Flavortown
A Vorthos finds beauty in the way a card pulls them into the narrative of the game. To them, a card is a window to emotional truth or narrative fidelity. This can come across in many ways, through the art, the flavor text, or the gameplay mechanics of the card; what ultimately matters is that a card is resonant with the player on a level beyond what is printed on the card itself. A truly Vorthosian appreciation of a card is to be emotionally gripped by it. A beautiful card is one that tells a story, no matter how short that story is, and pulls your heartstrings taut.
A Vorthosian appreciation of aesthetics is a continuation of one of the oldest traditions of aesthetics in philosophy: Mimetic Theory. Plato and Aristotle both understood art as being imitative of reality (and then reality itself, imitative of ideals or forms). While Plato was often critical of art as a simulacrum of a simulacrum, distrusting it as being twice removed from truth, Aristotle was more sympathetic to the innate human desire to imitate reality. Aristotle argued that as art was twice removed from the true nature of being, it offered abstraction and catharsis from truths that were too heavy for the soul to bear (such as fear, sadness, and pity). In both cases, the classical Greek understanding of artistic or aesthetic beauty is a function of how well it evokes truth. Your aesthetic appreciation for how faithfully Ajani, Nacatl Pariah represents the story of Ajani, the emotional weight of his rage after the death of his brother, is rooted in this same idea.
Our corresponding artistic movement to the Vorthosian ideal is the Romanticist movement. The Romantics cared about art as a vector for drawing out raw emotion and the truths of the human experience. When Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People, he wanted to inspire in the viewer the primal emotions of collaboration and rebellious justice against tyranny. When R&D designed Cathartic Parting they wanted to inspire me to cry about how the cyberpunk ninja rat boy misses his librarian rabbit mom.
Mel: Constructivism, Functional Beauty, and Sleek Design
A Mel finds beauty in a card’s mechanical form. To them, a beautiful card is a well-designed, mechanically-balanced feat of engineering. They might find beauty in a card’s efficiency, the cleverness of mixing mechanics, or just how cleanly a card explores a new design space without breaking the text box.
A Mellish appreciation for aesthetics is, at least from a philosophical standpoint, much more modern than its Vorthosian counterpart. In his seminal work Critique of the Power of Judgement, Immanuel Kant describes an understanding of beauty dependent on the intended function of an object. This concept, coined Pulchritudo Adhaerens, argues that the beauty of a functional artwork is fully dependent on that artwork’s capability to perform its intended design specification: if a column cannot support a roof, it cannot be beautiful regardless of its presentation. Two centuries later, Formalist critic Clive Bell took this structural obsession a step further by arguing that true art provokes a very specific, cerebral reaction–what he termed the “aesthetic emotion”–triggered not by narrative sentiment, but purely by Significant Form. To Bell, appreciating art requires stripping away all human lore and drama to marvel at the harmonious relationship of its internal parts. When a Mel admires Lightning Bolt, it is for the clean and snappy design with endless diversity in application. Those eight words evoke the same sense of contemplative, cognitive joy in a Mel as a mathematician might find in a compelling proof.
An artistic understanding of the Mellish ideal lies in the early 20th-Century Modernist movements: De Stijl, Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism. With differing focuses, each of these movements shared the same radical objective of purging the ornamental excess to highlight the bare function of an art form and the service it provides its user. Mishra’s Factory is a Mellish, Constructivist masterpiece; from its land mode, to its Assembly-Worker creature form, to the surprise boost it can give itself as a blocker, Mishra’s Factory wastes no design space and is a functional workhorse. If you try hard enough, you can think of Phyrexia as a form of autonomous worker’s collective, right?
New Blood
We come now to the first true addition to MaRo’s aesthetic taxonomy: Chase. But to understand Chase, we must first undo a fundamental misapprehension Mark paints of Vorthos. In the past, Rosewater has framed the Mel/Vorthos split as a neat binary: Mel is form following function, which leads him to assume Vorthos must be function following form.
I profoundly disagree.
To understand why Chase must exist as a distinct profile, we have to look back at the origins of Vorthos itself. In Matt Cavotta’s seminal 2005 article “Snack Time with Vorthos,” Vorthos was originally envisioned as a broad, catch-all bucket for anyone who cared about a card’s sensory presentation–explicitly sweeping players who just wanted “the cool art” or “the shiny foil” under the Vorthos banner. I would argue, however, that the larger point of Cavotta’s article is to outline the profile of a player who deeply cares about the flavor of a card, not just its visual representation. The two decades of Magic design and community consensus have only reinforced this distinction, and even the namesake card [Vorthos, Steward of Myth] specifically emphasizes flavorful diegetic presence and not special variants or art treatments. While those artworks or fancy treatments might be an element of this flavor, the truth is that all of this is still in service of a card’s function: its narrative function.
Given this distinction, we should have an aesthetic profile whose appreciation of beauty truly is function following form.
Chase: Material Opulence, Free Beauty, and the Gilded Age of Cardstock
Introducing Chase! Chase is the aesthetic profile who knows that All That Glitters must be golden. Special frames, unique arts, judge promos, serialized variants, Chase likes the pretty cardboard. Chase wants the best version of the card. Chase wants the card to be in a language they can’t even read because: look at how sick it looks when it’s not bogged down by my own reading comprehension!!
A Chasitic appreciation for aesthetics is the philosophical opposite to the Mellish argument. In acknowledging the Pulchritudo Adhaerens, Kant distinguishes the art of function from the art of form, which he contrastingly labels Pulchritudo Vaga. “Free Beauty,” as Kant describes it, requires no knowledge or critical exploration of what an artistic object does, is, or even aims to convey. It is a pure, primal appreciation and preference for certain artistic elements over others. This is the primary driving aspect for most Chasitic aesthetic appreciation: when a Chase clamors to replace the essentially free basics in their deck for a resplendent set of foil NEO Ukiyo-e woodblock print lands, it isn’t because they are more effective game pieces or even necessarily because they fit the deck’s theme particularly well, it’s because of the innate artistic appreciation for their decadence. This is art for art’s sake, the principle of function following form.
It is important to note that a Chase’s appreciation might be primarily driven by Pulchritudo Vaga, but many Chases also prioritize exclusivity. In this way, they are evoking the ‘Conspicuous Consumption’ of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. This ‘Positional Beauty’ does not rely solely on the sensory appeal of an object, but on the social validation and status marking that possession of the artwork provides. Consider, for a moment, the motivation behind the pricing and desire to own a serialized BRO [Mishra’s Bauble]. It is not an exceptionally different artwork, nor is it a particularly expensive card in its base edition even with the new artwork. The price and distinction are purely in its rarity, and for some Chases, that is enough.
The artistic movements most Chasitic in nature are Rococo and Art Nouveau. In either movement, we see the decadent and awe-inspiring flourishing of artistic adornment for the sake of the adornment itself. Art Nouveau did so for the mass ‘beautification’ of every formerly utilitarian mundane item (for example, a simple hairbrush is an opportunity for handpainted portraiture and gentle enameling) in a way that directly mirrors the modern design aesthetic of a Chase blinging out their Pauper deck with bespoke secret lair arts. In the Rococo movement, we see the flashy bourgeois displays of wealth absolutely drowning every architectural or structural element of a building or object with a tide of marble seashells and gilded scrollwork, sometimes even to the detriment of aesthetic appeal or functionality. Unfortunately, I can think of no corollaries in current Magic design for this, however.
Rounding Out the Taxonomy
With the addition of Chase to the existing aesthetic profiles, we have recreated the form/function dichotomy in overpriced cardstock. Given how neatly wrapped up that spectrum appears, with Chase on one end and Mel on the other, the next logical question is “Is there an aesthetic ideology opposite to Vorthos?”
If Vorthosian aesthetic beauty is the harmonic convergence of ludonarrative (that gameplay and aesthetics perfectly match narrative fidelity), then it stands to reason that there must be an aesthetic opposite. There must be an aesthetic profile that finds the absurd and discordant clash of misappropriated IP interactions and anti-diegetic card functions to be aesthetically beautiful, no?
Well yes, there is such an aesthetic profile, but what is important to note is that while it is tempting to pigeon-hole this final aesthetic profile into being the opposite of Vorthos, it is, in truth, the ideological opposite to every single other profile. It is also, nonsensically, a perfect harmony of all three profiles taken to their logical extremes, as well as a completely distinct intellectual argument in its own right. The final aesthetic profile is Bofa.
Bofa: Dadaism, Deconstructionism, and the Joke of it All
Bofa loves when a Walk the Plank targets a shark. Bofa loves when someone plays Opalescence into the on-board Humility & forces the new guy to learn what the hell ‘Layers’ are. Bofa loves when a deck is entirely handwritten proxies on white-bordered 6th Edition basic lands. Bofa’s aesthetic appreciation is for when the weight of Magic‘s ambitions collapse the pillars of ludonarrative, mechanical precision, and artistic expression into a mess of ugly and broken printed paper.
Y’see, Bofa understands, deep down, that in the end we are all adults sitting at a coffee table hallucinating nonsensical battles and arguing over scraps of paper. Whether we are laying on the floor in our mom’s basement or we are in Atlanta playing for thousands of dollars while streaming live to all of our online viewer, all of our serious feelings and well-reasoned decklists are ultimately arbitrary words printed on cheap cardstock that only do what we say they do because we agree they should. None of this truly matters, except for some reason when it does, and then the fact that it suddenly does matter is frankly insane.
Ultimately, Bofa is the end result of the fail-state of R&D’s design goals, the fail-state of the aesthetic profiles, and the fail-state of the entirety of the Magic project. When Vorthosian ludonarrative appeal is alienated by half-hearted IP crossovers & mismatched card design, when Mellish mechanical sensibilities are crushed by complexity creep & rules text bloat, and when Chasitic fascination is burned out through product fatigue & diluted artificial scarcity, you don’t lose a Magic player-you gain a Bofa. Bofa is the joyous Sisyphus, he who has accepted the realities of his situation and in defiance now revels in the chaos he once lamented.
So philosophically, where does Bofa find beauty? At its most intellectual, a Bofadese appreciation for aesthetics borrows from Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida) and Absurdism (Albert Camus). Deconstruction asks a viewer to look directly at the language they use, the intrinsic biases it holds, and how it shapes and forms the concepts around them, inherently limiting their worldview. To understand beauty you have to understand its relationship to its supposed opposite, ugliness. It is defined by its antithesis, yet still there is beauty in the ugliness and ugliness in the beauty. Under the weight of dissection, you will find that the boundary of ugliness and beauty is unclear, as trying to separate one from the other will cause either to lose its meaning. What beauty is is ever changing, infinite, and inherently contrarian to itself. Everchanging and inherently contrarian meanings to infinite topics might seem overwhelming or even meaningless, but in their embrace of Absurdist glee a Bofa can accept the paradox and embrace the beauty of disorder itself. In the simplest terms, a Bofa finds that an ugly card is beautiful in its ugliness, for it breaks the status quo and monotony of well-ordered and meaningful forms.
At its most irreverent, however, a Bofadese appreciation for aesthetic beauty is a cardstock expression of the philosophies of Camp and Classical Cynicism. The Classical Cynics practiced a type of ‘lived art,’ which Michel Foucault refers to as the Aesthetics of Existence in his The Courage of Truth lectures, that is a performative spectacle in which one sacrifices their comfort and shame in exchange for a stirring and powerful condemnation of assumed societal or social norms. In this way, Cynicism sees beauty in the truth that is brought to light by stark ugliness: Parrhesia.
In a more modern sense, we can understand the aesthetics of Camp, as defined by Susan Sontag in her essay Notes on “Camp” to be fulfilling a similar role (albeit in a lower-stakes and more lighthearted manner). To be beautiful by the standards of Camp is to once again embrace the ugliness of ‘bad taste’ (tackiness, exaggeration, plastic-y artifice) as a celebration of spectacle. With a wink and a nod to the audience the aesthetic beauty of Camp lies in the outrageous and the cringy, giving performer and consumer alike a chance to experience the liberating innocence of being gloriously off-putting or out-of-fashion. When a cohort of Bofas rallied around Fleem, Goben’s Creation, it was equal parts Camp spectacle and Cynic protest. By earnestly celebrating a charmingly tacky card, players turned a weird knockoff creature into an ironic mascot that served as commentary on the backfiring of Magic’s rushed corporate IP deals.
The artistic movement most evocative of the Bofadese aesthetic is Dadaism. Dadaism as a movement was largely a response to the Industrial Revolution broadly, and World War 1 specifically. It argued that if the end result from rationalism, logic, and intellectual elitism was the mass death & destruction, then the only morally just response is the embrace of the nonsensical. The most famous Dada work, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, tears away at the traditional foundations for evaluation of an art piece (craftsmanship or emotional resonance) and instead grossly insists that all that matters is an artist’s choice in context. When a player hastily scribbles “Gaea’s Cradle” with a subpar drawing onto a Basic Forest, they are operating in the Dada tradition: they insist on the acceptance of a common and standard object as a traditionally more dignified or valuable commodity, while in the process laying bare the absurdity of both objects being the same cardstock.
A New Taxonomy for a New Age
Magic is ever-evolving and clearly destined for infinite growth (a thing that is real and possible and I am very happy the CEO seems to be gunning for). Given this, it is likely these aesthetic profiles will change and grow in time as well. In addition, we may in ten years time find a need for a new set of aesthetic profiles; though if that is the case I expect successors to do the same amount of in-depth research and dedicated hand-wringing that I have to produce these, as the topic’s importance clearly necessitates such measures!
Further, I must always include the disclaimer: these are exaggerated archetypes of reality. Every Magic enjoyer has fragments of each of these aesthetic ideals inside of them, manifesting in a myriad of beautiful little appreciations and nasty online commentaries. You will always find cards that appeal to one or more of these sensibilities within you, or perhaps offend one of these sensibilities within you, and a holistic understanding of your aesthetic appreciation for Magic will thus be multifaceted.
A Treat Before I Go
With 2 new psychographics and 2 new aesthetic profiles, I suppose we need to update the quiz Mark normally puts out alongside his articles about the psychographics. As far as I can tell, all of the previous links to official quizzes are dead links lost to Hasbro’s unfeeling austerity measures, so this will be the definitive, only true MTG personality quiz.
