A Battlefield of Textual Elements: Bookishness in Magic: The Gathering

The Magic: The Gathering trading card is an underexplored bookish medium for literary theory and print culture that promotes the interrogation of existing conventions of authorship, paratext, and ephemerality. By focusing on the Magic card through a literary lens rather than one of game studies, the cards reveal as much about themselves as they reveal about literary theory. As a user centric medium, Magic cards connect to the larger history of commonplace books and support Barthes’ claim of author death. Conversely, the diverse discursive contexts in which Magic cards are used demonstrate the usefulness of Foucault’s “author function”. Additionally, the compact size of the Magic card creates tension that strains paratextual understandings of unity. By looking at the Magic card as a bookish form, current theoretical understandings are further developed, and real word applications, creating anti-racist spaces and promoting nonlinear and communal storytelling, become demystified.