Pattern Recognition #343 - Goblins Part 2

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

24 October 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

What makes a Goblin a Goblin? Is it the in the casting cost? It is the type line? Is it the semi-cohesive artwork that occurs on occasion? Or is it the deck archetype that focuses on fast moving and cheap creatures to push through a win at all costs?

It's all of this and more.

First, I would like to suggest watching the following video. It is from Curious Archive and just cracks open a peek at what it means to be a Goblin in the modern world. I enjoyed it and I hope you do to.

But that's just a general overview. And it does hit on some salient points that I can move forward. Our acceptance of Goblins has a very short lineage to it. Magic derives its Goblins from Dungeons and Dragons, and DnD most certainly did not get Goblins from Tolkien.

Look, there were no Goblins in the Lord of the Rings. Not in the books. Yes, I know that the very faithful adaptation of the books and story into the cards was very good. And there are five Goblins in the LotR set. However, the works that Tolkien created only had Orcs, and later the Uruk-Hai. The phrase 'goblin' was used as an alternate-language word for Orc. As an insult. Not to denote a separate species.

The Goblins that DnD wound up taking theirs from had more in common with faeries than they did the Orcs. Short, mischievous and operating on a completely different moral axis. And then merged then with Tolkien anyways because Gary Gygax was a hack and just made stuff up as he went along.

This led to the initial presentation of Goblins as being a curious mix of the militaristic orcs of Tolkien and the fey mythologies they were derived from. We got a species defined by their short lives, their short stature and huge populations in order to present a threat. Early Magic didn't lean into this as they were still just throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck. And for better and for worse, this notion that the Goblins were....

Goblins quickly became a joke. A visual gag whole lore indicated that for all the horrible things they did - including, you know, Goblin Grenade being a suicide bomber - they were portrayed as funny and ridiculous. When you get Phil Foglio for cards like Goblin King and Goblin Digging Team, humor is part and parcel of the deal.

When I mentioned last week how Mercadian Masques, the set, tried to upend the power dynamics and how various species and cultures worked, this was the problem they were trying to fix. Or at least address. The Goblins were intended to be serious foes, cunning and brutal. That even the crew of the Weatherlight, whose experience with Goblins began and ended with Squee would underestimate them to their detriment. It was a nice attempt, but it was in a set that had a lot of problems with it, meaning that the effort to turn Goblins into something more was a failure.

But Wizards did learn where they went wrong. The sudden and overt upending of a system they had built wasn't going to work. So instead, they started a long term plan - or someone did - to rehabilitate the image of the Goblins. Except for the pictures, they were too far gone with that.

This started with Kamigawa and Lorwyn. With these two blocks, a few years apart, Wizards established to their benefit and credit that the notion of the Goblin as a green-skinned miniature catastrophe in the making wasn't always true. By calling creatures of this type 'Akki' or 'Boggart', then Wizards found that players were more receptive to them as non-Goblins even though they had that word on the type line. That they could step back from the image they had built up and do something different with them.

And it worked. The fundamental nature of the Goblin had been changed, and no longer was it seen as the Red Weenie, to insult glorious in the process. Goblins reaches a sort of procedural dichotomy when presented in the lore and in the cards. They embraced their quickness and self-destructive behaviors - Goblin Bombardment was recently printed as a bonus card in Wilds of Eldraine, and before that was a regular Rare in Modern Horizons 2!

Alara even examined in part what it meant to be that sot of creature with the Goblins of Jund. For them, live fast, die hard and leave for future generations more than just a tale of warning was the way their culture evolved, especially when they were seen a a primary food source for the Dragons of the Plane.

Ravnica took the wilds out of most of the Goblins, as they received prominent roles in the Boros Guild to emphasize how well they could work in large groups, with the Izzet where their propensity for a lack of self-preservation meant they would take risks no one else would without a thought or a care. With the Gruul, who channeled their inherent recklessness into something more primal and the Rakdos who saw endless fun.

The (mostly) Mardu Goblins of Tarkir maintained their ferocity and savagery without leaning into the humor of their predecessors. Seriously, Ankle Shanker is lethal.

And on Ixalan, there are plenty of Goblin Pirates, and they aren't seen as different or lesser for it. Aside from Goblin Trailblazer, which does have some funny in it, but for that card, that the creature is a Goblin is almost incidental to the joke, not making it.

But they still haven't escaped that. Last week, SteelSentry suggested I compare the flavor text on Goblin Chieftain with Goblin Chieftain. The former leans hard into the serious threat that Goblins can have when they are organized and ready to rumble, while the same card portrays them as ... well... that song. Thank you for pointing that out to me!

Interestingly, Goblins also have a surprising number of Planeswalkers. As in two of them. Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer didn't get a Planeswalker card because he was a Planeswalker for only a few minutes before doing the moral thing by his friends, and Daretti, Scrap Savant, and his later incarnation, Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast. This native of Fiora - along with his compatriot in species - Grenzo, Dungeon Warden and Grenzo, Havoc Raiser represent what I like to see as the current state of Goblins in the game.

They are a vast and faceless horde with some interesting features. But some Goblins rise above the rest to become Legends in their own right, to be taken as seriously as any other individual across the Multiverse. Krenko. Squee. Daretti. The Guttersnipe. Breeches. You know their names first, but their species is a distant second to who they are and what they can do.

Disrespect the Goblins at your peril, for behind their historical sense of humor and stupidity - Goblin Chirurgeon comes to mind from Fallen Empires, the are still a force to be reckoned with.

As 's Characteristic Creature, they represent the base of what that colour represents and brings to the game. Cheap, quick, ready to rumble. And yet they have a surprising depth to them that makes them more than most people bargain for. Especially if they hold out long enough for the Dragons to come into play. Love them or hate them, they are here to stay.

Just don't play a Goblin Game with any of them. No one wins that. I should know, I've done it in EDH.

Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to talking with you about my subject matter. Join me next week when I talk about something! What? I don't know yet!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!