Webcomic / Cardboard Crack

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Cardboard Crack is a webcomic about Magic: The Gathering and its players. It has a simple black-and-white Stick-Figure Comic format and chronicles the trials, struggles and joys of playing Magic. It frequently pokes fun at players' habits, as well as how Wizards of the Coast are handling the game.

This webcomic provides examples of:

• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In "Emergency Landing", the passengers all have serious concerns like "am I going to die?" and "who will take care of my kids?"... except for the last one, who's worried about his Magic cards.
• Art Shift: As of 2024, all five of the strips about slivers are about the artist's opinion of the M14^note Magic 2014 Core Set sliver redesign.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: A running gag of the comic is characters getting distracted and going on Magic card purchasing spreesjust from a glance at a rare foil. In one case, a character suffers this when he comes within thirty miles of a Magic shop
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • "Finding the One" has a son ask his father when you know you've found "the one". For the first part of the response, it sounds like he's describing the feeling of being in love... but he's actually talking about finding the perfect Magic deck.
  • The father in "Use Protection" starts out by talking about protecting a valuable Magic collection, but his actual message is to use condoms because children are expensive.
  • "I finally got a BLACK LOTUS!"
  • "Note: Don't name your daughter 'Magic Cards'."
• Be Careful What You Wish For: At least twice with actual genies ("I want you to remove all luck from Magic so that games are only decided by skill" and "I wish for every Magic card I've ever wanted!"), plus the occasional WotC-granted wish ("Remind me, why did we want fetch lands reprinted?"). "Ludevic" is notable for having two in the space of a single comic.
• Beyond the Impossible: In this strip, a Magic player, "cursed to always be mana flooded", tries to play poker and still ends up with a hand of only Islands and Forests.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Commander has the author complaining about having to draw four stick figures instead of two:
  "Wait, was that the artist?"
  "Like it's that hard to draw a couple more stick figures!"
• Cloudcuckoolander: In Paying the Check, a bunch of Magic players in a restaurant calculate the value of their dinner in Magic cards and then leave the cards as payment instead of money.
• Crack Is Cheaper: The comic frequently references the cost of playing Magic, such as this strip citing "You hate money" as a reason to play it. Even the comic's title is a reference to how addictive and expensive Magic can be.
• Eleventy Zillion: In "Infinite", a player can make an arbitrarily large number of creature tokens. When told that he has to pick a number (not just "infinite"), he says he wants to create a "gazillion" tokens.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: This strip has a character get a tattoo in Phyrexian only for Elesh Norn, a Phyrexian leader, to ask why it reads "splendid cow fart".
• Everybody Knew Already: Emrakul is in Innistrad!
• Fan Dumbinvoked: "Quitting" features the kind of fan who constantly complains about the franchise and threatens to abandon it, but never actually leaves.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: What this custom "Atheist" card^note which he wants as a Power Nullifier against devotion decks would be within the flavor of Magic: The Gathering.
• Flipping the Table: The Hypocritical Humor in "Sophisticated" comes from a player talking about how "sophisticated" Magic is, then flipping the table in frustration after getting mana screwed again.
• Four-Point Scale: The joke that Commander players almost always rate their decks at power level 7 (before the introduction of the bracket system) was taken to an extreme in this strip, aptly titled "Seven."
• Furry Confusion: Discussed here regarding how anthropomorphic animals and normal animals share the same types.
• Game Night Fight:
  • Implied to be common in "Commander Night", where a player decides to show up to a game night with a dagger, a brick, shoulder pads and a helmet.
  • This playmat features four players fighting over a game of Commander.
  • This strip has a player declare that a Commander night is a success when "everyone but myself is fighting".
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Tasigur in gameplay: Dominating. Tasigur in story: A preserved corpse on a necklace.
  • Lampshaded in this strip, when Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, dies from a Tragic Slip:
    "No! The flavor of Zendikar and Innistrad sets should not be combined!"
  • This strip about the Eldrazi lampshades the way that non- or slow-rotating formats combined with overpowered Monsters of the Week makes storyline events more or less irrelevant.
  • This strip highlights a particularly amusing interaction regarding a Lord of the Rings set: you can make your One Ring the Ring-bearer... which is supposed mean a creature holding the One Ring.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In "So Annoying", a stickman keeps complaining about their opponent using "low-skill" or "annoying" strategies... but has no problems using these strategies himself.
  • "Sophisticated" has a player talk about how "sophisticated" Magic is, which leads into the punchline of him Flipping the Table after getting mana screwed again.
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • In "Kitchen Finks", a player tries to joke that a set included "everything but the kitchen finks" after noticing that the titular card didn't get a reprint. The opponent is not impressed.
  • In Flashing Life, after the player forces his opponent to play a card named Life using the keyword flash just to say "I made you watch your Life flash before your eyes".
  • Invoked in "Izzet", where people keep making lame "Izzet" puns to get someone to stop playing Izzet decks.
  • "Let's not talk anymore when we play."
  • "My playgroup says I can't use Prossh anymore."
• Paranoia Fuel: Discussed regarding both Phyrexian oil and Emrakul.
• Serious Business: Some of the characters take Magic a bit too seriously:
  • "Wedding" has a female player put "And I promise to never touch my wife's Magic cards" in the wedding vows.
  • In "Dating a Magic Player", the boyfriend tries to give his girlfriend a Magic-themed cake... only for her to complain that the colors are not in the correct order.
  • In "Contract", a player tries to get another player to sign a contract to prove he's serious about an in-game deal.
  • In "Dangerous", a woman declares that she likes men who live dangerously. She's with her current boyfriend because he runs 41 cards in draft, which is one more than the minimum deck size and slightly lowers consistency.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Being in a car crash is no excuse not to talk about Magic.
  • A TSA agent rifles through a traveller's Magic deck as the traveller tries to talk up how "dangerous" his deck is; the agent arrests him because "playing a deck this bad is probably a crime".
• Sssssnake Talk: "Are you going to do this every time you play your snake tribal deck?!" "Absssssolutely."
• Take That!: Many strips make fun of how Wizards of the Coast is running the game. For instance, "Never Better" has a player lament how he feels Magic is changing for the worse while a character representing Wizards is just ignoring him and bragging about profits.
• Talk to the Fist: In this comic, a player's response to a complicated double-face card.
• Tempting Fate: In "Drafting", a player keeps ranting about his opponents' supposed lack of skill. He ends up going 0-2.
• Throw It In: Discussed in this comic, which speculates that Avacyn's herons are because the art department misspelled hedrons.
• Throw the Book at Them: Joked about here: "In Magic, your creature cards attack your opponent directly — just not like this."
• Vanilla Unit: Discussed in "Vanilla", where the characters are impressed that after years of increasing complexity, creatures with no rules text whatsoever still exist.
• Wall of Text: Lampshaded regarding Strixhaven Double Face Cards. After explaining what the front of the card says,
  "What does the back side of the card do?"
  "Sorry, there isn't any space left in this comic."
• Who's on First?: A character attempts to purchase a non-foil copy of the card named Foil.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: After many squirrel-related shenanigans, Emrakul now hates squirrels.