Group #2 – Cards Elegant in Concept But Not In Execution
These are the cards that do something very cool, but are a bit clunky in some way – be it the rules associated with the card, the templating or just the mechanics concerning how the card functions. This is the Ice Cauldron category. At its core, Ice Cauldron is a neat concept. It’s an artifact that lets you store spells on it to use later. But the card is so muddled in execution (mostly due to excessive wordiness and unnecessary mechanical complication), that many players give up long before they understand how to use it. Be aware that Ice Cauldron is the extreme of this category. There are many cards in Magic that put more weight on the concept than the execution. Few of them are as clunky as Ice Cauldron.
This category is the domain of Camp A. The Camp A crowd is willing to put up with a lot to get cool effects. It’s important to note that as R&D’s design technology improves we are finding to ways to turn Group #2 cards into Group #1 cards. For example, several years back both Mindslaver and Time Stop would have fallen in this group (although at the other end of the spectrum than Ice Cauldron). But advances in templating have allowed us to adopt much shorter, cleaner templates.
引用元
AN ELEGANT RESPONSE Posted in Making Magic on November 1, 2004
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/elegant-response-2004-11-01
「エレガント」に関する記事です。より正確には、これより前に書かれた「エレガント」に関する記事（※１）へのコメントに対するものです。
「エレガント」なカードをカテゴリー分けして紹介するなかで、《時間停止/Time Stop》が「コンセプトもテキストもエレガントなもの」として登場します。
もっとも、これはルールを整備したからこそです。数年前であれば、「コンセプトがエレガントだが、テキストはそうではないもの」（《Ice Cauldron》がその一例）として分類されただろう、とのことです。
《時間停止/Time Stop》や《精神隷属器/Mindslaver》のような、これまでにない斬新なコンセプトの能力を、簡潔なテキストで表現できるのはまさに「エレガント」と言えるでしょう。
※１
ELEGANCE Posted in Making Magic on October 18, 2004
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/elegance-2004-10-18-48
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