Magic The Noah - TV Tropes

Have you ever wanted to see your favorite YouTubers get together to play a board game? Have you ever wanted to see them fight, argue, and trash talk each other? Did you ever wish to see them suffer? Well look no further. On Magic The Noah's YouTube channel, you can see all of that and more, with his own homebrew Board Game designed to make all of them suffer one step at a time.

Magic The Noah is a Magic: The Gathering comedy YouTuber who, starting with "Horrible Jeopardy," created a series of videos centered around homebrew board games with other youtubers, as long as they have an interest in any type of game medium. The only problem, is, well, they suck. Featuring some of the most convoluted game mechanics, gameplay, and challenges of any Party or Board Game, these games are designed for one thing and one thing only: To help torture the other players. They include Trial-and-Error Gameplay, as all the rules aren't explained at the beginning of the game, and almost every mechanic is designed to make players suffer, whether by being Nintendo Hard, counterintuitive, luck based,or outright ambiguous. In addition, it's all being played on top of a PowerPoint file with poorly drawn images representing the enemies, and simple boxes representing spaces people can move on. Watch as the players squirm to figure out the mechanics as they play, mess around with them in creative, absurd, and audacious ways, or just straight up fumble the ball and die to a weak enemy due to a bad roll. Enjoy their tears as each of them tries and desperately crawl their way to victory against the other players and the game itself, or just Troll and muck about with the game mechanics.

His other content includes (mostly before these particular videos), Magic: The Gathering card reviews, gimmick Magic decks, and Magic comedy skits. Even after they stopped being featured on the main channel, they can still be found on his second channel: https://www.youtube.com/@noahthemagic4529.

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Tropes in general include:

• Insane Troll Logic: A good chunk of his videos justify his weird deckbuilding decisions via this trope. For example, "Commander Deck with 97 Wastes" justifies his use of only wastes (when, by the way, give mana of no color in a game where mana usually comes in a colored form) by saying that color is a dependency that needs to be thrown off in order to experience true transcendence, then reveals that his commander has a way to get colored mana from all that uncolored mana anyway, justifying that by stating that colorless is a color because colorless has color in its name, and calling anyone who disagrees "colorist."
• Troll: His main channel theme: create things, like Magic: The Gathering decks or his own sucky board games, that make people suffer for his own amusement, like decks composed of only wastes and three colored spells, a board game where you can't see the board, several board games where everything is randomized, and a few board games that are designed to practically guarantee the players' loss with Fake Difficulty.
• Work Info Title: Pretty much all of his videos are titled something along the lines of "[X thing]," with his board game/game show videos in particular being titles something along the lines of "[X game] but [Y Twist]."

Tropes in his Party Game series:

• Artistic License – Biology: It should go without saying, but there is absolutely no chance a paramedic can revive a decapitated person, especially if their head is nowhere near the body. And yet, in "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", SmallAnt manages to do just that with a Nat 20, somehow regrowing the victim's head in the process.
• Berserk Button: Two words: Mimic Detector. ^note 
• Butt-Monkey: Vulpixie has very bad luck when she takes part in the games, constantly having to spin the bad wheel.
• Black Comedy: The games will often have a dark sense of humor. Easily the darkest is "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", where Failboat and PointCrow go on a mass murdering spree that is played for laughs.
• Calvinball: His games in general have this vibe, as he only lays down the (implied) rules when they become necessary, and often makes rules up on the spot to either fix an obnoxious oversight in the rules or because the players made a good or bad suggestion and he decides to Throw It In. There are some cases where this gets especially bad however:
  • In "Game Show Where I Didn't Tell Players How To Win," he doesn't even outline the win condition in the opening rules spiel, and his rules spiel is just a bunch of random rules that randomly become relevant later in the game, forcing the players to figure out for themselves what the rules are even more than usual.
  • This then gets exaggerated by "Game Show, But There Are No Rules," where he slowly removes rules in order to make things really become Calvinball over time, leading to the opening being just a clip of Thoralf holding up a shotgun with no context to the other members of Cardmarket.
  • This then gets exaggerated even more by "I Made A Game Where Players Can Change The Rules," where he doesn't even give a rules spiel and the players are left to discover, decide, and alter all of the rules of the game by themselves while Noah imposes his own rules, leading to absolute chaos breaking out as the players launch a Gambit Pileup into each other in order to try and win the game, while Noah Trolls the other players with his rules changes, forcing them to team up on him.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "[Person]/Unfortunately, you landed on the [X] space," whenever someone lands on such a space.
  • "[Person]/Unfortunately, You get to spin the [X] wheel now," where X is the wheel related to the zone a player lands in.
• Chekhov's Gun: Oftentimes, events earlier in the play session will have an unexpected or sudden impact on a later portion of the game, even if they weren't properly set up yet:
  • In "I Made A Game Where Players Can Change The Rules," one of the players makes a slime appear on the start space halfway through the game, but doesn't add a rule to make it do anything. When the demon comes around, he quickly makes it protect from its death ray, saving the spawn and two of the players, allowing them one last chance to think of something to stop the demon.
    • They then also realize nothing is stopping them from reviving each other and giving each other swords to defeat the demon with.
• Darker and Edgier: "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane" is one of Noah's most brutal and graphic videos yet, with the players beheading many, murdering everyone in sight, including multiple children and puppies, burning down a city, and the plot being about a drug addict and an abusive alcoholic tripping, trying to murder two police officers.
• Didn't See That Coming: Even though it's clear that his games have rules to begin with, oftentimes, the more creative players will find loopholes or uncovered exceptions to even rules he hasn't revealed yet, causing him to quickly try and make one up on the spot. One notable example is the idea that players can go into debt to pay for things, which has come up in several different videos.
• Downer Ending: "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane" ends with literally everyone dying, the city destroyed, and heads rolling.
• Eldritch Abomination: Time God is a reoccurring enemy that is a powerful entity with control over time.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: At the end of "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", every character dies during the final battle.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Several of these games devolve into this, with multiple spaces and entities threatening to ruin the lives of the competing players. Examples include:
  • An angry time monster destroying periods in time.
  • Multiple spaces where something bad happens to the players, like a place out of time that damages them constantly, or multiple versions of the Shadow Realm that can also do this.
  • Other players.
  • The board shifting around
  • Enemies that can sometimes be ludicrously overpowered.
• Fake Difficulty: He uses many of these to make his games that much more painful, such as having luck decide the outcome of most battles, having game mechanics that are counterintuitive or poorly telegraphed, and having game spaces that force challenging encounters.
• Fog of War: In "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Blind" and its successor videos, this is taken to the logical extreme, where the players literally can't see the board at all, forcing them to try memorizing it from what little information they get, leading to hilarity as they struggle to figure out where they are and where to go to from their limited information.
• Fun with Subtitles: Starting in later videos, he sometimes makes it so that the captions that appear on screen either aren't accurate (oftentimes arguing in Noah's favor when the players are actually arguing against him) or have blatant misspellings in them.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Quite a few of Noah's board games start off with one premise (usually the players competing normally against each other), only for Noah or the players to steer the plot in their direction, causing the plot to change directions for the rest of the video.
  • In "I Made A Game Where Players Can Change The Rules," halfway through the video, Noah makes a unicorn transform into a demon after the players reach it 3 times, who then acts as a player which is able to steal everyone's flamingos, which are required to win the game. As a result, everybody teams up to stop it, trying to hatch a complicated plan to stop Noah's demon from winning the game, mostly by trying to change the rules to their favor. Clearly frustrated, Noah then pulls out his trump card: making the demon charge up a death ray attack, which then wipes out all of the board except the slime space. The players finally win by conjuring up a weapon to beat the demon, giving one to each of them, then throwing everything they have at it until it finally dies, causing Noah to end the game with them all victorious.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: In "Board Game, But There's Only One Space," going too far ahead in time or backwards in time lands our erstwhile time travelers in a location known as Pure Time. Pure Time is an Eldritch Location beyond any existing time periods on the board that constantly damages players who enter it until they are lucky enough to roll the one result that teleports them back into the normal timeline, making moving through it an incredibly bad idea. This becomes even worse when the Time God gets angry enough at the time-travelers to start destroying places in time, causing the safe travel space for the timeline to shrink down to just one location, threatening to send the players into Pure Time any time they would try to use their time machines.
• Joke and Receive: Oftentimes, when someone jokes about a possible game mechanic, character trait, or game interaction in a Magic The Noah video, Noah will immediately try throwing it into the game, especially if it would make the game harder or funnier for the players playing the game.
• Luck-Based Mission: Many of his games feature dice rolling (or rather number/result spinning) deciding everything, from success chance during battles or the rewards gained thereby. In particular, oftentimes when it is a Board Game, the reward and punishment spaces each have random outcomes, and occasionally have the chance to give a result from the other wheel. Several specific games also take this to the extreme:
  • In "Card Game, but Cards Are Randomly Generated," each player has to randomly roll up cards each time they summon them, sometimes either having a ludicrously overpowered set of abilities, and other time dying instantly upon arriving to the battlefield. This got so tedious that, halfway through the game, Noah eliminate an amount of easy ways for the players to get out of killing each other just to speed up the game.
  • In "I Made a Game but Players Move Randomly," true to its title, has even movement be at the mercy of the random number god, with each player being unable to control their movement through the game for the most part. Instead, they have to either react to where they move, or use items to control where they move, in order to defeat the other players.
  • Whenever he runs a role playing game, expect the RNG to play an especially big part in whether everyone succeeds or fails, as Critical Hits and Critical Failures can spell immediate doom for your character. For example, when an Angel rolls a Nat 1 on its attack roll against Sophist in reverge for the "thunder spell" incident, it instantly dies without getting a saving throw or a reroll, and the same happens to a worm that attacks the party as they move through a cave.
• Nintendo Hard: Many of his games feature fiendishly difficult encounters that are very hard to defeat conventionally without a bit of luck, such as enemies that are much higher in power level than their foes, enemies that scale in power much faster than the players can, environmental effects that are almost entirely negative and which oftentimes grow throughout a game, and incredibly convoluted gameplay.
• Obliviously Evil: In "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", Failboat and PointCrow play a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired fantasy game where they try to hunt down a demon lord. Despite seeing themselves as the heroes killing the Demon Lord's army, it turns out they are actually insane and are going on a killing spree slaughtering innocent people.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Oftentimes, whenever the players find a loophole in his rules, he'll quickly either Throw It In, straight up ban it, or Nerf it so that it doesn't ruin the intended gameplay style. Examples include:
  • Whenever somebody who is out of money for buying or gambling stuff asks to borrow money, he goes with it and makes it so that it causes them to go into debt, with varying effects depending on what is going into debt.
• Off with His Head!: Failboat becomes obsessed with doing this to nearly every minion of the Demon Lord he comes across in "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane". PointCrow gets in on it too, culminating in him sawing off Captain Kidd's head and wearing it as a mask after killing him in the final battle.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", Failboat and PointCrow succeed in killing the Demon Lord and his lieutenant, who in reality were Captain Kidd and SmallAnt. However, PointCrow is mortally wounded and Failboat dies when he hugs SmallAnt with a land mine. PointCrow spends his last moments in the fantasy world lamenting the cost it took to save the world before bleeding out.
• Running Gag:
  • People becoming compulsive gamblers and gambling away all of the resources they need to win the game:
• Shout-Out:
  • On two separate occasions, the board has contained a space called the Shadow Realm that traps and hurts players who fall into it.
  • On two separate occasions, the damaging wheel has an option to attack people with Emotional Damage.
  • Multiple games have gameplay inspired by Dungeons & Dragons.
• Spotting the Thread: During "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", Failboat begins to catch on to the fact that something is wrong with his and PointCrow's perspective of their adventure when the Demon Lord and his henchman appear in a flashback as a frog and cyclops, which have been used as character sprites for Smallant and Captain Kidd in previous games.
• Stylistic Suck: His games are designed to be as sucky to play as possible, featuring many examples of Fake Difficulty such as luck based gameplay, information the players can't reasonably know about ahead of time, and a simplistic and unrefined art style.
• Taking You with Me: At the climax of "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", Failboat puts a quick end to Smallant's Heroic Second Wind by strapping a land mine to his chest and hugging him, killing them both.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Many of his games rarely explain all of their mechanics to players at the start, forcing them to uncover them by performing various actions, including actions not outlined to the players by Noah, whether he has a plan for them or not.
• Tempting Fate: Oftentimes, when somebody gets cocky in a Magic The Noah video, things tend to go downhill quickly, whether it's because they Joke and Receive, they provoke the other players, or because they provoke Noah into making the game harder/allowing a detrimental interaction.
• Villain Protagonist: In "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", Failboat and PointCrow are deranged lunatics going on a violent rampage throughout the city, under the delusion that they are heroes fighting the Demon Lord and his forces. Smallant and Captain Kidd are a paramedic and cop attempting to stop their rampage. However, they are pretty terrible too, as they arrest a random homeless man and leave him to die before shooting a grieving father after his son is murdered.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: A giant worm surprise attacks Brent, only to roll a Natural 1 and immediately kill itself.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • When the Party Crashers encounter a lost child just looking for her mom, Sophist promptly casts Thunder Spell on the child and kills her on the spot.
  • In "I Made A Game, But The Players Are Insane", Failboat and PointCrow murder numerous children and decapitate them, although they are under the delusion that they are monsters fighting for the Demon Lord.

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