Pseudo Newb Connections and Rooting when there's no Home Team

Connections in the Community

Ok, so here's a thing I've realized since I came back from vacation.  I'm making new friends and meeting people in a way I haven't for a long time since starting to play Magic seriously, even if not all the people I'm meeting would want to play competitively, I wouldn't have met them if it weren't for magic.  And if I only wanted to play casually, I don't think I would have been moving in enough different places to meet them.

Here's a weird little thing, I've made more really good female friends socially doing this than anything else I've done in my life ever. I'm not one of those "I don't have female friends" girls. My best friend from High School is still one of my best friends, My closest friend that I live near and go on adventures with is a 3:00AM-in-Texas friend.  The dissolution of another friendship, with another long term female friend still hurts worse some days than my actual divorce. (both situations are years old)  But creating NEW female friendships as an adult is super-hard, even the lighter social ones. I think because it's still hard for women to make time for each other, even if we really, really want to. So my social circle is probably really more mixed than it feels, but certainly in day to day life it was mostly my male friends that were actually spending time with me for the better part of the last decade.

It's connective and feels a little like a part of the world I really thought was lost, or only for younger people is opening up again. I'm pretty sure that it would surprise whoever does the marketing for WotC.

The State of My Game

On vacation right after Gencon, I did get to play Magic, The Perfectly Normal Husband played standard with me so I could continue to work with my Quirion Dryad, Talarand deck, which is moving much faster since I put in Ponder. I'll be watching Ravnica for a good substitute since I was originally running Think Twice but I really do need some deck manipulation.

We brought all the Planeshcase box sets treating them like a single set boxed game. The Boy seriously enjoyed it, so we ended up playing PlaneChase almost every night on Vacation. The only drawback is whoever is playing the Primoridal Hunger Deck is going to become target #1. It balances in 3 person, but 4 person going after one guy knocks the Primordial Player out too early. The Boy loved the Chaos Reigns deck and I played ninjas.

I like the ninjas deck. Maybe I could do a Commander ninjas deck.

Watching Competitions/ Following Players

I've become someone who watches the competitions on streaming video. Some of it works for me, some of it really doesn't. Without an encyclopedic knowledge of the cards, even though I play the game unless I've literally played the deck I can't follow it properly, so it doesn't really help me learn anything. I remember last September when everyone and their cousin was telling me to watch the pro's play like that was going to teach me anything. I watched the final game of Worlds in November and it was one guy shutting down another guy who barely got cards on the table. All I could think of was, "Well, that was useless" and not compelling at all. Certainly not instructive.

I'm watching it again now to see if it looks different to me, and no, not really. I still am not sure how the eventually winner got all the land out on turn 4. This time viewing it at least I'm familiar with the card names so I know what they roughly are. I know the advertising card is standing in for a 3/3 golem token which I didn't when I watched it the first time. I'm struck again by how similar the art design makes the cards look, so anything less than total familiarity with them makes it difficult to read the two board states, even now. I wonder if I will have less trouble with seeing Avacyn Restored cards in video.

I don't understand what the heck happened that won Game 1 at all. They sit there with a whole bunch of cards out on the table, they build things up and don't interact at all. Then Ju'yiaga turns a single card, a whole bunch of mana and they call the game without a single life total being dropped before that moment.

Think for a minute of a brand new player seeing that, no interaction other than shuffling, not a single explanation of WHY anything is happening. The arrogance of the video coverage is astonishing. They just ASSUME the only people watching already know the cards, know the decks, know the people. This is the biggest moment of the competitive season and I'm cool with the golf course silence but there's no reason for me to watch this and think that A: the game is fun, or B: I'll ever  be able to play this game.

Watching the World thing last year made me avoid videos for Magic, but Finkle made me change my mind.

This is an interesting experiment. Honestly, watching this final really put me off watching any of the Magic Videos for a long time. I'll rewatch the rest of the match and see if things are any clearer for me. What made me think that I could start watching the videos again? Actually watching John Finkle play on camera for some reason ( I think I was sick and couldn't move). I was surprised to see him playing a deck list similar to mine ( mine was not put together because I was so smart, it was put together because I was trying to subsititue cards I could understand how to use with cards I was shakier on ) I fully admit that I lucked into a build that was close to Finkle's Delver before I ran into the video. When Finkle plays it seems like I understand the actions and the cards in play better than when other people do.  I don't know if there's a real reason or it's just that he plays at a more interactive level than a lot of the pros do so I can sort of see decision points better, or it's just luck because the games he's played in camera were ones I could follow and understand.

The other thing that made me watch the coverage was that I became invested in some of the players doing well.  I completely admit the gender bias, because if more women win at that level of the game there will be room for women like me who may never be quite that good to just play their best without feeling like we're representing something.  But just like location and sports rivalries sometimes you're investment in a team, (or in this case a pro) comes around because of something personal. I was at GP Balt. Everyone there was really nice and a good sportsman in competition. There were many more women than I was expecting to see based on pictures of other GPs and several women made Day 2. Jackie Lee made it all the way to the Top 8 when I had to leave, I had an Ipad, but I had to go to the train before the Top 8 played. I figured I'd stream it and just kind of root for her. That's when I saw the chat stream on Twitch TV.

I admit I root for people for non-sports/competition reasons (warning poltically inappropriate rant)

I'm not new. Not in real life, only in Magic. It's not that I was shocked, it was that I was really, really expecting better of people who played Magic. And hoping like hell she wasn't ever going to be able to access the stream. I am now equally invested in Gabby Douglas's career for the same reason. When you go after an athlete or a competitor for some reason other than the game they're bringing, I'm going to root for them to kick your favorite competitior's ass. Even if I like that competitor too.

BTW in case you think it's an underdog or white knighting or feminist sort of thing I feel the same way about Tiger Woods.  I want him to bring home another green jacket and shut up all the moralistic assholes who've been rooting for him to fail because he's a sucky husband with apparent intimacy issues.

I wouldn't want to marry the guy, but he's the only time I watch golf and go "whoa . . ." My incredibly unfeminist view is that it looks like he was playing better when he could bang a bunch of groupie chicks who all fit a stereotype that all specifically screamed out "not a threat to my real marriage." None of those women were going to be a "next Mrs. Woods" they also weren't necessarily all telling the truth, none of them ever proved anything, all of them said they were going to sue but none of them did, but for a month they all got bank by selling their stories. Rachel Utchetiel is the only maybe.

Do you know what I know? I know the press went after and destroyed a man's life because he hit a fire hydrant at the end of his street and there's a possibility that his wife may have beaten him and he was covering up for her. And she may have beaten him because he was a cheater. But you know what was the only thing that was public information and "right to know" - dude hit a fire hydrant.

Do you know what that had to do with golf? Nothing. Is he the only horndog on the road in golf? Doubt it. I hope for Phil Mikleson's sake that the poor man never has to go through a divorce now that he's been sainted.

So yeah, everyone in the press made bank by invading his privacy because they've been looking for something to crack on him forever. It had nothing to do with the sport, it had everything to do with tearing him down. His concentration cracked, the zombies and parasites fed off the open brains, he kept his privacy by not really responding to the gossip. Do I notice a trend? The trend I notice is that I, as a non-sports person, only seem to hear about the character and sportsmanship issues of people of color in predominantly white sports. Serena and Venus Williams for instance, while guilty of questionable fashion are not any more aggressive than Sharapova and considerably less confrontational, angry, cursing or grunting than Monica Seles, or Andre Aggasi. Why the heck do I know about a dispute over Gabby Douglass's hair?

So that's pretty much my benchmark for support. Do I know about you because of some bullshit thing that I don't know about your equal but "acceptable" competitors. Did you come to my attention because other athletes/competitors are doing the exact same thing but the coverage is gleefully vulture like.

Is the thing you did something that was NOT actively violent or cheating or theft? (Unproven accusations of cheating because people hate you don't count and will probably move you over to my list of people I'll be watching if I as sole judge and jury decide I believe you) Are you conspicuously Not-Like-the-Other-Boys/Girls? Does the coverage make me check my privilege?

Yes? Cool I'm on your team, I'll go get a jersey.

Counts for straight white boys in traditionally "elegant" sports too - Elvis Stojko fan forever and actually out gay boys in a sport that marks Stojko down for artistic merit but pretends that their athletes are all either hetero or ken dolls (Go Rudy Galindo!)


So because I was on Jackie Lee's team, I started paying more attention ( I obviously already had been) but still hate watching all the damn videos. They're boring, don't explain things well enough and either move too quickly or make me think that if I gave Native Americans a choice between a horrifically politically incorrect memorial walking marathon of the Trail of tears with cultural lectures at each checkpoint given by earnest 4th graders OR watching deck and competition Magic Videos, with the only other choice being death because I'm an evil bitch, they would willingly choose the Trail of Tears marathon after checking out some magic videos. I believe this would possibly still be a choice for Native Americans who actually play Magic.

Yet I try to watch and I care about the following people: 

Here are the people that I know that I'm kind of interested in how they are doing on the protour with the  actual reasons why I care, since I'm too dumb to follow most competitive videos:

Martin Juza - first guy who I cared about ever. Because I found a decklist of his that he played that looked like something I could understand and it wasn't control, which I couldn't play at all.

Richard Bland. Because when I watched that video I felt really, really bad that he didn't get to play.

Patrick Chapin, because he really loves the game, shakes up the "received wisdom" and even though his book is problematic as an instructional text as far as I can tell he's the only guy at the top who tried. Yes I know about the drugs and the arrest.  And I've seen him.  He's very, very thin. Moreso than you can tell on the pictures and videos. The camera adds closer to 15-20lbs based on that. I want to cook for him.

Melissa Detora, because people picked on her for using FNM points and that pissed me off. Then because she wrote the only explanation of a received wisdom acronym that helped me actually understand a big piece of the fundamentals of draft.

Brian Kibler, because he outspokenly supports equality for everyone, cares about magic culture and because I am openly fascinated by everyone thinking he's so incredibly good looking and insisting that because I am female that I justify their male assumptions that he's that good-looking to us. I've heard male players say some amazingly sexual things about Kibler, male players who identify primarily as hetero. I feel bad when I can't back them up. He's got a very photogenic smile. But guys, sorry.

I think I support him because I feel like he's handling this nonsense very well and responsibly.

Darwin Kastle. Because he wrote about what the after effects of pursing Hall of Fame level excellence on his real life. It was a very, very necessary piece when everything I had been reading was all about "having the fire" and "The Art of War" and "The Next Level" and my personal least favorite part of Magic writing  pursuing "the Dream". It was brave, it made him vulnerable and it cuts through the hype. I'm not just rooting for him in Magic. I'm rooting for him. Also when he writes up budget decks I can play them and follow them. If I'm looking try a new archetype what he's putting together and writing about is accessible to me as a newb.


Jackie Lee. Because she played red/green with a phyrexian metamorph in a Delver world. Then because of the other stuff. Then later because she writes accessibly and well.

Conely Woods. It was his decks. I'm not really sure there is any other reason.

Jon Corpora - no he's not a pro, yes I care about how he's doing. In competition. He's not anything at all like I am, but during his 52 FNMs series many of the things he felt were some things I had felt and they interrupted my ability to play the game. Even though he might not attribute them to the same root causes, his writing about them made me realize that they weren't unique to me and therefore were something that should be worked through or minimized not accepted as flaws of my own in competition. Plus in totality, his 52 FNM series verifies some theories I have on when Magic Culture actively believes things that are the opposite of what's good for the game or the individual player and he's good at spotting when something he believed ended up just not being true.

LSV - Louis Scott Varga he's the one that seems to be working the hardest to make team and team theory a good and useful thing.


Alex Hayne - because he did something really, really different, because he's genuinely liked by his team-mates and because he inherently is the living proof to this idea that I have that having "the best deck" doesn't mean you can play it. His team mates played the deck and variance is not the reason that he won.

John Finkle - mostly because of the very stupid reason that the deck he played with Delver and Spirit tribal was very, very close to the one I had put together on my own. I am not John Finkle and I do not play things as well as John Finkle and he loves math and probability and analysis enough that he could make a living with it as a hedge fund manager. Which is the other reason I root for him, because he has to at a high level with the type of things I work with as a project manager, you don't have to be a clueless 20 year old to play and succeed at the game and you don't have to give up your whole life . . .if you happen to be super brilliant and naturally good at the game . . .

He's not a model for me of "how to be a player" he's more like "Being the best you can be at this game doesn't require you to destroy your life."

Also his play style is the one I seem to be able to absorb and learn from the best just by watching.

The Slovak World cup team = because they are adorable, they're like a basketful of Magic Playing puppies.


And to the future photographers or the Magic World Cup team photos this is a Horrible angle for anyone who isn't on the Olympic Swim team, Just sayin'

Slovak Republic (Robert Jurkovic, Ivan Floch, Filip Valis, Patrik Surab)

I also was rooting for Uruguay because of their snappy dressing and team spirit.

Uruguay (Martin Castillo, Federico Bigalli, Nicolas Righetti, Mauro Betschart)

I also know a few other names in the competition circuit like Raphael Levy, Paolo Vitor Damo De Rosa, Yuuyu Wantanabe, I know Gavin Vehey just stopped competing because he got an internship or job at Wizards, I know Carrie Oliver because I started reading her on Gathering Magic.

What I don't know, the records, histories or movements of their performance over a season, why they play the game, other than Channel Fireball if having or not having a team makes a difference, how they fund their achievements on the pro-tour, who supports them, how they stand statistically, what happens when they change decks or archetypes and how it affects their records. This is all information that would make me more aware of what they are actually achieving in the game.

It would also let us as spectators be able to make our own "heroes and villains" Mike Long, cheating scandals, and whiny pros stomping all over things in OP that don't give them immediate benefit and then clogging the airways as the only voice of magic make for conversations, but not compelling competitions. Really there is no context. But I'll keep struggling to find some because I know it's there.

Truth - I don't care about outside competitions for anything other than metagame information, I'm only interested in what WotC sponsors as competitions for placement because I don't trust stores that sell singles and preach the gospel of EV as real measures of performance and skill, not that there's none, just that the reason is almost always profit based by both competitors and TO's which is a "winning is the only thing" ethos instead of a "the game's the thing" ethos.

This is why I'm trying to follow Magic Competition, but I keep yearning for it to be like figure skating where I know who all the top competitors are, what the environment is like and their progress and setbacks during the season and the depth of the field back to about the top 100 in each country, maybe not by name but by coverage so if someone breaks out they won't have come from nowhere, they will have made actual improvements or changes in their game or the newest format/expansion will play to their strengths. Those are the stories that build interest in the people in the sport/competition.

But mostly, just because it's Magic, doesn't mean that you ignore every basic 101 communications and sportscasting lesson learned, you still have to entertain me even if I can't understand all the plays.

I think the problem for everyone involved in coverage is that they might have to actually spend some real money to develop a coverage program and mostly they're still just hiring internal or fan based people to do this work. Bring some fresh eyes in please. We're so close to being good.

Pseudo-Newb and return to FNM (Spoiler did not go well)

Ok, I went to gto check my Planeswalker Points to make sure that my memory of playing was the same as what I actually played.

In the month of July I was actively trying to get ready for the change over to the Scars block rotating out of standard.

Scars Block means that all the cards from Scars of Mirrodan, Mirrodan Besieged and New Phyrexia will be no longer be playable in standard. It also means that cards that were part of the core set for 2012 that aren't part of 2013 will also be cycling out of Standard.

This makes me very happy since a lot of my problems reading the board state of my opponent are cards that I had trouble following from those two groups of cards and mechanics that offended me at a consistency for design level are also going away.

The infect mechanic which changes a 20 point game with answers to a 10 point game that can only be answered by one card or controlling your opponent is a Scars block mechanic.

A lot of the removal, Vapor Snag, Dismember, Surgical Extraction, goes away and a lot of the things that allow you to manipulate your deck so that you can draw them when  you need them will go away.

But for me the big issues is that I now have a shot a reading the cards. Literally half the competitive field was cards I could not recognize and many of which are only played against me at high speed. As I learned from the art review I need to spend time with at least paying attention to each of the cards because I don't seen to have the ever flowing encyclopedic memory to know what all the cards do.

I've been playing Delver, which in it's current competitive format is pretty heavy on functional cards from M2012 and the Scars Block. And frankly so is my white weenie deck.

I spent July trying out different deck archetypes to find out what I'd like to play after rotation because mentally "it was only a couple of weeks" until rotation but I didn't realize then that that actually meant for a 3 month window ALL THE CARDS PRINTED FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS ARE LEGAL. Sun Titan with Rancor on it is not really something I have any idea how to deal with since I never really learned anything about Sun Titan.

Here is a thing I have learned about the last few months before Standard Rotation. People will break out their favorite decks because it will be their last chance to play them competitively outside the kitchen table.

Here is the other thing I learned, I fold like a chastised puppy to titans.


5 weeks of not playing competitive standard makes me much more tentative.

I lost badly playing a deck I thought I knew well but it was running differently than i felt it should. I'd played it a couple of times in the cafeteria now that I have a glorious six hours of time to kill where I'm not required to do anything other than play magic and there is a pool of people to play magic with. But it's kitchen table style so it doesn't help with the metagame.

This should be better for me in the long run but once again too long out of the format and I lose progress that I had made in my game and my ability to react to boardstate.

Before the FNM

I went to GenCon, I went on vacation, school started up again and I took up invitations to play casual magic in new formats on the last couple of Fridays, so ironically I've been playing lots of Magic, but not in a way that directly helps me with FNM.

I have two friends visiting this weekend, both excellent players and serious competitors, one mostly out of the scene as a competitor and one active but overseas. I'll be playing in GP Philly but it's sealed, not draft so the Pre-Releases will be closer to the kind of thing I'll be trying to do than either FNM or draft. I knew I was going to FNM with them but I didn't know what I wanted to play. I have three standard decks right now that all had weaknesses, while I'd been improving with my Quirion/Talrand deck the other thing that was going to change radically in the FNM was the metagame. School started, people coming home from school, people going away to school, adults who suddenly had more time/fewer commitments were back from vacation. Our younger kids who were getting in Friday nights at the start of school before their homework loads were too heavy. and ALL the THINGS are legal right now. So I had no idea what anyone at the store was going to be playing.

One of my friends did the draft FNM and placed first, and the other placed somewhere in the top three in standard. Last FNM I'd been to I finally broke through some of the issues with my Quirion deck and won 2 out of 4 matches. But I knew that this week everyone was going to be playing their Teir 1 or last chance to experiment decks and that Quirion just wasn't fast enough.



Preparation - about a half an hour before we left I showed my friends the decks I had that were tournament ready, but honestly not Tier 1. They were Quirion/Talarand, Red/Blue Delver ( but more enchantments and fewer sorceries, and a white tokens deck splashed for Lingering Souls.

I was waffling between the R/U Delver, which I had been losing to lingering souls regularly when I played it in July and the white deck.

I made a huge mistake when I was running through the white deck.  I thought it was one build, and a quick scan showed the cards I expected to see, but the deck had been altered because it was a deck that I handed other people to play against me when I want to play a tournament level deck at home. The build wasn't horrifically bad but it moved my mana curve from 1-2 to really 2-3. I did not realize this until Round 2 when I needed to sideboard.


Comfort Level - I went in knowing that I have skill loss when I don't play standard, my goals were actually presentation/mindset goals. I wanted to play clean, focus on board states, maintain equilibrium and readjust to the fall LGS environment.

Round 1 - there is one person who puts me on "tilt". "Creepiness" in sexual harassment in the geek community is a big thing that's in discussion right now and a lot of guys are saying that "aspie" or other non-normative conditions or illnesses will read as "creepy" so you should give all guys who are socially invading your space the benefit of the doubt. The counter argument is that "no aspie or autistic doesn't mean sexually threatening or creepy in the sexually discomfiting kind of way".

But it does mean stuff like my first round.

In practice aspie or autistic far enough on the spectrum that you can't read or give off interactive social signals means that the affected adult (even more than the child version) send off signals that create other reaction to the non-affected person. That results in this guymaking me tilt. I'm not saying this to be cute or funny. He tries real hard to socialize and give the right small talk. I had played against him and thought of him as "mildly entitled, sort of shady on the rules, obnoxious guy who invades my personal space and talks about what people have in their hands during tournaments"

He is bigger than me, younger than me and has committed several cheating-like in game actions in games that we have played against each other. I've always let him roll them back but when he is within arm's reach of me without a table between us he is always too close, too loud. He is not threatening to me despite all of that. What he is, is someone sending off signals that make me want to physically remove him from my personal space, which I don't do because he hasn't really done anything bad and he doesn't understand, or adapt to very clear instructions to please take a step back.

There are things he does that are his fault, but not all of them. It reads different than "creepy" but it still doesn't help. I work with people with disabilities so I've got a bunch of tools to deal with my reactions, but he of all people should not come up from behind me. When I explained slowly to him why it was a bad idea, he admitted the problem. We worked out how far a boundary was, I told him that if it was too hard for him not to talk or look at people's hands and say things he needed to not be standing at my table.

So here's the point of all that - he doesn't read as "creepy" but he does read as unpleasant and unlikely to be able to adjust his behavior and creates a gut reaction in me to get him away from me so I don't lose my temper. All of the responsibility for good behavior then rests on me when my lizard brain is like "this dude just doesn't fit, take him down or get way". If he were trying to hit on a girl, and the girl politely and firmly told him she wasn't interested, he'd be hurt, but he would adjust and stop. She might be freaked out by him but he wouldn't be creepy, his condition would be sending signals that are "off"

Because I know this, and my reaction, I am always polite when I play him, but I stare straight at the cards and the mat during the game. I don't make eye contact until the game is over. He can't help the fact that he creates that reaction in me, and I can only moderate my reaction to him. But playing him when he's playing a more effective deck than me and casting a primeval titan and some other thing happening on the board state that I didn't follow or understand was not the greatest start to my FNM.

That reason I went into this amount of detail is to illustrate that when someone has something actually wrong with them and isn't just using it as an excuse their presentation is wrong in ALL sorts of ways, not just being sexually creepy. This guy sets off response in me because of many things, but is not creepy, I would not try to conflate his problem understanding rules or boundaries with stalking. We can tell the difference, the biggest difference being that when confronted with the " please don't do this thing" he adjusted it as best he could.

He still puts me on tilt though. It's a lizard brain thing.

0-2 him - I was running on 2 land in the first game and the thragatusk he cast and and no removal in my hand along with direct burn fueled by primeval titan killed me quick.

The second game I sideboarded in more oblivion rings kept a mana heavy hand and we played a very close game that ended with him winning when I was at 1 and had gotten him down to 2. Also I learned how ratchet bombs work to take out tokens with a converted mana cost of 0. I had two thoughts about this:

1. if anyone else had done that in play I would not be upset yet I was, so put a cap on that.
2. I am really glad Ratchet Bomb is cycling out and destroy that sommabitch immediately if you're playing a token deck. That's the kind of mistake I'll only make once.

Round 2 - Awesome Eric and his brother had been playing at the more competitive store because they wanted to actually have some competition and it was great for decks but not so great for having fun. The more competitive store had better payout but only played 3 rounds and no one hung out afterwards so they were back at my home base LGS because they wanted to play. Awesome Eric was playing his beloved Tezzeret infect deck before it cycled out. His brother was playing some form of pod.

In the first game I drew one land in the wrong color and did not see another land for the remaining 4 turns it took him to kill me. Something was wrong with the deck. I had a hand that if I had known what was going on would have at least been competitive, but I mulled it because I thought my curve was lower.

The second game I side boarded the Oblivion rings back in and a bunch of specific artifact hate. My mana was better because doing that and looking for what I normally remove to sideboard I found out that it wasn't the build I thought it was and my mana curve was higher than I though it was. I was able to adjust but not enough to win. We had plenty of time and I played him with my red/blue delver, it was much cleaner and faster I didn't win that game but that issue was simply the creature that would have backed up my opening Stromkirk noble with Furor of the bitten on it never showed.

Round 3- By this time I was aware of what was in my deck, he was playing some sort of build where he played cavern of souls for Angels and demons and ran geist of St. Traft and Sun Titan phantasmal image. With which he slaughtered me even though I could take care of his his geists, I couldn't follow what was happening with the sun titans.

Here are the several mistakes in play I made even though I was literally stuck on two lands for 4 turns and 3 for the rest of the game.

I focused too much on his board state because I knew whatever the hell sun titans did they could only do it on attack and started to play defensively when there were two of them on the baord. this is a mistake and I should have stayed in the aggro mindset.

I was concentrating so hard on his board state that I misread mine and id not realize when I had numerical superiority and could have attacked for the win.

I completely forgot AGAIN that Intangible Virtue gives token creature vigilance  (and would not have caught that error is my houseguest hadn't pointed it out to me after the game, I would have caught that I should have been attacking but not HOW much I should have been attacking or why)

No matter the fact that I knew when he was casting the same spells I was and making the same tokens, even though I told myself that his spirits were not the same power and toughness as mine, i couldn't make myself react that way and kept treating his tokens as an even exchange when I was taking actions.

At least two of the times that my observer's pointed out that I should have attacked I had actually felt the impulse to attack and squelched it. At least some of this is because I fold to Titans. However the other part is something that I am highly trained in as an actor which is following and trusting the impulse to act. I also know from my project management experience that even if my conscious mind is having trouble processing and communicating exact symbols  my secondary processes ( possibly out of some meeting survival instinct) are doing some fairly complex analysis and math to come up with reasonable estimates. I have great faith in my ability to to that and no difficulty following up with or announcing those estimates on the fly. I need to trust those impulses the same way I would in a business meeting. They're right more often than they're wrong and I'm getting too caught up in the things at the front of my head.

I have more confidence in my ability to handle business needs and money projections than Magic but they shouldn't be that far off. I'm being to cautious.


Round 4 - bye-

I got to do a bit of analysis and even with 0-3 and the bye I was still 4 from the bottom of people who paid in. The tiebreakers must have really sucked for them.

Takeaways

The first and most important one is that the biggest mistakes I made were mistakes I couldn't have made four months ago. I couldn't spare enough concentration on my opponent's board state so I wouldn't have had the opportunity to concentrate on it so much that I missed aspects of mine. This is an error in play that could only come about because of a basic improvement.


I know I was picking between tournament legal decks, but knowing that I had been handing the deck to other people to play against me I should have checked the build.

I need to remind myself that I warn other people against playing defensively because defensively is a trap and I don't  build/play defensive decks. I don't know if it was insecurity because I'd been away from FNM too long or what but it cannot abide.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I think I was playing around potential removal by my opponent a little too much.

Even though last night I was really bad at Magic. I had a really good time. ( Except for the first round).

Pseudo-Newb is going to be very Mean about MTG "Strategy Articles"

This is an entry about exactly why it's so difficult to learn anything about strategy or deckbuilding in Magic. It is not actually about strategy or deckbuilding. It's about how the all powerful tastemakers and experts in Magic write about it. And why it makes some people stop trying. 

I paid for premium membership on Star City games to be able to read about analysis, the metagame and deck construction because I wasn’t seeing a lot of instructional breakdowns on “free’ sites and reading these articles is the advice given to almost everyone when they ask about how to improve their game. I figured perhaps it was better. Because StarCityGames makes their premium content available a month later, the timeliness is what is supposed to make it worth the money and useful as a teaching tool. This paragraph I'm about to share helps explain exactly what is wrong with depending on the community, or on expert magic players with little to no instructional or writing experience to teach the game to the lower and “mid level” and why perhaps you only see a homogenous group contributing to the online culture and getting to define it.

Here is the article excerpt that inspired this rant.

This article was supposedly about the difference between how Innistrad and Return to Ravnica are going to use colors of mana in Standard format. This is the third paragraph and the first paragraph you can see with your premium membership

“Mono-color decks will be those needing to hit a specific one-drop on 1 with some heavy color commitment further up the curve. Gravecrawler into Geralf's Messenger, Champion of the Parish into Loyal Cathar, or Stromkirk Noble into multiple burn spells. Even then, they have the option to free roll a second color almost effortlessly. Not even looking at noncreature spells, Cavern of Souls means there are eight untapped duals for Zombies to cast Lotleth Troll and Humans to cast Zealous Conscripts.”

What happens when you're not really writing to teach or inform:

I’m now going to break this paragraph down into each point where I had to figure out what he was saying. The original statement will be in boldface type.

1^st sentence

5     Mono-color decks – Ok I’ve got this – that’s decks with a single color instead of two or more.

"Will be those needing to hit a specific one drop"- OK now I'm getting  a little shaky . . .

1. Needing to hit – needing to be able to cast a very specific card? Or needing to be able to counter a very specific card? Either way the only thing I’m sure about is that needing to hit a specific one drop means that whatever the context of “hit” is ( either casting, or countering) the one drop cost means it only costs 1 mana

2. On 1. – would it have killed you to say turn one? So the reason you would play a one whole color instead of more than one color is to be able to play one card for one mana on turn one, and if you can’t manage to do that the whole deck won’t work?

3. With some heavy color commitment– wait, what do you mean color commitment? Didn’t you already commit to a color when you decided that you needed the single card on turn one or else there was no deck? How do you have heavier color commitment than being in a monocolor deck in the first place? It took me a moment to figure out that “heavy color commitment” is the REASON to play a monocolored deck, and that it was describing a choice already made. So it stopped me because color commitment looked like something you did for multicolored decks. I couldn’t see why it was being mentioned for monocolored ones.

6. Further up on the curve – which curve, what curve? People talk about curves and curving out and I’m only familiar with bell curves and mana curves for figuring out how much mana to have on the deck. It’s been almost a year and this is such assumed knowledge that I still haven’t been able to figure it out from context.

Based on context, I’m going to figure that this means that you plan on your one drop being the most important thing in the world, and you commit to the color so that the higher mana - cost cards in your deck are also the reason to use a single color because you have to make sure you get that one drop out.

This will then remind me that I have no idea how many of each mana cost card is recommended when you are designing a deck. 

I keep reading things about “Do you have room for this in your 2-drop slot" or "how many 4-drops" and I have no idea what the proportions for a deck are based on mana cost.  Without this strategic fundamental, discussions of which cards to include versus which cards to exclude are meaningless because I have no idea how many are supposed to ideally be there  in the first place.

8. Gravecrawler into Geralf's Messenger,  I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out how casting GraveCrawler helps you cast Gerlaf’s Messenger. I can’t, I don’t think it does. I don’t know what “into” means here  . . .

Champion of the Parish into Loyal Cathar, Ok now I’m really confused – wouldn’t you cast Loyal Cathar “into” Champion of the Parish because casting another human ( the Loyal Cathar) makes the Champion of the Parish get a +1/+1 counter?

or Stromkirk Noble into multiple burn spells – Stromkirk noble is just a mostly unblockable 1/1 that grows with direct damage. How does that feed into spells? He doesn’t generate mana.

After looking up all the cards he mentioned and trying to figure out why using Champion of the Parrish, Gravecrawler or Stromkirk Noble needed you to only use one color in your deck or how they fed into the cards, I realized that maybe the only thing the writer meant was”

On turn one you cast this card, AND THEN on turn two you cast this card. The two cards have no relation to each other except that they share a color and a mana cost. There is no “into” it’s not even “into” the turn because turn phases would have at least:

1)   Second main phase
2)   End step
3)   Clean Up
4)   Opponent’s full turn
5)   Untap
6)   Upkeep
7)   Draw
8)   First Main Phase

before the two cards would even be on the battlefield together.

4. Even then, they have the option to free roll a second color almost effortlessly. I really don’t know what “free roll” means here at all. Only by writing this breakdown did I have the “aha” moment of realizing that what he meant was “even if you wanted to do the things I just described you could still add another color without having any real strategic issue”

5. Not even looking at noncreature spells, Cavern of Souls means there are eight untapped duals for Zombies to cast Lotleth Troll So I’m just far enough along in the learning curve to know that when he says Zombies to cast Lotleth Troll, he means the Zombies deck archetype which is usually a two color deck being Black and and Blue. 

Writing it as though the Zombies are doing the casting confused me for a moment, but I recovered in context, however I’m not completely sure what he means by there are eight untapped dual lands for Zombies. The reason this is particularly unclear is because you tap lands for mana in order to cast spells. The phrasing indicates that the dual lands are in play and then you tap them to cast Lotleth Troll which costs one green and one black mana.

Perhaps what he means is that in the Return to Ravnica block there are potentially eight dual lands ( which are lands that can generate more than one color of mana) and you can include them in your normally blue/black Zombies deck to be able to use Lotleth Troll.

If that’s the case why on God’s Green Earth would you use an actual in-game term like “untapped” to describe the availability of cards that can be used in deck construction when you are simultaneously talking about playing those cards?

9. and Humans to cast Zealous Conscripts. Humans is another deck Archetype – it’s usually white but it can also be red/ blue/ green in combination with white. Zealous Conscripts is red so when you “splash” a color it would be to cast one strategic card. Splashing means adding just enough of another color mana in your deck without getting unusuable mana when you take your turn.

I now had to figure out why there could also be 8 untapped duals for humans to cast Zealous Conscripts and not know why that was an example of something so important that you would want to splash for it.

Why this is a problem :

In 81 words I had to stop thinking about the content and figure out what he was saying 9 times.

Some of this is magic “lingo” – mono-color, one-drop, duals

Some of this is shorthand that reads like English but you have to stop to remember that it might mean something else Zombies and Humans is an example, but even in the low standard of Magic writing it it usually indicated as a deck archetype by prefixing it with a color U/B Zombies would be Blue and Black Zombies Deck, G/W Humans would be Green and White Humans Deck.

But most of this is just trying to sound cool and not explaining a damn thing while actually creating confusing terms that already mean other things.

Other people who are newish might only stop 3 or 4 times, but each time you make a reader think, you lost the reader following your actual thought. 

Properly written it would look like this:

Playing a mono colored deck in the new environment will only be useful if a deck needs to guarantee that the first turn opens with a specific one-drop and the need to use the same color when you get higher into the mana curve to support the deck strategy. Examples would be: Gravecrawler on turn one, Gerlaf’s Messenger on turn two,* or Stromkirk Messenger on the first turn and then burn spells in a mono red deck. Even in these examples, there’s still room for a deckbuilder to add a second color without affecting the basic strategy. Without looking at non-creature spells, running Cavern of Souls in the deck means there are still eight other possible dual lands available for use in a deck. If UB Zombies wanted to run Loleth Troll it could run 4 Overgrown Tombs(B/G) from RTR and 4 Woodland Cemetaries  (B/G) from Innistrad without messing up the mana base.

Now admittedly I’m shaky on the last part. Cavern of souls creates colored mana to cast creature spells that can’t be countered. So my rewrite means I’m guessing about why he included that example.

And my prose isn’t perfect either. I also don't have an editor. 

In my version I kept the MtG lingo that is expected to be known by the time you’re trying to pay attention to articles (even though you don’t really know it, you just keep reading articles like an idiot until you guess right or you find someone who can explain the article to you). I might still need to look up the specific cards but in this text I wouldn’t have to do it to understand the sentence. This version explains the context of the choices and examples and the narrative that matches up with the turn phases.

I could not read the rest of the article, it made me pretty sure I was missing some important insider understanding if I couldn’t follow the first real paragraph and I had to stop, look up the cards and check my slang reference for some clue. Then finally I did this and got two things that made me realize why I was misinterpreting ( specifically the “into” and “free roll” wording).

I’ve spent an hour on 81 words and another hour to write it up to make sure it made sense.

*Update 12/12/12 - when sharing this column with a friend he pointed out that you can't really cast Gerlaf's Messenger on turn two because it's a 3 mana cost card.  Which either means there is missing information about ramping up your mana or the paragraph is even less helpful than I thought it was. I'm keeping the original because that was my takeaway from the paragraph after all the parsing but it should be "followed two turns later by Geralf's Messenger"

Retention and Emotional Response

I did not learn anything new about the varying manabase between Innistrad and Return to Ravnica. I did feel stupid, out-of-touch and excluded while trying to learn.

And then when I parsed it down, I felt ripped off. Because I’m in effect paying money to learn, not be obstructed.

This was written to sound “in the know” and “cool” not to help anyone other than people who can probably already come to the same conclusions on their own.

Want to know why non-spikes who aren’t into exclusionary language aren’t represented in Magic Culture? Unless you’re fairly stubborn you won’t get past things like this. And when you try, everyone sends you back to things like this. You will therefore assume it’s only for people who spend all their time learning the lingo to understand the advice or analysis and you might love the game but you don’t have an hour to reinterpret every paragraph and look up every referenced card.

Somewhere, someone in Magic culture needs to realize that we can do better. Editors need to stop this unnecessary posturing. It's getting in the way, it’s not “entertaining” or colorful it’s alienating and detracts from the subject.

I specifically did not link or mention the writer’s name because I used him as a single example, but almost every Magic article or website has a bunch of this type of writing. And Magic video coverage is almost NOTHING but this type of style. 

I've already been subjected to being a "baby" because I believe that Magic culture has room for more than one type of personality or player. I expect there would be some defensive reaction to this as well. In this case what I'm writing is actually confrontational. 

It's why I don't want to identify the writer. I'm critiquing the accepted wisdom, not the individual. 

Many good and well intentioned people write this way because it's what's encouraged. My asking for it to change is not "because I hate magic" it's because I love it. Asking it to normalize informational writing is not being a baby, it's assuming that we expect it to be a game for everyone, not just the people who are playing in tournaments or who have a strong social network that plays. 

We can have slang filled articles and cute writing with spikes vying to coin the newest hot phrase, but that should be culture writing not analysis or instructional writing. 

Pseudo Newb - Response to Melissa Detora's GP Boston article

Melissa DeTora wrote about her GP experience at GP Boston

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10690

I've been thinking hard about the GP situation and the interaction between my imaginary(brainstorming) team and coach centered non-EV competitive track and the pro centered one. 

I responded to her this way: and I'm posting it here so that I keep track of what I put out in the world about my "Dream" of a competitive, culture building but less Darwinian Organized Play. 

The big problem is the size of the GPs vs, the payouts. Honestly I feel a little sick when I read someone missing a "payout" as a tragedy or a problem. I know that out of those 1900 or so people there are lots of people going because there's no place else to go for trying their luck, seeing where there skills are at that have no place else to really do it but don't expect to money or place. Too many of those people and then there are the "tragedies" of people who only like Magic when their self worth is justified by being in the money or making back their investment.  That ends up being a huge turnoff for those of us who think playing a game, like playing a sport isn't about a cashback offer or a paycheck. 

When a baseball club is making 200 million off your name and you only see 2 million of it, money is an issue that a player had a right to focus on. Being a pro player is literally his job. No one should be using "pro" magic that way.  The entire revenue of Magic the Gathering is around 200 million and that is a high performing number: It was called out in the Q4 earninngs call as a strong performer:

The team at Wizards of the Coast has done a tremendous job of taking this brand, which totaled less than $100 million in revenues in 2008, and was on the decline to where it is today, the largest brand in our Games & Puzzle category, the largest game brand in the U.S. and more than double the size it was just 3 years ago.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/344581-hasbro-s-ceo-discusses-q4-2011-results-earnings-call-transcript?page=3

Now I'm assuming that the 100 million and the new number somewhere between 200-300 hundred million that equals "more than double" is a discussion of net revenue  which is gross revenue ( total sales/income) minus all the liabilities so the total profit they have to work with some of that has to be committed to shareholders, contingency and financial long term budget commitments based on revenue projections. 

Lets be clear on relative value here, 200 million is frequently the Yankees payroll cost. Just the payroll. 

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-3445_162-3021144.html

I don't really know what WotC's Magic budget is and one should take note that Hasbro is not talking about competitive  standard Magic but ALL of the brand, which includes all of the casual players, commander product, digital product, branded merchandise, licensing partnerships. 

Let's just say that I'm not sure growing the brand and the maturing the culture and competitive space will be accomplished by throwing more money directly at the players. 

As a matter of fact I think payout as the prime motivation tool to play and acheive "the Dream" has many positives for the metagame ( as expressed by the culture outside the game, not as the decks you compete against) but has many built in negatives that have to be managed and addressed. 

It's achievement, and materialism without structured competitive culture or sportsmanship and it also makes this a "money" game where barriers to entry, control over variance and conflicts of interest in controlling the culture are all incentivized by money as opposed to game play. 

It also means that unless you are making money, you do not perceive yourself as "succeeding" as a competitor.  Money becomes the marker of success because standings are only noticed with "fame". I honestly think this creates a lot of the secondary behaviors that become the negatives in the culture, like theft, disrespect and a disproportionate number of players who think that EV is the only motivator and point to the game. 

Melissa's observations and my thinking about these things in terms of getting at least SOME of Magic divorced from EV led me to respond with this.:



I think that EV and prize with value mentality is not necessary for people who want to compete but aren't looking to money. Since the only available places to compete at a regulation level are GPs it looks to me like there's a conflict as more people want to play competitive magic, understand that they are competing for experience, to get better, just because they like to play competitively and the people who are actively "following the dream" or expecting some sort of cash value that justifies their investment in playing.

GPs are the ONLY way for non-pros to play competitively. I've been playing for 8 months and FNMs are absolutely all over the place and not really connected to the kind of OP that GPs represent. What do you think of a concurrent non-pro league and team OP that runs concurrently to the season, it awards prizes

 like trophies, rankings, titles and maybe something like debate societies do with the pin system. But is is SPECIFICALLY NON-EV you can't make money, profit anything. If a card is given it's a participation card and everyone participating in the event gets one. It could feed the EV based competitive environment by acting as a "home base" for players who want to compete that way by being their team but EV based standings do not affect their standings in the Non-EV based league. I know the people at the top are convinced that it's all about "the dream" but there are many types of competitors that you guys never get to see because there's no place for them in Magic right now and the only forum to play that was is GPs, it would ease the pressure off GP attendance and since I envision the Non-EV thing as a team and coach based system it would support and feed higher level players in the current EV based system as individuals because there would be places to practice and drill and playtest and borrow cards.

I'm actually working towards something like this - there's lots of people who go to GPs and are kind of turned off by the culture there but would still like to compete, there's lots of people who don't want to go pro but still want something like an OP but also can't put in the amount of time pro-players do so they'll always be at a disadvantage in a mixed group. I know this kind of OP wouldn't interest the players on the top or the EV only crowd but I could see it where it would add value to the culture of the EV crowd. Fan support has to come from somewhere, people can root for the pros without having to play against them for instance. Pro's could support and coach non-ev teams if they wanted to and develop the future. Some of the attendence pressure might be off the GPs or the GPs could support two tracks this way. Any thoughts?

Adrienne