Now finishing paper and today's exam. And I am ridiculously excited about Avacyn Restored. Good(ish) guys can win! Now if they'd just give me my cool old lady Planeswalker.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Pseudo Newb and the battle for Time
Lots of Things Happening. 2 second place draft finishes (UB zombies and GB humans) , A new magic player friend who's both female and my age! The possibility of an actual Lady Planeswalkers society chapter here, a crazy but really interesting invitation. But also, Passover, school, job/business stuff. It's important to keep track of the magic I'm playing and will need to update soon, but apparently this is an important theory article so I'm going to leave the link here.
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/fundamentals/16396_Sullivan_Library_The_Strategic_Moment.html
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Pseudo Newb and Point Counterpoint
Mark Rosewater has an article where he is describing his desire to add complexity to the default of the card drawing abilty - he will make his case and his R&D counterpart will make a case against it. It's not like debate since they don't get to see and respond to each other's columns, they make the standing cases for and against on their own
Interstingly he would like to make a draw card default to a "target player" instead of simple card advantage - knowning the epic saga of my quest to get a straight answer on why Illusions breaks all the other stack rules and it ended up being based on "targeting" as an action and the great difficulty of anyone teaching that rule as coherent and reproducible I of course had an opinion, but primarily my opinion is because I'm beginning to see how limited their expectation of learning types, styles and enviroments is. The all presuppose either supportive, information rich environments with expert guides or compeltely even playing fields that ignore their own design psychotypes as teachers - if an expert Spike is teaching a newb Vorthos Johnny you are not set up for "joy of discovery".
Also they undersestimate the learning retention caused by experiential functions and prioritize visual processing and analytic inputs for what they call "crystallization" but what is actually something more accurately labled "comprehension of the learning objective", but I guess the real life learning term isn't as sexy or mysterious.
The primary problem with Mark's design is that the learning objective for the "target" vocabulary and strategy offers no real game benefit to the learner and is a learning objective covered in many other areas of the game, but by not recognizing kinetic experiencial learning he is actively undermining a far more intrinsic value learning objective - "recognizing and applying card advantage" which is what draw cards do at a basic level.
So I responded - this is the response on the message boards - where I somewhat unadvisably use my real photo.
****************************************************
While the concept of "crystallization" is an interesting one and apparent from a designer's standpoint in terms of relevatory gameplay, I disagree with the concept of it being a thing that is helpful or a learning tool.
Learning Environments aren't going to provide the positive experience of "target" first;
There are several assumptions about the learning environment for a new player involved in the idea. Many of them are presupposing a non existant learning environment.
What's being proposed is taking a basic card that actually encapuslates something simple and puts the learner on an equivalent field with a more expert player ( in this case providing card advantage) changing it to allow complexity to creep in at a point that offers little value for the learning player but lots of advantage to the expert player to exploit the card that formerly helped the learner while introducing an relevant complex concept at a kinectic learning level.
Changing the card into one where the card avantage experience simply becomes another opportunity to lose the advantage ( redirects and other exploits) will mean the learning player will not experience the card advantage and only learn the exploitation of things that can interfere with "target" the vocabulary word.
This destabilizes a real learning experience that DOES have positive value
Learning players have entirely too many points of learning that are "having your cards used against you" and not so many " hey this helps " during the very steep learning curve - simple card advantage is one of the very, very few cards that are advantageous to new players that don't get dissed by experience players at more advance stages of play later (life gain artifacts are specifically coming to mind here). So you are also changing a basic experience of a core play strategy that is highly valued at later points in expert play.
In order for it to be a "joy of discovery"moment it would have to be something the new player would discover and use - but the reality is that most players do not learn with other players at exactly their level - people are much more likely to learn from either playing people who are better than them and don't teach or don't know all of the permutations of interactions or they learn because they keep going to the local store. They will not learn the joys of targeting card draw by using it against an opponent, they will learn it by having an opponent steal their card advantage. No positive learner reinforcement for card advantage and a new negative reinforcement while learning to play.
There are very few scenarios where forcing an opponent to draw helps a new player. Actually I can't think of any that don't help the opponent first.
As someone who almost stopped playing in competition because of Target I'm getting a kick . . .
Target also specifically is FAR more complicated when interacting as the trigger for effects in Illusions. The difficulty of learning or understanding why the heck illusions disappeared even though cards didn't have to resolve if they affected the illusions almost convinced me that I was too dumb to ever play Magic competitively.
Because it works counterintuitively with the understanding of the stack ( target triggers float to the top of the stack and stay there to resolve first regardless of what else goes on the stack) there is no properly instructonally designed method to teach complex rules interactions anywhere in the world of Magic leaving a learning player to hunt all over the internet to try to understand. Opposing players and Judges below level 2 seem to really have difficulty explaining it at all. It wasn't until I read the FAQ for Ice Cage that I realized what was happening with Illusions and that the target trigger didn't behave the way other effects and triggers did.
I'm fairly sure my understanding while thorough and referenced is still incomplete. I keep a competitiors journal so I can specifically keep a record of explanations and my personal understanding of the rules - ironically it also keeps track of my learning curve and all of the various misinterpretations and hoops I have to jump through in order to get clear, easy to understand information to help me play. There are three seperate entries on target in relation to response and triggers -
The learning value of "Vanilla" Strategy vs yet another "vocabulary" experience:
Card advantage is something you can play and experience that allows you to devlop and understand the value of more complex cards later. Divination - "draw two cards" allows the new player to experience the positive value of card advantage before being able to intentionally exploit it strategically in deckbuilding - it creates a positive sense memory of being able to have more options when you had none or access cards with synergy earlier than you expected giving you a game advanatage - when you are better at the overall game this creates an additive learning experience when you can start seeing the advantage of Desperate Ravings of Faithless looting because trading "dead" cards for card advantage is the next most sophisticated application of card advantage.
In instructional design that would be additive skill building through kinetic learning. Not every learner is going to approach this the way Mark has described. In fact what he sees as a learning advantage I see as a specific learning demotivator for many just above basic but not yet good players. They will assume this is another "hidden rule" that you can't simply understand or read about when their card is yet another card that doesn't behave in a way that works for them.
Like vanilla creatures being a core idea to convey the game, some "vanilla" spells are needed not to demoralize a learning player that also create an experience of the positives of strategic play before the learning player fully understands them.
Card Advantage and Tempo are two deckbuilding basics but by creating complexity unecessarily and giving an opposing player the opportunity to interfere with anything other than a counter spell you are interrupting the more kinetic learning experience and making it suddenly unstable and moreover a negative experience that can't be built from.
One of the things that creates the majority of former-Magic-Players is the fact that when they are playing the people they are playing against are not just better than them with better decks, but they also get crushed regularly. You lose a lot in Magic when you are learning, and the people whom you play against at FNM are not looking out for your crystallization moment. You will just learn yet another opportunity for not being able to execute your strategy and be sideswiped by yet ANOTHER set of interactions that make you feel unknowing or incompetent. Cards like Divination and Think Twice are some of the cards that mitigate that experience in play - giving them a point of interruption creates value for "cool vocabulary learning " over "opportunity to actually play, succeed and learn from a positive experience".
Why it's unecessary to add complexity here:
Plenty of other cards exist for crystalization, as described in the article Bonds of Faith was my moment for that. There is also plenty of oppotuniy to learn "target" in magic without adding it here and in and of itself it's one of the easier concepts so it doesn't need to be added at this level. The idea of a targeted draw card is fine but not as a default. There really needs to be vanilla strategic spell cards or learning Magic simply becomes a gauntlet that only one type of homogenous learning style will be able to particpate in. I'm impressed with how much the designers think about people learning to play but they aren't really applying learning theory so the execution is really haphazard.
Changing the default would be a mistake and reduce real learning opportunity. Specialized uncommon in an expert expanision to feed multiplayer is fine.
Learning Environments aren't going to provide the positive experience of "target" first;
There are several assumptions about the learning environment for a new player involved in the idea. Many of them are presupposing a non existant learning environment.
What's being proposed is taking a basic card that actually encapuslates something simple and puts the learner on an equivalent field with a more expert player ( in this case providing card advantage) changing it to allow complexity to creep in at a point that offers little value for the learning player but lots of advantage to the expert player to exploit the card that formerly helped the learner while introducing an relevant complex concept at a kinectic learning level.
Changing the card into one where the card avantage experience simply becomes another opportunity to lose the advantage ( redirects and other exploits) will mean the learning player will not experience the card advantage and only learn the exploitation of things that can interfere with "target" the vocabulary word.
This destabilizes a real learning experience that DOES have positive value
Learning players have entirely too many points of learning that are "having your cards used against you" and not so many " hey this helps " during the very steep learning curve - simple card advantage is one of the very, very few cards that are advantageous to new players that don't get dissed by experience players at more advance stages of play later (life gain artifacts are specifically coming to mind here). So you are also changing a basic experience of a core play strategy that is highly valued at later points in expert play.
In order for it to be a "joy of discovery"moment it would have to be something the new player would discover and use - but the reality is that most players do not learn with other players at exactly their level - people are much more likely to learn from either playing people who are better than them and don't teach or don't know all of the permutations of interactions or they learn because they keep going to the local store. They will not learn the joys of targeting card draw by using it against an opponent, they will learn it by having an opponent steal their card advantage. No positive learner reinforcement for card advantage and a new negative reinforcement while learning to play.
There are very few scenarios where forcing an opponent to draw helps a new player. Actually I can't think of any that don't help the opponent first.
As someone who almost stopped playing in competition because of Target I'm getting a kick . . .
Target also specifically is FAR more complicated when interacting as the trigger for effects in Illusions. The difficulty of learning or understanding why the heck illusions disappeared even though cards didn't have to resolve if they affected the illusions almost convinced me that I was too dumb to ever play Magic competitively.
Because it works counterintuitively with the understanding of the stack ( target triggers float to the top of the stack and stay there to resolve first regardless of what else goes on the stack) there is no properly instructonally designed method to teach complex rules interactions anywhere in the world of Magic leaving a learning player to hunt all over the internet to try to understand. Opposing players and Judges below level 2 seem to really have difficulty explaining it at all. It wasn't until I read the FAQ for Ice Cage that I realized what was happening with Illusions and that the target trigger didn't behave the way other effects and triggers did.
I'm fairly sure my understanding while thorough and referenced is still incomplete. I keep a competitiors journal so I can specifically keep a record of explanations and my personal understanding of the rules - ironically it also keeps track of my learning curve and all of the various misinterpretations and hoops I have to jump through in order to get clear, easy to understand information to help me play. There are three seperate entries on target in relation to response and triggers -
The learning value of "Vanilla" Strategy vs yet another "vocabulary" experience:
Card advantage is something you can play and experience that allows you to devlop and understand the value of more complex cards later. Divination - "draw two cards" allows the new player to experience the positive value of card advantage before being able to intentionally exploit it strategically in deckbuilding - it creates a positive sense memory of being able to have more options when you had none or access cards with synergy earlier than you expected giving you a game advanatage - when you are better at the overall game this creates an additive learning experience when you can start seeing the advantage of Desperate Ravings of Faithless looting because trading "dead" cards for card advantage is the next most sophisticated application of card advantage.
In instructional design that would be additive skill building through kinetic learning. Not every learner is going to approach this the way Mark has described. In fact what he sees as a learning advantage I see as a specific learning demotivator for many just above basic but not yet good players. They will assume this is another "hidden rule" that you can't simply understand or read about when their card is yet another card that doesn't behave in a way that works for them.
Like vanilla creatures being a core idea to convey the game, some "vanilla" spells are needed not to demoralize a learning player that also create an experience of the positives of strategic play before the learning player fully understands them.
Card Advantage and Tempo are two deckbuilding basics but by creating complexity unecessarily and giving an opposing player the opportunity to interfere with anything other than a counter spell you are interrupting the more kinetic learning experience and making it suddenly unstable and moreover a negative experience that can't be built from.
One of the things that creates the majority of former-Magic-Players is the fact that when they are playing the people they are playing against are not just better than them with better decks, but they also get crushed regularly. You lose a lot in Magic when you are learning, and the people whom you play against at FNM are not looking out for your crystallization moment. You will just learn yet another opportunity for not being able to execute your strategy and be sideswiped by yet ANOTHER set of interactions that make you feel unknowing or incompetent. Cards like Divination and Think Twice are some of the cards that mitigate that experience in play - giving them a point of interruption creates value for "cool vocabulary learning " over "opportunity to actually play, succeed and learn from a positive experience".
Why it's unecessary to add complexity here:
Plenty of other cards exist for crystalization, as described in the article Bonds of Faith was my moment for that. There is also plenty of oppotuniy to learn "target" in magic without adding it here and in and of itself it's one of the easier concepts so it doesn't need to be added at this level. The idea of a targeted draw card is fine but not as a default. There really needs to be vanilla strategic spell cards or learning Magic simply becomes a gauntlet that only one type of homogenous learning style will be able to particpate in. I'm impressed with how much the designers think about people learning to play but they aren't really applying learning theory so the execution is really haphazard.
Changing the default would be a mistake and reduce real learning opportunity. Specialized uncommon in an expert expanision to feed multiplayer is fine.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Pseudo-Newb Designing Visual Learning Aides
I was kind of surprised that no one had a flowchart for turns and phases readily available on the web when @natasha_lh asked for one for a new/learning player- I've posted it here because the one I put on Twitter is really tiny- but the actual piece is the same size as a magic card so that it can be sleeved up and kept to the side during a game.
I want to futz around with the typography for maximum readability but it was designed with the learning objective being turn flow and the functional objective of running down vertically so they didn't have to forget steps.
I like the color choices but I will most likely change the background color and experiment with increasing the breakout font size without disrupting the Instructional design of the step grouping - this is my competitive journal, I don't usually make it public but everyone can feel free to take this graphic if they'd like to.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Pseudo-Newb and the Baltimore Grand Prix
I’m writing this about two weeks after the Grand Prix held in Baltimore which will be referred to as GPBalt after this. I went specifically to see what a large competition looked like these days ( remember I used to go to Origins) and to figure out if I wanted to play competitively on the longer term, it’s like going to play at an open at a Master’s golf course to see what the terrain is like and how you would have to train and improve your game to be able to compete regularly.
During the time that I went a number of hot button issues came up in the real world that were mirrored in the fairly insular Magic World involving women, misogyny and in many cases what people will say on the internet as opposed to what people will say to your face.
Here’s what I learned as a competitor:
My original plan was to play with my illusions Delver deck and drill it as much as possible since I was really finally beginning to play the tempo and synergy aspects of it intentionally as opposed to on discovery. I knew the cards, I had worked my way through the difficult rules questions – my version of it had always run a few spirits in it, a Geist, a Geist Honored monk and a main decked Oblivion Ring. Please make no mistake. I ran Oblivion Ring because I hate Planeswalkers and I was still too hesitant about casting instants to count on mana leaks for removal. It was the same reason that I didn’t have Snapcasters in my deck even though I now owned them, I wasn’t sure I played them well enough and I got plenty of advantage by bouncing ( a slang term meaning used a spell to put the card back into my hand) an aether adept to re-cast it onto the battlefield and knocking cards that had been pumped up back down to their original specs. It gave me card advantage, tempo and occasionally phantasmal image allowed me to create that ability to return things to my opponent which they weren’t planning around. Snapcasters are a better card, but almost all the spells I had were reusable on their own.
However after a month, I decided to start trying the Snapcasters, if for no other reason than to learn how to play them to understand their strengths and weaknesses – and I was enjoying the deck. When Lingering Souls came out I decided to rework the deck and I created something not unlike Finkle’s Delver Spirits ( now called Esper Spirits because Magic players at the high level aren’t very original) but I was running some very different cards. Still it was close enough for government work, it was running pretty well when I spent 8 hours play testing it against crazy combo homebrews and current standard decks in the cafeteria. Since I was running a lot of black for the flashback on the Lingering Souls I decided to put in the Evil Twin card because it gave me a lot of the advantages of Phantasmal Image but fewer weaknesses, what I found out though is that in tournment it created so many corner cases that I would have been calling over a judge every fifteen minutes. I didn’t want to get distracted by a card that I didn’t know inside out. I changed it to a second Havengul Lich.
I’ll write separately about the issues with running the GP and how shocked I was at both the expectations of the players and the amateurishness of the only “open” large tournament format supposedly directly sponsored by Wizards of the Coast. Suffice it to say I now understand a number of things that are limiting the appeal of competitive play to people who are not 20 something males. Back to the important competitive things.
I purchased a few cards from some lovely Canadians at Magic Stronghold, Thalia, a playset of Dungeon Geists, and bought a few Chandra’s Phoenixes with my eyes towards a red FNM deck. After a really abysmal single elimination draft side event I played a pick up game with a youngish father who had brought his 8 year old daughter to the tournament (her day 1 record was 4- 4 – 1, which made her record better than both her father’s and mine) he was testing UB control and I was playing my build which I was now officially calling “Not Finkle’s Delvers”. But I did totally change my mana base to match his, ( almost).
Playing the young dad we learned two things – UB control vs Spirit Delvers took a really long time. The only way either of us won was by the opponent being decked. We were both expecting a lot of UB control and Spirit Delvers so we both realized we were in for a long GP. I thought about moving more to UB Aggro or now that I had the pieces flipping over into Finkle’s actual build.
I went home (hotel) and added invisible stalkers and Runechanter’s pikes realizing that I missed the aggro from when I was running a straight Illusions build, and I realized something else. I missed casting the bears. Everytime I cast Phantasmal Bears there was just something incredibly happy making about saying “Bears!” when they entered the battlefield. Looking back I think I should have gone with the illusions delver build. In the first week of January I had to stop playing to help friends costume a show that was going up the week before GPBalt. That meant my hard won lesson about making sure to handle cards and play at least a game or two everyday got put aside, the close we got to the show, the less I could play and keep my skills sharp. The cafeteria folk were awesome and spent 8 hours the Thursday before GP running my deck against everything they had. The most important training was playing in a cafeteria for 8 hours – I’ll get into that more in a different post. The bottom line was that I wasn’t playing the best deck for me but I was OK with it, but then second guessing myself I went back to something else that had happened when playing with young dad.
After three games that never really ended, I offered to play him with my white deck so he could at least see how it ran against a different deck. I was way more comfortable playing the white deck and won 2-1. After tossing and turning a bunch I started wondering if I should just run the white deck. The I realized I hadn’t tuned the white deck or looked at it seriously as anything other than a goto FNM deck and hadn’t seriously played it since I added the Heroes of Bladehold ( fun card is fun!) It was midnight – I had registered for the Grand Prix but you don’t register your decklist until the next morning. So I had my cards and card options all spread out on the second hotel bed but went to sleep thinking about what a white deck would look like, especially since I had Thalia now.
I woke up a 7 convinced that I should be playing white and spendt an hour putting together a white build that I literally called “because I’m crazy” . If I had played it that would have been it’s name on the registration sheet too.
Main deck (60 cards)
2 Champion of the Parish
4 Doomed Traveler
2 Gideon's Lawkeeper
1 Mikaeus, the Lunarch
2 Accorder Paladin
1 Grand Abolisher
2 Leonin Relic-Warder
2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
1 Drogskol Captain
3 Fiend Hunter
2 Geist of Saint Traft
1 Mentor of the Meek
3 Mirran Crusader
4 Hero of Bladehold
2 Geist-Honored Monk
32 creatures
1 Bonds of Faith
3 Honor of the Pure
1 Midnight Haunting
3 Oblivion Ring
1 Curse of Exhaustion
9 spells
4 Glacial Fortress
2 Moorland Haunt
11 Plains
2 Seachrome Coast
19 lands
But the problem I was running into was I didn’t completely trust my build for the mana base and additionally I couldn’t figure out the best way to side board. I then veered crazily between trying to construct Finkle’s Delver or rebuild my original Illusions deck – finally I ended up with this build based on my extreme insecurity due to lack of playtesting:
Main deck (60 cards)
4 Delver of Secrets
2 Invisible Stalker
3 Phantasmal Image
2 Snapcaster Mage
3 Drogskol Captain
2 Geist of Saint Traft
2 Dungeon Geists
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Ponder
3 Vapor Snag
1 Revoke Existence
2 Runechanter's Pike
2 Dissipate
4 Lingering Souls
4 Drowned Catacomb
2 Evolving Wilds
4 Glacial Fortress
6 Island
2 Moorland Haunt
1 Plains
2 Seachrome Coast
1 Swamp
Sideboard (15 cards)
2 Dungeon Geists
1 Phantasmal Image
1 Revoke Existence
2 Mana Leak
1 Demystify
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Geist-Honored Monk
1 Tragic Slip
1 Divine Offering
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Curse of Exhaustion
1 Snapcaster Mage
When I went to double check my registered list against my actual deck ( on sight) it was two minutes before the printed deadline – I had built and taken apart three decks. When I checked my sideboard it was a card short- I had left the fourth phantasmal image with the remnants of an illusion deck. I threw in Timely Reinforcements instead.
Here are things I learned.
I love Surgical Extraction. A lot.
Changing your deck because of something that happened the night before instead of sticking to your original strategy is called and “audible” and apparently Magic the Gathering players took that term from football.
Audibling is stupid. I shouldn’t have done it.
No one running an artifact combo deck expects a delver build to have Curse of Exhaustion. That change was good.
I got much better at using a sideboard at the GP.
Don’t play a deck you don’t love because you are sick of looking at those cards by round 5.
I can’t read or keep track of the Scars Block in artifiact combo decks because the artwork blends together and all the cards look alike. That block is seriously over designed into homogeneity, they use almost all the same compositional arrangements and the stylebook apparently overemphasized the spiky curvy bits to the point of crushing artistic differentiation. I do not like the Scars Block, I will probably not be seriously competitive until it cycles out of Standard.
Elesh Norn Grand Cenobite is a killer card – stop it at all costs.
Buy more Surgical Extractions.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Pseudo Newb and her own Psychosis
On Weds I played in the Draft – it was a mediocre deck I made a mistake while drafting it and never saw the Travel Preparations card I was hoping for. It turned out there was a reason – GW was the preferred pick down the table from me but there were enough cards of the colors going around that I was still able to put together a reasonable deck
Record for the Wed was
- 0-2
- 2-1
- 1-2
On Friday I played my Delver Illusions Deck sans Snappy and the Aether Adepts that I put in there were really useful. I won cleanly against the monoblack in the first round, had a very competitive second round with a mirror which I lost 0-2 but really learned a lot ( and is making me think about the benefits of Runechanter’s pike) Lost badly to a stompy ramp deck with artifacts and a bunch of graveyard effects and pulled out a long win
- 2-0
- 0-2
- 0-2
- 2-1
So I played 9 games won 4. At 44 % win rate I played 4 rounds and won 2 at 50%. So my win rate went down 4% but my win rate for rounds doubled : )
Keeping track of the difference between win rates is one of the ways I keep my learning curve straight vs my competitive record – it also manages to keep me from obsessing about my losses in tournament – this is important as any chance I have to beat myself up for not being smart is an opportunity I take.
Between this week and last week I learned something new – something that could only really be noticed when I was playing better and had enough sleep: at the end of the last round when I’m playing against really good players and I’ve got a chance of winning – I kind of stop breathing – not due to nerves or games state or frustration or any of the bad things – just good, old fashioned math anxiety.
A complex board state with lots of interactions is a hallmark of a close game between either equal decks or mostly equal player skills. The primary difference between me and a really good player right now is not just card familiarity – mine is improving by drafting which honestly was not something I expected – but the ability to keep track of all other various triggers and interaction which pretty much add up to pluses and minuses caused by card effects.
So this is really the crux of the problem. When I played Magic the first time I knew about the LD and just figured “to hell with it I work as a writer anyway”. Now it’s more like “I need to work out some of the emotional baggage that came with my experience working in tech in a safe way so it stops interfering with my career and look there’s Magic where I can work out ALL the THINGS, and play magic.”
A little research on the meme shows that it really has a second part which would look like this “ I can work out all the things?”
It also mean “I can trigger ALL THE THINGS”
Not just trigger effects
So here’s what a competitor’s journal really is – it’s the place where you’re honest abut what’s happening to you in the game – so you can overcome it or work around it for a better game – but just like talking to a shrink, if you’re not honest it won’t work. I fix things better as a competitor than I do as a regular person.
It's like the famous "fearless inventory" magic article but more brutal and way more internal.
Here’s how it works. I can now play well enough to see win conditions, read my board state – read my opponents board state if I’m familiar with the vast majority of their cards. For some insane reason lately my last few matches have been with our VERY good players, probably because they are experimenting with new deck ideas or unfamiliar decks – playing against them has been really good for me because they never do things “accidentally” which makes it easier for me to break down mistakes in strategy or play.
It also means that if I’m winning it’s not usually a fluke – it’s because my level of play has improved enough that I’m a challenge (I’m still not playing with money cards). This in turn creates a weird kind of trigger related to things that I’m dealing with in the aftermath of professional situation that have left me, to put it simply – damaged.
- I play well enough to analyze what you are doing and not be completely awful when I’m playing.
- I know I’m not as good as you at this point in time so I respect what you are doing, paying attention and making sure that I take it into account.
Then the weird split between what I know I should be reacting to and what I’m reacting to instead happens:
- Magic: Opposing player won’t think about me or what I’m thinking or care as soon as it’s time to shuffle against the next round – will most likely either say good- game and mean it or be annoyed at own play
- Poisonous Work Scenario: Programmer will be holding grudge for some insane thing that I had to do because it was protecting either the project or his job and use any technical weakness to discredit me in front of anyone who’ll stay still long enough to undermine me with both team members and supervisors. When that doesn’t work (because it’s weakness not incompetency and technical execution is not my job) will then launch various complaints to trigger legally required inquiries even if they all come up dry.
Does my brain behave like I'm playing an Opposing Magic Player - why hell no! It behaves like I'm back at work.
Why is this relevant:
The problem with the poisonous work scenario is this – you begin to internalize it and so you feel like a fraud ( even though it’s not your job description) and you begin to doubt that you are worthy of your job/successes/skillset. It’s stupid – and it takes about 4 years to get that bad. But it did, and I did and here’s what happens in the last round when we’re getting close to overtime and if I play well technically I can win:
- I worry I’m missing a trigger or I’ve done the additive math wrong since you can only put counters on cards not enchantment or ability effects,
- I realize how bad it is that I can’t keep track of card effects and math in a god-damned game and wonder how the hell I can manage to do the analysis that’s required in my job,
- instead of thinking how well I’m doing I feel like I’m impersonating an intelligent person and start worrying about being a con artist and a fraud,
- I knock myself upside the metaphorical head and tell myself to just concentrate on the cards and ending this game and keep the psychobabble for the therapist that I won’t go to because it was useless
- – this in turn leads to the not breathing state
- – I make all the other shit go away and concentrate as much as I can on playing the game well in those last few turns
- – apparently to make all of that shit go away I need to also forgo breathing.
- I play pretty well even though I'm not breathing because breathing might make the math too hard.
How very disturbing.
Good news – I can block out the head noise apparently caused by work related trauma
Bad news – it’s so thick inside me that it’s literally down at the breathing level – what the hell kind of field day would my new age healer friends ( or Freud based shrinks) have with that?
The first time last FNM – I thought it was just the level of the guy I was playing with – this time it recognized all the same physical tags – but the extra spicy flavor of math anxiety since I’ve decided to take and place in math classes to rebuild basic knowledge so I can test out how realistic a particular degree path is for me.
So not being able to follow the math all the way through on Phantasmal Images copying my Lord of Illusions is not simply not-playing-well, apparently it’s also Drinne-you’re-deluding-yourself-if–you-think-you–can-really-succeed-at-your-professional-goals.
I can shut it down for meetings, interviews, pitch sessions, when I’m actually planning.
It’s louder and starker when I play Magic because it’s less connected to anything else. It’s just my damage screaming at me, trying to take myself down before anyone else can.
And because I’m terrified of being a fake.
So new goal is to not stop breathing if I’m winning in the last round – because when it’s over I’m 15 kinds of wired wrong. Maybe when the math placement doohickey is done it won’t be so bad, but I’ll work on my competitive headspace – that’s much more important this last week than new cards or competitive strategies.
I’ve also decided that social anxiety is a kind of negative narcissism – you’re anxious because somehow you think you matter and you’re going to do something wrong when in reality very few people actually care about anything you’re doing, and the ones that made you that self-conscious in the first place were probably more interested in how making you feel bad benefitted them.
Reality check – bullies never cared about you unless it was really about them. Even when we’re grown up. I just wonder why being picked on in school has left me with pretty much nothing, but being bullied in a workplace has left me with a list of neurosis that would make Woody Allen proud?
Oh well, it doesn’t matter – I’m going to be all happy about Dark Ascenscion’s Jar of Eyeballs instead.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Pseudo Newb and the First Meaningless FNM
The basic stats for my first FNM with a deck that I really worked on myself was I played 11 matches, and won five of them, however I played four rounds and won 1 of them. So my win rate per match is 48% and per round is 25% 2-0. 2-1, 2-1, 2-1
Ok – so the benefits of sleep really do make a difference at least to my level of sportsmanship and things that are weird to me before continue to maybe make me uncomfortable later.
There’s a point in OP where I get confused because people can agree to draw or immediately concede to help out someone else with standing. Team Channel Fireball (which looks like an OP Pro team but is really just a group of pros trying to work together) has publicly taken draws or conceded matches in tournament to help teammates top 8. There’s also apparently some legitimate forms of dropping in order to help other people with standing. If the FNM record doesn’t really matter to OP then the next question becomes is it also OK to do this or concede a game in order to help someone where being able to pick a better booster pack is THE most important thing to them?
And is it fair to say "no" after pretty much everyone else in OP has told me that FNM doesn’t mean a damn thing unless I’m trying to get to Pro Tour? ( And by “everyone” this I actually mean being asked directly by Aaron Forsythe why I would even care about the multiplier if I wasn’t good enough to place in a PTQ ). My fellow newbs are more traditionally tournament spikey and they don’t necessarily care about standings or points or ratings as much as they care about winning in the “now”. They might care later if they get good enough to place regularly at FNM but we pretty much established that in my crowd, at my store, I’m probably the only one using PWP as competitive markers for progress competing against my own record.
But I can also tell you that the multiplier went down and all of a sudden everything else at the FNM was rouge decks and competing for “stuff” – lots more trading between rounds too.
Before the Rounds
I went to play my version of a snapless Delver Illusions Deck because I honestly had no place else to playtest it seriously. I’m still pretty uninterested in Magic Online until I can play it on my IPad. I want real cards, or real mobility, I’m uninterested in being tied to a computer to practice Magic.
I met up with David Who Will Be Returning College Soon. Which will make me sad because he’s like the absolute mythical good welcoming high level player ( he has placed 1st at every single event I’ve attended that he’s been at) but he never brags, is always friendly and helpful and you never even notice that he’s placed first because as soon as he gets his store credit or pack he just turns around and gives complete focus to whoever he was talking to about whatever he was talking about. He makes taking big leaps forward in magic seem safe (like drafting blue). I wish there were ten more like him for every store.
Preparation –
I drafted blue on Weds before specifically to get playtime with more blue cards and I’d started working on the deck with the Steampunk Marchioness the weekend before. She loaned me the phantasmal images I needed to run 4 and a seachrome coast so I could see if it made a big difference.
This is the list I ran:
Main deck (60 cards)
4 Delver of Secrets
4 Phantasmal Bear
4 Lord of the Unreal
1 Merfolk Looter
4 Phantasmal Image
2 AEther Adept
1 Geist of Saint Traft
4 Gitaxian Probe
3 Ponder
1 Vapor Snag
4 Mana Leak
2 Think Twice
2 Dissipate
1 Ghost Quarter
5 Glacial Fortress
12 Island
3 Moorland Haunt
1 Seachrome Coast
2 Shimmering Grotto
Sideboard (15 cards)
2 Frost Breath
1 Merfolk Looter
1 Adaptive Automaton
1 Geist-Honored Monk
2 Flashfreeze
3 Master Thief
3 Oblivion Ring
The Nihil Spellbombs were for the two control decks that raid their graveyard that I had played against several times, the Frost Breath I had intended to use like Feelings of Dread and that I knew would be safe to cast even if I pulled no glacial fortresses, Flashfreezes were for the various Wolfrun ramps and Stompy humans. The Looter, Automaton and Monk were there incase I was running creature light or there were problems with either getting to my cards or having strong enough win conditions. Master Thief and Oblivion Rings were there as anti-infect deck and anti-artifact conditions since our FNM Johnnies really love their artifacts.
Comfort Level –
I would say exactly at “comfortable” I wasn’t playing with any strange cards and using the Delvers with the higher level players I was playing against on Wednesday night meant I had confidence in how to use the cards. Ironically because of all of the trouble I had getting real answers or understanding Illusions and Snapcasters it also meant that in the deck I was actually playing I wasn’t going to get sideswiped by not understanding basic card interactions which let me really appreciate some of the nuances of the deck. Between getting enough sleep and having realized this deck was an aggro deck it was possibly the first time I felt like I wasn’t swimming in water that had undertow as well as being over my head.
Results
- Yeah, I posted them at the top – there’s a reason for this. One of the 2-1 matches asked me to report at 2-0 no matter who won the tiebreaker – that would move said winner-take-all further up the chain to select cards if they placed first. If FNM is “casual and friendly” the way Helene Beurgerot and Aaron Forsythe and Melissa Del Toro and Patrick Chapin have all basically told me, well then why the hell should I care about in effect one of us conceding a match, to in effect give a position advantage to a teammate? Doing so moves my personal win percentage from 48% of matches played to 40%, but it wouldn’t change my 25% round win rate. But the guy who it really matters to gets to choose a booster back and FNM card two slots sooner. What does FNM mean now anyway? What constitutes your Magic Team if there are no teams in OP but you’re encouraged to build one?
We had no ranked judge present. I’m not sure I would have asked one over anyway because I had no desire to get someone who I would want on my magic team in potential trouble if it were different from the pros. I know I wouldn’t have even been asked when the multipliers were 3x because the stakes were different than stuff and saying you were working for a personal ratings goal meant competing priority.
I know it makes me uncomfortable enough not to ever agree to it in the future.
Round 1 – A player who came over from playing competitive YughiO who had the white humans deck I have been struggling over buying the cards for.
He explained how cheap the “good” cards in Magic are compared to Yughi O cards – ( 30 vs 180!). I took the game 2-0 mostly because the Delvers came up and flipped really early and Moorland Haunts ( which he was playing too) came out midgame. I made sure to point out interactions he might have missed in his own deck and loaned him my angel token when his Geist of St Traft came out. Mana Leaks and various control cards helped me here. He had some very effective removal on my creatures until the Lords came out.
2-0
Round 2 - A player who I’ve played before playing an infect /artifact deck. I hate infect. In both cases where he won it was specifically because I didn’t really “get” how his artifacts worked it was lots of charges and such. I sideboarded Oblivion rings but I should have more aggressively switched Aether Adepts for Master Thiefs.
2-1
Round -3 Played against one of my very first opponents – who I played the Illusions 2012 event deck against. He generally plays Red Deck Wins the “GoodStuff” version.
*newb note “Goodstuff” is apparently when you make a deck out of all of the best (and therefore most expensive) cards. The theory and indeed the proof in practice is that even if you aren’t the best player the cards are SO GOOD that most of the time they’ll take you to a win even if you’re not using them in the most advanced manner.
He told me he was “going rouge” this time. He put out a mountain and a Blood Crazed Neonate - I laughed and said it looked like he was playing the same kind of deck he usually played. He was it was just GoodStuff Vampires instead of Red Deck Wins. Did it have Lilliana’s and Bloodkeepers and Oliva’s and some other Planeswalker I don’t remember because I got rid of it quick? Yes it did.
I lost game one, sideboarded in all of the Oblivion Rings ( Because I hate Planeswalkers so much) and the Flashfreezes switching out with 2 mana leaks, the 1shimmering grottos, 1 island and 1 aether adept. I won the second game.
The third game didn’t let me get rid of Lilliana fast enough and couldn’t stop an unblockable vampire because I was pulling counterspells and nothing to remove threats after they resolved
2-1
Round 4 – I don’t remember his name. He was a really good player who was bringing a competitive deck that had been running iffy for him in terms of tempo- it was artifact, planeswalker infect running green.
*Newb Note – between rounds you have to return your deck to it’s original configuration if you sideboarded during the previous round. I asked and was told you couldn’t sideboard before the first round.
I held in for a while but he won with infect even though I had the better board state until the last minute. I brought in oblivions, flashfreezes and master thieves but won the second game because I flipped two delvers in two turns plus managed to get bears and a lord of the unreal out by turn 4
The third game was epic. Really epic, we ran out the clock, I held him at bay I but he was holding on to 6 life with me at 17 we were overtime and clocking down to 2 turns left before the board state slipped just enough for him to proliferate because my Master Theives were awol. A last minute ( literally) combo proliferated two poison counters to 10 winning him the game before I got in for last turn lethal
2-1
Takeaways:
Round 1's error showed I really need to find a way to process the sacrifice and exile requirements in word text blocks better – I’m pretty sure since this is a consistent problem of mine that it’s an LD issue – plus it’s taking me a while to get comfortable with the new timing/layer/sacrifice rules. I got better with it with the white and blue cards but having it on the land card made it kind of a starting point. However the proper amount of sleep seems to have made a difference in how I handled finding out about the mistake. I apologized, informed my fellow newb, and made a note to double check myself if I used the card again that night ( which I did)
Round 2 makes it clear that my dislike of Infect is actually more intesne when I am in a good mood and have had enough sleep because my true offence at the disruption of the design space is clearer to me and ultimately I'm a fan of the game desgin almost more than the game itself. Infect takes a 20 point game and makes it a 10 point game. For very little reason and with very little tech to fix it. He was playing enough control to slow me down all he had to do was outlast me when he had an unblockable infect. He basically won by getting a single poison counter on me and using some kind of combo I still don’t get to proliferate up to 10 in three rounds without using creatures.
The third game of the third round was when I saw what my “multiple instants/effects + tired + rules confusion” looks like from the other side of the table. Even though I was now playing against two of my least favorite mechanics, I wasn’t particularly upset about the mechanics of playing them it was sort of neutrally “unfun” but I was getting to see how the phantasmal images were giving me all sorts of strategic mobility that I didn’t have without them. I was wishing more of my instants had flashback. But my poor opponent was really overwhelmed trying to use multiple instants and effect on me when I responded by casting a response instant that did something for me without changing his board state. He was also under the impression that he wouldn't have to discard a card for Lilliana since I made him exile a different card, I suggested that we call over the judge ( who in our earlier game came over and tried to correct a boardstate that didn't need correcting but did manage to really disrupt both of us as players until we were able to walk it back and explain why I had a -1/-1 counter even though I had hexproof ( it was because he had blocked me using damage the old fashioned way but the phantasmal bears didn't disappear because they were hexproof) but I was pretty OK with everything even if it was the least fun round of the night and felt for him when he came out of the exchange having gained board advantage but still unsure of how.
Round 4’s game I learned a lot and played the hell out of that game. It was high pressure and really intense but not bad, or overwhelming or any of the other things that could have happened. I would have liked to win that game or even drawn, but I’m really proud of my level of play in that game. I think I need to become more familiar with the lower level artifacts in the Scars Block. I’m sure I didn’t play against them properly.
For the first time since I’ve played them I had a Glacial Fortress come in tapped, which was salvaged by the fact that Seachrome Coast was coming in untapped at that point, but I did wonder what if I was pulling seachromes late game – are they really a good choice to run so many multiples?
Decklist for Psuedo Newb and the Very Brave Draft
Draft Deck
Main deck (40 cards)
2 Delver of Secrets
1 Diregraf Ghoul
1 Invisible Stalker
1 Ludevic's Test Subject
1 Stitcher's Apprentice
1 Walking Corpse
1 Chapel Geist
1 Fiend Hunter
1 Brain Weevil
1 Makeshift Mauler
1 Moon Heron
1 Curiosity
1 Sensory Deprivation
2 Silent Departure
2 Think Twice
1 Claustrophobia
2 Dissipate
1 Midnight Haunting
1 Moan of the Unhallowed
9 Island
4 Plains
4 Swamp
Created with Decked Builder
http://www.deckedbuilder.com/Sideboard
1 Walking Corpse
1 Ghoulraiser
1 Tree of Redemption
1 Skaab Goliath
2 Bump in the Night
1 Ghoulcaller's Bell
1 Graveyard Shovel
2 Wooden Stake
1 Curse of the Nightly Hunt
3 Ghostly Possession
1 Curse of Oblivion
1 Maw of the Mire
1 Rooftop Storm
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