we want women to play our game, or whatever

Hello, ladies. We sure would love if you’d put down your nail polish and try our card game. It’s, like, totally spectacular! There are SO MANY women who are already playing this game. As an example, here’s a mid-level employee at our company that plays Magic! All her superiors are male. She’s dating one of them.

We’ve tried literally everything imaginable to get women to play our game. There’s a woman who writes 200-word pieces for our site a couple times a week. This one time, we even had a woman design some cards for us. She’s a programmer now.

There are women in our card art. Please feast your eyes on some Steve Argyle-illustrated women, Identify with them, and maybe dress up? Y’all like dressing up, and stuff. So do that.

Did you see that one Elspeth? She’s super pretty. She plays Magic, I think.

Hey! You like vampires? We have vampires. I mean, do you actually like vampires? We did a market research poll from people that currently play our game and heard that vampires are fine. We think they’re a Women Thing? I don’t really get it, myself, but whatever. It’s for the ladies! I’m all for anything you girls are into.

Look, let’s cut to the chase. We measure our game’s popularity by how many people show up on a Friday night to organized competitive tournaments populated mostly by people who’ve played the game for five years, and all you women are really letting us down. You act like there’s something stopping you from going to these!

Is it the card backs? We can change those. Did you know we almost made them pink for Arabian Nights? We didn’t. But we could.

Do you not even know how to play? God, you women are so needy. Just walk up to any group of guys you don’t know and ask them to teach you. Boom! Done! Next. Problem.

It’s not like we haven’t thought about this before. We’ve had meetings. We have all our best guys on the subject. We even followed their recommendation and made the foils shinier. They’re SO shiny now, you have no idea.

Have you heard of Felicia Day? She’s this SMOKIN’ hot babe (all of us are totally into her) and she plays Magic. She’s also a woman.

I know! Okay. I’ve got it. You girls are going to LOVE this. You know those game designers you love, like the Penny Arcade guys? We’re gonna get them to design cards for us! Oh my god this is such a great idea. We’ll get like, fifteen different guys to design cards for us and even put their names on the cards. You girls are sure to be a fan of at least one of those men, and then you’ll play our game. I’m getting a promotion for this.

I’m on a roll here. I can feel it. Okay. You know all those girlfriends you have, and you like talk about whatever it is, and you’re like “omahgawwwd there are like no single guys” well check THIS out: Single guys! Magic tournaments! Tons of them! They’ll practically be lining up to talk to you! They will probably even literally line up to talk to you. That will be the best thing. Come on, you’ll love it.

Let us know what you think, ladies.

-Wizards of the Coast Division of Female Outreach

destroy magic online and start over

Magic Online is doomed. Magic Online has doomed us all. Magic Online must die.

This is not something reformable. We have had eleven years for potential reform, and it all leads us back to the same place: a bad interface for an unstable product with a bad economy. In an age when online games are so much larger than real-life ones, there’s a good reason why Magic Online is a niche product: it is bad. Only people who are already extremely invested in playing Magic will ever bother with Magic Online.

Its badness is not limited to the recent crashes, the crashes that suddenly matter because Brian Kibler was the one to write about them. Look up announcements about previous Magic Online crashes: this sort of behavior has been going on for ten years with very little in the way of improvement since then. Tournaments should not crash due to having a thousand people in them. They should not crash with ten thousand people in them. If Wizards wants ten thousand people to play Magic Online, they should make Magic Online capable of holding ten thousand people.

Magic Online does a great job of implementing the rules system of Magic. This is overlooked, and people pay too much attention to relatively minor card-by-card bugs in the program. These are understandable, because Magic is complicated. But the outside-of-game bugs shed a lot more light on how horrific Magic Online is: if you are in the finals of an 8-4 draft in first place and drop, you get the first place prize. Instead of removing people’s ratings from the client, it simply has an image that covers them up, so if you’re really fast you can still see rating. How could this possibly happen? Why are there hacks upon hacks to keep the program functioning?

Why does Magic Online stress a new computer more than actual commercial games?

Why is Magic Online the only online game in existence that can’t handle the slightest bit of network instability?

Why does Magic Online randomly disconnect players who are on rock-solid connections, not inform the player they’ve been disconnected, and expect them to find workarounds to get back in the game?

Why are we okay with this?

Even if Magic Online was recoded from the ground up to be stable, reliable, and well-programmed, it would still be bad. The founding principles of Magic Online were made in 2002, and have barely changed since then, while the rest of online games have had a sea change in the way that we interact with each other through games, and how money and time relate to online games. Namely: “free to play” exists now.

The basic ideas behind F2P are that when a player plays a game, they should be rewarded for the time they invest in it, and not charged. But, if they want to hurry up their progress, or get cool new things, they have to spend money. Magic Online is exactly the opposite: as phantom queues show, Wizards sees the act of simply playing some Magic and not getting any cards as something they should charge for. This is insane. If people just want to play the game for the joy of playing it, the system should reward that, not expect revenue from it. If I feel like playing some games of League of Legends, not only will I not pay for it, I’ll get some points for winning or losing that, over time, I can use toward new heroes.

Why doesn’t Magic Online do this? Because it’s from 2002, not 2013.

The Magic Online economy makes no sense. Instead of players spending money for cards and getting those cards, they have to jump through a thousand hoops with a jerry-rigged “trading” system in order to spend tickets to acquire cards. There are thousands of bots offering the same things, and no in-client way to look up prices, and no way to check stock without opening a trade with the bots. Want to spend five cents on something? Fuck you. No sane person would wish for this to be the system, but it’s evolved that way, so… guess we’re stuck with it.

This is one of the plainest examples of the sunk-cost fallacy that I can think of. “We can’t just start over,” says Wizards of the Coast, about their program that desperately needs to be started over. “We’ve sunk so much time an energy into it! It’s been working just fine for eleven years!”

It has not been working fine for eleven years. It has, in fact, sucked.

If they invest the money necessary to rebuild Magic Online for the modern era, they risk making a program that could actually get players into the game. A program that allows players to play for free, and then monetizes it by having them spend money on packs. A program with an honest-to-god auction house, to buy and sell cards for in-game money, in order to build decks.

A program that isn’t a program, because it runs through a web browser, because again: 2013.

Magic Online running as an iPad app, connecting without issue to tournaments filled with players from all over the world.

This won’t happen. Wizards will keep throwing fix after fix at Magic Online, desperately trying to get it to crash slightly less often, working just well enough that only their digital division is embarrassed when a well-known player talks about it, instead of the entire company.

gtav review: chaos, linearity, and the open world test

Sometimes while playing GTAV, I didn’t think the designers of the game knew what made it fun.

The important part, of course, is that the game is still fun. How can it not be? It’s Grand Theft Auto in a new city, with Rockstar’s ever-present attention to detail and quality, and the reviews have been universally lavish. Going around jacking cars, causing chaos, and escaping from cops is the same as it has been (with some improvements) since GTA3. ^[1]

But other times, like thirty seconds after I start doing yoga or in yet another shootout, I sigh and wonder if maybe someone has been whispering evil things into the designers’ ears. Things like, “the game needs more distractions that have nothing to do with the enormous world in the game,” or “players really just want to have gunfights with bad guys all the time.”

Of course, the game needs missions and things outside of the main campaign around the city. But these should always remind the player that they are playing Grand Theft Auto. Many of the game’s side-missions accomplish this beautifully; the ones that have Franklin working with a paparazzi are perfect at merging an unglamorous occupation with extant mechanics and a healthy dose of satire (this sort of mashup is a GTA series staple, and among the reasons I’ve grown to love it), but I have no idea what golf, tennis, yoga, etc etc etc are doing in the game. One of the properties players can buy unlocks the opportunity to slowly meander underwater in search of nuclear waste. I wish I was making that up. I cannot imagine the state of mind one would have to think this is what people are looking for in this series.

If it was limited to entirely skippable and irrelevant diversions, that wouldn’t affect my opinion of the game hardly at all. But it’s not. The main missions, the heart and soul of the game, fall into the same trap that GTA4 and San Andreas^[2] did: here are some guys in a small area. Kill them all. GTA4, in a decision I would use a time machine to go back and change long before I considered using the device to assassinate Hitler,^[3] introduced cover-based shooting to the series; GTAV, on more missions than not, will have you slowly advancing through conveniently-placed half-height blocks and other miscellaneous objects in order to kill all the enemies.

This is dumb. The strengths of the game are not in gunplay. Despite promises with each release that the shooting is way better this time really we mean it, the only way to get through these is still with habitual abuse of the autoaim system in a way that feels cheap and gamey every firefight. The best way to dispatch unseen enemies is releasing aim, then re-aiming to lock onto them and hit them with a shotgun blast. This is needed because the way players are intended to use the autoaim, by flicking the right stick from one side to the other to go to the next enemy, is a bit finicky and will sometimes unhelpfully aim slightly next to the now-dead body instead of finding the guy with a shotgun who is having no trouble blasting you.

This inspires me to come up with this simple test for all future developers of open-world games: when doing a mission, is the player doing anything that they could not have done in a specific genre game (eg racing, shooter, helicopter sim)? If they are not, it should probably not be in your open world game. The most notable breaking of this rule was most egregious in Far Cry 3, a critically-praised game that had a few interesting tasks for the player when roaming around (but not too many), and a main story that had the player repeatedly walking down extended linear hallways over and over to trigger the next half-cinematic. There are plenty of fine linear games that do their thing and they are more than welcome to do that, but let’s separate the two categories of linear and open-world games a bit more here. Players who pop in an open-world game should be able to get away from the rigid structure of linear games, and today’s open world games aren’t providing this.^[4]

The open world with linear quests is a formula that feels built on budget-dictated compromise, whereas its inverse of a linear story with several ways to get past each obstacle feels much more rewarding. Deus Ex is the canonical example of this,^[5] but games like MGS3 that people actually bought did it as well, and Hitman: Blood Money implemented it absolutely beautifully in a way that is unlikely to be replicated any time soon. The times when GTAV lets the player approach something however they want provide some of the best missions: in one, the player has to hijack a slow-moving truck in a heavily-defended caravan, and I wanted to play that mission over and over trying out different tactics. On the other hand, an open-ended assassination mission just led me to stand by the mission’s start point, wait an eternity for him to leave the hotel, and snipe him, then run away. Mission complete. Hooray?

The big introduction to the series is heists, and I was extremely impressed by how they were executed. The structure of a heist gives a great natural progression to the missions,^[6] the heists themselves have multiple ways the player can choose to do them,^[7] they’re affected in noticeable ways by the NPCs the player decides to hire for that mission (and while that’s all scripted, it still led to great moments of “thank god I hired THAT woman” and “oh no, why did I pick this dumbass?”), and the heists themselves are the most fun missions in the game.

I can’t discuss this without spoiling something about the heists: there are barely any. In fact, there are five, and one of those has no options for hiring people, while another one has no options to it (and only one person to hire) and is just another “kill all the enemies” mission. The game makes a huge deal out of showing you how to do heists and how the people will get better the more you use them, which makes the fact that you’ll only use your hacker once more in the entire game feel really shitty.

A radical idea, then: the game’s big new mechanic/theme is heists, and the heists are super fun, and the idea of them is that you use the same people from one to the other, so why weren’t there more? Like, a LOT more? Why aren’t 90% of the main story missions either heist or heist-setup-related? Instead, it’s more killing of guys.

For decades now, action games have half-assedly implemented stealth systems. The difference between a true stealth game and the accursed half-assed stealth system is pretty clear: in a stealth game, you can stealth around all the time, not just in the 10% of it when it explicitly tells you “HEY, BE SNEAKY NOW OR YOU’LL AUTO-LOSE.” Real stealth games have levels of enemy awareness between having no idea where the player is and actively shooting at them. Real stealth games don’t have cinematics that trigger enemies all automatically knowing the player’s location, with no chance to re-stealth. (Real stealth games have re-stealthing, by the way.) One of the game’s least excusable anti-fun interactions is that when a player misses a shot with a silenced gun on a foe. The foe will immediately know where the player is, start shooting, and all the other enemies start running toward you. For the sake of fun gameplay, missing a shot should do nothing, and alerting an enemy should leave a good half-second window for the player to recover by taking them out before they tell their buddies where you are.

GTAV apparently thought enough of its stealth mechanics to make it one of the stats that characters have. The stats in this game are a completely unnecessary addition to the game that serve no real gameplay purpose. The characters already had differentiation via their different abilities, and there was never a time playing on a character when I consciously thought “gee, I wish I was playing a character that was better at this thing I’m doing.” And if it doesn’t affect gameplay, then what’s the point?

The writing in the series has long been the shining example of the best the video game world has to offer, and that continues here… mostly. Michael and Trevor have a great dynamic,^[8] but Franklin is just kind of… there. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of audience stand-in, because he’s mostly reasonable but wants to generally earn money and maybe kill/rob people if necessary, or whatever. It’s like his entire storyline was cut at the last minute. The satire that runs through the game (as it has through all Grand Theft Auto titles), though, fell much flatter in this one than in previous games. It’s like they were going through the motions: gotta make fun of Big Tech Trends one and two and the latest best-selling game series, right? Part of what felt off about it, though, was that after a dozen years of us living in the modern era of Grand Theft Auto, hasn’t the series itself elevated to the point where, had it been any other game, it would be the one getting parodied? Why isn’t the son in the game playing a game based on GTAV, since it’s the best-selling game in the world?

Does this come across as nitpicking a game that’s really good? It should. I spent about 30 hours in GTAV over four days, and I worked a full shift on two of those days. I enjoyed the game. But when this much time and money (and money and money and money) is sunk into a AAA project that gets unanimously adoring reviews, we should examine each aspect of it a bit closer.


^[1] This is slightly unfair to the newer iterations of the game. If one goes back to the GTA3-based games, it’s pretty obvious that the escaping-from-cop mechanics were, well, bad. You were basically not supposed to get away from them once you got to a certain level. The whole “find a pay-and-spray” thing was just never a good idea, and the game improved substantially when it went away from that model entirely.

^[2] I did not enjoy San Andreas very much. The missions were tedious, and the open world combined with a lack of anything interesting in the empty space made the game, well, boring.

^[3] Much less risky. Assassinating Hitler never works out well.

^[4] Game developers today seem extremely hesitant to release a player in an open world with the intent of genuinely letting them wander. This used to be very common: even those series we think of as linear, like Final Fantasy, used to have extended portions of the game where the player was simply thrown into a place and expected to stumble across something resembling a plot five hours in. There’s a reason we’ve moved away from this, of course: it sucked. It was a confusing mess with no reasons given to the player as to why they’re doing what they’re doing. A better-executed example of a good open world would be the first Fallout, where the player has a set end goal that they need to accomplish, and the feeling of wandering with only a vague direction in mind perfectly mirrored the vast world with only scattered civilization. Sure, it could have used a bit more guidance at times. But these pseudo-open-world games with a rigid linear quest and irrelevant durdling available are just total bullshit.

^[5] Only a few thousand people bought Deus Ex when it first came out, but everyone who did started an unreadable blog about game design.

^[6] This reminded me of the wonderful set of Thieves’ Guild sidequests in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where the player undergoes a series of smaller heists that all yield one important item that is needed at a critical time in The Big Final Heist. Instead of seemingly-unrelated quests involving just stealing stuff, I felt like I was really doing something productive toward a set goal, and the payoff during and after TBFH made everything worth it.

^[7] Okay, two ways. Still counts.

^[8] This includes a car ride where Michael accuses Trevor of being a hipster, and it rivals Portal in how good it is as comedy writing.

more magic jobs that can make you $$$REAL CASH MONEY$$$

Okay so we all play this game, right, but let’s set all that “game” shit aside for a second and focus on the real question: how can I make Real Cash Money off of intolerable nerds with too much of their parents money. Remember, the bank takes $20 bills even if they smell like a Five Guys Fart Burrito. That’s where I come in: I’m here to tell YOU what YOU need to focus on with this *makes a shitload of air quotes* Trading Card Game.

1. Creepy Exploitative Coach of Small Children

Basically you’d convince a bunch of parents and the like to get you to “teach” their kid Magic: the Gathering, and that would involve berating them constantly and make their entire life revolve around Magic: the Gathering like it does for any “true” pro player. Hopefully, we get to a point where if you haven’t been playing since you were in Necrotic Ooze-filled diapers, the game will be totally inaccessible to you since you have absolutely no skill and probably do things like play “other games” in your spare time, scrubbo. But don’t worry if you can’t actually “play Magic” or “teach Magic” or “interact with children,” because that won’t be your job at all! You just get them to play it nonstop, make sure they sign a binding contract that entitles you to a huge chunk of their lifetime earnings, and have no social contacts outside of you so they don’t know that you’re actually awful in every conceivable way!

2. Screaming Head

We already have a ton of people that will vehemently give their overly-sensational kneejerk reactions on a website, but do you really expect people to read??? Read words??? In 2013??? Please. This is the Information Age, and information should be delivered VERY LOUDLY. What Magic needs is the equivalent of ESPN, where people can yell at each other about whether a certain player is “elite” and give absolutely no useful content or context about anything so that casual observers understand that Magic is a thing that people care very, very deeply about. Let’s face facts, having people berate each other for hours will be way more interesting than goddamn Eggs matches.

3. Payday Loan Service Specifically for Magic Players

When smart people look at a community like Magic pros who travel constantly on a limited budget and have an unreliable source of income, you know what they really see? Profit. Like, I’m just spitballing ideas here, but if payday loan companies can blatantly market themselves to minority groups and low-income people living paycheck to paycheck, why can’t you do the same but like instead of “500% annual interest” it’s like a “Tarmogoyf Loan” because if you don’t constantly check how big it is you’ll probably just die. Look, these are just ideas.

4. Magic Pro Groupie

Self-explanatory.

5. Motivational Speakers

Basically they don’t like help you get better or entertain you or act worthwhile in any way, they just remind you that “hey! You’re not wasting your life away at all, you’re doing something really useful by learning to play Magic! It could even, like, lead you to playing more Magic and we know how great that is!” You see, Magic players oftentimes will feel weird guilt-esque feelings like hey maybe I should be having sex instead. But no. No that is bad. So just tell them like “no you should not be having sex, also you look great. $100 please.” This idea is pretty much Travis Woo but for money.

6. Inside Trader

Okay have you ever seen the salaries that Wizards people make? Ahahaha they suck so bad. They get all these applicants that are all “hello I am competent professional that will design good client for Magic Online Digital Objects, please pay me a rate that is competitive with what I could be making at a similar non-game-related position” and Wizards be all “haha nerp” because some guy’s resume said that “like oh my god dudes I love Magic so much!!! Magic for teh epic winzorz!!! I looked at HTML source code once” but they only have to pay THAT dude like $30k. So this is why it’s so important for us to make Real Money off Magic: no one other than the executives at Hasbro is doing that at the moment. Here’s where the real hotness comes in, though: bribery. Yeah son. So you can be all “hey why don’t you tell me what cards will be the best ones two years from now” and they’ll be all “nope” and you’ll be all “I’ll give you $10” and they’ll be like “oh well then sure,” and they give you a list of cards but they actually didn’t playtest enough to find out what would be good. I might not have thought this one through.

7. Go To Magic Tournaments and Steal People’s Bags

This is undoubtedly the best way to make money off Magic.

criticizing a criticism of critiques

Doug Beyer wrote a response to a question on tumblr about dealing with criticism, and it’s started to spread from Magic to the larger Nerd Art Community. As soon as I saw that a Wizards-employed person was writing about criticism, I almost tripped over myself in a silent movie-era slapstick manner to respond to it, because I have deep disagreements with most in the Magic community regarding criticism. Basically, I think it’s a valuable thing, and others disagree.*

Beyer, to his credit, doesn’t say that one should just ignore all criticism… but he starts off by saying that artists should try to see what the author of the criticism was saying. This is completely off, for a few reasons: first, intent is bullshit. I’ve criticized a lot of things in a lot of ways over a lot of different mediums. I’m not sure I could tell you what my intent was for all of them, other than I’m saying what I thought at the time. The artist doesn’t need to put themselves in the shoes of the critic, because all the information they have is there already, without the need to divine the authorial intent of the critic: they can already see the criticisms. They can judge each of those criticisms independently of the critic, and independently of each other.

Let’s use a non-artistic example here. You go for your morning run, since you’re an active, attractive person who cares about your physical health. Unfortunately, you have to deal with an emergency in the morning (eg someone in a forum Mafia game accused you of being scum), and are unable to take your morning shower. You dash into work, and the office bully, who you loathe due to the fact that well he’s just an idiotic bully, tells you that your shirt is “like, so gay” and that you smell “like a gym locker room today.” You can analyze these criticisms independently of who he is, and independently of one another: you know that your shirt (which features an elephant taking a picture of itself with its trunk) is the absolute best, while you smelling bad… there’s a good chance he’s right on that one.

In this case, getting outraged that he’s criticizing you for the smell is probably the wrong way to go. You will not look like a coward caving to a bully if you run out for some deodorant. You will, however, continue to smell terrible if you don’t, and no amount of loud protestation on your part will change this.

On the other hand, if your beloved mother, who has not an unkind bone in her body, comments to you that you will never get anywhere if you continue to wear t-shirts and jeans to work, you can safely smile and nod and entirely ignore that criticism because you work at Google and earn $250k a year. Sometimes, criticism from even your biggest fans and supporters doesn’t mean that you should question something, but instead that those fans and supporters have no idea what they’re talking about.

Especially when it comes to arts-related as opposed to smell-related criticism, there will be plenty of times when you make something that you know is incredible because it was exactly what you were hoping to end up with, and other people just don’t get it at all. These people might have even adored things you’ve made previously, but if you were previously recording solo acoustic guitar songs and now you’re the second coming of Jesus Lizard, it’s pretty safe to ignore that. This isn’t because of who those fans are, or whether they’re trying to hurt or help you, but by the criticism instead. Criticism doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong, and lack of criticism does not mean that something is right. There’s been plenty of great art intended to shock, offend, infuriate, grate, piss off, and even to itself criticize, so if that’s what you’re going for, then a lack of criticism should send up a red flag. People not caring can be worse than criticism.

Mr. Beyer ends by reminding us that criticism is “just words,” so who cares? This is the biggest load of shit I’ve read in quite some time. It’s very possible that what you’ve created is “just mostly-water organisms making vibrations in their throats,” or even markings on a page intended to symbolize that, and if not, then it’s still work made by and (probably) intended for human consumption that won’t affect the larger universe. Human communication is what makes us special as a species, so the communication we have with each other had better matter or we’re all fucked. Since this is all just words, I’d like to remind Mr. Beyer that mdj4jmf8ir.

In short: criticism does matter. It should not be ignored because of who it came from, and neither should it be listened to because of who it came from. Listen to it on its own merits. Sometimes, critics will be wrong. Use criticism as a tool to better make what you want to make.

*For the purposes of keeping this a short response to a specific thing Mr. Beyer wrote, I’ll use the same interpretation of “criticism” he was using, ie negative feedback given to an artist about their work, mostly unrelated to the fields of literary criticism, art criticism, etc. I promise I have some fascinating thoughts relating criticism in the Magic community to the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp, however.

six games of cube

Somewhere in the Magic: Online user agreement that no one has ever read, there is probably some clause prohibiting more than one person from influencing decisions on a draft, and that clause was written by someone with a PhD in funhating. Everyone should try playing Magic: Online with people they know, because a) it’ll stop you from doing some really dumb things that you would have smacked yourself on the head about five seconds later, b) it’ll make you consider options that never occurred to you, c) you’ll find out what other peoples’ internal monologues are like when they consider drafting/play decisions, d) it’s just a good way to spend an evening.

I arrive at the home of my friend Natalie, who is not just a Google programmer, but by far the most-programmer-y person I know. Her laptop is hooked up to her rather large HDTV, and she is halfway through drafting some sort of mono-red deck in Holiday Cube. Let’s not dwell on this: she drafted mono-red in Holiday Cube, and the lack of success was entirely justified. She is also being advised by a guy named Ben, who advocates for taking combo-esque cards and generally trying to drop nuclear weapons on the play area at all times, an approach I wholeheartedly endorse.

Natalie takes a second to record the results in her master file that tracks all tickets/product incoming and outgoing, and we fire up the next draft. The first pack doesn’t have much of interest to me other than Exhume, so I advise taking that. I had forgotten that she would actually listen to advice I give, and she takes the Exhume. The next pack has some generically Good Spells and a Sneak Attack, which Ben and I passionately lobby for (arguments consist mostly of “it’s Sneak Attack!” and “SNEAK ATTACK!!!”). We follow this up with Myr Battlesphere and Palinchron (unquestionably the most ambitious and cool-seeming but actually not very good of all the cube’s expensive creatures). Our fortunes take a turn for the better in pack two, when we’re passed Mana Vault, then open Sol Ring in pack three. The final decklist:

1 Exhume
1 Sneak Attack
1 Eureka
1 Necromancy
1 Firestorm
1 Goblin Welder
1 Faithless Looting
1 Nether Void
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Wildfire
1 Necropotence

1 Myr Battlesphere
1 Palinchron
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind
1 Frost Titan

1 Worn Powerstone
1 Mana Vault
1 Gilded Lotus
1 Selesnya Signet
1 Boros Signet
1 Sol Ring
1 Basalt Monolith
1 Dark Ritual

1 Simic Growth Chamber
1 Gruul Turf
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Bayou
1 Shelldock Isle
2 Island
3 Swamp
3 Mountain
1 Forest

Game one has a hand with lands, Mana Vault, Basalt Monolith, Myr Battlesphere, and Necromancy, so all of our decisions leading up to this moment must have been completely correct. Further cementing this fact, our opponent leads with Karakas, Isamaru, no further lands until turn six. Hopefully, they didn’t offer up their firstborn child in exchange for drawing a land, because on that turn, they play Maze of Ith. By this point, we have Myr Battlesphere in play, and that’s at 50% effectiveness against the Maze. Based on our opponent bouncing Isamaru at EOT with Karakas, we know that they have Balance and are trying to draw the second land for it. When they finally draw the Island to cast it, they’re at eight life. We cast Firestorm for five in response, hitting them and all our creatures, allowing us to cast Necromancy at end of turn on Battlesphere, in order to attack with four tokens, only one of which can be stopped by the Maze.

Game two shows us a couple bad hands, then a five of Swamp, Mountain, Sol Ring, Selesnya Signet, Frost Titan. Our concerns about the potential for Turbo-Nothing are diminished when our first draw is Gilded Lotus. Our opponent curves Isamaru into Nearheath Pilgrim (it really was in Holiday Cube!). We draw Necropotence and cast it off our Gilded Lotus, drawing five, going to 13, then 9 off our opponent’s attack. Their Land Tax seems like the less-effective card advantage engine. We cast Frost Titan tapping a land (in case they have one-mana removal and another land), go to 5 to draw four cards, and block the Pilgrim going to three. Gideon’s Lawkeeper does not seem very effective, either. However, that does leave our opponent with multiple creatures that can attack, and our life total is not too high, so we cast Wildfire, leaving them with a board consisting of Land Tax. Then we attack, tapping Land Tax. Land Tax does not untap, and they have no plays on their turn. We skip our draw step and cast Palinchron off zero lands. Our opponent concedes at 18 life.
Now that we have defeated the cube juggernaut that is White Weenie getting terrible draws, we move on to round two. Our first hand has a black-producing land, Dark Ritual, Necropotence, and I don’t care if that’s not really all that hot in Cube it’s still really cool and retro and all that so stuff it. We go to 15 and discard some reanimation spells and targets.

Our opponent has turn three Izzet Signet into Wake Thrasher (clearly coveting the Basalt Monolith we drafted), which temporarily gives them more of a threat than our Simic Signet into Sneak Attack. They attack us down to 7, because turn one Necropotence is a hell of a self-inflicted clock. Our Nether Void draws Mana Leak, but our Sneak Attack activation resolves. Sphinx of the Steel Wind makes the life totals a bit more palatable. On their next turn, he attacks into open red mana, which leads to Sneak Attacking Goblin Welder, which leads to Sphinx, which leads to them conceding.

Our game two hand has lands, Mana Vault Worn Powerstone, Sneak Attack, Nether Void. We play Nether Void on turn two. They concede. We high five over our ability to outplay our opponents.

Round three leads with Faithless Looting, discarding Dark Ritual and Necropotence. We continue our earlier high-fives, this time for having the presence of mind to avoid Cool Things and make The Tight Play. Anyway, our first spell is Basalt Monolith on turn three, and on turn four, we’re at six life facing down Treetop Village, Flinthoof Boar, Boggart Ram-Gang, and a Bloodbraid Elf that cascaded into Sword of Fire and Ice. We cast Eureka in order to put Myr Battlesphere and Sneak Attack into play. We choose not to put Emrakul into play for free. We Sneak Attack Emrakul, and our opponent concedes.

In what COULD BE the final game of this report, our hand has a bunch of lands, Sol Ring, Frost Titan, Emrakul. My rules about keeping hands that can cast Sol Ring are fairly strict. We draw a couple more artifact mana sources in the first couple turns, then draw and cast Wildfire on the third turn, leaving our opponent with Chrome Mox (R/G from Boggart Ram-Gang) and Sword of Fire and Ice. A couple turns later, we add Gilded Lotus to our magnificent collection of mana sources, and that leads to Frost Titan the turn after. The second-most-heated debate of the night: do we tap Treetop Village or Chrome Mox? Magic is a difficult game. We go for the Village. Our opponent attempts a comeback with a 1/1 Stormblood Berserker, which we swiftly lock up with our next Frost Titan attack. They cleverly equip the Sword to the tapped creature, preventing us from tapping it in the future. We draw Vampiric Tutor, and are faced with the most crucial decision: how do we hardcast the Emrakul in our hand? We use some of our remaining clock time to stage formal debates about whether to tutor for Dark Ritual or Mana Vault. The conclusion is that the most dramatic possible play is to cast Emrakul off nothing but permanent mana sources.

So we do. Cube is great.

What did we accomplish in this draft? We ended up with a deck that doesn’t play like anything from any “real” limited format, of course, because Cube decks rarely resemble non-Cube limited decks. We got a deck with the rare virtue of being able to surprise us as we were playing it. This is quite a difficult attribute to end up with, as decks constructed for the purpose of winning games value consistency as a path to victory, and surprise can only come via the deck doing different things. In the six games, the deck did a different thing every time, and they were each spectacular in their own way. Did these wonderful conclusions occur against the best decks in situations that gave our opponents the best possible chance to be competitive? Absolutely not. Our opponents had some combination of terrible decks and terrible draws the entire time, but that only served to reinforce our perception.

Drafting Cube is like a personality test to tell you what you enjoy about playing Magic. People will naturally drift toward certain archetypes, while justifying each decision they make as the logically sound one; others unapologetically force the same archetype every draft they do. Drafts like this one are the best tool for reinforcing notions people had going in. It would probably take at least five complete disasters attempting this sort of deck before I even consider it’s not a very good strategy, solely because of this one fantastic experience. It would be easy for anyone to read this and nod their head, saying how they can plainly see that it was all the result of good luck, but will you say the same thing about your own draft when everything goes perfectly? What about when you draft the same deck you always do and it collapses in every game?

Part of what gives Magic such lasting appeal is the amount of variety in decks and archetypes. Not because players enjoy playing twelve entirely different decks, but because they settle on one strategy as Their Thing, and play it at every opportunity in every format, and if there’s nothing close to it in a certain format, then that format obviously sucks and is no fun.

Cube is another example of how, as Magic has aged, the community has obtained more and more power in designing their own experiences. When Magic was brand new and everyone was bad, all players were able to control was what colors they played (since picking two colors and playing every card in those colors was the best way to get enough cards for a deck). Then, when people bought way more cards than the designers of the game assumed they would, Deck Design became a possibility; players controlled not just the plays made within a game, but what game pieces they had, and that was a crucial step forward in game design. Years passed, and the large number of players and cards necessitates separating Magic into “type one” and “type two;” now players could control what cards other people would be playing, and go into tournaments knowing roughly what to expect. More and more formats followed, obviously, but Cube is the first way to play that puts power previously allocated only to Wizards in the hands of players: Cube isn’t really a format, but a structure for people to design their own formats. The designer of a specific Cube chooses what aspects of Magic to include or disregard, and if that designer doesn’t like a certain strategy, playstyle, or card type, it may as well not exist for the purpose of that Cube. The designer gets to unilaterally revise the history of Magic to their liking, and the participants play games from some of the cards they selected which came from some of the cards the designer selected.

When I first visited Seattle about a year ago, I had never played cube before. Then, when I moved here six months after that, it became the default way to play Magic with people I was hanging out with. Cube requires no additional money from people playing, no one needs cards other than the person providing the cube, and it’s perfectly at the intersection of playing Magic because playing Magic is fun and playing Magic to win. I would still go to tournaments, sure, but then I would leave with the miserable feeling that really, I’d have enjoyed myself more if I had been playing cube, which led me to the even-more-miserable realization that I, Jesse Mason, have become that thing I’ve been trying to escape, trying to overcome, trying to be better than for the last dozen years: I have become a casual player. I am no longer interested in trying to qualify for the Pro Tour, because I am not currently good enough to play on the Pro Tour, and becoming that good would require hundreds of hours of honest-to-god work, and the idea of doing that much work sounds dreadful, and if I’m going to spend that much time slowly learning more and more without really enjoying it then maybe I should use that time getting a better job or something.

So that’s what has brought me here: writing about Magic, a tournament report about six games played online, and I didn’t even play the games. Because we all must find, within the things we claim to enjoy, what it is we actually enjoy about them, and sometimes we have to dig pretty deep.

you will never see the whole picture: why hotline miami is one of the most important games of the decade

In game reviews, it’s expected that the reviewer goes from one aspect of the game to the other (eg gameplay, graphics, sound, etc), like they’re going from level to level collecting the plot devices in order to get to the final boss (in this case, Summary Of Game). Hotline Miami is a game that integrates each of its parts so beautifully that nothing in it can be discussed on its own; it is a small, simple, beautiful, horrific, fun, frustrating, intelligent, twitch-inducing, jaw-dropping game that, if it supported a controller, would have made me throw mine through the window and decapitate someone in the building next to mine. Thankfully, keyboards are less effective projectiles.

JG Ballard said that “there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.” Similarly, it’s so far been impossible to make a perfect high-budget (“AAA”) game. The closest things to perfect games in the last ten years have been comparatively small games that achieved something holistic that no big games could: Portal was a brilliant, engaging, simple concept and showed how games could make truly great (and funny) stories that couldn’t have been made in any other medium. Hotline Miami achieves something similar.

From the intro screen one gets when they first open the game, Hotline Miami throws its aesthetic in the player’s face: pixel-art style in neon colors, like if the first Grand Theft Auto (a common point of reference for the look of the game) had been dipped in glow sticks; a title screen with text that gently rocks back and forth; and burbling synths. The player starts a new game, and a bearded man says “I’m here to tell you how to kill people.”

I killed a lot of people in Hotline Miami. I threw knives at them, I smashed their heads in with crowbars, I shot them point-blank with shotguns, I mowed them down with assault rifles. The first time I executed a knocked-out enemy (necessary, because he would have stood up and shot me within a couple seconds), I was genuinely shocked at the mass of blood that shot out of the half of his head that remained. This is part of what makes the game’s “retro” aesthetic so effective: it’s combined with ultraviolence in a way that we could barely conceive of in 1989 (the year of the game’s setting, the heyday of pixel art when it was necessary rather than purposeful, and my birth). It may, in fact, be the most brutally violent game I’ve ever played.

The game’s feel is more than pixels and blood, though. Just as the title screen, and the talking heads of characters, wobble back and forth drunkenly, so does the entire level as the player walks through it. Rather than the entire screen being filled with the level, there is always a shifting border of color (red, purple, blue) framing the action. The action parts of the levels are soundtracked by uptempo, retro-analog dance music (just like the game’s graphics, none of it is from the era of the game’s setting, but it calls back to it while improving upon that material); as soon as the player kills the last enemy in a level, there is a synthetic whooshing followed by a shifting tone that sounds like drunken tinnitus. The player then has to walk through the piles of bodies they left behind as they walk back to their car, which is such an obvious-sounding and simple twist on level design in ultraviolent games that I’m shocked no previous game had already made it famous. When the player goes back the protagonist’s home to begin the next level, it is accompanied by the date, then a slow fade onto the player’s character, and accompanied by songs that are slower, vaguer, half hangover, half dirge.

The official tutorial part only lasts 30 seconds or so, but the real learning takes a lot longer. A familiar aspect of modern games is how they guide the player slowly through new mechanics, giving them to the player one at a time with a detailed guide to use them before throwing them into a specific area where they must use that specific mechanic in order to progress. Hotline Miami, though, has only a few things the player can really do (move, pick up weapon, attack with weapon, throw weapon, execute enemy, take human shield… and that’s the definitive list, as far as I can tell), but a seemingly infinite number of ways they can be combined. The game doesn’t tell you how to do these things, but just like you were really a mass-murdering assassin, you figure them out as you go along. Unlike real life, though, you will die a lot and try over and over.

This is one of the defining aspects of the game: dying repeatedly. The player enters a room, dies instantly, presses R to restart, dies instantly again, figures out how to kill the first guy without dying, does so, progresses to the next room and dies instantly, presses R to restart… on and on until the player’s timing is honed to perfection and they can do the level flawlessly, because performing at any level below “flawless” leads to instant death.

Every enemy dies in one hit. The tradeoff is that the player does as well. This change that would seem to serve no purpose other than making the game impossibly difficult, but it’s so important that it changes the genre of the game entirely: with a standard health bar, Hotline Miami would be a rather dull shoot-‘em-up, but when death can come from an offscreen enemy’s stray booger, everything has to be perfectly planned and executed. Hotline Miami is an action-puzzle game, where the player has to figure out some way (and there are an infinite number of ways, in most cases) to progress through the level, then have the skill to implement that plan, then the improvisational ability to change the plan when an enemy reacts in an unexpected way.

Puzzle games are expected to be thought-intensive games where the player can sip their latte while thinking, and action games are generally meant to be played in a thought-bereft way that, personally, lets me devote the unused brainpower to thinking about what I’ll have for dinner and whether one needs to be British to effectively rhyme something with “rubbish.” Hotline Miami’s integration of these two genres consumes me so completely that thoughts unrelated to it can barely enter my mind; I involuntarily yell “FUCK” when I die on the last enemy in a difficult level, despite it being 2am and I live on a crowded and non-soundproof floor. I have had more emotional ups and downs due to this game than I have from most relationships. When I exit out of the game, my feeling mirrors that of the character after completing a mission: in a haze, drained, relieved, and wondering what just happened in the last few hours.

The difficulty is the only reason I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this game to everyone. There’s no way to get around it, there are levels that feel borderline-impossible. The only thing stopping me from recommending the designer of the final boss fight kill himself is the fact that he designed the rest of the game. For anyone that can muscle past the extreme difficulty, though, it deserves at least one playthrough. It was the best game I played this year.

The “plot” of the game is discussed below. If this review has convinced you to play it and you haven’t already, I’d advise not reading further until you’ve finished it.
Okay, so you’re this… guy? And there are people who talk to you that, chances are, do not exist, because they’re also the masks you put on, and you get calls telling you where to go, so you go there and kill people, and you see the same retail employee at every place you go after the said killings, and then after a while you start seeing things that definitely aren’t real and then you are shot maybe? And you don’t die, except later in the game you…

Okay, maybe the spoiler warnings were unnecessary, because the plot of the game makes basically no sense. And I’m alright with that, because it all adds to the general “haze” feeling that I get when I play the game. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but I’m sure invested in getting further.

Gamers, and nerds in general, when faced with a complex plot such as this one, have a tendency to look for minutia in order to “solve” the plot; they tend toward works like Fight Club (and, uh, Spec Ops: The Line) that, at the end of the work, have some sort of big reveal that explains every single aspect. If that doesn’t happen, they try to make some all-encompassing theory (usually by taking tiny aspects and basing everything off those) anyway. The attempts at this that I’ve seen for Hotline Miami don’t really make any sense, either. What’s much more interesting is looking at the Big Themes contained.

At the end of the game, we’re shown that there are a couple guys who created the phone calls on their own, because they felt like it and it made them some money, and there was no meaning beyond that. This is who, indirectly, teaches the main character to kill. They seemed to be pretty simple metaphors for the designers of the game (the game had two main people working on it, as well): they’re just setting up ways for you to go on a killing rampage, and there was no real point to it, but what a ride while it lasted, eh?

People looking for some sort of rock-solid explanation as to What Happened are taking the same path that the biker does, turning over every rock in a futile attempt to understand what’s been going on, and they’ll hopefully end up with the same crushing disappointment upon realizing that there is no secret code, there is no vast conspiracy beneath it all, it’s just been a couple guys fucking with them the whole time. (There’s also a “secret” ending, which I initially thought was stupid and should be entirely ignored, but once I thought of it as a purposefully overly-neat explanation for the sorts of people that want a clean wrap-up, it become much more palatable.)

The plot of the game, then, is another aspect that harkens back to the days of 1989. In this case, it recalls the action games of that era; “kill these people to destroy the Russian mob!” is a plausible NES plot. Those games didn’t need a lot of backstory, exposition, or character development in order to get the player to go around killing people, and their grand denoument would be “THE END.” That’s basically what we get here, but with a lot of fun headfakes and red herrings along the way.

Hopefully in the future, Video Game Studies courses at colleges are common instead of just being a gimmick. If this happens, just like film studies majors watch Rear Window and Peeping Tom because (aside from being great films) they deal with filmmaking as a theme or subtext, two of the first games students should play are Spec Ops: The Line and Hotline Miami.

response to my possibly-ongoing dci investigation

I would like to reiterate that I have absolutely no inside knowledge that I am under DCI investigation. If someone were to tell me that I was under investigation, this would be a blatant violation of DCI policy, and I would immediately turn myself in for violating the Lack of Knowledge Regarding Ongoing Investigations (LOKROI) rules. Not to do so would be a severe offense, and one I take very seriously.

While there have been many wild rumors about things I allegedly said on Twitter that may have contained objectionable language or other unsavory content, I will remind my readers that none of these statements can be conclusively proven to have come from me; Twitter accounts remain vulnerable to many exploits that could allow other people to post statements without my knowledge or consent.

Since I am confident my readers, a smart, capable, and well-educated bunch, I’m sure they understand alternative pleading in law¹. As such, these loathsome comments were not created by my fingers; second, in the alternative, they would be the result of a temporary and justifiable state of mind in the aftermath of certain games that I may have played against certain people.² Who among us has not entered a fragile emotional state after an intense game of Magic: the Gathering³ and wished upon former opponent similar things to the phrase in question of “get a thragtuysk shoved so far up yr buttplace you sneeze beast tokens” (and its subsequent post hoc revisions to include other cards commonly played in the archetype and their corresponding suggested anatomical locations).

While I would never personally stoop to such depths as to verbalize such vile instructions, let alone post them online, I will still take a stand in favor of freedom of expression; in favor of freedom of thought; in favor of the myriad rights that we as people too often take for granted. While it was certainly not me who posted such hateful statements, I will be the first (and hopefully not the last!) to take a stand against their persecution .

“First they came for the douchebags,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a douchebag.”

Yours truly through these trying times,
Jesse Mason
@KillGoldfish

¹ While totally unnecessary for my readers, I’m sure, I’ll include an explanation just as a refresher: a defense “in the alternative” creates a legal fiction wherein the defendant does not acknowledge a certain thing, but creates a scenario in which they do acknowledge that. Consult your bedside law textbooks if my humble explanation is lacking in any way.

² For my detractors and those participating in this witch hunt rubbing their hands hoping that I will slip up and mention the number of these comments (as a sort of admission of guilt), no such luck.

³ All trademarks property of their respective owners. All tweets’ copyright is currently in question and I will claim no ownership of them unless, hypothetically, they were proven to be mine (which would be an inaccurate proof, as I did not make them).

you can't solve magic with data

A short time ago, Wizards changed how Magic Online Daily Event results were posted to mtgonline.com. Previously, every completed event had all 4-0 and 3-1 decklists posted within 24 hours; now, this is restricted to results from one event per format per day.

For my non-Magic Online-inclined readers, I implore you to temporarily suppress your yawns, eyerolls, and faux-masturbatory gestures, because this change speaks to a Wizards ideology bigger than some obscure MODO-related reporting. It is, on philosophical grounds, one of the worst decisions Wizards has made in quite some time. Fortunately, it has next to no direct impact. Wizards has finished some sort of beverage in a glass bottle, seen recycling and trash containers equidistant from themselves, considered their options, and decided to smash the bottle over the head of the closest Magic Online player.

First, to address the tangible impacts this decision does have: all the work that’s been poured into mtgoacademy, puremtgo articles, and the like is devalued, because they can no longer analyze anything but a subsection of the data. When I was actively working on decks and playing in DEs, mtgoacademy was invaluable for seeing different archetypes, variants, sideboard strategies, and linking people to my deckbuilding ouvre and demanding they find five improvements I made over earlier versions of the archetype. Will these data analyses still exist? Sure, but they’ll be notably worse due to Wizards’ change to their reporting.

Before going further, let’s look at the given reason for the change, courtesy of Wizards_Sean on the official forums after someone made a thread after noticing (ie, the change wasn’t announced until after it was implemented):

“In regards to the recent reduced event coverage, this was a conscious decision by the Wizards R&D team that wasn’t made lightly. Ultimately, we feel that publishing every deck list leads to solving constructed formats far too efficiently, resulting in early stagnation that’s not fun for anybody. We still want to show new deck ideas every day and provide insight into the Magic play environment, but we don’t want metagame development to become purely a function of data analysis.”

The easiest way to respond to this is by questioning whether such a minor change reporting a small subsection of Magic tournaments can possibly accomplish their goal of slowing the pace of metagame development; for this to occur, metagame development would have to rely to some degree on Daily Event results posting after every event rather than just some of them. I’m scratching my head trying to come up with a connection here. This is the “easiest argument” because it’s also the weakest form of this line of argumentation, and we can certainly do better if we dig a bit deeper and turn our outrage level up past three.

This Daily Event data is a snapshot in time. Its only pure usage is to show how things were at a certain place and time; it is not a window into the future. People attempting to analyze this data can, with infinite time, perfectly solve the format for that day. But, as anyone who has followed a metagame closely on a week-to-week basis at a time when there are large incentives to do well in it (PTQ invites, large prizes at SCG tournaments, etc), solving last week’s format will not help much for this week’s tournament, because last week’s solution has moved beyond its origin as a solution and become the basic problem for this week’s events. People are playing their decks this week, and they have access to last week’s results as well, and regardless of how perfectly you crafted armor to stop sword thrusts and slashes, that will not help when your opponent shoots you in the head. This is what metagame evolution is, and why reducing the amount of data will not stop the steady progress of technological development: data is definitionally old, and relevant technology is definitionally new.

There’s another term that needs defining, though, and it will certainly be difficult to pin down: “solving formats,” and what a “solved format” is. The consensus^[1] is that a solved format has exactly one best deck, and that playing any other deck is just wrong; the deck’s worst matchup is itself. The canonical examples here would be Standard Affinity (post-Skullclamp banning^[2]) and the most recent true boogeyman, Cawblade. While some people advocated playing other decks during the reign of those, they were proven more and more wrong with each tournament result.

Cawblade rose to prominence during a fairly unique period of time in Standard history: the roughly year-long heyday of the StarCityGames Open Series. With an unprecedented amount of money on the line for week-to-week Standard tournaments that previously had mostly been the domain of FNM and the occasional PTQ season, there came an equally unprecedented amount of work put into playtesting and tuning Standard decks.

Did data speed up this process? Not exactly. To develop the best deck for an upcoming tournament, players have to come up with their own data. Even if it’s publicly known that Cawblade only has a 48.47% chance of winning a match against RUG, that can be safely ignored by players that, from their own results, know that with better-than-average play, deck tuning, and sideboard, it’s more like 70% in their favor. Taking it further, because Gerry Thompson and other people constantly innovating Cawblade had such an advantage deck-wise compared to other people (their Cawblade builds were often categorized by SCG’s Too Much Information column under a subcategory due to large changes to the deck), they never produced any data that could be classified as statistically significant.

At the risk of being dismissive, I’m going to dismiss one of R&D’s arguments: metagame development will never be a function of data analysis, because development is so separate from data analysis by their nature. This leads to a basic truth about Magic: Magic is hard.

Seriously, have you played this game? Have you tried coming up with new ideas, or improving existing ones? Have you tried inventing a theoretical model to explain the game?

There is no mystical way to solve Magic. There is no super-secret system to figure out the game forever. There is no way that data analysis will be the main driving force behind metagame development, because (aside from issues of reflecting the present vs predicting the future) there is too much going on in the data of Magic for anyone to make sense of it. There are no computer models that can say what the big deck will be a month from now, because to have a computer model of something, we have to understand how it works. We do not understand how Magic metagame development works nearly well enough to model it in this way.




¹  If pressed for a source on this, I will cite my butt.

²  This is something people tend to forget, but pre-Skullclamp-banning Standard was significantly healthier than post-. While all the best decks played Skullclamp, there was at least some variety; Goblins, Affinity, and Elf and Nail all had some claim on being quite good, and Goblins probably had the edge. After Skullclamp was banned, Affinity was the only remaining deck, especially since Fifth Dawn became legal at the same time, infamously replacing one headgear with another (Cranial Plating) and actually making the deck faster.

review: the official miser's guide (omg) by michael j. flores

“But anyhow: what can a decent man speak about with the most pleasure?

Answer: about himself.”

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

There are two main things Michael Flores is full of. He is full of himself, and he is full of shit.

The Official Miser’s Guide (or OMG, as he refers to it; since I find this sort of forced abbreviation distasteful, I will call it the Flores Audio/Reading Thing (FART)) is a “30+ day audio program that will help you refine your skills and understanding of competitive Magic: The Gathering.”

One of my go-to criticisms of Flores’s writing has been his constant namedropping, and he makes sure to… not address it, exactly, but sort of mention it offhand. He explains that “anyone who has been railbirding the best for as long as I have—anyone with any kind of a functional IQ, that is—can’t avoid having picked up something useful.”

The truth that it is quite possible to avoid having picked up something useful, just as it is possible to sell a $37 eBook about improving at Magic without containing much useful information for actually improving at Magic.

Flores thinks of himself as an expert in many things: deckbuilding, Magic theory, self-help, hypnosis, Pick Up Artistry, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (don’t worry, we’ll get to those last two), but the area he seems most passionate about is marketing. Specifically, marketing himself. This isn’t something he talks about in detail until late in the book, but he’s a devotee of the sort of ~Internet Marketing~ that boils down to get-rich-quick schemes whose entire scheme is marketing the get-rich-quick scheme; ie, marketing that serves no purpose other than to market itself. This ideology is all over the book, starting from the two-page-long entirely unnecessary story in the first chapter about going to the premiere of Kick-Ass that serves no purpose other than telling the reader how great the book is and how much it will help them.


^{All art by Nick CK using quotes from The OMG}

It also mentions ‘Who’s the Beatdown?’ (with a link to the article) three times. Only one of these times does say it’s “generally considered to be the greatest Magic article of all time,” but don’t worry, he’ll throw that in there nearly every other time he mentions it. Which is frequently. At this point, anyone I meet in person who mentions that article, Critical Mass, Napster, or New York States is going to get punched in the face just in case they’re Flores in disguise.

If it was true that his skill and insight comes from watching Pro Tour-caliber players and seeing what makes them win, then most of the book would be filled with analysis of other peoples’ great decks and great plays. Instead, nearly every example is either about Mike's Friend Jon Finkel, some low-level tournament Flores played in, or a deck Flores designed years ago for someone else to play. There have been so many great players, great decks, and great deck designers, that a genuine discussion about the varying approaches that modern deck designers take to defeat the metagame would be great to read. Instead, it’s all Flores, all the time. Just look at the homework he assigns in chapter 26:

“Compare Critical Mass to a preexisting U/G Legends deck. Name five ways that Critical Mass improves upon the existing U/G Legend deck’s speed or capabilities.”^[1]

Where to start with this. There’s the fact that Critical Mass is only ever brought up either by Flores, or as a reference to his constant mentioning of it; there are much better deck designs to focus on if we want to see how a deck can be made incrementally better over time.^[2]



His namedrops and constant crowing about the greatness of his past decks/articles isn’t because it’s incredibly relevant to the point at hand (it never is^[3]), or even just because of his massive ego. As he comes around to informing us late in the book, it’s all part of a big self-marketing strategy. If he repeats in every article that he’s the best deck designer and that his decks were incredibly innovative and he’s totally won tournaments and he hangs out with the coolest Magic players and his writing is well-received and his dick is definitely NOT going soft, he’ll convince us of those things.

Flores’s constant chest-thumping would be more tolerable if people wading through it were rewarded with good advice for getting better at magic, like the crab meat one receives as a reward for banging on crustaceans with a hammer. Flores’s style is to give some uselessly-vague theory, then illustrate it with a completely non-illustrative example, and provide no general guidelines for applying the theory in everyday gameplay.

His first actual Magic-related advice is that we should pay attention not to whether a theory is true or not, but whether it is useful. He illustrates by talking about the “no wrong threats, only wrong answers”^[4] guideline, then some almost-entirely-unrelated story about Napster, then a couple examples about how we should depart from traditional guidelines such as card advantage and playing instants at end of turn, then the guideline that “[a]ll things held equal, between two or more similar plays, the best play is usually the one that leaves you the most options.”

A simpler explanation for all these theories having easily-noticeable holes and tons of exceptions is that they’re bad theories.

After some not-very-notable review topics, Flores attempts to discuss concepts like a “trump” in a matchup. This could be a useful discussion, but only if he explains how we, as players, can figure out a trump in a specific matchup (or metagame). He does not do this. Instead, he tells us that Mageta the Lion was a trump in Masques Block Constructed, and that Rebel Informer was a false trump. Sure, that seems plausible. So how do we apply this knowledge to our everyday play? What are the heuristics we can use to distinguish a real trump from a false one? We never find that out. I assume that’ll be in the next book.



Flores has a couple Big Theories, and as an example, here’s the Grand Unified Theory of Magic. I’m not being smug when I give it initial capitals and a silly name; that’s actually what he calls it. The explanation:

“The Grand Unified Theory of Magic in its current form seeks to measure by a generic unit of one mana; briefly, this is how much a mana is worth:
● Deal two damage to the opponent.
● Draw one card.
● Put one permanent mana source into play.
● Gain some amount of life; more than three but less than, I don’t know... twenty.
These are about how much market value for these effects cost on playable Magic cards.”

This is so incredibly useless. Not only does two damage to an opponent not equal one mana, two damage to an opponent doesn’t even equal two damage to an opponent, nor does one mana equal one mana. As articulated in WHO’S THE BEATDOWN, one player is trying to control the game, while the other one is trying to end it; two damage to the beatdown is often close to irrelevant, while two damage to the control player is critical, and one mana from the beatdown player can be worth either much more or much less than the control player, depending on the stage of the game. Plus, there’s the fact that this Grand Unified Theory has absolutely nothing to do with combo decks, or decks that are in any way similar to combo decks.^[5]

Flores does a disservice to Magic theory with ideas like these. They are simplistic, nearly impossible to put to use in actual gameplay or deckbuilding, and have more exceptions than they have supporting evidence.



Aside from his inability to teach Magic, there are so many other reasons to dislike this book. We get a few hints early, when he mentions some… non-Magical things:

“It’s the same reason that pickup artists use “peacocking” as a baseline strategy for getting the attention of desirable women. They aren’t concerned about looking silly. They can wear the same khaki pants and button-down oxfords as the next dateless guy leaning up against the bar, forgotten. The pickup artists wear their wooden goggles and neon green cowboy hats because they don’t want to blend in; they want to stand out.”

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the pickup artist (PUA) community is centered around using pseudoscientific psychological tricks and generally acting like an asshole^[6] in order to sleep with women. The basic premise is that if you treat women as something between a calculus problem and a baseball card, you’ll be more successful with them. It should come as no surprise a) that a number of Magic players, unfamiliar with talking to women as if they were human beings, are more comfortable using a an overly-complicated and misogynistic “system” to attract them; and b) that it’s useless. There’s tons of information online about how hilariously awful PUA is, including my personal favorite, the PUA.txt twitter and tumblr.

But the misogynistic fun doesn’t stop there. Late in the book, we’re instructed as a homework assignment to come up with our “perfect average day.” As an example, Flores includes an MP3 of him reading “Samantha’s Perfect Saturday.” It is more horrific than I can possibly describe in text. First, let’s see how he describes it:

“After I put Samantha’s Saturday in front of a couple of extremely good-looking, yet career-focused twentysomethings, one of them literally cried and another said, ‘I wish life could be that cool.’

“Ding!

“That’s when I knew that I had gotten Samantha right.”

Samantha defines herself by her relationship with Sam, and obsessively looks after her appearance to make him happy. She loves shopping. She drinks Cosmopolitans. She makes out with her female friends in order to attract attention from guys. She picks out clothes for herself, but wears different ones based on what Sam wants. The overly-detailed description of her love for Sam is probably one of the grossest things I’ve heard in a while, especially since it’s read by Mike Flores.

“He is her emotional ball of sweat and hair, and big man muscles.”

I admit, I was unprepared for this, despite always expecting the worst from Flores. But this 14-minute MP3 of pure stereotypical misogyny is beyond anything I could have assumed he was capable of. Flores’s idea of the average attractive woman is someone who seems to have no thoughts beyond appearance, her weight, drinking, dancing, and her boyfriend, her boyfriend, her boyfriend. Even Sam gets to play some video games, while Samantha obviously has no idea what those ~silly boys~ are doing with their Playstation. Were it not for modern-day references like that, I would assume it was created in the 1950s as an example to young girls as to the way they’re expected to behave in order to secure a good husband.

What does this bonus MP3 have to do with Magic? Absolutely nothing. Oh, but there’s a male equivalent that he writes about: the guy (named Sam) has a perfect day by winning a PTQ, then receiving a text from “Misty” asking to “hook up.”

Let this be a lesson to all you wanna-be female gamers out there. Let’s leave the PTQ winning to us men, alright? Go back to making out with your friends while we watch.

Of course, Flores’s skills go far beyond gender studies. Let’s take a look at his expert psychological opinions, from Chapter 10:

“Language Lesson Numero Uno: Your unconscious mind can’t process a negative.”

“Don’t know what an embedded command is? Here is a nickel worth of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) training:

“An embedded command is an imperative hidden in a longer clause or sentence. The sneaky notion is that you can “implant” the imperative without your subject knowing it; embedded commands are a favorite technique used by pickup artists (but they obviously have broader applications than just meeting women).”

Will anyone be shocked if I reveal that Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a long-discredited pseudoscience, and that anything he tells us about the mental game of Magic based on it should be ignored completely? At least we’ll always have the phrase “your unconscious mind can’t process a negative,” which is one of my favorites in a long time.



He also reveals that his LOVE MIKE signature is an embedded command to make you like him more.
Some people somewhere paid $37 for this.

Here’s the truth, though: studying mental tricks will barely improve your win percentages, if at all. Despite the legions of examples that he uses to illustrate barely-different cases of tricking one’s opponent, that’s not something that will come up more often in actual gameplay than one player making a huge mistake and the other capitalizing on it.^[7] As someone that is not very good at Magic despite having played for over half my life, improving at the game is something I’d like to do. But reading yet another story about how Pro A totally pulled one over on Pro B doesn’t help me decide whether to take the common removal spell or the uncommon flier in my next draft.^[8]

The final couple chapters don’t even pretend to help the reader win games of Magic. Instead, they’re all about building one’s personal brand. As you might expect from Flores’s self-help/con artist manner of writing and promotion, his advice is given in chapter 29 by telling people the story of how he got where he is, and… that’s about it, really. In the final chapter, after slogging through analysis of his Samantha and Sam perfect day stories, he tells us how to become Twitter-famous.

This book is the product of the most cynical marketing possible; not only does it advise using a fun bit of the Internet solely for self-promotion and saying things that will get you attention rather than saying things that are correct or interesting, but he subscribes to a worldview where everyone is prone to simple psychological tricks.

I’m sure it’s possible to write a book-length guide to getting better at Magic. Such a book would have to be honest with its audience about what it requires to get good: tons and tons of playtesting and discussion and revision and new decks and new hypotheses, all with players better than oneself. Getting better at Magic requires more work than most people aspiring to get good at Magic are willing to put in. This book, though, tries to give players shortcuts around all the hard work necessary, by instructing its readers to instead focus on dumb mental games and inaccurate theories that will help no one.

What is present in this book is either based on pseudoscience, a rephrasing of earlier articles he wrote, an unhelpful version of better articles other people have written, or some combination of the above. Stay far, far away from this book, and stay far, far away from Michael J Flores.

FUCK
JESSE

¹  Is that quote more or less embarrassing than this one?

“Critical Mass represented a leap in technology and the pinnacle of what elite deck designers call THE Deck. Luckily it was unleashed at the tail end of the Kamigawa Block season, with only one Grand Prix and almost no PTQs left on the calendar. Many of you are probably not familiar with decks capable of winning 90% of their matches (Jon Finkel once won a PTQ with a deck he claimed had all good matchups; I only lost three games in that entire PTQ, but two were to Jon, playing for the blue envelope). These decks do exist. They just don’t last.”

You decide. I certainly can’t.

²  Gerry Thompson is the undisputed master of this. How about a discussion of the evolution of Mystical Teachings, when Gerry designed a mirror-beating version that splashed green for Gaea’s Blessing? Or how about the next ten times he designed an even-more-mirror beating version, tuned to beat his previous design? Or what about his work on Cawblade? Or UW Stoneforge in Legacy, during the height of SCG Open tournaments? Someone employed by StarCityGames, who thinks of himself as an expert at observing other players, should have seen one of the best examples of deck evolution and tuning happening right under his nose.


³  Parse the following paragraph and explain to me why this is an “example,” from a tortured bit of writing about how we’re all trying to get to our end goal (represented by “B”):

“For those of us who are theorists and drivers of the ideas that are helping to bring all Magic players closer to B, hopefully we are all adding to and improving our models of the world and how we can think about and improve at Magic. For example, most people think about ‘Who’s The Beatdown?’ as the single greatest Magic strategy article of all time. I wrote that in 1999. To give you some context, I had not yet produced my first US Nationals Top 8 design and was more than ten years out of my first World Championship-winning brew, hopefully the first of many. And while ‘Who’s The Beatdown?’ is very good, so are lots of other contributions, like ‘How to Think About Magic’ or ‘How to Win a PTQ.’”


⁴  Flores thinks this has some validity, but it’s fairly easy to prove it to be useless. I’ve played Storm and pumped the fist when my opponent plays Mogg Fanatic, because Mogg Fanatic was the wrong threat. There is nothing unique about either threats or answers that makes one of them “right” or “wrong” more often than the other one; going further, the classification of some things as “threats” and some as “answers” is wrong itself, but that’s an entirely other article.


⁵  Since the first articles about Magic theory, combo decks have been a bit of a sticking point; something to be handwaved away, or used as an exception, rather than a core part of the theory. While one argument might be that this shows how weird and unusual those combo decks are, I think it instead shows both the weaknesses of these theories and the strength of Magic as a game that it’s so difficult to sum up in some short, easy-to-remember theory. The only theoretical framework that has managed to include combo decks without twisting itself into an unrecognizable mess of exceptions and contradictions is Zac Hill’s Interaction Advantage (a theory that, while many times more accurate than competing theories, is so vague that it can be summarized with “do stuff that wins while stopping your opponent from winning”).


⁶  An example: “negging” a woman by saying something negative about her while hitting on her; ie, insulting her.


⁷  Contrast with Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, who published an excellent article on Channel Fireball about playing lands. This is something that, while rather corner case-y, does have an impact and is something overlooked and under-written-about, unlike the fantastically overrated and overstudied mental tricks that people are occasionally successful with. Does Flores, in this 30-chapter book, have anything to say about playing lands, or other basic mechanical aspects of Magic? Nope!


⁸  By the way, he includes no drafting advice in the book. I assume his advice would be to tell the person passing to you “don’t take the worst card.”