The Big Picture: How WotC Crushes Maro's Dreams

Big Picture: 

Mark wrote https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/big-picture-2022-01-17

Let's dig into this at a high level, because as usual, one section of WotC may have some ideals, but the rest of the company is either not living up to them, or actively working against them, and not in a 'healthy capitalist exploration' way. (extra note: This is not a critique that I want Maro to respond to. This is a critique of WotC. I write this as someone that might, say, be Maro's ally in WotC, who looks at his stated ideals, then the company, and asks, 'okay, so... how do we make it so the company lives up to these ideals that you think are important?')

Mark's Biggest Identified Problems

The Priority Problem/The Wasteful Problem (People are focused on what they see locally, not what is true globally due to all constraints.)

The Contamination Problem (Things that go outside expectations can upset (or delight) people in a non-linear fashion)

The Evolution Problem (Every action causes a reaction)

My critique here is that all of these are really just explaining the evolution problem, and not in a good way. The contamination 'problem' point is a really good one, given his theory about being loved, not liked, but he doesn't connect the two. They also, largely, are dismissive of peoples' concerns in the process, in fact, I would say they are largely attempts to get people to understand that their concerns aren't important. These can all be operationally summed up by 'anything we do will have someone complain, sometimes more than others'. (I don't think the breakouts are worthless: breakouts can be very illuminating, but... this is a lot of the column!) But let's move on from that to the affirmative statements.

Mark's Axioms: these are things he has internalized as true.

1. Magic needs to evolve to live

2. The audience wants different things
   

These are two strong axioms in the capitalistic model. The definition of 'evolve' is super broad, however, and not all 'evolution' is positive. Change is necessary, but how much is not defined in the axioms. All we know is that no change is death in a game that wants to sell cardboard and digital objects directly w/o a secondary market managed by them. (Sidenote: Whether this is true or not, it is also self-serving: If 1 is true, surely you need a R&D department! Score, eternal employment.)

Mark's Guiding Principle + Sub-Lemmas

Design Magic so that each player has the tools to make it the game they love

1. We must focus on inclusion over exclusion.

2. We must be willing to experiment more.

3. We must default to things being playable. 

 4. We must rely on the players crafting what they enjoy.

5. We must generate feedback that helps us.

6. We must understand what hurts the game. 

Okay. I think this is a reasonable framework. I don't want to quibble with it in total, instead, I want to ask 'Is WotC living up to these ideals?' Mark says R&D is, but if the other departments step on these actions, then Magic is in peril no matter what Mark is doing.

First, let's put the first 3 aside. Other people are better at critiquing how WotC lives up to 1 in general than I. 3 is very card specific. 2 is debatable, but Mark sees it as mostly about evolving from the conservative era of card design, so I'm going to leave it be. I'm specifically going to drill down on 4, 5, and 6. To wit:

WotC does not provide players the tools to do 4, especially with respect to digital play or formats. Similarly, they are comically bad at 5 and, subsequently, 6. 

There are so many ways 4 is the case. Here's one: the reserve list. People would like Legacy and Vintage to be playable in paper. WotC/Hasbro as a company is dedicated to making that eventually impossible, and currently extremely difficult.

Here's another: competitive play. Competitive players rely on WotC to provide a framework, since they are the largest actor in the space. They will reply 'but people are free to run their own tournaments!' and ignore the fact that WotC's decisions around competitive play set the baseline for peoples' abilities to run tournaments, their expectations from tournaments, and the network effects (esp. globally) around tournaments. You want to play globally competitive Magic in paper? That power is not in your hands, and WotC doesn't enable it.

Obviously anywhere that 'crafting what they enjoy' intersects with WotC's IP is not on the table. But, like, someone once put together a space themed skin for Magic as a cube, and that got the lawyers in a tizzy. All fanworks are at extremely heavy risk, and fanwork is where love shines through. This level of quashing strikes against inclusion over exclusion, and focusing on love over like.

WotC's creator program and the disappearing million... do I really need to say more there on how that crushes the idea of players crafting what they enjoy?

But all these notes pale in our modern world, because WotC's stranglehold on digital play is absolute. WotC's availability of 'legal' ways to play Magic digitally are constantly depriving people of the ability to craft what they enjoy. Do they want to cube online? Sorry, never will put that in the client. Only in isolated fashions, in small bursts, curated, sculpted down. 

How about running tournaments, casual or otherwise? Tournament software, pairing, etc, is not a secret sauce of WotC. They could make that software open source. They could introduce tagging so that people could 'tag' tournaments with formats, versions of formats, and such of their own design, and they (and their results) would be searchable, growable, relatable. Heck, there is no way to put in a 'format definition' in MTGO or Arena to develop and play your own formats (which would provide WotC some quite interesting data, I'm sure!

All the supporting tooling is similarly... not. They got rid of our ENTIRE play history with no expressed replacement. No API tooling for Arena or MTGO. Ever. Tools to help people read the game on streams are all backchannel. 

And what are people told when they want these things? When they say they love coverage? 'Not important, not worth it, you can't have lots of formats, you can't possibly get rid of the reserve list so vintage and legacy are dead.' No sympathy, no support, no understanding, nothing that makes it sound like 4 is anything but something Maro believes before WotC ignores it.

All of this is nonsense in a world where 4 is seen as important. Like... absolute nonsense. None of this is cutting edge tech. Just places WotC isn't living up to Mark's values. How can you say you're 'relying' on players when you don't let them do the things that are necessary? 

Enough of that. Let's move on to 5. The digital survey batteries about how one plays Magic are laughable. WotC has a history of ignoring people who criticize them in public and there is no indication in the slightest that has changed (if you're friends with people in WotC, you can get feedback to them in private.) They don't acknowledge the contributions of anyone from the outside if there is change. Their attempts to form advisory bodies in any area of Magic fall apart due to, you know, not wanting them to exist and using them as corporate mollification. And the idea that people complain too often is CONSTANTLY used at the highest levels as a reason to ignore any and all feedback. Do I really have to dig back through twitter to show this off? I can.

The note I made about 4 dovetails in here: when WotC tells people what they love isn't important, explicitly, repeatedly, they're cutting off lines of feedback, lines of understanding, and ultimately their ability to get feedback that matters. Driving people away from the game by disparaging what they love is the opposite of everything Maro is speaking towards, but it is absolutely one of the operational models of WotC PR and employees in response to feedback of any sort.

So the failures of 5 lead directly to 6, because you can't understand things you aren't willing to listen to. Even without that, there are huge things in the 6 space that WotC never addresses. Does not having a competitive environment hurt the game? Does selling on Amazon hurt the game (by striking at FLGS selling)? Does having your head of story nixing queer content that had been building for years hurt the game? Does having your pros being told, 'you shouldn't expect to be able to play professionally', being cleared to tell everyone that, and then not addressing that fact for year(s) hurt the game? Does having people writing end of year retrospectives talking about how competitive magic is dying a slow death hurt your game?

Having talked about all these, there is an example where the three areas come together, and attack Mark's primary guiding principle. Think about how all across the board, people who play eternal formats talk about how oppressive/crushing these massive additions of cards to eternal formats were to their identity, to their desire to play, their ability to enjoy what they enjoyed. There is nothing that can be done about that. Forever. There's no 'oh, well, you can just...' No, WotC. No you can't 'just'.  You don't let us have custom formats at any scale. You don't support it in your clients. You don't support it in your reporting software. You don't gather data on it. When it comes to eternal formats, WotC actively chooses to make certain that players don't have the tools they need. No input on cards, no input on bans, no input on format change speed, no ability to test different formats digitally at scale, no card availability for a meaningless subset of cards.

If Maro's theories are correct, my question is, 'Why isn't the rest of the company supporting those goals and, indeed, acting against them?' And that's not a narrow question about just what I like. These examples are, but commander will never be supported in Arena. Being able to draft old sets isn't something you can ever do except on WotC's time scale. Custom cube lists? Not for WotC. Arena APIs are core to all sorts of things, you can see devs asking about them all the time. Arena hasn't taken any significant feedback about its highly criticized economy, so surely the economy isn't important? Or do they just not know how to get that feedback to the right ears?

This is what systems analysis looks like. This is what looking at the guiding principles of one part of a company, and then comparing it to the whole, and identifying where they conflict, and how that either can or won't be resolved, looks like. Maybe Maro's goals are in tension with WotC's goals, and always will be. I don't think he believes that, but WotC... well, they sure aren't living up to them.

7th Saga Manipulation: Bizhawk is... weird part infinity

So 7th Saga's RNG is manipulatable, and I'll describe why some other time. But today I want to talk about Bizhawk's capabilities to figure this out, because Bizhawk is meant to be a fantastic TASing Emulator, and you would think that'd make this easy, but it's... surprisingly twitchy.

The core thing I need to do is 'Execute a series of commands with a simulated controller and determine if I reach my destination without getting in an encounter.' For example, If I know it's 20 steps south, 8 steps west, and 14 steps south to the next town, I need to do those things and see if I'm in an encounter, for every possible starting randomizer position. Okay. So here's the things we need:

- A list of actions to perform in sequence

- A starting point (state)

- A failure condition

- A success condition

- The ability to load all of these things

- The ability to set the controller inputs based on these things

- The ability to detect the failure condition

- The ability to detect the success condition

The list of actions: so Bizhawk supports a movie format called BK2, as well as a generic thing called a 'mnemonic string' that is a list of all the inputs across all the controllers for a frame. Perfect! I just assemble a sequence of those across all the frames. A bit painful, but fine if done manually. Except... in current versions of Bizhawk, you can't use those to set controller inputs. The developers have an opinion about this: https://github.com/TASVideos/BizHawk/issues/2525 . Why would you use this in the middle of a normal movie? Ugh, okay. So to make this work, I have to record and load a movie and THEN I can set the inputs, and ignore the movie inputs. That's not so bad. If I do more rom hacking I can disable encounters and get clean walk movies.

Okay, a starting point. So you can do savestates, right? This should be a piece of cake. Wait... you can't use any other savestates when a movie is loaded? Hrm. Oh, there's savestate-anchored movies, you can just... wait, they're different types of save states? Alright, fine. So how do I make-- you can't save a memory save state using LUA, the scripting language for Bizhawk, to the file system, without making a movie. So we're back to Movies. If I create a movie with a specific anchor point (manually starting its recording at the right frame), then if I load that movie, and then save that state to memory, then I can load it from memory to repeatedly iterate.

GREAT. Alright, so surely I can load or create a movie in an automated fashion, right? I think you know where this is going: nope! You can do neither. You can detect if a movie is loaded, and query the loaded movie's input data (but not its savestates directly), but you cannot load a movie automatically. Command line parameters? Alright. 

This is very weird to me. There are objects you can create but not save (memory save states), objects you can create but not use (mnemonic strings), objects you can load but not use (movie save states), and all of this to... run a for loop over a list of actions. I get this is a volunteer project, but... the story of how this came to be has to be truly, truly fascinating.

Twitter Expansion: Mislabeling Entitlement in Magic

This is an expansion of a twitter post thread I started at https://twitter.com/mechalink/status/1200445054898323457

Before I get into this, a note: there are other ways people walk their life through Magic. This, however, reflects my experience and frustrations, and I think it is an accurate way of describing what Magic, in particular, can do to your mindset, and how it doesn't match the model of entitlement.

So, the core thesis statement, stated in the second tweet: The core distinction: 'entitlement' as generally used is when a system tells you you deserve something, and then something outside the system doesn't satisfy that. In Magic, the system tells you you deserve something and then the system denies it to you for some opaque reason.

For example: when we say someone is 'entitled' by going to a store and asking for special treatment, or complains because they get two ponies instead of one, or doesn't see why poor people don't need help, because they did it all themselves, they didn't need it.. those all involve the system they live in telling them the world is like their model, and then the rest of the world pushing back and saying 'hey, no, that's not how it works', because that isn't how it works. Notably, this is a static model: it isn't someone learning and growing, or changing. They have a fixed model of the world, as given by their experiences, and the conflict is not because they're changing, it's because they're wrong.

In Magic, we are dealing with something different, and it's importantly different in several ways. The most classic entitlement people claim players have is 'people feel entitled to success'. As if there was one system telling them 'you will succeed!', a reality that says 'you aren't necessarily going to succeed', and these stubborn people saying 'I deserve success!'

That's not how this goes down. It's not even close. Let's lay out all the pieces.

1) The system telling them they will succeed is the toxic positivity and hype put out by other players, the community, and WotC. Here are a non-comprehensive set of sample statements that are all given out, unconditionally and unironically, in the magic community and on coverage:
- If you work hard, you will just get good results.
- If you keep trying, you will improve.
- If you play with better players, you will learn.
- Pros are proof that anyone can do well at magic if they try hard.
- Random people 8-0ing at the PT is proof that the game is approachable and learnable at a high level by anyone.
- This person just never loses.

2) This system is compounded by the gambling-based reward mechanics in place in Magic, giving out small successes and lots of failures in just enough of a cadence to keep one hooked. Striving. This is the closest Magic gets to telling you 'you aren't necessarily going to succeed' directly, but it's a derived message, not a direct one.

3) At some point, maybe after some moderate success, hard work, practicing, a person may see all of these messages, look at themselves, and go 'wait a minute. i'm not succeeding in the way I am being told that people succeed. something is wrong'.

This is the crux point. What could be wrong?
1) The system messages are wrong
2) You aren't satisfying the system messages
3) You are satisfying the system messages, but are unlucky

All three of these are logical conclusions, but lead down different paths.

'The system messages are wrong': trying to go down this route in public, when you are not established, is met with serious social censure. Whether it be rejecting toxic positivity, trying to bring up the role of variance in Magic, or criticizing system design choices, the pushback is high. If you want to hold this (accurate) position, you have to be prepared to suffer. There is a very narrow route you can walk to state how much variance is in Magic, and it typically depends on being recognized as being 'ingroup' not 'criticizing' (and  'ingroup' usually means 'high level pro'.)

'You aren't satisfying the system messages': this is the socially approved route. You aren't trying hard enough. You aren't practicing well enough. And to some degree it may or may not be correct, depending on each person's circumstance. But the fact is that once you reach a certain threshold of capability, each person's year in Magic is dominated by variance in the results they get (although skill plays a significant factor, it is not sufficient to explain the differences in results). If you're well known enough, you can even state that out loud without being yelled at. (See above.)

'You are satisfying the system messages, but are unlucky': If you realize that the first message isn't socially approved, but the second one isn't actually correct (because you are, in fact, trying as hard as other people in your group, but not succeeding), this is the tar pit. The Levine Trench. And it is a trap, and it can cause people to stagnate. To not try as hard. To stop trying at all.

But look at how we got here: we didn't get here because we thought we 'deserved' to win. We got here because 1) the system told us this is how it works: hard work is rewarded 2) I am working hard 3) I am not being rewarded 4) it must be luck 5) I am angry at unspecified sources. This is a completely valid logic chain from 1 to 4, and it only exists because the system _itself_ feeds back onto you if you try to make another conclusion than 4. We even see this from high level players when they have bad years. They have to ask themselves 'am I working hard enough? is my process correct? or was this just variance?' They are smart enough to not be very angry in public, though. But the anguish is real.

Note how different this is from entitlement. Entitlement, and things like it, say 1) the system told us how it works: hard work is rewarded. 2) I am being rewarded 3) therefore I must be working hard 4) people who are not rewarded must not be working hard 5) how dare you not reward me in this situation. The logical flaw here is way back at the jump between 2 and 3: a person who gets rewards, and is told 'yes, you deserve rewards', then assumes that rewards will come to them in the future.

While there are similarities, there is a major difference in how it comes about. This is why I say that peoples' obsession with 'entitlement' as the way of framing things in Magic is not a good/accurate model. But things get more complex yet.

I talk about the 'unlucky'  message, and the simplest case, but there is an immediate more complex case that looks more like entitlement, and I think that is where the confusion really comes into play. This is specifically when one has some success, and then can't get any more success. Now you have the chance to believe that you must be working hard enough because you are rewarded, and then suddenly you aren't rewarded and are given the chance to say 'hey, world, how dare you not reward me'.

The important difference here is that this transition happens while you aren't changing the amount of time you're working, so the logical problem isn't that you wrongly assumed you were entitled to success: it's that you believed the system proposition that your success was directly related to your hard work! Once the hard work then is shown to not be paying off like you thought, you're in the trap.

Oh, sure, it's relevant, but hard work only puts you in the position for luck to carry you over the finish line. (And it's also all you can control, so, you know... you gotta put in the work.) But the system says it's really all the hard work, so when you get one success, but can't get any more, in this case, it's Levine Trench time: frustration, anger, confusion. Because, dammit, this is frustrating, angering, confusing.

So if this is somewhat persuasive, what does this mean we should do? Strangely, it means we should do what we should always do: when you find someone who's struggling like that, but clearly still trying, treating them like they're innate garbage is the opposite of a learning mindset: it's a static mindset. Even if your message is 'they need to change', they need warmth. They need comfort. They need support. They are suffering. It's not necessarily about entitlement, structurally and logically, and peoples' insistence on that framework does a good job of saying 'this is bad', but it does a horrible job at helping people understand and climb out.

Discussion: GerryT's article on growth - http://old.starcitygames.com/articles/36074_Social-Currency.html

Here, Gerry self-identifies as entitled. But note his framework for what entitled means: "A sense of entitlement came from thinking the world "owed" me something because of how bad my childhood was." He identifies entitlement as coming from a different place than 'being frustrated by lack of success'. He came to Magic entitled, in his view. This is not a case I can inherently talk to: if someone comes to something entitled, the way they're going to act is different. But you can diagnose that across their action set, in theory.

This article, though, also talks to how Gerry dug himself out. He found friends, he found understanding, he found warmth. Even in a case that is arguably worse than the one I'm describing where Magic makes you frustrated and miserable, he dug himself out with the same rough toolset I recommend.

He talks about how one of his flaws was how you can't see why people are doing what they're doing, and that's exactly what's going on when you respond to someone struggling by saying 'you're just so entitled'. You're telling them their story.

He identifies three things, not one, as reasons why he was doing what he was. That is not going to be addressed by just saying 'you're entitled'. It's not a complete or accurate analysis, and to reduce it to entitlement is not just to tell them their story, it's to tell them their story is just one thing.

If you want to learn the lessons of Gerry's article, then I think framing things as 'if you struggle with losing you're just entitled' is simply not how you're gonna get there. It doesn't match the model, it doesn't provide you the tools to get out, and it doesn't follow the pattern of action he identifies as healthy.

A Fractional Life

The last year has been one where I lacked focus in Magic. Why? Numerous reasons: I've never slept this badly for this long in my life, work has been quite involved, I'm recovering from significant burnout after years of going hard at Magic for minimal reward, but I think one thing has to be at the top of the list.

The way that WotC incentivized people to play this year, competitively, was a complete departure from the last... roughly 13 years since the original creation of the Pro Club. Even Planeswalker Points Season 0 wasn't as much of a departure as this, although it was a departure. And I spent the previous 7 years of my life learning and training to work in that system.

First, a quick history lesson (I can do a longer form of this if people care, but I spent 7 years talking about Magic Organized Play and almost nobody cared). SO. The changes around Planeswalker Point Season 0 and 1 were focused around dealing with Magic's growing popularity. Why? In the 2011-2012 time frame, GPs were getting too big for WotC's tournament software to handle. PTQs started to grow to the point where stores didn't, or couldn't, reasonably schedule proper spaces for them, and had to figure out how to deal with the world where maybe 100 people showed up, or maybe 355 people. Also, the world is large and how do you deal with countries that aren't the US?

The response to this by WotC was to cut invites from GPs from top 16 no matter the size, to top 4, top 8 if the GP had than 1200 players, and put those into more PTQs around the world, as well as to simplify the pro point system to its platinum/gold/silver structure and remove rating-based invites. At the time, Helene B. (rest in retirement) stated that the rough idea was to get 30 plat, 50 gold, 70 silver, with 400 person PTs (the PTs at the time were creeping on 600, 'too much'.) The bye system at PTs was moved from rating to Planeswalker points based: after a short season 1 that had pros freaking out about the ease of getting byes, a 1500 per quarter line was set for 3 byes that was suitably insane to try to reach (I did, but... yeah.)

Over time, Silver gained an invite, RPTQs (32 per season) came into place to further allow for growth dealing with PTQs, a cap on GP attendance came into place to deal with burnout in the 2012-2013 era, and when we started seeing GPs above 2000 people, eventually WotC added the '13-2' qualifier line. This era also had special invites that were 'near-miss' invites, explicitly stated to be so that people who got close didn't get discouraged. This was obviously arbitrarily applied: people who were known getting the invites, people with the same level of near-miss ignored. Also, the number of byes available got cut down to 2 and made yearly, so as to be less punishing (Helene responded to me at the time saying 'see, we listened to your criticism!' so... monkey's paw.) After 2013 or so this system as described was more or less stable.

Going to GPs in this era was always pretty rough when you didn't have pro status. I got a couple GP top 8s, but never got status. Finally, after much pleading and arguing, we finally got Bronze (see: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WqCYww-TJhnzhIz7j-iMVeufAzfc9L7Tg-0yg6_k0kc/edit for the detailed argument) the year after it really would have helped me. It was finally possible (although not ideal) to claw your way into benefits from either the RPTQ or GP path for a year or two.

And then, kablooey. Back to a single-layer PTQ system, with GPs as bigger PTQs, and the MPL.

The losses caused by this change were significant to me in multiple ways, and not just because of the structural rewards that were no longer available: there were second order effects. I first went to GPs because it was the only way I could interact with higher level players for certain. It was, and still is, one of the biggest pieces of advice people give on how to improve at Magic: play with better players. In the era right before GPs grew, it was even possible to get money drafts going and really get some dedicated time with people who would soundly beat you, and give you the chance to learn the whole way.

In the new system.... the best players are not incentivized to play against you, at least in paper, at GPs. They certainly won't travel to them. If you can catch them on Arena, maybe you get a small chance of it. But... Arena. The latest Table for 2 Podcast episode (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/anchor-podcasts/table-for-2-an-mtg-arena-podcast/e/65360394?autoplay=true) has Hayne talking about how he doesn't get to see his friends anymore because of the new PT structure. That's been the case for a year (and he knows that well): I only see him when going to a GP in Canada, or a GP alongside a PT. The high level pro and mid level pro community has been fractured by this change, simply because they no longer attend the same tournaments most of the year.

And then there's Arena. Arena competitive play is a huge structural change. No longer can you engage in focused practice, no longer can you practice limited in a way close to how it will be at GPs and PTs. It's all about a massive grind which has never been my bag, except in limited. For some people this works, and I've seen some people brought back to the game with it. But for me, this is... not what I know how to do well. Playing online for me is a necessary evil, a draining exercise in not being able to connect with any humans. Whether this is good for Magic or bad is a discussion for another time, but it wasn't good for me.

Okay, well. After a year of chaos and lack of communication, we've got something 'new' for our esport. A very complicated upper tier, and a middle-lower tier which is... PTQs that qualify you for 3 regional Players Tour qualifiers, and fractional invites available at GPs which carry between seasons.

That's right: they spent a year to figure out a very rudimentary version of the same system they wanted to try 7 years ago. To say this is a bit insulting is to say that Oko was a bit playable: peoples' entire lives were changed this year, with regards to Magic, with regards to their ability to be semi-professional players, and not only was it never acknowledged, now we're back on a skinnier version of the old system? Yeah. Yeah.

So now we're looking at a brand new year, where what I've trained myself to do is back in play. Somewhat. So here's to a year where maybe being practiced at tournament play is worth just enough to get some Players Tour action.

PS: WotC, you want someone who cares about organized play to give you another angle of insight? *mimes 'call me' motion*
PPS: Call people who are from other countries too, I'm not an expert in the other countries' situations.

Depression Lies... but where's the lie? An analysis of my depressive spirals.

CW: This is about depression, and specifically my depression. If you have responses about how to defeat these lies, I am willing to hear them. But understand: this is not a post I make lightly, and these are not lies that are easily defeated. That is the point of the post. If you want to engage with me on this directly, be prepared. If you, instead, want to engage with this by, in fact, doing the things I comment could actually defeat the lies below, without actually engaging with this? That'd probably be a much less stressful use of your time.  Here we go.

So there's a truism in the mental health community, and it's not wrong: Depression Lies. It's supposed to get you to realize and understand that the negative things you are thinking are a function of the depression, and not innate, reasonable thoughts. The way you are supposed to combat this is by asking 'learner' questions, trying to attack depression's bad logic and lies.

A good example of this is the first step question: a behavioral therapist might ask someone who has an issue, 'If the issue was gone, what would your life be like?' For depression, people might say things like 'I'd get out of bed on time' or 'I'd take a shower' or 'I'd eat breakfast regularly' or 'I'd have friends'.

Then the therapist tells you, 'But you have friends.' And for a moment there's this disconnect, and then you are supposed to realize, 'I do have friends. There is hope. What you want is achievable.'

Self-hating is another good example. You might say 'I hate myself'. Why do you hate yourself? Is it because you forgot to brush your teeth? Nobody should hate themselves for not brushing their teeth. What you mean is 'I'm not happy I didn't brush my teeth today.' Then you can take steps to resolve the actual problem, and get rid of that negative self-destructive speech.

I have a problem, though: my depression is good at lying. Very good. And it's had a head start, and a lot of reinforcement. So good that even when I interrogate the lies, they're still mostly true. So I'm going to write down an example of the depressive spiral I am in right now, after going from 7-0 to 7-4 in GP Washington DC 2019, the 'lies' I am being faced with, the truth behind them, and why I am trapped. And why my tactics are mostly on mindfulness and distraction, because I can't defeat the lie.

'Lie 1': I got varianced so hard. Harder than other people get varianced. This is situation normal for me, but doesn't seem normal for anyone else. Therefore, this is going to happen forever, and you should have no hope.

To defeat this lie, there are several options. One of them is, 'well, actually, other people get varianced like you do.' Except if that is true, there's no data I can find to support it. My mulligan percentages are higher than people who I ask at limited tournaments. When people think my deck is good, it does not correlate to a good performance. One might think, 'another variance tiltmonster who just can't see that there's ways to improve'. I've probably played a hundred GPs now. A. Hundred. GPs. I have a lot of data wired into my mind at this point. I've spent a lot of money and time and effort into this game. But yeah, I'm a tiltmonster who doesn't want to improve. </sarcasm>

If I had a reasonable picture of other peoples' variance, and it was as bad as mine, then I could defeat this. But I don't. I'm the only one that has bad beat stories. Nobody talks about it. There's no definition. There's no theory. There's no _practice_. There's nothing other than going 'yep, got screwed again'.

That does not mean I don't look for ways I might have been able to change the game (although depression makes that harder.) But that leads to the second 'lie', which we'll get to in a moment.

Another way to defeat this would be 'well, sure, but it can't happen forever. law of large numbers/regression to the mean, right?' That is a full-blown lie magic players tell themselves. If a coin has flipped tails 100 times in a row, what's the chance the next one will be heads? It's still 50%. There is no 'innate' regression to the mean: that is just a property of systems. The thing is... there's still someone out there who's flipped a coin 100 times in a row and got 100 heads. It can happen. It's unlikely. But just because it's unlikely doesn't mean they're due.

A deck of cards is another good example of this. Every ordering of a 52 card deck is unique. Every one is incredibly unlikely. But there's still an ordering. And once you see one ordering, that doesn't make any of the other orderings more or less likely. There are lottery numbers that are pulled 0 times, and those that are pulled multiple times. Variance owes you nothing, and to expect something out of it is a statistical and logical fallacy. 

So the best I can do with this lie is to say 'Forever is a long time. It's more accurate to say that my variance has been poor, but could go better next time.' An addict's truth if I ever heard one. The problem is that when the first half is unarguable, the second half feels more likely. Hard to defeat that lie, but possible. But let's get to lie 2, because all of this locks into a circle.

'Lie 2': Nobody wants you around. Magic improvement all-but-requires other people, and nobody wants you around. You can't find GP teams. You couldn't find PT teams. You don't room with anyone. You don't get decklists from anyone. You don't go out to dinner like other people do. People won't even talk to you about your own games when they're watching. Of course you're destined for failure.'

 All the absolutes in this statement are the weakest parts. But if you change the absolutes to qualified negative statements... it's just not incorrect as far as I can tell. Nobody interacts with Magic like I do. People say it's the gathering: I'm lucky if I get to 'gather' with 10 people over the course of a GP weekend. I don't get to talk about Magic during the week. When I've tried to put together spreadsheets of analysis, people would say, 'Don't track your draws, don't blame a loss on variance'. Don't tell bad beat stories. Don't have emotional reactions. Blame everything on yourself.

That's suicide. Flat out, that last advice is operationally equivalent to saying, 'Get better or kill yourself trying.' Some people might argue that going to 100 GPs over 8 years like this is pretty close to that, but what're you gonna do there?

As far as I can tell, this lie just isn't a lie. Without ways to improve, without people to support you, without the tools that literally every other long term successful magic player has access to, there's just... nothing I can do to move the needle except bash my head against the wall and hope it breaks before I do.

Here's the thing, though: because nobody wants to talk with me, interact with me, that makes it even more impossible for me to beat Lie 1. How do I have a baseline? Coverage doesn't talk about players scrubbing out, they talk about players winning. About how various people can't lose. Nobody tells me stories. The few factual statements I have about magic players saying 'yup, variance is a thing' doesn't actually defeat Lie 1, because of course variance is a thing. It's a statement of degree, not kind.

A good example of defeating Lie 1 comes in the context of women sharing stories and experiences. Women have shared stories and experiences so that they can realize that they are not crazy for seeing the components of the patriarchy for a very long time. This is not unique to women, everyone shares experiences, but it is particularly notable because it is a case where a large structural problem is visible, and only by sharing it with others can the human mind put it in a context where it's not just them.

You know how nobody talks about bad beat stories? About how nobody quantifies variance? Yeah. You get destroyed by the system and have nobody to help you analyze, and nobody to help you commiserate? Depression is gonna win that battle, because you can't defeat the lie. And then lie 2 leads to lie 3.

'Lie 3': You don't win, you don't seem to improve, you don't have the magic relationships everyone else has, you don't have the magic success other people have, and you keep doing this. You are a crazy failure that should hate himself, because it's obvious your good traits are not enough to outweigh your bad ones, and that's unlikely to change ever. Even if you got lucky, you're in a poor position to leverage it into success, because of how bad you are at this now.'

And that is the lie that cinches the other two together into one incredibly difficult to fight package. Nothing in the statement is false except maybe 'should hate himself'. But what can you put there? The rest of it is as true as I can find it. I can hope for change, I can try for change, but I can't make anyone's reaction to me change. There is no place to find 'self-worth' because self-worth is an illusion: it is always defined in relationship to concepts that are not your own. I mean, in my best year I was top 400 in the world on pro points? I'm somewhere in the top couple thousand now? And it's _irrelevant to everyone_. Irrelevant to WotC, irrelevant to other players, and therefore irrelevant to me.

And so this is why my only effective tactics are distractions and misdirection. Because when I'm in the loop... there's nothing to break the lie. Yes, there are people in the world that care about me: none of them can help me at Magic. Yes, people want me at my job, but there's an incentive structure there that makes that not-fully-true and fragile. I've been fired before, after all.

All I can do is focus on tactical operations, which I am very, very good at nowadays: as long as I'm live in a tournament to achieve a goal, I am able to maintain a tactically functional mindset most of the time. But online? Or when I'm dead? It's a game of 'where's the lie' and it's too hard to shake.

I keep trying to find friends, to find resources, in the hopes that I can break lie 2, thereby breaking lie 1, and thereby breaking lie 3. But... yeah. Yeah. 8 years. 8 years of being told that because I want to commiserate about bad beats, I'm not worth your time. That I obviously don't want to improve. That Magic the Gathering is the greatest game in the world with the greatest welcoming community in the world, except you aren't really welcome, just tolerated.

It's hard to recover from that, even before you throw my issues with organized play in the mix, adding more layers of 'you aren't wanted'. That's a longer discussion.

So there it is. I have no resources or tools to improve, I have no emotional stabilizers, and that means that I can't break the lies, because they're just not lies enough. That's depression for you. Anxiety? Doesn't help here either. But that's a discussion for another time.

High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 4 of ???)

Elaine Chase put forth some interesting changes to how WotC wants to think about the MPL and its tournament invites going forward. The official notice is here, in the second paragraph: https://www.mtgesports.com/news/mpl-adds-janne-savjz-mikkonen-and-jessica-estephan

There's another interview-y article at https://esportsobserver.com/magic-esports-diversify-pro-scene/ that adds to this topic.

The fact that Elaine Chase admits at all that the decision of who is invited to tournaments changes the face of Magic indicates that high-level Organized Play decisions matter a lot. The fact that there is a lot of foment on the internet after this indicates that high-level Organized Play decisions matter a lot. The fact that this is still an amorphous system run strictly on human judgment and biases, and not a set of criteria (even if it in no way resembles the old criteria, because they didn't account for the right things) also matters, because human biases are known to be racist, sexist, classist, etc. High on recency bias too.

This is also not the first time WotC has used invites that people sneer at as 'diversity invites' for its major tournaments: there was a time in the 2011-2013 era when people got invited for both community and 'you got to multiple PTQ finals but didn't close, so here's an invite' patches to the system's holes. I made a note about this in my post about Autumn's success here: https://mechalinkjones.blogspot.com/2019/03/high-level-organized-play-decisions.html

Whether you like it or hate it, this stuff matters, and that means WotC, and everyone who cares about Magic, should take real time to analyze the system, and not just when it changes.

High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 3 of ???)

Ari Lax's post on the soul of competitive Magic is a huge point on this topic, and is worth a read. After you read it, I want to make a few additional notes.

https://armlx.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-death-of-competitive-magic-via-mpl.html

Ari mentions new Silver as a 'canary in the coal mine'. People might not understand why this is, exactly. (I was only barely around before 'PWP Season 0'.) At the beginning, the very beginning, of the Pro club, documented here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/welcome-pro-players-club-2005-05-02

There was no 'invite to only some of the PTs' tier. You went from no invites, to all invites. They moved there to being 8 tiers at some point, but I can't find documentation on the exacts of that (despite me knowing that fact beforehand.) Silver was, therefore, apparently the first time that pro status didn't mean invites to all the tournaments. (EDIT: Ari reached out to me to make this note: 'The old 8 level system had both Silver (L3 was 15 Points for 1 PT invite) and minor rolling (if you got 1.5x Gold between last Season and the first 2 PTs of next season, you got the last half year as Gold).' His tweet is here. The arc here remains more or less structurally the same: rewarding progress and success and incentivizing increased effort in achievable ways vs... not.)

That is fine-ish though, because after Silver started to exist, there were still ways to parley your work in Silver into higher statuses (the biggest of them being the double-triple PTQ, where winning an event would get you enough points to get you silver for this year, and then silver for next year's first PT, the most valuable PT of the year.)

The cycle system's Silver destroyed that, which is what Ari is referring to as the 'hook'. In the cycle system, once you burned a Silver invite, it was burned for the next 3 quarters as well: being silver in those quarters actually got you stone nothing. So as Ari says, then you fall out of Silver and there's nothing.

This is a subtle-ish change, that not everyone caught at the beginning of the Cycle system, but Ari identifies it as key here, and it's worth dwelling on its details for a few moments.