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.
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Monday, December 2, 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, June 16, 2019
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, March 2, 2019
High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 2 of ???)
Craig Wescoe is a long-time member of the Magic community, competing at the highest levels with his own style, while making content and writing articles for a decade. White Weenie has its hordes of dedicated fans, and Craig has been a standard bearer for that, while managing to stay on the train for the past few years. He's on the edge of what was Hall of Fame consideration. Last weekend at the Mythic Championship, a random person walked up to talk about White Weenie decks, and Craig invited him to dinner. Seems good.
However, he effectively announced his retirement from all that in his weekly article on TCGplayer.
While his ministry clearly matters to him (and has for as long as I've known him), to believe that this choice was made without thinking about the current and future state of Organized Play is foolish. Maybe the MPL was a plus, because the money was great. Maybe the lack of pro status was a minus. Only he knows for sure.
But what we do know is that there's no support for him in the system as stands. This was clearly a set of decisions which did not allow Craig to decide to continue playing the way he did. White weenie players will have to find a new standard bearer.
However, he effectively announced his retirement from all that in his weekly article on TCGplayer.
While his ministry clearly matters to him (and has for as long as I've known him), to believe that this choice was made without thinking about the current and future state of Organized Play is foolish. Maybe the MPL was a plus, because the money was great. Maybe the lack of pro status was a minus. Only he knows for sure.
But what we do know is that there's no support for him in the system as stands. This was clearly a set of decisions which did not allow Craig to decide to continue playing the way he did. White weenie players will have to find a new standard bearer.
High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 1 of ??)
(I ran through this already on Twitter, visible here , but I'm going to note it here again as well.)
Recent winner of Mythic Championship #1 2019, Autumn Burchett, stated in their interview that Melissa deTora's success at PT Gatecrash in 2013 was a core inspirational moment for them.
Melissa's invite to that tournament was a community invite, not one given by the organized play system of the time, which had been shrunk down and made harder to get qualifications in, or to advance ones' position in.
The inspiration which helped Autumn would not have existed if the organized play system at the time had not allowed for such special invites (which is largely the case now).
Additionally, Autumn was talked about on PT coverage as a veteran of the GP circuit. I know for a fact they were Silver as of PT 25 last year. Those things do not exist in the modern MPL world. Neither could Autumn be a national champion.
So WotC celebrated Autumn's victory, while moving full-force into a system which would have made Autumn's success far less likely, maybe even impossible, and the inspiration wouldn't even have existed if WotC hadn't made an exception so many years ago.
Recent winner of Mythic Championship #1 2019, Autumn Burchett, stated in their interview that Melissa deTora's success at PT Gatecrash in 2013 was a core inspirational moment for them.
Melissa's invite to that tournament was a community invite, not one given by the organized play system of the time, which had been shrunk down and made harder to get qualifications in, or to advance ones' position in.
The inspiration which helped Autumn would not have existed if the organized play system at the time had not allowed for such special invites (which is largely the case now).
Additionally, Autumn was talked about on PT coverage as a veteran of the GP circuit. I know for a fact they were Silver as of PT 25 last year. Those things do not exist in the modern MPL world. Neither could Autumn be a national champion.
So WotC celebrated Autumn's victory, while moving full-force into a system which would have made Autumn's success far less likely, maybe even impossible, and the inspiration wouldn't even have existed if WotC hadn't made an exception so many years ago.
Series: High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 0)
So this is something I've done on twitter a lot over the years, but I think it's time to be a little more rigorous about it. The entire time I've been involved in Magic at a competitive level, Organized Play structures have changed. From the pre-PWP times, into Planeswalker Poinnt Season 0, the big mushy middle after that, and through to the modern MPL era. One problem that I have is that people largely don't seem to care about these changes unless they have obvious, immediate effects. One example of that was 'Pay the Pros' and how everyone could immediately realize what the problem there was. But there's been a dozen or more changes in my time. And yet, nobody really seems to care. So I'm going to write a series. Every time something comes up which highlights the ways in which Organized Play changes matter (the larger changes have usually been bad, the smaller ones generally good), I'm going to add a post to this series. This post is going to be the thesis/mission statement, which is thus:
Given that Magic Players value community, that it takes a long time to build up sufficient skill to play competitively, and that Magic is an incredibly high variance game on an individual competitive level, even seemingly small organized play changes will have relevant effects.
Additionally, WotC and its representatives, being a part of the community, will praise things which they, themselves, disincentivize via their organized play decisions. This is worth highlighting because it indicates how their Organized Play decisions actively cut against their proclaimed ideals.
As a lot of these things happen as background, many people are able to dismiss them as 'just whining' or 'just an exception' or 'they chose to play, so they don't get to complain', or 'it's still hard/easy/doable so it's the same'. The goal of this series is to lay out so many examples that people might, finally, realize that what is going on matters. Maybe then we can have real conversations about doing something.
Given that Magic Players value community, that it takes a long time to build up sufficient skill to play competitively, and that Magic is an incredibly high variance game on an individual competitive level, even seemingly small organized play changes will have relevant effects.
Additionally, WotC and its representatives, being a part of the community, will praise things which they, themselves, disincentivize via their organized play decisions. This is worth highlighting because it indicates how their Organized Play decisions actively cut against their proclaimed ideals.
As a lot of these things happen as background, many people are able to dismiss them as 'just whining' or 'just an exception' or 'they chose to play, so they don't get to complain', or 'it's still hard/easy/doable so it's the same'. The goal of this series is to lay out so many examples that people might, finally, realize that what is going on matters. Maybe then we can have real conversations about doing something.
Sunday, February 24, 2019
March-April 2019: The Big Arcs of Competitive MTG Play
As we are mid-transition between systems, every month presents us a somewhat unique puzzle as to what to do as competitive players of Magic: the Gathering. While we are in 'Use Arena to qualify for the Invitational and last RPTQs' month, in February, March opens up a bit more. In this post I'm going to lay out a bit of the landscape for all of us.
Also, we're midway through SCG's first points season. If you want to jump in, either immediately or when Season 2 starts is what you should be targetting. But that's gonna mean modern if you wanna travel. IQs, though, who knows!
The problem with that all that? Arena doesn't support Modern. And the next set comes out the weekend of that Mythic Championship. So if you want to play Modern competitively, the next two months are great. If you don't? Welp... there is Mythic Championship: ESPORTS MODE.
The top 1000 Mythic players on Magic Arena for both constructed and limited in March AND April will qualify for 'Mythic Championship Qualifier 3' Mythic Championship Qualifier 3 will whittle those at-most-4000 people down to 16, which will qualify for Mythic Championship Qualifier 3 (look at the infographic: 52 people total, 32 MPL, 4 other people, and 16 Magic Arena competitors.
This is something a lot of people have missed, that there's two months to qual for the big unscheduled championship. That's demanding. But it's only one month. Maybe if you aren't qualified for Mythic Champs London you can spend April grinding after Moderning all of March, while it's more the reverse if you're qualified: you want to Modern closer to the day of.
Wait, there's more!
I'll be glad to update this if anyone has something significant to add, but right now this looks like the landscape to me. Pro points are still almost live, and if you are live for silver, you absolutely need to hit GP LA, because getting Silver there will get you two quals as per previous guidance given out directly to Ari Lax on twitter (I believe the qual you get out of that is MC Richmond.)
Two Months of Modern
Except for SCG's Legacy in Syracuse March 2-3, we've got modern GPs and SCGs a-plenty. Counting them all down, GP Las Angeles on the 2nd? LASCG Regionals on the 9th? GP Tampa or Bilbao on the 16th? SCG Philadelphia, also the 16th? 1/3 of the SCG Team Constructed in Cincinnati on the 23rd? Magicfest Calgary on the 30th? SCG Cleveland on April 6th? GP Sao Paulo on April 13th? GP Yokohama April 20th? All leading into a Modern Mythic Championship on the 28th? Modern is the headline format of the next two months, except for two Legacy events, one by SCG, and one by WotC.Also, we're midway through SCG's first points season. If you want to jump in, either immediately or when Season 2 starts is what you should be targetting. But that's gonna mean modern if you wanna travel. IQs, though, who knows!
The problem with that all that? Arena doesn't support Modern. And the next set comes out the weekend of that Mythic Championship. So if you want to play Modern competitively, the next two months are great. If you don't? Welp... there is Mythic Championship: ESPORTS MODE.
Esports Mode: Top 1000 (or 4000)
The article laying out the online Mythic Championship is a little bit of a headline-burier, so let's break out the headlines.The top 1000 Mythic players on Magic Arena for both constructed and limited in March AND April will qualify for 'Mythic Championship Qualifier 3' Mythic Championship Qualifier 3 will whittle those at-most-4000 people down to 16, which will qualify for Mythic Championship Qualifier 3 (look at the infographic: 52 people total, 32 MPL, 4 other people, and 16 Magic Arena competitors.
This is something a lot of people have missed, that there's two months to qual for the big unscheduled championship. That's demanding. But it's only one month. Maybe if you aren't qualified for Mythic Champs London you can spend April grinding after Moderning all of March, while it's more the reverse if you're qualified: you want to Modern closer to the day of.
Wait, there's more!
April: Paper Qualifiers for Barcelona, Planeswalker Points for Richmond
Mid-April is when the paper MCQs start for Barcelona, which means Standard's the game again. April 1st is also when the Planeswalker Points threshold starts for Richmond MCQs the following qualifier season, so you need to get in your paper play for 200 planeswalker points in April, May, and June. Maybe you parley the Standard grinding in this month into those MCQs if you're not qualed? 200 PWPs isn't a lot, and there's still 2 more months in that season, so maybe this doesn't really matter, but it's worth being aware of.
The Local Caveat
Local MCQs and IQs are a big piece of their respective organized play structures and they could change the game for you personally. Especially since the MCQs aren't scheduled, I can't really look that far into the future, or help anyone do so. If people get on the ball with scheduling their stuff and making it queryable, I might dig into a unified presentation, but for now, that's where we are.I'll be glad to update this if anyone has something significant to add, but right now this looks like the landscape to me. Pro points are still almost live, and if you are live for silver, you absolutely need to hit GP LA, because getting Silver there will get you two quals as per previous guidance given out directly to Ari Lax on twitter (I believe the qual you get out of that is MC Richmond.)
Friday, February 1, 2019
There Is More Than One Correct Play
or: Why Patrick Chapin and Sam Black are Right
Back on Magic Cruise 4, Patrick Chapin was one of the featured speakers. In his talk, he said something that is semi-controversial, which is that there may be more than one correct play in Magic, based on the player. Recently on the Pro Points podcast, (at about 18:15 in) Sam Black said, 'I think, more than most, that functionally it's valuable to make the right play, and right pick, for you as a player', and I was reminded of how I share his disagreement with the community.
I was stunned and glad to hear this the first time I ran into it, because the Magic community (as Sam mentions) believes that there is only one correct play, ever. And that's not wholly wrong. But it's not wholly correct either. Since models are sometimes correct, and sometimes useful, let me talk about the models that support both of these concepts, and what this might mean more generally.
Level 0: There are lots of plays, and they're close enough
This is the beginner mindset, and it's one that, in a game like Magic that has so many small edges that need to be gained, that people need to move away from. In the Jon Finkel interview where he laid this out, the way he put it is that people say that plays were 'good plays' when they weren't the most correct play, and they need to stop that. And he's right: a good play is not necessarily the most correct play! Figuring out the relative value and correctness of plays is core to your growth, and ability. I wanted to put this out there because if you are at this level, where you don't really think about which play is truly better than which, or you think that a play that is 'good enough' is fine and doesn't mean you need to improve on it, and you are competitive, you should change your process here. Note that I say you should focus on comparisons, and there's good reason for that. Let's move onto where the Magic community in general, for the moment.
Level 1: There is only one best play
So we've moved on to Level 1: there's one correct play at every point in a game/match of Magic (or your entire life, by some peoples' reckoning!)
Sometimes, this is actually just true. For example, Tic-Tac-Toe is a 'solved' game. Solved games usually (perhaps always) have one best (correct) play, or a set of equivalent plays, at all times. But why is this, exactly? It boils down to one major way that you can describe games like this: everyone involved is able to clearly evaluate the value of every possible choice at all times. (It may also be necessary that there are no 'trap' states (like 'shooting the moon' in hearts) that can wildly vary the value of a specific choice.)
The reason I bring that out is that the model of playing a game as complex as Magic actually has more components than the game state. So let's talk about representing Magic as a game for a second.
To represent choosing what to do in a Magic the Gathering game adds two major wrinkles to the simple model of what tic-tac-toe might require. Firstly, it has a significant hidden information component. This means that two different players' knowledge of the game state are different. Secondly, it is too complex a space to solve down to most of the time, so you don't actually know the 'goodness' of a game state, which means that the players' belief in what the goodness of a game state is substitutes for the solved analysis in tic-tac-toe, and that makes a huge difference.
... Actually, this is still too complex. Let's talk about rock-paper-scissors for a second.
Rock-paper-scissors, in concept, is a simple game. Each player chooses one of the three options, and then if they chose different ones, some player wins. If each player is a completely evenly random system, there are no edges to be gained. There are three equivalent best plays at all times.
But people... people are not completely evenly random systems. And so the edges of how people play rock-paper-scissors make it no longer match this abstract model.
This is important: once you bring in modeling the people, the correct decision in a game may no longer be the theoretical one.
'But you're talking about the soul read, that's not fair, that's not realistic to necessarily say there's different decisions based on your opponents' internal models that should be considered correct.' Mmm. Okay. Magic, however, also has the second problem I brought up: it is too complex to solve.
In Marshall Sutcliffe's classic example, If I am playing a game of Magic, and we are in a race where I believe I am winning the race, and my opponent believes they are winning the race, one of us is wrong. Which is to say, our evaluations of the game state, and the ways it could change, differ from each others' significantly.
That sounds a lot like the RPS situation described above, except it's less silly: knowing your and your opponents' valuation functions of the current state, as well as future state, allows you to make more accurate decisions. This is what LSV advises in levels 2 and 3 of his growth of a magic player discussions: realizing your opponent is a real person, and trying to figure out what they are thinking, or rather, what their model is. And their model includes an approximation of what a winning game state looks like.
So imagine there was a supercomputer that could calculate out all of the probabilities, and all of the actual endgame situations, and which had a perfect model of their opponent, so that they could put an objective value on each decision made, there would only ever be one correct decision (or several equivalent correct decisions) for them to make. If there were two such supercomputers playing each other, and they knew it, we would be in a space where all the correct decisions would be known, and executed.
But if they didn't know they were playing a supercomputer, then they'd have to BUILD a model of their opponent. And that means that each of the supercomputer players could try to fool the other as to what their model of the world is. This is what a bluff is, at its core: convincing your opponent that your evaluation of the game state is different from theirs for an important reason that they need to take into account.
None of this is particularly controversial, and people who believe there is one correct play are fine existing with this in their mental structure. Concepts people say which align with this include 'respecting your opponent enough to believe they have a trick here', or 'believing my opponent understands being on level 1, so I can be on level 2' or 'my opponent is a stone idiot, so I'm not going to respect their bluff.' All of these things are things magic players deal with on a regular basis, and they all pull from the above concept, implicitly, in doing so, even while they might still say there's only one correct play.
This might be enough to convince some people there's more than one correct play. But others might still say we're focusing a lot on the opponent. Not all of us are able to do that as well as others, and you can even choose to completely ignore your opponent, playing pure probability and doing quite well. Very fair! So let's focus on ourselves for a moment.
Level 2: There is more than one correct play
Let's say we're a dedicated limited player. We know our combat math, we win more than 50% of our games in Momir basic. And we're playing a game of magic. To maximize our win percentage, it is likely that it will benefit us to create board states which demand good combat math skills. Seems smart? But that by itself breaks the abstraction of Level 1. It's not even particularly controversial.
This is important again: a player's skillset/biases/knowledge/etc. means that the abstract probability analysis of what would give the supercomputer the best chance of winning the game/tournament may not be the one that would give that player the best chance of winning the game/tournament.
This is why I mentioned, above, the idea that comparing the value of plays is the real skill to have. In an operational context, when you are playing a game of magic, a choice might be a 55%er in the abstract, but the 45%er puts us in a world where we are more likely to make game-winning correct decisions than our opponent, and so we should take the 45%er. When good players take Jund into a modern tournament, this is often exactly the kind of choice they are making, and they are quite explicit about it: they want to be almost 50% vs the field, and then rely on their play skill difference, in the game they are choosing to make people play, to carry the day. That logic carries because the model of deciding on what deck to play is very structurally similar to playing Magic: lots of unknown information and probabilities in an iterative problem solving situation. What other players do, and believe, matters a lot, so by focusing on what they can control in their deck choice allows them to fight on a battlefield of their choosing. (Sun Tzu shoutout.)
Similarly, when drafting at the Pro Tour, it might be 'correct' to make a certain pick in an abstract context, but your win percentage may be higher if you make a different pick than that, because it puts you into a better position to navigate a draft, or outplay your opponents, or keep your opponents from outplaying you. When taking all the information into account, it simply isn't true that there is an objectively good choice that everyone should take evenly, and then all wrong choices, when it comes to Magic.
An important addendum: This isn't a paean to results-oriented thinking, this is about taking ALL of the models that are in play into account when deciding what to do.
If you make a play that fails to take into account all of the models, but happens to win you the game, that doesn't mean you made the correct play 'for you'. That means you got lucky. That doesn't change just because we've moved from 'the only model that really matters is the abstract model of how Magic cards interact' to 'modeling the players and the game at the same time'.
(Edit: See my postscript about Jon Finkel down below. Notably, if you are taking into account the players and the game and all the other factors, there is then still only one correct play. That makes the flow of this article a little weird, but I still think teasing out the distinction and why it exists is important.)
How do we use this?
I came at this from a machine learning background, but really, this is a core systems analysis insight, a sociology insight, a marketing insight, put into a specific context: the existing system, and the people involved in the system, and what they believe, and what they are capable of, all actually affect what the best course of action is. You very often can't just look at a system, optimize it in a vacuum, just put it into action, and get the best results. (Machine learning results that are funny and weird are often the result of this sort of raw optimizing, and often don't solve the problem we thought they would solve.)
This leads to the world where because it's complex, it's tempting to try to figure out an analysis, based on outputs, which lets us know if we're making decisions well enough. This is the world of Key Metrics in businesses: focus on the output, and try to get better output, even if we don't know all the machinery involved. In Magic, this is extremely hard, because every tournament and game is underspecified. It is nobody's weekend to win. You aren't 70% against a deck because you ran a 10 game set. Building up the tools to do the soft analysis with high success is one of the things which separates the best players from the rest.
If I'd solved the question of how to build up those skills, I'd let you know, I promise, but that's a space where I am still trying to figure things out. This is what people who advice 'get feedback from others' and 'play against better players' and such are actually getting at, what they're trying to get you to build up somehow, that soft analysis. But that's the hard part. To get the best results out of your tournaments, though? In the end, you have to make the decision that give you the best outcome, based on the information you have. Analyze it afterwards.
Postscript
Jon Finkel responded fairly quickly to an incidental tag, causing this twitter thread to exist. One big note to see here is that he thinks that believing there is 'a correct play' means that of course you take your opponent and your own internal models into account. This post came into being because I, Sam, and Patrick seem to believe that the community, in general, does not see it that way, and so I am trying to tease out how the correct play is different for different situations (but there technically still is only one, given all the information), but if that's what the phrase means to you, then I certainly have no problem with that.
Postscript
Jon Finkel responded fairly quickly to an incidental tag, causing this twitter thread to exist. One big note to see here is that he thinks that believing there is 'a correct play' means that of course you take your opponent and your own internal models into account. This post came into being because I, Sam, and Patrick seem to believe that the community, in general, does not see it that way, and so I am trying to tease out how the correct play is different for different situations (but there technically still is only one, given all the information), but if that's what the phrase means to you, then I certainly have no problem with that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)