(I don’t want to start discourse about this, if you disagree and want to let me know in an ask or something rather than a reblog)

Since I was gushing so hard about that M:TG blogger the other day, and @brazenautomaton has just made me aware that the guy also writes some amazingly terrible posts, I ought to acknowledge that too

Like, what the fuck is this

Of course Wizards circa Kamigawa is to blame for designing this shit in the first place, but post-Kamigawa design is to blame for it not fading into obscurity. Coldsnap’s Counterbalance, a loving callback to the recurring Ice Age theme of “fiddly shit no one could possibly enjoy unless they make statistical arguments defending The Bell Curve for fun,” elevated Top from something that takes forever and does nothing into something that takes forever and does everything. Avacyn Restored’s mechanic of “what if your topdeck automatically won the game” created the monster as it was.

But now it’s dead. Miracles players will have to go back to decks like Lands, or lobbying Wizards to unban Shaharazad, or replying to women on their 13-follower Twitter accounts with something like “[34] …when this is a preposterous rejection of well-established scientific consensus of the biological secondary sex characteristics…”

To anyone who enjoys Top that is offended that I think you’re all MRAs: I’m sorry that you’re an MRA. Fuck Sensei’s Divining Top.

Is this a joke?  It has the “progressively careening into absurdity” structure of a joke, but without, like, humor.  The opinions can’t possibly be sarcastic, so they’re presumably aligned with the author’s actual opinions, if only in exaggerated fashion.  In this context, that line from the Ice Age article seems a lot more sinister:

What sort of designer would think that such fiddly, bean-counting cards would be fun? If you guessed college guys studying math and physics, you’d be right!

I had interpreted that as good-natured ribbing, but no, this guy would probably reflexively hate my guts for the most insultingly dumb possible reason.  Ha ha, look at my caremad response right here, looks like he touched a nerve, huh??  Triggered, perhaps?  How the tables have turned! – for my rationalogical mathbro ways must now admit hurt feelings as a consideration worthy of … jesus, look, I don’t care, I’m offended by how bad the post is, by this idiotic “gotcha” schoolyard bullshit, by how even this guy who writes so well elsewhere falls into this.  The world is disappointing

Plus this is exactly the kind of thing I was praising him for not writing the other day, this boring cultural criticism that everyone in the Serious Games Writing world apparently must do.  Like, I’ve played both with and against Top, because it’s in my friend’s cube.  It is annoying, but at least in cube with friends it’s a source of amusement, “oh now so-and-so’s got the Top, time for their turn playing the obnoxious villain” and it’s all 100% in good fun because we are adult friends who like each other.  It’s a game, man, I thought you knew this

Verbal brain noise: “Cultural criticism is an empty prison.  It should not be attempted, even by me.”

(This wasn’t quite verbal brain noise, really – it was related to some concept I was momentarily thinking about, which I forgot immediately after)

Utopia: A How-To Guide

tanadrin:

So, I picked up “Utopia For Realists” by Rutger Bregman at Dussman yesterday, somewhat intrigued by its title; based on the blurbs inside the cover and the summary on the back, I was expecting something, well, a lot more utopian: a look at crazy pie in the sky ideas which sound terribly interesting but also are ridiculously impractical. In reality, the book is much more modest. It’s basically a 250-page, meticulously footnoted argument for a modest progressive political program, written in an informal and approachable style, which has some (fairly restrained) rebukes in it toward leftism that’s more about shoring up the identities of activists, or aiming at poorly defined abstract goals than actually improving people’s lives. I don’t think many people reading this will substantially disagree with the ideas Bregman presents, but he condenses a lot of persuasive arguments in favor of them into a single place, and in a form which I think is likelier to appeal to the average person interested in politics as opposed to the average rationalist-adjacent Tumblr user.

Notes I made and passages I highlighted:

Keep reading

There can be no doubt that when in his cockney fashion, he used the word “'ate” instead of “hate,” this curious difference between two monosyllabic sounds was not without its own faint psychic repercussion upon his nervous organism. Between the human feeling expressed by the word “hate” and the feeling expressed by the same word without the aspirate there may be little difference; and yet there probably was some infinitesimal difference, which a new science – halfway between philology and psychology—may one day elucidate.

hexcodes:

gayscreaming:

iapislazuli:

jock is NOT the opposite of goth. prep is the opposite of goth, and nerd is the opposite of jock. like this

switch goth and prep and u got a political compass

(via academicianzex)

kontextmaschine:

nostalgebraist:

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

One thing I thought about while reading that series was how long it took for the creators to start thinking clearly about design, even on a very basic level.

There’s a clear pattern across many of the early sets where it looks like the designers only thought about a card in some hypothetical context they had in mind for it, and ignored how likely that context was.  An ability that only functions in a rare situation is, obviously (I would think?), much less valuable than the same ability without the restriction.  But the designers didn’t seem to realize this, and would print cards that did mediocre things in rare situations while appearing to believe they were printing mediocre cards, not bad ones.

The post on Ice Age block begins with a discussion of the card Balduvian Shaman, which I actually assumed was a parody until I read the accompanying blog text.  Balduvian Shaman is a blue 1/1 for U with the following rules text:

Permanently change the text of target white enchantment you control that does not have cumulative upkeep by replacing all instances of one color word with another. For example, you may change “Counters black spells” to “Counters blue spells.” Balduvian Shaman cannot change mana symbols. That enchantment now has Cumulative Upkeep: (1).

“Wasn’t Magic founded by a bunch of math Ph.Ds?” I thought.  “How could they have not thought about probability?“  Which made it especially strange to read, in the very next paragraph:

What sort of designer would think that such fiddly, bean-counting cards would be fun? If you guessed college guys studying math and physics, you’d be right! Skaff Elias’s feature article is pretty essential background material here, so go read that instead if you were looking for actual history.

Some versions of this problem was around at least as late as Weatherlight, which was supposed to be a graveyard-seemed set, but which didn’t appreciate that players would only treat their graveyards differently if the graveyard-related abilities were sufficiently powerful (creating an incentive to shift other behavior to accommodate them).

Balduvian Shaman is better than it sounds because of white’s ten-ubiquitous Circle of Protection : [color] enchantments, you can maindeck Circles of Protection and then change them to the colors your opponent has

I mean it isn’t GOOD, but it’s not quite as much an edge case as you think

Oh!  That’s cool, the card makes some sense to me now

Even as I was writing, I realized Balduvian Shaman wasn’t an ideal example of the phenomenon I meant, because the necessary conditions are all things you can control.  The really bad cases are ones that only work if your opponent does something, especially something easily avoidable.

The clearest cases are where they introduced a mechanic on a few not-great cards and then added hosers for that mechanic (bands with other, snow-covered lands).  The mechanic never takes off because cards with the mechanic are always “maybes” for inclusion and the hosers mean they’re slightly worse than the alternative “maybes,” and then since no one uses the mechanic cards, the hosers become totally useless, so no one uses them either.

and the Ward enchantments, a cycle of one white mana “protection from X” creature enchants

I think I might have been at this even earlier than you guys, I remember the changes when the ideas of “card advantage” and “the mana curve” were first popularized

It also occurs to me that these designs may have made sense under the assumption that players wouldn’t buy many cards, and so their decks would be closer to random samples from the set

In that case, people would play the new mechanic cards because they didn’t have a choice, and so the mechanic and its hosers would sometimes come up, and no one would care about whether “snow-covered” was a good thing, it’d just be a source of occasional mechanical grace notes

(via drethelin)

brazenautomaton:

nostalgebraist:

One thing I thought about while reading that series was how long it took for the creators to start thinking clearly about design, even on a very basic level.

There’s a clear pattern across many of the early sets where it looks like the designers only thought about a card in some hypothetical context they had in mind for it, and ignored how likely that context was.  An ability that only functions in a rare situation is, obviously (I would think?), much less valuable than the same ability without the restriction.  But the designers didn’t seem to realize this, and would print cards that did mediocre things in rare situations while appearing to believe they were printing mediocre cards, not bad ones.

The post on Ice Age block begins with a discussion of the card Balduvian Shaman, which I actually assumed was a parody until I read the accompanying blog text.  Balduvian Shaman is a blue 1/1 for U with the following rules text:

Permanently change the text of target white enchantment you control that does not have cumulative upkeep by replacing all instances of one color word with another. For example, you may change “Counters black spells” to “Counters blue spells.” Balduvian Shaman cannot change mana symbols. That enchantment now has Cumulative Upkeep: (1).

“Wasn’t Magic founded by a bunch of math Ph.Ds?” I thought.  “How could they have not thought about probability?“  Which made it especially strange to read, in the very next paragraph:

What sort of designer would think that such fiddly, bean-counting cards would be fun? If you guessed college guys studying math and physics, you’d be right! Skaff Elias’s feature article is pretty essential background material here, so go read that instead if you were looking for actual history.

Some versions of this problem was around at least as late as Weatherlight, which was supposed to be a graveyard-seemed set, but which didn’t appreciate that players would only treat their graveyards differently if the graveyard-related abilities were sufficiently powerful (creating an incentive to shift other behavior to accommodate them).

Balduvian Shaman is better than it sounds because of white’s ten-ubiquitous Circle of Protection : [color] enchantments, you can maindeck Circles of Protection and then change them to the colors your opponent has

I mean it isn’t GOOD, but it’s not quite as much an edge case as you think

Oh!  That’s cool, the card makes some sense to me now

Even as I was writing, I realized Balduvian Shaman wasn’t an ideal example of the phenomenon I meant, because the necessary conditions are all things you can control.  The really bad cases are ones that only work if your opponent does something, especially something easily avoidable.

The clearest cases are where they introduced a mechanic on a few not-great cards and then added hosers for that mechanic (bands with other, snow-covered lands).  The mechanic never takes off because cards with the mechanic are always “maybes” for inclusion and the hosers mean they’re slightly worse than the alternative “maybes,” and then since no one uses the mechanic cards, the hosers become totally useless, so no one uses them either.

(via brazenautomaton)

One thing I thought about while reading that series was how long it took for the creators to start thinking clearly about design, even on a very basic level.

There’s a clear pattern across many of the early sets where it looks like the designers only thought about a card in some hypothetical context they had in mind for it, and ignored how likely that context was.  An ability that only functions in a rare situation is, obviously (I would think?), much less valuable than the same ability without the restriction.  But the designers didn’t seem to realize this, and would print cards that did mediocre things in rare situations while appearing to believe they were printing mediocre cards, not bad ones.

The post on Ice Age block begins with a discussion of the card Balduvian Shaman, which I actually assumed was a parody until I read the accompanying blog text.  Balduvian Shaman is a blue 1/1 for U with the following rules text:

Permanently change the text of target white enchantment you control that does not have cumulative upkeep by replacing all instances of one color word with another. For example, you may change “Counters black spells” to “Counters blue spells.” Balduvian Shaman cannot change mana symbols. That enchantment now has Cumulative Upkeep: (1).

“Wasn’t Magic founded by a bunch of math Ph.Ds?” I thought.  “How could they have not thought about probability?“  Which made it especially strange to read, in the very next paragraph:

What sort of designer would think that such fiddly, bean-counting cards would be fun? If you guessed college guys studying math and physics, you’d be right! Skaff Elias’s feature article is pretty essential background material here, so go read that instead if you were looking for actual history.

Some versions of this problem was around at least as late as Weatherlight, which was supposed to be a graveyard-seemed set, but which didn’t appreciate that players would only treat their graveyards differently if the graveyard-related abilities were sufficiently powerful (creating an incentive to shift other behavior to accommodate them).

kill reviews: time spiral →