I play magic. Well, at least I used to. Never competitively though, at least not in meatspace (or magic online, apprentice ftw). And I agree—there’s a great connection to rationality. One problem with the game though: to truly enjoy it’s dynamic nature, which is one of the great things that sets it apart from other games, it takes a significant continuous financial investment in new sets. It’s the reason I never played competitively.
I’d wager that there’s at least one other mtg player here. How many people are named Zvi?
There’s a set of 3 (I think) articles on starcitygames that performed an act of reduction in magic theory. It was a great example that I kept going back to when reading Eliezer’s stuff on reductionism. For those that know the terms, the author reduced tempo to a more general notion of card advantage. I’ll try to track the articles down.
Edit: here are the articles. If you don’t understand magic terminology… sorry. If you do, I think the articles are great from a theoretical perspective. However, from a practical perspective, the traditional notion of tempo may be more useful. I’m probably not a good judge of that, however. For one, I haven’t read the articles in a while.
Don’t know how many M:TG players are still around, since I’m replying to a two-year-old post, but I found this thread very interesting. I used to play Magic (a little) and write about Magic (a lot), and I was the head M:TG rules guru for a while. The M:TG community is certainly a lovely place to see a wide variety of rationality and irrationality at work. For seriously competitive players, the game itself provides a strong payoff for being able to rapidly calculate probabilities and update them as new information becomes available.
Agreed, a big problem with Magic is that it’s really, really expensive to play when compared to other types of games. It’s not as bad as golf, but staying current can cost over a thousand dollars each year.
I’d be really impressed if we managed to attract THE Zvi to our little community blog. So, are you THE Zvi?
Playing on apprentice or magic workstation are interesting solutions, but there’s nothing like having actual cardboard in front of your face for keeping you motivated. Same goes for paper vs. digital books. Well, these both apply at least for me.
I used to play on Apprentice a whole lot; there were some popular IRC leagues whose weekly scheduled tournaments would routinely attract over one hundred players. Unfortunately, Apprentice proved incompatible with some newly released cards and there were various programs, most notably Backwash, that allowed players to cheat. After the release of Magic Online, the best players migrated there, and the IRC leagues became much less popular. I used to play on Magic Online until I gave it up as too expensive.
I frequented e-leauge for a while, forgot the irc channel it was in. I didn’t know apprentice had those issues. Magic Workstation is much more aesthetically pleasing and user friendly, but I don’t know if it’s robust against cheating and quirky cards
AFAIK, Workstation hasn’t been cracked yet, and the specific cards that were incompatible with Apprentice (the Wish cycle from the Judgment set) work in Magic Workstation.
I play magic. Well, at least I used to. Never competitively though, at least not in meatspace (or magic online, apprentice ftw). And I agree—there’s a great connection to rationality. One problem with the game though: to truly enjoy it’s dynamic nature, which is one of the great things that sets it apart from other games, it takes a significant continuous financial investment in new sets. It’s the reason I never played competitively.
I’d wager that there’s at least one other mtg player here. How many people are named Zvi?
There’s a set of 3 (I think) articles on starcitygames that performed an act of reduction in magic theory. It was a great example that I kept going back to when reading Eliezer’s stuff on reductionism. For those that know the terms, the author reduced tempo to a more general notion of card advantage. I’ll try to track the articles down.
Edit: here are the articles. If you don’t understand magic terminology… sorry. If you do, I think the articles are great from a theoretical perspective. However, from a practical perspective, the traditional notion of tempo may be more useful. I’m probably not a good judge of that, however. For one, I haven’t read the articles in a while.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Don’t know how many M:TG players are still around, since I’m replying to a two-year-old post, but I found this thread very interesting. I used to play Magic (a little) and write about Magic (a lot), and I was the head M:TG rules guru for a while. The M:TG community is certainly a lovely place to see a wide variety of rationality and irrationality at work. For seriously competitive players, the game itself provides a strong payoff for being able to rapidly calculate probabilities and update them as new information becomes available.
Agreed, a big problem with Magic is that it’s really, really expensive to play when compared to other types of games. It’s not as bad as golf, but staying current can cost over a thousand dollars each year.
I’d be really impressed if we managed to attract THE Zvi to our little community blog. So, are you THE Zvi?
Playing on apprentice or magic workstation are interesting solutions, but there’s nothing like having actual cardboard in front of your face for keeping you motivated. Same goes for paper vs. digital books. Well, these both apply at least for me.
I used to play on Apprentice a whole lot; there were some popular IRC leagues whose weekly scheduled tournaments would routinely attract over one hundred players. Unfortunately, Apprentice proved incompatible with some newly released cards and there were various programs, most notably Backwash, that allowed players to cheat. After the release of Magic Online, the best players migrated there, and the IRC leagues became much less popular. I used to play on Magic Online until I gave it up as too expensive.
I frequented e-leauge for a while, forgot the irc channel it was in. I didn’t know apprentice had those issues. Magic Workstation is much more aesthetically pleasing and user friendly, but I don’t know if it’s robust against cheating and quirky cards
AFAIK, Workstation hasn’t been cracked yet, and the specific cards that were incompatible with Apprentice (the Wish cycle from the Judgment set) work in Magic Workstation.