I’m going to take a stab at explaining/translating some of the examples from that article. The first is about “mana screw”. In Magic: the Gathering, each player has a deck of 60 cards, of which about 2⁄5 are “land” or “mana”, and the rest of which are “spells”. Each turn, players draw one new card, put down one land card if they have it, and play spells whose total cost is less than or equal to the number of lands they have. Costs are typically distributed in a bell curve centered at about 3.5. If a player has too few lands relative to the cost of his spells, he can’t play them; this is called “mana screw”. If he has too many lands, he won’t have spells to play with them; this is called “mana flood”. Lands and spells also have color; to play a spell, some number of the lands used must be the correct color or colors.
At the start of the game, each player draws 7 cards, looks at them, and decides to either keep them or mulligan, which means he puts them back, reshuffles, and draws a new hand with only 6 cards. (If the 6 card hand is also bad, he can do it again, getting one less card each time.) If the initial 7 cards are worse than average (too few, too many, or the wrong color lands), then the player chooses between a small certain loss (one less card) and an uncertain large risk (you might not draw the lands you need, and be mana screwed). In practice, most players are strongly biased towards keeping hands they shouldn’t, which means accepting the uncertain large risk over the certain small loss.
The second issue is “netdecking”. Players can either choose the cards in their deck themselves, or get a deck from the internet, usually by looking at a recent tournament and copying the winner’s deck, or if they’re really serious about it, guessing which decks they’re likely to face, choosing a pool of candidate decks, looking at win/loss statistics, and choosing the deck which gives the best chance. Copying a deck that’s known to win is much more effective, but making a deck yourself is more fun. As a convenient side-effect, making your own deck gives an excuse for losing.
The third issue, which the article alludes to but doesn’t tackle directly, is that MtG involves a large number of easy decisions, with a small number of hard decisions mixed in but not clearly labeled. Players who think too long about all of their decisions are chided for stalling; on the other hand, players who fail to slow down and think will often lose the game because of doing so. Most players can’t tell the difference between a hard decision that requires thought, and an easy decision that can be made quickly; instead, they make all decisions quickly until they know they’re on the verge of losing; then they switch to thinking carefully about every decision, but at that point it’s usually too late.
Note: playing your own deck, as opposed to netdecking, is called “going rogue” and an original, unexpected deck is a “rogue” deck.
The advantage to going rogue is that your opponent will not be prepared to play against your strategy. As a result, he will be more likely to make mistakes when playing against you, and his deck will not be optimized for beating yours. (Plus, as designing an effective deck that hasn’t been discovered already is extremely difficult, winning with a rogue deck is very impressive.) The downside is that rogue decks tend to be weaker than netdecks, because, well, you and your friends aren’t smarter than the entire rest of the Magic playing world.
That’s funny. I haven’t played Magic seriously since pre-Google, and not building one’s own deck from scratch was commonly known as ‘cheating’.
ETA: this is because deck construction was considered most of the game, so playing someone else’s deck is like having a more experienced player play the game for you
I started playing very early (around Legends) and quit around Ice Age; this was the standard belief at that time too.
Of course, we didn’t really have the internet anyway. Winning decks occasionally got published in magazines, but the resources simply weren’t there for netdecking to be an issue. I suspect as it became easier and easier it moved from taboo to the norm.
When I initially played, I never would have thought of buying a premade deck; now I can pick up any of the ones that are sold and have a fun game with them, without any of the commitment that caused me to quit, and the deck will be better than one I could make myself.
There’s one thing in the article that even I had to use some Google-fu on, although it’s not really significant. “The Ron” is Theron Martin, who was suspended for five years for cheating—his DCI rating had been artificially inflated because someone had been sending the DCI bogus tournament results in which he won games that never happened. Theron Martin claimed that he was innocent because he didn’t know it was happening.
I’m going to take a stab at explaining/translating some of the examples from that article. The first is about “mana screw”. In Magic: the Gathering, each player has a deck of 60 cards, of which about 2⁄5 are “land” or “mana”, and the rest of which are “spells”. Each turn, players draw one new card, put down one land card if they have it, and play spells whose total cost is less than or equal to the number of lands they have. Costs are typically distributed in a bell curve centered at about 3.5. If a player has too few lands relative to the cost of his spells, he can’t play them; this is called “mana screw”. If he has too many lands, he won’t have spells to play with them; this is called “mana flood”. Lands and spells also have color; to play a spell, some number of the lands used must be the correct color or colors.
At the start of the game, each player draws 7 cards, looks at them, and decides to either keep them or mulligan, which means he puts them back, reshuffles, and draws a new hand with only 6 cards. (If the 6 card hand is also bad, he can do it again, getting one less card each time.) If the initial 7 cards are worse than average (too few, too many, or the wrong color lands), then the player chooses between a small certain loss (one less card) and an uncertain large risk (you might not draw the lands you need, and be mana screwed). In practice, most players are strongly biased towards keeping hands they shouldn’t, which means accepting the uncertain large risk over the certain small loss.
The second issue is “netdecking”. Players can either choose the cards in their deck themselves, or get a deck from the internet, usually by looking at a recent tournament and copying the winner’s deck, or if they’re really serious about it, guessing which decks they’re likely to face, choosing a pool of candidate decks, looking at win/loss statistics, and choosing the deck which gives the best chance. Copying a deck that’s known to win is much more effective, but making a deck yourself is more fun. As a convenient side-effect, making your own deck gives an excuse for losing.
The third issue, which the article alludes to but doesn’t tackle directly, is that MtG involves a large number of easy decisions, with a small number of hard decisions mixed in but not clearly labeled. Players who think too long about all of their decisions are chided for stalling; on the other hand, players who fail to slow down and think will often lose the game because of doing so. Most players can’t tell the difference between a hard decision that requires thought, and an easy decision that can be made quickly; instead, they make all decisions quickly until they know they’re on the verge of losing; then they switch to thinking carefully about every decision, but at that point it’s usually too late.
Note: playing your own deck, as opposed to netdecking, is called “going rogue” and an original, unexpected deck is a “rogue” deck.
The advantage to going rogue is that your opponent will not be prepared to play against your strategy. As a result, he will be more likely to make mistakes when playing against you, and his deck will not be optimized for beating yours. (Plus, as designing an effective deck that hasn’t been discovered already is extremely difficult, winning with a rogue deck is very impressive.) The downside is that rogue decks tend to be weaker than netdecks, because, well, you and your friends aren’t smarter than the entire rest of the Magic playing world.
That’s funny. I haven’t played Magic seriously since pre-Google, and not building one’s own deck from scratch was commonly known as ‘cheating’.
ETA: this is because deck construction was considered most of the game, so playing someone else’s deck is like having a more experienced player play the game for you
Same here—there might have been a few people around playing decks from the web or magazines, but they were a minority and not very highly considered.
But then I never took part in competitions, and don’t know anybody who did, that probably explains.
That’s something I’ve never heard, oddly enough.
I started playing very early (around Legends) and quit around Ice Age; this was the standard belief at that time too. Of course, we didn’t really have the internet anyway. Winning decks occasionally got published in magazines, but the resources simply weren’t there for netdecking to be an issue. I suspect as it became easier and easier it moved from taboo to the norm. When I initially played, I never would have thought of buying a premade deck; now I can pick up any of the ones that are sold and have a fun game with them, without any of the commitment that caused me to quit, and the deck will be better than one I could make myself.
There’s one thing in the article that even I had to use some Google-fu on, although it’s not really significant. “The Ron” is Theron Martin, who was suspended for five years for cheating—his DCI rating had been artificially inflated because someone had been sending the DCI bogus tournament results in which he won games that never happened. Theron Martin claimed that he was innocent because he didn’t know it was happening.