On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.
The reason why it seems so appealing might be some kind of barnum effect [0] - the effect that makes horoscopes work:
There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match.
This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackmore in her definition of a `memeplex` [1].
(Sidenote: I think a lot of the current cultural clashes in the western world can be interpreted as two big memeplexes fighting each other, having each developed strategies to be incommensurable [2] to the other side.)
I think this is basically correct, and that the comparison to the way memeplexes (lol memeplices?)construct worldviews is a good point that goes unnoticed in a great deal of political discussion. Almost every ideology is anchored to the real world by some element of truth.
Regarding the OP taxonomy, it makes me wonder if there's a way to aggregate these taxonomies to see if extracting the relevant principal components (that do map to the real world) from the subjective noise is possible.
One could imagine testing the Barnum effect in this way, writing a large number of these personality descriptions and seeing if real personality traits can emerge by having individuals rank which Barnum profiles best describe them.
Yeah, "explains" is rather strong, but "pseudoscientific mysticism" is straight-up harsh. It's an inevitably subjective way to organize the world of human behavior and motivation. Like colors themselves, which reside just as much in our internal perception of the world as they do in objective physical processes.
I think "pseudoscientific mysticism" is just in response to the fact that many people don't see it as being subjective, but rather objectively measurable/common sense/blatantly obvious.
Definitely, but I guess I'm implying many people don't think it's subjective. Should have probably put "common sense" and "blatantly obvious" in quotations.
The author says as much at the end, and also underlines that the area where it helped him a lot was in writing fiction, which inevitably deals with stereotypes.
This isn't a system to describe the human psyche as one how society likes to think about it.
It is one of my favorite stimuli in psychometrics and the philosophy of science. I already sent it to quite a few people, as a long-read remark on the applicability of models.
Of course, as long as you read it at the meta-level, comparing with other tools (scientific, pseudo-scientific), for example: Four Temperaments, MBTI, Big Five, Western Zodiac, Chinese Zodiac, etc.
The difference between science and pseudo-science is much more smooth than most scientists would like to admit. While MBTI is not up to academics standards, it is highly correlated with Big Five, trait by trait (still, AFAIR there is reason to use it in the place of Big Five). Plus, there is too much Jungian interpretation for MBTI, which is not up to current scientific standards. Still, I defended MBTI (in a dating context, e.g. as a self-identification) more times than I care to admit (for some insights, this https://www.16personalities.com/ is decent).
There is also a corollary that psychology is still in its infancy, much like biology before the discovery of bacteria, viri, or DNA.
...
In mathematics, there is a concept of a basis - more or less, directions, or orientation. We can express the same thing is a few different ways. Some bases are better (unit length, dimensions are orthogonal (uncorrelated)), but otherwise there is a lot of room here.
In this case, Colors of Mana are one basis. Just because it is an impromptu psychological explanation, does not mean it does not work. Yet:
- Some explanations or interpolations may not be valid.
- It is likely that we can find a more refined way.
All in all, I would love to make people2vec, where we embed various psychological trains as vectors, as see which other parameters (scientific or not) we can reproduce. All in all, even IQ can be considered a personality trait (as it is correlated with other traits of personality, it is not a separate entity) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/04/...
I approach this the same way I approach concepts like karma and reincarnation. Are they literally true, physical forces, laws or similar acting on the world? No, of course not. Are they useful metaphors to try to model and discuss tendencies and emergent phenomena arising from patterns in human behavior? Yes, often, if used with the right disclaimers and caveats.
Jordan Peterson? So are you saying now that having a PhD in Clinical Psychology makes you a pseudo-scientist?
Hundreds of scholarly papers cited thousands of times. But it's pseudo-science. Psychology might not be an exact science but it IS a genuine scholarship meant to understand human behavior.
Feel free to make your case based on "I just don't like him" though, I'm sure it will be very interesting and will include the "R" word.
I don't want to derail the discussion with irrelevant material, but to suggest that eating a beef-only diet cures autoimmune disorders is utterly unsupported by medical science, for one.
As someone who's mother died of a rare/poorly understood cancer after fighting it for 10 years and multiple experimental treatments, and met others in similar boats along the way (support groups), there are tons of niche medical conditions that science hasn't even bothered/had the resources to investigate.
Is a beef-only diet a good idea for the general population? Probably not. Could it be ideal for people with extremely rare auto-immune conditions that have an allergic reaction to virtually everything else? Sure, and that existing doesn't sound crazy to me at all.
I've noticed a trend where scientifically minded people tend to get hung up the "proven" at the expense of the "plausible", forgetting that everything they rightfully treat as proven once could have been dismissed in a similar manner. Real people in the real world have to make decisions based on nothing more than plausibility all the time, and I don't see why diet should be any different. Particularity if none of the "proven" solutions are working for you.
Put another way, there's a difference between "the evidence says this is wrong" and "there is no evidence that this is true".
I think you’re right. But people have all sorts of crazy diets for unsupported reasons.
I don’t think Peterson is promoting the carnivore diet, but I did hear him explain his diet on a podcast and it seemed pretty couched in curiosity, not resolution. The thing I remember is lots of “I don’t knows” and attribution of any benefits to it being an elimination diet vs any special property of beef.
Many autoimmune disorders react to food, for example the infamous Celiac disease is an autoimmune reaction to gluten, that is present in many cereals (not only wheat).
So why beef only wouldn't work?
I have autoimmune diseases myself and have a very meat heavy diet, to me is what works, as soon I move to a more typical diet my health declines quickly.
Well he has a PHD in clinical psychology, not nutrition. I think people like the OP throw these jabs at him purely because they're angry he spoke out against the Canadian pronoun law, rather than any complaints about the validity of his research itself.
Or, alternate option, you can take it at face value in that he claimed a meat only diet helped him, using his public persona to push an agenda that is completely unsupported by science.
He wasn't "pushing an agenda". He was telling people about how a diet he went on helped him and his daughter. He explicitly stated multiple times that he wasn't a doctor and that his experience was anecdotal.
Peterson does have a way of trying to tie all of his beliefs into a larger world view, and selling that, though. It's the same thing with the Mesopotamian gods and his beliefs about gender.
That's true, however I do think the meat-only anecdote came from a good place. Him and his daughter had been suffering from clinical depression and a host of other problems for decades and the diet seemed to help them. I think if I was in a similar situation I'd try to let other people know too.
Take care of both your mental and physical health.
Do something important with your life that's meaningful to you.
Respect yourself.
Life is bloody hard and you should be easy on yourself when you screw up. As long as you learn something from your mistakes and attempt to push forward again with new found knowledge, you're on the right path.
Clean up your room.
All of that is the utter nonsense Peterson spews out all of the time. None of that is useful or true. What a monster.
You can sarcastically toss out a list of uncontroversial useful or true things that have been said by literally anyone, no matter how often they’ve otherwise been wrong or harmful. It’s not a refutation.
Then by that, everyone's thoughts on anything and everything should be thrown out. Everyone is an asshole if you dig deep enough. There is no such thing as a perfect person.
Every time “Magic: The Gathering” is mentioned it seriously throws off my phrase parsing for like half a minute. What about “the magic”? What is “the gathering color wheel”? I wish “Magic: The Gathering” was in quotes.
By now I'm pretty sure that English-speakers are gradually forgetting what punctuation is. Quotes and commas are already basically dead—instead, we receive titlecase and italics, and convoluted stream-of-words sentences.
Yeah, runs of nouns and gerunds are notoriously hard to parse. Even a short phrase like "Finding Nemo Audience" cannot be parsed unambiguously. That's what you get when most words can function as nouns verbs and adjectives alike.
"The old man the boat." - a grammatically correct sentence in English. It's like Perl of human languages :)
Doesn’t really apply to the post title, though. Quotes would help. In Germany we have a thing called “Durchkopplung”. Basically, there are no spaces allowed inside nouns, so compounds are either concatenated or “durchgekoppelt” (which nobody does, unfortunately): The Magic-The-Gathering-Color-Wheel. However, in this case, the most elegant solution would simply be a more clear construction: “The color wheel of ‘Magic: The Gathering’” or, less fortunate, “Magic-The-Gathering’s color wheel”.
Spaces would be useful when reading Chinese. Words are composed of (usually) 1-3 characters. Each character has a particular meaning. Word have their own meaning, independant of the meaning of the characters used.
Often the meaning of the characters in a word kinda implies the meaning of the word, but that's not reliable at all. Sometimes the characters in a word are used just for their sound.
As once it was explained to me, most ideograms can be used as an independent word, but most words are 2 or 3 ideograms long. If I remember correctly an example was faucet=water+dragon
One of the best law schools in India is called "National Law School of India University". I had a great time there as an exchange student, but boy, there is some heavy parsing involved in that name.
This is what happens when you want to adhere to all local, national and international standards. A National XX is a protected term in education (well sort of) and the use of that term signifies that the government is involved to make this place good. School is there because its modeled after Harvard Law School (not really sure why that one is special in its structure). University is another more protected term. You cannot call an institute a university without ministry of human development's approval.
What is weird is because I know all this the name doesn't really sound that weird. They are just expressing a lot of things in the name which is normal to me.
A number of the (what I have been calling) universities in my country have the seemingly bizarrely redundant labelling "University College X" where X is the locale each is based in. Your comment made me look up why.
It appears that, “In a number of countries, a university college is a college institution that provides tertiary education but does not have full or independent university status. A university college is often part of a larger university. The precise usage varies from country to country.”
So now I realise that there is but one actual university in my country, that being the national university, and all the self-styled "universities" around the country are mere colleges.
It is fun to see how much of this overlaps with the official guidelines for colors [0]. I think that the five colors are better explained in terms of deck strategies and win conditions. Crucially, by design, no color is best, nor is any combination of colors best.
White represents not dying, both by preventing damage and by healing damage. White wins by having more health than their opponents, and outlasting them in battle.
Blue represents drawing the right card, mostly by drawing a lot of cards. Blue wins by controlling spells and hands. (When the article says "knowledge", note that the MTG deck in play is called "the library"!)
Black represents destruction. Black wins by controlling battlefields and removing blockers.
Red represents opportunities in the current moment and the random possibility of change. Red wins by playing on offensive tempo (the "upswing") and attacking vulnerable targets with instant abilities. ("Tempo" here is not quite as in music; it means playing cards turn after turn with a reliable ramping up in cost and effectiveness.)
Green represents growth and the potential for planning. Green wins by playing on defensive tempo (the "downswing") and tilting the battlefield in their favor over many turns.
Ideally, this system of categorizing by color works because there aren't any big strategies to winning that aren't color-aligned. "Milling", the strategy of deliberately destroying your opponent's library, is closely tied to blue and black, which are all about libraries and destruction. Keeping a "zoo", a battlefield full of mid-range on-tempo creatures, is closely tied to red and green, which are the two colors tied to tempo.
It was definitely the case in the early days. It is evidenced by the "boons", cards that cost 1 and do 3 of one thing the color is supposed to do best.
The white one, Healing Salve, is very weak, it has later been replaced by a strictly better card.
The red (Lightning Bolt), green (Giant Growth) and black (Dark Ritual) are very solid cards and were seen in most decks of their respective colors in the early days of Magic, would be a bit too powerful today.
The blue one, Ancestral Recall, is part of the "power 9": the 9 most famous, overpowered and expensive Magic cards. It didn't make it past the ironically called "unlimited" edition.
> The red (Lightning Bolt), green (Giant Growth) and black (Dark Ritual) are very solid cards and were seen in most decks of their respective colors in the early days of Magic, would be a bit too powerful today.
I don't think those three are super comparable; Dark Ritual is much stronger than Lighting Bolt, which is much stronger than Giant Growth. Dark Ritual has purposely not been printed in a "standard legal" set since 1999; it's not legal in the Modern format (cards printed in standard sets since 2003), only in formats that allow cards from any time period. Lighting Bolt is legal in Modern, with its last standard printing being in 2010, although the head designer has indicated that they wouldn't print it in a standard set now. Giant Growth was printed in a standard legal set just last year, meaning it's still currently legal to play in the Standard format (roughly speaking, cards printed in standard sets in the past two calendar years).
Dark Ritual was banned for as long as I remember (I played extended during 2003-2006). It's pretty much the definition of an OP card: if you were to draw 2 copies and a strong creature it'd be almost imposible to lose that game.
Dark Ritual was OP because of the abundance of BBB or 2B threats that it could plomp on the table on turn 1, most famous of them being Necropotence, of course, followed closely by Phyrexian Negator or Bad moon and a swarm of black weenies and with honourable mentions to Stupor or Duress + Ravenous Rats (Stupor and Duress not being threats, but still it sucks to lose two cards on turn 1 before you can do anything about it).
It's interesting to note that when the ability to produce a lot of quick mana with a sorcery was shifted to Red, two of them (Seething Song and Rite of Flame) also got banned (in Modern).
Ixalan standard had a powerful monoblue Tempo deck that used Curious Obsession and cheap scry cards to draw a ton while attacking with cheap fliers. I think it was tier 1 actually.
Interesting! I don't really follow standard much to be honest, I was aware of the curious obsession deck but I didn't know that it played giant growth.
No blue also got the best cards afterwards. Jace the Mind Sculptor, True Name Nemesis, Delver of Secrets, Snapcaster Mage, Narset Parting Veil, Ponder, Urza, Oko, Uro, etc.
Blue's color identity is just 'being really good at Magic' it seems
Blue is the color of intellectualism and prioritizing logic. By its nature, blue is prone to being good at strategy. Magic is a strategy game, so it makes sense blue is inherently good at it.
And that's a bit tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness blue is the color of mind tricks and the hacker mentality, so it makes sense blue prefers manipulating game state in ways other colors just won't think of doing, and unfortunately the game's designers grossly underestimated just how powerful "manipulating game state" is.
No I mean blue also got the best aggressive creatures and planeswalkers and value creatures at aggressive rates. It has little to do with 'logic' they just plain gave blue a 3/2 flier for one mana.
Right now it's green closely followed by white. Though I've been too busy to play in the last two months and have so far totally missed Ikoria, it's clear to see that Jamie Wakefield's favourite colour of magic has finally become OP just by the June 1st banned and restricted list:
Oh yes green (and GU) has seen a huge boost in the last year of so. It was probably an overcompensation for what was perceived to be the weakest color. I expect white to go through a similar overcorrection in the next year of so.
Blue is still the strongest color in Legacy and Vintage I think, even if the last few sets had a huge impact.
True, and as you say UG is a powerful combination, which is also kind of a new thing for me.
Those bans are a pain in the ass. They do it to hamstring the OP decks, which I understand and applaud, because nothing sucks more than having to play 4 copies of the same deck in one event. But then, because a bunch of us are using the same cards in our goofy rogue decks, these decks are also screwed and that ends up reducing diversity also. E.g. the ban of Fires of Invention has just screwed up my RW Giants deck. I mean, it's a Giants deck. About the only thing that made it viable at all was Fires.
There's more to these colors than your short summary says. In particular it doesn't say what colors can't do.
White is really bad at destroying stuff directly unless it's artifacts or enchantments. It can destroy or tap lands, but typically ALL lands (2WW Armageddon). It's self-centered and when it affects enemies it's usually by placing rules, laws, constraints (Pacifism; cannot uptap; etc). Mass effects of various kinds are a common theme.
Blue doesn't deal with combat buffs. It would rather change the rules and make them irrelevant.
Black, I would say it's more about decay, death and atrophy than outright destruction. It's the worst anti-artifact, anti-enchantment color in the game and can affect them only indirectly. Black has very few buffs, it's a very negative color. Win at all costs!
Red can't affect enchantments. Like fire, it often burns (sacrifices) something to keep going. It can't last long.
Green is exceptionally bad at destruction and dealing damage. Its boons are often individual in contrast to white's, which is morel like a jungle than a society. Very early M:tg had cards like Stormseeker, they are notably absent in modern M:tg.
One of best ways to realize how much negative space there is in M:tg is to play Shandalar, the ancient RPG set in the world of Magic. You will see very many off-color cards.
> White is really bad at destroying stuff directly unless it's artifacts or enchantments. It can destroy or tap lands, but typically ALL lands (2WW Armageddon). It's self-centered and when it affects enemies it's usually by placing rules, laws, constraints (Pacifism; cannot uptap; etc). Mass effects of various kinds are a common theme.
White also has a thing for destroying creatures engaged in combat, which is both an extension of its rulesetting ("fighting is against the rules, and if you break the rules, you die") and its preference for pacifism (enforcing non-violence via harsh punishments). White is also the only color besides Blue that gets counterspells, typically with a taxing condition (e.g. "counter target spell unless its controller pays {2}"). White, like any responsible government, collects taxes after all.
> Green is exceptionally bad at destruction and dealing damage. Its boons are often individual in contrast to white's, which is morel like a jungle than a society. Very early M:tg had cards like Stormseeker, they are notably absent in modern M:tg.
And when Green does get to deal damage, it's through creatures. It gets straight-up buffs such as good ol' Giant Growth, plus effects where creatures get to deal damage to targets equal to their power (nicknamed "one-sided fight", after the "fight" keyword where two creatures damage each other equal to their power).
I like your point (and wish I had more than one upvote), but I want to recast it in terms of color theory. Specifically, let's look at each color in terms of not being able to do what its two opposite colors can do. And, of course, there are counterexample cards to all of this, but the general outlines are certainly real in the game design. I'll also mention the Ravnica guilds for each pair; each guild can be thought of as exploring the negative design space hollowed out by each color.
White is opposite red and black, giving it the gap of high-risk play. White cannot make opportunities, but must straightforwardly initiate combat and exploit superior layouts on the battlefield. Both red and black have many useful instant spells which give them options that white doesn't have. The Ravnica guild is Rakdos, which is oriented around riskily playing an entire hand quickly, and also around destroying everything except enchantments.
Blue is opposite green and red, and indeed blue is missing the useful buffs in green and (to a lesser extent) in red. Blue is also missing the overlap between green and red, which is direct destruction of lands and artifacts. Blue represents not just knowledge, but abandoning nature in favor of libraries and cities; green and red remind blue of the power of wild nature. The Ravnica guild is Gruul, which is oriented around putting +1/+1 buffs onto friendly creatures.
Black does have more of a win-at-all-costs feeling than other colors, sacrificing library, battlefield, hand, and even graveyard for victory. Opposite white and green, black lacks health buffs and turn-over-turn permanent growth, and isn't rewarded for having a healthy zoo. The white+green Ravnica guild, Selesnya, is oriented around giving discounts for new creatures by tapping existing creatures, and making copies of creatures.
Red is across from white and blue. Like you say, enchantments are a bit of a puzzle for red. White uses enchantments to defend and protect, while blue uses them to surprise and misdirect; red has no way to deal with or emulate this. The Ravnica guild is Azorius, oriented around spells which change their behavior depending on when and how they are played.
Finally, green is across from blue and black. Blue and black have in common a willingness to sacrifice capability and knowledge in exchange for power. Green is gradual and lacks ways to trade away the library or sacrifice creatures. And the final guild, Dimir, is oriented around sacrificing cards to search the library; later, it expanded to also include sacrificing (both!) libraries directly.
I'm honestly kind of amazed at how well-designed all of this is. I suppose that surviving the test of time does imply some sort of quality design, but this is remarkable.
> I'm honestly kind of amazed at how well-designed all of this is. I suppose that surviving the test of time does imply some sort of quality design, but this is remarkable.
I'm amazed more people don't copy the idea (rather than straight-up ripping off the colors). M:tg is so interesting because of how well-defined colors are. Because they're defined, colors truly have a personality, and - crucially - play different.
For a straight ripoff check Master of Magic too. Very cheap on GOG. It's a Civilization 1 clone with tech tree/progression replaced by spells! Complete with common/uncommon/rare/very rare tiers. The system is so inspired by Magic colors it hurts. But incidentally, it's brilliant! In normal Civ games, tech tree is super boring because of many filler steps and boring +1 bonuses. Even otherwise great Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri suffers from this. But because each step in discrete (each step is a spell!), you get something concrete each time you complete research. The game also has extensive city build-up and a combat system that inspired Heroes of Might and Magic serries. The game has many design and balance flaws, and without the unofficial Insecticide patch by kyrub (who deserves eternal praise) it's extremely buggy. But they did something very, very right as game developers keep trying to clone Master of Magic. The game doesn't care much for balance, but more for very flashy and ambitious ideas.
Another accidental bit of brilliance came from memory limitation. Computers at the time didn't have enough RAM to support large maps. So instead they made 2 planes connected by magical towers. Very heavily guarded. The other plane has unique minerals, 4 unique races, magic roads that are instant travel, very magic everything (2x magic node output too). In late game, hell often breaks loose when POWERFUL computer civilizations emerge. You can also try to break into it early and loot it, but it's very risky.
I'd put blue down to slightly more generic "manipulation and control". It's the primary place for counterspells and other ways to screw with the opponent.
Both you and the other reply are focused on blue. I wonder if HN has an affinity for thinking with blue?
Yes, you're all quite right. The word often associated with blue's style of play is "control", and in tabletop card games, control is about restricting what your opponent can do. Control often doesn't directly remove creatures from the battlefield (like red and black can do), or buff your creatures (like white and green), but instead directly removes your opponent's ability to introduce cards to play.
Counterspell is possibly the iconic blue technique. I found this article [0] a really interesting writeup of the mechanism design.
There is interestingly one other style closely associated with blue, called "bouncing". [1] While black tends to be able to permanently remove blockers, i.e. to the graveyard, blue's skill is in temporarily removing blockers back to the hand or library. In addition to being able to decisively change the course of a battle, bouncing can also provide control over several turns, because bounces prevent blue's opponents from being able to set up a proper offensive line, and force opponents to waste mana on fielding units that will be bounced. This latter requirement is analogous to how counterspell forces opponents to waste mana on casting spells that will be fizzled.
The human brain loves finding patterns, meaning, and explanations ("the platonic rises to the top", per Taleb), so you'll be able to do something like this for pretty much any configuration of objects (all numbers are interesting after all! [0]).
One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. Read some Carl Jung, some Joseph Campbell, some TVTropes, and you too can make your own grand unifying theory of human psychology at home!
The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying, when on a first date or job interview or meeting at a party, they were telling me they were INWP or enneagram 14 second wing or a Capricorn rising Gemini.
> The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying
Yes.
I would add that another insight is that it's much easier to communicate with people when you learn their language. It might be much easier for a nerd to introspect about their personality when prodded using MTG, a familiar framework. Similarly some people expect their relative positions in n-dimensional personality space to be codified using zodiac signs. If you can do so, meet people on familiar ground, at least at first.
Hah, Granny Weatherwax would suggest it is all about headology, but I think you are right about our internal languages and how we may be able to really speak to others.
You're right on course, but I think Jungian archetypes are powerful for that very reason: it's a feedback loop. Archetypes not only embody different things and different kinds of people, but people are influenced by these universal archetypes as well.
For example, consider the trickster Jungian archetype. This archetype is universal to every human cultural, indicating (to me, atleast), that it's a core part of the human psyche, rather than some platonic shit that rose to the top of Jung's head.
My ex-girlfiend was getting a PhD in anthropology, and the different cultural archetypes and their similarities to each other among different, unrelated cultures astounded me. We independently come up with the same stories, over and over again. This cannot be a coincidence, rather it's a reflection of the unchanging nature of humanity.
> One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams.
While agreeing with what you're saying, I am curious what the parameters of such pattern matching are.
How many archetypes do you need so that they feel like "enough" to the average person? Is some number "too many"? Is 3 enough or do you need 5 or 6? Can I create some complex 97-archetype system, or would everyone scoff and say that archetypes 6, 14, 37 and 60-65 are all basically the same?
While I agree in the general, it's pretty clear that magic the gathering draws considerable inspiration from human literature and culture, and was exceptionally well planned and very carefully evolved over decades so if even if these arrangements aren't intentional, they certainly aren't accidental.
I had not heard that phrase, but I imagine it refers to the recently printed Oko, Thief of Crowns. A card that dominated every format until it was banned in all but Legacy, Vintage, and EDH. It is (almost) universally agreed to be the most busted Plainswalker in Magic. And it is unique in that when you first read the card you think ‘meh, no big deal’... then you play against it and lose every time.
It's surprising to me that you assert that a system which is simultaneously complex-enough to support Turing-complete calculation, and simple enough to be a "pick-up-and-play card game", is not carefully evolved.
Fair shout on the number of banned cards, though - R&D and playtesting could definitely do better, there!
I was more referring to the cultural content (names, flavor text, art) than the game mechanics. Besides which, Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game.
If you're referring to the Turing completeness, the algorithm and cards that were found require both players to be acting in concert to achieve the Turing machine; either player could stop at any time. I don't see the fact that players can choose to act strangely in a game to be a reflection of the game itself.
If you're talking about things like combining effects together that happen to cause an unbreakable infinite loop, then I'd argue that you're wrong; there's a rule that defines unbreakable infinite loops as a tie, so you know whether you won or lost (i.e. you did neither; it's not an xor, although it is a nand).
Your first statement is no longer true with the newest approach: it only requires a tournament-legal deck and the player piloting it to set up (and it could do so turn 1, though it's very unlikely to do so), and once set up it continues with only mandatory actions (neither player has any choices to make in the game, though either player could in principle concede).
But such things are not something which comes up in general play in practice: to set up such a machine you have to ignore several opportunities to just win the game. I've yet to even see an infinite loop which causes a tie.
> 104.4b If a game that’s not using the limited range of influence option (including a two-player game) somehow enters a “loop” of mandatory actions, repeating a sequence of events with no way to stop, the game is a draw. Loops that contain an optional action don’t result in a draw.
One (very contrived) example is the "three Oblivion Ring[0]" loop. Start with no non-land permanents on the battlefield, then cast an Oblivion Ring. There are no valid targets for the "ETB" (enters the battlefield) trigger, so nothing happens. Then cast a second Oblivion Ring; the only valid target is the first Oblivion Ring, so it's exiled until the second one leaves the battlefield. Finally, cast a third Oblivion Ring; the only valid target is the first Oblivion Ring, which is then exiled, causing the first one to come back. The only valid target for the first one is the third one, so that one is exiled and the second one comes back. The only valid target for the second one is the first one, so that one is exiled and the third comes back. This goes on infinitely, assuming no player has any cards that can respond to the ETB triggers by either countering it, removing the Oblivion Ring currently on the battlefield in some way, or putting another valid target for an Oblivion Ring on the battlefield. This isn't likely to ever happen in a game, but with the current rules, it's technically possible.
That rule is exactly where the the construction used becomes interesting: it's built in such a way so that if the turing machine halts, the player who set it up wins the game. If it doesn't, by the rule above, it's a draw. So it's fundamentally impossible to tell the result of an arbitrary setup (and in practice you could set it up such that it halts iff some unknown conjecture is true).
Regarding the oblivion ring loop, there's an example of it being used on MTGO, which doesn't end well (basically seems to crash the server and/or client): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGXG5rNe_tI
> Regarding the oblivion ring loop, there's an example of it being used on MTGO, which doesn't end well (basically seems to crash the server and/or client): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGXG5rNe_tI
Oh wow, I should have realized that somebody would try it out online just to see what happens! I'm not surprised it ends up with some sort of clash; given that it's Turing complete, the game engine obviously can't detect whether a current state will end up halting or not...
The whole opposites/balance motif is just something humans are really into about right now because we can't yet compare more than two things in our brain at a time.
In reality all of these things are orthogonal, and while we do have words to distinguish them, they are only "opposing" in the sense that there is a word specifically meant to distinguish between them. Whatever that word is, it's just an over-simplified symbol in your brain.
There is always a solution that includes both "opposites" but is too paradoxical feeling for us to yet see.
Overall, these "opposing" concepts are really just different means of reaching the same juicy core of sentience, but nothing less than all at once will get us the entire way.
Yes. Things are complex and multidimensional. But projections to lower dimensional spaces help us grasp it. Even if they distort the complex thing somewhat. If you see enough projections you can get the idea and some intuition about multidimensional thing. Much more than you could achieve just trying to see it in its full complexity at once.
Super into this perspective. Unfortunately, I find myself around many people who don't see the modality as a dimension lowering, but instead as the truth. Which is fine, we're still very, very, very primitive. But I've been done with the whole "balance" thing for ~6 years and philosophy gets pretty lonely passed that hurdle.
For what it's worth, if anyone is interested, "paradox" has been the thing for me since.
For me, it was neurotic as fuck. I started to question how predictable I was, and whether or not I could prove that the world around we wasn't just a tiny fake spec generated in real time based off predictions of what I would do next. The notion that my entire world could actually be very, very tiny as long as I was predictable enough kind of got to me. I started trying to do things I wouldn't do, and that was sort of a paradox. Eventually I began to use randomization to try to throw off the feeling. Nothing really worked, there's no way to prove that this isn't the tiniest matrix using advanced predictions to generate just a little more than what I sense. Also can't prove it's not a giant amazing universe. What-if-ism means: if it doesn't hurt to believe something, and you're willing to cede it's probably not reality, go for it. I like to believe in the universe as it's normally described.
Anyways, I find that the more I think about something, the closer I get to a paradox. What's the point of philosophy? To prove there is no point. What's the meaning of life? To understand there is no meaning. How do I achieve x goal? Stop caring about achieving it.
In a few words, rather than things existing as opposites, they exist as a paradox. They really shouldn't exist together.
As a WIP tangential thought (take it with a grain of salt, it's just for fun right now): as much as we take it for granted, I think there's something fucked up about a universe with both Cartesian and radial coordinates. Like, they shouldn't be together. And why just those two? Why not more? Why not just one? Seemingly things should be either universally relative, or personally relative, but not both simultaneously. It's like we're trying to survive in a universe with two disparate rule sets that by all accounts shouldn't be able to happen at the same time, and yet they are. It's a fucking paradox.
Thanks. It sounds like you spent a lot of time in Western philosophy and paradigms of thought. These themes you describe are basically the complete substance of Buddhism's various formulations and indeed most "Eastern" religions. Though you are not using the forms of description employed in the East, you are approaching the same ideas.
As a relevant example, consider the yin/yang symbol. It is composed of a duality which at first glance seems mutually exclusive, but what is most interesting about the two is actually where they interact. The paradox is that one cannot exist at the same (space-)time as the other, but each requires the other's existence to fully specify itself in terms of a cohesive concept. The light and dark sides are descriptors of two sides of the same coin. Finding the way to conceptualize that coin, rather than its sides, leads you to paradox that paradoxically makes sense! Just goes to show how "rationality" in the Greco-Roman sense is just one way to conceptualize our understanding, and that there are more ways than that.
We understand reality through language primarily built on identifying by what things are and what things are not. But maybe this form of understanding is limiting because it pre-supposes those dualities that make the language work.
To your point about coordinate systems -- there's something to be said about the ability to rationalize our sensory experiences into a formal logical system of description. However the paradox is actually that neither of those coordinate systems are "canonical" in the universal (literally and metaphorically) sense. They are first-order approximations to make our methods of reasoning (i.e., math) easier. But they do not reflect reality because, if you take the dominant theories of physics as true, the idea of space with curvature 0 or curvature +1 is a platonic ideal that cannot exist because matter and energy are distributed inhomogenously throughout space and time.
I think where Hegel differs from you though is that the resolution of a contradiction can be something new and different, rather than just being an aspect of the original definitions.
Take ‘order’ vs ‘chaos’ - a resolution does not require choice between one and the other, but can consist of asking a novel question like what structure (order) of society best maximizes individual freedom (chaos)?
Magic has terms for that too. Most decks aren’t mono-colored, people blend colors and those decks take a character and personality of their own.
A Green/Blue hybrid deck is called “Simic” and does encompass both sides. It refers to a kind of cerebral approach to cultivating nature, like a biologist or a gardener. The faction is comprised of weird genetic engineered organisms.
Black/White is called “Orzhov” and blends the desire for order with a willingness to cut throats to achieve your goals. The faction runs a sort of high value loan sharking operation.
Interestingly, you can view both Nazism and Soviet Communism through a black/white lens, but they hated one another because the way black and white split were inverted. This means there’s more than one flavor of black-white - you get a pair of flavors for every dimension along which one can resolve the self vs other contradiction.
Communism - white ideology (equality for all) led by a deeply black, self-serving Party and leaders that did things like repeatedly imprison, execute, and starve and both their own party members and the general Soviet population. This sounds like your definition of Orzhov.
Nazism - black ideology (serve the German nation and the German people above all others) led by a white (at least according to their own beliefs) leadership. The Nazis killed people they considered non-Germans, but they (largely) didn't kill and betray those they considered their own.
The color inversion drove conflict between these neighbors, but both movements were black-white at the core.
One illustrative example: Hitler delayed transitioning Germany to a full wartime economy, aiming to spare the population the rigors of a full mobilization.
By contrast, early in the war Stalin ordered waves of green conscripts, some without rifles, in mass attacks at the front, with NKVD units right behind tasked with shooting deserters.
I think it's hard to encompass massive ideologies into something like this without seeming reductive.
Communism might have rules and be ruthless, but it's also a utopian ideology that motivated heavily by a desire for "freedom" in its anarchist framing. It's just that this state of freedom is deferred (basically indefinitely). There is also a huge element of technocratic management in socialist economics. I would actually categorize it as a Blue/Red ideology with splashes of Black once the tankies show up. These are Grixis colors, but Grixis in magic is predominantly Black with a bit of Blue and Red, while Communists would be predominantly Blue/Red with a splash of Black.
Nazism is must more White rather than Blue. It's a preference for order, hierarchy, and purity, which are all classically White. It's also violent and ruthless, which is classically Black. There is also some Green in there because of the emphasis on a belief in primordial racial groups having a "natural" hierarchy. Their idea of nature is completely at odds with how nature actually works, but they think that's how it works. They're pretty close to Abzan (https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Abzan_Houses) with the general militarism, the xenophobia, and the obsessive focus on lineage.
A translation would add to the mystique, remember that period when it was in style to use everyday Japanese words as if they were all deep and mysterious?
Think cockatrice that trades ergonomics for a rules engine. Much easier to play when the game just 'works'. It even has loop detection for when you go infinite with triggers.
One thing to note is the community run servers are plagued with performance hitches at peak time. If you play regularly on xmage with friends, I'd recommend making an image on your preferred VPS provider and spinning up an instance when y'all want to play.
I do kind of like the manual aspect of cockatrice instead of the automated experience of arena. It feels more like an actual sit-down game IRL. But there are certainly cons, folks frequently miss triggers or debate rules. Still that's magic.
I poked around xmage and found it rather difficult. Cockatrice definitely has a learning curve too, but my first impression did not bode well.
Me and my friends have found that the most fun is to play using https://github.com/dr4fters/dr4ft (dr4ft.info, currently down, mirror here: https://beta-dr4ft.herokuapp.com/#) - we do a draft, then do a best of 3 rounds with the decks that we make. It makes deck-building a core part of the game, and it's always a completely new game. Brilliant fun.
but imho it's more fun to play with either cards you own or with a reasonable limit, because mtg is better with some kind of a social contract in force.
I play very infrequently, so it is fun to say "let's play legacy, pick something random from a legacy top decks list". Gets boring pretty quickly, but I'm burnt out on MtG for awhile by that point anyway :)
I think this contract is usually just the set of rules for deck construction, which is usually just a format. It's not really a problem if one player's preferred modern deck costs $200 and another's costs $2000 when neither of them had to pay for the cards and both of them had the option to play whatever modern deck they liked.
That's definitely a thing. I usually try to avoid games where trying to win is frowned upon in favor of games that are enjoyable when everyone tries to win.
Generally speaking, in Magic, people try to win, but you're not going to be sinking hundreds of dollars into cards when you're just getting into the game and playing against other newbies, making it a self-regulating thing - you spend more money as you need to spend more money.
You're replying to a thread that begins with "Even if you don't own the cards and you're playing with proxies or on cockatrice or whatever, you should still use an additional deck construction rule that places an upper bound on the physical version of the deck."
Works for seasoned players. For myself and most people I play with, we're reading the cards most of the time. Try fitting Shahrazad's text on a card with sharpie :)
They have little to do with how Magic works out in practice, though:
WHITE: swarm everything with little guys
GREEN: trample everything with giant monsters
RED: burn everything
BLUE: twist everything beyond recognition
BLACK: keep dragging up old, dead stuff
There's certainly little harmony and acceptance in Green. It's the color of rapid growth, of everything can be bigger. The others I can kinda see if quint at them a bit, but not green.
No, that's the motto of the citizen volunteer brigades! Feeling a bit down? Join a re-education group and go and kick some subversives' ribcages in! It'll do you a power of good!
On a side note: If you were successful in MtG and other 'deep' games, would you list it on your CV? Or does it still have the image of a children's card game?
For what it's worth, I know enough people who went on from MtG to make a ton of money in poker and/or finance that I'd probably perk up if someone with decent Grand Prix or Pro Tour finishes popped up during hiring. That said I am also biased and sentimental.
I learned the ins and outs of how to resolve a stack in CS from experiences playing MTG at a young age. I absolutely would perk up if this was on someone's resume, but I'm also biased and sentimental.
Yup, and a few went to sportsbooks or gambling syndicates. I wouldn’t want to over analyse it but I do think there’s something to be said for having viscerally suffered at the hands of probability.
These things have been around long enough that there are people now making decisions at a high enough level who also played these. So it's probably not as bad as it was 10-20 years ago?
If you're applying to stuffy places where the people aren't known to be into deep/complicated games, you might get rejected if you don't have something else. It depends if you want to apply to stuffy places because you need any job ASAP.
If you're doing okay and want to select businesses that like hobbies on resumes, go for it.
Not necessarily related to card games but as a hiring manager I do take into account non work related hobbies.
For example, I played on a nationally ranked college club sport team(paintball) and was also the club president and team captain at the same time. This was on top of getting a dual-BA/MBA. Running the club and team was essentially the same as running a small business or medium sized department in a larger firm with a budget of $50K (this was all volunteer) and a "staff" of 20+ people.
The experience taught me that anyone who has done:
- full time college
- played, at a minimum, a club sport or was part of a debate team, competitive dance whatever
- was also an officer in said organization
had the wherewithal to "volunteer" three times for activities that required a large amount of commitment, discipline and organizational abilities. In other words, they chose to do more than the people who were just students.
I am, of course, biased because this was my background. That being said, I have always found a strong correlation between people with the trifecta of college/extracurricular/officer and the skills necessary to do well in a work setting.
Years ago, one of my DnD buddies listed me as a reference. Luckily, I knew the call was coming so I prepared. I spent the entire time talking about his ability to collaborate in a team, have an eye for detail, and solve problems creatively. He's 12+ years into that job with a few promotions so not all bad. ;)
In tech circles it's pretty highly regarded. When learning programming, understand the stack comes very easily to MtG players since card players are resolved in a stack. Most highly competitive MtG players also come from math or other quantitative reasoning backgrounds.
In Australia at least, it's not unusual for CVs to include an "interests" section with 2-3 interests listed.
It's typically used to list hobbies and interests and if it gets mentioned during an interview, the candidate can briefly touch on their success (and maybe even how it lossely relates to the role).
From the other point of view - as someone who frequently interviews people for technical positions in the video game industry - I definitely wouldn't take it as a negative thing and most likely would ask about it in the interview. After all, we're usually looking for passionate people, and if your passion is playing MtG at a competitive level(or maybe you just love the game), I definitely would like to hear about it.
Richard Garfield took the concept from a fantasy novel, kind of said "Yeah, kind of like that" and didn't think any more of it.
The reason is to limit the players' choices. If everyone has access to everything, there is no variety.
There's a lot of bleed between the colors and a lot of things that just don't quite make sense.
And they're also wrong according to Mark Rosewater, the current lead designer of the game. For example: Black isn't satisfaction, it's looking out for yourself. It's a selfish philosophy. Whereas one can find satisfaction through altruistic acts. And you can argue every color is looking for satisfaction, it's just that every color defines satisfaction in a different manner.
All models are wrong, some are useful, yadda yadda.
Of course it doesn't explain humanity, that's just bad clickbait. But clustering things together helps analyzing things according to a certain theory/outlook.
You can use MBTI that way too, even if its fundation is unscientific. Ask any set of correlated-enough question, and you end up with a cluster of people/events that correlate with a slew of other things.
If you said the Earth was flat you'd be wrong, if you said the Earth was a sphere, you'd also be wrong, but if you said the second was just as wrong as the first, you'd be more wrong than either. Yadda yadda.
The article is flat Earth wrong.
Garfield needed a design reason to force players to include and exclude whole swaths of cards. Separating them by some arbitrary distinction solved that. Then he slapped some flavor on top of that.
There are serious color-pie breaks in the first set. Why? Because the philosophy wasn't a primary or even secondary concern.
You're using "wrong" to refer to the fact that the color pie was developed arbitrarily, and so can't be descriptive of humanity or people.
The other poster, and the article, aren't claiming that the color pie was developed with humanity or culture as a basis. They don't think that people can be solely described by a color and a description thought up by Garfield as a background for a card game. They don't disagree with you.
What they do think is: This is a useful lens to view people through. That's why the article refers to the techniques as an intuition pump - they allow you to use your intuition for a less complex space to solve more complex problems. I think I believe that this lens is a good one, but I'm not sure your comments engage with that angle at all.
Flat Earth is a great lens situationally, btw. If it's 3km East to the shops, and 4km North to work, then I know that they're 5km apart. Maybe not exactly right, but right enough. Easier to do that math in my head in a flat scenario than to try use some GIS tool or an oblate spheroid model.
But it's not a useful lens. It's overly simplistic and holds no predictive power. It can only be applied in hindsight. Even as a narrative scaffold, it fails because it creates one-dimensional characters unless you're pulling from so many colors that you're not really using it anyway.
And the metaphor isn't the point. So trying to defend the flat Earth model is missing the point of the metaphor entirely. It's an "ahksually" retort.
That's more the meat and potatoes I was interested in reading, so I appreciate the response.
I think there are probably better lenses that are equally simple (maybe Big 5/MBTI, though I know little about them), but the advantage of the colour pie is that MTG players already spend time engaging with it and have a broad understanding of the tropes/stereotypes/etc. There's an example of applying it in the article, but I'm guessing you think that that's an outlier situation, and that it wouldn't broadly be useful. I can respect that, and I'm not sure I disagree yet. Call me back in a year or two.
Hadn't thought of using it as a narrative scaffold, and can definitely see why you wouldn't want it as your sole source for such. Having 5 possible character themes and 10-15 possible relationships does not an interesting story make.
I thought that demonstrating the use of the flat Earth model as a lens would be interesting, so apologies if it came across as a retort.
If you want to learn more about the MTG color wheel or MTG design in general check out the "Drive to Work" podcast by Mark Rosewater, the lead designer of magic. Dude is wicked smart and very humble.
Drive to Work [1] is a great podcast. Most of it is, of course, about MtG, but there are a lot of episodes about various things like writing, creativity, or communication. Mark Rosewater is the head designer, which means that he is responsible for creating the general structure of a set [2] and not the various stages of fine tuning that happen later on.
So there is a lot of content about designing for humans and little about detailed number-crunching and game balance.
He also explains most terminology and concepts, so a passing familiarity should be more than enough to understand the MtG-related content.
[2] Cards are released in groups, called sets. A set (usually) takes place on a particular world and is connected to a part of the larger story, which are reflected in its gameplay.
Just off the top of my head: Feedback (545, 199), Human Nature (329), Teaching (415), Creativity (77, 551), Complexity (455), Stand-Up Comedy (347, 543), Interviews (335).
You may want to check out Blue Moon (Legends), a very enjoyable duelling card game with limited construction aspect. It has 9 carefully constructed decks that play very differently. It's a joy to see how differently they approach victory and how well-balanced they are. The free application, with ML-powered AI, is available at keldon.net
Do you know other card games with interesting and consistently defined roles?
I respectfully disagree. Green in MtG is about growth, power of life, abundance (not harmony). Black is about destruction, death and suppression (not “individualism” or “at all costs mentality”). You can build your strategy on all these.
dark = night = dangerous and white = day = you can actually see what's trying to kill you. This is much older than the whole race thing you're constructing. White = good and black = bad also exists among black humans in africa, completely detached from skin color shenanigans.
Black is bad because it represents the night, an evolutionary dangerous time. Light/white is good because daylight is safe. Humanity has had these associations long before race was ever considered.
