The New Civil War (ongoing) and Magic

A few (I use the term loosely) years ago, I wrote a series of posts about the Magic card game from Wizards of the Coast. At this point, I really haven't played any since sometime shortly after writing those posts, something which makes me sad on one level, but it is what it is. You have to pick and choose what you make time for in life, and Magic just isn't in the cards at the moment. But that's beside the point...

For those of you haven't realized it, yet, this post is going to be an analogy. Maybe an extended metaphor. I'm telling a story to make a point.

Before I go on, I should point out that one of the things I liked to do was make working, even winning, decks out of cards other people believed were worthless. In fact, my signature deck was built around

because one of the guys in my gaming group dismissed the card as a curiosity and nothing you could use to build a deck around. And everyone agreed with him. So, well, not only did I build a deck around it, I built a champion deck around it.

Back when I was into tournament play, I was responsible for having two different deck types banned from our local tournaments in north Louisiana. The first deck was organized around this card:

Chains was a card I was immediately drawn to (for reasons I'm not going to try to explain, since it would take more time than it's worth to get the point across to people who don't understand the game) when the Legends expansion came out, though it was mostly deemed a useless card by everyone else. Once I was able to gather the cards I needed for the deck (actually a difficult process where the Legends expansion was concerned), I put it together and took it to a tournament.

Without going into detail, each opponent I played, once I got the combination of cards out that I needed, cried foul. The tournament judge had to come over each time and verify that what I was doing was not, in fact, cheating and that the cards were operating as designed. Each opponent I played got all pissy about losing to the deck I was playing and, basically, accused me of not playing fair. Basically, because I had put together a card combination that no one else had thought of and created a deck no one had a counter to, I had done something that wasn't fair. One player quit in the middle of our match and stomped out of the store vowing never to come back because the judge wouldn't side with him against my deck, and the final player I was to play, the match for the tournament win, forfeited without playing a single game. He had watched my last couple of matches, knew he couldn't win, and didn't want to play against the deck I had.

Of course, my deck was banned after that from future tournament play and, several weeks later, WotC restricted the use of Chains because it was too powerful. The card everyone thought was useless. And the dude who stormed out? He was back the next week and expressed to me his admiration for the deck. No one, however, ever suggested that my win be declared illegitimate due to the immediate banning of my deck or the later restriction of the card.

The other deck I had banned was a deck built around creatures called thallids. Again, I'm not going to get into the mechanics of the deck, but let's just say it was a slow build deck and the issue around it was that it caused long games. When you're trying to keep a tournament to a reasonable length of time, decks that cause long games are not looked upon favorably. And, yes, I built the deck because it was general consensus that you couldn't win a tournament with thallids.

One thing of interest about that tournament:
The guy I played the championship against also had a slow build deck, so our championship match took a long time to play. He had, however, gotten a lucky break in the second game and won a quick victory so that we were tied one to one going into the third game. My deck was such that, though, if you hadn't beaten me by turn four or five, there was no way you could, so we played on and on until I could get to a point where I could wipe him out. The spectators started getting antsy because the game was taking so long and started urging one of us to forfeit. The other guy refused and, being the rules lawyer that he was, everyone knew there was no point in trying to convince him to surrender even though it was painfully obvious that he was going to lose. Eventually. So everyone started trying to convince me to quit and let him win, the logic being that since everyone knew I was going to win, I could forfeit and claim, "I was going to win, anyway."

Yeah, that didn't do it for me, so we played until the bitter end, and my deck was banned from future tournaments. Don't worry; it would have been banned even if I had forfeited.

This is the part where I get to the point:
No one that I beat came back later protesting that their losses had been unfair because my decks ended up being banned. No one came back saying that the tournament outcomes should be re-decided because of any kind of unfair advantage that I'd had.

But, see, white supremacists have lost two wars, two very major wars, and here they are whining about how unfair it's all been that they're not being allowed to "win." They're like little cry baby spoil sports who can't take their losses and realize that no one else wants their white supremacist bullshit.

Or, to flip the analogy (because I can do that sort of thing), I didn't whine about how my decks were banned and keep bringing them to tournament after tournament demanding to be allowed to play with them. No, I went home and came up with new deck ideas.

A good example of how pissy and whiny they are happened this weekend (as I write this) in San Francisco. After being denied all of their tools of violence and ways to broadcast their violence, the white supremacist ninnies called their event off all together. No one barred them from holding their "rally," but when told they couldn't bring their guns and other weapons and paraphernalia, they called the whole thing off (more than once), and played the "Fine! I'll just go home, then, and never come back!" card. [Many of them have said that they want attempt to come back to San Francisco (like it's some kind of threat?).] And everyone shrugged and said, "Okay, go." But the fact that they chose to not hold their rally shows what their true intent was all along: to incite violence. Being barred from that, they had nothing to say.

But they're not going to come back next week and say, "You know, that was well played. We lost fair and square." No, they're going to whine about it and talk about how they were treated unfairly and barred from holding their rally, and their #fakepresident Trump is going to support them in their whining. It seems even Magic players are more mature, much more mature, than white supremacists.

The High Cost of Magic

I've mentioned before that I play Magic: The Gathering. Well, sort of. I mean, I sort of play. I used to really play, and if you want to read more about that, you can go here, but, these days, I only sort of play.

I just don't have the time or money to really compete, right now, but it is fun to go play a tournament every so often. However, in the short time I've been back into playing again, I've noticed a disturbing trend. Now, stay with me even those of you that have never heard of the game, because I have a point, so I will try to keep my technical talk as general as possible so that you can follow along.

Cards in Magic have a cost to put them into play. In general, that cost becomes higher the more powerful the card. So, for instance, a goblin,

which is weak, only costs 1 to put into play while a dragon,

which is quite a bit more powerful, costs 6. In the past, these costs were basically unaffected by the cards rarity. In the above example, the goblin is a common card (easy to get) while the dragon is a rare card (difficult to get). But this wolf

is a rare card and has the same casting cost of 1 as the goblin while this common wurm

has the same cost as the dragon.

What this did for Magic was allow people to play at whatever level they could afford. You didn't have to own tons of rare cards. The rare cards allowed slightly more flexibility and some advantage but not an overwhelming advantage. The same Terror card, a common and cheap to cast,

could kill a rare card as quickly as it could a common card. Basically, you could build a strong deck without having to have rares in it. In fact, I used to keep a deck built entirely of commons (with a few uncommons) around just to show people you didn't have to have the rares. People would bring their competition decks to test against my common deck (which always resulted in sales for the store I worked in when I would beat them).

This model of Magic was a good one. It allowed a broad base of players to play and to play on a fairly level playing field. You didn't have to own thousands of dollars worth of cards to be able to compete.

That model of Magic no longer exists.

Just within the last couple of years, Wizards of the Coast has switched to a model that lowers the cost to put rare cards into play. For example, this Loxodon Smiter

only costs 3 to put into play and he has some pretty fantastic special abilities. It's half the casting cost of the above dragon and wurm and nearly as powerful. This common card, not nearly as powerful as the Smiter,

costs 5 to put into play. To which you might say, "There's still the Terror card," but, no, they took that card out of the game, so there is no card that will destroy a creature that's that cheap to cast. What you have instead are things like

which costs 3 (as opposed to Terror's 2) and only works on flying creatures (but is, at least, common) or

which costs a whopping 6 and isn't even common; it's an uncommon. Perhaps the best example can be seen here. Lightning Bolt

was a common card that could deal damage to a creature at a cost of 1 but has been taken out like Terror has. The closest to it is

for double the cost, which may not seem like a big deal but, trust me, it is. And it's still not enough to take care of that Smiter from up above.

All of that to say that Wizards of the Coast has shifted the focus of the game from one that allows people of all financial means to play to one that favors the players with lots of money to spend gaining rare cards and the even harder to get, but even more powerful, mythic rare cards.

What this has caused is fewer players showing up to tournaments. I don't go more than once every couple of months, but even I have noticed it. And, after talking with some of the guys in the game shop that hosts the tournaments, player numbers are about half of what they were two years ago. What you end up with is fewer players spending money on packs and cards. Sure, those fewer are spending more money than they were before, and it may make up for the attrition rate of players for a while, but that can't last for forever. The end result is a strong but small player base where once you had a very large player base. In the end, it's bad for the game.

The cost of Magic, both in the game with the casting cost of the cards and outside the game on the wallets of the players, has become too high.

Of course, this kind of problem is not restricted to the guys at Wizards of the Coast.

When I was in high school, I was pretty big into the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony.

The series involved the use of puns. In the beginning, the puns were few, just added in as a bit of fun, but, by book four, Centaur Isle (get it?), the puns were becoming part of the story and, later, in such books as Isle of View (get that one?), the puns had eclipsed the story. The reason was a fan-based one. Fans of Xanth began sending in puns to Anthony, and he would work them into the story with acknowledgement to the sender at the end of the book. But he lost the story somewhere in doing this and lost readers like me that wanted that story thing to be involved. He was left with a loyal but small fan base and, although Xanth is still going on, there is no call for any other kind of writing work from Anthony because he has become just that one thing.

I think authors can easily be pulled into traps like this. Basically, they can focus in too much on writing just one kind of thing because that appears to be where the money is. They lock themselves into just writing fantasy or just writing romance or just writing... whatever because "that's what people want." Usually, by the time you've realized you've put yourself in a box, it's too late to get out. As Anthony says, publishers don't want anything else from him anymore.

David Eddings did the same thing after the success of his The Belgariad. Everything he wrote after that was just that same story over and over again for two decades because that's "what people wanted."

All of that to say (all of that because I wanted to talk about the whole Magic thing since it's something that I've noticed and am not happy with) that it's a dangerous thing to narrow your focus too much to only appeal to a particular audience. The more you narrow, the more people you will lose.

So, yeah, I like fantasy and stories with fantastic elements, but I don't want to be "just a fantasy author." I don't want to get locked in like that. I want to write good stories, all kinds of good stories, so I'll keep trying new things. Some of them may not work.

But some of them will.

Blood & Magic

Man, with a title like that, it sounds like I'm about to go off on some dissertation about fantasy and magic within fantasy or, maybe, some new magic system I, personally, have developed for some epic fantasy epic that involves blood or something. Or maybe something with vampires. Sadly, it's nothing so fantastic. Actually, it's just what it says it is...

Blood
I have an ambivalent relationship with blood. I don't mind the sight of it, not at all. If you're gushing blood, I can even stay level-headed enough to help you or get you to help or whatever. I know this from personal experience (like when a friend of mine when I was a kid fell off of a wall and hit his chin on the way down (man, there was blood everywhere!), and I got him to his mom (so she could take him to get the bajillion stitches he needed)). So it was with some surprise that I found out I have a squeamish reaction to people having blood drawn.

I don't have a problem with needles. You need a shot? No problem. Well, unless it's in the belly; that's kind of gross, but it doesn't make me want to pass out (I know, because I had friend in high school with type 1 diabetes who had to give herself insulin shots in the belly. Gross. But no head issues). However, you so much as poke someone with a lancet, and I start to swoon. Not that I've ever actually passed out, but I think I've been close.

I found that out unexpectedly during sixth grade. We were on a field trip to a hospital, and they were going to centrifuge some blood for us, but they needed to get the blood, first, so one of the nurses or techs or someone popped his (or her (I don't remember)) arm out to have the blood drawn. I was trying to watch just like everyone else was, but, as soon as they stuck the needle into the person's arm and started to pull the blood out, I went "white as a sheet," as one of my classmates said, and broke out in a damp sweat, and felt like my head was going to pop off and float away.

To make a long story short, I have learned to avoid situations where I (or anyone else) am going to have blood taken out of me on purpose.

So it was with much trepidation that I had to go in to have my blood drawn last week. Just something for this program at my wife's work, nothing to be alarmed over. [We earn points for doing things like this and can redeem for, among other things, movie tickets. So, now, you know the secret to all of the Oscar movies.] Well, except for me. It was something for me to be alarmed over. Evidently. Because I didn't sleep well the night before (among other side effects). It was, after all, my first time to have my blood drawn.

I also had to have my blood pressure taken. I have had that done before. But it didn't go well. As in, she took my pressure the first time and it was really high. Too high. So she decided to take it again and started telling me to relax and stuff, so I told her it wasn't having my blood pressure taken that was the issue, and I explained the whole thing with taking blood out of people. During the discussion about that and her amazement that I had never had my blood taken before, she finished with the pressure for the second time, and it was even higher, and she was concerned, so she decided to try my other arm. I don't even know what it was that third time, because, by the time she was finished, she had decided to take my blood first. Yeah, yeah, I know she'd already done the pressure three times, but she didn't take any of those results.

She had me lie down and she took my blood. Which was actually okay, because I just stared at the wall the whole time, and, other than a tiny poke, it didn't feel like anything. I was quite shocked actually that she had taken three vials of blood out of me. Three vials! My wife says that's normal.
Anyway...

She took my blood pressure again... and it was totally normal.

Which brings me to my point: I didn't feel any different after she took out my blood than I had beforehand. I mean, to me, I didn't feel any different, but something in me changed, because, immediately after, my blood pressure had returned to normal even though I hadn't felt stressed before and I didn't feel relieved after.
And I find that pretty amazing. Bodies are weird.
And that thing in particular? Well, that's magic.

Which brings me to
Magic
Last week, Nathan Fillion tweeted that he was learning to play Magic: The Gathering, "the game with more rules than game." Or something like that. Here are the things you should take away from that:

1. Yes, I am now on twitter (in case you missed me say that before). You can find me here. If you follow me, I will probably follow you back. Unless I don't know you, in which case you need to give me a reason to follow you, like interacting with me.
2. Yes, I follow Castle. Um, I mean Nathan Fillion. The guy who used to a space cowboy. I only follow cool celebrities, though (seriously, I already quit following one (unnamed) celebrity who turned out to be a <content edited>).
3. Fillion plays Magic! And was even tweeting Wizards of the Coast about some issue or another. He became infinitely cooler when he tweeted about that.

I hope he posts updates, because I really want to know what color(s) he settles on as his favorite.

Oh, also, if you have any twitter tips, let me know, because I'm still trying to figure the whole thing out.

Last Friday Night (or Friday Night Magic)

If you've been following along this week, you're aware of how this past weekend went and ended, but I left out how it began, so let's go back to last Friday night. Okay, actually, let's go back to April...

Remember how I mentioned that during the midst of a-to-z that my washing machine had broken? Well, it did. Part of dealing with that was rearranging the garage, and part of rearranging the garage was finding things (like that first edition copy of A Game of Thrones). Well, it also meant finding a bunch of my old Magic cards.

As I've stated before, I love Magic: the Gathering. Best game ever made. I love Magic so much that I did a whole series of posts about it and how it relates to writing not all that long ago (you can find part one here). However, I haven't really played it in... a long time. Aside from games with my kids every great once in a while, but, considering that I used to play tournaments and stuff, that hardly counts. For me, anyway. I play it with them to enjoy an activity with them, not because it gives me the kind of game play I want.

At any rate, having unburied all of these cards, I thought it was probably time that I sort them out and sell off all the extra stuff I have. Because I have a lot of extra stuff. But, see, the sorting through them really made me want to play again. I mean play for real again. It is something that I miss doing. So I started checking into the local tournament scene...

There was a big problem with that, a problem I knew would exist, but I was just checking, so I was willing to ignore it for the moment. What problem? Well... see, here's where it gets complicated for those of you (I'm betting nearly all of you) that don't know anything about Magic, so I'll make it as simple as possible: My cards aren't current.

Yeah, I hear all of you non-Magic players out there: "What does that have to do with anything? Cards are cards." Which is true if I just wanted to goof around and play casual games, but it's totally not true for tournaments. To make it simple, due to the large number of expansions and the cost of the older cards, Wizards of the Coast has various formats for tournaments. The most common of these are modern and standard. Modern format tournaments allow cards printed after 2003; I stopped collecting in 2004. Standard format tournaments allow cards from the last couple of blocks of expansions, which means the last couple of years. Basically, I don't own any cards to build decks for these formats of play. That meant that "constructed style" tournaments were out (tournaments where you build a deck beforehand and bring it in to compete with).

Fortunately, in the time since I quit playing draft tournaments have become a big thing (a "draft" tournament is where everyone gets some booster packs of cards and chooses one out and passes it to the next player to choose and so forth until all of the cards are gone); they barely existed back when I dropped out of playing. I'm assuming the rise in popularity is because, theoretically, they put everyone on a somewhat equal footing. And you get to keep the cards you draft, so, even if you lose, you don't come away empty handed. This was exactly the kind of thing I needed. I could compete in a draft tournament.

Except for the one snag.
The draft tournaments are on Friday nights. Friday night is special family time night with a big special meal and all of that.
My wife was not going to be happy.

And she wasn't, but we worked it out. In the end, it was decided that I would take my oldest son, who had never played in a tournament, and go this past Friday night. Probably not the best choice of nights, but it was the only choice of Friday nights anytime around now. The prior Friday night, he was busy. Tonight, he is busy; actually, we all are, because we are going to see him in an improv show with his school drama group. Next Friday night, the whole family is busy, because my younger son will be performing in his school musical. I'm sure you get the picture with our Friday nights. Even with as busy as the weekend was going to be, it was the only Friday night available, so we went.

So, while I was busy working on formatting issues for Charter Shorts, Too and trying to get that finished, my son was looking up rules and stuff. And he kept trying to talk to me about the stuff he was reading, which I couldn't really do at the time. I answered his questions as best I could, but, whenever he would say something like, "hey, listen to this," I told him I couldn't. Now, that's important, so pay attention. In fact, in some ways, it's the point of all of this.

My son and I made it to the store where the tournament was being held at and got all signed up. We were asked multiple times by various employees "have you played in a tournament before?" and "have you played in a tournament here before?" I was very clear about our answers: 1. My son had never played in a tournament before. 2. It had been over 12 years since I had played in a tournament. 3. Seeing that that store had not existed a dozen years before, no, neither of us had never played in a tournament in that store. I kept waiting for some response to that question, or, at least, some kind of clarification as to why it was being asked, but the answer never seemed to get more than a nod, and at no time whatsoever did anyone bother to explain how anything worked.

I became that annoying kid in class that kept asking questions... except I really didn't know what questions I should be asking. And I didn't really get any answers, anyway.

At any rate, being totally unfamiliar with the cards, my son and I began drafting our decks, the slowest people at the table. Of course, once I had my colors worked out (blue and white), I sped up and even had to wait for stacks of cards from the people next to me. My son didn't get any faster and became the bottleneck at the table. But we got through it with only minor difficulties and miscommunications and got our decks built. 60 cards, right? Because that's been the minimum deck size limit since... well, since almost the beginning.

So I played my first match. It was against one of the top players in the store, and it was clear that he expected to win. And he did. Fairly easily, too. But, see, here's where it gets interesting. He took the time to put the cards he'd drafted into sleeves before playing [Sleeves are special flexible plastic covers for the cards so that you don't damage them while playing. I've never been a big fan of sleeves, but a lot of people use them.], so I didn't notice anything about his deck. But, once I had lost, I went over to watch my son in his game, and all I kept thinking was, "His deck looks really small." [Just don't even go there, okay.] So I got worried that he was playing a below minimum deck, but I didn't want to call him on it in the middle of the game. Afterward, though, I asked him, and he was playing with 40 cards.

Which had been one of the things he'd been trying to tell me earlier, that it was just a 40 card deck, because, at home, we always play with 60, because "them's the rules." Except for draft tournaments. Only I hadn't known that which is why that guy beat me so easily. It was definitely a "D'oh!" moment. The only issue I had about the whole situation was that none of the staff ever bothered to give any kind of run down of the rules despite making us repeat we'd never been in one of their tournaments before.

After dropping my deck down to 40 cards, which you can do in a draft tournament--mess with your deck as much as you want between matches (maybe even between games) as long as you are only using the drafted cards--I went on to win my other two matches and take home a prize. My son won his first match but lost his next two, so he didn't get a prize. But, now, he's totally hooked on tournament play. He really loved it and wants to go play again. Except, well, the next several Friday nights are booked.

Moral of the story? Take the time to know the rules and don't expect anyone to tell you what they are, even the people that ought to tell you. After seeing how my modified deck played and watching the guy that beat me play a couple of other games, I feel fairly confident that I would have won that match against him had I known about the 40 card thing. But that's what next time is for.

How To Win at Magic: Part 1: The Harry Potter Effect

Back in 1993 a game came out that sort of changed everything about gaming. That game was called Magic.

There were really only two types of gaming back around 1990: RPG (role-playing (like D&D (get your minds out of the gutter))) and tabletopping (like Warhammer). That had been the status quo for a decade or so at that point. [Being a "gamer" meant something completely different back in 1990 than it does today (a good example of how terms change meaning), because video games had not yet had the explosion that MMOs such as Everquest and WoW would bring them.] To make this clear, prior to the release of Magic, my gamer buddies and I met several times a week to play many different games.

There was a night for D&D. There was another night for some other kind of role playing game which varied based on who was GMing and whatever game they wanted to be running. Other nights would be for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the tabletop game we played. At least two nights of that a week in various formats. Sometimes, there were even board games like Risk and, every once in a while, poker. So, yeah, I was a pretty serious "gamer."

Mostly, the guys I gamed with had actual, real social skills. Many of the guys on the fringe, the guys we didn't play with on a regular basis, did not have social skills. As an example, on of those guys was called "Boogie" and that name had nothing to do with dancing. This was not a name that he was called behind his back. It was what he was known as, how he referred to himself, and he was in full knowledge of where the nickname came from, and he was fine with that. I only tell you that to confirm that some of those stereotypical views of "gamers" had a strong basis in reality.

Like I said, though, the guys I gamed with were mostly not like that, although they had all gone to the same high school as me, which meant that there was some amount of nerd in each of them just for the sake of the fact that you had to be smart to get into the school.

Mostly, we met at a particular friend's house, because, of all of us, he was the only one that was married and had a house. And a kid. This was probably the reason that only the socially adept were in our group, because, below a certain aptitude at communication and social graces, my friend's wife would not allow the person over to the house. Boogie was one of those people. He was allowed over one time to participate in a tabletop event, and my friend's wife very firmly let it be known after he had left that Boogie was not to come over again. We had another guy in the group that was only barely able to be there. The wife was always on the verge of kicking him out, because he had no control over his mouth.

There were some nights when we'd meet at the comic shop when those that were more like Boogie were allowed to be involved in whatever it was we were doing.

All of that is kind of beside the point, though. Mostly, it's just to show you how things were. We gamed. We played a lot of different games. We tried out new games. There were all kinds of things going on that we did, and we had different nights for the different things, so you could kind of pick and choose what nights you wanted to be involved. It was a lot of fun. Yes, I do miss those days.

Then came the fall of '93. One of the guys in our group took a trip out here to CA and brought Magic back with him because it hadn't yet made it to Louisiana. It changed everything. We were all, and I do mean all of us, fascinated by the game, and we all undertook it to get cards and put in a big group order through the mail to a CA retailer to get some. Seriously, it was well into '94 before the cards became available enough for any of the local stores to be able to stock the cards. Magic had the same effect on out little gaming world as Harry Potter had on the book world.

After Magic, everything was Magic. That's all we did. Often, we got together four or five nights a week to play. Once the local retailers were finally able to start stocking the cards (summer of '94 with the release of the Legends expansion), tournaments started happening, and everything became focused on that. Often, our evenings of playing were really only to refine our decks for the weekly tournament. [I was the top ranked player in north LA through '94 while we were tracking player stats. After that, Wizards of the Coast came up with their own ranking system, and we quit tracking it. It was a lot of hassle, and we had a lot of players in and out of the store by that point. (We were the biggest tournament location in north LA, so people would come from hours away to play every week.)] It was more than two years before we started filtering back into doing things that weren't Magic.

Harry Potter had pretty much the same impact on books and, well, kind of, everything. Harry Potter changed the landscape of popular culture and reading and movies and... like I said, everything. It was a, ready for it?, game changer.

The interesting thing to me about both of these phenomena is that neither creator created with the intention of "taking over the world." They made an excellent product, and it, the taking over the world, just happened. In fact, Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic, wasn't even trying to make/sell Magic. He had this other game, RoboRally, that he was trying to sell to WotC, but the guy at WotC told him what they really wanted was something portable. Garfield decided on a card game.

So... the first way to win at Magic: have a good idea and make it into the best product you can.

Here are some of my favorite cards from the Beta edition of Magic:

It's a great card, but it also went well with my whole elf thing from Warhammer (in which I played wood elves). No, I'm not going to explain how those things go together.

Not incredibly powerful but nice art and, again, elf.

The first Mox I ever pulled from a pack. The pack of cards cost $2.49; the Mox Emerald is currently worth over $500.00. I own this.

The most expensive card in Magic at up to $2000.00. Yes, I own this, too.

One of the best pieces of art from the initial series of cards.