Recap

Last week, I opened up a discussion about the communication in Legacy, specifically, and in Magic, on the whole. The article raised issues about a number of topics that are potentially damaging the Magic communities that we enjoy both on the Internet and in our lives. I highly suggest giving it a read and mulling the contents over for a while. While writing that article, I understood in advance that it would likely come off as incredibly cynical to leave the topic on that note, and so I formulated a plan. After addressing that laundry list of problems, to avoid seeming like a total curmudgeon, I decided to write a follow-up. You are reading the introduction to that follow-up at the moment.

Today, I will take a bit of time to talk about some of the more promising things that I see happening in Magic, and how those could potentially impact the discourse we're having. I don't want to give the impression that things are going to get too cheery, though, as once again I will bring up a couple more problems that I see. I will also analyze the meaning for us as players.

Good Vibrations

To start things out on a good note, I think it's fair to talk about a generally positive trend that has fairly recently popped up in Magic jargon. There has been a real pick-up in some promising vernacular in Magic circles that really has gotten me thinking. In fact, I used an example of this in the previous sentence. Phrases like "that's fair" and "that's reasonable" do a lot of good for how we're talking among ourselves. They allow other parties in the discussion to know that you've heard and understood their points, and encourage thoughtful discussion, which is a step in the right direction.

One of the best lessons from How to Win Friends and Influence People is the ability to understand that when people say something, they want to be not only heard, but acknowledged. While it isn't obvious, letting others know that they've made a valid point can feed their self-esteem and encourage them to attempt to make other meaningful contributions in the future. More people adding meaningful content to the discussion is exactly the remedy for the problems I've identified.

The concern I have with this is that it is being said so much that it may create semantic satiation (see this video)—that is, where you hear a word so many times in succession that it loses all meaning and just becomes sound. "That's fair, that's fair, that's fair, that's fair, that's fair, that's fair." At what point does this stop being an acknowledgement of a good point and start becoming a thoughtless dismissal? I've observed these words ending conversations, because it can easily be a very closed-ended statement where the one who utters it isn't conceding a point, but simply putting up a block to end the debate. Try watching Star City Games coverage or listening to various podcasts and see if you can pick up on this as well. See if you can discriminate between the use of these phrases to concede recognition of a point and when it is used to simply terminate the thought. For bonus points, there are even instances where this can be used as a form of trolling when used to validate a clearly bad idea and lead that person on. Even if this behavior is an automatic reaction, I don't feel that is any real excuse. We are all playing a game where we have to be thinking and reading all the time to do well. I think it was John Medina who said, "If you're not reading cards, then what are you doing?" The same thing really applies to our conversations. If you're not thinking about what you're saying and you're just going on autopilot, what exactly are you doing?

Competition

Another bit of good news is that Magic on the Internet is thriving again after a few years of ebbing away, unless you're mostly looking at The Mana Drain (although even TMD had a post in more than half the boards on the day I checked it, so maybe things are looking up there as well). This is great news because it means that most every site is going to be encouraged to push out the best information for the three most popular formats: Standard, limited (Draft), and, of course, Legacy. This equates to fierce competition on the Standard front, from all of the big players to the smaller sites that don't even have an affiliation with a store. Commander is probably the format that has the second-greatest number of writers. It is essentially a casual format in many rights, so the bar for who can write about it isn't the same as it is for a competitive format, which is great. There have really never been many people who write exclusively about Legacy. Star City Games fostered it in a small way for a long time when few other sites had the desire or capacity to do so. As a result, SCG is the site that has the majority of the articles. Other writers talk about the format from time to time, but there are still very few people who talk about it as their day job. As far as I can tell, this is about the golden age for Legacy articles in some respects.

The gloomier side to this is that there is an inherent dishonesty concerning the content that some writers put out as suggestions of what to play, and then a turnabout when that person plays something entirely different. It may be strictly personal, but I feel that if you're going to attempt to dole out information, you should at least attempt to have it be some of your better tech rather than intentionally trying to mislead others. In some regards, this even extends to giving an introduction to a deck without giving any real insight or new information for the deck that can't really be surmised by looking at it. A great example of how an introduction to a deck should be written is featured here. This approach is so successful because he not only discusses card choices but examines how the deck is going to play out in the metagame, which is vastly more valuable than looking at it in the context of a bubble.

With Legacy being such a wide-open format that still has many casual roots associated with it, it is perhaps the most daunting task in Magic to be well-versed in all of the potential matches that you can face in the Legacy metagame. With the approaching Grand Prix, a lot of players are really going to feel the sting from this lack of expertise in the decks they're looking at playing. It's very difficult to examine how the deck is going to play out against even half of the format's popular or successful decks, and it becomes easiest to simply relegate the testing process into a discussion regarding general archetypes. This is exactly where the competition among Legacy writers should produce great results, because most writers relegate this discussion to the presumed top tier of decks in the format, hoping to avoid the work of testing. The issue with a tier structure in Legacy is that there are simply so many decks, and within that, there are mind-boggling numbers of modifications that can be made to alter matches heavily in one way or another. You can literally never be fully prepared for the variety of decks that you're likely to encounter in a large event. Furthermore, tiers mean nothing at this point in Legacy. Until there is a clearly dominant deck in the format, the pool of decks generally considered Tier 2 and Tier 3 decks is going to be viable in competent hands until a better strategy emerges.

What does this really boil down to, though? The fact that not only writers, but almost no one, will even attempt the testing; it's far too much work. Even the top tier of decks in the format is an incredibly long list: Merfolk, Goblins, Junk, ANT/TES, Dredge, Zoo, Bant, and maybe B/U/g decks. This isn't even counting the decks that have been picking up wins but are not as popular, such as the Painter decks, Time Spiral, Cephalid Breakfast, Counter-Top Thopters, and Show and Tell decks. Even when working with just the first list of eight decks, you are facing an exhausting task running any deck through that gauntlet; even with the bare-bones approach that Luis-Scott Vargas took with all the major Standard decks recently, or that Brian Kibler has undergone with just his pet U/B Infect deck, this means that when you're looking at most primers or articles about a deck, you can almost rest assured that no exhaustive testing was done, and all of these claims being made are purely conjecture. This results in the realization that real life seldom looks as good as it does on paper.

When I started writing, I started reading a lot more articles. I found writers who I felt had something worthwhile to say, and then many who I felt were constantly moving, simply flowing with the tide. Nobody is going to write a stellar article every week, and it can't be expected, but everyone should be trying to communicate something they view as different from the rest of the voices out there. If it's not something worthwhile nearly every week, what are you hoping to accomplish by writing? The big result of doing so much more reading of Magic content is becoming far more critical of writers and posters for lack of testing. As previously stated, it's much easier to speak in terms of speculation, especially when it comes to Legacy. That is the cause of so much frustration on my part regarding Legacy content. I'm familiar with the matchups and the numbers, and it feels so dishonest when a writer, or an original poster of a thread, is presenting clearly untested and thus generally unsubstantiated information, usually presenting it as fact or at least as something other than conjecture.

Support System

You may have noticed recently that Legacy is the format that everyone wants to be playing. Legacy has always been here, with a huge number of playable decks and the highest threshold of playable cards of any format. Over the last few years, the Grand Prixes, the Star City Games events, and the diligence of local tournament organizers has helped a lot of people come to the same realization that many of us have known for so long, Legacy is the best format. The influx of new players means that more testing is going to be done, more innovation is going to happen, and more people are going to get involved in these discussions. This is part of why it's so important to have a serviceable infrastructure for these ideas to be exchanged, lest we risk alienating what Legacy has wanted for so long: more players. Of course, there is a price to pay for everyone knowing how great the format is, and that is the scarcity of cards becoming a reality for everyone who still has decks they want to build; but that is a topic for another day.

Marshmallows

Before I close out this week, I want to talk about something that is perhaps a little off-topic, but I feel that a connection can be made. There has been an experiment called The Marshmallow Test on my mind all week. In this study, a child (normally about four years old) is put into a room, and a marshmallow or other delectable treat is placed in front of him or her. The child is told that he or she may have it now, if he or she likes, but waiting until later (normally five to twenty minutes) will result in him or her getting twice that amount. The footage of one of these experiments taking place is rather intriguing to watch, and you can do so in several places around the Internet. A bit of background for those of you who are interested: The reason they used four-year-old children for this experiment is because it was observed that that was the age at which children could begin to delay gratification for something better in the long term. After the initial study, the doctors who performed this experiment kept up with the children into their teenage years and even adult life, and something remarkable was found. How long a child was able to wait before consuming the marshmallow (if he or she did at all) was a great predictor for how successful and even happy the child was as he or she became an adult. This ranged from SAT scores to attending and then graduating from a college or university to how highly they rated their life. Conversely, children who weren't able to wait or weren't able to for very long were found to do relatively poorly in all of those aspects. So, why did I keep thinking of this? I couldn't really make a connection between it and anything else that was on my mind recently, and every time I'd try to get my mind on something else, this idea would come back.

The connection was finally made for me last week when I was having a really interesting discussion about the ideas behind the article from last week and then this piece today. When talking with Aggro_zombies on The Source, he mentioned to me how our culture has changed into a beast that is concerned primarily with instant gratification. That's what really stuck me. Sure, it's easy to see the connection when I use the phrases “delay gratification” and “instant gratification” in adjacent paragraphs, but at the time, it finally made sense to me. Much of what I've been observing has to do with delaying gratification versus instant gratification, and a degree of self-esteem boosting that we see on social networking sites. Why read, skim, or at least use the search feature to go through dozens of pages of content when you can post something that was previously discussed on the last page? At least this way you've done it and it's over with. At least people are responding to you. When there is no clear incentive for displaying patience and putting in any effort, it's easy to understand why this breakdown is happening on the Internet.

As previously stated, when those children were followed later in life, it was fairly startling how strong the correlation was between waiting to eat the marshmallow and future success. If you view the footage of the children, you'll notice that they are all tormented by the problem of resisting this marshmallow so they can enjoy more later. The ones who are best able to wait aren't the ones with the steeliest resolve, staring down the marshmallow, but the children who are able to cope with the problem. In this instance, distracting themselves from the sweet, puffed sugar cylinder in some way seems to be the best solution. It's part of a toolkit that these kids have of coping with other problems that we all face. After hearing about the good life that these kids are expected to lead, my question was, "What about the children who weren't able to wait? Are they simply doomed to being unhappy and disgruntled?" The initial results suggested that this was a matter of genetic predisposition—that it was something biologically hardwired into us that was unchangeable. However, I've read and heard promising refutes to that claim that suggest these are skills we can all learn to help us make more effective choices.

The incentive for the children was twice as much of something sweet, but this incentive was relatively small. On the Internet, we're seldom given the allure of something tangible. Instead, we are tempted with being noticed as a face among the crowd for being "inb4lock" or first to post on or about something without really having anything of value to contribute. My perceived results of this sort of behavior were rather well-covered last week, but I want to say that there is promise that this is something that we can change, just as it's possible to learn the skill sets that help us to focus on or distract us from immediate problems.

Let's Take Another Look

The point of last week's piece and this section for this week is to have us question ourselves; are we communicating about Magic in a functional manner? If we aren't, what can we do to change that trend? In many ways, we should keep in mind the Golden Rule (which isn't "He who has the gold makes the rules," as Jafar from Aladdin would have you believe). We don't want to have our time wasted or our ideas shut down, so we should not only avoid doing that to others, but also foster an atmosphere where that behavior is far from the norm. Don't turn away from the discussion; demand that we have more substantial conversation. We should get attention with points and meaningful rhetoric rather than allowing ourselves to degrade into finger-pointing and trolling. I don't have specific solutions, but if enough people are cognizant of the problem, that may be enough to usher in change in how we talk with each other, at least in a small way.

Christopher Walton

im00pi at gmail dot com

Master Shake on The Source