Subject: Re: Top reasons that the Dojo is killing Magic. Date: 3 May 1998 22:55:24 -0400 From: denelsbe@cs.unc.edu (Kevin Denelsbeck) Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.misc I feel the need to say some obvious things. Forgive my rambling. I think the Dojo is absolutely essential to the development of Magic as an intellectual sport. Look at chess. If you want to get *serious* about chess (that is, you want to be properly prepared for a tournament where the prize is substantial), unless you're JR Capablanca you need to study your openings. Have to do it. If you favor a certain opening, you had better know the main lines and where the traps are. There are numerous publications in place to facilitate this -- general works like Modern Chess Openings (which is hopelessly daunting to the average once-a-year player, but by competitive standards is too shallow and somewhat outdated) to various periodicals which record practically every game played in sanctioned tournaments to monographs devoted to one variation of one line in one particular defense. If you don't know your openings, you are at an enormous competitive disadvantage, because you will waste valuable clock-time and mental energy in the early stages of a game. While you struggle simply to avoid missteps, your "booked" opponent will spend mere seconds selecting his/her next move and thus put you under even more pressure to select your move while thinking on your clock-time. Similarly, you can lose a won game if you don't know your endgames -- how to avoid draws when up a pawn, how to win with a king, bishop, and knight versus just a king, etc. The literature here is rich, too. If you want to play competitve chess, you should be at least mildly conversant with the basics here. If Magic is to become an intellectual sport, an effort has to be made to collect, organize, and theorize about decktypes. Magic differs from chess in that in very few cases can we claim that results beyond a certain point are deterministic (as we can with chess). There's almost always the luck of the draw to consider, where a newbieish deck beats a type 1 Weissman simply because the Weissman gets a bad draw. In the absence of a well-developed Magic theory (or an unbelievably complex Monte Carlo simulator), how can we make a claim that a deck is superior against the general field? That's where playtesting comes in, but playtesting against yourself is problematic because of the information problem (you know more about the "opponent" than you should, and it affects your decision-making in playtesting). Hence, probably the next best solution is to collect the outcomes of people playing a deck in tournaments (more authentic results!) and collate them somehow. Then, have good players "review the literature" and evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the decktype in question. To some degree, the Dojo does this. Tourney reports are organized by decktype and we have occasional articles from people like Mike Flores and Eric Taylor (just examples, there are many others who contribute). I think it needs to be done *more*, not less. Only through this playtesting and analysis will the elements of a Magic "theory" appear and coalesce. Witness how Sligh decks have revolutionized the way we build decks (especially weenie decks) by paying attention to the mana curve. Witness how much smarter we've become about mana ratios in different decktypes. Witness how much of sealed and booster draft deck construction has become formalized. I think these are all good things. Information should be free. It is certainly disspiriting to work hard on a new deck, keeping it secret and tweaking it over weeks of playtesting, only to lose in a tournament to a clueless yutz who doesn't even know how to best play the Scalding Sligh he scooped off the Dojo. If the guy got lucky or you got bad draws, well, that's one of the unfortunate aspects of Magic and it happens to everybody. But if the guy played suboptimally, and you (and your deck) played good or great, and you still lost, then the problem lies with you. You didn't playtest against the metagame enough, when the info was right there for you to read and evaluate. If you claim that you couldn't get to the Dojo because you don't have net access, well, it's time to get net access. (It can be had pretty cheaply at a public library, in the worst case.) And so on. If you have a problem with people mindlessly playing Dojo decks, then make a deck to beat them. It could be a Dojo deck with some subtle but winning tweaks, or it could be something entirely different. Think of a deck like Deadguy Sligh, which is memorably different from the usual Sligh because it has Lava Hounds in it. Summing up the differences as merely one card is a bit crude, but it was a great metagame choice and it was remarkable enough to get the "Deadguy" tag associated with it. These sorts of innovations are just waiting to be made. I think the Dojo is a great thing, and I check in every day to see what new decktypes or analyses have appeared. I wish it had even more than it does. I also wish that the Prosperous-Bloom players didn't appear to be such jerks in their reports :->. Funny how the headcases in Magic appear to be, mostly, control players, while you don't hear much bad about the aggro deck players. Some problems with Magic as I see it: in Type 1, there are too many broken cards that need to go into a deck to remain competitive. In Extended and Standard, there aren't *enough* cards. In all cases, this leads to less variety than one would expect for a game that has 1000's of different cards. Of course, there are a lot of cards that out-and-out suck. (Why would anyone play with Raging Bull or Gray Ogre?) And they continue to be made (Segmented Wurm, Chaotic Goo). This reduces viable card choice, too. So this leads to the surprisingly low number of viable decktypes in most formats (Type B is excused :->). I would love to see some reform with the way card sets are chosen for tournament formats; I would also love to see some "determinism" injected into the game. (Stacked deck tournaments, that sort of thing.) I know independent organizers have done the former, but it would be wonderful if WotC developed a few more tourney formats and sponsored them outside of the yearly Duelist Invitationals. Just some thoughts, nothing offensive intended to anyone. Kevin -- Kev @ UNC & Hope College _|_ "Every social war is a battle between the very denelsbeATcsDOTuncDOTedu | few on both sides who care and who fire their www.cs.unc.edu/~denelsbe | shots across a crowd of spectators.' GO HEELS! /"\ -- Murray Kempton, on flame wars? (1955)