41–50 of 207 posts
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?
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 s…
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…
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.
FYI - you can play mtg (even edh) online with your friends or randos: https://cockatrice.github.io/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fla…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Crucially, by design, no color is best Except for blue of course.
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 Ma…
Blue's color identity is just 'being really good at Magic' it seems
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Ma…
> 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…
FYI - you can play mtg (even edh) online with your friends or randos: https://cockatrice.github.io/
Yeah, no. If you're the author of this piece or you have a blog on Medium, get off it. There are plenty of other, less user-hostile options.