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.
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How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
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Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#92Under current events, I'd argue it does explain Humanity: look at a card upright, white is at the top while black is at the bottom :(
I 100% agree. This is where systemic racism comes from (black as destruction? White as godliness?) This is messed up and shame on those who don’t realize this and downvote you.
Darkness vs Light
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#93This promotes systemic racism by insisting that white is at the center top and emphasizing ‘rationality’, while implying that black is in some way the opposite. It’s fucked up for young POC kids.
The idea probably comes from bright light versus no light, but I can see why it's easy to make the wrong interpretation, both for a racist or a victim
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#94It 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…
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.
[0] https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/c...
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#95Every 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 :)
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#96I 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.
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#97In talking about linking colour to ways of thinking, there's also de Bono's hats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats BLUE "The Big Picture" WHITE "Facts & Information" RED "Feelings & Emotions" BLACK "Critical Judgement" YELLOW "Positive" GREEN "New Ideas"
There's also the Whatshisface Schema: BLACK: Big-picture executive thinking. RED: Thinking like a Reddit commenter. (Glib, humorous oneliners) ORANGE: Thinking like a Hackernews commenter. (Glib, contrarian milti-liners.) YELLOW: The color of the sun, sunflowers, lions, and therefore courage and the heart, as in middle ages medicine. GREEN: Thinking about the environment, or money, or both. CYAN: Coming up with busin…
What about PURPLE?
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#98Every 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.
Just be thankful in English there are spaces. Chinese doesn't have even that!
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#99This promotes systemic racism by insisting that white is at the center top and emphasizing ‘rationality’, while implying that black is in some way the opposite. It’s fucked up for young POC kids.
The idea probably comes from bright light versus no light, but I can see why it's easy to make the wrong interpretation, both for a racist or a victim
It's better to avoid 'black and 'white' for personality or 'humanity' tests given what current events have shone a light on.
The bible is full of light imagery as good. Darkness and light, yes.
AND IT'S ALL A PROBLEM when we unwittingly reinforce it, esp. as it relates to 'judging' a person.
It's oblivious (given current events) and detrimental to think otherwise.
Here's the original George Floyd video which is increasingly hard to find (SEO-wise):
https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/videos/142...
We have a serious problem in society when this isn't obvious. When it's just Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel as normal.
Choose other color wheels or games. Let's evolve past things that hold back Black people.
Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
#100If 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.
Also, no ads.
[1] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Drive_to_Work
[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.