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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

#161

If 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 lit…

Could you or GP recommend a few best of episodes?

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dark Ritual was banned for as long as I remember (I played extended during 2003-2006). It's pretty much the definition of an OP card: if you were to draw 2 copies and a strong creature it'd be almost imposible to lose that game.

Dark Ritual was OP because of the abundance of BBB or 2B threats that it could plomp on the table on turn 1, most famous of them being Necropotence, of course, followed closely by Phyrexian Negator or Bad moon and a swarm of black weenies and with honourable mentions to Stupor or Duress + Ravenous Rats (Stupor and Duress not being threats, but still it sucks to lose two cards on turn 1 before you can do anything abou…

yes, the ability is so strong that even significantly weaker variants got banned.

Interestingly even the third most powerful boon is powerful enough to be a multi-format all star.

The last two of course... are not.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it hasn't been playable outside of limited for a very long time though.

Ixalan standard had a powerful monoblue Tempo deck that used Curious Obsession and cheap scry cards to draw a ton while attacking with cheap fliers. I think it was tier 1 actually.

Interesting! I don't really follow standard much to be honest, I was aware of the curious obsession deck but I didn't know that it played giant growth.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#164
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, not the reason I said it but nice assumption.

Well until someone develops mind-reading technology, that's the most likely explanation someone reading your comment would have.

Or, alternate option, you can take it at face value in that he claimed a meat only diet helped him, using his public persona to push an agenda that is completely unsupported by science.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ixalan standard had a powerful monoblue Tempo deck that used Curious Obsession and cheap scry cards to draw a ton while attacking with cheap fliers. I think it was tier 1 actually.

Interesting! I don't really follow standard much to be honest, I was aware of the curious obsession deck but I didn't know that it played giant growth.

Huh. No, sorry, that's a misunderstanding. The monoblue tempo deck didn't play giant growth. I thought you were talking about playing Islands :)

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#166
post #116
post #107

On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.

The reason why it seems so appealing might be some kind of barnum effect [0] - the effect that makes horoscopes work: There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match. This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackm…

I think this is basically correct, and that the comparison to the way memeplexes (lol memeplices?)construct worldviews is a good point that goes unnoticed in a great deal of political discussion. Almost every ideology is anchored to the real world by some element of truth.

Regarding the OP taxonomy, it makes me wonder if there's a way to aggregate these taxonomies to see if extracting the relevant principal components (that do map to the real world) from the subjective noise is possible.

One could imagine testing the Barnum effect in this way, writing a large number of these personality descriptions and seeing if real personality traits can emerge by having individuals rank which Barnum profiles best describe them.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#167
post #85

This 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.

dark = night = dangerous and white = day = you can actually see what's trying to kill you. This is much older than the whole race thing you're constructing. White = good and black = bad also exists among black humans in africa, completely detached from skin color shenanigans.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#168
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game. You can literally crash the game so you never know if you've won or lost.

If you're referring to the Turing completeness, the algorithm and cards that were found require both players to be acting in concert to achieve the Turing machine; either player could stop at any time. I don't see the fact that players can choose to act strangely in a game to be a reflection of the game itself. If you're talking about things like combining effects together that happen to cause an unbreakable infinite…

Your first statement is no longer true with the newest approach: it only requires a tournament-legal deck and the player piloting it to set up (and it could do so turn 1, though it's very unlikely to do so), and once set up it continues with only mandatory actions (neither player has any choices to make in the game, though either player could in principle concede).

But such things are not something which comes up in general play in practice: to set up such a machine you have to ignore several opportunities to just win the game. I've yet to even see an infinite loop which causes a tie.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#170
post #106
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about PURPLE?

Following the scheme established by GP's list surely it would be something about purpose? This won't stand well in a translation...

A translation would add to the mystique, remember that period when it was in style to use everyday Japanese words as if they were all deep and mysterious?
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