Thoughts on MTG Deckbuilding, and What I Like

For me a beautiful deck is a deck that interacts with others, protects itself as it needs to, has the offense that it needs to, etc. all in perfect balance and harmony. Thus a deck that has great offense, but is fragile isn't my ideal; a deck that is solid, but can't do anything isn't my ideal; a deck that does one thing and then uses some completely different method to be good at something else is disharmonious and isn't my ideal.

But it's never the deck itself that is beautiful. It's the play of the deck. I measure and value decks in terms of what they will do, and the art is in the doing. The most beautiful game for me is one where both decks are preforming plays and counterplays, each one just barely having the answer to the problems posed by the other until someone slips. But I strive for what happens in the mean time.

I play a red deck against a big, nice midrange deck. I attack with my creatures, and they encounter spot removal, a counter to my creatures that keeps them weaker while the opponent builds up his mana. That, and my decks responses to sacrifice creatures to deny him lifegain or burn him one little bit more (all the mini-plays) are beautiful to me. My deck says, "look what I can do! I'm getting killed, but still getting stuff through!" and his deck is saying "Look what I can do, I'm lessening his creatures so I can buy time, just what my master needs!" ... and later there is another play between the decks - the midrange deck drops its fat, and my creatures stare down a 4/4. Strategy on the players' parts is employed - for me, should I attack into it so some guys get by for damage, or should I wait until I find some removal, and combine the two.... But on the deck end of things, they get to show off their stuff. I fight through for a little more damage while my creatures die against that 4/4, it is my plan. He beats with the 4/4 as soon as he can, trying to take me out before I draw enough burn to finish him - the final act is in motion. Will my deck show off it's goodness and provide me with the burn I need to win before the five hits take me to 0? Will his deck counter with some life-gain kill-spell aimed at one of my creatures, now that I don't have a mechanism to sacrifice them? The optimal would be for me to draw enough burn, but for him to counter with, say, Faith's Fetters to buy him just enough time to win. Because then both decks would have shown off their stuff.

But all decks do things, right? They all make their plays. But for me, if one deck does something that the other deck has no counter to--and that's defined vaguely--then that's not a beautiful game. Because all the playskill in the world won't help you if your deck doesn't have the right cards, and the deck will be sad, not having any way to provide me with the tools I need to use to fight. And the other deck is sad, because it can't really show off it's stuff, winning in the face of adversity, it's just follows it's rote form and wins.

I guess that's the main thing, perhaps - adapting to win in the face of adversity. My blue-white Mastermind deck can't do it's game plan against your land destruction, and so it turns to using the masterminds to protect lands and keep people busy while little guys run across and win. That adaptation is my joy as a player, and my pride in my decks come from their ability to provide me with the tools I need to adapt when the deck loses the plot. Which is to say that I am a bit funny as a johnny player - I want my plans to be ruined, and my fall-back plans (and ideally new ones I came up with on the spot) to be the ones that get to show their quality.

Any deck can build a plan, and execute a plan... in a vacuum. Even WLGYLSTYESFD could do its thing, given the chance. But the ability to execute a plan through adversity, or to be able to deal with adversity, that's excellence in a deck. And I don't mean adversity as in the challenges the deck was built to resist - I mean ones different or much stronger than expected. A deck fails when it can't adapt, and that makes me sad, and a deck doesn't succeed if it just does what it's supposed to do - that's just meeting expectations.

So play a game with me, and kill my key creatures, destroy the enchantment the deck revolves around. Your deck has the answers, doesn't it? Well, so does mine - watch as my deck brings back the piece from the graveyard, or converts itself into a beating machine during the lull as you found your removal, and tries to capitalize on the position it already got. Or watch it pull together a much weaker synergy, and try to win with that. Your deck answered my threat, but can it beat down to finish me off faster than I can finish you off? What do you do if I play the key piece again? Watch my deck as it tries to stall you before you beat me down - it's a race of sorts, and maybe I'll lose. Or maybe not.

Don't let me win against you by pulling off my plan. That's just boring. Don't beat me by doing something to which I cannot respond. That's just sad. But if you struggle to do something, and I struggle to resist, then each deck gets to show off all the things it was made to do, and maybe a little more.

The Robot Apocalypse: Pie Style

The robot apocalypse happens like this:

Someone creates a smart robot to serve him. Either fails to put in First Law protection, or for selfish reasons makes a zero-law of obeying him.

That someone asks the robot to make him a tasty pie.

The robot does.

The man finishes the pie, and tells the robot, "Make me more pie!" He fatefully leaves out specification of how much pie.

The robot attempts to fulfill the command as best possible: If the robot makes as much pie as possible, then the undefined "More Pie!" has the optimal chance of being fulfilled (or a 100% chance, if the request was reasonable).

The robot figures out the limits of optimal pie creation: Pie is limited by matter/energy to form it, and by entropy to organize it into a pie. Thus the robot is on a clock against entropy to make pie. The robot is also in a competition against everything else that is creating entropy.

The robot makes a plan: To create pie fast enough to race reasonably with entropy, some entropy must be spent to increase the speed of pie-making. This involves other robots to make efficiently produced matter-to-pie devices. Also robots to gather the resources. Also robots to protect those gatherers from hostile phenomena.

The robot's first step is to quickly mobilize the entirety of the resources of the earth* to quickly mobilize the resources of the solar system to continue onwards and ultimately convert the universe into as much pie as possible.

See that * there? Already, the robot apocalypse has occurred, as we are converted into organizations of matter more useful for the creation of pie.

That is how the robot apocalypse happens.

Also how the universe gets turned into pie.

Graduation

By the way, I graduated from ASU and "Barrett, the Honors College at ASU" magna cum laude on the 13th of May, 2010.

Maehadros

Maehadros was the first DnD character I created, and I built him with what I thought was a relatively interesting backstory. He was a human fighter, probably the most generic option I could have built mechanically.

Backstory: Maehadros was the son of a nobleman in one of the city-states of a particular unnamed continent. His father wanted him to apprentice to become a cleric, but Maehadros rebelled and ran off to a different city-state, and enlisted in the city guard there. Eventually the city he was working for came into conflict with his hometown, and Maehadros deserted the town guard. He found work as a mercenary, and was hired by what turned out to be a pro-human organization. While he didn't agree with their pro-human sentiments, he considered it a job, and helped them anyway. Eventually he became aware that they were a fairly radical cult, but continued to work for them until they gave him orders to kill the children of some local dwarves they had lynched. He then abandoned his job and fled on a ship away from the continent to avoid repercussions with the cult. This is how he wound up on the ship with the other Player Characters.

Character traits: The essence of Maehadros, or Mae, as he is generally known, is that he is a good person at heart, but lacks the courage to follow his heart. Instead he follows orders over his own judgement. By this point in his life, he is fully aware of the painful repercussions of not standing up for what he believes in, but has not implemented that in his life. Instead, he still follows the moral judgement of his new commanding officer (Tucker's warlord). His opinions mostly go in his journal, as always.

Other traits of the character include a town-guard sense of ethics, rather than the sense of an adventurer. He would rather bring his defeated foes to justice than to kill them, even if (as pointed out by other characters) bringing them to justice would doubtlessly lead to their execution. Again, he looks to authority other than his own, rather than making judgments on the lives of the defeated.

Character growth: Maehadros never had much opportunity to act upon his beliefs, partly due to me, the player, being pressured into not... complicating things. The party goes places, it kills things, it gets experience and loot, and I apparently wasn't supposed to call into question the ethics of all the things we were doing, let alone rebel against the judgement of the other players. Maehadros himself suffered a good deal of bullying by other players, mostly in terms of who was leading the party in the absence of Tucker and his character. (I was also somewhat disappointed to find that most of the party was neutral, and the paladin was of the "I'm a paladin, this gives me justification to kill things," style.) This was all cut short by Mae's untimely death.

Analysis: Maehadros deals with a lot of questions I have concerning righteous action, authority, and the subjectivity of morality, I suppose? And of social pressures? Dunno.

Dnd Characters - what does this say about me?

A good deal of people think that when a writer creates a character, they invest something of themselves into the character. What's more, some people think that characters allow writers to explore internal questions that they don't know how to tackle directly.

I guess the plots of various books I have been interested in writing fall along a strangely similar line, save that the questions explored are outward, and not internal questions.

But what about my DnD characters? This will probably be a series of posts, one for each character.

I'll be starting in chronological order: Maehadros, Selar and her sister, Mikalo, and now Little.

Thoughts on Media and 9/11

One of my classes is Terrorism and the Press. We were talking about the 9/11 attacks today (WTC towers, Pentagon, and another airplane crash), and i was reminded how terrorism chose the timing of the 9/11 attacks.

See, they wanted symbolic targets - the Pentagon, and the WTC towers count, as does Washington DC (the probable target of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). But they weren't seeking to kill people, directly. In fact, they chose the time of attack with the greatest proportion of symbolic damage to the amount of deaths: The early morning.

See, both the pentagon and the WTC weren't exactly filled up, as they would have been a mere 3 or 4 hours later. The later in the day, the higher the casualties.

So why not do it at night, when people wouldn't be killed? After all, if you want a lower death count, then that would be best.

That's where media impact and the message that they were trying to send comes in. If you attacked when it was dark, then none of those powerful, scarring images of the WTC towers burning would have been able to be seen. Al-Quada didn't know the towers would fall (Osama was the most optimistic in positing that the tops might fall off), so the lasting damage would be limited to nasty, fire-gutted holes in the tops of the towers.

So daylight so that the American people can see what they did, and yet morning to avoid unnecessary deaths.

Diarrhea

Somewhat disgusting, as might be guessed by the title:

I find myself morbidly amused by the splatter patterns in the toilet bowls.

That's all.