Obviously having Chaos Orb or ante cards legal would suck.  I'm just pointing out that it's theoretically possible to create tournament rules that support them.  Ante cards could be legal because they all have the clause, "remove from your deck if you're not playing for ante."  In other words they would be blank cards whose only purpose is to be removed from your deck.  If the judges are too overworked, then just say that Chaos Orb is the lowest possible priority for judges.  If they don't get around to dealing with the card, then the match is declared a draw.  (Also, how many people are going to play Chaos Orb anyways?)

Again, I'm not recommending this or anything.  Why?  Because it would be boring, un-fun and just plain stupid.  But Smennen seems to be making the argument that we should completely ignore those aspects.  I just don't think that argument works.

I haven't read the original article, but can you lay out the argument why Chaos Orb is fundamentally different than Shaharazad?  I've seen you talking in the comments about the fact that both players must agree whether the card flipped or not and if it was dropped from high enough, but there's an obvious way around that: a judge must be present and the judge rules on those aspects.

In fact, there are 2 reasons I've always heard that Chaos Orb is banned:

1) It makes the optimal behavior to spread one's cards out at maximum distance to prevent a 2 for 1.  This is tedious, creates a space problem and generally causes the tournament to be harder to run.

2) It rewards dexterity, which many believe shouldn't be part of magic.

In other words, the reasons Chaos Orb are banned are exactly the ones you are saying we should completly ignore for Shararazad. 

Granted, Chaos Orb is a hundred times worse in terms of space, tournament difficulties and sheer annoyingness.  However, you keep making the argument that those reasons have no place at all in the banning decision.  I could understand if your argument is that Shararazad was actually not that big of a problem and tournaments could deal with it.  But what you keep saying is that those reasons should never even be considered for banning and if there is any possibility at all for a card to be legal then it absolutely has to.

In fact, DCI could make ante cards legal, but just require them to be removed from the deck before play.  The tournament rules could require that the 60 card rule doesn't count ante cards to prevent this from changing things to much (or maybe not).  What's the point you ask?  Maybe someone enjoys the feel of removing cards from their deck.  Maybe someone wants to advance the clock by those 15 seconds.

I think at some point you need to give up on the argument "it doesn't break DCI Reporter so it has to be okay," and just focus on the fact that Shaharazad is not all that bad.

As a fairly strong chess player, but horrible magic player it's always interesting to see comparisons between the two.

First of everything dicemanx says is true, there's definitely more skill to chess than just in-game decisions.


I don't think you can argue that computers are better at forward thinking than humans.  Any strong human go player can easily defeat the best go computers.  It seems to depend on the rules of the game whether humans or computers are better forward thinkers.  Also it's not clear if chess will ever be solved, and it's very unlikely that go will be solved.

I don't find your SKILL() argument very convincing at all.  What does SKILL measure?  What are the units.  If you don't specify those, then how can you make any arguments about comparing the different weights.  Also, why do you say deck selection, deck tuning and sideboard design require luck?  To take luck out of magic you could do something like play with the decks face up and remove shuffle effects [edit: and make players specify their starting deck order].  Deck selection and sideboard selection would very much be part of that game.

At the end of the article you say that magic tests a wider variety of skills than chess (and by implication magic with the luck removed).  Seems to me that this statement is obviously true and more convincing then your longer argument above it.

Still, I found the article fun to read.

Overall, the article seemed okay, but a little thin.


Shouldn't the aim of theory be to reduce complexity, not the otherway around?  It's one thing to say that card advantage is not so important nowadays, tempo is more important (or whatever concept you want).  But it doesn't seem usefull to tell people to evaluate cards on "how much they assist in a game win".

Coming from a chess background, I found Smmenen's statement about "technical skill", fairly odd.  No chess player I know thinks in using the term "technical skill".  They think about many skills like opening knowledge, tactical ability, stategical feel, endgame play, and so on.  No one says, "today I'm going to study chess skill," they say "I'm going to work on my endgame play," or whatever.

Likewise, it doesn't seem like there is single Magic ability called "playskill".  You should break it down into things like tactical ability, planning, bluffing, reading oponents, metagame knowledge, etc.  Also, creating a new deck, tuning an existing deck and choosing the right deck for a metagame are very different skills.  It doesn't seem to me that it's possible to train more than 1 or 2 of these things at the same time.

This doesn't really answer the question of is it better to spend time improving your playing skills or creating/innovating decks, but maybe it's a better framework to see things with.  Seems to me that if you know that one part of your magic game is weak you should concentrate on that.  Likewise, if you think you have a solid foundation on all parts of your game, and you are a good deckbuilder than you should work on new innovations.

BTW, many (most?) professional chess players spend time physically working out.  Tennis and running are 2 popular sports among top grandmasters.  It takes a lot of physical stamina concentrating at a board for 4-6 hours.  Magic seems to require even more endurance -- Type 1 especially.  Maybe the best thing to do before the next tourny is take a few jogs...

It's not a coincidence that the article's logic is hard to follow.  If you clean up your argument and put it in a simple form like A => B => C => you should cast that land grant to shuffle, I think logical errors will jump out immediately.

1 problem is you seem to be confusing two probabilities:

* The chance you will see 2 dark rituals in a 15 card pile
* The chance of the same when you know that there is 1 ritual in the first 8 cards.

EDIT:

Also, uniform distribution doesn't mean "there is no pattern" (which isn't a very precise statement), it means each card is equally likely to be in all deck positions.  You will definitely see patterns, for example after the 4th ritual there will never be another ritual in the deck.  Can you give a link to "even distribution", I couldn't find it on google.

This math isn't very solid.  Merchant scroll *tutors* for ancestral recal.  It's either 1 card to draw 3, or 2 cards to draw 4 -- depending on how you want to look at it.  Either way it's +2 CA.

In chess, at the grandmaster level, the person who plays first wins about 55% of the time*.  To combat this, the tournament directors determine who gets white and black, and the tournament is paired such that players alternate between getting white and black (as much as possible).

What would people think about using a system like this in magic?  If people think the dice roll is critical in Vintage, this seems like it would be a good improvement.

* To be precise, it's more like he wins 35% of the time, loses 25% and draws 40%.

The odds are 31-1 that you won't lose 5 in a row guessing red/even/heads (assuming a perfect wheel/die/coin...).  That's a 96.875% probability like you say so you're you have a great chance of making that one dollar or whatever you bet.  Of course, that one time out of 32 where it doesn't work out right, you've now lost 32 times your initial bet.  Crap...  You also have less than a 50% chance of guessing right because of the two green slots.  Double Crap...

It's not the house limits that screw you in a casino, it's the fact that the odds are against you.

Moral of the story: Don't try beat the house in roulette.

I've got to agree, nice article.

One question though, what's the advantage of playing the spell in the FMP instead of the upkeep?  The only one I saw was that they might play out a spell their FMP, allowing you to cast it at the end.  But later on, you give the potential mana-drainers the correct strategy, always declare an attack before you cast spells.

Seems to me that the only benifit of casting the spell in the FMP instead of the draw phase is to try to catch inexperienced players.   And now that you gave away the secrets on starcity it's not going to be all that likely.

Is there any other reasons to cast the spell during the FMP instead of the upkeep?

Great thread!

1st off, it looks like point #3 is quite solid and non-debatable.

Point #2 has gotten us off into some really weird territory, but the debate has been quite interesting.  I think that Matt's points on the topic are really good.  Card advantage and tempo are important aspects of the game and we need to take them into account.  Of course, putting too much emphasis on them is going to lead to dumb ideas, but that doesn't mean we should thrown them out all together.

Card advantage theory probably did cause people to look past cards like LED, but also it was quite usefully in causing us to look past tons of other cards.  Spy network, Tahngarth's Glare, Rolling Stones, the "lucky charms", etc. etc.

People have been talking comparing magic theories to scientific ones, and I think there are good parallels there.  Newtonian physics wasn't "correct" but it was pretty usefull.  Sure it caused scientists to be blind to the ideas of relativity, quantum mechanics etc.  But it quite rightly caused scientists to reject astrology, numerology and Ishi's theory that if you throw an orange at exactly 20mph it will never stop.

Scientists would never make any progress if they had to rigorisly test every possible screwball idea, so they just ignore certain ones because they trust their theories to a certain extent.  Similary magic players would never get anywhere if we spent our time playtesting 100 matches of crystal rod-Test of Endurance.dec vs thallids.dec and then seeing if the winning deck could take on Griffin Canyon-Khamal Fists of Krosa-Artificial evolution.dec.

So playtesting is to magic what experimentation is to science.  Playtesting is useless without theory and theory is useless without playtesting.

Rob Dougherty's experiment is an excellent example.  The suggested "improvements" based on their theory alone were really poor.  But Rob's original idea was strongly based on theory.  He didn't just take 60 random cards and ask people to see what they could do with it, he tried to make a strong tempo deck and chose cards accordingly.  What should have happened (and what did after a while) is that people should have chosen cards that worked with the tempo theme and then playtested them to see if they were any good.  Theory and experimentation have to go hand-in-hand.

Also, we have to look to ways to improve theories or discard theories if the become obsolete.  The bazaar example was excellent.  It shows that card advantage can't be counted anymore by simple the number of cards in your hand + cards in play.  With flashback, reanimation, chalice etc. thinking in terms of which cards are active, versus which cards are dead is much more usefull.