The obits

Rolling and role-playing.

It’s been a long time.  Years since my last post.  I really do not play Magic the Gathering at all anymore.  The good news is that I found people to role-play with in my community.

My experiments with trying to fix MTG and make it work failed to find support with a wider audience.  There are many reasons for this.

First, the MTG economy is largely one in which risk is shifted downward to the player.  Stores rely on a shadow economy of regulars to break boxes by drafting and take their paltry share of any economic reward.  The pressures of competitive play mean that constructed formats are degraded to encourage pay to win style gaming and win at all cost strategies that reduce the fun of the game.

My budget cube was a “limited” success.  Limited!  Get it?  Anyway, it is very hard to find people interested in the long process of drafting for fun.  Again, the economic agenda only reinforces pay for the privilege of playing models that help stock store shelves with singles.

I tried one other model- a magic circle in which I created six custom 60 card singleton dual decks that were built for purposes of balance.  The idea was to create decks which had parity of play but were not min-maxed to the point where a game would end by turn three.  The format encouraged people to simply pick a deck play it against another deck and then move to the next deck.  Best 2/3 won.   It lacked the variance of the cube and removed the fun of constructing new decks.  However, it also meant anyone who knew how to play a game of Magic could play with these dual decks.   The investment did not really pay off as few people are interested in playing in a way that disrupts the underlying economic agenda in Magic the Gathering.

While the captain’s matches found far fewer takers in Orlando than Elko, I still have some good memories of those games and am disappointed players in Florida were disinterested in the format.

Now for the good news:  I finally found a group to play Dungeons and Dragons with at my library.  It is nice to be able to play outside of a store setting.  The library hosts events featuring D&D 5e.  5e characters are more powerful at lower levels than their 1E counterparts, but the focus on narrative game play is still fun.  I keep an open mind to playing new styles and new systems.  My pen and paper RPG collection is widely diversified, but currently 5e is really the only game where I found a ready gaming group out of the store environment.  While I personally would love to play games that involve non-WOTC products, I feel that having an opportunity to play at all is fairly decisive.  Undoubtedly, if the library group were playing Savage Worlds, Pathfinder, Blood of Heroes, or any other role-playing game, I would probably be playing that instead.

The library group only meets once a month, but it is a start.  It is good to see libraries encouraging a hobby that often inspires players to learn new skills and read about their world.  The library also has materials players can check out.

Although I am a huge fan of theater of the mind play, I also took the time to convert unwanted Heroclix models into use as miniatures for role playing.

Your trash is my treasure.

It’s a way of salvaging models that would otherwise be garbage from a pay to win gaming perspective into something more functional.

Most of my spare money is spent on necessities or invested in content creation tools.  I much prefer the challenges of learning and skill acquisition to those of empty consumerism.  I don’t mind teaching myself how to program my own dice rolling app or drawing my own character.

Get skills.

My time is much better spent creating a unique t-shirt or writing an interesting backstory for a 5e character than trying to fix the game of Magic the Gathering.

20 sided Earth.

In a world full of microtransactions, pay to win gaming, endless subscription plans, endless DLC, the competitive pressures of professional gaming, and a myriad of other challenges, I hope players can still find their way to having some fun.  GLHF.

 

Fundation

I’ve been playing games for a long time. Long enough to remember arcades, for example.

Lately, I find the experience is less satisfying. I’ve often complained that the gaming companies are exploiting many of the worst individual instincts. Unlike the mostly cooperative PVE environments of roleplaying or single player video games of my youth, the new multiplayer environments encourage win-at-all cost approaches which tempt people with premium-cost advantages.

It’s not a specific game anymore, but what passes for gaming in many ways. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of positive things coming out of the gaming community. I see people who are working to make gaming fun, affordable, and accessible to as many people as possible. The gaming community has done a lot of hard work to produce quality games.

It’s just that I am getting a bit burned out on some of the recurrent problems, like aimbots and cheat programs in online gaming, and pay to win gaming in general.

Projects like my Magic cube are attempts to make the drafting experience more accessible to other players and create a better group experience than some of the other formats.

I appreciate the efforts of the community modders in games to extend the playability and depths of games. For example, I recently picked up the CS:GO Operation Payback map pack and thought it was great to see some new content for a game that keeps improving.

Still, I and other players, are getting tired of waiting for the aimbotter who joins the server to get bored (usually after two rounds) and leave so we can actually get on with playing the game. Increasingly, I find myself encountering obstructionists who do not want the gaming experience to improve for others.

I am concerned about a lot of things in gaming, leaving me to wonder if today’s players are getting the experiences they deserve in gaming.

It’s a shame that given the amount of time and energy people put into trying to make the games enjoyable for players, there are also people putting time and energy into ruining the experiences of others.

Let’s keep in mind, gaming is supposed to be fun for people. It may seem stupid to have to say this, but some people don’t seem to understand this.

Circling Back to the Cube

I opted to play test the cube once again. This time six people opted to enter the cube draft. I opted to wrap the cards in 15 card aluminium foil packs to avoid confusion and pre-shuffled the cards to save time.

“Foiling” a cube.

I’m exploring more practical options, like cloth bags, for future drafts. It will take some time to locate the appropriate product for my cube drafting needs.

Some issues remain in running the draft. My first round ran a little long to say the least. It’s hard to play and organize the events. As a result, most players only played one round. The event is still a very social experience and it is nice to know that cube drafting at an LGS is viable.

Of course, after every draft, I reflect upon my own notions of the strengths of each section and try to make some changes to the Cube to improve the cube. Changing the cube is a very time consuming task. It requires that I resort the cards by color and converted mana cost. Then I shift one card in and one card out and update my spreadsheet.

In any case, I hope that I can continue to improve my cube and create a more interesting shared and balanced experience for the players. This is all very much a learning experience for me. Despite the fact that free FNM’s are now a regular event again, I am going to focus on my cube design and development for the time being.

One, somewhat unfortunate side-effect of creating a cube, is the fact that the creator has prior knowledge of the cube’s content. If someone else created a cube, I could draft their cube and these issues would be minimized. Given the enormous amount of time and energy that goes into building and maintaining a cube, I am not sure how realistic it is to expect others to create cubes.

Finally, I would again like to thank the people who took the time to try my cube. I often hear terrible things about Magic players in online postings. You constantly hear about people having their decks or cards stolen. My experiences have not been like that at all.

My experience with other Magic players is fairly positive. No one has taken any of my cards and everyone seems to respect each others collections and possessions. If you show up to enough events, you really do begin to get to know the other players and it makes for a great time. You also get to see players participating in charity events, attending free FNM’s, and making unique and creative contributions to the community.

Of course, I am still disappointed by the price increases in singles over the last year and it has certainly dampened my spending and impaired my enjoyment of the game. In addition to my usual concerns about the unjustifiable cost of cards, I am increasingly concerned that the price of singles incorporates the costs associated with prize structures.

I failed to make any trades. To be fair, the only thing I have to trade right now is a single Flinthoof Boar. While the Gruul plague is widespread enough to put the card in general demand, I have not met any players interested in making trades for that card. The upshot is that the attempt to trade the card did lead to some great conversations anyway. I’m really not interested in taking my little piggy to market and selling it to the store, so instead I’ll just hold onto it and if it trades it ever trades. If not, I guess I have a Flinthoof Boar.

I’d also like to add that by getting back out into the real world and playing Magic again (after my dismal experience with being muted online), I also ended up with a free haircut. A local barber ended up giving away free haircut coupons at the LGS I was at, so I took them up on their offer.

Finally, a new art book arrived this week so I’ll be getting back to my drawing as well as enjoying other online games. While the cube drafting has been a more refreshing experience, it’s also been a lot of work. Given the resources I have, I feel that my cube probably won’t undergo any dramatic improvements and it’s going to enter basic maintenance mode.

Update: Week 3 was a bust. No one wanted to cube draft. I updated the cube a bit more and I ordered the cloth bags anyway. Week 4 went better as a few people did cube draft, though my cloth bags did not arrive in time for drafting.

Squaring the Circle

Disappointed with the state of constructed play, I built a cube for drafting. Having played Magic the Gathering on and off for roughly 17 years, I have enough cards from a wide variety of sources to build a cube.

I chose to build a 540 card cube which I felt would provide a reasonable amount of variance and still be manageable. My cube is a basic five color Magic cube. I declined to include multicolored cards for two reasons. Multicolored cards are harder to design and play around and my collection of multicolored cards is not balanced enough. Half jokingly, I admit that a modest collection of around 8,300 cards is barely enough to build a 540 card cube. Still, I am lucky to still have those cards after some of my past experiences.

Aside from multicolored cards, I did not include any planeswalkers. If I were ever to include planeswalkers, I would want one planeswalker per color. I currently only own two planeswalkers, so including planeswalkers is out of the question. Whether I ever decide to include a planeswalker is unclear as I have never really grown attached to them as cards.

I opted simply to use the basic guildgates as my cube land base. They are inexpensive and provide about the right number of lands for a 540 card deck. I opted to add 5 extra manafixing artifacts (Myr) rather than the 5 additional lands for fixing purposes.

In any event, my hope is that the cube will be balanced for players and provide them with great drafts irrespective of the colors they choose. I tried to strike a balance between utilizing some of the best cards I own with some of more ordinary and overlooked sleepers that might make for fun drafting.

There are a lot of tools that can help a person build a cube over the course of a weekend. I’ve been using Deckbox.org to manage my inventory (though I use Mtgvault for deckbuilding). There are also sites like Cubedrafting.com that have handy spreadsheets and beginner’s guides to help provide additional cube building frameworks.

In building my cube, I did have to make some additional purchases to ensure that the cube had some quality cards in each color. In doing so, I deviated from my past practice of not spending more than $1 for a card on about four cards. I spent upwards of $1.50 each on around 4 cards. The reason I opted to break the $1 barrier is to provide my drafters with a better experience and balance my cube. Because it is a draft, all players have access to the same card base and therefore, the threat that the game degenerates into a form of pay to win dominance is negligible. This also allowed me to include some of the most valuable cards in my collection in building the cube without worrying about game imbalances. My cube is effectively a community pool.

The first draft was a bit rough logistically, but I managed to round up five guinea pigs for my efforts. I feel that the draft would have gone smoother had I pre-shuffled the cards before arriving. It would also be nice if I took to the time to pre-package the cards in aluminum foil to avoid any drafting confusion with pack selection.

I was lucky to have 5 people draft, although 2 players eventually dropped owing to other commitments. It is not always easy to find a group of casual players as many players burned out on broken EDH decks and the almost monolithic constructed formats (Gruul Aggro anyone?). Most players felt the draft was fun and agreed they would draft my cube again. It’s nice to have a game in which people play for fun rather than just for prizes. I thanked everyone for playing.

Overall, I enjoyed designing and playing a cube and found it an inexpensive and fun alternative to drafting. The response of the players indicates that they are more comfortable with a cube draft than alternative formats such as Captain’s matches in my current area.

Apparently, cube drafts can be sanctioned by stores and players can earn 1 paltry planeswalker points if they manage to build a cube and find seven other players to cube draft in a sanctioned event. Given the rather generous collection necessary for cube building and logistics involved in cube drafting, I should think Wizards would provide people with some real planeswalkers points. I have no real use for planeswalker points anyway, but feel it would be a nice symbolic reward. As it stands, WOTC seems to place little value on deep design exercises or community driven Magic.

I am extremely happy to have acquired many of my Magic cards at much lower prices over the last few years. The current prices in singles are not friendly to players and I will be investing my time in other gaming enterprises. Many of the other people I played with are involving themselves with their own game-making endeavors and I myself have decided to invest more time and energy in my own artistic projects.

Update: Cube drafting is a more social MTG experience and provides players with equal access to the card pool. Cubes can be designed with balance and are relatively cheap to put together. I like having access to limited play without having to pay for it constantly. The hardest part about cubes is simply finding players who are willing to play for fun in a balanced environment. I often cannot find people willing to play.

Breaking Down Standard

I recently went to a free FNM here in Florida. I usually only attend the free FNMs in my area because paying for that experience seems absurd. It was the second free FNM I had attended in a week. My record was terrible. Over the combined events, my record was 8-1-1. That’s 8 losses, one tie, and one win. However, I was able to win some games, if not matches. Likewise people with far better records and far more expensive decks than mine did not place in the money.

This was my decklist at the second event:

Requiem for Disruption

Main Deck
3x Aetherize
3x Archaeomancer
3x Curiosity
4x Frostburn Wierd
4x Invisible Stalker
23x Island
4x Nightveil Specter
4x Rapid Hybridization
4x Stolen Identity
4x Unsummon
4x Void Wielder

Sideboard
1x Elixir of Immortality
4x Mind Sculpt
4x Mind Shrieker
3x Sensory Deprivation
3x Witchbane Orb

Although the deck is a mono-blue build, I placed no emphasis on counterspells. Most people at the FNM have the overpriced Cavern of Souls to mitigate the threat of counterspells. Disruption presents a different strategy than straightforward denial decks. Unlike denial decks that overload counterspells, a disruption deck does not force players into purchasing expensive countermeasures like Cavern of Souls. I opted for Mindsculpt in the sideboard to provide card advantage instead of Dissipate. Likewise, I provided a nod to Nightveil Specter over Mist Raven in the mainboard. Frostburn Wierd was mainboarded over Mindshrieker because I assumed I might need a blocker against aggro rush decks.

Arguably, I could have played a deck which might have given me a slightly better record. One of the reasons I chose to play the deck I did was because of the upcoming change to the legendary rules. WOTC is making it so that two legendary creatures can be on the board at the same time under the control of different players. This eliminates the ability to clone kill legends. Although a player can clone a legend and keep it, players rarely have the same mana base and activating the abilities of another players legend is not always possible. This reduces the opportunities budget players had to level the playing field. Even if you try to play clones now, you will probably need a diverse land base to support the clones and everyone knows, the dual lands aren’t cheap.

This new rule change comes one year after poison seems to have disappeared from the player option list.

In many respects, this is a policy change which will try to push players further towards unnecessarily expensive solutions. I do not plan on spending the money to keep up with this new twist as I am tired of the unilateral rules changes, the inability to obtain affordable cards, and the indifference to player experience that WOTC is showing players with its recent design choices.

Wizards claims that this change will improve player interactivity, but I felt my recent matches cloning my opponents creatures (and killing some of the legendary creatures I copied) was interacting with my opponent’s board state. It required careful decision making and play on my part and challenged my opponents to overcome the loss of their creatures on their next turn. Sometimes they overcame the difficulties caused by cloning and sometimes they did not. Most of them thanked me for the interesting challenge.

Many of my opponents were running the typical decks that I (and many other players) are all too tired of playing. The deck lists at the FNM seem more suitable to a PTQ than the kind of innovative deck design one might expect to see at a free FNM where losers will outnumber winners 8-1 no matter how much top 8 netdecking people do. Players get tired of playing the same stale decks over and over again.

Despite their talk of increasing interactivity, Burning Tree Emmissary is probably the most broken “bear” I have ever seen. Assuming a perfect draw, it would be possible for a player to do lethal damage with very little response from an opponent by turn three. This continues a trend in which WOTC introduced overpowered one and two drops through Innistrad. The overall impact was to make Magic a game of draw rather than skill and diminish the interactivity. Vexing Devil was another (mulligan to?) draw card that increased turn 1 damage to four points without much effort and without allowing much opportunity to respond from an opponent on the draw.

Cards like Vexing Devil and Burning Tree Emissary are not alone in breaking the constructed formats in their low CMC requirements, high damage potential, and limited response.

Despite this, WOTC has not even taken the time to make sure there are actually five colors to play. Want to play mono-black in standard? Hope you don’t plan on any serious permanent control. Options for permanent control are the somewhat CMC overcosted Undercity Plague. This, however, gives your opponents a choice of sacrifice which means they will choose something they don’t need. Descent into Madness is currently grossly overpriced and requires you to sacrifice as well. Finally, with M14, there is the reprint of Ratchet Bomb. It is probably overpriced right now as it has just been released. Options outside of mono-black increase substantially. Dreadbore, Merciless Eviction, and Putrefy increase the options available to splashers if you are willing to pay for the high price of color fixing that obtaining dual lands usually requires. I am not, which is why I ran a simple mono-blue deck.

Oblivion Ring did not receive a reprint, which might be an attempt to push players into Detention Sphere. This again runs along money lines as all multicolored permanents will probably require land fixing.

WOTC also chose not to reprint the core dual check lands but has announced its intention to create new lands for the forthcoming set. Players are apparently expected to simply jump onto the new treadmill. All the while, apologists assert that WOTC has no control over the secondary market even though they are creating and reducing the demand for cards based on their rules and tight-fisted distributions practices.

I personally feel the degrading play environment created by a standard format that is essentially being broken by design is intended to force players to pay for the experience of drafting.

As I no longer have the benefit of a casual play group, I am taking many of my decks apart and resigning myself to the fact that WOTC no longer cares about the experience of all players.

Closing Argument

One year ago, I was crashing a fourth of July event at Crane’s Roost Park. The event was great, but the circumstances I found myself in at the time were not great.

One year later, I am in a much more comfortable position. I have managed to attend free RPG day, attend Megacon 2013, visit Disney World, read books to create my own art, and attempted to market that art. I enjoy regular swimming in a community pool. I have time to game and have enjoyed many real space and virtual gaming opportunities.

And yet, despite being in a comfortable position, I find myself still dealing with the recurrent problems of occult censorship- especially in gaming. I recently contacted WOTC customer support to ask them to reform their moderation policies in MTG. Sadly, it was only two days later that I was again muted in MTGO for 24 hours. The muting ended on July 3 on the eve before the celebrations of freedom and independence day in America.

As humans, we publicly celebrate our freedoms, but increasingly endure daily encroachments upon them.

Players are essential to the success of any game and routinely muting players is no way to treat players. Too many game companies have grown comfortable with routine censorship practices despite the fact that free expression is critical to gaming. Censorship impairs the dialogue that is necessary to promote the well-being of the community and solve serious problems.

The inability of players to engage in meaningful dialogue with each other and WOTC means that issues like affordability, accessibility, parity, and fairness are unaddressed.  This ruins a lot of the fun of the game- at least for me.

Game Over

Why now? Why is WOTC suddenly interested in shutting down a program which has been operating for a long time? The fact that Cockatrice has been operating for a long time may cause WOTC/Hasbro legal problems in the form of a laches defense as well as expose WOTC to the kind of legal scrutiny it probably wishes to avoid.

There are other programs and methods of playing MTG without paying for it. People could simply use the Tappedout.net deckbuilding and playtesting software on tablets or computers with multiple windows to play MTG with each other for free. (Using Open Broadcaster Software, I made a crude example of livestreaming a Tappedout testplay. ) Is WOTC only interested in pursuing claims against third-party software that is not in some way attempting, directly or indirectly, to sell the underlying paper product?

I think the answer lies in the fact that the rise in third-party software, most notably drafting simulators, in conjunction with playtesting software made drafting possible without paying to draft. Drafting is a widely popular playstyle principally because it involves a combination of skill and luck missing in the formats where luck is often sold in the form of expensive chase rares to build a deck.

Most people who play MTG quickly realize that the formats are generally dominated by broken combinations and/or a flood of chase-rare combinations that reduces the skill necessary to play the deck. Buying more chase-rares increases your chances. However, WOTC has created a system in which acquiring the chase-rares is cost-prohibitive to the ordinary consumer. Moreover, the fun of the game diminishes when the cards do too much of the work.

Players who get tired of the pay to win environment are “counseled” by others to consider the more level playing field of drafting. Recent events in Charlottesville have demonstrated, players like the more level playing fields of limited/draft events. They do not have to purchase expensive deck archetypes. The pay to win elements that now plague format magic are diminished. Drafting generally requires people to pay for the experience of drafting. (A case could probably be made that the compartmentalization of the experiences led some people to poison the general format experiences to drive people to spend money to draft.)

Unfortunately for WOTC, the rise of third-party drafting software meant that players could draft for free by cobbling together a network of third-party tools and programs like Cockatrice. Once Cockatrice challenged the draft “monopoly”, WOTC apparently felt it had to act. This is understandable as they undoubtedly want to derive income from their work product. Unfortunately, shutting down Cockatrice is probably not the correct action.

Many of WOTC current problems are self-inflicted. It continues to make obtaining its product unnecessarily difficult. While other companies strive to get their products into the hands of consumers, WOTC tries to keep it out of the hands of the consumers. This spawned an entire industry, sometimes involving shady practices like box-mapping, that are designed to thwart WOTC scarcity systems. The system makes WOTC products unnecessarily expensive to obtain. While many people cash in on the broken system, many others go broke trying.

While WOTC likes to point to high sales figures and rising profits to address critics, it is not clear if the game of Magic is popular or merely the underlying lotto.

I have argued that WOTC has stopped making a game and is now content to make money.

It is also not clear that the people purchasing the products are active-players or merely one-time sales. For many people, MTG may have a “fool me once” quality when they discover that they cannot reasonably obtain the cards they want or need to build a deck.

A more sensible approach would have been for WOTC to go back to its roots and start selling a game again.

Whatever the outcome of the situation with Cockatrice is, one thing is clear: WOTC feels it can no longer rely on its cultural power. Game over.

All Good Things

I attended the Magic for a Cure event in Kissimmee, Florida. The event was designed to raise money and awareness about cancer.

I was happy to attend the event and contribute what I could to it. My contributions were fairly minimal. I carried some boxes up a few stairs. I donated some foil cards including two foil Lingering Souls and one foil Lightening Greaves with the hope that the donations would in some way assist the ability of the organizers to hold a successful fundraising event.

The Cure

I ended up playing in the RTR release event to support the Magic for a Cure event. I chose Selesneya and shared some laughs with my guildmates during our brief guild meeting where we discussed guild meetings. For the Conclave! My build underperformed, but I am still happy with my choice. Selesneya has potential despite struggling a bit in sealed events.

Many of the players who attended were exhausted by earlier release events, but obviously felt it was important to attend an event to raise money and awareness about cancer.

At one point, I ended up forgetting my deck at a table between rounds, but recovered it shortly thereafter.

Despite losing every played match, I had some great conversations throughout the gathering.

During the silent auction, I managed to win a really great deck box. I thanked the designer who personally attended.

I enjoyed meeting everyone today and I can only hope that the event organizers were able to achieve their fundraising goals for the benefit of the American Cancer Society.

This seems like a good place to end this blog and I will see you around.

Have fun everyone.

Magic Cure

The Orlando Meetup group is hosting an event to help fight cancer, with the help of Phoenix Games, to help benefit The American Cancer Society on Saturday, September 29.

I am planning to attend.

101: Dungeons and Dragons

This is my 101st post on this blog. Fittingly enough, I’ve decided to make it about something which is basic to my gaming experiences.

When I was growing up, I was introduced to the world of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. The game was somewhat controversial at the time and some gaming controversies continue to this day. Nevertheless, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was a game that I truly enjoyed playing with a group of friends for years. We placed almost no emphasis on miniatures, but focused on story telling, freedom of action, and adventure. As we grew older, we continued to play Dungeons and Dragons but also explored a wide variety of other role-playing games as well as a very healthy supply of video games.

WOTC has re-released the 1st edition of the game. I opted to pick it up because I want to reintroduce myself to a game that started my interest in pen and paper gaming. Proceeds of the game will go to the Gygax memorial fund. I should mention that Dave Arneson also made enormous contributions to the game. I have a D20 from his funeral visitation in St. Paul and included it in my picture of my newly acquired books.

The Dungeons and Dragons community has become splintered among the many different editions. AD&D is one game among many roleplaying games these days and apparently a fifth edition of D&D is already in the works.

Still, as I am besieged by pay to win gaming everywhere, I wanted to take a closer look at a game that dramatically influenced the world we live in and shaped some of my earliest experiences in gaming. The three core books cost me less than the price of two Bonfire cards would in Magic the Gathering. I think this will prove to be money well-spent.

I look forward to re-reading the books and re-introducing myself to Dungeons and Dragons.

Also- I really like the Assassin class.