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The Sad Tale of the creative Magic Player

MTGnews.com Forums - News

- 23 hours and 9 minutes ago

hey yall,
was reading this on the gleemax forums...
Quote: The Sad Tale of the Creative Magic Player

How modern Magic punishes creativity - and my solutions for this problem.

I'm a Johnny-Spike. I'm rated 1950+ in Limited. I've been to two Pro Tours, and Worlds (Paris). I came 32nd at Pro Tour Kuala Lumpur, out of 340 players.

When a new set comes out, I love thinking about all the possible combinations of cards. I immediately devour the cardlist, and start brainstorming about what combos, cards, and deck ideas have potential. A single card may give me an idea for a cool new deck. Having said this, I'm a serious player, with a good understanding of deckbuilding. I want to win, but in an inventive way. (I'm not the casual Johnny, with his Door to Nothingness deck.)

For every significant constructed tournament I've been to for the last 5 years or so, I've spent weeks building and honing a deck of my own creation. I've endlessly switched cards in and out, looked for new synergies, and tried to refine the deck. I've played around with the land base, and perfected it to the last land.

I'm a very good player, and a creative deckbuilder. So how have I fared?

Dismally.

My wins have all been in Limited events, save for the one Nationals where I came third, and qualified for Worlds. I played a crazy blue-white control deck, with 29 lands, eight of which were bounce lands. It splashed green for Vitu-Ghazi, the City Tree, and also battered away with Genju of the Fields. It was a crazy, off-beat deck that did surprisingly well. I knew it was good, because I had spent a month perfecting it. The other decks I've constructed have been far more normal. This one was not typical of what I've built.

However, that one time doesn't make up the many other times where I've ended up towards the bottom of the field.

Creativity has been my greatest weakness, rather than a strength. I should just netdeck every time, but I can't bear to do it. I'm aware that I'm constantly handicapping myself by being creative, but I do it anyway.

The problem is simple. In the age of the internet, you're just better off netdecking. No matter how good you are, it's highly unlikely that you'll come up with a deck that's better than what the other endless thousands of deckbuilders will have come up with.

If you do manage to, then that's an awesome achievement. When Manuel Bucher comes up with Quick'n'Toast, that's a great feat. But behind that success story are thousands of other Johnny-Spikes like me who toil away making innovative decks, go 4-4 or worse, and are nobodies. They should've just downloaded Elves and printed out the decklist.

That's the problem. Now here's my solution.

Formats need to be made much more diverse. The current format just gets "solved" too quickly, with the best 5 or so decks rapidly appearing. There are endless thousands of people looking for the best decks, and these days, they can all communicate with each other. A creative individual looking for something novel is highly unlikely to find anything new.

For this increased diversity to happen, the playable card pool needs to be vastly bigger. Before PT Hollywood, I went through the spoilers of every available set, and picked out any cards I might possibly put into a deck. I didn't want to go looking through a huge list of cards I would never use. Even being very generous, I only picked out about 10-15% of the cards. The other 85% were just not viable. Even within this 10-15%, there were many cards that were highly unlikely to go in a deck. Any deck I (or basically anyone else) made was going to mostly comprised of cards from the top few percent of the possible card pool, with extras from the rest of the top 10%.

To make the playable card pool bigger, the power fluctuation needs to be lessened as much as possible. Every card should be viable to some extent, and no card should be so good that you'd likely play it if you were playing that colour. Every effort should be made to power-normalise the card pool. Cards that are above average power should be lessened in power, and those that are underpowered should be improved. A reasonable developer could easily sit down with ten random cards and give them similar power levels, by tweaking P/T, mana cost, and other numbers. There are, of course, other considerations for some cards, and this exercise is imprecise, but it would yield a much larger and more interesting card pool than previous sets. Rather than there being 50 or so tier-one cards, there would be a wholly-playable environment of 1,000 cards. This would create an exponentially higher number of possible deck combinations, and would be big enough for creative deckbuilders to constantly find new decks in.

Many things about Magic have improved in the 14 years I've been playing. The game is better than ever, and I continue to enjoy it. The problem of endemic netdecking and disincentive to creativity, now needs to be dealt with. It is, in my opinion, the biggest flaw in an otherwise-excellent game.

Pegaweb :> and decided to post my opinion here and garner yours while im at it.
oh, the thread can be found here.

i agree with the OP on most points as i have often been on the losing end with an interesting/fun/creative deck. but its pretty obvious that when you enter a competition you either win or you lose, there rarely is a "cookie" given out for trying.

one of the posters suggested something different that i considered as a good solution but saw it afterwards as a band aid to the actual problem: "tribal" tournaments where decks had to have some sort of creature theme to be played.
as you can guess, faeries would dominate and this would only lead back to square one of boringness.

so discuss! what do you guys think?

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Big Ads and Captions to Make YouTube More Like... TV!

Mashable!

- 1 days and 4 hours ago

So there are two items to do with YouTube that are making their way around the tech news world. One to do with big billboards that would take up a good portion of the site’s front page real estate - if only briefly upon visitors’ initial arrival; and another to do with captioning, for the hard of hearing and those who don’t happen to speak all the languages of the world.

It goes without saying that the tale behind door number one is naturally bound for bigger headlines than the other, but both may actually prove quite important and potentially very beneficial to the video site. One will presumably make more money for the company, while the other helps bridge quite a few divides. A win-win?

We’ll have to wait and see. SAI’s Michael Learmonth says YouTube is teasing names in the entertainment industry to stand as test cases for the effort, whom it plans to charge the general going rate for the square banner unit now in place: $200,000. If all goes well, a bump in rates can be expected to occur sometime next season. As per convention, YouTube isn’t entertaining the hearsay, valid or not.

Logically the new ad push would be what the bean counters would probably regard as “better to do than not do.” Considering YouTube’s gradual migration to a more officially-sanctioned, premium-content-rich archive, the project would more or less be a boon. But as with anything this “big,” there are tradeoffs. Some would accuse YouTube of losing itself, and the user-generated stuff manufactured by Average Joe and Jane would presumably decline. Or at least waver on a more stagnant plane, because of all the corporate whatever that’s impinging on users’ experience.

At this junction, though, YouTube has no choice. The sacrifice must be made in order to better that bottom line, and now is as good a time as any. If it were to have made the change years ago, it wouldn’t have been managing the sort of traffic it is today. Which wouldn’t have convinced premium content producers — be they from Hollywood or the virally-blessed indie set — to come aboard at the rate some have in the last 12 months or so. Which wouldn’t have given YouTube the potential monetary value and influence it is often claimed to have.

As for that captioning system you might well have forgotten in light of the ad talk, it is something which simply evolves the video service further along and gives it one more tool to add to its publicly-available arsenal. For those looking to broaden their audience and add an extra bit of attention and care to their material, this is one more thing. Put this feature together with the ability to upload and present better-than-usual video resolution, and you’ve got something that seems, well, like TV. Further still, that enhancement coupled with all the moneymaker stuff mentioned above has YouTube looking ever more useful to the mainstream. Just think about it. YouTube’s audience is international. That fact in and of itself makes the site outstanding. And now it can boast this new feature to its users, breaching a good number of linguistic barriers. Intriguing news altogether? Yes, very.

YouTube company profile provided by TradeVibes

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Does New York City Need More VCs?

Silicon Alley Insider

- 1 days and 7 hours ago

New York City has plenty of money to fund startups, argues Path 101 cofounder (and former Union Square Ventures associate) Charlie O'Donnell -- deals easily get done by "random groups of angels, hedge fund managers, and other out-of-the-way pockets of cash." But, he says, we're still missing out on part of the tech scene that works better in San Francisco and Silicon Valley: A "Silicon Valley VC mafia." O'Donnell:

I was talking with a banker today about it, and there's definitely something to the "Silicon Valley VC mafia" phenomenon--that they all know each other and do deals together. What they also do, which is incredibly valuable, is work with local universities, tech counsels, entrepreneur groups, etc., and actively participate in the community. Their deals get huge press at funding time. Their reputation of success is the community's reputation.

By being consistently active, they draw startups closer to them geographically. That doesn't happen when a random hedge fund guy and his buddies put two million in a startup here in New York, because only that startup knows them. That money builds a company, not a community. Sure, money is nice, but VC's provide glue for the community in terms of the networks formed among deals they've invested in and support of the local community.

Unfortuately, we don't have much of that in NYC. If you're an early stage technology company, you're going to Union Square Ventures, Greycroft, Venrock, DFJGotham, SAVP, RRE, Softbank...and... and who else? These are good firms, but they don't represent enough of a critical mass--a mafia, if you will--to attract companies and talent here from the outside the way VC firms in the Valley do. ...

One major difference is community presence. A lot of NYC-area entrepreneurs can't name more than a handful of NYC area funds and have never met a VC in person at a startup event. I think a lot of NYC-area VCs could stand to be a lot more visable--attracting more deal flow by participation the way Union Square Ventures does. Two or three NYC firms blogging and being transparent they way they are would count like 8 more firms doing deals here.

One firm O'Donnell singles out is Boston-based Spark Capital, which has recently done a bunch of New York deals, often together with Union Square Ventures, such as Bug Labs, Covestor, and Tumblr. "Perhaps Spark should open an office here," O'Donnell posits.

Probably not imminent, Spark partner Bijan Sabet replies on his blog. "Our NYC entrepreneurs tell me that they interact with me and my partners as much as if we were actually living in NYC," he says. And Sabet notes, he's bringing in another partner that keeps an apartment in Gotham. That doesn't quite solve O'Donnell's original problem -- that there needs to be more VC community in New York. But, as Sabet notes, "I think traveling is just part of the job. For all of us in this business. Startups and investors alike."