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- Thread starter James Stevenson
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The next Magic Online cube is going to be Modern - and it comes courtesy of an OG Riptide Lab member! :eek:
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/magic-online-modern-cube-2017-03-02
Okay, so Natalie (who went by nex3 around these parts) actually stopped posting on here... four years ago. But I remember her being on the original Google Group (pre-Riptide Lab), and contributing even back then. So it totally counts, in my book.
Riptide Lab alumni making a real world impact on Magic design!
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/magic-online-modern-cube-2017-03-02
Okay, so Natalie (who went by nex3 around these parts) actually stopped posting on here... four years ago. But I remember her being on the original Google Group (pre-Riptide Lab), and contributing even back then. So it totally counts, in my book.
Riptide Lab alumni making a real world impact on Magic design!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Boorish ranting is CML's native language.
Uh, if this comment no longer makes any sense in this context, it's because we had to mod CML for... being CML.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Didn't expect that post to get deleted, but even by CML standards it seemed... beyond insensitive and uncalled for.
Pooie I missed it.
CML
Contributor
come on! it was fine. this isn't 3rd-grade class or the teacher's lounge. and the absurd emphasis on civility lets people get away with being ludicrous and horrible in all sorts of other ways. some of you guys are euros and not privy to our polite purgatory across the pond and should know this better!
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
That's why I was suprised it got modded into oblivion. Still though CML, you've made some pretty mean-spirited posts in the past, but this one was pretty offensive to at least a few people around here that do have a positive impact on this forum. I'm sure you could have made some self-concratulatory fun of Natalie without (inadvertedly or not) implicitly deriding other people for being themselves.
CML
Contributor
you're right. let me try again!
i once looked at the homey's cube list, which was posted, with the corporate allegiance and appearance of rigor characteristic of this area, in a google spreadsheet. this spreadsheet had eight tabs, wherein were recorded: card lists for each color (sorted by CMC), another for gold (on which hybrid cards were, typically and nonsensically, included), another for artifacts, and one more with the results of every draft, including the record of each color combination and (much more to my interest) the record of every drafter. it was great fun to read the records of wotc employees, who were frequent drafters, but not skilled ones; i guess i'm reminded of the time we did a money-draft against one of them, who promptly uncorked the worst deck and excuse ("you lose your edge when you don't play!") i'd ever seen or heard. "don't quit your day job!" i riposted, and he'd've liked it had he a sense of humor about himself.
but such things are inimical to fantasy settings. ditto a sense of judgment. and this brings us back to the spreadsheet. every so often (several times a week?) the cube list would be revised—swapping out watchwolf for call of the conclave; cutting peek for gitaxian probe; these ensured that the subcategories that occupied an irrelevant column down the right side of each page ("blue tempo," "reanimation target," etc.), like the comments section on a student's report card, remained stable in number, thwarting all bias. of course, on riptidelab, we were all discovering that many different cubes were possible, that at best such orts would be quaternary characteristics of how each cube played out (after curve, singleton or not, and, uh, something else), and that "blue tempo" wouldn't work out in the vast majority of cubes, the conventional "cube" included.
now one could make a million jokes about how this is just an archetypal case of danny kahneman and amos t.'s finding that people do change their minds, but a lot less than they think they do (resulting more in the status quo than if they'd been more transparently stubborn); or how this is related to wotc's insistence upon gender-neutral language while remaining a horrifically patriarchal place to work, and how they use the former to paper over the latter, and how a bunch of people inside are fooled by it but it looks ludicrous to the outside, and how weizenbaum's tenure on riptidelab was defined (as i remember it) by a solicitation of criticism followed by rejecting it all in the name of the status quo while appearing to be open to change (and perhaps even believing it instead of being disingenuous), and how this typifies a particular kind of professional narcissism that doomed the clinton campaign, and so on, but that would be missing the point. what can we learn about ourselves from this? well, later, when a wotc employee came by my house to draft my build, he leveled a criticism at the ULD for being excessively complex. i dismissed this instinctively since he had praised weizenbaum's cube earlier in the evening, thereby rendering his judgments worthless. right?
well, maybe not. in retrospect, maybe the ULD is too complex. maybe it's worth it, but i should have at least considered the idea. and that, my friends, is what makes this place better than there. going to work just makes people really, really stupid. they have to uphold images of themselves, and keep their jobs. people like malcolm gladwell puzzle over what makes usa football coaches make statistically indefensible decisions year in and year out, missing the obvious fact that their objective isn't to win the game, it's to keep their job. needless to say, in such an environment, you can't be open with your thoughts, but you have to appear to be; you can't be punished for being wrong, but you can be punished for admitting you're wrong. and the mere possibility that we might be able to surmount this, however briefly and inconsequentially, is why i've always enjoyed this forum.
i once looked at the homey's cube list, which was posted, with the corporate allegiance and appearance of rigor characteristic of this area, in a google spreadsheet. this spreadsheet had eight tabs, wherein were recorded: card lists for each color (sorted by CMC), another for gold (on which hybrid cards were, typically and nonsensically, included), another for artifacts, and one more with the results of every draft, including the record of each color combination and (much more to my interest) the record of every drafter. it was great fun to read the records of wotc employees, who were frequent drafters, but not skilled ones; i guess i'm reminded of the time we did a money-draft against one of them, who promptly uncorked the worst deck and excuse ("you lose your edge when you don't play!") i'd ever seen or heard. "don't quit your day job!" i riposted, and he'd've liked it had he a sense of humor about himself.
but such things are inimical to fantasy settings. ditto a sense of judgment. and this brings us back to the spreadsheet. every so often (several times a week?) the cube list would be revised—swapping out watchwolf for call of the conclave; cutting peek for gitaxian probe; these ensured that the subcategories that occupied an irrelevant column down the right side of each page ("blue tempo," "reanimation target," etc.), like the comments section on a student's report card, remained stable in number, thwarting all bias. of course, on riptidelab, we were all discovering that many different cubes were possible, that at best such orts would be quaternary characteristics of how each cube played out (after curve, singleton or not, and, uh, something else), and that "blue tempo" wouldn't work out in the vast majority of cubes, the conventional "cube" included.
now one could make a million jokes about how this is just an archetypal case of danny kahneman and amos t.'s finding that people do change their minds, but a lot less than they think they do (resulting more in the status quo than if they'd been more transparently stubborn); or how this is related to wotc's insistence upon gender-neutral language while remaining a horrifically patriarchal place to work, and how they use the former to paper over the latter, and how a bunch of people inside are fooled by it but it looks ludicrous to the outside, and how weizenbaum's tenure on riptidelab was defined (as i remember it) by a solicitation of criticism followed by rejecting it all in the name of the status quo while appearing to be open to change (and perhaps even believing it instead of being disingenuous), and how this typifies a particular kind of professional narcissism that doomed the clinton campaign, and so on, but that would be missing the point. what can we learn about ourselves from this? well, later, when a wotc employee came by my house to draft my build, he leveled a criticism at the ULD for being excessively complex. i dismissed this instinctively since he had praised weizenbaum's cube earlier in the evening, thereby rendering his judgments worthless. right?
well, maybe not. in retrospect, maybe the ULD is too complex. maybe it's worth it, but i should have at least considered the idea. and that, my friends, is what makes this place better than there. going to work just makes people really, really stupid. they have to uphold images of themselves, and keep their jobs. people like malcolm gladwell puzzle over what makes usa football coaches make statistically indefensible decisions year in and year out, missing the obvious fact that their objective isn't to win the game, it's to keep their job. needless to say, in such an environment, you can't be open with your thoughts, but you have to appear to be; you can't be punished for being wrong, but you can be punished for admitting you're wrong. and the mere possibility that we might be able to surmount this, however briefly and inconsequentially, is why i've always enjoyed this forum.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
What? No! Well, only tangentially!
Yeah, to be clear, debate and criticism of other people's cube design is always welcome here. Who are we if we can't make fun of each other's bad design choices now and again? But Jason & I deleted your post because your disparagement of her character and her gender went way over the line, wasn't funny in the slightest, and had nothing to do with any valid criticisms you might have of her cube design.
Hah, I always had a sneaking suspicion that you were the reason nex3 left our forum. I wonder what that alternate universe would've looked like...?
We have a quota to discuss cube on here three times a year. While there's a ways to go, I'm not sure whether we're going to hit that for 2017.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
CML
Contributor
to be clear i never intended to disparage weiz for gender reasons, there are a bunch of other ones that are quite valid! i'm just making fun of myself for not knowing wtf gender to use when using the past tense, though i guess the political meta has veered away from Jokes for the past 4 months
you know, a problem i have is this: i used to be kind of sensitive in this regard too—like when i wrote for tcgplayer i was scared shitless there would be a whiff of negativity in the comments section. needless to say i grew out of this to the point that gawker disparagement from AMZ neckbeards was nothing short of exhilarating. the only way to get from A to B was with Self-Esteem, a luxury that MTG and its community emphatically do not afford. now i look back on it and the fact that i remember so clearly my similarities to hyper-touchy magic people who, of course, use it to hide from an outside world far more hostile to them than to me, makes me judge them not less but more brutally. i think lots of people are like this
on an unrelated note i'm watching moonlight and it's pretty boring
I've often gotten my panties in a bunch when a MTG'er, forever dedicated in their lackadaisical lifestyle of multitasking cellphone gaming with 2-hour trades to come out +2USD in a trade of 18USD while willing to travel in a car ~10 hours one way for an attempt to play magic for 20+ hours, eat both dinners at a Chili's that unfortunately ran out of beer earlier in the evening and then gamble for the check, complain about the smallest inkling of effort in the casual arena of the game. It's probably me; my warped sense of fun in gaming has degraded to the point where only 15-year-old advanced match students from 2001 that are straight-edge for reasons wrong and indecipherable can enjoy drafting and playing Magic: The Gathering decks with cube-like projects that I've curated. But FUCK, I get angry in the small section of my soul still burning with life when some MTG-obsessed zombie tells me that grid drafting sounds like too much work.
Also, my name is Chris, and I am a jerk (but I tried to delete my ad hominem comments before pressing submit because calling a human being "mashed potatoes" is insensitive"). Hi, everyone.
Also, my name is Chris, and I am a jerk (but I tried to delete my ad hominem comments before pressing submit because calling a human being "mashed potatoes" is insensitive"). Hi, everyone.
CML, are you a Chris? I feel like you are, but I am a bad forum friend.
