General CBS

[anotak]

Actually they took into account tournament attendence as well.

it's important to consider there are many factors which affect tournament attendance other than design as well. it is an obvious fact that sales or attendance often does not even remotely reflect the quality of the cultural artifact involved. if you doubt this, consider the state of things in the world at large outside of magic. otherwise we'd have to accept that bing crosby's white christmas is the best piece of music of all time.

however, i still think kamigawa is one of the worst blocks

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Yes thats true. It also happens sometimes that an excellent work will just exist at the wrong time, when a demographic is not ready or open to it. Being successful as an artist is nightmarishly difficult, but if you have that passion you still kind of just have to go for it.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

spiderdoofus asked: I'm not clamoring for a return to Lorwyn or Kamigawa, but I wonder if using market research from the past is misleading. Plenty of TV series and movies were unpopular at release and then went on to become beloved classics. Netflix revived Arrested Development presumably because they have viewer data that showed that although the show didn't click with audiences at the time, audiences had since come around. Do you think some Magic creative settings have gotten better with age?

Let me run you through the scenario that I would have to go through to make the set.

Me: We want to return to Kamigawa.
The Powers That Be (TBTB): Was it originally a successful set?
Me: No, it actually was a low point for Magic.
TPTB: Was the world popular even though the sales were poor?
Me: No, it’s actually the world that tested the poorest since we’ve been market testing worlds.
TPTB: Do you have newer market research that contradicts this data?
Me: No, newer data shows among our worlds it’s still one of the least popular.
TPTB: Then why do we want to go back?
Me: Because of the popularity of Commander and some use of the plane in more recent stories, there is a small but very vocal group of our enfranchised players that would like a return.
TPTB: Are there other worlds that this same group is also excited about that sold and polled better?
Me: Yes, a whole bunch.
TPTB: So, why are you bringing this to me?
Me: It’s a popular request on my blog.
TPTB: And…
Me: No, that’s it.
TPTB: We’ll pass.
Let’s just say it’s a *hard* sell to get made.

MaRo gets asked about Kamigawa all the time on his blog, this one is from April this year.

Ok, another one from April this year...

drcthulhuobeliskdankenstein-blog asked: I think Kamigawa has so much untapped potential. I think just cause it wasn't mechanically done justice before, doesn't mean they should discount it's reasonance with the player base. Design could knock it out of the park nowadays.

Once again, the world of Kamigawa (not the mechanics, although they too scored low) is the lowest ranked world by the player base in market research since we started doing market research.

It is not an example of a loved creative with bad mechanics. It is example of a block where both the mechanics *and* the world was disliked by the players at the time it was on sale.

So, it wasn't just the mechanics, pretty much nothing Kamigawa did was especially loved by the wider audience. There is a vocal minority that wants a return, but it's just not going to happen. Next time they do a Japanese-inspired set, you can bet it's on a new plane.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Thats a really good post.

Here are a couple really good perspectives on WOTCs current problems:

 

[sigh]

First one hits it good with the fact that mtg cards have virtually zero intrinsic value, with only player acceptance and faith providing any meaning. Good video, questionable views on inclusivity aside.

Second one has some cool science, and I think also hits a key point: Wizards needs to care more about the players. The fact the reserve list still exists is gold standard in my mind regarding this, because don't you think at this point there are far more new players who want the ability of getting these cards than there are old collectors who want to maintain 'value'?

Also very punk of them to flat out endorse proxies. Started my cube that way, and it made it easier, no, possible to even begin my cube, because of financial barriers stopping me otherwise.

 

[Laz]

One Mr. BastardJack of reddit just posted this beauty:

Bohemian Cube

I am not posting it here because it is a good cube, but because of the awesomeness which is its custom nature. Every card is templated as though it had been printed in Alpha, and it has some gorgeous artwork reminiscent of the same era.

 

[anotak]

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

regarding jordan peterson

i find it interesting that grillo finds that jesse mason is "too much of a pundit" but someone talking about petersen isn't.

 

[Laz]

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

regarding jordan peterson

i find it interesting that grillo finds that jesse mason is "too much of a pundit" but someone talking about petersen isn't.

I enjoyed that article, and while I have to imagine that the long-form quotations were selectively picked to appear as verbose and intellectually thin as possible, I found them pretty enjoyable to read, as though I was listening to a drunken debate between my far too academic friends.

 

[anotak]

so first video makes some valid points about how the value we put into the cards is entirely a social construct, and yes, they're just paper. these points and the larger systemic reasons for them were examined in much greater detail by that a certain article a while back

then the videos make some ridiculous claims like:
"emotions don't matter"
really? they don't? why are you playing magic: the gathering?

like weird claims that people aren't playing because of the art on grand warlord radha? really? also, it's just a weird comment to call her fat when she looks more muscular than anything. or her utterly bizarre comment about "transracial teferi"
really?
let's look at teferi over the years:


so again, i gotta ask, "transracial"? legitimately, what the fuck? dude's been black forever.
how am i supposed to take someone seriously that calls dominaria "tumblrnaria" with a straight face.
apparently, "emotions don't matter", except when they make radha into a muscle lady that could crush you.

there's the weird comments about wizards inserting "politics" into MTG as if MTG was never political. as if, for example, making radha look like radha, heir to keld isn't also a political choice.

regarding the second video:
humans are not rats. like, really, why do i even need to say this?

while we both might be mammals and in some ways are adapted to the same situations, you can't just take psychological observations about rats and apply them directly to humans as if it were valid. you may notice that scientists don't tend to do that in this century.

i can think of plenty of examples of people who played games despite almost never winning, for years, decades even.
before the downfall of arcades due to economic factors relating to home consoles, it was incredibly common to see people who played a fighting game for 5-10 years, often almost *never* winning. the onscreen win counters and the winner-stays-on pay mechanism make this more clear than anything. i can think of more than one arcade scene where a person could go and see a single player sit down, and not get up off the machine for hours upon hours, playing on their single $.25 coin, while the other people stayed and kept rotating on trying to beat them. in fact, many of these people reacted quite badly if their opponents went easy on them, as this was often seen as disrespect.

apparently "emotions don't matter", unless you're winning too much.

motivation to play is endlessly more complex than percentage of winning or losing, or how badly you lose.

a more useful model for player motivation is self-determination theory's 3 intrinsic needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

regarding jordan peterson

i find it interesting that grillo finds that jesse mason is "too much of a pundit" but someone talking about petersen isn't.

Here you go: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/

Here is the scary guy:

Mason takes extreme views where things are black and white, and as a result he can never rise above telling half-truths--he's an ideologue, or you could think of him as a pundit, or a salesperson. You can see that in his piece where he refuses to acknowledge that Lowyrn had huge complexity issues, which hurt its accessability, which is what killed its success. We all know that if you make your game too complicated, its going to hurt your ability to recurit new players, and this is something that happens outside of market forces. Timespiral block had the same problem, which I think is both fairly objectively obvious if you look at the set (suspend counters?), but also was reflected in low period tournament attendence rates. Where is that in the piece?

It isn't, instead he presents it as a purely market driven tragedy--capitalism's fault--where bad sales numbers alone prevented WOTC from capitalising on obvious genius. This isn't true. Jesse might be an "entrenched" player to whom these sets are sacred cows, and whom had no problem with the complexity level, but that isn't the entire story, and putting his disgust of capitalism over his own ability to objectively report on the topic is his failure as a writer.

But you know, the guy did a pretty good Innistrad review. I wish we could return to that.

Edit: I can send you links to some of the peer reviewed research if you like about the rats, and you can try to debunk it if its really imporant to you, but I think the conclusion is hardly shocking. When have people ever been motivated to play a game they aren't allowed to win at?

 

[Chris Taylor]

Man, I gotta go get some lunch, but there's a lotta reading to do when I get back!

 

[Chris Taylor]

Alright, I'm just gonna do some quick hits here:

The sentence "this all started when the SJW's started to take over everything in nerd culture" doesn't make for a great opening line to your argument. Anotak has elaborated more on this issue, but inclusion in magic isn't inherently an awful thing, and just because Hallar the firefletcher has this backstory that says she (they?) have their own elven pronoun (Neither I guess?) doesn't make dominaria worse. "Transracial Tefari" is ridiculous

Re: Rats, honestly I think that a pretty good line of logic here. Winning is just the most measurable thing we have to extrapolate with, and most (not all) humans don't have fun while loosing. Sometimes we have things like dwarf fortress or Group Hug EDH decks, but if I had to pick a metric to study, winning would be it. (Universally applicable or not)

I feel like Jesse's got some good points. Time spiral is where I think the most debate happens, and I like two big points he mentions:

1. A lot of people cite the raw number of keywords as a measure of time spiral's complexity, which he feels as somewhat disingenuous. The difference between a card with Delve (Each card you exile from your graveyard while casting this spell pays for ). and Each card you exile from your graveyard while casting this spell pays for isn't huge. I think he's underestimating it down to nothing, but ability words (Eg: landfall, which can be removed from cards entirely and nothing would change, essentially the same rules complexity as a watermark) existing probably shows that it's nonzero at least.
2. Time Spiral block released in 2006, right on the verge of the 2008 financial crisis. This probably had some measurable effect on sales drops, and possibly on tournament attendance as well (You do still need to buy cards to play in tournaments, after all)

 

[safra]

Grillo, I honestly don't know how you can say Mason is partisan in one breath and post Jordan B Peterson in the other; it is shocking to me in its flagrancy. One of them is far more the salesman than the other, and it's not the guy with a blog read by like 300 people. 12 Rules For Life is the highest-selling book on Amazon! Peterson does speaking tours! He's far more the pundit than Mason is.

The video you linked is sad, and it's also a good example of Peterson's genuinely uplifting and inspirational message to the young men who watch him. But the man is an incoherent mess 90% of the time. Mason's an ideologue? That recent NYT Style section interview with the guy was kind of a hatchet job, but it essentially just gave the guy a space to talk and then quoted him. The pull quote from it that's gotten a bit of wind behind it is the one where he says dragons are real and so are bog witches, but I think more illustrative is the one below:

Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.

“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”

I laugh, because it is absurd.

“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”

I find Peterson's side of this conversation to be disturbing. It's nice that sometimes Peterson cries and is emotional, but that's not who he is to the world beyond his fans - he's this guy in the conversation. Encouraging people to see the softer side, the vulnerable side, of a man who matter-of-factly endorses "enforced monogamy" - cui bono? Not women.


I didn't watch very much of the two videos you posted, since it looks like anotak kind of spoke to them already and I don't like vlogs very much. I just want to double down on the part where you write Mason off as a black-and-white extremist, an ideologue, and post Jordan Peterson in a positive context at the same time. To me this is totally inexplicable!

last point: "When have people ever been motivated to play a game they aren't allowed to win at?"

like, all the time, dude. Lotto, ugly people with bad personalities on dating apps, penny slots.

 

[sigh]

for any of those "unwinnable game" examples, it's still true that if those players perceived some sort of cheating or other unfair deception they'd be pissed. There is technically some allowance to win in any of those examples, at least by perception. Any (negative) deviation from that nominal fairness is , however "unfair" it is to begin with from someone else's perspective.

Still a valid point from multiple of the posts above that different people have different expectations about fairness, regarding how often they need to win and the manner in which they win/lose; the deviation from that is all that really matters. The Lotto etc. is just an extreme example of this really.

 

[Dom Harvey]

Peterson is a shameless, incoherent grifter and that interviewer being bad at her job doesn't change that

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Grillo, I honestly don't know how you can say Mason is partisan in one breath and post Jordan B Peterson in the other; it is shocking to me in its flagrancy. One of them is far more the salesman than the other, and it's not the guy with a blog read by like 300 people. 12 Rules For Life is the highest-selling book on Amazon! Peterson does speaking tours! He's far more the pundit than Mason is.

The video you linked is sad, and it's also a good example of Peterson's genuinely uplifting and inspirational message to the young men who watch him. But the man is an incoherent mess 90% of the time. Mason's an ideologue? That recent NYT Style section interview with the guy was kind of a hatchet job, but it essentially just gave the guy a space to talk and then quoted him. The pull quote from it that's gotten a bit of wind behind it is the one where he says dragons are real and so are bog witches, but I think more illustrative is the one below:



I find Peterson's side of this conversation to be disturbing. It's nice that sometimes Peterson cries and is emotional, but that's not who he is to the world beyond his fans - he's this guy in the conversation. Encouraging people to see the softer side, the vulnerable side, of a man who matter-of-factly endorses "enforced monogamy" - cui bono? Not women.


I didn't watch very much of the two videos you posted, since it looks like anotak kind of spoke to them already and I don't like vlogs very much. I just want to double down on the part where you write Mason off as a black-and-white extremist, an ideologue, and post Jordan Peterson in a positive context at the same time. To me this is totally inexplicable!

last point: "When have people ever been motivated to play a game they aren't allowed to win at?"

like, all the time, dude. Lotto, ugly people with bad personalities on dating apps, penny slots.

I kind of get the sense that its unlikely that we're going to have a conversation here. If we can't even agree that people dislike games where they are unable to win, I'm not sure where we going. Lotto and penny slots do allow people to occastionally win, btw, which is why people play them. One of magic's strengths is that there is enough RNG where even poor players can win occasionally against better players.

You're perfectly free to agree with Mason. I was hoping that we could have more of discussion about some of the flaws in the piece, and it would be helpful to have someone to defend some of the more questionable points he makes.

Peterson is a good guy. Here's his own rebuttal btw, to the quote you dug up, though I suspect you won't really care about it. Its...sad that I have to write that he wasn't advocating for women being forced into arranged marrages...but, its 2018 so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

It would be nice if we could have less hit pieces on a respected researcher, and more of a chance to unpack some of the psychology in regards to game design. Its difficult to find someone that can present it so clearly, and I was hoping to do that, as a lot of the research is really interesting,

Anyways, if this is about getting mad at me for posting some people you dislike, there is not really a lot I can do, and I certainly don't intend to apologize. Really disappointing though.

 

[Heymaker]

I feel like the phrase "hopeless odds" is never realized in the minds of the desperate (or even 'intellectuals' at an inconvenient moment). Even in regards to lottos (and on the theme of Magic, less extreme cases of opening a booster pack of a crap set), people fabricate glorious stories in their heads of achieving some version of magical-christmas-land (foil Brimaz or bust). Divorced from sitting oneself down to contemplate odds and likely outcomes (i.e. realistic, down-to-earth fantasies), I think we all fall into the trap of seeing things as best-case-scenario when caught off guard.

Ultimately in the heat of a game of magic, I don't always want players engaging System 2 of their brain as they work out the math of what outs they have and why that knowledge should depress them. I want the player falling behind to be full of hope; the player pulling further ahead to fear punting. Film, theatrics, stories, are so much more emotionally fulfilling when you're not always peaking behind the curtains...

...

I don't know what I just responded to , but it has been on my mind lately with regards to cube design (something I vaguely remember we do here on occasion)

 

[anotak]

Here you go: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/

you clearly did not even read the piece i linked.

the one i linked directly links the article you linked, and quotes it. the piece i linked specifically agreed the Channel 4 interviewer "repeatedly put words in Peterson’s mouth".

Mason takes extreme views where things are black and white, and as a result he can never rise above telling half-truths--he's an ideologue, or you could think of him as a pundit, or a salesperson. You can see that in his piece where he refuses to acknowledge that Lowyrn had huge complexity issues, which hurt its accessability, which is what killed its success. We all know that if you make your game too complicated, its going to hurt your ability to recurit new players, and this is something that happens outside of market forces. Timespiral block had the same problem, which I think is both fairly objectively obvious if you look at the set (suspend counters?), but also was reflected in low period tournament attendence rates. Where is that in the piece?

It isn't, instead he presents it as a purely market driven tragedy--capitalism's fault--where bad sales numbers alone prevented WOTC from capitalising on obvious genius. This isn't true. Jesse might be an "entrenched" player to whom these sets are sacred cows, and whom had no problem with the complexity level, but that isn't the entire story, and putting his disgust of capitalism over his own ability to objectively report on the topic is his failure as a writer.

But you know, the guy did a pretty good Innistrad review. I wish we could return to that.

he doesn't sit there and say in that article that Lorwyn was some godly set that was shafted by capitalism though
the literal only mention of Lorwyn is:

Magic, because it only prints sets that were released within the last couple years, has absolutely no use for sets that attract attention later, after the initial release. Wizards considered sets like Future Sight and Lorwyn massive failures due to their poor sales. Years later, boxes of those go for about $800 and $700, respectively. They’re two of the most historically important sets printed in the Modern era: Future Sight is still getting reprints from its “futureshifted” cards, with Steamflogger Boss literally inspiring an entire set. Lorwyn was the debut of planeswalkers, the first truly new card type since Alpha, and what came to define the entire identity of how the story works in Magic.

his central point in this paragraph is the first sentence "Magic, because it only prints sets that were released within the last couple years, has absolutely no use for sets that attract attention later, after the initial release".
if he has a failure here, it might be a failure to account for perhaps the secondary market value of cards from the set driving the price. but the central point he makes in the paragraph is one that is logically true: wotc has little-to-no incentive to worry about how sets are perceived 5-10 years after the fact.

i don't really see what i can even do here if you just make stuff up about the article.

Edit: I can send you links to some of the peer reviewed research if you like about the rats, and you can try to debunk it if its really imporant to you, but I think the conclusion is hardly shocking. When have people ever been motivated to play a game they aren't allowed to win at?

i don't doubt that the rats behaved that way, i was speaking about the connection to human behavior.

self-determination theory is also backed by peer reviewed research, and directly deals with motivation in humans. it has been studied explicitly with regard to games as well. i think most people here as cube designers would do well to look into it. you could try checking out scott rigby's gdc talks for example.

as far as "When have people ever been motivated to play a game they aren't allowed to win at?"
this is really weird, like, I made my previous post that you replied to had a specific example of people who played fighting games in arcades. did you miss that?
i myself still remember the first time i won a game of street fighter 3: 3rd strike after having played the same guy once a week for about 7 months, not having won a single game in that time. we often played 30+ games a session, and at the time 3rd strike wasn't a very popular game in my particular region so he was basically my only opponent. i know people who would show up to the arcade to play games over and over for a decade+ while they picked low tier characters in marvel vs capcom 2 who literally have *no chance* at winning.
there are plenty of games where you can't win at all.
and a subset of those games where you can't lose, but it definitely is not all of them.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I dismissed the example you provided, because I had cited to peer reviewed research, while you provided anecdotal examples (that often featured a player winning at some point), and I figured that if we were seriously arguingthe idea that people like playing games that they don't believe as possible to win, that maybe we weren't having an actual discussion.

The article you cited was weird, and I can't actually find the link that you referenced in it. It seemed to miss some of the best criticisms of Peterson, in favor of picking out sections from maps, making linguistic criticisms, and than defining him as not being a credible intellectual. It came across as more ad hominem than anything.

Here is the context of the article's Lowyrn quote:

Even compared to other industries, where companies are trying to make money selling some form of art or media, the collectable/limited run nature of Magic warps what products are thought of as successful. In almost any other medium where artistic creations are sold, things aren’t just written off as massive failures just because they fail to immediately attract a mainstream audience....

...Magic, because it only prints sets that were released within the last couple years, has absolutely no use for sets that attract attention later, after the initial release. Wizards considered sets like Future Sight and Lorwyn massive failures due to their poor sales. Years later, boxes of those go for about $800 and $700, respectively. They’re two of the most historically important sets printed in the Modern era: Future Sight is still getting reprints from its “futureshifted” cards, with Steamflogger Boss literally inspiring an entire set. Lorwyn was the debut of planeswalkers, the first truly new card type since Alpha, and what came to define the entire identity of how the story works in Magic.

They considered them failures not just because they failed to generate money, they considered them failures also due to the off-putting complexity.

Even if you take the market aspect out, thats an important part of the puzzle. While we might consider Lowryn a more important set in retrospect (that perception is going to fluctuate over time), a big part of the sets importance was the realization that board complexity was an issue, and its failure giving birth to NWO design. That history is a big part of what drives those sets perception, fair or otherwise.

And you get that from his reviews of the actual sets as well, in particular the time spiral one, where he laments:

When discussions of this block happen from current employees of Wizards, their starting point is always the same: it didn’t sell well. All their other reasoning flows from that. The job of a Magic set is to sell product, and Time Spiral didn’t.
This is such a spectacularly bad line of thinking that I’m amazed I even need to address it, but since they’ve been saying this same thing since 2008, clearly something has to be done.

It was not just sales numbers, there were real mechanical problems with the set.

 

[lsclr]

hey i've been lurking here since theros and this is the thread that dragged me in so thanks for that i guess.

Peterson is a man caught in a fill-in-the-empty cmc slot paradigm with pronouns. he also has a tenuous grasp on the meaning of the word 'exist', and is unlucky enough to be in a position where speaking out against the Left's fetishization of minorities and for disillusioned, lonely, touch-starved young men has put him in the middle of Culture Wars.

Mason genuinely loves magic, and has experienced the horrors of working retail firsthand. Card Kingdom seems like it was formative for him. Watching your favorite thing reduced to money sucks, and Magic would be a better game if dual lands were shifted to uncommon (and also people would buy less packs, so Hasbro wouldn't have it).

here is the difference between them: Mason understands that Sensei's Divining Top is a bad card.

he likes lorwyn draft, which scares the bejeezus out of me. he really hates capitalism, which did hurt Time Spiral, the block with the most cards that give me that shiny-eyed new player 'this does What?!' look, and Lorwyn, which has ridiculous board states; he used his GDS3 question to rant about it when he really shouldn't have. yes, he is a pundit, and yes, he has pinned what seem to me to be things with several different causes to one root.

ok
now that that's out of my system:
wizards wants to be Hip and Cool with the lgbt crowd, and Magic players are mostly young straight cis men. there's tension there. I watched the uncomfortable dance you did around the manland/creatureland/personland issue. let's not let the culture wars eat this space up.

speaking of conflict is anybody planning on making politics-based multiplayer cubes with Will of the Council and Assist, from Battlebond?

 

[CaptnIrony]

Is it normal I feel way too dumb/uninformed to understand most of this?

I can't even tell who's arguing against who... The only name I recognize is Jordan Peterson. I'm going to have to actually read this, rather than skimming over, and I'll have to watch the vids.

Welcome back, Grillo.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

hey i've been lurking here since theros and this is the thread that dragged me in so thanks for that i guess.

Peterson is a man caught in a fill-in-the-empty cmc slot paradigm with pronouns. he also has a tenuous grasp on the meaning of the word 'exist', and is unlucky enough to be in a position where speaking out against the Left's fetishization of minorities and for disillusioned, lonely, touch-starved young men has put him in the middle of Culture Wars.

Mason genuinely loves magic, and has experienced the horrors of working retail firsthand. Card Kingdom seems like it was formative for him. Watching your favorite thing reduced to money sucks, and Magic would be a better game if dual lands were shifted to uncommon (and also people would buy less packs, so Hasbro wouldn't have it).

here is the difference between them: Mason understands that Sensei's Divining Top is a bad card.

he likes lorwyn draft, which scares the bejeezus out of me. he really hates capitalism, which did hurt Time Spiral, the block with the most cards that give me that shiny-eyed new player 'this does What?!' look, and Lorwyn, which has ridiculous board states; he used his GDS3 question to rant about it when he really shouldn't have. yes, he is a pundit, and yes, he has pinned what seem to me to be things with several different causes to one root.

ok
now that that's out of my system:
wizards wants to be Hip and Cool with the lgbt crowd, and Magic players are mostly young straight cis men. there's tension there. I watched the uncomfortable dance you did around the manland/creatureland/personland issue. let's not let the culture wars eat this space up.

speaking of conflict is anybody planning on making politics-based multiplayer cubes with Will of the Council and Assist, from Battlebond?

Thank you sir, handled in a way where you didn't betray yourself, while still providing a well-rounded persepective. Bravo.

That sounds like something that I absolutely should do, or at least incorporate the mechanics in.

 

[NimbusToad]

wizards wants to be Hip and Cool with the lgbt crowd, and Magic players are mostly young straight cis men. there's tension there. I watched the uncomfortable dance you did around the manland/creatureland/personland issue. let's not let the culture wars eat this space up.

Is there really a serious conflict regarding Magic's lore incorporating too much of or responding too fully to contemporary identity politics' criticisms? First of all, in my opinion, good on them if that is the case. Second, I really wonder who cares about that. The worlds in which this game is set are so loosely fleshed out by the playing peices that I could not imagine myself being outraged one way or another (unless there was consistent racist/sexist/etc content, but that doesn't seem to be the case).

 

[Kirblinx]

Is it normal I feel way too dumb/uninformed to understand most of this?

I can't even tell who's arguing against who... The only name I recognize is Jordan Peterson. I'm going to have to actually read this, rather than skimming over, and I'll have to watch the vids.

Welcome back, Grillo.

You're not the only one. I read about a paragraph into everyones replies before I realise I have no idea what anyone is talking about and move onto the next post.

I feel like I am not cultured enough to care about these ideological debates, so I don't butt in, but it is nice to know I am not the only one who is lost out here.

This place isn't the kind where these discussions dissolve to hate rants quickly, so I am happy enough with them being here.
Until that point happens I will just keep scrolling until I find something that relates to my interests.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I mean a lot of these discussions are kinda stupid anyway so I wouldn't feel to worried about not following it. Peterson seem like a doof.