10 years ago, i would've agreed heavily with the original post
but as i've grown as a person, seen a lot of things, my opinions have changed some to be a bit more nuanced. while i think a lot of the knowledge checks involved in a lot of games (like magic) often can have all of the drawbacks you mentioned, there's a lot of positive to them.
so, competitive games (using a loose definition here, doesn't have to be tournaments) are hard. like really hard. almost always, the deep longterm difficulty in competitive games comes from situations with a lot of nuance, counterplay, emergent complexity, so on. these situations are NOT what the post terms "trivia" or "trivia checks", though i dislike how negative that name is, so i'll borrow the fighting game term "tech" instead. i think we're in agreement that the truly difficult choices in a game like magic is in those moments when tech is not the deciding factor.
those deep skills are very difficult, things like how or when to attack or block or sequencing or playing around cards. and those on a meta-level even deeper, are very hard to even understand or see at all. they're certainly very hard to talk about, and despite the wealth of writing about magic strategy, very little of that writing is actually particularly deep. and i don't know how it could be, it's real hard to put the deeper stuff into words.
however, losing to that deeper stuff if you're a new player actually really sucks, but it sucks in a way the new player lacks the vocabulary to even articulate. there is no weird tech to point to. when out-strategized, the new player often loses just feeling helpless because there is nothing obvious to learn about. it's often not really *clear* that that's what happened, because the player doesn't even have the skills to see the differences yet. and, also, importantly, people don't like to admit to themselves that this is what happened, because it hurts emotionally.
on the other hand, learning tech gives you something to latch onto as a new player, as someone unfamiliar with a format or game. it lets you focus on things that are *actually* quite simple in comparison to that hard stuff, the strategy. it lets you grow and learn the strategy passively in the background, while your conscious mind focuses on the tech.
there's also an emotional benefit to that experience of learning and mastering tech. the
oblivion ring trick might be old news to me and you, but i also remember the first time i learned it, and the first time i showed it to many new players. and it was like an "oh neat! i understand something about this game!" moment.
tech also gives emotional texture to a game. i wish i knew how to put more words to this idea here, to explain it fully, because i think this is one of the most important things about tech. so just writing that first sentence does not feel like it does it justice. but i don't know how to explain further.
the article makes the assumption that strategy is the only type of skill. however, learning, studying, and remembering tech is a skill. not everyone is equally good at it, just as not everyone is equally good at strategy. the post mentions
If a nearby judge or rules reference would reveal a clearly (in)correct play,
but judges are people who trained to be judges. interpreting a reference is also a skill. you might make the argument that it's not a particularly interesting skill for a game of magic: the gathering, or not the skill you enjoy or wish to encourage. but that's a very different statement than it not being a skill at all. and that's the second assumption, which is just that it's not an interesting skill but it's worth remembering that people who have this skill (and not strategy) may be people who will play your cube.
the skill's also not always about memorization, even if it often might be in the common case. i mentioned i remember learning about
oblivion ring. the way i learned it was reading the card. i was new during shards of alara, and i saw the card looking through my friend's deckbox, and i immediately asked "hey, can you look at this, does this work this way?" and my friend said yes. i got this right because i understood the rules, i understood the consequences of putting the rules together. and at the time it gave me a little bit of delight that i understood this system. this is a skill, because nobody can or will memorize everything. i also remember this moment because this was one of my earliest positive experiences with the game.
tech keeps the game from being something you ever feel like you can fully hold in your head. tech is something that lets anyone, no matter how actually good or bad at the strategy, find some weird interaction that lets them break the game maybe. in practice, a lot of it gets figured out and shared. but the fact that it's there, gives a sort of hope to so many people.
the negative experiences with tech are not even always a just drawback that pay for the positives i'm listing. sometimes some negative experiences can be good for your game overall. i hope people can understand this given we play the game with the mana system it does.
i was away from magic for a few years and i got into competitive quakeworld and i learned a great many things that were tech and not (for example) strategy, and i treasure a lot of those memories just as much as i treasure learning about the strategy. i treasure that stuff about fighting games, i treasure that stuff about starcraft: brood war, and so on. i've designed a lot of games and mods for games over the years, and seen a lot of people react to them. i think that this tech stuff is legitimately good, just in the right dosage, in the right places.
in my opinion nothing worth doing or enjoying is perfectly elegant. in my experience, other people react in a way that makes me think it is true for most people, even if they don't say so. the real world isn't elegant, and games are, while not simulations, something that connects in some way to that exprience of the real world.
