Christopher Morris-Lent
6/15/2012 10:10:00 AM
Hello everyone! I hope you're all feeling well today, and, if not, that you can at least chalk that up to variance.

I feel that everything that needs to be said about Limited has been said by Jackie Lee, and everything that needs to be said about Standard has been said by Craig Wescoe. So today, I'm going to write an essay.


Full Details for TCGplayer.com MaxPoint Diamond Open $5K - Orlando
Life

Life is a “series of addictions” (David Foster Wallace), a “matter of taste” (Spring Awakening), and “a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think” (Horace Walpole). These disparate quotations are trying to say exactly the same thing, eloquently put forth by Albert Camus in his awesome books – that life is what you make of it, and that life is a game. If you're lucky, it's the Game of Thrones; if you're unlucky, you watch other people play that game, and become subject to their arbitrary edicts (“marry someone of the opposite sex,” “pay less taxes than the rich,” “don't play online poker,” and so on. And though these dicta are idiotic, I count myself lucky that I only have to deal with them: it could be so much worse.)

So what is there to do? If life is a game – a series of games – then surely there are games within it that are better than others. Life is full of games not worth playing, and it is probably more important to not play those games than it is to play the ones that are worth playing. But I am not here to enumerate terrible games; this is, after all, a Magic card column, not an Apples to Apples dossier, nor a pamphlet on sarging. I have spent the better part of my life finding out what the best games are, and I will now state them. They are, in no particular order, Magic, poker, Starcraft, and basketball. I'm going to spend the rest of the column talking about what makes these games so special, as well as the common pitfall they all share: variance.


StarCraft

I first heard of StarCraft from a friend of mine, the same friend who taught Travis Woo how to play Magic and has now, for some reason, joined the Marines (a bad game). I was about to start the seventh grade. To that date, I had played games obsessively, cutting my toddler teeth on Designasaurus and Treasure Mathstorm! and continuing to SimCity 2000, Alpha Centauri, Magic, and so on. I had also played a great deal of soccer and baseball, but I was in the process of quitting the latter, because I rarely made contact with the ball, and it stung like an Unyaro Bees whenever I did.

Even at that tender age, people called me the “most competitive person [they'd] ever met,” so it was a natural progression from picking up StarCraft to picking up Brood War to quitting youth soccer. Let me explain. The first game of that season, I found that everyone had grown beyond my size; they were faster and stronger; it didn't matter much that they were dumber. When our team surrendered an early goal, I felt very much like vomiting. The parents, on the sideline, were encouraging, but also bloodthirsty – it was that awkward transition to adolescence, and I had only partially made it myself. Throughout the next sixty minutes, the score remained the same. Then the pimply referee blew the whistle, and the other team began to celebrate. I could not take it. A rictus of rage contorting my features, I gave them the finger. They didn't care, but my coach did! “You're not playing in the next game,” she yelled.

She was right. I wasn't playing in the next game, nor the one after that. I had found another way to sublimate my competitive urges, one that wouldn't require fake camaraderie or rainy practices or (worst of all) physical activity. I was playing StarCraft more or less continuously: I would get home from school, turn on the antiquarian 56k, and Crush all those who hid so meekly behind their computers. I heard that some other fellow at my middle school also played, so I took it upon myself to clobber him, too; our match was a joke; it lasted five minutes.

All this explains why I got into StarCraft, but I find the reasons I remained into it to be much more interesting. I think the best way to put it is: it's not so different from Magic. There are few riches to be made, but in spite of (because of) that, there is fierce competition. Competitive play is mano-a-mano. There is a constantly shifting metagame, defined largely by the best players. And, though StarCraft places some importance on execution – being able to click quickly, in other words – that's far from the most important part of it: what got me so far was something we called “timing.”

“Timing,” in StarCraft, denotes a number of concepts, taken together; it's being able to make an educated guess as to what your opponent is doing, and then responding to that. Or guessing what they think you think they're doing, and responding to that. We could continue ad infinitum, but that's not the point: “timing” is a natural and cerebral response to incomplete information, which dictates the psychological element of StarCraft. I was so good with my timing that, although my mouse was slothful and my computer obsolete, I could defeat someone “big,” someone who now commentates professionally on Korean StarCraft, for Anglophone audiences. I suppose the apex of my career was playing against ElkY. ElkY is now a poker guru, the only Frenchman (besides Camus) I have ever looked up to; but, before he was making millions, he was grinding StarCraft, at one point, the best White person to ever play the original. I was 16 when we played. We were in a 32-man tournament, the winner of which would get a trip to Korea. He was the 1-seed. I was the 32-seed. We played best two out of three. Game three was not necessary.


Basketball

At that point in life, I was so far removed from playing sports that I decided to watch them instead. I had done so before – the Mariners in 1995, the Sonics in 1996 – but I had been too young. What got me into basketball as a conscious person was March Madness. School had cruelly been scheduled on the Thursday it all started. In the era before smartphones, I recall scrounging for updates. Finally, the day ended, and we congregated in the school newspaper room to watch the waning seconds of Tennessee vs. Winthrop. Tennessee was a 2-seed, Winthrop a 15-seed. It looked like Winthrop had it, but then Tennessee drained a three. The game was over. A collective groan turned into a cacophony of cussing. The journalism teacher raised his arm and proclaimed, “This is a great time of year, isn't it?”

It is a tragedy for me, and most every other Seattleite, that our NBA team was stolen. The details can be found if you search YouTube for “SonicsGate,” but a blow-by-blow goes something like this. Our local coffee magnate, Howard Schultz, the worst NBA-related person to come out of the New York housing projects not named “Metta World Peace,” bought the franchise. He tried to manage it for a time, but he was terrible at it. “I know to whom I owe the most loyalty, and I see him in the mirror every day.”

And yet, the franchise appreciated in value, enough to be sold down the river to a pair of Oklahoma City businessmen whose hobbies include getting pointless tax breaks, funding homophobic initiatives, and not much else. While making a pretense towards keeping the Sonics in Seattle – a pretense that fooled nobody, aside from David Stern – the Okies were gutting the franchise to reduce local interest. “It's not a matter of deserving. It's a matter of strength. The power to hold versus the power to take.”

This part of the scheme worked. The franchise is now known as the “Oklahoma City Thunder,” but I prefer the name “Vichy Sonics.” Losing a storied and treasured sports team to Oklahoma City, of all places, smarted Seattleites; it appeared then that variance was then at its cruelest. But it got worse. The Vichy Sonics are now in the NBA Finals.

Though life is a comedy for those who think, who thinks about sports? It's not like politics; the entire point is to feel. So a tragedy could be in the making, and I can't do anything about it. Embracing a certain loss of control is not only integral to watching games, it's also critical to playing them.

But, before I get into that, let me finish my story. En route to the Finals, the Vichy Sonics faced the Spurs. In Game 5, they mounted a ferocious and energetic comeback. I was in a bar here. Kevin Durant drained a three; I heard the sound of clapping. I whirled around in fury and saw it was a man behind the bar; he had been serving me. The situation was hopeless. I asked to close out. The service was swift. The bill was reasonable. On it, for a tip, I wrote zero dollars and zero cents. As we were leaving, my friend, had he played Magic, might have said, “In the midst of horror beyond imagining, I still see things that lift my heart.”


Poker

So the Sonics were spirited away. That was in 2008. A municipal tragedy: but, for me, the worst was yet to come. When I went back to my execrable college, at the beginning of that year, I came down with a horrible case of indigestion. It wouldn't go away. Soon I couldn't digest anything. My abdomen was in constant, burning pain. I would wake up, two hours after I entered tortured sleep, with acid gushing up into my throat. I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. I was exhausted and malnourished. And soon I became depressed. A botched surgery from a New York quack later, I was back at home to seek medical care; I had left behind a girlfriend and a gaggle of venal quislings (but I repeat myself).

That extended summer, I tried to keep it together; there was a surgery that would save me; there was hope. The physicians here confirmed that the quack in New York had blown it. They referred me to a surgeon of high regard. I saw him a day before my twenty-first birthday. He dismissed my concerns out of hand and refused to operate on me. I went insane. Eventually, I found another surgeon. His repute was just as high, his manner infinitely more empathetic. He operated on me: a few months later, I was better. I'm better now, but, over two years later, I'm still recovering from that horrible episode. It sticks with you.

In the middle of this nightmare, I discovered online poker. I was bad at it, but I didn't know that yet; all I knew was that I was winning. Incapacitated as I was, my skill had a fairly low ceiling. I made a few thousand, and then lost it back. On Christmas Eve 2009, I was released from a psychiatric ward. On Christmas Day, I flew home. On December 26^th, I entered a small tournament for fifty-five dollars. Eight hours later, I had seven thousand. Every time I want to whine about “running bad” these days, I remember how fortunate I was that day.

Feeling disinclined to get a job, I made a go of professional poker for about sixteen months. It was great. I had a stretch of over a year where I never did a single thing I didn't want to do.
Then the poker sites closed their doors to American customers. The Department of Justice had decreed that big online poker was to no longer operate here, the “Land of the Brave,” the “Home of the Free.” As if I needed any more reasons to be disgusted at being an American.


Magic

Nothing ever happens for a reason – to think so is naïve at best, and willfully ignorant at worst – and yet it is necessary to try and “find the silver lining.” Had I not quit my soccer team, I would not have found StarCraft; without StarCraft, I would never have had the grounding in “timing” necessary to play poker; had poker never been banned, I would never have started playing Magic again. It's a stretch, but I need it for my sanity.

High Mid Low

Delver of Secrets

$3.65

$0.73

$0.35

Store QTY Price   dave f 8 $0.35 Cape Fear Games 2 $0.47 Cape Fear Games 8 $0.49 Miniature Exchange 4 $0.50 Lazavs Card Palace 3 $0.50 MTG Deals 16 $0.52 The Casual Gamer 1 $0.52 Static Age Games 1 $0.57 Nerd Rage Gaming 2 $0.59 >> View all Prices for Delver of Secrets << Store.TCGplayer.com allows you to buy cards from any of our vendors, all at the same time! Shop, Compare & Save with TCGplayer.com! - [Store FAQ]

My long illness – at first physical, and then mental – was kind of like watching your favorite sports team lose all the time. You cannot do anything about it, and yet, you feel miserable; you blame yourself. It was a complete loss of control. Variance giveth; variance taketh away; variance is a part of life. But, as in life, it doesn't have to be as big as it is in Magic right now. Jackie Lee did a great job of explaining why Limited sucks right now; Craig Wescoe did a great job of explaining why Standard sucks right now; it all boils down to the loss of control, to being powerless to stop a loss to a scrub wielding a curve-out Mist Raven or a blind-flipped Delver of Secrets. We try to exert control over our lives; when we can't, we try to exert control over Magic. Sometimes, though, you come down with acid reflux, or your NBA team is stolen – there's nothing you can do. And I think that's what frustrates people about the popular Magic formats right now. It's not so much losing, it's losing in ways that are beyond our control.


Hitting the Parlay

With Avacyn Restored at full ascension, the weather being grim, etc. I thought I was running pretty bad lately. But then this happened. I left work early. I went bowling. I rolled over 200 for the first time in my life. I went to the Seattle Symphony. I saw a god of the piano (my instrument) perform the Rachmaninov Third Concerto nearly flawlessly. And then I heard the Heat had won game two. That's a great day! That's variance.

Until next time, may your city's basketball franchises stay in town.

Thank you for reading!
CML