If I was sensible, I probably should stop playing Magic, or at least paying money for cards… but I have too much of my self-esteem wrapped up in that stupid game. It’s like trying to quit smoking. :P
This is why I tend to have an immediate aversion to using Magic as a rationality teacher. The whole game is set up on a business model that incentivizes constantly shelling out money for new cards to keep your deck from becoming obsolete. Wizards Of The Coast’s goal is to make sure that their players cannot continue to be competitive without providing a constant revenue flow. If you want to teach people good rationality skills, don’t start by encouraging them to get into something like that.
I’ve always been turned off my MtG on the grounds that I should just be able to print up any cards I like and use them as long as they form a valid deck, rather than having to follow WotC’s anti-”counterfeiting” policy. Do any Magic players actually do this?
People create “proxy” decks all the time. It’s one of the dominant ways of testing for big tournaments (when you don’t know what cards you’ll need until you settle on a decklist, but you don’t want to buy every potential card). However, for some reason the casual community doesn’t seem to do this as much. This is somewhat ironic because sanctioned tournaments are the only place you have to use real cards.
I have friends who did so, but they only used them to compose special print decks to play with the few other friends who were also using print decks, and I think they used their “real” decks more even among each other than the print decks.
If I was sensible, I probably should stop playing Magic, or at least paying money for cards… but I have too much of my self-esteem wrapped up in that stupid game. It’s like trying to quit smoking. :P
I don’t know if it’s a consequentialism issue, but “if I was sensible” seems like a way of locking a problem in place.
Maybe there should be a separate category for noticing identity issues.
This is why I tend to have an immediate aversion to using Magic as a rationality teacher. The whole game is set up on a business model that incentivizes constantly shelling out money for new cards to keep your deck from becoming obsolete. Wizards Of The Coast’s goal is to make sure that their players cannot continue to be competitive without providing a constant revenue flow. If you want to teach people good rationality skills, don’t start by encouraging them to get into something like that.
I’ve always been turned off my MtG on the grounds that I should just be able to print up any cards I like and use them as long as they form a valid deck, rather than having to follow WotC’s anti-”counterfeiting” policy. Do any Magic players actually do this?
People create “proxy” decks all the time. It’s one of the dominant ways of testing for big tournaments (when you don’t know what cards you’ll need until you settle on a decklist, but you don’t want to buy every potential card). However, for some reason the casual community doesn’t seem to do this as much. This is somewhat ironic because sanctioned tournaments are the only place you have to use real cards.
I have friends who did so, but they only used them to compose special print decks to play with the few other friends who were also using print decks, and I think they used their “real” decks more even among each other than the print decks.