jack

"Don't do what the judges ask for, do what the judges want"

2018-06-06T14:13:36Z

Recently wizards of the coast have been running the Great Designer Search 3, a competition to choose someone to potentially work in magic the gathering research and development. It's interesting because it says a lot about how they design such a complex game.

But occasionally frustrating when the competition is a bit arbitrary. I may have ranted about the preliminary multiple choice test before: it was done pretty well, but designing multiple choice tests well is hard, and a few "guess what the judges were trying to ask" questions slipped through the net.

After the multiple choice and essay rounds, the top 8 went through a series of design challenges, which are fairly interesting. They were quite intense, each lasted a few days with a week or so inbetween, and the candidates needed to design 8-15 cards meeting some set criteria. IIRC the challenges were design a number of cards for a previously underappreciated creature type, design N cards from the list of circus themed cards, design a mechanic that could be a major mechanic in a new set, design a series of cards using these pieces of art and meeting these descriptions, and design a booster-pack's worth of cards that could be added to an existing set.

The challenges end up testing multiple things at once, needing both "wow judges with fun ideas" and "understand what existing magic cards are relevant to this, and what abilities can be used and which shouldn't be".

From what I read on twitter, the "who did best, who got knocked out" judging was done based very much on candidates overall submissions. But there's also a card-by-card review published on wizard's website, which unfortunately does suffer a bit from "obvious problems jump out to the judges, overall quality of the card only stands out if it's especially good"

And partly because writing clear requirements is hard, and partly because the candidates were under a lot of pressure, there was also a steady trickle of failing to meet requirements by mistake. E.g. the tribal challenge required the Ooze (or whatever) cards to all care about other cards being oozes, whereas it was very easy to design an ooze that synergised with the abilities on the rest of the cards, or created extra oozes, etc, without explicitly caring about it.

At one point, I wrote a comment to one of the candidates when they were posting retrospectives on the Goblin Artisans blog, which had truth I wish I'd been better at seeing all my life.

I was talking about following the letter of the rules vs the spirit, and said, sometimes bending the rules is appropriate and sometimes it isn't, usually depending whether it shows the judges what they're looking for. But they don't usually TELL you explicitly what they're looking for (because they don't know consciously, or because they need to set objective requirements, etc), you need to intuit that and then design for that.

But a LOT of life is like that. Often doing what someone SAYS is only a proxy for doing what they WANT. There are exceptions, where they explicitly want you to NOT think about some things and just obey -- again, judging which things are which is difficult but what you need to try.

So sometimes, people are looking for ingenious solutions and bending the rules to get them is great. And sometimes they're looking for something in the spirit of the rules, and bending the rules produces something useless. And often they don't know themselves. But you can often guess.

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Words learned from Magic:TG

2015-07-20T17:01:58Z

If you already know collective nouns, you learn a lot less from Magic The Gathering, but words which I first learned there include:

Welkin (the sky, the upper air, the firmament, or the Celestial sphere)
Rime (Hoar frost, greyish-white crystalline deposit of ice formed in clear still weather on vegetation, fences, etc)
Whelm (submerge, engulf, as in "overwhelm" and "underwhelm" :))
Sarkan (dragon in Slovak)

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December Days: A game I enjoy

2014-12-10T17:00:13Z

This wasn't what I originally intended, I originally intended to talk about
a game I'd like to recommend, but I happened to be thinking about Magic:TG
recently, so let me talk about that.

There's lots of talk about the things wrong with magic, and I basically
agree, but let me here talk about the things I like about it.

I like that it's a sort of microcosm of almost all possible games. Do you
like psychological games and outguessing your opponent like poker? Do you
like precise estimation of odds and best chances and how much to gamble
like poker? Do you like playing a game and just doing the obvious thing and
letting chance determine if it works? Do you like a social game where the
focus is on playing with friends and it's ok if you play the same game each
week? Do you like playing in tournaments where you can improve your chances
by iteratively optimising your strategy in advance over months? Do you like
adapting to an uncertain battlefield? Do you like modelling real-world
strategy with a mix of how much to allow for chance and unforseen problems
and how much to exploit advantages? Do you like massive group games with
massive swings and pile-ons? Do you like poking for edges cases? Do you
like succeeding under arbitrary constraints? Magic has all of those!

I like that there's always a new game a couple of times a year, all quite
well balanced in their own right.

I like that each world, even if the story is questionable, is rich in
worldbuilding.

I like the amount of art that's introduced, ranging from the hilarious to
beautiful.

I like vocabulary, the trickle of obscure words I never heard of, or never
expected to see in a mainstream product. (I meant to find examples but I'm
running out of time writing this post. Welkin, a word for the highest
celestial sphere or upper sky. Many, many group nouns for animals.
Occasional theological terms.)

I like the consistency of the ruleset. Many games have some moment where
you say "this card says this, but this other card says that, how do they
work together". Magic has 12,000+ unique cards, and ANY of them might be
played together. Including some that do very unique and quirky things with
the rules. But, despite some rocky history, the comprehensive rules since I
started playing have had essentially zero ambiguities. Sometimes it's
confusing what the right answer is if it's an unusual situation. Sometimes
it's difficult to say, if it deals with "what happens when a player makes a
mistake in a competition" not "what are these two cards SUPPOSED to do
together". Sometimes the rules are temporarily technically ambiguous but
it's clear what they should say, or are clear, but something is not quite
working as intended and they have to be fixed. But generally, you can just
assume that for any given interaction between cards, there is a single
unambiguous correct answer to what happens and it would be a major scandal
if there wasn't, since an unexpected interaction is often the source of a
new competition deck. Lots of actual computer programs in production are
less deterministic! :)

The previous paragraph isn't _quite_ true. We have found cases where IMO
the rules are ambiguous -- but you pretty much need someone with a
university-level-maths background bent on creating an infinite loop :) In
fact, that's something else which is interesting, that the rules are
open-ended enough that you can do things like Alex's turing machine and
random-magic-card-generator. In fact, it's quite a useful body of research
in making complicated but clear rules, many other games borrow ideas from
it.

I like that magic has -- very imperfectly, but ongoingly -- avoid the lure
of printing more and more powerful cards.

I like that, despite mistakes, in design, and in dealing with players,
magic has made an ongoing effort to do the right thing for the long term:
abandoning decisions that don't work, making changes that are good
long-term but may be controversial, admitting mistakes. They could do
better, there have been some awful decisions, but at least with the design
of the game, there's an ongoing commitment to try to repair mistakes and
avoid clinging to them out of pride.

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MTG: Dragon's Maze Release event

2013-05-06T09:49:52Z

( Read more... )

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MTG: Reflecting Pool

2013-02-14T14:26:46Z

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More interesting bookmarks

2012-11-27T12:51:27Z

In my previous post, I described some of the bookmarks I keep around because I keep thinking they're awesome, even if I don't need them for anything http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/797921.html

Here are some more:

100 Movie spoilers in 5 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN5avIvylDw

If you're bored of all classic and not-so-classic movies having their endings spoiled in casual conversation and want to get it all out of the way at once, here is one of the most efficient movie-ending spoilers. It's really funny :)

This is another recent entry into the group that's not an internet classic yet, I just happened to really like it myself.

Also see http://xkcd.com/109/

Geek hierarchy

http://brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html

Here is a helpful schematic illustrating which groups of internet users consider themselves less geekier that which other groups of internet users, starting with "published science fiction authors" and working its way down through many different groups.

( Read more... )

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Magic: TG: Return to Ravnica

2012-10-16T23:19:17Z

I missed the release events for the Return to Ravnica set, but went along to one of the weekly drafts for the new set. I am not very good at drafting it yet, but it was pretty fun: there seem to be eleventy-million different things you can do, which all stand some chance of working, and two-colour spells just feel rich somehow.

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Inner Sanctum Collectibles: Magic Draft #2

2011-09-14T22:00:29Z

I'm glad I lost the first 5 straight games on my second visit, not my first, or I might get dispirited. In post mortem, I think my deck was average-ish: not terrible, but not great.

(i) A bit worse than my first-round opponent's (and she won with a consistently slightly better deck, and probably consistently slightly better play skill)

(ii) Probably slightly better than my second round opponenet (but I was unlucky, both games he played on the second turn a card which was really problematic to my deck, and I had to mulligan my opening hand twice in the second game, despite my deck having a fairly consistent set of cards)

(iii) And about the same as my third round opponents': his had slightly better cards on average but couldn't play them quite as consistently. I definitely made several small mistakes throughout all matches, but nothing catastrophic. The biggest thing is to develop a habit of mentally checking at the end of each turn if there's anything to do before the turn ends, and not to lose "may do X" triggers. I lost the first game (the fifth in a row), won the second, and won the third by the slimmest of margins: I was ahead, he caught up with an unkillable, unblockable creature that was going to kill me next turn, we were out of time and playing the last couple of turns allowed, I froze for five minutes thinking through all the options and finally figured out that he'd kill me next turn, but he only had one blocker, and Act of Treason took control of it for one turn, I put on the sword I had in play, and it was just enough to kill him.

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Magic draft at Inner Sanctum Collectibles: Four Elvish Archdruids

2011-09-06T13:14:11Z

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Magic:TG Tidbits

2011-08-28T11:51:51Z

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Playtesting at games evening

2011-02-16T14:39:30Z

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Gentleman Magicians Decks

2011-02-14T17:38:53Z

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Updating proliferate deck

2011-02-08T01:19:30Z

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2. At least one or two small artifact creatures (preferably myr) to increase the chance of getting a poison counter on the opponent, and then being able to seal the deal with proliferate.

3. Swapped out a few of the middle-cost utility charge-counter cards that rarely got used for ones that should be better.

4. Removed some of the top-heavy splashy cards, and swapped some for others. There were two many, and the original deck was asking the wrong question: "what would be good with proliferate" when it should be asking "if I can get up to ten mana without dying, what will win the game right now?"

It was a bit of a "do nothing until it can chain proliferate and card draw infinitely; eventually draw ichor rats and win" deck, which was ok, but not really what I wanted. I wanted one that would be more "keep the pressure on with good creatures over the first several turns, and then only if the game drags out, eventually draw a ridiculously powerful card and win", and hopefully it's a bit more like that.

I never used to pay any attention to whether decks were legal in any standard or extended format, but now I always want to check. Lamentably this does rely so entirely on the storage lands for the humorous denouement, it'll never be legal in any modern format, and not competitive against a turn-1 win in legacy...

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Mirrodin Beseiged Release Event

2011-02-07T00:32:50Z

( Read more... )

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More magic decks

2011-02-04T23:53:18Z

( More magic decks I have made recently )

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Proliferate magic deck

2010-11-21T18:30:33Z

( Proliferate magic deck )

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Test draft of my gentlemen magicians magic set

2010-11-12T13:18:53Z

If anyone who is not already on toothywiki is interested, I'm going to invite people to test-draft my invented magic set, signing up at http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?GentlemenMagicians/Draft.

(I don't really recommend that if you've not played magic before, but you'd be welcome to try if you like.)

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Magic decks I have made recently

2010-10-16T13:12:33Z

( Magic decks I have made recently )

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My magic set -- color balance

2010-07-19T19:47:24Z

( Read more... )

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The magic game where I won by attacking with a 4/11 wall of frost

2010-07-18T20:02:32Z

( The magic game where I won by attacking with a 4/11 wall of frost )

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The magic game where I did 10,000 damage

2010-07-16T11:00:33Z

( The magic game where I did 10,000 damage )

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My magic set -- fixed really big images

2010-07-10T20:08:50Z

OK, I'm not sure why they didn't copy correctly before, but I think I fixed the overly large images in http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/all_both.html.

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My magic set -- themes

2010-07-10T02:40:57Z

Three-quarter art and full-art cards

Normally the bottom half of the card has a text box with rules, but for cards with few rules, having bigger art makes sense. So far, wizards have saved this for special occasions, but since I have so much trouble finding simple card ideas (like, "no rule text") exciting, and tend to make horribly overcomplicated cards, I wanted a way to make vanilla creatures exciting.

I really, really love the full art cards. Watchwolf is an alternate version of an existing card, but I think the whole-frame picture makes it look so much more awesome.

( Read more... )

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My Magic set: Details

2010-07-10T01:37:35Z

What I did do:

1. I tried to keep the set on a consistent theme: almost everything fits naturally into the world (with the exception of some general utility spells), and humans and weird-beasts are represented on the less-common types of card, to try to give it a "here's what's normal, here's what's special" feel.

2. I tried to tie in to a number of mechanical themes, intending that there would be at least some hope of actually playing with the set in theory, and making sure that each "X matters" sort of card had enough X or "X matters" cards around to make it worthwhile.

( Read more... )

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The home-made Magic:TG set I designed from scratch

2010-07-10T01:23:36Z

I followed in Alextfish's inadvertent lead and spent the last two weeks designing an original Magic:TG set entirely without intending too. I started with a couple of cute ideas for individual cards I'd had ages ago (Tiny Bunny), and came up with a string of other ideas for other natural animals, especially for other sorts of rabbit, and spent a weekend talking ideas over with Liv.

And then kept on getting more ideas, and ideas for how to put them together, until I'd put them together into a cohesive set of 250 cards common, uncommon and rare, and with a variety of themes.

You can see a random three cards each time you refresh at http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/random.php (Edit: Updated version)

And you can see a list of all the cards here: http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/all_img.html (or img&text listing). (Edit: Updated version)

Culturally, the world is based around very traditional, English, non-ostentatious fantasy:

1. Normal woodland animals, represented as magic cards.

2. Small humanoid forest dwellers, called Boggles by themselves, and Ouphes by people who talk fancily. They're something like Pratchett's gnome series -- tenacious, brave and goofy, rather than stupid, greedy/angry and goofy. They have little wars between tribes, have legendary heroes, and so on. They often ride animals into battle.

3. Boggle shamans, who do druid-like stuff, channeling-spirits-of-animals to magical effect, but not throwing fireballs.

4. Gentlemen-magicians, in a very Jonathan-Strange-like mould, except living in an England that was never deforested or industrialised. To some extent, the set is more from the view of the boggles, so humans are strange and exotic -- there are five magicians in the set, and only a couple of other humans servants.

5. Really weird stuff, hidden away in the forest, based a lot on a Carol's Jabberwocky-like feel, which feels it's leaking in from some other plane.

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