wiresandstarlings

[wiresandstarlings]

all I find are souvenirs from better times

Some background: I was planning on making some scripted video content, but I found the process of actually recording so miserable that I gave up. I thought the transcript might still be an interesting read though, so I polished it some into this blog post. I was going to record my video over the original coverage, which you can find here if you want to follow along. You can find Sam and Josh's decks here.

So I'm going to try making a series of videos analyzing some matches from past coverage that I found instructive. My goal to showcase some interesting gameplay situations and to share what I learned from watching these matches.

This first video will be on Sam Black and Josh Utter-Leyton's semifinals match in PT Philadelphia in 2011. To me, this match really illustrates both how and how not to use your interaction against combo deck.  

To set the scene, this is the first ever Modern Pro Tour, so all kinds of shit is legal. Cloudpost, Blazing Shoal, Ponder and Preordain, Rite of Flame AND Seething Song. There are like 8 decks that can kill on turn 2.

Sam Black is playing one of them, a mono-blue Infect deck using Blazing Shoal plus Dragonstorm to do 10 Infect in one attack. The rest of the deck is just cantrips and tutors.

Josh Utter-Leyton is playing a creature aggro deck splashing blue for countermagic, including 3 maindeck Bant Charm. A bit of a strange choice given the cards legal in this format, but the idea was that it had enough interaction to beat the creature combo decks like Sam's while being more consistent and resilient against disruptive decks.

With that, let's get into game 1. Let's quickly go over the opening hands first.

Dragonstorm 2 Blighted Agent Peer Through Depths Preordain Island

This is Sam's hand. It's on the weaker side in that he needs both land and Blazing Shoal to participate and even then only has an unprotected kill, but I think it's still a clear keep. Peer is around 35% to find Shoal, 60% to find Shoal or Muddle, and can also find more Peers or cantrips. Preordain will probably find a land and then we have multiple threats.

2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant Lightning Bolt 2 Arid Mesa

And this is Josh's hand. It clearly sucks but you're not mulling it to 4, especially under the Paris mulligan. Coverage doesn't have the hands that Josh mulliganed, so overall not much to learn here.

Josh is on the play and goes land go.

Sam draws Progenitus for turn, which is a dead card, then casts Preordain. He sees Scalding Tarn and Muddle the Mixture. He's obviously keeping Scalding Tarn, but Muddle the Mixture is interesting. Muddle tutors for Blazing Shoal, which Sam needs, but Sam would need a third land in order to do that.

Given that Sam has Peer Through Depths already, which is like 53% to find either Shoal or Muddle, I like bottoming this Muddle to look for more cantrips or a third land.

Coverage cuts away so it's hard to see what Sam actually does, but Sam probably topped the Muddle given he drew one. I think this a small error but not a big deal.

Josh draws Bolt, passes again. Sam cracks Scalding Tarn casts Blighted Agent, which he has to do. Sam's deck doesn't have efficient protection spells like the current Modern Infect deck does, he has to just run his threats out there and hope they stick.

Now, Josh does not Bolt the Blighted Agent on Sam's end step. I'm going to pause the video here, because this is a more involved discussion.

On a high level, there are essentially 2 ways you can use your interaction in combo matchups. The first is to hold the interaction and make your opponent beat it. The second is to use the interaction to disrupt your opponent's set-up, trying to strand them with dead combo pieces. The first approach is what Josh is doing here, holding up the Lightning Bolts and making Sam cast a Blazing Shoal with enough protection to beat all of Josh's removal. The second approach would be Bolting the Blighted Agent end of turn and hoping to run Sam out of creatures. Neither of these approaches is abstractly correct, and the right path to take depends on the matchup and your exact hand.

Fundamentally, it makes sense for Josh to default to fighting Sam's Blazing Shoals rather than his Infect creatures in this matchup, since Sam has 8 Infect creatures but only 4 Blazing Shoals. And if Sam commits a Blazing Shoal into a removal spell and the kill attempt fails, Josh gets both the Infect creature and the Shoal.

But in this specific situation, there are a lot reasons why Josh should deviate and just Bolt the Blighted Agent. The first is that Josh knows he's constrained on mana, and Sam might not be. Further, once Sam has a Blighted Agent in play, his combo costs 0 mana, and his deck is full of Spell Pierces, Muddle the Mixtures, and Disrupting Shoals. On the turn Sam goes for the kill, there's a good chance that Sam will have more mana for interaction up than Josh will have for disruption.

The second reason is that using Lightning Bolt proactively here will also let Josh develop a threat if he draws one, like a Tarmogoyf, Green Sun's Zenith, or Qasali Pridemage, and Josh currently has no pressure.

The third reason is that Josh has 2 Lightning Bolts and Sam has not played an Inkmoth Nexus, which suggests he doesn't have one. Josh would still have a removal spell behind for a second Blighted Agent, and Sam is less likely than baseline to have half his threats in hand, so we can reasonably expect that we'll be able to answer every threat.

The fourth reason is that half of Sam's interaction is Spell Pierce, so additional mana can inherently represent another layer of interaction on the combo turn. 1 Bolt with 2 open mana will often be as hard for Sam to beat as 2 Bolts with 1 open mana.  

If Sam had played both Agent and Nexus on turn 2, I would be more sympathetic to Josh's line, since in that case we'd need to hold open Bolt for the rest of the game anyway to play around the combo. But even then, Bolting the Blighted Agent makes Sam's combo cost 2 mana rather than 1, making it harder for Sam to cantrip or Transmute and win on the same turn and squeezing out a counterspell.

Anyway, Josh doesn't Bolt. He draws Bant Charm and passes again.

Sam draws Preordain and sees Summoner's Pact and another Muddle. Pact is a clear bottom, and Muddle is a clear Bottom after we topped the first one. Situations like this one are why I think bottoming the first Muddle is better than keeping it. We would have wound up drawing a Muddle naturally anyway, and then this Preordain sees a card deeper.

Sam casts Gitaxian Probe and sees Josh's hand.

Now Sam has an interesting call because he's seen Josh's hand. He knows that if he plays the second Blighted Agent, then Josh can kill both and he'll likely be stuck transmuting Muddle for a third Agent. But Josh has so much interaction that Sam needs to put more threats into play, and countering a Bolt is more mana efficient than Transmuting but the end result is still just turning Muddle into a Blighted Agent. Plus, Josh has already shown disinterest in casting his spells, so we can maybe rely on him continuing to do that.

Sam plays the Blighted Agent here, which I like.

From Josh's perspective, Sam now knows he needs to beat 2 Bolts, is almost 0% to have Nexus after shocking to play the second Agent, and we drew a third piece of interaction. At this point, I think not using at least one Bolt is just heinous. I think not using both Bolts end of turn is fine since that might cut off our ability to cast Bant Charm down the line, due to fetching complications, but that's just even more reason to use one of the Bolts now.

Josh draws Plains, passes again. Sam draws another island, attacks and passes. Josh casts Bant Charm to kill a Blighted Agent end of turn, which is again an interesting spot from Sam's perspective. On one hand, the best this Muddle the Mixture is ever going to be is a Blighted Agent, so it kind of makes sense to get the mana expenditure out of the way in case we draw another Muddle. On the other hand, if we counter this Bant Charm and that convinces Josh to finally casts his Lightning Bolts, we're in trouble. Given how insistent Josh has been about not casting his spells, I actually like Sam's line because it potentially allows him to present more interaction on the turn he actually tries to win. Like if Sam lets Charm resolve, Josh lets Peer for Shoal resolve, and then Sam draws 2nd Muddle or Spell Pierce, then Sam forces Josh to have 3 pieces of interaction on the kill turn instead of 2, which is unlikely when Josh is stuck on 3 lands. Sam's play is relying on Josh to make a mistake for somewhat thin value, but Josh has kept making this same mistake so far.

Josh draws Helix, Sam finds Shoal off Peer. Then Sam draws Spell Pierce, so Josh dies with a Lightning Helix in hand.

It's not obvious that Josh wins this game if he casts his spells, since he still wouldn't have had any pressure and Sam was drawing live to more threats. But Josh certainly did not give himself the best chance to win. Like on the turn that Josh cast Bant Charm, if he'd just cast his Bolts earlier, he would have been drawing to any land or any creature finally get some pressure on the table.

Anyway, that game was pretty compact but I think instructive. Josh played really bad and Sam got to take a cool line that I think is a mistake in the abstract, but was correct based on how Josh was playing.

2 Noble Hierarch Tarmogoyf Bant Charm Plains Misty Rainforest Marsh Flats

This Josh's hand for game 2. It's marginal but a clear keep. It has threats, mana, and 1 piece of interaction.

Spellskite Gitaxian Probe Peer Through Depths Progenitus Blazing Shoal Island Inkmoth Nexus

And Sam's hand is the nuts. Just a turn 2 kill with Probe, card selection, and protection.

First turn cycle is straightforward, then Josh has an interesting choice on whether to pass with Bant Charm or to play Tarmogoyf and Noble Hierarch. My instinct is that Josh should just develop his threats, since it's not that likely that your opponent has a turn 2 kill and Bant Charm is so expensive that Sam can easily set up a kill through it if you give him enough time. But after thinking the situation over, I prefer Josh's play of passing. The fact that Sam played Inkmoth Nexus on turn 1 instead of a cantrip means that the Nexus being able to attack is important to him, and that to some extent implies Sam has the kill. Secondly, because Josh has the 2 Noble Hierarchs, he'll be able to hold up Bant Charm again next turn while developing the second Hierarch, and then he'll have enough mana to continue developing while holding up Bant Charm for the rest of the game. Third, Sam might have kept a hand exactly like the one he did, which is short on mana and interaction but has the kill, and can't continue profitably developing.

Now Sam plays Spellskite and Josh Bant Charms the Spellskite, which I think is a mistake. Sam has already presented 2 threats, you only have 1 piece of interaction, and you have infinite mana. It's the exact reverse of game 1, where Josh had a lot of interaction but not much mana. This is when you want to make your opponent beat your interaction, which means saving Bant Charm to Dispel Blazing Shoal.

If this was Josh's plan against Spellskite, I think he should have just played Tarmogoyf on turn 2 and accepted dying to the combo. Since now, barring your draw step, you're playing Tarmogoyf a turn later and still dying to the combo.

But anyway, Josh draws Green Sun's Zenith for Gaddock Teeg, which is the best possible. He puts Teeg and Hierarch into play, pretty straightforward.

Sam draws Peer and passes. There's some argument for casting Peer main so it doesn't get countered, but revealing what Peer finds is probably more important. Josh doesn't have many counters for Peer and doesn't want to counter it anyway.

Sam Peers and takes Snapback over Preordain, which makes sense. Sam has to get the Teeg off the battlefield to win and Snapback is one of Sam's few answers.

Josh draws Aven Mindcensor and plays it on his own end step after Sam reveals the Snapback. This play is interesting. There are two main upsides to this line. The first is that if Sam has Pact of Negation plus Shoal, then he no longer has the win on his turn with Snapback, Pact, Shoal. The second is that if Sam draws a fetchland, Josh doesn't have to play timing games with the Mindcensor. The downside is that if Josh waits, there's some chance that Sam goes for the kill against Josh's 1 unknown card, and getting Sam to commit the mana plus trade the Nexus is a good exchange. The situation basically boils down to what Josh thinks Sam will do. If Josh thinks Sam never attacks with the Nexus, it's strictly best to get the Mindcensor down right away. If Josh thinks Sam always jams into the 1 unknown card, even without Pact, then it's strictly better to wait.

From Sam's perspective, jamming is a "losing play", in the sense that he'll lose to a removal spell or a counterspell (in which case you've used your Snapback and no longer have a plan to beat the Teeg) and Josh probably has some interaction, but I think it's still the correct line. It's so tough for things to get better for Sam here, since he's two lands away from killing with Muddle backup and his Spell Pierces are already dead, if they're even still in his deck. If Josh just passes, it's right for Sam to jam and I think he frequently will jam. Josh could conceivably have a land, a dead Green Sun's Zenith, or a Noble Hierarch or whatever as a bluff.

This spot just comes down to Sam's tendencies as a player though. It's close enough that I don't feel strongly about either line, but I personally would have waited and expected that Sam would have gone for it.

Josh draws, Sam Peers again and takes Slaughter Pact, which is the best possible. And then he goes for it against Josh's random card and wins. All of Sam's plays here are straightforward and clearly correct, I think.

Wild Nacatl Gaddock Teeg Path to Exile Misty Rainforest Arid Mesa Horizon Canopy Tectonic Edge

Josh's hand is good, clear keep. It's heavy on lands but Teeg is his best card and he has a clock and interaction to pair with it.  

Pact of Negation Blazing Shoal Dragonstorm Blighted Agent Gitaxian Probe Inkmoth Nexus

Sam's 6-card hand is also a clear keep, it's turn 2 kill through a removal spell with an untapped land in 3 draws.

As is, Sam's hand is going to have a really tough time beating Gaddock Teeg, since he'll need to draw land and then either exactly Slaughter Pact or Snapback. So this game probably won't going to be too interesting.

You'll also notice that Sam lost game 3 off camera and chose to draw this game, which is a legal game action.

Sam draws another Dragonstorm, which is the worst possible. Josh draws Flashfreeze, which is the best possible.

This is where I start skipping and speeding up, since Sam's so unlikely to win.

Sam actually has outs here, drawing Spell Pierce and then land. If he Peers into free removal and then topdecks untapped land, he can removal, Shoal, Pierce and win. So Sam's on 20% into 33%, around 7% overall. That's impressive given how badly the opening hands lined up for him; Sam's deck was really broken. He bricks and dies though.

Noble Hierarch Wild Nacatl Qasali Pridemage Stomping Grounds 2 Marsh Flats Sacred Foundry

Josh's hand sucks but I agree with the keep. This tournament used the Paris mulligan, so mulliganing sucks, and Josh's hand has a fast clock on the play plus Pridemate to interact with half of Sam's threats.

Blighted Agent 2 Disrupting Shoal Ponder Inkmoth Nexus 2 Island

Sam's hand also sucks but it has a counterspell for a 2-drop, 2 threats, enough lands to Transmute, and a Ponder to tie things together.

Not sure either of these hands would be a keep under the London mulligan but I think they're fine here.

Sam chooses to draw again.

Sam draws Pact, casts Ponder, sees 2 Peers and a Nexus. Seems like a good top, planning to Peer past Nexus.

Sam uses Disrupting Shoal on Pridemage, pitching Blighted Agent, which definitely seems right. Pitching Agent instead of the second Disrupting Shoal is an unintuitive but good play. Sam knows he's going to cast Peer on both of his next turns, so he won't be able to deploy the Agent in a window where it'll be useful. And the second Shoal might be able to counter a removal spell down the line.

Josh plays his cards and attacks, and he's down to all lands. Sam has an interesting decision between Probe and third Peer with Peer here. My instinct was to take Probe since we have second Peer already, but it's close. We're two cards away from our combo still and will probably need 2 more turns, and we might end up taking a better cantrip than Probe off of the second Peer. Peer is better than all the other cantrips here since Nexus doesn't tap to cast any other spells. On the other hand, we might not have the luxury of tapping Nexus for mana for two more turns.

Worth noting that situations like this one are why you generally choose to play in constructed.

Sam draws another Spellskite, which is useless. He passes instead of main phasing Peer, which is a big mistake. By passing, Sam denies himself the option of casting a Ponder or Preordain if he took one off Peer. Josh is unlikely to use a counterspell on Peer, and giving Josh an opportunity to cast his counterspell this turn isn't a big cost given Josh has so much mana already.

Josh draws 2nd Nacatl, which locks up a 2 turn clock but is otherwise a brick.

Sam sees lands and Preordain off his Peer and gets punished for waiting. He draws Blighted Agent, which is useless.

Cantrip sequencing is worth noting here. Sam should lead Preordain since it sees fewer cards, so he'll have a better idea of what he needs to find off Peer. Sam does, finds Dragonstorm and keeps it since it's one of the two cards he needs, pretty straightforward.

Josh draws a lethal Helix and Sam gets paid for holding Shoal all those turns ago.

Sam bricks his 35%er to find Shoal off Peer, takes Ponder instead. He's on another 30%er to find Shoal with Ponder but bricks again to lose.

If Sam had cast Peer on his main phase earlier, having additional blue mana would have given him more redraws to Shoal. That mistake probably cost him a 5% chance of winning on the last turn.

So, closing notes. I do want to stress that when I'm pointing out mistakes I believe Sam or Josh made, I'm not suggesting that that they're bad players. If you watch my matches on coverage, or literally anyone's, you'll find mistakes every turn cycle. Everyone is bad at Magic.

Note that this means if you're not seeing the mistakes in your own games, you're not looking hard enough.

Watching coverage is so great for improving because you get to see the mistakes great players made, mistakes you may not even be thinking about the game deeply enough to make yourself. But to improve by watching coverage, this is the kind of watching you need to do – actively picking apart what's happening on camera, figuring out why the players on both sides of the match are making the decisions they are, looking for patterns. It's not about copying what the players on camera are doing, it's about improving on it.

Anyway, thanks for watching reading.

[wiresandstarlings]

where would you go to lose all your angles? how would you make it complete?

Last weekend, Oliver Tomajko polled his Twitter followers on whether they lean more on intuition or logic when playing Magic. Oliver's question got me thinking, because both processes are so important. I ultimately voted for intuition. This surprised my friends, since in conversation I reject arguments without sound logical justification out of hand. However, while I distrust my intuition, playing Magic without it would be impossible. 

For example, when I’m deciding whether to play around a combat trick, I can quantify how likely my opponent is to have the trick, how much damage I’m taking to play around it, and so on. But what is 2 life really worth? And what’s my plan for dealing with the trick down the line? No collection of numbers tells the whole story.

I see math as a guide for my intuition. While I can’t work out complicated probabilities inside of games, checking my intuition in retrospect keeps it in line. The more decision trees I solve and hypergeometric probabilities I calculate ahead of sitting down to play, the less likely I am to make mistakes. But no matter how much math I’ve done, my intuition is ultimately at the helm when I make a practical decision. 

To illustrate this paradigm, I want to walk through 2 interesting spots from my games at Dreamhack Anaheim. The first is from my match against Jim Davis at 4-0 on day 1. To introduce the game state, I played Narset on turn 4 with Mystical Dispute up and Narset instantly resolved, meaning that Jim had no instants. He played his own Narset into my Dispute, I played Teferi to force Elspeth Conquers Death, he played Elspeth Conquers Death on Teferi, I played Dream Trawler, he played a second Elspeth Conquers Death on my Narset. (I should have -3'd my Teferi and cannot explain why I didn't, but that’s outside this discussion.) Now it's my turn and I've drawn my 2nd Dream Trawler and an Omen of the Sea off the 1st Trawler attacking. I need to decide whether to cast my 2nd Trawler or to pass with countermagic. 

I know that on turn 6, Jim did not have Shatter the Sky, since he would have killed my Dream Trawler with it. With a draw step and his Narset coming back from Elspeth Conquers Death, he has a 20.4% chance of finding a Shatter with 2 Shatters in his deck. With 1 Shatter, he has a 10.6% chance of hitting. If I play the Trawler and Jim doesn't immediately find and play a Shatter, I'm almost 100% to win. I'll attack him down to 7 with my 2 Trawlers and then he'll have to find and resolve a Shatter through 2 counterspells, since his ECD taxes will have expired. If I play Trawler and he hits a Shatter, then I almost certainly lose. All in all, by playing the Trawler, I lock in an 80+% chance to win. So I need to figure out whether I'm more or less than 80% to win the longer game when I hold the second Trawler.  

To start, I can ask how the game will play out if I stay on 1 Trawler. Jim will get Narset back on his turn and minus it. And then maybe he’ll play another Narset, or a Teferi, or his own Dream Trawler? I know he has at least one threat in hand since he had no instants on turn 4 with 6 cards in hand and has played 2 lands, 3 threats, and missed a land drop since then. And if he plays a threat, I have to let it resolve because he still has the last chapter on his second ECD coming and currently has no targets for it. So if Jim has a Teferi, and that’s his most likely threat, then my countermagic is no good anyway. 

Even if his last threat is a third ECD and he doesn’t find Teferi off of Narset, what do I do? I’ll attack him to 11, then kill his Narset, and then kill him over the next two turns? In the meantime, he’ll get another minus off his Narset, which maybe finds a Teferi, which would force my Absorb with a 6th land, and then maybe Jim wins the fight over Shatter anyway. 

Further, will I even be able to even resolve the 2nd Dream Trawler after Jim Shatters? My hand isn't very good and Jim will have all spells and an active Narset, so probably not. 

Even after all that reasoning, I couldn’t tell you with certainty whether I'm more or less than 80% to win when I hold the Trawler. But when I think about how the game will play out after holding, I feel this total lack of control. So many things can go wrong, it’s hard for the 2nd Trawler to even matter when Shatter resolves, my hand is so bad against Jim’s likely holdings and it’s not going to improve. Knowing how high the number I’m locking in by jamming is, I have this strong sense that holding cannot possibly be right. 

The second spot is from my match against Aaron Gertler, the eventual winner, in the top 4 of the winner's bracket. This is an example of my intuition going astray. 

I navigated the game to a position where I have a Teferi on 5 loyalty and a Dream Trawler and Dovin's Veto in hand to Aaron's 2 random draws, 1 from Shatter the Sky. He casts Incubation, and I have to decide whether or not to Veto it. 

If Aaron misses on Incubation, his unknown card is a brick, and he has nothing on top, then I'll win no matter what I do. Similarly, if Aaron ever has 2 pieces of action, via Incubation or the top of his deck, then I lose no matter what I do. So the key scenarios are when Aaron hits off Incubation and his 2 random draws are bad and when Aaron misses on Incubation but has action in hand or on top (but not both). 

With 40 cards in deck, Aaron's unknown card and top card each have a 17.5% chance of being Escape to the Wilds or Fae of Wishes. (I don't know the exact size of Aaron's deck at this point and I'm not going to count.) So if I Veto the Incubation, I win 67.7% of the time, when Aaron has nothing and draws nothing. On the other hand, Incubation has a 42.7% chance of hitting Fae of Wishes if all 4 Fae are still in his deck. Because I have Teferi in play, Fae of Wishes is the only creature in Aaron's deck that I care about. But when Aaron hits Fae, I basically just lose because of his Clover. 

The upshot of holding the Veto is that if Aaron bricks on Incubation and his last card is exactly Escape (since I lose to Fae in hand no matter what I do) or if Aaron's top card is Fae or Escape (since Granted is too slow with the Trawler already in play), then I win. However, since I always lose when Incubation hits Fae, I have at most a 57.3% chance of winning when I let Incubation resolve, and I lose some of the time even when he bricks. 

This is a spot where my intuition misguided me and doing the math reveals the severity of my error. At the time, my instinct was that Aaron had around a 30% chance of hitting a Fae, from doing similar calculations in the past. If that's true, then the decision is close. But not only is Aaron much more likely to find Fae than I thought, I also just wasn't thinking about how few true haymakers Aaron had in deck. If Aaron had 6 Escape-type cards (noncreature must-counters), then I'd only have a 55.8% chance of winning by countering Incubation, and it's again a close decision. But as is, I incorrectly estimated both probabilities and made a clear mistake. 

I obviously won't be able to repeat all this reasoning inside an actual game of Magic. But by doing the math now, I’ll hopefully be able to intuit the correct play the next time I’m in a similar position. 

(As a bonus mistake from that game, I should have used Teferi to bounce my Banishing Light before casting Shatter the Sky on the previous turn. That line I just missed.)

Thanks for reading, as always. I'm planning to write more soon, maybe about topics outside of Magic again, but I'm always planning that. 

[wiresandstarlings]

it would be a hundred times easier if we were young again

Game 3 on the draw against Eldrazi Tron, keep Looting, Looting, Opt, Manamorphose, Sinkhole, Steam Vents, Delta. Sideboarding was -4 Bolt, -1 Dart, -2 Aria, -2 Surgical, +2 Rejection, +2 Force, +1 Sinkhole, +1 Abrade, +1 Spree, +1 Blood Moon, +1 Seasoned Pyromancer. 

Opponent (Sean Gifford in round 13, at X-2) plays Temple + Map. You draw Force and play Steam Vents tapped. (Debatable over casting Opt but I think fine after drawing Force.) Opponent plays Temple + TKS, takes Force. You draw Manamorphose and fetch for Island, cast Manamorphose, make UR and draw Thing in the Ice. 

Decision point 1: Cast Thing or continue casting spells? 

The problem with casting Thing is that he's very likely to have Chalice next turn given he took Force, which would make casting cantrips impossible. The problem with casting spells is that the strongest sequence of spells to cast is second Manamorphose for RR, Looting, Sinkhole, and Chalice only stops one of those anyway. Flipping Thing without the Manamorphose would also then require an untapped fourth land and favorable draw steps against a Chalice. He could also play a second TKS and take my only threat. An upside of casting spells is that if there's a Phoenix in the top 3 cards (a 22.55% chance), then I get a Phoenix in. Overall, I like playing Thing, and I did. 

Opponent plays his Chalice and an Urza land, passes with a mana up. You draw Scalding Tarn, fetch for Mountain, cast Manamorphose with Vents up for RR, draw third Looting. Cast Looting into Chalice to fuel Delve and Thing, Sinkhole TKS, and draw Spree off the trigger. All this resolves. Now Thing has one counter and your hand is Opt, Looting, Looting, Spree. Opponent has 3 cards in hand. 

Decision point 2: Cast Looting and flip Thing to get in for 7, or pass with Opt up to play around Dismember. 

Given my opponent knows about my Opt, I didn't really even consider this a decision at the time. If my opponent had Dismember, he "should" have played it in response to Manamorphose so I 100% couldn't flip it in response with instants, or at least in response to one of the other 2 triggers that turn. He actively presented me the option of just passing the turn with the instant he knew about and blanking Dismember forever, and the Thing flip invalidates many of his proactive plays. There's a lot of going in against a Sicilian with death on the line-type stuff here, but the upside of waiting on Dismember for him is a probably dead cantrip and the downside of waiting is catastrophically bad. (I know the cantrip isn't dead, but he doesn't.) His draw was also so strong that there was no reason to suspect he had Dismember to begin with, past 2 outs in 3 random draws. But mostly because of the massive payout imbalance, I thought he couldn't possibly have Dismember, except he did. I cast Looting and lost a card, my Thing, and probably the game to it.

I still think casting Looting was the right line, but that's also the kind of spot I consistently get wrong because I just don't account for my opponents playing on autopilot or not fully thinking things through. Like it was very natural for my opponent to try to get me to cast the maximum number of spells into his Chalice.

From my perspective, the downside of waiting is mostly that I miss 7 damage, because of the Thing reset. But 7 damage is a ton of damage, and my opponent has Karn 4s and All is Dusts and Endbringers that give him inevitability. Plus, those cards are his most likely holdings. 

I don't know. It's always tough when you have a line that could have won and you didn't take it. 

Games like this are why people who hate modern baffle me. Like sure, I didn't have all that many decisions this game, but the ones I had were far harder and more interesting than the decisions I typically face in standard or limited. Modern has some warts, for sure, but so does every format. Even the games I played against Hogaak at this tournament (PT Barcelona) were incredibly close and interesting. I'm not sure whether or not I made a mistake here, and I certainly made a bunch of other mistakes through the course of the tournament. 

On the other hand, I did have a worse constructed record than Ben Hull, who played my exact 75 on literally no practice. 

Even though I'm on my way out, I sure hope the Pro Tour is still here in a year’s time. 

Thanks for reading. Hopefully it isn't another six months until the next one of these. 

[wiresandstarlings]

boats ease into the harbor, bearing real suspicious cargo

1. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 131,200 people employed as writers and authors in the United States in 2016. If you assume writers work an average of 8 hours a day, that writing is 10% efficient, and that 5% of writers are worth reading, the United States produces 131,200 * 8 * 0.1 * 0.05 / 24 / 365 * 12 ~ 7.2 months of quality reading material each day. Even if you assume that only 0.1% of writers are worth reading, then that's still 4.4 days of reading per day of writing in just the United States. It's physically impossible to keep up with all the good writing being produced, even without sleeping, and setting aside catching up on the centuries of backlog.

When you look at even more popular and efficient media like streaming and YouTube content, the numbers are even scarier. The world is producing more information than even the world can reasonably consume.

Writing in the face of that knowledge feels wasteful, like driving an SUV or golfing. At the same time, writing has a fundamental urgency to it.

When I write, I'm forced to vocalize and confront my beliefs. I've written essays where, having finished, I don't agree with anything that I’ve said. It's like I've built up this latent energy by reading and thinking and watching, and I need to write to convert that energy, a muddy fuel of insights and exaltations and fears, into action and belief.

Reading good writing, I feel this total connection to humanity, on a primal and ineffable level. And trying to write well, I feel that connection again.

So, I guess, to whoever's reading this, I’m grateful you've chosen to share your time with me, and I hope you get whatever you need and whatever you're missing out of it.

2. On a practical note, I've been spending a lot of time reading about personal finance lately and want to summarize what I’ve learned. I've been fortunate enough not to have to worry about my finances for most of my life, but I realized a couple months ago that having my entire net worth parked in a Citi savings account was blatantly irresponsible. Panicking, I overcompensated.

Fortunately, the most prevalent and reliable personal finance advice is all straightforward. Still, given that I wasn't familiar with it, and apparently my parents weren't either, I figure there's value here. If you already have your life in order, feel free to skip this section.

Re: banks, don't use banks with physical locations. Physical locations are expensive, and you pay for them with the interest on your savings and the premiums on your loans. Online banks like Ally and Alliant Credit Union offer much better rates and services and also have better digital infrastructure.

There are a lot of online banks with various costs and benefits, but Ally and Alliant seem to be the most popular and reliable. I have some money in both right now, but I've mostly been using Ally because it has better integration with other online platforms.

Re: brokerages, that logic still applies. Use Vanguard, not Fidelity.

Re: investing, put all your money in a U.S. market index fund, ideally VTSAX, and forget about it until retirement. Services like Betterment or Wealthfront, which algorithmically invest your savings, are a reasonable alternative. However, they charge $25 per $10,000 they manage for you, and it's unclear whether they outperform plain index funds by enough to justify their price. They do provide some tax optimization services which likely cover their cost for accounts with $100,000 or more.

I'm currently using Betterment because my friend sent me a referral link with the first 3 months free, so I figured I might as well try it and reevaluate after the trial. I'm happy so far. I like that it's less involved than using a brokerage, and my account has almost enough to appropriately benefit from tax-loss harvesting.

This is my referral link, if that sounds interesting to you.

Re: credit cards, they're not worth learning about unless you inherently enjoy solving complicated systems. Personally, my ultimate plan is to get a 2% cash back card, the Amazon Prime card (for 5% back on Amazon purchases), the Uber Visa (for 4% back on restaurants and 3% back on travel), and the Amex Blue Cash (for 3% back on groceries). Cash back isn't as rewarding as travel points or signing bonuses, in terms returns per dollar spent, but those games are much more complicated for just an additional 2-4% back.

If you're having trouble getting approved for credit lines, it will likely be worthwhile to learn everything: about credit scores, secured cards, how to efficiently build a credit profile, etc. A lot of why I'm not interested in travel points and signing bonuses is that the additional 2-4% back I'd get from them could only be spent on things I don't care much about, like fancy flights and hotels. But the difference between getting a 2+% discount on everything and not is enormous.

3. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time watching YouTube lately. YouTube has been seductive substitute for games because it isn't obviously useless. When I watch videos on fashion, personal finance, self-improvement, and so on, I feel like I'm making progress even if the information in the videos is useless. There's something inherently satisfying and exhilarating about watching videos at 2x speed.

As a result, I've incidentally learned about the economics of YouTube, which are fascinating. Like, the idea of even a single media company focused entirely on YouTube content is wild to me. Yet there they are, the young thousands. There's just a tremendous amount of money in YouTube, such that it’s almost difficult to comprehend the scale.

Like, a video with 12 million views @ 1/3 a cent per view represents $40k, a respectable annual income. 12 million views is a lot, but it's a small fraction of the attention that YouTube commands. Like, there are random tours of capsule hotels in Japan with that many views. The music video for Gangnam Style must have made almost 100 million dollars.

In a real twist of late capitalism, content creators get paid more or less based on their primary demographics. Like younger women are less likely to use an ad blocker than 20-something men, so a greater fraction of their views get monetized. Views from wealthier countries like the U.S. and Canada are worth more than views from poorer ones.

There's so much at stake in getting us to click around these websites. And it's not just recommender systems. Whole content companies are fighting for even a couple minutes of our attention.

4. In Lineup, by a Seattle company called Cut Media, hosts are tasked to sort a lineup of strangers into different categories. In one video, for example, the hosts need to guess the lineup's sexual orientations. In another, they need to match people to their outfits. The general idea, of course, is to demonstrate how limited stereotypes are. The hosts typically don't take their task seriously, and their inability to perform it is humorous, heartwarming, enlightening, etc.

Ironically, from a purely statistical standpoint, the series makes a much stronger case for stereotypes than against them. For example, in the video about guessing occupations, a host choosing at random would get an average of 1 person right and would get 3 or more matches only 8% of the time. Yet every one of the 4 hosts got at least 1 match, they managed an average of 2.25 matches altogether, and 2 of the hosts got 3 or more. Those numbers look like failures on the surface, but stereotypes actually led the hosts to perform significantly better than chance.

Better than chance is, of course, not the strictest criterion.

5. Two series I’ve found helpful are Glamour's How One Woman Spends Her $N Salary and CNBC's Living On $N A Year in Location. I've been struggling lately to figure out how I should spend my income and the insight into how other people relate to money was valuable.

I feel like I'm making enough money now that I should buy whatever happiness is available to me, but I have no idea what to buy. The things I really want – like reading more, being healthier, having better self-discipline – aren't readily for sale. I used to think it was ridiculous that people spent thousands of dollars on life coaches, gym memberships, logos, and so on, but I'm starting to understand why. At this point, I'd happily spend hundreds of dollars on a guarantee that my life would even marginally improve.

At the same time, I guess opportunities to trade money for happiness will inevitably present themselves over time, and maybe there’s no need to seek them out.

6. I feel that, as a society, we're far too private about our finances. If we talked openly our income, for example, the prevalence and severity of the gender pay gap would have become obvious decades earlier. Everyone with credit card debt would have someone in the life to tell them how stupid credit card debt and how important living within our means is. Maybe economists and sociologists could even determine what purchases actually make us happier, and what we only think makes us happy.

I think we've adapted to obscure our finances because we have this like limbic compulsion to organize ourselves into hierarchies and fight based on where we land, and income is a very natural hierarchy. But if we just resist that compulsion, we'd collectively benefit from greater knowledge.

Like, in decision theory, more information is inherently good. We can only interpret it badly.

7. At the same time, I guess I have little interest in writing about my own finances. Not out of any desire to hide them, I just don't find the topic particularly compelling. But if you'd like to know, contact me through whatever channel and I'd be happy to share my accounting sheet and answer whatever questions you have.

Not that I have any great wisdom to share, clearly.

8. There's a “5 Minute Rule” in self-help theory that instructs people to complete tasks will take less than 5 minutes as soon as they think of them and are able to. I'm a fan of the 5 Minute Rule and have made a similar rule for myself where if I need something and it costs less than $20, I'll buy it without hesitation or deliberation.

Like, I was opening a box with scissors a couple weeks ago and I couldn’t cleanly cut the threads in the packing tape. My hands hurt trying to push the scissors through. So I bought an utility knife for $3 and opening boxes has been far more pleasant since it arrived. I noticed my wrist was hurting at work, so I bought a better mousepad for $8. And so on.

Overall, one thing I have learned is to buy the things I need and the things I know will make me happier. Maybe that should have been obvious.

9. Yield and overcome; Bend and be straight; Empty and be full; Wear out and be new; Have little and gain; Have much and be confused. Be truly whole, and all things will come to you.

[wiresandstarlings]

you’re not boring anymore

I'm not sure how strongly I believe any of these ideas. At the same time, I feel like I have to get all this out of my head to move forward, in writing and in life. Please excuse the form.

Proposition 1. Life is a constrained optimization problem.

Definition 1. Resources are finite means. The most useful and most common resources are time, attention, and money. Resources can be defined in terms of a type and a quantity.

Definition 2. Characteristics are distinguishing traits, qualities, or properties. Similarly to resources, characteristics can be defined in terms of a dimension and a scalar weight. For example, beauty is a positive weight along the dimension of “attractiveness”. Ugliness is a negative weight along that same dimension.

Note. When I talk about subjective characteristics like “attractiveness”, I mean them in a “conventional” sense. That is, if everyone in the world scored two people on attractiveness, whoever had the higher average score would be “more attractive”. Becoming more attractive means increasing this average score.

Definition 3. Assuming there are a finite number of resource types and characteristic dimensions, we can think of individuals in time as a vector of characteristic weights and resources. Let's denote the space of individual states as S.

Lemma 1. Across a population of individuals, characteristics and resources are normally distributed.

Proof. The central limit theorem suggests that measures that are the net of many factors are normally distributed. Most human characteristics and circumstances, including height, intelligence, attractiveness, and wealth, are the sum of a myriad of genetic and environmental factors. It follows that human characteristics are normally distributed. This is consistent with empirical evidence for a number of natural phenomena.

Some characteristic measures, such as IQ, were balanced specifically so that a representative human population would be normally distributed with respect to them.

Note. This includes time and attention. Different people require different amounts of sleep, and are capable of differing levels of focus.

Observation. We can think of some diseases – dwarfism, autism, retardation – as individuals falling at the extremes of various characteristic distributions.

Note. Some characteristics, like height and weight and attractiveness, are correlated. We assume here the correlations all wash out on a characteristic level.  

Corollary. Along every dimension, most people are average (~68%), some are good or bad (~13.5%), and very few are great or terrible (~2.5%).

Definition 4. An action is a function from the space of individual states S to S x U, where U is a subset of the real line. U represents utility, which we can think of as happiness or pleasure. Actions typically expend some amount of resources and/or happiness to generate other resources, alter characteristics, and/or alter utility. We can even think of inaction as an action which consumes time, doesn't alter our characteristics (or slightly degrades them), and either creates or consumes utility. Denote A_i the space of action functions for an individual i. Note that only a subset of A_i will be viable from any particular state, and the exact outputs of any particular action will depend on the characteristics and resources in the state.

Observation. Some characteristics, such as race, are immutable. Most are not.

Proposition 2. The goal of every individual is to take actions to maximize their average utility through the course of their life.

Note. “Utility” is not entirely self-interested. It's most typically the byproduct of self-development or self-gratification, but people can (and often do) gain utility by following a moral code, helping others, or righting wrongs. Our characteristics determine how we gain utility and how much. The calculus isn't necessarily (and often isn't) rational.

(For example, I get a lot of pleasure out of maintaining this blog even though it mostly serves to embarrass me.)  

Lemma 2. Our constraints are functions of our characteristics.

Proof. Based on our preferences and abilities, we improve along particular dimensions more or less quickly and gain or lose utility doing so. For example, athletes will learn sports more quickly than they learn math. Some people think abstractly; some visually; some physically. People who are out of shape will have a harder time improving their physical condition than people who are healthier, and will likely have a less pleasant experience. (At least initially.)

Where we start also affects who and what we have access to. For example, people who show promise in a sport at an early age will have greater support from their parents, access to better coaching, and invitations to more competitive games than those who don't. People who are poor are often forced to accept underfunded and understaffed schools.

Based on our characteristics, we need to expend greater or lesser quantities of time, attention, and money to make the same kind and amount of progress. People have greater or lesser difficulty reaching the same benchmarks.  

However, our constraints change alongside our characteristics. Once we've learned the fundamentals of math, learning more gets easier. Once we're in shape, staying in shape is rewarding. Much of why life is difficult is that our constraints are constantly changing and that we can change our constraints.

Note. Some of why life is difficult are the constraints we can't change.

Observation. Age is one of the most significant factors here. As we get older, we get slower, weaker, and changing becomes harder. (Eg. fluid versus crystallized intelligence.) Our daily allotments of time and attention grow smaller.

Corollary. Life is unfair.

Proof. Individuals are assigned differing allotments of characteristics at birth. Thus they face different constraints.

Observation. As a society, how do we fairly distribute public resources given that people face different constraints?

Lemma 3. All actions carry diminishing returns.

Proof. There are natural limits to every characteristic, every resource, and to human improvement. Improvement is monotonically increasing by definition, so we must approach these limits asymptotically with respect to our expenditures of time, attention, and money.

Theorem 1. Anyone can be above-average at something.

Proof. By definition, we all have finite resources and in particular have roughly equal allotments of time and attention, the most valuable resources. So if we're naturally above-average in at least one dimension, we can likely remain above-average in that characteristic by devoting all of our resources to it. But even if we're below-average in every way, we can still become above-average in at least one dimension by allocating all of our resources in a dimension that nobody else allocates resources to. There are more dimensions than people, since there are several dimensions with regard to each specific person, so at least one such dimension must exist.

Note. In practice, people allocate their resources carelessly, so even valuable dimensions like attractiveness are easily accessible. Even though appearance is mostly genetic, the vast majority of people don't exercise enough, eat well, or take care of themselves. So even someone who's unattractive to start can become more attractive than average by just putting the work in.

Note. The real question behind taking any action or aiming at any goal is whether the time, attention, and money you'll need to expend are worth what you get. If you're unattractive to start, maybe you can become attractive by devoting all your resources to that goal. But is being attractive worth that commitment?

At the end of the day, utility is the only true objective.

Note. Standing out is essentially a resource allocation game.

Theorem 2. Unless you're at the top of at least one characteristic distribution to start, there is no guarantee that you will ever be the best at anything.

Proof. The people at the top of each characteristic distribution have the option of allocating all their time and resources to that characteristic. Because there are limits to human improvement, you will never surpass them if they do.

Theorem 3. To have a lasting impact on the world, you need to have been born at the top of several characteristic distributions.

Proof. To advance a field, you need to be at or neat the top of that field. To be at or near the top of a field, according to Theorem 2, you need to have been at or near the top of the characteristic distributions prerequisite for that field to start.

Corollary. To maximize your chances of having an impact on the world, you should devote your full resources to improving your natural gifts.

Note. Living a good and fulfilling life doesn't mean having a lasting impact on the world. The two are barely related.

Theorem 4. Nobody can have it all.

Proof. By lemma 1, the probability that anyone is at the top of every characteristic distribution is infinitesimally small. So everyone is almost certainly lacking in several areas. Time, attention, and money are finite, so nobody can't remedy every flaw they have.

Theorem 5. People have both more and less control over their lives than they think.

Proof. Theorems 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Note. Thinking about the world this way added a lot of clarity to my life. Five months ago, I was applying to jobs in tech but I wasn't entirely convinced I wanted one. I'd always preferred writing to math and programming, and trying streaming had been at the back of my mind for a while. On top of all that, I felt like I wasn't social enough, wasn't reading enough, needed to exercise more, needed to get my finances in order, etc.

But when I stepped back and asked myself what I really wanted out of life, it was clear that working in tech was by far my best play. The two things I want most at this stage in my life are to have an impact on the world and to have the financial freedom to pursue interesting ideas and opportunities. And although it's unlikely I have a real impact on the world no matter what I do, the massive force-multiplying power of computers makes improving the human condition on a global scale more accessible through tech than through any other field. Tech also pays more and more consistently than writing and streaming.

And like, I enjoy writing, but I'm decidedly unexceptional at it relative to math and programming. These days, writing professionally also requires personal branding, networking, and marketing, all of which I hate and am horrible at. Streaming has all those same demands, but also requires social skills.

I also felt more comfortable just working in tech for a while and reevaluating later. I wasn't trying to find my purpose anymore, I was just satisfying my objective function to the best of my ability given my immediate circumstances. Those circumstances will change and my solution will change with them – that's life.

Note. This perspective gave me a lot of comfort in my personal life. I realized that the reason why I don't have many friends is because I don't spent much effort trying to make friends, not because I have some deep-seated flaw. My relative isolation was a choice, even if I was unaware I had chosen it.

I also felt a much greater sense of purpose. Recognizing that my happiness was entirely a matter of how I allocated my time, money, and attention and that my reality was a function of my priorities forced me to reevaluate how I was distributing my resources. I stopped doing things that didn't make me happy and made more time for things that did. I started exercising more. I stopped worrying about money so much.

Note. Happy New Year, and best of luck. So it goes. 

[wiresandstarlings]

I look for a picture of you to keep in my pocket, but I can’t find one where you look how I remember

A common problem in Bayesian inference is to determine how likely an outcome is. For example, when we flip a coin, how often will the coin land on heads? If we don't know anything about the coin, we'd start with the uniform distribution Beta(1,1). This means we think it's equally likely to land on heads or tails, but aren't confident. Then we'd flip the coin and if it lands on heads, we'd update our prior distribution to Beta(2,1). If it lands on tails, we'd update to Beta(1,2). A Beta(m,n) distribution has mean \(\frac{m}{m+n}\) and standard deviation \(\sqrt{\frac{mn}{(m+n)^2(m + n + 1)}}\) over the domain [0,1]. So if we get a heads, our prior distribution would be centered at \(\frac{2}{3}\) with standard deviation 0.236. This means that we think there's a \(\frac{2}{3}\) of getting a heads, but the real chance could easily be 0.4 or even 0.8 as well. If we flipped the coin 1000 times and got 500 heads and 500 tails, then our posterior distribution would be Beta(501,501). This has a mean of 0.5 and a standard deviation of 0.016. This means we're very confident that the coin has a 0.5 chance of landing on heads. It might be 0.49 or 0.51, but at this stage we're almost certain it's not 0.55. The bigger the numbers that parameterize our belief distribution are, the more confident we are that the mean of the distribution is the true mean.

I'm sweeping a bunch of math under the carpet here, but the underlying intuition is simple. The more we flip the coin, the more we know about it. And if you're not already familiar with Bayesian inference, this probably seems like an excessively elaborate formalization of a basic concept. However, Bayesian inference has one key insight. It cleanly demarcates our knowledge of the world into three components: our priors, our evidence, and our posteriors.

For example, with our coin-flipping exercise, we'd never start from an uninformed prior in practice. After all, flipping a coin is the canonical example of an uniformly distributed event with 2 outcomes. Even if we got 10 heads in a row, we'd dismiss that evidence as a freak accident. This is because we'd start from a distribution like Beta(10000,10000), making our posterior distribution Beta(10010,10000). So mean 0.5002, standard deviation 0.0035. We were confident the coin was fair before, and we're still confident the coin is fair.

I'm explaining all this because I want to discuss Bayesian inference in the context of opportunistic cheating in Magic. Some cheats are obvious and egregious, like mana weaving or stacking an opponent's deck while you're shuffling it. But the vast majority of cheats occupy a gray area where they could easily be honest mistakes.

The tricky thing about cheats of opportunity is that Magic is a complicated game that pushes on the limits of human cognition. With long tournaments, short lunch breaks that encourage skipping meals, grueling travel schedules, and loud, crowded convention centers, some mistakes and sloppiness are inevitable. Most of these mistakes will be detrimental, like missing triggers. Some will be beneficial, like miscounting how many damage an opponent's creatures deal. Asking whether someone is an opportunistic cheater is asking whether a disproportionate number of his mistakes benefit him.

This is where things get complicated, because the information stream on sloppiness is largely hidden and extremely biased. When our opponent makes a mistake that's in our favor, we either correct it and move on, if we need to in order to maintain the game state, or dismiss it, if it's something like a missed trigger. If someone misses a trigger on camera, it's a little embarassing but who really cares. However, when someone makes a mistake that's in her favor, we call a judge or start a witch hunt. Because of this, we only hear about sloppiness that could be construed as cheating, and never about sloppiness that definitely couldn't be.  

To compensate for this, we can consider the context of the alleged cheat or the rate at which a player makes beneficial mistakes. If a player makes a mistake that's in his favor in a game that he was certainly winning anyway, then it's not such a big deal. He doesn't have any real incentive to cheat, so he likely wasn't cheating. And if a player makes a serious error in her favor once every two or three years, then it's whatever. It's unlikely we'd hear about her so infrequently if she were actively looking for opportunities to cheat.  

However, even more than these proxies, we rely heavily on our priors. We “know a player is a good guy” or “have heard that so-and-so is shady.” When we trust a player, we're essentially assigning her a heavily informed prior that she's unlikely to cheat. Personally, I'd assign my best friends in Magic distributions like Beta(100,1000), where m = beneficial mistakes and n = detrimental mistakes, so that hearing any individual story of opportunistic cheating won't shake my faith in them very much. Not only that, because they're my friends, I'll hear about the judgment calls they get wrong, the triggers they miss, and the attack steps they forget, making my evidence much more complete. If I've heard someone is shady, then my prior will be something like Beta(20,30), so that any instance of opportunistic cheating greatly increases my suspicion of him.

Where things get really messy is when the biased information stream mixes with even uninformed priors. If I don't know a player, let's say because she’s from a different country and doesn’t speak English very well, then I'll start from an uninformed prior like Beta(1,1). That sounds equitable enough, but because I don't know anything about her and I'll only hear stories about mistakes that worked in her favor, I'll quickly come to the conclusion that she's a cheater, or at least likely to be cheating. Maybe I'll see her make a boneheaded mistake twice and hear about how she played an extra land four times, and then my posterior will be Beta (3,5). Despite extremely limited and incomplete information and no personal bias a priori, my posterior reflects a relatively strong belief that she's cheating.

I believe that the professional Magic community is seriously racist. We can just count the number of Asian, European, and Latin American players who are widely suspected of cheating against the number of Americans. Not necessarily out of any ill intent, but because most Magic players are American and will naturally give other Americans some benefit of the doubt, whereas they'll assign foreign players at best an uniform prior.

I felt compelled to write this because I'm frustrated by the Hall of Fame voting dialogue. I don't have a vote and I've always been an outsider to the professional Magic scene proper, so I don't have any real stake here, but I'm perplexed by how ready some people are to drag people they barely know through the mud. And I think people need to seriously consider if they're treating people from other countries, cultures, and backgrounds fairly.

[wiresandstarlings]

I don't want to sound trite but you were perfect

Monday

Wednesday

Neither Ben nor I talk to Greg about Standard at all, but we expect he'll register UW Control and he does. He has a Kefnet in his sideboard, for reasons. “Durdle bird is the word,” he says.  

Ben registers stock Hollow One. We spend some time debating whether to cut an Engineered Explosives or a Grim Lavamancer from the sideboard to make room for the 4th Leyline of the Void. We decide on Lavamancer so that we'll have access to 2 of each card, and since Explosives provides such an unique effect. This proves to be a slight mistake.

After spending over three hours debating whether I want to play a Mirran Crusader or a Serra Avenger and the third Rest in Peace or a Surgical Extraction, I register the following 75:

4 Mother of Runes 4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben 4 Stoneforge Mystic 4 Phyrexian Revoker 4 Flickerwisp 2 Recruiter of the Guard 1 Sanctum Prelate 1 Mirran Crusader 1 Palace Jailer 4 Aether Vial 4 Swords to Plowshares 1 Batterskull 1 Sword of Fire and Ice 1 Umezawa’s Jitte 3 Karakas 4 Wasteland 4 Rishadan Port 1 Horizon Canopy 1 Mishra's Factory 5 Plains 6 Snow-Covered Plains SB: 3 Rest in Peace 2 Council’s Judgment 2 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar 2 Path to Exile 1 Faerie Macabre 1 Pithing Needle 1 Ethersworn Canonist 1 Containment Priest 1 Leonin Relic-Warder 1 Walking Ballista

On 24 lands: Credit to Jacob Nagro for making me play more lands. With how widespread Daze and Wasteland are in Legacy, how many powerful utility lands exist, and how badly D&T wants to hit its fourth land drop, playing at least 24 lands is mandatory. A part of me thinks the optimal build of D&T features 26 or 27 lands, 4 Horizon Canopy, and 2 or 3 Mishra's Factory, but I'm personally not quite there yet.

On Mishra's Factory and Horizon Canopy: Because I was playing more lands than usual, I wanted to play utility lands that I could reliably recoup a full card’s worth of value from. Factory and Canopy are just absurdly powerful cards and I was happy with both throughout the tournament. Mishra's Factory in particular makes playing around planeswalkers significantly easier.

On Cavern of Souls: I hate Cavern of Souls. It's not really an utility land and it's not really a white source, the double-white sideboard cards are powerful and important, and most of the time your opponent still going to get value from their Force of Will or Daze down the line. Brainstorm exists. I'd prefer to play more Factories, Canopies, or Plains.

On Brightling: Brightling just isn't a very powerful card. The main problem is that it doesn't have evasion, so it winds up staring off against ground creatures that cost less mana than it does. When you spend 3 mana on Brightling, your opponent spends 1 mana on Gurmag Angler, and then your best case scenario is to invest 3 more mana to trade and gain 5 life, that's a horrible exchange. Even if you have a Sword of Fire and Ice, Brightling still can't beat Gurmag Angler in combat. Mirran Crusader attacks past Tarmogoyf, Angler, or a wall of Bitterblossom tokens and can win the game out of nowhere with equipment, and Serra Avenger is cheaper, flies, and still insulates you against the usual hate cards like Massacre, Dread of Night, and Sulfur Elemental. The only matchup where Brightling is better than Crusader and Avenger is Miracles. While it does provide an unique and valuable effect there, Miracles just isn't prevalent enough to justify it.

On Remorseful Cleric: Cleric is likely fine, but I don't see the point. You're unlikely to tutor for it over Sanctum Prelate and Palace Jailer, neither the body nor the effect are particularly powerful, and it's vulnerable to every sideboard card.

On Phyrexian Revoker: My general philosophy with D&T in Legacy is to skew my maindeck towards the matchups I expect to face least and my sideboard towards the matchups I expect to face most, because the white sideboard cards in Legacy are so potent. I expected to play mostly fair decks at the PT, like Delver, Grixis Control, Eldrazi, and the mirror, so I shaved the targeted hatebears in my sideboard for cards like Path to Exile and Gideon. I maindecked a bunch of Revokers so I'd still have enough cards to submit a presentable 60 against all the combo decks. In retrospect, I wish I'd gone even further and I played 3 Revokers and 1 Serra Avenger, but I was afraid of not having enough interaction against Storm.

On Palace Jailer: Some people don't play this card, but it's such an absurdly powerful effect to have access to that I can't understand why. I'm not sure about playing 2 in the 75 just because Gideon is more flexible and reliable, but 1 is mandatory.

On Walking Ballista: Walking Ballista is the truth.  

Thursday

I get into Minneapolis at 6 AM, on three hours of sleep, irritable. I take the light rail to my Airbnb, welcomed by a procession of broken windows and “Beware of Dog” signs. It's cold and overcast. I walk past an abandoned skeeball runway, a high school sports field piled high with dirt, flaking murals.

When I get to the Airbnb, I discover that the host hasn't left the keys in the lockbox yet. I regret not confirming my check-in time with the host yesterday, text her to let her know that I've arrived, and start looking for places to pass the intervening time on my phone. I find a park with an adjacent cafe and set off.

I get a large coffee and spend a couple hours finishing Ken Wong's Florence and Michelle Perez and Remy Boydell's The Pervert. Now, in addition to feeling gloomy and exhausted, I'm emotionally devastated. I can't take sitting anymore and head to the park.

The park is massive and meticulously maintained. It features a lake, a baseball square, and gymnastics equipment. It's practically empty. There are a handful of joggers and a television crew interviewing some students. I see two gardeners mowing the grass and a woman repainting the bases. I walk around the lake a couple times and think about Keynes.

It's 9:30 now. I sit down and listen to a podcast until the host texts me back saying she's deposited the keys. I make my way back to the Airbnb and take a nap until I need to let my roommates in.

Jacob Nagro arrives first. We talk about the lineups our teams decided on. His team is on Rb Aggro, Bridgevine, and Grixis Delver. I didn't know that Bridgevine was even a deck. Apparently Sticher's Supplier enabling Gravecrawler made the deck just consistent enough. Curious, I challenge him to some games with my Legacy deck. We get five games in before Ben Hull arrives, and I'm down 4 games to 1. Ben shakes his head sadly when I tell him this.

I rope Ben and Jacob into going to the Minneapolis Institute of Art with me on the way to the convention center. We check out the sculpture garden, a food-themed exhibition featuring a bunch of resin rotisserie chickens and a painting made entirely of eggshells, and the ancient Iranian art collection. In the contemporary art section, we get a surprise visit from the spirit of Nathan Smith, alias pandabeast24.

At around 3, we head to the convention center to check-in and meet up with Greg Orange, Ben's and my teammate, and our other roommates, Hunter Cochran and Jonathan Sukenik.

I naively challenge Greg to mental Magic and he gives me the most ruthless beating I've ever received. We get dinner and Hunter, Jonathan, and I walk the three miles from the convention center back to our Airbnb for the hell of it.

I'm feeling better.

Friday

Hunter, Jacob, and Jonathan head to the convention center early because Hunter missed check-in on Thursday. Ben and I head out a half-hour later, getting breakfast before walking to the convention center. I'm adamant about eating a substantial breakfast before Magic tournaments because it's hard to find time for a real lunch between rounds. I get a bowl of wild rice porridge with walnuts and dried cranberries that ranks among the best things I've ever eaten.

With Jacob being the luckiest human being in the world, Hunter-Jacob-Jonathan get the round one bye. I lose to Elves, Ben beats Humans, and Greg loses a 45-minute game one after he's forced to cast an early Memory and eventually decks out. Ben and I walk away, resigning ourselves to a loss, but Greg somehow wins game two in 15 minutes to draw the match. At this point, Ben and I decide to just leave Greg to his match for the rest of the tournament.  

Things pick up from that point onward. We finish 5-1-1 and Hunter-Jacob-Jonathan finish 6-1. My matches are all straightforward. Every time I look over at Greg's match, it just looks like pain.

One of my favorite memories from the weekend is round 3, where I'm playing against Eldrazi, Ben is playing against Tron, and Greg is playing the UW mirror. I win game one, and Greg announces that he's won his match as I'm sideboarding. I win a quick game two, and Ben doesn't get to finish his Modern match.

We get dinner, and Hunter keeps me up until 1 AM debating the metaphorical versus literal truth of the Bible and the function of meaning.

Saturday

On Saturday, I get an omelette with hash browns and apples cooked into it, alongside sausage, onions, almonds, and spinach. It's delicious. We get to the convention center early enough to get playmats.

The day starts off well, with Ben and Greg winning while I get deck checked. We continue to win. Hunter, Jacob, and Jonathan keep winning too, until we get paired in round 12. Amusingly, Jonathan and Greg both kept 0- and 1-landers on the draw this round and wound up with more lands in play than their opponents by turn 5. Jonathan beats me, Greg beats Hunter, and the match comes down to a close game 3 between Jacob and Ben where Ben has a Leyline of the Void and Jacob doesn't but Jacob has applied enough pressure with his Insolent Neonates and Walking Ballistas that we have to play defensively to avoid dying to a Bushwhacker or his suspended Gargadon. Jacob's somehow assembled a 5/5 Walking Ballista. The game comes down to a Goblin Lore that leaves us with a Lighting Bolt, Flameblade Adept, and Gurmag Angler while putting a Flamewake Phoenix into our graveyard. Jacob bricks and can't survive another attack.

Hunter tells us we're locked for top 4 already, but the standings suggest that we need to win at least one more. We lose our first win-and-in to Shahar Shenhar, Mattia Rizzi, and Jacob Wilson. I get good draws against Jacob, but Greg can't overcome a hard matchup and we come a couple points short against Mattia. There's a turn where we cast Burning Inquiry and I'm not sure we should have, since we knew Mattia's hand was extremely poor, but we also didn't have much going on ourselves. For such a random card, Burning Inquiry is tough to play with.

Hunter-Jacob-Jonathan win their match though, and we'll both have win-and-ins next round. We get paired against Andrew Baeckstrom, Justin Cohen, and Jack Kiefer. Hunter-Jacob-Jonathan will play against the Belgian team.

I lose quickly to strong draws from Andrew and focus on helping Ben. Ben's match comes down to a game where both Ben and Justin have Leyline, but Ben draws fewer dead cards and wins a close race. We need Greg to win one of the two postboard games against Jack, and look over to a crazy board where Greg has an active Lyra but Jack has drawn 7 cards off a Bomat Courier. Jack ignores Teferi and goes directly for Greg with some Ahn-Crop Crashers. Greg's out of gas and things look sketchy, but he cycles an Irrigated Farmland and draws Settle the Wreckage. He draws a card with Teferi, sighs, and passes. Jack adds a Hazoret and makes a lethal attack, but Greg Settles the match.

Hunter, Jacob, and Jonathan lose, however, so our victory is bittersweet.

We answer some questions for coverage and get the other top 4 decklists. Our round 1 draw guarantees us first seed throughout top 4. We get dinner, head back to the Airbnb, watch coverage for a while, then sleep.

Sunday

I run the nutty omelette back, but adrenaline keeps me from finishing it. Still, considering the stakes, I feel calm. Greg and I both have good matchups and even though Humans is favored against Hollow One, Ben still gets to be on the play in Modern.

The semifinals is anticlimactic. I have good draws and win easily, Ben loses quickly, and it's down to Greg to slowly win his excellent matchup.

I do mess game 3 up. I'm on the draw and my opponent plays turn 2 Karn off 2 Ancient Tombs and makes a construct. I untap, draw, and my hand is something like 2 Plains, Karakas, Leonin Relic-Warder, 2 Stoneforge Mystic, Flickerwisp, Mirran Crusader. I decide to save the Relic-Warder to disrupt combat later on, and instead aim to get Batterskull into play to apply pressure to Karn. My opponent promptly equips the construct with Umezawa's Jitte and I'm more or less busted. I Relic-Warder the Jitte next turn but I'm too behind already. Since the Flickerwisp can reset the Relic-Warder later if I ultimately need the trigger and the Relic-Warder and Flickerwisp represent enough pressure already, I should have played conservatively.

Waiting for the finals is brutal. I pace, watch Jacob draft, drink an unhealthy amount of water. I listen to Jackie Wilson's “This Love is Real” repeatedly.  

Greg somehow winds up in a side draft.

By the time we're called to the feature match area for the finals, my heart is racing. I don't know how much money I'm playing for and don't want to, but I'm acutely aware that this is the highest stakes match of Magic I'll ever play. I remember a mindfulness class from Stanford and lie down, spread eagle. I inhale for a count of seven, exhale for a count of seven. I hear the professor lecture about how leaving yourself physically vulnerable activates the parasympathetic nervous system and forces your mind to recognize you're safe, and I'm calm again.

The finals start and I'm quickly down two games after a pair of mediocre draws. At this point, I've written off my match as lost. I'm going to have to win three postboard games against 3 Dread of Night, two of them on the draw. Then I win my favorite game of Magic I've played in my life, beating all 3 Dread of Night. I'm not going to try to do the game justice in narration. You can find coverage of it here.

This game also features the most interesting decision I had all tournament. Late in the game, I have a Batterskull, a Stoneforge Mystic, a Gideon emblem, an Aether Vial on 3, and 5 lands in play, with a Mirran Crusader in hand. Josh has 2 Dread of Night, a Gurmag Angler, a Liliana the Last Hope on 3, and 2 cards that are likely irrelevant in hand. (It turns out they were Daze, but they were almost certainly Daze-like cards.) I attack Liliana with Batterskull and trade my Germ for his Gurmag Angler. Now I have two choices: I can use Vial during my second main phase and equip Crusader with Batterskull, or I can pass the turn intending to reset Batterskull with Stoneforge Mystic and Vial Mirran Crusader into play.

The advantage of waiting is that if he draws Diabolic Edict, then I can sacrifice the Germ token after making a lethal attack and then he'll no longer have any outs in his deck to the Crusader after I equip Batterskull during my second main phase. The disadvantage of waiting is that if Josh draws his third Dread of Night, then I will no longer be able to make use of Mirran Crusader. If I equip the Crusader right away and Josh draws Diabolic Edict, then he can use Liliana to kill my Stoneforge Mystic, Edict away my Crusader, and I'll have nothing.

Since there was one copy of both Dread of Night and Diabolic Edict left in Josh's deck, there are three main tiebreakers that led me to wait. The first is that Josh is relatively likely to draw a cantrip and equipping the Crusader right away lets Josh know that he must find either a Delver of Secrets or Diabolic Edict with his cantrip or he will die. I believed that Josh would accept a Death's Shadow or perhaps his second Gurmag Angler with a cantrip in the dark. The second is that Josh's Liliana the Last Hope means that a Delver of Secrets will buy him multiple draw steps to find his Diabolic Edict even if I equip. The third is that I slightly preferred the scenario where Josh draws Dread of Night and I reset Batterskull but can no longer use my Mirran Crusader to the scenario where I equip Crusader and he draws Edict, leaving me tapped out and with nothing in play.

It's a spot where I can't think for too long or else I give away what I have, so I made my decision primarily based on instinct. Given that Josh did draw the third Dread of Night and it's such a close decision, I can't help but wonder if there's something that I missed. Still, I'm content for the time being that I made the best play.

The other main point of strategic interest in the match is how I sideboarded. Going in to the match, I planned on executing the following sideboard plan, play or draw:

-4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben -3 Flickerwisp -1 Sanctum Prelate -1 Umezawa's Jitte

+2 Path to Exile +2 Council's Judgment +2 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar +1 Leonin Relic-Warder +1 Walking Ballista +1 Ethersworn Canonist

My approach was to maximize the number of creatures in my deck that live through Dread of Night and the number of cards that could interact with it, including Gideon's emblem. This meant sideboarding out Thalias and Flickerwisps, which are otherwise some of my best cards in the matchup, and boarding in some subpar cards. At the last minute, I decided that Thalia is so good on the play that I still wanted some copies. I opted not to bring in the Canonist and Walking Ballista and took out one of my Phyrexian Revokers to leave 3 copies of Thalia in.

This ultimately came back to bite me when I drew Recruiter of the Guard and finding Walking Ballista would have almost deterministically won me the game, and I was instead forced to select Palace Jailer and hope to get lucky.

In retrospect, I believe that leaving Walking Ballista in my sideboard was a mistake. With how we both sideboarded, it's reasonably likely for the game to go very long, when Walking Ballista can be individually game-winning. I should have had 2 Thalias and the Ballista instead of 3 Thalias.

All this was moot, however, as Ben and Greg were both up 2-1 in their matches. That meant that Ben Stark and Martin Juza would both have to win at least one game on the draw as well as game 4 on the play, making us heavy favorites. Greg summarily wins his game 4, and then Ben manages to sneak a game on the draw with a hardcast Leyline of the Void after Ben Stark floods out.

And we were Pro Tour champions.

Aftermath

It's Friday now, almost a week from the Pro Tour. My nervous system is still shot from the overflow of adrenaline and serotonin after winning. I was feeling wistful that I'd invested so much time and attention into Magic and was going to quit with almost nothing to show for it, and now I've accomplished the thing. Up until this point, my primary aim when I played Magic was to qualify for the next Pro Tour, and now I'm qualified for the next four. It all just feels weird.

In any case, I'm looking forward to at least a short break from Magic, until I need to start preparing for Worlds.

I was too overwhelmed during the weekend to give all the people who congratulated me the thanks that I wanted to, but I appreciated everyone's support. It really meant a lot to me.

Props

Greg, for being a master. My favorite part about the weekend was leaving Greg to his match each round, knowing he'll play it faster and better without me. 

Ben, for winning more than 38.9% of his matches. (And for winning every decisive game.)

Nathan, for watching over us all.

Jackie Wilson, for getting me through everything. 

Hunter, Jacob, Jake, and everyone else I've met through Magic, for making so many faceless cities and crappy hotels into amazing memories.

Slops

The Tempest design team, for creating Dread of Night. 

Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, because what the fuck. 

Magic, for hooking me real good.

Best, Allen

[wiresandstarlings]

never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line

Introduction

For the entire 15 year stretch I've played Magic, high rolling has been the default way to determine who gets the choice of whether to play or draw first. But high rolling is just a horribly designed protocol. These are some of the many problems with it:  

It's not deterministic. You have ties, forcing you to repeat the protocol. With lower numbers of nice, the chance of ties is nontrivial. Even with four dice, for example, there's an 8.09% chance of a tie.

Dice need to be rolled at least two times. High roll just takes longer.

Both players need to observe and track the first roll. This might sound trivial, but there have been numerous times late into Magic tournaments where I've glanced at my roll, started shuffling my deck and thinking about the matchup again, and have forgotten what I rolled by the time my opponent rolls.

Most importantly, there's room for cheating. I have no idea how or if people cheat when rolling dice, but it's conceivable that someone could master something like “rolling” a die from one face to the other. I'd rather just not have to wonder if I'm really expected to win less half my high rolls.

Because of these issues, I've gravitated toward asking my opponents to odd-even first and only high rolling when they object. But I understand that on its surface, odd-even looks even more vulnerable to cheating. Only one player gets to roll the dice, and I've had players agree to odd-even only granted weird stipulations, like I throw the dice up and let them call the outcome midair.

“Symmetric Odd-Even”

I was thinking about a probability problem earlier today (For what m and n is the sum of n rolls of m-sided dice modulo n uniformly random?) and it occurred to me that there's a simple way to get all the advantages of odd-even (determinism, efficiency, no information tracking) while eliminating the opportunity for the player rolling the dice to cheat. Just let both players roll dice.  

One player chooses whether they want odd or even. It doesn't matter who.

Both players roll however many dice they want.

Take the sum of all rolls.

Odd player wins if the sum is odd, even player wins if the sum is even.

 This idea is so simple that I assume it's not original, but it has so many advantages that I also understand why it isn't the default protocol.

We can observe that so long as a single dice that either player rolls is fair, then the parity of the sum is fair. To see that, consider outcome of the fair die separately from the outcomes of all the other dice. No matter whether the other dice are fair or loaded, or if their roll was manipulated somehow, the sum of their faces will either be odd or even. If the sum is odd, then the fair die has a 50% chance of switching the parity, when the roll is odd, and a 50% chance of maintaining the parity, when the roll is even. When the sum is even, the situation is the same. So regardless of what the sum of the other die is, the overall sum has a 50% chance of being even and 50% chance of being odd.

That's why this protocol is resistant to cheating. So long as you know that your die is fair, then you can be confident that the whole protocol is fair. And even if both players can roll odd or even at will, the protocol reduces to a leveling game where the competitive equilibrium is for both players to choose the parity of their roll at random. Because the players roll simulataneously, it's impossible for either player to know the other's choice before it's too late.

This process also guards against manufacturing defects when both participants cooperate. For example, if you think there's a 20% chance that either player's die is compromised, recognizing that if a single die is compromised then it's likely that the box it came from likely has the same problem, then the overall process still has a 96% chance of being fair.

Pseudo-RPS

Rock-paper-scissors is actually a perfectly reasonable way to randomly determine who goes first. It's another game where the competitive equilibrium is to play at random, so who wins or loses is random when both participants play optimally. In terms of ties, time, and complexity though, it's even worse than high rolling.

Thinking about these problems reminded me of an interesting way a player offered to decide play-draw at GP Seattle a while back. (I think his name was Ryan Slone? Apologies if I'm misremembering.)

He had the usual Rock Lobster, Paper Tiger, and Scissors Lizard set, but instead of offering to play RPS, he just shuffled the cards, burned one, and let me choose from the two remaining cards. I would get whichever card I chose, he would get the last card, and whoever won RPS would get choice of play or draw.

Ryan's method has pretty much all the advantages of symmetric odd-even: it's deterministic since each card is unique, there's no tracking, and because I had the final say on who got which card, there's no way he could have cheated. Not only that, it's even faster, and there will never be any awkwardness with dice that fall into the crack between playmats or off the table.

The primary disadvantage of Ryan's method is that I can still cheat. If Ryan flashes me the order of the cards or I can track their movement through his shuffle, I can know which card he burned and which card I need to take to win. After playing against Ryan a couple times, maybe I notice that the backs of the RPS cards are marked and can choose the winner that way.

And of course, there's still the overhead of having the RPS cards in your deckbox.

Note that although it's less aesthetically pleasing, all this works exactly the same if you only ever use two of the cards and skip the burn phase.

Conclusion

Obviously, the easiest and best solution is to have the tournament software decide who plays and draws in each match, and maybe also take steps to ensure each player gets to play and draw an equal number of times throughout the tournament. But it doesn't seem like that change will come anytime soon. (At this point, I'm reasonably confident someone important at WotC believes that randomly determining play or draw at the beginning of each match is “fun”.) And in the mean time, I hope these methods become commonplace. They're not perfect, but they're significantly better than the status quo.

Addendum

My friend Jake Koenig and his colleagues actually solved the problem that inspired all this. It turns out the sum of n rolls of m-sided dice modulo n is uniformly random if and only if n divides m, assuming m and n are greater than 1. You can find their proof here. 

[wiresandstarlings]

time to kill was always an illusion

Now that PT Dominaria is over and I'm semi-officially semi-retired, I figured I'd share my testing spreadsheets in case anyone else might benefit from them.

Limited Data

The limited data spreadsheet is pretty straightforward. I put some thought into how to get people to enter all of their data, including making a leaderboard of who'd entered the most drafts, but I suspect none of it made any difference.

Limited Card Rankings

This was the first time I did a Limited rankings survey and spreadsheet, and it was really helpful and I'll definitely keep doing them going forward. Just keeping my evaluations consistent while doing the survey was informative, and obviously seeing where I agreed and disagreed with my friends was incredibly helpful. I also did a couple drafts following the aggregate rankings almost exactly and felt like I understood the format much better afterwards. I really underrated Jousting Lance in particular, and had been drafting too many middle-of-the-road decks.

Still, the rankings weren't perfect. I think a lot of people, myself included, systematically underrated the blue commons because they don't look like premium cards. Cold-Water Snapper and Cloudreader Sphinx should have both been ranked higher than they were, for example. Cloudreader Sphinx in particular should maybe have been as high as 4.5.

If you're curious about the process, I sent a Google Forms survey to some of my friends and processed the results with a Python script. The main thing I learned is to provide more clarity regarding what the ratings mean in the survey prompt. I shouldn't have just assumed 10 people would be on the same page. (Pretty obviously, in retrospect.)

Constructed Data

This was maybe the most interesting spreadsheet. I wanted to use an exploration/exploitation algorithm to guide my PT testing and built a sheet to facilitate that.

Framing deck selection as a multi-armed bandit problem clearly isn't entirely accurate. I'm learning as I play more with each deck, the metagame I'm playing against constantly shifts, I'm tuning my deck between leagues, there's an almost infinite number of “arms”, etc. But I'd tried doing a detailed matchup analysis for previous PTs and found I just couldn't get good enough data for that from leagues. Reinforcement learning seemed like a useful but much less demanding approach.

Ultimately, I found this process super helpful. It was nice to have a mathematical framework that formalized when I'd spent too much time on a losing deck and needed to move on, or exactly when I needed to try new things versus continuing to practice and tune what I already knew. For example, I would have gotten stuck on black midrange decks and WB Vehicles for much longer without the sheet.

The biggest problem was that I just wasn't that motivated to test for this PT. Never testing with Hazoret or Teferi wasn't great, but I stopped testing as soon as I found a deck that I was winning with and liked.

Brief PT Recap

I finished 9-7 at the PT, going 3-3 in limited and 6-4 in constructed. Prepared medium, played medium, ran medium, finished medium. So it goes.

Shoutout to Jacob Nagro, Ben Hull, and everyone else who helped me test. 

[wiresandstarlings]

I got so fucking romantic, I apologize

1. I played GP Seattle last weekend, my first individual Grand Prix since GP Kyoto last summer and probably my last GP until I finish my degree. I went 11-4 playing 4c Control in Legacy, which is a good finish considering my preparation (none), deck choice (good but not Delver), and form (poor).

I played against decks featuring Deathrite Shaman, Brainstorm, and Force of Will 9 times in 13 matches. The other 4 matches were against Lands, Miracles, D&T, and Sneak and Show. Even though the other decks I played against were tuned to beat my own, I felt most comfortable in those matches. I had some good fortune, of course, but my cards were also just better than my opponents' cards. I lost to Miracles and 3 times to Grixis Delver. I made significant errors in most of the games I lost, so I'm content with that.

I was sick the entire weekend with nausea and an interminable cough. Between my cold and the endless blue midrange mirrors, this was probably the least fun I've had playing Magic in some time. I started writing this post on the flight back to Palo Alto, with a bad headache from dehydration and too much menthol.

Despite everything, I just felt gratitude and sadness that the weekend was over. For all their flaws, GPs are human society at its finest. Hundreds of people from across the country and even the globe gathering at particular coordinates in space-time out of just a shared sense of community.

I could give or take the actual tournaments at this point in my “career”. But wandering around new cities searching for restaurants that can seat 10 people, playing games and talking shit between rounds, celebrating and commiserating, making stupid bets... That's the marrow of life.

I've been pretty cynical about Magic since I quit working at Wizards of the Coast. I started to regret that I'd spent so much time and energy on a pursuit that will never reduce hunger or poverty, cure a disease, improve literacy, etc. This weekend has made me realize that I've lived a much more interesting and satisfying life because of Magic. Ultimately, even though I'm still disillusioned, I'm also amazed that a card game could have had as profound an impact on anyone's life as it has on mine.

I'm looking forward to my enforced break from Magic and from traveling for the next month. But I'm also looking forward to the next GP.

2. Speaking of quitting Wizards of the Coast, part of why I've had so much trouble writing the past couple months is that I've felt like I had to write about quitting. Lessons I learned, etc. Like, it's pretty dramatic to land your dream job, leave school and move to a new city for it, then quit after three months. There isn't really much of a story, though. I took a big risk on limited information, it didn't pay off, and I cut my losses. I expected a dream and got a job.

I did learn some meaningful lessons. Know my worth, location matters, etc. But mostly things I should have known to begin with.

I will tell one anecdote though, which I think summarizes my experience at Wizards pretty well.

Maybe a month after I started, I noticed that the Wizards of the Coast homepage was out of date. The articles dropdown menu listed the obsolete Latest Developments column rather than the Play Design column that replaced it, and clicking the menu only showed the older articles. I had begun experimenting with taking initiative rather than just bringing up problems I noticed with my manager, and asked around for who I should bring the issue to. A coworker told me I should try the software department upstairs on the 4th floor, so I walked up a couple flights of stairs and wandered around a labyrinth of cubicles until I found the guy who owned the website. I told him about the articles menu, and he nodded and thanked me and said he'd fix it right away.

If you check the Wizards homepage (as of April 14th, 2018, around 5 months since this story), the menu is still out of date.

3. Soon after resuming my program at Stanford, I noticed The Princess Diaries on the shelf at the library and read it. I'd loved the movie adaptation as a kid, and even in high school thought that it, alongside its spiritual sequel The Devil Wears Prada, was the great American movie. I don't feel so strongly about either film anymore – though I'll still watch The Devil Wears Prada to cheer up when I'm feeling particularly low – but I was looking for some light reading.

The writing and story were surprisingly compelling, and it was exactly what I needed after a battery of problem sets. If you're not familiar with The Princess Diaries, it's about a teenage girl named Mia who discovers she's the heir to a small European principality after her estranged father gets testicular cancer. She has adventures, comes of age, learns to be herself.  

But this was also around when the Harvey Weinstein revelations came out and the #MeToo movement picked up, and the most impressive parts of The Princess Diaries were the valence and normalcy of sexual assault. Like, there's this endless cast of skeezy guys at the peripheries of the story. There's Mr. Stuart, the health teacher who rubs students' shoulders to feel if they're wearing a bra (146); the “blind” guy who gets women to walk him across the street so he can grope them (19, 282); Norman, the stalker who tries to pay to see Mia's feet (64). Mia meets her best friend Lily after a classmate flashes them both (10). Even Josh, the heartthrob, calls the paparazzi on Mia and kisses her without her consent (263).

Consider this quote regarding the blind molester:

Just my luck, the only guy who's ever felt me up (not that there's anything to feel) was BLIND.

Lily says she's going to report the Blind Guy to the Sixth Precinct. Like they would care. They've got more important things to worry about. Like catching murderers. (19)

Like, sexual assault is so commonplace for Mia that she considers being assaulted a kind of trophy. She's more concerned about how she looks than the fact she was assaulted. And she just assumes that nobody is ever going to do anything about the perpetrator.

Mia's anecdote isn't as repulsive or charged as many of the stories than fell out of #MeToo, but this is also a book for teenage girls written in the voice of a teenage girl. This isn't even a particularly controversial book. Numerous adults read The Princess Diaries and thought that all this was perfectly acceptable reading material for children.

Maybe I'm overreacting, and it's really not my place to comment, but I find it deeply fucked up that The Princess Diaries is just the status quo.

4. I've been thinking lately I need to be a nicer person. Like, more receptive to other peoples' concerns and ideas, less stubborn, less toxic.

I'm remembering the Harvey quote about being pleasant or smart, and Harvey having been smart for years but recommending pleasant. And I know that those traits aren't mutually exclusive, and that being pleasant is a choice and being smart doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but that's not how I feel.

I'm starting to think that what I really want is to take over the world, and I obviously never will.

5. “The hobos know where the warm places are, so you have to sleep next to them.”

[wiresandstarlings]

when I get to California, I’m gonna write my name in the sand

I've been really into using brute force Monte Carlo simulation to find hand distributions in Magic lately. It started because I wasn't sure how aggressively I was supposed to mulligan when I was testing Eldrazi Tron. The difference between Eldrazi Tron's best hands and even its average hands is so massive that it's usually worth giving up a card to try to find a broken start, but I wasn't sure what to do with borderline hands that were only missing a piece or two. Like, what are you supposed to do with this hand, on the draw?

If this hand finds Urza's Tower, Expedition Map, Chalice of the Void, Mind Stone, or Eldrazi Temple on its first two draw steps, it's an good hand. Map on turn two is a little slow, but it's still turn 3 Tron with a Reshaper. Even if the hand bricks twice, a Tower or Temple on turn 3 would still represent a great draw. That's 18 outs twice and then 8 outs once: a 63.59% chance of a solid hand. Those odds aren't perfect, but is it really worth spending a card to try to improve?

What about this hand, on the play?

This hand is drawing to Chalice of the Void and Mind Stone in one draw step or Urza's Mine and Eldrazi Temple in two draw steps, plus the scry. So this hand has a 40.93% chance to get there. Again, not perfect, I didn't think the chances of a great hand on 5 cards could have been that high either.

Rather than guessing and stumbling into an intuition for these hands, I figured I'd rather just know:

The numbers are the top of this table are the number of cards seen in a game. So 7 represents a 7 card hand as well as 6 cards and a scry. So the probability of a broken hand after mulliganning once is 63.85% and after mulliganing twice is 50.66%. Following the table, it's clear we should mulligan both of these hands. With the first hand, we only slightly improve our chances of having a good draw on the first mulligan but we give ourselves the opportunity to mulligan again if we miss, which is an additional 18% equity.

I was surprised by these results. Before simulating, I was sure the first hand was a keep and that the results would just confirm my intuition. With any other deck in Magic, I would never mulligan a 63% shot at one of my best draws unless the consequences of bricking were catastrophic. But Eldrazi Tron features so many broken draws and its spells are so individually impactful that here it's just correct.

These results also indicated that Eldrazi Tron was much more consistent than I thought it was. I had always assumed Eldrazi Tron was a cheesy deck that needed to get lucky to win. But honestly, it's really unlucky if the deck doesn't produce a broken draw: if you're willing to mulligan to 5 looking for a great hand, you'll get one over 90% of the time. (Note here that the table doesn't consider that you functionally see 7 cards twice with the Vancouver mulligan rule.)

In addition, notice how dramatically the Vancouver mulligan rule strengthens the Eldrazi Tron deck. With the Paris mulligan, both of the hands above would have been clear keeps, and between them the Eldrazi Tron deck would have had upwards of 30% fewer broken draws.

Do note that I defined my five classes of “broken” hand pretty liberally. I asked Eldrazi Tron master Collin Rountree what kinds of hands he would always keep, and it boiled down to these: hands featuring Tron, hands that could cast an Eldrazi on turn 2 or 3, and hands with Chalice. Some hands in these classes will be weaker, some much stronger. Overall though, I think Collin's heuristic is quite good. Also note that this simulation doesn't take into account the equity of hands that don't quite get there but you'd likely keep anyway on 5 cards, and it functionally assumes you know your top card when mulliganning with a scry. However, these effects somewhat counterbalance each other, and even trying to account for them would make the simulation exceedingly complicated.

After that, since I'd written this whole framework, I explored some other applications. The first was how many 0-drops to play in Affinity:

Starting from a standard Affinity deck and varying the numbers of Memnite, Welding Jar, and Galvanic Blast, we can see that each Memnite you play gives you an additional 1.2/1.8% chance of casting a 2-drop on turn 1 on the play/draw and each Welding Jar you play gives you an additional 1.1/1.4%.

These results were also surprising to me, even though I've played Affinity for a long time. Firstly, I didn't expect the chances of having 2-mana on turn 1 to be quite so high. I always felt exceedingly fortunate when I got a draw that good, but now I realize the deck is even stronger than I thought it was. (And I liked it a great deal already.)

But secondly, and perhaps more operatively, I didn't expect the impact of additional Memnites and Welding Jars to be so similar. I'd always assumed that Memnites were critical because they could operate Springleaf Drum, but apparently that isn't particularly relevant for having 2 mana on turn 1. Welding Jar has a lot more utility, and I think I should have been playing more of them the whole time.  

Granted, there are other considerations than casting 2-drops ahead of schedule. Memnite considerably increases your chances of casting a 3-drop on turn 2, for example. At the same time, I think the chance of casting a 2-drop on turn 1 is reasonable proxy for the general explosiveness and consistency of the deck.

While writing this script, I also realized just how many more combinations of cards cast a 3-drop on turn 2 than cast a 2-drop on turn 1. It was so many that I couldn't be confident I'd enumerated all of them, and that made me think that I should also have been playing more 3-drops as well, like Makis Matsoukas did at the last Pro Tour.

Lastly, I tried to figure out the optimal manabase for Grixis Energy in standard for my friends playing GP Memphis:

Firstly, I just figured out the chances of each checkland coming into play tapped (and of all checklands in a hand coming into being tapped) in a typical manabase. The results suggested to me that most Grixis Energy lists were playing too many checklands and too few cyclelands to enable them. Then, out of curiosity, I decided to iterate over every possible combination of the lands in the deck and try to find the optimal manabase:

These results ultimately weren't very interesting, and in retrospect I shouldn't have expected much. I was curious what would happen if I “penalized” tapped checklands and drawing cyclelands similarly, to minimize the number of tapped lands in the deck overall while maximizing access to colored mana based on the relative representations of colored symbols in the deck's spells. But most of the terms in that utility/loss function are just closed-form hypergeometric expectations that say to play a lot of dual lands, so most of the land slots were mathematically locked.

Still, after tuning the parameters to find the decision boundary, the final proportion of cyclelands and basics to checklands was interesting. Averaging over the best configurations, my program generally played 6 basics, 7 cyclelands, and only 4 checklands. This suggested that checklands are much, much less consistent than people give them credit for being, and people should play them much less. And to an extent, I think we saw these results borne out in practice last weekend at GP Memphis. Every high-finishing Grixis Energy deck save Matthew Kling's featured at least as many cyclelands (or Evolving Wilds) as checklands, and even Matthew played 7 cyclelands to his 8 checks.

Two failings of my utility function are that it didn't prioritize untapped mana later in the game for Scarab God more highly than untapped mana early and it didn't weigh having access to all 3 colors at once in addition to having the right proportions of each. In practice, players played more checklands and fewer basics than my algorithm suggested, which makes sense. Checklands mostly come into play untapped when you really need untapped mana and too many basics make the mana much shakier. Still, I suspect most of these top lists should have had at least one more basic.

Ultimately, I'm not sure how practical or interesting these simulations really are. But I've gotten some cool and surprising results after even these few preliminary analyses, and it just seems like a basic thing that almost nobody does. Anyway, hopefully you've enjoyed reading this. I actually really enjoyed writing it.

If you'd like to vet my logic or try a simulation of your own, you can download my code here: https://github.com/nalkpas/hand-simulator

Until next time. (Hopefully not another 5 months from now.)

[wiresandstarlings]

I can still smell the fire, even though it’s long died out

1. As an entry-level game designer, my primary responsibility is to test the designs and games that more senior designers make and give them actionable feedback. A lot of emphasis is placed on communicating succinctly and selecting foci carefully. I've been chafing under the constant demands for elaboration and clarity, given my infatuation for the laconic, so I've been thinking about the value of clear communication. And ultimately, I feel like clear communication is a seductive and pernicious fiction.

In my view, the purpose of communication and language in general is to unify different peoples' disparate perspectives. Naively, I have some idea or some worldview that I would like to share, so I compose some sequence of words or sounds or images that puts my idea in your head. Aiming for “clear communication” presumes the existence of some Platonically ideal composition that efficiently and totally transfers the idea from my head to yours.

But an idea isn't a single concept or logical sequence, it's a network of associations and memories and beliefs. The basic premise of transferring an idea from my head to yours is flawed. In practice, you cannot have the same idea that I do. You don't have the history and neuroses and biases to support that network as it exists in my head. And likewise, I can never really have the same idea that you do. Ideas are by nature sui generis. All we can do is create objects that provoke each other to create new ideas that inspire common action.

The myth of clear communication disguises the basic need for provocation. Good writing is not simply a matter of understanding your audience, it's about engaging them. I think this is a large part of why we still have white supremacists. We believe that if we simply write about privilege more clearly, if we quote Martin Luther King enough times, if we do enough studies on institutional poverty and stereotype threat and implicit memory, then eventually our argument will be so ironclad and convincing that we'll overpower racism. But white supremacists simply don't have the background to comprehend inequality from that perspective. Our arguments aren't convincing because they're the arguments we'd like to hear, not the arguments they'd understand. It's not a matter of logic or diction, it's a matter of empathy.

And to that end, it's better if writing is unclear. The purpose of writing is to make the reader think, not to overpower them. An essay or story needs to contain the seed of an idea, not the entire object. Completeness obscures the essential truth.

I should be clear that when I disparage clear writing, I don't mean clear prose. Prose is merely a stylistic tool. With George Saunders or Kurt Vonnegut, for example, their writing is easy to read but difficult to understand. After I finish a Saunders story or essay, I have to go back and reread and empathize and visualize. The clarity of his writing is a tool to bring the readers down to the level of his characters. And despite how clear his writing is, his ideas aren't.

When I attack clear writing, I mean books like Crazy Rich Asians, that I could read from cover to cover without thinking or stopping once.

Personally, all the writers I most admire and who've most influenced my beliefs were impossible to read. Marx, Freud, Saunders, Wallace, etc. All these writers have meant different things to me at different times, and the brilliance of their writing wasn't that they convinced me, it was that they didn't try to. They simply made me think.

Exercises left to the reader in math textbooks seemed like cruel jokes at first, but I've come to appreciate them.

2. Holy shit, I hadn't anticipated just how much of my life a job would represent. I'd assumed when I got off work, I'd still have the energy to exercise and read and write and live some vague life of the mind. So far, I’ve just been exhausted. I'm hoping that changes.

3. I'd like to write more, but it's too late and I'm too tired. So to close, here's a poem I wrote while I stared at a glacier for an hour trying to get a fracture on video. It's shitty, but I like it:

parity she was like a glacier cold, ragged, scarred  like she'd been tortured for arcane secrets a knife dragged across her face mind buried deeper with each cut  until, cracked, she spilled out  all at once, thundering  a metaphor, maybe,  for nothingness

he was like a mountain scaly, myriad, bulbous gorged on dreams of completion his hopes and failures and longings delicately layered and obfuscated folded inward like pastry crust ready to implode a metaphor, maybe for eternity

[wiresandstarlings]

all my life, I had to grind and hustle

Some half-baked ideas that I'm done baking:

1. I first heard of Daymond John's clothing brand FUBU via his Shark Tank stint. FUBU stands for “for us, by us”, and at first I thought that was so cool. A clothing line based on inclusion and authenticity. But then I wondered, who's “us”? Black people? Streetwear dudes? Minorities in general? But really, it's whoever buys the clothes. And I realized that as seductively inclusive as “for us, by us” sounded, it was just corporate bullshit. Buy these clothes, and you'll be someone who owns those clothes.

But as I've gotten older and more jaded, I think of that phrase more and more. A documentary series on Chinese food by a Chinese reporter: “for us, by us.” This Jenny Zhang essay on white poets taking Asian names: “for us, by us.” Even Crazy Rich Asians: “for us, by us.”

And as much as FUBU the clothing brand is corporate bullshit, the sentiment isn't. We all need art that's for us, by us. And the more art we have, the bigger “us” gets.

2. My father has two faces.

At home, he's taciturn. He watches a lot of Chinese soap operas and the news, he makes dinner every night, he says what's on his mind but rarely says much.

With his coworkers, he won't stop talking. What are they doing this weekend? What do they think about whatever current event? How are their kids doing?

For a long time, I resented him for his faces. It felt like lying, somehow, or at least miserly. Why would he go to such lengths to impress his coworkers, these people he barely knew, but not us, his family? Why did he hoard his jokes and smiles and laughter?

With some distance, I realize that my father adopted his faces to survive a world he didn't totally understand. Chinese culture is quiet and deferential, when my father immigrated to America he had to learn shouting and slapping and small talk against his upbringing and inclinations. If the way he behaved around coworkers felt “fake”, that's only because it was.

Growing up, when my parents told me about racism, I thought they were exaggerating. Like, sure, maybe people were racist when you came to America in the 60s, but things are different now. It's a new millennium. All the stereotypes of Chinese people are positive. Chinese people represent less than 2% of the population but as many as 20% of students at top universities. We probably make more on average than white people. If anything, life is easier for us.

But racism isn't about how smart people think you are, or what colleges you get into, or how much money you make. It's about whether or not, on a gut-level, you're “us” or “them”.  

In Japan, people would speak to me in Japanese until I started talking back in English. And as inconvenient as that was, it felt like a vote of confidence. His haircut, his clothes, his eyes, his posture – this guy's one of us. And thinking back, I realized I'd never really experienced that before in America. Someone looking at me, seeing me, casually accepting me. And ironically, I didn't actually belong in Japan.

Like, it's not quite racism that Chinese and Indian guys are less successful on dating apps than white guys. That's just a statistic, and you can't control what people are attracted to. People should date who they want to date. At the same time, even though I don't really use dating apps, hearing about that statistic makes me feel profoundly foreign, like I'm somewhere I shouldn't be. And I guess that's because I am.

3. While biking, I observed that Chelsea Clinton went to Stanford and Bernie Sanders went to UChicago, and that my feelings toward the Clinton family and Bernie exactly mirror my feelings toward their respective universities.

4. It also occurred to me that Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is basically about a guy who got ghosted.

5. I spent an hour or so reading Mitski's tweets last night, and she's an amazing human being.

6. Moving, I can't help but think back to my first post on this blog. It almost feels prophetic. As much as I hated the Bay Area when I first moved there, I came to feel like I belonged there. If I wanted to see a movie or a concert or go to a museum, I knew where and what and how. And now, spurred by vague discontent, I've moved onto the next city. Maybe, anyway. 

[wiresandstarlings]

I’m just trying to be someone better than I am

1. Maybe six months ago, Netflix recommended me a show called Terrace House: Aloha State. I don't usually pay much attention to Netflix's recommendations, but the preview image featured the most attractive girl I've ever seen. Short hair, feline eyes, sharply angular face, just every physical feature I find attractive. So naturally, I looked up the show to find out who she was.

Terrace House is a Japanese franchise of reality shows where the producers select a group of six people, three guys and three girls, and put them up in a mansion. A group of Japanese celebrities comment on their lives. That's the entire premise: reality television with all the bullshit stripped away. There's the usual production magic, where small arguments and innocent flirtations are amplified with fast cuts and dramatic music, but there are no cash prizes or external pressures. Just the real drama of lost twenty-somethings trying to figure out their lives. Guests can stay as long as they'd like, but in the history of the franchise, only one guest has stayed the entire duration of a season. Quintessentially Japanese minimalism.

I found out that the girl's name is Lauren Tsai. She's a model and an illustrator, and at the time there wasn't much information on her, at least for someone in reality television. There was only a two-minute interview on a site called “hypebae” that showcased some of her drawings, which are surreal, grotesque fantasy portraits. Girls with baleful eyes and arms of fish, dragons with tentacles, etc. Mysterious, beautiful, slightly disturbing, a cross between Miyazaki and Robert Crumb.

But she didn't have a Twitter or Instagram or Youtube channel. And the art and the mystery made her more even attractive to me.

I spent a couple more minutes looking at some of her modeling photos, and moved on. Slightly creepy, also typical. I saw an attractive girl, found out who she was, looked at some pictures of her, filed her name in the back of my head. My momentary obsession wasn't sufficient motivation to actually watch the show.

Earlier today, Youtube recommended me a radio interview she did earlier this month. And as placid and otherworldly as she looks in her modeling photos, Lauren's replies were simple and candid and entirely approachable. She talked about growing up and Terrace House and her uncertainties and insecurities.

Terrace House is filmed in Japanese, but Lauren isn't Japanese at all. Her mother is white, her father is Chinese, she was born in Massachusetts, and she grew up in Hawaii speaking English. She's 19 now and has studied Japanese for 4 years. She was lonely and maybe bullied in high school. She changed high schools three times, including going back to Massachusetts for boarding school, and got her diploma from a small Buddhist high school. She models in Tokyo now, and it's weird sometimes. “You feel like an object really... Or you feel like there's nothing you can do. Like no matter what you say, all you're judged on is how you look.”

In contrast, she has Twitter and Instagram accounts now. And like, on her social media she's only amplified the mysterious and aloof persona of her earlier photos. It's mostly modeling and outfits and a couple illustrations, and her clothes have gotten stranger and tighter and more expensive. I spent maybe forty minutes looking through her pictures on Twitter, more out of jealousy and confusion rather than attraction at this point. Like, how is this person so cool? How did she seem so normal in her interview while she's living her life like this, with these clothes and perfect makeup and hair and style and she just watercolors these amazing portraits between her modeling and celebrity?

On one level, with some distance, the answers to these questions are simple. She was sad and lonely for a long time, she worked hard in obscurity for a long time, and she turned an unusual and not entirely attractive opportunity to her advantage. She learned Japanese on her own, she probably gets up at 6 every day and works out for 3 hours and spends another half-hour picking out her outfit and draws in every free moment.

But are those answers really so simple?

2. I mention all this because I also saw Ingrid Goes West later today. Ingrid Goes West stars Aubrey Plaza as Ingrid, a woman who begins to obsess over Instagram celebrities – “social influencers” – after her mother dies. At the beginning of the movie, she crashes a wedding because the bride, one such celebrity, replied to one of her comments but didn't invite her to the wedding. In tears, she maces the bride and gets committed to a mental health ward. She finds another influencer to admire in an Elle profile, Elizabeth Olsen's Taylor, and moves to California to be closer to her. Naturally, Taylor's life isn't nearly as perfect as her Instagram account.

Ingrid Goes West addresses the gap between how we perceive other people and who they actually are, the boundaries between art and life, the benefits and dangers of social media, mental illness – the entire landscape of the 21st century. The audience empathizes with Ingrid because of her pain, but she's also ruthless and manipulative and remorseless. Ingrid Goes West is a film about a stalker, and by any reasonable moral standard Ingrid is a villain. But if Ingrid is a villain, then so is anyone who's ever wished they could be someone else.

There's a delightful scene where Ezra, Taylor's husband, shows Ingrid his art: realist paintings sprayed over with giant hashtags in gross neon colors. Did he paint the underlying landscapes himself? Of course not. They're found objects.

In the end, Ingrid films and uploads a moment of quiet, desperate honesty and the aftermath is both comforting and devastating. The last scene is a moment of absolute desolation. It's a thoughtful film, but it's also funny and moving and warm.  

I had the privilege of watching Ingrid Goes West next to two twenty-something girls whose running commentary elucidated how much was at stake in Ingrid's growth and reversion. When Ingrid changes her hairstyle and buys new clothes and meets Taylor for the first time, one of them offered, “I'm actually stressed out right now.” And at the end: “I'm going to need like five more drinks after that.”

Because, after all, despite its myriad individual themes, Ingrid Goes West is at is core about our new American dream. We have everything, but we desperately need more. We have hundred of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter, but we're painfully alone. Something is missing from all our lives but only because corporations need there to be. When we follow someone on Instagram and like their jacket and buy that jacket and feel no different, well, what could we really expect. Should we all just give up Instagram? I don't think that's the answer either.

3. Naturally, after Ingrid Goes West, I thought of Lauren Tsai. And as much as Ingrid contains pieces of every millennial, I basically am Ingrid.

I have a gut-level suspicion of social media, and honestly I Instagram and Facebook stalk very rarely. But I'm certainly familiar with loneliness, self-hatred, and wishing I was someone else. Basically everyone I've ever admired, I admired with consuming obsession. Inio Asano, Carey Mulligan, James Murphy, Miranda July, Carrie Brownstein, George Saunders, now Lauren Tsai. I have difficulty just appreciating someone's writing or music or acting, not using it as a vehicle to just inhabit someone else for a while.

And like, I've had friends, even very good friends, but I'm not sure how. The mechanics of social interaction bewilder me. My friends ultimately come and go, and even when they're present I spend most of my time alone. And if I had the money and freedom and bravery, I might well move to Syracuse and follow George Saunders around for a couple months.

I would pay a lot for footage of someone just living his life for a full 24-hour cycle, unaware he was being filmed. I want to know how to be. I want to know how to live in a particular place at a particular time and just function.

I feel like I've made a lot of progress over the past couple months. I sleep more regularly, I spend more time doing what I enjoy or need to do and less time wasting away and worrying. I exercise more. But I still feel fat and lazy and I wonder when I won't.

I wonder if my biggest problem is how much I look towards the future. I've never been entirely present anywhere. In high school, I was looking toward college. In college, I was looking toward a career. Here in California, I was still looking toward what's next. I've never been anywhere I expected to stay for more than a couple years. That said, I'm moving again soon, and I'm not sure how long I'll stay.

4. Biking home from the movie theater after Ingrid Goes West, I listened to Julien Baker for the first time in a while. During the bridge of “Sprained Ankle”, I stopped pedaling and glided through the night and stared at the streetlights and it was perfect.

5. I hate using headphones. I buy expensive foam tips but they still bruise my ear canal, and no matter how quietly I set the volume, my tinnitus flares up. Even so, I have my headphones in for maybe a third of each day.

6. There's nothing like three days of idleness and total isolation to make you question your entire existence.

7. I should standardize how I use words and symbols for numbers at some point, but not now.

8. I really fucking love writing. I'm going to write more.

[wiresandstarlings]

oh, no way. The puzzle takes over. You’re not even trying to solve it anymore.

1. Being happy has been awful for my writing. I don't feel the same desperate drive to record my every neurosis and insecurity to understand them. I don't feel so slighted and angry and confused. I still hate my classes and my schoolwork, but even that's been better. My workload's lighter, I feel some pride when I understand the material even if I don't care for it, and I generally feel pretty okay. My life's not perfect, but there's not much worth writing about either.

I used to feel guilty when I played Magic Online or Hearthstone for a whole day. Partially because I thought I was wasting my time, but mostly because I felt like a passenger in my own mind when I played games. I was only partially aware of what I was even doing. Being good at Magic didn't feel like much of an accomplishment, it felt like a symptom of a disease. And I just don't lose control anymore. I dip my toes in the deep end sometimes, when I find a new deck to tune mostly, but I don't jump in anymore. I play for a while and stop and I've found, surprisingly enough, that I enjoy playing games still.

I've been jet lagged the past week and too tired to work during the day and too energetic to sleep at night, and that's been shitty. But even that honestly hasn't disrupted these halcyon days of contentment.

I have gotten bored though. As happy as I've been, I don't feel fulfilled. I've been writing less and reading less, but the writing and reading I've done has still felt more wholly pleasurable than playing games or watching television. It's mostly that time has passed so quickly that I didn't notice how little I've been writing.

I'm so bad at keeping this resolution, but I'm going to try again: I don't have anything I want to write about, so let's write about nothing.  

2. It's funny how markedly different the Costco in Santa Clara is from the one in Mountain View. The Costco in Santa Clara is way bigger, but the books section is less than half the size of the one in Mountain View. And whereas the Costco in Mountain View has a solid selection of literary fiction – a neverending stack of the latest Paulo Coelho book, some selections from Europa Editions – the books section in Santa Clara is mostly thick cardboard picture books. The fruits and vegetables section is also like two-thirds the size in Santa Clara. The selection is similar, but they didn't have bell peppers and had one mix of cherry tomatoes rather than three. The extra floorspace is occupied by vacuum cleaners and trash cans and storage bins. You could probably furnish an apartment at the Costco in Mountain View, but only barely.

I don't mean this as a judgment. I only really buy granola bars and fruit at Costco anyway. It's just that I don't usually notice the higher forces at play in my daily existence – the algorithms and market research and linear regressions – even if I know they're there. But here they were, having for a moment lost their instinct for self-preservation.

3. I didn't think I'd ever be jealous of the writing in a cartoon, but fuck Rick and Morty's “Pickle Rick”. The premise of the episode is so dumb it's hard to imagine a breathing human being in time and space pitching it: Rick, one of the protagonists, turns himself into a pickle. That's it, full stop. I understood that was the general idea from the episode title, but I assumed there would be some backstory or build-up. But no, the cold open is Rick, the pickle. And while that was funny, watching on felt like almost a testament of faith.

But the writers make Rick's asinine transformation somehow both reasonable and compelling. Right from the start, the other characters try to figure out why Rick would turn himself into a pickle and in doing so question the motivations behind human endeavor in general. And there is a backstory: Rick turned himself into a literal immobile vegetable to get out of family counseling with his daughter and grandchildren. There's even action. Rick gets knocked into a sewer by a cat who thinks he's a snake and has to kill and neurologically pilot progressively largely animals to fight his way out. The scene where Pickle Rick evolves into his final form is both amazing and morbid. Who would do that to themselves, for any reason?

The family counseling scenes, featuring Susan Sarandon as the therapist, are realistic, funny, and uncomfortably insightful about the nature of human connection. The episode closes with some contemplative scenes where the characters both dismiss and trivialize the truths the therapist presents and grow closer because of them.

Visually, conceptually, and narratively, “Pickle Rick” is a masterwork. It's a profound meditation on the human condition and an absurdist comedy and brutal cut-em-up. It's everything, sutured by only the brilliance of its writers and animators. It's a little baffling that so many people with so much talent would write Rick and Morty instead of the next In Search of Lost Time or Ulysses.

But, of course, they do it because they can.

4. I've also been reading Downfall by Inio Asano lately. It's a single volume that hasn't completely been translated online yet, but new chapters come out every week. It's about a manga artist who finishes a long, popular series and, without the distraction of work, loses all motivation to keep living his current life. He separates from his wife, moves out, and starts seeing escorts. He makes a real connection with one girl he sleeps with and accompanies her to her hometown when she has a family emergency. It's weird and quiet and intricate and also just amazing. The story climaxes in the most recently translated chapter and it's painful knowing the story is finished and I just can't read it. I'm so occupied thinking about it that can't sleep right now, so I kinda regret starting it, but I really don't.

5. Game of Thrones has also been deece, I guess.

6. I'm 24 in two weeks. Still fucking bizarre.

[wiresandstarlings]

the newly opened bottle of wine clinked against the rim of my teacup, sounding a clear ring

1. Biking last week, I crossed into the left lane because there were too many cars in the right lane trying to turn. I biked up past the turn, then waited for some cars to pass so I could cross back into the right lane. While I waited, the guy in the car behind me lowered his window and shouted at me to get out of the fucking way. And like, maybe I shouldn't have been in the left lane, maybe I should have been more patient, but I couldn't help but feel happy that I'd pissed this guy off. After all, don't people who shout at bikers in traffic deserve to be all the misery and anger coming to them?  

I'm not sure that was an ethical response to the situation, but it was certainly a satisfying one.

2. I went to a Starbucks in Japan with my friends to hang out and bum the wifi, and the sitting area was packed. We walked around looking for a table that would seat six people, and as we were about to leave a barista accosted us and asked a couple on a date to move to another table so we could sit as a group. None of us had even ordered anything yet.

The next day, I went the same Starbucks and split the skin on my finger getting my wallet out of my backpack. I gestured for a napkin to stem the bleeding since I couldn't find a dispenser. The barista gave me a roll of band-aids from the back of the store.

I bought a bottle of tea and got a one yen coin as change, and tried to leave it as a tip since I didn't want it. The woman at the register pushed the coin back and insisted I take it.

I think I could just walk into a department store, stuff clothes into my backpack, and walk out.

In Japan, there are metal and glass barriers separating train tracks from the platform. In California, there's a yellow plastic strip indicating where passengers shouldn't stand and small signs for suicide hotlines you couldn't see unless you were looking for them.

Everyone I've seen has been well-groomed and well-dressed except for an old man standing outside in oppressive heat with a sign advertising a sale at a glasses store.

I recently finished The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami. It's the story of Hitomi, a drifting twenty-something working at the titular thrift store, and the people around her. It's quiet and contemplative, a weave of implications and understatement and subtle metaphors. The climax of the novel is Hitomi and the owner's sister sitting in the back of the store, biting into tart apples that symbolize their relationships, their jobs, their life in general.

3. Each chapter in The Nakano Thrift Store ends with a vivid, particular image. Each chapter is named after an object the store acquires. On its surface, The Nakano Thrift Shop is a light romance, but the novel is really about how the objects in our lives can represent the people in our lives better than the people themselves. A sketch drawn by a lover, a photograph of an illicit affair turned romance, an old cutout advertisement featuring a model from the 80s – these objects occupy particular moments in time and space. That old lover might have changed, he may have grown old and jaded or become unbearably new age, but the sketch he drew eternalizes who he was when you loved him. History is nominally the study of people, but it's really the study of the objects they left behind. Whereas the settings and props and details in most stories are ornaments, present only to advance the plot or the characters, The Nakano Thrift Store has more empathy for its objects than its characters.

4. It's been a while since I just bought a book that looked interesting and read it all the way through. I should do that more. I should just read more.

5. “It was as if everyone doled themselves out in such small portions. Never completely open, not all at once.”

[wiresandstarlings]

a small place, but you seem so happy

1. Last evening, I decided to wake up around 11, eat and take a shower, then go to a yoga class before holding office hours. I woke up at around 9:30 and lay in bed watching Stanislav Cifka stream Hearthstone on Twitch for two hours, then brushed my teeth and ate lunch. At 12, 30 minutes before I needed to leave, I didn't really feel like going to yoga class. I was so tired, I could always go tomorrow, I didn't even have cash to pay for the class. I was biking to campus anyway, so I didn't really need the exercise. If I lay in bed for another two hours before my office hours, maybe I'd feel better.

At some point, I realized I hadn't taken my vitamins or antidepressant that morning. I took both and left twenty minutes later for the yoga class. This class was much worse than the last two. The instructor gave vague instructions, never stopped rambling about freedom and energy and chakras, and only played country music. She wasted a bunch of time on advanced poses basically no one was capable of. Her nose was grotesquely large and I imagined she had been hexed in a past life and her gnostic preaching was a form of repentance.

What would I be reborn as? Maybe one of those fish that clean the teeth of sharks or the underbellies of manta rays.

I was still happy I went, on balance.

I wonder if this is drug addiction.

2. John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van is narrated by a forty-something who shot himself in the face as a teenager and wound up a deformed outcast. He writes a mail-order game that inspires two kids to make a suicide pact, and he spends the novel trying to figure out why he committed suicide and whether he's responsible for how badly these kids hurt themselves. But he's not responsible, just like his own father wasn't responsible. Nobody is.

We like to pretend that suicides are carefully planned, that people who commit suicide shave their heads and give their possessions away and write notes cataloging every torment and grudge. We institute classes in high schools and make documentaries about bullying. We need to believe, ultimately, that we could have done something, that victims had reasons they committed suicide. But they don't. Fewer than a third of suicides leave notes, and as many as half of suicides are commited while drunk. Eighty percent of victims see a doctor for mental illness in the year prior to their suicide. In practice, suicide is desperate, deeply irrational act.

That's the beauty of Wolf in White Van. John Darnielle's characters and writing meticulously and melodically unravel the myth that our world has meaning. Wolf in White Van reveals that nothing has meaning, especially not death. That's why we have to be kind to each other.

Ironically, 13 Reasons Why teaches us the same lesson. 13 Reasons Why so profoundly and completely tells the myth of suicide that its farce is self-evident. It's perverse that over ten million people watched and enjoyed a show about a girl who killed herself, and that's the point. Suicide can only function as entertainment so long as we believe it can be understood and contained. That by watching 13 Reasons Why, we might stop the next Hannah Baker. 13 Reasons Why is only tolerable so long as we buy into its premise.

But we can't. The show is ridiculous. No suicidal person would actually record thirteen hours of audio and start a chain letter. The show is propulsive and shocking and at times painfully real, but that only makes its nature as entertainment more obvious. 13 Reasons Why is a soap opera about suicide – it's a wildly inappropriate joke. And I don't claim that 13 Reasons Why was meant to be this grand critique of our collective desire for narrative, but it certainly is one.  

3. I'd like to set a world record for walking around foreign cities alone, without purpose or destination. I might have set it already.

4. Misc. Zen wisdom: “Time enjoyed isn't wasted.” “Don't be ashamed of what you love. That's disrespectful.” “Nothing in life is promised except death.”