How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity
humanparts.medium.com
humanparts.medium.com
There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match.
This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackmore in her definition of a `memeplex` [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex
(Sidenote: I think a lot of the current cultural clashes in the western world can be interpreted as two big memeplexes fighting each other, having each developed strategies to be incommensurable [2] to the other side.)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard
Regarding the OP taxonomy, it makes me wonder if there's a way to aggregate these taxonomies to see if extracting the relevant principal components (that do map to the real world) from the subjective noise is possible.
One could imagine testing the Barnum effect in this way, writing a large number of these personality descriptions and seeing if real personality traits can emerge by having individuals rank which Barnum profiles best describe them.
This isn't a system to describe the human psyche as one how society likes to think about it.
I don’t think Peterson is promoting the carnivore diet, but I did hear him explain his diet on a podcast and it seemed pretty couched in curiosity, not resolution. The thing I remember is lots of “I don’t knows” and attribution of any benefits to it being an elimination diet vs any special property of beef.
He also says its not a healthy diet in general and that he doesnt know if it will work for other people.
I think a lot of people try to twist his words(or assume the worst interpretation) even on "normal" topics because they dont like his Politics.
Is a beef-only diet a good idea for the general population? Probably not. Could it be ideal for people with extremely rare auto-immune conditions that have an allergic reaction to virtually everything else? Sure, and that existing doesn't sound crazy to me at all.
I've noticed a trend where scientifically minded people tend to get hung up the "proven" at the expense of the "plausible", forgetting that everything they rightfully treat as proven once could have been dismissed in a similar manner. Real people in the real world have to make decisions based on nothing more than plausibility all the time, and I don't see why diet should be any different. Particularity if none of the "proven" solutions are working for you.
Put another way, there's a difference between "the evidence says this is wrong" and "there is no evidence that this is true".
So why beef only wouldn't work?
I have autoimmune diseases myself and have a very meat heavy diet, to me is what works, as soon I move to a more typical diet my health declines quickly.
Take care of both your mental and physical health.
Do something important with your life that's meaningful to you.
Respect yourself.
Life is bloody hard and you should be easy on yourself when you screw up. As long as you learn something from your mistakes and attempt to push forward again with new found knowledge, you're on the right path.
Clean up your room.
All of that is the utter nonsense Peterson spews out all of the time. None of that is useful or true. What a monster.
Of course, as long as you read it at the meta-level, comparing with other tools (scientific, pseudo-scientific), for example: Four Temperaments, MBTI, Big Five, Western Zodiac, Chinese Zodiac, etc.
While many predictions are bogus (e.g. month of birth and relationship comparability, vide https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaff...) they capture various traits of character people consider important.
The difference between science and pseudo-science is much more smooth than most scientists would like to admit. While MBTI is not up to academics standards, it is highly correlated with Big Five, trait by trait (still, AFAIR there is reason to use it in the place of Big Five). Plus, there is too much Jungian interpretation for MBTI, which is not up to current scientific standards. Still, I defended MBTI (in a dating context, e.g. as a self-identification) more times than I care to admit (for some insights, this https://www.16personalities.com/ is decent).
There is also a corollary that psychology is still in its infancy, much like biology before the discovery of bacteria, viri, or DNA.
...
In mathematics, there is a concept of a basis - more or less, directions, or orientation. We can express the same thing is a few different ways. Some bases are better (unit length, dimensions are orthogonal (uncorrelated)), but otherwise there is a lot of room here.
In this case, Colors of Mana are one basis. Just because it is an impromptu psychological explanation, does not mean it does not work. Yet:
- Some explanations or interpolations may not be valid.
- It is likely that we can find a more refined way.
All in all, I would love to make people2vec, where we embed various psychological trains as vectors, as see which other parameters (scientific or not) we can reproduce. All in all, even IQ can be considered a personality trait (as it is correlated with other traits of personality, it is not a separate entity) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/04/...
Hundreds of scholarly papers cited thousands of times. But it's pseudo-science. Psychology might not be an exact science but it IS a genuine scholarship meant to understand human behavior.
Feel free to make your case based on "I just don't like him" though, I'm sure it will be very interesting and will include the "R" word.
"The old man the boat." - a grammatically correct sentence in English. It's like Perl of human languages :)
Doesn’t really apply to the post title, though. Quotes would help. In Germany we have a thing called “Durchkopplung”. Basically, there are no spaces allowed inside nouns, so compounds are either concatenated or “durchgekoppelt” (which nobody does, unfortunately): The Magic-The-Gathering-Color-Wheel. However, in this case, the most elegant solution would simply be a more clear construction: “The color wheel of ‘Magic: The Gathering’” or, less fortunate, “Magic-The-Gathering’s color wheel”.
Often the meaning of the characters in a word kinda implies the meaning of the word, but that's not reliable at all. Sometimes the characters in a word are used just for their sound.
What is weird is because I know all this the name doesn't really sound that weird. They are just expressing a lot of things in the name which is normal to me.
A number of the (what I have been calling) universities in my country have the seemingly bizarrely redundant labelling "University College X" where X is the locale each is based in. Your comment made me look up why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_college
It appears that, “In a number of countries, a university college is a college institution that provides tertiary education but does not have full or independent university status. A university college is often part of a larger university. The precise usage varies from country to country.”
So now I realise that there is but one actual university in my country, that being the national university, and all the self-styled "universities" around the country are mere colleges.
Notions!
White represents not dying, both by preventing damage and by healing damage. White wins by having more health than their opponents, and outlasting them in battle.
Blue represents drawing the right card, mostly by drawing a lot of cards. Blue wins by controlling spells and hands. (When the article says "knowledge", note that the MTG deck in play is called "the library"!)
Black represents destruction. Black wins by controlling battlefields and removing blockers.
Red represents opportunities in the current moment and the random possibility of change. Red wins by playing on offensive tempo (the "upswing") and attacking vulnerable targets with instant abilities. ("Tempo" here is not quite as in music; it means playing cards turn after turn with a reliable ramping up in cost and effectiveness.)
Green represents growth and the potential for planning. Green wins by playing on defensive tempo (the "downswing") and tilting the battlefield in their favor over many turns.
Ideally, this system of categorizing by color works because there aren't any big strategies to winning that aren't color-aligned. "Milling", the strategy of deliberately destroying your opponent's library, is closely tied to blue and black, which are all about libraries and destruction. Keeping a "zoo", a battlefield full of mid-range on-tempo creatures, is closely tied to red and green, which are the two colors tied to tempo.
Except for blue of course.
- Teferi
The white one, Healing Salve, is very weak, it has later been replaced by a strictly better card.
The red (Lightning Bolt), green (Giant Growth) and black (Dark Ritual) are very solid cards and were seen in most decks of their respective colors in the early days of Magic, would be a bit too powerful today.
The blue one, Ancestral Recall, is part of the "power 9": the 9 most famous, overpowered and expensive Magic cards. It didn't make it past the ironically called "unlimited" edition.
I don't think those three are super comparable; Dark Ritual is much stronger than Lighting Bolt, which is much stronger than Giant Growth. Dark Ritual has purposely not been printed in a "standard legal" set since 1999; it's not legal in the Modern format (cards printed in standard sets since 2003), only in formats that allow cards from any time period. Lighting Bolt is legal in Modern, with its last standard printing being in 2010, although the head designer has indicated that they wouldn't print it in a standard set now. Giant Growth was printed in a standard legal set just last year, meaning it's still currently legal to play in the Standard format (roughly speaking, cards printed in standard sets in the past two calendar years).
It's interesting to note that when the ability to produce a lot of quick mana with a sorcery was shifted to Red, two of them (Seething Song and Rite of Flame) also got banned (in Modern).
Interestingly even the third most powerful boon is powerful enough to be a multi-format all star.
The last two of course... are not.
But don't forget all of the other broken stuff blue had from the start: timewalk and timetwister, to name two.
We old people used to joke that the most powerful card printed of all item was "island".
Blue's color identity is just 'being really good at Magic' it seems
And that's a bit tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness blue is the color of mind tricks and the hacker mentality, so it makes sense blue prefers manipulating game state in ways other colors just won't think of doing, and unfortunately the game's designers grossly underestimated just how powerful "manipulating game state" is.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-fo...
Three of the six cards (still) banned in standard are Green and two of them (Oko and Once Upon a Time) are also banned in Modern.
Blue is still the strongest color in Legacy and Vintage I think, even if the last few sets had a huge impact.
Also, Oko and Uro are also blue.
True, and as you say UG is a powerful combination, which is also kind of a new thing for me.
Those bans are a pain in the ass. They do it to hamstring the OP decks, which I understand and applaud, because nothing sucks more than having to play 4 copies of the same deck in one event. But then, because a bunch of us are using the same cards in our goofy rogue decks, these decks are also screwed and that ends up reducing diversity also. E.g. the ban of Fires of Invention has just screwed up my RW Giants deck. I mean, it's a Giants deck. About the only thing that made it viable at all was Fires.
Yes, you're all quite right. The word often associated with blue's style of play is "control", and in tabletop card games, control is about restricting what your opponent can do. Control often doesn't directly remove creatures from the battlefield (like red and black can do), or buff your creatures (like white and green), but instead directly removes your opponent's ability to introduce cards to play.
Counterspell is possibly the iconic blue technique. I found this article [0] a really interesting writeup of the mechanism design.
There is interestingly one other style closely associated with blue, called "bouncing". [1] While black tends to be able to permanently remove blockers, i.e. to the graveyard, blue's skill is in temporarily removing blockers back to the hand or library. In addition to being able to decisively change the course of a battle, bouncing can also provide control over several turns, because bounces prevent blue's opponents from being able to set up a proper offensive line, and force opponents to waste mana on fielding units that will be bounced. This latter requirement is analogous to how counterspell forces opponents to waste mana on casting spells that will be fizzled.
[0] https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/c...
White is really bad at destroying stuff directly unless it's artifacts or enchantments. It can destroy or tap lands, but typically ALL lands (2WW Armageddon). It's self-centered and when it affects enemies it's usually by placing rules, laws, constraints (Pacifism; cannot uptap; etc). Mass effects of various kinds are a common theme.
Blue doesn't deal with combat buffs. It would rather change the rules and make them irrelevant.
Black, I would say it's more about decay, death and atrophy than outright destruction. It's the worst anti-artifact, anti-enchantment color in the game and can affect them only indirectly. Black has very few buffs, it's a very negative color. Win at all costs!
Red can't affect enchantments. Like fire, it often burns (sacrifices) something to keep going. It can't last long.
Green is exceptionally bad at destruction and dealing damage. Its boons are often individual in contrast to white's, which is morel like a jungle than a society. Very early M:tg had cards like Stormseeker, they are notably absent in modern M:tg.
One of best ways to realize how much negative space there is in M:tg is to play Shandalar, the ancient RPG set in the world of Magic. You will see very many off-color cards.
White also has a thing for destroying creatures engaged in combat, which is both an extension of its rulesetting ("fighting is against the rules, and if you break the rules, you die") and its preference for pacifism (enforcing non-violence via harsh punishments). White is also the only color besides Blue that gets counterspells, typically with a taxing condition (e.g. "counter target spell unless its controller pays {2}"). White, like any responsible government, collects taxes after all.
> Green is exceptionally bad at destruction and dealing damage. Its boons are often individual in contrast to white's, which is morel like a jungle than a society. Very early M:tg had cards like Stormseeker, they are notably absent in modern M:tg.
And when Green does get to deal damage, it's through creatures. It gets straight-up buffs such as good ol' Giant Growth, plus effects where creatures get to deal damage to targets equal to their power (nicknamed "one-sided fight", after the "fight" keyword where two creatures damage each other equal to their power).
[1] https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/185815973623/does-r-d-...
White is opposite red and black, giving it the gap of high-risk play. White cannot make opportunities, but must straightforwardly initiate combat and exploit superior layouts on the battlefield. Both red and black have many useful instant spells which give them options that white doesn't have. The Ravnica guild is Rakdos, which is oriented around riskily playing an entire hand quickly, and also around destroying everything except enchantments.
Blue is opposite green and red, and indeed blue is missing the useful buffs in green and (to a lesser extent) in red. Blue is also missing the overlap between green and red, which is direct destruction of lands and artifacts. Blue represents not just knowledge, but abandoning nature in favor of libraries and cities; green and red remind blue of the power of wild nature. The Ravnica guild is Gruul, which is oriented around putting +1/+1 buffs onto friendly creatures.
Black does have more of a win-at-all-costs feeling than other colors, sacrificing library, battlefield, hand, and even graveyard for victory. Opposite white and green, black lacks health buffs and turn-over-turn permanent growth, and isn't rewarded for having a healthy zoo. The white+green Ravnica guild, Selesnya, is oriented around giving discounts for new creatures by tapping existing creatures, and making copies of creatures.
Red is across from white and blue. Like you say, enchantments are a bit of a puzzle for red. White uses enchantments to defend and protect, while blue uses them to surprise and misdirect; red has no way to deal with or emulate this. The Ravnica guild is Azorius, oriented around spells which change their behavior depending on when and how they are played.
Finally, green is across from blue and black. Blue and black have in common a willingness to sacrifice capability and knowledge in exchange for power. Green is gradual and lacks ways to trade away the library or sacrifice creatures. And the final guild, Dimir, is oriented around sacrificing cards to search the library; later, it expanded to also include sacrificing (both!) libraries directly.
I'm honestly kind of amazed at how well-designed all of this is. I suppose that surviving the test of time does imply some sort of quality design, but this is remarkable.
I'm amazed more people don't copy the idea (rather than straight-up ripping off the colors). M:tg is so interesting because of how well-defined colors are. Because they're defined, colors truly have a personality, and - crucially - play different.
For a straight ripoff check Master of Magic too. Very cheap on GOG. It's a Civilization 1 clone with tech tree/progression replaced by spells! Complete with common/uncommon/rare/very rare tiers. The system is so inspired by Magic colors it hurts. But incidentally, it's brilliant! In normal Civ games, tech tree is super boring because of many filler steps and boring +1 bonuses. Even otherwise great Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri suffers from this. But because each step in discrete (each step is a spell!), you get something concrete each time you complete research. The game also has extensive city build-up and a combat system that inspired Heroes of Might and Magic serries. The game has many design and balance flaws, and without the unofficial Insecticide patch by kyrub (who deserves eternal praise) it's extremely buggy. But they did something very, very right as game developers keep trying to clone Master of Magic. The game doesn't care much for balance, but more for very flashy and ambitious ideas.
Another accidental bit of brilliance came from memory limitation. Computers at the time didn't have enough RAM to support large maps. So instead they made 2 planes connected by magical towers. Very heavily guarded. The other plane has unique minerals, 4 unique races, magic roads that are instant travel, very magic everything (2x magic node output too). In late game, hell often breaks loose when POWERFUL computer civilizations emerge. You can also try to break into it early and loot it, but it's very risky.
One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. Read some Carl Jung, some Joseph Campbell, some TVTropes, and you too can make your own grand unifying theory of human psychology at home!
The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying, when on a first date or job interview or meeting at a party, they were telling me they were INWP or enneagram 14 second wing or a Capricorn rising Gemini.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...
Have you seen the number of banned cards?
Or the fact that it's accidentally Turing complete?
This is a card game, nothing more nothing less.
You can literally crash the game so you never know if you've won or lost.
If you're talking about things like combining effects together that happen to cause an unbreakable infinite loop, then I'd argue that you're wrong; there's a rule that defines unbreakable infinite loops as a tie, so you know whether you won or lost (i.e. you did neither; it's not an xor, although it is a nand).
But such things are not something which comes up in general play in practice: to set up such a machine you have to ignore several opportunities to just win the game. I've yet to even see an infinite loop which causes a tie.
See https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Ending_the_game:
> 104.4b If a game that’s not using the limited range of influence option (including a two-player game) somehow enters a “loop” of mandatory actions, repeating a sequence of events with no way to stop, the game is a draw. Loops that contain an optional action don’t result in a draw.
One (very contrived) example is the "three Oblivion Ring[0]" loop. Start with no non-land permanents on the battlefield, then cast an Oblivion Ring. There are no valid targets for the "ETB" (enters the battlefield) trigger, so nothing happens. Then cast a second Oblivion Ring; the only valid target is the first Oblivion Ring, so it's exiled until the second one leaves the battlefield. Finally, cast a third Oblivion Ring; the only valid target is the first Oblivion Ring, which is then exiled, causing the first one to come back. The only valid target for the first one is the third one, so that one is exiled and the second one comes back. The only valid target for the second one is the first one, so that one is exiled and the third comes back. This goes on infinitely, assuming no player has any cards that can respond to the ETB triggers by either countering it, removing the Oblivion Ring currently on the battlefield in some way, or putting another valid target for an Oblivion Ring on the battlefield. This isn't likely to ever happen in a game, but with the current rules, it's technically possible.
[0]: https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...
Regarding the oblivion ring loop, there's an example of it being used on MTGO, which doesn't end well (basically seems to crash the server and/or client): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGXG5rNe_tI
And here's the paper on the latest turing machine construction in mtg: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828
Oh wow, I should have realized that somebody would try it out online just to see what happens! I'm not surprised it ends up with some sort of clash; given that it's Turing complete, the game engine obviously can't detect whether a current state will end up halting or not...
> And here's the paper on the latest turing machine construction in mtg: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828
Awesome, thanks! I'll definitely check that out
Fair shout on the number of banned cards, though - R&D and playtesting could definitely do better, there!
Yes.
I would add that another insight is that it's much easier to communicate with people when you learn their language. It might be much easier for a nerd to introspect about their personality when prodded using MTG, a familiar framework. Similarly some people expect their relative positions in n-dimensional personality space to be codified using zodiac signs. If you can do so, meet people on familiar ground, at least at first.
For example, consider the trickster Jungian archetype. This archetype is universal to every human cultural, indicating (to me, atleast), that it's a core part of the human psyche, rather than some platonic shit that rose to the top of Jung's head.
My ex-girlfiend was getting a PhD in anthropology, and the different cultural archetypes and their similarities to each other among different, unrelated cultures astounded me. We independently come up with the same stories, over and over again. This cannot be a coincidence, rather it's a reflection of the unchanging nature of humanity.
While agreeing with what you're saying, I am curious what the parameters of such pattern matching are.
How many archetypes do you need so that they feel like "enough" to the average person? Is some number "too many"? Is 3 enough or do you need 5 or 6? Can I create some complex 97-archetype system, or would everyone scoff and say that archetypes 6, 14, 37 and 60-65 are all basically the same?
Yeah, no. If you're the author of this piece or you have a blog on Medium, get off it. There are plenty of other, less user-hostile options.
looks clean, simple and usable.
In reality all of these things are orthogonal, and while we do have words to distinguish them, they are only "opposing" in the sense that there is a word specifically meant to distinguish between them. Whatever that word is, it's just an over-simplified symbol in your brain.
There is always a solution that includes both "opposites" but is too paradoxical feeling for us to yet see.
Overall, these "opposing" concepts are really just different means of reaching the same juicy core of sentience, but nothing less than all at once will get us the entire way.
For what it's worth, if anyone is interested, "paradox" has been the thing for me since.
For me, it was neurotic as fuck. I started to question how predictable I was, and whether or not I could prove that the world around we wasn't just a tiny fake spec generated in real time based off predictions of what I would do next. The notion that my entire world could actually be very, very tiny as long as I was predictable enough kind of got to me. I started trying to do things I wouldn't do, and that was sort of a paradox. Eventually I began to use randomization to try to throw off the feeling. Nothing really worked, there's no way to prove that this isn't the tiniest matrix using advanced predictions to generate just a little more than what I sense. Also can't prove it's not a giant amazing universe. What-if-ism means: if it doesn't hurt to believe something, and you're willing to cede it's probably not reality, go for it. I like to believe in the universe as it's normally described.
Anyways, I find that the more I think about something, the closer I get to a paradox. What's the point of philosophy? To prove there is no point. What's the meaning of life? To understand there is no meaning. How do I achieve x goal? Stop caring about achieving it.
In a few words, rather than things existing as opposites, they exist as a paradox. They really shouldn't exist together.
As a WIP tangential thought (take it with a grain of salt, it's just for fun right now): as much as we take it for granted, I think there's something fucked up about a universe with both Cartesian and radial coordinates. Like, they shouldn't be together. And why just those two? Why not more? Why not just one? Seemingly things should be either universally relative, or personally relative, but not both simultaneously. It's like we're trying to survive in a universe with two disparate rule sets that by all accounts shouldn't be able to happen at the same time, and yet they are. It's a fucking paradox.
As a relevant example, consider the yin/yang symbol. It is composed of a duality which at first glance seems mutually exclusive, but what is most interesting about the two is actually where they interact. The paradox is that one cannot exist at the same (space-)time as the other, but each requires the other's existence to fully specify itself in terms of a cohesive concept. The light and dark sides are descriptors of two sides of the same coin. Finding the way to conceptualize that coin, rather than its sides, leads you to paradox that paradoxically makes sense! Just goes to show how "rationality" in the Greco-Roman sense is just one way to conceptualize our understanding, and that there are more ways than that.
We understand reality through language primarily built on identifying by what things are and what things are not. But maybe this form of understanding is limiting because it pre-supposes those dualities that make the language work.
To your point about coordinate systems -- there's something to be said about the ability to rationalize our sensory experiences into a formal logical system of description. However the paradox is actually that neither of those coordinate systems are "canonical" in the universal (literally and metaphorically) sense. They are first-order approximations to make our methods of reasoning (i.e., math) easier. But they do not reflect reality because, if you take the dominant theories of physics as true, the idea of space with curvature 0 or curvature +1 is a platonic ideal that cannot exist because matter and energy are distributed inhomogenously throughout space and time.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
I think where Hegel differs from you though is that the resolution of a contradiction can be something new and different, rather than just being an aspect of the original definitions.
Take ‘order’ vs ‘chaos’ - a resolution does not require choice between one and the other, but can consist of asking a novel question like what structure (order) of society best maximizes individual freedom (chaos)?
A Green/Blue hybrid deck is called “Simic” and does encompass both sides. It refers to a kind of cerebral approach to cultivating nature, like a biologist or a gardener. The faction is comprised of weird genetic engineered organisms.
Black/White is called “Orzhov” and blends the desire for order with a willingness to cut throats to achieve your goals. The faction runs a sort of high value loan sharking operation.
Communism - white ideology (equality for all) led by a deeply black, self-serving Party and leaders that did things like repeatedly imprison, execute, and starve and both their own party members and the general Soviet population. This sounds like your definition of Orzhov.
Nazism - black ideology (serve the German nation and the German people above all others) led by a white (at least according to their own beliefs) leadership. The Nazis killed people they considered non-Germans, but they (largely) didn't kill and betray those they considered their own.
The color inversion drove conflict between these neighbors, but both movements were black-white at the core.
One illustrative example: Hitler delayed transitioning Germany to a full wartime economy, aiming to spare the population the rigors of a full mobilization.
By contrast, early in the war Stalin ordered waves of green conscripts, some without rifles, in mass attacks at the front, with NKVD units right behind tasked with shooting deserters.
Communism might have rules and be ruthless, but it's also a utopian ideology that motivated heavily by a desire for "freedom" in its anarchist framing. It's just that this state of freedom is deferred (basically indefinitely). There is also a huge element of technocratic management in socialist economics. I would actually categorize it as a Blue/Red ideology with splashes of Black once the tankies show up. These are Grixis colors, but Grixis in magic is predominantly Black with a bit of Blue and Red, while Communists would be predominantly Blue/Red with a splash of Black.
Nazism is must more White rather than Blue. It's a preference for order, hierarchy, and purity, which are all classically White. It's also violent and ruthless, which is classically Black. There is also some Green in there because of the emphasis on a belief in primordial racial groups having a "natural" hierarchy. Their idea of nature is completely at odds with how nature actually works, but they think that's how it works. They're pretty close to Abzan (https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Abzan_Houses) with the general militarism, the xenophobia, and the obsessive focus on lineage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats
BLUE "The Big Picture"
WHITE "Facts & Information"
RED "Feelings & Emotions"
BLACK "Critical Judgement"
YELLOW "Positive"
GREEN "New Ideas"BLACK: Big-picture executive thinking.
RED: Thinking like a Reddit commenter. (Glib, humorous oneliners)
ORANGE: Thinking like a Hackernews commenter. (Glib, contrarian milti-liners.)
YELLOW: The color of the sun, sunflowers, lions, and therefore courage and the heart, as in middle ages medicine.
GREEN: Thinking about the environment, or money, or both.
CYAN: Coming up with business ideas similar to the printer ink pricing model.
BLUE: Thinking about celestial objects that are moving towards us, like Andromeda.
VIOLET: Being violent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_...
It's also worth knowing how our sense for colours did evolve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive...
And on top of that the colours can differ in symbolism https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in...
You're being way too charitable to Reddit commenters.
Also, so much effort ><
Think cockatrice that trades ergonomics for a rules engine. Much easier to play when the game just 'works'. It even has loop detection for when you go infinite with triggers.
One thing to note is the community run servers are plagued with performance hitches at peak time. If you play regularly on xmage with friends, I'd recommend making an image on your preferred VPS provider and spinning up an instance when y'all want to play.
Apparently since you can construct a Turing machine in Magic: The Gathering, this is a case where halting is formally undecidable in general. :-)
(not to suggest that any actual players have ever achieved a position in real play that would be undecidable by this engine)
[0] https://scryfall.com/card/pvan/304/oracle?utm_source=mw_MTGW...
Me and my friends have found that the most fun is to play using https://github.com/dr4fters/dr4ft (dr4ft.info, currently down, mirror here: https://beta-dr4ft.herokuapp.com/#) - we do a draft, then do a best of 3 rounds with the decks that we make. It makes deck-building a core part of the game, and it's always a completely new game. Brilliant fun.
PEACE THROUGH ORDER
HARMONY THROUGH ACCEPTANCE (of your place in society)
PERFECTION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE (of the Party's teachings)
FREEDOM THROUGH ACTION (go to work in the factory, that is the true freedom!)
SATISFACTION THROUGH RUTHLESSNESS
WHITE: swarm everything with little guys
GREEN: trample everything with giant monsters
RED: burn everything
BLUE: twist everything beyond recognition
BLACK: keep dragging up old, dead stuff
There's certainly little harmony and acceptance in Green. It's the color of rapid growth, of everything can be bigger. The others I can kinda see if quint at them a bit, but not green.
GREEN: creature growth, +1 counters, …
RED: direct attack spells (fireball, lightning strike), …
BLUE: counter-spells, …
BLACK: don't play it (don't know), graveyard stuff?
---
COLORLESS: artifacts 'n such
So this can happen: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dl3o2p/billionai...
If you're applying to stuffy places where the people aren't known to be into deep/complicated games, you might get rejected if you don't have something else. It depends if you want to apply to stuffy places because you need any job ASAP.
If you're doing okay and want to select businesses that like hobbies on resumes, go for it.
Problem with such games is that they are "winner takes it all" and in "real life" a win with "one life point" usually isn't worth it.
It's typically used to list hobbies and interests and if it gets mentioned during an interview, the candidate can briefly touch on their success (and maybe even how it lossely relates to the role).
For example, I played on a nationally ranked college club sport team(paintball) and was also the club president and team captain at the same time. This was on top of getting a dual-BA/MBA. Running the club and team was essentially the same as running a small business or medium sized department in a larger firm with a budget of $50K (this was all volunteer) and a "staff" of 20+ people.
The experience taught me that anyone who has done:
- full time college
- played, at a minimum, a club sport or was part of a debate team, competitive dance whatever
- was also an officer in said organization
had the wherewithal to "volunteer" three times for activities that required a large amount of commitment, discipline and organizational abilities. In other words, they chose to do more than the people who were just students.
I am, of course, biased because this was my background. That being said, I have always found a strong correlation between people with the trifecta of college/extracurricular/officer and the skills necessary to do well in a work setting.
YMMMV
Richard Garfield took the concept from a fantasy novel, kind of said "Yeah, kind of like that" and didn't think any more of it.
The reason is to limit the players' choices. If everyone has access to everything, there is no variety.
There's a lot of bleed between the colors and a lot of things that just don't quite make sense.
And they're also wrong according to Mark Rosewater, the current lead designer of the game. For example: Black isn't satisfaction, it's looking out for yourself. It's a selfish philosophy. Whereas one can find satisfaction through altruistic acts. And you can argue every color is looking for satisfaction, it's just that every color defines satisfaction in a different manner.
Of course it doesn't explain humanity, that's just bad clickbait. But clustering things together helps analyzing things according to a certain theory/outlook.
You can use MBTI that way too, even if its fundation is unscientific. Ask any set of correlated-enough question, and you end up with a cluster of people/events that correlate with a slew of other things.
The article is flat Earth wrong.
Garfield needed a design reason to force players to include and exclude whole swaths of cards. Separating them by some arbitrary distinction solved that. Then he slapped some flavor on top of that.
There are serious color-pie breaks in the first set. Why? Because the philosophy wasn't a primary or even secondary concern.
The other poster, and the article, aren't claiming that the color pie was developed with humanity or culture as a basis. They don't think that people can be solely described by a color and a description thought up by Garfield as a background for a card game. They don't disagree with you.
What they do think is: This is a useful lens to view people through. That's why the article refers to the techniques as an intuition pump - they allow you to use your intuition for a less complex space to solve more complex problems. I think I believe that this lens is a good one, but I'm not sure your comments engage with that angle at all.
Flat Earth is a great lens situationally, btw. If it's 3km East to the shops, and 4km North to work, then I know that they're 5km apart. Maybe not exactly right, but right enough. Easier to do that math in my head in a flat scenario than to try use some GIS tool or an oblate spheroid model.
And the metaphor isn't the point. So trying to defend the flat Earth model is missing the point of the metaphor entirely. It's an "ahksually" retort.
I think there are probably better lenses that are equally simple (maybe Big 5/MBTI, though I know little about them), but the advantage of the colour pie is that MTG players already spend time engaging with it and have a broad understanding of the tropes/stereotypes/etc. There's an example of applying it in the article, but I'm guessing you think that that's an outlier situation, and that it wouldn't broadly be useful. I can respect that, and I'm not sure I disagree yet. Call me back in a year or two.
Hadn't thought of using it as a narrative scaffold, and can definitely see why you wouldn't want it as your sole source for such. Having 5 possible character themes and 10-15 possible relationships does not an interesting story make.
I thought that demonstrating the use of the flat Earth model as a lens would be interesting, so apologies if it came across as a retort.
So there is a lot of content about designing for humans and little about detailed number-crunching and game balance.
He also explains most terminology and concepts, so a passing familiarity should be more than enough to understand the MtG-related content.
Also, no ads.
[1] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Drive_to_Work
[2] Cards are released in groups, called sets. A set (usually) takes place on a particular world and is connected to a part of the larger story, which are reflected in its gameplay.
Do you know other card games with interesting and consistently defined roles?
Reading the comments here feels like when I was a kid and I listen to the TV's neighbour and tried to imagine what about the movie was
This is messed up and shame on those who don’t realize this and downvote you.
There are many racial issues at WotC that need fixing, many.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depiction...