Identity Crisis

Some people are suggesting that the person who commented on my Inglourious Basterds review claiming to be critic Jonathan Rosenbaum is a fake. I’ve exchanged emails with the person and believe he is who he says he is.

The issue of identity on the internet is a mind-bender, though, isn’t it? I was paranoid about it even before I read this infamous New York Times Magazine article on trolling. Now, my default position is that someone isn’t who they claim to be. For a technology that was supposed to bring us together, it sure did make it easy for us to be distrusting.

Review: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

I’ve long thought that Quentin Tarantino (whom I will call QT from now on, as his name is a pain in the ass to type) operates on three distinct levels as a filmmaker:

1) The movie itself. No matter what the other meanings he might intend, he’s trying to make Reservoir Dogs a good crime movie, Kill Bill a good martial-arts movie, etc.

2) The audience reaction. Being a geeky former video store employee himself, QT is a decent judge of what people like, and he’s usually trying with each scene — sometimes with each line of dialogue — to get a specific reaction from the viewer.

3) The cause of the audience reaction. After making a decent movie and getting a particular reaction from us, QT then wants us to ask why we reacted that way: what does it say about us as an audience, or about the genre of film we’re watching, or some other meta-topic.

Now, not every QT movie works on all three levels. I found Death Proof’s level 3 to be lame, and the deliberate pacing of Jackie Brown caused a lot of people to find it a level 1 failure. He’s always aiming for that level of depth, though, which is why I found Inglourious Basterds to be a qualified success.

The Soul of Wit

Like many people, I’m available on Twitter, and I generally enjoy using it. However, I’m well aware that there’s a fairly large segment of our society that actively hates Twitter, and they’re usually not quiet about it; as one writer for the AV Club said in a tweet, “Eating my soul away, 140 characters at a time.” I wanted to think out loud a little bit about this, and why I think Twitter is a useful way to communicate.

On Donkeys

So I was playing online poker a couple of days ago: no-limit with blinds of $0.25 and $0.50.  A hand came up where I held

in late position, and decided to call a raise to $1.50 from a player who had about $20 in front of him (compared to my $50 or so).  The flop came

i.e., just about perfect.  The opponent made a pot-sized bet, and having watched him for awhile I figured he was not on the flush draw, so I just called.  The turn came

and my opponent went all-in, representing the flush.  I instantly called him and it turned out he was on a really loose bluff with

He was drawing dead — the 9 that gives him the straight gives me a full house — and I won a nice pot.  Afterwards, the conversation started.  If you’ve ever played online poker, you know what I’m talking about:

Playing GOOD IDEA/BAD IDEA with the New Magic Rules

So I get home from a fun New York vacation, and my Twitter is full of tweets about the new rules announcement for Magic. So, I thought I would offer my take.

1) Simultaneous Mulligans: This is simply a smart decision.  One-at-a-time mulligans slow down the tournament game, and thus are more likely to lead to a draw.  Casual players probably won’t even care; some kitchen-table games just make up their own mulligan rules anyway.  Verdict: Good Idea.

2) Terminology Changes: Simple games — i.e., games that are easy for new players to understand — have simple terminology.  Using terms like “Battlefield” and “Exile” instead of “in-play zone” and “removed-from-game zone” allows for simple wording on new cards, allows for better wording on mechanics like Suspend, allows for new players to better understand the difference between stuff that’s in the graveyard and stuff that is out of the game … there’s no shortage of things that become easier.  And remember, most people don’t learn magic from a rulebook anyway, so simple terminology makes it easier for a person to teach his little brother or girlfriend or whomever.

You don’t want to get me started on this next issue, because I’ll rant forever.  But it bugs me to no end when players like Paulo Vito Damo de Rosa write things like, “Battlefield and Exile I can live with, though I personally think they are childish names that make me somewhat embarrassed to play Magic.” Attention Paulo: I make a great living in an island paradise thanks to Magic, and I wasn’t even that good. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. Verdict: Good Idea.

3) Mana Burn. See, I don’t get why mana burn is a difficult concept to understand.  Just about every fantasy story worth reading mentions the concept that magic has a price, and it can kill you if you don’t pay it.   I grasped this immediately upon learning how to play Magic.  So why are we now claiming that “many players aren’t aware of the existence of mana burn as a game concept”?  Isn’t it perfectly in keeping with game flavor?  Verdict: Bad Idea.

4) Token Ownership. An obscure rule gets eliminated because it created confusing game situations that players could sometimes take advantage of.  Attention Wizards of the Coast: taking advantage of obscure rules and confusing game situations is awesome!  It makes new players feel smart, like they’ve accomplished something.  I’m sure your market research says otherwise, but from my experience I must say Verdict: Bad Idea.

5) New Combat Rules. Well, removing the idea of combat damage using the stack is, in the abstract universe of game design, a positive development.  It just doesn’t make any logical or flavorful sense for a Fulminator Mage to be fighting with somebody, decide to go off and blow up a land in the middle of the fight, and still be able to kill his opponent.

However, this change will have a lot of after-effects that I’m not so happy with.  For one thing, a lot of creatures get a lot worse.  The aforementioned Fulminator Mage example makes no sense, but on the other hand I think it’s cool that Fulminator Mage was a playable card.

For another thing, this whole “putting creatures in a line” for damage is maybe a little over-simplifying.  It seems like it’s a lot harder to out-play people during the combat step now: not only are there no tricks while damage is on the stack, but there are fewer ways for your opponent to screw up his blocks.

I always thought that the VS System was a card game which absolutely should not have failed.  You get to fight as your favorite comic book characters!  And yet fail it did, mainly for two reasons: 1) Its rules got too complicated, too quickly; and 2) it was virtually impossible for a bad player to beat a good one, especially in a tournament setting, which causes new players (who are usually bad, at least to start) to quit playing.  The new Magic rules are an attempt to avoid those two problems, the obvious cost being that experienced players losing a few of their opportunities to make good plays.  There was a time when I would have been very upset at paying that cost, but that was a long time ago… Verdict: Good Idea.

Why The Cleveland Cavaliers Are Losing

The conventional wisdom about the NBA Playoffs is that the team with the best player is advantaged.  It’s not always true — Michael Jordan was the best player on the floor when he was eliminated by the Knicks and Pistons during his first forays into the playoffs, and the Lakers had the best two players on the flo0r when they lost to Chauncey Billups and the Pistons in 2004 — but it’s true often enough to satisfy the experts.  That’s certainly why the Cavs were heavy favorites in Vegas prior to game 1; LeBron James was the MVP by a large margin, as he had one of the best statistical seasons since the invention of the three-point shot.

Well, Vegas and all Cleveland can’t be happy with what they’ve seen since then (one miracle shot aside).  The Cavs are down 3-1 and staring elimination in the face; you can count on your hands the number of times a 3-1 series lead has been lost in the NBA.  Everyone from Mark Price and Craig Ehlo to David Stern and Nike is wondering how in the world this is happening.  Good thing I’m here to explain it…

Review: STAR TREK

For all that you hear people complaining about the over-use of the word “reboot” with respect to pop culture, only two franchises have really been rebooted of late: Batman with the Christopher Nolan films, and the Star Trek franchise that is now being helmed by J.J. Abrams. (I’ve heard some folks say that Terminator is being reset, but it seems like T3, the television series, and Terminator: Salvation are three entirely different attempts … and it’s not even clear what got rebooted.)

Joel Schumacher had so thoroughly blundered with Batman that no one really cared if the not-so-sterling efforts of Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney were lost in the resetting process, but Star Trek fans are a different animal. For the diehards, throwing out the efforts of Shatner and Nimoy was a sacrilege on the level of re-crucifying Jesus Christ Himself.

So, I thought it was pretty impressive that screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman — who also wrote the odious Transformers — were able to find a solution. Not only did that solution avoid the painful awkwardness that often comes with a Star Trek product catering to its most intense fans, but in fact it provided the heart and soul of the movie: it established how Kirk and Spock can have a friendship that is different than the original TV series, yet also a little bit similar.

This approach requires really good acting from the Kirk and Spock characters especially: if they do too much impersonating of Shatner and Nimoy, the movie just turns into camp.  For the most part, I think we got that quality acting.  Chris Pine does a good job of avoiding impersonation as Kirk, but it doesn’t really seem that he changes over the course of the movie … he’s just as cocky and insubordinate going out as he was coming in.  He plays it well, but I guess I was expecting a little more nuance from him then we ended up getting.

Zachary Quinto is the real revelation: the script’s rebooting solution forces Spock to suffer a terrible loss, and as a result Quinto plays “inner turmoil” much more than Nimoy ever had to. He plays a changing, evolving character better than Pine does … better than any actor in this franchise has in at least fifteen years. I’d even go so far as to say that Abrams might, somewhere down the road, be able to get away with replacing Pine, but he’d be completely screwed if he ever let go of Quinto.

So, with the rebooting nonsense out of the way, and trustworthy actors in the leads, the movie can get down to being awesome. I recently saw a Tweet which said Abrams had made “the best Star Wars movie since [The Empire Strikes Back],” which I thought was a little unfair. If there’s one drawback that the original series and the Next Generation cast shared, it’s this: for a fleet that has spent a lot of screen time at war, Starfleet hasn’t done that much fighting. (I’m sure the special effects budgets played a part in that.)

This was the first time since The Wrath of Khan that I really got the feeling that Starfleet is a navy, sort of a cross between a submarine navy and Commodore Perry’s Black Ships establishing relations with Japan.  This naval action doesn’t leave much room for the sort of philosophical wrangling that was the hallmark of Gene Roddenberry, but I presume that kind of thing is coming in the sequels. (Orci and Kurtzman would do well to watch Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of The World to see how their realistic fleet might face an internal moral quandary.)

Getting back to the whole “reboot” issue, my only real problem with Batman Begins was that it bit off more than it could chew. Nolan mixed an adaptation of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One with the trappings of a summer blockbuster, and the end result got a little unwieldy as it went on. Abrams’ Star Trek doesn’t make that mistake, and as a result I found it to be a tight, exciting way to take an old vessel and boldly go … well, you know.

Prisms

In general, I tend to look at the world through two prisms:

1) Competitions. These are challenges — against others, or against yourself — where some kind of objective value is at stake. Games, in other words, or things which can be covered by game theory.

2) Appreciations. These are challenges where there is no value at stake, or the value at stake is not objective. Another way to describe these might be arts, or entertainments.

Sometimes you’ll use both prisms at the same time. A sports team’s style of play might be aesthetically pleasing, and also the best way to maximize their players’ values. Two chess moves might offer equal chance to win, so you just choose the most beautiful one available.

Conversely, the same action might be seen through either prism, depending upon the situation or the person. For instance, a famous scene in the movie Dead Poets’ Society uses the idea that poetry’s greatness can be numerically quantified, as well as appreciated. The movie takes the position that giving poetry an objective value is ridiculous, but hey, in the present day websites like Rotten Tomatoes try to do exactly the same thing with film and other types of art.

In the same way that real prisms refract light into its component colors, these metaphorical prisms break down the things you do and help you think about what you’re doing and why. If you are playing Magic because you gain pleasure from building an unusual deck, that’s fine, but then you should ask yourself why you enter tournaments. If it’s all about the creativity, what does a purely value-based arena like a tournament offer? And if you really want to be winning tournaments, is your deckbuilding style at odds with that?

Thinking about what prism you are using can also help you find the right path to success. In baseball, the home run makes for the biggest cheers and the best highlights, but not all teams want that much power; they may have to consider their stadium or the salary they’ll have to pay. So teams may try to maximize their ability to win by going with “small ball,” or they may try to maximize their ability to put butts in the seats with a big-power team. The team needs to know its goal, and it can only do that by considering which prism they are using to look at baseball itself.

A professional gamer who I greatly respect recently posted a Tweet asking, “I wonder [if] there are unintended side effects to a [life] spent always trying to maximize value.” It seems to me that there is at least one such effect: your ability to appreciate, to get something out of that other prism, could be lost. Most of the time you use the appreciation prism, all you get out of it is the feeling that it’s good to be alive, and as Watchmen reminds us, life is an unquantifiable abstract. There’s value in it, but you won’t know how much until it’s too late.

In fact, I suspect this person doesn’t really spend his entire life trying to maximize value. Does he go to the movies? If so, how does he determine whether he’s getting good value for the ticket price? Does he decide to see only movies that score above X on Rotten Tomatoes? Or does he trust in the appreciation judgements of other people, like professional critics or his friends? In fact, does he measure his friends only in terms of their ability to maximize his value? Or is friendship something which must be appreciated?

Here’s my final point: you ought to be able to look at everything you do through at least one of these prisms. If you are doing something — working in fast food when I was a teenager comes to mind — and it can’t get your competitive juices flowing, and you can’t appreciate any aspect of it, then you should be doing something else. I left my old job because, although I once appreciated it and found it competitive, I realized that both of those had gone away a long time ago. If you don’t want to compete, and you can’t appreciate, then you’re just wasting your time.

Value Meal

On Monday, Star City author Todd Anderson wrote an article drawing many comparisons between Magic and poker. A forum response drew a much more interesting comparison:

[It is] better to compare Magic to bridge or other trick taking games where you are trying to get the maximum value from each card.

Bridge is a complicated game if you don’t know what he is talking about, so let me explain using Spades instead. In Spades, each of the four players has 13 cards at the start of the game, and each round (or “trick”) of the game involves each player playing one card. The suit played by the first player is noted, each player has to play a card in that suit if he can, and then the highest card in that suit wins the trick.

If you can’t play in-suit, you can play any card you want. Spades are the “trump” suit; if one or more spades have been played in the trick, then the highest spade wins the trick no matter what else is played. Winning a trick can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending upon the point values of the cards involved and the strategy that you are using.

One strategy is to go “blind nil,” announcing to the table that you will take zero tricks before you’ve even seen your hand. If you succeed, you get a boat-load of points, and if you fail you lose a boat-load of points. So if you go blind nil and you fan open a hand with the ace of spades, you’re screwed. You’re going to end up taking at least one trick no matter what you do. (1) You might think that you’re also screwed if you fan open an ace in one of the other three suits, but it’s not necessarily so … not if you can get maximum value out of your other cards.

For example, this…

… would be a great nil hand, if not for that ace. But, you can use some of your other cards to try and create a situation where somebody leads some other suit that you don’t have, and you drop an ace on them. Maybe you use that jack of hearts early, to make your opponents think they can get you with hearts, and then after you’re out of hearts you drop the ace. Maybe you do something else. Depending on how well you can read or manipulate your opponents, that ace is not much of a disaster at all.

The really interesting thing about that forum comment is that the commenter seems to think poker isn’t like this. In fact, it is. Most amateur poker players know that in no limit hold ‘em,

is a worse hand than

but, being amateurs, they don’t realize how much worse it is. The suited hand is a decent-but-not-spectacular holding that is playable in many situations and against many opponents; the off-suit hand is a marginal hand that will break you if played too often. In the same way that getting poor value out of your non-Ace cards can hurt you in the Spades example above, you can’t afford to have that ten have less than the maximum effect on that jack.

The jack and ten are only mediocre cards on their own, and combining them together adds to their value because of the possibilities of a straight. However, it’s only the flush possibility that maximizes the value of both cards; otherwise, if you have the off-suit hand against three other people and a flop like

comes, what do you really have? One pair with a lame kicker and a couple of re-draws that, combined, will come in less than 5% of the time. If somebody fires the size of the pot at you, what reasonable value plays can you make? However, if you have the jack-ten of hearts here, you might be willing to make a big semi-bluff raise based upon the flush draw, even if you were sure someone else had a better jack. It’s all situational — much like in Magic — but the suited hand gives you more options in more situations, and thus more value.

You see these sorts of value considerations in lots of places. Take the NBA: the Denver Nuggets have had plenty of talent over the past few years, but it was anchored by Allen Iverson and Marcus Camby – two guys who, on offense, just do not pass the ball. Furthermore, since those two guys are veterans, their example shows the younger talent on the team (Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith) that they shouldn’t be passing the ball.

A couple of trades later, and Chauncey Billups is now leading the way, showing Anthony and Smith how to lead in turn, and maximizing the team’s overall value. Based on what I’ve seen from the L.A. Lakers recently, the Nuggets are actually my dark-horse pick to win the championship, because they are that much more than the sum of their (already highly skilled) parts.

In the article I mentioned at the top of this post, Todd Anderson leads by saying, “Luck does not exist.”  That’s absurd on its face: there’s a random element in almost every facet of life.  It’s in that random space that I’ve been making my living these past eight years.  And in that space — the randomness of Magic, of poker, of the distribution of pay amongst academic librarians, of the Watchmen film’s ability to get box office, whatever — is where you must maximize your value.

So don’t just go thinking that value is only about making the right-sized bet or building your Magic deck correctly. As long as you can find a way to measure it, value can be found anywhere, and it’s there for the taking.

 

 

(1) Actually, most variants of Spades let you pass cards to your partner if you go blind nil, so you’re not screwed. But I’m trying to keep my hypothetical example simple, so I’ll ignore that fact.

Tommy Ashton’s Finest Hour

My friend Tommy Ashton won a Pro Tour qualifier in Roanoke last weekend with this Bant deck:

4 Birds of Paradise
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Jhessian Infiltrator
4 Shorecrasher Mimic
2 Kitchen Finks
4 Dauntless Escort
4 Rhox War Monk
4 Rafiq of the Many

4 Bant Charm
3 Finest Hour

3 Forest
2 Adarkar Wastes
4 Brushland
3 Mystic Gate
3 Reflecting Pool
4 Treetop Village
4 Yavimaya Coast

Sideboard:
4 Burrenton Forge-tender
1 Cloudthresher
2 Kitchen Finks
2 Negate
2 Path to Exile
2 Elspeth, Knight-errant
2 Captured Sunlight

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Based upon tournament results over the last month or so, upon everything that good players are writing, and upon everything I’ve experienced myself in the Tournament Practice room on Magic Online, I had acknowledged that some sort of token-based deck with Windbrisk Heights was the best in the format.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I just feel like any deck where your key to victory is attacking with three or more creatures is a little overkill; if you untap with three or more creatures in play, shouldn’t you be well on the way to victory anyway? I respect the strategy, it’s just not the sort of deck that I am going to want to play, given a choice.

Tommy’s deck, on the other hand, is an aggressive strategy that I can get behind. With Finest Hour in play, every creature is a threat. The Exalted bonus is until end of turn, so under Finest Hour a Birds of Paradise attacks for 1, then gets to untap and attack for 2 — as much damage in one turn as all three of those Spectral Procession tokens combined. And that’s the worst creature to have in that scenario; Finest Hour + Rafiq is 20 damage by himself.

The Shorecrasher Mimic is the card that surprised me the most; I imagine it was the card that caused Tim Aten to ask Tommy, “so, you did cheat a lot, right?” Ever since the printing of Rhox War Monk and Rafiq of the Many, people have had visions of giant Mimics crashing in their heads, but there just wasn’t enough critical mass of G/U cards there in order to, y’know, win. In this deck, though, the Mimic doesn’t need that much help: during his Finest Hour he can get in there for a minimum of 13 trampling damage. Plus, Bant Charm can cunningly step in and counter a Path to Exile that would otherwise ruin your Mimic’s Finest Hour.

It’s not only the Mimic, though; the thing that I like about this deck is that so many of its cards combo off of each other. Noble Hierarch makes Rhox War Monk both faster and bigger. The Infiltrator makes Mimics huge, but with Exalted he also presents a good threat in his own right that can’t be stopped by tokens or Plumeveil. Of course, all of these interactions require that you draw the right cards in combination, but if you have good practice with the deck and you are good at making mulligan decisions then that’s not a crushing drawback.

With Alara Reborn not yet available online, I obviously haven’t been able to test this deck. However, I imagine its worst matchup is probably some sort of Red deck that can burn down any problems across the board, and keep the creature count low. Luckily, Tommy didn’t have to worry much about that; the top 8 was 50% Black/White token decks. Tommy defeated two such Black/White decks in the top 8 and finals; I imagine that the only card even remotely troublesome for him in that matchup is Path to Exile.

I won’t be playing Regionals, for obvious reasons, but if I was this would be the deck that I’d have in my backpack. Good luck to all!