Three Great Magic the Gathering Stories

My favorite game of all time, bar none, is Magic the Gathering, the collectible card game.  For those who care about the details, I tend to be a card collector, but prefer to stick to the Standard format, which is a more constrained format that roughly limits the player to using cards from the last two years (the format creates a rolling obsolescence that players eagerly look forward to and crave – a neat trick on the part of the game designers because it simply creates a gold-plated monetization model while still keeping the game balanceable.

Anyway, there have been three stories that have been fascinating from the MTG world in the last 6 months.

1) The tale of the guy who won a $5000 magic tournament while shrooming.  Go ahead, see if you can guess which guy in the top 8 photo is currently hallucinating.

I stared at the trippy art in my beautiful deck and felt destiny course through me with the might of a million memories. I knew I would win the tournament. I also knew I’d gotten this feeling dozens of times before and I’d invariably lost, at some point, with all the dull brutality of probability….Ah, how sweet it is to win when you’re anyone. But how much sweeter when you’re a massive and incorrigible troll!

2) The guy who coded a neural network to create new magic cards.  Can a computer replace a designer?  These results imply ‘not yet’, but there’s clearly a world to explore here.

Slidshocking Krow
U
Creature – Dragon
Tromple, Mointainspalk
4/2

For anyone familiar with Magic—and I’ve already outed myself here—it will be immediately clear that this is a ridiculous card, in every sense. It’s tremendously overpowered, and its abilities aren’t quite right (the AI meant to emulate Trample and Mountainwalk, two abilities that creatures in the game actually do commonly have). But other than the misspelling, all the other details are technically sound; it could be a card in the game. It doesn’t break any rules.

3) If you’re going to cheat, don’t do it on camera.  I meant to cover this when it happened, but to be honest, there was another, more fully engaging but less interesting scandal in the games industry at the time.  In THIS scandal, experienced player Trevor Humphries was caught manipulating the top of his opponent deck.  It is fairly standard in MTG to have cards that require your opponent to shuffle your deck – for example, if you play a card that requires you to search your deck for a certain card, your opponent gets a free shuffle of your deck to prevent YOU cheating.  However, Humphries figured out how to take that shuffle and in almost every instance, drop a land on top of his opponent’s deck (effectively ensuring that his opponent’s next draw was not hugely impactful to the game state).  I should note that the videos showing this in action are pretty deeply fascinating, once you know what’s going on.

What’s really amusing here was the temper tantrum on the way out, once he recieved a 4 year ban from competitive play.  He seems to have no level of internalization how deeply he’s run afoul of the integrity of the sport.

“ENTIRE COLLECTION FOR SALE, on a FOUR year sabbatical. I guess I’m just as bad as all the nasty criminals of the world. Yeah, the rapists, murderers, felons, etc, I’m so bad I forgot I was the only one who knew how to sin. All you underground dojo KEYBOARD cage fighters won. Yea I messed up, I gave in to temptation. I AM HUMAN. I didn’t threaten your personal life, your woman’s or let’s play the game of (do) we publicly punish Trevor. A FOUR YEAR SENTECE ITS A FREAKING CARD GAME, yea all the media fire you guys really got your justice, F@&#*$ clowns.”