This first section is written especially for the people who hate my meandering, long, irrelevant leaders.
I’m sitting in the car listening to Thievery Corporation – don’t you love those pointless details we writer-types slip lithely into our paragraphs to either demonstrate our sophisticated palettes or establish our credibility amongst people with similar preferences? – on the way back from a PTQ in Atlanta. It was, without a doubt, the most poorly-run event I have ever had the misfortune of attending.
Imagine each one of these situations and tell me if they couldn’t be used as tactics to extract information from prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Coalesce them all into one enormous smorgasbord of ineptitude, add just enough wholesale confusion to make communication with the players impossible, and you come close to approaching the calamity that was this Qualifier Event.
1) One-hundred-plus hefty, roadtripped gamers packed into a room capable of holding thirty.
2) The continued signing-up of players after said room has reached said capacity.
3) The cancellation of aforementioned tournament because of aforementioned idiotic policy.
4) A Beethoven-caliber choir of righteous indignation following this decision.
5) Rescheduling the event for the weekend of Grand Prix: Columbus in an attempt to resolve the problem.
6) Confusion on the part of the tournament organizer as to why people who drove 7+ hours to attend this event would be upset at this policy, and a complete lack of explanation as to how this problem would be avoided next weekend.
7) Moving the event location all the way across the city as a “compromise”…
8) … into an old college gymnasium…
9)… where the first round started at around three-thirty…
10) … only to be delayed again because two separate teams had registered their team name as “A”.
In all fairness, the judging staff handled the event extremely well once it got up and running – particularly the head judge – and the TO fed the players lunch and gave out booster packs as compensation. Still, it is completely inexcusable not to understand that one of the last PTQs of the season is going to require much more space than a tiny single-unit game store. This was seriously one of the smallest stores I have ever been in, and we knew when we arrived almost an hour before the tournament was scheduled to start that it simply wouldn’t be enough.
That last sentence really needs another subordinate clause.
Obviously Cody and I 1-2ed in short order due to keeping three-land hands in eighteen-land decks and missing our fourth through seventh land drops in two separate matches. Tim always tells me I actually err too far on the side of skill over luck in Magic, but this was one of the few times in recent memory where I can honestly attribute a bad tournament to luck. Every other tournament of the season I have made some pretty evident mistakes, but in this one I honestly cannot think of anything I ought to have done differently.
Bummer. Hook me up with some “No More Tears” baby shampoo, please, because I’m certainly going to need it. A few of those “Handi-Wipes” certainly couldn’t hurt.
So what I need right now is for Jan Doise to pick up at least one Pro Point at GP: Strasbourg. Shotgun?
Alright, so Richard and I have been working extensively on a Legacy deck that we’ll debut at the GP. Unfortunately, I can’t really talk about that format right now because of that. I wanted to talk about Dragonstorm and why it’s far and away the highest-EV deck to play in Standard right now, but I don’t play enough Standard to feel confident opining about anything specific. I haven’t thought about Extended in ages, I wrote about 2HG recently, and although I could rant about 9th-edition draft for years on end I am sure nobody wants another installment of that (least of all my editor).
So I guess I’ll finally get around to that topic.
I promised I’d write about IDs awhile back, but kept putting it off because I had something strategically relevant to say. Enough people have mentioned it, however, for me to go ahead and get it out of the way.
Specifically, I want to talk about why intentional draws – and even intentional concessions – are not somehow morally wrong. I am not arguing that people who won’t ever intentionally draw are horrible human beings, and I’ve never made anything even remotely resembling that claim. I do believe that people who want to receive intentional draws and concessions ought to be willing to dole those out in turn when appropriate, and conversely that people who think IDs are the most horrible things in the universe should be prepared to abide by what that policy entails. But enough people think that predetermining the outcome of a match is wrong that I felt I ought to outline why that is not the case.
Incidentally, I think it’s worth pointing out first that many people automatically assume that the burden is on ID-supporters to prove their case. The argument, as best as I can tell, is that intentional draws are so seldom found in sports or games outside of Magic that it’s necessary to justify their inclusion. Several people in the forums have articulated an opinion similar to this. Alternatively, they may view IDs as by their very nature aberrations against the spirit of the game, since when you agree to one you’re necessarily not playing out a match. Therefore, it rests on the shoulders of those who agree to draws to demonstrate how they can ethically do so.
By contrast, I think the structure of tournament Magic actually encourages concessions and IDs, and seeing as how it is the responsibility of tournament players to maximize their expected value over a span of several years, the burden would actually rest on those who would prevent them from doing so.
I’ll get to that later, but I’m going to go ahead and tackle the “sports” objection first because there are so many holes in it that it’s too easy of a target to ignore.
It is almost too obvious to mention that professional athletics, particularly in America, have very little to do with professional Magic, and so drawing parallels between them doesn’t really accomplish much.
Perhaps the sport with the most similar tournament structure is golf, but golf at its core is an individual sport. Of course you have to beat out the other players to move forward, but it’s not a zero-sum game. If you hit a Birdie, great, but it doesn’t have anything to do with another player’s score. So there’s not the possibility of a single-round “concession” or “intentional draw” with any given person.
That’s well and good, these people say, but most popular sports pit one team against another, and there’s always a winner and a loser. Yet you don’t see the Grizzlies (lol) “scooping” the Warriors (lol) into the playoffs. Undefeated teams don’t sit and intentionally-draw all their games after the middle of the season just to ensure a bracket position. Why then, these people say, does this happen in Magic?
That point of view is very cute and adorable, and I very well might have gotten it as a graduation present for Katie if it came in teddy bear form. But professional sports aren’t results-driven on a per-game basis, they haven’t been since the advent of modern advertising, and anybody who thinks they are should stop being a fan and start being a businessman.
Think about it: How on Earth could the Mavericks, for example, just decide to cancel all their games a month and a half before the playoffs because they are already a lock? They’ve got a contract with ESPN to put X amount of games on television for Y amount of dollars, they have seats to fill so that they can make a killing off tickets, they have advertisers sawing off arms and legs to plaster their logos on the back of cheap fold-up seats and giant jumbo-tron LCD displays, and they have fifteen billion corporate executives dying to impress potential clients with box seats. No, they don’t play out every game for the love of basketball, or because the players are ready and eager to go out on the court and “give their all for the fans.” Believe me – and Cody can attest to this, since we went to school with the families of most of the Memphis Grizzlies – many of them are giant assholes. They play out their games because the NBA exists to make a relatively small amount of people a giant, giant amount of money, and that only happens if SportsCenter can replay the highlight reels. I promise you that if franchise owners could ID their way into the elimination rounds every year, most of them would.
You’ll recall that in the Top 8s of Grand Prix or Pro Tours, nobody’s sitting there scooping to one another on camera. By contrast, nobody is chomping at the bit to watch my fourth-round PTQ playbacks. I’m not getting paid by the minute to wear a Doritos baseball cap. Without these external incentives, there’s no reason to always “play it out.” Moreover, in baseball it’s commonly accepted that you don’t play out the bottom of the ninth if one team already has the game won. The result is more important than “the love of the game,” whatever that means – at least according to a certain definition. The less cynical among us, though, will realize that you can simultaneously love the game and not play out every round even though you’re mathematically eliminated. Also, concessions and intentional-draw type situations do in fact occur in very popular modern sports where advertising and sales are not so prominent. Sumo wrestling employs a point-total cutoff for a wrestler to advance into the next round of competition, and wrestlers are not necessarily paired according to a Swiss system of equitable losses and victories. In Freakonomics, Levitt examines how wrestlers who are won win shy of meeting their point-total cutoff disproportionately win their last match, even accounting for the fact that a wrestler might be more driven to win an elimination round than he would be otherwise. Moreover, wrestlers who “scoop” another wrestler into “Day 2” tend to be reciprocated if they’re in a similar situation later on.
Is that “right” from a moral perspective? I would say, “sure,” but the most important thing to consider is not whether it’s right or wrong. What matters is the fact that when people belong to established circles of competition, and the members within those circles subscribe to a collective identity, patterns tend to naturally emerge that ensure the greatest possible gains for the group as a whole. If you prohibit this from happening, you emerge with a self-destructive system – that is, you require the participants therein to act against their own self-interest, thereby encouraging them to subvert the system. By contrast, if you allow for these natural tendencies within the system and regulate them according to ethical guidelines – similar to what Magic is doing now – you are able to sustain a much more viable player-base. This is even truer in Magic, where repeated draws are conceivable within the normal context of a game. What you don’t want is to have to have a judge monitor every single match to ensure that every potential-wannabe-ID-er isn’t lying when they tell the judge “He Cannonaded me when I was at 2 and he was at 3,” or that they really couldn’t finish game 3 in a reasonable amount of time. That is what I was talking about when I mentioned “the structure of the Swiss system” earlier.
You also prohibit people from making the strategic choice to “ID” a bad player who they think they can beat into the Top 8, and you don’t want to start removing layers of strategy from the game.
So I have spent all this time describing realities, and how Magic isn’t all that different from most other forms of competition when you take into account the determinate factors for the differences they do possess. That doesn’t answer the “moral” question, though – that is, whether or not (despite the way things actually work) if that is how they should work. I’ll go ahead and try to do that now.
Those of you who think IDs are like gay marriages to a neo-conservative, let me ask you this: is it wrong to drop for a tournament after going 0-2? If you’re mathematically eliminated from the Top 8, are you committing some heinous infraction by saying, “You know what? I want to analyze what I did wrong, go home, and salvage a Saturday.” I would imagine that the majority of you would say, “No, of course not, that’s perfectly acceptable!” I would agree with you; after all, if someone wants to stop playing, or has nothing to gain by doing so, why require him to stay in the tournament?
Alright, so let’s say that person is 4-2 – still mathematically eliminated – and is paired in the final around against someone who is 5-1, or even 4-1-1. All of the sudden, if that person says, “You know what? I want to analyze what I did wrong, go home, and salvage what remains of a Saturday,” can he or she no longer do so? What has changed about the action such that it becomes morally reprehensible?
The argument tends to go, “Well, you’re giving that guy a win that he didn’t deserve,” or something along those lines. I don’t buy that, though. For one thing, if you’d dropped earlier, then it’s less likely that “the guy” would have been paired down, and could have avoided getting paired down at all. Second of all, how does he “not deserve” a Top 8 position? He has more wins than most people at the tournament, and assuming you’re the only person who’s wanting to “play it out,” then you’re actually requiring him to do more work for the exact same result – hardly a “fair” course of action. You can say, I suppose, that everybody ought to think like you do and refuse to play it out.
My only response to that is “everybody should act like I do and everything will be okay” is rarely a viable intellectual position. Moreover, there’s no evidence that “playing it out” maintains some sort of moral high ground. Players enter tournaments to maximize their expected value – they think they are good at Magic, and so they want to succeed at it and reap the rewards thereof. Magic is enjoyable not just for the game, but for the travel, the social dynamic, the victory, the money, and all the rest. If all you wanted to do was “play,” you’d sit around the kitchen table. I’m not saying that “playing the game” is no longer important, but I am saying it’s completely ignorant not to factor in all of the other variables as well.
Like most positions, there’s more to consider than what lies on the surface.
Take care, y’all, and wish Feldman and I luck at Columbus! (pretty pretty pretty please!)
Zac