The Weekly Shift Sift: Understanding In A MODO Crash

As we speak, this article is being written on a tight deadline. You see, my

I just rebooted my computer. I can go up to about twenty minutes before it conks out and gives me the Blue Screen of Death, but until that dizzying moment of pure crashitude I’m living on borrowed time. See, I was in the middle of writing that first sentence when BAM! Suddenly, it all went down. The speakers popped, the screen regurgitated data, and we’re back at the Windows load screen.

I’m pretty sure it’s due to bad RAM. I’ve narrowed it down at this point and am running some tests to verify, but I’m getting contradictory information. And normally, I’d write it on my laptop, but my laptop’s hard drive just went kablooey and so I am working in short spurts.

Really short spurts. Because I

Another reboot. This makes it hard to play Magic Online, or even write about it, because when I get deep into a game then I find my computer crashing out from under me. (And some wags have suggested that I buy a Macintosh, but even Macs don’t deal well with hardware failure. Boo.)

But actually, this is kind of symptomatic of my playing Magic Online. I’m actually a much better player in real-life tournaments than I am on MODO, mainly because all there is for me to do in real-life tournaments is, well, play Magic.

When I’m MODOing, though, I’m distracted. I have the TV on. I’m surfing LiveJournal. I’m checking my email. And worst of all, it’s the attitude.

I play MODO to relax. I don’t want to give it my full attention. It’s what I use to unwind at the end of the day, after I’ve spent a hard day programming and writing novels I hope to sell and reading up on how to properly configure a server for maximum thoroughput. I know there are people who get off on using their brains 100% of the time, and in fact really enjoy challenging themselves to the max on everything they do, and they are in fact called “winners.”

Me? I’m a loser.

Not a total loser, mind you. I rarely bomb out. But I hardly ever 5-0 my games for the week either, because I’m usually not paying as much attention as I should and make mistakes that in retrospect are obvious. I don’t make those mistakes in tournament play, but it’s harder on MODO. You have

….thanks for saving my data in a crash, Word.

Anyway, what I was saying is this: I get my cards for my Sealed Build. At a tournament, I’d spend the full thirty minutes analyzing them, making test shuffles, fudging with the mana base, checking through before I really went with the build I wanted. In MODO, I wanna play. So I blaze through, taking a short amount of time to plop together a deck, and starting the game in less than ten minutes after I started.

This is not the way to win. It’s a way to learn stuff, certainly, but it’s not always conducive to what one should do. And that’s an important lesson for the mediocre Magic player. You

Should always take everything seriously.

Right now, I’m writing like I play Magic Online. My full attention is not on the article. It’s on the endless cycle of reboots, the terror of wondering when the next ugly Blue Screen is going to arrive, the worry that maybe this next RAM test I’m about to do won’t solve it and it’s the motherboard that’s gone wonky.

Now, I’m an experienced writer, so I can function quite well on autopilot. More importantly, I can revise. Originally, this paragraph said something quite different, but I realized halfway through that I was making the wrong point and changed it to talk about my ability to edit on the fly. In other words, I just played the wrong spell, shrugged, and tucked it back into my hand to cast the spell that was the smart move the make.

In Magic, there are no takebacks.

In Magic, I just would have lost the game.

Magic’s that weird paradox: It’s a game, but if you treat it like a game you lose. The irony is that high-level tournaments are only sorta-fun for a lot of people, because the winning’s cool but the actual process of getting to the win is so strenuous that at the end of the day you just want to cool down. And when you put that much effort into winning, then every loss burns more.

The great thing about casual Magic is that losing means nothing. So what? You lost. You don’t care, there’s nothing at stake. But when you start taking Magic so seriously that you need to win, that you apply every available neuron to the task at hand, that losing starts to smack of failure on a more global level.

I’m trying to win in several areas of my life. Programming. Writing. Marriaging. Parenting. Do I need to do it in one more place with that same vigor?

I’m spending enough time applying my full concentration elsewhere. When I play Magic, I want to get a light buzz, like a couple of beers in my head; I want to have the illusion of concentration, but without that concentrated concentration. It needs to be more challenging than, say, watching reruns of Mama’s Family on TV, but less challenging than trying to reapply to college after over a decade of absence to try to pick up the last credits on my English degree and to get financial aid for it and to do it in another state when the home college that holds 130-someodd credits is half a thousand miles away.

So do I want to really look at the board? To search it as thoroughly as I do the contracts I sign when I sell my writing work to ensure that I get paid properly? Do I want to look for every advantage?

How hard do I want to

We’re starting from the beginning again. And it’s kind of appropriate.

The problem is focus. Specifically, the fact that I don’t want to have much of it. I can coast on moderate talent and several years of experience, but to win the queue at MODO I have to do more than skim the cards and rely on innate experience to pick not-bad cards to put together a pile of forty that’ll win more than 50% of the games I face.

I do well at prereleases, and the players there? Not much better than the guys I’m facing in leagues. I do pretty decent at the local drafts, and the answer is much the same.

But online? I have so much else tugging at me.

I need to really get down and analyze. What are the cards I play? I know what cards are good or bad on the whole, but can I play Clue with Magic? Can I narrow down the range of possibilities and say that my opponent has two cards in hand, and with that much mana there are only three cards that can wreck me, and if he’d had two of them he would have played them before so what’s in his hand must be the candlestick, as wielded by Colonel Mustard!

I can outmetagame Mustard in a heartbeat, man.

Or will I just shrug and go, “Hey, it’s MODO, it’s 8:30 in the evening and I’m killing time before my wife and I go for a nice walk around the neighborhood to look at the pretty lights, so what the hell, let’s walk into it?”

Will I reboot without even knowing?

Will I have that informational gap?

Here are the cards for this week. I’m gonna look at ‘em closely. This time, I’m really going to try to see what the potential is herein, as opposed to just skimming quickly for the sake of getting to the game, the game, the all-precious game.

It’s not a game this week.

It’s war.

Tell me how you would attack. And I’ll let you know next week.

When I

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 12-24-2006

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (45)

Lands (3)

Spells (25)

Plug Now! Home on the Strange! Fluttershine! Shocking revelation! Don’t crash, PC!

Signing off quickly,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy