a magic 50
my review of magic for 2021
This picture sucks.
Much like every workplace in the world, wage theft makes up the overwhelming majority of crime in the Magic community. The name “wage theft” is a little misleading because it’s the time that is being stolen for nothing in return. People sold the promise of “an honest 9-to-5” typically end up working much closer “45–50 hours a week plus a pervasive sense of dread coloring every day of your life,” and that’s not even including any potential commute. This is time that you’ll never get back.
Magic tournament round times have been the laughing stock of the community “in the know” for too long to remain unchanged. The gentle suggestion of “50 minutes” no longer holds the promise it used to. A “Magic 50” is anywhere between 40 to 80 minutes. If you want to let your friend know you’ll be over in “an hour or so,” just hit them with a “see you in a magic 50.”
With the GP-sized Magic events starting up again during the coronavirus’ 5th Wave, it’s important to reflect on how things can be improved during this restructuring period for Organized Play. Typical venue organization is more up in the air, which is the perfect time to test out some new changes to help streamline the player experience. Crowded tables getting spaced out a little more to help with distancing is a good start, but we can do better. We can target infrastructure to make long lasting changes to player behavior. Of course, I am not referring to using these powers to help slow the spread of new coronavirus variants. That ship has long since sailed unfortunately, so now it’s time to use our powers for evil.
How do you solve this problem of slow play? Chess clocks, like the timers used on MtGO, would be both impossible to properly implement and prohibitively expensive. Asking players to narc to judges about their opponents’ slow play every two minutes is snitch behavior, and stitches are in short supply as of late due to global supply chain delays. Do we admit defeat in the face of these challenges? As it turns out, the answer may be more simple than we’d first imagined.
Ivan Pavlov demonstrated in 1897 that humans learn to associate sounds, as well as any other general stimuli, with positive and negative outcomes. Give someone a repeated bad experience enough times, and they’ll learn to avoid that same experience by changing their behavior (for better or worse). This is everywhere today. Every app competes to have a neutral-sounding, positive-emotion creating ping to take up permanent residence in your brain in a competition to win your time and attention. If this were a lecture, this is the point in which I would surreptitiously play the Discord notification sound at a low enough volume to make a majority of the audience flinch and then look at the crowd with the “you see what I mean???” face.
As it turns out, I’ve already found the perfect implementation of this psychological concept.
Since tweeting this on November 3rd, I have been putting in extensive research into the topic. Finally given a chance to put my history in psychology, music, and making playlists for people I had crushes on in the past to work, I began to craft.
I separated my usual playlists of ambient, instrumental, and easy-listening music into different lengths of 50 minute chunks in order to determine which was the most suitable for playing Magic to. In order to rule out any advantages or disadvantages to English and non-English speakers, I automatically ruled out anything with lyrics. From this point, I paid special attention to how the songs flowed into each other to create an experience that would allow players to keep an internal metric in their head as they got used to the classical conditioning. I made sure that the playlist was exactly 50 minutes of lighter music followed by 18 minutes of increasingly more abrasive harsh noise, mirroring my experience with the round pictured earlier. Additionally, I would recommend that the sound output start at a low 40dB (a low white noise) and eventually work up to 120 dB (a loud concert) before the end of the 68 minutes. If the round goes long, all attendees will be subjected to the repulsively loud music and know exactly who to blame it on, leading to increased paces of play overall. As a proof of its efficacy, I wrote each section of this piece while listening to the track it corresponds to on repeat. It’s my contention that implementing this system will lead to decreased wait time between rounds, giving players more time to spend away from the game, which I promise is a good thing.
[the intended reading experience is to listen to each track with the section that falls beneath it, but you obviously don’t have to. the full playlist is here to listen to on your own time.]
Brian Eno, “1/1” (0:00–17:21)
brian eno’s 1/1 is often considered to be one of the ambient genre’s foundational pieces. while “ambient” music had existed long before its release, eno’s “ambient 1: music for airports” gave the sound a firm definition and name in a way it had been formless before. originally designed as an installation of speakers placed in different locations in an airport terminal intended to create unique and distinct listening experiences, the piece is comprised as a series of loops of varying lengths to play off of each other. eno described the mission statement of the piece, as well as his ambient work in general, to be “as ignorable as it is interesting.”
My second favorite Magic writer and current roommate, Jesse “killing a goldfish” Mason, once wrote about his experience playing Arena for the first time, around the end of 2018.
I had a game where, on turn two, my opponent tried to Lightning Strike my 1/1 with Curious Obsession, I responded with Dive Down, and they conceded. This, to me, is the ideal game of Magic.
The phrase “this, to me, is the ideal game of Magic” has been stuck with me ever since. I wield it a lot, like when my opponent mulls to 3 and concedes before I play a single card, or any other even remotely applicable situation really. This 18 second game 1 in Round 16 of Mythic Championship I where Andrea Mengucci concedes on Turn 3? Genuis-level behavior, the perfect game.
This isn’t at all a joke. When a Magic player has played enough games with a deck in standard to know that they’re beat on turn 2 and they choose to concede, this isn’t “salt” or “nerd rage,” it’s extreme intelligence. Games of Magic have come to make a comfortable nest in the idea of “garbage time,” scraping every possible second out of games where one player was very clearly dead or on a no-outer for several minutes in the hopes that your opponent might make a mistake like they’re playing in the finals of a Grand Prix. I can’t begin to count the number of minutes of my life that I’ve lost watching people sit and do nothing while someone else’s Emrakul, the Promised End slowly digs away a cozy grave for their dreams as a pro player. Don’t worry, everyone. You probably just didn’t read the rulebook. It’s understandable, there are a lot of rules in there! I pulled my favorite one out to help.
The Mountain Goats, “Scaling the Well” (17:21–22:16)
off of the bonus edition 12" vinyl titled “selected goths in ambient” from the mountain goats’ 16th studio album “goths,” the band offers a restructured version of their original track “unicorn tolerance,” from which the song’s title “scaling the well” is derived. the driving power-pop from the original is entirely discarded and replaced with open, airy piano twinkle and reverb dreched rhode chords. given the mountain goats’ john darnielle’s recent fascination with magic, wizards of the coast could probably license this song to play at events for the low cost of a couple booster boxes.
I tended to gravitate towards aggro or faster combo decks in most of the time that I was trying to play constructed Magic competitively. I can’t explain why I enjoyed playing these types of decks so much other than I am an idiot who wants my Magic experience to be as close to degenerate gambling as possible. You’re at 3, I’m hellbent, let’s flip the top of the fuckin’ deck, baby.
Playing combo decks also gave me time to reflect upon what must have been going through my opponents’ heads as I combo’d them to death for the second game in a row. Why have they not conceded now that I’ve shown them the Objectively Correct and Deterministic Kill Gifts Ungiven pile again? Do they think that within 8 minutes I’ve just completely forgotten how to play the game? Do they think so little of me?
Playing these types of decks led to an unintended side effect in large tournaments a lot of the time. I would finish the round in about 25 or 30 minutes and then have the rest of the time to eat, go to the bathroom, walk around and clear my head, or stare at a clock ticking below 00:00. This was both a blessing and a curse.
When you aren’t able to visualize or feel a wait time, the wait feels shorter and blends into the experience as a whole. However, when waits are abstract, arbitrary, and unclear, it gives you nothing but time to stew in it. Excitement turns to restlessness which in turn becomes boredom that goes on to become frustration. The mind wanders. You start visualizing the hold up. Like being at the end of a long line of traffic, you just want to know who is causing it. Why are people allowed to play this slow? Is this a problem of just a sheer number of people or an infrastructural problem that has been in place for long enough that people are now knowledgeable enough to abuse it?
Anxiety Machine, “no rain” (22:16–28:06)
anxiety machine’s 2020 release “so sad, beautiful shoping mall” came as a response to the front half of a devastating year. ethereal synth loops bubble throughout the track, painting an image of sanctuary after the point of complete exhaustion.
Ultimately in times like these, I would look around the event hall. It’s not like it was one match holding up the entire room. It was usually anywhere from 5 to 50, depending on what round or day of the tournament it was. I wondered how all of these matches were going on. They couldn’t all be playing Sensei’s Divining Top decks (because it got banned), so what are their excuses? Did all of these people get deck checked and then also have to go to the bathroom and then also just kinda sit there every turn?
I understand the need to think, unfortunately. I understand that some decisions take time. I don’t want to rush people who are making actually difficult decisions, but I also have seen enough poker to know that not every decision is your tournament life or death. Some decisions take 2 minutes, some should take 2 seconds. With this new playlist solution, I’m not trying to stop the former but instead encourage the latter. Time is a resource that is shared between players in paper, and Magic players love to try to maximize their resource use at every junction, even at times when they shouldn’t.
Players aren’t blind to the power that they hold with their time. In fact, they’ve learned to weaponize it. Roping someone on Arena or clocking someone on MtGO is a tool that people use to lash out in anger at their opponent for no reason other than to cause pain and be a general pissant. While the online programs generally have steps in place to avoid bad behaviors, there’s no recourse to this. You can turn off emotes. You can never open chat. You can unfollow every Magic personality on every social media platform to avoid having your time wasted that way, but if you want to play this game for whatever reason, at some point you’re going to lose some of your precious time by someone doing absolutely nothing.
glass beach, “(blood rivers)” (28:06–29:42)
the track “(blood rivers)” from glass beach’s 2019 album “the first glass beach album” serves as one of the three interlude tracks. the song’s swelling guitars are punctuated by crackles and hums of amplifiers. these little imperfections in technology that are typically removed or buried in final mixes are instead treated as a second instrument.
Deliberate wastes of time committed by others is an easy thing to catch, but there’s only so much to do be done about the small continual microdecisions that add up to hours of your life. That’s what this playlist is for: to make you feel that time that is being taken from you, or, more accurately, the time that you continually choose to give up.
I hate to keep harping on stupid things like this as much as I do, but also, if I don’t, who else will? Because Magic is optional and (usually) a leisure activity, none of anything that I’ve written or anything else that anyone else has written matters in the grand scheme of the world, assuming there’s a scheme. And because none of this matters at all, everything equally matters the same amount. No time spent with this hobby is more meaningful than another’s time spent with it. The game simply Is, and we Are As Well.
Mike Huguenor, “Enoch Soames” (29:42–33:55)
on mike huguenor’s album “x’ed,” the slow droning of sustained guitar and fuzzy amps create a backdrop which the slow, punctuated notes punch through in the back half of the track. the album composed entirely of noises made by guitars (no percussion, etc.) explores the full range of the instrument, offering a more intimate look at an instrument typically associated with large walls of sound. shout out to the 408.
So is Magic just one big waste of time?
Well, inherently, yes, but I suppose that’s a feature of it and not a bug. I once wrote about Slay the Spire, stating that I believe the game was designed to be a time machine that transported you anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes into the future. I think the same could be said about most games to be honest, and Magic is no exception. The problem with Magic is having your time wasted on others’ terms, in cruel or apethetic forms.
Over this year, I’ve taken a long look at how I spend my time each day. Living in quarantine (still ongoing at the time of this writing) has made this a lot easier. I started playing drums again after years away, and it’s given me a joy back in my life that I can’t describe here because this piece is already going on too long. I learned new things that made me feel fulfilled. I feel like I made actual steps to improve my life in a tangible way following a year of doing basically nothing. I deliberately avoided playing Magic to focus on making myself better and yet I find myself here again.
When you have enough time away from an activity you spend a lot of time doing, you start to focus less on the positive feelings associated with it that kept you coming back and more on the negative aspects you were trying to avoid thinking about the entire time. Only in absense can we feel the accents of what we avoid. So then why am I here? Why am I in a perpetual state of returning?
Caddywhompus, “It’s a Self-Portrait (Of You)” (33:55–42:04)
caddywhompus is an experimental two-piece from new orleans, louisiana. while the band’s compositions typically span a wide variety of genres, this deep cut from “maze demos,” an ep that served as a demo to their album “feathering a nest,” is pure guitar drone. the crunchy static lends the track texture, giving it movement in an otherwise dormant piece. i couldn’t find an upload of the track on youtube, so i did it myself. the guitarist of this band followed me on tumblr when i was in college. he hasn’t posted on it in five years, and the band has been silent for the last three. i just started using tumblr again. time makes fools of us all, i suppose.
In one of my earliest introductory Psychology courses I took in my first year of college, I had a great professor. He was young and cool. He would tell the class all the stories of all the different drugs he took as a warning to the freshman that were looking to break loose from their parents in their first year away. He told us that the only reason he got a PhD was so that he could “tell racist fuckers that (he was) a Mexican dude with a Doctorate.” He owned.
He liked using stories to teach. Like most good teachers, his stories probably weren’t true. He told us about a client that he had in his private practice in the past who he was helping treat for alcohol addiction. He told us that the patient started by drinking wine every night while he was cooking dinner, a little ritual that he liked to perform. He looked forward to it at the end of each day. Was this addiction? Most of the class responded, “well, no, this guy just has something he likes to do,” so the story continued.
Now this person, on their way home from work, realizes that they’re out of wine at home, so they go out of their way to buy more before they start cooking. How about now? Okay, now this person makes it all the way home and realizes they’re out and now has to spend a large amount of time to go buy more before they can start cooking. Now maybe? How about when it’s late and he gets home and the stores are closed so he can’t buy more wine and he ultimately decides to just not make food and not eat. Now?
That final point was where most of the class decided that This was too much disruption of “normal functioning,” and his behavior now would start to fit into the DSM-IV-TR criteria (lmao) for substance abuse disorder. The professor smiled. He told us that the truth is that all of these can be addiction. He said that the strict criteria of “normal functioning” is a vagueness that many of us would come to know if we kept working in psychology, something you would have to get used to seeing with your own eyes or feeling yourself maybe. When you do something for long enough, it becomes your new normal.
Dirty Three, “You Greet Her Ghost” (42:03–46:54)
hailing from melbourne, austrailia, dirty three create massive soundscapes from their limited three instruments. the first time i knew this band existed was when they were playing live in front of me at the hardly strictly bluegrass festival in san francisco. they played an extended 15 minute version of a song off this album that i can still hear today.
I listen to Magic-related podcasts every so often, mostly because I need some background noise to work or fall asleep to. While the topics could be about different things, there was a similar thread among a few episodes that stuck in my mind like shrapnel. To paraphrase all of them, “Magic hasn’t been fun/exciting for me for a long time.”
To sit on a Magic podcast or stream and (whether you like it or not) continually sell a product that you’ve grown disenchanted with is a fate that I never wish to occupy. I’m no stranger to this. I’ve written extensively in the past about the pain in the darkness that I fear sleeps in the hearts of invested players, the grinders, the burnouts. I made some quick money that I desparately needed at the time for a few Magic-related articles I wrote. What I’m trying to say is I rediscovered the joy of writing again by writing about how I made my favorite hobby into my job and hated it and then I immediately turned around and made this new hobby a job. By the time I sat down to think about writing something again, it was March 2020. I sat in a room, one that I would continue to occupy for nearly every waking moment for the next year, and sat in front of a keyboard and tried to wring fucking anything out of all my little dumb jokes and grand articulations about this game at a time when the dire situation we all find ourselves in was starting to reverberate louder and louder every second. I would have rather done anything else in the world than have that job, in that moment and now today. I don’t envy “content creators,” I fear them.
Disasterpeace, “Beyond” (46:54–50:00)
in the soundtrack for the 2012 game “fez,” rich vreeland, better known as disasterpeace, uses luscious synths to create pulsing waves of crackling warmth. the song’s arrival in the game punctuates the protagonist’s departure into a vast, unknowable, and uncertain future.
[Consider this the three minute warning.]
However, having your life tied up into a game you don’t even find joy in anymore isn’t just isolated to the high-visibility community members, it trickles down further. I’ve spent a lot of time around various communities of Magic players with varying skill levels, and I have unfortunately found out that I’m not alone in this. The minmaxing, the research, the grind, the time, the time, the time. This is the True game, the struggle that proves it was worth it after all.
When wins come, this is easy, but when the losses roll in, you’re forced to sit with this time. You’re forced to sit between rounds, to scrutize and agonize over every wrong decision you just made while the clock keeps rolling into the negatives. It was either variance’s fault or yours, so pick whichever is easier to swallow. If the outcome of winning in Magic is feeling close to nothing and the outcome of losing is feeling worthless or frustrated, why are any of us still here besides the money? Is this a collective hazing ritual that we’ve all invested too much time into to quit now?
Akira Yamaoka, “My Heaven” (50:00–53:18)
akira yamaoka’s mastery of creating blanketing dread punctuated with squealing electronics in the soundtracks for the silent hill games are the reason they got popular. an introduction to industrial and noise for many people.
[This is the bad ending. I’m sorry, but it’s about to get a lot worse. You should have played faster.]
If you were to take a survey of the top 50 reasons why people play Magic, the top two answers would most likely be to the effect of “it’s fun” and “my friends all play it so I keep doing it to hang out with my friends.” This makes sense: being fun and social activities is (part of) what makes games great. These would shortly be followed by the more neutral “I have a lot of money invested in it” and “I’m good at it.” These first four answers are easy to digest, but I think the other 46 are a lot more interesting to unpack. I feel like there is a genuine melancholy at the heart of a lot of magic players, a continual investment of resources into a hobby that brings only diminishing returns, an obsession with a product simply because “i’ve put a lot of time in it already so why stop now.”
I guess that’s mostly what I’m trying to explore in my writing about Magic. i’d like to think that there’s more to this game than just being a timesink to distract myself from the fact that a lot of people are dying to a machine that (it feels like) we can’t do anything to stop every second of every day and i’m just biding my time until it’s my turn, that it’s more than just Something To Do In The Face Of Inevitable Annihilation. i think i try to prove it to myself every time i log on to Arena again or write another manic, rambling article, and i’d like to think i succeed in my own little way each time.
Merzbow, “Ultra Marine Blues” (53:18–64:47)
merzbow needs no introduction.
habituation is the psychological concept that describes the diminishing returns associated with repeated exposure to the same stimulus. it’s present in nearly all forms of life, from humans to sea slugs. if you prod a slug with an electric charge enough times, its usual recoiling in pain will eventually be replaced with nothing until enough time has passed for the stimulus to become novel again.
it’s important to note that this is different than the theory of learned helplessness, a concept discovered back when you could kind of do whatever you wanted in experiements with animal subjects. the basic premise of the experiment that suggested this concept is this:
- you place a dog in a room bisected with a short wall
- you play a tone and electrocute one side of the room
- the dog learns to associate the tone with the shock and and starts moving to the other side of the room
- you repeat this
- eventually you start shocking both sides of the room
- after enough repetitions of this, the dog will stop jumping
- it will lie down
- it will stop trying
- it will accept its fate
sometimes the two are hard to tell apart. it’s never easy to tell when something you continually return to for comfort stops providing it for you. the lines between banality and addiction blur. by the time you figure it out, the good times are usually far in the rear-view mirror. you were going through the motions of what fun used to feel like. you keep drinking and smoking, but the party has been over for months and all the lights are off and you’re left with yourself to ask “how did i not notice for so long?”
it’s easy to lose track of time. they make it easy. sometimes when your brain can only produce the thought “i don’t want to wake up tomorrow,” you just need any source of comfort, no matter how diminished. when given the choice between an electrified floor and an elecrified floor with a computer hooked up to the internet and games where you can talk to other people about how much this floor sucks, i don’t think anyone can fault anyone else for choosing the latter. you come to expect the soft radiance of the mtgo queue, the quiet company of the discord call, a signal among the noise. it’s only when time is screaming in your ears like a permanent 100dB tinnitus can you sit alone and ask yourself how much longer is this going to go on for
how many times will you say yes
The Rita, “Untitled” (64:47–67:42)
hit play (i’m doing it too right now)
adjust to a comfortable volume for you (the volume can be 0% if you’d like), the music is abrasive, i get it
listen to however much you like
sit and feel how long three minutes really is, let it envelope you
i’ve stolen enough of your time already by getting this far, you might as well just do it
but also it’s your choice not to, just make a choice of your own
don’t let other people waste your time for you
it’s hard to do this and sometimes it’s out of your control
but it’s good to check in like this every once and a while
focus
you’re still here because you chose to be
you choose every day
the machine screams and whirs
good luck
