No Bad Cards
On the brewer's ethos, and finding value in unlikely places.
A friend of mine, Janet, failed to get a certain fellowship.
🙁
its more like-- i wish i was more capable like whoever did get nominated (definitely people i know and/or are friends with)
i just feel like i dont have the same ability/or life skills to thrive like other people can
and it makes me sad, like i'll always be financially unsteady and not meeting my potential because im so defective
This general sense of “I wish I wasn’t such a defective failure” is apparently a very common symptom of ADHD, or at least a common feeling caused by the kinds of life situations that ADHD sufferers seem to find themselves in. It’s very close to the title of a book on the subject: “You mean I’m not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?”, which if I ever stop procrastinating and end up reading will have all kinds of sage advice on how to help someone who is feeling that way.
However, instead of piggybacking off of advice of psychologists and clinicians with real medical knowledge, I’m going tell you about how I see things as a Gamer and armchair economist.
There’s this card game that I like, which is just about the only game I play anymore, called Magic: The Gathering. The rules are complex and nuanced, and there’s many different ways to play, but for our purposes all you need to know is that every few months a new set of a couple hundred new cards comes out, and you make your deck with some mixture of old and new cards.
Lots of these new cards more or less “expire” as worthless the second you open them up. They’re mainly meant to be played in “limited” formats, meaning that everybody sitting around a table opens up a new pack of cards, plays with only the cards that are opened at that table on that day, and nothing else. Because of the restricted number of cards, and the mostly-random mixture of them, the overall power-level is much lower, so cards that are weaker or less streamlined can find a time to shine here.
Once you give players the time to find all the cards they want and sculpt more complex strategies, the overall powerlevel of each player’s deck can take a dramatic uptick, and most cards will never see a single second of this “constructed” playtime.
In the Magic community, players are often characterized into a few broad archetypes based on what they like most about Magic, and I’m what they call a Johnny.
Johnny is the creative gamer to whom Magic is a form of self-expression. Johnny likes to win, but he wants to win with style. It’s very important to Johnny that he win on his own terms. As such, it’s important to Johnny that he’s using his own deck. Playing Magic is an opportunity for Johnny to show off his creativity.
Johnny likes a challenge. Johnny enjoys winning with cards that no one else wants to use. He likes making decks that win in innovative ways. What sets Johnny apart from the other profiles is that Johnny enjoys deckbuilding as much as (or more than) he enjoys playing. Johnny loves the cool interactions of the cards. He loves combo decks. Johnny is happiest when he’s exploring uncharted territory.
In other words, I play Magic mostly as a way to show off how smart I am. The win condition is not just to win, but also to show much of a special snowflake I am, with my one-of-a-kind deck, featuring cards you forgot existed. And Magic is a treasure trove for people like me. Every year they release about 1000 new cards and add in a little bit more complexity. Every time the new cards come out, there’s an extensive global scavenger hunt for new, unusual interactions between the old and new cards that could spawn whole new decks, upgrade old strategies, or just do something fun and amazing. The weirder, more useless-seeming, and more niche the card, the more tempting it is as a target of my fantasies. There’s also a financial aspect to the game, where these “useless” cards can be found for less than the postage used to mail them to you, while the most popular cards can be closer to the $20 or $200 mark, depending on how widely used.
Both aspects of this “Johnny” style of play, the “Against the Odds” elements of using weird cards and the “Budget Magic” elements of weird cards being cheap, became the focus of an extremely popular YouTuber at the MTGGoldfish outlet. The name of that YouTuber is Seth, probably better known as SaffronOlive, but you can sort of imagine him as a widely beloved patron saint of Johnnies. The things I most want to say to Janet have been said much better by him.
First, there is no such thing as “bad cards”. Obviously, that’s a little hyperbolic, since plenty of cards will never see play outside of limited, but the sentiment is genuine. The thing I love most about Magic is that it always feels like there’s a way to make those “bad cards” look good. They just need to be put into the right deck, surrounded by cards that will play to their strengths and shore up their weaknesses. As SaffronOlive says, you need to ask yourself “What does this card do better than any other card?” and not simply state “well, it’s usually not as good as this other card.” To add onto that is the idea of Competitive advantage. What does my deck do better than any other deck? How can I “identify, embrace, and build around the competitive advantage” of my deck? Yes, you’re looking outward and comparing yourself to them, but it’s not in a derogatory way. It’s to identify the gaps that you can fill, identify exploitable weaknesses in others, and to better understand what makes you strong and unique.
The nice way of putting it is your standard “ADHD is a superpower” pep-talk that you can find anywhere on TikTok or instagram. Alternatively, my long-standing opinion of “it’s kind of amazing that the FAANG business model was ‘hire every autist we can find and hope something good happens when we sit them in front of a computer for as long as humanly possible’” applies, as always.[2023-02-28 edit: Whenever my wife tells me to go back to therapy, I say “why can’t I just read the medical textbook myself instead of paying for some midwit to do it for me?”, but the great thing about capitalism is that A, having the midwit do it for you is kinda worth the $25 or whatever your copay is, and B, industry gets it done REAL fast. If the FAANG model really is to weaponize autism, then they obviously will have the latest tech in weaponizing ADHD, and among their “literally hack human executive function” weapons is the deadly Kanban board.
has a link to a fucking sweet video where they say that when you’re being a bad sperg they give you a PIP, Personal Improvement Plan, and assign you an extra tard wrangler and one FAANG gf took that personally and just writes “do the dishes” on the honeydo list home kanban board instead of getting mad. Based and tradpilled.] And also, most cynically, “wow, amazing, you mean there used to be this job where you’re actively incentivized to just be quirky and cute and flit from one little interest to another, like a professional jack-of-all-trades, and your material need were automatically met by someone else who loved and took care of the financial side? That sounds like a pretty sweet gig for someone who mostly wants to do that and loves kids, but doesn’t love academia or applying for grants.”
As a side note, the current decks I’m working on are a RB Discard and a Bant Blink deck, but I’m not too deep in it right now.
Alongside SaffronOlive’s description of Competitive Advantage, there’s a somewhat similar Comparative Advantage. Slate Star Codex’s “The Parable of the Talents” has a line in it that stuck with me, because it was exactly how I felt when I first heard it described.
Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.
Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.
(it’s also notable for “Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.” What a fucking writer.)
The first time I heard about it, they had a little table where the US is good at making Radios and TVs, and Canada is a little less good at both, but comparatively good at making TV’s, so if they lean into TV production and the US leans into Radio production, the total number of goods produced will be greater than separately. And I sat there for a few minutes and worked through the math myself and was like “huh, it really works.” I’m fuzzier on the details now, but my understanding of comparative advantage is that “even if you are objectively inferior to someone in literally every way, you are almost certainly not exactly proportionally inferior in every way, and are therefore still useful.”
As usual the nice version of this is your typical “you’re a valid human being” pep-talk with stuff about how you’re a special and worthwhile person, blah blah blah. The more medium is the classic sarcastic “yes, you’re absolutely fucking worthless, as evidenced by the fact that you graduated highschool, followed by college, followed by an acceptance into a top-tier grad program. You clearly are without merit of any kind, and it is only through sheer luck that you have consistently failed upward or at least sideways, for the last decade”. And, though it’s harsh, I’m glad that you can see that the winners kind of deserved it, because I’m a bit too much of believer in meritocracy. It’s obviously not randomly distributed, though everyone wants better fitness functions, and honestly I am in the same boat of not living up to my potential. It’s kind of tough to see that, but honestly, it’s everyone else’s fault for not wanting the coolest Magic the Gathering Decks and longwinded blogposts. Maybe they should’ve hired me to provide that instead of TVs and Radios, then they wouldn’t have to break out the ol’ law of comparative advantage to figure out what thing I’m marginally less bad at, and instead just get to look at how obviously superior I am at coming up with completely unplayable jank? And, more importantly, we’re all living in such an unbelievably prosperous time that you can live up to only a tiny fraction of your potential, and still have an incredible, luxurious life. The grad stipend is unironically a lot, and it only goes up from there.
Look at this post for example. It’s awful compared to my hopes and dreams for it. Every link (besides my random decklists) blows it away. But it definitely exists, and that’s kind of good enough.
TL;DR