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How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

262 points by exolymph 6y ago

GuiA 6y ago
The human brain loves finding patterns, meaning, and explanations ("the platonic rises to the top", per Taleb), so you'll be able to do something like this for pretty much any configuration of objects (all numbers are interesting after all! [0]). One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. Read some Carl Jung, some Joseph Campbell, some TVTropes, and you too can make your own grand unifying theory of human psychology at home! The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying, when on a first date or job interview or meeting at a party, they were telling me they were INWP or enneagram 14 second wing or a Capricorn rising Gemini. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
- dnautics 6y ago
  While I agree in the general, it's pretty clear that magic the gathering draws considerable inspiration from human literature and culture, and was exceptionally well planned and very carefully evolved over decades so if even if these arrangements aren't intentional, they certainly aren't accidental.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    Emphasis on was, they are slowly killing legacy. Elks for life is the new paradigm.
    - esrauch 6y ago
      As someone who used to play magic, can you explain what "Elks for life" means?
      - Fezzik 6y ago
        I had not heard that phrase, but I imagine it refers to the recently printed Oko, Thief of Crowns. A card that dominated every format until it was banned in all but Legacy, Vintage, and EDH. It is (almost) universally agreed to be the most busted Plainswalker in Magic. And it is unique in that when you first read the card you think ‘meh, no big deal’... then you play against it and lose every time. https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=473159 https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...
        Avicebron 6y ago
        Yeah my stacked turbo depths deck got absolutely roasted. I'm salty.
  - buzzkillington 6y ago
    > was exceptionally well planned and very carefully evolved over decades Have you seen the number of banned cards? Or the fact that it's accidentally Turing complete? This is a card game, nothing more nothing less.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      I was more referring to the cultural content (names, flavor text, art) than the game mechanics. Besides which, Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game.
      - buzzkillington 6y ago
        >Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game. You can literally crash the game so you never know if you've won or lost.
        saghm 6y ago
        If you're referring to the Turing completeness, the algorithm and cards that were found require both players to be acting in concert to achieve the Turing machine; either player could stop at any time. I don't see the fact that players can choose to act strangely in a game to be a reflection of the game itself. If you're talking about things like combining effects together that happen to cause an unbreakable infinite loop, then I'd argue that you're wrong; there's a rule that defines unbreakable infinite loops as a tie, so you know whether you won or lost (i.e. you did neither; it's not an xor, although it is a nand).
        rcxdude 6y ago
        Your first statement is no longer true with the newest approach: it only requires a tournament-legal deck and the player piloting it to set up (and it could do so turn 1, though it's very unlikely to do so), and once set up it continues with only mandatory actions (neither player has any choices to make in the game, though either player could in principle concede). But such things are not something which comes up in general play in practice: to set up such a machine you have to ignore several opportunities to just win the game. I've yet to even see an infinite loop which causes a tie.
- errantspark 6y ago
  > The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying Yes. I would add that another insight is that it's much easier to communicate with people when you learn their language. It might be much easier for a nerd to introspect about their personality when prodded using MTG, a familiar framework. Similarly some people expect their relative positions in n-dimensional personality space to be codified using zodiac signs. If you can do so, meet people on familiar ground, at least at first.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    Hah, Granny Weatherwax would suggest it is all about headology, but I think you are right about our internal languages and how we may be able to really speak to others.
- smabie 6y ago
  You're right on course, but I think Jungian archetypes are powerful for that very reason: it's a feedback loop. Archetypes not only embody different things and different kinds of people, but people are influenced by these universal archetypes as well. For example, consider the trickster Jungian archetype. This archetype is universal to every human cultural, indicating (to me, atleast), that it's a core part of the human psyche, rather than some platonic shit that rose to the top of Jung's head. My ex-girlfiend was getting a PhD in anthropology, and the different cultural archetypes and their similarities to each other among different, unrelated cultures astounded me. We independently come up with the same stories, over and over again. This cannot be a coincidence, rather it's a reflection of the unchanging nature of humanity.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  > One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. While agreeing with what you're saying, I am curious what the parameters of such pattern matching are. How many archetypes do you need so that they feel like "enough" to the average person? Is some number "too many"? Is 3 enough or do you need 5 or 6? Can I create some complex 97-archetype system, or would everyone scoff and say that archetypes 6, 14, 37 and 60-65 are all basically the same?
bena 6y ago
I hate these things. Richard Garfield took the concept from a fantasy novel, kind of said "Yeah, kind of like that" and didn't think any more of it. The reason is to limit the players' choices. If everyone has access to everything, there is no variety. There's a lot of bleed between the colors and a lot of things that just don't quite make sense. And they're also wrong according to Mark Rosewater, the current lead designer of the game. For example: Black isn't satisfaction, it's looking out for yourself. It's a selfish philosophy. Whereas one can find satisfaction through altruistic acts. And you can argue every color is looking for satisfaction, it's just that every color defines satisfaction in a different manner.
- norswap 6y ago
  All models are wrong, some are useful, yadda yadda. Of course it doesn't explain humanity, that's just bad clickbait. But clustering things together helps analyzing things according to a certain theory/outlook. You can use MBTI that way too, even if its fundation is unscientific. Ask any set of correlated-enough question, and you end up with a cluster of people/events that correlate with a slew of other things.
  - bena 6y ago
    If you said the Earth was flat you'd be wrong, if you said the Earth was a sphere, you'd also be wrong, but if you said the second was just as wrong as the first, you'd be more wrong than either. Yadda yadda. The article is flat Earth wrong. Garfield needed a design reason to force players to include and exclude whole swaths of cards. Separating them by some arbitrary distinction solved that. Then he slapped some flavor on top of that. There are serious color-pie breaks in the first set. Why? Because the philosophy wasn't a primary or even secondary concern.
    - chrisdirkis 6y ago
      You're using "wrong" to refer to the fact that the color pie was developed arbitrarily, and so can't be descriptive of humanity or people. The other poster, and the article, aren't claiming that the color pie was developed with humanity or culture as a basis. They don't think that people can be solely described by a color and a description thought up by Garfield as a background for a card game. They don't disagree with you. What they do think is: This is a useful lens to view people through. That's why the article refers to the techniques as an intuition pump - they allow you to use your intuition for a less complex space to solve more complex problems. I think I believe that this lens is a good one, but I'm not sure your comments engage with that angle at all. Flat Earth is a great lens situationally, btw. If it's 3km East to the shops, and 4km North to work, then I know that they're 5km apart. Maybe not exactly right, but right enough. Easier to do that math in my head in a flat scenario than to try use some GIS tool or an oblate spheroid model.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Kednicma 6y ago
It is fun to see how much of this overlaps with the official guidelines for colors [0]. I think that the five colors are better explained in terms of deck strategies and win conditions. Crucially, by design, no color is best, nor is any combination of colors best. White represents not dying, both by preventing damage and by healing damage. White wins by having more health than their opponents, and outlasting them in battle. Blue represents drawing the right card, mostly by drawing a lot of cards. Blue wins by controlling spells and hands. (When the article says "knowledge", note that the MTG deck in play is called "the library"!) Black represents destruction. Black wins by controlling battlefields and removing blockers. Red represents opportunities in the current moment and the random possibility of change. Red wins by playing on offensive tempo (the "upswing") and attacking vulnerable targets with instant abilities. ("Tempo" here is not quite as in music; it means playing cards turn after turn with a reliable ramping up in cost and effectiveness.) Green represents growth and the potential for planning. Green wins by playing on defensive tempo (the "downswing") and tilting the battlefield in their favor over many turns. Ideally, this system of categorizing by color works because there aren't any big strategies to winning that aren't color-aligned. "Milling", the strategy of deliberately destroying your opponent's library, is closely tied to blue and black, which are all about libraries and destruction. Keeping a "zoo", a battlefield full of mid-range on-tempo creatures, is closely tied to red and green, which are the two colors tied to tempo. [0] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Color https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Color
- gpderetta 6y ago
  > Crucially, by design, no color is best Except for blue of course.
  - ayakura 6y ago
    If I play blue, no fun for you! - Teferi
  - GuB-42 6y ago
    It was definitely the case in the early days. It is evidenced by the "boons", cards that cost 1 and do 3 of one thing the color is supposed to do best. The white one, Healing Salve, is very weak, it has later been replaced by a strictly better card. The red (Lightning Bolt), green (Giant Growth) and black (Dark Ritual) are very solid cards and were seen in most decks of their respective colors in the early days of Magic, would be a bit too powerful today. The blue one, Ancestral Recall, is part of the "power 9": the 9 most famous, overpowered and expensive Magic cards. It didn't make it past the ironically called "unlimited" edition. https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Boon https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Boon
mariocesar 6y ago
I can't read it ... Reading the comments here feels like when I was a kid and I listen to the TV's neighbour and tried to imagine what about the movie was
tcgthrowaway 6y ago
On a side note: If you were successful in MtG and other 'deep' games, would you list it on your CV? Or does it still have the image of a children's card game?
- manfredo 6y ago
  In tech circles it's pretty highly regarded. When learning programming, understand the stack comes very easily to MtG players since card players are resolved in a stack. Most highly competitive MtG players also come from math or other quantitative reasoning backgrounds.
  - shakezula 6y ago
    Hard agree. It's also a great way to teach resource management and trade-offs with immediate consequences.
- vsareto 6y ago
  These things have been around long enough that there are people now making decisions at a high enough level who also played these. So it's probably not as bad as it was 10-20 years ago? So this can happen: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dl3o2p/billionaire_shopify_ceo_finds_out_on_twitter_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dl3o2p/billionai... If you're applying to stuffy places where the people aren't known to be into deep/complicated games, you might get rejected if you don't have something else. It depends if you want to apply to stuffy places because you need any job ASAP. If you're doing okay and want to select businesses that like hobbies on resumes, go for it.
- k__ 6y ago
  I learned much with MtG. Problem with such games is that they are "winner takes it all" and in "real life" a win with "one life point" usually isn't worth it.
  - taneq 6y ago
    There are plenty of pass/fail situations where it is, though. A sale where you get the job due to a 1% lead over a competitor is still a sale.
simonsarris 6y ago
A much shorter version I made in 2018: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/966111482395136000 https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/966111482395136000
VectorLock 6y ago
I'm sure there is a management/leadership training company out there who is leveraging this in their materials.
seph-reed 6y ago
The whole opposites/balance motif is just something humans are really into about right now because we can't yet compare more than two things in our brain at a time. In reality all of these things are orthogonal, and while we do have words to distinguish them, they are only "opposing" in the sense that there is a word specifically meant to distinguish between them. Whatever that word is, it's just an over-simplified symbol in your brain. There is always a solution that includes both "opposites" but is too paradoxical feeling for us to yet see. Overall, these "opposing" concepts are really just different means of reaching the same juicy core of sentience, but nothing less than all at once will get us the entire way.
- scotty79 6y ago
  Yes. Things are complex and multidimensional. But projections to lower dimensional spaces help us grasp it. Even if they distort the complex thing somewhat. If you see enough projections you can get the idea and some intuition about multidimensional thing. Much more than you could achieve just trying to see it in its full complexity at once.
  - seph-reed 6y ago
    Super into this perspective. Unfortunately, I find myself around many people who don't see the modality as a dimension lowering, but instead as the truth. Which is fine, we're still very, very, very primitive. But I've been done with the whole "balance" thing for ~6 years and philosophy gets pretty lonely passed that hurdle. For what it's worth, if anyone is interested, "paradox" has been the thing for me since.
    - GuiA 6y ago
      “When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
    - uoaei 6y ago
      What does the transition from "duality" to "paradox" look like?
core-questions 6y ago
> Victory for a white agent feels like brightness, purity, exaltation — a clean breeze sweeping across a high plain under a bright sun. Defeat feels like watching the corrosion creep forward, the great monuments crumble, or the enemy pouring over the gates, knowing that the goodness of the world is unraveling. > Victory for a black agent feels hefty, exultant, and satisfying, like a bag of gold coins or a heavy hammer — it’s the feeling you have when you know that the game is won, even if you haven’t yet crossed the finish line. Defeat, on the other hand, feels like aging or imprisonment — like scrabbling against an unscalable wall behind which your dreams are turning to ash and trickling away, leaving you with nothing. ... I'm just going to leave those would-be poetic words there, and await the inevitable visitation of the Junior Anti-Fascist League to claim thoughtcrime against the author.
mynegation 6y ago
Every time “Magic: The Gathering” is mentioned it seriously throws off my phrase parsing for like half a minute. What about “the magic”? What is “the gathering color wheel”? I wish “Magic: The Gathering” was in quotes.
- herval 6y ago
  Same for news involving Yahoo!!
  - hkmurakami 6y ago
    Yahoo!! Japan called.
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    My coder's eye has always read their name as "Yahoo not not ..."
- niklasd 6y ago
  One of the best law schools in India is called "National Law School of India University". I had a great time there as an exchange student, but boy, there is some heavy parsing involved in that name.
  - newswasboring 6y ago
    This is what happens when you want to adhere to all local, national and international standards. A National XX is a protected term in education (well sort of) and the use of that term signifies that the government is involved to make this place good. School is there because its modeled after Harvard Law School (not really sure why that one is special in its structure). University is another more protected term. You cannot call an institute a university without ministry of human development's approval. What is weird is because I know all this the name doesn't really sound that weird. They are just expressing a lot of things in the name which is normal to me.
  - igravious 6y ago
    OT: A number of the (what I have been calling) universities in my country have the seemingly bizarrely redundant labelling "University College X" where X is the locale each is based in. Your comment made me look up why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_college https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_college It appears that, “In a number of countries, a university college is a college institution that provides tertiary education but does not have full or independent university status. A university college is often part of a larger university. The precise usage varies from country to country.” So now I realise that there is but one actual university in my country, that being the national university, and all the self-styled "universities" around the country are mere colleges. Notions!
platz 6y ago
FYI - you can play mtg (even edh) online with your friends or randos: https://cockatrice.github.io/ https://cockatrice.github.io/
- strbean 6y ago
  And completely for free, without buying packs/cards! You can play with decks that would cost $10,000 to put together with physical cards.
  - platz 6y ago
    but imho it's more fun to play with either cards you own or with a reasonable limit, because mtg is better with some kind of a social contract in force.
    - anonymoushn 6y ago
      I think this contract is usually just the set of rules for deck construction, which is usually just a format. It's not really a problem if one player's preferred modern deck costs $200 and another's costs $2000 when neither of them had to pay for the cards and both of them had the option to play whatever modern deck they liked.
      - platz 6y ago
        try your cedh deck in a casual game and let me know how it goes
        anonymoushn 6y ago
        That's definitely a thing. I usually try to avoid games where trying to win is frowned upon in favor of games that are enjoyable when everyone tries to win.
        vertex-four 6y ago
omni 6y ago
> To keep reading this story, create a free account. Yeah, no. If you're the author of this piece or you have a blog on Medium, get off it. There are plenty of other, less user-hostile options.
- bambax 6y ago
  Block JavaScript on the domain and you're set.
- Noumenon72 6y ago
  I signed up for this one since I've been reading a lot about Angular on there and I appreciate it.
- danamkaplan 6y ago
  https://makemediumreadable.com https://makemediumreadable.com - Browser extension that actually works
  - omni 6y ago
    I just tried this and it didn't get rid of the signup wall.
    - danamkaplan 6y ago
      Maybe it is in addition to my ad blocker (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock). Either way, don't surf without them.
- ericsoderstrom 6y ago
  What do you recommend?
  - wsc981 6y ago
    HackerNoon might be a decent alternative, but I never tried posting there myself: https://www.hackernoon.com/ https://www.hackernoon.com/
atemerev 6y ago
I respectfully disagree. Green in MtG is about growth, power of life, abundance (not harmony). Black is about destruction, death and suppression (not “individualism” or “at all costs mentality”). You can build your strategy on all these.
- brandnewlow 6y ago
  Sounds like you started playing in the 90s! Wizards has sanitized Black a good deal since then to being less METAL and more META.
  - atemerev 6y ago
    Ah, OK. But is Blue still about clever tricks and negation? Or the author is correct, and now they represent "knowledge" in general?
  - mcv 6y ago
    It's still mostly about dragging up dead things from the graveyard.
js8 6y ago
On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.
- preordained 6y ago
  Spoken like a blue mage ;)
- Garlef 6y ago
  The reason why it seems so appealing might be some kind of barnum effect [0] - the effect that makes horoscopes work: There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match. This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackmore in her definition of a `memeplex` [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex (Sidenote: I think a lot of the current cultural clashes in the western world can be interpreted as two big memeplexes fighting each other, having each developed strategies to be incommensurable [2] to the other side.) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard
  - belly_joe 6y ago
    I think this is basically correct, and that the comparison to the way memeplexes (lol memeplices?)construct worldviews is a good point that goes unnoticed in a great deal of political discussion. Almost every ideology is anchored to the real world by some element of truth. Regarding the OP taxonomy, it makes me wonder if there's a way to aggregate these taxonomies to see if extracting the relevant principal components (that do map to the real world) from the subjective noise is possible. One could imagine testing the Barnum effect in this way, writing a large number of these personality descriptions and seeing if real personality traits can emerge by having individuals rank which Barnum profiles best describe them.
ai_ja_nai 6y ago
Such a fresh piecce still today.
twic 6y ago
Not the author's intent, but the descriptions would make fantastic mottoes for a totalitarian state: PEACE THROUGH ORDER HARMONY THROUGH ACCEPTANCE (of your place in society) PERFECTION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE (of the Party's teachings) FREEDOM THROUGH ACTION (go to work in the factory, that is the true freedom!) SATISFACTION THROUGH RUTHLESSNESS
- afiori 6y ago
  the last one would be probably said in lowercase far from broadcast microphones
  - twic 6y ago
    No, that's the motto of the citizen volunteer brigades! Feeling a bit down? Join a re-education group and go and kick some subversives' ribcages in! It'll do you a power of good!
- mcv 6y ago
  They have little to do with how Magic works out in practice, though: WHITE: swarm everything with little guys GREEN: trample everything with giant monsters RED: burn everything BLUE: twist everything beyond recognition BLACK: keep dragging up old, dead stuff There's certainly little harmony and acceptance in Green. It's the color of rapid growth, of everything can be bigger. The others I can kinda see if quint at them a bit, but not green.
  - igravious 6y ago
    WHITE: defensive, protection from, … GREEN: creature growth, +1 counters, … RED: direct attack spells (fireball, lightning strike), … BLUE: counter-spells, … BLACK: don't play it (don't know), graveyard stuff? --- COLORLESS: artifacts 'n such
swebs 6y ago
Site appears to be down. Here's an archive http://archive.is/YALTz http://archive.is/YALTz
b0rsuk 6y ago
You may want to check out Blue Moon (Legends), a very enjoyable duelling card game with limited construction aspect. It has 9 carefully constructed decks that play very differently. It's a joy to see how differently they approach victory and how well-balanced they are. The free application, with ML-powered AI, is available at keldon.net Do you know other card games with interesting and consistently defined roles?
aerovistae 6y ago
This got me reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is so far a fantastic fan-fiction.
bikamonki 6y ago
Under current events, I'd argue it does explain Humanity: look at a card upright, white is at the top while black is at the bottom :(
- tmsh 6y ago
  I 100% agree. This is where systemic racism comes from (black as destruction? White as godliness?) This is messed up and shame on those who don’t realize this and downvote you.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Black is bad because it represents the night, an evolutionary dangerous time. Light/white is good because daylight is safe. Humanity has had these associations long before race was ever considered.
  - mydongle 6y ago
    Darkness vs Light
  - bikamonki 6y ago
    Like I care about HN karma :) There are many racial issues at WotC that need fixing, many.
  - bikamonki 6y ago
    Look, they corrected themselves (somehow) https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depictions-racism-magic-2020-06-10 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depiction...
h0l0cube 6y ago
In talking about linking colour to ways of thinking, there's also de Bono's hats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats BLUE "The Big Picture" WHITE "Facts & Information" RED "Feelings & Emotions" BLACK "Critical Judgement" YELLOW "Positive" GREEN "New Ideas"
- whatshisface 6y ago
  There's also the Whatshisface Schema: BLACK: Big-picture executive thinking. RED: Thinking like a Reddit commenter. (Glib, humorous oneliners) ORANGE: Thinking like a Hackernews commenter. (Glib, contrarian milti-liners.) YELLOW: The color of the sun, sunflowers, lions, and therefore courage and the heart, as in middle ages medicine. GREEN: Thinking about the environment, or money, or both. CYAN: Coming up with business ideas similar to the printer ink pricing model. BLUE: Thinking about celestial objects that are moving towards us, like Andromeda. VIOLET: Being violent.
  - bjourne 6y ago
    What about PURPLE?
    - usrusr 6y ago
      Following the scheme established by GP's list surely it would be something about purpose? This won't stand well in a translation...
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        A translation would add to the mystique, remember that period when it was in style to use everyday Japanese words as if they were all deep and mysterious?
  - TomK32 6y ago
    Cyan, violet, even blue/green aren't the same in every culture/language and sometimes even missing altogether. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_in_various_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_... It's also worth knowing how our sense for colours did evolve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive... And on top of that the colours can differ in symbolism https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in...
lifeformed 6y ago
People who do MTG color wheel analyses are Blue.
Zanderax 6y ago
If you want to learn more about the MTG color wheel or MTG design in general check out the "Drive to Work" podcast by Mark Rosewater, the lead designer of magic. Dude is wicked smart and very humble.
- suyjuris 6y ago
  Drive to Work [1] is a great podcast. Most of it is, of course, about MtG, but there are a lot of episodes about various things like writing, creativity, or communication. Mark Rosewater is the head designer, which means that he is responsible for creating the general structure of a set [2] and not the various stages of fine tuning that happen later on. So there is a lot of content about designing for humans and little about detailed number-crunching and game balance. He also explains most terminology and concepts, so a passing familiarity should be more than enough to understand the MtG-related content. Also, no ads. [1] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Drive_to_Work https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Drive_to_Work [2] Cards are released in groups, called sets. A set (usually) takes place on a particular world and is connected to a part of the larger story, which are reflected in its gameplay.
  - mapleoin 6y ago
    Could you or GP recommend a few best of episodes?
    - suyjuris 6y ago
      Just off the top of my head: Feedback (545, 199), Human Nature (329), Teaching (415), Creativity (77, 551), Complexity (455), Stand-Up Comedy (347, 543), Interviews (335).
tmsh 6y ago
This promotes systemic racism by insisting that white is at the center top and emphasizing ‘rationality’, while implying that black is in some way the opposite. It’s fucked up for young POC kids.
- epse 6y ago
  The idea probably comes from bright light versus no light, but I can see why it's easy to make the wrong interpretation, both for a racist or a victim
  - tmsh 6y ago
    It's better to avoid 'black and 'white' for personality or 'humanity' tests given what current events have shone a light on. The bible is full of light imagery as good. Darkness and light, yes. AND IT'S ALL A PROBLEM when we unwittingly reinforce it, esp. as it relates to 'judging' a person. It's oblivious (given current events) and detrimental to think otherwise. Here's the original George Floyd video which is increasingly hard to find (SEO-wise): https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/videos/1425398217661280/ https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/videos/142... We have a serious problem in society when this isn't obvious. When it's just Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel as normal. Choose other color wheels or games. Let's evolve past things that hold back Black people.
- f1refly 6y ago
  dark = night = dangerous and white = day = you can actually see what's trying to kill you. This is much older than the whole race thing you're constructing. White = good and black = bad also exists among black humans in africa, completely detached from skin color shenanigans.
mattrp 6y ago
Seems very similar to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 (Which isn’t exactly a great thing)...

262 points by exolymph 6y ago

GuiA 6y ago

The human brain loves finding patterns, meaning, and explanations ("the platonic rises to the top", per Taleb), so you'll be able to do something like this for pretty much any configuration of objects (all numbers are interesting after all! [0]). One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. Read some Carl Jung, some Joseph Campbell, some TVTropes, and you too can make your own grand unifying theory of human psychology at home! The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying, when on a first date or job interview or meeting at a party, they were telling me they were INWP or enneagram 14 second wing or a Capricorn rising Gemini. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

dnautics 6y ago
While I agree in the general, it's pretty clear that magic the gathering draws considerable inspiration from human literature and culture, and was exceptionally well planned and very carefully evolved over decades so if even if these arrangements aren't intentional, they certainly aren't accidental.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  Emphasis on was, they are slowly killing legacy. Elks for life is the new paradigm.
  - esrauch 6y ago
    As someone who used to play magic, can you explain what "Elks for life" means?
    - Fezzik 6y ago
      I had not heard that phrase, but I imagine it refers to the recently printed Oko, Thief of Crowns. A card that dominated every format until it was banned in all but Legacy, Vintage, and EDH. It is (almost) universally agreed to be the most busted Plainswalker in Magic. And it is unique in that when you first read the card you think ‘meh, no big deal’... then you play against it and lose every time. https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=473159 https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...
      - Avicebron 6y ago
        Yeah my stacked turbo depths deck got absolutely roasted. I'm salty.
- buzzkillington 6y ago
  > was exceptionally well planned and very carefully evolved over decades Have you seen the number of banned cards? Or the fact that it's accidentally Turing complete? This is a card game, nothing more nothing less.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    I was more referring to the cultural content (names, flavor text, art) than the game mechanics. Besides which, Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game.
    - buzzkillington 6y ago
      >Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game. You can literally crash the game so you never know if you've won or lost.
      - saghm 6y ago
        If you're referring to the Turing completeness, the algorithm and cards that were found require both players to be acting in concert to achieve the Turing machine; either player could stop at any time. I don't see the fact that players can choose to act strangely in a game to be a reflection of the game itself. If you're talking about things like combining effects together that happen to cause an unbreakable infinite loop, then I'd argue that you're wrong; there's a rule that defines unbreakable infinite loops as a tie, so you know whether you won or lost (i.e. you did neither; it's not an xor, although it is a nand).
        rcxdude 6y ago
        Your first statement is no longer true with the newest approach: it only requires a tournament-legal deck and the player piloting it to set up (and it could do so turn 1, though it's very unlikely to do so), and once set up it continues with only mandatory actions (neither player has any choices to make in the game, though either player could in principle concede). But such things are not something which comes up in general play in practice: to set up such a machine you have to ignore several opportunities to just win the game. I've yet to even see an infinite loop which causes a tie.
errantspark 6y ago
> The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying Yes. I would add that another insight is that it's much easier to communicate with people when you learn their language. It might be much easier for a nerd to introspect about their personality when prodded using MTG, a familiar framework. Similarly some people expect their relative positions in n-dimensional personality space to be codified using zodiac signs. If you can do so, meet people on familiar ground, at least at first.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  Hah, Granny Weatherwax would suggest it is all about headology, but I think you are right about our internal languages and how we may be able to really speak to others.
smabie 6y ago
You're right on course, but I think Jungian archetypes are powerful for that very reason: it's a feedback loop. Archetypes not only embody different things and different kinds of people, but people are influenced by these universal archetypes as well. For example, consider the trickster Jungian archetype. This archetype is universal to every human cultural, indicating (to me, atleast), that it's a core part of the human psyche, rather than some platonic shit that rose to the top of Jung's head. My ex-girlfiend was getting a PhD in anthropology, and the different cultural archetypes and their similarities to each other among different, unrelated cultures astounded me. We independently come up with the same stories, over and over again. This cannot be a coincidence, rather it's a reflection of the unchanging nature of humanity.
saalweachter 6y ago
> One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. While agreeing with what you're saying, I am curious what the parameters of such pattern matching are. How many archetypes do you need so that they feel like "enough" to the average person? Is some number "too many"? Is 3 enough or do you need 5 or 6? Can I create some complex 97-archetype system, or would everyone scoff and say that archetypes 6, 14, 37 and 60-65 are all basically the same?

bena 6y ago

I hate these things. Richard Garfield took the concept from a fantasy novel, kind of said "Yeah, kind of like that" and didn't think any more of it. The reason is to limit the players' choices. If everyone has access to everything, there is no variety. There's a lot of bleed between the colors and a lot of things that just don't quite make sense. And they're also wrong according to Mark Rosewater, the current lead designer of the game. For example: Black isn't satisfaction, it's looking out for yourself. It's a selfish philosophy. Whereas one can find satisfaction through altruistic acts. And you can argue every color is looking for satisfaction, it's just that every color defines satisfaction in a different manner.

norswap 6y ago
All models are wrong, some are useful, yadda yadda. Of course it doesn't explain humanity, that's just bad clickbait. But clustering things together helps analyzing things according to a certain theory/outlook. You can use MBTI that way too, even if its fundation is unscientific. Ask any set of correlated-enough question, and you end up with a cluster of people/events that correlate with a slew of other things.
- bena 6y ago
  If you said the Earth was flat you'd be wrong, if you said the Earth was a sphere, you'd also be wrong, but if you said the second was just as wrong as the first, you'd be more wrong than either. Yadda yadda. The article is flat Earth wrong. Garfield needed a design reason to force players to include and exclude whole swaths of cards. Separating them by some arbitrary distinction solved that. Then he slapped some flavor on top of that. There are serious color-pie breaks in the first set. Why? Because the philosophy wasn't a primary or even secondary concern.
  - chrisdirkis 6y ago
    You're using "wrong" to refer to the fact that the color pie was developed arbitrarily, and so can't be descriptive of humanity or people. The other poster, and the article, aren't claiming that the color pie was developed with humanity or culture as a basis. They don't think that people can be solely described by a color and a description thought up by Garfield as a background for a card game. They don't disagree with you. What they do think is: This is a useful lens to view people through. That's why the article refers to the techniques as an intuition pump - they allow you to use your intuition for a less complex space to solve more complex problems. I think I believe that this lens is a good one, but I'm not sure your comments engage with that angle at all. Flat Earth is a great lens situationally, btw. If it's 3km East to the shops, and 4km North to work, then I know that they're 5km apart. Maybe not exactly right, but right enough. Easier to do that math in my head in a flat scenario than to try use some GIS tool or an oblate spheroid model.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Kednicma 6y ago

It is fun to see how much of this overlaps with the official guidelines for colors [0]. I think that the five colors are better explained in terms of deck strategies and win conditions. Crucially, by design, no color is best, nor is any combination of colors best. White represents not dying, both by preventing damage and by healing damage. White wins by having more health than their opponents, and outlasting them in battle. Blue represents drawing the right card, mostly by drawing a lot of cards. Blue wins by controlling spells and hands. (When the article says "knowledge", note that the MTG deck in play is called "the library"!) Black represents destruction. Black wins by controlling battlefields and removing blockers. Red represents opportunities in the current moment and the random possibility of change. Red wins by playing on offensive tempo (the "upswing") and attacking vulnerable targets with instant abilities. ("Tempo" here is not quite as in music; it means playing cards turn after turn with a reliable ramping up in cost and effectiveness.) Green represents growth and the potential for planning. Green wins by playing on defensive tempo (the "downswing") and tilting the battlefield in their favor over many turns. Ideally, this system of categorizing by color works because there aren't any big strategies to winning that aren't color-aligned. "Milling", the strategy of deliberately destroying your opponent's library, is closely tied to blue and black, which are all about libraries and destruction. Keeping a "zoo", a battlefield full of mid-range on-tempo creatures, is closely tied to red and green, which are the two colors tied to tempo. [0] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Color https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Color

gpderetta 6y ago
> Crucially, by design, no color is best Except for blue of course.
- ayakura 6y ago
  If I play blue, no fun for you! - Teferi
- GuB-42 6y ago
  It was definitely the case in the early days. It is evidenced by the "boons", cards that cost 1 and do 3 of one thing the color is supposed to do best. The white one, Healing Salve, is very weak, it has later been replaced by a strictly better card. The red (Lightning Bolt), green (Giant Growth) and black (Dark Ritual) are very solid cards and were seen in most decks of their respective colors in the early days of Magic, would be a bit too powerful today. The blue one, Ancestral Recall, is part of the "power 9": the 9 most famous, overpowered and expensive Magic cards. It didn't make it past the ironically called "unlimited" edition. https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Boon https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Boon

mariocesar 6y ago

I can't read it ... Reading the comments here feels like when I was a kid and I listen to the TV's neighbour and tried to imagine what about the movie was

tcgthrowaway 6y ago

On a side note: If you were successful in MtG and other 'deep' games, would you list it on your CV? Or does it still have the image of a children's card game?

manfredo 6y ago
In tech circles it's pretty highly regarded. When learning programming, understand the stack comes very easily to MtG players since card players are resolved in a stack. Most highly competitive MtG players also come from math or other quantitative reasoning backgrounds.
- shakezula 6y ago
  Hard agree. It's also a great way to teach resource management and trade-offs with immediate consequences.
vsareto 6y ago
These things have been around long enough that there are people now making decisions at a high enough level who also played these. So it's probably not as bad as it was 10-20 years ago? So this can happen: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dl3o2p/billionaire_shopify_ceo_finds_out_on_twitter_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dl3o2p/billionai... If you're applying to stuffy places where the people aren't known to be into deep/complicated games, you might get rejected if you don't have something else. It depends if you want to apply to stuffy places because you need any job ASAP. If you're doing okay and want to select businesses that like hobbies on resumes, go for it.
k__ 6y ago
I learned much with MtG. Problem with such games is that they are "winner takes it all" and in "real life" a win with "one life point" usually isn't worth it.
- taneq 6y ago
  There are plenty of pass/fail situations where it is, though. A sale where you get the job due to a 1% lead over a competitor is still a sale.

simonsarris 6y ago

A much shorter version I made in 2018: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/966111482395136000 https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/966111482395136000

VectorLock 6y ago

I'm sure there is a management/leadership training company out there who is leveraging this in their materials.

seph-reed 6y ago

The whole opposites/balance motif is just something humans are really into about right now because we can't yet compare more than two things in our brain at a time. In reality all of these things are orthogonal, and while we do have words to distinguish them, they are only "opposing" in the sense that there is a word specifically meant to distinguish between them. Whatever that word is, it's just an over-simplified symbol in your brain. There is always a solution that includes both "opposites" but is too paradoxical feeling for us to yet see. Overall, these "opposing" concepts are really just different means of reaching the same juicy core of sentience, but nothing less than all at once will get us the entire way.

scotty79 6y ago
Yes. Things are complex and multidimensional. But projections to lower dimensional spaces help us grasp it. Even if they distort the complex thing somewhat. If you see enough projections you can get the idea and some intuition about multidimensional thing. Much more than you could achieve just trying to see it in its full complexity at once.
- seph-reed 6y ago
  Super into this perspective. Unfortunately, I find myself around many people who don't see the modality as a dimension lowering, but instead as the truth. Which is fine, we're still very, very, very primitive. But I've been done with the whole "balance" thing for ~6 years and philosophy gets pretty lonely passed that hurdle. For what it's worth, if anyone is interested, "paradox" has been the thing for me since.
  - GuiA 6y ago
    “When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
  - uoaei 6y ago
    What does the transition from "duality" to "paradox" look like?

core-questions 6y ago

> Victory for a white agent feels like brightness, purity, exaltation — a clean breeze sweeping across a high plain under a bright sun. Defeat feels like watching the corrosion creep forward, the great monuments crumble, or the enemy pouring over the gates, knowing that the goodness of the world is unraveling. > Victory for a black agent feels hefty, exultant, and satisfying, like a bag of gold coins or a heavy hammer — it’s the feeling you have when you know that the game is won, even if you haven’t yet crossed the finish line. Defeat, on the other hand, feels like aging or imprisonment — like scrabbling against an unscalable wall behind which your dreams are turning to ash and trickling away, leaving you with nothing. ... I'm just going to leave those would-be poetic words there, and await the inevitable visitation of the Junior Anti-Fascist League to claim thoughtcrime against the author.

mynegation 6y ago

Every time “Magic: The Gathering” is mentioned it seriously throws off my phrase parsing for like half a minute. What about “the magic”? What is “the gathering color wheel”? I wish “Magic: The Gathering” was in quotes.

herval 6y ago
Same for news involving Yahoo!!
- hkmurakami 6y ago
  Yahoo!! Japan called.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  My coder's eye has always read their name as "Yahoo not not ..."
niklasd 6y ago
One of the best law schools in India is called "National Law School of India University". I had a great time there as an exchange student, but boy, there is some heavy parsing involved in that name.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  This is what happens when you want to adhere to all local, national and international standards. A National XX is a protected term in education (well sort of) and the use of that term signifies that the government is involved to make this place good. School is there because its modeled after Harvard Law School (not really sure why that one is special in its structure). University is another more protected term. You cannot call an institute a university without ministry of human development's approval. What is weird is because I know all this the name doesn't really sound that weird. They are just expressing a lot of things in the name which is normal to me.
- igravious 6y ago
  OT: A number of the (what I have been calling) universities in my country have the seemingly bizarrely redundant labelling "University College X" where X is the locale each is based in. Your comment made me look up why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_college https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_college It appears that, “In a number of countries, a university college is a college institution that provides tertiary education but does not have full or independent university status. A university college is often part of a larger university. The precise usage varies from country to country.” So now I realise that there is but one actual university in my country, that being the national university, and all the self-styled "universities" around the country are mere colleges. Notions!

platz 6y ago

FYI - you can play mtg (even edh) online with your friends or randos: https://cockatrice.github.io/ https://cockatrice.github.io/

strbean 6y ago
And completely for free, without buying packs/cards! You can play with decks that would cost $10,000 to put together with physical cards.
- platz 6y ago
  but imho it's more fun to play with either cards you own or with a reasonable limit, because mtg is better with some kind of a social contract in force.
  - anonymoushn 6y ago
    I think this contract is usually just the set of rules for deck construction, which is usually just a format. It's not really a problem if one player's preferred modern deck costs $200 and another's costs $2000 when neither of them had to pay for the cards and both of them had the option to play whatever modern deck they liked.
    - platz 6y ago
      try your cedh deck in a casual game and let me know how it goes
      - anonymoushn 6y ago
        That's definitely a thing. I usually try to avoid games where trying to win is frowned upon in favor of games that are enjoyable when everyone tries to win.
        vertex-four 6y ago

omni 6y ago

> To keep reading this story, create a free account. Yeah, no. If you're the author of this piece or you have a blog on Medium, get off it. There are plenty of other, less user-hostile options.

bambax 6y ago
Block JavaScript on the domain and you're set.
Noumenon72 6y ago
I signed up for this one since I've been reading a lot about Angular on there and I appreciate it.
danamkaplan 6y ago
https://makemediumreadable.com https://makemediumreadable.com - Browser extension that actually works
- omni 6y ago
  I just tried this and it didn't get rid of the signup wall.
  - danamkaplan 6y ago
    Maybe it is in addition to my ad blocker (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock). Either way, don't surf without them.
ericsoderstrom 6y ago
What do you recommend?
- wsc981 6y ago
  HackerNoon might be a decent alternative, but I never tried posting there myself: https://www.hackernoon.com/ https://www.hackernoon.com/

atemerev 6y ago

I respectfully disagree. Green in MtG is about growth, power of life, abundance (not harmony). Black is about destruction, death and suppression (not “individualism” or “at all costs mentality”). You can build your strategy on all these.

brandnewlow 6y ago
Sounds like you started playing in the 90s! Wizards has sanitized Black a good deal since then to being less METAL and more META.
- atemerev 6y ago
  Ah, OK. But is Blue still about clever tricks and negation? Or the author is correct, and now they represent "knowledge" in general?
- mcv 6y ago
  It's still mostly about dragging up dead things from the graveyard.

js8 6y ago

On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.

preordained 6y ago
Spoken like a blue mage ;)
Garlef 6y ago
The reason why it seems so appealing might be some kind of barnum effect [0] - the effect that makes horoscopes work: There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match. This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackmore in her definition of a `memeplex` [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex (Sidenote: I think a lot of the current cultural clashes in the western world can be interpreted as two big memeplexes fighting each other, having each developed strategies to be incommensurable [2] to the other side.) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard
- belly_joe 6y ago
  I think this is basically correct, and that the comparison to the way memeplexes (lol memeplices?)construct worldviews is a good point that goes unnoticed in a great deal of political discussion. Almost every ideology is anchored to the real world by some element of truth. Regarding the OP taxonomy, it makes me wonder if there's a way to aggregate these taxonomies to see if extracting the relevant principal components (that do map to the real world) from the subjective noise is possible. One could imagine testing the Barnum effect in this way, writing a large number of these personality descriptions and seeing if real personality traits can emerge by having individuals rank which Barnum profiles best describe them.

ai_ja_nai 6y ago

Such a fresh piecce still today.

twic 6y ago

Not the author's intent, but the descriptions would make fantastic mottoes for a totalitarian state: PEACE THROUGH ORDER HARMONY THROUGH ACCEPTANCE (of your place in society) PERFECTION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE (of the Party's teachings) FREEDOM THROUGH ACTION (go to work in the factory, that is the true freedom!) SATISFACTION THROUGH RUTHLESSNESS

afiori 6y ago
the last one would be probably said in lowercase far from broadcast microphones
- twic 6y ago
  No, that's the motto of the citizen volunteer brigades! Feeling a bit down? Join a re-education group and go and kick some subversives' ribcages in! It'll do you a power of good!
mcv 6y ago
They have little to do with how Magic works out in practice, though: WHITE: swarm everything with little guys GREEN: trample everything with giant monsters RED: burn everything BLUE: twist everything beyond recognition BLACK: keep dragging up old, dead stuff There's certainly little harmony and acceptance in Green. It's the color of rapid growth, of everything can be bigger. The others I can kinda see if quint at them a bit, but not green.
- igravious 6y ago
  WHITE: defensive, protection from, … GREEN: creature growth, +1 counters, … RED: direct attack spells (fireball, lightning strike), … BLUE: counter-spells, … BLACK: don't play it (don't know), graveyard stuff? --- COLORLESS: artifacts 'n such

swebs 6y ago

Site appears to be down. Here's an archive http://archive.is/YALTz http://archive.is/YALTz

b0rsuk 6y ago

You may want to check out Blue Moon (Legends), a very enjoyable duelling card game with limited construction aspect. It has 9 carefully constructed decks that play very differently. It's a joy to see how differently they approach victory and how well-balanced they are. The free application, with ML-powered AI, is available at keldon.net Do you know other card games with interesting and consistently defined roles?

aerovistae 6y ago

This got me reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is so far a fantastic fan-fiction.

bikamonki 6y ago

Under current events, I'd argue it does explain Humanity: look at a card upright, white is at the top while black is at the bottom :(

tmsh 6y ago
I 100% agree. This is where systemic racism comes from (black as destruction? White as godliness?) This is messed up and shame on those who don’t realize this and downvote you.
- smabie 6y ago
  Black is bad because it represents the night, an evolutionary dangerous time. Light/white is good because daylight is safe. Humanity has had these associations long before race was ever considered.
- mydongle 6y ago
  Darkness vs Light
- bikamonki 6y ago
  Like I care about HN karma :) There are many racial issues at WotC that need fixing, many.
- bikamonki 6y ago
  Look, they corrected themselves (somehow) https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depictions-racism-magic-2020-06-10 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depiction...

h0l0cube 6y ago

In talking about linking colour to ways of thinking, there's also de Bono's hats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats BLUE "The Big Picture" WHITE "Facts & Information" RED "Feelings & Emotions" BLACK "Critical Judgement" YELLOW "Positive" GREEN "New Ideas"

whatshisface 6y ago
There's also the Whatshisface Schema: BLACK: Big-picture executive thinking. RED: Thinking like a Reddit commenter. (Glib, humorous oneliners) ORANGE: Thinking like a Hackernews commenter. (Glib, contrarian milti-liners.) YELLOW: The color of the sun, sunflowers, lions, and therefore courage and the heart, as in middle ages medicine. GREEN: Thinking about the environment, or money, or both. CYAN: Coming up with business ideas similar to the printer ink pricing model. BLUE: Thinking about celestial objects that are moving towards us, like Andromeda. VIOLET: Being violent.
- bjourne 6y ago
  What about PURPLE?
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Following the scheme established by GP's list surely it would be something about purpose? This won't stand well in a translation...
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      A translation would add to the mystique, remember that period when it was in style to use everyday Japanese words as if they were all deep and mysterious?
- TomK32 6y ago
  Cyan, violet, even blue/green aren't the same in every culture/language and sometimes even missing altogether. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_in_various_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_... It's also worth knowing how our sense for colours did evolve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive... And on top of that the colours can differ in symbolism https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in...

lifeformed 6y ago

People who do MTG color wheel analyses are Blue.

Zanderax 6y ago

If you want to learn more about the MTG color wheel or MTG design in general check out the "Drive to Work" podcast by Mark Rosewater, the lead designer of magic. Dude is wicked smart and very humble.

suyjuris 6y ago
Drive to Work [1] is a great podcast. Most of it is, of course, about MtG, but there are a lot of episodes about various things like writing, creativity, or communication. Mark Rosewater is the head designer, which means that he is responsible for creating the general structure of a set [2] and not the various stages of fine tuning that happen later on. So there is a lot of content about designing for humans and little about detailed number-crunching and game balance. He also explains most terminology and concepts, so a passing familiarity should be more than enough to understand the MtG-related content. Also, no ads. [1] https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Drive_to_Work https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Drive_to_Work [2] Cards are released in groups, called sets. A set (usually) takes place on a particular world and is connected to a part of the larger story, which are reflected in its gameplay.
- mapleoin 6y ago
  Could you or GP recommend a few best of episodes?
  - suyjuris 6y ago
    Just off the top of my head: Feedback (545, 199), Human Nature (329), Teaching (415), Creativity (77, 551), Complexity (455), Stand-Up Comedy (347, 543), Interviews (335).

tmsh 6y ago

This promotes systemic racism by insisting that white is at the center top and emphasizing ‘rationality’, while implying that black is in some way the opposite. It’s fucked up for young POC kids.

epse 6y ago
The idea probably comes from bright light versus no light, but I can see why it's easy to make the wrong interpretation, both for a racist or a victim
- tmsh 6y ago
  It's better to avoid 'black and 'white' for personality or 'humanity' tests given what current events have shone a light on. The bible is full of light imagery as good. Darkness and light, yes. AND IT'S ALL A PROBLEM when we unwittingly reinforce it, esp. as it relates to 'judging' a person. It's oblivious (given current events) and detrimental to think otherwise. Here's the original George Floyd video which is increasingly hard to find (SEO-wise): https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/videos/1425398217661280/ https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/videos/142... We have a serious problem in society when this isn't obvious. When it's just Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel as normal. Choose other color wheels or games. Let's evolve past things that hold back Black people.
f1refly 6y ago
dark = night = dangerous and white = day = you can actually see what's trying to kill you. This is much older than the whole race thing you're constructing. White = good and black = bad also exists among black humans in africa, completely detached from skin color shenanigans.

mattrp 6y ago

Seems very similar to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530 (Which isn’t exactly a great thing)...