Act Like a Baby, Feel Like a Man - Theros Pre-Release Edition

Great guy alert!

I don’t play much paper Magic these days, but I like to play pre-releases. Part of that is I can’t wait the extra two weeks for the cards to come out on Magic online, but mostly it’s because I like pre-release buzz. I am fully taken in by spoiler season – I see sweet cards, I want to play them, I want to figure out the limited environment, so I bustle on over to the game store, plop myself in my chair, and feed off of the buzz in the room generated by people who share my excitement. This is the most fun I ever have playing Magic, and probably my life in general, really. It feels the most like Christmas anything has felt since I stopped feeling the way I used to feel about Christmas (I just won a Nobel prize for this sentence, by the way). Plus, occasionally I like to swap out the cold anonymity of Magic Online and encounter some personalities.

However, it’s usually only a couple rounds into my first pre-release tournament that I am reminded of one of the reasons I normally prefer the cold anonymity of Magic Online: some of these personalities are pretty garbage. No, I’m not talking about nerds and smelly weirdos – I like nerds and smelly weirdos. Heck, I am one. I’m talking about sore losers. I’m talking about sore winners. I’m talking about sore-the-game-isn’t-even-over-yet-ers.

I’m talking about babies. Magic is full of them. It’s hard to go a few matches in a row without running into someone who gets sad over some part of the game. Randomness is a defining part of Magic, and occasionally that randomness is cruel. Most of the time, though, it’s just fine. It may be clunky, it may be less than ideal, but rarely is it so bad that it causes you to lose the game on its own, and it’s definitely the case that randomness is blamed for losses more often than it is truly responsible.

This is rampant on Magic online, but it is mostly confined to the chatrooms rather than the in-game chat between players. In real life, you are forced to absorb your opponent’s slumped shoulders, their narky comments, their accusations of lucky top decks, lucky card pools, and not-unluckiness, which they, of course, possess in abundance. At the Theros pre-releases I went to, the most egregious episodes of this came from players that I like, respect and are better than me, which made it kind of better but also kind of worse. You lose to a person so often that when you beat them, you feel proud of yourself, and since they’re usually the only witness to your victory, you want some kind of confirmation from them that you did good. That confirmation would be especially meaningful since you value their opinion, because they’re better than you. Instead, they blame luck for their loss and rob you of credit for your win. You and your victory simply do not matter to them. The only thing that does is saving face.

Why does blaming luck, or some other game minutiae  save them face? Firstly, it absolves them of responsibility for building their deck a certain way, keeping a certain hand they kept, and making the play choices they made throughout the game. Second, it’s a form of demonstrating mastery over the game and their opponent despite having just lost. They may have lost to you, but they know better why they lost than you do, and guess what? It’s not because of any quality of yours.

Players love bitterly telling stories about their opponents’ clueless victories. “Afterwards he said he was pleased with his deck, but he didn’t even notice that I only had three lands in play.” This practice validates the bitterness they feel because it suggests that they, the player who notices fundamentals like numbers of lands in play, have a moral right to win, because they are the better player.

This is 100% dogshit. No player has moral ownership over the outcome of a game. No-one deserves to win. This is especially true of Magic, where there are so many factors out of the players’ control that can influence the outcome of a game, but it is even true of games like chess and Star Craft, where the better player almost always win. Low stakes games of no consequence do not enter into the realm of morality, which is at best a murky realm to begin with.

So why do people resort to morality when making themselves feel better about their loss? I think because it provides a universal baseline for considering themselves good. In my last post I suggested that, for me, Magic is a testing ground that provides an opportunity to make up for some serious perceived internal deficiency. In short, in the past I have felt powerless, and Magic affords me the opportunity to feel powerful via dominating my opponent. If that doesn’t happen, I have to dominate them in some other way, namely by showing that my knowledge of how I just lost is better than their knowledge of how they just won. This has the added bonus showing that I have moral ownership over this victory, so, in the eyes of the universe, I have proven my mastery. Not only is this mode of feeling good about myself hogwash from a logical standpoint, not only is it unreliable, but it requires the suffering of my opponent to function.

This is not acceptable. I need to find another way of enjoying Magic, one that does not lean so heavily on mastery.

Also, I realise now that earlier in this article I suggested that players who act like babies, including the ones I like and respect who did so after games against me at the pre-release, have garbage personalities. Okay, I take that back. I don’t think those guys do have garbage personalities, but also, I am as guilty as they are of this behaviour, and I don’t think I’m garbage either. However, I am grown up enough to admit that I sometimes act like garbage, and that I don’t want to do that.

First step: next time I lose, allow the bad feeling to be there, acknowledge it, and tell my opponent good game anyway.