Playing Magic can be a very time-intensive hobby. Casual multiplayer games can take a few hours. Tournaments are often all-day affairs. The time required to travel to and from events is nontrivial. And, thanks to the power of the Internet, you can even play Magic against real opponents, through Magic Online, any time of day or night from the comfort of your home (and potentially missing your pajama bottoms).

Magic can be the all exclusive, only game you play. And at the risk of biting the hand that feeds, making Magic be the only game you play exclusively is probably the wrong choice.

Lateral Thinking, Literal Process

A small caveat before continuing: I’m not pushing any particular other games here today. While I will draw from my own personal experience you can simply replace whatever game I mention with a similar substitute that you may enjoy more. My choices are just my personal preferences, your mileage may vary.

The idea that there is simply one way to look at everything is very wrong, for a variety of reasons that I don’t have room for here. The fact that there are multiple ways to look at the same situation should be obvious to most of us. However, our minds don’t always cooperate and allow us to move to these other perspectives easily. In fact, our brains are usually wired to attack things directly.

Playing Magic, especially the same ways over and over, puts a set of blinders over our eyes. It’s not easy to find new things in the game when our brains fall into a pattern of repetition. We really enjoy repetition and repeated information. There is no way we can directly apply the full faculty of our brains to all of the incoming information so, like the smart analysts we are, we make assumptions about vast chunks of the data and our brain processes with that assumption.

Essentially, it’s like how digital television works: assume some area isn’t going to change and only push through the changes. Minimize data load maximizes detail where it’s relevant. It’s just simply a good optimization approach to a truly inordinate data set (and don’t even get me started on color reproduction; that’s a whole different ball game of industry standards and practices).

Obviously this natural shortcut becomes a significant drawback when actively desiring to understand more.

While there is no easy way to begin to approach something in a different or unique manner, there are tricks to encourage your brain to flex differently. If you’ve been feeling stale, finding the same answers seems to always be the wrong ones, or think there’s more to Magic than “the textbook approach” you’re on the right track.

I’m not an expert in the field of Magic thinking, but by applying yourself to different games will help you see things you didn’t see before and approach problems with different lines of thought. In short, you can begin to think differently which is a huge plus in the category of “Ways to think better.”

Massively Multiplayer

While there are some holdouts remaining, I feel confident in stating that most of us have played some sort of first person shooter. FPS games are a staple of the digital age, all thanks to a little game called Doom.

Doom was the brightest start of the early years of PC gaming, giving us something that doesn’t stand up to the test of time but instead laid the groundwork for everything to follow. Everything you find in modern FPS games can be traced, in some form or another, back to Doom:

• Oversized and obscenely powerful gun? Check.
• Hilariously powerful melee weapon? Check.
• Multiplayer “death matches”? Check.
• Hidden secrets to be discovered by intense players? Check.
• Coding and add-on level development by the player community? Check.

Playing Doom was an experience those of us who did will never forget. But there’s more to the story than just video game history: it’s a lesson in moving forward.

The principle learned in Doom apply, generally speaking, to modern FPS games: learn the correct routes, use the correct weapons, solve the puzzles (if any) quickly, and check everywhere if possible. Learning the basics allows you to confidently explore anything.

Magic is the same way. We all start with a fairly limited card pool and learn quickly that some things work while others don’t. But more important than the individual pieces we use are the core basics we often overlook. Every new FPS has a new set of information to learn and optimization to find: grinding the basics and pushing for the right choices is how these new games are broken down into simpler pieces for those who follow after.

Taking time to play a FPS with an eye on the basics rooted in the ordinary moments of gameplay can help you move back to Magic with a similar eye. Why do two similar decks work differently? What part of the basic elements of the deck are different? Are “all the bases” covered in a given deck?

It isn’t an exercise of looking at specifics but the feeling and general sense of function. Try playing Serious Sam then Splinter Cell. The core of being an FPS is there, but the actual use of the tool provided varies wildly, from the amusingly over-the-top traditional in Serious Sam to the subtly more like a game as an entire minigame feel of Splinter Cell.

Same genre, different feel through the absence or emphasis of general staples and tools.

Paper Pleasures

As is often the case across the board with any group of gamers in a local game store, there is often an overlap between players of one game and another. Specifically, the recent release of Ascension and ongoing success of Dominion is testament to that fact. These two “deck construction” games work in a surprisingly similar way to Magic: get the cards you want and try to get them into action as quickly as possible.

While the process of doing what you want, and how you get to that point, are different there’s a lot to be said for why so many of us happen to enjoy these non-Magic paper card games. I won’t dive too deep but I can summarize in a simple statement: you can talk about the effects and actions within these games through the lens of Magic terminology. Why is that?

Our brains do this anyway, remember? Since we already have pathways laid down and comfort associated with a known quantity, finding the one-to-one correspondences between Magic and “this new game” makes learning something new easier.

However, translating anything isn’t a matter of perfect one-to-one conversions (that is it isn’t a surjective function F:”Magic” to “this new game” for anyone into maths out there). There are things unique to the specific game that aren’t applicable or comparable to Magic. There are ways and means that lie outside of easy comparisons.

When I learned these new games I found myself struggling immensely against other players who had been playing for some time. It isn’t that I didn’t know the rules or objective, just that I was using my awkward translation of Magic to try to play. My mental approach was tainted by the hang ups I had in how my brain attacked the problems it was presented in this new game.

My answers were often footed in Magic which, almost invariably, didn’t translate into the new environment.

But slowly, through continued experience and some great discussions, my brain worked out this new system separate from Magic. I could act and react without going through a bad Google translation of what was going on.

And then I began to flip the interaction on its head: if some things could be compared to Magic what relationships would I find in this new game that I could take back to Magic?

The lights of the heavenly host open up from the sky and the warm light of wisdom casts softly down.

I’m not a theorist of Magic by any stretch and the idea of playing a different game isn’t about cracking the code of true Magic knowledge (at least with my rudimentary tools). Playing deck building games is one way I trick my brain into looking at things in a completely different environment and way. Taking that perspective back to Magic results in interesting new considerations.

As a Commander player I live and die by the randomness of my large singleton decks. Deck building games often come down to correctly acquiring the components that allow you to dig through and “combo out” more often on your turns. This eye for consistency is something that I’ve taken back to Magic and, through my experiences working through my pauper cube, has drilled the relationship between similarly-functioning pieces and the count of said pieces in a deck (see The Cube Part 1 – Redundancy for more).

Sequence Breaking

If I could download the entire body of Magic knowledge and distill it properly, I suspect that elaboration of one topic would be sorely lacking: ordering of plays, or sequencing. It’s trivial to discuss Magic as a strategy games (though what you specifically state is or isn’t strategy is something else altogether). There is one genre of games I consistently like to compare Magic to, and that real-time strategy games.

Dipping back to the digital frontier, RTS games apply a simulation-like environment of resource gathering and unit production with the unknown of exactly what your opponent is doing and exactly when they are doing it. The “fog of war” is a common element: you have known information but, more often than not, you are missing important information normally only your opponent has.

Sound familiar?

One of the most crucial elements to most RTS games is what’s called a build order, the sequence of harvesting and unit production, along with unit commands, that minimizes the time to a goal (like having a count of a certain unit or being able to have a certain ability). The idea is that by applying a specific pattern that has been optimized against the randomness of most players you end up with an insurmountably powerful advantage and effective decide the game early, even if gameplay occurs significantly longer after this.

This is only possible through both practiced, consistent gameplay and the assumption that your opponent doesn’t know what you’re up to. The order you show specific key elements, such as scout the opposing base or reveal a specific unit in combat, and radically impact how the opponent plays. Certain strategies rely on surprise or ambush for effect: indicating this approach can spell impossible doom if you’ve committed to the strategy that the opponent will now properly prepare to counter.

Sound familiar?

Magic is a game of strategy. But  the decisions within the game are made in real time based partially on information available to all players as well as known only to individual players under normal circumstances. If you’re planning something that isn’t what the opponent would usually expect, keeping that information private until the appropriate moment is often critical.

Answering the question “Why do players write down what they see in an opponent’s had when  they play a ‘reveal’ discard spell?” isn’t as simple as “To know what’s in their hand.” The implications of what an opponent does after the reveal can itself be very useful information. Do they play the land that was there in hand or a different land after two turns? Do they use a card that was unknown previously instead of the one known for a similar effect?

The choices you make and the choices your opponents make all interrelate to each other, and examining beyond simply  the known information to see why the opponent could be making the decisions they are is often the more important place to be. Once you’ve begun to master using your known information to full effect you can then apply the idea of how you use that information to influence your opponent.

I’m still in the “master using your known information” stage of but the principle to leveraging that further is obvious thanks to growing up with RTS games.

Achievement Earned

The brain is the most impressive piece of biology we have in our body. It does some phenomenal things and has placed us as the dominant species on the planet. Fighting through the intricate and natural shortcuts and constraints our brain has hardwired isn’t easy, but the reward to expanded vision and deeper knowledge is well worth it.

I hope you have found a reason to flex your brain in a different direction and discover a little more of the multitude of ways to see in Magic. What made Magic pop out for your today?