Jank [4of5]

A Magical Trading Card Game Memoir

Awaiting my first opponent, I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. The seriousness of the competition decreased the chatter in the room. If you listened closely, you could hear order emerging out of chaos. The soothing hiss of distant waves breaking. Only distant because my thoughts pulled me away. I acknowledged each and dismissed them. But one kept tugging at me.

The Game had been simplified, streamlined, and made more accessible. That was good. But like every idea, every invention; anything at all of beauty or majesty, discovered or created by mankind; control was usurped from the people. Middlemen had inserted themselves artlessly and without love. Seeking to profit parasitically, they diluted it.

The corruption was gradual. Generationally style-guided, superficially diversified, and nerfed. Functionally refined, but homogenized on unconscious aesthetic levels. It had become entirely too glossy. Inoffensive and inert. A Product(™) like so many others. And yet deep within its cardboard and plastic prison, below the ink, suppressed beneath the infinite weight of the bottom line of a corporate consumer capitalist overlord; The Way persisted. Indomitable.

###

My first round opponent introduced himself as Morton Sheng. He was abnormally tall and scruffy for an asian. His handshake was firm. Real friendly guy. I think he might have been drunk.

We shuffled and presented each other our decks for final cut. Mort waived his cut and trustingly knocked on the top of my library, a custom of casual play. I opted to riffle shuffle his seven times. Not because I had any reason to suspect he might be illegally stacking or weaving his deck, but because it’s good practice to ensure proper randomization. It is ancillary shuffling also thwarts those who would cheat. I insisted he shuffle my deck too.

In online simulations of the game, shuffling was automated by algorithmic pseudo-random number generation. That was an indisputable improvement over the cardboard version. But something about its virtual incarnation was dry. Without the mutual absorption of small-talk, smack-talk, battle banter, bluffs, and tells. Without the harmonious feedback loops between the mirror neurons of two brains attempting to recursively model each other to gain a competitive edge; without those things, The Way could not be navigated. Additionally, if not for the social interaction of face-to-face match-ups, I would probably be a deranged hermit.

Our first game was close but I finished off the round rather quickly. 2-0 in the Best of Three; our match went to me. I thanked Mort for the game. With time to spare I went to watch Emm play.

###

I had been watching their game for a few turns, when Emm’s opponent made a critical play mistake. He immediately asked if he could undo it. This would not be permitted at a professional event. But, this tournament was a Duelists' Convocation International sanctioned competitive event conducted using relaxed Regular Rules Enforcement Level. Such determinations were left up to player consensus. I observed my mentee, wondering what her response would be. She waved her hand over the battlefield, motioning to allow it. Their game was made better for the both of them. And she still won. Takesies-Backsies was another advantage of playing face-to-face.

My gaze drifted away from Emm and washed over the crowd. Out of the sea of faces, my eyes met Helga’s. She was looking at me. Observing me. What business did she have staring at me? I looked away, feigning a sudden attention-requiring-task as subterfuge. I didn’t have time for her disturbances. Holding my breath and counting to ten, I down-regulated activity in my amygdala. Worf’s words of wisdom came to mind.

“Thinking about what you can’t control only wastes energy and creates its own enemy.”

Early in game three after one of Emm’s removal spells resolved, she paused for an extended period. Not to shilly-shally, but to think through a few lines of play. Her opponent asked her a simple yes or no question, to which the answer was obviously ‘Yes’. Emm affirmed, then her opponent put his hand on his library and said, “All done?”

It was a classic psych-out. Neuro-Linguistic Programming is widely recognized as pseudoscience, and thus game rules permitted his car-salesman-like persuasion tactic. He had tried to plant the suggestion she announce the end of her turn. It was a good try. But Emm was far too strong minded for tricks like that.

“No, I think I’ll enter my combat phase.”

She declared an attacker and swung for two points of unblocked damage, then paused again. This time only pretending to think deeply. Thirty seconds passed, before she facetiously faked forgetting to end her turn, saying, “Oh yeah. Moops! You can go now.”

Epic troll. I walked away assured of her dominance.

###

My opponent for round two was Mateo Crabone. Trilby tightly covering his eyebrows, presumably to lower the possibility of an unconscious micro-expression betraying him. I liked the cut of his jib.

I found myself ahead mid-game one until he summoned a 7/6 Hexproof Beast for which I had no answers. In three turns, I was trampled to death. Game two took slightly longer. Our play was intense. Our match-up, even. But ultimately, Crabone was weak to my flying creatures. We sideboarded before our third game, replacing dead cards with speculatively more effective ones, then shuffled profusely and began our decisive battle.

Crabone’s sideboarding choices made game three uncommonly interesting. He started by gumming up the ground game. He answered my flying creatures with the tightening coils of his removal spells. It wasn’t until around turn ten I understood his plan.

Boy oh boy, was I surprised. It was not a traditionally viable archetype. Most games are won through dealing damage. It’s roughly three times as hard to win by depleting an opponent’s deck. Low odds of this win condition be damned, he had the gall to go for it. I admire gall. He summoned a feeder from the fathoms then began exiling my spell library.

On his next turn I realized I was wrong. His milling of my library intensified aided by his green mana ramp. I was reacting based on a false belief, accurate for sixty card constructed decks, but not forty card limited ones. And, foolishly, I wasn’t counting cards in hand or cards drawn. I mentally updated my math. There had been seven in hand at start, and I estimated thirteen draws. Subtract from forty, leaving only twenty for him to mill away. Further automatically reduced by one every turn. He had me on a ticking clock.

My face must have flushed fear, or perhaps just understanding. Crabone smiled and said, “Je sais que tu sais que je sais.”

“...I know ...that you know ...that I know.”

Crabone was a worthy opponent.

I summoned a silent skimmer, and suddenly, we were racing. Attacking each other on different fronts. It was no longer a battle of skill or will. The outcome of our game had already been decided at the level of sideboarding. An infinitely complex vortex of causality converged on a single level: our shared gamestate. We were dancing deterministically, being moved by the universe fluidly filtering random action through rigid rules. I attacked. He milled. His life lessened slightly slower than my deck depleted. We laughed together as my last card was exiled. My resources brought to naught, Crabone decked me.

“I can not believe that worked!” he said.

“Ditto.”

I congratulated him on his incredible victory, autographed the match report, then thanked him for a thoroughly entertaining game.

###

The ecstatic experience of the previous match had me reverberating. I felt myself floating at the fringe of a lucid dream. Alert for out-of-order-execution of reality’s narrative. Paradoxical dualities and causeless effects. Upstream perceptions. Opportunity knocking. Things unintuitive, at the level of reality our base logic inhabits. Unintuitive, but not unknowable. For example, Quantum Non-locality and Superposition. The collapse of the wave function is the point where our models of reality cross-fade. With effort, training, and devotion, we can grasp such alien concepts. Our ability to conceive of other logics emerges from a super-liminal space in our consciousness. Given adequate information and the right perspective, we can balance chaos and order. We can learn, create, and sail the seas of existence, with meaning.

The Way encourages us to observe our own thoughts. It allows us to realize consciousness is not magical, but mechanical. Self awareness is an off-label use of our ability to play the most dangerous game; to track prey and avoid becoming prey. Our capacity for meta-cognition results from the evolution of survival itself.

The ability to experiment; to take chances freely and non-fatally fail. Losing a game, a match, or a tournament, but living to play again and again and again and again and AGAIN, is perhaps the greatest factor in our evolution. Pushing outward the boundaries. With every loss or win the motivation to play is refreshed. We learn to go on. How best handle unfavorable odds. To persevere. To be better. To ascend. The Way rewards us greatly.

###

“I’m undefeated so far,” said Emm.

“Nice. I won my first match, lost my second... to mill.”

“No way! Really? That can work?”

“Evidently, yes.”

There was a disturbance in her aura. Emm seemed distant.

“How’s your deck playing?” I asked.

“Every time I draw my six-drop bomb, I win. Forgot to attack once, didn’t matter though. A few mistakes, nothing fatal.”

“Allowing yourself to get distracted?”

She tilted her head ever so slightly, precursor to a quip. “You know what they say... if the bra fits.”

###

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