On Narrative 2: Magic Systems

A number of different Youtube channels have recently done analyses of magic systems in popular fiction. As far as I'm aware, though, they all cover the topic from the same perspective: comparing "hard" magic systems like the bending system in Avatar: the Last Airbender, which have internal consistency and set up reasonable expectations for what characters can and can't do, to "soft" magic systems like the Force in Star Wars, which change their nature whenever the plot requires it.

I'm not gonna do that here. This blog will take as given that a good magic system is internally consistent and has rules that both the characters and the audience can figure out. I'm going to take a step further and break down the different types of internally consistent magic system in a way that might help some of my writer friends with their worldbuilding.

Dungeons and Dragons has, broadly speaking, three types of magic that are representative of the vast majority of fictional magic systems. They are:

• Innate magic, used by sorcerers
• Learned magic, used by wizards
• Granted magic, used by clerics and druids

The Harry Potter series has innate magic. Magical ability is hereditary, and wizards and witches are treated as a different ethnic group from Muggles. There's even been speculation in the fandom about what type of gene causes magical ability.

The Abhorsen trilogy has learned magic. Anyone can learn it if they study hard enough, and it is taught alongside other subjects as part of a normal school curriculum. Some people are better at it than others, but only to the degree that some people are better at math or writing than others. There are no chosen ones, only choosing ones (and those whose parents chose it for them).

Lord of the Rings has granted magic. Magical abilities come from gods or godlike nature spirits. Most granted-magic settings come with their own gods, or a variation on classical European pantheons; but some, including the Alpennia series, integrate magic into the mythology of Christian saints and miracles.

Many magic systems that look like a combination of these types are actually primarily one or the other. For example, not all magic systems that require training or active study are learned systems. In fact, most "school of magic" settings, such as Harry Potter, Akata Witch, and X-Men, are innate, and the purpose of the school is to teach magical children to gain some basic control over their power so that it doesn't kill them before they have a chance to learn to use it properly.

Likewise, not all systems that involve making contracts with extradimensional beings are granted systems. Young Wizards is, because becoming a wizard requires that you be sought out by the One Power and agree to accept its faith in you; but Bartimaeus is not, because even though its wizarding society is built on the backs of enslaved demons, the wizards themselves must study for years to even get to the point where they can bind the least powerful demon. It's a learned system.

Here are some settings that either have real hybrid systems or multiple coexisting systems:

• Terry Pratchett's Discworld series begins with rigorously academic learned magic and then introduces an innate system in which the eighth son of an eighth son is always a powerful wizard, and his eighth son is so powerful that there's a good reason for wizards to be celibate. These systems interact in interesting ways, especially in the early installments Equal Rites and Sourcery.
• Star Wars has gone back and forth between innate (anybody up for a blood test?) and granted sources of Force-wielding ability. The Last Jedi makes it officially a granted system with a large helping of Conservation of Ninjutsu: the more users of one side of the Force there are, the weaker each individual's power is. This explains a lot about the prequels: the Jedi were ineffectual because there were so many of them, while the Rule of Two allowed individual Sith lords access to much more power at any given time.
• Michelle West's House War series and its spinoffs have both gods granting magical ability and schools teaching it. This one might actually be a real hybrid, since the university faculty includes demigods who can call on their divine parents for help with their research.
• Avatar: the Last Airbender appears to be all three at once: there are four ethnic groups, each with a different innate elemental power, but those powers can be extended into new domains through training (think metalbending and bloodbending), but some of these powers are also believed to be divinely granted, and gods and spirits occasionally show up and interfere with the workings of the world.

The type of magic you choose for a story will affect your characters' relationships with other people, as well as the society they live in. For example, an innate magic system might lead to stronger ties between family members, or greater concern with the maintenance of bloodlines, or a society using a granted system might prioritize the religion associated with the gods doing the granting, or any number of more subtle results that the characters themselves might not be aware of. Again, I'm prioritizing internal consistency, so I want to see the effects of how magic is used on a society that uses it.

On Games Gone By 4: Ocarina of Time Part 2

Note: I am experimenting with moving my blog to an open-source host. You can also read this post here on write.as.

This week I continued my adventures through Hyrule on the Geek's old Nintendo 64. Having defeated the weird spidery monster poisoning the Great Deku Tree in my first session, I returned to Kokiri Forest to say goodbye to my friend Saria and all the other Kokiri who I never really fit in with anyway, and after some dicking around in the Lost Woods while the Geek hunted down his strategy guide, left the forest altogether to fulfill the Great Deku Tree's last wish: that I meet the Princess Zelda in Hyrule Castle and go save the world.

Never underestimate the power of putting your own name on the save file. I still feel incredibly personally invested in this quest. (And maybe that's why it took me to the end of the visit with the Geek to come back to the game--I get anxious about returning to stories I've left in the middle. Well, that and Desert Bus was finally over and no longer taking up all my brain space.)

I feel like I've forgotten a lot about the controls (note to self, right shoulder button raises the shield), so I'm glad this session didn't have much combat. I did have to fight off an endless wave of skeletons in Hyrule Field, though. Waiting for night to end so you can go to a new area is annoying.

Something that isn't nearly as annoying as I expected is Navi's reminders of where to go to follow the plot. It was actually refreshing, coming back after a month away from the game, to have someone dedicated to telling me what came next. (This is why I've never finished a main-series Pokemon game. I start it up after a few weeks away and immediately get lost.)

Another not-so-annoying thing was the stealth sequence that takes Link up from Hyrule Castle Town to the castle proper. The hardest part was at the beginning: finding the vines to climb up the cliff, going down into the guardhouse and then finding the exact right path up the second hill in the dark. After that, the puzzles with the walking guards weren't a problem at all.

I met Zelda and Impa, learned about Zelda's prophetic dreams and how Ganondorf is Obviously Evil and after the Triforce, and now I'm part of some kind of conspiracy to save the world. I need three Spiritual Stones and a better ocarina to get into the secret back room of the Temple of Time (which looks remarkably like a Christian church), and the next stone is somewhere on Death Mountain. On the way there, I stopped at Lon Lon ranch to meet Epona and make the Geek play the cucco lottery for me, because at that point my hands were too tired for me to be any good at a timed challenge.

Next stop, Kakariko Village, home of--guess what?--more cuccos.

Some irrelevant statistics:

• Link now has three potential love interests: Saria, Zelda, and Malon.
• I've learned two songs: Zelda's Lullaby and Epona's Song.
• I have one Spiritual Stone, given to me by the Great Deku Tree, 
• I've had one moment of intended inventory weirdness: the egg that Malon gave me before I snuck into the castle hatched into a rooster, which I had to remember to use to wake up her father. The rooster is labeled "Chicken," not "Cucco." (Note to self: tweet at Clyde Mandelin to see if he knows anything about this.)
• I have one bottle, which contains two quaffs of Lon Lon milk, and have had the temptation to try Reverse Bottle Adventure exactly once.
• I know where one Fairy Fountain is, but can't get to it.
• I have found one Easter egg: the portraits of Mario, Peach, and Yoshi in Hyrule Castle/

And some interesting animation choices:

• The Skull Kids in the Lost Woods stare at you solemnly when you climb up onto a podium without an ocarina.
• Ganondorf's red and green palette clashes appropriately with the yellow and purple livery of Hyrule's royal guard.
• When Link learns a song, he stares at his ocarina with the wide-eyed expression of a kitten producing its first hairball. The Geek says "You would too, if your ocarina started glowing in your hands!" Maybe the first time, yeah, but not every time thereafter.
• After I learned Epona's Song, when the cutscene ended Epona was walking toward me and pushing me along with her head. It took me a second to realize I was now in control of Link again and could just walk sideways. We're friends now.

On the Net 4: Desert Bus for Hope 2018

My favorite annual charity event is about to begin.

On Friday morning, at 10am Pacific time, a group of Canadian comedians and their friends will begin playing and livestreaming the most boring video game ever created: Desert Bus, in which you drive from Tucson to Las Vegas at 45 miles per hour in real time, in an otherwise empty bus with steering issues. It takes eight hours, at the end of which you get one point and the option to drive back. They will be playing this game for somewhere around a week; the more people donate, the longer they drive. All the money goes to Child's Play, a charity that gives games to children's hospitals and women's shelters.

But why, you ask, would I want to watch such a boring stream? Well, mostly because driving through the virtual desert is not all that's going to happen. There will be singing, dancing, skits, calls from cool people like Phil Plait, and most importantly, auctions and prizes. Many of the things being auctioned off or given away in random drawings were made and submitted by viewers.

And that's where I come in. This will be my fifth year watching Desert Bus (out of the twelve in which it has happened), and my fourth consecutive year of sending in something I knitted to be sold for Child's Play. This year's submission is a pro-wrestling-style Desert Bus championship belt. A good friend of mine has also gotten in on the crafting for the first time this year; she sent in four beautiful laser-carved deck boxes. Both of these projects will be available at some point during the stream as silent auctions.

There's a lot going on at Desert Bus for Hope. It's a lot of fun, with a great community, for a great cause, and it's a great relief these days to see a community getting together and having fun for a good cause. Hope to see you in chat! I can't wait.

On the Stack 12: Tiny Fighters, a homebrew Magic format

I like building decks with cards that I have left over from drafts and Sealed events, and I'm always on the lookout for new ways to use cards that might not be effective in Standard decks, where you're always using four of each of the best cards, or Commander decks, where there's often a better option from an older set. So I have a lot of fun building decks for formats like Brawl, which give me opportunities to use a more diverse set of cards from Standard, and Tiny Leaders, which forces me to be creative by limiting the converted mana cost of the spells I can use.

So why not combine the restrictions of Brawl and Tiny Leaders and see what happens?

On Food 1: The Beyond Burger

I've been curious about meatless hamburgers for a while now, both as a disaffected Jew who wavers on kashrut and is dating a guy who thinks cheeseburgers are a good use of both meat and cheese, and as someone who's trying trying to eat less beef both for her own health and the health of the planet. But for most of my life thus far, veggie burgers have been weird and unappetizing. So it was a lovely surprise to learn that there are now two different brands of vegetarian hamburger that people think look and taste sufficiently similar to meat that even non-vegetarians will find them worth eating.

The Impossible Burger looks like more of a classy restaurant-y thing , while Beyond Meat's Beyond Burger has started showing up in such affordable places as Vancouver burger chains and the meat fridge at my local Seattle Safeway. So a couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a couple of Beyond Burgers and made them for lunch.

For about $6 US, you get two 4-ounce plantburger patties and instructions for grilling them. Not having a grill handy, or wanting to mess with pan-frying, I baked mine instead, which took 20 minutes at 350F with a break in the middle to flip them.

They came out a lighter brown than I'm used to from beef burgers, and the taste was less intense, but the smell and texture were convincingly beefy. I might have overdone them a little, since most of the juice ran out and there was less pink inside than the packaging recommended, but on multigrain bread with a slice of heirloom tomato (thank G-d for the farmer's market), one patty made most of a delicious lunch. Not all, though; it wasn't as filling as I'd expect the same mass of beef to be, and the smell lingered and made me not stop being hungry until I found some dessert.

I saved the second one for dinner and ate it with penne, mozzarella, and marinara sauce. The texture didn't really hold up to reheating, or maybe, when the flavor was covered up by the sauce, the texture was just more apparent; either way, the second burger felt and tasted a lot more like tofu. (It is not tofu: the packaging assures me that Beyond Burgers are vegan, soy-free, and gluten-free.) Since the flavor is such a big part of the meatlike experience, this is definitely a hamburger substitute, not a meatball substitute.

The Beyond Burger is a convincing meatless hamburger, but it's best as long as it's freshly grilled and the focus of the meal. If you want to be impressed by great strides in vegetarian technology, use as directed on the box and don't add strongly flavored toppings. And don't try to eat the crispy burned bits that get left in the pan. They do not taste like they're made of beef.

On Usernames: StyleJam 2018

This summer, I participated in an online event called StyleJam. It followed the format of game jams, wherein a bunch of people sign up for the event on itch.io, a host and storefront for creative projects (mostly video games), and make small games on a set theme in a short time. Instead of games, though, the event was about style guides and creative bibles: creating documentation for real-life situations the way writers of TV shows and video games do for the worlds they’re creating.

I wrote a style guide for online usernames. You can read it here, and other StyleJam submissions here. StyleJam ends at the end of September.

On Games Gone By 3: First impressions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

When I started this series, I figured I'd stick to PC games, since that's the form I can most readily find and play games in. But the Geek has a Nintendo 64; and I've been watching a lot of Ocarina of Time speedruns lately, mostly as research for a potential conference paper about what the speedrunning community does and doesn't consider a glitch; and Ocarina of Time is a very popular game from the late 90s, and one of the first successful 3D console games, so I'd been wanting to give it a try.

At time of writing, I have finished the Great Deku Tree dungeon. I'm (a little at a time, because of my wrists, and only when I visit the Geek) playing the original North American N64 version with trident controller and rumble pack.

The controls are not at all what I'm used to from newer games, mostly because there's only one analog stick, so you can't move and look around at the same time. The action buttons are also weird: while I'm familiar with the contextual function of the A button, which does different things depending on what you're looking at, I find it difficult to switch between the B button, which swings your sword, and the C buttons, which activate other items, and I often found myself pressing the wrong one under time pressure. The analog stick is sensitive enough that it was hard for me to run in a straight line, and the addition of the rumble pack made the controller heavy enough that I had to rest it on my lap or on the couch next to me, though the added height made it a useful controller stand.

On top of all this, I spent a lot of time learning how to Z-target, a mechanic unique to Ocarina of Time (and probably its sequel, Majora's Mask) that attempts to make up for the lack of camera control. Even when I remembered to Z-target, it didn't work consistently; I especially had trouble locking onto enemies above me, even when I could see them.

The tutorial was very thorough, as well it should be: since Ocarina of Time was one of the first 3D console games, it had a lot to teach. It might even have been too thorough; it included so many movement and combat techniques that I left the level feeling like I'd forgotten more than I remembered, especially about Z-targeting. Some of that is likely hindsight bias, since the things I felt weren't explained enough were game-specific things like Z-targeting, while the things I thought were overemphasized were things that have since become industry standard, like the way the A button's function depends on the object you're interacting with. Maybe if I knew nothing about how video games were "supposed" to work, the tutorial would seem more balanced. As it was, I felt really tense in combat and puzzle-solving situations, and was always worried I'd forgotten something important. (Fortunately, the Geek was sitting behind me with the strategy guide and usually had something helpful to say.)

My evaluation of the game's graphics is also likely biased by my experience with later, better-rendered games, especially since the Geek keeps telling me how revolutionarily lifelike the angular, low-poly character models seemed when the game is new. So I don't really have anything to say about the quality or realism of the character models, except that a number of the Kokiris' face models fall straight to the bottom of the Uncanny Valley. I can, however, report that the Geek and I played with his TV settings for a while before we found a combination of brightness and aspect ratio that made it possible for me to distinguish helpful tufts of grass from the dungeon walls behind them.

The best part of the game is probably the story. So far, it's a typical hero's journey, but the details are remarkably compelling. I don't think I'd ever really understood before how much interactivity can add to a story: I wasn't just watching Link, I was Link, and dealing with all those dangers and puzzles and timed platforming, regardless of how tense it made me, also made me care about Link and the Deku Tree and the fate of Hyrule. The fact that I put my own name on the save file probably also helps with immersion--it's a little eerie when characters address me by name, but it makes me feel personally involved.

Rating: I can't play much of it at a time, for the sake of my wrists and my nerves, but I really want to keep playing.

On the Stack 11: Yasova Dragonclaw and the story of Core Set 19.

The story for Magic the Gathering's Core Set 2019 is a series of flashbacks telling the origin story of two of Magic's recurring characters: the evil Elder Dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas and his enigmatic rival Ugin, known as the Spirit Dragon. While both of these characters have been in Magic Story for years, the flashbacks stand on their own as a tale of sibling rivalry writ extremely large across planes and millennia. But their framing device relies on the story of three Magic sets from almost five years ago, and as a result, if you're new to Magic and its lore, it may be hard to follow.

I started playing during the set after all of this, so I didn't see it as it happened. But here's what I've learned from reading flavortext and the wiki.

On Music 2: Dog on the Floor

Raffi Cavoukian's new album, "Dog on the Floor," is not for everyone. After all, it's fifteen songs for children, performed by a Canadian guy who's been known for writing children's music for longer than I've been alive. But if you have children, or if you like children's music, or especially if you grew up listening to Raffi, this is a must listen.

I have been listening to Raffi since before I can remember, and his music has always been a comfort (with the exception of "Evergreen Everblue," which was my introduction to environmentalism and has some songs on it that kinda scared me as a kid). Baby Beluga and Bananaphone are family traditions, and when I moved to the Pacific Northwest I remembered that Raffi had written a song about a place very near to where I was going to live. This was the first new Raffi album I'd heard about since "Bananaphone" (though he's produced several others in the meantime), and so when it came out last week, I ordered it on CD and prepared for a major nostalgia trip.

And I got exactly what I came for. "Dog on the Floor" comes from the same place, both geographically and philosophically, that I remember from my childhood. Raffi, along with local children and other professional musicians, sing about the joy of being a child ("Play Play Play"); the pastoral ideals of the British Columbia Gulf Islands ("Market Day" and "The Way it Goes"), and animals, especially the titular dog, Raffi's poodle/collie mix Luna (in "Luna's Song," "Walkin' My Dog," and "Dog on the Floor"). The lyrics paint a picture of a world that's much less complicated than the one I live in, and lets me remember, or perhaps imagine, a time in my life before I had to worry about anything.

But there's at least one song on this album that's as much for today's worried grownups, as it is for children: the next-to-last song, "Take a Breath," is a meditation on mindfulness, a reminder to take a moment every now and then to breathe, to stretch, to sing (and it doesn't hurt if what you're singing is a Raffi song).

The voice of my childhood is back, and he's telling me it's going to be okay. And for me, that's reason enough to listen.

On Games 7: Just Shapes & Beats

Disclaimer: I did not play this game. I will not be playing this game, for reasons I will explain in a minute. My review is based on this 6-part let's play series by Dan Floyd on his delightful channel PlayFrame. While my opinions are my own, they may be influenced by Dan's enjoyment of the game.

Because Dan Floyd really likes Just Shapes & Beats, which was released in May 2018 by Berzerk Studio, and he recommends it repeatedly to his viewers as he plays it. But before you rush out and buy it (if you haven't already), there's a major accessibility issue I need to bring to your attention.

Just Shapes & Beats is full of flashing lights. It's a bullet-hell rhythm game in which obstacles appear and disappear in quick succession following the beat of fast-paced electronic music. While there is an "epilepsy-friendly" setting that turns off flashing backgrounds, and there's undoubtedly a way to turn the contrast down, there's no way to make the movement of actual in-game objects less sudden, and watching the let's play series consistently gave me headaches, a sure sign that I would not be able to play the game myself.

But I kept watching in spite of the headaches, because there's so much that Just Shapes & Beats does well.

On the Needles 19

I think it's time for a crafting update.

Knitting

My main project right now is the Revenge of the Kea shawl, which I'm making with a navy blue sock yarn and a rainbow-striped sock yarn. I've finished six out of eleven sections, but each one is longer than the last, so I don't think I'm halfway yet.

I'm also working on a number of smaller projects, including a sock with cool zigzag stripes (pattern) and a new idea for making pants the right shape, and I have plans for gloves for a Halloween costume. More on those as they develop.

Pokemon

I passed day 600 last week. As long as the Pokemon Company doesn't release a new game this year, I'm going to finish drawing every single Pokemon by sometime next February. Today's Pokemon is number 606, Beheeyem.

Deckbuilding

This week's Lady Planeswalkers event was Core Set 19 Mini-masters. I opened Vivien Reid and a Satyr Enchanter, and made a white/blue/green enchantments-matter deck that won two rounds out of four. The surprise MVP was Psychic Corrosion; both of the rounds I won were won by surviving long enough to mill my opponents out (that is, to make them run out of cards in their deck faster than I did).

I've also modified my Elves Commander deck to be mono-green instead of green-white, with Marwyn the Nurturer as its new commander, and I've made a new Brawl deck based around Squee the Immortal and goblin tribal. There are now sixteen goblins in Standard, which is not quite enough for a 60-card deck, but I filled the rest of the creature slots with other small aggressive things. I think it will still feel very goblin-y to play.

Intro to Magic Part 3: Reading Magic Story

All this talk about game mechanics is all well and good, and it's important to know if you want to play Magic, but none of it is really why I got into the game in the first place. What drew me in was hearing longtime players talk about the stories that went with the sets, and the settings those stories happen in. In this post, I'm going to talk about what the stories are like, and suggest some places to start reading.

At a very high level, here's what's going on: Magic story happens on a multiverse of parallel worlds called planes. Most people, including some very powerful wizards, spend their entire lives living on one plane, but planeswalkers can travel between them using an innate ability known as the Spark. Most Magic stories are about planeswalkers either stirring up trouble on a specific plane, or trying to solve an ongoing problem on a plane. Or both, since the biggest social and environmental issues on any given plane are usually caused by planeswalkers.

Early Magic story was published as a series of novels, mostly set on the plane of Dominaria. I recommend starting with The Gathering Dark by Jeff Grubb, and its sequels The Eternal Ice and The Shattered Alliance. These books tell the story of a wizard named Jodah as he grows up from "awkward apprentice" to "someone who's wise and powerful enough to boss planeswalkers around." It's a fairly typical coming-of-age story for the most part, but it's solidly written, it has a number of fun characters, including the pyromancer Jaya Ballard, and it's the best introduction to the actual magic system of Magic that I've ever read.

There's a full list of Magic novels here. I can't vouch for the quality of all of them, and the books published before 1998 are no longer canon, but here are some more that may be worth reading for more context, both for Jodah's story and the current Magic story.

• The Artifacts cycle tells the story of the war between the wizards Urza and Mishra, which caused the nuclear winter on Dominaria that's the setting for The Gathering Dark and The Eternal Ice.
• Rath and Storm and the Masquerade Cycle follow the adventures of Gerrard Capashen, a distant descendant of Urza's, and the crew of the interplanar airship Weatherlight. This was the first time Magic had an ensemble cast.
• The Ravnica Cycle and the Return to Ravnica Cycle are set on the plane of Ravnica, which is ruled by ten competing guilds. I recommend these because Wizards of the Coast has announced three consecutive sets set on Ravnica beginning in fall 2018.
• Agents of Artifice and The Purifying Fire tell the stories of important moments in the lives of four of Magic Story's current main characters.

Wizards of the Coast switched to publishing official story on its website between 2012 and 2014. If you're more interested in getting a quick background in the story and catching up in time for the next set, everything you need is in their archive. The best place to begin is with the stories from Origins, the summer 2015 set, which tell the origin stories of the five planeswalkers that make up the core of Magic's current ensemble cast:

• Gideon, an indestructible order mage who's determined never to let his friends down again
• Jace, a mind mage with amnesia (he recently got better)
• Liliana, a necromancer who traded her soul for eternal youth and has been trying to get the rights to her soul back ever since
• Chandra, a teenage pyromancer who believes the government of her home plane killed her parents
• Nissa, an elvish nature mage whose home plane has been invaded by eldritch monsters

These characters all already existed in the lore, and in some cases their stories have been altered slightly in recent retellings, but the five stories I've linked to above are a helpful prologue to the characters' adventures together, which happen in the following order.

• Battle for Zendikar/Oath of the Gatewatch
• Shadows Over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon
• Kaladesh/Aether Revolt
• Amonkhet/Hour of Devastation
• Ixalan/Rivals of Ixalan
• Dominaria

Stories I've listed together are set in the same place and listed together in the archive. The continuity between bullet points isn't always as strong as I would like, but it's all worth reading.

The story of the latest set, Core Set 2019, is a series of flashbacks to the history of two more recurring characters, the Elder Dragon planeswalkers Ugin and Nicol Bolas. The flashbacks themselves stand alone, but the framing device that connects them is going to need some more context if you're new to the lore. I'll lay that out in another post.

One important thing to keep in mind when reading these stories, especially when switching between old and new stories, is an event about sixty years ago in canon (or 2006 in real time) called the Mending that totally changed how planeswalkers work. Urza did some experiments with time travel that caused the spacetime around Dominaria to break. Other planeswalkers repaired the breaks, and the repair changed the nature of the Spark. Before the Mending (as in Jodah's story), planeswalkers were effectively gods; afterward, they became mortal, their powers were limited, and it became a little easier for them to have empathy for planebound people. This made it possible to represent planeswalkers as a card type (before the Mending, they were just too powerful), and to keep the story moving from plane to plane after the destruction of the Weatherlight. It also drives the plot: some of Magic's antagonists, including Nicol Bolas, became planeswalkers before the Mending and are trying to regain their old powers.

So that's my guide to Magic story, both old and recent. I wish you all happy reading.

On the Stack 10: How I Build Constructed Decks

One of my favorite parts of playing Magic is building decks for Constructed formats, in which you bring your own deck to the event. They give me more time to think about what to put in my deck than Limited formats, where you build your deck as part of the event; and I can use all the cards I've collected from recent Limited events to do a specific thing or small set of things that I enjoyed doing with those cards at the events I got them in. Here's a brief walkthrough of the steps I take when building a Constructed deck, and some examples based on my current Standard and Brawl decks.

A good rule of thumb for a sixty-card deck is to have about twenty-four creatures, twelve noncreature spells (including Vehicles and Planeswalkers, if you use them), and twenty-four lands. I stick to these numbers pretty strictly, but they're not absolutes. An aggressive deck might have many more creatures, or one or two fewer lands; a deck whose strategy benefits from casting instants and sorceries may have a higher proportion of instants and sorceries; and so on.

When building a deck, I try to answer the following three questions in order:

1. What do you want your deck to do? What cards do you intend to use to win?
2. What other cards help you get to your win condition?
3. How do you prevent your opponent from getting to their win condition first?

Here's how I've worked through these questions while building Standard and Brawl decks recently.

Mono-black Historic (Standard) [decklist]
Note: the art on a number of the cards I link to in this section contains unsettling images of people in pain. Proceed with caution.

1. At two consecutive Lady Planeswalker Limited nights, I won games with a combination of Cabal Paladin, Chainer's Torment, and Guardians of Koilos using some variation on the following sequence of plays. (This is what happens in the best-case scenario. In most cases, my opponent will have some way to interrupt me, and I'll have to play around what they're doing.)

1. I cast Cabal Paladin as soon as I have enough mana.
2. On my next turn, I cast Chainer's Torment. It does two damage to my opponent, and since it's historic, Cabal Paladin also does two damage.
3. I attack with Cabal Paladin, dealing four more damage. This turn, I have done eight damage.
4. On my next turn, Chainer's Torment deals two more damage.
5. I cast Guardians of Koilos. Cabal Paladin deals two damage because the Guardians are historic, and I use the Guardians' ability to return Chainer's Torment to my hand.
6. I attack with Cabal Paladin. This turn, I have done six damage, and if my opponent has no way to gain life, they are now at six life.
7. On my next turn, I recast Chainer's Torment, dealing four damage as in step 2.
8. I attack with Cabal Paladin and win.

I want to be able to win consistently using this kind of sequence. Fortunately, since this is a Standard deck, I can use four of each of these cards to make sure I see them more often.

2. All the cards I've named so far have a converted mana cost of 4 or 5. I need smaller, cheaper creatures to defend myself with until I have four lands out. Khenra Eternal and Caligo Skin-Witch are good choices right now, but since Khenra Eternal is leaving Standard in October, I plan to replace it with Knights of Malice and maybe add in a Diamond Mare or two to feed some more life into Chainer's Torment's third chapter. I'm including two each of Urgoros, the Empty One and Tetzimoc, Primal Death as alternate win conditions; it's not a great idea to include more than two of each, though, because I might get stuck with multiple copies of the same legendary creature in my hand and be unable to play them. They also have abilities that will help with step 3, since Tetzimoc can destroy creatures and Urgoros either makes my opponent discard cards or lets me draw cards. It's also a good idea to include a couple of ways to bring important creatures back from the graveyard, like Recover and Memorial to Folly.

3. In addition to keeping myself alive long enough to get the cards and mana I need to win, I need to prevent my opponent from casting spells that affect me. Hand attacks like Duress (art warning: acupuncture needles), Divest, and Raider's Wake are useful here, as well as Torment of Scarabs. I'll also need ways to kill my opponent's creatures; while most of those will stay in the sideboard, I am including two Phyrexian Scriptures (art warning: lots of blood), as well as two Doomfalls, which let me choose between hand attack and getting rid of a creature. When Standard rotates in the fall, I'll have to take out some of my favorites of these cards, but I'm hoping for plenty of alternatives in the sets that will be released between now and then.

Tishana Midrange (Brawl) [decklist]

1. I love playing tribal decks. Tribal is a deck archetype where you play as many creatures as possible of the same creature type, plus cards that interact either with that creature type specifically or a creature type of the player's choice. During Ixalan block, I drafted several aggressive Merfolk decks and picked up a number of cards that support Merfolk tribal. I want to make a Brawl deck that uses as many different Merfolk from my collection as possible, and Brawl’s requirement that I only use one of each card (besides basic lands) actually makes choosing which Merfolk to include easier because I can use more of them.

 At this point, I have three choices for the deck's commander: Tishana, Kumena, and Tatyova. Tatyova isn't a great choice because she's not a tribal card, and I want my commander to represent the thing I actually want to do with the deck, which is cast lots of Merfolk. The remaining two choices both do this. Kumena is easier to cast than Tishana, but I like Tishana better for a couple of reasons. First, her ability allows me to draw cards when I cast her, which is rarely a bad thing. Second, in the story of the block, Tishana is a much more sympathetic character than Kumena, and this is reflected in how they interact with other Merfolk: Tishana draws on their strength in numbers, while Kumena taps them down to take all the glory for himself. (Remember that "I like this character better" is often enough reason to build a deck around them; that's why legendary creatures are so cool.) So Tishana will be my Commander, and Kumena and Tatyova will go into the deck with my other Merfolk.

2. Since my Commander's power and toughness is affected by the number of creatures I control, I'm going to need a lot of small, efficient Merfolk, the ones that cost four mana or less and have the highest power and toughness and best abilities for their mana cost. Merfolk Mistbinder, which makes other Merfolk bigger, is an important one to include. I'll also include cards that work best with Merfolk creatures, like River Herald's Boon and Crashing Tide, and cards that make Merfolk tokens, like Deeproot Waters. A lot of Merfolk and Merfolk-related cards interact with +1/+1 counters, so I'll include cards that add and interact with counters, like Hadana's Climb (which, as a bonus, is also Merfolk-flavored). Two-colored lands and color-fixing cards like Unclaimed Territory are also important, to make sure I can cast both double-blue and blue-green costs.

3. It's a good idea to have some removal and counterspells in this deck, especially since blue is good at both of those things. I use Crashing Tide (it's better with Merfolk, after all), Waterknot, and Cancel, among other things. Since this part of my deck involves so few cards, I'll choose more general counterspells over spells that counter only creatures or only noncreature spells, bearing in mind that they usually cost a little more to cast.

Multani Lands (Brawl) [decklist]

1. Where my monoblack deck is built around a combination of a few cards, and my Merfolk deck is built around a creature type, this deck is built around a single card: its commander, Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar. The goal of the deck is to make him as powerful as possible by accumulating lands both on the battlefield and in the graveyard, ideally attacking for ten or more damage at a time.

2. I'll include a lot of small creatures that make mana to help get my deck going. Most of the mono-green ones are elves, like Llanowar Elves and Druid of the Cowl, so I'll include Marwyn the Nurturer to get extra benefits from having lots of elves in play. I'll include some big efficient creatures with trample, to take advantage of having all the extra mana, as well as Spike-Tailed Ceratops, which blocks extra creatures. I also need spells that let me find extra lands, like Adventurous Impulse and Ranging Raptors, spells that put cards in my graveyard, like Perpetual Timepiece, World Shaper, and The Mending of Dominaria, and spells that let me play lands out of my graveyard, like Ramunap Excavator. (Notice that these cards can also bring cards back from my graveyard; I don't want to run out of cards in my deck before I win.) 

My mana base is mostly Forests, since most spells that search for lands only look for basic lands, but I also have lands that can end up in my graveyard easily, like Desert of the Indomitable and Evolving Wilds. (Note: Evolving Wilds is not worth it in a mono-colored deck unless you really want lands in your graveyard.) Ramunap Excavator will let me play lands from my graveyard, so I can recur Evolving Wilds and not miss land drops. I'm also looking forward to Scapeshift and Crucible of Worlds returning to Standard, though they're expensive enough that I may not end up getting them.

3. I'll also include spells that destroy artifacts and enchantments, spells that allow my creatures to fight other creatures, and maybe one or two that destroy creatures with flying. My favorite in this area is Broken Bond, which both destroys an artifact or enchantment and lets me search for a land.

Conclusion

As you're finishing up your deck, keep in mind that your playgroup can be a valuable deckbuilding resource. If you're not sure which cards to use, it should not be hard to find someone who can give you good advice about how to improve your decklist--and, importantly, tell you why any particular change is an improvement, so that you learn from the conversation instead of just following instructions.

Happy brewing!

On Games Gone By: Wolfenstein 3D (Apogee, DOS)

Sometimes you just want to punch a Nazi. But you don't want to get arrested for doing it for real, your computer's graphics card can't handle the new Wolfenstein games, and the old Call of Duty games doesn't make the combat personal enough. Have I got the game for you.

Wolfenstein 3D, developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in May 1992, three days after I was born, is the follow-up to a couple of 2D stealth games and one of the very first first-person shooters. You play as William "B.J." Blazkowicz, an American prisoner of war in the Nazi-held Castle Wolfenstein, fighting your way out of the castle's dungeons and collecting stolen gold along the way. I played the first few levels of the shareware version, which is available on My Abandonware, in DOSBox with keyboard controls.

The controls are tank-style: the up and down arrow keys move you forward and backward, the left and right arrows turn you left and right, and moving left and right without turning requires an extra key press. Adding in one button for shooting and another for opening doors, it can be a lot to keep track of if you're used to simpler control schemes, leading to slower progression through the levels. (Full disclosure: the only other first-person shooter I have experience with is the iOS port of Fortnite Battle Royale, which has remarkably comfortable touch controls.) But that slow movement has a silver lining: it gives new players opportunities to practice the spatial awareness that is necessary for success in faster-paced shooters, checking around every corner for enemies.

Wolf3D's UI and level design rely on the conventions of dungeon-crawling games like Dungeon Master in ways that don't feel entirely appropriate for later shooters. The player stats are collected at the bottom of the screen, instead of spread out around the edges as in newer games, and it can be hard to tell which numbers represent what aspect of your character's status at a glance. Level maps resemble the classical "maze of twisty passages, all alike," to the point where I often got lost playing unfamiliar levels and could only really tell I was making progress when someone was trying to shoot me. At times, I wanted to pause the game and map out the levels on graph paper, but I never actually did, because I felt like the game wanted me to keep moving, and to move faster, and like taking the time to make a map would make my performance worse somehow.

The end-of-level statistics support this feeling: in addition to the percentages of enemies killed, gold collected, and secret rooms found, there's a timer that tells you how long you spent in each level. The game rewards practice: if you take the time to play each level repeatedly and learn the layout, you'll get a shorter level time. And once you're good at it, the levels go pretty quickly. But spending lots of time stumbling around Castle Wolfenstein's dungeons when you don't know what you're doing is not particularly rewarding. Especially not when you have to kill adorable pixelated German shepherds. I feel sorry for those dogs. (Note: the Sega Genesis port, which I have not played, replaces the dogs with rats.)

Between feeling lost, feeling rushed, and being forced to shoot cute animals--not to mention a list of difficulty settings that mocks you for playing on lower difficulties--there's a lot about playing Wolfenstein 3D that just doesn't feel good. If you do decide to play, make sure you read the list of keymappings carefully, and don't let the game bully you into playing on a harder difficulty than you're ready for. And maybe pause every so often to draw a map.

Rating: It's a nice lesson in gaming history, and shooting Nazis is cathartic, but if I'm not looking for one of those two things, I would rather spend my time and energy doing something else.

On Books 14: The Best of All Possible Worlds

The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord is, appropriately for its title, the most optimistic book I’ve read in a long time. Reading it felt so good that, when I finished, I immediately wanted to turn the book over and start again, to spend a little longer in Lord’s cozy, diverse world and become even better acquainted with its characters.

On Books 13: Akata Witch and Akata Warrior are not just "Harry Potter in Africa"

Note: I am a white American of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. These books are about the experiences and cultures of black people, both in Nigeria and in the United States. I am probably, therefore, not the ideal person to review them. Still, I would like to talk about the impact these books had on me, in the hopes that more white people will read and appreciate them, and express my gratitude to Dr. Nnedi Okorafor for telling her stories.

Nnedi Okorafor’s novels Akata Witch and Akata Warrior tell the story of Sunny Nuwaze, a Nigerian-American girl with albinism struggling to fit in after her family moves back to Nigeria. She discovers that she, and a number of her classmates, have magical powers that make them part of an international secret society, and begins to learn how to use those powers to save the world from demons.

Parts of this are going to sound familiar if you’ve read J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The two have often been compared. But Akata Witch and Akata Warrior go above and beyond the wizard-school tropes of my childhood in a great many ways. (Spoilers ahead.)

On Games Gone By 1: Tetris (Windows 3.1)

Many video game reviewers go out of their way to emphasize their personal connections to the games of their childhood, and to review games they remember fondly to see how they hold up. While I don't have a whole lot of fond memories of classic games from when I was a kid, I might as well start with a game I do remember well.

The version of Tetris that came with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack is my childhood Tetris. It's the version I learned to play on, and the one I'd occasionally catch my parents playing after my bedtime, and it's the one I always wish I had when I get frustrated with the controls on mobile ports. Of course, now that the Internet Archive has a collection of Windows 3.1 games, I can play it in a Windows 3.1 emulator in DOSbox.

Basic keyboard controls: left and right to move pieces, up to rotate, and down to drop a piece to the bottom and lock it in place. In multiplayer, one player uses the arrow keys and the other uses JKL and the spacebar. The game can be paused and unpaused by pressing P. There are ten levels, and beating each level requires you to clear five more lines than the last one.

It's missing some of the quality-of-life features of later Tetris releases: there's no soft-drop, you can only rotate pieces in one direction, you can't swap out pieces for later use, and you can't hold down an arrow key to make a piece move more than one space left or right at a time, which leads to a lot of button-mashing.

But it does have the option to show what piece is coming up next, and it has a feature that I've been disappointed not to find in most later Tetrises: the option to start with a specified number of partly-filled rows on the board. This not only gives the player more control over the difficulty, but also makes the game feel more like a puzzle at the beginning, instead of simply being a test of dexterity.

The two-player mode is a lower-speed precursor to Tetris Battle games. One player can, by clearing multiple lines at a time, send extra lines to the other player to deal with. (This can be turned off in the Options menu.) The level progression keeps pace with the faster player, which can make it harder for a player who falls behind to catch back up. (This cannot be turned off.)

Accessibility note: This version of Tetris has brightly-colored and visually busy backgrounds that change after each level, and there isn't an easy way to change the backgrounds or import new ones. The movement of the pieces is also not smooth, especially at higher speeds. If you are photosensitive or prone to headaches, this is probably not a game you will enjoy. The flickering is even worse in the Internet Archive browser version, so if you do want to play it, I recommend downloading it and setting it up in DOSBox.

With the exception of the loud backgrounds, this is Tetris at its most basic and least confusing. It doesn't have microtransactions, powerups, or countdown timers, and it doesn't rank you relative to other players unless you choose to save your high scores with your name on them. Your only goal is to play for as long as you can keep the game going, and even then it's easy enough to pause in between levels to take a break.

This is my favorite version of Tetris, though I wouldn't mind less button mashing. I don't just love it  because it's the version I grew up with. It's simple and clean, has almost no gimmicks, and feels more like puzzle-solving than a lot of speed-based puzzle games.

Rating: I would play this until my arthritis begged for mercy.

On the Blog: A Change in Format

The blogging experiment has been going well so far. Posting three times a week has helped me practice keeping up with deadlines and, most importantly, it's gotten me to sit down and write even on days when I don't feel like I have anything to say.

The downside is that I'm writing when I don't feel like I have anything to say, and pushing myself to get posts finished instead of taking the time to make sure they're as good as they can be. So I'm going to spend the next few months focusing on that part of the process. I will be posting less often, but using that extra time to edit and polish my essays, including Parts 3 and 4 of Intro to Magic. I will still post crafting updates, but only when I feel like I've made progress on a project. This should let me focus on improving my writing and give me the time to work on some longer and more detailed articles that I currently don't have time to do justice.

I'm also planning to start a new occasional series called On Games Gone By, in which I will be reviewing classic PC games from the 1990s and 2000s. I was born in 1992, and was always either too young or too busy reading to play the games that reviewers my age and a little older all seem to have fond memories of. In On Games Gone By, I'll review games I miss from the old days and try and find out what I was missing out on.

On the Needles 18

Writing

Chapter 3 of my Planeswalker fic is up on Archive of Our Own. Zofia introduces her latest invention, and Esther finally gets to teach Gideon to meditate.

Knitting

The Twitter MKAL is done, and my nose will never be cold again.

Drawing

Today is Pokemon day 551. Today's Pokemon is Sandile.

Intro to Magic part 2: What happens in a game of Magic?

In last Wednesday’s post I explained what Magic: the Gathering is and a little about how the different card types work. Today, in part 2 of my Intro to Magic series, I'll go over the structure of a Magic game and some keywords you should keep an eye out for.

How to play

Most games of Magic are played by two people, though some formats require more, and some don't require more people but are more fun when played in a group of three or four. Almost all of what I am about to say is the same in all formats, with just a couple of things that change in larger groups.

The game begins with all players shuffling their decks. After you shuffle, it's polite to offer your deck to an opponent to cut, as a sign that you're playing fair. Players determine who goes first, usually by rolling dice, and then each draw an opening hand of seven cards. In a two-player game, the winner of the die roll chooses whether to play first and not draw a card on their first turn, or play second and get the extra card. In multiplayer games, everyone draws a card on their first turn.

The part of the play area (commonly called the battlefield) controlled by any one player looks like this:

• The Library is your deck.
• The Graveyard is where creatures go when they die, enchantments and artifacts when they're destroyed, instants and sorceries after their effects resolve or are prevented from resolving, and planeswalkers when they get tired of helping you and leave.
• Exile is where cards go when they're removed from the game. It's much easier to get cards back from the graveyard than from exile.
• Lands should go closer to you, and spells closer to your opponent. This is considered best practice because it makes it easier for your opponent to see what your cards do.

A turn has the following phases, though you can't do all of them on every turn.

• Untap: If it's not your first turn, you untap all cards you control that are tapped. (Remember, tapping a card means turning it sideways to show that you are using an ability it has that requires it to be tapped.)
• Upkeep: Some cards, but not many, require you to do something during this phase. They will say so.
• Draw: You draw a card.
• First main phase: You may play a land and/or cast any spell that you have mana available to cast.
• Combat: You may have creatures you control attack an opponent or a planeswalker they control. 
• When a creature attacks, it becomes tapped unless they have an ability that says otherwise. 
• Creatures you cast this turn, unless they have an ability that says otherwise, have summoning sickness, which means they're a little nauseous from having just been pulled out of the aether and have to wait until next turn to attack, or to do anything else that requires you to tap them.
• Once you have declared which creatures you're attacking with, your opponent has a chance to block with creatures they control. Before and after this step, both of you have opportunities to cast Instant spells to affect the outcome of combat. You could, for example, cast Charge to make all your creatures temporarily stronger, or cast Moment of Craving to make one of your opponent's creatures weaker.
• Each creature then does damage equal to its power. If it was blocked, that damage is subtracted from the blocking creature's toughness; if it wasn't blocked, it's subtracted from the blocking player's life total. Creatures whose toughness is now zero or less go to the graveyard; creatures who survive will be restored to full toughness at the end of the turn.
• Second main phase: You can do any of the things you could do in the first main phase. If you played a land then, you cannot play another one now, unless you have cast a spell that says otherwise.
• End: Some cards, but not many, require you to do something "at the end of your turn." This is when you do those things.

In part 1 I mentioned that Instants are different from Sorceries in that Instants can be played at more points in the game. This will make sense now. Instants can be played at any time, even during your opponent's turn, and in response to their spells. Sorceries, like all other card types, can only be played during your main phases.

After your turn ends, your opponent's begins with their Untap phase. In larger games, play passes to the left. The game ends when only one player has a life total greater than 0. There are also cards that grant alternate win conditions; there's a list of those on the wiki if you're interested. Be aware that it includes some mechanics that aren't used anymore and might not make sense.

Common keywords

Magic has a lot of card abilities that are described using keywords. Not all of these keywords will make sense at first glance; here are some that show up fairly often and are good to know. Most of them either appear on creatures or can be given to creatures using other cards that grant them.

• Trample: If this creature is blocked, it deals any leftover damage to the blocking player.
• Haste: This creature does not get summoning sickness. It can tap and/or attack the turn you cast it.
• Vigilance: This creature does not tap when it attacks.
• Flying: This creature flies. It can only be blocked by creatures with Flying or Reach.
• Reach: This creature can block creatures with Flying.
• Flash: This spell (doesn't have to be a creature) can be cast at any time you can play an Instant.
• Menace: This creature is scary. It cannot be blocked by one creature on its own, only by two or more creatures.
• First Strike: This creature deals damage before all the others. You can use this to kill an opponent's creature in a combat situation where both would otherwise die.
• Double Strike: This creature deals both first strike damage and normal damage, effectively doubling its power.
• Hexproof: This spell (again, not just creatures) cannot be the target of spells your opponent casts that requires them to choose a target.
• Lifelink: When this creature deals any amount of damage to anything, its controller gains that much life.
• Counter: This one only appears on Instants and some spells with Flash. Cast this spell in response to another spell to cause that spell to go straight to its caster's graveyard without its effects happening.
• There is another meaning of "counter" in Magic; it also refers to putting something on a card to mark a change that's been made to it. The most common type of counter in this sense is +1/+1 counters, which add one to a creature's power and one to its toughness. A planeswalker's loyalty is also represented using counters. It's common to use dice in place of large numbers of counters.
• Permanent: This isn't an ability; instead, it's a grouping of card types. "Permanent" describes all the card types that stay on the battlefield after you cast them: creatures, enchantments, artifacts, and planeswalkers. Instants and sorceries are not permanents.

Thanks for sticking with me this far! I know it's a lot to take in. Next time I'll describe the different Magic play formats and some ways to get started playing.

On Vacation

I’m traveling today and didn’t have time to make an image I needed for Intro to Magic part 2. That will go up on Wednesday. In the meantime, I hope you all have a peaceful and mindful Memorial Day.

On the Needles 17

Knitting

The last Twitter MKAL clue will be announced today, and I am gradually catching up.

The interactions between the colors remind me of Thin Mints and Speculoos.

Writing

Fantasy Twists, a short story collection that includes my story "Welcome to Connection," is now on sale. Check out this post for links to buy it on Amazon, Google, Nook, and Kobo, and this one for an interview I did about my story.

Drawing

Today is Pokemon day 544. Today's Pokemon is Whirlipede.

Intro to Magic part 1: What is Magic: the Gathering?

It occurs to me that not all of the people who read my blog regularly know how to play Magic. And I talk about it a lot, because it's a thing I enjoy and do a lot of. Here's a brief introduction to what the game is and how it works, so that you are not confused by my continuing to talk about this complicated thing that I enjoy.

Note to experienced Magic players: This is a general overview, so I will not be discussing set-specific mechanics. Please do not leave comments asking "but what about...". Please do leave comments elaborating on things you think I've missed, but bear in mind that this is a series and I will probably get to your point eventually.

The Lore

As a player of Magic, you play the role of a kind of powerful wizard known as a planeswalker (hence the name of my regular playgroup, the Lady Planeswalkers Society). A game of Magic is two planeswalkers fighting a magical duel, summoning creatures from various planes of existence to attack each other with, and casting spells to do further damage and/or change the environment the game is played in. Most Magic games start with each player at twenty points of life and the goal of reducing their opponent's life total to zero.

The cards

Here are the types of cards that normally show up in a Magic deck. Any generalization I make from here on out comes with the caveat "unless someone has played a specific card that says otherwise."

• Lands produce the mana you need to cast spells, and make up between two-fifths and one-third of a deck, depending on the size of the deck and what strategy you're using. You can play one land on each of your turns, and each land card taps for one mana. To show that a card is tapped, you turn it sideways.
• There are five types of basic land, each of which produces a different color of mana. Each color is associated with different kinds of spells and creature abilities, and plays a different role in the underlying philosophy of the stories that accompany the game (more on that in a later post).
• Plains produce white mana,
• Islands produce blue,
• Swamps produce black,
• Mountains produce red,
• Forests produce green.

All card images in this post are from magiccards.info.

• Nonbasic lands are any other kind of land. Some of these produce multiple colors of mana, or colorless mana (represented by a number or a diamond symbol). Some have abilities in addition to or instead of mana production.

• All spells (that is, any card that isn't a land) have a casting cost, shown in the upper right corner of the card, that tells you how much mana of what colors is needed to cast that spell. This can include any of the five colors, any number of generic mana (you can use any color), and in some rare cases, mana that must be colorless.
• Creatures usually make up another third-plus of  a deck. These are people, animals, plants, and sometimes magic-powered robots from the planes you have access to as a planeswalker.

 

• Each creature has one or more types (such as Bird, Soldier, Elf, and Druid), and a power and toughness that show how it attacks and blocks other attacking creatures. Aven Sentry has three power and two toughness; Llanowar Elves has one power and one toughness.
• Most creatures also have abilities. For example, Aven Sentry can fly, making it harder to prevent from attacking successfully, and Llanowar Elves can be tapped (the curved arrow symbol means "turn it sideways") to create one green mana.
• Legendary is a card type that is most often associated with creatures, but can appear on other kinds of card. If a card is legendary, you can only have one of it in play at a time. Legendary creatures often represent named characters in the stories associated with Magic sets.

• Enchantments are spells that stick around after you cast them and have a lasting effect. They come in a number of subtypes, including Auras, which are cast enchanting a specific other card.

 

• Instants and Sorceries are spells that have an effect for a short time and go away after you cast them. Instants can be cast at more different times during a turn than Sorceries; I'll explain that when I describe the structure of a game.

 

• Artifacts represent magical objects or machines. They stick around and are almost always colorless. There are a variety of types; some act like enchantments, some (called Equipment) act like Auras, and some are creatures in their own right.

• Planeswalkers are a rare card type that represent you calling on another wizard for help. They have loyalty, represented by the number on the bottom right, and abilities that require you to add or subtract loyalty from them. If they run out of loyalty, they get tired of helping you and leave. Planeswalker cards often represent the main characters of the stories associated with Magic sets, and they are always Legendary.

That's probably enough to think about for now. Next time I'll go over the structure of a game of Magic.

On the Net 3: Teaching with Mastodon

Students are never going to stop using their phones in class. Any attempt by professors to ban technology will backfire, and cause them to hate you and not learn anything. It'll be much better for class morale, participation, and retention of course material to give them a way to engage with the class using their technology.

I had an idea a while back for Livetweeted Lectures: students tweet the course material and their responses to it, with a predetermined hashtag so the professor can collect the tweets and grade them for participation points. But given that I've gotten a bit sour on Twitter lately, and given that even tweets with very carefully chosen hashtags can get lost in the ocean of information that is the birdosphere, I propose that courses implementing Livetweeted Lectures use Mastodon instead.

A department can create its own purpose-built Mastodon instance. Something like, to use a nearby example, uw.linguistics.space. Professors make accounts with names that clearly identify them as professors, such as ProfKatz@uw.linguistics.space, and students are expected to use either their name or their student ID as their handle (AlexKatz@ etc or amk19@ etc).

Each session of a class has its own hashtag (like #ling101week1), which students use to livetoot the class. Professors grade students' posts for participation points as they see fit, and have moderator privileges both to remove posts that share test answers and punish their authors according to the department's plagiarism policy. Students can assemble study guides from the hashtag search results, or the professor can compile an official study guide based on what students actually learned, not just what they were supposed to learn.

Livetweeting has become an important part of academic discourse, so much so that following a conference hashtag is often the best way to keep up with what's happening at a conference, even if you're physically there. It's an important skill for university students to develop, and using Mastodon will give them a practice space that's safer than Twitter and will help them pay attention in class.

On the Needles 16

Knitting

The Twitter MKAL continues! I'm just finishing up clue 4 (out of 9); clue 5 has been announced, but I'm trying not to work on it too fast so I can rest my wrists.

Writing

Don't forget to check out this interview I did with Rayven Whitaker from Cuil Press! Cuil's new short story collection, Fantasy Twists, is out for preorder now (links here) and includes a story I wrote called "Welcome to Connection."

Drawing

Today is Pokemon day 537. Today's Pokemon is Seismitoad.

Deckbuilding

This week's Lady Planeswalkers event was Dominaria draft. I built a mono-black Historic deck with three Cabal Paladins and a bunch of artifacts, plus a Torgaar and an Urgoros I saw about once each. I won one round out of three.

On Writing 3: Fantasy Twists Interview

This week, I was interviewed by Cuil Press' Rayven Whitaker for a stop on the the Fantasy Twists publicity blog tour. We talked about "Welcome to Connection," the story I wrote for the book. Here's how that went:

Which trope did you decide to twist?
The trope I'm playing with is the Little Shop that Wasn't There Yesterday--a magical shop that shows up just long enough to kick off the plot and then vanishes. Occasionally the protagonists manage to get stuck inside, or hitch a ride on one from one place to another; Terry Pratchett did this in The Light Fantastic. My story is a look into the inner workings of such a shop, and how it finds its employees.

Do you have a process that you follow when creating a plot for your stories?
I like to say I listen to my characters. My plots tend to be driven by who my characters are and how their experiences lead them to interact with each other, so while I usually have an endpoint I want to reach, how the story actually gets there, and sometimes whether it can get there at all, is based on how the characters react to the situations I put them in.

Why did you decide to participate write/submit your short story?I'm not a professional writer, though I've always kind of wanted to be. This particular setting is one I've spent a lot of time in, mostly in fanfiction contexts, and when I saw the call for stories, I thought this would be a good chance to see if I could actually write something that gets published, and have a chance to share my world with people who might not get to read it if it weren't, you know, official.

Who are authors who inspire you?My biggest inspirations right now are Shira Glassman, who creates cozy diverse worlds that I would love to be a part of; and Nnedi Okorafor, who makes cultures and experiences I knew nothing about feel both familiar and important. I'm also in debt to Spider Robinson, whose Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series pioneered the concept of the interdimensional drinking establishment; Terry Pratchett, who taught me a lot about what makes an interesting story; and Ursula K. LeGuin, who famously hated answering this kind of question but I'm including her anyway because of how thoroughly The Left Hand of Darkness has stuck in my brain.

Are there any reads of yours that you would recommend to readers?I haven't formally published much fiction, but I do write essays and/or reviews twice a week here on The Under-Linguist. I'm also in the middle of an elaborate Magic: the Gathering fanfic that I need to find the time and spoons to finish the next chapter of.

What are a few groups that you like to see represented more in writing? I want to see more stories from the perspective of people with autism, ADHD, and other neuroatypicalities, and especially stories about how those neuroatypicalities interact with other aspects of the characters' identities.

What is next for you as a writer?Again, I can't commit to anything because, sadly, my day job requires me to spend most of my brainpower not writing. But I will absolutely keep blogging; I plan to write more about Connection; I'm going to continue working on my Magic: the Gathering fanfiction; and, of course, I'm going to keep an eye out for future Cuil Press calls for stories.

On Writing 2: Canterbury

The other day, I posted the following on wandering.shop:

#Story idea:
A 21-st century update of The Canterbury Tales, told by a carful of frat boys on a massive road trip to Disney World.
It was the English major's idea; he was sick of the music the other guys brought.

Now, we all know Disney World is America's great modern pilgrimage site, but I wasn't prepared for how many people were excited about this idea, or the responses that suggested I actually write the story. There are a couple of things in the way, I explained:

1. I've never actually read The Canterbury Tales, and don't feel like I have time to.
2. I have no idea how college-age guys talk, or how much the vernacular has changed since I was an undergrad. To really get a sense of it, I'll have to get help from my brother, who is an undergrad, and I don't know how much time he has either.

But somebody went and found me the Project Gutenberg upload of The Canterbury Tales, so now I guess I'm doing this thing. Or at least figuring out how to modernize the basic structure of the story.

Things I'll need to figure out for this outline:

• how many days the trip should take (it's probably going to be shorter than the original, since they've got a car)
• who the characters are--they have to have distinct personalities, or at least defining characteristics. Otherwise, as someone pointed out, it's just going to be "The Bro's Tale" over and over. I'm at least going to have:
• the English major who has the idea
• a science or engineering major
• an athlete
• a musician
• maybe a girlfriend or two
• which stories I'm retelling, and whether I need to add any new ones

I'm not guaranteeing I'll get anywhere with this; it may be that this isn't a good idea, or that I'm not the writer who will do it best. But here it is, and if it goes anywhere I'll talk about it in my crafting updates.

On Books 12: Fantasy Twists (announcement)

Fantasy Twists, edited by Michón Neal, is a fantasy short story collection in which each story riffs on genre tropes in the sort of way that will be familiar to any of you who have spent substantial amounts of time in the narrative alchemy lab that is Tumblr. Story hooks include "what's Little Red Riding Hood's dark secret?", "What if it isn't the bite that makes you a vampire?", "What happens when the same parents promise their firstborn to two different witches?", and "You've finally found a job--but it's at the Little Shop that Wasn't There Yesterday." It's now available for preorder on Amazon, Google Play, Nook, and Kobo, and I contributed a story to it.

In fact, the story I wrote is the first one in the book, the one about the shop that wasn't there yesterday, called "Welcome to Connection." It's a setting I've been working on for a few years on and off, and for this story I put extra effort into the details of the shop and the people who work there, and making Connection a place where I feel comfortable and welcome and at home. I'm looking forward to you all reading it, and I hope some of you find home there too.

On the Needles 15

Knitting

This week I joined a Mystery Knitalong whose clues are posted as tweets. There have only been a couple of clues so far, but I think it's going to be a cowl. I'll share pictures when it looks like something.

Drawing

Today is Pokemon day 530. Today's Pokemon is Excadrill.

Deckbuilding

This week's Lady Planeswalkers event was Dominaria Mini-Masters. I built a green/black/blue Legends Matter deck, and I won round 3 with it and got a bye in round 4, so technically I won the last two round. My play of the night in the round I won, was as follows; it made up for all the bad draws I had the rest of the night.
Turn 4: cast Cabal Paladin.
Turn 5: cast Chainer's Torment. Deal 2 damage with the Paladin's historic trigger, drain 2 life off chapter 1 of Chainer's Torment, attack with the Paladin for 4. Opponent is at 12 life.
Turn 6: Chainer's Torment goes to chapter 2 and drains 2 life. Cast Guardians of Koilos; as I cast it, the Paladin deals 2 damage; and as it enters the battlefield, I return Chainer's Torment to my hand. Attack with the Paladin for 4. Opponent is at 4 life.
Turn 7: Recast Chainer's Torment. Deal 2 damage with the Paladin's historic trigger, drain 2 life off chapter 1 of Chainer's Torment. Opponent is at 0 life and I win.

I got some useful cards in my prize packs, including a Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar, who I'm building a Brawl deck for.

I am GROOT

On the Stack 9: An idea for an Mechanic

One night last week I dreamed I was building a Dominaria sealed deck, but the cards were all different, I kept finding rares I couldn't use, and every time I looked through the deck I was in different colors. In the middle of all this was a mix-and-match mechanic, like a cross between the split cards with Fuse from Dragon's Maze and Unstable's Host/Augment mechanic. I was still thinking about that mechanic when I woke up, and I started trying to refine it so that it might work, if not in tournament-legal Magic, then at least in silver border.

Let's call it Synchronize, and make it a keyword ability on instants and sorceries. Spells with Synchronize can be cast like normal, or any two can be cast as if they were one spell, for a mana cost slightly lower than the sum of the two spells' costs.

Here's a rough draft of an example.

Time to Build Up
1G
Sorcery
Put a +1/+1 counter on up to two target creatures you control.
Synchronize (You may cast this card at the same time as another card with Synchronize. If you do, pay 1 less than the total casting cost of both spells, and the two spells resolve and can be countered as if they were one spell.)

Time to Break Down
1G
Instant
Target creature you control fights target creature you don't control. (Each creature deals damage equal to its power to the other.)
Synchronize (You may cast this card at the same time as another card with Synchronize. If you do, pay 1 less than the total casting cost of both spells, and the two spells resolve and can be countered as if they were one spell.)

So you can cast Time to Build Up for two and a green, or Time to Break Down for one and a green, or cast them both together for a total of 1GG. If you synchronize two spells with different colors in their mana costs, you pay all the colored mana; the discount comes out of the generic part of the cost. For example:

Time to Stop
1UU
Instant
Counter target spell.
Synchronize (You may cast this card at the same time as another card with Synchronize. If you do, pay 1 less than the total casting cost of both spells, and the two spells resolve and can be countered as if they were one spell.)

To synchronize Time to Build Up and Time to Stop, you would pay one generic mana, one green, and two blue.

The remaining big question is about the card types. Sorceries can only be cast on the caster's main phase; instants can be cast at basically any time, including during the caster's opponent's turn. It makes sense for two synchronized sorceries to be cast as a sorcery, and for two synchronized instants to be cast as an instant. But if you synchronize an instant with a sorcery, do you increase the combined spell's power by allowing it to be played as an instant, or decrease it by making it a sorcery? It depends on what the cards with Synchronize end up doing, and how powerful they need to be to fit into the set.

On Narrative 1

My tastes in storytelling have changed a lot over the last few years. Up through college, I was a big fan of stories that began with exposition. Once upon a time there was a princess. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, who lived at Number 4 Privet Drive, were proud to say they were quite normal, thank you very much. I liked stories that began by taking the time to center the reader in the setting, giving them a place to view the action from that made sense. Stories that began in medias res were confusing, ungrounded; I couldn't follow the action because I was starting in the wrong place. My least favorite episode of Firefly was the one that starts with Nathan Fillion naked and alone in a desert, and then takes half an hour to explain how he'd gotten there.

I've gotten more tolerant of in medias res these days, and I think I now get the point of it. Seeing how the main characters behave in stressful situations, even if those happen well after the ostensible beginning of the story, is as much scene-setting as is an entire chapter of straight world-building. And more and more, it's the characters that make or break a story for me, regardless of how interesting the world is.

Here's a couple of recent (for me) examples of how characters affect my experience of a story. The Geek had been trying for months to get me to read Michelle West's Hunter's Oath, which is set in the kind of world I would love to play Dungeons and Dragons in. I could tell from the start that I would like the world. But the main characters of the first book were:

• two little boys caught up in violent sibling rivalry
• their father, who is too obsessed with their culture's norms about hunting to parent properly
• their mother, who has spent her whole life preparing for the trauma of losing her husband or one of her sons in the annual Sacred Hunt where someone always has to die to appease their god and ensure a good harvest
• their uncle, who's a supportive father-figure but dies abruptly a third of the way into the story
• some time-traveling woman with a crystal ball who keeps showing up out of order

I didn't think it was worth reading about those characters. But the Geek had found characters and moments in the sequel that he knew I would like, and he knew the second book wouldn't make sense if I hadn't finished the first, so he started telling me about the people in the sequel that I should look forward to meeting, and eventually I decided it was worth slogging through the first book to finally meet the brilliant female politicians in the second and find out what was going on with the time traveler.

The other recent one is a shared-universe setting called Wild Cards, where a mysterious virus has given people unpredictable, and sometimes self-destructive, superpowers. I like superhero stories that haven't been redone to death, and the diversity of people and powers in Wild Cards make it sound, on the surface, like exactly the kind of thing I'd enjoy. The problem is that 90% of the people in this universe are power-hungry assholes, and an overlapping thirty percent are traumatized victims of power-hungry assholes. Even the children with superpowers are mostly victims of human trafficking. So it's not a series I seek out. Yet both times I've stumbled across Wild Cards stories recently, I've read them to the end in spite of how dark they get, because I care about the characters. I can't stop when the plot or setting gets dark, because I want to make sure everyone's okay.

So I think I get stories that start in the middle now, though I still get confused by stories told out of order (like China Mieville's Embassytown, which I read this weekend and found hard to keep track of until the past timeline caught up with the beginning of the present timeline). The hook is the people, not the setting. And I've increasingly prioritized "do I want to spend time with these characters" over "do I want to spend time in this place" in choosing what I want to read.