SneerClub

My God, it's like if Mark Rosewater was also a Nazi.

Cards on the table, I love M:tG as a game design nerd, and the color pie is a really well-done tool for keeping the game interesting and fun over it's very long history and even longer list of expansions and extensions. From a mechanical perspective, it strikes a beautiful balance between allowing the player to do exactly what they want and preventing the player from just doing everything. Without the color pie, it's easy to see deck building descend into an attempt to assemble the strongest individual cards. It's telling that basically every other CCG has some kind of mechanism to solve the same problem, but I don't think any of them have done it as cleanly or in a way that so smoothly enables players to combine mechanics and elements from different colors.

From a narrative perspective it's a great story engine that allows for all the disparate settings, characters, even genres that the game has explored over its life to still have a cohesive identity - to rhyme. I would argue that part of why the world's beyond sets have seemed wrong is because the settings weren't designed from the ground up to align with that narrative tool, and no matter how good the actual card designers at WotC are it just isn't going to rhyme properly, like trying to translate poetry to a different language family. But that's beside the point.

As a psychological model of the world? I mean I guess it's a tool for categorizing and narrowing down the ways that different people interact with each other or the world or whatever. But that's fundamentally not what it's for! Even as bad as the science behind the MBTI or whatever might be, at least they were designed from looking at actual people and intended to categorize them and understand them. This is the equivalent of trying to do therapy based on people's fucking Hogwarts house. Hell, even that was actually intended to fucking categorize people. Like, even without getting into all the ways that he's extending and distorting the actual color pie as used in Magic to match his own fixations, the whole project is so blindingly wrong-headed from the start that it ought to be an old BuzzFeed listicle and not something that people actually use in any clinical setting, even if it is just his wacko girlfriend.

[To save space, the following several paragraphs of increasingly incoherent ranting and raving are to be filled in by your own imagination. If you do not have an imagination you can consider using an LLM of your choice before going off to fuck yourself]

The account of blue and black is worth reading:

Blue and black are the enemies of green, the color of tradition, which they see as complacent and passive. Black is more about taking and blue is more about optimizing, but both of them agree that green’s hands-off attitude is a silly hangup. Blue and black both agree on growth mindset — the idea that one is not defined by one’s origins or constrained to the role society has set. Blue/black characters are often intelligent, clever, arrogant, and aloof, and unimpressed with the way things have always been done — notable examples include Odysseus from The Odyssey, Sherlock Holmes, Lex Luthor, and Quirinus Quirrell from HPMOR.

A blue/black agent asks the question how can I best achieve my goals? It’s fair to describe the blue/black philosophy or attitude as belief in the value of “enlightened self-interest,” which is why it’s not surprising to find it overrepresented in communities like LessWrong and Silicon Valley, which see themselves as attempting to disrupt the status quo for the better. Transhumanism is a fundamentally blue-black worldview, in opposition to the green imperative to accept death as a crucial and inevitable part of life.

Odysseus got his entire crew killed, massacred most of his neighbours and housemaids, and was only saved by the intervention of Athena. Lex Luthor is a supervillain. Yud says that Profesor Quirrell was modeled on Robin Hanson the creepy Libertarian economist and Michael Vassar who two people say argues for sex between grown men and underage girls. So it is bad news that so many rats see Quirrell or "blue-black" as a model ("overrepresented in communities like LessWrong and Silicon Valley").

I would not recommend a therapist who identifies with this description like Sabien's and Yud's partner.

2024-Sabien claims that "I myself am green/blue with a strong splash of red, though I often find myself with goals and roles that lean white, such as running workshops or writing essays like this one." But his Dragon Army project and Anna Salamon's memories of early CFAR sound more like the above. Sabien also named a convention at Lighthaven after himself. As I said before, I think Bay Area rationalists read HPMOR and conclude that the thing to do is to set up their own smaller cult with their own crowd of disciples to manipulate.

I'm no fan of Myers-Briggs but at least that has some cultural cachet outside of extreme nerd circles. Or is MtG "mainstream"? Like, I'd say Star Wars fandom i mainstream in that they have been wildly succesful media franchises, and I'm kinda boggled the deckbuilder games like Slay The Spire have such huge player bases, but MtG seems to be its own little world.