Probably Designed: We Love Uncle GCB

In this week's episode, I had a conversation with Gabe Carleton-Barnes. Gabe is actually an old friend of mine, and this conversation is a little bit different from what you've heard so far on the podcast because Gabe isn't a game designer.

Gabe is a professional Magic the Gathering player. So we've talked a lot about collectible card games, drafting, and these sorts of things, and I thought it'd be really interesting to get a high level perspective from a player. So our conversation spanned a bunch of topics from drafting, to deck design, but mostly from a high level player's perspective.

Links

GCB Tournament record on MTG Elo Project

Sickening Dreams and Psychatog

GCB - The Beauty of Bad Cards

History of Psychatog decks on YouTube

Second Sunrise (Eggs) and Valakut in Pro Tour RTR

Transcript

GCB: My name is Gabe Carlton-Barnes. I am a lifelong gamer. My father identified that I liked math. My father, who was a poet when I was a kid, forced me to play a game of chess with him every weekend, starting at age five.

And I didn't get interested until middle school. And then I fell in love with games. At that time, I became the first board on the chess team in high school very quickly, where I learned about Magic: The Gathering. And I've been playing Magic since 1994, and I won my first Magic tournament that I ever played.

And I think that in the area of the states where I live—Portland, Oregon, and the Seattle, Washington area—there are definitely periods of time where I've been the consensus best competitive Magic player. I have a little bit of minor subculture fame in that area. And so I've played on the Magic Pro Tour 16 or 17 times, traveled all over the world doing that. And that's really my relationship with games—it's deeply connected to Magic, which I simply cannot stop thinking about.

HDH: And that's also, I guess by way of introduction, how we met, right? So I was trying to think about it, and I think that the first time that you and I met, you and Seamus were up for a PTQ, a Pro Tour Qualifier—if such things exist anymore—up in Seattle. And Seamus asked if you guys could stay the night because you were grinding for a Pro Tour or whatever. We went to the tournament, I met you at the tournament, we hung out. You went deep into the tournament. You won the tournament. We hung out at some bars and stuff afterwards, we ended up back at my house, and I think that the memorable bit is that they gave you this little cup, like a trophy that was like a little cup for winning the PTQ.

And then we had some, definitely not champagne, but some sort of sparkling wine that we drank from the cup, which was pretty fun.

GCB: Yeah, absolutely. I actually have that trophy still. It's just over there. That was the largest PTQ that ever took place in the Northwest. So that was a really proud moment for me to win that one. And it was a very fun event. That specific type of tournament doesn't exist anymore, but there's still a lot of those types of events. And yeah, it was a wonderful introduction to you. You put us up, we took the train up on Friday so that we could practice on the train, spent Friday night at your place, and—

HDH: Oh, that's right. Okay. That's right. Okay. It was a couple days then.

GCB: Yeah, it was. And most of the time was the tournament Saturday when we were all at the event center. But yeah. And from there, I think the first time we spent together having it be exciting and fun, and obviously, we became friends, which we've maintained across international borders. I guess you're good at that though.

HDH: I mean, I have to, to some degree, being an expat or whatever, and living abroad or whatever. I value my friendships, and so I try to do some amount of friendship outreach that allows me to keep some international friendships alive. So that's part of the routine, I guess. And that was quite a long time ago, right? So you're still grinding, you still play a lot. You still have been to Pro Tours, I think, since then.

GCB: Absolutely.

HDH: And I thought you would be a really interesting guest because I've been talking to game designers who work in the digital space and with a lot of games that are, I think, pretty strongly influenced by Magic in a lot of ways. So a lot of games that have carried the metaphors of drafting, the metaphors of cards into the digital space.

And, you know, we haven't talked about this at all, but I don't know how familiar you are with some of these games, but there's this whole subgenre—they're called Roguelike Deck Builders. But to me, it's funny because when I was a kid, I certainly played Rogue, the video game, but it was in the basement of my friend's house, on his dad's 386 or whatever. We would play this game because we wanted to play D&D, and it's kind of like D&D random encounters. It was kind of like roleplaying themes or whatever else.

And so that was always in my brain, like what Rogue was. And of course, I'm old and many things have happened in the intervening years. And in a lot of cases with these deck builders, you have a lot of Dominion influence and this build-as-you-go sort of mechanics.

But also I feel like the genre has a lot of board game mechanics. So I guess the biggest game in that subgenre would be Slay the Spire, which might be familiar to you as well.

GCB: So one of my curses of learning about Magic early on is that Magic is such a good game that it kind of stopped me from exploring more games. I'm a little bit deeply obsessed with it, and so I have not played nearly as many games as somebody who loves games as much as I do normally would. So you can brief me a little bit on what these types of games are, if you want.

I, yeah, as I said, I think Magic is—you talk about being an inspiration for a lot of other games, and when I do learn other games, I'm always a little bit trying to make them Magic in my mind.

HDH: You know, it's the first collectible card, first deck building type of game that there was. And so a lot of games are drawing inspiration from that. I think that the inspiration is this drafting idea where you start with nothing, and then, okay, you're given a choice, you have to choose a card.

And then there's a bit of randomness involved in what you're choosing. And you start to build the deck over time and over the course of a run. And over the course of a run, you will, kind of like in a draft, you'll get kind of a certain deck identity. You'll maybe find some sort of archetype or something that's kind of interesting there to play.

And then a lot of these games actually tend to be single player rather than multiplayer games. And so there's a little bit of difference in terms of the mechanics from Magic because Magic has this symmetric element, right? And then there's kind of different ways that the meta game plays out, and there's different kind of community reactions or feelings about, say, like broken combo decks or whatever else, right?

Because I think that one of the things I've learned from talking to some of these designers is that, in my brain, because I'm also not as deep of a Magic player as you are, but I'm pretty Magic-pilled in terms of how I think about any game that involves different cards and collectible card pools or whatever.

Because these games are single player and they can kind of end up being more about the player's power fantasy, there's a lot more space for you to just kind of let a player have something broken. Whereas, you know, in a symmetric game where you have a competition, it just feels bad when you have broken cards, et cetera.

But aside from that, I think that there's a lot kind of going on in how these games work with regard to drafting cards and kind of building a deck as you go or building a strategy as you go.

GCB: Yeah, so I do believe I've played some of these games. I couldn't name them. But our common friend Seamus occasionally gets me a little bit of an introduction to different games.

HDH: Yeah. And so, I think that the thing that's interesting, and the kind of the core—kind of the McGuffin for this podcast, and it is a McGuffin because we'll go where the conversation takes us—but it's about how these game designers, and I think kind of designers in general, are designing either for or around randomness and chance.

And so, I think it's kind of an interesting space to explore. I know that you are an avid and very strong limited player. So you've spent a lot of time dealing with both drafting mechanics and making the most of whatever cards you're pulling. But then also mixing that a little bit with, of course, your skill as a player. I think that the constructed deck building stuff is pretty interesting also. One of the things that I feel like you know the answer to that I maybe am misquoting—it's something like, Magic is such a high variance game that if you're one of the better players playing one of the best decks, you still have something like a 65% win rate.

Is that right?

GCB: Oh yeah, absolutely. The best players in the world—you know, they have websites where you can go and look at the history of basically ELO ratings for competitive Magic players and see the best players and their win rates at the biggest events. And yeah, they don't get much higher than 65%.

That would be an amazing win rate.

HDH: Is it closer to 60 or?

GCB: Yes.

HDH: Okay. Interesting.

GCB: So, have you heard recently—maybe not recently, but Roger Federer did a graduation speech?

HDH: You know, I think I saw something in my YouTube about this because there's something crazy with tennis where a very small percentage adds up to huge win rates or something. Is that right?

GCB: Yeah. The percentage of points that he won over his tennis career, legendary tennis career, was 54%.

HDH: That's wild.

GCB: Yeah. And so it's interesting. Magic offers something that chess doesn't for me, which is that every match is a challenge. But it's also a possibility. I can play against the best players in the world and know, you know, they're better than me, but playing against them, the match can still be interesting because of the variance in the game.

And it makes them continue to play their best the whole time and not take it easy because they know they can beat me. And so I get to learn more from them in those moments. The element of randomness really makes the game so much more interesting, even at the same time, it sometimes makes it more frustrating.

And one of the things that I've learned from that is the thing that Roger Federer talks about, which is acceptance. We curse our bad luck in the world. We complain about things going wrong. But if you want to be successful in any game that involves a lot of randomness and you want to really care about the results, professional poker players, of course, will tell you this—you have to take the, you know, the bad beats, the unlucky moments, and put them behind you and move on to the next game because they're going to happen. And if you let them get to you, then you've basically given up. You've lost your chance to do well at an event.

And that's honestly an incredible life skill. And so one of the things for me when I talk to people who aren't gamers about gaming is how much I've learned from even just Magic about dealing with the world, about dealing with life. And randomness is a big part of that, you know.

HDH: Yeah, it's like, I am always amazed because I think I've got streaks of being a decent Magic player, but I'm not, you know, a great Magic player by any stretch of the imagination.

But there's this patience with kind of doing the operational stuff very diligently and thoroughly that strong, really strong players and successful players have. And it's like, you are running bad, but you're still operationally tip-top because you're trying to accumulate all these little edges in order to just make sure that if something swings your way, that you're set up for it, right? And it's really, like it's very disciplined.

GCB: Mm-hmm. Yep. And my proudest moments as a Magic player are when I've successfully overcome that sort of sense of bad luck in that sort of discipline. There was a Magic player from Seattle who, when I was coming up, was one of the best players in the area. His name was Mike Thompson.

And I was at a tournament with him, and I knew him. He had driven down to Portland for this Magic tournament, and it was a sealed deck, you know, where you're opening your random cards and you've got to work with what you get. And the sealed deck he got was really unlucky. He looked at it and he was like, this is not good, you know, there's nothing I can do here.

He looked around and he tried to figure out if he could come up with an excuse to leave the tournament and get a refund, which you can't do. But he was like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. I can't believe I drove to Portland for this. I'm so unlucky. But instead of that, he made the best of it, and he made the elimination rounds of the tournament where he beat me, and he won that tournament. And I thought, you know, this is what I want to be able to do. I want to be able to walk in the door, have everything go wrong right from the start, and still persevere. And it's funny that that weekend I met you, it was a sealed deck tournament, and I opened my sealed deck and it looked okay, but it had no rares that I could play in my deck. And rares are usually, you know, the big powerful cards—you're looking for, can I get some good rares? And this was one of the biggest, like I said, one of the biggest tournaments I've played in at a PTQ level, the biggest one ever in the Northwest. It was going to be so many rounds, and you go through that many rounds without any rares, you know, it just didn't seem possible.

But I was able to focus that day, you know. I said, that's okay, I'm going to roll with the punches and make the most of it. And so that's one of the reasons that I actually have that cheesy plastic trophy in the corner still. It's because I'm proud of that one, you know?

HDH: Well, and it's funny because you got to drink champagne out of it—or, I mean, not champagne, but Prosecco, right?

GCB: Can we call it champagne?

HDH: Not in Europe. No, we can't.

GCB: French authorities might get us.

HDH: Yeah, it's true. I mean, I think it's super interesting. So getting into that, right? Around the kind of the deck building and kind of how you approach it. I know—I mean, so sealed is incredibly high variance, just because you have no decisions that you can make to kind of affect your card pool.

But drafting can be a bit more consistent even though you're in the face of variance. I guess I don't even know how to form the question, but it's like, how do you manage variance? Because you're a pretty regular drafter, right? So you're drafting probably many times a week, or at least multiple times.

GCB: Yeah.

HDH: And I'm sure you've got a pretty decent win rate with regard to drafting. And so how much of it is operational during play and how much of it is at the drafting table, pulling the right cards? Because it's a mix of both, and obviously you're a very strong player.

GCB: It's definitely a mix of both, but of course, you know, the cards you put together make such a difference. And every draft is different. Some of them make it easy for you. And I think that's one of the traps. One of the challenges with variance is that sometimes it goes your way, and that can teach you bad habits. So one of the things that I try to do—I think one of my strengths, and maybe one of my weaknesses—is that I like to win the hard way. So I'm not afraid of things going wrong. In Magic, the classic example is, you know, you usually draft when you're putting your deck together, you play two out of the five colors.

And so if you're drafting and find out the people taking the other packs are taking the colors that you tried to take and they're just not there, you're going to get weaker cards. Your deck is going to be weaker. And the thing that you have to be ready to do is to change plans. You know, you get enough cards that you can change into different colors if you figure it out soon enough.

And so one of the ways you deal with a random future, basically, is you keep an open mind about what could be and don't convince yourself that everything's going to go right from the start.

HDH: Yeah.

GCB: You know, in Magic, a lot of people talk about the various concepts with this, with how sort of submissive versus assertive you are in your drafting.

Because, you know, if I pick all the red cards that I see, it makes it less likely someone else will take the red cards, but it doesn't mean for sure that they won't, obviously. You know, two assertive players are going to mess each other up. This is a version of the prisoner's dilemma in a way.

HDH: Okay, so like, now I'm just going to drill you for strategy or whatever. What's the latest pick that you would switch a plan or colors? So you're picking 45 cards. You're planning on keeping 23 of them, or putting 22 or 23 in your deck or whatever—maybe 24, depends on the set, right? But when's the latest you change gears?

GCB: I don't have a specific time that's the latest. When I was playing, you know, the era that I met you, I remember in a specific draft after the first pack, which is the first 15 cards—

HDH: What set was that, by the way? I don't remember what set that was.

GCB: Return to Ravnica.

HDH: Okay. Wow.

GCB: Yeah. After the first pack, I had not identified what colors I should be in yet. And I looked at my pool of cards, and I had almost a perfect balance across all the colors of things that I had taken. But I was perfectly happy with that because by the end of the pack I had identified what was possible. And most Magic players, they decide in the first two or three picks what colors they're drafting, and they sort of stick with that.

HDH: Like you identified what was possible by the card pool that you saw and kind of what you saw at the table?

GCB: Yes, you learn the most from the packs that you saw come all the way around to you. So, you know, I took a card and I know that, hey, there's this many red cards, this many black cards, et cetera, that are worthwhile. And when it comes around the table, what's left over?

You know, people will talk about reading the signals. And they can be really, really hard to identify. Maybe somebody took a card and immediately decided they're not going to be in that color. You know, nothing is certain.

But with Magic, and when I've played a lot with a certain set as I have with Return to Ravnica, there's almost an intuition that gets built up. It's like there's a part of my brain that is doing this job for me. And I have a feel about what's happening. And so the strategy in draft, if you want to be really successful, involves the question of how much work you can put in to learn about that format. The most successful strategy, if you just, you don't, you haven't played very much, you don't know it super well, is to identify a good color combination or two and try to draft that strategy every time.

HDH: But so, if you're in this draft, right? And—oh, what am I thinking? It's like, how much of it is you've just learned the set so well that it's what—system one thinking or whatever? Is it really just like a hunch, or are you kind of mathing the whole thing out?

GCB: I'm definitely not mathing the whole thing out. A lot of competitive Magic players will talk about that and doing sort of these equations—what are the odds of X, Y, Z? And I think when you do equations like that with a game like Magic, your inputs are almost always wrong.

And so the precision is a trick, if that makes sense.

HDH: Right? I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like false precision or whatever.

GCB: And if it helps people make decisions, that's great for them. But I do it definitely more by instinct. And depending on what the set is, I have sort of these identifications of what's important and where the scarcity is.

So classic scarcity from Return to Ravnica was quality two-mana spells. So turn two plays. And you need a lot of those in that particular format because of the way it worked. It's actually very common in Magic for you to need a lot of those, but they make more of them now than they did then. So in looking at what to do when I haven't figured out what deck I want to draft, and I have these cards in front of me, I'm going to keep that in mind.

Which colors did I get a couple of two drops in? Or which colors are those coming around the table? And I can identify them. So little things like that. I sort of build up anxiety as I'm drafting about what I'm missing, what I don't have, right? And one of those things is I don't have a decision about what colors I want to be. But I'm comfortable with that anxiety, and it builds over time.

So I've switched colors very, very late in drafts before. And one of the beautiful things about Magic's design is, you know, usually you're doing two colors. So if you have two colors and you have to switch out of one of them and switch into another, you at least have the color that you kept, that you have sort of a backbone.

So that allows you to, if you think about it, switch a lot later. If I switch halfway through the draft, I only lose half of my picks.

HDH: Right, right. Or maybe you'll get some sort of color fixing and splash the third color or something along those lines, depending on the set, I guess.

GCB: Yes, yes. And yeah, the idea of don't get attached to what you've done is the way to be the most successful, but only if you have that ability to identify the points of anxiety. Right? Once you're good at that, then you can do what they call hard mode drafting. Right? I'm going to get the best possible deck I could from any given point in the draft forward.

Whereas if you don't know it well, that's what I was saying before—you have to sort of make this choice of, the most successful thing I can do is to be forceful and say I'm just going to draft this one strategy. And then from the start, you don't miss any opportunities to take cards for that.

But it can go very badly, of course, if the table doesn't happen to cooperate with what you're doing.

HDH: Pack three? Have you switched strategies like third pack or—I mean, I'm sorry. Okay. Because that's pretty fascinating because I've definitely, you know, I've drafted a fair amount, not like a crazy amount, but a fair amount. And I've certainly switched strategies like second pack or whatever, especially when you start seeing the cards go the other direction. You see different things based on what the table's taking or whatever else. But pack three's pretty—well, I guess if you get a bomb, or is it like, what would cause you to switch your strategy that late? Just seeing a card that is a new possibility, I guess?

GCB: Yeah, I think certainly a bomb—you open something that's super, super powerful and you say, well, if and when I do draw this card, it's going to make such a difference that it's worth it. Because the other thing I had going on usually isn't looking like I want it to look, right? The other strategy isn't going well.

HDH: Yeah.

GCB: And I've done it many times. I've also drafted so many times that it's not like this happens very often.

But usually also because, you know, you do take 15 cards out of each pack. Sometimes you happen to have a couple of cards of a color that are pretty good that just showed up and there was nothing else there.

So when you switch, you have a little bit of a cushion in there. So have I taken a very first card in a color in pack three and then gone on to play that color? I think the answer is yes, but it would be such a rare occurrence. Obviously, a very, very special case.

HDH: I mean, usually by pack three you've got some jank in every color from just from the end of the passing or you made a decision on a rare and then you ended up not seeing anything else in the color or something. So you were talking a bit also about what you were calling hard mode, and I want to understand what that is a little bit better.

GCB: Yeah, hard mode is a way that Magic players in the competitive community talk about drafting. And different people feel differently about draft. It's generally a very popular way to play, but some folks who are more into the constructed style of Magic, where you plan every card and bring it in advance, they get nervous. They're not comfortable with the anxiety about the deck building as you go along. And so they do the other strategy, easy mode, which is to say if you open, you know, something really powerful in your first pack, you take it and then you try to draft that color, force a color, and then fill in with something else, whatever's kind of available.

And try to build a deck that contains a lot of good cards. Hard mode is you try to build a deck that has not just good cards, but also more synergy. So cards that interact well together, which can be very scary to take a less powerful card, hoping to get another card later that interacts with it well.

So you get more combined power, or being ready to switch, to say, just to identify what is available at the table and to switch out, to abandon your early picks. And it's considered hard mode because if you guess wrong, right? If you make that switch and you didn't identify that it was correct to do so, well now, you've—no matter where you end up, you've wasted picks, you've lost cards that you could have had that would have made your deck better.

And so, yeah, hard mode is because you're concentrating the whole time. Easy mode—I think, you know, if anyone plays Magic on Arena, it can be very easy to just be like, ah, yes, another black card, click-click-click, click-click, you know, it's got the more video game feel, and that feels like easy mode. You identify a couple of colors you want to pick, and then each pack comes up and you just grab the best card in those colors.

That's easy. What's hard is to look at that pack and be like, why is this red card here that's so good after, you know, seven picks? Does this mean I need to change? Because you have to engage with each decision. And decision making is exhausting.

HDH: Yeah, totally.

GCB: I think it really identifies what people are in the game for. What makes it fun for them, right? Are they in the game to solve a puzzle? Are they in the game for, you know—you called it something earlier, like the God experience or being super powerful and feeling powerful.

Power fantasy. Yeah. So if you're in the game for power fantasy, there's no advantage to hard mode. You want your deck to be the most powerful one, so you don't want to risk bouncing around and figuring something out.

HDH: And you see that though? You see that at the highest levels of competitive play? There are some players who are just like, okay, I'm going to just try to force this particular deck in limited because I know that it's a powerful strategy, and that's just the way to win? I mean, I guess it makes sense. When I say it out loud, it's like, oh yeah, of course people do that.

GCB: Well, it's also a way of increasing variance. And at the very highest levels of Magic, you kind of want higher variance in your results. I have not had high variance in my results on the Magic Pro Tour. I have, I think, a 55% win percentage. That's at the very top level.

But I almost always have a record of, you know, nine and seven at these tournaments. And nine and seven gets the same reward as zero and sixteen. So you kind of want to have one tournament where you go zero and sixteen, and one tournament where you go fourteen and two, and then you'll make it to the top eight, win thousands of dollars, and, you know, get on the big stage. So people at that level are sort of min-maxing their results.

And so I actually think you don't see as consistent drafting at that level sometimes because people are trying to take the risk, right?

HDH: And I guess that this kind of gets into the other bit around constructed deck building, because what you see is, you know, there are teams, they go into the tank and they try to find something that is a kind of weird high variance edge that they can get. And sometimes it works and sometimes it spectacularly fails, right? So the teams will go into this deck building hole for, you know, two weeks or whatever, however long they do it, and try to come up with something that's got this edge on the meta game. But everyone's kind of, I don't know, angling against this hypothetical angling that's also happening in other places. And then there's some people who just show up with the known best deck or whatever.

GCB: Right.

HDH: And so I think that's super interesting from the perspective of randomness and chance. Is that the right kind of takeaway?

GCB: Yeah. There's so much randomness in a Magic tournament environment, especially one where people are preparing really hard, like for one of the Pro Tours. And that thing you're talking about, the people, you know, getting together in a house and building a deck and trying to address what is, quote unquote, the meta game.

Well, I've done that, and you know what the hardest part is? It's identifying what the meta game's going to be.

HDH: Right. Especially if the set's just come out, right? Because the Pro Tours are often scheduled where no one's actually won a major tournament with the cards yet.

GCB: Right. There are new cards that come out and, you know, people work really fast in the online world, which is kind of amazing, you know. And so people figure out strategies very quickly, and that happens online, but it's still a guessing game as to what other teams will decide, what other groups of people will decide.

And one of the biggest skills in high-level competitive Magic is just that one—just sort of understanding the wisdom of crowds and what will appeal to people.

HDH: And kind of, I guess, the psychology of the other top players maybe?

GCB: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so there's this balance of how much do you try to play against the metagame and how much do you just try to optimize the effectiveness of the strategy you build yourself, right? And there are famous examples on both sides in the history of Magic where they were really, really successful.

And so there's no definitive answer, which is one of the things that makes that really fun. And ultimately, Magic already allows your deck design to be sort of a stylistic choice. And I think that's one of the things that makes the game really have great staying power and continue to be fascinating, is that part of what affects those things is just what people like to do.

And I guess that's sort of true in any sport. You talk about something like tennis—what players like to go to the net more, you know, what skills they use. Everyone's a little bit unique. But Magic really expresses that, you know, more than a game, I think, like chess or poker, right? Where there seems to be a very definitive understanding of what the correct play is, you know, a high percentage of the time. And in Magic it's not so much.

HDH: What's the wildest bet you've made on a big tournament with a team or some planning in terms of just taking this crazy—do you have any fun stories around some kind of crazy choices that you've made into the meta game?

GCB: Oh, what a good question. I have tended to make really conservative choices at the highest level, which I'm not happy about in my own history of decision making. But I'm trying to think of some. I have some bad examples. Oh, you know what? I have one good example.

Actually the second Pro Tour I ever went to. So the team I was working with was just one other person from the Portland area who qualified. Back in that time it was hard to connect up over long distances with other people. This was like 2002, and we were trying to figure out what to do, and both of us were kind of new to this Pro Tour scene.

But we got in touch with somebody who is a bit of a famous deck builder. And I don't know, Magic players may know this name. His name's Brian Kibler. And my friend connected with him online, and we didn't know what we wanted to do, and so we offered him a percentage of our winnings if he would share his strategy with us, the deck that he was going to come up with.

And he shared something. He said, okay, great. And he shared a deck that was basically very similar to one we'd already been working on. For those who play Magic, it was a blue-black Psychatog deck. And it had a lot of strengths, but it wasn't, we thought, particularly good against some of the other strategies that were out there. But time was short, and so we found a very strange card that nobody else was trying or trying to use at all.

Because the way it worked was—it's a card called Sickening Dreams, and you pay two mana, whatever, that's a Magic thing, and you have to discard cards to make the card do anything. So you play it and then you discard more cards, and it does damage to all the creatures in play equal to the number of cards you've discarded.

Well, this is kind of a classic bad Magic card. You don't want your cards to say discard cards on them. Often Magic comes out to a battle of attrition. The interesting thing was, one of the most dangerous cards for the Psychatog deck at the time was in this goblins deck, which would just make a lot of really tiny creatures and spread them all over the board.

And one of them had protection from all your blue spells in your blue and black deck. So you needed a black card to deal with that. And everyone was using a card called Engineered Plague, which sounded like it would do the job, but it just didn't. We would test it and it wouldn't work. So we knew this very popular deck that was going to give us trouble. And we discovered that this weird card really worked.

And the reason it worked is because the Psychatog deck, one area of strength, was drawing more cards than your opponent. It had a ton of cards that let you just pick up more cards and more cards and more cards. So the disadvantage of this card, you know, was pretty irrelevant in this particular deck.

And so me and my friend, we were the only players to use this card on the Pro Tour, and it was one of the best Pro Tour finishes I had for a long time at this event. And we did better than Brian Kibler, who played his list. And we went to him before the tournament. We said, hey, we've solved the problem with the deck. You know, its biggest issue—we're showing you this card. And he looked at us like we were crazy, and he was like, there's no way, that can't possibly be good.

And he wouldn't even consider it or try it. And, you know, he's known as a bit of a creative player too, so maybe willing to think about...

HDH: I love that stuff, because I think that it's so many levels that you're trying to get into. The structure of the event and the metagame and what cards people are playing. And I think that some of the stories I feel like are just kind of wild because people are in this crazy mode where they're just like, and then what if this, and then what if? And people just go so deep on these ideas that it's, I don't know. I think it's super fun, some of these deck stories. Yeah.

GCB: And so interesting to think about, because, you know, Magic has enough randomness and enough variables including what your opponent decides to show up with, right? So you're talking about in your first episode, input randomness and output randomness, right? Well, Magic, your input randomness is what you bring in a way, right? There's a—maybe it's not the exact term, but I bring a deck, that's my input, and you bring a deck, and to me, that's output. So I have to deal with both of those things.

HDH: Yeah. I mean, the most crazy version of output randomness would be like Chaos Orb or something like that, you know, where it's like, okay, I'm just going to flip this thing and everything it touches because of the physics of the card flying around is going to wreak havoc on the table or whatever.

GCB: One of my favorite things to do in the world of Magic constructed Magic, you know, you talk about the metagame and the decks that everyone's really used to. And so that very, very often happens in constructed where you go to a tournament and 90% of what you see are very familiar, and everyone's playing the same cards.

And one of my things is that I will never do that without adding something a little strange, something that people won't be expecting or that isn't getting used in those decks. Because you get so much advantage out of the randomness that you're providing to your opponent, right? Which is saying, I'm not actually required to use all the strategies you read about online.

It looks like I have that strategy, but I have this card that you didn't think about. And so you find a card that optimizes for the situations that your opponents assume cannot happen and how you take advantage of those. And there's a beautiful sort of corollary to that, which is that now if someone's played against me before, they know that I do that, and that makes it so much harder for them to plan, even if I don't have any surprises for them.

HDH: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Playing tournaments, everyone who's done their homework has played the best deck and they've played against the best deck, and they've played the top four decks and against the top four decks. They've played against the kind of the standard hot-now decklists.

But just adding that operational confusion where they have to manage, to reason about a card they haven't thought about is probably a weird psychological advantage, I guess I would say. But I mean, I guess you're beating their preparation is what it is in a lot of cases.

GCB: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things about constructed Magic and the way that competitive players try to play is they try to reduce the impact of randomness as much as possible so that they can control the possibilities. And one of those ways of doing that is to have your deck contain redundancy, you know, so your deck is providing you consistent things every time.

And one way is to get adapted to all of the strategies that are out there and sort of learn how to address them by rote. And so I take great pleasure in making Magic less like chess.

HDH: I think that's pretty awesome. This is making me think about deck consistency. And I know in some formats there's a lot of redundancy in terms of cards that are in the same color and kind of do the same thing, or in some larger formats that's definitely the case—if you get into Modern or Legacy or whatever. But there's also some decks that are pretty inconsistent. What would be the two extremes for you in terms of a deck that you played a lot that really just did what it was supposed to do and did it very consistently versus something that was kind of a bit more inconsistent, but great when it worked, terrible when it didn't work?

GCB: Yeah. Well, there's a lot of classic examples in Magic of both those things. I think the classic example of the competitive Magic player who wants things to be consistent and is going and playing in their Friday night tournament every week is they play a control deck.

So what you do is you slow the game down so that over time you'll draw the correct mix of cards, so you know what you're going to get every time. And so control decks tend to be very, very consistent, and that consistency is a bit of a temptation for a lot of competitive players. Some players just tend always towards that.

And I used to be that way. That was my first identity as a Magic player—I always played control decks. And then the most random ones are the sort of crazy combo decks where you have to have a certain collection of cards together and then you can win on turn one or turn two.

And I've played those a few times. I don't find it super satisfying.

HDH: Why is that, that it's not satisfying to you? I say this as a storm enjoyer.

GCB: Yeah, totally. And I've played storm a bit. I don't find it satisfying because for me, the fun of the game is to try to figure out the strategies within each game as you're playing them. And combo decks tend to try to ignore the opponent. Say, I'm going to not worry about what you're doing, and I'm just going to do what I'm doing over here.

And I just don't enjoy solitaire as much.

So actually the deck I played that was the most random on the Pro Tour, it might be a good answer for your question earlier about what was the craziest thing that we ever tried on the Pro Tour—it was actually in your home of Berlin, years ago.

And there's a card called Second Sunrise in Magic, which does a very weird thing. It just brings back all the cards that went to the graveyard this turn right back into play. But cards going to the graveyard in the turn isn't that common, but it's based around all these sort of trinket cards that go to your graveyard. And then you play Second Sunrise and they come back, and all of the little trinkets make you draw more cards so you can find another copy of the Second Sunrise.

And actually eventually this became a really, really good deck that was very popular, and almost a problematically good deck. That happened after they printed a second copy of Second Sunrise, another sort of version of it. At the time, there wasn't a second copy, so we only had, you know, you're allowed four of each card in Magic. And this deck was really fun to play in solitaire mode. And so in preparation for this tournament, my friend Jake Van Lunen and I got really obsessed with how this deck could win the game so fast and do really powerful things. And I think we didn't understand quite how inconsistent it was.

And also there was another really powerful strategy in our trying to identify the meta game and what was going to happen that we missed. We just did not recognize that it was as good as it was. And this tournament was won by that deck, which is an elves-based deck.

Anyway, a bunch of people on our team played this crazy deck in the tournament, and only one of us made it to the second day of competition. And that was me. And I did not do well after that, but I had to scrap and claw to get there. And, you know, we were so excited going to the tournament because we thought we had something really different and unique and fun, and it went poorly. But, you know, if I had taken risks like that more often, I might have played that same deck five years later when it was good, right? So that was a pretty wild strategy. But yeah, I think the thing for me with the combo decks is that you're trying to take the element of what your opponent's doing out of the game as well, and so you're trying to reduce variance in that way, and that's just not as interesting to me—the variance of what opponent's doing.

HDH: Yeah. It's like you're only fighting against the variance of your draw, right? It's like you're just trying to set yourself up so that if you get the right seven or mulligan to six, then you can win on turn two or whatever.

GCB: Yeah. If Magic were that game, I never would have fallen in love with it. And so I think that's part of why—

HDH: Yeah.

GCB: I don't like these strategies.

HDH: What is the deck you played that was the kind of the most consistent, just did the thing that it was supposed to do, the redundancy was there and whatever else? Was there something that kind of stood out in that way, especially if you were maybe involved in the design of it?

GCB: Yeah, there's a deck that I loved for a number of years, that was in Modern, and it was a deck originally designed by my friend Conrad Kolos, who is a really interesting person and Magic player. He always thought about things in his own way, and it was based around sort of a common strategy, a combination of two cards. One is Scapeshift, which allows you to sacrifice your lands, all your resources, and go find different ones from your deck and put them into play. And then a card called Valakut, which is a land that if it sees enough other lands that are all mountains, it deals damage for each land.

So the idea is you'd get enough lands into play that you could play a Scapeshift, sacrifice all of them, go search up a Valakut and a bunch of mountains, and be able to deal enough damage to win the game in one spot. So this is sort of like a control-combo deck where you have this combination of two cards, but you really only need one of them.

So it's a one-card in a way combo because the Valakut card can just be in your library and you just cast the Scapeshift. So the idea of this deck was you had to get lands into play and prevent your opponent from winning the game. And it was very interactive because you were trying to, you know, stop your opponent from doing things long enough for you to find the Scapeshift card and get the lands into play.

And the big secret of this particular deck design was we learned that you needed the cards that you used to all be cantrips, meaning they replaced themselves. So everything that you used to stop your opponent from moving towards winning the game also drew you a card. So cards like Remand, which stops your opponent's spell, but they get it back, but you get to draw a card as well. So everything either had to be a land to get more lands into play or something that would replace itself. And so the deck design had this really strong philosophy to it, and every time you played it, since it was very redundant in that way and since you were drawing lots of cards, it was incredibly consistent.

And I won a couple of tournaments with this deck, and so did Conrad. And it was a very fun version of a combo deck.

HDH: It's like one card plus time.

GCB: Yes, exactly. So we were just buying time, you know. You just got to play this thing of, how do I bob and weave and buy as much time as possible?

HDH: What mix of digital versus paper do you play in 2025?

GCB: Uh, sadly the mix is probably higher in digital. I host a draft at my home once a week. So that's the consistent paper Magic that I play. And then I'll go to an in-person tournament probably once a month. And online it varies, but when I'm actually preparing for a tournament, I will play nearly every day online, at least an hour or two.

But it's interesting in the modern era, you know, it used to be playing online was sort of just sitting there at the computer, you know, plugging away. And now, you know, I go on Discord and I'll be talking to other people who are practicing, who are friends, and we'll screen share and sort of play together. It makes it a lot more fun. But I still definitely prefer the paper version, to be with other people.

HDH: Yeah, I do too. I mean, I don't—I haven't played much in a while, but maybe I'll be inspired after our conversation or excited to play. I just haven't been paying attention, and I'm like, oh, what? They just got an email that Spider-Man is going to be on my Magic cards or whatever. I don't know, but it's okay. I don't look at the pictures much anyways, so it's fine. But I just didn't, I never made the Arena conversion. And you know what I was thinking about this earlier when you were talking about drafting is that something for me dies a little bit that I don't play against the draft pool. Like that kind of—that kills a little bit of joy for me somehow. Yeah.

GCB: Yeah, I agree. It takes something out of it. And, you know, the only way to do that online anymore is—I think you can arrange your own drafts in Magic Online. But yeah, that's really an in-person experience now. That I will say, I love having the access to draft more often. I definitely draft on Arena a lot, and I enjoy it. So it's not as bad as I was afraid it would be when I went from, you know, pod drafting to league-based drafting.

HDH: For sure. I mean, everyone I've talked to has said that, right? They've, they enjoy drafting still. I, for some reason, I just held the grudge and I never made the transition. And so unfortunately I just play less Magic, but I need to get over it.

GCB: Maybe I would say Arena, they finally did that thing where they made the game, the digital version of the game, pleasant and nicely designed and sort of aesthetically comfortable. And that's not a good thing for me. It's way too tempting to log into Arena and play, you know. I need to play less sometimes.

So I will say, you know, if you're going to enter into it, go in with your eyes open. It's very addictive.