MTG Set
.My friend Brett read the post about Set last week, and last night presented me with 81 MTG cards that have the same set of 3x3x3x3 characteristics.
Brett came up with the following card aspects to differentiate by:
- Color (Red, Blue, White)
- Type (Creature, Instant, Enchantment)
- Amount of generic mana required (1, 2, 3)
- Border/Style (White, old-style Black, new-style Black)
Using border/style was genius. That’s definitely a big leap towards making it easier, as it allows must wider range. I’ll have to check to see if the combined Unglued and Unhinged sets could provide enough of the necessary cards—that would be fantastic, as a White/Black/Grey trio for border color would be better.
But kudos to Brett for putting it together. I inflicted it on Monika this evening, and it worked fine.
It was definitely a lot harder to see the sets, and quite difficult to adjust to. For the first several sets I just couldn’t see any (Monika started out more strongly). I’m sure there were a lot of sets we missed completely. Generic mana is easier on non-MTG players, since it’s a number, but somehow it felt wrong to me. I’m probably conditioned to think in terms of converted mana cost, as that’s more relevant for actual MTG play.
Somewhere in the middle of the game we tried, I got the hang of it, and my greater familiarity with the cards asserted itself, and I grabbed most of the sets after that. This makes me think that a kind of subset of pattern recognition is involved in the game—not just seeing patterns between cards, but being able to glance at a card and quickly ascertain what its characteristics are without consciously enumerating them. As an MTG player, I was clearly going to be able to do that more readily than Monika, so that’s a rather unfair advantage. I don’t know what it means that she started out so much more strongly than I did, though.
I wonder how much the standard version of the game relies on that also, but renders it less apparent due to the deliberate simplicity of the cards.
Anyway, it was interesting (and taxing for the brain) to try it out. Thanks to Brett for making it and loaning it to me, and thanks to Monika for being willing to try it!
02 Mar 2007 at 09:04
Her starting advantage might be from your brain working out the wrong things. Stuff that’s relevant to MTG, but not sets.
02 Mar 2007 at 10:13
Hmm, could be, but on the other hand I had a big advantage because of that, too, easily recognizing the border styles, knowing whether something was was a creature or not just by a glance, etc. I’m not sure what the process I had to go through was…
On another note, it looks like there are too few grey-border cards in print to make it work as one of the border styles, Gold would be a possibility, but those would be a lot harder to get ahold of, I suspect.
03 Mar 2007 at 12:01
The difference in card border might in fact be particularly tricky for an experienced Magic player… that feature is truly irrelevant to MtG play mechanics and isn’t something that we usually pay much attention to.
It would be very interesting to make note of which kinds of sets you are best at finding from the modified MtG Set game and to compare that with what Monika finds. Given a sufficiently large data (ahem) set, you might be able to pose hypotheses about how your brain spots sets out of arbitrarily chosen symbol groups.
04 Mar 2007 at 17:31
I’m not sure I agree, Lev. The card border, and card style, stands out a great deal to me–even more so now that Time Spiral includes some black-border cards with different card face styles.
The idea of noting which sets are most easily found by which individuals is an intruiging one. I’d be interested in doing that with the standard Set cards too.
05 Mar 2007 at 11:49
Hey, that’s great; glad it worked out!
I’m thinking of making another, easier Set deck to teach the game to Yetta. I’d just use 3 basic land types, 3 border styles (maybe Unhinged for one), and then I’d add on some stickers to for the other two features: 1, 2, or 3 dots in red, green, or blue, for example.
As for what sets are found easily, I think the more “same” features there are, the easier it is to spot quickly… surely that’s true for just about everyone? Now which features are easier to spot the set-ness of, I’d say number and color are easier than shape or pattern. But that could definitely be different for different people…
06 Mar 2007 at 11:34
Brett: If you’re doing that (using dots, which are clearly not MTG features), why not buy the game? It’s pretty cheap (I think $12), and comes with a “starter” section that’s just one color.
Rather than using border style and dots, you could use type, set, and picture. Likely harder, but purer with regards to using MTG features. I can’t think of a way to increase that to four variables, though.
I’m not sure that everyone spots the “same” features most easily. I think that I tend to spot all-different or three-different more often than I spot certain types of two-different sets. But clearly more data would be necessary to figure this out for sure.
Number does seem to stand out as the easiest for most people. I’m not sure color trumps shape, but you might be right.
06 Mar 2007 at 20:17
Yes, of course I could buy the game… but that would require going to a store, whereas I have a huge stack of extra lands and dot stickers (don’t ask) sitting right here. When I do get to a store, I’m thinking of picking up one of the other games by the Set people that look pretty interesting… and then maybe not play it. (This is similar to how I have “borrowed” a particular CD, and then I’ll buy the artist’s next CD unheard, but end up never listening to the purchased one… it balances out. Am I the only one to do this?)
About using land picture — it won’t work. There’s no way to correlate the various pictures of one land type with the pictures of another land type, unless you can make a really strong case for artistic style… but that’s hard to incorporate with the border constraint. Sleeve color is another possible variable, though.
07 Mar 2007 at 01:22
Brett: You’re right about land picture. I was envisaging the recent “panorama” art and thinking of them as a sequence, but that would be a little too tricky, I suspect.
Sleeve color is an excellent idea, in fact I think I’d replace border style with that, although some testing would be required.
Which other game by the Set designers do you have your eye on?
(About the dot stickers… I think I had some theoretical use for those with proxies or something at some point, or perhaps as part of some card organization scheme—I know you said not to ask, but are either of those reasons connected to why you have a lot of those?)
07 Mar 2007 at 14:07
I think it was Quiddler I saw somewhere and it looked like it might be ok.
Now you’ve got me thinking about making a mah-jongg set from MtG cards. The dragons and winds would be easy… you’d just have to find 1-10 CC cards in four colors. The idea is especially appealing because mah-jongg is basically like a booster draft, except once your deck is really good, you just win. The downside of this plan is you ideally need four people who know how to play. Also, much of the fun of the game is lost if you’re not sliding tiles around.
About the stickers… no, it was for Science. Basically, they were stuck onto my skin and I was shot by lasers for two days. Late the first night, we had to stop by a drugstore for two tubes of the strongest hair gel we could find and some makeup remover. I told you not to ask…
08 Mar 2007 at 10:32
Brett: I’ve never played mah-jongg, but I have to say that your description above doesn’t make it spectacularly appealing!
On the sticker subject, I sense an imminent tell-all memoir: Science Covered Me in Stickers and Shot Me with Lasers—But I Lived to Tell the Tale