It's the Magic: Commander

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Commander, also known as Elder Dragon Highlander, is a Magic: the Gathering format for three or more people. It features larger decks with only one of each card, as well as higher starting life totals. That means that games tend to last longer and be a little less consistent. That means instead of playing well-honed decks in burnout matches against a single opponents, player must establish their footing, understand what their opponents are doing, and do a significant amount of social wrangling to stay ahead.

EDH was a fan format until the guys who make Magic opted to make an official--and identical--version called Commander. They released specialty decks, some of them had original cards made specifically for the format. They were also about thirty bucks apiece.

 

The boxes look like this.

Decisions

Hey, I was just thinking about decision making and made a graph. Points represent decisions. The axes are the good and bad outcomes of those decisions.

As you can see, for the top left decision, you...aren't making a decision at all. For the rest, it's always a series of greater reward for greater consequences and there's always a handful of suboptimal options you never have to consider.

This model tends to ignore things like two decisions having different types of positive or negative results in favor of a simple, linear expression. It also fails to account for uncertainty, where each decision actually represents a range of unknown positive and negative effects.

 

Here, each decision is an unknown range of good and bad outcomes. Judging them by the best or worse cases yields very different options. For the sake of simplicity none of the decisions overlap, though they could.

I'd delve into probabilities here, but I was using MS Paint, and no matter how much better later versions have gotten, I can't get it to do a decent gradient without using the spray paint tool or just working with the pixels myself.

Feelings about Stuff (Yes, I know feelings are icky, but we're doing it anyway)

Don't know if I've posted this video before. Almost entirely unrelated blog below.

Playing Favorites excerpts, pt 28

Every Tuesday I post excerpts from best selling at not selling super blog, Playing Favorites.

Okay, so the moral myopia and righteous vengeance are staples of the genre. Got it. The heroes who pursue violence against those who don’t deserve it, who are pacifists, and who try to solve all of the world’s problems are doomed to failure. Failure and suck. Eventually.

That said, let’s discuss some of these unapologetic punching bags for our heroes, the villains:

Field Manual Kris: Not Complaining, Just Informing

I first noticed it Wednesday, just a slight tightness in my throat as I was driving back home from New Orleans. The trip up to that point had taken me about three hours, enough time for someone to have completed a round trip from Houma to New Orleans and back to the city. My passenger side window was stuck down, I had to leave to go back offshore at one AM, and I was kicking myself for not finding a better way out of another emotional quagmire, so I didn’t think a thing of it.

Thursday was taken up mostly with travel. I took acetaminophen for a headache and spent the van ride to Texas in a sleep coma punctuated by buying fruit juices. My throat was very tight, but I thought I was just a bit dehydrated. On the boat ride out, I was unusually sea sick.  I don’t have a lot of man-points by default, and one of the places I work really hard on keeping them is the appearance of a strong constitution (a word which, no matter how much of it you have, will still leave you looking like a D&D geek if you actually use it in a sentence). I spent most of the ride on the outside deck for the fresh air, sitting on a storage locker with one arm draped awkwardly around a ladder so I wouldn’t slide off the boat when we hit large waves. I got sunburnt on the right side of my face and my right arm and soaked with spray, but I managed not to lose my lunch.

Weekend Music: "Cruel Sun" by Rusted Root

I know two things about this band:
1) I like them.
2) How to link their website.

No blog today, folks

I've got a virus that's destroying me like Ivan Drago and I puked up my medicine.

I've got a full shift ahead of me, and in a few hours, my virus will start up a righteous part with his friends dehydration and caffeine withdrawal.