Interactivity in MTG cards can be measured by the variety of cards the opposing player can use to affect the card in question and the window of opportunity the opposing player has to do so.
This defines interactive cards, and is fine as far as it goes. This doesn't define an interactive game, though.
The problem with defining "interactive" is that people use it in 2 separate ways, and the perspective difference between them is very large.
I call the first one logistic interaction, and it's exactly what you said here: the ability to affect the other player or his/her cards. By this definition, all forms of disruption (countermagic, LD, and discard to name a few) are all iteractive: they allow you to trade your disruption card for one or more of your opponent's cards.
The second use of "interactive" is tactical. An interactive game is one in which both players can make meaningful decisions, and in which the board develops as the game goes on. By this definition, cards that can reset the board, delay threat development, or entirely shut a player out of the game aren't interactive. The best example I can think of is permission-style draw-go: it shuts the opponent out of the game with countermagic, fields exactly one big threat, then prevents any other cards from affecting the board. While the cards may be interacting quite a bit, the overall deck is preventing the opponent from doing anything, which leads to stagnant board states and complaints about how "unfun" and "uninteractive" a deck is.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
This defines interactive cards, and is fine as far as it goes. This doesn't define an interactive game, though.
The problem with defining "interactive" is that people use it in 2 separate ways, and the perspective difference between them is very large.
I call the first one logistic interaction, and it's exactly what you said here: the ability to affect the other player or his/her cards. By this definition, all forms of disruption (countermagic, LD, and discard to name a few) are all iteractive: they allow you to trade your disruption card for one or more of your opponent's cards.
The second use of "interactive" is tactical. An interactive game is one in which both players can make meaningful decisions, and in which the board develops as the game goes on. By this definition, cards that can reset the board, delay threat development, or entirely shut a player out of the game aren't interactive. The best example I can think of is permission-style draw-go: it shuts the opponent out of the game with countermagic, fields exactly one big threat, then prevents any other cards from affecting the board. While the cards may be interacting quite a bit, the overall deck is preventing the opponent from doing anything, which leads to stagnant board states and complaints about how "unfun" and "uninteractive" a deck is.
Read my post above, this is a case of a deck doing exactly what it's designed to do. You can't blame another person for using a mechanic to win, when you yourself are unprepared for it. It's entirely normal. Winning is uninteractive.
It's exactly the same if you flip the perspective and look at it from the point of view of the persmission player getting stomped by aggro/midrange. He has a hard time affecting the board since all his removal acts on the stack, and the creatures are so fast or resilient, there's very little he can do to stop that kind of onslaught. It's just a case of people operating on different axes, not necessarily non-interaction.
No deck was ever built that was designed to allow the opponent any kind of meaningful interaction. That kind of philosophy is antithetical to winning the game, since it means you're willingly building weaknesses into your own deck.
It's not about individual player skill, it's about the inherent game design. Cards that allow a wider berth of opportunity for other cards to affect them means the opposing player will more often cast spells that affect them - act on them. Simple.
This is an argument where both sides are too stubborn to ever relent, so I'm staying out of it, but I do take issue with this statement.
This sounds like part of the definition of a good card to me, not necessarily a less interactive card. Sphinx's Revelation isn't less interactive because it's an instant rather than a sorcery (in fact, it makes it vastly more complex to both play and play against, which sounds like interaction to me), but it being instant makes it much less likely to be affected by other cards.
In Bridge, the Ace of trumps is an unbeatable card. If it's played to a trick, the other players cannot meaningfully affect the trick--the Ace will win, simple as that.
Likewise, the King of trumps is the second-best card. It can be beaten ("interacted with", as the kids say) only if the Ace appears on the same trick. If the Ace has already been drawn out on a previous trick, or if A-K are held by the same player, then the King becomes just as untouchable as the Ace was.
With that in mind, have you ever heard of a serious bridge community that advocates steadfastly refusing to ever declare a contract in a suit where you hold the Ace, out of a sense of courtesy to your opponents because they should always be able to mess with your stuff? Of course not! Rather, this leads to a core concept that's well-understood in games like Bridge and Poker, even if it's not always expressed as such because authors of the literature might believe it to be so manifestly obvious:
The most fundamental measure of power level--the only such measure, really--is a direct function of how few, or how many, possible cards can beat yours at any given point over the course of the game.
Consider this: One deck plays Upheaval floating three and then Psychatog, passing the turn. The other deck plays a Forest, discards a couple lands and Craw Wurms for hand size, and passes back. On the next turn, knowing Fog is a very real possibility, the Tog deck takes care to consume exactly enough resources to put its power equal to the opponent's life total, and swings. Sure enough, the opponent taps their forest...but then plays Lifelace. "Yeah, Dr. Teeth is going to eat me to death and I have no answer, but at least I got to make it green! HA!"
Is that "interaction"? Is it "meaningfully affecting the game"? If not--if meaningful is limited to those decisions that actually change the Win Probability--then you have defined it as a direct antonym of strength, and anyone who is aware of the equivocation should rightfully pay it no mind whatsoever, especially if it's coming from the other side of the table.
You can't blame another person for using a mechanic to win, when you yourself are unprepared for it. It's entirely normal. Winning is uninteractive.
That's just plain wrong, and quite condescending. Losing isn't noninteractive. Losing TO A PRISON DECK is noninteractive. Because, for the last n turns of the game, you had no possible decisions to make other than what card to discard. On the other hand, there are games of magic that you lose due to a complicated situation in which you slightly overcommit on an attack, then run into one more combat trick then you expected, and make an incorrect blocking choice, and end up dying on the swingback, or something. That's not at all noninteractive.
No deck was ever built that was designed to allow the opponent any kind of meaningful interaction.
Again, that's just not true. A tempo deck has individual parts that are easy to interact with, in a vaccuum. It attempts to win by overwhelming you. You don't lose to a tempo deck and say "well, absolutely nothing I did influenced anything that happened that game", you say "if only I'd had one more turn I could have stabilized the board".
Which is not to say that I believe people have an obligation to play tempo decks instead of prison decks in formats where both are legal. I'm just saying that your description of the situation is wrong.
Is that "interaction"? Is it "meaningfully affecting the game"? If not--if meaningful is limited to those decisions that actually change the Win Probability--then you have defined it as a direct antonym of strength, and anyone who is aware of the equivocation should rightfully pay it no mind whatsoever, especially if it's coming from the other side of the table.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. To me, a hallmark of a good deck has always been that it is able to negate entire venues of disruption, thereby increasing the likelyhood of an opponent holding a hand full of dead cards. I played Enchantress for a while because it blanked almost all forms of creature removal, and now I play Storm decks partially for the same reason. In EDH my Wydwen deck plays almost zero non-land permanents, Avacyn makes my stuff indestructible, and Jolreal revolves around winning with my lands which avoid most forms of removal.
By virtue of negating certain forms of disruption, you leave more room in your deck to protect yourself against whatever's left. Lightning Storm/Ad Nauseam combo decks in Modern running Boseiju, Who Shelters All to protect their combo against counterspells for example.
This is how you build good decks. Complaining about decks like this is equivalent to complaining about people playing good decks.
That's just plain wrong, and quite condescending. Losing isn't noninteractive. Losing TO A PRISON DECK is noninteractive. Because, for the last n turns of the game, you had no possible decisions to make other than what card to discard.
If the lock is secure enough and you know your deck has no possible outs, what do you hope to get out of your decision to play on? If you can see that the WP is 0%, you always have the power to resign, in effect forcing n=0.
Some win conditions (from a WP perspective) exist that may not automatically invoke the rules that force the game to terminate immediately at that point, but if the outcome is as good as determined after a player takes some number of turns to establish a dominating position, there's nothing preventing the player on the losing end from accepting that outcome and bringing the game to a close right then, rather than continuing on and wallowing in futility for dozens of additional turns.
I am the only one that's starting to feel that the issue here is that some people are bad losers, and some people are bad winners, and every now and then the rest of us has to play one of them?
Read my post above, this is a case of a deck doing exactly what it's designed to do. You can't blame another person for using a mechanic to win, when you yourself are unprepared for it. It's entirely normal. Winning is uninteractive.
I have my own preferences about the decks I enjoy playing, and playing against. Everyone does. I don't blame anyone for bringing a strong deck to a tournament. Even in casual, if I see a permission or prison deck, I'll play it out a few times. I don't like playing against control, but it isn't a matter of blame.
It's exactly the same if you flip the perspective and look at it from the point of view of the persmission player getting stomped by aggro/midrange. He has a hard time affecting the board since all his removal acts on the stack, and the creatures are so fast or resilient, there's very little he can do to stop that kind of onslaught. It's just a case of people operating on different axes, not necessarily non-interaction.
Which is why it's useful to me to think about interaction on both axes: individual cards, and the game as a whole. By the first definition, hexproof is non-interactive, but it's not by the second. Stone Rain is interactive by the first definition, but when a good LD deck works, it stops the opponent from doing anything meaningful except "what do I discard this turn."
No deck was ever built that was designed to allow the opponent any kind of meaningful interaction. That kind of philosophy is antithetical to winning the game, since it means you're willingly building weaknesses into your own deck.
You do the best you can. So does your opponent. By the same token, very very few decks run no disruption of any kind, relying only on their threats to power straight past the opponent without regard to what they're doing (I was going to say none, but Belcher exists.)
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
I am the only one that's starting to feel that the issue here is that some people are bad losers, and some people are bad winners, and every now and then the rest of us has to play one of them?
That is defintly a part of it.
There are also to many people who do not want to adapt or improve their game, and claim that any deck that is not a similar game style and power lebel is bad/wrong/unfun (usually using terms like "un-fair" or "non-interactive" as a mask for "It beats my scrub deck")
There are also to many people who do not want to adapt or improve their game, and claim that any deck that is not a similar game style and power lebel is bad/wrong/unfun (usually using terms like "un-fair" or "non-interactive" as a mask for "It beats my scrub deck")
Regardless of whether that's true, it has no bearing on whether or not "interactive" is a useful or meaningful adjective for describing magic games/decks/cards.
Regardless of whether that's true, it has no bearing on whether or not "interactive" is a useful or meaningful adjective for describing magic games/decks/cards.
True, but "interactive" simply isn't a useful or meaningful adjective for describing anything in magic.
Aggro and combo decks win only if they are not sufficiently interacted with. Midrange, tempo, and control decks win only if they interact with their opponent sufficiently. If you are playing a deck that attempts to minimize interaction, and you lose to your opponent doing something interactive (like killing, discarding, and/or countering all your things), there's no basis for complaining because their deck was designed specifically to beat yours in the exact manner in which it did and you should have a plan for that, or at least know that it might happen if you get the wrong matchup. If you are playing a deck that attempts to maximize interaction and win by profiting on the collective result of many interactions, and you lose to an uninteractive deck because you didn't interact enough, your deck is failing at its primary goal and you should have a better plan for the matchup.
A lot of people seem to be complaining about "uninteractive" strategies that are actually hyper-interactive (prison, permission, etc), in which case the complaint is actually "interaction is too easy, effective, and efficient and my opponent is doing more of it than I am." Tangle Wire is a hyper-interactive card ... It interacts with the opponent's entire board at once, favorably, for several turns. Force of Will is hyper-interactive because it interacts with almost anything. These cards are necessary options in a format like Vintage where failing to interact in very, very powerful ways gets you killed quickly and decisively. Gaddock Teeg is hyper-interactive in the ANT matchup in Legacy, the same way Moat is hyper-interactive in the Zoo matchup. The presence of hyper-interactive cards in format with otherwise broken decks (Belcher is a broken deck in a format without Force, etc.) just increases the challenge involved in picking an exact 75 cards to play at a tournament with a varied and powerful metagame.
In a format like Standard, where the least interactive thing you can do is play cheap guys, turn them sideways, and hope you race your opponent's interaction, the interaction doesn't need to be very good to keep that kind of thing in check, so decks that rely on interaction to win (control, midrange ... tempo basically doesn't exist in Standard anymore) have to make do with a lot of situational answers because the format would break if interaction was too easy (envision Swords to Plowshares in Standard. Gross.)
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Thanks to Gabgabdevo for the awesome sig image!
I'm always looking for foil Madcap Skills and Ghitu Fire-Eater, [trade thread link forthcoming]
True, but "interactive" simply isn't a useful or meaningful adjective for describing anything in magic.
Only in some crazy land in which words cease to mean the things they mean.
I think the problem with this discussion is that people conflate the word as a description with the value judgments that are often associated. Some games of magic are more interactive than others. To pretend otherwise is either ignorance, stubbornness, or some kind of weird pedant nitpickery in which "well, my activation of charbelcher on turn 1 went on the stack, so it was INTERACTING with the rules, and then it INTERACTED with your life total" demonstrates that a particular game was just as interactive as a game that went on for 15 turns and had attacking and blocking and removal and tricks and instants and both players played lots of cards and the game swung back and forth many times and there were some exciting topdecks and then finally someone won.
Describing a charbelcher turn 1 win as "noninteractive" is entirely accurate. What it is NOT is a value judgment or a condemnation.
Interactive gameplay is just each players' decisions at least somewhat dynamically affecting the other person's decisions.
It's easier and more efficient to define what it isn't:
Non-interactive gameplay is when you would make all or most of the same decisions you're already making, regardless of who you are playing against and what deck type they have.
I.e. you might as well be playing with a brick wall, so why did I bother driving over to meet you to "play" magic?
For future posts can anyone responding to me leave out the insults and just put in their arguments? Cheers.
Saying that your piecemeal logic is piecemeal isn't a comment on you. It's a comment on your logic.
If you don't like that, then you're being too sensitive. See, that's what a comment on you looks like
Moving the goalposts. Look unless we can agree on a definition of interactivity this entire thing will just boil down to semantics. To avoid this I'll lay out what I understand to be interactive in mtg. You've criticised me a lot, but you've not actually suggested your own definition of interactivity. Please do.
We don't need to invent conflicting definitions out of whole cloth when we're using a simple word in language.
From Dictionary.com - interactive, adj., acting one upon or with the other. Derivative of "to act", which the source defines as: to do something, to produce an effect, and so forth.
Interactivity in MTG cards can be measured by the variety of cards the opposing player can use to affect the card in question and the window of opportunity the opposing player has to do so.
This isn't the definition. This is reading something you want your opponents to do - leave a "window of opportunity" - into your private definition so that you can own the term. Apparently, the reason why you need to own it is to bludgeon people into playing your own vision of the game, which you're powerless to enforce on the play mat instead because it's just worse at winning.
Every card type can be interacted with while in the hand, in the graveyard, on the stack, sometimes even in the library. The only key difference between card types is that some enter and stay on the battlefield where they are permanent exposed to ways the opponent's cards can affect them. The stack as a card zone is identical to the battlefield, except things only exist there momentarily and only one colour can truly cast spells that affect this entire game zone. It's the very nature of instants and sorceries as one time effects to be brief. It's the difference between a bullet (an effect) and a medieval knight in full armour (a continuous thing). Sure you can "interact" with the bullet by grabbing a shield to block it, or shooting that bullet out of the air with another bullet. But that's about it. Poof, you interacted with it right there and then for a millisecond and it's over. The knight on the other hand is open to a world of possibilities with no set time limit.
So, nice example. "Stop shooting at me, guys, so I can beat you with this piece of metal. If you don't, you're not playing fair."
But really, even this example fails fundamentally because there are a lot of tactics that two people trying to shoot each other with rifles can use on one another to "interact".
Strawman. I didn't say interacting with your opponent's lands isn't interacting, I implied that it wasn't a unique way of interacting with the instant or sorcery card type because every card is cast using lands and is susceptible to exiling from the graveyard and being discarded from the hand.
Well, what you were actually arguing was never clear to anyone but yourself, because all you did was say that every deck uses lands, game, set, match. Again though, even having a second bite at the apple you make the same mistake of relying on a bogus implicit premise. The uniqueness of a method of interaction isn't on anyone else's radar in a discussion about whether it meets a definition of interaction, unless uniqueness becomes part of that definition. And it certainly doesn't prove non-interaction. You have to make some sort of case for why something is non-interactive or less interactive as a result of it being useful against everything. It seems that just the opposite is true.
Yet somehow someone not accepting these unstated, absurd ideas along with you is a strawman? Oh no, I get it. With all the talk about fedoras, the cliche logical fallacies were all that was missing from this being a teenage reddit debate. Now we've come full circle, I guess.
Well, let me explain something that's probably not taught at the reddit school for adolescent petulance. A strawman is when one party misstates position A as position B, then uses that refutation to claim that position A is refuted. You seem to think it means that whenever you hold position A, someone's making a strawman when they refute position B, for any reason. Nevermind that you yourself fail utterly to relate your position to the discussion, and and that the position actually refuted is a relevant one.
blah blah blah ad hominem blah blah
Ok old chap, whatever you say, no need to be such an ******** because someone disagrees with your obviously objectively correct views of magic: the gathering cards
Ah, the rhetorical repertoire of the internet crusader isn't exhausted until he flails around with the ad hominem fallacy.
Someone saying something that you don't like about how you've written something isn't ad hominem. And get this, even if insults had been thrown, which they weren't, openly insulting you isn't ad hominem either. Read that again, if necessary. The internet seems to think that insult-laden refutations automatically contain ad hominem fallacy. They do not.
The ad hominem is when you try to use an insult against someone in order to refute their position. You not only have to insult the person, you also have to use that as a premise as support for why their position is wrong. No one is doing that because, first, no one but you understands what your position is in the first place, as shown by numerous comments of how sloppy it was to make sense of, and in the second place, no one is saying that you're automatically wrong just because no one can understand it. Honestly despite how often ad hominem gets thrown around in muck-dwelling internet debates, it's really rare to find someone arguing that everything an idiot says is axiomatically false because he's an idiot. It's usually easy enough, as has been done here, to show that what was actually said is just wrong.
There are also to many people who do not want to adapt or improve their game, and claim that any deck that is not a similar game style and power lebel is bad/wrong/unfun (usually using terms like "un-fair" or "non-interactive" as a mask for "It beats my scrub deck")
This sums up my position fairly well. Usually someone arguing for interactivity is asking their opponents to play poor, easily defeated decks. Whether they like that style of Magic or not, whatever. But reading a window of response into your own definition of the term "interactive" really is just asking opponents to run stuff that you can respond to. Don't be surprised if most people tell you to get bent instead.
As for value judgments, there are two perspectives: FUN, or POWER
Noninteractive decks are usually (though not always) pretty powerful, and have a positive value therefore in terms of competitiveness.
Noninteractive decks are terrible, however, for fun, because you're not really playing a game anymore with a person. You're playing two (or in some cases 1) game of solitaire. Solitaire can be sort of fun, but why go to the bother of getting together and having a Magic night if you were just going to play solitaire? Noninteractivity has negative value judgment for two player fun.
The fact that many of the most powerful decks happen to be noninteractive is a design flaw that isn't any one particular player's fault and leads to arguments like this. But it's still an obviously BAD thing for fun.
In any given situation, you have to evaluate whether the PRIMARY goal of the game is fun or profit/winning. If the primary goal is fun, don't play non-interactive decks. If the primary goal is winning, play whatever works. Simple as that.
It was better when it was a discussion about hats.
You do realize you're arguing about the definition of a word that, it seems, none of you know or bothered looking up. The entire game of magic is an interactive experience. A stasis lock is an interaction. It's effecting a phase of the game. The definition of interaction is one thing effecting another. Period. That's what it means.
It's actually close to impossible to do anything in magic that isn't an interaction.
All this discussion is, and ever will be, are players warping a word and making their own definition for it to validate their opinion of the game. It's annoying and no matter how many huge walls of text you post, you're still going to be wrong.
Please, buy a dictionary before you throw words around . Not a single post in this thread, besides maybe a hand full, are correct about interaction in magic.
Again. The definition of interaction.
THINGS EFFECTING OTHER THINGS.
Phases of the game are a thing. Your draw step is a thing. Your upkeep is a thing.
If a card effects those things, it's an interaction.
And don't try to counter this point unless you can go back in time and change the words origin.
That's just plain wrong, and quite condescending. Losing isn't noninteractive. Losing TO A PRISON DECK is noninteractive. Because, for the last n turns of the game, you had no possible decisions to make other than what card to discard. On the other hand, there are games of magic that you lose due to a complicated situation in which you slightly overcommit on an attack, then run into one more combat trick then you expected, and make an incorrect blocking choice, and end up dying on the swingback, or something. That's not at all noninteractive.
Again, that's just not true. A tempo deck has individual parts that are easy to interact with, in a vaccuum. It attempts to win by overwhelming you. You don't lose to a tempo deck and say "well, absolutely nothing I did influenced anything that happened that game", you say "if only I'd had one more turn I could have stabilized the board".
Which is not to say that I believe people have an obligation to play tempo decks instead of prison decks in formats where both are legal. I'm just saying that your description of the situation is wrong.
In what way was I being condescending? I was making an observation that you apparently took offense to, even though it wasn't directed at you. As for losing against prison, if they get the lock on and you have no answer, YOU JUST LOST THE GAME. Why would you play beyond that point? Just get over it and shuffle up. Sure, your life total doesn't read zero, but then you can die to mill and be on infinite life. Having multiple paths to victory is one of the things that makes this game great, and I would rather circumcise myself with a sharp rock than play the game that you apparently want to play.
And both of those scenarios are interactive by definition, because they involve two players. The first scenario has a player getting a prison lock, and the second player (a) letting him get the lock, and (b) being too much of a moron to realise that he just lost the game, and continuing the game despite having no obvious answer. That's hardly the prison player's fault, and he shouldn't wilfully weaken his strategy to cater to dip****s. Rather, the prison player's opponent should learn that there are better things in life to get mad at, and make his strategy either more proactive so he overwhelms his opponent before the lock falls into place, or more reactive so that he can prevent the lock from ever occurring.
As for the second scenario, it's just a different way of interacting. It has neither more or less inherent value than the first one, and given the subjective nature of fun, the game would be severely diminished if that were the only form of interaction available. I can't think of anything in he game that I find more boring than midrange and aggro mirrors, but hey, that's my opinion. I would never, ever deny a player the right to enjoy their own subjective experience, and that means allowing people to play the strategy that they want to play. If they don't like playing against a particular strategy, they're always free to say no, and play against a different deck.
One last thing: you find tempo easy to interact with? Really? We're talking decks that play nimble mongoose, goyf, TNN and delver here. I mean, aside from the fact that tempo decks hammer your lands and counter your every attempt at removal, their creatures are either evasive, untargetable, or just plain bigger than yours. If you're having difficulty with prison decks (which are generally bad outside of a few specific decks), legacy tempo decks would make you quit magic. When a delver deck does its thing, you might not even have lands on the field, let alone feel like there was anything you could have done. I just don't even understand your logic here.
You do realize you're arguing about the definition of a word that, it seems, none of you know or bothered looking up. The entire game of magic is an interactive experience. A stasis lock is an interaction. It's effecting a phase of the game. The definition of interaction is one thing effecting another. Period. That's what it means.
It's actually close to impossible to do anything in magic that isn't an interaction.
All this discussion is, and ever will be, are players warping a word and making their own definition for it to validate their opinion of the game. It's annoying and no matter how many huge walls of text you post, you're still going to be wrong.
Please, buy a dictionary before you throw words around . Not a single post in this thread, besides maybe a hand full, are correct about interaction in magic.
Again. The definition of interaction.
THINGS EFFECTING OTHER THINGS.
And don't try to counter this point unless you can go back in time and change the words origin.
^^^ This for president, exactly what I want to say
That's why I said in the beginning that its just an excuse by WOTC to dumb down the game by reducing strategies available other than aggro.
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Want to have more creativity with your food?
Wanna hear what I think about restaurants?
You do realize you're arguing about the definition of a word that, it seems, none of you know or bothered looking up. The entire game of magic is an interactive experience. A stasis lock is an interaction. It's effecting a phase of the game. The definition of interaction is one thing effecting another. Period. That's what it means.
The community uses the word consistently to mean a specific thing: decks that are played mostly the same way regardless of what the opponent has, such as lockdown. Most people know what it means, including obviously you. Thus it is effective as a communication, whether or not it is ideal as a term.
The important thing about the topic is not the term, though. Whether or not you think the word choice is accurate is entirely irrelevant to what IS important: whether or not such decks and strategies are good for the game or not.
Go ahead and call it "shminteraction" if you want, or a "fleeblewock" if you want. The issue of it being unhealthy for casual/fun games will still remain and be a serious issue no matter what you call it.
The community uses the word consistently to mean a specific thing: decks that are played mostly the same way regardless of what the opponent has, such as lockdown. Most people know what it means, including obviously you. Thus it is effective as a communication, whether or not it is ideal as a term.
The important thing about the topic is not the term, though. Whether or not you think the word choice is accurate is entirely irrelevant to what IS important: whether or not such decks and strategies are good for the game or not.
Go ahead and call it "shminteraction" if you want, or a "fleeblewock" if you want. The issue of it being unhealthy for casual/fun games will still remain and be a serious issue no matter what you call it.
It's your opinion that it's unhealthy, so it doesn't need a word. It already has one: opinion.
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The EDH stax primer When you absolutely, positively got to kill every permanent in the room, accept no substitutes.
The community uses the word consistently to mean a specific thing: decks that are played mostly the same way regardless of what the opponent has, such as lockdown. Most people know what it means, including obviously you. Thus it is effective as a communication, whether or not it is ideal as a term.
Exactly correct
The important thing about the topic is not the term, though. Whether or not you think the word choice is accurate is entirely irrelevant to what IS important: whether or not such decks and strategies are good for the game or not.
Actually, that's a completely separate issue. Granted, an important one, and one that is clearly lurking in many people's minds as they answer the question. But
(1) arguing about what is or is not "interactive"
and
(2) arguing about whether interactive decks are "fun" or "good for magic" in various context and various formats, and what people should do about it, if anything
are two totally distinct debates. Some people seem to claim that the very word itself has no meaning, that it conveys nothing to say that a deck or a game is "interactive". I think those people are completely wrong, so wish to argue point (1) to convince them otherwise. I may or may not also have an opinion about (2), but I consider that to be a completely separate debate. Clearly it has leaked into this thread some, but I feel like it deserves its own.
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This defines interactive cards, and is fine as far as it goes. This doesn't define an interactive game, though.
The problem with defining "interactive" is that people use it in 2 separate ways, and the perspective difference between them is very large.
I call the first one logistic interaction, and it's exactly what you said here: the ability to affect the other player or his/her cards. By this definition, all forms of disruption (countermagic, LD, and discard to name a few) are all iteractive: they allow you to trade your disruption card for one or more of your opponent's cards.
The second use of "interactive" is tactical. An interactive game is one in which both players can make meaningful decisions, and in which the board develops as the game goes on. By this definition, cards that can reset the board, delay threat development, or entirely shut a player out of the game aren't interactive. The best example I can think of is permission-style draw-go: it shuts the opponent out of the game with countermagic, fields exactly one big threat, then prevents any other cards from affecting the board. While the cards may be interacting quite a bit, the overall deck is preventing the opponent from doing anything, which leads to stagnant board states and complaints about how "unfun" and "uninteractive" a deck is.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Read my post above, this is a case of a deck doing exactly what it's designed to do. You can't blame another person for using a mechanic to win, when you yourself are unprepared for it. It's entirely normal. Winning is uninteractive.
It's exactly the same if you flip the perspective and look at it from the point of view of the persmission player getting stomped by aggro/midrange. He has a hard time affecting the board since all his removal acts on the stack, and the creatures are so fast or resilient, there's very little he can do to stop that kind of onslaught. It's just a case of people operating on different axes, not necessarily non-interaction.
No deck was ever built that was designed to allow the opponent any kind of meaningful interaction. That kind of philosophy is antithetical to winning the game, since it means you're willingly building weaknesses into your own deck.
This is an argument where both sides are too stubborn to ever relent, so I'm staying out of it, but I do take issue with this statement.
This sounds like part of the definition of a good card to me, not necessarily a less interactive card. Sphinx's Revelation isn't less interactive because it's an instant rather than a sorcery (in fact, it makes it vastly more complex to both play and play against, which sounds like interaction to me), but it being instant makes it much less likely to be affected by other cards.
This is an inane argument, not a debate.
Likewise, the King of trumps is the second-best card. It can be beaten ("interacted with", as the kids say) only if the Ace appears on the same trick. If the Ace has already been drawn out on a previous trick, or if A-K are held by the same player, then the King becomes just as untouchable as the Ace was.
With that in mind, have you ever heard of a serious bridge community that advocates steadfastly refusing to ever declare a contract in a suit where you hold the Ace, out of a sense of courtesy to your opponents because they should always be able to mess with your stuff? Of course not! Rather, this leads to a core concept that's well-understood in games like Bridge and Poker, even if it's not always expressed as such because authors of the literature might believe it to be so manifestly obvious:
The most fundamental measure of power level--the only such measure, really--is a direct function of how few, or how many, possible cards can beat yours at any given point over the course of the game.
Consider this: One deck plays Upheaval floating three and then Psychatog, passing the turn. The other deck plays a Forest, discards a couple lands and Craw Wurms for hand size, and passes back. On the next turn, knowing Fog is a very real possibility, the Tog deck takes care to consume exactly enough resources to put its power equal to the opponent's life total, and swings. Sure enough, the opponent taps their forest...but then plays Lifelace. "Yeah, Dr. Teeth is going to eat me to death and I have no answer, but at least I got to make it green! HA!"
Is that "interaction"? Is it "meaningfully affecting the game"? If not--if meaningful is limited to those decisions that actually change the Win Probability--then you have defined it as a direct antonym of strength, and anyone who is aware of the equivocation should rightfully pay it no mind whatsoever, especially if it's coming from the other side of the table.
[GTC] Gatecrash Patch for MWS (249/249)
That's just plain wrong, and quite condescending. Losing isn't noninteractive. Losing TO A PRISON DECK is noninteractive. Because, for the last n turns of the game, you had no possible decisions to make other than what card to discard. On the other hand, there are games of magic that you lose due to a complicated situation in which you slightly overcommit on an attack, then run into one more combat trick then you expected, and make an incorrect blocking choice, and end up dying on the swingback, or something. That's not at all noninteractive.
Again, that's just not true. A tempo deck has individual parts that are easy to interact with, in a vaccuum. It attempts to win by overwhelming you. You don't lose to a tempo deck and say "well, absolutely nothing I did influenced anything that happened that game", you say "if only I'd had one more turn I could have stabilized the board".
Which is not to say that I believe people have an obligation to play tempo decks instead of prison decks in formats where both are legal. I'm just saying that your description of the situation is wrong.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. To me, a hallmark of a good deck has always been that it is able to negate entire venues of disruption, thereby increasing the likelyhood of an opponent holding a hand full of dead cards. I played Enchantress for a while because it blanked almost all forms of creature removal, and now I play Storm decks partially for the same reason. In EDH my Wydwen deck plays almost zero non-land permanents, Avacyn makes my stuff indestructible, and Jolreal revolves around winning with my lands which avoid most forms of removal.
By virtue of negating certain forms of disruption, you leave more room in your deck to protect yourself against whatever's left. Lightning Storm/Ad Nauseam combo decks in Modern running Boseiju, Who Shelters All to protect their combo against counterspells for example.
This is how you build good decks. Complaining about decks like this is equivalent to complaining about people playing good decks.
And then call me an ******** in the same post. Classy.
If the lock is secure enough and you know your deck has no possible outs, what do you hope to get out of your decision to play on? If you can see that the WP is 0%, you always have the power to resign, in effect forcing n=0.
Some win conditions (from a WP perspective) exist that may not automatically invoke the rules that force the game to terminate immediately at that point, but if the outcome is as good as determined after a player takes some number of turns to establish a dominating position, there's nothing preventing the player on the losing end from accepting that outcome and bringing the game to a close right then, rather than continuing on and wallowing in futility for dozens of additional turns.
How To Keep Your FOIL Cards From Curling: http://youtu.be/QTmubrS8VnI
The Best Deck Boxes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEwgLph_Pjk
The Best Binders: http://youtu.be/H5IauASYWjk
I have my own preferences about the decks I enjoy playing, and playing against. Everyone does. I don't blame anyone for bringing a strong deck to a tournament. Even in casual, if I see a permission or prison deck, I'll play it out a few times. I don't like playing against control, but it isn't a matter of blame.
Which is why it's useful to me to think about interaction on both axes: individual cards, and the game as a whole. By the first definition, hexproof is non-interactive, but it's not by the second. Stone Rain is interactive by the first definition, but when a good LD deck works, it stops the opponent from doing anything meaningful except "what do I discard this turn."
You do the best you can. So does your opponent. By the same token, very very few decks run no disruption of any kind, relying only on their threats to power straight past the opponent without regard to what they're doing (I was going to say none, but Belcher exists.)
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
There are also to many people who do not want to adapt or improve their game, and claim that any deck that is not a similar game style and power lebel is bad/wrong/unfun (usually using terms like "un-fair" or "non-interactive" as a mask for "It beats my scrub deck")
Regardless of whether that's true, it has no bearing on whether or not "interactive" is a useful or meaningful adjective for describing magic games/decks/cards.
True, but "interactive" simply isn't a useful or meaningful adjective for describing anything in magic.
A lot of people seem to be complaining about "uninteractive" strategies that are actually hyper-interactive (prison, permission, etc), in which case the complaint is actually "interaction is too easy, effective, and efficient and my opponent is doing more of it than I am." Tangle Wire is a hyper-interactive card ... It interacts with the opponent's entire board at once, favorably, for several turns. Force of Will is hyper-interactive because it interacts with almost anything. These cards are necessary options in a format like Vintage where failing to interact in very, very powerful ways gets you killed quickly and decisively. Gaddock Teeg is hyper-interactive in the ANT matchup in Legacy, the same way Moat is hyper-interactive in the Zoo matchup. The presence of hyper-interactive cards in format with otherwise broken decks (Belcher is a broken deck in a format without Force, etc.) just increases the challenge involved in picking an exact 75 cards to play at a tournament with a varied and powerful metagame.
In a format like Standard, where the least interactive thing you can do is play cheap guys, turn them sideways, and hope you race your opponent's interaction, the interaction doesn't need to be very good to keep that kind of thing in check, so decks that rely on interaction to win (control, midrange ... tempo basically doesn't exist in Standard anymore) have to make do with a lot of situational answers because the format would break if interaction was too easy (envision Swords to Plowshares in Standard. Gross.)
Thanks to Gabgabdevo for the awesome sig image!
I'm always looking for foil Madcap Skills and Ghitu Fire-Eater, [trade thread link forthcoming]
Only in some crazy land in which words cease to mean the things they mean.
I think the problem with this discussion is that people conflate the word as a description with the value judgments that are often associated. Some games of magic are more interactive than others. To pretend otherwise is either ignorance, stubbornness, or some kind of weird pedant nitpickery in which "well, my activation of charbelcher on turn 1 went on the stack, so it was INTERACTING with the rules, and then it INTERACTED with your life total" demonstrates that a particular game was just as interactive as a game that went on for 15 turns and had attacking and blocking and removal and tricks and instants and both players played lots of cards and the game swung back and forth many times and there were some exciting topdecks and then finally someone won.
Describing a charbelcher turn 1 win as "noninteractive" is entirely accurate. What it is NOT is a value judgment or a condemnation.
It's easier and more efficient to define what it isn't:
Non-interactive gameplay is when you would make all or most of the same decisions you're already making, regardless of who you are playing against and what deck type they have.
I.e. you might as well be playing with a brick wall, so why did I bother driving over to meet you to "play" magic?
Saying that your piecemeal logic is piecemeal isn't a comment on you. It's a comment on your logic.
If you don't like that, then you're being too sensitive. See, that's what a comment on you looks like
We don't need to invent conflicting definitions out of whole cloth when we're using a simple word in language.
From Dictionary.com - interactive, adj., acting one upon or with the other. Derivative of "to act", which the source defines as: to do something, to produce an effect, and so forth.
This isn't the definition. This is reading something you want your opponents to do - leave a "window of opportunity" - into your private definition so that you can own the term. Apparently, the reason why you need to own it is to bludgeon people into playing your own vision of the game, which you're powerless to enforce on the play mat instead because it's just worse at winning.
So, nice example. "Stop shooting at me, guys, so I can beat you with this piece of metal. If you don't, you're not playing fair."
But really, even this example fails fundamentally because there are a lot of tactics that two people trying to shoot each other with rifles can use on one another to "interact".
Well, what you were actually arguing was never clear to anyone but yourself, because all you did was say that every deck uses lands, game, set, match. Again though, even having a second bite at the apple you make the same mistake of relying on a bogus implicit premise. The uniqueness of a method of interaction isn't on anyone else's radar in a discussion about whether it meets a definition of interaction, unless uniqueness becomes part of that definition. And it certainly doesn't prove non-interaction. You have to make some sort of case for why something is non-interactive or less interactive as a result of it being useful against everything. It seems that just the opposite is true.
Yet somehow someone not accepting these unstated, absurd ideas along with you is a strawman? Oh no, I get it. With all the talk about fedoras, the cliche logical fallacies were all that was missing from this being a teenage reddit debate. Now we've come full circle, I guess.
Well, let me explain something that's probably not taught at the reddit school for adolescent petulance. A strawman is when one party misstates position A as position B, then uses that refutation to claim that position A is refuted. You seem to think it means that whenever you hold position A, someone's making a strawman when they refute position B, for any reason. Nevermind that you yourself fail utterly to relate your position to the discussion, and and that the position actually refuted is a relevant one.
Ah, the rhetorical repertoire of the internet crusader isn't exhausted until he flails around with the ad hominem fallacy.
Someone saying something that you don't like about how you've written something isn't ad hominem. And get this, even if insults had been thrown, which they weren't, openly insulting you isn't ad hominem either. Read that again, if necessary. The internet seems to think that insult-laden refutations automatically contain ad hominem fallacy. They do not.
The ad hominem is when you try to use an insult against someone in order to refute their position. You not only have to insult the person, you also have to use that as a premise as support for why their position is wrong. No one is doing that because, first, no one but you understands what your position is in the first place, as shown by numerous comments of how sloppy it was to make sense of, and in the second place, no one is saying that you're automatically wrong just because no one can understand it. Honestly despite how often ad hominem gets thrown around in muck-dwelling internet debates, it's really rare to find someone arguing that everything an idiot says is axiomatically false because he's an idiot. It's usually easy enough, as has been done here, to show that what was actually said is just wrong.
This sums up my position fairly well. Usually someone arguing for interactivity is asking their opponents to play poor, easily defeated decks. Whether they like that style of Magic or not, whatever. But reading a window of response into your own definition of the term "interactive" really is just asking opponents to run stuff that you can respond to. Don't be surprised if most people tell you to get bent instead.
Noninteractive decks are usually (though not always) pretty powerful, and have a positive value therefore in terms of competitiveness.
Noninteractive decks are terrible, however, for fun, because you're not really playing a game anymore with a person. You're playing two (or in some cases 1) game of solitaire. Solitaire can be sort of fun, but why go to the bother of getting together and having a Magic night if you were just going to play solitaire? Noninteractivity has negative value judgment for two player fun.
The fact that many of the most powerful decks happen to be noninteractive is a design flaw that isn't any one particular player's fault and leads to arguments like this. But it's still an obviously BAD thing for fun.
In any given situation, you have to evaluate whether the PRIMARY goal of the game is fun or profit/winning. If the primary goal is fun, don't play non-interactive decks. If the primary goal is winning, play whatever works. Simple as that.
It was better when it was a discussion about hats.
You do realize you're arguing about the definition of a word that, it seems, none of you know or bothered looking up. The entire game of magic is an interactive experience. A stasis lock is an interaction. It's effecting a phase of the game. The definition of interaction is one thing effecting another. Period. That's what it means.
It's actually close to impossible to do anything in magic that isn't an interaction.
All this discussion is, and ever will be, are players warping a word and making their own definition for it to validate their opinion of the game. It's annoying and no matter how many huge walls of text you post, you're still going to be wrong.
Please, buy a dictionary before you throw words around . Not a single post in this thread, besides maybe a hand full, are correct about interaction in magic.
Again. The definition of interaction.
THINGS EFFECTING OTHER THINGS.
Phases of the game are a thing. Your draw step is a thing. Your upkeep is a thing.
If a card effects those things, it's an interaction.
And don't try to counter this point unless you can go back in time and change the words origin.
The EDH stax primer
When you absolutely, positively got to kill every permanent in the room, accept no substitutes.
In what way was I being condescending? I was making an observation that you apparently took offense to, even though it wasn't directed at you. As for losing against prison, if they get the lock on and you have no answer, YOU JUST LOST THE GAME. Why would you play beyond that point? Just get over it and shuffle up. Sure, your life total doesn't read zero, but then you can die to mill and be on infinite life. Having multiple paths to victory is one of the things that makes this game great, and I would rather circumcise myself with a sharp rock than play the game that you apparently want to play.
And both of those scenarios are interactive by definition, because they involve two players. The first scenario has a player getting a prison lock, and the second player (a) letting him get the lock, and (b) being too much of a moron to realise that he just lost the game, and continuing the game despite having no obvious answer. That's hardly the prison player's fault, and he shouldn't wilfully weaken his strategy to cater to dip****s. Rather, the prison player's opponent should learn that there are better things in life to get mad at, and make his strategy either more proactive so he overwhelms his opponent before the lock falls into place, or more reactive so that he can prevent the lock from ever occurring.
As for the second scenario, it's just a different way of interacting. It has neither more or less inherent value than the first one, and given the subjective nature of fun, the game would be severely diminished if that were the only form of interaction available. I can't think of anything in he game that I find more boring than midrange and aggro mirrors, but hey, that's my opinion. I would never, ever deny a player the right to enjoy their own subjective experience, and that means allowing people to play the strategy that they want to play. If they don't like playing against a particular strategy, they're always free to say no, and play against a different deck.
One last thing: you find tempo easy to interact with? Really? We're talking decks that play nimble mongoose, goyf, TNN and delver here. I mean, aside from the fact that tempo decks hammer your lands and counter your every attempt at removal, their creatures are either evasive, untargetable, or just plain bigger than yours. If you're having difficulty with prison decks (which are generally bad outside of a few specific decks), legacy tempo decks would make you quit magic. When a delver deck does its thing, you might not even have lands on the field, let alone feel like there was anything you could have done. I just don't even understand your logic here.
^^^ This for president, exactly what I want to say
That's why I said in the beginning that its just an excuse by WOTC to dumb down the game by reducing strategies available other than aggro.
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The community uses the word consistently to mean a specific thing: decks that are played mostly the same way regardless of what the opponent has, such as lockdown. Most people know what it means, including obviously you. Thus it is effective as a communication, whether or not it is ideal as a term.
The important thing about the topic is not the term, though. Whether or not you think the word choice is accurate is entirely irrelevant to what IS important: whether or not such decks and strategies are good for the game or not.
Go ahead and call it "shminteraction" if you want, or a "fleeblewock" if you want. The issue of it being unhealthy for casual/fun games will still remain and be a serious issue no matter what you call it.
It's your opinion that it's unhealthy, so it doesn't need a word. It already has one: opinion.
The EDH stax primer
When you absolutely, positively got to kill every permanent in the room, accept no substitutes.
Exactly correct
Actually, that's a completely separate issue. Granted, an important one, and one that is clearly lurking in many people's minds as they answer the question. But
(1) arguing about what is or is not "interactive"
and
(2) arguing about whether interactive decks are "fun" or "good for magic" in various context and various formats, and what people should do about it, if anything
are two totally distinct debates. Some people seem to claim that the very word itself has no meaning, that it conveys nothing to say that a deck or a game is "interactive". I think those people are completely wrong, so wish to argue point (1) to convince them otherwise. I may or may not also have an opinion about (2), but I consider that to be a completely separate debate. Clearly it has leaked into this thread some, but I feel like it deserves its own.