Chumping with a Bollock

 

All we really have in life are a series of choices. We don't control what life throws at us, only how to respond to it. That is where games offer their best lessons. If you make good choices you will win more at games. Now, we don't "win" in life in quite the same way as we do in games, but you can absolutely make the best out of life and get more of what you want from it with good decision making. I have been gaming my whole life so I don't know if I was good at making choices so naturally became more attracted to games, or if I simply liked games and by playing them lots they helped me to be a better decision maker. It it likely some of both, but I do pile the majority of the credit for my ease at making decisions in life upon Magic the Gathering. This is however not really about Magic.

Nearly four years ago I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. While mindlessly rummaging around in my pants one day, as any boy in private with idle hands often finds themselves doing, I noticed a difference. One of the nuts was rather less grape shaped than I recalled and had gone a bit more kidney bean. Not very significant in size or shape but certainly the first decision point. Not a hard one at that. It is either nothing or something and you can either check it out or ignore it. Two choices with four possible outcomes. This really felt like having a Shock land in your opener and some reactive card like a Fatal Push. The greedy line is hoping you don't need to use the Push on turn one, laying your land tapped and saving that two life. If however they curve out at you and you don't have access to that turn one removal the game can so easily spiral away from you. You end up missing out on your turn two play to Push the thing you should have had access to Push on the previous turn, and before you know it, it is all she wrote. I hate doing much of much, I certainly hate admin, appointments, talking to strangers, and all things associated with going to the doctor. I am not sure paying two life for an untapped land is quite the comparison most would go with but it feels apt. I almost always translate my life choices into Magic terms as a little means of sanity checking them. Suffice it to say I was not about to punt this best of one game by greedily laying my lands tapped. And so I called the doctor. 

This next little bit is mostly reassurance to any fellow UK residents. We have the National Health Service, which is a great institution. Notoriously however it has been hard and slow to see a doctor since the pandemic. I rang my surgery and asked to make an appointment. The tone of the receptionist was professional but very much had the air of  "I'll bet you would like to see a doctor, you and everyone else mate". When however she asked what the appointment was for and I said "I found a lump on my testicle" the mood immediately changed. It was as if I had announced I was the king of all England. All very much yes sir, no sir, whatever we can do for you sir. I was given an appointment on the next working day simply by asking politely and providing the information asked for. They made it as little hassle for me as possible. Suffice it to say the doctor had a rummage and was like, yeah, that is indeed a lump, lets get an ultrasound. A couple of days later and I am at my ultrasound appointment and some poor young lass of a doctor is having to ultrasound my bollock. I felt worse for her than I did for myself at that point! There was a brief moment upon seeing her (she wasn't an ugly lady) that I was concerned I might disgrace myself but it transpires that the general subject of cancer is powerfully unerotic and no such danger was anywhere near the vicinity. It was when she kindly said "I would just like to get a second opinion from the senior doctor" that I knew we had a positive result. I knew that paying the 2 for that early interaction was coming good. I think many would be hit hard by that moment but somehow I was mostly just pleased with myself for making the right call in the first place. Like the satisfaction of running into the problem card you suspected your opponent might have and that you played around accordingly.

Within about two weeks of that scan I was having an appointment with an oncology specialist. They were like "yeah, very likely cancer". We can do a biopsy to be sure or we can just whip it out. The biopsy sounded more invasive and tedious than the orchidectomy (the whipping it out technical term) itself, not to mention more time consuming, and so I sent that bollock out to chump block the cancer!  We had already used some decision matrices, now we were using some probability to direct our choices. I had the operation in less than two weeks from that appointment meaning it was almost exactly a month from when I discovered the lump to when it was removed. That is some impressive pace. The NHS do not mess about when it comes to these sorts of things and for that I am very grateful. 

I was in and out of hospital on the same day. I was mostly recovered and back to playing sport in about three weeks and back to playing at full intensity in about six. I had my appendix removed when I was about eighteen years old and that was a longer recovery and a more serious operation. I have noticed zero side effects since the orchidectomy. I was offered a prosthetic option but given I'm mid forties, am still with the same girl I was with when the appendix went, nor have never been one to use the aesthetics of my groin to achieve anything, it seemed like such things would be a waste of time. You wouldn't even really notice unless you were able to get a good look! The NHS have been checking up on me pretty diligently since too with regular blood tests and CT scans. Coming up four years and so far so good. 

One thing that really stuck with me was the general concern the NHS staff had over the post op findings of the pathology labs. They would be testing the offending nut once removed and generally the staff seemed concerned about how I would react to those results. One doctor tentatively asked "How would you feel about the results coming back as not having been cancer once removed?" This would mean no chance of it spreading elsewhere and so seemed obviously like the very best outcome to me. It had been my choice not to bother with the biopsy. The Magic analogy here is looking at the top of your deck once you have made the call to mulligan. We all know it is about making the right call at the appropriate time and that future events don't change whether a historical call was "correct" or not. The hospital were clearly very scared I would get all litigious should they remove a healthy bollock despite it being the best outcome at the end of a string of correct decisions. I think this simply shone a light on how useful gaming can be on framing decisions in life. Not just in making good ones but also how you feel about those choices. Or how bias and emotions can get the better of us and cloud our choices or make us act badly. Every single doctor looked shocked when I revealed that I thought that I would be glad if the pathology labs came back with a clear result. This means most people clearly wouldn't react that way. This in turn makes me think we should do more to encourage people to play and engage with games. I would love to see it on curriculums one day. 

Equally, I entirely encourage all the boys having frequent private rummages, checking what is going on down there and taking it to the professionals as soon as there is anything unexpected. Fighting cancer is a tempo game in Magic terms, so always give yourself the best chance to stay ahead. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I think people are generally more scared of this sort of thing than they need to be and a lot of that is due to the unknown factors. On the physical side of things I have had multiple appointments with the dentists that have been worse! Obviously things went as well for me as they could have and that helps a lot. The emotional toll mostly stemmed from it being a load of unknowns. That in tern is likely because it is all a bit stigmatized. Cancer is general is not a good time conversation topic and it does certainly seem the case that us men are pretty rubbish at talking about things like this. I have had significantly more words of support from the appropriate whatsapp group about a dicky knee that is keeping me off that regular football game than I did when I was off with this. People just seem pretty in the dark about how to approach talking about such things and revert to simply not doing so. One of the most helpful things to me was talking with an old university friend who had had the same thing a few years prior. He said many of the things I have said here and they made me calm and confident going forwards with everything. One of the starting principles of this blog was to "help" people be better at, and enjoy cubing more. While not magic related I have a little platform here and if I can get one person to check themselves out, or to call the doctor, or even just to be less worried about engaging with the process then I will have managed to be a lot more helpful than all my other articles combined.

What Makes a Format Good?

There are several things that go into making a format a fun thing to play in. In short, these are having fun cards, having decent balance between the cards and archetypes, and having a good depth of options. These apply to all formats but they do so in different measure if we are looking at constructed or limited. Most of the formats are predetermined for us by Wizards, they design the cards then say which ones are allowed in which places. As such it is not very important for the average magic player to understand how to make a format good. These are game design skills rather than game play skills. It is a skill that comes in handy as a cube curator but even then you only have control over which cards to include. You can use simple metrics to determine what is worthy and it is simply a binary yes/no on each card. If you open the door to the individual card design in terms of creating a format then the possibilities literally become infinite. In trying to completely design my own cube from the ground up I have learned a lot about how to make a format good and hopefully I can use those skills to be a better cube curator across the board. 

Individually fun cards is the hardest part to design, but luckily Wizards are pretty good at that. There are plenty out there to chose from. The key is that you can't all be front men or strikers (insert some NFL reference here, would it be the quarterback for yall?), you need drummers and defenders to make the band/team perform. Omnath might be the fun thing your deck is built around but you are leaning on those dull Farseeks really hard. The most fun cube doesn't just have as many fun cards as it can ram in, it has as many fun cards in it as it can suitably support with your more standard cards. A fun card is only fun if you get to use it and you need those foundational cards, the Shocks, Preordains, and that sort of jazz are what will lead to you getting to cast and use the fun stuff. 

Balance is important to a point but in some lights it just looks like the third category - options. More cards that are suitably powerful means more playable stuff and hence more option rich format. There is also a strong point for not over balancing too much. A bit of variety is no bad thing. If it is all too flat in power level things can get a bit generic card soup and games can become a slow grindy trudge. Balance between archetypes is more important than between individual cards. Ideally all cards within a format should be playable in some circumstances, ideally more than one. Equally you don't want any card being an auto-include if you can help it. If your cards sit within that range then great. Even if they don't it is still fine, you are just reducing your options a bit and having some dead space. Dead wood is worst for limited formats where cards of little power or use get in the way and lower consistency. You can just ignore them in constructed settings where they are just background noise.

Depth of options is the area that a cube curator or designer has most scope to improve their format. A healthy format should look like a healthy ecosystem. There should be lots of interconnecting and crisscross synergies. Balance is all well and good but if your cube supports eight archetypes but there is no overlap between them then the draft portion is far less fun and relevant. Everyone just gets in their lane and has far fewer meaningful choices. If those eight archetypes all share cards they want with various others then the draft gets a whole lot more interesting. Building and playing decks also gets more fun if your cards have lots of little synergies between them. This is where the dead wood in a cube harms you most as it really reduces your synergy density. The higher the synergy density the more interconnecting interactions your cards have the better the format. You get more control over the direction your deck and draft go in, more interactions with your opponents at all stages, and just have more cool and quirky little interactions popping up and giving novel and cool experiences.