Further Twitter Revolutions

I saw someone recently put up a Twitter poll that read "Who do you think should be president?" Options listed for answers were Biden, Trump, and "Someone better who will never get elected." They then used the fact that that third one was well in the lead to be all "See? We shouldn't vote for Biden and the national committees control who gets elected."

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that your Twitter followers are *not* a random sample. If you're the kind of person who's posting that, the kind of people who follow you are people who are likely to agree with it, because you're probably posting leftist politics normally. Everyone you know agreeing with you, or large swathes of Twitter agreeing with you, is not the same as most people in America agreeing with you.

Another problem is that you didn't specify the "someone better". If your someone better is Sanders, a bunch of people are thinking of Inslee, then a bunch more are thinking "Gary Johnson" or "Bill Weld", and yet more people are thinking "Down with the presidency; anarchist collectives all the way!", you're going to have some problems right there with that vote getting split-- maybe to the point where Biden's got a plurality of people who actually do *want* him to be president, even if he doesn't get a majority. Large numbers of people not being happy with the current presidential candidates are not the same thing as those large numbers of people agreeing on who should replace them.

Y'all lose a lot of the moral high ground when you complain about push polls and media propaganda and then go resort to the same tactics yourselves.

An Observation on the Mutate Mechanic

Between being reintroduced to Magic by someone who had been a judge and having very much wanted to be a judge myself until Wizards killed that dream with the advent of Judge Academy (I am still *so angry* about Judge Academy), I read and listen to a fair amount of judge media. (I was the person whose response to finding a bunch of essays on how to properly conduct a deck check was more or less "Yes, this is fascinating, tell me more in great detail!") Less now, because, again, Judge Academy killed it, but JudgeCast is still there and the same as it was, and I still listen to it.

They've got the current episode out on the new Ikoria set. This is an episode they do for every new set, and they're usually among the longer episodes, as the hosts go through the new mechanics for the set and then go over every card that has been deemed likely to have weird or counterintuitive interactions with other commonly used cards or mechanics, laying out what *should* happen with that card if those weird things ever come up.

I've heard people saying that Ikoria is the first set that was *designed* for online play-- it's the first set that went through the large bulk of its design process *after* it became apparent that the new online Magic game was wildly popular and had wildly increased the playerbase of the game. I had not fully appreciated the significance of that until I started listening to the Judgecast episode on the subject: 20 minutes into the episode, they're not done explaining mutate, and I've had to stop and replay parts of it several times to process what they're saying. The episode itself is 3 hours and 20 minutes, for a show where the release notes for War of the Spark, which everyone considered an overly complicated set resulting in an extra-long release notes episode, was an hour forty. This is *absurd*.

Bear in mind, as well, that Wizards has a history of explicitly setting out to reduce complexity in the game-- a *long* history, dating back to the fall 2006 set Time Spiral, which was loved by experienced players and completely incomprehensible to new ones. The reaction to Time Spiral has shaped their design philosophy ever since, and part of that design philosophy has been that you don't make sets too complicated. You make a few very complicated cards per set and the people who want extra complicated gameplay play in formats where those complicated cards are legal.

Honestly, this is the set that makes me give credence to the "Wizards is trying to kill paper Magic and move everything online" rumors. Ikoria is going to be a complex pain to play on paper. It will drive new players crazy and even I will probably find it frustrating. Online, with a game engine that manages merged cards for you, it'll be fine.