Pattern Recognition #250 - Pattern Recognition

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

11 August 2022

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

And give it up for the big 2-5-0!

Woo!

Anyways, today's subject is going to be a little more esoteric and exotic than my normal fare. Today, I'm going to talk about the nature of Patterns in Magic, and why they are important in both positive and negative terms. I'm also going to do a lot more verbal wandering, so please bear with me.

To start with, the idea of Pattern Recognition is a fundamental part of human psychology and we are predisposed towards finding the connections between things in the world around us. At its most basic, it is a primary survival trait, one that allows us to connect cause and effect and use it as a predictive model for other causes that could lead into other effects. You see that fire burns, so you begin to associate fire with danger, that sort of thing.

On the other hand, we humans have become so good at this, that false positives are a normal thing. We can go about our daily lives, and something grabs our attention because we think that there is a cause and effect in play that should be producing an outcome we need to pay attention to, but ... nothing happens.

There are some very interesting studies involved, and if that's your cup of tea, I highly recommend reading some of the medical and professional articles. Recognizing how people think, and more importantly, why, can be quite illuminating. But that is that, and this is this, and I wanted to make it clear that what I'm going to be talking about today does have one toe in the real life nature of us players, and the designers of the game.

Patterns happen in Magic mostly by design from the people at Wizards, but sometimes buy accident. It can be said that once is an accident, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action, and in Magic, that is true as long as you don't think of everything as your enemy. They occur in cards in a set, in the cycles we see. They occur across sets and years as archetypes are developed or reduced. Patterns can be traced to ideas that are implemented, or can be the result of a chain of events that did not have a specific end in mind, but simply came naturally to the game.

Patterns occur in players, by the way we look at cards and the way we play them. How we build our decks and how we play them. Two people can look at the same deck and come to two different conclusions about how it should be played. And by the same token, ask those two people to build a specific deck, and they would each put their own take on it because they have their own patterns that they follow.

People here to pay attention to my ramblings as well as people whom I play against in real life, know that I have my own patterns of play and deck building. I like to build Aggro decks, branching out into on occasion. I rarely touch , but when I do, I tend to go all-in on the hard Control archetype. And is just there. But that's me, and you are you. You do things differently than I do, and you see the game in a different light that I do.

When I started this series, I struggled for a name for it. I recognized that a good name would help me keep track of what I was doing, and at the same time, I didn't want to limit myself by picking a name that was too narrow. And if I ever get around to talking about how Magic and other card games stack up and how they handed the same issues, I should name-drop "The Non-Aligned News" and see who recognizes that.

In the end, I chose on this name because I realized and accepted how important the nature of patterns were to the game, and how picking such a name would allow me to look back and go "is this part of something greater or is it not?"

That has been one of my driving questions for Pattern Recognition. What makes something part of a bigger whole, part of a larger series of cards and events and ideas? And when is it not? But that just leads into one further question - WHY? Why is a thing a thing and not something else?

I suppose I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Let me back up and try to regain the plot.

Patterns are a thing that make the game easier to play, to understand and to interact with. Things as simple as "Common 2 color Taplands for limitied fixing leads to Rare lands that are better" or "Blue gets a limited effect Counterspell at Common" and "White gets a Boardwipe at Rare" help maintain the cohesiveness of a set. You know what to expect because these are things that always show up in one form or another.

When you know what to expect out a set, you can design your playstyle, your decks and your card choices around knowing what is and what is not. You change your patterns to fit what is available to you and to your opponents. You can see plays coming, and react or be proactive accordingly. These lines of play are either intended or not, but they exist, and they can be done not just by you, but against you as well.

On the other side of this coin, these same patterns help the people at Wizards design the game as well. That same rough outline of a checklist of cards to put into a set is work that is already done. You just need to give it a spin that is relevant to the set, or a reprint that is solid and dependable. These sort of patterns serve the players and the designers as long as the effort is put in to maintain them.

You see, that's the problem with patterns. Or rather, one of two of them. The first is that patterns need to be maintained. For a pattern to be a pattern, it needs to keep happening. You need to see the same things over and over again consistently and within predictable variance (such as the limitation on 's Common Counter). This can, if it not handled properly, cause players and designers grief as the game they are trying to keep alive becomes stale and repetitive. A game with no real card variance, nor flexibility to it because everything is precalculated from the get go, where plays are made with perfect information is a game that is quickly abandoned for something that more players will find fun to play.

A pattern works, as long as it is not abused to cheat out the cards, to not put in the work and to take shortcuts in the design process. Yes, shortcuts are fine as long as they are used with intent to support the rest of the set and that you know what you are doing, but just saying "Oh, this is something people expect, like a Black Common that causes discard, so put in a Mind Rot" is the wrong way to go about it. That's bad game design. You have to keep adding cards to your patterns so that players can find what they like, can keep finding what they like and in the end, will look forward to more things that are what they like.

Support is the key. All too often, Wizards will introduce a perfectly viable mechanic, then, because it wasn't the greatest thing ever, throw it out. They don't take the time to establish what a mechanic does and keep giving players the options to use it, to play with it, to make things work with it before moving on to the next big thing, or so they hope. Honestly, that Landfall, Kicker and Madness have done as much work as they have is nothing short astounding.

The other problem that is faced is something I touched on just now, but requires more clarification. Patterns create sterility in the game. In my current pre-rotation Standard deck, which is a Clerics deck, my best play is a Turn 1 Cleric Class leading into a Turn 2 Cleric of Life's Bond leading into a turn 3 Righteous Valkyrie. That's my best play, and it's a solid and dependable pattern that I can trust.

It's also very predictable, and I know that I am predictable because I can also predict what my opponents are playing by their first couple of turns as well. Knowing how the game is going to go, turns in advance? That's not fun.

What is fun is being surprised. In seeing new and interesting things out and about. Cases of 'Huh, I didn't expect that'. Too many patterns, patterns that are held too closely to the source? They are a problem. Seeing the same cards, the same plays over and over again can be disheartening and cause players to stop playing for a while.

Patterns are good for the game just as they are bad for it as well. Too much and it strangles the game, too few, and there's no real way for decks to be cohesive and whole, no redundancy and no ability to be reliable. We can't live with them, we can't live without them.

But I hope you can live with my recognization of the patterns I see and don't see.

Thank you all for sticking with me for so long. It's been full of ups and downs and I am looking forward to another 250 over the next.... 6 years? Wow, how time flies. And join me next week when I talk about a bad pattern, one that is in my favourite colour - .

Until then please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!