Magic Theory – MTGCast

This podcast will be our final podcast. It isn’t part of the syllabus, but we reflect on what went right and what went wrong with the class. We also have an interview with Leland, the winner of our tournament. Again, thanks to everyone who’s helped us along with this class, including Tom and whoever else...

Syllabus Description: For the final session, students will each do approximately 5 minute presentations on topics related to the course. Most of the presentations talk about the evolution of the deck they played, but some other interesting topics included: – a love/hate relationshp with lifegain – evolving a deck one card at a time over...

Syllabus Description: We will continue our discussion of knowledge in limited formats, addressing topics such as signaling and hate-drafting. Particularly, we will formalize the notions of knowledge into epistemic logic. In a system of knowledge, various players will know different things, perhaps leading to an infinite regress of knowing what another player knows. We will...

Sorry, the gain at the very beginning is way too high, but I correct it a couple seconds in. Syllabus Description: This week, George Michelogiannakis, a level 3 DCI judge, will talk about professional Magic. So far, we’ve focused primarily on casual Magic, but there are many tiers of tournaments organized by the DCI and...

WARNING: This podcast is deathly boring. Syllabus Description: Developments in artificial intelligence and game-playing computers have begun to influence Magic as well. Having seen the program Chinook officially conquer checkers and force a win or draw in any game, it’s likely that we’ll see current computer Magic players develop as well. We will consider both...

In our second lecture on the topic, we will take a more quantitative look at deckbuilding. We will discuss how probability can help us understand expected outcomes for deck construction, including a discussion of the “mana curve”, and when to mulligan. We will also see how Monte Carlo simulations can approach playtesting differently. We also...

Syllabus Description: In this lecture, we will step back from topics within a game to Magic as a commercial product. Magic has largely been successful because it layers the lore of fantastic worlds on top of these mathematical systems to make it tangible to players. We will look at the target consumers for Magic and...

Syllabus Description: With multiple agents and imperfect information, Magic is a series of strategic situations. We will explore basic Game Theory, including dominated strategies and best response and see how it applies in 1-on-1 games, multiplayer games, and drafting. We also respond to some comments from listeners on our previous podcasts. Slides are at: http://magic.kevinleung.com/slides/GameTheory-prepodcast.ppt...

Syllabus Description: The two basic activities in Magic are playing the game and building decks to play with. Having learned how to play and gained some insight into the theory of playing, we will discuss the basic concepts behind deck construction and the types of decks. An important Magic-specific theory discovered is “card advantage,” a...

We’ll first deal with administrative details and look over the syllabus to see if the class is suitable for the students. There will be an overview of the various topics we’ve decided to consider in the course and the justification for their importance. The rest of the class will be focused on teaching the rules...