I have a love for card games specifically Magic: the Gathering. It’s a game that requires a vast amount of ever expanding knowledge as well as the ability to think critically about hte situation you’re in while also trusting you gut. It allows for so much creativity within how you interact with the game and the community as a whole. Everything deciding what deck you’ll build to inventing whole new formats with whole new rules. It has something for everyone because of it’s complexity and depth.

I haven’t played MTG in a good number of years. To be honest, the concerns about unwashed stinking nerds loving Magic Tournaments is quite true and I wasn’t invested enough in the game to risk COVID to play it and I was also too invested in the physical game to justify the online version. So I let my spark fade.

Recently, my Fiance got into PokemonTCG Pocket. The Pokemon Company has seemingly revamped the Pokemon Trading Card Game to be more mobile friendly by revamping the rules, doing away with the prize cards and changing how energies work while also slimming decks to 20 card max. Plus you get a ton of cards free when you start a new account which is great because it pays out holofoil, full art, and shiny cards quite regularly and that’s always fun to my gremlin brain.

It was quite approachable and triggered that card gamer itch in my mind I hadn’t scratched in years and I was hooked. I played through the tutorial, ignored the stuff about auto build and play, then started deck crafting. I read through all my cards to see what abilities I had access to, what types of decks I could make with my starter sum, and I made a few sub optimal decks. Then I got to grinding and won a bunch of bot matches so I could find the weak points and tempo problems with my deck. I won more matches and unlocked more packs and thus more cards to play with and so on.

The first week I played the game I probably sunk ten to twenty hours into it. I was hooked.

The Trouble

I had played a bunch and I knew this game was meant for the masses and especially kids. So I expected the auto build feature to be an accessibility thing to get people started. Out of curiosity, I figured I’d let it build a deck. I have a lot of electric cards, so I told it to make an electric deck and… it made a much better deck than I did.

That was disheartening. But it was a blow softened by the fact that I was trying to beat an expert, what I thought bot, running a water type Slowbro deck for this even that’s going on. I managed to win against it with this generated deck and I was happy enough. Now I wanted to complete the challenges, grind out all the wins I need to earn more packs.

It was here I noticed I was making some mistakes piloting the deck. Just a missed energy drop or a poor calculation on if I should keep my active pokemon out. Little things. So, I thought I’d try the auto battle option since I wanted to grind out wins while watching videos. Ya know I’m sure the random inputs it was giving were good enough for kids, and I just needed some wins, I have infinite tries so its no- Aaand the bot was doing better than me.

Okay. Well. What the fuck am I doing here?

The game was made so simple that you can quite quickly figure out if the game is even winnable, several turns in advance. There is nothing you can do in response to game state changes, so you have to just let your opponent do whatever, no trap cards or instances for those who care. On top of that, I’m pretty sure a random inputs bot that just does all the things you can do every turn would do just fine versus every level of player. I’m not sure I needed to put any amount of thought into running the decks.

At some point I didn’t even have to think about what colors I wanted in the deck it became so done for me. If you open certain Full art and EX cards, the game will just give you a rental deck worth 10 plays free of cards you probably don’t have based around this card you just pulled.

I really only start the animation to open packs at this point with most of my player choice going to if I want the cards to open facing me or not. This sucks, and I’m not having fun. Why would I want bots to play my games for me? Oh hell, it’s to sell me crap isn’t it?

Capitalism Optimized Gambling

Modern consumers are quite optimized for the gains of these capitalist organizations. They see you want nostalgia and they sell it to you. You can see this in all the classic toys either rebranding or making a new brand for adults. LEGO is a good example of this right now with their flowers, movies, and architecture sets. The Barbie Movie gave barbie an edgier hit to the franchise and fucktoupled their sales as adults went to buy Barbie Movie dolls or “I am Kenough” sweaters. It’s such an obvious ploy at this moment that I don’t know how much better I could explain it.

Now, I don’t view this as inherently bad. We should enjoy little things in life. We should have nostalgia for things that brought us joy regardless of it’s ties to a profit motive. If the thing makes you happy, by all means enjoy it.

That is unless it’s gambling. You should most certainly not be gambling and there’s a lot of that too.

I invest little bits on Robinhood. I’m not immune to retail therapy and I’ve decided that boomer investing is the best way to quell that urge. Boomer investing is when you invest like you’re planning for retirement, a lot of high yield dividends and incredibly stable stocks. I have a real retirement fund but this is one that I can control and I get a cozy $5-$10 every few months to reinvest and it’s nice. Anyways, Robinhood has “Predictive Markets” on the app now, AKA Gambling.

You have certainly seen a sports betting ad in the last two years or so. I live in Kentucky so it’s been completely fucked with sports betting ads and it’s just weird it’s not exclusively horses now. Polymarket keeps coming up in the news because of insider trading done by fascists in the Pentagon. All while we sell blind bags and lootboxes to children to normalize this ideal that a sum of money may return a higher sum of money but will mostly just pay out the booky….

Wouldn’t it be awful if a very nostalgic IP that’s been around for, I don’t know, thirty years noticed that adults were buying blind bags of cardboard trying to win money on the fancy looking art cards they put in those packs. So, they revamped their digital card game to be almost enough of a fix in this gambling behavior, but make buying more digital cards super easy and also having no way to “cash out” their winnings?

If it’s not clear, this is what the PokemonTCG Pocket app is, a dangerous combination of nostalgia bait capitalizing on the current gambling craze. And once I saw that for what it is, I lost all interest in the game completely. I even feel a bit gross that I enjoyed it at all.

I did try going back to Magic: the Gathering, but tit’s the same thing over there, they’re selling Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtle cards right now. They nostalgia baiting people there too.

What do I want?

I want to use my brain. I want to be mentally stimulated. I also don’t want to be insulted and I see all these mainstream options of entertainment as clear abuse of my mental capacities or insults towards my time and ability. It’s why writing has become so important to me. It’s where I can still practice all the critical thinking I spent a lot of good money to learn how to do. But I don’t know if that’s what everyone wants.

I was talking to a coworker who is pretty pro AI in the work place because he sees it as an efficiency thing. I honestly and truly see where he’s coming from since we’re not engineers, we’re the tier of corpos that write reports to people who don’t really care what it says so long as it sounds corpo. We do real work too, but the slop reports are part of the humiliation ritual of being salaried. My life is legitimately so much better off using Co-pilot to send slop reports to said people, but then we started talking about students writing papers with AI and I was much less sympathetic. Even a paper who’s topic I don’t enjoy is a wonderful exercise in research, outlining, drafting, refining, finding a voice, etc that I can’t understand why a person would want to circumvent that valuable set of lessons. Like that is what you are paying $2000 a semester to do.

Final thoughts

I’m scared that the masses are going to completely abandon any semblance of free thought and not because I’m worried for their mental health, but for mine. I don’t want to know what it’s like to be a free mind in a cyberpunk dystopia this lonely. I don’t want to know what it’s like to have a conversation as devoid of meaning as with a chatbot, but I’m allegedly talking to a flesh and blood human who’s simply reading off what their Openclawed agent has to say about my view.

I’ve been thinking about Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” a lot lately. I always struggled with the end where Bernard Marx finds out there is a sanctuary for free thinkers that they happily send people too so they won’t have to live like this, and yet he’s still distraught at the idea of leaving the only world he’s ever known. I used to not understand why he was so upset other than not getting the girl, but I’m starting to understand how frustrating it is to see all these people who are otherwise with a right mind just accept the propaganda and the lifestyle that is normal without even considering how beautiful the things are they don’t want us to use. But I think I need to find joy in the island of outcasts.