“Man does not know how to play: this is because, even when he is given a situation of chance or multiplicity, he understands his affirmations as destined to impose limits upon it, his decisions as destined to ward off its effects, his reproductions as destined to bring about the return of the same, given a winning hypothesis. This is precisely a losing game, one in which we risk losing as much as winning because we do not affirm the all of chance: the pre-established character of the rule which never knows which fragment will emerge. The system of the future, by contrast, must be called a divine game, since there is no pre-existing rule, since the game bears already upon its own rules and since the child-player can only win, all of chance being affirmed each time and for all times.” pp 116

Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game/tabletop strategy game/fantasy roleplaying game/notorious money-eater, and I’m not ashamed to say that I played it constantly from the fourth grade to the tenth. Jump forward about eight years – not having thought about MTG for anything other than nostalgia value during that time, having sold all my decks and cards – and I discover that the city I live in, Victoria B.C., has a devoted MTG community. So, being very unemployed and very between degrees, I embraced the nerdiness once again and attended a prerelease tournament for the new MTG expansion set. I pumped some money into making a playable deck around the cards I got from that tournament (I did alright, won prizes, but got destroyed by one of the judges), and ever since I’ve been thoroughly reminded both of how much I love the game, and how much thought can be put into it as a system and as a cultural phenomenon.

“The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce o the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as signs. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an innate or acquired practical familiarity with signs, which means there is something amorous – but also something fatal – about all education. We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do’. Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.” pp 23

Many players put their cards in 'deck protectors' to preserve their value, just as many philosophers put Ideas in 'traditions' for the same purpose.

Here’s a primer on how Magic works for you normies out there. Each person plays with a deck of, at minimum, forty cards. (There is no real maximum, but the general rule is that if you need another person’s help to shuffle, your deck is illegally large.) There are a number of different card types of which you can have different compositions (creatures [which might have different mechanics like flying, only blockable by stuff with flying or reach, or doublestrike, which lets the creature deal its damage both before the blocker can harm it and again as regular combat damage], spells [instants that can be cast at any time, sorceries hat can only be cast on your turn], enchantments [globals which stay in play and give some overarching buff to you or debuff to your opponent, auras that specifically attach to other cards and augment or detrimentalize them in some way], artifacts [equipment you can give to creatures or trinkets with specific activated abilities, as well as ‘colourless’ artifact creatures], planeswalkers [which function kind of like ally players], and land); out of these, land is the most essential. Land cards are the resource you use to play all the other kinds of cards (usually), and they come in five varieties which correspond to the five card-colours that define the game: plains/white, mountains/red, islands/blue, forests/green, and swamps/black. Each turn you can ‘tap’ any number of lands you have in play to draw their colour of mana from them, and each turn they ‘untap’ and are useable once again. Similarly, when you want to attack with a creature, you tap it, and a tapped creature can’t block or use its abilities until it untaps – same with artifacts. Spells that are cast as well as creatures that are killed go to the graveyard and are unplayable unless you find some way to retrieve them. In the standard format of play, each person starts the game with twenty life and loses when creatures or spells or other effects reduce their life total to zero (barring certain enchantments and creatures that can prevent this counting as a loss). Like any card game, each person draws a hand (starting at seven cards) – and like any card game, as long as you don’t know what cards your opponent has in their hand, and as long as they have untapped mana, you’ll have to guess what your chances are of successfully attacking or casting, at the risk of leaving yourself open to being countered or worse.

MTG is actually a very easy game to learn in terms of these basics. But what makes it one of the best strategy games in existence, smarter and more complex than any board game, more customizable and unpredictable than any video game, is that every four months a new set of cards are released that can retroactively alter the entire meta. Cards that used to dominate become obsolete, cards that used to suck find amazing combo potential – new mechanics are added, even new types of cards (planeswalkers being the most recent addition), and the whole tone of how a game of Magic functions or how the construction of a deck is viewed can change. In addition to all this, or as an underlying cause for all this, is the nature of MTG in the context of capitalism. Let’s say you want to get into MTG for the first time. Well, head to your nearest comic book or gaming shop and buy a preconstructed theme deck (which are usually horrible) for $12.00, or get one of the better preconstructed event decks (based on very good pro-league strategies) for $35.00. Then to make your deck better, or to try your own deck designs, you’ll have to buy boosters for $4.00 each – these being sleekly plastic-wrapped packets of around fifteen fresh-smelling cardboard rectangles, randomly organized by their differing levels of quality. 9 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare, and sometimes, instead of a rare, you’ll get a mythic…and SOMETIMES, in addition to all this, you’ll get a foil card that’s really just for show. Your chances of getting something useful to you are a whole other story. But I’ll get to all this later.

“The entire theory of learning risks being misdirected so long as the prior question is not posed – namely, whether it is through acting that we acquire habits … or whether, on the contrary, it is through contemplating? […] The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation.” pp 73

This post is not about Magic: The Gathering. It is about Difference and Repetition, by the French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This post is going to use MTG as an allegory, not in order to explicate, but in accordance with Deleuze’s thoughts, to implicate the ideas of his early and foundational book. Interesting in that he wrote it prior to the work he did in collaboration with Felix Guattari (which involved doing a lot of hallucinogenics) that more forcefully targets capitalist ideology/ontology, D&R is tries to do with ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’ what Heidegger’s Being and Time did, you guessed it, with ‘being’ and ‘time’. It is especially indebted to Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche as well, and has gone on to influence (both in continuity and resistance) thinkers like Ray Brassier (remember him?) and Nick Land. Of course, yes, I lied, this post really IS about MTG. It’s just that I don’t want to appreciate either of them unconditionally, and offer to be in a sense pedagogic buffers – if I can be playful with the material, not taking the one too seriously, not taking the other too lightly, I can avoid a critique from too far a distance, and can avoid giving praise with too much proximity. This is a long post, so I suggest it be read according to its subheadings piece by piece. The TL;DR is: Hey, did you know that Alain Badiou’s “Being and Event” costs as much new as the current MTG set’s ridiculously good event deck, ‘Spiralling Doom’? With which, I might add, it has much in common?

Just kidding. I will never allow you a TL;DR.

CARD POOL

“Concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to ‘dramas’ and by means of a certain ‘cruelty’. They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.” pp xx

At present there are a total of 12,000 different cards in the full canon of MTG, some of which are so overpowered they’ve been banned, some of which are so shitty that no one cares about them. Now let’s think about them as concepts. I don’t mean that a 3/3 creature called ‘Bear’ (the first number being its power, the second being its toughness – this is how creatures have their damage calculated when attacking or blocking [something with 4 power would kill the bear, but if it had only 2 toughness it would die as well]) is in some way the Platonic form in which all bears share. Think of the inverse: what if all concepts/all possible concepts/all intelligible-to-us concepts/all the things we call concepts were represented as cards, such that the conceptualization of a spring day in late February is of the same ‘type’ as a spring day in early March? How many cards would there be? How many KINDS of cards would there be? The specifically Deleuzian way of framing this metaphor gains a lot from the referent in MTG specifically because of the constant arrival of new concepts. Platonically speaking, the card pool would be set for all eternity whether we know all the cards or not. For analytics in the tradition of Kuhn, only the current set of cards would constitute meaningful play. To David Lewis the creation of new cards is really just the discovery of other possible cards. In a way Lewis is closer to Deleuze than the others:

“In fact, concepts only ever designate possibilities. They lack the claws of absolute necessity – in other words, of an original violence inflicted upon though; the claws of a strangeness or an enmity which alone would awaken thought from its natural stupor or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world. Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy […] Something in the world forces us to think.” pp 139

But that something, for Deleuze, is the design process of the game itself, suffused with the economic production of card value and problems within the metagame (more on this later). Or, not the design process as an intentional guided development, but the perpetual expression (in the sense of something being expressed as toothpaste is expressed from its tube) of a chaotic designation that has no original designands to refer to. Here I want to return to what is the oldest and most distinctive facet of any card pool, which is its colour composition. In the philosophy of MTG design each colour is supposed to accommodate a style of play: they call this the “colour-pie philosophy”. What that means is that each colour has its piece of the pie, and maybe it leaks out a bit into its nearest pieces/colours, but no colour can do everything that any other colour can do. For instance, red specializes in direct damage, but its close relative, black, specializes in life loss – the difference between these two events only becoming pronounced when cards are introduced that pronounce them (it wouldn’t have mattered whether you are dealt damage or lose life had there not been a card in play that says “double all damage dealt to target player”, or “for each life another player loses, you gain that much life”). As with many fantasy tropes, the underlying ground four the five colours of magic is basically a throwback to the alchemical metaphoricity of the elements. Colour, however, is not as limiting as it seems: in addition to two or three-colour combinations, the fully prismatic deck is a perennially popular theme in the game, as is the all-artifact deck (where colour of mana won’t matter), and recently colourless cards were introduced whose philosophy is basically nihilism.

It might be useful for me to share my experience at the prerelease tournament. In the prerelease format, the set you have to play with is totally new and no one is familiar any of the cards yet (which makes it good for beginners or casual players who are ignorant of bigger trends in game-winning strategies). Not only that, but prerelease isn’t a situation where you get to bring your own constructed deck. At prereleases, which are ‘sealed’ format, you’re given around six boosters and need to make the best forty card deck you can. Cards from older sets don’t show up, the game environment is more regulated by the current tastes of whatever design team helmed it, and no one is going to have a deck full of great rares that work perfectly together. It’s easy to think about the opening hour of a prerelease – in which you obtain a card pool, pick a few colours to play within, try and detect synergies in the cards, and maybe even focus on a theme (like the classic blue-black control, or white-green aggro) – as the developmental stage of concept-acquisition, not only in the sense of human beings, but philosophical systems too, cultures, etc. “You start out with a basic Heraclitean deck because of how random-ass a cardpool you drew, but then, because you’re rich and can buy a whole lot more cards that utilize fetching, making the randomness of your deck a responsiveness to change, it becomes more of a Stoicism deck.” For Deleuze, that would be the traditional understanding of conceptual difference and how it shapes us as players/thinkers, but he sees this as very problematic. He outlines the dogmatic view as such:

“According to a principle of sufficient reason, there is always one concept per particular thing. According to the reciprocal principle of the identity of indiscernibles, there is one and only one thing per concept. Together, these principles expound a theory of difference as conceptual difference […] However, a concept can always be blocked […] This is why the comprehension of the concept is infinite; having become other in the thing, the [predication of the concept] is like the object of another predicate in the concept.” pp 12

Deleuze isn’t interested in what concepts are per se. He doesn’t think that absolutely everything is representable by a concept, or that the world is at base conceptual. As he says, for too long the only theories of difference we’ve had insist of limiting themselves to conceptual difference: all the different cards and their importance/power. What’s far more important for us today is the question “for what purpose are new concepts brought into existence?” or “why do concepts seem to change and why do they seem to persist?” He eventually wants to pay more attention to Ideas than concepts. Difference is Ideal, not conceptual.

“Let us take seriously the question: is there a difference in kind, or of degree, between differences of degree and differences in kind? Neither.” pp 239

The answer could be: There is only a difference in Idea between kind and degree (keeping in mind that differences in Idea are the repetition of the Idea of difference), and by extension, there is no distinction by kind of Ideas, no distinction of Ideas by degree. Some people read Deleuze as a monist (everything shares in one substance and there is nothing other than substance) or vitalist (life or thought infuses all levels of the material world and there are more concretized forms of life and thought above us, just as there are those less so, below us) in this: he often suggests that we are doubled by (or are the doubles of) ourselves in the Idea, that the doubling is as divine as anything can be, and that individuation happens not by conceptual determination/partitioning, by a differential/fracturing of the Idea. Though he continues with what he says has been the only real project in ontology – proving the univocality of being – his own work strives to depict this univocity as ‘the clamour’ of a multiplicity. To him there is not just one being, and there are not merely many beings; the one is multiple, and the many are multiple, and it’s that shared multiplicity, or the causes of this multiplicity (pure difference and pure repetition), which results in ‘univocality’.

From here on in, don’t think about cards as concepts in the established sense, think about them a Ideas in the as-yet-unclear Deleuzian sense. Don’t even think about the cards themselves: think about them as their potential impact in games – this is, I think, close to what we’ll come to understand Ideas as. Take this classic card:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=202462

which isn’t conceptually different from its modern update:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=205098

But in an Ideal sense, their impact among other Ideas (cards-in-play, or affecting play) can differ substantially. Are there many cards or one card? Isn’t it possible that every single Magic card, or at least every card in your deck, could be depicted on one giant cardboard sheet? Well, yes, but even that card could and would be filled out differently, given the contraction of repetition into the time in which new cards are introduced and old ones forgotten, as the pool (not the river) changes. Now we get to the interesting interactions between D&R and MTG: what is this multiplicity REALLY? Deleuze would put difference and repetition as foundational, but could something found them? Could it be…capitalism? Is Deleuze as anticapitalist as some left-postmodern academics want him to be?

“The words ‘everything is equal’ may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal, univocal Being: equal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things reside unequally in this equal being. There, however, where they are borne by hubris, all things are in absolute proximity, and whether they are large or small, inferior or superior, none of them participates more or less in being, nor receives it by analogy […] Univocal Being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy.” pp 37

STACKS/TURNS

Back to the minutiae of the game. How is the order of actions in a round of Magic similar or dissimilar from Deleuze’s reworking of our standard models for temporality?

“A succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed.” pp 70

“The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it did not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is.” pp 82

Let me explain the stack to you. The stack is not really an area on the playing field, it is a logical space that arises from the playing field. For example: an enemy creature attacks me; I cast Go For The Throat on that creature to kill it; the opponent taps his remaining untapped land to cast Dissipate on my Go For The Throat, countering it; in response I tap and sacrifice my Strip Mine to destroy one of the lands that would have been used to cast Dissipate, removing it from the stack and avoiding the attack. Because the stack puts any event in the game into stasis as it waits to resolve, and because the stack is resolved from top to bottom, rather than the reverse, the stack literally contracts Ideas in the game (again we’re not thinking of cards as concepts any more, we’re thinking effect on the game as Ideas) into what Deleuze would call the originary synthesis of time. Time doesn’t ‘pass’ in Magic. Only turns are ‘passed’, and they too, being composed only of the stack, contract, always deferring the ushering in of time. In a given turn, There are only so many ‘openings’ in which the stack can be interacted with, and in fact, as long as you have the mana and the cards there are more openings for the stack than there are phases in a turn (beginning of turn, untap step, draw step, upkeep, first main phase, attack step, blocking step, combat resolution, second main phase, end of turn; there are a huge variety of ways cards can alter or be triggered by these phases).

Some cards are themselves precontractions of the stack: for example, cards with an upkeep cost that must be paid every turn, or cards like Sundial of the Infinite which end the turn early, or cards with mechanics that fill out upcoming stacks (like ‘rebound’, which appears on certain instants and sorceries and causes them to be cast again for free one turn later). And the location of the stack – whether it’s on the game board and floating above it, whether it is played out by putting cards on top of one another or by holding them in the air above the field – is largely a matter of habit and custom, must like the traditional conception of time, but, also like the underlying promise of time, the stack is its own offer of repeatability. The stack isn’t anything other than its content, whatever actions are made or cast, but the content (difference in the Idea) does not make a difference in the game without it.

“Perceptual syntheses refer back to organic syntheses which are like the sensibility of the sense; they refer back to a primary sensibility that we are. We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air – not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism […]  is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations.” pp 73

“The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated.” pp 94

The turn or the thinking player (themselves an Idea, a dymanism in the game) is the present. The past is the stack, and the future is the next game. Repetition runs throughout and binds all three. You’re always repeating the next game you could have by affirming the chance operations of your deck by playing with it, testing the probability of drawing the cards you need to answer your opponents. But as we’ll see later, we can never affirm the chance in full. Why? Because we can never play all possible games at once? Because we are designating/designated Ideas of difference just like the cards we eagerly tear out of a booster pack? Only that which passes the test of eternal return (and Deleuze is known for his unique interpretation of this Nietzschean thought experiment) is truly in play or is playing. We can’t be. So we play again.

A FEW VICTORY CONDITIONS

There are actually more ways to win than just by reducing the opponent’s life to zero. The most common way that professional MTG players secure wins (which at the top leagues can have very hefty payouts) is not by trading damage back and forth, but by creating paradoxical interactions with the stack that are effectively unanswerable. Most popular in this vein of strategy today is the Kitchen Fink loop. Kitchen Finks given you 2 life when they come into play, and the first time they die they return to play, giving you their enter-the-battlefield effect again, only with a -1/-1 counter (and if they have a -1/-1 counter on them they don’t come back if killed anymore). There are a number of ways to do it, but, for example: if you get a legendary creature called Melira, Sylvok Outcast into play she prevents your creatures from getting -1/-1 counters (this was meant to interact with a wholly different mechanic, but due to the wording it also affects Finks, which use a mechanic nine sets prior to the release of Melira), and if you have some way to sacrifice creatures at no mana cost and with no permanent alteration to the game board (in the current paradigm people use Viscera Cultist, who by sacrificing a creature simply allows you to look at the top card of your library), then you can actually sacrifice Kitchen Finks an infinite number of times, and have an infinite amount of life. But you really win by preventing the stack from ‘contracting into time’. Does philosophical victory come in the prevention of synthesis?

“The conditions of a philosophy which would be without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead of being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its point of departure a radical critique of this Image and the ‘postulates’ it implies. It would find its difference or its true beginning, not in an agreement with the pre-philosophical Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image, which it would denounce as non-philosophical. As a result, it would discover its authentic repetition in a thought without Image, even at the cost of the greatest destructions and the greatest demoralisations, and a philosophical obstinacy with no ally but paradox.” pp 132

There are lots of victory and loss conditions written into specific cards, but one of my favourite standard ways of winning is a process known as ‘milling’. To win by milling, all you have to do is make the opponent (or wait for them to) run out of cards to draw from their ‘library’ (deck). The reason I like winning this way has a lot to do with the kind of MTG player I am. See, I’ve always loved the flavour, the lore, of the game above all else. As a kid I would read all the novels that Wizards of the Coast (parent company of Magic) released to explain the story of each set. Magic isn’t just a game about mechanical and rule-based actions of cards. There are whole formats of play that try and tell stories with decks, rather than just compete. There are recurring characters in MTG, and in the story of the game you, the player, are basically a being lucky enough to be have been born with the gift of multidimensional exploration – your knowledge of the planes you ‘visit’ become your deck, (each block of expansion sets takes play on a specific world or plane, and visitation is equal with purchasing in this sense) and your wielding of that deck is like fashioning your personal plane from the pieces of others. Part of the game’s success has been its ability to cater to audiences who want a win no matter what, to audiences who love the idea of splashy rare cards or spending more money on them than their friends, and to audiences who see games as narrative in some way. But back to milling. To me, milling is basically like saying: “I have removed the possibility of being from your little pocket universe: you never existed, I did, I win.”

“Either there is no non-being and negation is illusory and ungrounded, or there is non-being, which puts the negative in being and grounds negation. Perhaps, however, we have reasons to say both that there is non-being and that the negative is illusory.” pp 63

This view of milling says a lot about ontology. Every time you manage to force someone to “mill”, to take the top card(s) off their library and put them into the graveyard without play, you reduce the probability that what they need to win will be accessible to them. The maximum number of any single card you’re allowed in a deck is four – if you mill away all four of the card essential to someone’s strategy, they usually lose, whether you manage to grind away the rest of their library or not. Milling is the ontological strategy of capitalism: if capital is abstract value, value taken out of its productive source in labour, or in material conditions of the organism and its world, and if capital is used to further abstract value from value-production, creating a surplus of possibility within capitalism (and this possibility can only ever relate to the attenuation of capital) and a deficit of possibility outside of it (whether that outside is other economic systems or ecological ones), then capitalism is winning not by concrete combat exchanges (though its ally the State tends to play beatdown and ramp decks), but by milling. At the same time, Deleuze claims that non-being is possible and that it is impossible to negate being in its possibility (which I think is rephrased as ‘becoming’ in his later work). Isn’t that kind of like saying, “Hey, milled player – read: helpless wage slave – you don’t LOSE per se, because you played, but I win so GG!” These questions of what Badiou has called “the aristocratic fatalism” in Deleuze” will come up again.

“It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power to begin and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to me, without power over me – that which is stripped of all possibility – to unreality of the indefinite. I cannot represent this reversal to myself, I cannot even conceive of it as definitive. It is not the irreversible step beyond which there is no return, for it is that which is not accomplished, the interminable and the incessant. … It is inevitable but inaccessible death; it is the abyss of the present, time without a present, with which I have no relationships; it is that toward which I cannot go forth, for in it I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die. In it they die; they do not cease, and they do not finish dying … not the term, but the interminable, not proper but featureless death, and not true death, but, as Kafka says, ‘the sneer of its capital error’.” pp 112

You can read the article from which I got this card's "flavour text" here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/slavoj-zizek/resistance-is-surrender

It isn’t the case in Magic that someone who has spent more money on their deck will always have a better chance of winning. But whosoever manages to preserve the context in which their cards have value in their deployment, that context being the multiplicity of the deck, and whosoever holds the reigns of capital, the abstractly-valuable engines of value-abstraction, wins. Who wins for Deleuze?

SECONDARY MARKETS

“The ‘economic’ is never given properly speaking, but rather designates a differential virtuality to be interpreted, always covered over by its forms of actualisation.” pp 186

In D&R the argument is that there is no original incarnation of an Idea. In the above quote Deleuze is revealing what might be his defense against accusations of a joyful confusion between capital and univocal multiplicity. He might tell us we need to reinterpret the virtual, and to be glad that the economic is virtual rather than real (the real is that which we actualise, but the possible is that which is virtualized; the virtual actualizes what is real, and I would suppose, only possibilities [in the Idea of difference possibilities don’t change difference, they only allow it] are real; thus, if a new situation is found for the virtual [soon we’ll see that it would be better to say “if new questions are found for the problems”], the real will be actualized differently, and possibility will find a new differentiation). But this still seems to me to evade the loopholes of a theory in which basically all we need to do is rethink something for it to change. Brassier sees this as the core flaw in not just Deleuze, but any philosopher who correlates thinking strongly with being. Make no mistake: Deleuze believes in contemplative power and the otherworldliness (take this word in the sense that he thinks thought alone is that which makes our ‘world’ become ‘other’ than what it has been), but, not wanting to side too much with Brassier, we need to remember that thinking for Deleuze is an organic and visceral activity, that the storming of the Bastille incarnated an Idea, just as much as what was the essential revolutionary point of reference for all the French poststructuralists, May 1968, tried to embody another Idea in that same genealogy of revolution. It isn’t clear whether we’re dealing with a kind of witnessing that allows the event to happen, or the Ideal happening of events behind the witnessing thought, and Deleuze knows this. He notes that Ideas are inexplicable as such, almost suggesting that thought cannot incarnate itself, that it must disseminate itself the best it can and wait. In one of his monographs on Nietzsche Deleuze famously says that “Practical struggle never proceeds by the way of the negative, but by way of the affirmation of difference.” Isn’t this kind of like saying “Ideas are never truly taken out of circulation”, and isn’t saying that a rather tepid denial of the obsoletizing power of capitalism? Is the visceral organism of capital the true embodiment of perpetual revolution? Does the perpetual accumulation of a card pool contradict the archetypicality of Ideas in the meta, or the Idea of a meta in itself?

“Good sense essentially distribute or repartitions: ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ are the characteristic formulae of its false profundity or platitude. It distributes things. It is obvious, however, that not every distribution flows from good sense: there are distributions inspired by madness, mad repartitions. Perhaps good sense even presupposes madness in order to come after and correct what madness there is in any prior distribution. […] Good sense is by nature eschatological, the prophet of a final compensation and homogenization. […] This sedentary, patient figure which has time on its side corrects difference, introduces it into a milieu which leads to the cancellation of differences or the compensation of portions. It is itself this ‘milieu’. Thinking itself to be in between the extremes, it holds them off and fills in the interval. It does not negate differences – on the contrary: it arranges things in the order of time and under the conditions of extensity such that they negate themselves. […] Good sense is the ideology of the middle classes who recognise themselves in equality as an abstract product.” pp 224

One of the most unique things about MTG is the dominance of its secondary markets. By secondary market, I mean the sale and pricing of cards that are resold and traded. The mother-company of the game, WotC, makes money off the direct sales of those products I mentioned earlier, but they have no direct power to affix monetary or lasting value to cards. It’s the local retailers of the game who keep card pools ‘in existence’. One of the reasons Magic has grown in popularity so exponentially in the last six years, all of which I missed out on, is that WotC, rather than try and combat the secondary markets (it would seemingly be better for them to have fuller control over resales, just as IKEA would love to buy Craigslist and continue profiting from its already-sold commodities), the corporate font of Magic has to a large extent decentralized its hold on the game post-design to these small stores. All of the launches and promotions and weekly events of Magic are run out of nerd-owned and nerd-serviced small businesses around the world (MTG is huge in Northern Europe and urban China), and even entry into pro-league has to happen through a dispersed participation with the secondary market. To me this has a lot in common with Deleuze’s utopian phrases ‘nomadic distribution’ and ‘crowned anarchy’…but those phrases, and the decentralization of Magic, are also indicative of a deepening resemblance between so-called anarchisms and the kind of postmodernist capitalism that has become subtler than ever. Endless customizability and adaptability (multiplicity?), the pride and heart of both Magic and Capital.

The moment of consumption is not 'having' something, it's 'opening' something, as the precisely modulated 'unboxing experience' of both Apple products and Magic cards attest to. In this view, which Deleuze may unwittingly espouse, all we have is what we've opened.

“Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system. The one and the many are concepts of the understanding which make up an overly loose mesh of a distorted dialectic which can proceed only by opposition. The biggest fish pass through. […] We can say ‘the one is multiple, the multiple, one’ for ever […] but the Idea is missed. […] ‘Multiplicity’, which replaces the one no less than the multiple, is the true substantive, substance itself. The variable multiplicity is the how many, the how and each of the cases. Everything is a multiplicity in so far as it incarnates an Idea. Even the many is a multiplicity; even the one is a multiplicity. […] Everywhere the differences between multiplicities and the differences within multiplicities replace schematic and crude oppositions. There is only the variety of multiplicity – in other words, difference. It is, perhaps, ironic to say that everything is multiplicity, however irony itself is a multiplicity, or rather, irony is the art of multiplicities: the art of grasping the Ideas and the problems as they incarnate in things, and of grasping things as incarnations, as cases of solution.” pp 182

WHAT THE PLAYER IS

Other than being a ‘planeswalker’ in the lore of the game, the player is hard to differentiate from their deck or even from a card. When you become active in a MTG community you recognise people at first through their decks, not as players or human beings. “Oh, that guy has a really awesome squirrel deck, that guy has this crazy Megrim/discard deck”. The player is the actualisation of their deck, which is the real incarnation of the cards they themselves have virtualized out of the total possibility of a card pool by making them playable, and in playing them, the player actualises. Another way of understanding this is by looking at planeswalker cards, which within the rules of MTG function just like players in terms of their interaction with the stack. A planeswalker card has several abilities (if they have three, you could say they’re playing with a three-card deck, though instead of mana they use a resource called ‘loyalty’) and may use one per turn to assist you, the ‘real’ planeswalker.

“The self, therefore, is by no means simple: it is not enough to relativise or pluralise the self, all the while retaining for it a simply attenuated form. Selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self, under conditions yet to be determined, but it is the system of a dissolved self. […] The self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification – […] one only is what one has.” pp 78/79

And it’s no surprise that activities like MTG are often played by very intelligent, or at least intelligent in an autistic kind of way, people. (The game, by the way, was designed by Richard Garfield, a PhD in combinatorial mathematics.) Our culture of course loves the platitude that knowledge is power, a phrase that in a lot of ways encapsulates the post-Nietzschean conception of power in thinking, specifically in thinking’s correlation with being. ‘Steer thought, steer the world.’ Marketing a new set, recruiting new players, accommodating demographics. Are players what they do, or are players what they think?

“Thought is also forced to think its central collapse, its fracture, its own natural ‘powerlessness’ which is indistinguishable from its greatest power – […] Artaud pursued in all this the terrible revelation of a thought without image, and the conquest of a new principle which does not allow itself to be represented. He knows that difficulty as such, along with its cortège of problems and questions, is not a de facto state of affairs but a de jure structure of thought; that there is an acephalism in thought just as there is an amnesia in memory, an aphasia in language and an agnosia in sensibility. He knows that thinking is not innate, but must be engendered in thought. He knows that the problem is not to direct or methodically apply a thought which pre-exists in principle and nature, but to bring into being that which does not yet exist (there is no other work, all the rest is arbitrary, mere decoration). To think is to create – there is no other creation – but to create is first of all to engender ‘thinking’.” pp 147

I’m about to get to the most important part of this post: that about the designers of this game. But before that, let me let Deleuze pose a problem. That gets a bit closer to the question of our position in Magic as a game, maybe in any ‘game’, language game or otherwise (consider how, in its accompanying artwork, the pictorial Idea could be said to be part and parcel of any given Magic card).

“Consider a terrified face (under conditions such that I do not see and do not experience the causes of this terror). This face expresses a possible world: the terrifying world. By ‘expression’ we mean, as always, that relation which involves a torsion between an expressor and an expressed such that the expressed does not exist apart from the expressor. […] The terrified face does not resemble what terrifies it, it envelops a state of the terrifying world.” pp 260

Magic is like any game. In Magic, you try and anticipate your opponent, you try to know them. When you’re at 6 life late in a game while your opponent is at 2, and you’re being attacked by their only creature, a 7/7 wurm, and you can either block it with your 1/1 token or the 5/4 angel with flying that you could kill them with NEXT turn (if you lose the angel your win will be less secure, since they’ll still have the wurm), you have to ask yourself whether or not you’re facing kind of player who would fake a last ditch attack with a trick up their sleeve, whether they would have saved something, maybe an instant that will give their attacker trample (caused blocked damage over the blocker’s toughness to go directly to the player, as it usually would not) – you’re basically performing ideology critique every time the stack yawns before you. This hearkens back not to Deleuze, but to Wittgenstein. Ideology critique is behaviourism. To Wittgenstein, languages, like games, have the rule-structures and resemblances among relative languages they have because of their roots in a way of life. Change the way of life, change the language. The Deleuzean and in a larger sense poststructuralist insight was something along the lines of, change the language, change the way of life – that we don’t just read texts to see how life is today, right now, we read life AS text, to shape its futures. That’s the dream, at least.

CYNICAL DESIGNS

You don’t have to read it all, but this is a very revealing article about the purpose of ‘bad cards’ in Magic. It’s also hilarious. It’s not enough to say that WotC designers purposely release bad cards to create artificial value for ‘good’ ones, much like banks purposely sell shitty mortgages to make the ‘good’ ones more sought-after, although this is something they can do. What the release of as-yet-unusable cards tells me is that game designers are futurists. They have to be. They have to hope that someday a shitty card will chaotically find its perfect combo: most of the truly broken cards in the game required a second look years later to find usage. If the situation were reversed, if they only released cards with specific wording and specific interactions, not as many people would return to Magic. Replayability is futurity, according to futurists that is.

“Repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself. It is not underneath the masks, but is formed from one mask to another, as though from one distinctive point to another, from one privileged instant to another, with and within the variations. The masks do not hide anything except other masks. There is no first term which is repeated.” pp 17

Maro’s articles are unabashedly cynical in the sense of Peter Sloterdijk take on it, which I keep forcing this blog back to. For instance, this article in which he defends the release of a very controversial card called Grafdigger’s Cage. Grafdigger’s is not only very accessible as a rare, rather than a mythic (I have two!), but it shuts down EVERY popular strategy active in the metagame today. Remember that infinite life trick I talked about? That won’t work. Or the very cool Enduring Ideal deck, which is made up of all enchantments, barely any creatures, and will win by turn three almost every time by shutting down the whole game and stalling it out? That one’s impossible now too. Design pretty much admits: “Grafdigger’s Cage is way of plugging holes that are prominent right now. We could ban or restrict the cards that are the holes, but that would reduce the potentiality of the current extended card pool, so instead, we’ll force the card pool to solve its own problems. And if Grafdigger’s turns out to be a problem too, we’ll ban or restrict it!” Sloterdijk sees the same kind of cynicism as the functional core of, among other things, the modern spymaster – he even says that espionage as only efficacious kind of critique (as in, it’s just as futile and cold-warry as academic critique is). As my friend Zaq said to me last night about the movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, “it’s in keeping with that genre of spy thriller that shows how the higher up you go, the less you have to believe in ideals, and the more every action is about keeping the board even, about representing and manipulating the world so that it requires espionage for its stability, rather than fighting in the name of those ideals for a different kind of stability.” How about Ideas?

“We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solution. Already, under this double aspect, they can be no more than phantoms. We are led to believe that the activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the search for solutions. […] According to this infantile prejudice, the master sets a problem, our task is to solve it, and the result is accredited true or false by a powerful authority. It is also a social prejudice, with visible interest in maintaining our infantile state, which calls upon us to solve problems that come from elsewhere, consoling or distracting us by telling us that we have won simply by being able to respond at all. Such is the origin of the grotesque image of culture that we find in examinations and government referenda as well as in tournaments of leisure (where everyone is called upon to choose according to his or her ‘taste’, on the condition that this taste coincides with everyone else). Be yourselves – it being understood that this self must be that of others. As if we would not remain slaves so long as we do not control the problems themselves, so long as we do not possess a right to the problems, to a participation in and management of the problems. […] When, however, a false problem is ‘set’ before us, this propitious scandal serves only to remind that problems are not ready-made but must be constituted and invested in their proper symbolic fields; and that the master text necessarily requires a (necessarily fallible) master in order to be written. […] Everyone ‘recognises’ after a fashion that problems are the most important thing. Yet it is not enough to recognise this in fact, as though problems were only provisional and contingent movements destined to disappear in the formation of knowledge, which owed their importance only to the negative empirical conditions imposed upon the knowing subject. On the contrary, this discovery must be raised to the transcendental level, and problems must be considered not as ‘givens’ (data) but as ideal ‘objecticities’ possessing their own sufficiency and implying acts of constitution and investment of a field. […] This is what is meant by such famous formulae as: ‘The really great problems are posed only once they are solved’ or ‘Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve’ – not because practical or speculative problems are only the shadow of pre-existing solutions, but because the solution necessarily follows from the complete conditions under which the problem is determined as a problem [rather than from the problem itself], from the means and the terms which are employed in order to pose it.” pp 158/9

The designer here is the person who has to make the cards ask questions first and foremost. The designer can’t make the cards solve problems. Because without questions, there are not problems.

“Kant even refers to Ideas as problems ‘to which there is no solution’. By that he does not mean that Ideas are false problems and thus insoluble, but that true problems are Ideas, and that these Ideas do not disappear with ‘their’ solutions, since they are the indispensible conditions without which no solution would ever exist. […] An object outside experience can be represented only in problematic form; this does not mean that Ideas have no real object, but that problems qua problems are the real objects of Ideas. […] And in so far as we refer to a fractured I, an I split end to end by the [pure and empty] form of time which runs through it, it must be said that Ideas swarm in the fracture, constantly emerging on its edges, ceaselessly coming out and going back, being composed in a thousand different manners.” pp 168/9

In another article released on MTG’s eighteenth birthday, Maro schematises the progress of the game as a whole in a very non-Deleuzean, that is, structuralist, way – and he means capital-P Progress, Enlightment-style.To paraphrase him, the current and fifth generation of designers aren’t mathematicians and they aren’t corporate researchers anymore, they’re all people who were players and even found success at the pro-level of the game. And yet, “this latest group of R&D members are very interested in what the players want, not in cards but rather in concepts […] I believe [the success of our new block] has come from how all R&D is working together to create something that has a visceral feel as much as stimulating an intellectual curiosity.” Part of me wonders how ‘past’ structuralism ‘post’structuralists ever got. Especially in the case of Deleuze when he tries to borrow Ideas from areas like theatre (the dramatization of the Idea) or mathematics (the differentials of an Idea). Onto what template is what we’re borrowing being fitted:

The only thing that HASN'T changed about MTG is what the back of the cards looks like - other than the fact that it was originally misprinted in the gaudiest kind of purple and orange, but let's not talk about that.

“Mathematics does not include only solutions to problems; it also includes the expression of problems relative to the field of solvability which they define, and define by virtue of their very dialectical order. That is why the differential calculus belongs entirely to mathematics, even at the very moment when it finds its sense in the revelation of a dialectic which points beyond mathematics.” pp 179

“Difference is not the phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon. It is therefore true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude of injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world ‘happens’ while God calculates; if the calculation were exact, there would be no world. The world can be regarded as a ‘remainder’, where […] every diversity and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason, where, everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences […] of intensity.” pp 222

REMATCH

After six hours at the prerelease, six hours that passed unnoticeably fast, there came to me the familiar thought of having done nothing at all. Some people criticise games like MTG for being a waste of time, or a waste of money. It is. It isn’t even a waste: it the sublation of time, and of money, just like life in capitalism is. Deleuze wrote and lived and played (what sort of card games?) in capitalism too, not quite so late a capitalism as ours, but he saw what we see.

“The whole of Phenomenology [negation] is an epiphenomenology.” pp 52

“Here, as elsewhere, becoming conscious counts for little.” pp 19

Magic: The Gathering is a dramatization par excellance. And in Difference and Repetition, philosophy is reconceived as the dramatization of Ideas, the deployment, the play, of difference in the Idea. It seems to me that one of the biggest changes brought about by late capitalism, postmodernity, the age of virtuality, informatics, whatever your flavour of choice for the era between the mid-20^th century and today – has been the increasing ease we have with treating all disciplines equally (how in vogue interdiscipline thought is), or at least applying the same methodologies to them (how trendily Slavoj Zizek talks about Hegel and Kung-Fu Panda in a single paragraph). If this is the kind of equality of difference Deleuze was calling for I fear that it is an insufficient and seductive one.

“Everything which can be denied is and must be denied. The genius of eternal return lies not in memory but in waste, in active forgetting. All that is negative and all that denies, all those average affirmations which bear the negative, all those pale and unwelcome ‘Yeses’ which come from ‘Nos’, everything which cannot pass the test of eternal return – all these must be denied. If eternal return is a wheel, then it must be endowed with a violent centrifugal movement which expels everything which ‘can’ be denied, everything which cannot pass the test. Nietzsche announces only a light punishment for those who do not ‘believe’ in eternal return: they will have, and be aware of, only an ephemeral life! They will be aware of themselves and know themselves for what they are: epiphenomena. This will be their absolute Knowledge. In this manner, negation as a consequence, as the result of full affirmation, consumes all that is negative, and consumes itself at the mobile centre of eternal return. For if eternal return is a circle, then Difference is at the centre and the Same is only on the periphery: it is a constantly decentred, continually torturous circle, which revolves only around the unequal.” pp 55

My deck is blue-black zombie-mill, with control and rushing in the early game, and super-heavy card removal in the late game. I can trade in combat and prevent myself from taking too much damage with the cheapness and strong tribal interactions between my zombies (Diregraf Captain has deathtouch to deter attacking, he buffs all zombies +1/+1, and whenever a zombie dies he causes the opponent to lose one life; Undead Alchemist converts all the damage zombies deal to enemy players into the mill effect, so two damage is two cards removed from the deck; Havengul Lich then lets me summon creatures out of anyone’s graveyard into my control; and I can bounce back and forth, as well as resurrect multiple times, Geralf’s Mindcrusher, a tanky creature that mills the opponent five cards for each entry into the field), and my Nephalia Drownyards are both lands and tappable for a mill effect of three. I can counter your spells with Dissipate. I can destroy your creatures with Go For The Throat. I can get my zombies into pay rapidly with Call of the Kindred. That’s my (me as) Idea, at least.

“Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different. […] It carries out a practical selection among differences according to their capacity to produce – that is, to return or to pass the test of eternal return. […] It is not the Whole, the Same or the prior identity in general which returns. Nor is it the parts of the whole. Only the extreme forms return – those which are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another. Only the excessive returns; that which passes into something else and becomes identical.” pp 41