Jon Agley: His Values Are Off

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/standard/23602_Grinding_A_Question_Of_Values.html

There's so much wrong with this that I don't even know where to start.  I would totally normally make this a blog post, but I just can't be bothered so I'll make a long comment here.
1)  The article you mentioned was published on THIS SITE (http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/23253_The_Problem_With_Planeswalker_Points.html), the fact that you couldn't even do the most basic of research for this piece is pretty telling (and indicative of the overall quality (which is, unsurprisingly, lacking).
2)  Don't act like you're not judging, it's 100% clear that you are and trying to fall back on "The purpose of this article is not to pass judgment on specific valuations of the Pro Tour" is cowardly (but you're very skilled at cowardly, as we'll cover in future points).
3)  I really enjoyed how you tried to act very intellectual in your analysis of PWPs and valuations, but completely failed in doing so.
4)  "Isn't it terrible that these players had to take these extreme actions to grind PWP?":  No one ever said it was the system's fault that people did this.  What Kibler was pointing out was the system rewarded things it shouldn't and that people, even if they were dumb enough to do objectively stupid actions, should not be rewarded for doing so.
5)  Name names.  There are only TWO pieces that can maybe be described as "tell-all":  Carrie Oliver's (http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/feature-article-on-the-grind/) and mine (http://www.gatheringmagic.com/chrismascioli-chasing-kate-why-and-how-i-qualified-for-pro-tour-dark-ascension/) and not listing them is a great injustice if you want to discuss them.  I was 100% open in my article, the least you could do is be a bit more open about your intentions here (which were to judge me).
6)  Your contentions are just wrong:  "100 people who were willing to do the most to secure an invitation (i.e., ostensibly, those who valued a Pro Tour invitation the most as evidenced through their quantifiable actions)"
a)  This is just untrue, it wasn't the 100 people who were willing to do the most, but the 100 people who were in the best position to do the most.  The PWP system was extremely USA-centric so those that were in the northeast or were able to go to Worlds and lock up a qualification did so.
b)  They did not necessarily value the invite most, human behavior is not a direct correspondence between value and commitment, but is also guided by the probability of success.  For example, someone could value a date with [insert celebrity here] VERY highly, but they'd never place any time into it because P(success) is so low.  Some kid in Europe could have valued the invite much higher than any of us who actually qualified, but because he couldn't afford to go to Words, his P(success) was low and he put 0 effort into the system instead.
7)  "Recall that this isn't a social, political, or economic system in which one can argue the chicken-and-egg syndrome (does the system cause the behavior or does the behavior necessitate the system?). This is a qualification system for a collectible card game.:  What purpose does this line serve other than to attempt to belittle the people who wanted to qualify for the Pro Tour?  I'm so sorry something I wanted to do isn't important enough for Jon Agley, who wants to appoint himself God for a day, to think it was important.
8)  "Assuming a method of ensuring such a process would not ultimately be fatal, I have no doubt that a number of players would qualify for the tour via Scorpion Bath (SBQ).":  Just listing some more quotes that prove that you have no idea what you're talking about.
9)  "It illuminated the manner in which many people in young adulthood are identifying and valuing different aspects of their lives":  It didn't do this at all, at least for me (which you would know if you actually read my article).  I used the PWP system as an escape from other aspects of my life; it was dumb, but it doesn't come close to defining my life.

tl;dr:  This article is bad and you should feel bad for writing it.

I Asked the Magic 8 Ball Something!

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/finance/23516_Wise_Buys_Are_You_Smarter_Than_A_Magic_8Ball.html

How to Lose Money Compared to the Null Hypothesis

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/finance/23507_The_Financial_Value_Of_Dark_Ascension.html (it's premium, "sorry" if you can't read it)

Ben Bleiweiss is obviously a very knowledgeable (if not the most knowledgeable) guy in mtg finance.  However, he is not a particularly good player and his evaluations of cards (and the prices derived from these evaluations) should not necessarily be taken as accurate.  However, in his latest pre-release set review, Ben included a reason you should take his reviews seriously when he devoted a section to evaluating his Innistrad predictions.

"So in short, I was right on 61 cards and wrong on 14. I wish my investment portfolio could hit 50% of the time these days, much less 81% of the time."

This is one of the most misleading statements to be included in any mtg finance article and I hope to debunk it here.

The reality Ben wants you to believe (I didn't include the cards he called bulk since even I have more of a life than that):

Of the cards that weren't predicted as bulk, he got the direction of movement 65% correct (I am too lazy to calculate if this is of any statistical significance, but let's give Ben the benefit of the doubt and say it is.  Also, if you include all the bulk predictions Ben's rate is over 80%).  So if we, as a reader of this fine piece, listen to his advice and choose to buy at pre-release prices if he says the card will go up or stay the same and wait until now to buy it if he says the card will go down, our total cost would be:  $199.75 compared to the $257.25 one would spend if they bought each card at the pre-release price (I am not including the 5 dual lands since there was not individual predictions).  So overall Ben's predictions, on first glance, seem incredible and would have saved the consumer almost 25% of the cost of the set.


What's Really Happening


In reality the only person our hypothetical above would benefit is someone whose goal is to acquire four of each card regardless of when (or if) they actually use that card.  A more useful way of looking at things is to evaluate the purpose of a pre-release pricing guide.
1)  The pre-release is when supply of cards is lowest and demand is the greatest, therefore it is a good assumption that card prices will always go down.  So what happens if we replace all of Ben's predictions with down in the previous example?  We end up with a total set cost of $188.50, a 5% savings compared to  the method utilizing Ben's predictions above.  So by listening advice that you paid for you lose money compared to someone who is under the very obvious impression that prerelease card prices will go down.
2)  Since you don't own any cards in the set yet, knowing the price of a card will go down isn't helpful (since there's no way to take advantage of other people overvaluing the card unless you create some sort of card futures market) so the most important takeaway from a set review is to know the cards that will go up in the future and invest in them.  Here's what would happen if you took Ben's advice about cards that would go up in the future:

For every set of these cards you would have lost $9.75 out of a $24.25 investment (over 40%).  Therefore, by correctly utilizing Ben's predictions, you would have once again paid to lose money.  


It is therefore inexcusable to claim "if you had sold off the cards I said to sell off and bought the cards I said to buy, you would have ended up a lot more ahead than behind"  since this doesn't represent the reality of the situation at all (not even considering the fact that you would not be able to sell any card for scg's sell price).  This is not even including the fact that the card Ben claimed was the "most overrated card in the set" (Geist of St. Traft) is now triple of what Ben's predicted price (and almost double its pre-sale price).  In conclusion, Ben using his Innistrad set review predictions as a reason about why you should trust him about his Dark Ascension review is an outright misuse of statistics and good taste.

-Chris Mascioli
@dieplstks on twitter

Going Infinite - I Bet You're All Surprised This Took So Long

Going Infinite - Magic Oddities


If you follow me on twitter (@dieplstks) you've probably come to realize a few things:
1.  I'm not very friendly
2.  I probably dislike you
3.  I probably dislike your writing
4.  As much as I dislike your writing, the amount I dislike the "writing" of Jonathan Medina is much, much greater.
5.  I'm depressed and pathetic and single, :P


Every week I look forward to the sociology/psychology project that is Jon Medina's article; the man is the Dunning-Kruger effect with a pair of lungs (I'd say with a heartbeat, but I'm not sure if Medina has a heart or if he traded it away for an extra foil at some point to maximize "value").  His most recent series about pimping out your collection/deck (also known as "The Magical Frat House:  How to be a Douche") serves to showcase almost all the flaws of the series so I'll just use his most recent one to illustrate my points.


1.  Medina does not care about the quality of his writing


This is obvious to anyone who has ever read something ever so I don't really feel the need to expand.  However this sentence is a good indication of the whole thing (and from the free preview):


"I had two trades going when David Sharfman walked up with the Counterspell that's pictured above. He waited patiently for me to finish with the other two trades"


2.  Medina has basically the worst tone possible

You know how every family has that Uncle that has that side business that's really shady?  You know, the one that comes up to you with the big new thing:  "Hey, Chris, I started selling these black boxes out of the back of my car, want to help?"  Well, if the Magic community was one big (un)happy family, Medina would be that uncle.  His knowledge of any subject is only thorough enough to (supposedly) earn a profit, but he acts like the wisest guru that mtg finance has (spoiler:  he's not).  Look at this fucking shining gem from the most recent article:

"This revelation might put you in panic mode, “If Medina can't tell us how to price this stuff, then who can?!”"

No, I am not kidding.  He actually wrote that.  Word for fucking word.  Without irony.  Without even the hint of it being a joke.  "If Flores can't tell us how to win states six years ago, then who can?!"

3.  Medina is a tool

Do I need to say anything else?

Flores Friday #1

Flores Friday – Ten Underrated Black Cards In Standard


(Note: this was originally posted as a comment on the article, but because the SCG commenting system is weird and I can't figure out how to make the post visible to everyone, it's copied here.)


This article is so bad. I would just quote some of the worst sentences from the article, but then people would assume I'm just trolling instead of legitimately pointing out how terrible this article is.

The main problem is that it's basically a set review of a bunch of cards that've been around forever, in that it's a list with some gut reactions and possibly a second-hand overheard testing result from someone that knows what they're talking about. Flores, you do not know what you are talking about.

Cards do not exist in a vacuum. Cards go in decks. Decks exist in formats. For a card to be good, it has to be good in a good deck at the right time, and what we have here is just a list of things that feel right. Here and there you might suggest what deck it's good in: okay, so what do you take out from that deck? How else does this change the deck construction? How does it change the matchup you want to change? What other matchups does it help? What's it bad against?

Magic is a game where sample sizes in testing matters a lot. Okay, so a certain card one you a specific game against a specific deck in a specific situation. So? That didn't teach us anything about the card as a whole. What card would you have otherwise had in that situation, and could that card have done something equally powerful? How'd it do in the other hundred games you played with that card?

The scientific method goes hypothesis -> testing -> reevaluate hypothesis -> retest -> conclusions. These are just untested hypotheses, and absolutely no attention should be paid to them under any circumstances.

Fortunately for the strategic content, it's nearly impossible to read due to the horrendous quality of the writing. This is a near-structureless assembly of anecdotes, observations, namedrops, and pure bullshit under an incredibly weak premise. Postulating about inclusions in the top 10/top 50 in a format is not interesting. Talking about how you "innovated" a card in "one of the most important decks of all time" is oh my GOD not interesting.

As a tangent of my own: "overrated" and "underrated" mean very little in Magic, because it doesn't tell us how good they actually are. It's not like stocks, where an underrated one is inherently valuable. If the common perception of a card is a 1/10 but it's actually a 4/10, that still means it sucks.

Flores seems to be under the opinion that people will read him just because of who he is and he has some kneejerk opinions, which is the surefire sign of the hack writer. I don't know if Flores is just doing this for the money, because he genuinely feels he's enlightening the general Magic-playing public, or to feed his ego, but it's beyond the point of a bad article into the territory of things that would be immediately rejected if his name was someone else's and the twice-per-article Chapin namedrop was "my friend Bobby."

Stop.