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I have a history attending Magic: the Gathering tournaments, both local and regional. I know you're not actually asking, but I thought this was a fun exercise: - How do people talk about money? Money is completely avoided, but prices are regularly discussed. Almost all casual trades are facilitated with the use of apps that tell you the current market prices of cards, and trading partners usually try to get within a dollar of matching value. This can be hilarious when making high-value trades, like when A has a $50 card that N wants, and N has a $70 card that A wants--there's a whole song and dance around finding the extra $20 of value from A's collection. Words like "throw-in" and concepts like the liquidity of said throw-ins get bandied about. Wealth, however, is a very taboo topic. Magic, especially at regional tournaments that have entry fees, travel expenses, hotels, and metagames that require the use of multi-hundred-dollar decks to compete are nearly universally attended by two kinds of people. The most obvious are middle class folks for whom this is their hobby and vacation. Their coworkers and social peers take up things like skiing, photography, mountain biking, classic car repair, and other gear-and-time-intensive hobbies. Magic is just another one of those, with built-in social events. The other are working class people for whom this is an extremely important hobby, and for whom their Magic expenses are an almost-too-high amount of their spending. But in any interaction between two strangers at a Magic event, you'll almost always see the latter guiding money-related discussions ("the price of the format is too high because you have to constantly change your deck" / "who is this new collector edition even for" / etc). The former, meanwhile, pretend to also be working class to avoid difficult discussions about money. This is such an important tactic that many people who have multi-thousand-dollar decks will hand-wave away the price of their deck by saying they got the cards when they were an order of magnitude cheaper--regardless of whether that's the truth. - What makes people prestigious? In the competitive scene, winning. Nearly universally, prestige comes with winning a lot, over a large amount of time. Note that this doesn't require always winning, because even the best players barely break 70% win rates. And because of that variance, winning big but only once or twice also doesn't confer prestige, and instead gets derisively written off as somebody "spiking" a tournament, implying that it was all a bunch of lucky matches and the person doesn't deserve their win. Some people will try to gain this kind of prestige by winning only a little bit and then writing strategy articles; or by playing a lot without winning much and writing metagame articles. That rarely works. In the casual scene, people claim to avoid the concept of prestige, as though having traits that make one prestigious in that social circle turns the social circle into a competitive scene. But the truth is that prestige in a casual circle comes from coming up with creative ideas for decks (or even just combinations of cards that can be folded into other decks). - What kind of traits influence social standing? Social standing on the large scale is influenced by content creation. Content creators (of podcasts, articles, videos, or streams) tend to be higher up on the social hierarchy, even if they don't have prestige. On the smaller scale, social standing within playgroups or among local gaming store regulars comes from apparent kindness and honesty. - How familiar are people with evaluating quality of research? On the whole, pretty poor. Frank Karsten is nearly universally known for applying statistics to deck building, which goes to show just how few others are known for what should be a prerequisite of good deck building. Gut feeling has a huge influence even on professional teams, and superstition reigns supreme among casual players. - How private are we supposed to keep gossip? Generally, very private. When people don't show up to a tournament, very few questions are asked and very few details are given. Usually it's just assumed that "life happened" and they'll be back next time, even if that's not the case. Even pro teams don't do much gossiping about their strategies for an upcoming tournament. A bit of an extreme counter-example is the Gaby Spartz / LSV drama, but that was less "Magic culture" gossip and more "Twitch culture" gossip. |