Episode 57: Magic: The Gathering is Autistic

We were so excited when we recorded this episode, but when we heard it played back we realized we needed to release this one on video. So here it is, our first YouTube exclusive episode. We really hope you enjoy it.

Are you an MTG superfan? Tell us about it in the comments!

Show notes and resources:

Wikipedia: Feynman diagram

Wikipedia: History of the periodic table

Poster: MTG card variations

Article that discusses how fan communities can become excellent at organizing information from a bottom up perspective.

Links from Fred:

• Fred’s personal website

• Fred’s professional website

• The healthcare taxonomy system used in the United States

• Aspergers

  • The Scientific American article is a good summary.

  • NPR interview with Edith Sheffer, who did the research that showed Aspergers collaboration with the Nazi regime.  

  • A more recent article from The Guardian detailing how the patient communities still hold to the community building nature of the Aspergers diagnosis. 

• Coral Sword is the famous Game Store in Houston, TX that I frequent. 

  • Tallia Vess (talented player, great to learn from!!) https://www.twitch.tv/taaliavess 

  • Hunter Pence (yes.. The baseball player) https://twitch.tv/hunterpence

• Bioportal is by far my favorite clinical ontology browser.

  • Here is the link for the results of searching Bioportal for “Autism” 

• Here is my MTG Card Information poster

  • This is something I use when teaching my MTG database class

• Scryfall is the authoritative source of MTG information online. 

  • Using scryfall, you can see all of the prints of a card, like “Diabolic Tutor”, which according to wizards of the coast, is just one card.. 

    • Which lets you see how they are resurfacing classic card designs, with new characters.

    • It also lets you fully enjoy “alternative art” on cards. MTG uses a “planes” model, where planes correspond to different real cultures and their magical mythologies. The set “Kaldheim”, for instance, is full of viking mythology.  One card in that set, “Fynn, the Fangbearer” has:

      • The basic card. Which is always done in a modern fantasy high-art style.  

      • An alternative art style, which references the mythology of the plane. For vikings, lots of celtics knots and carvings. 

      • A reprint that might continue the alternative art style. 

      • Sometimes, there is a “universes beyond” print of the card, where the card has two names, and references totally different pop culture entertainment franchises. 

  • They have an API

  • And they support very complex searches.

  • They have an art tagger project, which allows the community to label MTG art. This helps to allow people to find connections in the art at several semantic levels.. For instance: 

    • You can find cards that have hidden monsters in the art. 

    • You can find cards that use a specific palette, like red-orange or green blue

• Some amazing MTG Data analysis: 

  • The first appearance of different creature power/toughness combinations, by set icon.

  • Race/Class/Color combinations on cards

  • The “evil color pie” which shows how evil is expressed by characters of different colors. This goes back to the idea that despite the fact that white and black are two of the five colors, they do not map to “good/evil’ at all.

• Economic analysis of MTG. There are dozens of different resources in the game, which have a kind of “exchange rate” between them.

Other episodes to check out if you liked this one:

Episodes 16: Pokémon is Autistic

Episode 35: Sex is Autistic (Alfred Kinsey episode)

Episode 39: Dungeons and Dragons is Autistic

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