I’d failed to run a 5-Color event for 3 months and snuck one in today.  The time between announcement and event was about a week so I didn’t feel bad when 6 people canceled due to work and we had event participation of 6.  The deck I had built for the day quite simply blew as it was a case of what I call reactionary differentiation in trying to build a new deck.  I’d made a card choice, realize it made the deck closer to a deck I was trying to avoid building and would add the opposite.  This process happened between 8 and 12 times resulting in an unwieldy deck that did nothing particularly well.  I scraped through three matches winning two largely by non-core win conditions in the deck.  I sucked.

I didn’t play much Magic over the summer.  I didn’t play much Magic over the spring.  I didn’t play much Magic over the Winter.  I detect a trend.

The redeeming aspect of the event was going out to eat with Mike Noble where we coined a phenomenon for something I’ve been doing more and more often: conceptual name dropping.  Looking over my recent media posts I’ve used phrases like Buridan’s Ass, Morton’s Fork, Hobson’s Choice, File Drawer Effect, Euthypro dilemma, and Russell’s Teapot a lot.  I think there’s a power to having a name for a phenomenon such that I found I got more traction if I said someone was falling for the Perfect solution fallacy rather than saying “you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect”.  I’m glad I have a slightly mocking name for this tendency.