It’s the sixth week of my paternity leave. I recently became a twin dad in addition to being just a dad. Being off work and spending hours changing diapers and holding a baby or two offers a lot of time to think about stuff. I am a passionate Magic player and I haven’t been touching cards in the last few weeks, thus I found myself to be thinking about Magic a lot. So much that I felt the urge to put my thoughts down somehow. And here I am – writing the first post of my newly created blog.
A few notes on me
Since this is a Magic related blog I start with a brief summary of my Magic career. My brother was the one who introduced me to the game. He started playing during Time Spiral and always wanted me to also try it out. To me Magic looked complicated and somewhat intimidating and I thought it wouldn’t be worth it to learn how to play. In 2008, my brother qualified for Nationals. He was very excited and I decided to join him on the trip since he didn’t really know anyone from the local community yet. The tournament started well for him but he lost a couple of matches in a row to drop out early. However, even though I was only watching and didn’t really know what was going on, the overall tournament atmosphere fascinated me and I wanted to be an active part of it.
I played my first prerelease with Shards of Alara and threw a lot of dollar into MTGO within the first months. After a year or so me and my brother started to go to our local cardshop more frequently and we were introduces into the infamous Berlin limited scene. In 2010 we started travelling to GPs and basically didn’t miss a European limited GP for the years to come (Constructed was only played when necessary, e.g. at Nationals). During Scars of Mirrodin block I had a nice run with three cashes in a row and my first Pro Tour invite. In 2014 my son was born and the opporunities to travel for Magic became rare. At one of these, at GP Lyon 2015, I reached my first and final top 8 playing Battle for Zendikar. This somewhat terminated my competitive career, since a GP top 8 has always been this very unlikely yet not entirely unrealistic goal, given my limited time (and skill). Nowadays I enjoy GPs to play side events, usually I chain chaos drafts and beers.
Figure 1: Copyright owned by Wizards of the Coast
Let’s get to some of my non-magical background relevant for this blog. I grew up and live in Berlin, Germany. In 2010 I obtained a diploma (equiv. to M.Sc.) in mathematics with a focus on stochastics. Afterwards I received my doctorate (equiv. to PhD) in statistics, where I worked on Bayesian methods for infectious disease transmission models. Now I work as a biometrician for an institute that monitors and analyzes treatment quality in German health care, trying to make the world a little better.
My vision of this blog
Here I want to combine my hobby and occupation, Magic and theoretical and quantitative sciences. Each post should treat a Magic related topic or a scientific question related to one aspect of Magic. Some examples might be:
What is the optimal land distribution for a draft deck?
What is the skill distribution within a GP player field and how does it decompose into the various score brackets?
What is the best deck choice in a given metagame?
This is not a definitive list of topics I will adress in the near future, just a few example question which might show up some time. Also note, that some of the presented topics will be widely known problems which have already been adressed elsewhere. If that is the case though, I will always try to add a new perspective instead of just reinventing the wheel.
Within a typical blog post I will formulate a mathematical or statistical model capturing the problem at hand. Then I will try my best to analyze or solve the developed model. If it suits the problem and solution, I will also provide a web application in order to computationally solve each problem in the face of actual data. You will see what I mean once we get there.
Figure 2: Copyright owned by Wizards of the Coast
Be warned: In my posts I will not shy away from using formulas. In fact, you can expect to see formulas in each and every post. However, I will try to verbally explain formulas and mathematical results for those who aren’t familiar with mathematical language but are still interested in the problem. Still, it will be helpful to at least vaguely know some basic concepts from mathematics – especially stochastics – such as a probability distribution or an expected value.
One aspect which I am not sure about is the frequency of my postings. I have a few topics lined up, but I am not sure how often I will find time to write it up. My guess is I produce one post per month. Maybe I will split up one topic into multiple posts, also depending on the volume of each post. In that case, you can expect me to publish connected posts in a timely manner. Anyhow, the best strategy to not miss anything exciting is to follow me on twitter.
Lastly, I am very eager to hear feedback, especially once I posted some to real content. When formulating a mathematical model for a Magic related problem there is lot of space between right and wrong, since each model is only a simplification of the real multiverse. Thus, I will appreciate any opinion or alternative suggestions. If you have an interesting problem that is worth to be solved, feel free to share in the discussion. Alternatively you can find my mail contact in the bottom menu.