Day 20 — Life, Luck, and Magical Cardboard
Magic: the Gathering has been part of my life since I was 8 years old. It’s a strategic trading card game (TCG) where players take the role of powerful wizards, summoning creatures and casting spells to defeat their opponents. It’s the longest-running TCG and definitely served as some inspiration for the popular Pokémon Trading Card Game and Yu-Gi-Oh!.
The most famous Magic card is Black Lotus, which often pops up in the news when one sells for a record amount. This January, a copy of the card signed by its now-deceased artist sold for over 500k USD! (5000万 JPY!)
I played semi-competitively for a few years, with tournaments taking me to many cities around the world like Warsaw, Bologna, Prague, Taipei, and Shizuoka. I still play some events every now and then, and below is a picture of me winning an event where the top prize included four Hamburg steaks. They were pretty yum and the most unique prize I’ve won at a tournament.
Having played Magic for over 20 years, it’s taught me many lessons in all areas of life and is possibly even why I got into coding. This article will talk about lessons about luck that I’ve learned from the game.
The concept of luck is an intriguing one. We have a bunch of idioms in English such as “beginner’s luck”, “to push one’s luck”, and we wish each other “good luck” before an undertaking. It seems to be pretty baked into our society and culture, and I’m sure many similar idioms exist in other languages.
Recently, I read a perspective that luck doesn’t really exist for the future — it is more a way for us to frame things and interpret past events. I found it to be a provocative way of looking at it. I don’t want to get too deep into the philosophy of luck, so let’s see if we can talk about some practical takeaways.
Some things are out of your control
Magic is a card game that uses a randomized deck of cards, like poker, 大富豪 (Daifugō), or even Uno. Whatever cards you draw are up to chance. This means that luck is a big part of the game.
Even if you do everything right, you can lose. Even if you make a lot of mistakes, you can win. I think that you can find parallels to this in real life.
I’ve won many games of Magic where I made mistakes. They just didn’t come back to bite me.
Just because you succeeded doesn’t mean you did the right things.
In university, I once had a long essay assignment that I had months to work on and would count for a large percentage of my grade.
Did I start writing it early and gradually so I could have a manageable amount to deal with each week? Clearly not, or else it wouldn’t make a good story to write about here…
I left it to the day before the deadline before I even started writing it. Not only that, I decided that I would go clubbing that day too! I ended up handing the assignment in a day late, but I ended up with a respectable score.
Does this mean that I took the correct approach? I think most people would say no. It somehow worked out, but I would do things differently if I had another chance. I can see that I didn’t make the best decisions. (It also seems like I didn’t learn my lesson, seeing as I’m here writing this article at the last minute.)
On the other hand, just because something turned out poorly doesn’t mean you did something incorrectly.
In a game of Magic, you can make the correct plays and still lose because the cards lined up better for your opponent than they did for you.
A friend of mine left their house to be five hours early for their holiday flight. However, there was a bad accident on the motorway and they ended up missing their flight. You could argue that there were other things they could have done, but I’d say that they did everything within reason (actually, I think five hours is unreasonably early) and yet they ended up with an unfavourable outcome.
Baz Luhrmann — Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) is one of my favourite songs. I find its little snippets of insights and advice to be appropriate across many life situations.
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much
Or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s
For me, these few lines from the song tell us that outcomes are often not within our control. We make decisions but we don’t get to choose the results.
There are plenty of ideas that never got off the ground because of unlucky timing. Imagine the number of businesses that have collapsed during the pandemic that may have succeeded at other times. On the other hand, there are countless numbers of creators that don’t achieve the same success as others in their industry for not-so-discernible reasons.
Concentrate on the things you can actually change
Luck plays a big part in a game of Magic. But not everything is up to luck. There are things that you can affect and influence, and that’s what we can focus on.
Less experienced players have a tendency to blame their losses more on luck, and there is a natural and common reaction to these situations to be annoyed or frustrated.
The lesson I learned from Magic is to be put less mental energy into things that are outside of my control. I try to downplay the losses when I “get unlucky”. It’s part of the game and I’ve had my fair chance of lucky victories. Instead, I can make sure that I am making the right choices and avoiding major mistakes.
This expands to areas that aren’t so much to do with chance. There are a lot of things in the world that I believe could be improved, but it would be a waste of energy if I would get worked up over everything.
Humans love to complain, and it can often be a nice way to release some stress. However, complaining about the same thing endlessly can exhaust us without any progress to show for it.
I find it important to make a decision internally — either take action to influence something I’m unhappy with or do nothing and accept that things will stay as they are. We don’t have unlimited time and effort, so we have to pick our battles to get the best results.
You can’t get lucky if you don’t even try
Are you the kind of person who enters themselves into lucky draws and competitions? I am.
In high school, I won tickets to a two-day music festival from a free prize competition. I also won several movie tickets from random giveaways on Facebook before. I’ve been entering a lottery each year to win a blender from a company I buy a lot of kiwifruit from but that dream hasn’t come true yet.
I have been in many games that seemed hopeless but in which I decided to persevere and play on. I’m not going to lie, I did lose most of those games, but there are a good number that I miraculously managed to win because my deck decided to be extra nice.
The lesson I learned from Magic is that to get lucky, you have to put yourself in the right position. In particular — when there’s nothing to lose, why not give yourself a chance to win it all? Even if the odds of success are minuscule, they’re better than the 0% chance that you would have if you didn’t even try.
You won’t make new friends if you don’t even try to find situations where you can meet them. Meeting your soul mate is going to take a lot of luck, but how are you going to find them without putting yourself out there?
That’s all for now
This got a bit longer than I thought it would, so I’ll wrap it up here. In summary:
Direct your energy at things you can influence
Focusing on the things I can control gives me a feeling of freedom and makes me reflect on my actions, no matter the outcome. Of course, I am still human and affected by the actual results, but this mindset helps me cope with failures and helps me find the next steps towards my desired results.
Make your own luck
Many Magic cards have “flavour text” — text that does not affect the game but is there to give some background information or set the tone. I’ll leave you with some from a card that is memorable to me:
Opportunity isn’t something you wait for. It’s something you create.
So what are you waiting for? Go and make some opportunities!
This article is part of the 2021 HENNGE Advent Calendar. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. 2021 HENNGE Advent Calendar presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2021
