I’ve been reading sirlin for years – preetttty awesome. I love his articles around the application of actual game theory and mathematical balance to games.. (of course!)

I had a similiar Starcraft journey.. and I’m still enamoured with the professional scene. Of note to your barracks comment – in pro matches of Starcraft it’s not uncommon to see 15-20 factories/barracks constantly at work in the end game!

And yeah, whenever I was into magic heavy my friends and I would hit the site all the time. Its where/how I would keep up with my friends plans for instawin combos. I’d watch what color they’d play and hold onto one thing to screw over any game winning combo hat could go with the deck.

Magic is actually a really excellent example of a really deep game that (when the designers do it right) is extremely well balanced. Do you know about the official Magic website? Lots of great articles in there.

The thing that finally made me realize that having allusions of standing were just silly was Magic the Gathering. Back in the days of Mirrodin(sp?) My friends that I played with kept making two or three card game enders, and I hated it. I called it cheap and said it wasn’t type II or some other nonsense.

Eventually though I poured in and said forget it, I was going to beat them, I knew their crux, I knew what they relied on to win and how to ruin it, and so I went about finding cards that removed single cards and all their duplicates from the game, thus neutering my friends decks. I got called cheap for it in return, but I had found a way to beat them.

It was after that I actually started opening up my characters and paying attention to tricks, not thinking of things as cheap. I’d acknowledge if something was gray in terms of programming and possibly even report it as a bug, but I’d continue using it, because it was there.

I’d never seen the playing to win series though, I think I’m going to enjoy it.