My best-kept secret is that I have avidly played the trading card game Magic: the Gathering for almost ten years. (Okay, maybe it wasn’t that good a secret, considering my apartment has an entire shelf weighed down with solely Magic cards and accessories.) I find it such a rewarding hobby because it engages with many aspects of my life, from engineering to friendship to writing and everything in between.

Magic, or M:tG, links up especially well with my recent reading interests, namely, David Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Thinking is a valiant effort to summarize a lifetime’s worth of Nobel-Prize-winning research in cognitive bias and decision-making, every chapter unlocking a different secret of the human brain. Kahneman spends most of his ink summarizing the most common cognitive illusions in our decision-making, those moments when we feel perfectly rational but in fact are acting illogically or even subconsciously letting our emotions run the ship.

As I was trying to contextualize Thinking‘s wealth of info for my own life, I kept realizing how many of my M:tG experiences revolve around cognitive bias in myself and others. Eventually, I realized the connections were rather profound; for Magic players, avoiding these biases can level-up their skill as players, and for other humans, seeing these biases applied in the harmless context of a fantasy game may reveal just how widespread cognitive biases are.

Without further ado, here are the 5 most common cognitive biases in Magic:

[Actually, with further ado — skip the italic section if you are familiar with Magic! Magic: the Gathering, published by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is a collectible card game that is a fantasy-flavored hybrid of chess and poker. Human players take on the role of powerful wizards called Planeswalkers, and they do battle against one another by casting spells, summoning creatures, and calling upon the aid of lesser planeswalkers. In order to “cast” these effects from their custom-built deck, players must tap into the power of nature, which is called “mana”, and serves as the primary economy of Magic. Magic is the oldest (and dare I say, best) trading card game and has become so popular in its 26 years that individual cards may sell on the secondary market for thousands of dollars (yes, seriously). Some Magic players compete in tournaments, and the collective standings of tournament-winning “deck archetypes” (groups of similar decks) are known as the “metagame”. Magic’s metagame shifts naturally as WotC releases new Magic expansions every three months.]

Illusion 1: Substitution

Oko, the Trickster / Chris Rallis

The high-level tournament structure of M:tG necessitates a rigorously balanced metagame and is enforced by periodic “bans”, where WotC will exclude problematic cards from the tournament-legal pool. The bog-standard Magic player is notoriously fickle when it comes to bans, and will often clamor on social media for a card’s banning months before the regularly scheduled ban announcement. Bans get political, too, since usually, the players arguing for a banned card aren’t the same people winning with that card.

Kahneman explains this phenomenon as “Substitution”, where humans will often answer a hard question by mentally substituting an easy one. When asked, “Is the card Nexus of Fate banworthy?” (a complex question that requires consideration of metagame health, win-loss data from online matches, secondary market price, card availability, and public relations), Kahneman’s results suggest that Magic players will instead answer the question “Can I beat the decks that run Nexus of Fate, and do I hate losing to Nexus of Fate?”. The substituted question is easy, but the original question is what truly matters.

Some other examples of Substitution: When asked “Is this new card Oko, Thief of Crowns going to be good?”, Magic players often substitute the easier question “How good was a similar card I played ten years ago?” without considering that they just pigeonholed Oko, Thief of Crowns into a totally inappropriate archetype (spoiler for the non-Magic people — Oko was very, very good and has been mega-banned for his efforts, r.i.p.).

Or, when asked “Will Joe Shmo make a good president?”, we will substitute the substantially easier question “Will my city/state/tax refund benefit if Joe becomes president?” or even “Does Joe look/talk/act the part?”.

Even being aware of our common propensity for Substitution allows us to interrupt the process and “turn on our brains”, answering better questions in Magic and life alike.

Illusion 2: Loss Aversion

Calix, Destiny’s Hand / Chuck Lukacs

Magic cards typically change hands via the time-honored barter. “Do you want to trade my Doomwake Giant for your Calix, Destiny’s Hand?” Kahneman has bad news for the traders, though, when he reports that we humans fear loss more than we seek reward. In other words, losing my Giant hurts more (psychologically speaking) than gaining Calix, even if I’m making a bit of monetary profit. Notably, even if I will never use my Giant, the sense of endowment bestowed by my brief ownership already has me fearing the pain of losing it.

In Magic, loss aversion keeps us using the same ol’ faithful cards long after their expiration date, even if they’ve long been power-crept into obsolescence (this is especially true for my favorite format, Magic “Cube”, where a player curates a custom 360-card-plus set of their favorite cards).

Another instance of loss aversion is when one has a favorite restaurant, which serves excellent food menu-wide, and yet one habitually orders a single dish every time, without even trying the other options once. We fear getting a dish that doesn’t compare to our usual, even more than we would enjoy finding a dish we like more than our usual!

Now, nostalgia (whether for food or Magic) isn’t all bad, but sometimes it limits our possibilities. Kahneman notes that the fear of regret is much greater than the actual negative experience of regret. So, try a new dish/card! Even if it goes south, you won’t regret it as much as you think.

Illusion 3: Risk Evaluation

Giant Killer / Shawn Wood

One of Kahneman’s biggest insights is that, where our intuitions are concerned, “what you see is all there is”. Either a risk is all-consuming, or it’s completely negligible, regardless of its actual threat. This heuristic made sense for our prehistorical monkey brains (i.e. my head cold mattered, on balance, much less than the tiger stalking me), but it makes modern humans extremely bad at assessing risk.

The effects are patently obvious in M:tG. Multiplayer games are a tedious procession of whack-a-mole: one player ekes out an edge, only to be served a bowl of piping-hot smackdown soup by the rest of the group. The free-for-all typically goes to the player who kept their threats secret, biding their time until their opponents no longer considered them a threat.

Another common case of risk (mis-)evaluation in Magic is when players spend their deck’s one premium creature-kill spell on a mediocre creature, despite knowing that their opponent has premium must-kill creatures in their deck, just because the mediocre creature is presently eating away at their life points. Under the metric of loss aversion, the future risk of dying in 1 turn to the opponent’s premium creature pales next to the present danger of dying in 12 turns to the mediocre creature!

In other parts of life, the recent Coronavirus scare is a perfect example of risk evaluation. Despite being less contagious than measles and less lethal than HIV/AIDS, because Coronavirus is news-worthy, the world has focused on the new virus to the exclusion of all other risks. For the average American, you’re more likely to die checking your phone in traffic for Coronavirus updates than you are to die by actual Coronavirus, yet the more realistic threat gets largely ignored for the sake of the sensational one.

The takeaway: Despite what your monkey brain might be urging, the threat you see might not be all there is.

Illusion 4: Regression to the Mean

Answered Prayers / Seb McKinnon

Every once in a while, players “spike” a M:tG event at a local store and go undefeated. It’s a great feeling, and they leave thinking they’re “on a hot streak” or that they’ve improved as a player. They’re usually dismayed the next week when they employ the same strategy, but to a mediocre finish. They wonder, despondently, if they’ve gotten worse, or they blame their opponents for playing dirty. Kahneman absolves both the player and their opponent when he calls this phenomenon an example of Regression to the Mean.

This needs a little more explanation. M:tG is a game of luck as much as it is of skill — luck of the draw evens the playing field, so that players with more experience/money don’t always deterministically win. I consider myself a skilled Magic player — let’s say I would win 6/10 games if M:tG were skill-only. Now, if my luck of the draw for a particular day works out 100% in my favor (which you can conceptualize as rolling two 6-sided dice to get a perfect 12 result), so I win 10/10 games. But if I roll the imaginary Magic-luck-dice again tomorrow, probability tells us the average result will be 7/12 (only 60% in my favor), so I might only win 5/10 games. I’m left thinking that I’ve “gotten worse” compared to yesterday, but really I’m just experiencing a larger sample size, where my average luck is closer to 7/12 than it is to 12/12. (Note that the odds of rolling a 12 don’t change from roll to roll, but aggregated over 100 rolls, the average result will be about 7.)

Other ways we encounter regression to the mean:

A child having a relatively bad-attitude day right after they had a great-attitude day (“What happened, honey? Yesterday you loved carrots!”).

Basketball players appearing to have “hot hands”, when in fact they are just more lucky than average for that time period.

Giving a weekly update presentation that improved compared to last week’s abysmal one (it works both ways).

Exceptionally tall parents having averagely-short children and vice versa (this is actually what led Sir Francis Galton to discover/invent regression, and it’s worth a Wiki dive if you have the time after finishing this mega-essay).

Clearly, regression to the mean is super-common, but we often mistake simple luck for causality. We need to remember, we’re not bad Magic players (or humans) when we regress to the mean! It’s just the law of averages at work.

Illusion 5: Expertise

Murderous Rider / Jenn Ravenna

Believe it or not, some people make a living from Magic. People like Louis Scott-Vargas, Marshall Sutcliffe, and Maria Bartholdi do Magic for a job — but they mostly write/talk/etc about it, because tournament earnings are somewhat inconsistent given that you have to, you know, win.

As a result, there are a lot of professional Magic articles across the Internet, many of which concern gameplay (how to get better, which cards are underrated or powerful in the current metagame, deck breakdowns, etc). However, some of the most-clicked articles are like any other sport or game — they’re attempts by the authors to predict the future. Kahneman strongly warns us against blindly trusting expert forecasts — though our minds may be inclined to believe a trusted, expert source, chance are that source isn’t too accurate.

If Kahneman were a Magic player, he would say that the majority of far-reaching future predictions that Magic pros and experts make (i.e. “this archetype is going to be great next year” or “I predict that the next expansion will feature XYZ”) basically boil down to things an algorithm could do. The competitive future of a Magic card is a combination of metagame position and the ratio of mana cost to game effect; in this sense, an algorithm may be just as capable of making metagame predictions, with just as much accuracy as a human expert!

That’s not to say that Magic pros are bad at playing Magic (much to the contrary!). But their skill at playing a game does not translate to making accurate predictions about the future.

The implications are clear in the wider world, too — Kahneman explicitly relates this inability to see the future to stock traders, baseball scouts, and Bordeaux oenophiles.

Conclusion

Serra the Benevolent / Magalli Villenueve

M:tG serves as a microcosm of the human brain when it comes to hidden biases and cognitive illusions. Some of the most interesting illusions include:

We answer hard questions by substituting easy ones

We fear loss more than we seek reward

Risk is either mentally all-consuming or totally ignored

Regression to the mean is responsible for many of our disappointments

Experts may be skilled at intuition, but their far-future accuracy doesn’t exceed that of a robot

Cognitive illusions are widespread and humbling, but that doesn’t mean they have to be discouraging. To the contrary, by awakening to the true landscapes of our minds, we will be better equipped to make meaningful, active decisions — and maybe we’ll pick up an extra win in Magic along the way!