The Bureaucratic Implications Of Magic: the Gathering

Despite my gamer background, I never got into Magic: the Gathering or its spin-offs. (This is not a rant against the game.) (Note for non-gamers: chess is the most popular & profitable game in human history, and MtG is second despite being only a couple decades old. MtG is that big.) (Unsure if that statistic includes Go, but you see the point.) Partly I was busy with roleplaying & tabletop wargames; partly I was nervous about cost after a friend once said, “I needed new wheels while unemployed, so I sold enough of my Magic card collection to buy a new truck”; but mostly because the mentality was alien to me. The mechanic was all about combining cards, rules & resources to achieve effective and sometimes out-of-nowhere combinations with which to defeat your opponent at the game table. It felt off. There was no real context. It was just stacking rules for marginal gains. An attitude I labeled “incrementalism”.

That mechanic wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t even a question of “right or wrong”. I could barely explain to myself what MtG did differently from my D&D tomes. My question was mostly, “Where did this come from?” We had card games for a long time before MtG. None were comparable. This indicates a mindset that the human race did not have in previous generations.

There was a tabletop wargame to which I had the same reaction, called Warmachine if you’re curious. The miniatures were amazing and fun to paint; the steampunk backstory was great and even spawned a few books that didn’t suck; the ruleset was tight (once its 2nd edition standardized things); and I hated playing the game. It was the strangest thing, because every element of it had my approval. The reason is because I kept fielding my soldiers like they were soldiers, my artillery like artillery and my commanders like the rear-echelon resource cornucopias that HQ units always have been. That was not the ethos of Warmachine. Your commander was THE frontline centerpiece and the only reason he had an army at all, was to serve as a delivery vehicle for the other commander’s assassination by any means necessary. Nothing else mattered. Even in games with “king of the hill” or similar objectives, you could always just kill the other commander to win.

Opponent: “My cheapo militia activates its one-time invulnerability this turn and runs into position to block your bodyguard, then my artillery knocks down your mech, which gives me line of sight for my HQ’s now-unblockable charge that… stacks bonuses… I oneshot your boy. Good game.”

Me: “I inflicted 90% casualties on your forces with only one KIA. Doesn’t that count for something?”

Opponent: “Hey now, half those casualties were MY doing!”

No joke. Example, one Warmachine faction had cheap flamethrower infantry. You’d think that would be a good unit for chokepoints or something, especially because there were no rules for war crimes, but their real use was in open fields because of a rule that said they exploded when killed by “an attack from their rear arc”. The explosion was more powerful than their flamethrowers. Large mechs could throw small figures impressively far. So, your battlemech would walk up behind 2 or 3 of your flamer dudes, and chuck ‘em at the enemy while their squadmates patiently waited their turn for “deployment”. So long as they were picked up & flung from behind, it counted as “an attack from their rear arc” never mind it was friendly fire. The tactic was so popular that they were nicknamed “holy hand grenades” in the forums.

And if you had the proper unit placed (suicidally) downrange, you could recycle their souls into extra mojo for your HQ’s next turn, too. Again, only your HQ mattered and there were no rules for war crimes.

Then there was the “hockey stick charge”. What does charging at your enemy look like? Haha sucker, it looks like whatever the rule says it does! And the rule as written for a long time, said your miniature could change facing freely during a charge but the movement had to be in a straight line and for at least 3”. So, if your fighter started his turn only 2” away from a target, he could turn away from his target, charge past his target, then turn again and claim a “charging” bonus while stabbing the foe from behind.

Reality didn’t matter. “Rules as intended” didn’t matter. What did matter, was that a rule existed that you could cite for a minor tactical advantage. The game’s makers encouraged such “rules as written” thinking.

Where am I going with this? I found a parallel explanation of incrementalism.

The end of Two-Step self-interest

h ttps://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-end-of-two-step-self-interest.html

By Bruce Charlton, 27 July 2026

The Old Left in Britain was largely rooted in the self-interest of unionized skilled workers, who strove to protect their pay and conditions over the medium to long-term.

It was accepted that, in the short-term, workers would lose-out.

By union activity they would become less popular with employers, need to pay union dues, attend meetings, maybe embark on self-education; and if there were strikes they would lose wages.

My point is that at this time - from the 1800s right up into the middle-1900s; ordinary people were thinking in the medium to long-term; on a timescale that encompassed years ahead.

Let’s call this Two-Step self-interest.

Emphasis his. Something bad happened to humanity at the start of the 20th Century or thereabouts. Exactly what is not in any history book, but man, nearly every inhumanity we now experience from the Federal Reserve to Forever War sprang from those early 1910s.

Some Zionists pinpoint 1840 as the beginning of our current woes. I would put it later, no sooner than the (now known to be engineered) financial panics of late 19th Century, but maybe that’s just my outside observer status not being able to see the early steps.

But we now (and increasingly over the past half-century) inhabit an era of One-Step self-interest.

The concern is with me, here, now. Proposed change to our work and life is evaluated on the basis of what may benefit me today, tomorrow, next week, maybe next year?

This is part of the change from an Old Leftism based around class, economics, and power; to a New Leftism based around lifestyle, personal identity, social status, self-esteem etc.

Charlton’s One-Step is comparable to my incrementalism. If so, then Magic: the Gathering’s existence proves that this change is not something our ruling class decided to impose. Its existence proves that human minds, on a large scale, are not behaving the way they once did.

He lost me a little with previous speculation that humanity today is spiritually different from humanity past. That would raise the possibility that Scripture is no longer relevant to humanity as it once was, a concern that his subsequent musings about direct man-God mysticism confirmed in my mind. While I agree that the organized Church is dead, I believe that’s because its mission is completed, not because human souls are qualitatively different than a century ago and require a new approach to Christianity.

But if I’m right, then where did Magic: the Gathering’s popularity come from?

New Leftism is a top-down ruling class project. It does not seriously seek support among working class unionized workers; but instead among the managerial and intellectual workers, among “youth” (and youth-minded) who value being “cool”; and by pandering to an expanding client class of disaffected self-conceptualized victims.

New Leftism has coincided with and also abolished Two-Step reasoning from all public discourse.

The pursuit of basic self-interest is nowadays regarded as despicable - except among the designated victim class; who must accept subservient status and live by grace and favour of The System to retain this contingent privilege.

There is simply no place in mainstream societal and professional public discourse for considering the medium/ long-term consequences of changes.

New Leftism didn’t build that preoccupation with short-term thinking over long-term thinking. Technology is my go-to explanation for why modern humans behave differently from ancient humans because it truly is a gamechanger. One notices that MtG’s popularity began with the first generation of kids to grow up with computers. Both require abstract reasoning on a level so high that few ancients could have imagined, let alone achieved…

…All of whom would have been bureaucrats, because elaborate Systems of rules don’t survive engagement with reality. (Sly look at the fatality rate of self-driving cars.)

Abstract, because little that most people do today is practical, manual stuff. One reason my blogging rate has fallen off is because I’m redirecting my energy to hobbies that make me work with my hands, away from the Internet. Making stuff with hand tools keeps me mentally healthy in ways that doomscrolling modern headlines manifestly doesn’t. People today are not in touch with Nature as we nearly always have been, and I think such an artificial environment is bad for long-term planning. Such environments require dependence upon the System. I don’t blame people, mostly. Our rulers clearly intend to impose System dependence upon us whether we accept it or not.

Although that’s no excuse for letting them win without pushback. Especially when their ultimate goal is our Systematic culling.

Perhaps modern society is locked into a civilizational fever. We are trapped by forces beyond our control, long-term planning is almost useless with the upheavals happening monthly, so it becomes natural for our outlook on life to shrink to a short-termist “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” attitude. The number of people in the decision loops of most governments has been at an all-time low since computers got rid of middle managers in the 1980s.

Consequently (or from some other cause) people have actually become incapable of Two-Step reasoning, of evaluating their own Two-Step self-interest.

They can, and do, look no further ahead of more widely than me/ here/ now; and become very uncomfortable or angry when anyone tries to make them consider the medium-long term consequences of proposed change.

All that people ask, all that they can conceptualize; is that proposed change be approved officially or by their chosen “authority; and have some superficially-plausible chance of yielding One-Step self-interest - better conditions or pay, perceived chance of promotion, higher status among peers etc.

There’s definitely a pleasure, dare I say “dopamine hit”, in finding new ways to take advantage of a System for personal gain. That is the essence of game mechanics that rely on brief, advantageous exceptions to how a System normally operates. That was also the essence of the Plandemic for too many petty tyrants. The State made the lockdowns a Thing, and rather than fight it, people decided how to work it to their advantage. Most just took a vacation. Some began nagging their neighbors. Some quit paying rent, invoking brand-new hardship rules. A few poisoned children or choked the elderly to pay off their student debts.

Incremental advantage within an arbitrary system of rules?

The implication of MtG in the context of Normie America’s quiet acceptance of endgame-level tyranny, may be that short-term success within a bureaucratic System is the practical and rewarding decision if you are dependent upon that System regardless, and particularly for people habituated to System-style abstract thinking. Whereas rejecting a System from the inside, even ineffectively, is a whole different mind- & skillset. One that begins with a “rules as intended” attitude, not “rules as currently written”… one that quickly requires a theology of Suffering.

Are abstract thinking and bureaucratic thinking the same thing? Rules without context, do they inevitably become tools by which we one-up each other?