Magic speaks to the immaturity in all of us. Watch me with a booster pack sometime; I'm thirty-three and I still rip the thing open as soon as I get outside the store, like someone's going to take it away from me. And then, I almost invariably complain about the contents.

Sometimes I think I could open one of the fabled"God Packs" - the ones with fifteen rares - and still complain. Wizards could serve me roast angels on toast and I'd complain that I really don't like angel, and could I just have a burger, please?

Even the language of Magic appeals to the base elements in our character; when we win, the other player's not reduced to abject poverty, as in Monopoly, or a life of peonage and servitude, a la Risk. In Magic, most of the time, our opponent is dead, dead, dead: Deader than Jerry Garcia. Deader than Vanilla Ice's career. Deader than the deadest thing there is.

After every duel, there's a little part of the brain, somewhere in the part where we're all five, chanting"I'm better than you are, neener, neener, neener." I don't care how graceful a winner you are, or how nice you are, or how kind you are to your mother or stray cats, dogs, and raccoons - some part of your soul is dancing around, pointing and laughing at your vanquished foe.

And, if you lose, well, that same part wants to smash the winner's face in, take his cards, and give him an atomic wedgie. Is it any wonder that some people cheat, or that some people consider a debate to consist of badly-spelled personal insults?

I got in touch with my inner five-year-old the other day - my opponent slapped four enchantments on a Regenerating troll and bulldozed his way to eleven damage. Who does that? Who loses to that? One bounce spell, one destroy target critter, one remove from game, and he gets a big lesson in card advantage and why what he did was dumb. And I had none of the umpteen trillion cards that would have stopped his monstrosity and died horribly as a result.

I pride myself on being a good loser*, and even I couldn't keep Kindergarten Guy under control. I grouched at him, I whined, I was a very unhappy camper.

Magic, like it or not, has randomness to it. When we plead mana screw, or insanely wrong matchups, or sheer luck, sometimes we're right.**

Improbable plays come off all the time. Every day, there's a guy out there losing a game when one card in his deck would save him, turn the game around and make his opponent cry like Nancy Kerrigan, and there are four in the deck, and he hasn't seen one all day.

If nature abhors a vacuum, then humans hate randomness. Part of that is biological, or socio-biological: Humans are really good at noticing patterns - it seems to be hard-wired into the brain. If you present a person with the actual results of a coin flipped one hundred times and ask them to continue the series, most of the time, the person will create a sequence in which heads and tails are equal, because they know that's the"right" answer. The actual flipping, though, produces clumps of heads and tails. Clumps, oddly enough, are random, where alternation is not. People generally forget this - but random means random. That is, not subject to prediction or control.

This all so human desire to find patterns can be a total detriment. Once, black came up on a Monte Carlo roulette wheel twenty-eight times in a row. Let's say you showed up about half way through this miraculous run and were told about it. Probably you'd follow your instinct and put the college tuition, the house payment, and whatever you could get for your wife on red.

And you'd now be living in a dumpster, 'cause you weren't right for another fourteen spins of the wheel.

A casino has a vested interest in keeping things random; first, intermittent reinforcement has been shown to be the kind of reinforcement most likely to cause a repetition of the behavior you wish to have the subject repeat*** - and secondly, people are dumb and will try to find a pattern where none exists. Gambling breeds optimists.

People tend to be really, really good at noticing patterns. This came in really handy when our ancestors were figuring out the behavior of Woolly Mammoths. It's why we have fire, the printing press, penicillin, and computers that work. If it weren't for some semi-intelligent ape discovering that you can make sharp edges on this black rock over here, we'd still be eating things that just happened to drop dead. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Full House, people tend to think a pattern of white - black - white - black is random, when in fact it's highly organized. Think of a chessboard.

If your deck is randomized at the start of a match, it is possible to run into a fourteen-land run. Not only is it possible, but that happens to some poor person every day. We think there's a pattern there - too much land, too little preparation - but when you've got a tiny percentage of something happening, it sometimes just happens. Heck, I know that my chances of winning the lottery are less than my chances of getting struck by lightening twice, but I'll still buy a ticket from time to time.****

Randomness is hard and unpleasant. Kids hate it... And adults? Well, we try to pretend it's not there. And sometimes we all hate it - why do bad things happen to good people? Magic is riddled with it, and the downside to that is that things sometimes just don't go your friggin' way. We try to minimize randomness - that's why we play with four-ofs, why we scour the Net for decks, why we read strategy articles... But the only way to beat it is cheat.

Let's also admit, once and for all, that if you win a tournament, you've just had luck on your side for a day. Preparation's important, the metagame is key - but you did, in fact, get lucky. Let's assume you went undefeated - you probably played eight rounds of Swiss, and then won through the top Eight. You still only beat eleven people, out of how many at the tournament? Think you could have beaten all of 'em?

These insights should surprise no one; after all, a mathematician invented Magic. Probability theory governs Magic the same way it governs Poker; each card is just as likely to be any card in the deck except the ones drawn before it. That's why the broken cards are the cards that get around randomness. They allow you to search for a card, or make all cards part of their win condition, or they break the rules in some fundamental way that reduces the effect of random ordering. That's why some players hate Limited - it multiplies chance by limiting you to a random set of cards.

Another way of expressing chance is risk... And that's where these ideas have more significance than the musings of a poorly-informed theorist. Anyone versed in the functions of the market will tell you that potential risk equals potential return. The greater the chance of losing your money, the more money you stand to make. (Setting aside fraud, of course; there really ain't no such thing as a free lunch, as anyone who invested in Enron can tell you.) Magic is full of unavoidable risk - that's why you have to shuffle - but avoidable risk is another matter. Some people prefer to avoid it, and prefer to play decks that are known quantities, that make their chances of winning primarily driven by their skill at playing the deck. The playtesting's already been done - in the hands of a truly skilled player, this deck can win. The only unknown is whether you can play it effectively.

Some people choose to embrace it, and cheerfully crawl out on a limb with an unproven deck and then rely on their play skill.

It's a similar strategy to buying stocks - buy the risky ones, and you might make a killing and retire to the Riviera. You might also end up collecting cans in your old age. Buy the blue chips and get wealthy slowly. If you prefer a bond comparison, buy T-Bills, you're making a loan to the US Government. If your T-Bills tank, you've go worse problems than the fact that your money's gone - you're going to be armed to the teeth and sitting in the dark watching for looters. If you buy junk bonds, you're making a loan to Fly-By-Night Inc, and you're quite possibly better off making little green paper airplanes.

Play a Net Deck and you're buying the T-Bills. You've bet the favorite, you're playing it safe. Build something yourself, and you're buying Fly-By-Night. You've put the mortgage on number 33, you're hoping for the long shot.

It amuses me to see people defend the choice to play a Net Deck, or a well-publicized deck if you insist. It's a strategy that needs no defense, because it's the smart strategy if you're concerned about the end result - the good record, if not the win. There's nothing wrong with that - you'll be sitting over there opening boosters while Don Quixote is in the ER from tilting at windmills.

"I want your place at the bar, I want your girlfriend in love, I want to cut off your head and watch it rolling to the basket." - Elvis Costello

Rogues want it all; they want to win, but they want to do it without a net, with the crowd oohing and ahing. We want to break the card and redefine the format. Rogue is about risk, and it needs no defense if you're about risk.

Guess what? Most of the time, reality gives us a wet slap in the face.

The record ends up 0-2, 3-5, 1-3, whatever's below the cut: a quick lesson in what risk really means. The payout's 35-1 for a reason, you big yahoo - they don't pay it very often.

Magic only rewards risk in big ways - most games I play, there's some point where you have to just go for it. Pros don't take unwarranted risks - after all, this is their paycheck they're talking about. Calculated risks, yes, but not unwarranted risk. Icarus is not a role model. Death or glory, in most cases, is not a viable strategy for building a rating. The problem is what one does then - when all things are equal, you are in fact rewarded for innovation, as you have become the random factor - the thing that cannot be predicted.

Most of the time, though, things are not equal.

The most immature belief is that there is one right way to be and that way is your way. I know some really tall infants; some of them drive themselves to tournaments. There's a real temptation to give in to this. Still, Magic speaks to our immaturity, but it also speaks to our innocence.

C'mon, haven't you always wanted to take out a windmill?

In the spirit of sheer zaniness, I submit the Spice Girls deck list I promised:

Spice Girls.Dec (Give Me What I Want)*****
2 Booby Trap
2 Grinning Totem
1 Ivory Tower
1 Mirari
1 Mox Diamond
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Icy Manipulator
1 Death Wish (Scary Spice)
1 Demonic Tutor
2 Clone
4 Counterspell
2 Cunning Wish (Baby Spice)
1 Diminishing Returns
2 Flying Men
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Relearn
2 Rewind
1 Vesuvan Doppelganger
3 Living Wish (Sporty Spice)
1 Regrowth
3 Burning Wish (Ginger Spice)
1 Iridescent Angel
1 Enlightened Tutor
3 Golden Wish (Posh Spice)
2 Suntail Hawk

26 Land (all Duals, Lairs, and Tap Duals)

* - I've had a lot of practice.

** - Usually, though, we're wrong, which is why one should keep one's big yap shut.

*** - Intermittent reinforcement is when behavior will result in a reward, but not all the time. The fact that some rares are awesome and some are okay, or terrible, but you only get one to a booster is an example.

**** - I only buy one when the jackpot is up to 100 Million. I have some respect for math.

***** - I'm sorry if the song gets stuck in your head. You can dope slap me if we ever meet in real life.