Snusnumrick Shareholder Letter Q4 2024

2024-12-13

I often feel as though I said everything I had to say about MTG with previous long form writing and Tweets in my first year or two of engagement with the game with everything I’ve done since then just being floundering about. Of course this can’t be entirely true and here I will attempt to document some of things I have been thinking about recently.

Dynamically Leveraging Competitive Intelligence Ecosystem Paradigm Shifts

It’s not that I used to give zero credit to people it’s just that I focused solely on my own prep. These days I mostly think about preparation as a market and the general population as a moving entity. It’s dumb but not static so you have to keep asking yourself what your edge is.

Implementing Holistic Human Capital Architectural Frameworks for Collaborative Synergy Amplification

The quality of a testing team is very sensitive to exact composition. In a group of ten a single bad apple easily ruins the culture. The floor on some decent players talking is pretty high so it’s tempting to settle for that but I think it’s important to try and push further. This takes a number of forms but the general principle is prompting yourself with the question of how professional people would handle some situation. The angle of interviewing potential adds is also something that came up recently in discussion and I am excited to see how applying it pans out.

Multilateral Format Competency Calibration and Performance Vectoring Methodologies

The MOCS circuit is very unique way to engage with Magic. Four main formats plus multiple one offs is just so much to keep track of. My personal bar for good prep for a MOCS event is doing anything more than copy pasting a list the morning of an event (ideally a sideboard mapping document is involved) but most people fail to clear even that. Still the difference between being ok and good at a format is quite large and it’s better for you to be 65/65/50/50 than 55/55/55/55 so there is some balance that needs to be struck.

Strategic Cognitive Resource Allocation and Interpersonal Dynamic Recalibration Protocols

As soon as you are not actively testing people get distracted by nerd sniping (what if [ABSURD HYPOTHETICAL], how do we feel about [DIVISIVE NORM], …) and jostling for status (examples left as an exercise for the reader). It’s important to keep a narrow circle of concern and avoid getting sucked into that. I’d rather develop camaraderie by going through shared hardship than empty banter.

I’m writing this while sweating the results of the MOCS Opens this weekend. Unless things go horribly wrong I will be qualified for the two next PTs and will have to significantly adjust my approach to the game from a “just try to qualify and go from there” mindset. As part of that I will be trying to write more about what I am doing so stay tuned.