Untitled

2025-10-19

I’ve tried to talk about elements of this many times and invariably have ended up failing to do so and taking down my attempts. I continue making attempts because this was a huge part of my life and has a lot of bearing on my path moving forward. Arguably part of my historical issue is overvaluing authenticity and being too transparent in public but I think I am comfortable with the tradeoffs involved in that. Let me start by talking about some of my background. I’ve never been socially adept and went through a lot of social difficulties in my life getting yanked out of the dominant context of first half of my life when I abandoned religion, being abused by my parents, and just across the board struggling to form or maintain relationships with people. I don’t say any of that as a form of “woe is me” but to make clear that I have observed a lot of relevant datapoints here and at this juncture my dominant model is just viewing myself as having something akin to -3 Charisma persistently adversely affecting ability to interact effectively with others. In the short-run this can be fine but in the long-run masking becomes more difficult and negative edge compounds.

For a long time I felt that if anything Magic was helping me here since it provided a clear shared context and purpose. I thought that if I delivered value (specifically by being a good teammate and helping drive process) and sent costly signals (like investing a lot of time or repeatedly working with people) that would enable me to form effective working relationships. This went through a lot of ups and downs with me feeling like I had a good group at some points and feeling like I had no one to work with at others but at the end of the day I think the patterns informing how things ended up are visible as a throughline in all that specifically the fact that the vast majority of groups I felt good about were ones I created in spaces that were undersaturated. People may have found it beneficial to work with me in some contexts but generally were not very invested in doing so if they had better options. While I was not qualified for the PT this was mostly fine but as soon as I requalified (my experience for New Capenna was an anomaly. Objectively I should not have been on that team but some combination of people overrating me spiking a MOCS while new and people vouching for me got me in) that started to become clear with people I expected to potentially work with turning me down and me eventually getting stuck working with Daniel’s group for a second event in a row despite it being clearly non-functional only to have even that implode.

What I’ll do now is touch on some specific examples.

When I was first having difficulties with team stuff this year one of the people I thought my relationship with was strongest by virtue of working together extensively contacted me to say they would work with me for worlds if I qualified. Later they joined a large team and that was the end of the discussion. If I was in their shoes I would likely have done the same though I would not have made such a commitment to start with and certainly would have followed up on it having made it.

When I got left by the wayside after putting plans to organize my own group on hold to work with Andrew he communicated that he was sorry about taking actions that benefitted him at my expense.

When I left Daniel’s team after finally getting tired of being insulted multiple former teammates contacted me to say they thought Daniel was in the wrong and specifically that has behavior was “unacceptable”. None of them had spoken up previously and all continued working with him.

When I complaining on Twitter about feeling upset with how things were going for me after leaving Daniel’s g multiple people contacted me to say they thought my complaining was unproductive and burning bridges. This struck me as fundamentally misunderstanding the situation in a number of ways since I did not see there being bridges left to be burned with any of the people I made reference to and my historical record has seemed to demonstrate that if there is a “productive” way to present myself to the public eye I do not know what it is.

At the same time one of the things I mentioned was having been ghosted when inquiring about joining Cosmos. The person responsible for that who I had worked with extensively and was one of the rare instances where I thought our relationship extended beyond the game in some capacity contacted me and communicated that the reason for this was that they were not willing to vouch for me.

At the same time multiple people contacted me multiple people contacted me communicating some form of validating a friendship. This seemed to demonstrate a large disconnect to me as I don’t really think there can be any basis for a friendship with someone you wouldn’t want to team with MTG when friendship is 60% shared experiences 40% general evaluation of a person.

I engaged with MTG and the community around it very extensively for around five years and had a lot of decision points during that time. It’s hard to say what takeaways can be drawn from that because there are not many decisions I regret and don’t think it is particularly viable to take a calculated approach to engagement with people over such a long duration for something that is as large a part of ones life. A common thread in the interactions I described here is people placing relatively little value on their relationship with me or more specifically a mismatch in our relative perceptions but that is more of a symptom than a a cause. While I have had a deeply negative experience I ultimately view this as a skill issue.