As a long time depression sufferer, this video was really cathartic to watch. The level of nuance and love here is truly something rare and precious, as are you, the person reading this.
Yeah, I found his channel a few months before this one. Both great content creators though I might ironically like Spice more because talking about card/boardgames in a video essay format is something that I've never seen before. Jacob does have a ton of variety mind you
@@Spice8Rack what's funny about this is i had a bunch of youtube tabs open, over several days, (as i had to catch up on content), and when i got to a new chapter i thought the buffering was natural as the tab was open eating processor resources for however long. it wasn't until the last one that i figured out it was intentional. great video btw!
The payoff to the "i took this screenshot from the Wayback Machine" was utterly sublime, and also explains why the MTGA client updates lead to 404s. Amazing work Wizards (sarcasm) and amazing work Spice8Rack (genuine) edit; No mention of the Madness Keyword? Shame on you Spice, shame on you..../s
Spice, in doing this kind of in-depth analysis into mill vs discard, you've inadvertently also made a primer on the ludonarrative links between gameplay mechanics seeking to create a sense of self-dissociation and self-destruction. I imagine this is super useful for anyone trying to make that sort of thing in a game, what those kind of mechanics entail, and what could be improved from Magic's embodiment of it in mill & discard. It's excellent!
This video was a banger and I can’t help but think about the Pokemon card game. Mill and discard exist but essentially without any attempt at creating a ludonarrative through line beyond “disruption”-a player’s deck and hand are so fundamentally abstracted that ties to madness or the psyche are almost nonexistent beyond a general theme of disruption. But your final level of analysis, the mechanical experiences of the player, ring through so much that it finally let me put into words why I’ve been playing the same dang deck for almost a decade. Decks built around discarding the opponents hand (in expanded which is the format I play) have existed and paralleled the destruction of the self, the stripping away of one’s immediate plans but not entropic eradication-that’s why they’ve been banned, as they make the opponent feel powerless while not outright winning and why I haven’t been so attracted to them, as mechanically they also have the fail-case of an opponent top-decking one of the million draw sevens and undoing your gameplan. Stall on the other hand is just one player playing as entropy-a winconless control deck that relies on deck-out while not playing mill cards to expedite that win condition (except in a tournament setting where games need to be kept to an hour, so you typically play one slow mill piece to run the opponent out of cards). As opposed to discard decks which rely on the temporary destruction of the opponent’s plan to buy time for a quick win, stall as an archetype runs nothing but healing and cards that erode at opponent’s resources in play. Since games take that full hour you as the player come to embody entropy in the game and meta-game, your opponent’s deck crumbing to an unrelenting force while their own time to play a best of three beyond the first match runs out. Your game plan is always the same, time, and all that changes is the opponent’s deck’s capacity to cope with that slow infinity with which they are confronted.
You don't even know how helpful this is for me. "dealing with the effects of trauma without even knowing you were dealing with it..." man. I experienced psychosis. I fractured my own ego out of SELF DEFENSE. I then proceeded to put myself back together, take care of an elderly family member with early onset dementia/alzheimers (uh oh, this is genetic). you have NO idea (maybe some, you have empathy) how personally relevant this is for me. and speaking of timing? I was hunting today for a Jeskai card, I wanted Narset, Enlightened Master. I bought a single mythic pack on arena. I instead got Sidisi, Brood Tryrant (I think? Brood lord? its late). I have, for the FIRST TIME in my life ever, toyed with the idea of making a self-mill sultai "bring-it-back" deck. I also found this video through the youtube algorithm of reminiscing, finding a video of me playing Total War vs some youtuber, quite literally 4.5 years ago now, that 4 year demarcation on UA-cam really set me back. I then somehow found myself here. Coincidence? I think not. Thanks, for once, UA-cam. And thank you Spice, for the sense of self-validation and peace that this video has given me.... some semblance of helping me on my path of healing. Mangalam, friend.
Gods, I love the patron list. Also, just played a mill deck against my mom, who's new to magic. She hated it. I'm definitely sending her this video when I'm done.
On a note of discards vicerality, I think the impact of each should be noted. Ripping resources from the hand is infinitely more valuable than theoretical resources from the deck. An opponent notices having their options dwindled down, quite literally occupying their short term memory. This also ties into the complexity of mills unknowable horrors theme: it is impossible to know how you may have used these resources that have escaped your grasp unless you are a skilled recursion mage.
Great stuff Spice! This was incredible stuff, really entertaining. I was thoroughly impressed with the fact that though we had numerous introductions they still moved the video as a whole forward. That's some skillful work that does not go unnoticed. Banger from beginning to end.
I came here for funny British man yells at a cardboard fantasy game and was pleasently surprised with a deep dive into the possible harm of our definition of madness all the while keeping a seemingly dull subject intriguing and entertaining throughout
Warms my heart to be catered to. I've been around people very familiar with Magic mechanically, and I'm fascinated by it all, but am not attuned to grasping and executing it myself.
as far as stern constable, I can see it as the hand being the potential knowledge; him refusing to hear the story, refusing that knowledge, in order to just arrest someone
Spice, I want to thank you from the botttom of my heart for this content. I had a hard time grasping the intent of the video starting over and over, but once I realized what it was... MY GOD! That is pure genius right there. I've been thinking of ideas to start a channel of my own, and this contributed A LOT to thinking of it. Your content is amazing. Keep up the good work, you're awesome!
A bit off topic, but I like how different decks, different games and different contexts shape the way mill and discard and in turn draw, hand and deck, (I didn't do nearly as much research so any thing I say is vibes mostly) Magic has this concept of the library as the memory of the player, drawing a card being remembering something you can do, discarding and milling being forgetting or being unable to remember. But then you see instances where actual destruction of books mean discard or mill, in this context then the library and hand becomes physical information. But then you see a gobling rummaging through stuff, in this case, the entire library and hand is physical; it's now tools, gadgets and resources. Discard is then the same as scrapping. But then (if you allow me I'll be referencing LoR, which is the card game I played first) you see mill in both Nautilus and Maokai, which represent two different things, Nautilus exist in the depths of the ocean, thus your deck, filled with sea monsters, is now the ocean, and milling yourself is now going deeper down the sea. In the other hand Maokai wants to heal his land, so milling your deck, containing mostly cards of that region, is now related to uncorrupting your own deck that now represents the entire region Milling and Discarding is a game mechanic of endless potential that can ultimately have drastically different meanings depending on the needs and contexts of the current design
My immediate reaction upon the first restart: "Huh that's funny 😄 *_O H H_* 😳😳" Idk why I never watched it when it came out, but goddamn this is a masterpiece. I just, I just wish it wasn't so difficult for me to organize and get my thoughts out, because this piece has my brain fucking GOING
This is brilliant. It downed on me in the middle what's going on (not the repeating but it's meaning). As mad as it sounds it was worth 2h of my time. Wish somebody could pay for it though.
Wow this one's gotta be a bumpy ride for anyone who couldn't watch it in one sitting. Respect for the huge work put in though, and here's my toll for the algorithm gods!
So thankful for this video, Ive been waiting for it since the beginning. Leave it to you to make it a 2 hr 39m adventure that rewards you for paying attention the whole way through. Kudos for always knowing how to work through heavy topics with just the right amount of levity. Your creative writing degrees showed their worth 😂 I've loved watching your channel grow. Discovered you through your Entire* Magic thr Gathering Story in 10 Mins video, but gotta say I became a real fan after the Yawgmoth: The Scientific Priestcraft of Eugenics video. It felt like the first time you really put your theatrical talents on full display and I was hooked. You tackle topics that deserve to be discussed and wrap them in a nice little, foil on cardboard skin for easier consumtion. Hearing RysticStudies(Sam) do reading in your video was a welcome surprise! Eagerly awaiting the next one, its always worth the wait, be well!
Majestic work! Also yet again I find myself on a video reflecting about huge problems in the world not knowing what to do, great, might also send this video to my therapist for the part about how we treat mental health disorders as a society and the dsm 5 I’m curious.
it's funny, cuz my procrastination and adhd make it hard for me to watch long form videos like this, but here i am, a month later, watching this really wonderful gem. Thanks, Spice~
I kid you not, 48 hours ago I complained to myself "God it's been months since spice8's last video I wonder when the next one will come out" this totally made my night!
I never comment and you probably won't see this but I just wanted to express how good it feels to have someone breaching the subject of madness having actually done research for once. It's the first time I see it, and it's the first time I see a big youtuber talk about the links between psychiatrisation and capitalism. As a mentally ill person who calls themselves mad - thank you.
This was amazing, excellent work Spice.Mill has always sat ill with me, for reasons I was never really able to put my finger on. It seemed underhanded, and somehow more cruel to mill out an opponent then to kill them with battle damage. As a younger player, I never knew how to fight back with just the cards I owned, I had no way to save myself if someone tried to mill me out. And when fucking Hedron Crab came out, I almost began to fear being milled because it seemed so inevitable - it was inescapable and there was no defense (in my deck anyway). Maybe I sorta intuitively understood that mill was the loss of agency that comes from someone else believing I had lost my mind, the very thing that I as a neurodivergent person fear more then anything. After all, I still had lifepoints, I still had a board state - why are you removing me from play when I can still act? On one hand I suppose it really is excellent design that being milled made me feel that way. But on the other hand fuck Hedron Crab.
Back in the 90s, we already call em Mill even before "mill" became an evergreen term just this 2021. Discard - we call em "Disrupt/Disruptor/Distruption". Similarly blue is mostly called "permission", Red as Burn, white as Weenie (before Agro became the term from the MageKnight hobby), Black has "recursion" even before Recurring Nightmare was printed, and Green as....well green
I disagree with a lot of what you say Spice, but I absolutely love the way you convey your ideas. This was an incredible watch, and a body of work that you should be proud of.
Ive hopped on board the spice train one to three years ago (there was a pandemic who the fuck knows at this point?) so I didn't get the full wait, but even so this was highly anticipated and SO worth it! I loved this, thank yoi for your time, effort and the undoubtable emotional labour that went into the research and writing.
Wow! Spice, love this video as I imagine that if I had no idea what MTG was, then watched this educational performance I maintain has no flaw, would fall in love with the game from an entirely different perspective than my own experience. Thank you.
3:43 as a jacob geller fan i love this, as a new fan of yours i just want to say i think that at the very least from what I've seen you're genuinely talented and entertaining. Having said that you're clearly a mix a jacob geller and windigoon
This is why I watch your channel not for funny card game though I do play, but for discussion on legitimate issues or history hidden behind a thin veneer of playing cards.
I feel like self discard in certain context can also be viewed as losing morals. So in the case of Stern Constable it would be ignoring whatever the potentially innocent "culprit" has to say or ignoring the situation around it and just locking them up.
Brilliant typewriter callback, you are a person of considerable quality of narrative device. I wonder if the quality of your editor might be equal though... some can't import certain image types without crashing.
On the topic of madness, I know that you're a magic UA-camr first and foremost, but I would love to hear your take on madness and how it's presented in cyberpunk edgerunners. I feel like it's one of the more unique portrayals of madness and a lot could be learned by dissecting the show.
Here's an idea: In my Reanimator decks I envision that my Hermit Druid is planting a garden of corpses that will later be harvested by Spells like Reanimate and Creatures such as Teneb, the Harvester
Dam…that was good. I read a meta narrative, this video is in many ways a self mill of Rack by Ashiok. Each time rack makes a new video about mill vs discard they are, taking a card (an idea, a concept a memory) and putting it into the graveyard (the video being done, the idea being brought to conclusion). Definitely the best horror film I’ve watched in a while
The high-pitched vocals for Ashiok sound like the female Undead merchant in Dark Souls. Look up her rant if you've got a minute; that is some _master-class_ voice work!!
I think the most important takeaway I got for this very long, very informative, very enjoyable, and very impressive video is that Ashiok is a Bluey fan
Always nice to see multiplicity interpretations of Ludo-Metaphoric mechanics being some reflection (no matter how far down the line) of sociological implications and even larger philosophical understanding on the Western Tradition's interpretation of what even the "self" is. Not bad for a secondary gameplay condition analysis. Tho more for the last word between difference of exile vs graveyard mill, one wonders what exactly it implies that certain cards and creatures CAN'T mill you out, like the 3 big Eldrazi or Gaea's blessing. Is then the implication that even if you are completely erroded of your own personality and "self", that just the image of the Eldrazi can never simply be forgotten? or in more optimistic takes, that Gaea's blessing is to always maintain your sense of will to retain "yourself" even through all mental attacks? One wonders then if you can still apply even further meta-textual metaphor with other completely taken-for-granted gameplay...like pulling from your side-board: specifically Learn, but also with cards like Karn or Mastermind's acquisition, where there is greatly an implication that some other planeswalking throws a spell your way. Then what does side-boarding standardly imply between matches? You planeswalk out to re-mentalize your memories? It's just an endless hole once manifesting "the mind" vs "the self" within a game interactive zone...and I love it all the way down
Holy shit. This video was... Fucking great. Absolutely amazing. I'm pretty sure that people could make whole essay videos based on this essay video by how great this is. NO, I'm not saying that they should exist, because fuck that noise. But yeah, this shit is great.
I love this video but some of the things about Alzheimer’s really bugs me because my grandma would kill her cat by forgetting to feed her if we left her alone because she can’t function by herself
I legitimately went back to the start to check if they were always swapped. While I could divulge the secrets I learned, doing so would ruin the fun >:)
It ought to be understood that in any modern definition of a mental disorder, a symptom, however unusual it may be, will only ever qualify as a mark of such a disorder, if it leads to suffering of those who experience it. Social norms certainly shape thos window of sanity by leding to suffering from external factors in enviroments that condemn a given symptom, but ultimately it is only the wellbeing of the patient that is considered when forming a diagnosis.
What an adventure, what a marvelous interaction, what a fantastic plot, what a delicious bite of Ashiok doing their favourite pastime, messing up people for no real specific reason. Now we know what such an interesting planeswalker was doing after traumatizing Elesh Norn.
So maybe this answered in the video, but what is the thematic difference between milling your library versus exiling your library. Tasha’s Hideous Laughter is very clearly a mill centric card, but it exiles instead of putting into graveyard. Could the theming of that extend to some of the themes that red has since they tend to enjoy impulse effects? An explosion of emotion that can lead a mage to potentially forget what they were doing or provide the emotional energy or creative muse needed to find a solution to a problem? I’m just thinking on the spot
Found and subbed to you after watching you and The Professor on his channel. And gotta say love u man. You talk about the two things I love, mtg and leftist politics!!❤🎉🫡
rewatching this today because I don't have the mental capacity for Tarkir. So just gonna stump for a video on Walter Benjamin vs the Legend rule and copy effects
I have been postponing watching this video for quite a while and now I feel ashamed I haven't watched it earlier. This is all quite... ah fu*k, it's brilliant. Full stop. Keep it up. I'd like to see you exploring more of the metaphysics of colours in MtG and how that ties into political/ethical alignments. I have a few ideas I'm willing to share if you like.
1:01:49 could also add MRAs to that pile. Because, contrarery to belief of many, they don't want to return to times where men were responsible for women, and women were subserviant to men. They want to have men get all the rights women already have, and make legal responsobility of both closer to equal.
Not to be extremely pedantic... but poison counters are NOT and intrinsic alternative win condition. It is a mechanic that some cards have. It is no more an intrinsic way to win then casting Approach of the Second Sun two times is an intrinsic way to win the game. I've both won games and lost games due to having an empty library when there wasn't a single mill card in either deck, so it is always a possible wincon, regardless of what cards are in either deck.
TECHNICALLY it is intrinsic. The difference between being intrinsic & not has nothing to do with the likelihood of it happening, and more to do with where the rules around it reside. AotSS's win condition is printed on the card itself "If this is the 2nd time you've cast this card you win the game", whereas poisonous, toxic, infect, etc's win condition is baked into the actual rules of the game itself. That's why many poison related cards have reminder text, not rules text, which mention the game loss condition. It may not be relavent for 99% of games (hell, I've only ever lost to poison once in my whole life) but it is still intrinsic.
@@Spice8Rack "...whereas poisonous, toxic, infect, etc's win condition is baked into the actual rules of the game itself." They are both mentioned in the comprehensive rules. Rules: 104.3. There are several ways to lose the game. ... 104.3d If a player has ten or more poison counters, he or she loses the game the next time a player would receive priority. (This is a state-based action. See rule 704.) 104.3e An effect may state that a player loses the game. There's also rule 104.2b An effect may state that a player wins the game. (In multiplayer games, this may not cause the game to end; see rule 104.3h.) According to your logic, "You lose the game" / "You win the game" effects are also intrinsic parts of the game. I don't think that's right. I think this is just part of an aspect of Magic you joked about in this video. (Nearly) every rule in magic is contradicted by at least one card and the comprehensive rules have to talk about that. By the way, did you know the comprehensive list of rules is just shy of 200 pages long. You could have a Patreon goal where you read the entire thing like, if you hit $100,000 a month in funding. Don't do that. It's a bad idea.
Not so fun fact about the term sanity: it has the same linguistic root as sanitary, implying that insanity is unclean in some way, simply through the language used
so... about that infect vs damage video...
so... about that "opponent loses life" VS "deal damage to opponent" video...
28 minutes in... that corkboard is gonna get wild huh?
Infect is easy. Nobody dies from Infect. You just stop fighting and join the cult.
Yes please.
OH BOY! A new spice video! Time to go into a vegetative state for the next few hours.
As a long time depression sufferer, this video was really cathartic to watch. The level of nuance and love here is truly something rare and precious, as are you, the person reading this.
Thank you, Spider Lord that doesn't trigger my Arachniphobia, you are wonderful in your own amazing way.
As a huge fan of both you and Jacob Geller, the “Strictly worse in every way Jacob Geller” joke made me CACKLE. Great vid
Yeah, I found his channel a few months before this one. Both great content creators though I might ironically like Spice more because talking about card/boardgames in a video essay format is something that I've never seen before. Jacob does have a ton of variety mind you
I still laugh at "Welshie was right." Gets me every time.
You’d think after the third fake loading screen, I’d stop checking my internet. 😂
Splendid video!
Heheheh I'm a lil stinker ;P
@@Spice8Rack It's such a great choice for this video, if anything you stink like a rose garden in full bloom.
Mine went out for a bit and I got a real one, really confused me for a sec
The best part is that after 2 of the loading screens I got actual ads played on me
@@Spice8Rack what's funny about this is i had a bunch of youtube tabs open, over several days, (as i had to catch up on content), and when i got to a new chapter i thought the buffering was natural as the tab was open eating processor resources for however long. it wasn't until the last one that i figured out it was intentional.
great video btw!
The payoff to the "i took this screenshot from the Wayback Machine" was utterly sublime, and also explains why the MTGA client updates lead to 404s. Amazing work Wizards (sarcasm) and amazing work Spice8Rack (genuine)
edit; No mention of the Madness Keyword? Shame on you Spice, shame on you..../s
Spice, in doing this kind of in-depth analysis into mill vs discard, you've inadvertently also made a primer on the ludonarrative links between gameplay mechanics seeking to create a sense of self-dissociation and self-destruction. I imagine this is super useful for anyone trying to make that sort of thing in a game, what those kind of mechanics entail, and what could be improved from Magic's embodiment of it in mill & discard. It's excellent!
This video was a banger and I can’t help but think about the Pokemon card game. Mill and discard exist but essentially without any attempt at creating a ludonarrative through line beyond “disruption”-a player’s deck and hand are so fundamentally abstracted that ties to madness or the psyche are almost nonexistent beyond a general theme of disruption. But your final level of analysis, the mechanical experiences of the player, ring through so much that it finally let me put into words why I’ve been playing the same dang deck for almost a decade. Decks built around discarding the opponents hand (in expanded which is the format I play) have existed and paralleled the destruction of the self, the stripping away of one’s immediate plans but not entropic eradication-that’s why they’ve been banned, as they make the opponent feel powerless while not outright winning and why I haven’t been so attracted to them, as mechanically they also have the fail-case of an opponent top-decking one of the million draw sevens and undoing your gameplan. Stall on the other hand is just one player playing as entropy-a winconless control deck that relies on deck-out while not playing mill cards to expedite that win condition (except in a tournament setting where games need to be kept to an hour, so you typically play one slow mill piece to run the opponent out of cards). As opposed to discard decks which rely on the temporary destruction of the opponent’s plan to buy time for a quick win, stall as an archetype runs nothing but healing and cards that erode at opponent’s resources in play. Since games take that full hour you as the player come to embody entropy in the game and meta-game, your opponent’s deck crumbing to an unrelenting force while their own time to play a best of three beyond the first match runs out. Your game plan is always the same, time, and all that changes is the opponent’s deck’s capacity to cope with that slow infinity with which they are confronted.
You don't even know how helpful this is for me. "dealing with the effects of trauma without even knowing you were dealing with it..." man. I experienced psychosis. I fractured my own ego out of SELF DEFENSE. I then proceeded to put myself back together, take care of an elderly family member with early onset dementia/alzheimers (uh oh, this is genetic).
you have NO idea (maybe some, you have empathy) how personally relevant this is for me.
and speaking of timing? I was hunting today for a Jeskai card, I wanted Narset, Enlightened Master. I bought a single mythic pack on arena. I instead got Sidisi, Brood Tryrant (I think? Brood lord? its late). I have, for the FIRST TIME in my life ever, toyed with the idea of making a self-mill sultai "bring-it-back" deck. I also found this video through the youtube algorithm of reminiscing, finding a video of me playing Total War vs some youtuber, quite literally 4.5 years ago now, that 4 year demarcation on UA-cam really set me back. I then somehow found myself here.
Coincidence? I think not. Thanks, for once, UA-cam. And thank you Spice, for the sense of self-validation and peace that this video has given me.... some semblance of helping me on my path of healing. Mangalam, friend.
Gods, I love the patron list. Also, just played a mill deck against my mom, who's new to magic. She hated it.
I'm definitely sending her this video when I'm done.
On a note of discards vicerality, I think the impact of each should be noted. Ripping resources from the hand is infinitely more valuable than theoretical resources from the deck. An opponent notices having their options dwindled down, quite literally occupying their short term memory.
This also ties into the complexity of mills unknowable horrors theme: it is impossible to know how you may have used these resources that have escaped your grasp unless you are a skilled recursion mage.
Great stuff Spice! This was incredible stuff, really entertaining. I was thoroughly impressed with the fact that though we had numerous introductions they still moved the video as a whole forward. That's some skillful work that does not go unnoticed. Banger from beginning to end.
He did it boys the prophecy has ben fulfilled
Good for Ben.
@@Reach_WIndeed. Though is it Wheeler, Ulmer, or Stark? Or perhaps the akki hermit?
I came here for funny British man yells at a cardboard fantasy game and was pleasently surprised with a deep dive into the possible harm of our definition of madness all the while keeping a seemingly dull subject intriguing and entertaining throughout
Warms my heart to be catered to. I've been around people very familiar with Magic mechanically, and I'm fascinated by it all, but am not attuned to grasping and executing it myself.
So what is the ludonarrative when a Dredge player discards their hand, mills their deck and vomit jellyfishes, zombies and oxen?
as far as stern constable, I can see it as the hand being the potential knowledge; him refusing to hear the story, refusing that knowledge, in order to just arrest someone
Finally! Been waiting for this for longer than I can remember!
...wait a minute
Spice, I want to thank you from the botttom of my heart for this content. I had a hard time grasping the intent of the video starting over and over, but once I realized what it was... MY GOD! That is pure genius right there. I've been thinking of ideas to start a channel of my own, and this contributed A LOT to thinking of it. Your content is amazing. Keep up the good work, you're awesome!
Can't appreciate the "I forgot the seal of approval" moment enough rofl
A bit off topic, but I like how different decks, different games and different contexts shape the way mill and discard and in turn draw, hand and deck, (I didn't do nearly as much research so any thing I say is vibes mostly) Magic has this concept of the library as the memory of the player, drawing a card being remembering something you can do, discarding and milling being forgetting or being unable to remember.
But then you see instances where actual destruction of books mean discard or mill, in this context then the library and hand becomes physical information.
But then you see a gobling rummaging through stuff, in this case, the entire library and hand is physical; it's now tools, gadgets and resources. Discard is then the same as scrapping.
But then (if you allow me I'll be referencing LoR, which is the card game I played first) you see mill in both Nautilus and Maokai, which represent two different things, Nautilus exist in the depths of the ocean, thus your deck, filled with sea monsters, is now the ocean, and milling yourself is now going deeper down the sea. In the other hand Maokai wants to heal his land, so milling your deck, containing mostly cards of that region, is now related to uncorrupting your own deck that now represents the entire region
Milling and Discarding is a game mechanic of endless potential that can ultimately have drastically different meanings depending on the needs and contexts of the current design
43:10 "I know words when I sees them" is now an important phrase in my vocabulary
My immediate reaction upon the first restart:
"Huh that's funny 😄 *_O H H_* 😳😳"
Idk why I never watched it when it came out, but goddamn this is a masterpiece. I just, I just wish it wasn't so difficult for me to organize and get my thoughts out, because this piece has my brain fucking GOING
This is brilliant. It downed on me in the middle what's going on (not the repeating but it's meaning). As mad as it sounds it was worth 2h of my time. Wish somebody could pay for it though.
Wow this one's gotta be a bumpy ride for anyone who couldn't watch it in one sitting. Respect for the huge work put in though, and here's my toll for the algorithm gods!
So thankful for this video, Ive been waiting for it since the beginning. Leave it to you to make it a 2 hr 39m adventure that rewards you for paying attention the whole way through. Kudos for always knowing how to work through heavy topics with just the right amount of levity. Your creative writing degrees showed their worth 😂
I've loved watching your channel grow. Discovered you through your Entire* Magic thr Gathering Story in 10 Mins video, but gotta say I became a real fan after the Yawgmoth: The Scientific Priestcraft of Eugenics video. It felt like the first time you really put your theatrical talents on full display and I was hooked. You tackle topics that deserve to be discussed and wrap them in a nice little, foil on cardboard skin for easier consumtion.
Hearing RysticStudies(Sam) do reading in your video was a welcome surprise!
Eagerly awaiting the next one, its always worth the wait, be well!
Love the vid! Also super awesome to see that you too use Shinigami Eyes :D
Majestic work! Also yet again I find myself on a video reflecting about huge problems in the world not knowing what to do, great, might also send this video to my therapist for the part about how we treat mental health disorders as a society and the dsm 5 I’m curious.
it's funny, cuz my procrastination and adhd make it hard for me to watch long form videos like this, but here i am, a month later, watching this really wonderful gem. Thanks, Spice~
Gotta love content warnings that warn for just about everything in existence lmao. That's how you know it's gonna be a banger
I kid you not, 48 hours ago I complained to myself "God it's been months since spice8's last video I wonder when the next one will come out" this totally made my night!
I never comment and you probably won't see this but I just wanted to express how good it feels to have someone breaching the subject of madness having actually done research for once. It's the first time I see it, and it's the first time I see a big youtuber talk about the links between psychiatrisation and capitalism. As a mentally ill person who calls themselves mad - thank you.
I read all my comments, and I truly do appreciate this lovely compliment. I tried very hard and I'm so glad it's resonated with so many folks.
This was amazing, excellent work Spice.Mill has always sat ill with me, for reasons I was never really able to put my finger on. It seemed underhanded, and somehow more cruel to mill out an opponent then to kill them with battle damage. As a younger player, I never knew how to fight back with just the cards I owned, I had no way to save myself if someone tried to mill me out. And when fucking Hedron Crab came out, I almost began to fear being milled because it seemed so inevitable - it was inescapable and there was no defense (in my deck anyway). Maybe I sorta intuitively understood that mill was the loss of agency that comes from someone else believing I had lost my mind, the very thing that I as a neurodivergent person fear more then anything. After all, I still had lifepoints, I still had a board state - why are you removing me from play when I can still act? On one hand I suppose it really is excellent design that being milled made me feel that way. But on the other hand fuck Hedron Crab.
Back in the 90s, we already call em Mill even before "mill" became an evergreen term just this 2021. Discard - we call em "Disrupt/Disruptor/Distruption". Similarly blue is mostly called "permission", Red as Burn, white as Weenie (before Agro became the term from the MageKnight hobby), Black has "recursion" even before Recurring Nightmare was printed, and Green as....well green
HE DID IT. HE ACTUALLY DID IT!
I disagree with a lot of what you say Spice, but I absolutely love the way you convey your ideas. This was an incredible watch, and a body of work that you should be proud of.
Ive hopped on board the spice train one to three years ago (there was a pandemic who the fuck knows at this point?) so I didn't get the full wait, but even so this was highly anticipated and SO worth it! I loved this, thank yoi for your time, effort and the undoubtable emotional labour that went into the research and writing.
I'm really impressed with your work. Thank you for this, i enjoyed learning so much
Wow! Spice, love this video as I imagine that if I had no idea what MTG was, then watched this educational performance I maintain has no flaw, would fall in love with the game from an entirely different perspective than my own experience. Thank you.
3:43 as a jacob geller fan i love this, as a new fan of yours i just want to say i think that at the very least from what I've seen you're genuinely talented and entertaining. Having said that you're clearly a mix a jacob geller and windigoon
This was fucking phenomenal. What a great job. After all the build-up, did not feel let down in the slightest.
This is why I watch your channel not for funny card game though I do play, but for discussion on legitimate issues or history hidden behind a thin veneer of playing cards.
Bravo, what a wonderful video 👏👏👏 Certainly worth the wait! Excellent work!
Holy fuck this was a trip and then some.
Thanks for this. You make the multiverse better
That was awesome! Thanks for helping us all remember one of my fav innistrad cards.
I feel like self discard in certain context can also be viewed as losing morals.
So in the case of Stern Constable it would be ignoring whatever the potentially innocent "culprit" has to say or ignoring the situation around it and just locking them up.
Great video!
So where does Dredge fit into all of this?
Love to see a chapter titled "Mill vs Discard_Capitalism" 100 minutes into the video lol
Brilliant typewriter callback, you are a person of considerable quality of narrative device. I wonder if the quality of your editor might be equal though... some can't import certain image types without crashing.
I now want to activate a Tacasia's Dig Site and reveal a might stone or weak stone.
well you see, rats are tied to discard effects because they prefer to nibble at hands
This was a wonderful watch thank you
1:54:52 this is exactly why mill is so exhausting- oh, wait you brought it back 40 seconds later
"There it is, in black and white."
Well this sounds like foreshadowing.
On the topic of madness, I know that you're a magic UA-camr first and foremost, but I would love to hear your take on madness and how it's presented in cyberpunk edgerunners. I feel like it's one of the more unique portrayals of madness and a lot could be learned by dissecting the show.
Here's an idea: In my Reanimator decks I envision that my Hermit Druid is planting a garden of corpses that will later be harvested by Spells like Reanimate and Creatures such as Teneb, the Harvester
Epic vid! Well done. I was also thinking "he's gonna talk about exile, right? RIGHT??!"
Dam…that was good. I read a meta narrative, this video is in many ways a self mill of Rack by Ashiok. Each time rack makes a new video about mill vs discard they are, taking a card (an idea, a concept a memory) and putting it into the graveyard (the video being done, the idea being brought to conclusion). Definitely the best horror film I’ve watched in a while
The high-pitched vocals for Ashiok sound like the female Undead merchant in Dark Souls. Look up her rant if you've got a minute; that is some _master-class_ voice work!!
I think the most important takeaway I got for this very long, very informative, very enjoyable, and very impressive video is that Ashiok is a Bluey fan
Always nice to see multiplicity interpretations of Ludo-Metaphoric mechanics being some reflection (no matter how far down the line) of sociological implications and even larger philosophical understanding on the Western Tradition's interpretation of what even the "self" is.
Not bad for a secondary gameplay condition analysis.
Tho more for the last word between difference of exile vs graveyard mill, one wonders what exactly it implies that certain cards and creatures CAN'T mill you out, like the 3 big Eldrazi or Gaea's blessing. Is then the implication that even if you are completely erroded of your own personality and "self", that just the image of the Eldrazi can never simply be forgotten? or in more optimistic takes, that Gaea's blessing is to always maintain your sense of will to retain "yourself" even through all mental attacks?
One wonders then if you can still apply even further meta-textual metaphor with other completely taken-for-granted gameplay...like pulling from your side-board: specifically Learn, but also with cards like Karn or Mastermind's acquisition, where there is greatly an implication that some other planeswalking throws a spell your way. Then what does side-boarding standardly imply between matches? You planeswalk out to re-mentalize your memories?
It's just an endless hole once manifesting "the mind" vs "the self" within a game interactive zone...and I love it all the way down
my gods, spice is a bowser jr main? everything makes so much more sense now
The anthology style where you jump to something else when you finish a topic was super cool.
You think I have heard this before?
When the video autoplay's to the beginning of the video.
Absolute fucking tour de force, some of your best work
"... one in a million..." hmmm... "so there's five more just in New South Wales" - The Whitlams, Up Against The Wall
Holy shit. This video was... Fucking great. Absolutely amazing. I'm pretty sure that people could make whole essay videos based on this essay video by how great this is. NO, I'm not saying that they should exist, because fuck that noise. But yeah, this shit is great.
This is the single greatest mtg video on the Internet, absolutely love this analysis
I love this video but some of the things about Alzheimer’s really bugs me because my grandma would kill her cat by forgetting to feed her if we left her alone because she can’t function by herself
I legitimately went back to the start to check if they were always swapped. While I could divulge the secrets I learned, doing so would ruin the fun >:)
Dithmarschen EU4 shot in the first couple minutes, I know this one's gonna be good.
It ought to be understood that in any modern definition of a mental disorder, a symptom, however unusual it may be, will only ever qualify as a mark of such a disorder, if it leads to suffering of those who experience it. Social norms certainly shape thos window of sanity by leding to suffering from external factors in enviroments that condemn a given symptom, but ultimately it is only the wellbeing of the patient that is considered when forming a diagnosis.
This is unironicly a masterpiece thank you for making this
I think this is your best work. This is next level stuff.
Van der Kolk as a reference source for trauma gets a tip of the hat!; using the word DIS-ASSOCIATION instead of dissociation gets a wag of the finger!
I wish Ashiok lived in MY walls...
Fantastic video! Educating and entertaining art!
When i started my magic journey on the xbox 360. Milling win was my favorite
What an adventure, what a marvelous interaction, what a fantastic plot, what a delicious bite of Ashiok doing their favourite pastime, messing up people for no real specific reason. Now we know what such an interesting planeswalker was doing after traumatizing Elesh Norn.
got the popcorn made, can't wait to watch this video for the first time and certainly not have my memory completely wiped by the end of it
Great video, well worth the years of teasing. Never thought I would laugh as much as I did to calling Foucault "Michael" thanks
So maybe this answered in the video, but what is the thematic difference between milling your library versus exiling your library. Tasha’s Hideous Laughter is very clearly a mill centric card, but it exiles instead of putting into graveyard. Could the theming of that extend to some of the themes that red has since they tend to enjoy impulse effects? An explosion of emotion that can lead a mage to potentially forget what they were doing or provide the emotional energy or creative muse needed to find a solution to a problem? I’m just thinking on the spot
Cant wait for the 10th anniversary of the channel redo of this masterpiece
This is amazing work, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Well worth the investment of time.
stunning work
Truly a work of art. Great piece :D
I think he might be doing it in a detailed and very concise capacity but that might be the mill though
Found and subbed to you after watching you and The Professor on his channel. And gotta say love u man. You talk about the two things I love, mtg and leftist politics!!❤🎉🫡
and now every time i play/see ashiok im just going to be thinking thier played by noel fielding
Hedron Crab made me stop playing for years
rewatching this today because I don't have the mental capacity for Tarkir. So just gonna stump for a video on Walter Benjamin vs the Legend rule and copy effects
1:58:30 this migration pissed me off so much, there was soooo much lost in that
I have been postponing watching this video for quite a while and now I feel ashamed I haven't watched it earlier. This is all quite... ah fu*k, it's brilliant. Full stop. Keep it up. I'd like to see you exploring more of the metaphysics of colours in MtG and how that ties into political/ethical alignments. I have a few ideas I'm willing to share if you like.
Such an amazing ride, thank you.
1:01:49 could also add MRAs to that pile. Because, contrarery to belief of many, they don't want to return to times where men were responsible for women, and women were subserviant to men. They want to have men get all the rights women already have, and make legal responsobility of both closer to equal.
Kirby Super Star jamming in the background. Spicy touch🕺🕺🕺
I can’t wait for “Infect vs Damage” in 2027
Sometime I will watch all 2.5 hours of this madness...or maybe, its actually a memory?
You done did it! Well done buddy
Not to be extremely pedantic... but poison counters are NOT and intrinsic alternative win condition. It is a mechanic that some cards have. It is no more an intrinsic way to win then casting Approach of the Second Sun two times is an intrinsic way to win the game. I've both won games and lost games due to having an empty library when there wasn't a single mill card in either deck, so it is always a possible wincon, regardless of what cards are in either deck.
TECHNICALLY it is intrinsic. The difference between being intrinsic & not has nothing to do with the likelihood of it happening, and more to do with where the rules around it reside. AotSS's win condition is printed on the card itself "If this is the 2nd time you've cast this card you win the game", whereas poisonous, toxic, infect, etc's win condition is baked into the actual rules of the game itself. That's why many poison related cards have reminder text, not rules text, which mention the game loss condition. It may not be relavent for 99% of games (hell, I've only ever lost to poison once in my whole life) but it is still intrinsic.
@@Spice8Rack "...whereas poisonous, toxic, infect, etc's win condition is baked into the actual rules of the game itself."
They are both mentioned in the comprehensive rules.
Rules:
104.3. There are several ways to lose the game.
...
104.3d If a player has ten or more poison counters, he or she loses the game the next time a player would receive priority. (This is a state-based action. See rule 704.)
104.3e An effect may state that a player loses the game.
There's also rule
104.2b An effect may state that a player wins the game. (In multiplayer games, this may not cause the game to end; see rule 104.3h.)
According to your logic, "You lose the game" / "You win the game" effects are also intrinsic parts of the game.
I don't think that's right. I think this is just part of an aspect of Magic you joked about in this video. (Nearly) every rule in magic is contradicted by at least one card and the comprehensive rules have to talk about that.
By the way, did you know the comprehensive list of rules is just shy of 200 pages long.
You could have a Patreon goal where you read the entire thing like, if you hit $100,000 a month in funding.
Don't do that. It's a bad idea.
Not so fun fact about the term sanity: it has the same linguistic root as sanitary, implying that insanity is unclean in some way, simply through the language used