Despite numerous attempts by many talented students of the Mathematical arts, professional Magic players continue to be unable to find the value of X, even when X turns out to be such commonly found numbers as three, four or seven. As a result, it has now been several years since the last time anyone knew which round it was or what their actual results had been.

I questioned Ken Krouner about this issue, since he is an expert at asking for people’s results during tournaments. “It is a well-known fact that at the start of the tournament, your record is X-0,” he noted, referring to a discovery attributed to Shawn “Hammer” Regnier back at the first Grand Prix Los Angeles. “Later on in tournaments, players will have worse sounding records like X-1-1 or X-3, and they seem to be all right with that if it is late enough in the tournament, although they also get progressively unhappy when referring to large numbers like ‘four’ or ‘six and one.’ Maybe we just don’t like counting that high.”

“We’re working on several theories on what X might be,” reported Ed Fear, one of professional Magic’s experts at doing the math on who needs what to attain what record. “There is a theory that some people support that claims that X is going to be the number of rounds minus the number of losses and draws, but we have no way of testing that. If you don’t know what X is, how do you know what round it is?”

Other pros have additional theories, many of which are similar, but all expressed doubts that the matter will be resolved any time soon. Brian Kibler has proposed a skeptical hypothesis, stating that it is impossible for any Magic player M to know the value of X because in the time necessary to find the value of X it is possible the number of rounds played will have increased, so even if Fear’s proposed method were proven correct and the round number somehow found such knowledge would still be impossible. As a result, while many continue to work on the problem, we may never know how often we have mised.

This is Zvi Mowshowitz for MiseTings news.

Discuss this article in the Magic: the Gathering Forums!

Despite numerous attempts by many talented students of the Mathematical arts, professional Magic players continue to be unable to find the value of X, even when X turns out to be such commonly found numbers as three, four or seven. As a result, it has now been several years since the last time anyone knew which round it was or what their actual results had been.

I questioned Ken Krouner about this issue, since he is an expert at asking for people’s results during tournaments. “It is a well-known fact that at the start of the tournament, your record is X-0,” he noted, referring to a discovery attributed to Shawn “Hammer” Regnier back at the first Grand Prix Los Angeles. “Later on in tournaments, players will have worse sounding records like X-1-1 or X-3, and they seem to be all right with that if it is late enough in the tournament, although they also get progressively unhappy when referring to large numbers like ‘four’ or ‘six and one.’ Maybe we just don’t like counting that high.”

“We’re working on several theories on what X might be,” reported Ed Fear, one of professional Magic’s experts at doing the math on who needs what to attain what record. “There is a theory that some people support that claims that X is going to be the number of rounds minus the number of losses and draws, but we have no way of testing that. If you don’t know what X is, how do you know what round it is?”

Other pros have additional theories, many of which are similar, but all expressed doubts that the matter will be resolved any time soon. Brian Kibler has proposed a skeptical hypothesis, stating that it is impossible for any Magic player M to know the value of X because in the time necessary to find the value of X it is possible the number of rounds played will have increased, so even if Fear’s proposed method were proven correct and the round number somehow found such knowledge would still be impossible. As a result, while many continue to work on the problem, we may never know how often we have mised.

This is Zvi Mowshowitz for MiseTings news.

Discuss this article in the Magic: the Gathering Forums!