The Problem of "Win-More"

I call this the "win-more problem." Concepts that suffer from the win-more problem are those that-- while certainly useful to an advanced user-- are misleading or net harmful to a less skillful person. Further, they are wrong or harmful in ways that are difficult to detect, because they screen off feedback loops that would otherwise allow someone to realize the mistake.

Even though you've said this, people will think you defined the "win-more problem" to be the problem with something that helps you win more only when you're already winning.

This is part of a general issue in binary win/loss games.

As you approach the end of a game with a lead in points, the value of scoring more points diminishes. If you don't adjust your strategy to compensate, you end up taking risks that increase your expected points, but decrease your win probability. Win probability plotting is popular for American Football obsessives.

It's often very frustrating to be a sports fan, as it's obvious what's going wrong with the decision theory in the heads of coaches and players.

The real danger of the "win-more" concept is that it's only barely different than making choices that turn an advantage into a win. You're often put in a place where you're somehow ahead, but your opponent has ways to get back in the game. They don't have them yet - you wouldn't be winning if they did - but the longer you give them the more time they have.

For a personal example from a couple years ago, playing Magic in the Legacy format, I once went up against a Reanimator deck with my mono-blue control deck. The start was fairly typical - Reanimator trying to resolve a gigantic threat to win, while I played many counterspells and hit him with some Vendilion Clique beats. My opponent ended up getting an Iona out (naming blue, obviously), but went down to exactly one life to do so. This was very, very awkward for him, since he couldn't attack with the Iona, activate fetchlands, or use the alternate cost of Force of Will. But, I had outs - Powder Keg (7 copies of keg/ratchet bomb) and waiting 9 turns, or Vedalken Shackles (3 copies). So I stayed in, and got as many draw phases as I could, and lucked out with a Shackles topdeck, followed by being able to play blue spells and winning the game.

Anyhow, my point is that cards that help you only when you're winning can turn wins into losses. Your opponents can have outs, and it's a good idea to take those outs away. If you don't, then sometimes your opponent will pull exactly what they need to do something ridiculous - say, dealing with a card that keeps them from playing 28 of their 38 spells, and seven of the ten spells they can play take 9 turns to do anything about it.

"Win-more" is definitely the wrong word to describe this concept. I think a better choice is calling it a "close-out" or "finishing" card. The point of these is to make sure that you win when you have an advantage. It also tells you that you don't want too many of these - many decks run just one or two copies. Dredge, for instance, runs a single Flayer to turn having their deck in their graveyard into a win. My mono-blue control deck ran two Sphinx of Jwar Isle (there were essentially zero answers for him in the meta, and I've stolen games with him. That said, one copy would be an Aetherling if it was printed at the time).

Replacing a card with a finisher means that you'll take fewer leads, but win more games while ahead. Sometimes the right number of finishers is one - when Dredge has a lead, it's got access to all or most of the cards in their deck. Sometimes it's more - my mono-blue deck would run between 2 and 6, depending on how I felt about Jace at the time. Often it's zero, and your game plan is to win with the cards that got you ahead in the first place.

See also The Valley of Bad Rationality.

Can you give additional example of this? I'm looking for parallels elsewhere in life where something is apparently useful, but is only useful in cases where you don't really need it, and nothing leaps to mind.

Win-more is a subset of narrowness. Cards that are narrow are good in smaller subsets of the situations that exist in Magic than cards that are less narrow. A creature is broad, because it can interact with creatures and there's almost always an opponent for it to attack. A spell that destroys enchantments is narrow: It requires your opponent to play an enchantment, and is useless in every other situation. Win-more cards are the ones that are limited to being useful when some gamestate prevails, usually involving you have a lot of something occurring. Cards that trigger when 5 creatures attack, cards that cost 9 mana, etc.

Here are a few examples from a cycle of cards in Zendikar that came to mind when I started thinking about this topic:

Quest for the Gravelord is a straight up good card. It's easy to cast, and requires only 3 creatures to go to a graveyard before it puts a sizeable threat onto the battlefield. It's somewhat situational, but in any average game of magic, creatures will regularly be dying on side of the table or the other. It has to be in play before creatures die, but can be played after you play creatures, on the same turn as you play a removal spell, or late in the game before your attack step.

Quest for the Nihil Stone on the other hand, is a pretty good example of win-more. Players discarding cards is not very common: usually you have to make them. This means that in order for this Quest to work, you need to have drawn it before you play whatever spell is making your opponent discard. As in: you already need to have been somewhat lucky for this card to be good AT ALL. Assuming you draw it early, putting two counters on this quest won't be hard for any deck dedicated to it, but making sure an opponent has no cards in hand is a lot harder: This will usually take 2-3 spells on your part. This is part one of the win-more narrowness: Cards that are good when you have several cards that support them. In a dedicated deck, this is usually not a problem, though it's still a big deal in Limited. The second part of the narrowness: If your opponent has no cards in hand, they are doing nothing. This means that unless you are also doing nothing, you are winning the game. Quest for the Nihil Stone is only good when your opponent is already in a position of failure. And they draw a card every turn. So even if you get them into the position of vulnerability, the mechanics of the game can help them escape.

The key to understanding win-more is that you're not comparing cards in a vacuum: You're comparing them to all the other cards they could've been. In the time a Quest for the Nihil stone takes to become active and deal 5 damage, a Vampire Lacerator could've already dealt 6, 8, or even 10 damage. If your opponent has no cards in their hand and is half dead to any creature you might've played, you would be winning anyway. Nihil Stone only makes you win in a situation that's already great for you, and in which almost any card that has a positive effect would also be good.

Cards can be win-more in some decks and good in other decks and just plain bad in other decks. This doesn't mean win-more is a bad concept, simply that it depends on context. There are times when Quest for the Nihil Stone is good, there are times when it's the best card for a situation, but those times are way outnumbered by the times where it doesn't really do any more than a random creature would've done, and that's not counting the times it does LESS. Don't get me started on Strictly Better and Mindslaver.

In MtG there only winning, losing and a draw. Real life isn't that way. In real life it matter very you get a job being payed 100k or win-more at the job interview and get payed 110k.

As a Magic player, I've thought that "win-more cards" have a worse reputation than they deserve. You don't just need to be winning at some point, you need to maintain a winning position long enough to actually end the game. If you're barely winning, your opponent is much more likely to make a comeback than if you're totally dominating things.

I call this the "win-more problem." Concepts that suffer from the win-more problem are those that-- while certainly useful to an advanced user-- are misleading or net harmful to a less skillful person.

Also known as "a little learning is a dangerous thing", as Alexander Pope noted in early XVIII century...

The real problem with "win-more" cards is that they're conditional. Being conditionally good is a common criticism of many magic cards. The advice to new players is simple: think about how likely these conditions are to be met. If they can't make this estimate, copy a more experienced player's opinion.

It's also possible that a "win-more" card is also just a decent card even when you're not winning. For example, if you play MTG now, you'll know that 2 desecration demons on the play against G/R monsters is both very good, and that the second demon is "win more".

So I don't really see a problem with playing "win more" cards. The problem is playing too many conditional cards.

I've never known this to happen, and I've been playing magic for years.

I think that 'win-more' is the probably least helpful concept in card game strategy. Not just for new players, but for experienced players as well. (Its annoying enough to read people say something is win more on MtG sites, now I have to read it on LessWrong as well!)

I'm of the opinion that almost everyone would become better players and would be better at card evaluation if they eliminated the concept of Win More from their vocabulary. It almost never is used to actually successfully avoid using an actual bad card, and almost always results in misclassifying good card that would actually help you convert games into a win as a bad card.

What term should we use for concepts that are net harmful for ALL users?

I consider fashion a real-life win-more 'card'.

A concrete example in a situation where you have an all-or-nothing choice like in a card-game is job application: Either you get the job or you don't get it. Investing enery and money in an expensive business suit and optimum outward impression is a win-more strategy because it only helps once you already have the face-to-face interview where your appearance will not much difference (except in a few professions) but at best win-more. Your enery would have been better invested into writing more or better applications and a thorough preparation.

I'm not sure if this generalizes to fashion being in general a win-more strategy.