New Magic Post: The Pro Tour Was Magic

A pro league with a rule like 'the maximum age is 28' might get the best of both worlds.

I do think that there are hypercompetitive nerds that play games hypercompetively even if they don't earn money for it because they want to be the best. Most of them don't do it full time, but I don't see why that's needed. 

 (I'll say that, at least as games go, the ones that depend more on probability judgments and less on, say, reflexes seem more likely to lead to general rationality skills.)

I do think there's an argument that MtG is better for general rationality skills then Go. MtG has a lot more uncertainty and when you cards are released the process of understanding how the new cards interact with the existing ones brings constantly new things that have to be figured out while go is relatively static. 

However in contrast to chess or go I think the average magic player puts less effort into becoming a good magic-player currently partly because of how MtG's culture differs from the culture of the others. Having the skill building centered around Pro Tour's seems to me like a way to limit the amount of people who focus on skill building.

(MtG and Go are the two games I know best and where I have an idea of how they work)

For another streaming "ecosystem", I have some familiarity with five Youtubers who have posted a lot of Rimworld videos; Rimworld is a single-player game and there are no tournaments.  The most popular one, Ambiguous Amphibian, is extremely entertaining, and is also clearly the worst player—I see him make plenty of mildly substantial mistakes even in recent videos.  The rest are all very good players and it's hard to say who's the best.  Pete Complete, definitely the second most popular, has a spectacular British narrating voice.  The other three have similar subscriber counts, and the view counts on their Rimworld videos vary widely, so it's hard to compare exactly; anyway, to introduce them, Francis John has the gleeful enthusiasm (and, seemingly, the general personality (note this isn't a bad thing)) of a boy playing with his toys; Rhadamant is somewhat entertaining, but his main attraction is being serious and competent while playing through interesting or difficult scenarios; and xwynns/"Crusha of Mans" projects a very "hyper" personality that is generally entertaining.

All five present most of their videos as challenge runs of some kind; the most popular type is "start with no tech and no resources in an extreme hot/cold climate at highest difficulty level".  All five players at least talk about strategy and what they're planning; Ambiguous Amphibian and xwynns are the most likely to talk about silly non-strategy things (although xwynns' final series was also one of the most technically impressive).  Francis John is the only one who goes as far as creating entire videos dedicated to teaching strategy or game concepts, which he calls "tutorial nuggets", wherein he uses dev mode to construct scenarios illustrating whatever lesson he has in mind, or to run large-scale experiments (like creating 100 characters and 100 enemies, dressing the characters in different kinds of armor, saving the file and letting them fight repeatedly, and collecting the results in a spreadsheet).  Francis John's day job is apparently network engineering.

What can we derive from this?  It's possible for "skill and teaching skill" to do well, when it happens to co-occur with charisma.  Skill does help, because it lets you do more impressive things as a streamer.  But the tradeoff of improving skill vs improving entertainment does seem weighted towards the latter.  And dedicated "teaching" efforts, among the top streamers, are mostly done by one guy who seems intrinsically motivated (and has a probably-well-paying day job).  It's possible that these effects are stronger for one-player games, of course.

If we take someone like Nassiv as an example, as far as I understand his daily schedule had time allocated for streaming and time allocated for playing with his team-mates.

Do you have a good example of a team that streamed in MPL era times where they stream a match in which they develop a new gears understanding of some aspect of magic together and communicate the process to the listener?

The streams I watched of Nassiv or Luis Scott-Vargas were not those people playing with their team mates and having discussions about what they learn in their training matches but those people playing online against other people and explaining their play decisions. 

As far as training the rationality skills of the listeners, you don't really get that by copying the play decisions from either of those. The important skill to transfer would be how to develop an understanding of the value of new cards or how to learn from the games you play which cards you should cut from your deck because they underperform as those two are much more about the skill of gears understanding.