There are few writers of great enough stature to inject themselves into every story. David Foster Wallace. Hunter S. Thompson. Truman Capote. Jack Kerouac. Paul Theroux. If one of those names aren’t you then god help your writing if you insist on doing so. You will come across arrogant, patronising, and conceited. This is made infinitely worse if, when you do choose to force your ego into every narrative, you play yourself up, rather than take the more nuanced route of self-deprecation. And the greatest sin is to do self-deprecation so badly it becomes indistinguishable from arrogance.

This left me wondering, while reading The Official Miser’s Guide by Michael J. Flores, whether the constant, excruciating, self-aggrandisement was something he meant as a joke, or meant seriously but failed to be humorously conveyed. Because boy does it get in the way of everything else in the book. But by the end of the book what I discovered is that not only is the ego inflation intended completely seriously, behind it is a sophisticated plan based on pure, unadulterated bullshit.

The Official Miser’s Guide is, ostensibly, a self-help book written to help Magic: the Gathering players improve various areas of their game. It’s written by Michael J. Flores, one of the longest and most prolific Magic writers, a guy who has won various competitions and designed many decks. If you read The Official Miser’s Guide you’ll hear about every single one of them. Possibly twice. At the very least, by the end, you’ll have absolutely no doubt in your mind who came second at New York States in 2005.[i] This is the terrible journey the book takes you on, and with it comes the creeping realisation that Flores intends on moving from being the deck-building don of Magic to the Tony Robbins self-help guru of Magic.

Chapter 1 opens up with Flores bragging about attending for free the NYC movie premier of Kick-Ass, which has nothing to do with Magic but apparently is highly relevant to Flores’s “…framework for the personality that I invented (and presumably all of you guys love…)”, a rather large, but entirely in-keeping with his ego, assumption for Flores to make. The kicker for this anecdote is a joke that there is no-one having sex in The Official Miser’s Guide (although, horribly, there are several dating tips), and thank whichever higher power prevented that because you just know it would have involved Flores fucking some impossibly beautiful person and describing in entirely too much detail exactly what he was doing to give her the most almighty orgasm of her life.

The next 20-odd pages involve Flores justifying his (and the books) existence, which largely involves name-dropping other Magic players[ii] and explaining why Flores’ very existence among these titans of Magic made him the best person to write this book. These names are punctuated by random big-noting for his Magic history, for instance Flores declaring “”Who’s The Beatdown?” – generally considered to be the greatest Magic article of all time” and “the podcast that Brian David-Marshall and I have been doing for more than six years, was the first –and still the best – Magic podcast”.

As you chew through these early chapters you wonder whether Flores has the world’s largest ego or instead some sort of self-image problem so crippling he needs this immense, continual, self reinforcement in order to face the world each morning.

At the end of Chapter 1 Flores announces his first “homework assignment”, which is to smile for twenty minutes a day. In Chapter 8 he explains it in reference to an Anthony Robbins anecdote about a UC Berkeley study that supposedly cured the clinically depressed through smile therapy with a 100% success rate, a study I’m guessing was so profound that to this day psychologists and psychiatrists prescribe it at every given opportunity (and cannot be found on the web except in reference to Tony Robbins[iii]). Here’s some counter-advice. Use those twenty minutes to masturbate. I guarantee you’ll have something to smile about by the end of it. Besides, masturbating for twenty minutes a day is exactly how Flores wrote The Official Miser’s Guide.

Chapter 2 starts out with the same self-improvement guff, followed by more of the same self-serving pap, for instance “Most people think about “Who’s The Beatdown?” as the single greatest Magic strategy article of all time.”. Apparently telling us this point in Chapter 1 was not enough, Flores’s insecurity is so great that the point needed to be restated in Chapter 2.

This is followed by writing that is alternately patronizing (“At US Nationals 2000—you may have heard of this tournament”), lazy (“I don’t remember what I told Tom, but eleven years later, it hardly matters. What I would say now is that what I might have said in late 1999 or early 2000 was no more or less true at that point than it was when I built Napster”), and contradictory – after navigating the dirty waters of why complexity, context and flexibility is so important, Flores then launches into a full throated defense of generalisations, which he will then rely on for the rest of the book. His defense of generalisations rests on the philosophical question of whether “Can 1-3 words describe even one strand of her hair, let alone a whole head of it?” to which the only response is short, dark and curly.

Flores then launches into a weird attack against an anonymous podcast with “I was listening to a not-useful (and for that matter not-good) podcast about a week ago…”, which is a pretty unnecessary and mean-spirited thing to drop into a book out of nowhere. In fact, the entire sequence about the “Double Nickel” could of easily been re-written to avoid mentioning the podcasters, and it makes his lead-up to his otherwise blow-job-esque description of Jon Finkel – “While he never gave us a Deckade or a My Files full of wisdom and tournament reports, or even that general rule that we all so desire, Jon….” – seem like a side-swipe instead of an in-joke as probably intended. What you eventually discover is truly important about the wisdom Finkel does impart is that is that Flores was there when Jon said it.

Having crowed about Finkel, Flores seems to realise he might not appear the biggest cock in the room anymore, so he spends the next few pages reinforcing his uber-status, noting that for two-years running (2005 & 2006, apparently the most relevant years of Magic ever) Ted Knutson called him “the “Pat Miletich of Magic.””. Flores notes “I took it as a compliment then, and am bragging about it now”. Mike Flores, bragging? Better fetch the smelling salts for surely one has fainted dead away.

In Chapter 3 Michael J. Flores kicks off with a mention of New York Times writer Paul Zane Pilzer, but it’s another Times writer that Flores reminds me most of: Thomas L. Friedman.

If you’re not familiar with Thomas L. Friedman, he’s written such seminal works as The Lexus and the Olive Tree and From Beirut to Jerusalem. His early work, although criticised by some, was widely lauded and his articles as the time for the Times earned him plaudits and awards.

However time has not treated Friedman well. His tendency to insert himself into every story in a larger-than-life manner has worked against him. His habit of torturing analogies to death has caused him to become a target of mockery in the pundit world. His constant name dropping, references to irrelevant historical touchstones, and continual repetition of hollow theories has made his writing cumbersome and easy to ridicule.

Remind you of anyone?

Flores rounds out Chapter 3 with The Power Of Positive Thinking, which essentially moves him from channelling Friedman to channelling Oprah and The Secret, that awful self-help book that implied people should not associate with cancer victims lest they bring cancer upon themselves.

“The winner is the person who is most certain of victory” states Flores, which is an eye-opening read for all the underdogs and longshots who cannot possibly win against a superior player with a superior deck in a game of chance.

Flores hedges this somewhat by following it up with “But by and large, in competitive matchups—you know, the ones where neither player is blown out in a mana-screw, where the fight can go either way—the player who establishes superior certainty will win.”, which defangs the statement by taking the psychological aspect out of it and effectively making it a truism; the player who establishes certainty to win first will win. Ultimately, he simply contradicts this entirely in Chapter 28, when he talks about how he beat a guy who “had every certainty he was going to win… “, thereby revealing a players certainty has little to do with the matter, it’s a player’s skill that shines through.

Chapter 4 kicks off with game theory (after three pages about how gravity isn’t about to fail him and cause him to go spinning into space as he is bound to earth by the shear mass of his ego) and finally Flores is in his element; card economy, the philosophy of fire, and tempo. These are pretty basic theories by now, still solid, and Flores does well to get them out of the way early.

As this stuff has been around for years, the only real problem with this section is the hedging that Flores employs, as in these three instances:

“While conventional wisdom quite usefully states that Pro players are more likely to maximize card advantage given the same resources and matchups than amateur players are (especially in Limited), it is important to approach Magic knowing that card advantage is not a be all, end all. Should we in general try to maximize it? Sure. But not every time.”

“While playing to maximize card advantage is the default way that Pro players approach the game, remember that when a particular resource is not what is scarce, the value we gain by maximizing card advantage may be similarly de-emphasized. In short, card advantage is a guideline, but for the most part, play to win.”

“As with card advantage, operating with tempo in mind is generally desirable but not a “be all, end all.””

This continual hedging leads the reader to one of two conclusions: either Flores lacks such confidence in his own guidelines that he has to continually reinforce the notions that they are just guidelines; or he lacks such confidence in the intelligence of his readers that he feels he has to keep reminding them what a guidelines is.

The problem is that continually reminding the reader of such creates trivial non-statements in the form of “do x unless you shouldn’t do x”, without any clear guidelines of what to look for in the exceptions. This is a real area where Flores is lacking. Rather than build up a new, interesting framework on when to go outside the boundaries of his useful guidelines – ie. when do his guidelines no longer become useful – he just skips the topic entirely and relies upon his readers to fill in the gaps, thereby adding nothing of substance to theories that are now almost a decade old.

This would have been an excellent spot for Flores to describe what corner-cases are in Magic and how to recognise when the gamestate has reached a corner-case, but the opportunity is missed. If you are going to give your readers a toolkit of guidelines, it’s equally important to give them the tools for operating outside of the guidelines and recognising when it’s correct to do so.

At this point, four chapters in, the only new and unique discussion Flores has committed is the difference between useful & non-useful vs right & wrong (an interesting discussion back in Chapter 2). Everything else has been pomp and pageantry marching across well worn ground.

This continues in Chapters 5 and 6, which cover the concept of trump cards, Zvi’s the Fundamental turn, going “over the top”, game-stage theory, sliding into home with Flores’ ” Grand Unified Theory of Magic” and a re-tread of the old stock mana theory – and the confession by Flores that he was at the height of his theoretical powers in 2000, over ten years ago. It shows.

Chapter 7 is about the metagame and it’s a logical clusterfuck of Flores proportions. Firstly Flores sets up the strawman of ‘players’ who define the metagame as “a proxy for the word “environment” or “format,” and it’s not the same thing.” This isn’t what most players would define the ‘metagame’ as. Next Flores takes a look at the Wikipedia definition:

“the ‘metagame’ refers to the deck (or group of decks) that are expected to show up in a larger number in a tournament”.

In response Flores declares:

“Sorry Wiki! I think this is kind of a terrible and not particularly useful definition. Instead, I’ll give you one from Justice League of America co-foundress and Bird of Prey Dinah Laurel Lance, the trainer of teevee’s Young Justice: “Combat is about controlling conflict—putting the battle on your terms. You should always be acting, never reacting.” —Black Canary”

This is an even less useful description of the metagame than the Flores Wikipedia version. Later Flores continues:

“I want you to stop thinking about the metagame as Wikipedia suggests—merely a group of decks—and more along the lines of a game, a game you are (or at least can be) playing. The true metagame is what we play (though maybe we don’t necessarily play it well) every time we pick a deck to play in a tournament.”

Incidentally, Wikipedia actually defines ‘the metagame’ as:[iv]

“a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. Another definition refers to the game universe outside of the game itself. In simple terms, it is the use of out-of-game information or resources to affect one’s in-game decisions.”

So maybe Flores could stop harshing on poor Wikipedia as he puts words in its mouth.

Regardless, Flores uses this as a segue to talk about his deck, Critical Mass, a deck that by his own admission “was played in only two tournaments ever” and yet “represented a leap in technology and the pinnacle of what elite deck designers call THE Deck”. Yes, that’s correct, Flores has officially declared Critical Mass the pinnacle of deck design. Forget other equally fleetingly decks that have performed better (for example Alexander Hayne’s Pro Tour winning UW Miracles deck). Forget Cawblade, which completely and utterly dominated its format for months. Forget Thopter Depths, which was so attuned to the metagame the key pieces were immediately banned on Modern’s inception. Forget Flash Hulk, a deck so broken it could win on Turn Zero. No, the pinnacle of deck design was a deck that never had a chance to be blown out by a competitive metagame because the format ended too quickly.

If the argument is that Gnarled Mass should be considered “the pinnacle of what elite deck designers call THE Deck” because it had 90% match rate, Flores himself undercuts this argument by stating that “Jon Finkel once won a PTQ with a deck he claimed had all good matchups” that Flores himself lost to. Under this criteria surely that deck would be The Pinnacle Ultimate Fighting Championship Deck Of All Time. But it’s not. It’s Gnarled Mass.

Flores follows this up with an interesting discussion about metagaming using Rock – Paper – Scissors as an example that is well worth reading. He then almost leads into a useful philosophical discussion about the why or why not to play the “Deck to Beat”, but only states one side of the argument, never following through with the intellectual rigour of positing the other side’s viewpoint. Flores reveals that he never plays the Deck to Beat because:

“Who are the most popular Magic writers? Myself? Patrick Chapin? Zvi Mowshowitz? Gerry Thompson? Heck, Conley Woods was awarded the title of Deck Designer of the Year by a Magic podcast in 2010. All of us are technology producers. None of us want to blend in.”

It all boils down to ego. Ain’t that a surprise?

Chapter 8 involves Flores getting punched in the face twice, easily making it the best section of the book.

Chapter 9 contains a lot of repetition of the words “smile“ and “certainty“, easily making it one of the more boring sections of the book.

Chapter 10 is where the fun begins again. Flores delves into the world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. What is Neuro-Linguistic Programming? Let’s allow Wikipedia to take a swipe at Flores this time:

“Neuro-linguistic programming is a largely discredited approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created in the 1970s… Reviews of empirical research on NLP indicate that NLP contains numerous factual errors, and has failed to produce reliable results for the claims for effectiveness made by NLP’s originators and proponents… Criticisms go beyond the lack of empirical evidence for effectiveness; critics say that NLP exhibits pseudoscientific characteristics, title, concepts and terminology. NLP is used as an example of pseudoscience for facilitating the teaching of scientific literacy at the professional and university level.”[v]

That’s right, NLP is pure, unmitigated bullshit. I’m not going to further dignify NLP with a cogent argument against it. Crack open a book. Use Google. It’s all there.

Flores states “Language Lesson Numero Uno: Your unconscious mind can’t process a negative.”

This is also pure, unmitigated bullshit. Even the most cursory examination of this premise should allow you to recognize its invalidity.

Flores launches into the use of NLP “embedded commands”, as used by pickup artists and multimedia marketers.

Embedded commands are pure, unmitigated bullshit.

Flores then drops the name of Frank Kern, who he calls “the godfather of Internet marketing”.

Frank Kern is full of pure, unmitigated bullshit. If you’d like more information on Frank Kern, try reading The Verge’s 2012 article entitled “Scamworld: ‘Get rich quick’ schemes mutate into an online monster“.[vi] Be careful if you google for him, there are a great deal of websites that start off criticising him, only as a lure to get you to buy his product.

Flores spends the chapter using NLP and pick-up artist practices as the theoretical underpinnings of “mind tricking” your opponent. Further pure, unmitigated bullshit.

This is not to say you can’t mind-trick your opponent; certainly you can. You can lead your opponent into all sorts of self-harming actions during a game. However the psychology behind these actions have absolutely nothing to do with the pseudoscience of NLP.

But forget the rest, Flores citing NLP is itself the big reveal.

It becomes clear that across The Official Miser’s Guide Flores follows up each mention of Who’s The Beatdown with hyperbole[vii] not because he necessarily believes it, but because he thinks that if he keeps repeating these statements, you will believe it.

This explains the endless effort Flores takes to tie himself to accomplished players, to insert himself however tenuously into any situation where Magic of worth is occurring, to exaggerate and inflate and laud himself and his work as infinitely more important than it is, and apparently, the reason he finishes each of this non-Wizards articles with LOVE MIKE, as he believes the embedded command of this statement will cause you to actually love him. No seriously, that’s what he writes. In his own words. To be seen by everyone.

The stark reality is that The Official Miser’s Guide isn’t a self-help guide. It’s a long advertising flyer for Michael J. Flores, with about as much value.

It’s at this point in The Official Miser’s Guide where, as a reader, you have to make a choice. Are you going to continue to absorb this non-information and waste your time on ego-inflated, scientifically discredited, factually challenged, illogical, repetitious nonsense, or are you going to put it down and go do something more useful, like stick forks into your eyeballs?

Mike Flores was a great deck-builder and great writer. Now he is an inglorious hack spouting utter nonsense in an effort to fool enough people to buy his “brand”.[viii] The Official Miser’s Guide is less a self-help book than a marketing pamphlet filled with the Magic equivalent of get rich quick schemes. When I began reading The Official Miser’s Guide I thought there was nothing here that couldn’t be saved by a ruthless editor. However as the layers around the foundations were pulled back to reveal the bullshit bedrock beneath them it became clear that The Official Miser’s Guide is irredeemable. The best of it is already out there; the worst of it actually makes you dumber for reading it.

Paradoxically, we will leave it to Flores to argue whether you should buy The Official Miser’s Guide or not. Flores states:

“There is such a thing as not useful, and we should generally slough off not-useful information whenever possible. I would go so far as to say we should shun and actively avoid sources of not-useful information.”

And I, for once, agree with him.