Turn on the NBA at any point during a game. Which team is winning? The scoreboard immediately tells you what you need to know, such as the point difference between the teams and how much time is remaining.

While this snapshot doesn’t give you complete knowledge of the game (one team might currently have momentum on their side, for example), it’s enough to allow people with rudimentary rules knowledge to cheer on their team in the big games. You can even summarize the state of the game for a friend in another room in less than a sentence.

Magic is much different in this regard. Even disregarding alternate win conditions like milling or Triskaidekaphobia, life totals rarely tell you what is going on in a game. Life is leveraged for card advantage or tempo, and it is not uncommon to see a control player who has overcome her opponent’s early threats easily winning a game in the ensuing turns, despite being currently lower in life. In addition, the amount of time remaining in a round has little to do with when a game will end. While these complications keep Magic interesting, they do make it harder for less entrenched players to jump into watching a GP or Pro Tour. How can this be improved?

Poker is another game where in any given hand, the person with an advantage is not always clear. In ESPN’s poker coverage, the cards in players’ hands are known, so they calculate the chances that each player has the winning hand as more community cards are revealed. This raises the excitement at home, when someone with “no chance of winning” is able to bluff out their opponents. This also helps contextualize the background math in terms people can understand.

While looking for an easy visual thing for viewers to latch on to, it’s not possible to do percentages for Magic. Even if there were a super computer or Frank Karsten to calculate such odds, the makeup of each player’s hand is not always known information (nor should it necessarily be). After all, excitement can be generated in another way, where a player needs a certain card in hand to not die, only to reveal it at the last second. Is there a way to display who is winning with publicly known information without needing to rely on exact numbers?

For the solution, I look at a non-game example: presidential debates. During the presidential debates in 2012, CNN gave a focus group of undecided voters dials and asked them to change the dial to indicate how much they liked or disliked what each candidate was saying. Afterwards, they were able to look through and find which comments had the most traction and which ones fell flat. They could have even gone a step further and analyzed whether people disliked or liked one candidate more than the other if they wanted to. This could hypothetically be used to decide the “winner” of the debate! Replace a presidential debate with a game of Magic and the focus group with commentators, and it may have what we’re looking for. Instead of asking whether they like or dislike how people are playing, they can be dialing in whether one player currently has an advantage over the other. Let’s look at an example of this.

Let’s look at Patrick Chapin (Grixis) vs. Jiachen Tao (Naya Ramp) in the fifth round of GPLA, game 2. In the layout, I have taken the space where the timer used to be. The line in the middle represents parity, with a triangle above and below representing what the commentators Marshall and Huey think of the current situation. The closer they move their triangle to a player, the more they believe that player is winning by. My specialty is not graphic design, but the mockup should give you an idea.

I start with Jiachen ramping into a Nahiri on an empty board. Marshall is slightly worried about an unanswered Nahiri, but Huey is a little more reserved due to the possibility of a Boom // Bust setup in the next few turns.



Chapin chooses the Boom route, following up with a Snapcaster Mage to keep Nahiri from her ultimate. He draws the requisite land on the next turn, his Ancestral Vision comes off suspend, and he plays a Goblin Dark-Dwellers to flash back Bust. As it’s sitting on the stack, things look grim for Jiachen. “That is disgusting!” Marshall exclaims. “It’s almost impossible from my perspective for JC to come back from this,” Huey adds.



But Jiachen had a Through the Breach in his hand and he was able to quickly get back his lands, evening out the score after breaching in another Primeval Titan to take the win.



I’ve only pictured a few moments in the game, but this should illustrate how the dial system would work. So what are the pros and cons of such a system?

Pros

All of the costs are upfront. Unlike other coverage suggestions like Autocard systems or hand information, no additional coverage personnel are required. The commentators just need to update their dial as their opinion of the situation changes. There are some upfront costs in getting the equipment to work out and making the layout incorporate the information in a visually appealing way, but once those things are ironed out, the system is easily portable between GPs.

Commentators are already verbally doing this. Many times throughout the course of a match, a commentator will state that one player is “far ahead” or that someone has a “slight advantage.” Making the information visual reinforces the board state and helps people just tuning in or who are dividing their attention between two tasks (or those people watching with sound off instead of doing their job!)

Visual information increases excitement. When a person goes from being way behind to favored, the accompanying visual of indicators swinging to their side only raises excitement. This is especially true when it is not immediately clear why something should swing the balance, like if you were not familiar with the Goblin Dark-Dwellers and Boom // Bust interaction from the earlier example. You can see the same excitement when the last card is revealed in poker and someone with a 10% chance of winning the hand jumps to 100%.

Cons

People need to be trained to use the system. A system that is not used ends up being dead graphical space. It may be unnatural at first for people to get used to dialing in their thoughts, and there would need to be some extra time spent mentally calibrating to be able to use the full range effectively.

People may be wrong. I don’t think this is an actual con, but people don’t have the objectivity of poker, so an “unlosable” situation could quickly become one.

But any coverage change is only valuable if the community ends up liking it. Would the Goblinslide Meter (better name pending) be the new Tarmographic? Would it make coverage easier for new players? Only experimentation will tell.