The TCG You've Never Heard Of

Weiss Schwarz!!! It means "black and white" in German, but it's also the name of an esoteric trading card game from Japan. Featuring an assortment of anime, gaming, film, and other pop culture franchises, Weiss is the perfect game for otaku. After eight months of playing, I'm still learning new things and making a fool of myself at the local game shop. 

The end-game for Weiss is simple: do enough damage to your opponent to win. Unlike most TCG, Weiss doesn't have its own stable of characters, and there are no obvious deck-types or elemental advantages to consider. To balance this game, you really have to understand your own deck's character-based gimmicks to create an effective winning strategy. The Seven Deadly Sins anime has one of the lowest-priced trial decks, so that was my first Weiss purchase. I didn't do a good job of learning that deck's tricks; needless to say, I was thoroughly beaten for many weeks.

Is Weiss Schwarz fun? At first, hell no. I didn't win a game until I put together an entirely different deck: a Fate/Stay Night one based on character Rin Tohsaka. The deck is a little underpowered compared to others, but Rin's low attack damage is remedied by conditional buffs to beat tougher opponents. I won my first game with that Fate deck...before losing many more matches.

Rin Tohsaka: best girl in Fate franchise. 

Weiss isn't nearly as popular as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or Magic the Gathering, so we're a small group at the back of the card shop on Sundays. When the Pokemon or Magic tournaments get too large, Weiss is cancelled for the day so there are more tables available. Because of the game's obscurity, it's difficult to obtain Weiss cards unless you preorder them early. On the other hand, there are no scalpers lurking around supermarkets and vending machines to buy all the stock at once, which has become a serious problem for Pokemon players. 

Why do I play? It's nice to be part of a community, no matter how small. It's nice to have new experiences. It's nice to get out of the house, play cards, and return home in time to eat dinner with my wife and kid. I think my record is 3-25 or something terrible like that; I picked up two of those wins during my last playthrough, so I've made progress! If I win another game before the end of the year, I'll be happy.

X-Men: The Manga and its No Good, Very Weird Government

I bought X-Men: The Manga Remastered the other day at Barnes & Noble. Narratively, it starts where the 90s animated series begins, on Jubilee as she runs from Sentinels that hunt an emergent mutant population. In order to end these discriminatory attacks, the X-Men make their way to a quasi-governmental facility that stores dossiers on mutants around the country. At first I thought, "Why would you have to go to a facility to do that? Can’t you just hack into their systems remotely?" Then it occurred to me: this story is set in the 90s. I’d almost forgotten what that world was like back then.

Paper documentation, especially at the government level, is a challenge I saw firsthand while working at a municipal court. My days were spent entering information, scanning, and filing it away for hours at a time. Need to issue a search warrant? Fax the judge. Need to collect payments? Send a certified letter. On the federal level, the government has tried to reduce paper processes: the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Paperwork Elimination Act, and several memoranda in recent decades (which points to the truism everyone knows by now: government is extremely slow to change). In the essay "The Filing Cabinet," Craig Robertson describes the archaic — and analog — filing process required for American federal workers to get paid, which can involve sifting through some 28,000 filing cabinets. Should everything be digitized nowadays? Can that be done? Who knows.

Here’s another weird example of inefficiency: SENTINELS. I didn’t think about how goofy these giant robot killing machines were growing up, but now I read X-Men and wonder, “How many are there? How much did the government pay these subcontractors to build them? What are the repair costs?”Considering there are no giant robots (we’re aware of) for commercial or military use, the only comparable product I’ve found is this $3,000,000 Tsubame Industries mech that resembles a really slow Armored Core. In a world where ICE raids are regularly conducted against illegal and migrant populations in the US, it’s obvious that a real government would spend big bucks to find perceived threats. Is this a good investment of our money? All I’ll say is the cost-benefit analysis of hunting mutants is clearly based in something other than a balanced budget. 

X-Men: The Animated Series. 1992. Marvel Entertainment Group.

Finally, the X-Jet is clearly an SR-71 Blackbird, an older stealth plane contracted by the government from Lockheed Martin. How this wound up in Charles Xavier’s hands depends on what version of the story we’re reading: he “obtained “ it from SHIELD, or Hank McCoy (aka Beast) built it, or it’s a modification of Xavier’s private jet. All scenarios imply massive security leaks pertaining to the design of a military stealth craft. As a telepath, Xavier could have easily wound up with the information needed to steal the plane or its schematics, but it also seems like a government fully aware enough to build giant robots for mutant hunting could also put more efforts into its security apparatus. 

Which brings us full circle to the X-Men raiding that facility for mutant records. The universe our heroes occupy may be full of hateful xenophobia, but luckily, the government gestapo is incredibly good at wasting time and money. 

An Audience of One

Both of the manga I’m reading at the moment, Tune in to the Midnight Heart and Insomniacs After School, feature characters with personal broadcast radio stations via Internet streaming. I’m an avid streamer of podcasts, but that’s a slightly different flavor of online audio content that’s more curated and episodic than spontaneous. So, is this a thing Japanese high schoolers do? The short answer is, “I have no idea.” 

Tune in to the Midnight Heart. Masakuni Igarashi. Kodansha.

What’s interesting is that the protagonists in the aforementioned manga both maintain their closest relationships using streaming broadcasts to an audience of one person. If characters are confessing their feelings, it’s quite indirect when done through the radio. In my day, texting was the thing kids did; I guess radio is the new thing. I feel there’s a material difference in pretending you have an impersonal audience instead of just directly speaking to your friend. The question becomes, “Why do it this way?”

Modern dating is bad because men and women are doing a poor job of communicating or have nothing good to say. Many people blame the internet for creating information silos that breed stupid opinions and false facts, and this means men and women’s interior worlds are more easily exposed (and increasingly appalling to one another). Because much of our human interactions are mediated through text, I'd say that from a communications theory standpoint, the issue is this: sending texts is information-deficient when compared to radio — even an indirect broadcast conversation — because our voices carry messages through tone and volume, clarifying the intention of our speech. Text, as anyone who’s ever sent one can share, is notoriously hard to interpret even when intentions are good. It’s also easier to be an asshole when hiding behind your keyboard or firing off a quick message without thinking twice. I feel like using our voices is an extra level of personal investment and confidence that helps us be judicious with our words. (Unless you're Alex Jones, of course.)

Insomniacs After School. Makoto Ojiro. VIZ Media.

Radio broadcasts to my wife sound like a cute idea, but would quickly grow old because we already live with each other. For high schoolers who want to treat radio as a form of public journaling and indirect confessional, however, the practice seems harmless. If you don’t want your parents to see your call history, it’s certainly one way to avoid getting into trouble for talking late into the night. Ah, the beauty of being young…