Welcome to What Would They Play?

I'm Charlie, I'm a storyteller, creative writer, and author; I handle the historical sections of the articles.

And I'm Dan, a Commander player who is obsessed with building thematic decks. I connect the stories to Magic cards to create decks that reflect the vibrant tales of the past.

We take famous or not-so-famous figures from history and make Commander decks based on their lives, philosophies, and histories.

Our articles are meant to be part history lesson, part deckbuilding guide. We believe that decks can be expressions of personal philosophies, so a fun way to learn about historical figures -- and flavorful brews -- would be to speculate about what sort of Commander deck a given person would play, given their times, opinions, and philosophies.

It's like a history class, only using the medium of Magic: The Gathering.

This is meant to be an accessible glimpse at the people in question, not a rigorous or definitive biography; we have sources at the end of the article for that!

Let us begin!

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Ada Lovelace (1814-1850) was a scientist, polymath, polyglot, and the first computer programmer, most famous for her work with the analytical engine. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Our main sources for this article were Lizzie O'Shea's marvelous book Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune can Teach Us About Digital Technology, and Victoria Ludas Orlofsky's paper A Different Sort of Bird: Ada Lovelace in Steampunk Literature.

Lovelace's work was very future-focused; just as she designed programs for a mechanical computer that did not yet exist, her chosen commander, Elsha of the Infinite, allows her to cast spells that are not yet in her hand. Her deck uses Elsha's "Future Sight" ability to assemble a machine of synergistic artifacts that brings about her victory.

Early Life

Ada Lovelace was the only non-bastard child of Lord "They Named A Specific Type of Anti-Hero After Me You Know" Byron and Lady "Princess of Parallelograms" Anne Isabel Millbank.¹ Given her fathers' legendary horny-bard energy (and lifestyle) that revolved around drugs, fornication, and poetry, Ada was raised in a strict household. As far away as possible from poetry.²

Ada's mother saw Byron's behavior as a form of madness, and sought to steer Ada in a different direction. Ada herself was fascinated with her own "potential madness", and thus she included a madness theme in her Commander deck. Madness spells, like Obsessive Search and Nagging Thoughts, help her dig to her win condition, while counterspells Circular Logic and Broken Concentration and removal spells Avacyn's Judgment and Alchemist's Greeting answer opposing threats while she sets up. Various artifacts are included as the main discard outlets, including Bag of Holding, Network Terminal, and Currency Converter (which even resembles a mechanical computer like Ada may have worked with).

Young Ada Lovelace was tutored rigorously from an extremely young age in the ways of poetry's seeming antithesis: math. Obviously there is significant overlap between mathematics and poetry, but her mother's goal was to steer young Ada away from her father's influence and reputation--though even this route was far from easy. O'Shea notes that one of Ada's own mathematics tutor fretted that "All women who have published mathematics have shown knowledge, and the power of getting, but...[none] has shown a man's strength in getting over them...the reason is obvious: the very great tension of mind which they require is beyond the strength of a woman."

But regardless of the societal prejudices (that I might add, have not entirely dissipated in the intervening centuries), Ada took to mathematics like a duck to water. She flourished in them. And inside the rigidity of math, the bloom of her imagination was taking root.

Ada's Partnership with Babbage, the Man Who Despised Fun

In her last teenage year (1833), Ada Lovelace (recently married) met the crabbish, cranky, and cantankerous creature known as Charles Babbage. She couldn't have known it, but her life was just over half done.

Babbage, it seems, from O'Shea's recounting, was the sort professional hater of fun, frivolity, and theater of any kind that the Victorian age was excellent at producing en masse. To give you a sense of his personality, he absolutely couldn't, according to Lizzie O'Shea: "...stand music and started a campaign against street musicians."

Stop having fun! Babbage is on the scene!

What Babbage did have (besides a big target on his back for people like me to throw rhetorical darts at) was a genius for mathematics and complete disregard for anyone who couldn't keep up with his specialized interest in mathematics. He very much was wearing the "overwrought genius with no social skills" trope as an overcoat.

But young Lovelace could communicate well with the crotchety old Babbage. She understood his ideas, and was able to elaborate upon them and make them comprehensible to laypeople--no small feat of understanding, theoretical knowledge, and multiple-disciplinary translation. Babbage and Lovelace might seem like unlikely partners, let alone friends. As Sydney Padua observed: "The stubborn, rigid Babbage and mercurial, airy Lovelace embody the division between hardware and software."

Ada Lovelace's and Charles Babbage's shared project was the (by now) legendary analytical engine, as O'Shea describes it: "The world's first mechanical computer."  Babbage's focus was upon using it as an automated calculator (complete with punch cards!). But, in true Babbage form, he scorned explanation and even in his written work often was brusque and curt--nobody but another obsessed mathematician would be likely to make head or tail of his observations.

Fortunately, Lovelace was one such mind, but blessed with both patience and social skills enough to explicate and expand upon Babbage's bursts.

Where Lovelace shone, initially, was in was showing how Babbage reached his conclusions, and then extending her intellect beyond it to reach unsurpassed heights. The first paper on computer science, as O'Shea notes, was a combined effort. One of Babbage's abandoned speeches served as the base of this, but Ada Lovelace (with infinite patience) translated it, rewrote it to provide explanations to the interested readers, just in case that reader wasn't a lifelong, fanatical disciple of mathematics and might require some intermediary steps. You know, most people. Lovelace's contributions to the paper ballooned to 2/3rds of the final thing, exploring and expanding Babbage's initial remarks (And insuring that people would you know, actually read it and understand it).
This paper became the treatise on the analytical engine.

Lovelace's work on the analytical engine is considered to be the first computer program. Her program used a recursive method to calculate the Bernoulli Numbers. Anyone who's done any computer programming knows that recursive loops are a important tool in the programmer's toolkit, so it's no surprise that Lovelace's deck uses an infinite combo as its win condition. The setup for the combo is to have Elsha on the battlefield along with Sensei's Divining Top and a cost reducer such as Helm of Awakening. This allows her to draw a card with the Top, recast the Top for free from her library, and repeat until she's drawn her whole deck.

At some point in this process, she will draw and cast her Aetherflux Reservoir, after which point each casting of the Top will gain her some life. Unless the Reservoir is in the bottom two or three cards of her library, it should be easy to gain 150+ life and finish off three opponents. Just in case it is, though, or if one or more opponent is engaging in lifegain shenanigans, she's included a Timetwister to shuffle her hand back into her library and start again.³

Poetry and Science!

Lovely as that was, that was hardly the full extent of Lovelace's mind or contributions to the future. According to Sydney Padua, what Lovelace understood and expanded upon about the analytical engine was this: "By manipulating symbols according to rules, any kind of information, not only numbers can be operated on by automatic processes." Lovelace had made the leap from calculation to computation.

It cannot be stressed enough that the creation of computer science came not from siloed knowledge, but the deliberate combining of multiple strands of seemingly unrelated disciplines. What we might call the humanities in the 21st century and stubborn affection for mathematics. A great and expansive desire to imbue poetry into something like mathematics, to develop a rhythm of numbers.

One of Ada Lovelace's most famous quotes is a reply to her mother, a defiant quote that says quite a bit and is a beautiful bit of rhetoric in and of itself: "You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?"

If artifacts are science and enchantments are poetry, Lovelace would have played both in her deck (Babbage even called her "The Enchantress of Number"). Banish into Fable and Roadside Reliquary become powerful removal spells when both types are in play. There are enough creatures, instants, sorceries, and fetchlands in the deck to reach delirium as well.  Dragon's Rage Channeler can clear away unwanted lands and creatures from the top of her library to set up Elsha plays, and Bloodbraid Marauder, when cast with delirium, has a decent chance of finding Sensei's Divining Top for the winning combo (or finding Enlightened Tutor to find the Top).

Some of the enchantment's in Lovelace's deck include Omens of the Sea, Sun, and Forge, each of which can be sacrificed to increase the Delirium count and set up the top of the library for Elsha. Jeskai Ascendancy, when combined with a mana creature such as Vedalken Engineer, can stand in for Helm of Awakening in the Top combo. And, if she doesn't manage to find the Top, she can go for a commander damage win instead by enchanting Elsha with Auras like All That Glitters and Aqueous Form.

All of this mind-bending work, this fantastical exercise of mind and abstracts and material conditions...and it didn't change the world immediately.

The first computer would be developed a century later. Lovelace and Babbage would languish in historical obscurity until the 20th century.

Legacy

Ada Lovelace died young, at thirty-six (of cancer). But her legacy is larger than one might expect, and yet it is smaller than she deserved. She has a day named in her honor, Ada Lovelace Day, which is observed on the second Tuesday of each October (Happy Ada Lovelace Day!) which celebrates the contributions of women in STEM fields.⁴

She is adored by feminists, romantics, STEM-focused folk, and fans of history--especially the alternate history wing of steampunk (I know, redundant, but bear with me here).  

Ada Lovelace's full Commander deck is below!

1. This was apparently one of Lord Byron's nicknames for her, according to O'Shea--so he may have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but at least he was good at nicknames.
2. Ironically, poetry was arguably the one unalloyed good Byron might have left behind aside from his support in the House of Lords for the radical Luddite movement as a justified attack against the core of then rapidly-growing nucleus of industrial capitalism. Even still, poetry was treated in Victorian society, according to O'Shea, as a sort of "gateway art" that would cause young Ada to follow in her father's footsteps of libertinism, hedonism, and adventure--not at all acceptable for a woman from a "good" family at the time.
3. Nowadays, the cheapest printing of Timetwister is thousands of dollars, but keep in mind that in the 1840s it would have been much cheaper. If you want to build this deck in paper, I'd suggest using Diminishing Returns instead.
4. As Victoria Ludas Orlofsky notes in her paper: A Different Sort of Bird: Ada Lovelace in Steampunk Literature: "Ada Lovelace Day, a day devoted to blogging and sharing stories about women in technology, was founded on March 24, 2009, by Suw Charman-Anderson, a British social media consultant. Though the fields of information technology and computer science have grown rapidly since the 1980s, the percentage of women in the field has dropped sharply, and studies examining this trend note the persistence of gender-related discrimination and stereotyping. Recognizing this situation, and citing a study that showed college-aged women responded to and were inspired by female role models, Charman-Anderson claimed Ada as one of the earliest women in technology and established Ada Lovelace Day as a way to honor the achievements of women currently working in the field. In the 50 hours during which it is Ada Lovelace Day somewhere around the world, participants are encouraged to do a blog post about women in any field of technology. The yearly event has grown bigger and gained international attention, both for women in technology and for the reputation of Ada Lovelace as chief among its pioneers. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2015), discussed below, is based on a web comic that began as part of the first Ada Lovelace Day in 2009."