First Semester Done.

First Semester Done — What's Next

I'm closing out my first semester in the MS in AI program at Grand Valley State University this week. Feels like a good moment to refresh the website and start writing here regularly. This is the first post in what I plan to be a slow, occasional blog — notes from the research, reflections on findings, the occasional piece on whatever else is on my mind.

Summer's coming and I'm heading into it with a clear goal: get the next phase of my research project off the ground. The project is called the Card Valuation Matrix, or CVM. It's a framework for evaluating trading card game cards across multiple value dimensions at once — not just "is this card good in tournaments," not just "is this card valuable on the secondary market," but how those two value systems relate, where they agree, and where they diverge.

CVM grew out of a class research project I led this past winter semester in CIS 635 (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining). The core finding from that project: in Disney Lorcana TCG, the features that predict competitive winning aren't the same features that predict price. Rarity drives price; rarity does not predict winning. The cheapest archetype in the meta outperformed the most expensive one. The model that predicts tournament finishes ran near-random, which sounds like bad news until you realize it's actually evidence that the game is genuinely well-balanced — no archetype has a runaway advantage, no card is so dominant the meta collapses around it. That's healthy game design, and it shows up in the data.

CVM takes those findings seriously and turns them into a more rigorous framework — proper statistical treatment, handling for how value shifts as the meta changes, room for both competitive and collector value to show up as distinct signals. The summer work is bringing the methodology from designed-on-paper to running-on-real-data. By the end of summer I want to have findings worth writing into a real research paper.

And as a reward for putting in the work this year, I'm planning to play in the Disney Lorcana Challenge in Indianapolis this summer. There's something fitting about studying a game and then showing up to compete in it, and I'm looking forward to it.

Last thing — a thank you. Going back to school after the military isn't a small transition, and I haven't done any of this alone. To the friends, family, teammates, professors, and classmates who've been part of this past year: thank you. The support means more than I usually say out loud. There's a lot ahead, and I'm grateful to have you in it with me.

More soon.