killing a goldfish

a guide to card pimping

2011-12-05T11:09:00.001-08:00

A bunch of people are writing a lot about how to pimp your decks. This leads a lot of people to ask, "how can I make my cards as deliciously pimped-out as these?" Well, since you're completely ignorant about everything, I'll tell you.

A pimped card is one that is more expensive, because money makes things better. If you disagree, it's because you're poor.

We'll start with a card that I chose completely at random and ~pimp it out~

It's fairly bent, and overall not in great condition.

More importantly, it's a common, and therefore worth nothing to anyone. This makes this card "a piece of shit."

The first step in pimping it is to make it more tasteful. Since sleeves are used to hold expensive cards sometimes, I put it in a sleeve.

Next, we need to surround it with things that will make it look expensive and like some sort of decoration in a rich person's house, because rich people can throw money at things to make them "pimp." A candelabra is pretty pimp, because it's shiny and costs money. (This is the basic reason that promotional foils are pimp.)

This isn't enough, though; we need our card not to be simply placed upon something slightly pimp, but completely surrounded by class and luxury. In the following picture, our soon-to-be-pimp card is placed upon a lace doily, next to a glass of expensive bourbon, a magazine about horse breeding, a guide to wines of the world, and an original pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico (if you haven't heard of that album and especially if you don't have a vinyl copy, then you might as well forever stop trying to pimp your cards, scrubbo).

This isn't good enough, though, because that spread would be a bit awkward to carry around and present every time we need to cast the card in EDH (by far the most pimp format, because deck size is bigger = more cards = more money = better than). We need something to pimp it out in the sleeve, so I put a $20 bill in. NB that $100 bills are extremely un-pimp because they're associated with actual pimps.

Hell yeah now THAT is a pimp card, even if it's only $20. I tried to put more in the sleeve but it kept breaking so I'll just lay it out here on some nice china. The money shown should be sprinkled liberally through the cards that are put into any deck containing this. Then people will go "wow! That's a lot of money! You must be a better person and it'll be more worthwhile to listen to you talk about Magic!"

Our work here is done. I hope you enjoyed this article on how to pimp a card, pimp pimp pimp pimp pimp pimp pimp pimp pimp.

podcast, episode one: odyssey

2011-11-29T17:48:00.001-08:00

This podcast was recorded ten years from now.

MP3 download here (mediafire link)

a style parody of matt sperling and michael j flores

2011-11-28T08:50:00.001-08:00

Yeah, I’m losing my edge

I’m losing my edge

But I was there

I was there in 1994

I was there at the first Mirage booster draft playtests in Renton

I’m losing my edge

I’m losing my edge to the EDH players whose laughter I hear after round two

I’m losing my edge to the SCG grinders who can tell me every card played in Cawblade from June through the banning

I’m losing my edge

To all the foreign pros

I’m losing my edge to the casual players with Monster binders and ten thousand dollar versions of Ghost Dad

I’m losing my edge

But I was there

I was there at the first practice games at the beach house

I didn’t want to lend Herberholtz my Overgrown Tombs, so I gave him Stomping Grounds instead

I made top eight at a PTQ where Conley played Death Cloud

I told him, don’t build such weird decks. You’ll never win a match

I cut Flamentongue Kavu from my Standard decks because it died to Flamentongue Kavu

I was there in 2002 testing the Pyschatog mirror against Carlos Romao

He never resolved a Fact or Fiction

I was there

I was the first guy drafting Dampen Thought

I drafted it at Neutral Ground

They know now

I was there

I’ve never punted

I was there on StarCityGames when Chapin wrote an article where he took a judge’s order to stay away from E a bit literally

I joined an Invitational draft on Magic Online and they didn’t know how to kick me out

I was there when Bertoncini won his first M11 draft with Ant Queen

I was there on MTGSalvation when Gavin Verhey infracted someone for posting a decklist with Damnation

But I’m losing my edge to better-informed players with better mana curves and different draft archetypes that are actually really, really really good

I’m losing my edge

I heard you quit Magic when damage didn’t use the stack, and again after the Organized Play changes

I heard you have every gold-bordered World Championship deck, altered to have black borders, then altered back because it was worth more originally

I heard you have every piece of tech Gerry Thompson has ever withheld from his articles

I heard you have a cube made only of cards that made other people stop playing cube

I hear that you’re buying a Sol Ring, Capture of Jingzhou, and an Emrakul, and are trading away your Snapcasters, because you want to play a fun deck

You want to play Vintage Teachings

I hear that you and your team have sold your Jaces and bought Doubling Seasons

I hear that you and your team have sold your Doubling Seasons and bought Jaces

I hear that every deck you play is more skill-intensive than every deck that I play

But have you seen my binder?

Incite, Island Sanctuary, Ernham Djinn, Protean Hulk, Stifle, Fluctuator, Crimson Acolyte, Ignite Memories, Tarnished Citadel, Arcane Denial, Demonic Consultation, Ironclaw Orcs, Pyrokinesis, Olivia Voldaren, Battlefield Scrounger, Snap, Pillory of the Sleepless, Attunement, Wall of Blossoms, Scorched Rusalka, Exile into Darkness, Desperate Ravings, Corpse Dance, Dralnu, Skyshroud Poacher, Dream Halls, Skirge Familiar, Manriki-Gusari, Abeyance, Cadaverous Bloom, Lightning Helix (just flip it…), Knight of Stromgald, Saffi Eriksdotter, Cruel Ultimatum, Plow Under, De! Ranged! Hermit! Covetous Dragon, Ebony Owl Netsuke, Serra Avatar, Goblin Bombardment, Barbed Lightning, Threads of Disloyalty, Swans of Bryn Argoll, Recurring Nightmare

Recurring Nightmare

Lend Your Cards!

2011-11-15T11:43:00.001-08:00

There are so many articles about MTG finance and trading and how to maximize value out of the game by acting in a completely self-interested manner. This is not one of those. This article is about why you- yes, you- should immediately lend way more cards at Magic tournaments. I don’t mean just to close friends and teammates, though that’s obviously fine. I mean friends-of-friends, people in competing playgroups, that guy you saw Top Eight once, the guy who knocked you out of the last tournament, and little Timmy at his first FNM. And not just a couple uncommons here and there: I want you to start the first round of the GP with your binder spread out through the tournament hall, those dual lands and Snapcasters beign put to good use. Not just that, but you should take the first step in offering to lend these people cards.

Why?

It builds community. A lot of Magic tournaments, especially big ones, have small groups of people that cross paths very little. With increased communication and investment between people, in the form of cards lent back and forth, Magic scenes and player groups are going to talk to each other more than ever before. What better way to start communication between the group of Texan players that drove 15 hours to a GP and the ones from Toronto that flew there than a heavy investment in each other’s decks? Competitive players and more casual ones, that go to big tournaments mostly to show off their EDH decks, are going to interact with one another a lot more if they’re lending Wastelands and Doubling Seasons back and forth. This concept will be familiar to anyone who’s studied the history of civilizations’ growth (or read books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel): the successful groups are the ones that interact with others and trade information back and forth.

It’ll make people like you more. See, there is a self-interested reason. Instead of just being that guy with a binder full of expensive stuff that does some trading here and there, now you’re the guy that’s supplied crucial last-minute cards to three players you barely knew. If you’re a mediocre player (and let’s face it, you probably are), that’ll get you testing with more people, getting constructive advice on your decks, and generally giving you more access to more information from more people. And what if that guy you lent Garruks ends up taking down the PTQ? Now you know someone that’s going to the PT.

It’s more efficient and cost-effective. Before every tournament, players spend hundreds of dollars on last-minute cards, and dozens of copies were sitting unused in other players’ binders. That’s just a huge waste. Save Magic players money by lending them cards, and more people can afford to travel farther and to more tournaments. And just think about how many subpar decks were played because people didn’t have the cards to switch to a better one. The only alternative, if those people didn’t want to spend money, was giving up their whole collection to value-trading assholes at the last minute because that trader knew they had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to gouge them to the breaking point. And for those traders out there, you should lend as well: what are the chances you’re actually going to find a good trade for those specific cards during the tournament? Isn’t that a risk you can be willing to take given all these other benefits?

In the world of social media, the risk is negligible. If I’m trying to get someone to loan me a Bayou for my Elves deck at a Legacy GP, I’m going to tell them that I’m Jesse Mason from Rhinebeck, New York, and they’ll have my phone number, email, facebook profile, and twitter handle. How could I possibly run off with their cards? It’ll be all over the internet within hours, and no one will want to hear a damn thing I say because I stole some poor fellow’s cards. This isn’t just because I write now and then; nearly everyone that plays serious Magic has a network of people they talk to online with various forms of social media, and information spreads quickly about anyone. Worst case: I accidentally do take someone’s cards home with me, we’ll contact each other and I can mail them back as soon as possible. Anyone doing that on purpose will borrow cards exactly once and never show their face again anywhere.

It makes the game more accessible. I don’t have the data to tell me if it’s the number one cause of leaving the game, but the cost of Magic is a huge hurdle to people getting started and continuing to play. If that just-picked-up-the-game FNM player doesn’t have to drop $100 on his goofy Standard deck because you can spot him the cards for it, he’s going to keep coming back to FNM. Every week. If you don’t think a few more FNM players at every store around the country is going to have a positive impact on those communities and those stores, you don’t know much about how those things work.

All the good players do it. You think pro-quality players are walking into every tournament with thousands of dollars of cards for every possible deck they might make? They’re proxying copies of rares that sell for $5 the day before the tournament, knowing they can easily get copies of any possible 75 cards the instant they decide on what deck they want to play.

Finally: because you’ll get cards lent back to you once people know you as a decent person that’ll do the same for them. This will save you the trouble of grinding out trades trying to get to your new Modern deck, and you certainly won’t have to overnight cards any more when the whole tournament knows who you are.

I genuinely hope people take this to heart. I’m sick of seeing people drop huge amounts of money or using large blocks of time to get what they want when those cards are only two tables away from them.

an open letter to magic players, by planeswalker points

2011-11-01T22:17:00.000-07:00

Dear Players,

Hey. I know we didn’t get along at first, and that a lot of you don’t like me that much. That’s cool. Some of you aren’t any hot shakes yourself. Not pointing fingers or anything, just saying.

The point is that we’re stuck with each other for a while. Cool, huh? Yeah, thought so.

So. Remember that time you tried to get rid of me? Right. Fun times, fun times. How’d that turn out for you?

Oh, that’s right. You failed miserably. Because you’re a fucking whiny cauldron of baby cries that explodes into tears if the fucking frames change for a single goddamned set, with your pitch never changing from “earsplitting,” so Wizards is used to hearing the same “we’re all quitting” bullshit every time a single thing changes. Remember damage on the stack? Yeah, you yelled up a shitstorm about that one. Bosses actually caught word of that. They rolled their eyes and continued with their actual business making actual money.

Oh no, you say. You really, REALLY mean it this time. This change REEEAAALLLLY sucks.

Well then. Sucks to be you, because it sounds the same to me. But what do I know, I’m a noncorporeal system set up to distribute incentives.

You think your silly little letter is going to get this huge change reversed? The one that was obviously approved by businesspeople that don’t play Magic, and therefore don’t give a shit what a Magic player thinks? Sign whatever fucking name you want to it. They don’t know who you are. Hey, remember that huge change to Magic that was reversed due to immediate public outcry from the community?

No. No you do not. Because nothing gets reversed like that because of a few players bitching. Because players are always bitching.

And now, guess what? After all that complaining, they made some changes. And what were those changes? I’m more important than ever.

Ha ha ha. See what happened? You complained about how the system was weird with me around. So it got changed. And the changes made me more important than ever. Funny, isn’t it? It’s funny to me, at least. Humor is subjective.

So. Then. The point here (aside from me! Haw haw!) is that I’m not going away. Live with it.

Oh sure. You might get a change here and there. But I’m here to stay.

Motherfuckers.

Sincerely,

The Planeswalker Points System

gp montreal postmortem at goodgamery

2011-10-07T14:37:00.000-07:00

My long-awaited (by me) report from GP: Montreal is up at GoodGamery.

"You find yourself in a modern-looking train station that, due to lack of windows, could be hundreds of feet below ground or directly under the foot of some Francophone Godzilla, and you would be none the wiser until your life ends in its footprint. You’d still be none the wiser after that happens, being dead."

writing about magic: a style guide

2011-10-05T21:05:00.001-07:00

Magic players are mostly smart people. This isn’t just audience flattery on my part or marketing by Wizards, it’s probably measurable by a bunch of people that are too busy doing actual work to measure it. Because of this raw intelligence, us smartypantses probably put vanishingly small amounts of effort into high school English, and got good/bad grades in spite of/because of the not caring. Personally, I wrote most of my essays the morning they were due, and got mostly A’s on those papers because I could put words together without making the teacher fly into a grammatically-induced rage; I doubt my experience was unique. Unfortunately for y’all, that teacher was trying to teach some shit that’s reasonably important about How To Write A Thing, and reading a lot of Magic articles doesn’t show much evidence that it seeped through the heads of Magic players into their brainplaces.

Magic writing is still writing. Words still form sentences, sentences still form paragraphs, paragraphs still form essays (that are usually assailing “WIZARD$” but that’s another topic). While it’s truly commendable that writers want to educate the masses about how to play better Magic with better decks and better ideas about the game, what makes those sentences fun to read doesn’t change just because it’s about a subject we all know and love. Some writers seem to aspire to writing the sorts of detailed instruction manuals that come with a waffle iron.

While those English teachers may have told you some good information about writing, don’t interpret this as saying that you need to accept their simplistic bullshit about how to construct an essay (intro/body paragraphs/conclusion is strictly for researchers and other losers), or that you should feel constricted in what you’re allowed to do. While I’ll give advice on how to write certain common types of articles, the best thing you can do as a writer is to break the mold. Write something that fits into no established bin, and no one will know how to react (that’s a good thing).

Nothing in this guide is going to tell you what to say about the cards you’re playing, the decks you’re choosing, or the games you’re describing. That’s still on you. Hopefully, it’ll help a bit when it comes time to decide how you’re going to say it.

pt I: have style

In sixth grade, our class had to write weekly short essays on our reading, and we were graded on a scale of 1-4 on four different criteria. Almost always, I got somewhere close to straight fours, and my sixth-grade self was quite proud of that. After one essay where I got another near-perfect score, the teacher made a note that I should stop it with all the silly jokes in the essays, because this was Real Writing for School. I complied in the next essay, and got straight twos. This led me to conclude that altering my style based on what I thought the audience (my teacher) wanted was for the lowest of boogereaters. I went back to silly jokes, and back to good grades on the essays.
The moral here isn’t “make jokes or your audience will hate you,” because then you’re missing the forest for the being an idiot. Your writing should sound like you, and no one else. What do set reviews by LSV, Chapin, and Erwin have in common? They could switch sites, be published anonymously, and anyone even the slightest bit familiar with them could tell who had written it after the first two paragraphs. Next time you finish a piece of writing, take a look over it and ask, “does this sound like me? Is this something no one else could have written?” If you answer no to either of those, your article may be something worse than bad: it could be generic. Bad articles will still get sent around from person to person, laughing at the dumb ideas and weird MS Paint drawings. Generic writing gets forgotten immediately.

Unfortunately, many writers that think they’re writing articles like they talk fall into the same old Magic slang and cliché that makes so many people sound exactly the same as one another. Writers like Stephen King say that it’s best to use the first words that come to your head rather than search your mental or literal thesaurus, but there are so many words in the English language that there’s no reason to describe everything as being “insane,” “unreal,” “sick”/”the sickest,” “a beating,” “the nuts,” “best ever,” “worst ever,” etc etc etc. Poker terminology, unless it truly is the most straightforward and easily-understandable phrasing available, should be avoided as well due to similar overuse. I’ll give “durdling” a pass for now, because it’s a funny word that can be intuitively understood on sound and context alone by people who’ve never heard of Magic. Don’t overdo it, though.

Of all the guidelines I’m presenting, “have style” is the vaguest, most open to interpretation, and yet the closest thing to a hard-and-fast rule.

pt II: the deck explanation

“Here is a deck. Here is why it is good.” This is one of the oldest, most basic, and most common types of Magic articles. Sadly, the incredible volume of this sort of article means that they are mostly written to be ephemera; they are relevant for anywhere between four months and negative one month (in the sad, rare, but fascinating case of the “here’s a deck that used to be awesome” article).

Writing these articles, one should assume the reader is the founder and president of Skeptic Magazine, raising his brow and looking over his spectacles whenever you say something questionable or without proper evidentiary backup. This discerning reader needs a series of questions answered:

1. Why is this deck, at this moment, the best deck to play?

You shouldn’t wait until the matchup summaries to start proving this; this is what the introduction is for. Summarize the current metagame, including the weaknesses in what the reader thinks is the best deck. Drew Levin’s excellent explanation of Legacy Faeries from July has this in the introduction:

“For anyone paying attention to Legacy in the last month, the fall of U/W has been inevitable since Indianapolis. Up to that point, the metagame was filled with decks that couldn't ever beat a Batterskull—Merfolk and Zoo—or an Ancestral Vision—BUG, Junk, and B/W. The combo decks all lost to Mental Misstep—Breakfast, Storm—and some control decks still relied on Sensei's Divining Top and Ponder to fix holes in their game. People hadn't adapted yet…

“U/W Stoneforge and U/W Control lack the tools to beat Hive Mind. To start, they both have too many cards that are awful with Ancestral Vision. With U/W, I would often resolve an Ancestral against Hive Mind or the mirror, draw a zillion cards, and have nothing to do. That's not where I want to be in today's metagame. You can still play U/W, but it's not going to pay the same dividends that it would have in the weeks directly after Providence.”

What makes this introduction to Faeries great is that it doesn’t start by trying to sell the reader on Faeries, it explains how last month’s hotness won’t cut it now. Reading this, I’m wondering “wow, if what I thought was fantastic is just kinda eh, what should I play instead?” Drew complies by then showing the decklist, and the story of its creation. These stories shouldn’t just be self-aggrandizing narratives where you list off all your loser friends, they should detail your thought process at each step and pre-empt people asking themselves “what about X card?” or “how is this version better than another similar deck?” (This is usually phrased in forums as the dreaded Why Not Just Play _____.)

2. What does this deck do?

Answering this question involves walking a thin line between explaining how your deck plays out and treating your readership like grade-schoolers. If you’ve made an update to an existing archetype (and the vast majority of the time, you have), all you have to do is describe the in-game differences between this deck and its predecessors.

“The mono-red version of this has no choice but to send every burn spell to the head to end the game as soon as possible, but with Tarmogoyf, the deck can play a little more controlling and still win. Most aggro creatures should be killed on sight.”

This is good. It provides a short reminded of how certain matchups used to play out, then how the update changes that; not only does it show off the reasons you might have made the change, it provides play advice for people hopping on Magic Online with your list.

If the archetype you’re updating is highly technical and needs a multi-paragraph explanation of its intricacies, someone’s probably written all that before. Save yourself the hassle and link to it. When I was playing Elves a bunch, I would read just about every article on the deck, and the number of times I had to scroll past unending descriptions of how Cloudstone Curio triggers worked and the exact infinite combos one could make. If you didn’t invent the archetype, you usually don’t have to invent the prose on the technicalities, either.

3. Why those specific cards?

Hopefully, you’ve done a good enough job in your creation story that this shouldn’t take a long time to answer. Here is where we see our first huge trap of the deck explanation: the dreaded Card-By-Card Explanation. If you write enough deck explanations, even trying your hardest to avoid it, you’ll write one eventually. That’s alright. We’ve all done it. I’ve done it. But when they’re bad, they are the unquestionable worst part of the article, and if I see a bad one of these I’ll stop reading immediately. Everyone should know what I mean, but just in case:

“Go for the Throat: simply the best removal available. Four-of!”

Or even worse,

“Mana Leak: obviously fantastic, but only three due to lack of room.”

These statements tell nothing that a reasonably-competent player couldn’t have seen looking at your decklist. Either omit such silly descriptions entirely, or spent the time to detail why your deck needs the utility provided by such cards, and describe why in that deck they are better than other available options.

In a lot of cases, providing a detailed rundown of the cards left out of the deck will give readers a lot more insight into the workings of the deck, and the thought process that went into it, than the same list of the cards in it. This is similar to politicians’ speeches that address their critics’ arguments, shooting them down one by one, knowing that many in the audience are thinking along the same lines (though hopefully, you won’t make as cartoonish a strawman in your article).

4. How does this play against the extant decks in the metagame?

Having meaningful playtest results, and writing about those results, is an enormous pain in the ass, and I am completely unqualified to writing a guide to this process. A non-comprehensive list of the ways you can plausibly fuck up:

Large difference in play skill between you and those you test with
Gauntlet decks are outdated
Gauntlet decks have been “improved” so as to no longer resemble what people will play
Emphasis put on pre-sideboard games, rather than matches
Gauntlet decks have sideboards different from what people will play in tournaments
Gauntlet decks sideboard badly
Gauntlet too small, missing large portions of the metagame
Gauntlet too large, skewing playtesting away from the best and most relevant decks

…and we haven’t even talked about the writing yet. So let’s pretend you’ve overcome all those obstacles and have perfect playtest results. (You haven’t and you don’t.)

What makes matchup summaries relevant is not the data on what deck tends to beat what, since that is both unreliable and summarized by a number instead of with prose. What you need to write about is how the games play out: what cards are the all-stars or the virtual mulligans, the strategies each side uses, and how things change after sideboarding. Even if you have a great matchup in a specific instance, you still need to be detailed about what can go wrong, and any problematic sideboard cards that could be used, even if they’re not especially common.

pt III: the tournament report

Deck explanations are usually the complex, necessary information that serious players need to internalize to succeed at their next tournament. Tournament reports, though, are where the reader gets to kick back and read something entertaining about how a guy’s marvelous topdecks, his opponent’s manascrew, and his teammate’s girlfriend all helped contribute to a spectacular performance at some major event.

That’s the ideal, anyway. Many tournament reports don’t have much purpose to them; the author just decided that since they did well, people will read it, so they’ll crank out an uninformative, boring report that will be forgotten within a week.

Even if you don’t take my previously-written ideas for spicing up your tournament reports, it’s worth it to go back and read classic ones like Wakefield’s “It’s All About the Dinosaurs,” if nothing else than to read:

“Alan keeps suggesting Wall of Roots over Wall of Blossoms, and I keep telling him to shut up.”

Wakefield, in early reports like this, doesn’t follow the rules of grammar like modern Magic writers do. But if you can write sentences like that one, no one’s going to care. What made Wakefield special was that he knew to make every single match entertaining. How many times have you read reports with match summaries like:

“Game one, he doesn’t get the right lands, and I kill him with Clique. Game two, I mulligan and do nothing. Game three is a lot closer, but the inevitability is on my side, and Thopter tokens kill him.”

There is neither entertainment nor strategic value provided in that match. It’s just taking up space. At worst, you can cut it, but there must have been something that happened, some interesting decision or weird hat your opponent was wearing, to make it a bit more lively. If you can’t come up with a way to make a match of Magic interesting to the reader, why are you a Magic writer at all?

In any report, there will be the obligatory sections about non-Magical things that went on, and while it often contains the most interesting writing and stories, it’s not at all integrated in the overall article. If you can’t find any connections, common threads, or cohesion, leaving them to stand distinct with no relation to one another, then why aren’t they entirely separate articles?

Almost any good player with enough time and thought can write a good article explaining a deck, but writing about a tournament experience in an interesting way takes a lot more practice. Get in the habit of writing about every tournament you go to, regardless of result. If it doesn’t end up interesting, don’t publish it. Hopefully, you’ll at least stumble across a turn of phrase you liked, or capture an interesting anecdote or situation that you can reuse in a future piece.

Chances are good that, in your tournament report, you will encounter people. They may be people you know, or people you don’t. If they’re worth a mention, they’re worth some type of description, and “my friend Josh” isn’t much of a description. If you have an interesting conversation with a Name Player, great, feel free to talk about it, but don’t assume that your readership automatically knows everything about them. I don’t mean that you need to say “professional player Conley Woods,” but if you do encounter Mr. Woods, take the time to summarize your impressions of what he was like as a person for your readers who haven’t had the pleasure of making his acquaintance. If all you do is list names, your report will be a list of names and nothing else.

This leads to a note on namedropping. Pointless namedropping is the most worthless way to take up space in an article; it is grating, self-important, and borderline unreadable at its worst. Readers will not care about how well-known the people are that you hang around. Mentioning people because they play a part in your narrative is fine, that’s the purpose of having characters in a story. But often, the person could be removed entirely and no one would notice:

“Michael Flores suggested I try four Snapcaster Mages instead of three, and it worked out well.”

Unless Mr. Flores was doing something else in this report, there is no reason to mention him here. That is a namedrop, and it suuuuuuuuuucks.

pt IV: further reading

When reading others’ articles about Magic, don’t just think critically about the ideas and information they present. Take the time to think about how they were presented; whether it was written in an interesting, accessible manner, and how you would have done it differently. Is there a block of pointless, useless, or uninteresting prose that should have been cut? If so, think back to everything you’ve written, and whether it had similar cuttable sections. Is there anything important left out? Make a note to include that information when you write a similar piece.

If you want to write well about Magic, you will have to read a lot about Magic. However, if all you read are other people writing about Magic, you’ll imitate them when you write, because you’ll have no other points of reference for writing other than those Magic-related pieces. You’ll end up writing like them, thinking like them, and becoming generic, and hopefully I’ve made it clear how I feel about being a store-brand-quality Magic writer. If you’re truly interested in progressing the craft of writing about the game, as I sometimes am, you’ll have to broaden what influences your writing. You’ll have to read books. Some writers have never read a book in their lives, and when they try to describe a playtesting session, it shows. They’ll fall back on cliché and write generally dead-sounding sentences. If you’re a writer and don’t like reading… why are you making things for other people to read?

This essay was inspired and heavily influenced by the previously-mentioned Stephen King’s On Writing, and I encourage everyone interested in the topic to read that. For more nuts-and-bolts advice, The Elements of Style is the slightly-stodgy classic; the recent Elements of Fucking Style presents the same information in a more interesting and juvenile fashion.

a response to "dating and magic," by garruk wildspeaker

2011-09-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

Now, apparently some dude tried to school y'all in "Dating and Magic." Garruk basically thought the guy's head in a place it shouldn't be, basically inside his butt.

Garruk met this guy one time. True facts. Dude was wearing some weird shiny black shirt and some like rainbow-colored armband. Looked like he was going to a funeral in unicorn land.

He made a list and Garruk will basically go down the same thing, talk about what y'all should actually know from it. Should help.

Be excellent. Now the first and most good way to be excellent is to be Garruk, but let’s get this clear, Garruk has that one on lock. Y’all ain’t gonna be excellent by being Garruk. Only Garruk can pull this off. So just step away from those bootleg “Garruk Hats” because first, Garruk’s the only one that has the real one because Garruk fuckin killed the thing that had it as part of its skeleton; and last but still first, your head’ll be spillin over the sides and look like upside-down meatloaf.

So y’all should find another way to be excellent. Now Garruk isn’t sayin y’all can’t at least get some inspiration from Garruk’s excellence, specificity the huge fuckin arms I’ve cultivated over the years. Those you can get. Just go out and, you know, swing some wurms round y’alls heads till the girls take notice. Then you’ll get laid AND have arms look like a dozen goblin heads. Kill two birds with one big fuckin arm.

You there. You want some help with this?

Yeah, I know you do.

You wanna be excellent, right?

Yeah.

So your plan to be excellent should... you’re going to what?

Are you serious?

Well, if you’re going to play Garruk in that game then I could understand if-

What? No, no, Garruk will pretend he didn’t hear that part. Okay so let Garruk understand this. You’re going to sit there. In a fuckin room. With some fuckin cards. And the part where you fuck until your cock planeswalks her into fuckin Ulgrotha comes into this how? Garruk obviously missing something here.

Let’s take a step back, hope that pile of shit doesn’t stick to our feet too much. Okay. When Garruk say somethin like BE EXCELLENT then Garruk mean BE EXCELLENT at somethin that’s cool as fuck. I’m sure some boring-ass old blue mage is excellent at like, like, intercollabinating the hyperfloosher wiggleflop or whateverthefuck but you know what that dude name is?

That’s right. You don’t. Neither do Garruk. Neither do all the women not currently bangin that loser. Which is all of them.

God damn. You don’t have a fuckin clue.

Present yourself well. Basically what this means is like, don’t look like you. So let’s go over this a second. What are those? Those things. Hanging off your legs.

Cargo? The fuck kind of cargo you carrying around here? Do you keep your sadness as cargo? The fuck you want with cargo SHORTS when if you actually had CARGO you’d want something that wasn’t SHORT to carry them the fuck around in.

No, no, no. Get rid of that shit right now, it’s emba- NOT HERE IN FRONT OF... you have to be the dumbest little Saproling Garruk’s ever seen. Taking everything all lateral. Point is, when you see someone, make sure you’re not wearing those. Look like two skirts stitched together.

Flirt. Okay there’s some things Garruk can’t tell you. Some things you just gotta do for yourself. Okay so there’s some women over there. Technically I guess. Now pick one and-

Oh. You picked one, well at least you got that impulsiveness that-

Which?

Oh. Serious? I mean, yeah, we all gotta start somewhere, but she look like her toughness is a lot higher than her power. You know what I mean. Garruk heard enough cracks about “Garruk’s Companion” and that has to be like a cousin or some shit.

What?

You want me to tell you what to say to her?
Now under normal circumstances Garruk would take this opportunity to demonstrative the technique on the woman in question... but yeah this one’s all you, son, Garruk gonna stay at a safe distance away from anythin poisonous might shoot out of her. Don’t know WHAT she could be hiding under them folds.

Anyway. Yeah. Say whatever the hell you want. I mean her, like, not sure it matters even what fuckin language you start speaking she’ll be grateful. I’d start with “hi.” “Hi” usually works.

Be different. Well, let me give credit to you here on this one, you’ve basically got “different” down pretty good. You different from anyone I ever seen that’s been laid, that’s for sure.

Have A Plan. The fuck is this list? A plan? Garruk wishing he looked over this before starting this bullshit. Y’all already know Garruk’s plan. Come on now. It involves being Garruk, and gettin some.

For you? Oh. Well, your plan. I’d stay step one is stop standing over here near Garruk like you’re declaring yourself a blocker and get over there and talk to miss Angel of Despair you had your eye on.

Know your competition. This means, like, know how big their head is, so you know how much space to clear off your mantle. Garruk just kidding. That don’t apply to you. For you it basically means, like, if you see anyone swingin a dick within like ten wurms of her, choose someone else. Just bein real.

Know her. “Know” is like real obscure word for “fuck.” So yeah Garruk can do this part.

You’re back. Didn’t see that you left. You’re a pretty easy one to miss, like, seems like no one would notice whether you’re around or not.

So. What’d you do with her?

You what?

Garruk sorry. Garruk must have misheard you. Sounded like something about “nice” and “friends.”

No.

No it wasn’t “successful.” Successful is when you, yes you right there, are having sex. With someone. Now Garruk stood by you when you chose that over there, but Garruk can’t just let you off for speaking two words and saying that’s good.

You know what a success is? Fucking. Let me ask you. Are you, at this moment, having sex with that woman, standing over there? Garruk going to guess no. Garruk going to guess you don’t have an invisible thirty-foot cock reaching over to fuck her as we’re standing here.

Get the fuck out of here.

These dudes are the worst.

this is not a kneejerk reaction to the planeswalker points system

2011-09-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

I’m not going to write about the new Planeswalker Points system. Yes, it’s a fundamental change to an element of Magic that’s gone mostly un-fucked-with for quite some time now. It also gives us a new number to slap down on the table for all to admire. Is it a good system long-term? I don’t know. It doesn’t rate who the best players are, that’s for sure, but it’s not really designed to do that. Will it drive more people to play competitively more often, thus spending more time and money on Magic? That’s the hope, obviously. It probably will.

The pattern is thus: Wizards announces some change to something long-established. It is good for some people and/or things, bad for some people and/or things. The people it is good for and/or those who like the things it is good for praise the new, noting how it is good for them and/or the things it is good for. The people it is bad for and/or the people who support the things it is bad for detest the new, noting how it is bad for them and/or the things it is bad for. The latter group (the players, not the things) is vastly more likely to write long articles beginning with “Dear Wizards,” or some other such overdramatic epistolary introduction. The former group will note, with possible abundant usage of the “rolleyes” emoticon, that every change leads to a “sky is falling” reaction. While somewhat correct, this pro-Wizards reaction to anti-Wizards reactionary sentiment is just as predictable. Kneejerk negativity without logical merit does not mean the thing they’re reacting to is the hottest shit on the planet.

If I wrote about the Planeswalker Points system, I could probably get it published by a website with bigger readership. Since it would probably be mostly negative (negativity is a good deal easier and many multiples more fun to write), people that agree with a dim, vaguely Peter Principle-inspired view of Wizards employees would gleefully link it to one another, patting themselves on the back because someone who writes in longform takes the same position they do. The site I sent it to would probably hire me back to write whateverthehell, and it would pay for another pair of sneakers (I just bought two).

In my attempt to not write about Planeswalker Points, I’ll be basically alone. We’re only on Day Zero here, so expect a huge wave in the next week. Even the more well-written articles will be inherently mediocre, for the same reason that all kneejerk set reviews are: not enough time has gone by to see how things play out in reality. When people (who disregard my exceedingly sage advice) write some stupid shit in response to this announcement, I’m not even going to write an article calling them out for the amount of spittle that must have gone into writing it, or for their grammatical mistakes in sentences like “Wizards is neither capable of running a legitimate business, or deserving of my hard earned dollars.” I’m not that petty. I’m going to be way more brutal this time around. I’ll just wait, sitting over here, taking it all in. Letting the bullshit wash over me like a bath in a Detroit fountain. Then, six months from now, when everyone has accepted that the new system is mostly just “eh” and has some good and bad parts to it, I’ll relink that emotional explosion of an article all over the internet. I’ll staple it to people’s doors like the Martin Luther of Magic. They will never live it down. That is my personal promise.

Here’s the takeaway: step back from Twitter for a minute. Breathe. If you’re writing an article about it, you probably shouldn’t. If you absolutely must, try to think about whether what you’re stating is immediately obvious to anyone who reads the announcement, then avoid saying those things. Wait for clarification from Wizards before you take a few sentences out of context and imagine them to be talking about something way broader than the current subject. Don’t demand that all the changes be immediately reverted, because Wizards doesn’t revert changes like this: they’ve been planning this shit for years and are going forward with it, fuck your opinion. That’s for the kneejerk haters.

For the pro-Wizards crowd: The Magic Show is bad. Way to bury your announcement that you’re gutting the StarCityGames Open stipends that go to people for showing up to every single one of your tournaments, because you know that with the Planeswalker Points system, people will play every week anyway. Tttthhhhbbbbbttttt.

obligatory alyssa bereznak response post

2011-09-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

The Alyssa Bereznak post is the first true crossover hit between the Magic: the Gathering community and greater nerddom. For those of y’all that have, hopefully, streamed in with millions of your average-joe friends to read this fascinating piece of writing you have before you, what you have to understand is shit like this just doesn’t happen. Magic news is for Magic people. We’re comfortable in our little bubbles and don’t venture outside of them too often unless we’re really hungry and the Burger King is right there.

I’ll talk about the article itself for a bit so that people don’t get tricked into thinking I’m just jumping on the “hey let’s all respond to some dumb shit a dumbshit wrote to get more views for our stupid piddly blogs” bandwagon without ever actually discussing the thing. The article was bad. I think we’ve established that by now. It’s completely without a point, and when on this blog I’m criticizing someone for writing without a point then woo buddy are you in some point-having trouble. So this woman is fine with going on a couple dates with someone who has some boring-ass office job, but it turns out that oh no horror of horrors, he also earns money playing a card game. And he’s really good at it. And well-respected. So you... decline to see him because of that. That makes no sense, but almost anyone that read that article and then this one came to a similar conclusion so it’s really just talking nasty at the horse that’s spread over a five-mile radius due to constant barrages at this point.

It’s still an article without much of a point. The Magic community, instead of looking at it as an article without much of a point, immediately sees it as a vicious attack on all things Magic and greater-nerd-related, and retaliates in the most appropriate way they can think of: calling the author a bitch, cunt, ugly, vapid, etc. “How dare she look down on people who met all their best friends playing magic! Why, I’ve met all my best friends playing Magic too, and I wouldn’t take this dumb whore last pick in the bitch draft!” Stereotypes about Magic players are there for a reason, and the community has done a fantastic job of living up to them. Using gendered insults against someone you disagree with isn’t the best way to seem dateable. No, it’s not a fair response to something you think is wrong. Just don’t do it.

Then there’s the Elly Hart response and it’s a crime against writing. She attacks Ms. Bereznak for the horrendous crime of being a woman drunk and on the internet at the same time, because apparently any woman who gets a bit drunk is the “drunk girl falling all over the place” and Ms. Hart doesn’t say it but it’s pretty obvious “slut” is implied somewhere mixed in with those other words. I would like to inform Ms. Hart that, contrary to what she seems to believe, it is not uncommon for writers- even famous and high-quality ones- to indulge in alcohol consumption that leaves them shit-faced. As one of these good writers who drinks, I was so enraged by her essay that I had to have some drinks, and then, yes, I went on the internet.

In a bit of creative license, Ms. Hart apparently imagines Ms. Bereznak as some sort of Travis Bickle-esque figure, maliciously stalking men on the internet and ruining their lives by posting about it later. For all of Ms. Bereznak’s failings in her article, she never seemed to be going on OKCupid for any reason other than to get some nice dates, yet Ms. Hart thinks she is purposefully fucking with his head in order to... something? Not really sure here.

There’s a greater issue beneath this, though, and that’s stigma. Whether or not Magic players and anyone associating with nerdiness wants to acknowledge it, a great number of people associate these sorts of people with a great deal of negative things, from the dated cliches of pocket protector-types to the more accurate portrayal of the community as poorly-dressed and socially awkward, with a singular focus on their interest to the exclusion of all else. The article hit a nerve because it directly confronted what so many players don’t want to acknowledge: their hobby isn’t helping them get dates with anyone other than the comparatively small number of nerd-leaning females. The greatest outcry in response to the original essay has been from women who are gamers or otherwise self-identify as nerds, but a basic headcount at any gaming convention or, worse yet, Magic tournament, will tell you that even if every nerd girl dates a nerd guy, there are going to be a lot of straight guys left over. They’ll either have to be single, convince the aforementioned nerd girls that monogamy is overrated, or date someone who isn’t a nerd. And that’s where we run into stigma.

The fact that a large number of people have not-so-good ideas about Magic isn’t going to go away if we mock people that bring it up, or high-five each other for only dating within the community of nerds. Is it silly and myopic to disregard a potential date because they play Magic? Obviously. But to be fair here, Jon didn’t make the best case that Magic players are the specimens most worth dating; by both their accounts, they didn’t have much chemistry together. The MTG aspect just seems like a handy scapegoat. If a perfect dreamboat had come along, I’m sure that Ms. Bereznak would have given the game a second look, maybe reconsidered her views on it. But if the dates are just kind of eh, and you have no connection to something the man is deeply emotionally invested in, why bother?

deck choice (a response to pvddr)

2011-08-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

There is a very good chance that you are not Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa. Not only, chances are, do you not have his sweet name, you are not as successful a player as PV. This means that you are under no obligation to choose a deck for your next tournament in the same way that PV does.

His latest article was titled “What Makes A Good Deck Good?”, but it wasn’t about that. It was about the factors that affect PV’s decision to play a deck. I’m not going to hold an inaccurate article name against him too much since a) it’s an eye-catching title, b) he might not have chosen it himself, c) I wrote “why i want to fuck mark rosewater.”

“There are many decks that will simply fold to anyone who leaves home with the mindset that they will beat you, and I don’t think a deck like that is usually optimal.”

PV likes to play decks that don’t have any truly terrible matchups, and have answers to every possible threat (usually, but not always, control decks). This next sentence is important. Feeling like you control the outcome of a game of Magic is not the same thing as controlling the outcome. PV specifically calls out Manaless Dredge as a deck he’d never play, since it auto-loses to Leyline of the Void. It's the pinnacle of The Fear, enemy of everyone who plays either combo or any linear strategy that can be specifically hosed. The issue with his approach is that it means he’s fundamentally opposed to playing any combo deck that isn’t completely degenerate. Hypergenesis, if it wasn’t banned in Modern, would certainly auto-lose to any player with enough specific hate, like Chalice of the Void, Ethersworn Canonist, or even countermagic. Yet it’s banned anyway, because requiring players to sideboard specific cards to be able to beat a specific archetype is rather silly. When it comes to tournament performance, it doesn’t matter whether you lost that match because they guy set out specifically to beat you, or because it’s a 60% matchup and you happened to run smack into the 40%.

“Being 100% versus 60% of the decks and 0% against the other 40% is much worse than being 60% versus the entire field, since you need a lot better than 60% to do well in a tournament and with the second kind of deck your playskill will be much more important, as opposed to pairings – again, why leave your fate to something you have no control over when you have a choice?”

Pro players see a 60% matchup differently than the rest of us. If I say I have a 60% matchup against something, I’d expect to win roughly six out of ten matches. Complex, isn’t it. When PVDDR talks about his 60% matchup, he translates that in his head into “I’d need to fuck up pretty bad in order to lose that in a tournament.” Statistically, the quote in the above paragraph is just nonsense. If you have a matchup that is honest-to-god 60%, you’re going to win about 60% of your matches, and it’s exactly the same as the 100%/0%. There are two ways it’s different: one is, as mentioned above, it’s 60% for us plebeians and ridiculously good for pro players. In which case, be honest and say that. The other difference is how the games feel. Playing The Rock or any other deck that 50/50s everything, most games one loses are going to feel like it was just that close, like you only needed that one more turn or one different card in order to turn the game around. This doesn’t mean that you actually could have.

Regardless of what deck you choose, fate dictates a large amount of the outcome, and in a game with a random element, there’s really no way around that. Even if we could create KaiFinkVargasBot3000 that makes the technically correct play every time and plays the best possible deck at every tournament, they’ll still mulligan to four, or face a bad matchup, or get out-drawn by the twelve year-old kid. Choosing a deck, in many ways, is choosing what you want to lose to. PV has chosen that he doesn’t want to lose to hate cards or a truly unwinnable matchup; instead, he’ll lose to getting worse draws than his opponents. And there’s nothing wrong with that decision.

This is the part that y’all should pay attention to again: the real way for anyone to choose the best deck to play at any tournament. First, find a way to narrow down the field to a manageable number of decks that are reasonable. A reasonable deck is one that has been posting good results, or, if it’s a mostly uncharted format, goes about 50/50 on balance with the expected field. How exactly to narrow down a field is a whole other article, so let’s assume you have that group. Now, play some matches and find the deck that you enjoy playing the most. Playtest the hell out of it. This isn’t some, “Magic is a game so enjoy yourself” nonsense; this is the best way to win a tournament. If you enjoy the deck you’re piloting, you’ll be more willing to put in the extra hours testing, tuning, tweaking, sideboarding, and discussing. You’ll wake up in the morning and look forward to hopping on MODO to grind Daily Events. That extra work is what decides tournaments. You’ll also playtest harder. You’ll care more about each game, because you’ll want to prove how great the deck is that you’re enjoying. (N.B. this isn’t a justification for people to play awful pet decks and expect them to win tournaments. It still has to be a reasonable choice. Is your pet deck a reasonable choice? Maybe.)

In the end, what makes us play specific decks has way more to do with personal preference, style, and having fun than most serious players want to admit. Look at the massive amount of headshaking and justification that it took PV to bring a white weenie deck to a tournament where it was far and away better than anything else. It’s not a coincidence that Chapin almost always goes for awkward-looking blue control decks, Nelson and Ross play aggro, and Ari Lax plays Storm tournament after tournament. People play what they want, and they’ll do best that way.

Since this is a criticism article, people will probably expect some vicious takedown of PV’s style. Here it is: he uses too many exclamantion points. Ooohhhh buuurn, take THAT.

a review of newly-banned cards in modern (by garruk wildspeaker)

2011-08-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

Alright so y’all punks’ve been talking about this “Modern” format when first of all, let’s get this out of the way, Garruk Wildspeaker AKA Garruk, Primal Hunter doesn’t do this “Modern” shit. Garruk is old school. “Ooh Garruk you absolutely must experience the exquisiteness of this piece of furniture of the utmost modernity that I’ve concocted from the newest metallic alloys” shut the hell up Tezzeret, your arm’s a chicken wing. Garruk wants a format called “back in the day.” In that format, y’all do some silly shit and Garruk clocks you over the head for looking at Garruk funny. Cut that shit out. But people keep asking Garruk about oh, what does Garruk think of the Modern banned list, well let’s take a look. This isn’t planned. Garruk just does. Gets shit done in a hurry.

Hypergenesis

This shit right here is the reason Garruk became a planeswalker in the first place. Oh what’s that, you want to talk some shit to Garruk BOOM portal to the plane of Wurms that gobble your sorry ass before they’re even out of the portal. Oh what’s that you have an axe BOOM Garruk checks in with the plane of bigger fucking axes and now what’s up. Ooh but Garruk if there’s Hypergenesis then I won’t be able to sit around thumbing my ass with a scrollbook, well no shit that’s kind of the way the world is numbskull, you sit around not doing shit you become horse devour. For y’all uncultured fools that don’t know from that, it means an appetizer where the main course is a horse, of course. Y’all didn’t think Garruk could be cultured, Garruk couldn’t make the wordplay, but Garruk gets around, Garruk goes here and there. Yeah, you know, from time to time. Garruk does it all. Anyway Hypergenesis is great and y’all just pussies.

Glimpse of Nature

Oh come on you assholes. What’re y’all scared of? Elves? ELVES? You’re full of shit. Oh no, there are thirty elves hanging around. They’re so scary. They might menace me with a lute during their picnic. They might accidentally use a bow to fire an arrow instead of its usual purpose of sticking it up their own self-righteous assholes. Garruk’s just playing. Garruk loves lady elves. Often. Because the guys sure ain’t putting up much competition when Garruk’s around. Anyway, what does Glimpse of Nature do again? Brings more elves around, eventually, when they feel like it maybe, after there are already a bunch? Right. Sounds daaangerous, ooh look at me quivering in my wurmhides over here. For those of y’all not paying attention, those are made of WURMS. That I KILLED. Hey, you know all those elves that kill wurms just for kicks? Right, you don’t, thought so.

Dread Return

Okay, now we get to some bullshit. Garruk just want to point out, if you’re raising the dead, like, that’s creepy as shit to Garruk, but normally you know those necromancers they’re just doing their thing, doing them, bringing back girlfriends and having sex with them, the usual. But this is Dread RETURN. Key word to Garruk: RETURN. Some ‘walkers going around using Dread RETURN on some bullshit creatures wasn’t even alive in the first place. That’s Dread TURN. Garruk just sayin’. So yeah ban that bullshit.

Stoneforge Mystic

Okay. So Garruk was like minding his own business, just you know sayin’ hey to this lady and she’s all “ooh Garruk, your hunting is so primal, let me go freshen up I’ll be right with you baby” and Garruk should have known something was up because no white-aligned bitch gonna just “go freshen up” without like a pre-authorized letter of intent in triplicate from her clan with explicit instructions on how to prepare their asses for Garruk. And the girl leaves there this kinda badass spikey-looking thing there, thing’s huge as shit and Garruk thinks “damn what’s this lady doing with some heavy ordinance over here, shit look like a metal pufferfish with handles” until Garruk remembers how this mystic, she doesn’t really touch equipment they just kinda float around because she doesn’t have the fitness regimen Garruk does. Anyway Garruk is thinking that he could put the shit to good use so Garruk’s about to lift it up to take a look when THE THING FUCKING MOVES. THE SHIT IS ALIVE, SERIOUS. And Garruk wasn’t prepared for that so reaching for the big-ass Axe of Axes and shit but THE FUCKING THING HAD ALREADY STARTED MOVING FUCK IT’S ALL NEEDLY AND SHIT and the lady comes back like “baby what’re you doing is everything alright over there” DOES IT LOOK LIKE EVERYTHING’S ALRIGHT YOU LEFT ME OVER HERE WITH A GODDAMN INFECTED PIECE OF SHIT FUCKING MOVING SPIKE FUCK THING SHIT SHIT and she’s over there giggling her little ass off all “aww you met Skullywullington.” Anyway Garruk found a way, that’s just what Garruk does. Bitch is crazy, though, that’s what Garruk’s getting around to here. Stay. The fuck. Away.

Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle

When Chandra tells you she has a “super hot place” for y’all to go, just don’t. All I’m gonna say. She’s not talking in metaphors like Jace or some shit ‘cause she thinks a metaphor is for killing fools before they have time to finish saying “metal.” When she says the sex is gonna be explosive just don’t. Even. All I’m gonna say.

Bitterblossom

Now the first thing you’ve gotta understand about these here Faeries is that these are the smuggest little flying things y’all can imagine. Like yeah you might get pissed off when you show up to a party minding y’all’s own and some elves come up like “ooohhhhh you’re wearing thaaaaat to a sooocial event, rrreaaaallly” but at least then Garruk can just go “yeah it’s what I woke up wearing next to your hundred-year-old daughter.” But Faeries, you smack one of them down in the middle of some stupid “shame about your entire family being murdered by a sheriff” then another comes along to finish the fucking sentence. And if you have the nerve to actually like wanna beat some shit up as is your natural right as a being on this plane then nope they’ll just doopy doooooooo buzz in front and nope you didn’t kill that planeswalker you’ve been hunting for millenia to find, you killed a fucking Faerie. Again. And the giggling, the fucking giggling.

Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Jace is [far superior to Garruk in any fathomable and/or conceptual way (with “fathomable” not meaning, in this context, the ability for a being as simplistic and dull as Garruk to understand; rather, what those of higher intellect are capable of grasping), and special emphasis should be placed on the myriad number of ways that Jace far exceeds Garruk’s sexual abilities, despite his unrelenting false claims that contradict all available evidence, both anecdotal and statistically-verified (see subnote 41)].

Mental Misstep

...so on every other plane he still gets called Lace Felt-urine. Anyway, what’s this thing? I think it, like, confuses a Goblin or something because that’s so incredibly difficult and definitely could not be done by a word longer than “rock,” whatever, moving on.

Ancestral Vision

Brief comparison here, let’s have like a show of hands from y’all. Would you rather, like, option one over here, wait around for somewhere around “until the end of time” and then know what’s up, that’s the Vision option, OR, like, option two, you’re hanging out with some huge-ass wurm or dragon whatever at your command and you give a holler to ol’ Garruk and Garruk gives you something better than the result you would’ve waited for AND that wurm or dragon gets to eat the guy that picked option one, fuck you Jace. I guess what I’m saying is that Blue can suck it forever.

Anyway there's some Elvish party over in Yavimaya and let's just say that Rofellos doesn't fuck around with his parties and doesn't get in the way of Garruk when it comes to the pointy-eared girls, know what I mean, he's not Ro-FELLOWS for nothing.

Y'all's truly,
Garruk W

tournament dialogue part 2

2011-08-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

“It was lying there under a McDonalds wrapper but instead of Big Mac it had all these neatly-typed words and numbers on it. 4 Pattern of Rebirth. 1 Academy Rector. Some number of Protean Hulk. Etc. It had some french dude’s name on it and we’re sitting there just trying to make sense of the damn thing and it takes us a while but I have some experience with Protean Hulk-based decks so I can sort of kinda tell what’s going on? So we’re mostly doing our neanderthalesque headscratching and some kid from a card shop I used to play at comes over. HEY MAN WHAT’S UP. WHAT’RE YOU PLAYING. And I want him to piss off so I say that it’s a secret and he keeps nagging me about it so I say, well, sorry ‘bro’ but I don’t just give away my decklist for free, this is a capitalist society and-”

“You’re a capitalist?”
“-before I can even finish he says ‘I’ll give you $100.’ The look in his eyes is like a labrador staring at its food bowl getting filled. I’m not sure if he’s serious so I say $200 and he doesn’t just take them out with a normal motion, he boogies out ten twenties. I write up the decklist with some key changes like making sure it has 62 cards and he snaps the thing up and puts it so close to his eyeballs I think he’s about to inhale the paper. Through his eyeballs. And he jogs off in this strange side-to-side way to his friends who have the binders that bad players have, in that they have lots of cards in them.”
“So how’s he doing?”
“He’s being interviewed.”
“About what?”
“The deck.”
“What?”
“What’re you confused about?”
“The deck’s bad, right?”
“Terrible.”
“So why’s he being interviewed?”
“Because he’s winning.”
“What?”
“You already asked that.”
“How?”
“How’d he win, you mean?”
“...”
“Well what I hadn’t been informed of is that deep in the uncharted heart of New Jersey they keep some sort of special school for training people in the darkest art of Magic, namely how to cast Cabal Therapy in a way that hits your opponent over the head until they are unconscious and drooling their signature onto the match slip. Here’s a quick peek at the course itinerary, there’s a 200-level class in becoming one with your opponent’s fucking soul and replacing their desire with yours and it makes them desperately crave a Brainstorm that results in three Force of Will in their hand and also around the same time let him know hey you should name Force of Will with that Therapy. And he graduated Magma Cum Fucknut from that fucking school and also from the equally mystical school on how to cast two of them by the third turn every fucking game, I can only assume this happened every other game because I cannot think of any other way he could have won a thing.”
“So... you kept talking to him throughout the day.”
“Of course.”
“But he was an annoying hanger-on.”
“Well...”
“What?”
“Well, that was just my initial impression.”
“But now...”
“He’s really, really nice. I can’t say anything mean to him. I can’t tell him that he’s incredibly lucky and playing a terrible deck and there’s no way he should have even considered paying actual money for a decklist because he has this huge smile on his face and he comes over after I’m done playing and we talk about what I might have done better, and I mean fuck some of his advice was... okay so he’s a good player. I just... I can’t be mean to someone with intentions so pure. It would be like kicking a unicorn. The only time he ever like abandon an in-progress conversation is when the Wizards guys come over to interview him-”
“He gets interviewed.”
“Yes.”
“And they ask him about the deck.”
“Yes.”
“And this guy is now superbuds with you, so he tells them that-”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“...”
“So now...”
“So now StarCityGames is asking me if I’d like to write an article on developing the deck and the guy was so complimentary and asking all these questions about the decklist without actually giving me any time to answer and say that no no no I just found the list laying there, it was on a table, it is a tablelist the table made the list also there is probably some very pissed-off frenchman wondering who stole his tech and why he is 0-2 with the same deck, and the guy from StarCityGames gave me his business card but then the guy from ChannelFireball came up to me after being like all Shadowmage about that shit, you know ‘(heyman heardyougotsomethingsweet wellifyouwantmorethanwhatheoffered justletmeknow wecanworksomethingout lookingforwardtoit)’ and yep business card. The whole time I kept seeing everything in black and white and we were in a darkened alley instead of a huge tournament hall and we had to look out for the coppers.”
“How much are they paying you for the article?”
“Columns.”
“What columns?”
“My new columns.”
“You have columns.”
“On each site, yes. On StarCityGames I’m going to be doing a video series where I do various draft walkthroughs or video of constructed deckbuilding-”
“What are you going to write about?”
“Well my main hope, here, is that I have accidentally become incapable of making or recommending a bad deck, so I’ll just write about whatever with no justification and do some card-by-card rundowns of everything in it and basically just tell people what the cards do. If I write enough articles about enough stupid decks with stupid one-plus-one combos in them, then eventually one of them will turn out to be sorta kinda similar to something that a pro was working on at the same time-”
“The infinite forumposter hypothesis.”
“-and that’ll make me look super splendiforous that I totally called that amazing deck and look at that, I built that deck with the combo of cards before anyone had even designed those cards at all let alone built decks with them. If on the other hand I am wrong and I am still a bad deckbuilder then I won’t last three weeks.”
“How long have you been writing that Magic blog?”
“Year and a half.”
“Ever contacted by SCG or ChanFireball?”
“Before today? No.”

why is mtg salvation bad?

2011-08-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

Pt 1: Overview

Commonly-held opinions don’t always get written down. Not in any sort of persuasive form, at least. Usually just in passing, just in reference to some other thing that not quite everyone knows. It is probably this somewhat-admirable avoidance of the obvious that has kept MTG Salvation from having critical articles written about it, like any new set or card would; That and the fact that it’s not a Magic card. Magic writers don’t tend to write about Magic-related things that often unless they are formats, sets, cards, or players. Even in describing players, writers usually just use different words for “good” because if they were bad, no one would have heard of them.

If future generations unearth the vast trove of information that is written about the game, they will have little concept of its overall importance to the broader culture. To these possibly-human explorers bravely sifting through the mountains of shit produced, I would like to inform them: very little, thanks, we’re basically doing our own thing. They will also be mostly unaware as to how we view each other; the previously-mentioned prevailing opinions that are never written down. MTG Salvation is enormous. It is somehow bigger than the official Magic forum. It is awful. This is prevailing opinion. While I doubt I’ll fully get across this intention, I don’t mean to simply pick on and mock the forum for its already-devalued status in the eye of the community. It honestly just wouldn’t be as much fun as writing about those people and things that are held in higher esteem; I don’t want to just be the bully laughing with the cool friends at the kid with the wrap-around braces. Hopefully, instead, it can be used as a case study that can be examined by any current or prospective forum-runner as to how a bad community is established. I’ll start with the explicit assumption of MTGS being bad, which is obviously pretty bad essay-wise if I was attempting to convince people of this, but I’m not.

What separates a good forum from bad is fairly easy to describe but cannot ever be objectively be described. A good forum has good posts. Good posts are insightful on the topic, intentionally entertaining, and influential on the broader community. Bad posts are not those things.

MTGS’s ideology is, above all, doing what’s best for “the community.” Every rule, procedure, and attitude the staff takes is toward what would be better for the community, rather than valuing what would create the best content (and, hence, attract a better community). While not a democracy, the staff acts as if it was one. Every possible decision is weighed not on whether it would improve the site, but whether the community would approve of it. And the community is always for the status quo. Thus nothing changes, ever.

Some forum theory and/or group pseudopsychology: any new member to a social group is going to imitate how the other members act. They then become one of the accepted members, and take part in enforcing the norms of their group. Potential new people can choose to adapt to the norm, act differently, or leave. Acting differently is generally fairly unpleasant, since the person won’t be accepted, so not many do that. Due to the inherent (but not rapid) turnover at an internet forum, certain styles of posting become the accepted norm, becoming effectively an unwritten style guide to new members. When staff members do what they feel is in the best interest of the community, then, what they’re protecting is not any individual member or clique of members, but the established posting style of the forum. Staff members have imperfect control over the style of any forum, but the tools they have are fairly powerful. Since they are inherently looked up to as the big kahunas of the community, ideas they enforce often get adopted by the community. (Example: I suggested that MTGS adopt a rule similar to Something Awful’s prohibiting pseudo-moderation from members, that is, snidely telling other users what rules they broke, referred to as “backseat moderation;” it was quite common and no one had any problem with it until the MTGS staff adopted it. Now the users don’t like it any more.)

As awful as it sounds, a good forum needs to be run like a dictatorship with rules and decisions that are above second-guessing by the userbase. Sometimes it’s necessary for the staff to take actions that will piss off or even get rid of certain cliques, such as merging or even getting rid of certain forums if the posts there are bad. Having different places for different types of people is fine and should be encouraged, but when a contingent of them brings down the quality of posting as a whole, sometimes shit just has to happen. MTGS never makes that sort of decision, because those bad posters are part of “the community” and thus un-fuck-with-able.

The prevailing posting style is one that seems unbelievably stilted, formal and overly friendly at the same time, like people who had never met were placed inches away from each other by lab researchers and told to make small talk and that they would be graded on their conversation, while the researchers stand there making notes on everything. Exclamation points abound.

The sad truth is that stupidity is more-or-less tolerated at MTGS. The uninformed, the misinformed, the insane, the clueless, all are welcome. All that’s required is enthusiasm and sincerity. Staff at MTGS and its predecessor have (consciously?) made the decision that what’s punishable is anything off-topic, while inane posts on-topic are accepted. Agreeing with someone in a worthless way is fine, making a joke at someone else’s expense is definitely not fine, as that cuts down others’ enthusiasm. Sarcastic posts are clearly labeled, with near-mandatory rolleyes emoticon. It wouldn’t be fair to call MTGS “humorless,” since posters make jokes and there is a forum specifically labeled “humor.” Their version of humor just isn’t funny. It’s harmless, toothless, and obvious, in a similar way to a book of knock-knock jokes for children.

It’s no surprise that the only Magic “celebrity” that goes near MTGS is the one who most embodies its enthusiasm, comradery, and cluelessness, Evan Erwin. A person so thoroughly gosh-darned wholesome and likeable that if he was on the radio he’d be Christmas music one plays to placate visiting grandparents. Actual Magic pros have no use for MTGS, and never have. This is what makes it so unbelievable when someone claims that a person like Gerry Thompson has lifted an idea from an MTGS thread; aside from issues of there only being so many possible deck ideas in any given format, no one with the personality of GerryT could stomach the relentless un-called-out stupidity of the forum. There are no pros that post there, to my knowledge. Anyone who gets good enough at Magic to be somewhat-better-known abandons the place immediately. It’s fairly shocking, just shotgun-effect-wise, that no regular poster has achieved much Magic success, whereas the tiny forum of GoodGamery has multiple people who are or were respected pros (though I’m obviously biased toward that community).

MTGSalvation, respectability- and community-wise, got off to a pretty bad start by virtue of where it came from. Brief/official/boring history is available from the MTGS wiki; more interesting history is in a thread from former admin Goblinboy. What feels bizarre to me is that, upon leaving a previous forum en masse because of horrendous administration, my first impulse would be to run through the streets waving the flaming remains of the old rules the night before drafting entirely new ones, establishing a Year Zero of etiquette and posting to establish a community unique from the past.

MTGS went a different route, instead modeling every single thing on the new forums after MTGNews. Same forum layout with excessive amounts of subforums everywhere, same prohibition against the peasants using “mod text” (though changed from green to red, sensibly), same rules. And oh god what rules these rules are. A fairly important test of a rules system is the following: can mods or admins ban someone for blatantly being a useless dick? If no, the rule system needs a drastic overhaul.

The MTGS rules are currently a monstrous 2600+ word document detailing not just each thing a person can do wrong and get justly punished, but how the “infraction” and “warning” system works. Years later, I have absolutely no idea what possible purpose these could serve. Instead of giving the person some sort of fitting punishment for posts that weren’t completely horrid but still undesirable, a warning is attached that does absolutely nothing. If the post is more severely against MTGSian principles, it will be infracted instead. This still does nothing. Infractions only count if a user gets three within a 40-day period. Why does someone have to fuck up three times before they have to care? Why 40 days? No clue. I asked a current admin why they’re so strange yet haven’t been changed since I was active. His answer was, revealingly, that it “hasn’t had one iota of conscious thought since you were active.” At MTGS, assumptions and systems go unquestioned for ages because no one makes a serious effort to improve the place.

Pt 2: Bullshit Memoir Section

At the end of 2004, I had fallen in with a MiseTings splinter group of sorts that posted fake photoshopped cards on MTGNews (breathtaking note for the current MTGS posters somehow still reading: Annorax was a key member). I had no technical skill, so I designed a few of the cards. When the shit got ventilated at MTGN, MTGS was the logical next step, so I got an account there on January 1st, 2005, making me basically a Ground Zero member. For about the next year I posted genuinely and wanted to be accepted as a normal member. Somwhere around there I posted in FYAD (an inexplicable forum on Something Awful) and got firmly rejected, but I still appreciated the different style of posting. That seed planted, I became active in the hidden subforum The Gutter on MTGS, your basic NO RULES type place. Within six months or so I was made moderator. If that seems contradictory to the idea of a forum with no rules (and this was pointed out by many people), it just means that the normal forum rules didn’t apply. I could make whatever proclamations I wanted.

So I did. Just as new MTGS posters are made in the images of the ones currently there, I shaped “my” forum into what I wanted it to be by setting the tone with no-capitalization jokes and plenty of links to posts that I felt were bad on the rest of the MTGS forums, then often jumped in to heckle the poor fellow in question. I tried to imitate Helldump 2000 from SA, and threw anyone out that posted like the greater MTGS forums (or, worse, 4chan, though I was less successful in that; it eventually devolved into a 4chan clone). It worked fairly well, creating a small bastion that would attempt to buck the predominant MTGS ethos and stroke my ego at the same time.

As explained above, the rules system is a piece of shit, and exploiting it was absurdly simple. I figured out where the border was between posts that were on-topic and off-, between trolling and not, and pushed at every opportunity I could find. Since the standards were so set in stone, there wasn’t much that could be done. In case I got caught going too far, the appeals process was long and drawn-out, with someone at several levels that could reverse the infraction and piss off the mod more in the process (and create opportunity to post more jokes in the process). If the appeal failed, well, they needed to nail me three times in 40 days to do anything about it. So I kept my head down when I had two active.

Trolling, in MTGS terminology, meant posting anything someone disliked. So to them, I trolled with every post I made, and by the end that was probably a fair assessment. Good trolling, though, isn’t about blindly insulting everyone in sight; people know how to react when insulted. They get offended. They call the moderating authorities. Others see what happened. This wasn’t even very much fun, so I avoided it. Good trolling, instead, is posting in a way that calls attention to oneself by breaking from the stylistic norms of the forum, leaving people confused as to how to react. In my case, this meant posting snide jokes slightly related to the subject material but mostly against another poster. It wasn’t a flame/insult, really, so I usually wasn’t punished under that, and the target felt insulted without the usual moral support of the rest of the forum. No one had gone through the forums just making jokes before.

Since I was a mod by forum software, though not given actual mod-status in terms of title and access to the mod forum, a new usergroup had to be created for me in order to receive an infraction. Someone misclicked, though, and forgot to take off read/write access to every forum, including the mod and admin ones. I got a huge Here’s Johnny grin on my face, immediately saved as HTML as many threads as I cared to from these forums, and began to read an incredibly long mod debate about whether or not I should be banned. The mods argued a lot. Since MTGS has so many subforums, and each forum has up to five mods (granted, with overlap), it has a fairly insane mod to user ratio. The mods and admins I had on my side from The Gutter at this point, and there were some, were in a near fight to the death with basically the rest of the staff, who I spent most of my posting career intentionally pissing off. I then made a post in that thread asking “hey guys what’s up” and laughed a bunch.

By April of 2007, I had set the record for the user with the most infractions and warnings without being banned: 27. A large part of the staff was, understandably, not all that pleased with this. I had two active infractions; someone gave me a third for a not-even-borderline post, then deleted the post. Thus, banned. I had already planned to leave by my 18th birthday in May of that year, so it wasn’t an entirely unwelcome departure.

I’ve tried to come back since then, but it’s been a thoroughly depressing experience. The biggest change in wearing the Wizards uniform is that I no longer had any desire to improve the place, which was what motivated all my posts the first time around. Since then, I’ve decided that there’s no way MTGS will ever be an interesting or insightful forum, and the only way to improve it is if it loses its place as the most popular MTG forum.

the rise and fall of commander

2011-08-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

Commander went through some fairly large shifts, not in gameplay (gameplay shifts would have been inexcusable) but of how its community interacted both within itself and with the larger Magic community. Once it gained enough popularity to shed its original-and-way-cooler-sounding-but-not-as-acceptable-to-Wizards Elder Dragon Highlander/EDH nomenclature, the community, in a way both shocking in hindsight and almost eerily foreshadowing, zealously removed all references to Elder Dragon Highlander/EDH in time for the official Wizards Commander product, so much so that all columns were edited in a stereotypically Eurasia-esque way to talk about “Commander,” and anyone mentioning EDH would get a faux-confused look that was somewhat spooky to the recipients. After that is when Commander people got real organized.

Every Magic writing site, at that point, had at least a few Commander writers and every city worth a PTQ had several dedicated Commander playgroups and when they started communicating between each other, well. Prior to that each playgroup had their own unstated rules about how powerful was too powerful, which made mass inter-group communication a bit painful at first, since almost everyone either had to make their deck much more or less powerful, but most agreed that it was preferable to the uncomfortableness of showing up in a new town with a new deck and getting constant scowls for daring to kill everyone else before they had their fair share of turns. Plus it wasn’t like they had mandated anything, they reasoned. They just changed the victory condition. Now that victory wasn’t dictated by killing everyone (a win condition, most agreed, was highly unfun since killing people removed them from playing Commander, and wasn’t that why they were all here anyway, to chill out and play some Commander? Chilling out was definitely a major goal), strategies that were too strong could just be addressed by adding or removing entries from the list of point-providing actions.

Critics would often mock the ever-changing goals of Commander. Commander players would respond by ignoring everyone they didn’t like. These players would then further respond by finding out who said critics were, where they played, and ensuring that if they played Commander on a regular basis, well, they wouldn’t be too successful. While specifically sniping certain players out of the game was deemed even more brutish than simply killing someone in a counterproductive effort to win, players could fairly easily give one another negative points if they really truly disliked that person (especially easy with subsequent installments of Commander products with point-altering mechanics on the cards, though one had to check how many points a certain card could affect on any given day.)

Then came the PTQs. It was inevitable, as there was a considerable following for the format at this point, and they wanted higher-profile events where their passion would be taken seriously by the community as a whole. Not that Wizards was exactly held hostage. They had every incentive to want to send as many relatable everymen from as many communities as possible and publicize the hell out of how those players went from, in just a few days, playing at kitchen tables to flying out to exotic locations. While the established competitive community was somewhat crossarmed about it, they eventually relented when it was compared with previous Wizards attempts to make the Pro Tour more of a realistic goal for the average player (their last effort was sending all players with a specific DCI rating, chosen at random, to a single Pro Tour. When, after a dramatic reveal, 1641 ended up triumphing, the spectacular cost in airfare and predictably unsuccessful results of the players that were thus invited led to a rather belated and obvious apology from the then-director of the Pro Tour whose current occupation is unknown but rumored to involve managing an employee-owned grocer in Charlottesville, Virginia). The judge community was a huge supporter, both because judges have historically loved Commander, and because for each table of four players there was a judge. It was the first time that judging duty extended to having a deck and playing it in the event they were judging (to ensure fairness, good sportsmanship, etc, they would use their resources against whatever player was acting in an un-Commanderly way).

Since the Commander Committee had complete control over the format, even when it became something run at more serious events, one might think that it would lead to tension between them and Wizards, which wasn’t the case. Their relationship was truly lovely. Players, it seemed, were much more inclined to rant against Wizards killing Magic when it was because of decisions Wizards was making; when Wizards was simply deferring to a bunch of casual players who just like Commander a lot, well. It was a lot easier to get mad at someone taking a paycheck for making a decision than it was to fistshake the guy who’s been running your local tournament for ten years. The Committee going completely anonymous, then, was the first real mistake. While some members of it were still well-known, such as Sheldon Menery, he went from the public ambassador of the community to someone that would issue cryptic bimonthly unsigned emails, to someone whose existence was, bizarrely, unable to be officially confirmed by the Committee.

The short history of Commander as a Pro Tour format was marred by what was later termed “The Emrakul Event.” What details are available are either incomplete, biased, contradictory, or legally unwise due to the current status of the lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of former Judges against Wizards. What is mostly agreed-upon is that there is a game called Magic: the Gathering, it has a Pro Tour (contested by the fact that all mentions of sanctioned play, Pro Tour or otherwise, were immediately removed from all Commander-related sites following the Event), which pays out substantial sums of money (somewhat contested statement) to professional players (more significantly contested statement). One of these Pro Tour Locations was in Oakland (contested) and run under the Commander format (contested; one of the most significant arguments by Commander community leaders not partial to the outcome of the lawsuit was that it was not, in fact, really Commander, merely a different format masquerading as Commander, with the implication that Commander should not be held accountable for whatever did or did not transpire at or around or away from this Pro Tour in/outside of Oakland). What follows is mostly alleged by the victims (whom the defense calls the alleged victims), though their individual stories tend to vary from time to time and person to person:

Unnamed Players are at Table. Unnamed Player A [casts/puts into play/reveals/draws/discusses] Magic Card, often referred to as but never conclusively proven to be Emrakul. Unnamed Players other than A object to previously-mentioned Magic Card. Table judge is [asked/told/informed] about [format stance of/point value deductions for] previously-mentioned Magic Card. Table Judge dutifully [looks up/remembers] [legality of/point value deductions for] PMMC. It is at this point that defense attorneys tend to [subtly/loudly, somehow] roll their eyes so that [judge/interviewers/TV cameras] pick it up if they are within a certain radius of person describing Event. (Defense attorneys will, if [asked/looked at/in earshot] present their self-described “factual” account, which involves a significantly more sinister-seeming Table Judge selfishly choosing is invent format status of PMMC, due to his current status in game.) UPs, with [significantly/increasingly] more [volume/aggression] question TJ’s [rulebook/memory/knowledge/intelligence/planetary origin/sexuality]. Other Judges [nearby/in the vicinity/in the tournament hall] come over to see what the [discussion/noise/altercation/ruckus/hubbub, bub] is about. Other Judges attempt to [lower the volume please/calm down the situation/give doctor’s prescriptions of maximum-strength Chill Pills/pause game/resume game/restrain players/defend TJ’s [see above]/according to Defense, throw some serious punches we’re talking like Bruce Lee here, but these are still mostly Plaintiff’s accounts] but, unfortunately, they are unable to stop UPs from [Terror/Wreak Havoc/Overrun/Kill! Destroy!/Damnation/Hellfire/Panic Attack] and, here is where they all agree, sending upwards of a shitload of Judges to the hospital. Defense attorneys tend to make [Bronx cheers/masturbatory gestures] at this. Matter is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.

It was after this that the Committee started what Commander players called “game reform” and non-Commander players called “The Fuck-Ups.” Somewhere between officially endorsed by Wizards and a decentralized guerrilla activist network, groups of Commander players would go to major tournaments and play multi-hour games on the top tables until the best players would “play fair” and “have fun.” Where they were successful, it led to the only known instance of a 120-card Block deck winning a Legacy PTQ after relying on a succession of “flip a coin” cards. He was, all parties witnessing admit, obscenely lucky with regard to flipping coins. Wizards was, to put it mildly, a bit perturbed, especially since many inside the organization harbor no small amount of resentment both for causing, in their view, a near-riot as well as being more-or-less incapable of playing Magic: the Gathering. Commander events were taken out of the group’s hands, and subsequent efforts to get back to their previous power were mostly unsuccessful (though rumors that members of the group were hired as Wizards interns en masse persist). Commander players became a much rarer breed, since what fun is it to play a “fun” format run by former Pro Tour winners?

The specter of Commander still looms above any rising noncompetitive format, both because of the bad memories the format brings forth and the constant reminder that nothing popular in Magic can stay truly “casual” for long.

BOOK: grinder: the brad nelson story, by rich hagon

2011-07-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

(Note: if you're unfamiliar with the book, here's an explanation.)

After the success of Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, it was inevitable that someone within the Magic community would write another book about a pro player with the intention of giving those with no knowledge of the Magic pro scene a glimpse inside this difficult-to-penetrate lifestyle. Potential authors, once they know that Grinder: the Brad Nelson Story by Rich Hagon exists, will probably stay away.
This is about Brad sitting at home, alone, in front of a computer screen playing Magic: “Because Brad understands that no matter how hard he tries he will never solve Magic, never reach the end boss, never disbelievingly read the words "game over" when all the content has been exhausted, he can let The Fire burn bright. He quests deep into twilight, night after night, the greyhound in pursuit of the hare that will never be caught. Throughout this endless Grind, The Fire drives him on.”

This is about Brad after going to some tournaments: “It also means a time to recharge the batteries, both mental and physical, that have taken a pounding during the previous six months. Perhaps most of all, it means time to reflect on all that he has seen and done, accomplished and thought, and to try to make sense of it all as he heads for hearth and home.”

This is about Brad improving his playing fundamentals: “Imagine Michelangelo wiping clean the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, retiring to his quarters, and asking himself, "What is art?" Imagine Mozart throwing the score of his latest symphony into the fire, retiring to his quarters, and asking himself, "What is music?" Imagine George Soros giving away billions of dollars, retiring to his quarters, and asking himself, "What is money?" In the privacy of his North Dakota home, Brad effectively does exactly that.” (Haddaway is unmentioned.)

This is about Brad playing a game at a tournament: “They go at each other with huge skill and crushing will. Quarter is neither asked nor given and, while neither will go on to lift the World Championship trophy, this is where the last round action truly lies: with the grinders in the trenches, with careers on the line. Both games 1 and 2 go long, marginal mistakes pounced on with killer instinct and singleton cards coming to the rescue in the nick of time. Speaking of time, Brad is running out of it, and fast.”

That last sentence will stay with me for years.

Brad Nelson’s claim to fame is being really fucking good at Magic. He did that by playing a lot of Magic at the expense of everything else in his life. That’s the basic gist of the first half of the book or so. In the second half, he plays a lot of tournaments and becomes Player of the Year. Unfortunately for the entertainment value of the text, it’s not all luxuriously overwritten prose like the above passages. While the portions that read as yearning nonfiction romance novel are by far the most interesting to quote, most of the text is impossibly dry listing of what Brad did (go to this tournament, beat this player, finish Xth in tournament) that slogs on chapter after chapter, leaving my memory of large portions an interchangeable blur.

Characterization would have helped. Brad, despite being quoted for roughly a third to half of the book, shows no personality traits at all (which is odd, since everything I’ve heard about him describes him as likable, approachable, and funny*) other than that he plays a lot of Magic and is good at Magic. Offhand, the only other things I can remember the book saying about him, person-wise, are that he dislikes board games (because why aren’t those people playing Magic), that he’s had a tumultuous on-again-off-again relationship with Amber (because he was playing too much Magic), whom the book never describes in any meaningful way either, and several mentions that he prefers aggressive decks to reactive ones (without any true explanation or speculation as to why). And that’s the man the book is about.

Stories of tournaments or pre-tournament testing quickly devolve into unreadable lists of names with their spreadsheet-style list of accomplishments. I barely follow the professional scene, yet I know more about their personalities than the book describes. LSV is the everyman of Magic professionals, always playing goofy formats and making tortured puns. Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa (who the text sets up, weakly, as a rival/best friend, and who Brad accurately refers to several times as being the best player in the world) speaks English as something around his ninth language yet can write circles around practically any Magic player, including Brad himself. The book doesn’t say anything like this, or anything about anyone at all.

There are many facets of competent writing Hagon lacks, and one of the most striking is his lack of perspective about Brad, the pro scene, or the game in general. Imagine for a second that you’re looking at a book about someone who’s the best in a certain field of competitive play. Thumb wrestling, let’s go with that. How is a book about a champion thumb wrestler going to hold your attention? Well, it’d better have interesting characters including a true villain our hero has to declare thumb war on, a good central narrative with our hero eventually triumphing over/falling to said villain, and the exact right amount of explanation so that the reader feels like they’ve been given a window into a previously unforseen community without getting bogged down in the minutiae of the sport or the exact weight each person can lift with their thumbs (each hand). Hagon completely misses this. He assumes, rather than convinces, that the number of pro points specific Magic players have earned and their number of top eights is of crucial importance; that it’s more important than, say, their appearance, manner of speaking, or personality in helping the reader picture this cast of people. Hagon just gives lists.

The perspective-less-ness of the book comes across best in passages like the previously quoted prose, where Magic is held up as a plainly noble endeavor. As I'm a complete douchebag, I’d really like to see the humor and overdramatics of these enormous tournaments played up in any biography of professional players, but Hagon can talk about the nerve-wracking situations caused by “hundreds” of people watching from their computers without the faintest touch of irony. It’s difficult to imagine a non-Magically-inclined reader picking the book up and taking in the earnest depictions of players playing a children’s card game surrounded by cameras in a faux-Roman arena with cardboard columns in the back of the shot. Ironic detachment is probably too much to ask from someone taking paychecks from Wizards to promote the game, but some of it is necessary when the game is written about in longform. Failing that, I wish he could have realized the place that Magic holds in most people’s minds, and not have made his metaphors so bizarrely overwritten. True, they’re funny to read, but the fact that they’re so horrendous makes any imitative parody superfluous, and I was really looking forward to writing that.

Hagon tries to portray it as a universal tale that could be about anyone succeeding at anything (the promotional material goes to great lengths to talk about this) but the book has absolutely no idea who its audience is supposed to be. The idea that people with no interest in the game will pick up the book as some sort of inspirational story is rather silly, since how are they going to find out about an ebook published by a Magic strategy website? If the intended audience, then, is people who play, then why are there unending explanations of the intricacies of how decks work?** His normal occupation is as commentator***, where unless people mute it entirely they’re held captive if they want to see what’s going on in current matches, and as such Hagon has no real need to continually say interesting-enough things to keep people listening. Books are a much less kind form of media, where readers will viciously gloss over entire pages looking for the next bit of relevant action, or abandon them entirely if they don’t like the current words.

The most interesting portions of the book, almost by default, are the few times when Hagon addresses everything Brad has given up in life, i.e. everything under the sun other than the ability to beat people at Magic. The idea of Brad as someone addicted to Magic features prominently and, I’ll admit, was a truly troubling bit of biography. Basically, the guy loses everything because he spends all his time/money/brainpower on Magic, quitting or getting fired from every job he’s ever had****, going to college unsuccessfully twice, and pushing away what seems to be the only woman who could possibly care for him in a romantic way, all because he’d rather be playing Magic Online. Credit where it’s due, the text refers to Brad as an addict, which is entirely accurate. He tries to quit, gets roped back in by a “one last time” sort of tournament which he obviously wins, and things go on as before, but more successfully.

The idea of Magic-as-addiction doesn’t surface after that at all, and it troubles me that either Hagon no longer considers Brad addicted, or that he feels it’s no longer a relevant issue. It seems plain that the man is still addicted to the game; he just happens to be good enough that he makes tens of thousands of dollars feeding his addiction. Is that a bad thing? It’s hard to say. He’s basically in the same spot at the end that he was at his depths, just with more stable finances and a habit that has pulled family somewhat closer rather than pushed them away.*****

Because the book was written right after he got Player of the Year, it ends triumphantly but extremely prematurely, like a biography of Jordan that came out immediately following his first championship. If Grinder was instead written years from now after Brad’s inevitable decline from (statistically) best player in the world, we might see a more reflective version of the man with more perspective on what the game has done to him, and his attempts at making a comeback. There almost has to be some sort of comeback in the trajectory of his career, really.

*On Something Awful, after posting that I was reading the book, someone recalled Brad saying that he was going to dress up for Halloween as Conley Woods. That line alone is more interesting than anything he said in the book he apparently co-authored.

**Hagon spends 333 words describing Tooth and Nail in Standard. This might be justified if it’s of extreme importance to the plot, but the tournament that the description is leading up to only mentions the deck offhand once, as one that he lost to in the Swiss**(a), and I cannot for the life of me figure out who’s going to read 200 words (exactly) about how the combo of Triskelion and Mephidross Vampire works. Let’s go over some possible situations.

A) I was playing Magic then. I’m going to skip this explanation.

B) I’m new to Magic. I’ll take your word for it that it’s good, and skip the explanation.

C) I don’t play Magic. What are these words you’re using? Why do I care? Is this relevant to my quest to become the world’s best gardener? I’ll skip this explanation.

Unbeknownst to Hagon, information that is irrelevant to the main storyline but of potential technical interest can be put in footnotes or endnotes (like this one) where people can read or skip them as they so please, rather than gumming up the main text with that head-shootingly dull explanation.

**(a) There’s also a detailed explanation of how Swiss pairings work, since that’s like, crucial knowledge to figuring out that going 9-0 at a tournament is a good thing.

***Brad will occasionally run into Hagon in the story, who is never referred to in such contexts as “I” or “the author” or “this reporter” or “yrs truly Professa Rich Magic$” but, disorientingly, as “Pro Tour Statistician Rich Hagon.” Both parts of this confuse me. What does the Pro Tour Statistician do? All I’m seeing in this book is just like how many finishes certain players have gotten, which is only statistics in the vaguest sense of the term. There are no Bell curves of expected outcomes or discussion of standard deviations as they relate to Nelson’s extraordinary finishes. It reminds Magic Literary Critic Jesse Mason of the extravagent titles that third-world dictators give themselves. Also, why is he referring to himself in the third person at all? As soon as I saw that I wanted to read it as a story of how Rich Hagon is writing this by going through alternate dimensions and if he interacts with Alternate Universe Rich Hagon it’ll cause a paradox in the continuum, leading to impossibilities like Hagon writing a half-competent sentence.

****This leads to possibly the biggest bit of bullshit in the book: “He takes a job, learns to do it better than anyone else, and then quits.” The fuck he does, Hagon. The man can’t hold down a job because of his addiction to Magic, don’t make it seem like he accomplished something great here.

*****At several points, family members who don’t play Magic and have no non-Brad-related reasons to care either travel out to tournaments with him or stay up until the wee hours watching GGslive or Pro Tour webcasts just to see how he’s doing, which has to be the most boring and confusing possible activity for those people unless they’re getting a cut of the winnings.

why i want to fuck mark rosewater

2011-07-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

Mark Rosewater once wished that writers would review sets from a more holistic perspective rather than going card-by-card,* and it’s an interesting enough idea until the issue of how much Magic sets differ from other forms of art that are reviewed. He’s definitely right in that sets should be looked at through the lens of whether they’re well-designed sets instead of just useful; if these were music reviews we’d all be talking about how useful the bass it as driving away squirrels from our houses and giving it a de-squirreling score out of ten (with ten being Wonderful Rainbow by Lightning Bolt).

Partially because of Mark Rosewater’s call to action, but mostly due to people trying to get jobs at Wizards following the focus on player designs with Great Designer Search 2, masses of people have crawled up offering card-by-card reviews of new sets from a design, rather than playability, standpoint, which to me seems to miss a thousand points at once. The idea of designing a set is that the pieces fit together as to add up to something better than a bunch of Grizzly Bears and weird designs by themselves. Cards aren’t played by themselves; a clever design isn’t going to do anything unless it’s in a set and then it’s played with other cards (from that set or others). This also unleashes that ever-present monster of the terrible traditional set review, that all the opinions are entirely knee-jerk backed up by no playtesting or anything like that. Design reviews are just looking at the card and giving hypotheses of how things might play out in real games without doing any actual work and trying to find out for themselves if that clever design works in practice. Let’s do a holistic set review, then.

The logistics of a holistic set review are nightmarish.

When someone reviews a movie, they watch the entire movie, just like most people do when they go to see it. When someone reviews a set, they look at the entire set, but how many people genuinely care about and/or play with Every Last Card In The Set? Drafters, maybe, but a review aimed at them would focus just on how things play in Limited and then we’re not doing a design review any more. The issue we’re running into here is that while people might view/read works of art differently, it doesn’t come close to how diverse the experiences are for a new Magic set, and as such, any review of it is going to be hopelessly artificial in the way it attempts to approach it. No one puts the entire new set in their deck, they pick and choose; this is exactly what makes Magic such a deeply personal experience to play.

To review a set from the lens of whether its design is good or bad, there needs to be some sort of ideal that sets need to be capable of accomplishing, or some combination of them. Reviewing from a perspective unrelated to playing the cards in actual games, sets can attempt to convey some sort of high concept like Time Spiral block, or they can do a little bit of that while creating a coherent world, like Ravnica block. But Magic is a game. At some point, we have to play the cards and whether that card properly conveys the set’s theme of post-modernism in a Latvian-influenced agrarian magical realism ends up being mostly irrelevant if the game isn’t fun any more. All the way on the other end, a set with randomly-collected cards that make games more fun won’t stand up too well as a holistic design.

Which brings us to M12.

M12 attempts no grand statement, builds no complex worlds, and pushes no boundaries. It is the continued realization of Wizards’ strategy/ideology of acquisition, giving new players something immediately accessible while still selling enough packs to experienced players that newer ones won’t feel like losers for playing with it. Accessibility, in this case, partially means that nearly every card stands on its own without raising other questions of what else is in the set or what role the card plays (excepting the bland obviousness of the cards that specifically name others in their text, as well as the admittedly more interesting way that bloodthirst is used but I’ll get to that shortly). M12, due to this, stands up to holistic reviewing extremely poorly. It’s not supposed to, sure. That just puts it, design-as-art-wise, on the level of an instructional film shown in junior high schools. Does that make it a bad set? No, it’s a useful set with little artistic merit as a cohesive work. The two are quite different.

M12, Scars of Mirrodin block, and the doctrine of acquisition combine to form a bleak picture of the future of holistic design as art. The high point was certainly Time Spiral and Future Sight, with cards that are more fun just to look at and deconstruct than cards from any other set. References upon references, ideas that would fit in no other set but make perfect sense, it’s the Magical art house movie that gets a cult following and critical praise in the form of overjoyed experienced players (including the current director of R&D). Yet now, it’s mostly used as an example of Wizards going too far alienating new players, who couldn’t figure out what was going on. Instead, we get nostalgia sets that only reference a very small subset of previous cards in a much less artful way than Time Spiral’s obscure homages. Scars was an attempt to make the moderately-experienced player feel like an old timer, part of the in-crowd. This is the sort of block design we’ll see in the future, especially seeing as the set following Innistrad will be Ravnica 2 (even without this rumor leaking about lately, I’d be stating that as fact because it just feels so obvious).

Another way to have artful set design is to make players reevaluate a fundamental aspect of the game. Odyssey block did this the most successfully on a large scale, with card advantage being turned on its head in several ways (and implementing itself differently in different formats, with some of the same cards being used differently in each context). Innistrad is looking graveyard-themed once again, so we'll have to see how Wizards solved the problem that newer players didn't want to put their cards in the graveyard when it was right to do so. Chances are, we won't see concepts turned around like Odyssey any more. Good art is challenging, whether it's relearning basic concepts in a game or a particular scene in a movie being tough to get through but sticking in one's brain for weeks or years afterward.

Not every card is for everyone. Since Magic design has over time always pulled further back to look at the bigger picture, not every set is for everyone. Players that understand the game well enough to have a bigger-picture view of sets are in the smallest of minorities, though, so we’ll never see inaccessible quality block design like we did previously. Enjoy the incoming sequels.

[Post-publishing note: this is neither an anti-Rosewater screed nor a "Magic is dying" rant. Magic is not dying. I fully expect Magic's sales to continue to rise as a result of these business decisions, and for Magic to continue for many years happily and healthily. But good business and good design are not always the same.]

*“New set coming out? Let's have eight thousand people tell you what they think of each card. As the Head Designer, I would love to see more writers actually talk about the design. Look at the set holistically and talk about what's going on or look historically to understand what this set is bringing to the game overall...

“I would love to see a set review that isn't about cards but about the set as a whole. I'd love to see the equivalent of movie review for sets where it isn't about the pieces but the entirety of the thing. To continue the metaphor, I feel like current set reviews would be like a movie review that goes like this:
“‘Okay, let's start with the first scene in the movie. Beginning with a wide shot and then cutting in to an interior. I've seen that like a thousand times. And then the first line is voice over from an unknown character. I was a little intrigued. I like voice over narration when it's not too heavy handed, but then we cut to see the person who's talking and I'm like – that's the first shot of the character? Couldn't it have been a more striking composition?’
“How about a set review that talks about whether it's a good set overall and why? Or even an article that talks about what parts work for them and what parts don't. Also, like a good movie review, it would put it in context. Anyway, number one – I'd love to see more writers talk about the game in a more macro and less micro sense.”
-Mark Rosewater from Conversations pt 2

how to make yr tournament reports slightly less boring

2011-07-11T05:35:00.000-07:00

Congratulations, you did Something Moderately Noteworthy at a recent tournament and now you want to throw some words up on a screen so that we can all be envious of your immense Magic- and writing-related skills. The biggest issue with this plan is that most tournament reports are unbelievably uninteresting and can somehow turn high-intensity situations with thousands of dollars on the line into what resembles a summary of your aunt’s weekend spent “antiquing.” Example:

This match was against Valakut, which is a good matchup for me. Game one a mulligan is taken but my hand is pretty good after that. I have pretty good early pressure and he is killed by it within six or seven turns. After sideboarding, he starts out with some mana accelera

Oh sorry did I end that quote midword, my head just slipped and hit the enter key because I was asleep because it was really boring because it is bad. Instead of causing cranial pain in both the metaphorical and (as previously demonstrated) literal senses, you should spice up your writing a bit and maybe get laid once in a while too, loser. There are so many ways to write about Magic without sounding like every other asshole with a what-happened-last-match summary. For example, why just say what your opponent was playing? That opponent is a person, and shouldn’t just get ignored and treated like the only important aspect of them is their deck. It’s disrespectful and objectifying. How would you like it if people passed you on the street and only saw you as a walking stack of cards, huh? It wouldn’t feel very good. Treat your opponent like a real human being:

My opposition this round has the appearance of a quivering batch of sticks held together with body hair and anticipatory energy; his black T-shirt (with white text that has faded off in the nipple vicinity) clings to his concave chest at seemingly impossible places. His eyes dart around to other players, the clock, the judges, his dick, as if he’s expecting one or more to jump out and assault him. Somehow managing to not knock over his own deck while presenting it toward me, the texture of it informs me that his perspiration is not limited to his armpits and forehead and that Dragon Shield sleeves can hold a shocking amount of liquid. His stuttered question, unnecessarily ensuring that the high roll will determine who goes first, leads to a die roll of Six and On The Floor. His subsequent re-roll leads to a Three and Annoyed-Sounding Bodybuilder-Looking Guy Next To Us Who Got A Die In Front Of Him Like Totally Messing Up His Shuffling. After more quaking and stuttering from my opponent, the goal of the dice is finally realized, and we’re ready to start.

Now we’re talking. Before even starting a game we’ve already clearly established who the enemy is (some nerd) and since he’s so unlikeable then the audience is going to hope you win just by default. Throw in a few descriptions of how good-looking and humble you are and you’ll have the audience supporting you through anything, even the incident later in the report where you get DQ’d for calling the head judge a very long compound insult. This will get even further reinforced when you start to demonstrate how much better you are at this simple card game than all the rest of us doofuses:

By the way he paused looking at each card before he played it, I could tell the deck was fairly new to him, which was great news for me. I had tested the matchup extensively with [name pro] and we had concluded that it was, at worst, 64/36 in my favor (“but at a real tournament you’ll do a lot better than that just by your raw play skill,” as [pro] mentioned). My hand was reasonable, but not unbeatable in the hand of your average player off the street; I would have to be careful to play as well as I did in the previous tournaments I won with the deck.

On the third turn, my opponent cast a spell, untapping and retapping his lands haphazardly (still ending up with the incorrect decision of which to leave untapped, in my opinion) and looked over to me anxiously. I paused, slightly moving my left hand to a card before hesitating and saying “okay.” A lesser player definitely would have overplayed this ploy, making it seem bluntly obvious. By the look on my opponent’s face, he bought it completely: he definitely believed I had a counterspell, despite the fact I was playing GB midrange. The whole game, he plays around it and I leave up a land or two to continue his delusion. Finally, I smile as I play the last card in my hand. He looks at me dumbfounded that I never had it to begin with. He immediately shoves his cards together, mumbles “good games” and scribbles on the match results sheet as my friends and girlfriends congratulate me on a match well played.

Oh shit yes. Now the audience is well aware that you’re by far the best player in the room, which is valuable for them to know because if they saw in the title of your report that you didn’t win, they’ll know something’s up: either someone cheated you or lucksacked you. Probably both. That’s called “foreshadowing,” folks, and it’s tricks like that which will put you far ahead in this little ol’ writing game we’ve got going here.

But wait, you exclaim, I still haven’t the slightest clue how to describe moving cards around a table in a way that will interest even the most passionate fans of moving cards around a table. Sometimes, one needs to think a bit outside the box, or at least go back to a founding principle of Magic: it’s a fantasy game, with big dragons and angels with tits and if you can’t make tits interesting to an audience of straight males then well maybe writing just isn’t your calling. Stop talking about cards and start talking about the Story Those Cards Represent:

On the mystical plane of Raund’Phoeaur, the first of three great battles is being waged between the powerful planeswalkers Jon, Savior of the Righteous (using the pure and holy armies that have conquered and ravaged so many unholy places in previous times) and Mark, Destroyer of Dreams (using a combination of intellectualism with malicious thought tampering to [author’s note: how the hell to describe ANT in fantasy jargon. think of smthng]).

The field of battle opens with Mark, Destroyer of Dreams calling forth a long-uncharted passage of water beneath the earth, before exploiting its great power as a resource to diabolically meddle with Jon, Savior of the Righteous’s thoughts and seize the inkling of a thought Jon once had regarding an artificial religious construct of moderate fighting power but which would severely hamper Mark’s future schemes. Jon, Savior of the Righteous sends a secret interplaneswalker message that Mark, Destroyer of Dreams is “A Fucking Sack.”

Jon, Savior of the Righteous calls forth the first mythical monstrosity, a proud warrior of the Kithkin race with the potential to transform itself into a variety of increasingly fearsome forms. After the great adventurer enters the plane of war, a torrent of magical spells and incantations comes forth from Mark, Destroyer of Dreams. The first of these malevolent actions is one calling forth the purest form of black mana, followed by multiple more with similarly self-serving results. Jon, Savior of the Righteous sends forth his comment that the battle tactics employed by Mark are “The Gayest.” Mark continues his slew of spells with an attempt to gain a massive influx of knowledge at the expense of his own well-being and sanity. Repeatedly, he purposefully chooses to harm himself to the brink of destruction to greedily learn as many forbidden secrets of the multiverse as he can.

His plan beginning to come to fruition, he ends his pursuit of potentially deadly information, using what he learned to call forth even more of the darkest mana, then shockingly using secret jewels to gain even more at the expense of virtually all he had just learned. Cleverly, he had done this while consulting a dark demon to learn the only piece of information he currently lacked. Jon, Savior of the Righteous has his magically-endowed arms, covered in gold and treasure from a multitude of planes, crossed dejectedly and making expressions unseen on his face since his pre-planeswalking days when he spent his time throwing tantrums when disallowed his favored swords. Mark, Destroyer of Dreams reveals the final phase of his nefarious plot by subjecting Jon to unbelievably cruel torturous magical vines that penetrate the very sanity of Jon, who goes insane attempting to hold even the most tenuous grasp on reality. His last audible words are potentially factually inaccurate statements involving himself and Mark’s mother, grandmother, and sister.

Whoa nellie I just filled like a full page with way more interesting bullshit when most inferior Magic writers would only spend like half a sentence on that game. That’s the joy of quality writing, folks, you can describe basically nothing at all and feel great about it in the morning.

scg writer roundup

2011-07-08T20:08:00.000-07:00

Patrick Chapin

Style: enthusiastic descriptions that make no sense whatsoever- so he can be viewed either as a version of Evan Erwin that has played nonzero games of Magic or as a schizophrenic professor that wildly oscillates between theories that won them the Nobel prize a dozen years back and the rantings that had them institutionalized six months after said prize. Talks about levels a lot. Popularized the phrase “semi-soft lock,” often used to describe the feeling of eating a DQ Blizzard.

Significant accomplishments: wrote a book. No one read it, but he still like sat down at a keyboard and wrote a bunch of words that were then sold at some places, so congratulations.

Nadir: in non-magical interludes, talks about his exploits in the same smirking passive-voice style a frat boy would use to “subtly” inform you that he totally boned your sister last night dude (the younger sister that gave you Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems for Christmas with a note saying “enjoy it, or not”).

Looking forward: currently in talks with various theater producers about adapting his Tha Gatherin rap project to a traveling minstrel show. Coming soon to a town near you, yassuh!

Mike Flores

Style: find a long post on MTG Salvation. Get a list of famous Magic players. Sprinkle list onto post.

Significant accomplishments: wrote a bunch of important theory articles and then the continents started to drift into their current locations.

Nadir: MS Paint illustrations that resemble either a MOMA exhibit or Timecube.

Other nadir: after I wrote two sentences mentioning him in my critique of GerryT, he spent a half hour on Twitter in what can only really be described as “A Huff” refusing to respond to my criticism and insisting that by objective measurements he was at the top of his game.*

*Also that criticism of him was from “people who have no concept of the numbers, just based on skewed personal perspectives” [sic]. Also asking “Do you ask the taleban [sic] about physics?” Also that yours truly was “painting a counter-factual picture of *me*.” (W/ “me” referring to himself- Flores; usage of decorative asterisks [sic].)

Looking forward: he’ll probably mention in a future article that he won a tournament. Just a hunch.

Drew Levin

Style: the top Legacy writer at the site, moved over from the free side once some Legacy player paid $10K for a foreign signed altered foil Metalworker. Self-reflective to a nearly Drake-like degree, his favorite topic is his own mental attitude or what he thought about something months ago and how he was right. Also this isn’t exactly style but his author pic makes him look like some sort of Brazilian supermodel, so what I’m saying is stop using PVDDR’s photo, Drew, you’re not fooling anyone.

Significant accomplishments: on the heels of Chapin’s widely-praised article that didn’t use the letter “e,” Levin wrote a theory piece using only the word “I.”

Nadir: AJ Sacher chewing him out. I’m going to call this the nadir because Sacher hasn’t written much after that and I’m choosing to blame Levin.

Looking forward: in a world where thieves run rampant, unchecked in their power to steal Magic players’ Legacy decks, one man decides to boldly stand for justice. This summer, Drew Levin is... The Mind Sculptor.

Jonathan Medina

Style: like a blue-collar uncle showing you the ropes at the job he helped you get, kid, stick with me and you’ll be running this place in no time. If you follow Medina’s expert advice on trading, at tournaments instead of playing you can make close to $6 an hour with an initial investment of only a few thousand or so on cards to stock your binder, but be sure to have the prices of every rare memorized (SCG, eBay, player-to-player value) or you won’t make a dime.

Significant accomplishments: giving hope to a new generation of Magic players that realize they’ll never win a game of Magic, and valiantly chose instead to become the most-disliked people at a GP other than Rich Hagon.

Nadir: pointing out that really when you get right down to it, people trading cards aren’t usually paying that much attention to what your hands are doing when you’re going through their binder and it’s not like they were really using that Phyrexian Dreadnought in the first place.

Note: it’s come to my attention via his Twitter feed that Medina seems to have fairly thin skin with regard to his trading practices. In which case, Medina’s prices so bad he only offered Judas 23 pieces and a throw-in Sindbad (4E). Medina’s prices so bad, someone said “no thanks I’ll buy from StarCityGames.”

Brad Nelson

Wait, Nelson is with SCG now? When did that happen?

Gavin Verhey

Style: undoubtedly the most readable of SCG Free writers, because he is an SCG Free writer and is readable. He’s an English major, so hey, actual writer.

Significant accomplishments: due to a mixup involving having too many Word documents open at once and multiple pressing deadlines, half of a Standard article was replaced by 700 words of analysis of how the backlash to New Criticism paved the way for late-20th century linguistic analysis. This led to multiple SCG Open Top 8’s by readers who interpreted this section as an allegory of how to play the midgame of UW Landstill vs BUG in Legacy.

Nadir: his column is named after a Magic card. Haha what a dork am I right guys?

Looking forward: after avoiding using foul language his entire life, makes up for lost time in his final SCG article. It ends up well short of suggested article length, with only 247 of the original 13,983 words being deemed printable on a family website.

Sheldon Menery/Abe Sargent/etc etc etc

These writers cover something referred to as “EDH” which as best I can tell is the genius result of a brainstorming session amongst card retailers on how to inflate the price of dime rares from Ravnica block. Gameplay seems similar to overly-polite people debating who gets into a car first, except they’re trying to one-up one another with worse decks than the guy next to them so they don’t make the social faux pas of ending the game (oh heavens).

Sheldon, especially, is widely-known for an almost puritanical view of playing EDH The Right Way with The Right Way directly correlating to His Way. This includes holding EDH tournaments with entry fees and prize money followed by chastising (for going against the Spirit of the Format and Having Fun) those who dared tarnish his delicate format by bringing decks optimized to win games within a half-hour of them beginning. He holds a view of EDH similar to a Tea Party activist’s view of America and/or Heston’s view of the world in Planet of the Apes and/or Heston’s view of the world in real life: that Magic has been tarnished by the great plague of competitive play and we must return to a mythical golden age where everyone played fair, no one was overly competitive, Magic was fun, the birds were chirping, Black mana users knew their place, etc.

An enclave must be established, where the true believers can play Magic in peace. Except that among them grows a plague, the desire to play Unfun Decks and do Unfun Things, and this must be eliminated everywhere it is diagnosed. A hunt gets underway and no one is safe from the watchful eye of the Fun Police (except Menery himself, obviously).

Evan Erwin

Hopefully readers at this point understand that for the most part, what precedes this has mostly been good-natured ribbing at some of the better writers about this game, and that occasionally people will make fun of writers while enjoying them at the same time.

I sincerely loathe the content produced by Evan Erwin. It is the worst audience-pandering ever published in Magic-related writing. Hopefully it has all been a grand ploy to get a marketing job within Wizards, because I cannot imagine any person being genuinely excited about everything Wizards is doing all the fucking time. To quote from his latest article:

“So our new core set is upon us and boy is it sweet.”

I haven’t seen much reaction to M12 beyond “it has some interesting cards” or “it is a Magic: the Gathering set.” The man simply cannot restrain his enthusiasm about what is- let’s be realistic here- one of the most bland releases in years. It attempts nothing spectacular or even out of the ordinary, so it’s incapable of even teaching designers real lessons by failing in an interesting way like Coldsnap.

Evan Erwin has nothing interesting to say about Magic: the Gathering. His content amounts to a small child running around the room at the prospect of going to Disneyland. Constant kneejerk opinions serve only to validate the equally vapid kneejerk opinions of almost the entire Magic-playing population and thus cancels out a good portion of what legitimate theorists are doing to try to understand the game better.

m13 review

2011-07-07T18:23:00.001-07:00

Now that the entirety of M13 has been spoiled and the momentousness of Wizards’s product has begun to set in, the usual deluge of reviews will start. While it is difficult to write a true set review for the latest creation of lead designer Pierre Menard, the difficulty that mainstream Magic writers have in describing the changes it will have on the format is, in itself, a shining endorsement of Wizard’s new theories on how to change the most about the game by changing the least. For so long, the pendulum of how many new cards are in sets has been swinging toward the side of lots of new things (or at least things that had not been seen in a while), epitomized by the M10 change to core sets.

The set questions the very ideas that Magic players have about card quality in any given format. Because we all know- or, rather, have the possibly incorrect impression that we know- the value of all the cards in M12/M13, people will assume that these impressions will hold static going forward into Ravnica II from Innistrad, when many of the cards will have a totally different value without the artifact-heavy nature of the sets that followed M12.

It is encouraging that Wizards has taken an approach that plays most directly into what all Magic players crave, whether they know it or not (per Mark Rosewater’s convincing articles about Magic players’ desire for repetition in all aspects of the game). To the surprise of many, it led to what was one of the most surprising sets of preview weeks in recent memory; it’s much easier to convince people that they’ll enjoy playing a card in Standard when they’re currently playing that card in Standard.

This set will be a lesson to all novice designers that, sometimes, the card designs they’re looking for are right in front of them. Wizards bravely asked, “why bother finding variants for all these cards when they work perfectly well in their present incarnations?” Too many designers spend all their time being clever, finding inventive ways to reinvent the wheel and making new cards that really just result in making games less fun than they would have been with older cards. This set reminds us all: as exciting as it is to see brand-new cards for the first time, we don’t play games with brand-new cards, and the amount of time that a card has been in print for doesn’t make that card less fun to play in real games.

M13 is an enormous triumph for the budget-conscious player, as well. Nearly every card in M12 set is already under $5, and the reprinting of every card from that set will surely bring prices even lower than that. For ages, people have been complaining about how a set full of chase rares at limited quantities makes the game less accessible; Wizards finally did something about it.

Wizards has taken a big risk here and truly knocked it out of the park. Bravo Wizards, and here’s hoping Ravnica II stays on the same brilliant path.

an awed critique of gerry thompson

2011-07-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

Gerry Thompson is one of the most brilliant people that currently writes about the game or builds decks, which is part of what makes him occasionally frustrating for me to read. It’s not because his decks, advice, or general tech is bad, because I certainly haven’t done the weeks of testing necessary to refute something he says. In fact, I’ll go ahead and assume that when Gerry tells the audience a card is good in a certain situation, it really is. Instead, what’s frustrating is that he never lets us in on the underlying theory that would let the plebeians figure all this out for ourselves. Several writers (Zvi, Lapille, most recently Sacher) have referenced the old cliche about learning to fish versus receiving fish, and Thompson seems way on the side of giving out heaps of the highest-quality deep-blue-water savory fish known to mankind and not letting the rest of us even see the boat. Show us the boat Gerry. We want to understand it.

For years, Gerry has had the same role among the elite Magic players: changing last week’s deck for this week’s tournament and doing the same thing next week against what used to be his deck. Teachings, Thopter/Depths, Cawblade, UW Standstill. The Open Series simply gave him a wider stage for his skill; a format that rewards his unique way of changing his tactics while never changing his approach. Every week he tells us what he did this time in order to make the decks for himself and his friends better against the rest, every week he explains the interactions that make it possible and never telling us how he even found those ways of winning in the first place. How did you know that you wanted to be more aggressive in this mirror match? Why were you instead more controlling in the other one? Why does it win both times? It’s unlikely that there will ever be another person that does this with the same monotonous success as Gerry, because he has never told his readers how to accomplish it.

There are a few possible explanations of why this is. Oftentimes the people that are best at something don’t make for the best teachers of the subject, usually because it’s difficult to explain a concept that’s grown internally into something that’s no longer even a feeling or instinct but just a core part of the person. Jordan can explain the mechanics of a jump shot, sure, but it’s probably a waste of time for him to focus on such things and really he’d just reiterate what instructors told him when he was 15. Mike, can you explain exactly why and how on that drive you got past the first guy rather than going above/through him and how you knew the exact angle to throw the ball from beneath your chin so that it would both miss Shawn Bradley’s idiotic head and kiss gently off the glass into the net? Chances are, his response would be something like “it was just the right thing to do.” How can Gerry summarize years of playing this game for hours a day into simple sentences instead of just skipping all that and telling us what cards are good and what isn’t? It’s my honest hope that he learns how. This is just one possible trajectory for Gerry’s writing career. My fingers are crossed that he rejects the Floresian model of slowly drifting into beginner writing and 70s-rocker-still-recording style irrelevance. We’ve learned all there is to learn from Flores, yet he still writes.

A more conspiratorial explanation is that Gerry knows exactly how to articulate the concepts he’s been exploiting for advantage (both in tournaments and to explain the results of these tournaments) and is protecting this knowledge like a trade secret; the Coca-Cola chemist allowed only to describe the flavor of the product and the energy that went into creating it rather than the formula used. Or he could keep writing what people want to read: a weekly summary of the things he’s learned in the past week, all bottom-line lessons. Which is not to say that his articles are lists of quality finished products, because they’re not. The reasons that are given are simply a step removed from true relevance; the reasoning behind the reasons left to the imagination.

His writing of non-strategic material, summarized by the anecdotal Tales from The SCG Open Series, is probably the high point (along with Heezy’s latest article) of the truly inside Magic tournament writer, filled with jargon and references that read like writing down names, putting them in a hat, and tossing the hat at the screen. His stories appear to be written addressed to a handful of friends and accidentally made public to the unwashed masses of the game; the audience as voyeur looking in at the lives of people that can profitably play a game that is for the rest of us our entire hobby or entertainment budget. The world of high-level tournament play is so insular that each player’s stories start to resemble each others- each credit card game result eliciting guffaws from the players who know the results of each of the last ones and the names of everyone involved because they were there too. At its best it can be a view inside an often hilarious circle of friends and their best stories, at its worst like reading the quotes page of a yearbook twenty years and three continents away from the audience. Like much classic writing from the observers of a game, it could be modified to describe any other game but could only have been produced by the one in question.

tournament dialogue part 1

2011-07-05T19:54:00.000-07:00

“And I’m sitting there arms-crossed with my hand on the table looking at the matches on either side of me because that’s the proper response to an opponent resolving a Top activation during his upkeep for like the third turn in a row and way more interesting than this dude furrowing his brow over and over is the match to my right where this woman has taken her deck out of a box that says in label-maker-text ‘ANT’ and she’s playing mono-red burn against this Goblins player right. And this is the first game and she’s just crushing him with Lava Spikes and Bolts that go to his head at EOT instead of his turn-one Lackey, she was on the play, and then he’s tapped out she’s at fourteen or whatever he has the three creatures he’s had time to play before he’s down to two life and she untaps draws a land to go with her in-hand Bolt, Magma Jet, and she passes the turn back to him right after dropping the land and either she was just trying to tilt him majorly or she was just told always cast things at EOT instead of-”
“Oh right, so you’re Captain Feminist, and this woman must have just been told what to do. Right on.”
“Well I was getting to that, asshole, as they’re shuffling up and sideboarding and he’s trying to salvage himself from a complete embarrassment at the hands of a $20 deck-”
“Isn’t Chain Lightning like $5?”
“Probably had Guides.”
“Fetches?”
“Fine, $80 deck whatever thanks for your brilliant contributions; point is he’s trying to find two pride-salvaging brain chemicals to rub together and he starts doing the usual chats, you know all those where from how long’ve you been playing play much Legacy and she’s telling him in just that incredible French accent that before this wonderful life experience of losing at Magic, he’s only heard emerging from dark-lipsticked-mouths of fatales in noir movies about the Resistance set in 1944-”
“The French Resistance.”
“No. The fucking Native American resistance because they totally had French accents, yes obviously the French Resistance if I’m explaining that she sounded French, so what I was trying to say was that she tells this dude with this all-foil-except-the-duals-and-only-because-foil-duals-don’t-exist Goblins deck (why you’d foil Goblins instead of an actual deck well that’s just Legacy players I guess) anyway she tells him that she’s been playing for two weeks and this is her first Legacy tournament but it seems fun so far and he’s smilenodding looking down at his cards as he’s shuffling to make sure they’re not laughing at him that his Piledrivers don’t have their art altered to give him the finger but the read on him is pretty obvious. Dude is already forming his bad beat story. It’s half-written. That’s what people do when they sideboard, really, they’re thinking about the wording they’ll use when they tell-”
“So you won.”
“No but that’s not the point, you don’t hear me standing here talking about how I got sacked out-”
“Yet.”
“Shut up, anyway so he’s already thinking how he’ll be like ‘oh man, unreal, I just lost to France’s Next Top Model’ but he pulls it together, turn one Lackey obviously again obviously survives obviously has Gang so yeah nice Spikes, game three she has the classic quad-Bolt Blast You Blast You and she kills him right as her counterpart starts birding-”
“Oh, here I thought you had a shot. Sucks, dude.”
“Well obviously none of us had a shot, dude has the same absolutely jaw-dropping Mediterranean look to him and they’re chatting in froggish about, I assume, high-level theoretical concepts that become intrinsic to your playstyle when you can blind half the tournament hall with the gleam off your teeth or maybe they’re just involuntarily scoffing at every other human that ever has or will exist and I think I might have recognized him? So he might be a pro or maybe I’ve only seen his bare chest and abs in professionally-photographed black and white magazine ads, but he seems happy so I guess he’s up.”
“Unlike you.”
“Well it’s like a 50/50 matchup, depends on if he has Deeds, I got Deeded both games, had maybe 50/50 shot if I had attempted a combo one game but I didn’t go for it, got Hymned and lost. Positive I could have played it better but no idea how, getting 2-0’d means I must have fucked up somewhere.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Deed seems slightly okay against you.”
“Little bit. Played against Conley yesterday and you know that BUG Standstill list?”
“Sure.”
“Well he’s playing something like that but four Deed-”
“Oof.”
“-removal package of a Diabolic Edict, a Dismember, a Go for the Throat, some other one-of that’s probably a four-mana uncommon that -0/-1s a guy and gives horsemanship if you control an Advisor-”
“First pick in MED draft for sure.”
“-anyway so yes, first he crushed me with a Deed, then he got Deed and I cried and he told me it would all be alright and then once that massacre was over-”
“Whoa, Massacre could be sweet in this format.”
“...that’s... actually a good idea. Huh. Well anyway this guy that I’d never seen and Conley didn’t seem to know was like giraffeing over Conley’s shoulder at the deck and doing that little look-up-and-to-the-left look with a slight head bob and barely mouthing to himself and he would do that every time Conley mentioned a card in his deck and then this dude tries to all stealthy-slip past everyone straight to the dealers which is a bit difficult when you’re pushing so hard against 300lbs that 300lbs falls over and rolls down the hill and plus one of those jumbo-sized backpacks over his god-knows-how-many X’s L black shirt with some white words on the front of it, guy’s at the SCG booth and does the same sort of look back and forth before saying anything that a Sim does when you tell it to steal something from someone’s house.”
“Okay, so what did he get?”
“No idea.”

“So I was walking back from the garage and Wescoe is sitting outside on a bench alone, reading something looked like a mass-market-size paperback and I could see small text and each page was broken into two columns, right? So I ask out of nowhere all incredulous ‘are you reading a dictionary?’ and he kinda looks at me and turns the cover and it says Holy Bible on the front and I think I saw on the inside that part of it was highlighted and had a heart drawn in sharpie around it so I just start blubbering apologies over and over and get out of there as fast as possible.”
“What? No.”
“All fact.”
“Do you think he’ll remember you?”
“Of course not, he’ll mistake me for the other million Magic players that are incredibly tall, rail-thin, with skinny jeans and a combover. The fuck do you think.”

“The strangest part is that these fucking nerds don’t even know how to cross the street. We’re talking one lane- granted it’s an offramp from a highway but still like one lane and not one of those luxurious west-coast “single lanes” with space for dancers on either side of your car as you’re driving, this is old-school east-coast thin-ass lane here. And the thing has a crossing sign which really isn’t even necessary. If there’s a car crossing, don’t fucking cross, if there isn’t one you cross. Not that complicated. So there’s a group of maybe like eight people and I’m at the front and the crossing sign changes from the bathroom sign turned sideways into the flashing hand that means 'planeswalk on over' and not just that but the damn thing has a timer to let you know how long you have before you can’t enter that five feet of pavement. So I cross and the thing has like 15 left on it and everyone save one person stays on the other side like 'whoa now. Let’s take this easy. Twenty seconds from now the other light will change from red to green and then if there is a car there it might not be safe to walk across this narrow strip of black for a few seconds. Better wait until the next cycle.' Either these dorks don’t really live in a major city like they claim or Seattle is some suburban hellhole that everyone calls a city just for shits and to trick people into thinking that it’s a place with culture instead of a desolate strip malling hellhole. Do they not even have streets there or does no one give the slightest of fucks about getting anywhere on time. Oh wait I know what it is, they only ever drive from their house to the card shop and to Local As Hell Coffee Store That Has Doughnuts so they never have to cross a street so they’re encountering these strange hieroglyphics on poles for the first time and don’t know what the fuck.”

“If he didn’t pull in more per hour than I make in a week and win every tournament he went to I’d feel a bit sorry for the guy.”
“Professional player, professional something else right heh heh-”
“No you idiot he’s one of those guys that gets paid to go to suity corporate events and do the little sleight of hand tricks in front of CEOs and the women they- the CEOs- are having sloppy grunty overpriced affairs with, he- the player- is doing the same thing he used to do at children’s parties except now he gets to make an occasional dick joke instead of the occasional fart joke and just leaves with his suit pockets bulging with tips from those CEOs that don’t want to look cheap in front of said affair-having-partners. Fortunately for him he’s practiced enough with little hand-movements that he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable managing a wad of 20s/50s/100s that would be the envy of like most modern rappers and he can even subtly slip a few of them off of the wad when he actually needs to like pay for a thing, which he can do now because the guy’s just loaded to hell is the point. And so instead of sipping Warhol-print-colored drinks with sentence-long names on the beach owned by a now ex-wife of one of those CEOs mentioned previously he’s now hunting tournaments up and down the east coast not like just going to a few or some of them once in a while no no no. Dude is stalking them, seriously. Just comes to them out of the blue and the usual ringers just die in top eight-”
“When did people start using ‘ringer’ to mean, like, anyone competent because it actually means someone that’s not really supposed to be there but-”
“Oh not that shit again cut that out so anyway it’s not like he’s hiding his occupation from the world or anything- not bragging about it like a total dick either thankfully- but the thing of it is like no one wants to say anything but how would you feel if you’re playing against this guy that happens to do sleight-of-hand card tricks where he’ll move around cards and people don’t notice even when they know that’s what he’s doing and that it’s what he gets paid to do so he’s really good at that- this is what he does for a day job not in a game, hopefully, but that’s what I’m saying like how would you really know that. The guy seems legitimately good but there’ll always be that question in people’s minds. That oh wow what a shock the master card manipulator happened to draw the card at the exact right time hmm shocking.”
“But sometimes people just draw the right card.”
“Right.”
“Well what would you do?”
“I’d go oh my god cheating lucksack, obviously. But that’s the thing like if you’re constantly watching him for oh man is he putting an extra card in his hand is he trying to con me right now- oh I should mention he used to be an actual con man before the whole magician thing, that’s how he got into it because tricking people into giving you their money by being all fast-talking and using your hands a lot is actually a lot less profitable than just smiling and hoping they give it to you knowing full well exactly what they did because you were so impressive with your fast talking and hand shit. So he has this wonderful way of playing Magic where if you watch him it doesn’t look like he’s doing anything particularly fantastic and his decks are all usually like a week out of date at least, doesn’t hang with Thompson or anyone like that-”
“Thompson would ask for his bag from Denver back anyway.”
“-so instead he just plays a solid game of Magic. And smiles a lot. And hits on his opponents- he’s gay by the way- and laughs and more smiling. He doesn’t even flick the cards in his hands back and forth because like he’s just too good at actual ways to manipulate cards to bother with low-level shit like that I mean what would be the point? And his opponents just chuckle nervously at his jokes and sit there and flick and tank and flick flick tank tank and keep getting distracted by when he every now and then just peeks at one of the cards in his hand, they’re usually sitting in a pile face-down on the table except for that. Only remaining aspect of his day job in his play- he has to do this just to remind you that he can so you’d better watch him even closer- is not only does he not flick he doesn’t even look at his hand. He just flings it down on the table and it happens to land in that neat face-down pile and during his turn he draws his card quick peek and puts it in the middle of the face-down hand and whenever he needs to play a card he just turns over the top card and it’s what he needs to play because he’s just that fucking good and then he smiles. Always the smiling.”
“So how’s he today?”
“X-1, lost to burn I think.”

magic players are straight white males

2011-07-04T17:34:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago an article about Magic players and their treatment of women made the rounds to mostly positive reception. One of the reasons I mostly dislike it is that it seems to ignore what I feel are the more interesting issues: why are Magic players such morons around women, and why are nearly all Magic players male?

Magic isn't a product that many people will hear about for the first time from a TV ad and go out to buy. A more experienced player has to introduce the person to it, like with heroin, and for a while the newcomer will only be playing with that person, like with bondage. This means that Magic is a game spreads mostly through social circles. Magic's demographics are dominated by straight white males at levels that make the past Standard season look like a joyous time for deckbuilders, and it's because the only people these straight white males ever hang out with are other straight white males, so the game will only ever be played by straight white males. I'm not trying to say that Wizards should change their marketing strategy or try to encourage diversity in some other way because that would be completely pointless. Instead let's all collectively acknowledge that this is the way it was/is/always will be and that it sucks terribly. People have a natural affinity for people that look and act like them, but the Magic community takes this to a level of uniformity above and beyond normal social groups.

There's nothing inherent about Magic or women that keeps the two apart. Both Harry Potter and especially the Twilight series are phenomenally successful fantasy franchises that, to different degrees, are supported by large numbers of women and girls. "What house would you be in?" is still a good pickup line on most women 15-30. The success of Title IX sports at the high school and college levels should be indication that women don't have much of a problem playing a game competitively.

All- well, both- of the people I've taught to play Magic have been female. My ex-girlfriend asked me to teach her, and a friend of hers who had never heard of the game said it sounded interesting as well. The stereotype about female MTG players is mostly true: a way larger portion learned from their significant others than the number of men who learned from theirs. This shouldn't be surprising, really, since it falls in line nicely with the reason not many women play Magic in the first place. Male gamers don't really hang out with women that often unless they're dating. The lack of tact that these gamers have w/r/t issues of gender, race, and sexuality are understandable if still excusable for the same reasons that the girls I taught to play weren't immediately at pro-quality levels of play. It's just a lack of experience. Gamers have no idea what to say or what not to say due to a lack of familiarity with people outside their social circle.

The only way that this will ever change is if the average Magic player starts talking to more people as well as being generally less obnoxious so that they make a wider circle of friends. Because of this I'm not predicting any huge changes in the future.

my elves

2011-07-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

Legacy Elves is not very good. It has bad matchups against some of the best decks, and fairly difficult ones against some of the combo decks. I play it because it's the deck I'm best at, so it gives me better results than anything else. Is it the best deck in a format where people are playing Pernicious Deed, Stoneforge Mystic, and Grim Lavamancer? Of course not, have you READ those cards? Good lord they're incredible.

The rest of this assumes that, for whatever reason, you still want to play Elves and know how the basic deck works (Glimpse draws cards! Elves make mana!).

The following is the agreed-upon foundation of the deck:

>=12 land
X Fyndhorn/Llanowar Elves
4 Heritage Druid
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Quirion Ranger
1 Regal Force
4 Glimpse of Nature
Y ways to tutor

...with X being >=4 and Y being somewhere from 4-8 of some combination of Green Sun's Zenith, Summoner's Pact, and Living Wish. After this, one needs to decide what the deck should accomplish. The options are basically: combo as fast as possible, or have a better linear beatdown plan, or have a better backup plan, or slow the deck down to be more reliable (well, in theory). Because so many decks have few answers game one against the combo option of the deck, it's my opinion that going for the combo is the best option. Running more aggro creatures or a backup plan is just going to dilute that for fear of cards that will mostly come post-board anyway. The data I collected from my MTGO games backed this up: the game one win percentage of the deck was outrageous, somewhere around 75%. How does one make the combo the best it can be?

4 Fyndhorn Elves
4 Llanowar Elves

This is because the most common turn two win is turn one F/L Elf, turn two Glimpse, Quirion, Heritage, continue from there. Because of that, doubling the number of turn one elves will almost double your turn two goldfish wins that happen in this manner.

4 Summoner's Pact

It's the only tutor that helps the above happen; it's the only tutor that doesn't set you behind mana for the privilege of running your combo. If you're trying to win this turn, Pact is better than any non-Glimpse card you can have in your hand (since it can become anything else, silly).

4 Green Sun's Zenith

If the deck never had to play a real opponent, you'd rather have 8 Summoner's Pact. Since we're playing real Magic with both deckbuilding rules and opponents, 4 Green Sun's Zenith is necessary as a card that can set up the next turn, or be a poor mana's Summoner's Pact. It's also ways 5-9 to find Regal Force. The most common usage of the card is finding Priest of Titania or Elvish Archdruid to win the following turn. Speaking of which:

3 Priest of Titania
3 Elvish Archdruid

Basically, if you untap with one of these and a hand that's at all reasonable, you'll win nearly every time. The three-ofs aren't four because they can clog opening draws something fierce if a hand has more than two; the equal numbers are because mana curves make them equal in quality, but slightly better to have one of each. Usually. Feel free to experiment here, but I'm quite happy with that. Archdruid is fantastic in making your last-ditch aggro plan into a real threat, though; I've won plenty of games just playing my entire hand ending with an Archdruid or two on turn two.

4 Wirewood Symbiote

Oh my god this card is so fucking good. It draws extra cards with Glimpse, it recurs Viridian Shaman and Elvish Archdruid, it lets Quirion Ranger activate multiple times in a turn, it creates even more mana with Nettle Sentinel but most importantly, it's a one-mana dude that people want dead before Priest/Archdruid. That means that you get to untap with those guys, and well, see above.

1 Elvish Visionary

Instead of explaining why it's good, I'll explain why I don't play more: it's a next-turn card in a build that wants to combo faster. Most games don't go long enough against slow enough decks to make Visionary + Symbiote a realistic way to gain card advantage, and Visionary is plain bad at trying to win immediately. The one-of is to tutor up in situations where card advantage is relevant, or last-ditch efforts trying to stop oneself from fizzling. Usually, Symbiote is the better pick.

1 Emrakul

It's the best kill condition because it dodges Moat and basically everything else.

8 green fetchland
5 Forest
1 Bayou
1 Savannah

Fifteen lands. Lots of people cheat and play less; really, it's just costing you games to mulligans for the benefit of less mana flood losses. It's a careful balance but I'm pretty sure fifteen is where the sweet spot lies. One land is still optimal while goldfishing because of Quirion Ranger, but not everything works out perfectly all the time. Elvish Spirit Guides are not lands! Stop cheating.

0 Living Wish

Why Living Wish is worse than Pact: It costs two mana. Seriously, that's the answer. Costing mana is so bad. If you're going to tutor something up, it's almost always to set up a win next turn in which case it's difficult to afford both Wish and the mana to play the creature; or it's to win this turn, and then Wish is just horrid. Why play Emrakul main instead of Wish? That's certainly a reasonable question, and something I've considered. I just don't feel that it's worth the sideboard slot, really.

0 Elvish Spirit Guide

This card's benefit is an illusion. What are you trying to accomplish with it? Make your deck faster? Random one-drop Elves can do that just fine, and aren't dead after turn two like this is. Stop using it to cheat on lands, you're just making control decks fantastic for no real reason.

The complete list:

1 Bayou
5 Forest
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Savannah
4 Verdant Catacombs

3 Elvish Archdruid
1 Elvish Visionary
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
4 Fyndhorn Elves
4 Heritage Druid
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
3 Priest of Titania
4 Quirion Ranger
1 Regal Force
4 Wirewood Symbiote

4 Glimpse of Nature
4 Green Sun's Zenith
4 Summoner's Pact

Sideboard:

3 Buried Alive
3 Vengevine

Backup plan! Basically the best thing you can do against decks that want to kill all your guys. Buried Alive is pretty much an auto-win against those sorts of things if it resolves; Vengevine hardcast isn't nearly as good, but can be fine.

3 Sylvan Library

For when your opponent has basically no way to damage you before turn a million, the deck can negate their one-for-ones.

3 Thorn of Amethyst
1 Viridian Shaman
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Qasali Pridemage

Should be self-explanatory. Pridemage might not be needed any more, as I haven't faced too many troublesome enchantments where I can really take the time to tutor it up.

A rigid in/out sideboarding guide would be pointless not just because Legacy has a million decks, but because it wouldn't teach people a thing. Regardless of the specific configuration of the sideboard or the exact list, keep the following concepts in mind:

Against decks with lots of removal (Zoo/BUG/RBW/etc), you want your backup plan. Comboing off isn't very likely post-sideboard, so take out all the Pacts and a couple Priests/Archdruids because they'll hardly ever live a turn, and if they do, you won't have many guys in play. Your goal in the matchup is to win on a combination of beatdown and card advantage, mostly the former against slower decks and the latter against faster ones. Using Glimpse to draw a few cards is wonderful.

Against decks with lots of counterspells but not much removal, the deck doesn't want to change much, since the basic framework does very well at flooding the board with too many Elves for the opponent's Force of Wills to deal with. I usually take out a couple Pacts for tutorable creatures, but it's really important not to go overboard here. It's a good matchup, don't fuck it up by making your deck slow and awkward. Buried Alive is subpar, because they can just counter Buried Alive and Vengevine isn't really as scary as winning the game.

Against other combo decks, sideboard as little as possible. The Visionary is the weakest card, followed by Archdruids. Hope you practiced goldfishing.

Against creature decks without much removal or countermagic, your maindeck is great. Sideboard in a couple one-ofs and Archdruid them to death. Taking out a couple Pacts is probably the best call, just to reduce risk.

If your opponent has creatures, it’s not a bad idea to bring in Viridian Shaman because of Jitte and Canonist.

You might notice how often Pact comes out in some number. This isn’t because it’s a bad card; it’s just a lot better game one than games two and three when the opponent has some chance of stopping you from going off.

On playing the deck: no advise I can give can shortcut the massive amount of goldfishing and playtesting that the deck requires to be capable of winning a match against even the most basic forms of resistance that Legacy will put up. I already wrote an article back in Extended season with tips on playing that version of the deck, and almost all of it holds true now. The biggest changes to the goldfishing tactics come from Quiron Ranger; namely, how it acts like two elves for purposes of making mana. Practice comboing a lot. Set up hands with one or two Summoner’s Pact and try to puzzle them out; if you can’t win turns two or three 80% of the time, you’re not ready to even play the Tournament Practice room on Magic Online. That’s not a judgmental statement, it’s simply the procedure to learn to play the deck. Most players, at first, will rely on Glimpse too heavily. That one-of Regal Force isn’t there as a last-ditch effort; it leads to combo wins almost as often as playing Glimpse does, simply due to the huge amount of mana the deck can make.

On strategy outside of goldfishing, the biggest thing to keep in mind is to know what the next lines of play will be at any one time based on your hand and the matchup, and know what cards you can draw that will change your decisions. For example, if your hand is a bunch of one-mana Elves and a couple of Archdruids on the second turn, for god’s sake play as many as you can, don’t wait around thinking that you’re making the pro decision by holding back and waiting for Glimpse or playing around removal. The proper decision is to go kill your opponent. Remember, if your hand/board is nothing but Elves, you have a way higher chance of drawing a way to get Regal Force than you do of drawing a Glimpse. Play as if you’re not going to get it.

Questions on the deck or anything else? Message me in the comments or on twitter (KillGoldfish). Follow me on twitter even if you have nothing to say.

return

2011-07-02T17:52:00.001-07:00

Playing Elves on Magic Online made me realize how I could lose my house at a casino. Until recently playing constructed was, at best, a slow profitable crawl where it was impossible to wager more of one’s bankroll than professorial poker experts advised, because it took hours to play out a $6 event and one couldn’t do much else at the same time.* Gold queues, as the metallic name indicates, bring the smoky world of higher-stakes gambling to the nickel-and-dime world of online Magic.

*People often neglect to count their deck as part of their bankroll, when its liquidity should make it part of that.

Today with my mother, we discussed my father’s previous addictions. When they started dating he enjoyed the trio of tobacco, alcohol, and cocaine, and since then has has (admirably/to his credit/etc) kicked the trinity entirely. Which isn’t to say that he danced away into bunnylandistan of Addiction-Free-Me; instead of drinking himself to tears once a week and spending everything on King of Beer while my mother was alone home with a smaller version of myself, he went to constant AA meetings, buried himself in their literature and knee-high stacks of Guitar Player while spending his money on guitars/amps/fuzzboxes/etc.

“I need a drug” was his explanation.

AFAIK he was never a real gambler, though. Previous members of my family were. I don’t know their specific stories. Invent your own.

At any given time, I’ll always have a thing. A thing that consumes roughly 90% of my usually-plentiful free time. At the moment I’m working four days a week, in class four, zero neither. It’s a different feeling not being consumed.

The process of having one (1) thing makes it difficult to attempt to establish a consistent readership for myself, due to to the inherent inconsistency. Who would read a daily blog on Elves (and only Elves) for two weeks, followed by two weeks of PC game reviews, followed by two weeks of hip-hop reviews? Substitute Starcraft 2 strategy or noise rock or anything.

Drafting online is perfectly suited for a gambling fiend. 3 packs + 2 tix, spin the roulette. Get the high or the letdown within thirty seconds of seeing the pack. Then slowly diminishing hits, each pack a little more Arm & Hammer than the last until the mellow disappointment of the dregs of the pack. Repeat for two more packs. Then each game won heightens anticipation, each loss heightens anxiety, but they feel the same.

Opponent: turn three Moltensteel Dragon

Fuck

Me: beat down w/ Ardent Recruits till opponent concedes

!!!

Opponent: turn five Thopter Assembly

FUCK

Three packs two tickets fuck that guy fuck fuck YES Batterskull. Etc etc etc

Rosewater (paraph): Timmy, Johnny, Spike. Experience something/express someth/prove smth. I grew up making weird decks built around weird cards or ideas (first deck built as a result of specific planning: UG Confiscate/Dominate/Bribery/etc) though it was mostly an honest attempt to win, if occasionally on My Terms. First deck I ever built not of my own design: Tight Sight, which I won’t go into the workings of too deeply but it was a bizarre UG Future Sight combo deck that won by decking itself then infinitely recurring Early Harvest then Predict to kill. Really a gorgeous piece of machinery in deck form. What I’m getting to is that I’m apparently a Spike/Johnny with nothing to express or prove through the game and I think Timmies are horrid people that should shut up always so his classification system (like all such pseudopsychological grid-based systems) is total bullshit. Men are from Mirrodin women are from Vesuva. Just the very assumption that people enjoy Magic for different reasons and in different ways is wrong, since there are people that play a whole lot of Magic without enjoying it. It’s just there.

Rosewater (paraph (himself paraph his college writing prof)): what unites all the decks you make/all the decks you play? For a lot of people this answer should be pretty obvious and if you just say that you “play the best deck” you’re wrong because you can play the best deck in such a vast number of different ways and I don’t mean in-game; which version do you use? Did you change it or use someone else’s 75? Test it yourself? Who’re you trying to beat with it? Was it even the best version in the room, really?

My decks are all reasonable gambles. I’m not going all in on 00 but if you give me a favorable coin flip? Definitely. Fuck all the decks that go to turn 30 with a way to win practically every game if you play it right, I need the rush from a turn three combo or at the very least a turn three five-drop. When I first started playing combo decks at tournaments, I would try to stop myself from smiling on the turn I went off. That was unsuccessful. I would involuntarily shake as I beamed down at the cards and go through the combo, whether it was Heartbeat or Desire or anything else. I’ve mostly stopped the smiling and shaking, from going through the motions so often on Magic Online if nothing else. No other type of deck gives that sort of rush. Sometimes after a close Limited game, I’ll begin the next game feeling terrible before I rack my brain to remember that I actually won in the end. Doesn’t make it very satisfying, personally.

Rosewater assumes in his analysis that all three player types want to interact in some way with their opponents, or at least their Magic-playing friends. I dislike interacting with most Magic players. That’s not what makes the game fun for me.