tournament dialogue part 2

“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.”