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-”

how to make yr tournament reports slightly less boring

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

tournament dialogue part 1

“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-”