gp montreal postmortem at goodgamery

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

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.

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

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.

this is not a kneejerk reaction to the planeswalker points system

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.

obligatory alyssa bereznak response post

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.

deck choice (a response to pvddr)

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.

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

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.

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-”

why is mtg salvation bad?

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.

the rise and fall of commander

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.