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.

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

(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.

why i want to fuck mark rosewater

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).

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

scg writer roundup

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.

m13 review

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.