One of the ever-present factors in the world of Magic writing is jealousy. Envy. The green-eyed monster. Deep down, within their hidden heart of hearts, almost every Magic writer has a bone to pick with every other writer. He wants to be the best, most erudite, most knowledgeable The undeniable pressure and competition to provide the most entertaining content and useful advice makes for wearing away keyboards and the death of keys. (My only casualty to date is C.) Fame, recognition, acclaim; these are our watchwords and treasures.
Or so it would seem.
But there’s a more important goal than making a name for oneself. And that’s doing a good job of promoting the game we love. This article’s going to point out the ten people who I deem to be the top ten promoters of Magic, the people who put sales in the gaming store cash registers, the people who make the sound of cracking cellophane happen. These people aren’t the only reason why we’re here, but they’re the best salespeople the game has, and they deserve recognition for their hard work. Not only do they succeed in inspiring motivation, but they also create targets for us other writers to aspire for. Just like a Kenji Tsumura or a Kai Budde can drive us lesser mortals to excel, so do these writers and commentators manufacture interest and material for the mental grist mill. It’s time to rank their performance.
March’s end does bring the end of the fiscal year, after all.
But before we can examine the list, we’ve got to take a gander at the criteria I used. Only fair, right? I’ve gleaned most of these principles from working daily with Japanese automobile and associated sales teams day in and day out. The guys I teach know how people tick and how to get them motivated to make the sale. Just the same, there are a number of principles that aren’t highly relevant to the art of sales, and I’ll point out why they’re not being used in my criteria.
A good salesperson has to be a talented and persistent communicator. They need to be professional, focused, and control their message. They should have the ability to shape perception, and need to knock on doors all the time. That means that I’m going to have to cross any names off the list that haven’t done any great sales in recent months. My dad often cites the adage "if you don’t shave every day, you’re a bum." I’ve got to agree with him here. As much as I’d like to, that means that Geordie Tait, Josh Bennett, Oscar Tan, and Anthony Alongi get kicked to the curb. History’s important, but resting on your laurels is not the way forward, to use an overworked Rich Hagon phrase.
A good salesperson must make Magic look like the best thing since sliced bread. They should capture all that makes Magic dynamic and exciting and diverting, and trap that electricity into his message. They have to be able to be honest and up front about shortcomings, but make those points come across as appropriate and reasonable tradeoffs for the marvelous benefits of the product. They’ve got to be quite knowledgeable and reliable when offering their services.
When you’re selling a product, you have to realize that you’re not just selling a product. You’re selling a lot more than that. You’ve got a piece of your corporate reputation at stake. You’re selling your good name and trust in your company’s culture. Good Magic promoters hype up their friends, their opponents, and themselves as well as the cardboard. That sort of confidence is contagious.
I neither handicap nor penalize Wizards employees or freelancers. Of course they’re getting paid to make Magic look good. They earned their jobs the hard way. However, I do have a bias against pro players. Yeah, they make the game look good, because they excel at the game. However, they usually don’t make that much of an effort to promote themselves other than through their performance. And to be frank, I think we’re better off that way. Who wants to go to an event to find loudmouthed prima donnas starting the match with custom entrance music and pyro?
Actually, that doesn’t sound half bad. It’d get tiresome after the second round, though. Anyone who’s played a pro wrestling video game can tell you that. Besides, everyone knows how to be a better player. It’s the same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Examples clarify the goal, but they don’t define the goal.
I also don’t credit the people who design the product. In cars, that’s engineers. Engineers deserve a lot of credit, but they have industrial awards and trade publications that discuss issues (at least when they’re allowed to discuss them publicly.) It’s not that these people are unimportant, but they’re not in the public eye. Rather, I want to give credit to people who explain how the car / game works and why people should try it out.
Now that you know how I’ve picked these guys, let’s go through the list.
10. Craig Jones – Ah, the exception to the rule comes right through at the beginning. Craig offers up all sorts of good weekly tech here at StarCityGames.com, and gives us a first-hand, almost real-time chronicle of his endeavors at the Pro Tour. How he manages to summon the mental tenacity to pull this task off, I’ll never know. He does the “you are there” bit very, very well.
I have to put him on this list because I’m afraid he’ll murder me if he sees me. I’ve seen him bare his soul, his black, inky, murderous, spiteful soul, on the karaoke mic. And I was mortified by what I heard. He could grin menacingly at me and I’d buy ice from him in the middle of Greenland. Because the alternative would be far, far worse.
9. Ben Bleiweiss – He’s the most patently amusing salesman of the lot. He has a bagful of stories to regale you with, and his schticks are clever. He does such a good job of coaxing the reader of Building on a Budget to yield up a few, measly tickets for the sake of his latest creation.
After months and months of sticking to the cardboard versions and avoiding Magic Online as a potential resource, Bleiweiss was the guy to finally get me to start building Constructed decks on Magic Online. I was able to make a reasonable go at GP: Kyoto thanks to hours testing online.
8. Rich Hagon – The new guy on the block. As a consummate coverage follower, I was surprised to hear about Mox Radio’s debut a while back. It was pretty good stuff. Hagon’s enthusiasm hits you over the head repeatedly. He has a certain newness to the Pro Tour, but is well familiarized with his regional players. He also does a fine job of producing the incidental music and the radio style match play-by-play. The nuances of his soccer-tinged schtick may be a little too forced for North American audiences, but it rings true for a good part of the rest of the world.
As a relative new guy, he’s got a lot to prove, but I have no doubt he’ll make a solid reputation for himself. Besides, it’s always important to have new, fresh perspectives ready to tap.
7. Keita Mori – It wouldn’t be wrong to say that he is a one-man webpage army. You may have never read an article by him, but he’s the vital force behind Wizards’ Japanese webpage. He is a coverage machine, editing his crack staff at GPs and PTs. Photography, blurbs, interviews, translation… he does it all. He acts like a mother hen, shooing away all predators and disturbances that would harshen the vibe at Asian events.
Keita’s one of the easiest, most friendly Japanese people out there. I have no idea how he manages to juggle so many chainsaws and keep all his extremities.
6. Mike Flores – Flores has big ideas. He’s not going to hide them. He shouts them from the rooftops, and if you don’t like the one he’s marching for at the moment, just wait a month. He’ll come up with something new. Good products need to be innovative, and Flores personifies the innovation process of Magic. Flores’s research and confidence is infectious. That chutzpah gets transmitted very easily.
Mike loves getting caught up in the here and now, and yet he manages to demonstrate a remarkable tenacity for striking true when looking at the past. That process of understanding shows how exciting the race for understanding and advancement makes Magic.
5. Ted Knutson – Yes, he’s an amazing event coverage writer. He’s an editor emeritus on this very site. He took the helm at the absolutely essential Magic Academy, compiling some of the core techniques and strategies for success and encapsulating them into a simple, fresh series. Knutson’s work is the very definition of creating customers.
If there’s one thing I miss about Knut’s articles, it’s his kitchen sink collections of IRC quotes and snippets of conversation. Do more of this, Ted. Pretty please?
4. Randy Buehler – The top guy at Magic, Buehler’s biggest public contributions to the game in recent years have been in the broadcast booth. He’s been calling the play-by-play for years. He’s only had one serious handicap, in that he’s often so deep in new set development or other projects that he comes across to some as being unfocused on the cards at hand.
Recently, he’s been passing the torch on the podcasting duties to newer hands like Rich Hagon and Jake Theis. I’m incredibly curious to find out what this Goblin Game thing is all about.
3. blisterguy – Let’s face it. blisterguy has more fun than you. Or your best friend. Or your best friend’s entire high school glee club. He’s having so much fun that he doesn’t even realize he’s having more fun than you. He couples mirthful enthusiasm with an eye for the photogenic and peculiar. With his idiosyncratic lower-caseness, he has the utmost respect for the players he covers at Grand Prix these days, and the rest of the time encapsulates everything you want into a minimum of words. Every time I read him, pangs of jealousy eat at me. It’s torture, but a good kind of torture.
Note: blisterguy is also a very fun human being to hang out with.
2. Brian David-Marshall – Get out your dictionary and look up the phrase community leader. You’ll find BDM’s picture here. I’ve gamed a few times at Manhattan’s Neutral Ground, the site he founded. He faithfully reports week in and week out on the innovations at his Wizards column, anchors the Top 8 Magic podcasts, and is the single best partner with Buehler in the Pro Tour broadcast booth. His output is stunning.
BDM has the remarkable ability to stay objective and keep his views based on demonstrable results. (This makes a perfect foil to Flores, who seethes with passion when dealing with contemporary issues.)
1. Mark Rosewater – Rosewater’s a hell of a writer. If he has one shortcoming, it’s that he doesn’t tell nearly enough stories of the exciting games he’s played. But he has a product very few can offer. He explains how Magic gets made and has a keen eye to highlight it in a fundamentally positive way without getting bossy or egotistical. His ideas shake the heavens of our minds, without having a solid grounding in the practical. If Rosewater changes hats and leaves the Lead Designer post, I pray that he’ll stay put in his Making Magic column. He’s an institution that can’t be replaced.
Mark Rosewater is the salesman of the year in my book.
What, did you think I had a cheap joke in mind at the end? I’m not Letterman.
…
There you go. Our top salespeople of the game. If you think I’ve made any egregious omissions, go ahead and tell me so on the forums.
Eli Kaplan
turboeli on Magic Online
japaneli at hotmail dot you know
People who I hated leaving off the list:
Craig Stevenson [Hehehehe! – Craig.]
"Face" Kouichirou Maki (I shudder to think of what he’d be like if he were "Heel")
Frank Karsten
Scott Johns
Note: Okay, so my weather prediction about cherry blossoms at GP: Kyoto was off. So sue me. They should be out for Pro Tour: Yokohama, though.
Speaking of Yokohama, if you haven’t been there before, go and check out my city guide at this very website.