Four zeroes in a row on my odometer excites me. I know I’m not alone; I’ve been in the car with other people as I point out we’re about to roll over into 50,000 miles and everyone holds their breath as we tick off the distance.
My friends aren’t interested in 49,997, which is probably an equally interesting number to mathematicians. Nor does 50,005 hold their interest, which has a nice “Able was I ere I saw Elba” palindromic ring to it. No, they want to see a messy jumble of nines and sevens rearrange themselves into a clean sweep of four zeroes. We hold our breaths, and I drive a little faster (and probably more recklessly, since I’m spending my time staring at the dashboard instead of the road)…
…and then we roll over. 50,000. We do a little cheer, pop open the champagne, and continue driving.
Today, StarCityGames.com is rolling over. If you look at the URL above me, the end of it reads “10000.html” – which, in nerd parlance, means that what you are reading right now is our 10,000th article. That’s gotta be the largest article archive in all of Magic; people have written ten thousand articles on some aspect of this silly little card game we all love, sent it in, and had it published for people to read. That would be a lot of words.
….Except that it’s not technically true.
That nice neat number indicates that this is the 10,000th item in our article database, which also includes all of our forum topics and news alerts. If you look at only articles, we have a mere 8,243 articles – which, admittedly, is more than most people could read in an afternoon.
(If you’d like to know exactly how long it would take you to read all the articles on StarCityGames.com as of today, take this handy test here to figure out your average reading speed, then divide by 19,625,183 – which is, roughly, the total number of words in all of our articles, counting HTML and other fun stuff. Me? I read at 866 words per minute, so it would take me approximately 15.73 sleepless days to get through our complete archives.
(I’ll skip it, thanks, but feel free to try it yourself. Let me know how it goes for you.)
In any case, since humans like celebrating round numbers, I figured I should probably celebrate this completely arbitrary anniversary with a look back at the milestones of StarCityGames.com.
StarCityGames.com Opens.
Pete Hoefling said, “Hey, this Intarweb thing seems to be popular, and so is this new-fangled Magic: the Gathering game! Perhaps if we put the two together, it would be the peanut butter in my chocolate.”
Since he himself knew nothing about the Internet aside from looking at lingerie pictures on AOL, he did what any competent store owner would do: he looked around his store to see if there was some sucker he could get to do his bidding at a drastically reduced cost.
Fortunately, he found someone – specifically, a man called Omeed Dariani, who would go down in history as The First Editor Of StarCityGames.com. Omeed scoured Usenet posts to find people who’d be willing to write strategy for us, specifically the classic starters like Bennie Smith and Josh Bennett. Omeed had the very tough task of finding people at a time when everyone was either writing for The Dojo (more on that in a bit) or didn’t want the hassle of actually writing real articles, so he had a tough row to hoe.
Omeed set a very professional tone for StarCityGames, which would prove to be critically important. While other sites (including some reader-submitted portions of The Dojo) would publish stuff as-is, Omeed actually went through and cleaned up people’s grammatical and spelling errors, and tried to make their writing better. Only in Magic could this be revolutionary, but good God some of the sites back then were awful. (If you want an example of what raw articles look like, check out my birthday page.)
Pete also hired Joseph West as the webmaster,*** who came up with the delightful yellow-and-green color scheme. Omeed’s legacy thunders through us to this day, but the nature of technology dictates that Joseph’s biggest legacy is a Lenscrafters e-mail newsletter that I cannot unsubscribe from despite years of trying. Every week, I get an email saying, “Hello, Joseph West! Here are your deals on scratch-proof lenses!”
“I’m not Joseph West, dammit!” I scream, but the emails keep arriving.
Seriously, Joseph did a good job for the time, but unfortunately we keep adding new features and we’ve completely rewritten every aspect of the site ever since he left. There is, quite literally, nothing left of Joseph here…. and that’s a good thing, since when we started out, all of our articles were hand-converted into HTML by Joseph, then cut-and-pasted into a template and uploaded to the site. If we wanted to change a link on the side of the site, we then had to go back and re-HTML all of the articles we’d ever published.
This was a colossal pain in the ass, but considering the Internet had been invented only last week nobody knew any better. All the cool kids were doing it.
We also had an astoundingly crappy shopping cart, which we apparently bought from a guy in a trenchcoat in the back alleys of Tijuana. Nobody, not even Joseph, seemed to understand how it worked. People bought things from it, but mostly our cart just spat at them whenever they clicked on the link.
StarCityGames.com Does, Um… Stuff.
Omeed was the editor for a while, which is my clever way of saying “I wasn’t working for StarCityGames.com yet, so I don’t actually know what happened.” A good writer would probably call up Pete and ask, but then Pete would want to know why I haven’t finished that new buylist software he’s been bugging me about, and that would be embarrassing. So I’ll just make it up.
Omeed battled the Fire-Breathing Squid of Syracuse in his first year as editor, using his frosty breath to cocoon it in a cage of Mentos-scented ice. He worked with Joseph to convert the Squid’s five-dimensional hyperconscience into HTML and posted it in a chat room on CompuServe, where it still languishes to this day, waiting for some horny teenager to unwittingly unleash Ragnarok.
The Ferrett Takes A Chance.
Unemployed after his new move to Alaska to be with his new wife, a nobody with the ludicrous nickname of The Ferrett decides to write articles on multiplayer in his spare time and send them in. He doesn’t know what a Featured Writer is, but he does want his headshot on the front page and a modicum of fame.
Assuming that they’re looking for quantity, The Ferrett writes not one, but six separate articles and sends them in as a sampler of what he can do. Later, Ferrett would become the editor of the site and discover that nobody else would ever be so insane as to write six separate articles in advance. But that’s the kind of guy he was, dammit.
Omeed makes him a Featured Writer, as requested.
Omeed Leaves.
In a pattern they would repeat ad infinitum, the juggernaut that is Wizards looks at the tiny speck that is StarCityGames.com and says, “Say, that guy is sure talented! Why don’t we hire him away from StarCityGames.com?” They offer Omeed a position editing their official site.
This begins a long-standing tradition of Wizards thinking of StarCityGames.com as the minor leagues for WotC. Whenever an author of ours becomes popular, we know within a year Wizards will do their damndest to steal them away for their big official site, where we’ll never see them again. It’d be kind of a compliment if we didn’t have to keep developing new writers every six months.
I imagine this is how a sheep feels come shearing time.
The Ferrett Begins.
“Before we interview you,” Pete and Omeed inform me, “You have to pass the [Notorious pro] test.”
“What’s the test?”
“We send you an article from [Notorious pro],” they said. “He’s the most incoherent writer in the world. If you make him look good, we know you can edit.”
“How bad can it be?” I ask. They send me the document, which looks like a dyslexic vomited on the page. Sentences lie askew, hacked apart like mangled bodies. The period is used at random, sometimes appearing where a comma should be and sometimes not at all. Thoughts begin and then wander off, never to be found again.
“This guy had a Top 8?” I asked. “Judging by his writing, I’m surprised he found his table.”
Eventually, I turn in my edit and wait patiently. I get the job because out of out of six people, I was the only one to edit the toughest paragraph correctly – which I did by throwing up my hands and saying, “I have no clue what he’s trying to say here. I’d email him to ask him what the hell he meant.”
[Notorious pro], of course, has dropped out of the game after one final triumphant Top 8 finish, but his legacy lives on as [Notorious Premium author] has replaced him as a truly awful writer of prodigious Magic talent.
StarCityGames.com Branches Out.
Since Magic was doing so well, why not write articles on other card games? We set out to find writers for MLB Showdown 2000, Star Wars, and WWF Raw Deal in an attempt to become the Kings of All Card Games.
We got two articles on Raw Deal, and I think we finally gathered fifteen articles on MLB Showdown before it finally died out, along with our dreams of making cash off of anything but Magic.
StarCityGames.com Goes Technological.
Joseph converted the site to a PHP-based technology to save us from the “upload 10,000 HTML files to the site” syndrome, which was done with the blissful idea that nobody wanted to harm us. At the time, anyone with the slightest knowledge of web hacking could have defaced our site and destroyed everything we ever loved.
Fortunately, this was the Summer of Internet Love and everyone trusted each other. Our site remained untouched. Now, people try to break in every day with automated bots that knock on the door of every big web site.
Alas, in the Great PHP Conversion of 2000, only Featured Writers got brought into the new system. Almost two hundred articles were lost forever, mostly from nobodies who we never heard from again. Still, I grieve for the loss.
Oscar Tan Starts Writing.
In July of 2000, I wrote a very bad article on how to play Type One. A young Filipino by the name of Oscar Tan took umbrage with my poor strategy and decided to write an article exposing the common misconceptions of Type One.
He kept writing. And writing. And writing. To this day, in fact.
Oscar was seminal in the field, because up until then nobody had taken Vintage seriously. But though Oscar was not the best player, he wrote with such clarity and force that he made Vintage seem, you know…. like a real format.
He knew history. He’d dissect the smallest decisions with gusto. He made controversial arguments that brought some of the best Vintage players out of the woodwork to debate him. Without Oscar Tan, there would be no Power Nine series, no serious attention paid to Vintage by Wizards, no format as we know it.
You see, people tend to think that articles get written because a format is big, but my experience shows me that it’s almost the opposite; a format gets big when good articles are written on it. By shining a consistent spotlight on an underexposed format, Oscar brought enough players in to make it real.*
There’s only one other author in SCG history who’s that influential… but we’ll get to him.
The Ferrett Goes To Pro Tour: LA.
When I started working for StarCityGames.com, I hated tournament players – which, in a radically inaccurate description, I lumped them all together in as “Pros.” I was a controversial choice as editor because I’d written several fairly nasty screeds on how the Pros didn’t have a real love of the game, and they were all jerks who wanted to win at any cost. Certainly that was the way it had been in Ann Arbor, where the few tourneys I’d been to were populated by Mike Long-style oafs who’d yell at you and call the judge for every infraction to try and get you kicked out.
So when Pete sent me to Pro Tour: Los Angeles, I was expecting to find a haven of nasty idiots. But all the pros I met were actually pretty nice guys. They were willing to explain the basic strategies of Invasion Limited to me, and they smiled, and even if they didn’t think much of StarCityGames.com proper – which they didn’t – they still chatted with me.
That was totally not what I was expecting.
Eventually, I figured out the truth: you could play at all costs to win and not be a total jerk, an act which most people can pull off… if they have talent. Unfortunately, there are some idiots who don’t have the talent and have to make up for it by cheating, yelling, and humiliating you. These guys spoil the game for a lot of people, but it took PT: LA to show me how isolated they were.
That was when I decided that StarCityGames.com not only could but should be a serious strategy site, and I realized my own game wasn’t nearly good enough to be a competent editor. To make StarCityGames.com better, I had to become better – so on November 11th, 2000, I made a public vow to win a PTQ within a year.**
The other thing that I noticed about Pro Tour: LA is that the Limited scene was radically different from what I found online. Nobody was writing about Limited the way they were writing about Constructed, and since I liked Limited a lot better I vowed to try to get the best pros to write for us.
This section could also be titled, “The Ferrett stops sucking as an editor.”
The Dojo Closes.
The progenitor site in Magic – the first place to hold strategy articles, and certainly the most popular site – closes thanks to the Internet stock bubble evaporating. We go all-out to try and scoop up several of the authors, and get only Peter Jahn.
I think we win.
Unfortunately, we also lose, since The Dojo was founded in a time when few people were paying for Magic strategy articles, audiences were small, and information was truly free. The quality of the articles was a cut above what you can find today, but market considerations and expanding audiences have made it impossible to duplicate those initial highs.
That doesn’t stop people from eternally bitching that we’re not as good as they were, though.
StarCityGames.Com Becomes Humiliated.
StarCityGames.com was a laughingstock, and mostly it was due to my poor choices as an editor. Team Academy – a nasty site that copied articles from other sites, then marked them up with profanity-laden comments on how and why the author was full of crap and his strategy sucked – used our articles more often than any other site.
But I found Team Academy to be helpful. Our writers hated them, but I looked at them as a boon; yeah, they could have been kinder about it, but constructive criticism does not have to be nice to be true. In rubbing exactly how much I sucked into my face, they showed me what I should do better.
And I did better. But we still didn’t have the quality of strategy writers that we needed. Our native guys were usually fine, but there was this weird perception (one that persists to this day) that only the pros have strategy worth listening to. This is patently false, of course, since the pros occasionally write about formats they know nothing about and are totally wrong (which is most apparent come Regionals and States), and they frequently fail to share their full tech on formats they’re competing in… but the illusion persists nonetheless.
So we set out to get a pro. In secret, we began talking to one of the top pros in the business, arguably the most popular writer on the Internet. We offered him a boatload of money to write for us, more than he made currently….
….and he turned us down. He didn’t want to be caught writing for a scrub site like StarCityGames.com.
That stung, and stung hard. I redoubled my efforts to improve the quality of the site to ensure that this would never happen again.
The Ferrett Becomes Webmaster.
Joseph left StarCityGames.com to go buy glasses from Lenscrafters, and Pete offered me the position of Webmaster. I didn’t know jack about web programming – but I was eager to learn and I had a whole site to explore.
That’s when SCG became my full-time job as webmaster and editor. That was nice, working at home.
I immediately spruced up the site with all the pretty doo-dads that I wanted; an Ask The Judge database, searchable archives, forums that worked, a deck database, hit trackers, and a totally improved shopping cart bought from Russians who were awfully nice guys but coded as if they believed the include() function was going out of style.
Our new redesign had a lot of criticism – people hated the color scheme – and when we changed it again six months later, people hated the even newer color scheme.
As a fun fact, two of the people who complained about the new color scheme, claiming they liked the old site, were people who had complained when I switched the first time. I know. I kept their emails.
The Ferrett Gets Serious.
My concentration on good strategy articles and really tightening up on the editorial control began to pay off. Within a year, our traffic quadrupled – an amazing feat that I was glad to see happen. We got a good pro to write for us in the form of Rob Dougherty, which opened the door to other people, and eventually we became one of the big two sites for pro playas, our scrub roots forgotten.
Our casual articles, however, did not increase at the same rate. I wish more people read casual articles – their traffic isn’t terrible, but a good multiplayer article won’t inspire nearly the clicking frenzy that a Standard article will. Now the casual players complain that we’re too strategy-oriented.
Oh well.
Nick Eisel Begins Writing.
When I first met Nick, he was urging Jeff Cunningham on, but in a good way. “You can win!” he said, knowing that the Top 8 was on the line for Jeff. “Come on!”
Jeff won and made the Top 8. Nick made the Top 8 of Grand Prix: Philadelphia anyway. I recruited Nick. So it looks like we all won.
Nick Eisel turned out to be very influential, because he was the first talented writer to really analyze Limited. He didn’t just list pick orders; Nick discussed the impact of powerful cards, discussed land counts and the importance of turn 3, gave us complex draft walkthroughs and discussed which archetypes were best in a given format.
Nick was the first guy who really showed us what Limited was like from a Pro Tour perspective. Until then, Limited had been the bastard cousin of strategy; you’d discuss it, sure, but Constructed was where all the meat was. Nick gave us not only the meat, but a side salad and a nice dessert, too.
Immediately after his articles began revising Limited articles as we knew them, you could see that tide rising for all boats; miraculously, other players, even on other sites, began to write better articles. Nobody had mentioned the U/W archetype in Onslaught before Nick – but after he came along, everyone was trying to figure out what the good archetypes were in a given draft set. And with Magic Online rising over the horizon, drafts were more important than ever.
Unfortunately, Nick got himself into a serious scandal, and then got banned from tournament Magic for a few years. But his impact is still being felt.
The Site Crashes.
The entire thing goes down. Kablooey. And of course, I’m in Albany visiting my daughter, operating off a 14.4 connection in a crappy hotel. Suffice it to say that the help we got from our web hosting service, Web Authorities, was less than perfect.
Driven to extremes by the amazingly crappy service and badly-built servers these guys provided, we switched to a new hosting company which has been amazing, kind, and efficient. They’re slightly on the pricey side, but whenever something goes wrong they are so there for you it’s not even funny.
The Ferrett Becomes Overloaded.
Our Russian-made shopping cart wasn’t working for us, since it was designed for normal items – you know, things that were always available, didn’t change price seven times a year, and didn’t come in several different flavors. We’d hacked it like it was attacking our family, but it was time to build a customized shopping cart.
Thus, we needed a daily editor while I oversaw stuff. We needed a guy who could follow in the tradition of being outrageous enough to draw a crowd, but someone who was a better player and more in touch with the Magic pros.
When Ted Knutson actually smoked pot in order to see whether it made his play better, I knew we had found our man. (Not that we condone this sort of thing, but it took cojones.) We hired him on, and now he kind of edits. I mean, I’m sure he does actually edit, since I see articles going up, but as far as I can tell he gets back from covering the latest Wizards event on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, then spends seven hours chatting with pros on IRC before finding porn.
He must do work somewhere. I just don’t know how.
StarCityGames.com Goes Premium.
Pete flew to my house in his private Concorde jet, landing on the strip in the back yard of my mansion, as he does every morning so we can have tea and caviar. We sat down in my atrium, where the jugglers and acrobats did a delightful dance for us as we chatted amiably about the proles.
“You know,” Pete said, lighting his cigar with a thousand dollar bill, “StarCity is doing so well for me that I just bought my second country.”
“Fiji?” I asked.
“Crystal liked the flowers,” Pete shrugged. “But it occurs to me that these ignorant rabble still have money in their wallets. I saw a man play Magic the other day, and he had enough left over to purchase a hot dog.”
“Too much!” I sighed, then collapsed onto my fainting couch.
“But I think I have a plan to bilk these people out of every dollar they have!” Pete cried. “We can go Premium, locking away articles and forcing people to pay to access them!”
“It’s genius!” I cried, leaping out of my chair. “We’ll make a fortune! I mean, a second fortune!”
And that’s how Premium began. (Or maybe, you know, we were paying a lot for writers and couldn’t afford to keep it free despite our best attempts. Fortunately, the decision to go Premium has allowed me to work full-time on installing this cool new deck database for all readers, with more new stuff on the way.)
The Future.
We just opened StarCityVS.com, so we’ll see how that goes. And we have a huge upgrade in the works for the shopping cart, plus some other neat things…
Who knows what happens when we hit an actual 10,000? Check back in a year or so.
We’ve popped open the champagne; now let’s continue driving.
Signing off,
That Ferrett Boy
Editor-In-Chief and Webmaster, StarCityGames.com and StarCityVS.com
[email protected]
* – Yes, there was the Mana Drain – which was also important – but that was a crowd of people preaching to the converted. By taking his Mana Drain discussions to a larger world, Oscar was far more influential than the Drain, even if the Drain had more of an impact on how Type One was actually played.
** – Very astute readers looking at my archives may note that I attended PT: LA three months after I made this vow. The strict answer is that I had begun to recognize my own inadequacy already, and PT: LA showed me how far I had to go. The real answer is that it makes for a better story.
*** – Pete informs me that Jack Slattery, a local player who fell in love with web design after purchasing WebTV, was actually StarCityGames.com first webmaster. I mention this because hey, the guy deserves the credit.