Introduction
Once upon a time, I had no article topic. This is somewhat ironic since I was on a tear that summer, by inflated ratings qualified for every upcoming Pro Tour, taking advantage of the carefree life of The Dojo’s Editor-in-Chief, twenty-three, and living in the greatest city in the world; you would think that I would have had many article topics, but Scott or Ted will tell you – if you corner them or perhaps offer them a frosty brew – that after long hours of poring through other people’s poor diction and clumsy grammar, day in and day again, the last thing that you want to do is summon up the psychic energy and almost physical discomfort required to even start a Magic article of your own. I don’t care if you are the second most prolific Magic writer out there: You Just Don’t Want To Do It.
Now this was a problem for the Editor-in-Chief in question, because, remember when I said that I was “on a tear that summer, qualified for every upcoming Pro Tour?” Like anyone with an inflated rating – at least anyone without a Secret Store – I simply had two lucky premiere events, the second one being the weekend of July 4th, 1999; this episode occurs near the end of that month, the last week in July, as time and Magic slouched towards the apathetic Megiddo of August. Any Magic editor will tell you that August is death. The most prolific Feature Writers shrivel up and immolate themselves, the mostly empty unsolicited submissions become inexplicably dominated by three-word posts only one of which is correctly spelled, and the IRC channels are filled with nothing but the ebon gall of the chronically unsatisfied. So there came a day that I needed to write something, just to have something for my front page.
In order to help me out of my topics slump, my friend altran suggested that I do something other than decks, the metagame, or my then-specialities of history and theory. Why not write about the real reason we play Magic? The reason that dwarfs The Love of the Game like Verdant Force towers over a teeny weenie Elvish Pioneer? The result:
Mike Donais quite liked that article, but Lan resented being mentioned only in passing; judge the artifact as you will: it was my first real “Issues” or “Opinion” article. Our decision was ultimately focus on decks, the metagame, history, theory.
Not counting that sky falling Thawing Glaciers thing, my next real Issues article (the original Issues Issue) showed up here about a year ago. It also appeared after my longest hiatus – 28 days – since returning to Star City Games dot com. After the said full February off, I can only plead “daughter” (had to help when she first popped out… managed to dodge that since). Here is a photograph of the cutest baby on the planet:
Here she is celebrating her birthday alongside Magic luminaries Dad, Teddy Cardgame, Paul Jordan LOL, and BDM; my wife, Teddy Cardgame’s Wife. Fear the fauxhawk.
This is pretty much my third Issues article; at least that I recall.
The Problem with Jamie (Obligatory Strategy Section)
If you haven’t spied the letter that Dan’s Goblin Secret Agent purloined from Aaron Forsythe and Randy Buehler, go check that out now. It is eerily accurate… Will this be the year that Jamie doesn’t go 6-2?
To be honest, when I saw the Joshie deck last week, I dumped my previous deck and decided to switch. Is this an overreaction? What kind of metagame shift can we expect?
Teddy Cardgame has been predicting a metagame shift for weeks. He wasn’t sure which direction it would come from, but, being focused on the absurdly powerful cards of the Green or Red Decks, I just couldn’t see it. The interesting thing about Jamie’s deck is that he doesn’t have anything close to a Top 10 card anywhere near his deck list. He doesn’t summon Arc-Slogger, he can’t assemble the UrzaTron, he has no interest in stealing your turn, or blowing up all your lands, or – oddly enough for the Forests of this format – even returning any cards from his graveyard. He has maybe the third best equipment in the format in his deck, and even though it is Legendary, plays the Maximum Number of them. edt may have said it best when we were discussing the format: Blanchwood Armor is probably the best card in his deck.
But you know what? I think this deck is scary. Without getting too much into the specifics of the format, Jamie’s Joshie Green is the closest thing to The Solution that we’ve seen in some time. I like decks that break the rules and spit on the sacred cows of deck design, and Jamie is a Green mage with no Sensei’s Divining Tops.
Regardless of my initial reaction to the deck, and my subsequent decision to go a different direction myself, I’ve since decided that the metagame shift, if it occurs, is actually going to bounce Black. I wish I had more time to test and tune, because I like Black’s chances in the developing metagame. It is the natural foil to Green, can answer essentially any of the 1/1, 2/1, 2/2, 3/2, or even 5/5 creature threats that Green can produce, pre-empt or recover from the Plow Under, and generally dominate with its own Legendary Spirits, whether Demon or Dragon. People are sniffing the same sap that I am, I think, which is why we are hearing more whispers of Rats, Rats with Viridian Shamans, and bigger Black Controls.
But you know what? There are at least rumors of metagame shifts, year in and Regionals out. I’ve heard about them pretty much every year since 1998, the year that I started to actually play the metagame at Regionals, rather than some terrible basic Plains that I had found in the bottom of my sock drawer, but the frequency of my actually facing the “new decks” of the shift rumors has been pretty small.
From 1998 on, I didn’t play a single deck that I hadn’t heard of, until 2003. Fair enough, in 2003, I actually played against Wake – which I was aware of but didn’t care enough about – and Zombie Bridge, a deck that I had neither prepared for nor beaten. The interesting thing about 2003 is that of all the years full of Tinker-Will, French Trinity, and Thundercats, 2003 was the only year that I actually lost to unsuspected decks… but the metagame shift we were getting ready for was – get this — Rob Dougherty Elvish Succession. BDM was convinced that I would have to beat an Elf combo deck, would need combo breakers, more discard, etc. and so on, whereas Dan would probably be puzzled at the viability of an Elf deck designed to kill its own Elves.
Interestingly enough, the metagame shifts this year invite a lot of Splash Damage, moreso than in previous Regionals. Blue UrzaTron seems to be picking up, but I don’t see how it doesn’t acquire the vulnerabilities of both Tooth and Nail and Mono-Blue Control. Similarly, Green beatdown with Blanchwood Armor has some of the same vulnerabilities of Medium Green, inherent to all the creature/enhancement decks ever. edt used to say that the deck to play in a metagame approaching equilibrium is always the under-represented one. Persecute much?
So at the end of the day, is my personal deck swap irrational? An overreaction? In 1998, I actually played against Naturepotence (look it up), and the weekend after Jamie won his PTQ with the Dinosaurs, I had to beat up on two of his Secret Force disciples on the way to my own Blue Envelope. Switching decks is less a function of reactionary impulse than a reasonable attention to history: I attract Wakefield decks like fatties were ferrous.
The Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame
I’ve wanted to write about the Hall of Fame for some time. Obviously being on the selection committee is an honor. The challenge for me is to cast a set of five votes that mean something. It is less important for me that the four non-Finkel guys that I vote for get into the Hall than my actual ballot is something that makes sense. This process is significantly more stressful than you might think, particularly because of the public nature of the voting.
Because our votes are public, some or all the judges will necessarily re-examine our ballots for no other reason than to avoid being embarrassed about them. One of my friends, for example, says that he feels a need to vote for Chris Pikula due to this reason… whereas I feel an unwanted tug not to vote for the beloved Meddling Mage. Let me explain:
One possible ballot idea I had was to cross off every Wizards of the Coast employee on the grounds that they won’t use the Hall of Fame benefits anyway, and just vote in the guys I like the best. This would look something like:
Finkel
OMS
Pikula
Price
Hacker
Teddy Cardgame said that this ballot would be a cop out where I cast my votes for no other reason than to avoid being criticized by friends.
Another ballot I thought of was to try to honor Magic’s early teams. Consider:
Finkel for the Deadguys
Hacker for the Dickheads
Long for Tongo Nation
Justice for PCL
Hovi or Rade for “Europe”
This is kind of a flawed ballot because it automatically discriminates against players who weren’t on one of Magic’s early and great teams. Furthermore, “Europe” isn’t a team, BDM points out that the Generation One Jon Finkel would more properly describe ECA-era New Jersey so I’d have to actually pick one of the “real” Deadguys from the ballot, and then there’s this scummy whisper in the back of my head asking “Why em gee?” which I don’t understand at all.
So you see the pressure to create a cohesive ballot is a daunting one. One of the things that helped me in my decision making process is the idea of criteria. The objective criteria that we are supposed to use is already laid out for us in Chris Galvin’s article:
1. A player must have at least 100 lifetime Pro Points.
2. A player must have made his or her debut in the Magic Pro Tour or World Championships at least 10 seasons ago.
3. A player must not be currently suspended by the DCI.
That’s it. Every player who fulfills those three criteria is, at least in a sense, equally up to the job of being inducted into this year’s Hall of Fame. They’re all equal and there are no automatics; no automatic votes – not even Jon – and no automatic rejections (sorry Mike Long detractors). At the end of the day, it’s up to the judges, with all our human biases, to figure out the five lucky players. There is no “right” ballot or wrong ballot. You can’t reasonably say that someone who doesn’t have Jon or any other player on his ballot “shouldn’t be voting.”
The objective criteria are set; they just don’t happen to cull the crop to only five players. Beyond those three rules, it is all about opinion, ultimately the players that each voter wants in the Top 5 more than anything else. Just look at the public votes: Brian Schneider – a human being I hold in literally the highest regard – has Mike Long on his ballot. Is that surprising? Brian and Mike were teammates and longtime friends. Mark Rosewater values – some would say overvalues – the early years of the Pro Tour; the players that Mark honors were the heavy hitters when he was still forming his concept and understanding of this great game at the highest levels. Worth Wollpert is leaning towards Chris Pikula and away from Mike Long… Surprised yet? Worth was Chris’s teammate on Deadguy, the crusaders against cheating in the early Pro Tour; their most emblematic opponent was Tongo Nation’s fiercely talented captain. As for me? You’ll see that I value deck design, writing, and showing us just who the beatdown is.
Strong opinions – biases and prejudice and respect and even love – are all good things for this voting process. The people on the committee were chosen because of our close proximity to particular characters and developments in the game. You would expect to see Kim Eikefet approach her ballot like a European reporter and Brian David-Marshall like a baseball fan with close ties to certain candidates; that’s what they are. The Hall of Fame is something that demands attention, and the varied points of view that will create this class are exactly what it needs: debate and ire and villains are all good, or at least intended, things. And honestly, if we were supposed to just vote for the players who had the highest career earnings or the most matches under their belts, the powers that be would have just told us to do that; they didn’t make those the criteria at all.
Of all the players in the first class’s pool of candidates, Jon Finkel is clearly the most impressive, but I wasn’t initially sure about anyone else. However after really looking at the potential players, one name eventually stood out next to Jon: Brian Hacker.
If you don’t know anything about Brian Hacker, all I can tell you is that he is possibly the most influential Magic player ever to type a word or swing with a two-drop. I don’t know if redundancy would have been discovered, but Hacker was the first player to break the idea of playing more copies of cards that did the same thing in order to smooth out his draws, rather than choosing cards based on power. He understood that Erg Raiders wasn’t as good as Black Knight or a pump Order, but that once you already had 12 of those guys in your deck, you just grabbed the next best thing. He excelled with combo decks, control decks like the Humility-Prayer build that shares his name, as well as weenie decks like Bad Moon Necropotence and White Weenie. A superlative Constructed mind, Hacker will never be remembered primarily for this aspect of his game.
The reason? He was quite simply the best Limited mind ever to type a Magic article. I like Tim Aten more than you do, once called Nick Eisel “the future of American Magic,” and marvel at the combat skills of Kenji Tsumura, but I can tell you without a doubt that no one has ever written on Limited like Brian Hacker. Today, you as a player who may have never read his work, use Hacker’s Limited strategies every time you play the forty-card decks. His influence in this realm of Magic theory is too vast to commit to a short subsection of a multi-topic article, but can best be summed up in Randy Buehler “He taught the world to beat down.” Dave Price may be the King of Beatdown, but Brian Hacker, at least for the purposes of the Magic mainstream, is its father. A small achievement next to his grand steps in magic thought, Hacker is also simply the best tournament report writer of all time.
In all aspects of the game, Brian excelled during his short career. He doesn’t have the most impressive resume of the list, but led the Swiss at my first Pro Tour and holds a couple of premiere event Top 8s. It should be obvious that I gush over his theory and his writing, but more than that, as the current color commentator for Pro Tour webcasts, I aspire to his Maher v. Davis. Brian never let the fun leave his work… his reports are full of strip clubs, picking up models in discos, and blue or orange hair. Wondering where he went? Literally the only “bad” thing you can say about Hacker and the Dickheads is that they discovered Poker before the rest of the Pro Tour.
Now even though I decided on two players that I wanted for my five votes, I still didn’t really have any kind of criteria for picking even them. BDM suggested that I look at my old buddy Worth Wollpert’s idea of scoring each category, multiplying them across five columns, and just picking from there. This seemed pretty reasonable to me, so I began with player performances, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, and contributions to the game in general.
As the first class of the Hall of Fame asks for us to elect the best of the best, I decided to score on a three point scale:
1 – mediocre for a Hall of Fame candidate
2 – above average for a Hall of Fame candidate
3 – best for a Hall of Fame candidate
Each column had about half 1s, about half 2s, and one 3, totaling 43.
Once I decided on the three point scale, BDM actually suggested I try just “voting the paragons,” that is, the five guys with the top ratings. You’ll see the problem with that in a second…
Player Performances – Jon Finkel
Plaing Ability – Jon Finkel
Integrity – Alan Comer
Sportsmanship – Alan Comer
Contributions to the Game in General – Brian Hacker
See the problem? So I multiplied and came out with:
Humpherys – 32 (only player with five 2s)
Hacker – 24
Comer – 18
Finkel – 18
OMS, Price, Regnier, Gab Tsang – 16
Doesn’t quite cut to five, either. The system isn’t perfect, though. For one thing it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that Finkel and Comer, the two players with two threes each, are tied for third. Furthermore, my integrity and sportsmanship columns looked exactly the same. It was actually hard to score those because this group has a lot of great and sporting competitors… but Alan is the only one who has ever called a judge on himself to the tune of a game loss against me on the Pro Tour when he made a minor mistake with Cloud of Faeries — sorry Dave, Chris, and MikeyP. I decided that the integrity and sportsmanship categories didn’t differentiate at all, and were basically over-penalizing Finkel. I mean you HAVE to give Jon a 1. He lied to his teammate and best friend about his first pick and routinely rubbed it in when he ruined his opponents with the Skittering Horror-into-Persecute draw… but that actually made him a better competitor, if not a nicer one.
So anyway, I decided to expand and contract on the columns:
Performance – Two points for a PT win; rough crowd when Mark Justice gets a “mediocre” for Performance.
Skill – Same as “playing ability” but with a cooler name; I used this category to reward players who didn’t win Pro Tours but impressed me with their Magic over the years.
Integrity – Integrates Sportsmanship. This one is always hard to judge; the player I know least, Kurt Burgner, got a 2 for teaming with Alan Comer in his most famous finish.
Innovation – It bugged me that Tsuyoshi Fujita wouldn’t have a column where he’d get a 3 so I made this one up. Then I noticed he’s in the same class as Zvi, Kai, Randy, Kibler, Rubin and Turian.
Reputation – This is my favorite category. I’m mostly known as a writer and commentator, but I cut my teeth on Pro Tour Magic like anyone else. Who is the scariest player on the list, from a competitor’s standpoint?
Reach – How many players has this player touched? To what extent?
I came out with these paragons:
Performance – Finkel
Skill – Finkel
Integrity – Comer
Innovation – Hacker
Reputation – Long
I suppose this one requires a word. First of all, most of you need to understand that you don’t know very much about Mike. I’m not close friends with him or anything, but I know enough about Mike and his reputation that I am aware that what most of you “know” is based on rumors and half-truths. Yes I know you know, Gary; I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking to that guy, the one about to respond to this article, or maybe the guy next to him. Mike didn’t get suspended for a Bloom in his lap: at least do your homework before you start spouting off about how he doesn’t belong on any ballots… There is almost no Magic mind I hold in higher esteem than Brian Schneider’s, and Long is on his.
The reason I scored on a three point scale without any zeroes is that I don’t think that cheating is an automatic end. Cheating certainly isn’t “good” for a player’s resume, but the fact of the matter is that way more players on this ballot have gotten away with way more than you are aware of for integrity to be a true zero. Case in point: Next year, if they still want my opinion, I am likely going to choose Bob Maher as my first vote; am I not supposed to vote for the second best American player of all time because he was suspended for quite a bit longer than Mike was?
Anyway, you’d think that Finkel would be the scariest player on this list, but that is just a gut reaction. Finkel is Finkel… but even the best player on the list is still human. I tested with Finkel during his most dominant years, and frankly learned to beat him. Jon still holds a flawless tournament record over me, but I’m just not as scared of him as I was the first time he stole a PT slot from me. Mike on the other hand…
Mike is a player whose reputation precedes him in a way that no other Magic player can claim. The anger that he inspires on message boards in players who have never met him is a testament to that. If you got the Mike Long pairing, you knew one thing: you had to be on the top of your game. Mike inspired the best play out of the best players because if they brought anything else… Mike had them. You sit across from Mike, you shuffle his deck. He plays a card, you read it… even if you think you know what it does, you double check. This is Mike Long we’re talking about!
Anyway…
Reach – Finkel
This one was the hardest one to do. Who has reached the most players? Scott Johns edited Mindripper, brought Brainburst premium, and continues on the most popular Magic site today… Pretty nice resume. Alan Comer retired to… jack into your brain every night as the guy who makes MODO. Pretty long arms there himself. Dave Price is the reason kiddies tap for R, attack for 2, and sacrifice Mountains; he was also my predecessor at the greatest and most wonderful failure in the history of the Magic Internet. But at the end of the day? There’s only one Finkel. If you don’t aspire to Jon’s plays, even knowing you won’t make them, you don’t know jack about Magic.
Finkel – 108
Humpherys – 64
Hacker – 48
Long – 48
Hovi, Johns, Price, Rade, Regnier – 32
Picking the guys who made both lists, I came out with what will probably be my final ballot:
Finkel
Humpherys
Hacker
Price
Regnier
I was of course overjoyed to see Hump on my list. He was the only guy with straight 2s in both ballots; I once considered him the best player on the planet. Before watching Kenji in Atlanta, I would have said Dave had the best attacking and blocking in Limited Magic.
Price and Regnier surprised me… but in a good way. Dave’s big push over Chris in especially the first ballot – I know they have very similar careers and popularity – is simply that he actually won a Pro Tour. When you’ve got half 1s and half 2s, how do you differentiate the best of the best players in the game? Hammer was a real surprise… but you know what? Who else would make a better first Hammer Invite of the Hall of Fame era?
That’s Not All
My ballot isn’t 100% set. I like how it came out, and tried to be really passionless as I scored the players. That said, I’d love to hear some feedback in the forums. I promise to read every post… promise not to consider especially the ones that include “BUT HE CHEATED” all in caps.
Bonus Section
After testing one night at Grand Prix: Philadelphia, Mike Long decided to switch to my Hatred deck. This was odd because he mostly bashed me the whole time and his then-teammate Pete Leiher made a nice run with their White Weenie deck. Mike figured out a great innovation to the Hatred at about two in the morning and got me to get some Vampiric Tutors. He still owes me $10.