Dear Kanoot,
Why has Star City been so slow lately? Where have the host of articles gone and when can we expect them to come back? I still love the site, but I’d like to see more content!
Bob from Milwaukee
Dear Bob,
Thank you for your question. Hope you are keeping warm these days in that fine city by Lake Michigan. I’m so glad that I don’t live anywhere near there any more. As to your question, there are three real factors that make December a rough month to be an editor (and it wasn’t like this nearly as much before the PTQ season change).
1) The Holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas are big holidays in the United States, and people generally take vacations during this period of time, making them less likely to write.
2) Finals. Many of our writers are in college, and the end of the semester means they have more important things than writing Magic articles to concentrate on. As much as playing too much Magic may have contributed to the loss of many GPA-based scholarships (I saw it happen way back in 1994-5), it’s doubtful that too much Magic writing has done so. Regardless, we here at StarCityGames.com still believe writing your term papers is probably more important than finishing an article for us.
3) Team Sealed Season. I lament this year after year and it never changes – almost no strategy is ever written about Team Sealed and Team Rochester, so content during this period dries up a bit unless there are big things going on in other formats or a new set is released, or a new Banned & Restricted announcement is coming. None of that applies to this month, so it’s a little quiet.
If you look at MagictheGathering.com, you’ll see that they will have no new content at all for the next two weeks, so the slowness is pretty universal. We will continue to provide a slightly reduced amount of fresh, new content for the next two weeks of holidays, but come January we’ll be back and better than ever. One interesting side effect of a slow strategy season is that you often get a lot of good Fundamentals articles though, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen in the last month, so if you haven’t read Mark Young recent work or missed out on Dan Paskins, Flores, Mike Clair, or my own stuff, expand your mind and check it out.
If you have interesting Extended ideas, feel free to get cracking on some articles and submit them to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2. In the meantime, I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season.
Dear Ted,
What exactly do you tell people when they ask you what you do for a living? I think its pretty cool that you get paid to edit Starcity and fly around the world covering Magic events, but I would imagine its not easy to explain to non-Magic playing people. Also, what do you close friends and family think of your job? Do they approve of it, or do they think it’s just some “weird card thing?”
Mr. Spectacular
Dear Specs, (Can I call you that? Could you stop me if you wanted to?)
I used to just tell people “I’m a writer” or “I’m an editor of a website” and that answer would generally suffice. Then when people pressed, I’d sometimes say “I do press coverage for… poker tournaments” or things of that nature, but it always made me feel a little dirty, even if everybody I talked to thought it was cool. These days I usually say “I’m a writer and I edit a gaming website.” If people are still interested after that point, I’ll usually tell them the whole spiel about how I get paid to travel all over the world covering these silly card games where they hand out millions of dollars in prizes every year. Most people can relate to it in some way and there are plenty of folks who tell me “Oh my son/daughter/roommate would think that you are awesome. They love that type of stuff.”
Honest. It happens. It shocked me too, let me tell you.
As to my job, my close friends all think it’s swell, my wife is okay with things but wishes she could either travel with me more or that I would travel a bit less (something I will probably do in the coming year). My family is just happy that I’m happy and the Australia and Japan trip I took really opened their eyes to the fact that this job actually has some nice perks involved in it. I think everybody realizes that I’ve done the “good corporate citizen” thing and that I can do so again if I wanted to, but as long as I’m happy with what I’m doing and making decent money, they are very supportive. They’d much rather see me this way than making tons of money but completely miserable like I was at my last job.
Ted Knutson
Teddy Card Game
Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2