Winning the lottery is a pretty unlikely proposition, yet I am reliably informed that certain people participate. Having an uncontrollable desire to revisit some of my past columns here at starcitygames.com is another statistically unlikely scenario, but just in case you turn out to be the man with a girlfriend out of town for the week, nothing in the fridge, and accounts registering $0 for both poker and porn, I’m here to help you while away the hours.
Just how many catastrophic predictions have I made? Which articles are the ones that have something to say in more than a time-sensitive context? I’m prepared to wager that while there might be nuggets tucked away about playtest sessions for Ravnica Block, by and large these aren’t the places to start. The thing is, with more than a hundred articles sitting in the archives, nobody sane is going to want to wade through the lot. So, this is an attempt to save you a ton of time, and leave you with a few suggestions for articles that, at the very least, should be entertaining, and ideally also informative. Don’t worry / worry (delete as applicable), I’m not going away any time soon, but with the hundred up now seemed like a good time to take stock, not least because half the time I can’t actually remember what I’ve already written about, and ideas for new material are always welcome. Come to that, if there’s something you think I haven’t looked at over two years plus, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, let’s get to it with the column that started it all…
The Stars of Pro Tour: Geneva, Part 1
Two things surprise me looking back at this. First, I’m amazed that I had the stones to say all that about so many people I didn’t know very well. By the time Geneva rolled around, I’d been covering the European Grand Prix for about a year, and found myself on the biggest stage a full year earlier than I could have realistically hoped. For those of you looking for someone to blame, it was former Coverage guy and Pro Tour hero Craig Jones who knocked on the door for me, for which I’m eternally grateful. So much so that I may actually buy him a beer when we meet in Honolulu for the Pro Tour in less than two weeks.
The Stars of Pro Tour: Geneva, Part 2
The second thing that surprised me was just how much heat this opening salvo caused. When I arrived at Geneva, I found these articles quoted back at me, especially by a group of American Pros that included the Clown Prince of Darkness Osyp Lebedowicz, who will incidentally also be attending Honolulu to sling spells at the highest level. Life’s never dull with Osyp around, and I spent my first Pro Tour week getting teased mercilessly by Osyp and the boys. My tips for the 2007 season featured Tiago Chan, Kenji Tsumura, Katsuhiro Mori, Roel van Heeswijk and Antti Malin. Not a bad group, taking one from each Pro Club Level. Roel made Top 8 at Worlds, and Malin would go on to become the Current World Champion, while Kenji continued to be one of the dominant figures in the game. Tiago Chan is yet another big name who has navigated their way through PTQ-land to get a ticket to paradise next month.
Not a lot to see here. Strictly for budding Pro Tour Historians.
Deckbuilding At The Speed Of Thought
If deckbuilding leaves you a quivering wreck, or (more likely) you find your homebrew concoctions getting taken apart time after time by not just one but all the major archetypes, this two-parter has a lot to offer. It attempted to slow down the process to such an extent that the apparently alchemic nature of deck design was shown to be the fallacy that it is, and that — just like jazz piano, which I teach from time to time — extraordinarily complex decision-making can be brought down to individual tiny steps that form a coherent whole. The articles used Time Spiral as the canvas, because that’s what was around at the time, but the fundamental lessons underneath are just that — fundamental – and therefore well worth a revisit if you have the time.
The Pro Year So Far
Since Last We Met
In between these two, I was fired and re-hired, the first due to my alleged shenanigans with Miss Venezuela, and the second due to a 47,563 signature petition calling for my re-instatement. Alas, both of these are lies. Nothing wrong with the articles, but they’re very much du jour, and the jour was Ago.
Making Mistakes So You Don’t Have To
Taking Dragonstorm as the canvas for learning, I cheerfully abased myself on Magic Online, doing exactly what the article said. Although some of the specific plays are somewhat arcane now (no, not Arcane, let’s not complicate things), the underlying principals of learning are set out pretty clearly for any relatively new players who are feeling overwhelmed by the vastness of the game.
At this point in time, I was working quite hard to cloak serious messages in a user-friendly humorous shell. The literary artifice this time around was to bring each of the cards in my sealed pool to life, giving them a voice in an imaginary conversation, where they put forward their bid to be included in the deck. Whilst I’m reluctant to invite you to create 25 fictional characters inside your head and then talk to them as a path to deckbuilding, I can confirm that questioning yourself as to your choices is a fantastic way to get better quickly, as long as you’re prepared to accept that sometimes your self-serving arguments are going to be rubbish. One of my personal favorites, for many reasons, including a monstrous pun-per-line quotient in a Shakespearean epic at the end. Try this to Benalish Cavalry: ‘see you on opening, er, Knight.’ For which I got paid actual gold sovereigns. Truly.
Road to Regionals: Standard from Scratch
This was the first time I contrived to begin a paragraph with the word ‘breasts,’ at least on this site. Otherwise unremarkable.
Because Asking Questions Is What I Do
At the time, Jeroen Remie would regularly answer reader’s questions, but was equally regularly running out of inquiring minds. I did, and do, find this astonishing. How is it possible to have one of the best players in the world at your disposal, and not be able to think of something worth asking him that could improve your game? You know by now that I find people endlessly fascinating, and people with a passion for something — even techniques for re-enforcing concrete — even more so. As I discovered on Tour, this genuine desire to hear what people have to say isn’t as universal as I had initially supposed, and I suspect that many of the relationships and outright friendships that I’ve managed to forge while on Tour are in no small way due to the fact that the players know I genuinely care about them, their tournament, and their life in general. This article then, set out to give Jeroen a helping hand, and come up with literally hundreds of questions that I’d ask if I wanted to become a better player.
More tales from on the road. I’ve been accused, and not entirely unreasonably, of failing to call a spade a spade, and developing a severe case of splinters from sitting on the proverbial fence. This piece was (for me) hard-hitting, since it dealt with the sensitive fallout from Grand Prix: Columbus, where Willy Edel and Gadiel Szleifer went at it in more ways than just cards (and for those who don’t know and are too lazy to check, no that doesn’t mean fisticuffs).
This was a complicated article to write, since it attempted to introduce a Model for the Metagame based around the idea of a horseshoe, drawing on the Model of politics where two apparently radically different extremes share rather more than they might suppose. It’s a long and tough read, but for those starting to explore the whole murky world of the Metagame, time well spent.
At the time, Craig Jones was writing his amazing Pro Player Blog whilst simultaneously playing in each PT, which is a working definition of insanity in an MTG context. In this spin-off, I went through the experience of GB Nationals 2007. Because most of the people involved were and are personal friends, there’s an inevitable intimacy to the piece, and as a result this is a Real experience of what it means to want something very badly, knowing full well that only one can attain the goal. And in true Hollywood style, one of them made the summit. For an understanding of desire, this is one of my better efforts.
I had wanted to do a piece on artwork for some time, since although I’m an utter amateur when it comes to their world, I still have a fellow-creative admiration for some amazing pieces. You’ll learn almost nothing of practical benefit by reading this, and it’s entirely possible you’ll never look at Magic art the same way if you do. Man, Alpha was camp. This is also one of my sexier articles. Yes, you read that right, since there’s an undercurrent of playful sexiness to the tone which, believe me, is quite tough when talking about cardboard.
Having come to the Pro Tour scene late, I’m acutely conscious of having a responsibility to Hall of Fame contenders to do my homework and attempt to find out something about them. For the most part, my picks have been well within the norms of more learned colleagues, and even though I recognise he may never get in, voting for Alex Shvartsman still seems an eminently reasonable position to adopt. As for the title, I suspect it was a reference to a line from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (an entendre-laden title if ever there was one) but I confess at this distance the subtleties and tangents that led to it have defeated even me. Now that’s obfuscation right there.
The Cost of Lorwyn Part 1
The Cost of Lorwyn Part 2
Although often esoteric, I like to bring something to the table that other writers do not. Here, I embarked upon a careful analysis of what the four-set year would mean for Magic. Part one was all macroeconomic, the big picture, while the following week got down to individual numbers featuring a comedy character called Billy, a name (sorry Mr Moreno and anyone else) I just instinctively find comical. Not laughable you understand, just comical.
More Bang For Your Buck
Even More Bang For Your Buck
I’ll not lie, I was a bit taken aback by just how much cash dollars it looked like we were all going to shell out during the Lorwyn experiment. So, just like any good tax attorney, I set about working out how best to maximise our resources. For anyone on a tight budget, almost all the advice in these two stands today, and if you currently do almost none of them, and change your habits to follow almost all of them, I absolutely guarantee your Magic experience will improve, and you will have more money at the end of that experience. Even by the end of a mammoth two-parter, there was still a ton of fertile ground to cover in the frugality stakes. One day I’ll return to this.
This was a global round-up piece, focusing on the Nationals hurly-burly. The only thing of note was my suggestion that an Eternal Pro Tour might be coming soon (I predicted 2009). Astute observers will have spotted this is not currently the case, but I’m in Seattle this week ahead of the Grand Prix, and will attempt to unlock the vaults of Scott Larabee to find out whether Legacy is on the way.
For ‘Lorwyn,’ insert whatever new set is about to appear. For an aspiring player, trying to make head or tale of the spoiler is super-exciting, but often super-frustrating. This was a real nuts and bolts, take you by the hand approach to understanding both individual cards and how they shaped up in a wider context, both within the set and particular Formats. As a teaching tool, I was extremely pleased with this, and tend to look it over before each new set comes out.
Actually Reading Your Lorwyn Spoiler
And then Lorwyn came out, and after the theory of the previous week we had the chance to apply all that with an actual brand new set list. This article featured what was comfortably my worst mistake in print on the site, comfortably beating my calling Rich Hoaen American, suggesting Mark Herberholz owned a games store as his full-time job, and the story about the banana. Yes, in the largest font I could persuade Craig to find for me, I decried the hideaway lands as utter toiletry. Take away a card that was instrumental in the Top 8 of a World Championship, and the current Best Card In Standard, and I was 100% right about the other three. C’mon, 3 out of 5 ain’t bad, right Aaron?
The title is probably the best thing about this article which pooled information from a weekend of Drafting post-Lorwyn chez Hagon. Now pretty dated and with little of interest, unless you like to read about the math of Clash.
You may be thinking ‘no it didn’t’ but I deliberately stuck my neck out in advance on this one. In the event, what was a fantastic exercise in Metagame trends and analysis got thoroughly hijacked by the freak show that was the storm that almost destroyed the PT That Never Was, ultimately won by Remi Fortier. As a record of those utterly bizarre hours, this is quite a nostalgic piece.
I’m On The Road And You’re Invited
To the Magic Invitational, see? This featured one of my happiest Magic memories ever, because for all I have many Pros as friends, I’m never going to be first choice to fill a berth on a team because, not unreasonably, they’d quite like to win. At the Invitational though, there were just sixteen of the world’s finest on hand, so chairs at the big table were plentiful. This featured the tale of the perfect Draft, where everything that could possibly go my way fell my way, and I comprehensively battered everyone. For two hours in Germany, I truly lived the Pro dream.
The fallout from Pro Tour: Valencia, setting up the downhill run to Worlds. Pro fans only, I should imagine.
No prizes for guessing the subject matter, and therefore the current relevance, but this was one of the few occasions I stepped up to the plate and left nobody in any doubt where I stood (and indeed stand.) The catalyst was the no-show of Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, gifting Olivier Ruel urgently needed Pro Points, and utterly disrespecting the Player of the Year title in the process. You can argue that corruption exists everywhere, and that it isn’t even necessarily bad — and I bent over backwards to observe that I had no problem with what W-T had done, given the rules (and in this case the Ruel) — but corrupt, in the truest, most morally-neutral ‘it corrupted what would otherwise have happened’ to wit, the running of the tournament was altered, is inescapable. Perhaps Magic will never achieve mainstream status in the sense of huge viewing figures crossing cultural and social boundaries in the way that the major Pro sports have. But with friends doing each other a favor, well, nobody enjoys seeing that, or in the case of those empty chairs, not seeing that.
Drafting And Drafting And Drafting And Drafting With Rich Part 1
Drafting And Drafting And Drafting And Drafting With Rich Part 2
If memory serves, Rich Hoaen was on sabbatical at this point, so the hugely popular Draft series was in a lull. For reasons that now passeth all understanding, I decided to co-opt two friends into a Magic Online marathon, thinking sagely that I could both learn a bunch and generate material for StarCityGames.com at the same time. By halfway through the second article, we’d reached the humiliation of 3 wins, 10 losses, and a draw, across multiple Formats. Frankly, we’d have managed to lose at tiddlywinks against a dead camel, that’s how badly we were stinking the place up. And then everything changed, and the Comeback was on, rescuing what was looking like a massive waste of time, and turning it into an entertaining tournament report with a twist. That I’ve just spoiled.
I like my titles obtuse and intriguing. Market research says that most of you don’t. This became Visualising The Draft For Fun And Profit, and offered a mode of Draft analysis that I believe huge numbers of good players use, and almost nobody writes about, because it’s a hard thing to grasps, and doesn’t appeal to the straightforward ‘what pick do you take card blah, and what pick is card bleh?’ Those who like a structured approach to the mad world of Draft will find plenty here, at least to get them thinking about the way they view the game.
Now there’s a title you couldn’t confuse for a treatise on 17th century bagpipe laments. I’m not sure whether Craig’s guidelines allow him to publish the word… but think of the name Alan, cunningly rearrange into the kind of naughty word young teenage boys giggle about at the back of biology class, and you have my Alanysis of all the permutations for who could win Worlds and how. This is the kind of deep Sadness of which I am tremendously proud, and I hope that in some small way I encouraged the avalanche of stats from people like Paul Jordan. Now that man can crunch numbers.
I’m always trying to find different ways of telling the same story. Somebody wins. Everybody else doesn’t. It’s the sheer predictability of sport that we love, not the unpredictability. It’s the unpredictability that’s the illusion. Dig away, you can see the reasons why things happen. Antti Malin may have been a Surprise winner of Worlds in 2008, but when you look at his career he had every reason to suppose he had as much of a shot as most other semi-Pros. This article of course concentrated on the New York rendition twelve months earlier.
Worlds Pro Report Card Part 1
Worlds Pro Report Card Part 2
For those who wanted more than broad brushstrokes, here was the blow by blow for all the big names.
Bill And Ted’s Winston Adventure
For lighthearted yet deeply strategic Magic, I firmly believe Winston Draft is hard to beat. Play enough of it, as Dave and I did during Shadowmoor and Eventide, and you even develop a head-to-head Metagame reflecting known preferences and sometimes even deliberately set Metagame traps. Undoubtedly some of the happiest times in the game I’ve ever had, this article went step by step, looking to encourage players into this wonderful way of playing. One word of caution — having played a ton of Winston, right now is not a good time to dip your toe in the water. Trying to pull everything together with a total pool between all the (two) players of just six boosters in a year of Gold goodness is a thankless task. Go get some Eventide. Now that’ll put hairs on your chest.
The 2007 Removed From Game Awards
And so the year drew to a close with a variety of intriguing categories. A fun walk down memory lane to conclude.
Looking back, I’m pleasantly surprised how many articles are potentially more than just ‘yesterday’s news’. I guess because I so rarely venture into cutting edge technology (viz. Never) I’m more likely to be able to leave recognisable signposts for new players to follow. Hopefully, if you’re new to scg and new to me, there are some words just a click away that can help you on your path to better Magic. And now if you’ll excuse me, the descent to Seattle has begun.
Until next time, when I preview the forthcoming awesomeness that is Pro Tour: Honolulu — and it promises to be sensational in so many ways — as ever, thanks for reading.
R.