Happy New Year to me!
On March 5th, 2007, I moved to Madrid to start a year of living dangerously. Not “mixed martial arts” dangerous. Not “bullfighting” dangerous. Not “card-flopping” dangerous, and not some wacky combination of the three:
“Wakefield throws an overhand right! It connects! He taps some Green mana for a Giant Growth! The Bull is out! The Bull is out!”
As cool as that would be, I’m talking real terror scary.
Trying to make a living as a writer scary. A journey that is usually littered with failure. Everyone wants to be a writer. Everyone thinks they can be a writer. 99.9% of them fail. Do you know that even small time literary agents can get up to 5000 requests a year for representation, and will add less than five of those to their list of clients? So far, I have contacted fifteen agents and have fifteen rejection letters to show for it.
Go me.
But I am not without resources. I brought five books to Spain with me.
Be your own Literary Agent.
The Everything Get Published Book.
Odd Thomas (A gift from a close friend and former girlfriend.)
Sex and the Perfect Lover (backup plan.)
The Freelance Writer’s Bible — Your guide to a profitable writing career within one year.
So, it’s “one year” time. New Year’s Day. I have a year to either make it as a writer or else I’ll have to turn to selling myself to fat Spanish women. It’s just a little bit scary. Okay, actually it’s terrifying.
I think I’ll pretend I’m a huge corporation and just make March 5th a holiday. The Wakefield New Year. Next year, that’s a Wednesday. I plan to take the day off from work. Play Magic and video games, and watch geek-themed movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Lord of the Rings. Terminator II. Pro Tour: One.
Pro Tour: One. Before I left, Hilary and Michelle came down for dinner with Doug and I. We went out to Fire and Ice and then came home, and Hilary said, “I’ve never seen this.”
“Yes you have.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I’ve had this for ten years… how is it you’ve never seen this?”
“I just haven’t. I don’t think any of us have.”
We put it on, and everyone looks for glimpses of themselves in the footage, which I gave up doing long ago. Despite long pans over the crowd, there is no sign of any of us… until the end when the credits are rolling and there is a short clip of Rodney playing Sean Fleishman when they were both 3-0 and sitting at the feature match table. Fleischman with his huge feathered hat on. Rodney with actual hair on top of his head. (The last time such a photograph existed.)
About a third of the way into it, Andre Redi’s name is mentioned as losing in the Top 16. At the mention of Andre Redi, I go off.
“Man, I will never forget playing him. Siding in four Glooms, both games, never seeing one as I’m holding lethal on the board… but he played a Circle of Protection: Black on turn 2 both games. I remember pulling all my Glooms out in disgust and throwing them on the table after the match, holding up four fingers.”
Doug finishes the story for me.
Doug — “Andre went through his deck, pulled out the one COP: Black, held up one finger and laughed.”
Michelle — “Heard that story before?”
Doug — “Every ten minutes on the train ride home.”
Magic is like that sometimes. A couple of days ago, I beat a player in draft who had an 1823 rating and he cursed me out as a “lucky newb, WHATEVER!!” he screamed in all caps at me. This always tickles me pink. Later on, to get into the Top 8 of a Premier Event, I needed to get by a player with a 1533 rating. He rolled me in two.
The early days of Magic were something.
Michelle recounts her tale of trading a Mox Ruby for a smoke.
I recall how Mare used to love to Hymn me, and I would tell her it’s a bad card… “Look, see, I just draw another. It doesn’t do anything.”
“I don’t care, I like it,” she would tell me. And smash me repeatedly.
Doug recounts in the early days that he, Hilary, Michelle and Doug all picked a color. Rod got Blue (and rich). Hilary was left holding a bunch of Giant Growths. Let’s move back to the present.
Planar Chaos has been released online, but I’m a bit behind the curve. Last week I was in Florida and I don’t own a laptop. Joshie and I feel the same way about laptops.
“Laptops are vengeance from an angry God for all of man’s failings.”
Couldn’t agree more. I hate laptops. With their mushy keys, their cramped keyboards, their little touch pads that are always double clicking when you don’t want them to. Those tiny little screens instead of my twenty inch widescreen flat panel. They’re under powered low voltage processors. I just hate them.
I should fill you in on the end of the UPS tale. When last we talked, I had shipped my computer (Pentium D, 3.0 GHz, 2 gigs of ram, Vista) to Spain. Wendy was going to be in Florida with me, so would not be there to receive it. This turned out to be fine because it was held up in customs. The Spanish authorities wanted to believe it was a new computer that she was going to sell, and wanted to charge her a hundred euro taxes on it. UPS was on our side, and wanted all manner of crap to get it through without paying. They wanted a scan of Wendy’s passport, the invoice of the computer, and a letter explaining it was a used computer that was going to be used for writing and Magic playing. We couldn’t be bothered to deal with all that while on vacation, so we let it sit there for a week and dealt with it when we got back. They charged us 40 euros storage and delivered it on Wednesday. And oh man, did the UPS guy love carrying seventy pounds up five flights of stairs! And he couldn’t let me help him. He had to deliver it to the door and have it be checked for damage, and we sign for it.
Last week in Florida, I borrowed my folk’s laptop for a couple of days, suffering through so I might actually have a column for Craig on Monday. Annnnd… you can see how well that turned out. The laptop is 700 MHz, with Windows XP, a dog-slow shared memory video card, and 256 megs of ram. Windows XP hates 256 megs of ram. I was able to download the Magic Online client (Hey Wizards, how about adding the last three years of expansions to the zip file instead of making me download all the patches to every computer I move to? Thanks!) I watched some replays, and actually played 2-3 extremely slow and annoying games.
When I got to Madrid, I did what everyone does. I joined a league.
Turn 7: MLGreen.
MLGreen plays triggered ability from Psychotrope Thallid.
MLGreen plays Forest.
MLGreen plays Gaea’s Anthem.
I start to see why this is going to be so much better than Crusade. While White has ways to generate tokens, they don’t have Thallids or Beacon of Creation. Well, they didn’t have Thallids until now… The other bright idea I have is to combine it with an Elf Champion. White doesn’t have a Soldier Champion that I know of. What happens when you put eight ways to make your army huge into a deck? Let’s see how that works…
zeb30 plays Island.
Turn 1: MLGreen.
MLGreen plays Forest.
MLGreen plays Boreal Druid.
Turn 2: zeb30.
zeb30 plays Izzet Boilerworks.
zeb30 plays triggered ability from Izzet Boilerworks.
Island is returned to zeb30’s hand from play.
Turn 2: MLGreen.
MLGreen plays Forest.
MLGreen plays Elvish Champion.
Two 2/2s on the board.
Turn 3: zeb30.
zeb30 plays Mountain.
zeb30 plays Wee Dragonauts.
Turn 3: MLGreen.
MLGreen plays Forest.
MLGreen plays Elvish Champion.
MLGreen plays Llanowar Elves.
Four 3/3s on the board.
Turn 4: zeb30.
zeb30 plays Island.
Turn 4: MLGreen.
MLGreen plays Forest.
MLGreen plays Gaea’s Anthem.
Four 4/4s on the board
Turn 5: zeb30.
zeb30 has conceded from the game.
That was picture perfect… Let’s do some more testing.
Turn 5: Resolve.
Resolve plays Forest.
Resolve plays Giant Solifuge.
Resolve plays triggered ability from Primal Forcemage.
Resolve plays triggered ability from Primal Forcemage.
10/7 Giant Solifuge swings to my head. And I’m pretty happy about it, because I think we all knew about this deck, but its fun to see it in action.
Turn 6: Resolve.
Resolve plays Groundbreaker.
Resolve plays triggered ability from Primal Forcemage.
Resolve plays triggered ability from Primal Forcemage.
12/7 Groundbreaker. That’s pretty funny. And game ending.
You know what my deck needs? Wrath.
And hey, with White I can now splash Glorious Anthem. And Tolsimir Wolfblood!
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Playing one test game, I play Llanowar Elf, Wood Elf, Wood Elf, Champion, Wolfblood, and my opponent conceded. I was holding a Gaea’s and a Glorious Anthem. Of course, the deck also has four Vitu Ghazi, the City-Tree. How can that be bad? Get three Anthems down and all of a sudden you have an uncounterable 4/4 every turn. How can you not smash face with that kind of power?
There are two main versions. The first is an all-elf version that works great against people playing Forests (but works horrible against people playing Dralnu du Louvre). Darkblast is a beating when you can’t get an Anthem through some counters. I’m trying to counter this by adding in some larger elves.
The other version is a G/W good stuff deck that still has a bunch of elves, but also has Watchwolf, Saffi Eriksdotter, Loxodon Hierarch, and Giant Solifuge. Both have games where they smash face and seem very powerful, and both have match-ups where the other version would shine. Next week’s column will be an exploration of which version to work on, and maybe twenty games with each, like Ben does in his column over on that other Magic site.
I play some more league games looking for some more inspiration. See, I don’t look at spoilers much. And even when I do, I don’t understand them half the time. I think it’s a disability. Maybe it’s a not “being present in the moment” kind of thing. Being present in the moment is very important. And it’s something I’m very bad at.
To illustrate —
I’m talking with my therapist one week. As usual, she remembers everything I said the last week, and everything I’ve said for the past eight weeks.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“You never take notes, and yet, you remember everything I’ve said. And I know you have twenty or even thirty other patients. Do you write a whole bunch of notes down after I leave and read them before I show up? How do keep your patients’ stories straight and remember all these little details?”
“ I have a good memory, and I focus very hard on being present in the moment.”
Having done some research, I know exactly what she means. She means that her attention is always on us. On whomever she is counseling. Being in that moment, and not letting your mind wander and drift like sea foam. If I start talking about something boring to her, she doesn’t zone out and start focusing on chores she has to do, a book she’s reading, or when it’s going to be her chance to talk. Just focusing on the moment. Living each second being in that second, not thinking about things in the future or in the past.
Wendy is also excellent at this. My folks love her for that. We just spent a week in Florida with my folks and my brother and his family. It was a good time. For those interested in such things, details are at my blog. Anyway, my folks like to show us stuff. Of course, it’s stuff they find amazing, and they hope we do too. But it doesn’t always work out that way. My dad, being a former teacher, has to explain as much as he can about everything we see. Some of it is interesting, some of it is boring. On the boring stuff, I tend to zone out. I think about Magic, or what is going to be happening later in the day, or the movie we watched the night before. I’m listening, but not really contributing.
During the boring stuff, Wendy asks questions. She remains in the moment. She points things out and asks what they are, or why a bird that’s just been explained to us has his wings outspread while perched. So, of course, they are thrilled. She’s always inquisitive about what they show us, she never looks bored, and she has a better time than, well, me, who is thinking about other things. It’s not something I mean to do; my mind just wanders easily unless I’m focused.
When Alan calls me up to discuss a new set, I just don’t get it. He’ll read me a card, and I don’t know if I zone out or have some sort of dyslexia, but I can never understand the ramifications that he so clearly sees. Text means nothing to me. I have to see the art. The flavor text. The casting cost in the right place. The power and toughness at the bottom. I don’t get how a card really works and what it could be used for until I actually see it played against me, or I play it myself. Like, say, a rescue creature.
Spiketail Drakeling blocks Uktabi Drake.
ImperfectBeing plays Brute Force targeting Spiketail Drakeling.
MLGreen plays Whitemane Lion.
MLGreen plays triggered ability from Whitemane Lion.
Uktabi Drake is returned to MLGreen’s hand from play.
This is insane. My mind starts to reel with the possibilities this guy brings up. Adding him into a Ghostway or Momentary Blink deck. Wood Elves. Timbermare. Groundbreaker. Won’t Affinity just love that guy when, at the end of their turn, I bounce my Viridian Shaman or Indrik Stomphowler back to my hand? How about a Calciderm with one vanishing counter left on it? Oh! Just when you thought he was gone, I play him again!
Yeah, I know. Everyone saw this weeks ago, but I don’t pour over spoilers, and when I do, I don’t really get it.
I start off strong with a 2-0 in my league, and I love my deck. Then I drop the next three and you know why? Because I am too old and set in my ways. Too stubborn. Not invested in the other colors or in how to make a good deck. I play Green/X. The X is either Red, Black or White, whatever color has the stuff that most catches my eye. Usually the stuff that catches my eye is made up of fatties. Calciderm! Guess I’ll go G/W this league. Looking over my pool of cards at the end of the league, I see that I should have gone G/W/B. But then I’ll get color-screwed because I’m always sure – I’m always sure – I’m going to get color-screwed. When I see someone get color-screwed playing three colors, I always gleefully trumpet “see, that’s why I only play two colors.” Of course, the problem with that is the 99 losses I take to three-color decks… the one time they are color-screwed “justifies” my mistaken belief that two colors is always better than three colors. My prejudice skews my analytical results by ignoring the multitude of matches lost to three color decks that don’t happen to get color screwed.
The Wakefield New Year. A year of getting serious about writing, Magic, and possibly MMA if there is time. If that’s so, I need to change my ways. Work harder. Adopt new strategies, and learn new things rather than just bashing my head against the wall.
For me, this game is no longer about the money, or about the points, or about the honor, or the fame. It’s a personal goal, toward my checklist of things to do. I don’t want to quit Magic one day without having a GP Top 8.
A long time ago, I made a checklist that involved the following:
Being National Champion. Check.
Being, even if only for a little while, on the Gravy Train (now Pro Club Level 3). Check.
Making Top 8 at a Grand Prix. Not yet.
At the beginning of the Wakefield New Year, this is what my goals look like, without any of the check marks. Also, unlike Tiago, I have never been that good at Magic. And I am starting to think my concentration is the next thing I need to work on. Being in the moment, fully.
We’re in the online Planar Chaos release events and drafts, and I am still not in the moment. I am still not paying close enough attention. Still have not achieved the mental Magic state I learned at PT: NY after watching the real pros play. That concentration of every turn counts. That slow, methodical, constantly thinking ahead state. Nope. Right now I’m just flipping cards. Trying to find out what works and what doesn’t. I’ll enter a release, hope for some good G/W or G/R cards, put a pile together, go 2-0, need to win one more match to draw into the top, and drop the next two. Without fail. Usually through my own play errors. Usually through not diversifying and learning how to play Blue. Usually by being distracted for a crucial split second and making a dumb play when I should have waited and reassessed the situation before clicking “next” and passing the turn.
I lost a game yesterday when I swung with everything to put my opponent at four. Wendy started talking to me, and I passed the turn. Without casting the Call of the Herd I just drew, and without then flashing it back so I would have two blockers. Well done!
Time to pull out the mistake dice again.
This year is weird already. I’m one week into it and I already feel lost. Overwhelmed. Crushed under the weight of my own expectations, and already behind on the Magic scene because of my busy schedule over the last month. In no particular order, these are my goals.
Learn Spanish
Get back on the Pro Tour
Get an agent
Get another book published
Run a marathon
Write a good column every week
100 pushups
Interesting goals, huh? I left a well-paid job with full health insurance, dental, 401k, a house, and three dogs to come to Madrid, play Magic, do pushups, and follow the impossible dream of becoming a writer.
To contrast – behind me, Wendy is working on a very technical business document. Charts, graphs, proposals, timelines. She has a color LaserJet. She sets up contracts worth tens of thousands of euros. She’s talking to her boss in France about an important meeting they have tomorrow and how they are going to fulfill their promises to their client and get him to sign the deal.
I’m trying to figure out if I should play Elvish Champion or Loxodon Hierarch.
My life is weird.
Let the New Year begin!
Jamie