AuthorZac Hill

Wednesday, April 15th – Round one, Singapore PTQ. Third game, three life, two Mutavaults and four other lands on my side, a grip full of counters. Venser and a Clique, too. In hand. My opponent has himself a Gaddock Teeg, a Mogg Fanatic, and an Isamaru. I am not afraid of whatever he might have in his hand unless I’m out of mana. It’s my end step, he taps three. I ready counter mana and pause. “Volcanic Fallout,” he announces.

Wednesday, April 8th – Rap Sheet, Chatter’s last seven PTQs: 9th on tiebreaks, Finals, Finals, Top-8, Top-8, Top-4, 9th on tiebreaks. Oh, and a GP top-32 somewhere in there. But guess who isn’t qualified, guess who isn’t as of yet going to even start thinking about leis, tropical fruits, and slack-key guitars?

Wednesday, March 25th – The feeling that comes with truly reaching the next level is almost indescribable. It feels like you’re walking in one smooth transition from the brown dense rush hour of Jakarta into one of those pure-100%-oxygen chambers inside which I imagine Michael Jackson chooses to sleep.

Tuesday, March 10th – Lists with singletons often appear to the outsider to be cobbled together at the last minute, haphazard scraps of “good-enough” that contain enough tools to get the job done, but are rarely optimized. Yet increasingly we’re seeing more and more lists from very good deck designers that feature numbers like “1 Terror, 1 Celestial Purge, 1 Pithing Needle,” stone absent any tutors whatsoever…

Tuesday, February 24th – A lot of players talk in the forums about how decks by authors like Chapin, GerryT, and myself are light on ‘win conditions.’ Without a big tap-out fatty to end the game quickly, they worry they won’t be able to finish their matches on time. This sentiment isn’t entirely unreasonable, but there are so many ways to solve the problem of time limits without having to resort to making your deck worse. This article will outline a few of them.

Tuesday, February 17th – I hope this article might expand our conception of the existing definition of a ‘gamer,’ might incorporate elements that appeal to a more expansive array of competitive pursuits. Magic may never become properly mainstream – though that’s another argument, I suppose – but I do think the imagined ‘market’ that most people try to target is fundamentally flawed.

Tuesday, February 10th – When I wrote Interaction Advantage, I knew I’d want to take some time after my initial excitement had dissipated to sit down and test the theory, to make sure it really works, to explore some of its intricacies and examine some of its quirks. To see if it actually accomplishes something.

Thursday, January 29th – What I propose, and hope to outline in this article, is a theory called Interaction Advantage. It aims to reconcile the competing existing concepts of Card Advantage and Card Quality with one another in a coherent fashion.

Tuesday, January 13th – Is this game we play, somehow, art. And perhaps more relevantly – really, more to the root of why I want to write this article – are the game’s creators, maybe even its players, in some sense artists?

Tuesday, January 6th – I remember cracking the first Onslaught pack I ever opened, only to see this awe-inspiring Blue guy staring right back at me. His eyes flashed with energy; his hands melded into an inferno of like ectoplasm that seemingly wanted to engulf him, swallow him fully. And then I looked at the text box: Draw three cards.

Wednesday, December 31st – Two weekends, two second-place PTQ finishes. “Kowalifying.” Certainly not satisfying. At least the guy I lost to this time around was Cynic Kim, i.e. An Actual Player, but still. Stings, daggers, grail-shaped beacons in the sky hovering exactly one micron beyond arm’s length, all glowing and neon and come-hither. An almost profound and certainly reinvigorated respect for how difficult this hill is to conquer.