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Writing has become so important to me. I do it recreationally now. I post all the time in my Live Journal (though not often with substance). I am currently writing fiction. Writing is very therapeutic. The other thing writing rekindled for me was my love for StarCityGames.com. When I started writing for Star City. it was actually a joke. I was made fun of for writing for this site. It was the laughing stock of Internet strategy, and I was a laughing stock in the pro community for writing for them.

What a difference four years makes… Now the same type of people who once laughed at me for writing for Star City are asking me how they can become featured writers.

What’s that you say? Flores and Ferrett on the same day? Sacre Bleus! Can it possibly be true? Oh yes indeedy, our cup overfloweth! We’ve drug Ferrett back to add his usual spark and panache to a Magic: Year in Review article. The following is but the tiniest sample of the cheeky, sarcastic goodness that comprises today’s offering:

“After years of consistently proclaiming that TurboLand is the best deck in Extended no matter what the metagame was, Zvi Mowshowitz finally wins a Grand Prix with it. Snowball fights break out in Hell as pigs request flight plans from astonished air traffic controllers.”

I should have known this would happen. I can hear you all now:”Of course he wins; he opens bomb rares!” Just so you know, I don’t wait for the drafts where I open insane bombs and then start writing. Every draft (all three) I’ve set out to record has become an article, so I’m not giving you an incomplete picture. I don’t open a Pentavus every time, and sometimes I lose even when I have Pentavus. Enough about the integrity of the medium. There are still several”thinker” picks to come, some room for discussion, and some lessons to be learned. And if you’re angry that I opened Pentavus, wait ’til next pick!

Don’t worry, the formulas in this article aren’t serious, I’ve had it with fancy math. Last week, I snuck into the cafeteria for a bite, and the only other person there was a grad student from the neighboring college, studying calculus models for a Macroeconomics midterm. Missing my Bachelor’s in Economics days, I took the seat beside her, put on a big smile, and asked,”So, what’s your favorite equation?”

Teaching the game is actually pretty easy. Just buy them a precon, or give them a deck made out of draft leavings with some land mixed in. Then pull out your best deck – for me, that’s my Keeper with the foreign foils, but an Illusionary Mask/Volrath’s Shapeshifter deck works just as well – and beat them to pieces a dozen times in a row. They’ll be really impressed with the game when they see how hopeless their position is, and how complex the interactions are, especially with the errata.

Remember to play fast – you want to really impress them with your skillz. Nothing makes people more interested than watching someone do something complex and repetitive while not understanding what is actually happening.

Eisel gets his Thragg snapped off, Bleiweiss tries to imagine what it’s like to be White, and Geordie Tait officially goes mad, all in the latest edition of the StarCityGames.com Digest!

StarCityGames.com recently acquired a small quantity of Chinese Torment and Chinese Invasion booster boxes, and we’ve put them on sale for the incredibibly low price of $59.99 each! This is the last weekend for this sale, so if you want to get your hands on some super cheap boxes, click here!

Today, I’m going to explain why Magic Theory is important, what’s wrong with Magic Theory in general, and how to fix the problems. I’m going to set forward some rules and guidelines that should be followed when writing about theory. And… I’m going to introduce you to the hallowed digital halls of The Magic University.

The experiment works like this. I build the packs for an entire 8-man booster draft (twenty-four packs). I then build the same set of packs again, making two copies of the exact same draft. I have my CMU cohorts sit down and draft once, and then for the second run of the same draft, I move the packs back three seats so that different people are drafting different packs even though both of the drafts are identical. The object, of course, is to see how different people draft the same exact set of packs.

Draft Two analysis and side-by-side comparisons of the outcomes.