Has anyone pointed you at Jesse Mason yet?
http://blog.killgold.fish/
Bit contentious, but there's a wealth of magic history in that same vein there.
Oh yes! It's a great read, I've read most of it actually. I actually appreciate the contentiouness. Most writing about Magic is done on a very narrow axis, typically "is this card good?" and other strategy-centric perspectives . There's very little writing on game from a wider view, which is one of the reasons I'm writing about Urza Block.
Speaking about being bummed mechanically, how do you guys prevent nongames?
I have Temples and the black cube loves to loot, but I saw quite a few miserable faces last weekend as one or both players were disabled from playing and I'm kind of sick of having a bad night myself or watching someone have a bad night as they're unable to cast things.
Something I noticed is that my playtest cube games are much, much better on every metric than playing on Arena. And while my cube is far from good, I can think of a few reasons:
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Good mana fixing: The quality of my matches on Arena dropped significantly the second checklands left Standard. The mana system is one of Magic's weakness and good fixing in the form of duals/fetches does away with color screw.
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Low mana curve: The more lands you need for your decks to work the higher the chance of mana screw. The difference between having to hit 2-3 lands and having to hit 4-5 is massive both in number (2 less spells) and probabilities. After all, a 2-lander is good in a low-curve format but will lead to non-games if you have to hit a turn 5-drop on curve
Even beyond the obvious reduction of non-games, I think there's obvious correlation between good mana fixing and better gameplay and more varied deckbuilding. I must point out:
Moving to 20 Duals/20 Fetches is the best decision I've ever taken with my cube.
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Reducing "removal checks": One of my annoyances with Magic and specially Standard is that many games down boil to sticking a card that will win the game on its own if not deal with. Planeswalkers and Baneslayer Angels are the most obvious examples.
The problem with these cards is that they are very binary. You either deal with them or you don't and lose. I prefer cards that give one-shot effects or incremental advantages over time because they don't reduce the number of options a player has so dramatically.
For example, you'll probably lose the game to Life of the Loam or Erratic Portal at some point. But the game doesn't radically change, you can still play your cards, attack your opponent or get a similar advantage through other means. It just gets harder as card advantage piles up or the lock gets tighter.
This leads to grindier games, but I don't see any problem with that kind of gameplay.
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Less extreme gameplay: You can win Magic on several axis. The more extreme a deck is on a given axis, the harder it is for other decks to interact with it. Belcher, Storm and extremely hard aggro lead to more non-games than The Rock or Aggro Loam do.
Personally, I think a healthy Magic metagame is mostly creature-based and disruptive.
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Longer games and more cards: One of the reasons Magic has such variance is that you go through very few turns and very few cards. You can win a game of Magic with 5-6 "real" (that is, non-land) cards which is very low. Making games go longer and having players draw more cards naturally reduces non-games because you have more options and variance killing the game through mana screw or not having the right awnswer is less likely.
