General ChannelFireball: Learning from Legacy, Part 1

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Hi guys, just posting this here for posterity, as it's been lost in the site migration.
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When looking for ways to improve and refine my cube, my most common approach is to study constructed environments. Not only can this help for finding quality cards that may have slipped under your radar, but it allows you to see how cards and decks interact in an optimized setting. What are the pillars or common effects in that format? What kinds of decks aren't prevalent in the format? Are there any dynamics that we can port to our cube environment?

Let's jump in.

Finding Cards

While digging through decklists, almost all cube tech will come from the maindecks of the common “fair” lists. Archetypes like combo and linear tribal will have great cards, but generally rely upon a density of interactions that isn't reproducible in a cube environment. With a format as powerful as Legacy, often you'll find that top decks are comprised entirely of cube cards. The recent Grand Prix Denver's finals, for example, featured Jund versus Esper Stoneblade. Between the two decks, the only mainboard cards not found in my 360-card cube list were Academy Ruins and Karakas.

In the same Top 8 we'll find a fairly representative RUG Delver list sporting two cards that are rarely if ever found in cube lists. The first is Nimble Mongoose.

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Nimble Mongoose is a miss by cube standards, but for the sake of exercise let's jog through the reasoning. The RUG Delver lists are aggro-disruption decks who seek to keep the boardstate in its infancy for as long as possible. The deck's curve tops out at 2 mana, and sports 8 cheap land destruction effects in the form of Wasteland and Stifle. Moreover, with 8 fetchlands, 8 free counterspells and quick cantrips like Brainstorm and Thought Scour, the Mongoose hits shrouded Nacatl status incredibly early. Without the ability to stagnate mana development or rapidly fill the graveyard, we're looking at a one-drop that might not be relevant at any stage of a typical cube game.

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Stifle's obvious main role in life is as a one-mana land destruction spell. The card reminds me of Twisted Image from New Phyrexia era Standard, in the sense that you include it for some primary purpose, like killing Spellskite, but find that the card's versatility gives you loads of incidental value in unexpected situations. Twisted Image, for example, proved to be quite a swiss-army knife. It killed Birds of Paradise and Cunning Sparkmages, recalled off of Precursor Golem and even allowed pumped Inferno Titans to survive rumbles with other 6/6 creatures, all while cantripping.

With Stifle, the question is whether its primary role as a land destruction spell comes up frequently enough to warrant inclusion in a 40-card list. Once in the door, there are dozens of other opportunities for it to provide value at opportune moments. For comparison, if you count Wastelands, the typical Legacy list runs around 8 – 12 lands that can be hit by Stifle. To have the same density of land targets in cube we would need 40 – 60 targets in an 8-man draft. We'll hold that thought.

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Shardless Agent, the namesake of the recent Shardless BUG lists, hasn't found its way into many cube lists either. It's a very powerful card that comes with its own set of constraints. Namely, Shardless Agent demands that you play proactive spells over reactive ones. This isn't a particularly hard constraint to meet, so long as blue is mostly a splash color in your deck. I've been running this card ever since it cracked into the Legacy scene, and it's been an all-star in Bant, RUG, BUG, and even 4-color decks. Shardless Agent is one of my favorite cards in a draft setting, as it rewards you for careful deck construction. My players and I were skeptical at first, but free Tarmogyfs, Confidants and Jittes can be extremely persuasive.

The Mana

Every format is defined first and foremost by its mana. Legacy, like Cube, features some of the fastest and most flexible mana fixers from the game's history. In the absence of any checks and balances, Legacy decks could easily support a five-color mana base at very little cost. Modern is host to the likes of five-color Tribal Flames aggro decks and four-color Jund brews, yet Legacy decks almost always stick to three or fewer colors. The difference, of course, is the ubiquity of Wasteland.

Wasteland is one of the major pillars of the format, and stands as a safety valve against overly greedy mana bases. The benefit, from a design perspective, is that mana base decisions are much more nuanced and involved in both deck construction and during actual gameplay. The presence of Wasteland creates great decision points, where an Esper Stoneblade player for example has to choose between fetching an Underground Sea for Counterspell mana or grabbing a basic to stay on track for a Turn 4 Jace.

In addition to adding interactivity to land sequencing and providing a counterbalance against greedy mana bases, Wasteland also tips the scales in favor of aggressive decks that can benefit from extending the early game.

These issues all have their analog in cube design. Cube designers have long contemplated how to keep multi-color “good stuff” decks from being the dominant archetype. The original MTGO cube addressed this by limiting the amount of available mana fixing.

I chose to put the total amount of mana fixing where it is because I wanted color commitments to mean something. I found when I had a higher ratio of mana fixers to total cards, strong players could take cards of tons of colors early, then table all the mana fixing they needed past weaker players who were drafting one or two color decks. This left the strong players with all the best cards and good mana on top of it. When I used a lower amount of mana fixing, the strong players who went for greedy mana bases couldn't do that anywhere near as much, so that keeps everyone honest.”

There's a lot to unpack here. Let's leave aside for now the fact that the biggest victims of a lack of fixing are two and three-color aggro decks. Tom LaPille posits that experienced players can overload on fixing and end up with a deck with higher card quality. This is true. He further argues that this gives stronger players an advantage, which is also true, although I'm much less sympathetic to this point.

My concern is not that good players will find an edge, but that the path to finding an edge should be lined with interesting decisions. When it comes to greedy mana bases, most cubes don't really have a prevalent system of checks and balances. If your environment has sufficient fixing, there's very little incentive or strategic reason to stick to just two colors. Of course there are costs to adding colors to a deck, but these costs are generally eclipsed by the associated increase in card quality.

The reason for this phenomenon is that, due to the nature of land cycles, three-color mana bases aren't much less consistent than two-color mana bases.

Let's say you're playing a straight Gruul deck. In a typical 10-land cycle (e.g. the Ravnica shocklands), only one of those ten lands actually provides fixing.

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Add white and you're up to three possible fixers from a 10-land cycle.

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Tossing in a fourth color gives even more options.

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Although multi-color decks have more mana requirements, they also have many more available lands to fill their deck with. Even if you're committed to running a two-color deck, there simply aren't many lands available to you. With fewer spells to choose from and only small gains to be had in terms of mana consistency, often two-color decks are leaving value on the table. For many months I jammed three and four-color decks draft after draft, and was rarely punished for doing so.

Not every land cycle offers so little to two-color decks. Let's take a look at the fetchlands. For this exercise, we'll assume we have access to the above dual lands. For a Gruul deck, the following lands provide useful fixing (7):
Wooded Foothills
Bloodstained Mire
Windswept Heath
Scalding Tarn
Arid Mesa
Verdant Catacombs
Misty Rainforest

If we're playing Naya (9):
Wooded Foothills
Bloodstained Mire
Windswept Heath
Scalding Tarn
Arid Mesa
Verdant Catacombs
Misty Rainforest
Marsh Flats
Flooded Strand

For four-color decks (10):
Wooded Foothills
Bloodstained Mire
Windswept Heath
Scalding Tarn
Arid Mesa
Verdant Catacombs
Misty Rainforest
Marsh Flats
Flooded Strand
Polluted Delta


We're looking at some dramatically different ratios with fetchlands!

For the sake of example, let's look at the number of available fixers available to two, three, and four-color decks in a 360 card pool with 4 cycles of fixers.

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These numbers work out a little differently for larger cubes. A 720 card cube running a single cycle of fetchlands would find itself about halfway between the “40 Duals” and “30 Duals, 10 Fetches” lines of the table. Also, the numbers are a little fuzzier than presented. For example, with the aforementioned Gruul deck, one could get clever and grab Savannah, Plateau and Marsh Flats to add some backdoor fixing.

Overall, what we find is that the more fetchlands we include, the more fixing we open up to two-color decks relative to more multi-colored decks. Rather than restrict two-color decks to only a handful of lands, a dense presence of fetchlands enables decks to build mana bases that are legitimately good without branching out into a third or fourth color.

Interestingly, the even split of 20 dual lands and 20 fetchlands yields a perfect 2{3}4 ratio of lands available to two, three and four-color decks respectively.

In my 360 card cube, I have opted to run the 10 original dual lands, 10 shocklands and 20 fetchlands. The change has really helped to equalize the balance of power between two-color decks and the greedier decks out there, without depriving your environment of sufficient mana fixing entirely.

In addition to doubling down on fixing, I took a page from Legacy's book and bumped up to four copies of Wasteland.

Out:
Strip Mine


In:
Wasteland
Wasteland
Wasteland


Here we run into a classic situation where the strictly inferior card from a power-level perspective provides much better gameplay from a design perspective. Strip Mine is virtually impossible to interact with from either a deck-building or a gameplay angle. The threat or presence of Wasteland creates interesting decisions. Do you fetch out basics and risk not being able to cast your color-intensive spells? Bait the Wasteland activation by laying out a less crucial dual land? Account for it in deck design by more carefully constructing your mana base?

Strip Mine brings no such choices. Strip Mine cannot really be played or planned around. Not to mention, the players hated it. Loam-Wasteland is powerful, but at least leaves a game to be played. Loam-Strip Mine was simply miserable. Eventually players started early hate-drafting Crucible of Worlds and Life from the Loam with no intention of even playing the cards. Loam/Crucible decks didn't even need Strip Mine to be successful, but the mere threat of Striplock caused players to hate out the archetype entirely.

In addition to the four copies of Wasteland, I am running Fulminator Mage and Goblin Ruinblaster. Collectively these changes have introduced a critical mass of non-basic land destruction. The point isn't to prevent players from playing greedy decks, but to provide some substantial advantages to playing a one or two-color deck to offset the decrease in card quality. Monocolor? Congrats, you're playing around Wasteland effects. Two colors? There's still plenty of fixing for you to fight for.

I personally still opt for the greedier decks more often than not, but it's not nearly as automatic of a decision as it was before this wave of design changes. There are now some legitimate risks and rewards to consider, and running a two-color deck no longer feels like a strictly inferior proposition in my cube.

Stifle

Lastly, we come back to Stifle. Whenever you make a pretty dramatic change to your cube environment, one of the most exciting design tasks is to identify cards whose role or performance will change drastically. This wave of changes doubled the number of lands that Stifle can profitably target, bringing the total up to 24 lands in an 8-man draft. Although still short of the 40-60 land density we cited for the Legacy metagame, there are some important questions to consider. How few fetchlands would there need to be before Stifle stopped seeing play? How valuable is the card went not serving 1-mana land destruction duty?

Stifle is extremely context sensitive, and its value will obviously fluctuate based on your cube's build. By cube standards, my list runs a very high density of targets, and Stifle is usually well worth the price of admission. It wins games that no other card can, and does so in unforgettable ways. Some games it will counter a crucial Planeswalker activations, other times it breaks a Birthing Pod chain, and some games it stuffs a Nevinyrral's Disk activation. On occasion it blanks entirely. It's also a bit of a push your luck card too. Do you use it now for some guaranteed marginal value, or hope you'll have a better opportunity down the road?

All in all Stifle has added some real spice to blue tempo decks. It may not pull its weight in every cube, but it's definitely worth a test in environments with a high density of targets. If nothing else it'll give you some great stories.

Wrapping Up

The first half of our sweep through the Legacy format has yielded a couple pieces of interesting tech and some new ideas for handling the classic “five-color goodstuff” dilemma in a way tat introduces some strategic decisions while leaving open the door for Travis Woo style multi-color draft concoctions. Join us in Part Two where I'll take a look at some of the deeper implications of added fetchlands, white aggro and a hidden gem from Zendikar.
 

CML

Contributor
jason -- thanks for posting this again, one of the best articles on fixing and synergy ever (in addition to touching on a bunch of other topics). i'd've gone further in debunking the '5c myth' that is used as an intellectually dishonest excuse for conventional cube's flaws but you're not me and can do what you want!

i like to reward my drafters for takin and makin nonbasics so i try to keep the counter strategies kinda soft (fulmy mage and wasteland as mentioned above.) i'm gonna try anathemancer on wednesday too. what do you think about price of progress?
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I ran Price of Progress briefly, but with the utility land draft it was roasting people for unhealthy amounts of damage. I didn't really find it to be necessary, given how strong red aggressive decks already are. Mostly you want to consider to what extent you want to discourage people from playing the nonbasics you include.

Regarding the four/five-color myths, I think it's definitely deserving of article space. I have a lot of subjects I'd like to touch on, and it's just a matter of pacing myself. I've written 8 articles for CFB now, and haven't yet even gotten to my utility land draft idea yet. I don't know if it's a question of dishonesty (for everyone) though. Well, my opinions on Wizard's handling of the cube format is a topic for another day. But I think a lot of these things are the symptom of people having a very narrow view of what a cube's constraints are. If you force yourself to run all the best context-independent spells and have not-fast-enough aggro decks, along with conventional cycles of fixing and inexperienced drafters, then I can see 4/5 color "good stuff" decks being a problem. There are any number of ways to have your format not be just "good stuff" decks, but the wheels are slow to turn unfortunately.

This approach (20 fetchlands) actually combats the "multicolor good stuff" dynamic because now aggro decks take more lands. There are still multicolor decks (which are a blast to play I might add), but you introduce really strong two- and three-color aggro decks.
 

CML

Contributor
thanks for the advice on pop, seems unfun to just get people for 10. 'you mean i shouldn't've drafted any of the 80 non-basics?'

of course 4c midrange of the standard / modern variety isn't possible in cube -- even if you ran ~1/3 lands in a small cube including doubled fetches, which not even i do, the other decks would also want these lands -- but your phrase 'conventional cycles of fixing' reminded me of something. i assume you mean slower fixing that's more control-oriented, which brought to mind signets and bouncelands, which were the defining cards of RGD, which was the only limited format of all time where you could play '5c good stuff.'

i dunno if you've ever drafted RGD (the real RGD i mean) but it's just astonishingly good -- a pinnacle of design within a pinnacle of design. the drafting part is challenging; there are strong rares, but they are strong rares of the old school that give you several turns to answer them before they kill you; the power-curve is flat (though skewed towards multicolor, and compulsive research is one of the best draft commons ever). the deckbuilding process is not easy, as you must have enough playables and enough fixing too. i have seen everything from 5cc to RUG to RG auras. archetypes exist not so much to constrain (as in GTC) as to direct -- there are so many that you're always doing something a little different, anyway. then the games -- oh god. they unfold with the leisurely, expansive pace of a good victorian novel. the play is very difficult. the breadth of the pace allows for a lot of decisions. the huge density of cards that say 'draw a card' (i include bouncelands) flattens variance. i must have done 30 or so of these drafts and i feel like i've only beheld the iceberg's tip. i have not even come close to mastering it. there are things i have not seen yet and hope to see. each RGD draft hints at depths unexplored, and whenever i play it i remember why it's so much better than any limited format, any other type of magic (legacy notwithstanding), ever.

back on point: everyone loves RGD. RGD had 5-color mid-range decks. they were challenging and fun to draft and play with and against. conventional cube is more like limited than constructed (i'd argue that what you and i are doing pulls it strongly towards the constructed end). so why are conventional cube designers afraid of 'good-stuff' decks? if they're really afraid, why do they include colorless bombs? why are all their decks more or less the same? i suspect the answer has to do with intellectual dishonesty and bad taste, which i'm coming to realize are the same thing.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
By conventional cycles of fixing I meant any card that taps for two colors of mana (e.g. ABU, Shocklands), as opposed to Fetchlands. E.g. a 2-color aggro deck wants 1 shockland, but 7 different fetchlands.

I have not played RGD unfortunately, but have watched many drafts. It looks pretty spectacular.
 

CML

Contributor
ah, those. yeah, fetches are extremely powerful. i remember reading your analysis of fetch v. shock w/r/t number of colors now, it's brilliant and i strongly agree.

someone once wrote that flooded strand and friends were the best cards printed since mana drain. hard to disagree with that, either. (he also argued ZEN fetches, JTMS were about as powerful as each other).

the reason i got confused is that signets and bouncelands and mana-rocks are for mid-range and control decks only (the conventional cube hypocrisy is too obvious to point out). an interesting POV comes from LSV, who said that signets, had they been reprinted, would have been bad for standard; control would have been too strong. i think he's right. if you played ISD-RTR or ISD-GTC standard and imagined it with control decks that didn't stumble out of the gate and didn't have awkward mana and always had the 'farseek,' it would be (a) awful (b) similar to the conventional cube games
 

Dom Harvey

Contributor
idk about that. The problem pre-GTC was that there was literally no good removal. It was virtually impossible for a U/X control deck to permanently deal with a Hellrider/Aristocrat/whatever. For as much bad press as Revelation and Thragtusk, I don't think a deck containing either of them has been the best deck at any point in the last ~6 months or so.

Personally, I love what Signets do for Cube; and, as much as it pains me to say it, I'm not sure that the bouncelands are even that good any more. The problem comes when people assign their fixing slots to Signets/bouncelands and thereby exclude the fixing that aggro needs; they then see aggro fail in their Cube and conclude that Signets/bouncelands are OP, when in fact everyone gains if there's enough quality fixing to go around: aggro decks get to play their spells, and control decks get more choice over what spells they can play. The usual worry people voice is that this leads to control having too much fixing available, but in my experience the polychromatic control decks are great fun to play both with and against and a good aggro deck can easily go toe-to-toe with them.
 

CML

Contributor
hey dom! thanks for the reply.

(feel free to skip the big brick of text below if you just want to talk about cube)

re. pre-GTC standard your statements are inaccurate. here's why. bant was maybe not ever the best deck but it was quite popular for awhile; reid duke's RTR bant control won the scg invitational in december; he even wrote an article where he said he liked the deck and it was powerful. there was good removal. supreme verdict was the nuts, but the spot removal was ok too. azorius charm was a thing. the metagame even shifted away from mono-red for awhile due to the prevalence of UWR featuring pillars, spears, and sideboard staticasters. aggro mirrors were primarily decided by the amount of removal you drew (giving red an enormous advantage). all mid-range played bonfire and/or mortars, and jund midrange supplemented that with spot removal like price or decay or spear. i've often said that the burn was so inefficient (spear? arc lightning?) that it served only a defensive purpose; in other words, it was a control element in every deck, even aggro or mid-range. the perception that removal was bad came from creatures that generated an enormous advantage just by hitting play -- tusk, big angel, et al. -- but hellrider and aristocrat weren't in that category; they won games for different reasons. the control decks usually lost because they stumbled out of the gate -- against a good mono-red or Rb or Br Zombies or GW draw, they needed to durdle, wrath, durdle a little more, and then seal the game with a revelation. needless to say, signets would have helped enormously with this plan. the bant hands with farseek were much tougher for my aggro decks to beat than those without. i have no way to prove this, but i'd guess that it mattered more than even the die roll. then think about this: what if all the other colors got to play farseek too -- as many farseeks as they wanted? what if you didn't have to play green to fire off a revelation for 4 on turn 5? mana was so important for those decks, and in GTC standard it continued to be so, such that a popular and effective sideboard plan for GWB reanimator vs. control was to bring in 4 acidic slimes and kill their lands. anyway, i do like that this forum doesn't have as many competitive-constructed players as the people i hang out with in seattle -- it's different; it provides context; it gives me insight into what both designers and players are trying to do with mtg (as it's easy to forget people who play even FNM are a tiny sliver of the mtg market, let alone ptq grinders) -- but nah, signets would have been very good.

(continue reading here)

next point: however! signets were not all that great in RGD; you'd take a bounceland over a signet almost always. i guess their power scales to the power of the format? who knows. i'd still say it's worth considering the possibility that they are very very good in cube. don't get me wrong, i love signets too, but do try your cube without them once?

i agree bouncelands are pretty bad in cube. in RGD the extra card and fixing justify the loss of tempo. in cube this is rarely the case. i also like land destruction and i felt dirty getting people to pick a rot farm when it was just gonna get slimed or something. this would be an acceptable risk if it wasn't so game-ruining and if the upside of bouncelands was as great as it was in RGD, but nah.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I always feel really weird when people complain about there not being land destruction in a cube that runs bouncelands. Granted, I would rather have the land destruction than the bouncelands, but the risk/reward there feels all off. I mean, in Pauper I boomeranged a Turn 2 bounceland and can only imagine what that would feel like on the other end. One great thing about Modern Magic design is that they've really started to understand this emotional risk/reward and the fact that not all interaction is fun interaction. Old-timers may complain about the changes, but Magic design has definitely had a much greater emphasis (in my opinion) on cards that feel good to play with and against.

I'm also a big fan of Chris' suggestion of just trying different configurations. It's easy to get stuck on a weird local maximum, which is I think a problem in a lot of cube design. People see some variables as fixed (let your imagination fill in the blanks here) and come to really awkward conclusions. Sometimes you just need to shake things up very dramatically. This is actually something they do in statistical algorithms a lot. You do random restarts (jump to somewhere completely new in your parameter space) and see how the conclusions change. Often what you consider to be an undisputed truth is just the product of some unfortunate starting assumptions.
 

CML

Contributor
jason -- for nwo sets, i agree that in constructed the 'emotional risk/reward' is managed very well. in limited there are bombs (it is thought that kids love bombs more than they hate bad games where they show up on either side of the table) so it's all fubar. where would this leave cube? it is what we make of it.

configs: when i brew in competitive constructed, what annoys me the most is when people describe the effect a card has on their deck without having tried alternatives or taken it out. what annoys me the second-most is when people argue to cut something that clearly belongs for well-reasoned arguments a,b,c that are both correct and irrelevant. that these two annoyances are at odds with each other is weird and interesting and one of the tensions that makes mtg fun.
 

CML

Contributor
as one of zac's most stentorian internet critics i should say that i've met zac in person and he's smart and engaging and kind. my best guess is that he writes these absurd lies, hates it when people point them out, cultivates sycophants, etc. because he's insecure and miserable, and having played magic and lived in new york i find that easy to empathize with. it is a terrible waste, though, and he will not listen to people that point out these obvious truths
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
more lies on the mothership:

"The thing is, a lot of gold environment trend toward "good-stuff" decks that just aren't very fun to play."

seems like zac can't stop bullshitting, even after he quit wizards to focus on his own bullshit instead of someone else's.

source: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/245b

Thanks for the link Chris. I'm always looking for things like this as article fodder. Do you have a storehouse of statements that you find uh... objectionable?
 

CML

Contributor
i've been collecting quotes about wizards' general hypocrisy for like the last five months and i have yet to organize them into any kind of coherent thesis. for cube and limited your best bets are

zac's above platitude re dgm
http://www.twitch.tv/magicprotour/b/330393278 (jump to like 1:37:00 if you want to hate the world)
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/tpc12/intro_to_cube

there aren't many of these (wizards is as quiet about their cube as rochester is about antoinette!) but jesus the video is a doozy.

finally i'll share a personal fave: “The problem with Cube is that we've got a lot of different ability levels, a lot of different income levels, a lot of different familiarity levels.” (from some rando i wrote about in my casual-play article: http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10597)
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
finally i'll share a personal fave: “The problem with Cube is that we've got a lot of different ability levels, a lot of different income levels, a lot of different familiarity levels.” (from some rando i wrote about in my casual-play article: http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10597)

Hey Chris, you should write more! That article was really entertaining, and it's nice to see an author who is so honest and enthusiastic about what they're writing about. Too many articles are of the "clock in, clock out" variety, and I found it very refreshing.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Also, is there some sort of database you can pull all these analogies from? I feel severely under-equipped.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Really enjoyed that article too, Chris. Not many writers do the long form article thing well, but I thought the mix of storytelling and theory was very well done. We probably all know people like the one in your story.

And ya, all of the oblique references make me feel like I'm missing something. Maybe I just need to get outside more..?
 

CML

Contributor
jason: books (the internet too) and other people who like 'em. eric: quite the opposite of going outside, unless you also like reading on the beach with mai tai in hand!

thanks for the kind words though! i'm glad you guys liked the article. there's ~30 more on tcgplayer and 2 on scg and a whole welter of juvenilia a google search away. (if you thought i hated corporate cynicism and non-thinking in mtg, you didn't know me when i was in college. which is not a bad thing.)

i haven't written for publication in around 4 months cuz i'm working on a big memoir and tryna balance my life and cube, but i'll keep you guys posted on that too. funny, i used to play poker and on 2p2 (the biggest forum / community in the world) my posts would be even shorter and more slipshod than they are here. when i wrote a 2,000th post that had paragraphs and punctuation and stuff, one guy commented that he 'was surprised i knew all those big words.'

watch the vid though. hagon's 'questions' are (i can't resist this easy cheapo) as soft as a fox news anchor interviewing romney, and mccall's answers are at least as disingenuous
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
One thing I remember thinking about Hagon when I first entered Magic is that he makes it sound like he thinks winning Magic tournaments 12 years ago is the most important thing you can achieve as a human being.
 

CML

Contributor
mike flores comes to mind

hey, good thing one of our other good local writers penned hatchet jobs on both of them:

http://killingagoldfish.blogspot.com/2011/07/book-grinder-brad-nelson-story-by-rich.html
http://killingagoldfish.blogspot.com/2012/11/review-official-misers-guide-omg-by.html

the sad thing is that they're not even earning much money or respect by cultivating these shit-eating and dishonest personae. it reminds me of a joke i made about the east coast: 'new york is awful, but dc is worse. at least in new york they work for money'
 
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