Magic Arena has really gotten me back into Magic.
So much so that I started thinking about how far I wanted to take this. I already had OBS set up on my system and had it linked to my Twitch channel. Joshie Trash Talker was willing to do a podcast with me. So, I could jump back into the Magic life with both feet.
I started out doing some streaming and I noticed a few things about myself when I was streaming.
We all know I'm not great at Magic. Well, I'm even more "not great" when I'm trying to be entertaining and when I am too aware of the camera. And, I can get pretty salty. Which isn't the image I want to project to the world while I'm streaming. Or ever.
Also, as an introvert, who seems to be getting more introverted as I get older, being "on" for the camera was exhausting.
The last thing that happened was that Facebook popped up a memory where another writer described the appeal of my writing. The continuing adventures of me and my friends trying to qualify for the pro tour. The journey, the striving, the hilarious personalities. The author even brought up the fact that when I was in Spain, and didn't have that, but was still writing, the feedback was brutal. People just wanted decklists.
So, that moment of my writing career will have to stay in that moment and not try to recreate it from my basement with a digital version of Magic.
Also, last year I did November National Novel writing month aka NaNoWriMo.
https://www.nanowrimo.org/
You don't try and write quality you try to write 50,000 words. I am very prolific and I could only hit 25,000. But there were parts of that 25k that I was really proud of. There is some really good stuff there.
I continue to wrok on my fantasy novel and I think that is the right direction to take. Trying to go backwards and recapture former glory is probably not the right path forward.
Which isn't to say I'm not writing about Magic anymore, it just means if you're wondering why there isn't a lot more Magic content up here, that's why.
I'm sure that people were jerks the last time you embraced Magic writing, but I think "people just wanted decklists" is an unfair encapsulation of that criticism..
ReplyDeleteMy sense from when you were writing a few years back was that (a) the salt content was very high, (b) you put yourself at an impossible competitive disadvantage by trying to play mono color in Alara Block Standard (monocolor was as unplayable as it got short of a literal ban on playing it) when you could've just played Jund, which fit your playstyle perfectly, and (c) you ostensibly were trying to win for real, but your other choices made that impossible.
So, as I recall as a fan of yours dating back to the 90s, it was frustrating to read your stuff around that time. If you were serious about trying to win at tournaments in the 2010s, you needed to be willing to "netdeck" and accept the "rules" of the format you were playing in. Too often, it seemed like you thought you could just brew up a competitive deck on the back of an envelope and beat tuned tier 1 strategies, which led to the infamous "Abyssal Specter in Legacy when Emrakul/Show & Tell was a thing."
I thought the articles about trying to make Secret Force work in Legacy were pretty fun, but even then, you were severely handicapping yourself by playing an underpowered strategy. That's totally fine if the point were what I took from it (let's try to make a fun underpowered strategy work in local tournaments) but it's not so worthwhile as anything else.
In the 90s, you were a somewhat salty but lovable critic of Wizards. You basically said, "Hey! Guys! There's this fun way to play--midrange--that you've basically legislated out of existence with the cards you're printing, and it sucks!" You were 100% right. You were so right, in fact, that Wizards basically remade the game so that midrange is always good, but you need to be willing to play the midrange strategies that are well positioned in the format.
Trying to make decks work that don't just copy everyone else's deck is like 85% of the fun of Magic for me. Anyone can netdeck and get a deck that'll do just as well as everyone else running that deck, and then you're down to the like few percent of how well you can play it or microtune it.
DeleteIt's a hell of a lot more fun to make your own deck, and see if you can beat the field. At the very least, people won't have sideboard options for your wonky but awesome natural order verdant force combo when they're all concentrated on beating Necropotence or whatever the latest big net deck is.
Are you streaming on Twitch? What platform?
ReplyDeletedude,your writing is fantastic, write more about magic not less. Just send it to my inbox if nothing else. I need more Wakefield MTG thoughts. Trying to win with fatties is hard now days.. even harder without you providing your incites regularly.
ReplyDeleteI stumbled onto your name again when trawling my old rec.games.trading-cards.magic posts. Your writing and play style really inspired me. I just recently got back into Magic after a 15 year hiatus, and thus was looking back through what life was like in another age. Glad to hear you're still writing, regardless of the subject.
ReplyDeleteI'm with indybearsfan - you should be writing more not less. You have a funny/everyman quality to your writing ( maybe more of a New Englander/Vermonter quality) that has yet to be duplicated. Try dipping your toe in the water again.... it might not be as cold as you think.
ReplyDelete