Magic and Immersion

Depending on what numbers you use, the average Magic player is between 16-24 years old.  I will have given 19 years of my life to this game in one way or another in August of this year.  That means that I've been playing the game longer than a huge portion of its audience has even been alive.  When I look back, there is nothing I would change about the role the game has played in my life.

Darwin Kastle recently shared his own Magic story and I want to continue to explore mine.  But my story doesn't involve any Pro Tour Top 8s or GP near misses, and there are barely any adventures involving beautiful women throwing themselves at me.  So instead of boring you by using an Amis-style objective correlative to build a narrative, I thought it better to tackle the subject more seriously.

Why in the name of all that is good and decent in the world have I spent so much time on a hobby that in case of a zombie apocalypse will only leave me with a rather large pile of kindling?

I would guess, three days of continuous burning.

Magic's Hole Cards: 5 Ways to Improve Video Coverage

If you're anything like me, you spent the weekend of Pro Tour: Dark Ascension ravenously devouring the delicious non-stop coverage that made you feel almost as if you were two thousand miles away and not on a beach.  And if you were, you might be wondering, why does this guy think the coverage needs improvement, because it was actually that awesome.

Almost this awesome.

Well, there might be one thing better than watching fantastic video of your favorite players making the wrong blocks that you would never in a million years have made on a twitchy Internet feed.  That would be watching on glorious High Definition delivered straight out of your over-priced 3-D television.

Imagine this, but in your living room.  In three dimensions.

Any more dimensions would be too awesome to comprehend/

And that could happen.  But it won't.  Not yet.  As Patrick Chapin discussed during a recent SCG Open event, Magic won't make it back to ESPN until there is a way for Joe Plumber, Joe Six-Pack, and the seven other people who would have voted for Sarah Palin to quickly get into the game and devise drinking competitions and side-bets.

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions for how to make a good thing even better.  None of them involve laser beams, unfortunately.

Because you know you wanted it.

Preview Article #2--Home-Brew: Magic: The Gathering Deckbuilding with Ben Snyder

Ed. Note: You can expect various Magic: The Gathering articles to appear on the website as a part of our section on Gaming.  With the "release of the new set", Ben is going to be discussing a variety of "rogue deckbuilding options" and "high value plays" as well as a number of other things that we don't entirely understand.  Enjoy.

“It’s the return of the—aw wait”

Yeah, I went there.  It’s been a long time.  More than 5 years since my last SCG article; more than 5 years since you last read about a deck I designed on Magicthegathering.com.  (Am I still proud that an article of mine still shows up as the first result in seven different Google searches?  Yes...yes I am---try "team constructed magic" for example)  I haven’t taken a hiatus from Magic so much as I lumbered about in the degenerate world of corporate retail sales management.  I still play the game, never stopped, and I still read the articles, but I didn’t have time to do what I do best: designing decks. 

So for those of you who don’t know my history, why don’t we do the David Copperfield thing for a moment?  I started playing Magic in 1993 when my cousin brought home two starter decks and some boosters from his annual trip to Ohio.  That’s right, I’ve been playing longer than anyone who is reading this article (except for an extremely short list of people who probably aren’t reading this, I’m one of the few still actively playing who can claim to have played since the literal beginning of the game).