#19 - Identity in Magic
Featuring a look at sideboard guides, an explanation of mouse shoulder, and a kid.
What did I miss?
A week and a half has passed since my last post and this feels like one of those Civil War letters to a loved one back home. I survived dysentery (food poisoning in Belize) and a munitions failure (computer imploded) and forged currency (Foundations resealed box) and all of it still feels small.
But nothing is worse than having to explain to you, dear reader, my battle with Mouse Shoulder. The twee-est of injuries, there is no Rataouille-esque rodent controlling me as I type (would be dope tbh) but rather a repetitive stress injury that makes my shoulder feel like it’s on fire because I’ve engaged in years of:
having the posture of a thing about to lurch out from the shadows
using a desk that doesn’t remotely support a person of my size
doing absolutely no work on my core, neck, back, arm, or pretty much any other load-bearing part of my body
Because I neglected everything during the move, it’s back with a vengeance. I type for 10 minutes, need a twenty-minute break where I can’t use my right arm, and then I hopefully type for 10 more. So that’s why it’s Thursday and you’re just getting a column.
I’ve got a ton to get to so that’s it for small talk: a list of my maladies and misfortunes.
In this issue:
Universes Within-ish
I’ve grown somewhat conditioned to check the weekly updates on the Mothership once a week and largely wait to see what breaks through the din of social. If this relatively large announcement slipped under past your radar, I can’t blame you, as it was it’s own post:
Even as a soon-to-be-retired seller, I would have probably scrolled past it. The word “test” alone gives me agita. The news, however, is big: Universes Within is dead.
God Save Universes Within.
Mechanically unique cards printed into Secret Lairs have long been controversial. In an era of print-to-demand? Tolerable. In the new hype drop model? Probably just cruel. Since The List was exiled as a place for these cards, there is no way for cards like, say, Storm, to make it into circulation outside of her Lair or an actual, factual reprint.
So she’s $50.
The solution is… something. Many reasonable people can’t sit in queue for hours on a weekday morning, so instead, you can go stand in line at your Local Game Store. Yes, instead of releasing the full allotment online, some will be parcelled out at retail locations around the U.S.
The Wins:
A dual track model means that both IRL and online folks have a chance at these most coveted drops.
Stores get people in the door and we love that for them.
The Ls:
Only WPN stores, so your local ‘lil guy is fighting that much harder to hang in there. No local WPN store? Tough titties.
Only available in non-foil. Sorry, bling kings.
Supply doesn’t seem to increase in this model, just get pushed around.
That last point is important. My source shows around 2,000-3,000 of each Lair printed in the U.S., depending on perceived popularity, so we’re still not looking at THAT many copies out there.
If you were hoping this was the solution to “scalpers,” this is but a scratch.
Flip, Flip! Game Over
Congratulations to @chaosdruid for pulling the single greatest misprint. Wait for it:
I kept waiting to see if it was some sort of lowercase m magic trick. It, alas, was not. Modern set printing has struggled mightily with DFCs, even making a mea culpa necessary in the MH3 “Collecting” article because so many DFC faces and backs were swapped.
Anyway, I’m sure this will sell in the neighborhood of 5K if they’re not printed on too many sheets. An infinitely cool card for people who collect the sort of thing. But a reply really hit me:
Talk about a nightmare to draft, right? I don’t even know how you execute this1, other than the use of clear sleeves. Since they don’t correspond to a front card, it functionally doesn’t matter if they see the back, right? Someone build this before Chicago. I’ll buy ya a Malort.
Above Board
As a kid, I remember seeing my first Nintendo Power guide to Zelda. It had a freaking map, something my buddy Arthur and I had only cobbled together roughly on loose sheets of paper. Instead of trying to walk through walls all day—not the most entertaining activity as a first grader—we suddenly knew the passages. It was beautiful. It was worth the $3 or whatever we had in change.
When I started in Magic, there was nothing even close to the equivalent. At JSS Worlds, I grabbed a deck I’d never played from a kid I knew from IRC on the morning of the tournament. My sideboard decisions were entirely vibes-based.
Now, for the price of an Artisinal Burger™, you can confidently understand the way any deck functions, its matchups, and how to sideboard against most decks you’ll face. Making a primer is never a revenue generator: you’re hoping, at best, to recoup some of your hours of testing.
So when Guilherme Merjam, AKA Rastaf, hit send on a tweet promoting his Boros primer January 15th, he couldn’t reasonably have expected what happened next.
After all, it was only $15, a little more than his usual rate since his last guide put four players in the Top 8 of an RC.
Almost 150,000 people soon saw some screenshots of said guide and got a look into Theo Jung’s media diet. Who subs to the New Yorker Mag anymore, Theo? /s
From his thread, since I know some of you are no longer X users:
If I'm paying $15 for a single Magic article, I'd expect more than "water is wet" level insights such as "Orim's Chant is good against storm" and "Thraben Charm can exile graveyards".
It's also written in barely legible English and doesn't have any advice on keep/mull ranges for any matchups either. Lots of vague descriptions like "I go fast in this MU" or "This MU is bad"
The person writing this is Brazilian and may not have English be their first language but I don't really care. If you're going to write for an audience that speaks English and charge money for it, then it better have at least some semblance of polish.
I don't have an issue with paid SB guides/content. I think it's a good way for grinders to monetize their time. But if you are going to do this, PLEASE make sure you are producing something of proportional value to the price. Too many landmines these days
Until this point, I didn’t know there was an epidemic of scammy sideboard guides. I’m not convinced there is. But let’s talk about how to sus out if one is bad:
Consider the source. Has the player produced quality work product in the past? Would you trust conclusions they made that would seem counterintuitive? Is this someone that just got hot with a list and doesn’t have much insight into strategic, high-level play?
Ask the creator questions in advance. If keep/mull ranges are important to you, ask if they’re included. Is matchup X in there? Do you care about flex slots? Communication is the surest safeguard against disappointment.
Ask for a sample page. I think this should be normalized, frankly, because it gives you a feel for how completionist they are and if you think it’s a good fit for you. Not everyone is going to write a Dom Harvey encyclopedia.
When possible, ask for a previous primer they’ve created. Often, these are no longer relevant and should be free. It’ll give you a great idea of their style.
I don’t want to focus too much on Theo, but 245 people agreed with something I think is fundamentally #$^%ing wrong, so I’m going to address it
people are not paying you for your time spent playing, they're paying you for this specific piece of content
I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what you’re paying for.
When I’m brought in to consult on a project, I’m being paid for the thousands of hours that I’ve spent preparing to solve their problem. They're paying for the years I spent freelancing for nothing to get the experience. They’re paying for Adobe Suite and my Dropbox. They’re paying for every refinement I’ve made to my work flow and stupid mistake I’ve made that cost me money it won’t cost them.
If you want quality output, you need quality input. This means grinding games, trying out cards and sideboard strategies, and every league entered comes with an actual cost to do this. We can’t disregard the amount of time it takes to get to quality input.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many FREE sideboard guides and cheat sheets in my life. Want to learn Yawg? How about Breach? Blue Belcher? Nammersquats has your UB Frog guide, complete with Theo shout out.
What does any of this mean?
We may have reached a point where information disseminates so quickly that it’s pointless to worry too much about how you’re going to monetize your sideboard decisions. We’re also firmly in the age of attention, where having eyeballs on you and what you create outweighs the quality of said creations. If your guide drops in a forest and doesn’t make a sound, etc.
On the flip side, creation comes at a real cost. Magic is one of the only spaces I’ve been in where I consistently see people toss away time without regard for money. Worse than stand-up comedy, a “job” people often do for beer.
If someone makes something you like, toss them some cash. I promise you, it makes a difference.
55 FLUBS DECKS 55 FRIES
Okay, a lot to take in here. Let’s start with “joyful cEDH tournament,” which is a combination of words up there with Jumbo Shrimp and Magic investment. We’ll get the “joyful” in a second, because the cEDH tournament has a wild restriction: FLUBS ONLY.
OnlyFlubs. You get it.
A bunch of people are signing up for a Flubs carnival mirror match. How do you metagame for this? There are only so many theoretical Flubs builds out there. MD Ankh of Mishra? Is there a Tunnel Ignus within 40 miles? Rog Thras only without Rog or Thras? Yikes!
After you get past the conceit of the whole event, you have to imagine the sound of a tattoo gun buzzing over what I presume is a playlist of I Think You Should Leave Episodes? I am more interested in this than I should be.
I guess the lynchpin to the whole day is what “& more” constitutes. Pizza? Awesome. Indoor vaping? Probably. A payout in meme coin? Inevitable.
I don’t know. Maybe I drive an hour to do this. Maybe I don’t. But I’m saluting you, very dude-coded, bizarre tournament. To you and yours!
Aether Revolting
Admittedly, I’ve been a little light on processing spoiler season and will have some thoughts on limited as I test for the PTQ in Chicago next month. At this point, we’ve seen a lot of Aetherdrift. It looks mechanically fast, difficult to track, and like somewhat of a banger. But my thoughts aren’t about gameplay yet.
We’ve lost the thread.
Someday, somewhere—anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.
-Pablo Neruda
I’m not particularly invested in a specific visual identity of Magic: the Gathering cards. What I am growing tired of is the giant wheel of derivative card styles we keep spinning for each set.
*wheel clicking noises*
Looks like we’re doing a Pokemon and Pop Surrealism this time. Great job, everyone.
For much of the game’s history, this boundary-pushing art was isolated to Secret Lairs. Little five song EPs where they could noodle and occasionally cook. It worked for most of the player base? I don’t care for the phrase “no one asked for this” because, invariably, someone #$%^ing did, but for the better part of 25 years, we had fairly “traditional” art.
Then came Kaladesh Avishkar Inventions and Amonkhet Invocations, the first of the “cover songs” that were thrown in. We’re still in genre, with only the frames getting big tweaks. More Fiona Apple doing “I Want You” than T-Pain covering “War Pigs.”
(Editor’s note: they’re both excellent ways to spend seven minutes of your life)
Fast forward to today, where you can open everything from Japan Showcase Fracture Foil to Borderless Graffiti Giant First Place Foils. They’ve even added someone tagging over God because, hey, gotta pastiche.
It all feels so unnecessary considering that fantasy has never been more culturally relevant. Instead of clawing through the bottom of the barrel for more and more unique premium treatments, why not do anything to reimbrace the visual and story elements of the game?
Oh, because we’ve gone full Looney Tunes on the latter, also?
The last year has been the Wild Wild West, 20th Century Horror, and now Street Racing. It’s full-on bad Kurt Russel roles at this point. I can’t wait for Universe’s Beyond: 3000 Miles to Graceland.
Games Workshop learned the value of doubling down on story revitalizing 40K, investing in writers, and using the department as a lifeline. Hasbro seems intent on creating as many Monopoly boards as possible.
At the end of the day, I’m not yearning for a Magic from a bygone era. I’m kindly asking that the current era figure out what its thing is.
Odds and Endstep
I, Jake Browne, hereby give you permission to throw away whatever basic lands you want.
I’ve never seen it any other way.
Never having known my dead dad, sometimes Dads Doing Dad Things hit me square in the gut, right above the ribs, and destroy me. “Where to buy son cards” is the start. The story is the tough part.
OP suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving Our Country and has been fighting with The Country for SSDI benefits for a while based on his post history. The TBI developed into Parkinsons, dementia, and now he’s being placed into hospice care.
At 45 years old.
Reddit is not a perfect place, but sometimes people come together to do some pretty damn beautiful things:
I wish I could send a letter to that kid.
“You’re going to think these are worth money. They are. But they are not, and will never be, worth the memories you’ll have 30 years from now, looking back at them and thinking about your dad.”
Dads are complicated. I can’t imagine what it’s like living with someone with a TBI. Dementia stole my grandmother away from me. It made her hilarious and frightened and gave her a penchant for eating sauerkraut from a jar standing in the kitchen, laughing as she chased me around, trying to get me to take a bite.
Keep the cards, kid.
Giveaway Update
No new winners, so we trek on. Going to make Saturday’s update a mystery since I haven’t done inventory in a while, but here’s an MTGO code for 120 Play Points: CCGW-JGVT-X9JT-UX3Z-ICRG
Because my shoulder hurts and this week was a little light, here’s a bonus code that can only redeemed by a different account: CCGW-OP4B-ZLKL-MTHZ-JJTO
If I find out you tried to redeem both, I’m coming to your house and hitting unsubscribe for you.
Saturday is going to be a big one. I’m going to unveil a Big Project that’s been cooking for a week and is part of the reason my shoulder is so shot. I’ve also been doing a deep dive on the VML that you’re going to want to read.
Thank you to the following paid subscribers: Casey, John Dale, Will, Alex, Connor, Joshua, Denis, Kyle, Ben, and Patrick.
Passing the turn,
Jake
Bonus Seymour of the Week
Maybe one of those Scryfall-connected printers? But it seems awful to get a RANDOM back.
We would love to have you at OnlyFlubs!
We wanna bring the relaxed goofiness, the levity!, back to The Gathering. Flubs is our conduit. It'll be a very silly tournament with actually real prizes. And yeah: tattoos! I Think You Should Leave! Mini-games!
The world is what the fool will abide.
Ken, I'll be honest, I spent most of the night trying to figure out Flubs Stax and came to the conclusion might not be the intended audience for the cEDH portion. Everything else seems 100% up my alley.