The Year I Quit
Featuring a look at the cards that made the man, Magic's Burning Man problem, and SINCERITY.
Hi. I missed you.
I have the drafts folder to prove it.
I wanted to tell you about my vacation and new job and the death of my father-in-law (who was my father in every sense of the word) and never pressed send because none of it was about Magic. That’s what we’re here for, right?
I X.com’d this back in May:
The hardest part of walking away from Magic has been the silence. People just... stopped talking to me.
It's okay! I'm fine! But, advice:
Shoot someone a text that you used to play with. Catch up. Get a coffee or a beer. I promise you that your friendship ran deeper than cards.I used to do the same thing! Someone quit? Well, I wouldn't want to remind them of Magic. How uncouth.
I promise you, they don't care.
They say that a fear of heights isn't about falling, but the worry you might jump.
I think a lot of us avoid The Quitters because they jumped.
To be fair, I didn’t want anyone to reach out. I was drinking from a firehose at the new job and Barry was dying and I barely had time for myself.
If we’re being honest, I missed the attention. I was still in the car.
I’d like to think things have changed. That my relationship to Magic is veering back into “healthy.” But then I get into a fight with the stranger on the internet and have to question everything. I have too many hard seltzers and burn a Mox Diamond.
I’m still a fucking mess and that mess has a week off of work and wants to talk about Magic with you.
Thoughts On Setting Yourself On Fire
First, don’t.
Even as the King of Hubrisville, I wouldn’t compare myself to a Buddhist monk self-immolating in protest. Could you even imagine if that’s what I came back to say? “Look at this brave thing and how Very Important it was.”
Background for those uninitiated: Hasbro owed me six collector boxes of FIN when they were $1000+ each. I think 2k? Anyway, I was stuck in customer service hell so I started burning RL cards until they started answering my emails.
We live in an attention economy and doing stupid shit loudly is how you generate the most attention. The dumber the shit, the more eyeballs. Good things? Well, nothing to gawk at there. For every, “please, donate to charity” I received, I will show you a post trying to do just that that received 1/5th of the views and did nothing to move the needle.
I did get my boxes shortly thereafter. The program is still a nightmare. Godspeed, LSV.
Final Arena Direct numbers on the year: 305 wins, 220 losses (58.1% win rate).
Worst: Neon Dynasty being responsible for a miserable and overall record devastating 29.2%
Best: Tarkir Dargonboys for a nice 40-18 (69%) which I needed after testing my ass off for the Denver event and then flaming out.
Magic Doomerism
I have never been to Burning Man but for many years I lived a very Burning Man lifestyle. Drugs and art and Freedom Day levels of self-expression and communal culture. Life existed there because people made it with strangers (sometimes literally) without hierarchy or ego for decades. In the UU church, we talked about the 7th principle a lot: Respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence of Which We Are a Part.
That was Burning Man.
Was.
In the late aughts and early ‘10s, tech money found the Black Rock Desert. Glamping and influencers and private chefs were the new chic. A class divide grew. Gone was the “try hard and you’re doing it wrong” aesthetic because millionaires were essentially paying for the experience of being an outsider. They weren’t making. They were consuming.
I feel like that’s where we’re getting with Commander.
To be clear, I don’t like Commander. I do like sitting at a table with three (possibly two or four) friends. Sitting at a table with two to four strangers for a leisure activity seems like a bad version of group therapy.
At BM1, a core principle is radical self-reliance. Yes, you’re a part of a community. No, you should not be a burden to said community. You bring water because you need to drink. You share LSD because you’re cool. It’s a cultural norm rather than an enforcement mechanism. It’s their Rule 0.
But adults are notoriously bad at self-regulation at scale. Enter: incentives, strangers, big stacks of cash, and, eventually, catastrophic failure. It’s hard for trust-based, non-competitive systems to exist in a competitive, status-driven world.
Sure, healthy games of Commander exist in the same way that smaller, experimental gatherings exist: in the walled gardens of friendship or cEDH (which is honest optimization). All of this could probably work itself out. But our problem is Hasbro.
It’s the tech money.
What happens when you release so many pre-cons the “cons” should stand for “constantly”? Discovery erodes. Decks are pre-solved. Expression becomes a commodity for sale.
The gas on the tire fire is the accelerated release schedule and luxury toilet paper soft banlist. Hasbro prints new engines that rip, power creep out your existing cards annually, and nothing ever rotates. Instead of being accountable at all, the entire cost is borne by you and your playgroup.
They release the dam. You figure out flood management.2
The more I think about the Brackets system, the more I think it accelerates the fiery end. BM tried to introduce more rules and classification systems once it became clear tech bros weren’t leaving. They both normalize the idea that bad actors are what breaks the system, not capital and institutional abdication. It’s an acknowledgment of cultural damage without interrupting the cash flow that causes it.
What dies isn’t Commander. Burning Man returns in 250 days. MagicCon is coming to a Region Near You. What dies is the middle. The space where people do weird shit that isn’t optimal or profitable or designed for the algo.
What are we left with? Curation of excess at the top and a Starter Pack mass produced for the bottom. Commander becomes competition or consumption. Burning Man became spectacle or souvenir.
Luxury and the leftovers. Power and pre-cons.
And somewhere, off on the side, a few friends still sitting around a kitchen table, making something weird together, hoping the next flood doesn’t reach them.3
In a year of drama, one word stood out:
SLOP
I don’t want to talk about drama but rather the drama metagame. After a one year hiatus, we had a single tweet from one of the forefathers of Magic toxicity:
New players might be unfamiliar with his game. The Librarian of Leng was the original MTG Deuxmoi, screenshotting our moments of failure, running an annual MTG Villains contest, and generally contributing to the weakest parts of callout culture I’ve been critical of in the past. It’s rare that an account is born for the express purpose of what it becomes, but the account’s first tweet really spells out the game plan:
A portent, indeed.
I had a complicated relationship with the account. I’m pretty sure I made the papes once or twice. There’s a lot of value in spreading legitimate information about bad actors like Michael David Lynch (who inexplicably is still producing his show and now grifting his Patreon members and also is doing everything with bad ChatGPT text). But in this tweet, there was absolutely no reason to tie him to The Professor or Brian Kibler:
It looks like he saw his shadow and is gone for another year. Now that everyone lives for the shame of the day, I don’t know that the account really needs to exist. Just one of those things I clocked because this stuff used to matter. As Sperling put it:
From The Drafts
Editor’s Note: The following section was originally written on October 27th, 2025.
Writing on vacation calms my mind. A mind that is obsessive and occasionally screechy like the last four seconds of any 100 Gecs song from their album 1000 Gecs and is regularly overwhelmed by experience.
I was 18 and living in Italy. My agency gave me a bed in an open basement with two of their other models who were older and did underwear ads and “scored” a lot. They were models. I was a stringy kid who spoke no Italian4, would regularly get lost in Milan, and knew how to saute chicken breasts in a mixture of mustard and olive oil because no one bothered to stop me.
I stayed in a lot.
The only books in English I could get my hands on were Great American Classics™. I picked up Walden and grew deeply insufferable. I found Khalil Gibran because both Lisa Simpson and Saul Williams had name checked him. I suspect this did not help my sufferability. I highlighted this:
Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.
I became determined to live a true love story and write even better fiction. None of my short stories ever went anywhere (outside of a failed career as a rapper) but I, for the first time, could see myself as a writer.
We should all think about the times we saw ourselves as something different.
I still play a little Magic. It’s white noise for my brain. I love internet culture and you can say a lot of things about the state of the game, but there’s never been a better time to be terminally online about Magic. I wish I could come back here but work has been keeping me busy.
Here I am, though, on a rainy day in the Philippines while Sam gets a massage, so I’m going to write a series of (incredibly) short stories for you in 90 minutes.
The Man And The 10 5 Cards To Get To Know Him
I’ve seen this trend a lot over the past few days but I’m dying to know why these are your cards, everyone. Figured I’d write about mine.
My mom has, in the 43 years I’ve known her, never left a gas station without buying a lottery ticket. She loves gas station culture: the sound of a fountain Diet Coke effervescing on ice, a roller snack, a scratcher. “You never use a dime because of the ridges” is institutional knowledge.
I think she’s like opening a pack of something random from Standard. But she’d think I lost my mind when I got into pack breaks.
Part of the reason I rail against WhatNot’s predatory platform is because it got my ass. Hanging out for the freebies quickly turns into buying a little something so the sad man in his living room doesn’t forget how to open his garage door one day. The first one I ever did was, hands down, the worst.
$80 for a single card from a Legends booster. I still have it. Near Mint.
I’ve spent ~$2000 on pack/box breaks in my life. It was a good chapter to close.
Card #1: Emerald Butterfly, Legends
We’re on Wadsworth at Game Heroes, the only Denver LGS I’ve ever stepped into, and I’m trying to be ironic by drinking a Mountain Dew. Cory is briskly paraphrasing the 30 minutes of Limited Resources we didn’t get to finish on the drive over. I need him to back up. “Morph stuff starts face down” makes sense(ish) and “There are new cards called ‘Planeswalkers’” is blowing my mind but otherwise, this is a prerelease. In 25 years, sealed deck hasn’t changed.
This set is fucking cool. There’s a lot going on but it still feels on rails since everything is a “wedge” and wedges feel, by nature, prescriptive. I’m focusing on attacking since combat is more forgiving than trying to know what matters. Call me a Murphy Bed salesman because I’m turning rectangles sideways today.
I forget my games as soon as they happen because I don’t really know what anything is. This is pure, dropped-in-a-wasteland-on-the-show-Alone style discovery that we just don’t get anymore. 2-1 gets me some packs and I have a new best friend.
Card #2: Ponyback Brigade, Khans of Tarkir
Gerry Thompson is in an Uber in December of 2016 after a disappointing finish at GP Denver. I don’t know if he’s disappointed. I don’t know who he is.
Neither does my father-in-law, Barry, who drives Uber for the love of the sport: talking to strangers. They’re talking en route to Denver International Airport and Magic comes up. Barry says that I play Magic. Gerry asks my name.
I have a Facebook friend request.
Gerry is asking me what kind of Magic I play. I google him but I don’t really have any context for the words I’m reading. “Good Magic Player” is what I deduce. I’m telling about how I’d like to try Vintage Cube some day but it’s super intimidating. He’s fucking cool and while I’ve met a couple people in my return to Magic, they’re a lot of things but not “fucking cool.”
It’s 2021 and I survived the pandemic with a lot of Arena play. We have draft (finally) and as a certified Tylenol enjoyer, I’m noticing patterns with how the bots rank cards. I’m printing money mining gems in Eldraine by forcing red or green depending on the signals. My play is getting its ass covered by exceptional decks.
I pitch Gerry on letting me write about these bots. Gerry does not have a website or formal distribution channel for written articles about online draft bot content. It’s insane of me to ask.
He refers me to Star City Games with a personal endorsement. My first article about Orzhov in Strixhaven does numbers and I’m an official Magic: the Gathering published author. A stranger changed my life.
Card #3: Killian, Ink Duelist
There’s nothing open. Hell, the hall was empty by the time we got out of there, so we’re running around Chinatown in Philly looking for a sign that doesn’t say “Closed” and alcohol. It’s 11:42PM when we find a little hot pot spot that’s packed with a quasi table in the back.
“We’re just here to drink,” I try to explain. Jace, the other Denver guy I’m here with, is actively hungry and shoots me a look. It’s okay, I tell him telepathically. If we get a table, they’ll give us food.
I’m told there’s no tequila, so I’ll have to celebrate with a big beer and the whiskey my wife thinks I shouldn’t drink. I’ve made my first Pro Tour since the ‘90s.
This whole trip is a fucking lark. Sam’s mom lives in Allentown so she goes ahead to visit while I stay back to play. We did not schedule this trip and she doesn’t particularly want to go home. I wanted to play a PTQ.
ONE is not a popular format. People don’t like infect even when it’s reskinned, games are fast, broken stuff is big. I’ve played a lot of it and even I don’t like it. Certainly not enough to justify a flight across the country. But here we are.
My pool is fine but lacking the big bombs of the format like The Eternal Wanderer or Migloz or Nissa. According to the data, my best card is a white uncommon. But I keep playing a pretty sweet mini-combo that I hadn’t seen previously.
Do you know the card Indoctrination Attendant? A white common. Mostly forgettable.
Well, turns out that a turn three Jace, the Perfected Mind is pretty good with it. Your common play pattern is:
Turn 2: Blocker
Turn 3: Play Jace, tick up to protect him in the event of a hasty threat, going up to 4 loyalty.
Turn 4: Mill opponent for 15 cards and bounce with Attendant.
Turn 5: Mill your opponent for 20 cards, leaving him at one loyalty and your opponent decked.
It won’t dawn on me for years that my roommate at the AirBnB this weekend is literally named Jace.
Card #4: Jace, the Perfected Mind
Today is the day. I have a little clip binder with a fake cover on it and inside is the coolest thing I’ve ever managed to find on the internet. My mom’s working her second job all summer long and has no clue what I’ve been printing on the dot matrix. I get to hang out at the LGS until, well, I call her and tell her they’re packing up for the night. They double as an ISP where we play Diablo on the LAN, so hours don’t apply.
I’m going to blow everyone’s minds when they see that I’ve printed my own porno mag.
In reality, it’s a single picture of a topless Teri Hatcher at the peak of Teri Hatchermania. I’m in a lot of AOL chat rooms that are not made for 8th graders but also probably run by 8th graders. This week, it wasn’t just Monty Python stills and simpsons.gif, though. This week there were certified boobs.
Gentry is laughing at me. He’s in his mid 20s and a mid player but a good guy. He has seen actual pornography and assures me this is not it. I’m quietly mortified, a feeling I’ll get to know a lot over the coming years.
Reinking pulls me into some games of Type II. Only kid, single mom, no clue what porno is, and I can only really afford Sligh. He’s been messing around with a new card that is very good against sorcery-speed removal and wants to test it in my deck. It’s hard to tell if I’m his pet project or he’s just getting in reps, but I look up to him.
He’s in high school, theater kid with perma-rosy cheeks and one of those really high singing voices that were prized in church choirs? He’s also the smartest person I’ve ever met. Different smart. Intuitively understands concepts that I don’t have words for.
He plays with a cool panache. None of it seems particularly confident, but there’s a style and choices being made. He’s beating the shit out of me with this random uncommon from Visions and every end step, he snaps it off the table and forcefully but quietly says, “GET BACK IN THE CAR.”
Decades later, when I write about a metaphorical car, I’ll fail to make the connection between this and that piece, even if it’s one of the most memorable things about my years playing with Reinking.
Card #5: Viashino Stalker
I’m over my allotted time. Maybe I’ll do the remaining five cards some day. Maybe I’ll do a lot of things.
An Update On 100 Thoughts on Limited Magic
I haven’t read it forever. I do recommend it, even if the formatting is bad and there are a number of errors that I’ve decided to cement into it.
The one big thing I want to stress that I’m not sure came through in the original piece is how important mana is in 2025 and moving forward.
Keep track of how much mana you lose.
Decks that fail to spend mana often have a variety of problems: too many lands, not enough mana sinks, bad curves, etc. It’s the best metric I have for how a deck performs.
In standard, spending your mana aggressively can be easily punished. Board wipes reset aggro strategies. Old school blue control decks needed interaction or draw (Capsize, Whispers of the Muse) at the end of the other turn to turn mana into advantage.
In draft, unspent mana usually means you’re going to lose. So I stopped referring to it as “unspent” which has a connotation with savings. It’s lost mana now.
Limited Resources popularized quadrant theory, but I think it’s better as a mana evaluation tool than card at this point. How does your deck spend mana while the game is developing? When you’re behind? When you’re ahead? When you’re at parity?
Let’s talk about that in practice.
In Avatar, a lot of my Arena Direct “teammates”5 fell in love with Barrels of Blasting Jelly. It gives you a rare turn one play, fixes your mana forever, and gives you a five mana valve at any point. Basically great every time other than when you’re behind, but even then, it’s expensive removal or helps you cast something stuck in your hand. An interesting card for sure.
Messenger Hawk provides mana flexibility by generating a Clue token. Being able to spend two mana to draw a card allows different permutations on how you avoid losing mana in a turn. It doesn’t help when you’re developing (1/2 for 2U/B isn’t a great rate) but is great at parity or ahead. It’s functionally a five mana 1/2 flyer that draws a card when you’re behind. Worst. Mulldrifter. Ever.
Lost Days wound up being one of the best commons in the set. Not only do you get to choose when you play it (God bless instants) but it also generates a clue, so you get to untap with more flexibility and knowledge of how your opponent might spend their mana.
A lot of the duds from this set at common were exhaust creatures. There are no restrictions on exhaust (no “on your turn”, no sorcery-speed) but I think it failed because this set put too much of a priority on having mana flexibility as a core part of your spend. Committing 5, 6, or 8 mana to exhaust at common left you vulnerable. The best exhaust creature wasn’t even a creature: Invasion Submersible. When you get the flexibility to Waterbend the cost, it suddenly opens a lot of doors.
All of this to say, think about your mana loss. Think about cards that alter how you spend mana on a given turn and put THOSE in a separate pile. Think about the goals of your deck and categorize them. Let me know how it goes.
Odds and Endstep
Ridiculously happy for Phil over at BANDING for the year that premodern had. Can’t wait for postmodern to take off, which is when Universes Beyond are brought in Universe, translated to Alpha, with punny names featuring the original art. Let me cook.
I did pretty well on my only spec of the year: Accumulate Wisdom. It has since crashed back down to earth. Longtime readers will know my affinity for a random uncommon spec, though, because in the play booster era, they usually receive a single printing. The occasional rare still pops, but there are extended arts and piss Aetherdrift arts and so it can be kind of a wash. Check out the price charts of Tannuk and Weftstalker, both of which are seeing nice growth. If you’re betting on cards, they’re a solid place to toss a sack of quarters and later buylist so you don’t go insane doing fulfilment.
The new gig is pretty great. Incredibly challenging. A lot of 50-60 hour weeks, so there’s just no time to write. There’s no time to read about things to write about. I get a little Arena/MTGO time every week but even Direct runs conflict with our event schedule. I’m happy. But I do miss you.
I won’t be doing this frequently, but there may be a column coming somewhere else. Stay tuned.
Things I’m looking forward to in 2026: the limited championships (but just for funsies), more travel (recommendations go in the comments), beating the Overcooked Switch Universe with Sam, maybe getting another dog, contributing to my 401k like an adult, seeing Sublime with Jakob Nowell as the frontman (Rome, you were very nice and got me incredibly high, but Jakob belongs up there), seeing the Celtics when they come to Denver, Lorwyn Eclipsed, reading more new, funny voices on X (sorry, I can’t bsky, y’all), and roller skating more.
You have one day left in 2025. I hope you do something that makes you see yourself as something different.
Passing the turn,
Jake
BONUS SEYMOURS OF THE YEAR
Yes, I could type “Burning Man” again but BM is more fun.
I realize I have lost the Burning Man thread at this point and will try to be better.
Again, I know that I have blown it here by talking about the flood. I love floods. I love the album Flood. I will try to be better.
To this day, the only phrase I can remember is, “Ciao bella, come stai?” which, after some Googling, turns out to NOT be a formal greeting for a woman. Good one, Josh.
It’s a loose Discord of grinders so I’m not sure if there’s a better term here
You were the last bastion of magic old school blogs, so happy to read you once again and know that you are doing great. Happy New Year!
So glad to see more of your writing! Glad the new job is treating you well!