Pseudo-Newb is going to be very Mean about MTG "Strategy Articles"

This is an entry about exactly why it's so difficult to learn anything about strategy or deckbuilding in Magic. It is not actually about strategy or deckbuilding. It's about how the all powerful tastemakers and experts in Magic write about it. And why it makes some people stop trying. 

I paid for premium membership on Star City games to be able to read about analysis, the metagame and deck construction because I wasn’t seeing a lot of instructional breakdowns on “free’ sites and reading these articles is the advice given to almost everyone when they ask about how to improve their game. I figured perhaps it was better. Because StarCityGames makes their premium content available a month later, the timeliness is what is supposed to make it worth the money and useful as a teaching tool. This paragraph I'm about to share helps explain exactly what is wrong with depending on the community, or on expert magic players with little to no instructional or writing experience to teach the game to the lower and “mid level” and why perhaps you only see a homogenous group contributing to the online culture and getting to define it.

Here is the article excerpt that inspired this rant.

This article was supposedly about the difference between how Innistrad and Return to Ravnica are going to use colors of mana in Standard format. This is the third paragraph and the first paragraph you can see with your premium membership

“Mono-color decks will be those needing to hit a specific one-drop on 1 with some heavy color commitment further up the curve. Gravecrawler into Geralf's Messenger, Champion of the Parish into Loyal Cathar, or Stromkirk Noble into multiple burn spells. Even then, they have the option to free roll a second color almost effortlessly. Not even looking at noncreature spells, Cavern of Souls means there are eight untapped duals for Zombies to cast Lotleth Troll and Humans to cast Zealous Conscripts.”

What happens when you're not really writing to teach or inform:

I’m now going to break this paragraph down into each point where I had to figure out what he was saying. The original statement will be in boldface type.

1^st sentence

5     Mono-color decks – Ok I’ve got this – that’s decks with a single color instead of two or more.

"Will be those needing to hit a specific one drop"- OK now I'm getting  a little shaky . . .

1. Needing to hit – needing to be able to cast a very specific card? Or needing to be able to counter a very specific card? Either way the only thing I’m sure about is that needing to hit a specific one drop means that whatever the context of “hit” is ( either casting, or countering) the one drop cost means it only costs 1 mana

2. On 1. – would it have killed you to say turn one? So the reason you would play a one whole color instead of more than one color is to be able to play one card for one mana on turn one, and if you can’t manage to do that the whole deck won’t work?

3. With some heavy color commitment– wait, what do you mean color commitment? Didn’t you already commit to a color when you decided that you needed the single card on turn one or else there was no deck? How do you have heavier color commitment than being in a monocolor deck in the first place? It took me a moment to figure out that “heavy color commitment” is the REASON to play a monocolored deck, and that it was describing a choice already made. So it stopped me because color commitment looked like something you did for multicolored decks. I couldn’t see why it was being mentioned for monocolored ones.

6. Further up on the curve – which curve, what curve? People talk about curves and curving out and I’m only familiar with bell curves and mana curves for figuring out how much mana to have on the deck. It’s been almost a year and this is such assumed knowledge that I still haven’t been able to figure it out from context.

Based on context, I’m going to figure that this means that you plan on your one drop being the most important thing in the world, and you commit to the color so that the higher mana - cost cards in your deck are also the reason to use a single color because you have to make sure you get that one drop out.

This will then remind me that I have no idea how many of each mana cost card is recommended when you are designing a deck. 

I keep reading things about “Do you have room for this in your 2-drop slot" or "how many 4-drops" and I have no idea what the proportions for a deck are based on mana cost.  Without this strategic fundamental, discussions of which cards to include versus which cards to exclude are meaningless because I have no idea how many are supposed to ideally be there  in the first place.

8. Gravecrawler into Geralf's Messenger,  I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out how casting GraveCrawler helps you cast Gerlaf’s Messenger. I can’t, I don’t think it does. I don’t know what “into” means here  . . .

Champion of the Parish into Loyal Cathar, Ok now I’m really confused – wouldn’t you cast Loyal Cathar “into” Champion of the Parish because casting another human ( the Loyal Cathar) makes the Champion of the Parish get a +1/+1 counter?

or Stromkirk Noble into multiple burn spells – Stromkirk noble is just a mostly unblockable 1/1 that grows with direct damage. How does that feed into spells? He doesn’t generate mana.

After looking up all the cards he mentioned and trying to figure out why using Champion of the Parrish, Gravecrawler or Stromkirk Noble needed you to only use one color in your deck or how they fed into the cards, I realized that maybe the only thing the writer meant was”

On turn one you cast this card, AND THEN on turn two you cast this card. The two cards have no relation to each other except that they share a color and a mana cost. There is no “into” it’s not even “into” the turn because turn phases would have at least:

1)   Second main phase
2)   End step
3)   Clean Up
4)   Opponent’s full turn
5)   Untap
6)   Upkeep
7)   Draw
8)   First Main Phase

before the two cards would even be on the battlefield together.

4. Even then, they have the option to free roll a second color almost effortlessly. I really don’t know what “free roll” means here at all. Only by writing this breakdown did I have the “aha” moment of realizing that what he meant was “even if you wanted to do the things I just described you could still add another color without having any real strategic issue”

5. Not even looking at noncreature spells, Cavern of Souls means there are eight untapped duals for Zombies to cast Lotleth Troll So I’m just far enough along in the learning curve to know that when he says Zombies to cast Lotleth Troll, he means the Zombies deck archetype which is usually a two color deck being Black and and Blue. 

Writing it as though the Zombies are doing the casting confused me for a moment, but I recovered in context, however I’m not completely sure what he means by there are eight untapped dual lands for Zombies. The reason this is particularly unclear is because you tap lands for mana in order to cast spells. The phrasing indicates that the dual lands are in play and then you tap them to cast Lotleth Troll which costs one green and one black mana.

Perhaps what he means is that in the Return to Ravnica block there are potentially eight dual lands ( which are lands that can generate more than one color of mana) and you can include them in your normally blue/black Zombies deck to be able to use Lotleth Troll.

If that’s the case why on God’s Green Earth would you use an actual in-game term like “untapped” to describe the availability of cards that can be used in deck construction when you are simultaneously talking about playing those cards?

9. and Humans to cast Zealous Conscripts. Humans is another deck Archetype – it’s usually white but it can also be red/ blue/ green in combination with white. Zealous Conscripts is red so when you “splash” a color it would be to cast one strategic card. Splashing means adding just enough of another color mana in your deck without getting unusuable mana when you take your turn.

I now had to figure out why there could also be 8 untapped duals for humans to cast Zealous Conscripts and not know why that was an example of something so important that you would want to splash for it.

Why this is a problem :

In 81 words I had to stop thinking about the content and figure out what he was saying 9 times.

Some of this is magic “lingo” – mono-color, one-drop, duals

Some of this is shorthand that reads like English but you have to stop to remember that it might mean something else Zombies and Humans is an example, but even in the low standard of Magic writing it it usually indicated as a deck archetype by prefixing it with a color U/B Zombies would be Blue and Black Zombies Deck, G/W Humans would be Green and White Humans Deck.

But most of this is just trying to sound cool and not explaining a damn thing while actually creating confusing terms that already mean other things.

Other people who are newish might only stop 3 or 4 times, but each time you make a reader think, you lost the reader following your actual thought. 

Properly written it would look like this:

Playing a mono colored deck in the new environment will only be useful if a deck needs to guarantee that the first turn opens with a specific one-drop and the need to use the same color when you get higher into the mana curve to support the deck strategy. Examples would be: Gravecrawler on turn one, Gerlaf’s Messenger on turn two,* or Stromkirk Messenger on the first turn and then burn spells in a mono red deck. Even in these examples, there’s still room for a deckbuilder to add a second color without affecting the basic strategy. Without looking at non-creature spells, running Cavern of Souls in the deck means there are still eight other possible dual lands available for use in a deck. If UB Zombies wanted to run Loleth Troll it could run 4 Overgrown Tombs(B/G) from RTR and 4 Woodland Cemetaries  (B/G) from Innistrad without messing up the mana base.

Now admittedly I’m shaky on the last part. Cavern of souls creates colored mana to cast creature spells that can’t be countered. So my rewrite means I’m guessing about why he included that example.

And my prose isn’t perfect either. I also don't have an editor. 

In my version I kept the MtG lingo that is expected to be known by the time you’re trying to pay attention to articles (even though you don’t really know it, you just keep reading articles like an idiot until you guess right or you find someone who can explain the article to you). I might still need to look up the specific cards but in this text I wouldn’t have to do it to understand the sentence. This version explains the context of the choices and examples and the narrative that matches up with the turn phases.

I could not read the rest of the article, it made me pretty sure I was missing some important insider understanding if I couldn’t follow the first real paragraph and I had to stop, look up the cards and check my slang reference for some clue. Then finally I did this and got two things that made me realize why I was misinterpreting ( specifically the “into” and “free roll” wording).

I’ve spent an hour on 81 words and another hour to write it up to make sure it made sense.

*Update 12/12/12 - when sharing this column with a friend he pointed out that you can't really cast Gerlaf's Messenger on turn two because it's a 3 mana cost card.  Which either means there is missing information about ramping up your mana or the paragraph is even less helpful than I thought it was. I'm keeping the original because that was my takeaway from the paragraph after all the parsing but it should be "followed two turns later by Geralf's Messenger"

Retention and Emotional Response

I did not learn anything new about the varying manabase between Innistrad and Return to Ravnica. I did feel stupid, out-of-touch and excluded while trying to learn.

And then when I parsed it down, I felt ripped off. Because I’m in effect paying money to learn, not be obstructed.

This was written to sound “in the know” and “cool” not to help anyone other than people who can probably already come to the same conclusions on their own.

Want to know why non-spikes who aren’t into exclusionary language aren’t represented in Magic Culture? Unless you’re fairly stubborn you won’t get past things like this. And when you try, everyone sends you back to things like this. You will therefore assume it’s only for people who spend all their time learning the lingo to understand the advice or analysis and you might love the game but you don’t have an hour to reinterpret every paragraph and look up every referenced card.

Somewhere, someone in Magic culture needs to realize that we can do better. Editors need to stop this unnecessary posturing. It's getting in the way, it’s not “entertaining” or colorful it’s alienating and detracts from the subject.

I specifically did not link or mention the writer’s name because I used him as a single example, but almost every Magic article or website has a bunch of this type of writing. And Magic video coverage is almost NOTHING but this type of style. 

I've already been subjected to being a "baby" because I believe that Magic culture has room for more than one type of personality or player. I expect there would be some defensive reaction to this as well. In this case what I'm writing is actually confrontational. 

It's why I don't want to identify the writer. I'm critiquing the accepted wisdom, not the individual. 

Many good and well intentioned people write this way because it's what's encouraged. My asking for it to change is not "because I hate magic" it's because I love it. Asking it to normalize informational writing is not being a baby, it's assuming that we expect it to be a game for everyone, not just the people who are playing in tournaments or who have a strong social network that plays. 

We can have slang filled articles and cute writing with spikes vying to coin the newest hot phrase, but that should be culture writing not analysis or instructional writing.