I guess a brief introduction is in order. My name is Mike, my first Constructed FNM was right before 10th Edition hit the street, I’m from the Chicago suburbs so you’ve probably never seen me at a big event, and I’m a former Splinter Twin one-trick pony.1, 2 I am almost exclusively a Standard and Modern player that dabbles in Legacy from time to time. I started with control decks, then branched out into anything that would let me play my extremely beat-to-shit Reflecting Pools, before landing on literally anything cheap during college, before finally transitioning to literally anything. My passions include my wife, putting individual songs on repeat for literal hours, proper sequencing, half-sarcastic overuse of the word ‘literally’, my dog, and piloting combo decks through hate cards, in no particular order. It wouldn’t be unfair to call it an autism spectrum thing, I suppose.
I’m as spiky as they come: I switched from chess to Magic with the intent of winning tournaments.3 When high level tournament play is the best way to grow as a player, what happens to players left behind? Do they stagnate? Are they still growing but at negligible rates? I’m not particularly interested in answers for those questions; I think it’s a waste of my time. I simply LIVE those questions.
I believe I possess the ability to have the ability to become an elite Magic player. I absorb Magic content better than other consumers. I have a better gauge on deck power levels and changing the last two or three cards to nudge an A towards that A+. I know I see things that to most people are just invisible geometries that could be warping the play of a game. And I think my ability to reverse engineer a game state and consistently play to my outs surpasses a large percentage of the competitive population. (I may write about where that came from in the future.)
But I’m unproven. And when I said I “possess the ability to have the ability,” I wasn’t being redundant, for I know I can still develop and that my mind is not incompatible with developing my Magic skills. And after developing my talents, the onus is on me to put in the time to nurture them. I am going to treat this blog as the massive personal undertaking that it should be. I want to be a somebody in the world of Magic. I think it is my best fit. My dream job has been Magic commentary ever since Craig Jones flipped a Helix onto the table. The best way for me to start down that path is to create content on my own terms. I’m not interested in word counts and I want to be able to diverge from the main topic whenever I feel like it. I am aiming for an initial goal of two posts per week, and I already have several recurring column ideas. I need a serious de-rust in the writing department, for my writing has completely gone to shit since my college graduation. My speaking has also gotten significantly worse, and I may prescribe myself some video content as a fix.
Tone is going to be a major piece of how I initially present my content. I am not going to position myself as the authority on everything, but instead as a connector. A lot of the idea generation process comes from my long conversations with myself, as I’m driving my route. Some of that may carry over to the blog. Something that I champion is the ability to connect old experiences to new ones, melding gameplay and theory to gradually extrapolate and push the boundaries of an initial idea without going significantly beyond the outer limits of sensibility. The execution on some of these ideas ends up being poor sometimes, but part of that comes from not putting pen to paper sooner. I once had an actually coherent argument for how Amulet and Lantern Control are secretly (and figuratively) the same deck, but then I forgot all of the good parts of said argument and cobbled together the significantly worse parts into a horrifically bad Reddit comment for a whopping one comment karma.
Sometimes, I may present something as a stream of consciousness, not out of laziness (though you could try to argue otherwise, since a lot of my writing starts that way), but out of interest of where it will take me. Alas, my poor short term memory often prevents me from being completely thorough and I will occasionally lose some nuance in my editing process, which involves shuffling my non-stream posts around to compose a better narrative, while retaining some poorly placed statements referencing thoughts I have not explained yet. In fact, there’s a lot of winding, run-on sentences in this post because I’m paranoid about whether or not I have all of my bases covered.4
When it comes to Magic, I have a chip on my shoulder that will probably never leave. The Magic scene in college didn’t improve dramatically until after I finished school. And I’ve always had a job that worked on Saturdays, so I never got to travel and played in fewer PPTQs than everyone else in the area. Had I realized sooner how important Magic was to me, my life would probably look nothing like it does now. Hell, it wouldn’t even be slightly aggressive for me to claim that if I had met one or two people six months sooner than I did, that I’d probably own 40 Revised duals in the present. I have no reason to be satisfied with where I am in the game unless I build something for myself and others.
This is Unfulfilled MTG.
1. Please. Please. Please. Don’t unban that shit. Let the dead stay dead.
2. Nowadays, I will play literally anything I deem sufficiently powerful, occasionally to my detriment or on zero playtesting, and I’m NEVER afraid to audible.
3. I would say this blog is aimed at the starcitygames.com comments section and /r/spikes replies, but I don’t have any plans to post sideboard guides. Also, for those who just got called out by that last sentence, I dagger myself significantly harder than anyone else.
4. Narrator: He did not, in fact, have all of his bases covered.