Star City experienced technical problems the same weekend that the Dojo did no updates for five days straight. I admit it, I am a Magic web site junky. I read as much of the stuff as I can. If I didn't have bills to pay I'd be completely lost. I think it comes from living in a community where I'm basically exiled from other players. If I can't get my Magic fix at the local comic shop (where local means one hour each way), at least there are the web sites. (Reading tournament reports and such is really a form of voyeurism. Don' tell your legislators or they'll ban them.) But, the big ones that I follow were down for days.

Since I couldn't get my fix from the web sites I decided I had to write something myself to keep from going crazy. Since I didn't have any single topic that was warming my heart enough to generate the thousand or so words I like for my articles, I thought I would take a chance and write up a few short topics.

NEW PLAYERS DON'T DESPAIR

Whenever I read the doom and gloom "Magic is Dying" articles, I want to scream out so that all the new players can hear me "IT IS NOT" and for the author "STOP SCARING PEOPLE, YOU TWIT.” I've written at length about this before so just a summary here for the new folks:

MAGIC IS NOT DYING.

IT IS SAFE TO START LEARNING AND PLAYING MAGIC.

When I started in this game, the doomsayers were spreading their message and it scared me a lot. I had found a really neat game with a lot of interesting potential and here were people predicting that it would be dead in a year. All my time and effort learning the game were going to be for nothing.

But the doomsayers were wrong, sort of. Magic once had more activity than it does now and those days are gone forever. Magic does, today, have a somewhat smaller following that ebbs and flows as players come and go.

The real truth about Magic is that players do come and go. Magic takes a lot of time and dedication if you are really going to be good at it. This is no different from any other skilled activity. A lot of folks have more time to devote to things like Magic in high school than at any other time of their lives. As life takes them to new places, many people stop playing Magic. Of the players you know, most will quit the game at some point. Maybe you'll be one of them; maybe you'll play forever. If you think Magic is fun right now, go for it.

BE NICE TO NEW PLAYERS

This can't be said too much and it follows directly from the fact that so many people quit Magic sooner or later. If you are one of the ones that plays for a long time you'll need someone to play with. Most everyone you know is going to quit and if none of the up and coming "kids" will play with you because you are a jerk you'll have to play with yourself.

I NEED SOME NAMES

Being mathematically inclined, I tend to refer to hypothetical Magic players using clever names like "A" and "B.” But, you know what, I don't think that this works for readers as well as real names for these hypothetical beings. I like the names "Cog" and "Zog,” but Wakefield invented those and I don't like stealing them for my own use. I'm also not creatively inclined in ways that are useful in inventing a pair of names for my own use.

So, here is the deal. I want some suggestions for a pair of names that I can use in my articles. I'll even make this a contest subject to the following rule: what ever I say wins, wins. All judging will be by me only and will be completely subjective. If two, or more, people submit the same name pair the one with the earlier timestamp gets credit for the entry. The winner gets a worthless rare, where worthless means it has been in my trade book for more than a year and nobody has offered a trade for it. The contest ends 72 hours after this is posted.

That's the deal, take it or leave it.

SLOWING DOWN MAGIC

Some folks agreed with my basic theme that there are just too many cards coming too fast for most players to keep up. There were a lot of suggestions on how to correct the problem and I just want to say changing from a four month expansion release schedule to a six month schedule was just the idea that I thought was the most viable for WotC. There are a lot of ideas floating around out there and I could live with most of them. The real question is, am I right or am I wrong in asking for a slow down? Maybe one of the web sites that takes polls could use that as their question of the week (hint hint). If they do, I want to know about it so I can vote. If the players really want things to slow down, then we can debate the best approach.

LEVELS OF PLAY

I think that WotC's development of beginner, advanced, and expert card set ratings is border-line marketing genius that ended up wasted. Does anyone actually play Starter? They must, someone is buying those cards at the bookstore, but would you actually tell your friends to buy Starter as a way to get into Magic? I wouldn't. And I just called the concept "border-line marketing genius (I even liked Portal but wouldn't recommend it either).”

The Starter set is not tournament legal. It may be at some time in the future, but not now. The base set is tournament legal but nobody plays base set only.

So, why go to all of the trouble to rate the card sets when nobody plays that way? Real beginners go to tournaments and get trounced by expert level players and never show their faces at the Magic shop again. This cannot be good for the game.

The missing piece, I think, is DCI sanctioning. Face it, for good or bad DCI sanctioned formats are the default that folks play. Sure there are some pockets of folks who play Highlander or other unsanctioned variants, but these are rare. When I travel and I expect to be able to find a game I carry a Type II and an Extended deck. I am pretty sure that any likely opponent will have a deck that fits one of those categories.

If the DCI were to sanction a tournament format for beginners, I think that good things would happen. First, the kids being killed in tournaments by cards they've never even heard of would get to play on a level playing field with other new players. Maybe more of them would stick around to become regular players. Such a format would have to be limited to real beginners by either time or experience. I can't imagine that even in areas where Magic is popular tournaments like this would happen more than once per month, but the idea is to let the beginners get some experience before challenging better players in a regular tournament.

A second format for advanced players that would consist of base set or base and Starter could be sanctioned for the folks who think Magic is a cool game but don't have either the time or money to keep up with all the new sets. The Friday Night Magic program would be a perfect vehicle for this format. I think that this would ultimately reduce the Magic drop out rate and would contribute to Magic becoming a classic game.

And, for the serious players (you know who you are), the current formats would continue.

Ok, the word counter says that I'm already over 1300 words, and Omeed is right, much more than a thousand and folks go to sleep. Send me your name suggestions.

Michael Granaas
mgranaas@usd.edu