So you want that $30 (or even $20) in sweet, sweet cash. Fair enough! But did you know that you can get even more? Loyal StarCityGames writers have a history of going on to bigger and better things....
You could be next! Here's how it works: Submit an article to StarCityGames.com for publication. At the end of every week, the editors will choose the two best published articles and give cash prizes to the authors - first prize gets $30, second prize gets $20. (If you'd like to know what contest-winning articles look like, an archive of past contest winners can be found here.) If you write quality articles on a regular basis, we may even ask you to join our staff of paid Featured Writers!
So what are you waitin' for? Start writing and let the entire Magic community hear what you have to say!
No need to ask me first; just send your article to editor@starcitygames.com, preferably in Word format - though I'll accept email or text files in a pinch.
(But don't send it anywhere else! It probably seems like a good idea to maximize your chances by sending your article to all of the major sites at once... Until you realize that we all want our own, exclusive articles. Most of the articles I've seen that were sent to every site never got published - and besides, to win the weekly contest it must be exclusive.)
If I reject it, I will write you a personal rejection letter within ten days. (If you don't get a response in ten days, remind me; I may have mislaid it, or just need a swift boot to the butt.) If we do publish it, you'll see it on the front page of StarCityGames! Every Monday, we'll pick the winner and send them an email to let them know where to collect their prize!
And if we don't publish your article? Well, maybe you should have read our writers' guidelines below to see what we wanted in our articles....
Our readers come here to find out what decks win. Your job is to play the decks, find out what works and what doesn't, and then report the results as accurately as you can. If you don't know, then please don't bother sending it in.
A solid, contest-winning article will usually have:
- Your odds of winning against the top five decks in the format
- How to play the deck against each of the top five decks, including the critical cards in each matchup (both the cards you want to see and the cards that will wreck you), what they're likely to sideboard in, and what approach you need to take to beat each matchup
- Complete sideboarding plans against each deck type (what you put in, what you take out)
- How many matches you've played against each major deck type, and how many you've won
If you have a deck for Standard, test it against the top five decks in Standard, a minimum of five matches - not games - each. If you're testing a deck for Extended, play the top five Extended decks. If you're showing off a cool multiplayer deck, play it in a few games and see if you can sweep the table with it. Ideally, by the end of your article, the reader will have some idea of what kind of environment this deck will thrive in.
(Incidentally, you do not need a winning deck to make a good article. I myself have a great history of testing great big whoppers of losing decks, as does Andy Stokinger in his "Don't Waste Your Time" series, and the lessons we learned in testing were still useful.)
I don't want just decklists - or worse yet, decklists gussied up with card-by-card explanations of why each card is in this untested deck. Anyone can make a decklist that looks good at first glance, and pretty much everyone does. If you want to be published, don't guess - prove to us that your deck is good beyond the shadow of a doubt.
And by the way - saying "I don't know how this deck will do, but maybe you can test it for me!" is the biggest insult you could give to our readers. They don't work for you. If you want to earn the money, you do the work for them.
Other things that will cause instant rejection:
- If you claim a better than 60% win percentage against the entire field, you're wrong.
If you have no bad matchups (or one bad matchup that's a deck that nobody plays), you're not testing it right.
- The crazier the deck, the more support I need.
If you're sending in an eight-card tweak on the latest netdeck, then I'll take you at your word. If you're playing an Extended deck whose kill condition is Transcendence and Last Laugh, then I need to know exactly how many games you played against, which decks you played (yes, it's Goblins, but what was in that Goblins deck you claim you beat so easily?), and who you played your matches against.
- No card is broken before you playtest it.
If you play ten matches against the top five decks in the field and come away with a 75%+ win rate, then we might talk. Otherwise, wait for the results.
- Rogue is not enough.
A lot of people change five cards in the latest netdeck and write an article on it, saying, "It's rogue!" But it's not enough just to be unique; a deck has to be good. The question has to be, "What makes this deck better than the original, and where is it now worse?"
- Test matches, not games.
At least half of your games in any tournament will be sideboarded. Ignoring that means your results are useless.
- Do not test single matches.
Playing one game each against each of the big decks is statistically useless.
- Do not explain why obvious cards are in your deck.
If you're playing a green-based deck with Birds of Paradise, don't waste a paragraph telling us why it's in there. We know. Get to the interesting bits. (And if you spend more time discussing the cards than the matchups, steel yourself for rejection.)
- Do not send in Part 1 of The Great Experiment.
Don't send me an article that says, "This is what I want to do, and next week I'll tell you how it worked." All anyone cares about is the results anyway.
Hear me now as I shout:
If you fool around with tabs or put a damn table in your article, I'm rejecting it.
I've been asking - no, begging - for three years now: Please don't put tables in. Please don't use tabs to do little funky pseudo-tables. After all that time, some of you still don't listen, and it's getting to feel all personal-like. Send me an article with tab spacing, and you are spitting in my face. You have been warned.
Other items of interest:
- All card names must be capitalized and fully spelled-out
. It is not, "I sent in my mongrel and walla," or even "I sent in my WILD MONGREL and BASKING ROOTWALLA"; it is, rather, "I sent in my Wild Mongrel and Basking Rootwalla." Missing one or two is fine, but not capitalizing anything will require a rewrite.
- Spellcheck it and grammarcheck it
. "i dont know what u think of this card but i think its good" may cut it in chatrooms, but it shan't see play at StarCityGames. I'll do a lot of cleaning up to make you look good, but you have to meet me halfway.
- Use no headers in Word.
Do not set titles as "Heading 1" and put something else under "Heading 2." I strip these out. It hurts.
- Never, ever embed a picture in Word.
Once embedded, the picture cannot be extricated from Word without becoming a pixellated mess. Send them separately, zipped - or better yet, don't use pictures at all.
- Don't send it in HTML.
I don't edit in HTML; I edit in Word. All those tags just slow me down.
Spiritmonger was one of the most powerful creatures ever printed... But it never saw serious play back when it was Standard-legal. Although it was an incredibly-potent win condition, the rest of the black and the green cards available couldn't back it up.
The lesson is clear: No single card is good enough on its own. You need at least fifty-six other cards to make it win. (Combine Spiritmonger with Cabal Therapy and Treetop Village, on the other hand, and you might just have a deck for Extended.)
As such, one of the most common errors I see is players looking at cards from spoilers and saying, "Oh, this looks powerful! And this looks powerful!"
Cards cannot be judged in a vacuum. The question is always, "Can a deck be built around this card that will win against the most popular decks?" If you're just saying, "Wow, Mindslicer is a powerful card and it will surely see play just because it's powerful," then you'd better think again.
These articles fall into two categories:
- Hi, my article is less than two pages long.
Any article less than 500 words or five paragraphs is never going to get published. Any article under 1,500 words is usually an automatic reject unless it's a very good article. Find more to say.
- Hi, my article has been done to death.
If you're going to send in the five millionth article on why the new card look sucks or how horrible it is that blue is weak, find something new to say. Chances are, it's been discussed in our forums, and in previous articles. I reject at least three or four articles a week that are well-written, erudite, and charming, but just don't say anything that fifty other people haven't already said.... And that's sad.
At least twice a week, I wind up snipping out what I have come to refer to as the "Alcoholics Anonymous Prelude" from people's articles:
"Hi, my name is Ryan and I am a Magic player. I've been playing Magic for seven years and this is my first article...."
Hi, Ryan. Nobody cares. People don't know you, and the fact that you play Magic's a given - otherwise, why would you be writing about it? And as for your time served, I know many players who've been around since Alpha and still suck.
Don't bother. Just get to the deck, or the tourney, or whatever you're here to talk about.
Always remember the "ham sandwich" rule: When writing an article, always assume that your reader is just on the verge of going out for a ham sandwich. As such, it is your job to make every sentence so dazzling, so entertaining, that he will stay to read your words despite his hunger.
Listing the generic resume of an unknown person will not keep him from leaving.
Making lots of "Ha ha, I suck so maybe you shouldn't listen to me" jokes will not keep him from leaving. (In fact, it'll drive him away.)
Making in-jokes that don't make sense to anyone but your friends will not keep him from leaving. Neither will saying, "So what's the point of all this? Well, I guess I don't have one...."
Get to the point quickly, make sure it's entertaining, and make sure it's relevant; if you can't do that, he's off to lunch and so am I. I reject a lot of articles that spend a lot of time making lame jokes about how stupid this article is and ha ha, I shouldn't have written it. If it's that dumb, keep it to yourself! Have some confidence, for God's sake.
(Incidentally, it is not relevant that you have never won a Pro Tour; most of our writers haven't. If you have many significant accomplishments in Magic, go ahead and tell us - but otherwise, you'll be judged by the quality and accuracy of your playtesting.)
Well, if you really want to be a Featured Writer, write. The most important thing for a Featured Writer is consistency. I want writers who can provide good, constant articles week after week - because they're the ones who draw crowds. If you send me a solid article for eight weeks in a row, I am far more likely to make you a FW than I am if you provide me with one killer, blow-the-roof-off article.
Everyone has one killer article in them... But StarCity's relentless, gaping demand for content beckons every day. Feed me.
Signing off,
The Ferrett
Click here to email me!
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