I'm Jerry Maguire. I'm hammering out this article in a long, sleep-deprived night. It's my manifesto. It's what I want to be remembered for. I want you to read this and never forget my name. Go ahead, re read the by-line. I'll wait.

You don't know me. I'm not a Pro. I've never made it anywhere important. I have yet to earn profit on Magic. But damned if I don't love this game for the b*tch that it is.

Recently I had it out with a friend about why the Internet was good for Magic. He was arguing that the net-decks destroyed the game. That the fact that the decks were easily found and made, given enough greenbacks, that Magic was hurt by the everlooming minds of Flores, Fujita and others.

Back in my day, when I first got into Magic, the game was still budding online. This was when the Dojo was The DOJO. If you played Magic, you knew the Dojo and you bowed to it, for it was God. This was before MODO and before even playing Magic online was considered. This was when Mirage was the new kid on block and... well... nothing was really different.

During that time we lived by The Duelist, Scrye and Inquest, and the occasional third party magazine. We waited outside our place of play for the month's issue to arrive so we could devour the deck articles and strategy columns.

The only difference between then and now is that we're moving faster. Magic decks are posted online and through a good engine of playtesters, decks are tuned in days instead of weeks. We're able to proxy decks from winning deck lists and prepare for play.

The Internet hasn't hurt Magic, it has empowered the players. Got a Spike at the game store playing the latest net deck? Then screw him, find the anti-deck and play it. Gifts? Deck X! Tooth and Nail? Troll and Nail!

Magic is about strategy, tactics and preparedness. Kai Budde is notorious for his preparation going into an event. He knows the metagame. He knows his picks. He knows what he's doing, that's why he's paid the big bucks. Bobby Fischer was not an overnight chess prodigy. He played the game more seriously than anyone before him. A game a thousand years old and he was discovering new tricks, old tricks, new strategies and quickly developing a repertoire for being a man above all others when it came to Chess. Sure he's a little nuts now, but who can blame him?

The Internet, Star City, magicthegathering.com, and the other dozen strategy sites all allow us to learn from the greats with new information daily. We're no longer reading Duelist every month and waiting 30 days for our next lessons.

Let me make it clear, I'm not a good Magic player. I may make good plays from time to time, but I will most likely never make it to a PT. I have no illusions about it. Don't get me wrong, if I get an invite, I'll skip a week of class to get there, but it'll never happen unless I make drastic improvements in my game. Until then, I'll just sit back and try to rule FNM.

The Internet is not the bane of Magic. It's the guiding light. It's the classroom we've all dreamed of. We can find articles from the greats, past, present and even future. We can learn at a rate faster than ever before, and with so many strategy sites (though none match SCG and MTG), we are raising the tide.

John Nash - you know, the guy from the movie with Bruce Willis, err Campbell, err Russell Crowe. You know, the mathematician? Yeah, Beautiful Mind, that's it. Well the guy's real and his math is real. If we all help each other, we all end up ahead. And the Internet does that. Sure you've got Secret Tech, but so do 300 other people and of them, maybe 1 is going to make Top 8 without help from others. Ben Franklin I think said, "A secret's only a secret among two people, if one of those people is dead." If I've got Tech and I think it works, I've played it against somebody and that means my button man's going to be getting busy.

So where would we be without the world of Magic online? I'm not talking about MODO (long live Apprentice!), I'm talking about the volumes of theory and strategy archived for us all to see. Without the Internet, Magic might be dead. D-E-D, dead. Magic has faced a continual growth of power, with subtle knockbacks as sets come and go, but the power now is so much greater overall than it was in the time of Alpha or Beta. Sure Moxes and Black Loti fill our dreams, but remember that at the time people were playing Craw Wurm and Swamp Wraith. It was a time where almost every player was a Timmy. And only with time did Johnny and Spike emerge.

Where would Spike be without the Internet? He wouldn't exist. I don't mean players wouldn't be playing competitively, but I mean that Mark Rosewater may never have introduced any of us to him. Johnny would be quite a bit weaker without the deck think tanks to churn over abusable cards. Timmy? He'd still reign supreme.

Magic is a game of change. The playing field now is going to be different in just a few short months. Richard Garfield has invented a game that is going to last a long while, so long as the world still has some way of making cards for people to shuffle.

I know Zvi came to Magic from the world of Chess (with an intermission return as I recall) and so did I. My father taught me chess when I was a tiny lad and I've played it ever since. It's another game which I am horrid at, but play because I love it. I love the moment where I find the occasional win from an impossible situation. Just like I love managing to draw just the card I need and playing it just how it needs to be played for the win. I can lose five times in a row as I know I made at least one good play in each game. But the sixth loss? Well I have to take a walk after that one.

I've rambled wonderfully up to this point, and for a long night's ramblings I'd say I've stayed fairly close to topic. I used the word Internet in every paragraph so far... I think. Alright, let's try this again,

Anyway, Chess. Right. Chess is an evolved game. There are actually books about the history of chess. Originally the game was quite different than it is today. The pawns didn't leap forward up to two squares on their first move. The Queen of today is what historians call the "Mad Queen." Originally the Queen was a hampered King, only able to move 1 space on any diagonal square. So she was not a powerhouse at all. But Chess's changes came over the span of something like 3000 years.

Magic is a teenager. A punk rockin', mohawkin', card playin', bad beer drinkin', thinks-he-knows-everything teenager. The game is young. It's brash and loud and likes to go against the flow. It changes with his hormones every few months. It relies on what others think of it to survive. It plays well with others who understand it, and to those who don't - well we won't go there.

The Internet is Magic's perfect match. It's a world about information. It's about upping the stakes and sharing information. Chess players don't go to tournaments carrying Super Secret Tech. The game is all but solved. With miles of print devoted to the looniest of moves and most random of positions.

Magic has miles of text devoted to its minutia, discussing how Jitte is broken, or how Tooth-and-nail is unstoppable. Would word of T&N spread without the Internet. Yes. The magazines would have made sure this tech was front page news. "Crappy Card Turns Out To Be Good." We all looked at it and tossed it aside - paying nine mana for two creatures is ludicrous.

So the argument I presented to my friend was that the Internet was not to blame for the presence of Net decks. It was only responsible for raising the tide and forcing us all to be better and be better informed.

I shamefully admit I am a metagame addict. I stay up until 12:01 and load up the sites to read the latest posts about the game. I want to be fed and sated for my night's rest before rising and leaving at the ass-crack of dawn. Then when I go to the game store to test my skills against my friends, I want to be able to have a watercooler discussion about Boros over Dimir, or the uses of Dredge in certain situations.

What about competitiveness overall? Are Spikes more prevalent because of the Internet? No. I remember playing in the back of a used book store and catching a friend stacking his deck so he would draw Necropotence against me next turn. He wanted to win. He wanted greatness at any cost. Sound familiar?

How about, "He exercises his right to 'bear' arms"? Just making sure you're paying attention. The caffeine is wearing off and my glasses are laying on the desk as I try and finish this without drooling too much on the keyboard.

Richard Garfield didn't foresee the competitiveness players would approach this game with. His initial visions were much smaller, much less grand. He never dreamed he'd inspire a game that people would make livings at and that there would be a Pro Tour for. He'd thought it would be a fun game with Minotaurs and Pegasi. I'm not harassing him for how wrong he was, I'm only pointing out that it wasn't the Internet that brought this about. It was human nature.

People are competitive. We want more money to impress friends. We want the girl to notice us so we try to one up our friends in the gym. We race other unwitting drivers in traffic. And game players are the worst. We celebrate the win of a dice roll and the choice it affords us. We luxuriate in wins and glower in losses. Spike is not put in anyone by the Internet or metagame writing, Spike is in us all. He's just kept on a tight leash until he breaks loose.

The conversation went close to the above ramblings, with bad puns and flavor text tastefully peppered throughout to compete for the title of King Geek. I won the argument and my friend conceded his point, he then goaded me into writing this tonight and then proceeded to go to bed as I feverishly typed all 1800 words of this. The punk. I'll break out the new W/r deck tomorrow and show him who's king of the metagame.