You probably noticed, but you’re reading a Magic article written by a Magic writer. Being a writer skews what type of information you receive as a reader, so I want to demonstrate what writing articles does for Magic content and how you can adjust for those biases. Basically, there’s a huge chunk of effective Magic that’s dull to write about, but that shouldn’t stop you from playing it even as it stops me and others from writing about it.

Color Association Time!

Here’s a list of colors and their most famous adherents as best as I know:

• White – Craig Wescoe, with Cedric Phillips preceding. Bruce Richard otherwise.
• Black – Daryl Bockett. He isn’t Graveborn Muse for nothing.
• Red – Patrick Sullivan, though Darwin Kastle writes the most about it.
• Green – Bennie Smith, with Jamie Wakefield preceding. Brad Nelson in 2010.

Brian Kibler is starting to be known for R/G. Conley Woods’s best rogue decks are B/G or B/R, but he’s thought of as rogue rather than a black magic user.

So, that’s four of the colors. What about blue?

• Blue – Luis Scott-Vargas, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, Pat Chapin, Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, and so on.

The list of best players clearly is on the side of blue. Even column names for several years tended to be the names of blue cards—for example, Flow of Ideas (Gavin Verhey) and Thirst for Knowledge (Chris Jobin).

I didn’t think about it much until Chris Millar (former DailyMTG.com writer) tweeted a couple of years ago about the disproportion of blue-themed titles. Financial columns helped alleviate the monochromatic tendencies, but the impression stuck with me and helped me figure out something much more recently—something that affects all Magic writers at some point:

As a group, Magic writers are biased to cards and strategies that allow them to write a lot of words.

Successful Magic players pull from a few essential traits, most of which involve analysis and reason. Successful Magic writers pull from a few essential traits, some of which are refinements on analysis (e.g. verbalizing their analysis), and some of which are unconnected to Magic (storytelling, persuasive ability, contagious enthusiasm). Those traits don’t overlap equally in every form of Magic. Any format or style emphasizing board interaction and card advantage naturally has more to be discussed than aggressive/burn-minded formats. In Pro Tour Land, this historically gives the advantage to blue and secondarily to green at the moment. You have to talk about what to counter, whether you need permission counterspells or tempo counterspells, what kind of card-draw you want, and so on. Blue control decks have nuances, and nuances lead to words. Green has the toolbox aspect right now—Primeval Titan, Birthing Pod, Green Sun's Zenith–and its most important pieces tend to be on the board, so there’s plenty to talk about there, too. When you’re gaining incremental advantage or going for the long game, you’ll have more plays along the way you can talk about, whether in theory or after the game.

Consider my prerelease Sealed deck, with which I went 4–1 at Card Exchange in north Seattle:

"Dark Ascension Prerelease Sealed"

• Creatures (17)
• 1 Ludevic's Test Subject
• 1 Mindshrieker
• 1 Selhoff Occultist
• 1 Somberwald Spider
• 1 Stitched Drake
• 1 Undead Alchemist
• 1 Black Cat
• 1 Diregraf Captain
• 1 Ghoultree
• 1 Gravetiller Wurm
• 1 Headless Skaab
• 1 Soul Seizer
• 1 Tower Geist
• 2 Dawntreader Elk
• 2 Shriekgeist

• Spells (6)
• 1 Artful Dodge
• 1 Chant of the Skifsang
• 1 Increasing Confusion
• 2 Reap the Seagraf
• 1 Traveler's Amulet

• Lands (17)
• 4 Swamp
• 6 Forest
• 6 Island
• 1 Hinterland Harbor

Buy This Deck

Beside the fact that I had six rares in two colors (the seventh was Vault of the Archangel) and an obviously bomb-heavy Sealed pool, this deck is the type you can tell extended narratives about. Playing every Zombie I could (Ghoultree’s a Zombie, too!) to work Diregraf Captain and Undead Alchemist, I had the Zombie plan. With Increasing Confusion, Undead Alchemist, Mindshrieker, Selhoff Occultist, and two Shriekgeists, I had the mill plan. With Gravetiller Wurm, Ghoultree, Ludevic's Test Subject, and Artful Dodge, I had the killing blow plan as well. With no true removal, I had to deal with complicated board states for the whole tournament. That makes for great and varied stories. Some of my wins:

• Against W/B flyers, I took a risk and used Artful Dodge on Soul Seizer to steal his Falkenrath Noble. I hadn’t seen too much of the deck yet, but I knew that I wanted a Noble in that situation, even though he a good chance of killing the Noble or the Aura-to-be without much advantage for me. I rode that Noble to victory by staying alive long enough for my deck to function.
• In Game 3 against the same guy, I lived the dream of Increasing Confusion with Undead Alchemist out, raising three Zombies out of the sorcery’s first use and some silly number from the second . . . which didn’t matter because I had just milled him for the fatality.
• Round 4 against a U/B deck with Geralf's Messenger and other undying gems, I won with Selhoff Occultist, a morbid Somberwald Spider, and a smoke-and-mirrors package. He had solid flyers, but a 4/6 reach annoyed all of them, and the Occultist kept poking at his library for every trade we made. I think that also was the game I had dropped my Ghoultree on the floor and forgot about it for several turns. Fortunately, I was already friends with the guy from earlier that day, and he understood when I explained the drop. In any event, he was milled pretty much from the Occultist alone.

Contrast that with this Round 5 loss:

• My opponent played Avacyn's Pilgrim into a turn-two Elder of Laurels. He played more creatures before I established a board. The end.

Now, it’s obvious that a turn-two Elder of Laurels before I establish a board is a fantastic victory plan against most opponents. If you want to win, I recommend it. But there literally isn’t more story to tell there unless I name you every single creature he played (and most of them were Spirit, made by Lingering Souls). The plan is so straightforward that there’s little to write about it. I couldn’t write every week about decks that efficiently . . . normal. I’d run out of column very quickly.

You see why writers are drawn to writer-friendly deck styles? Writers want to focus on a situation, talk about it for a while, and extract every ounce of value out of the topic. It’s both natural and convenient. That causes them to gravitate toward certain Magic concepts over others. The huge multiplayer format lends itself to this just as much as blue control at the Pro Tour. Massive board states unlocked by a windmill slam from the player everybody forgot make for natural climaxes of lengthy game narratives—the best multiplayer games gift-wrap stories for casual writers like me.

So Why Does That Matter?

You, the dear reader, receive Magic articles through a writer’s lens. Due to the basics of writing and stories, that’s a naturally skewed lens. I don’t play much red. You can find plenty of blue-loving writers who have a tough time playing mono-red or anything close to it and dislike it any time they have to talk about red as a deck. If Magic consisted only of mono-red-type strategies, I wouldn’t play it. It would be too simple and boring. So instead, I write about these green and blue monstrosities with odd interactions. It makes better writing, but it doesn’t necessarily make better Magic.

You also have cards hyped disproportionately when there’s interesting stuff to say about them. Other than DJ Tiesto and Paul Van Dyk, people don’t like to repeat themselves, and comparing obvious, simple spells to previous obvious, simple spells is no fun. Extolling Sorin, Lord of Innistrad or Havengul Lich is much more fun, even as they’re untested and probably not worth their current price tags. They have so many more possibilities, and so people want to write about them. Naturally, that means you end up with some overhype there and underhype on simple stuff that works. Unfortunately, that drives up prices on writer-friendly cards beyond their utility.

Conclusion

History isn’t written by the victors; it’s written by the literate, and relative to Magic, the same bias is present. Like most communication issues, it’s fine when you know to adjust for it, but it’s difficult for writers to see their own predispositions. Keep it in mind, and you’ll have an edge.

(Inspired in part by the logic win of Sean McKeown’s 2010 article here.)