GP Vegas looks totally insane! I am incredibly excited for that tournament, and not only because I love Grand Prix. I love Sealed deck, and it’s Vegas baby! I plan on going early, and staying late at Casa de Huey and Efro. I fully expect two weeks of debauchery and some really horrible hangovers coupled with some big gambling wins… right? For now it will be very hard to prepare for a Modern Masters Sealed Deck tournament, because the packs are hard to acquire, and to my knowledge there won’t be much time to spend grinding on Magic Online.

I like the set after giving it a quick once-over, and not only because I think of myself as an old-school player—whenever Magic Online runs the throwback Sealed and draft formats, I always play them and do pretty well. I’ve seen and played with every card in this set before in their own respective Limited formats, I know exactly how powerful they are, and I think as long as the format is normal and not crazy like Cube and its combo decks, then I should be in a good spot. That said, I’m going to show you some opening packs for Modern Masters draft under the assumption that you should just be drafting a good solid deck with no bells and whistles.

Part of being successful is to properly judge your metagame and then decide on the best deck to play. Even when a deck is theoretically versatile (i.e. Naya), you still have to build it differently depending on what you expect, so it’s still very important to predict the metagame correctly. Normally I would say, “play whatever you’re most comfortable with,” but I don’t think this is true for this format. You have to play whatever is good in the metagame, because the difference is more significant than the edge you get from playing your deck optimally (i.e. if you’re getting paired versus Bant Auras every round, I’d rather be a mediocre Mono-Red player than an awesome Junk Reanimator player with a standard Reanimator list). Of course, you can never predict a metagame 100% correctly, but simply having an idea of what’s going to be there can be enough to sway your decision.

This is the second installment of my FNM Hero journey. If you did not read my last article, it spells out all of the guidelines. One thing I didn't bring up is the lag time between when I write articles and when they are published. I promise that all of the prices I use in articles are accurate as of the time I write them. To be honest, I didn't even think about it until a few card prices were different in between the writing of my first FNM Hero article and this article.

When we last left off, I had started to make a plan for what to do with my $100 budget. I planned on saving at least $20 for tournaments, and another $3 was bookmarked for a SCG deckbox. This left me with $77 to build an actual deck. In my last article, I went over the various Event Decks that I could start my journey with. Given that they are designed to help players make the jump into tournament Magic (generally at the FNM level), Event Decks seemed like a good starting point.

I turned off my TV.

The danger hadn’t passed, but I was safe enough for the time being. And I couldn’t watch much more. The tape loop that had been running for the last twenty minutes had given way to fresh images of horror, all live from the scene.

I hadn’t yet received the call, but I knew it was coming. This was, after all, part of the job description, and I knew that when I signed up.

I passed hundreds of people sitting quietly in backed-up traffic. From the college student in his beaten-up Chevy to the businessman in his Lexus, all were listening to the same grisly radio station. But most people were driving away from it, while I was headed directly toward the maelstrom instead.

As I entered a city mired in total gridlock, I began to see more and more people walking rather than driving, running rather than walking, shouting rather than talking. But I didn’t yet see anything.

One more turn, and it hit me all at once. Tree branches littered the street. Roofs partially peeled off and lying on the ground. Bicycles carelessly thrown in the street. Satisfied I was there, I parked my car and began to follow the stream of people walking down the road.

Love is by far the hardest concept to convey in games.

It’s among our more complex emotions, and since games often rely on tropes for storytelling, it’s crazy-hard to include. Using love as shorthand for sex is lazy at best, and it’s really damaging at worst.

If used correctly, love can convey romantic love, admiration, a father’s failings, a mother’s worry and raw emotion, among other things, that could be directly tied into a game. Magic includes parts but often strays away from deeper love or difficult conceptual cards. Nuance is stupidly difficult to include when working with freelance flavor writers, top-down designers, and freelance artists. Despite the barriers, love is incredibly additive to a magical wizard dueling game. It adds for greater representation of, well, reality, and it allows deeper flavorful cards.

I give Magic a lot of credit for shaping my life. Magic Online is a big part of that, too. It let me hone my skills so that one day I could play on the Pro Tour. It kept me connected with friends even when I was out of town for the summer. It let me connect with an entire community of people in an awesome way by streaming. It entertained me for more hours than any other videogame has, by far.

I love Magic Online, and I want it to be as good as it can be. It has done so much, yet it can do even more. That's why Wizards of the Coast hired me into a whole new position—the digital team is growing. A lot of smart and passionate people are working to take Magic Online to the next level, and I feel honored to be a part of it.

A question I frequently get from people interested in the game industry is, "What's your average day like?" It's such a weird industry, who knows what we do! Sometimes I wonder myself. The days can be very different depending on the current project, but I'll give you a run through of my "average" day.