There are a number of articles I'm going to write, barring natural disaster, that are heavy. Life is hard, and sometimes, the burden of a lot of gravity is too concentrated on one person. A lot of the time, I am such a person, living, as it were, with such conditions.

Today is not a day where I feel like doing heavy.

So am I phoning it in? Never.*

*yes.

I'm going to break out a list of compiled Magic wisdoms that you may proliferate if you approve of them on all the social media platforms - few to none of which I approve of. Really, I've created the best form of social media here: instead of the whole world saying stuff, it's just me.

Only my private knowledge and wit, hidden from the sky until now, can lift us all out of this solemn winter deadness.

I've combed through many a journal entry and scrapped article to find bits of good that haven't made it to the public written word until now. Without further delay, here's stuff I've said about Magic cards and the people that spend time around them.

On Formats

"There's a special place in hell for players that lecture me on how unhealthy turn-one Green Sun's Zenith would be for Modern while picking up the turn-three Karn Liberated I just conceded to."

"If Commander is the horny ape that leaps onto a sex partner and achieves release before they've undone the first button, Brawl is the slightly more skillful lover that plays its hands slowly with expert restraint until the partner is fully nude and soon after dissatisfied in a much less tragic way."

"Players are so used to just falling in line with sanctioned format rules and things, it's so odd to me to see those attitudes in Commander. Commander should have a legislative body for collective play at Grands Prix and things, but at the end of the day, it's bumper bowling. If you're playing with a couple friends or your dad and uncle or whatever, is anyone going to call you out on your Chaos Orb throw? Play with less uptight people. Or don't and change your deck how you want. Or do neither and go get a soda. That's the joy of that kind of Magic; the most important thing about why it matters is that it doesn't matter at all."

On Magic Players

"Every single tournament player alive would flunk a polygraph test that asked them how good they are at Magic."

"It gets old explaining how 'cardboard' can be worth so much. You jackass, money is just paper. You can apply this arbitrary value to anything. At least Magic cards have creative utility on their own. It's not like I can attack with Ben Franklin."

"Isn't it stupid to describe certain simplistic Green decks or their pilots as in the style of 'little kid'? Like, how is that an insult? 'Everyone look at the little kid Green player with his unbridled enjoyment of Magic like I used to have! It's hilarious how not dead inside he is!'"

"Magic is mostly intellectual; there's not a lot of adrenaline involved in determining who wins or loses, but I will note that a few of the best players I've ever met seemed like the least sentimental in terms of their Magic play. If you're trying to win a tournament, being attached to certain cards or artwork or card concepts or getting really engaged with the subjective sentimentality of Magic cards is probably only going to hinder you. Nobody does a winning tournament report and talks about how they just really, really wanted to build around the coolest-looking Spider in the set."

"Brett Kavenaugh's hearing makes him come across like a player insisting that he lost due to a terrible luck but that everyone else in the room knows was a blatant on-board player error."

"Can we use the term 'fuel,' instead of gas? Anything else but 'gas' really. Why do players like to use the word 'gas' all the time now? The last thing I want to be thinking about when I'm in a warm convention hall with a thousand strangers is gas."

"There is tremendous expression that pro players as they've been to this point and as they are now within the Pro Tour payout structure are entitled to pay based on what they give to Magic, which may be entirely true, but I haven't seen a single explanation that ties this idea to real numbers or relevant data beyond the notion that players who were paid lots of money to play Magic publicly a few times a year several years ago should be paid to play Magic publicly a few times a year forever for incrementally more money."

On Cards and Wizards of the Coast

"Questing Beast is the Gingerbrute of mythic rares."

"Saying Bridge from Below shouldn't count as one of the best enchantments ever because it doesn't do anything on the battlefield is like saying that Tim Wakefield doesn't count as a pitcher because he only throws knucklers."

"Does anyone else think the Unglued, Unhinged, Unstable sets are not so much a real product as a restraint release valve for people on the teams with really immature humor? Like, if they don't find a way to get a picture of a human ass on a card called City of Ass they'll just eventually lose it and start doing that to real Magic cards?"

"Hexproof is an abomination. Shroud has an inherent gameplay tension that makes for really cool, subtle gameplay sometimes. We're back to putting protection and the word 'can't' on cards. I think hexproof will go before that much longer. Hexproof should be the last Blockbuster Video manager pretending everything is going to be fine."

"Travis Gibson always teaches me the most amazing practical things about Magic. He had a really bad headache for a Modern event that we had traveled for. So instead of staying in the hotel and popping Tylenol all day, he just borrows the Slippery Bogle deck from a friend. His rounds are all over in less than ten minutes, he has to make very few decisions with giant outcome implications; it's just easier. Hexproof is the government contract career path of Magic decks: you could end up with a big pay off or you could end up with pretty much nothing, but either way you're not going to have to work yourself to death finding out."

"I always take the side of Renton and Wizards of the Coast. Then they do the Pro Tour announcement with all the predictable backlash the same day Netflix debuts the documentary about the series. Anyone who wanted to google more information about the entire thing now just finds that as a culture we are as disorganized and whiny as the rest of the world. That's a hard thing to defend. Nobody wants to play that game."

"Why do they make some of these staple designs in every major set release? I get the token Dragon and such, but why 'the Turtle?' Calcite Snapper, Cold-Water Snapper, Mist-Horned River Turtle. Is there one customer out there who gets stoked for these and they just can't stand the thought of losing that business? They're terrified of losing the niche turtle enthusiast money? Do they have a QA dope in Renton whose entire job it is to make sure they're checking those boxes? 'Okay, it looks ready to go to the printers - wait, wait...oh no...WHERE'S THE TURTLE, IRENE?!'"

On Theory

"If you can play for years without seeing simple parallels between the deep, complex problem-solving demanded by both Magic and the human experience, you might be missing a lot of crucial information for being good at either of them."

"Is it correct to play worse cards when available if you're already playing a horrible deck and there might be some synergy buried in there somewhere?"

"I have a loose theory that winning a big tournament is hard enough that you should always just be doing the most absurd, broken thing possible. In fact, there's a good chance that basically anyone who only plays in a few large events a year should have been on Dredge at all of them every year since 2006. Basically, playing any other deck but Dredge ever is objectively wrong, even when it jeopardizes Magic's health as a card game with rules."

On Himself

"When I was in college my parents told me to stop playing Magic all the time and to study. All of the decent work I've had since graduating has been in Magic. I really wish I'd studied less."

"A few years ago I was working out the prize split with another finalist in 30-player or so local, right? It was a qualifier for an Invitational, I think. Someone knew I was already queued and asked why I was playing in the qualifier at all. I told them that I know it's shocking, but that I really, really just enjoy playing Magic: the Gathering sometimes."

"I empathize with players who like to latch onto identity. Craig Wescoe likes playing White creature decks, Ari Lax loves casting Thoughtseize in disruptive midrange decks. Shaheen Soorani is a control player, Ali Aintrazi is a Blue ramp player... Someday I hope people will identify me as the definitive bad player."

(~_^)

The Rascal

The "Indestructible" Danny West