As one of the Magic media, I'm always looking for "the noise." I use that in terms of signal vs noise. The signal is the main stream, the dominant ideas, theories and decks. It's the Faeries and Doran of the current metagame. What I want to find though is the noise, the random deck that pops up on tournament reports. That deck can either be a waste of time, having won by a fluke of some sort, or it could be the scoop. The news no one else has yet. Which do you follow?

Do you want to hear the signal or the noise?

Well you have to follow the news, you have to see what is mainstream and you can do so with only half your attention. But you're constantly looking for the noise. It takes more focus, more digging, more work. Or perhaps as a deck builder you're trying to create the noise in the signal, you're looking for the rogue deck to pilot.

[cardpic card="Gifts Ungiven" title="Gifts Ungiven was a dominant card during Kamigawa block, one of the few highlights from the set. It provided for great card advantage. The premise of the deck was to wield numerous combos and fetch the best combo using this card."][/cardpic]My friend, Karl, went to GP Salt Lake City back in Kamigawa block and brought a little known deck. The dominant deck was of course Gifts Ungiven, and one day he had stumbled across a deck from a tournament that apparently everyone else overlooked. It was a Mono-Black Control deck and I mean it when I say that it had been completely overlooked. It completely wrecked Gifts Ungiven and so he easily made it to the finals where he faced down Antonino DeRosa. Antonino had brought another rogue deck, Mono-Blue Control. And in a top 8 facing six other players, all wielding Gifts Ungiven, it was Antonino and Karl who made it to the finals. Karl ended up losing the match, but his performance was still good enough to earn him an invite to the next Pro Tour stop. This is the perfect example of listening for and finding the noise.

As competitive players, if you can't find the noise, you go with the signal. Meaning, if you don't have a good rogue deck, then the correct choice is to take one of the dominant decks and tweak it for the metagame as best you can. Don't go rogue just for the sake of going rogue. This is always wrong. Always.

Why? Because we've all seen people bring the wrong rogue deck. They listened to the wrong "noise" and didn't properly test it to identify it as bad noise. They find this rogue deck, playtest it a few times and maybe win against their friend, but they don't test it enough and so it ends up that the deck they bring sucks. Hey, major kudos for going rogue, but don't do it stupidly. Playtest the deck endlessly, as a rogue deck you don't have the data from other people and so it falls to you to play it out and collect that data. And sometimes the deck is just wrong.

So how do you separate the "good noise" from the "bad noise?" The same way we always hammer home: playtesting.

With the "bad noise," the goal is to playtest, discover the flaws, then you either fix the flaws or discard the deck and move on to the next one.

Thomas Edison didn't do it wrong 999 times before getting the light bulb right to start with, he did it 999 ways that weren't right, and he learned from each of them. It's the same process for you. You're going to get frustrated as random deck after random deck fails. It simply is going to happen.

But like a young hunter or fisherman, if this is the play you are destined for, then you will come to relish every discovery. Truthfully this is not the path laid out for many Magic players, most will not have the patience, the methodical nature, or the skill to endlessly toil at it. No indeed some are only fit to carry the deck given to them.

However, if it is your goal to be recognized as a deck builder. If you want to be a player who builds more than just one successful deck during their competitive career, then this is the path you are destined to walk.

Safe travels and may your successes be far more numerous your failures.

-- Trick