Knowledge

It's been almost a week since my last post. Before that, I was posting an article a day quite consistently. What's the deal? Where are the posts about Eventide's White-Black and Black-Green cards?

Well, I realized that I have nothing to say. All I can do in these Eventide posts is look at the cards and say "oh they're cool." I don't know anything about Standard. I don't know how well they'll do, and I don't immediately see interesting combos. I really just don't know.

Now, the Lorwyn articles were a little better. I did know something, because I backed it up with hard data. I made a few errors, sure, and I didn't know what the ultimate significance of my study was (again, a product of my lack of knowledge about the game), but I had information I wanted to share, and I succeeded. Those were good.

But this Eventide prediction stuff just isn't for me. I enjoy talking about cards, and even thinking about how they might interact, but you won't get much value out of it. Just the ramblings of a newbie. This thought occurred to me most profoundly when I was reading articles on MtG's very own website, some of which were, indeed, about Eventide cards and the impact of Eventide on Standard, etc. But when I mentally compared my own articles to theirs, I wasn't saying anything new. I was just saying that they were cool, whereas the professional writers of articles for Wizards' website said that they were cool AND were able to explain why.

Now, I want this blog to be about Magic. But I also want it to be about me. I want the articles to be about how I perceive the game, and about the aspects of it that I like, but there are limits to what this should mean. It's true that the Eventide articles expressed my own opinions, and for that reason, at least, they have some value. But my opinion was mixed with information, information which I was quite unqualified to analyze and interpret. So, although I would have continued the Eventide articles for the sake of expressing my own interests and talking about which cards I thought were cool, I'm not going to. I don't want my articles to be the musings of an amateur, passionate though I may be.

So that's why I haven't written anything for a while. When I thought, "hm, I should write a blog post," it was mixed with other thoughts, too: "but I don't really know what I'm talking about, which is unfair to my readers, few though they may be;" and "I don't really care that much about black-green, I'd just be half-heartedly finishing a cycle for the sake of closure." And those aren't good thoughts. So I'm not going to write those posts.

So now the question is: what next? Do I crank out more statistics? Do I talk only about cards I know? Do I just repeat the words of others? Or do I stop altogether?

Nope. If I have any more inspirations like the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor color/creature type study, I'll certainly pursue them, but I'm not going to go chasing after statistics about things I don't really care about. And I'm not going to stop altogether either. I've come this far; I'll think of something.

And I have! One thing I CAN write about with confidence and accuracy is my own experiences. As fun as it might be to spout predictions and evaluations, I have no experience with them, rendering them ultimately meaningless. But if I talk about things I have experienced, I can be sure to stay true to my purpose. So I'll talk about decks I've made (be they physical or online), and the decks I've played them against. And I can talk about the cards in them, and how they work in that deck, and if they don't, why not. I can talk about cool ideas for decks, or ones I've seen that I admired.

Now, this pushes the blog in another direction: decks. Before, I was talking about sets and cards; there is nary a mention of decks in my previous posts. So this will be a change. But even if I am terrible at deckbuilding, and my opponent is too, and we are both playing casually, I can still learn things about cards, and about deckbuilding, and I can pass on this knowledge. It may not be crucial knowledge, and it won't help aspiring Pro Tour players, but it will be fulfilling to me, and hopefully useful to casual players, new players, or just players who are looking for something new. So, for the next few articles, at least, I will probably be talking about decks. And that's all I have to say.