Watch the whole game
This seems to be my week to disagree with Anthony Palmerio. In addition to his normal episode of The Proffessors for the week, Anthony put together a Theory in Practice episode discussing Magic highlight videos, with the premise that they are "the greatest way to watch Magic games."
So yeah, I disagree.
I understand where Anthony is coming from when he says "I don't like to sit there watching ten minutes of shuffling, ten minutes of game play, and ten minutes of thinking," but I think there's an issue with the idea that highlight videos let you "see what happened in the game, and why."
Trying to actually understand a Magic match from a highlight video is a lot like trying to recreate the flow of a baseball game from a highlight reel, or understand how poker is played by watching the highly edited television coverage of poker. You're going to come away thinking that baseball is all about hits that are or aren't fielded properly, and that poker is about people going all-in all the time.
That whole "ten minutes of thinking" part of the game is, well, part of the game. If we're looking at it from a learning perspective, you will understand a lot more about the "why" portion of "what happened and why" if you watch the entire game play out. The idea that "important things weren't happening" in the rather slow Dreadstill versus Team America match at Worlds 2008 just shows that the viewer isn't following the dynamic of the match.
I do realize some people just kind of zone out during any game that slows down. I'm with Randy Buehler here, though - I like watching two control players try to decide when to act, when to break a (perhaps literal) standstill, and so forth. To me, this is not downtime - it's the part of the match that is very interesting, far more so than someone just swinging with a bunch of creatures.
One of my favorite top eights of all time is Worlds 2005, focusing on the quarters and semis in particular. I've actually stripped the audio portion out of this event and have it on my iPod (that's five hours of listening right there for the semis and quarters, by the way); I even have the semis on two CDs in my car music collection.
I do think it helps if you don't just try to sit and watch the matches with literally nothing else going on. As I'm always doing something else when I watch a movie or television program anyway, this isn't exactly a big problem for me.
Don't get me wrong - I do love a highlight reel, and the ChannelFireball crew did a brilliant job with their highlight coverage of the recent 5K top 32. I've also made my own highlight clip, featuring my absolute favorite PT match moment:
I just think that it's good to recall that highlight videos are just what they say on the tin. They're fun and excellent narrative experiences, but probably bad learning tools.
Here's Anthony's video:

