Gifts Ungiven

Yesterday, I was looking up a picture of an oldschool Battletech Marauder (that is to say, a Zentraedi Glaug) just to have something fun to test our newly repaired printer out on. In the process, I hit a web page with a super-classic Battletech scenario, only to discover that it was part of an old Jeff Rients site, the same Jeff Rients of Jeff's Gameblog. That's right, the home of Dungeons and Ninjas and How to Awesome-Up Your Players.

Everywhere, I tell you.

iMTG is a new launch point meant to aggregate a wide range of Magic blogs, podcasts, and other materials, giving Magic players an easy place to keep up with new content on the web.

I'm a big fan of aggregators of this type. While I subscribe to many resources already via RSS, launch pages inform me about new resources I hadn't heard of before. It also gives me the option of not subscribing to every single resource, when some of them only really interest me occasionally.

Note that iMTG is heavily biased toward Spanish-language content, by dint of being organized out of Spain. Nonetheless, deck lists and many other bits of Magic data are typically universal - and hey, shouldn't you know how to speak Spanish anyway? Sure you should.

There's a similar German-language launch page called MTG Pop. I imagine, given the game's popularity there, that there's also something like this in Japanese, but I'm seriously no good in searching in Japanese. In contrast, I can point you toward the information site for Korean PTQs.

The pattern here being that I can read Spanish, German, and Korean, but not Japanese. So there you go.

I'm excited about the Spanish-language Magic community, as I've only recently begun exploring it. iMTG should be a good starting point for any of you who are interested in delving into Spanish Magic.

In the last year or so in Northern California, Superstars has really boosted support for the local Magic scene, giving us a steady home for all our PTQs, and hosting multiple $1K events each month and now bringing us a Standard $5K event.

Now the kind folks on 3rd street are bringing us ChannelFireball.com, a content-rich site with many of your favorite writers and some very talented newer authors as well. The "beta" launch of the site includes these excellent articles:

Zaiem Beg discusses the post-Conflux Extended scene and the contentious topic of just how good Path to Exile is
Josh Utter-Leyton (nicknamed "Uber-Leyton" by BDM) teaches us all about 5CC in Shards draft
Riki Hayashi tells us how we, too, can be judges
Luis Scott-Vargas reveals what his pre-Kyoto thought process looked like
Eric Levine answers all our tricky rules questions

I'm personally excited to see the rest of the Magic world getting a sampling of our excellent Northern California community, judges and players alike. I'm adding ChannelFireball to my daily Magic roundup, and strongly encourage you to do the same.