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:

Standard - 254
Extended - 24
Legacy - 43
Vintage - 9
Block - 9

Interesting, but about what I would expect. There are other venues for dedicated Vintage players, and Extended, while being my favorite format, tends to go in bursts around PTQ seasons, whereas interest in Legacy is perennial. I don't know if I was expecting Standard to win by an order of magnitude, or for Block to be as weak as it is, but there you go.

I also touch on how we can tune a Junk deck between power and resilience, and how to play a resilience-oriented game.

Click here to read the article.

You can also follow me at parakkum on twitter.

The Zendikar to Eldrazi transition reminds me of Earthdawn.

Earthdawn is a fantasy roleplaying game originally published by FASA, the folks who brought you Battletech (which spawned the Mechwarrior games) and Shadowrun. The Earthdawn property is currently licensed by Redbrick Limited, and you can see their Earthdawn product line by clicking here.

The concepts behind Earthdawn and Rise both clearly plug into the Greek titan myth (click here to learn more about those guys), and the general idea of "older, scarier things that are coming back."

In Rise, the Eldrazi are coming back, and it's bad news for everyone.

An Eldrazi - clearly bad news

In Earthdawn, Magic moves in multi-thousand-year cycles. When it's surging high, things go terribly wrong, and big, old-time magical creatures known as Horrors come out and wreck the world. The setup for the Earthdawn game is that when times were bad, people bricked themselves into great underground cities, some of which survived...and now that magic is on the downswing again, adventurers are out exploring the world, delving into cities that didn't make it, and fighting the occasional Horror.

An Earthdawn Horror - you will lose some party members on this one

Given that Zendikar is the "adventure gaming" block, it's not surprising that it would have some overlap with any fantasy adventure RPG. That said, I always loved the Earthdawn setting as one of real action and adventure, and it's nice that Zendikar, Worldwake, and Rise are pinging that same spot in my mind.

"Sure, attendance at GP Madrid was huge, but how many people there actually had viable Legacy decks?"

More generally, how many people are actually viable in general going into a Legacy event?

Lino Burgold's writeup of GP Madrid touches on the experience of playing through earlier-round opponents. I say 'earlier' as Lino still had his three byes, so these are people who have one way or another made it undefeated to rounds four and beyond. Consider:

The funny thing about Legacy players I noticed, is that they are a lot more casual than the usual player I expect to meet at a PTQ or even at the weekly draft I do at home. This means they are a lot more narrow-minded about the game in general. They often don’t read your cards, don’t understand your cards, or don’t care about what you are really doing… In fact, in the twelve rounds I played, not a single opponent actually used my Dream Halls even once…sure, most of the time they couldn’t, but often, even if they could, they just didn’t. I understand Legacy is a lot more complex considering all those old and weird cards in the format, but if you are playing the format, you might as well be prepared?

Here's what Dream Halls does, if you don't know.

...and...

In my first round, I played against a woman piloting 2-land Goblin Charbelcher (maybe even zero land Goblin Charbelcher). Besides completely fizzling to a Force of Will because she played her cards in the wrong order and wanting to respond to my counter with a Chrome Mox (???), she also failed to play Pyroblast after I resolved my Dream Halls…It didn’t matter anymore at that point.

The quality of Lino's early round opponents suggests that he may have run into the consequences of people who had access to Legacy cards plowing through people with insufficient access. I'd really like to see a broader listing of decks from round one. How many people were making do with weaker cards and, as a consequence, never had a chance at winning the tournament on deck strength alone?

Legacy GPs and other big events are pretty cool, even if I'm not currently a big Legacy player. However, having Legacy as the gateway into the Pro Tour feels ugly, and likely to turn people off from the game -- at least as long as the mana bases are so cost prohibitive.

I think it's the Bituminous Blast that just did it for me this time. Here's PT San Diego champion Simon Gortzen's Jund list:

Notice the absence of Bituminous Blast anywhere in that list. Indeed, Simon's main deck is relatively "removal light," running just Bolts and Pulses, where other Jund lists run Terminates and Bituminous Blasts as well. Gortzen also chose to run twenty-seven lands and two copies of Rampant Growth, putting the emphasis on smooth mana progression.

I'm not really surprised by that choice.

As Mike Flores pointed out, Gortzen also made sound strategic choices with how he played his cards, keeping his Blightnings in hand to use as planeswalker removal rather than just autopiloting them out on turn three. You'll notice this in playing against Jund players as well. When your opponent just runs on autopilot, it's easy to beat them.

The idea that Jund plays itself, or is just "random," fundamentally misunderstands how the deck works. In playing against Jund, you should take a page from Nassim Taleb and assume that their Bloodbraids will hit the "worst case" for you. Likewise, in playing Jund, you should assume that your Bloodbraids are likely to be blanks, and plan accordingly.

The complaints about Jund now sound a lot like the complaints during Pro Tour Honolulu about cascade generally. I actually enjoy playing with and against Jund, and I think Simon Gortzen made a tremendous update to the deck and played quite cleverly.

I understand that players get a little bored when there seem to be "only a few" viable deck types in Standard. This is in one sense a product of the size of the card pools. There are just a handful of reasonable decks in Block, more in Standard, many more in Extended, and tremendously more in Legacy. However, it's also a confluence of other factors such as the fact that not everyone feels like designing and testing a deck, so reasonably stable designs are going to see a lot of play from people who just want to play.

I'd also suggest that the perception that there are just a few dominant decks relies on a very shallow review of the decks, as I alluded to above. Gortzen's Jund is a significant update on pre-Worldwake Jund. Indeed, it relies critically on new cards from Worldwake, and does not just "autopilot" on the prior Jund plan. As someone who pretty reliably plays novel or semi-novel deck designs, I have a great deal of appreciation for players who can tweak or significantly update a known archetype to deal with a shifting metagame or to accommodate a new set.

It's only "Jund wins again" if you're not paying attention. If you're so inclined, go back to the Pro Tour San Diego coverage and compare the top Standard lists to all the others. There are differences there, and they're interesting and fun.

For the record, I didn't have to die that turn in game two. As I mentioned in my column earlier this week, I literally miscounted my mana and, having done so, made the "aggressive" play that made no sense. Ah, well. It was midnight.

I think these videos turned out quite well. Head over to the ChannelFireball YouTube channel to see videos of several matches from the top 32, including the finals, all with quality narration by Eric Levine.

As he describes, his deck just doesn't interact with most of the field. When I realized what he was playing, I had a brief flash of panic before I devised my game plan against him. Our match took an hour and a half, and was by far the longest in that round.

Grant's a nice guy, and I really enjoyed our match - it was among the best I'd had all day.

The answer is in the extended entry.

I had a great deal of fun with this deck -- and hey, won some cash, too. Head on over and check it out.

For my possibly confused Magic-playing readers, this article is about running a roleplaying game based on nineteenth-century war fiction.

Games in the imagined wars at the end of the nineteenth century

From Fearful Times

When The Battle of Dorking was published in the popular Blackwood's Magazine in 1871, it made an immediate and lasting impression throughout Europe. It wasn't the first fictional speculation about war, or even the first to address contemporary issues in the field. It was,
however, well-written and extremely timely. Bare months prior to its publication, the Franco-Prussian war had ended decisively in Germany's favor. People across Europe were shocked at the rapid downfall of what had been the strongest army in the theater -- strong enough to warrant earlier stories describing a French conquest of England. As the Tom Clancy of his day, General Sir George Tomkyns Chesney drew on this rapid conquest to deliver an engaging cautionary tale about the need for a well-prepared army.

Click through to the extended entry to read the full article.

Naturally, this means I have access to my early DCI play history as well. There's not a lot of it -- I only participated in two DCI-sanctioned tournaments before moving away from Magic for about a decade. I'd played in quite a few tournaments before that, but it wasn't until I went to college that I heard of the DCI and was carded up.

It occurred to me to try for a quick-and-dirty "Where are they now?" on my opponents from those two sanctioned tournaments. Here are the highlights from the first tournament, which contained a couple interesting surprises:

My first opponent appears to be a user I'm familiar with over at boardgamegeek.com, the best general boardgaming site around.

My fourth opponent was John Immordino, who took seventh place in Pro Tour Columbus 1996, the first ever Block Constructed Pro Tour. He also top eighted PT Los Angeles 1997. The 1996 Pro Tour information on Wikipedia also reminds me that I used to be casually acquainted with Preston Poulter via the gg-l mailing list and Usenet (he was tied with Olle Rade for fourth place in the Player of the Year race in 1996). Sort of like a casual Facebook friend, for those of you who are too young for Usenet and mailing lists.

Notably, John handed me my first loss of that first sanctioned tournament, in round four. If I recall correctly, I was playing what we might now call a "midrange" W/B deck featuring Swords, Wrath, Ashen Ghoul, and Nether Shadow. My love of recursion is not new.

You can also read more about these Pro Tour years in this Mark Rosewater article. I played against John about four months before his first PT top eight.

My fifth and final opponent was one Megan Huntsman. I don't know where she is now, but I sort of remember what she looks like and much more vividly recall how unfair it felt when she hit me with Armageddon after resolving an Erhnam Djinn. She also ran Autumn Willow, which seemed like a huge beating to me.

I wasn't able to track down anyone particularly interesting from my second DCI-sanctioned tournament.

It was kind of nice to see that I went 4-1 in my first sanctioned tournament, with my only loss coming at the hand of a future PT top eighter.

You can see me and the deck in action in the coverage of the Swiss rounds, here. And I do mean, "see," as in addition to being the round two feature match, there's a picture of me playing at the bottom of the page.

If you look at the archetype breakdown for the main flight, I'm the sole "Junk" representative there.

I exited in the round of sixteen (which you can also read about here) after a somewhat harrowing, one-and-a-half hour match against an Unearth deck. I must admit I was not particularly thinking about Unearth when I put my deck together for the tournament. I lost in the round of sixteen to Magic TV host Tristan Shaun Gregson, who was playing Boss Naya.

I'll have more on all of this in my column this week. I had a great time all day Saturday, sparring with the kind of fun crowd I've come to expect at ChannelFireball and Superstars events.

Also, for those who are in the greater Bay Area and also into Legacy, you may be happy to hear that Superstars will now be hosting regular Legacy tournaments. You can read more about that here.

2,220 players!

You can always keep track of the official coverage, of course. But given that the event is being held in Madrid, you probably also want to check in with MagicMadrid and, more specifically, the twitter feed of Juan Miguel Garcia.

This will be a chance for you to stretch your Spanish language skills, or perhaps your Google Translate skills (conveniently, I actually took Spanish back when I was in high school).

My favorite update so far:

"De momento no hay feature match ni side events por falta de espacio en la sala"

At the moment there isn't a feature match or any side events because we don't have room in the hall

Indeed. I'm waiting for round four to start, so we can follow the performance of our attending ChannelFireball writers.

Click here for more information. The main flight today starts at 10am, with a second flight at 4pm, to be followed by the top 32.

Click here to read ongoing coverage of the event. Last night's archetype breakdown is currently posted, with a strong showing for Jund, Naya, and U/W Control.