Magic Writing That Can Change Your Life

I don’t recall if I have written about this before. Probably… It’s like I often say: I have a limited number of topics.

I’d like to flatter myself that my writing has changed the lives of some of my readers (I guess that helping a reader’s strategic game or cluing him in onto a deck list that he hadn’t heard of before so that he can get a Q might count)… That’s the dream for most writers anyway (or my goal, anyway).

This post is about the article that changed my life.

The setting: A little over 10 years ago* … Closer to lucky thirteen probably.

I was in the computer lab in my sophmore year dorm. I didn’t even have my own computer yet! (How did I survive?)

We thought Elvish Archers was a pretty good card to play in G/W Armageddon in these days.

I read a PTQ report by Bill Hodack about how he won “the Central New York Pro Qualifying Tournament” in Syracuse.

Bill played a creature-light “Necropotence” deck splashing Red for Lightning Bolt.

To our modern eyes his deck looks pretty inefficient (though at this point in 1996 I seriously doubt if I could have restricted myself to 60 cards)… Lots of janky two- and three-ofs.

But in 1996 I didn’t make judgments like that. I was a sponge. The amazing altran and I would compare notes. Standard Kim plays two Elvish Archers! Individual customization was not within the realm of our power sets. For deck variations, we looked to established deck lists and compared their moments of dissonance.

Bill’s deck, then, was a refreshing departure from Mono-Black.

Hodack only had to wade through four rounds of Swiss to make the single elimination rounds, and he had people running their Autumn Willows into teams of first striking Knights… But in the end, he got there.

Tournament reports were pretty new at this point. You automatically rooted for the narrator, even when he was a scumbag Necropotence deck. I stayed with him reading through this tournament report. There was no sad ending, no manascrew in the second-to-last round of Swiss. Bill just got there. Fulfillment of our — as readers — our wish-fulfillment.

It inspired me to want to do the same thing.

…

Five months later, I would qualify for my own first Pro Tour, also with a B/R Necropotence deck.

I’ve written a 700+ page book about Magic, headlined premium services, sat the Sunday booth in the most exotic locales the Pro Tour has ever dropped anchor, and even had the credits roll over my image hefting a trophy on ESPN, but in many ways, Hodack’s newsgroup post is the most important thing about the game I’ve ever read. It is full of strategic nuggets like “Drain Lifes become useful at about five mana” that have stuck in my mind for 13 years. In 1996, sentence fragments like that one taught me to think about the game in a different way and laid the groundwork for my ability to race in the heated give-and-take battles of the spring of 1999.

I’ve never met Bill Hodack (so I’ve never had the opportunity to tell him how important this tournament report was to me) but I recall Pikula once told me he is an all right guy. People assume I modeled much of my writing and directon on the work of Rob Hahn, but I am pretty sure I would never have attempted what I have done in Magic without reading this report.

He probably isn’t reading this, but…

Thanks Bill.

Pro Qualifier Report-Syracuse

* Big G says it was posted on April 16, 1996