how to do magic
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I didn’t ever plan on writing about Magic. It kind of happened by accident really. It’s happening again right now. 2:51am, Saturday, February 19th 2022. I won’t lie to you. I’m going to write all of this as fast as possible and post it as soon as I can. I need to do this in order to rhyme with my past self. Let me explain.
In December of 2019, I stumbled upon the Medium page of Tim Rogers, a writer whose work fundamentally changed my life. I found his writing by accident on my morning commute to my new job. I started reading during the last ten minutes of my bus ride into work. I read as I walked into work, to the point that it gave me motion sickness. I logged into my work computer and continued reading. I was a little shocked to be honest. I normally have a hard time sitting and focusing on reading for extended periods of time, but I was still in the training period of my job and had finished all of my required tasks. My supervisors were waiting for some paperwork to go through before I could legally do work. In the meantime, I could do whatever I wanted. All I wanted to do was continue reading. I read for four hours straight.
At some point in the day, “writing” stopped feeling like it was “something that writers do” or “something I did in college,” and now felt like “something I can do at any time.” I remembered reading a Magic article a few days earlier. It was a tournament report from a Pro who had not made Day 2 of a GP. For the author’s sake, I will withhold their name.
They wrote about how frustrated they felt investing so much energy and money into the game. Their uncertainty surrounding their future as a pro player bled through their words, even if they didn’t state it themself. This article was a descent into the dark heart of the grinder dream. Then, it came to a screeching halt. They ended the piece with a few platitudes. They soon felt better through the magic of friendship. They knew everything was going to be okay because there was always another tournament. I was stunned. My mind lingered on the question of, “okay but… what if it is very much not going to be okay tho…”
Let me assure you, the author did not intend for this to happen! This is the result of corporate money-havers paying pros who do not have backgrounds in writing to write on a near-weekly basis in order to make ends meet. I don’t blame the players. By all means, take whatever free money you can get. It’s just that the space of Magic writing has so much possibility. Having the vast majority of the output be disposable articles that become irrelevant within weeks feels like a waste.
So many of the online spaces where I’d see Magic discussed were constantly filled with stoic banality and sisyphean arguments. When everyone is constantly abrasive, sincerity is the new cruelty. Firing off a snarky tweet is easy, but making yourself vulnerable by making something yourself takes work. What did I know? I hadn’t written anything in years.
I had to try. I had to write what I wished I’d seen in that article. I had to know how hard it could be. How hard is it to say one honest thing by only talking about Magic? I told myself if I could put one thing out into the world that touched someone’s life in some small way like Tim’s writing did to me, all the years I spent failing as a grinder would not be wasted. I would have changed this place in some small way. I opened a text document and just started spewing. I didn’t eat lunch that day. I didn’t even notice. By the end of the day, I had 75% of what would eventually become my first piece. I cleaned it up over the weekend and posted it as soon as I was able. I expected a maximum of ten people to read it all the way through.
When a few people did enjoy it, that feeling of catharsis never came. I felt shocked and embarassed more than anything. I feared I had made a simulacrum of Tim’s writing style because I had no idea how to have one of my own and people mistook it for talent.
I kept trying. I placed a ball under one of three cups and shuffled it around for a bit and swindled some money of my own by writing a couple things I was going to end up writing anyway if nobody paid me. By some fluke, I had somehow finally become a real, taxable Magician without ever being good at Magic or writing.
“A goal occurs to me. I want to accomplish a magic trick with this writing. I will not be perfectly honest about all of the details… I would like you to either decide for yourself where the dishonesty lies, or to not think of it. Whichever path you choose, please accept my sincere promise that, despite any organizational dishonesty, every detail of this piece is real and true.”
Tim Rogers, “just like hamburger, exactly like hamburger:”
I came to embody this dishonesty. I held it like a mantra. I have to own up to this now. I don’t know if the fear of conning people through a stolen voice will ever leave me, even if I tried. So then, why not lean into the pastiche for fun a final time? Why not do one more sleight of hand? Just like real magic, in Magic writing, the cards alone are not the point. It is the actors, the theatricality, the show.
However, there’s another side to consider. I’ll quote another writer who is not me to show you what I mean. When reflecting on his earlier writing, famous racist H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, “I see my ‘Poe’ pieces and my ‘Dunsany’ pieces — but alas — where are any Lovecraft pieces?”
He had a point about one thing, I guess. The difference between influence and replication blurs when you spend enough time alone writing. I would like to someday look back on something I wrote without hearing someone else. I don’t know if I know how to communicate honestly through text without filtering it through the language of artists I respect. I don’t know if I can ever feel authentic here.
However, I do know that I have had people that I respect tell me that they enjoy my writing, even if I don’t know exactly how I write. So for all of our sakes, I’m going to figure out how to write in my own way. I’ll put on this act again.
But I won’t just keep it to myself. With paid Magic writing positions in short supply these days, little freaks like me who choose to make chalk drawings on the walls for free on purpose in dark caves of the internet might be the only writers left outside of Youtube ad-rev Content churners in the coming years. To the “anti-Magic-article” authors (whatever that means) out there, I offer you a seat by the fire. If you want to learn the proper way, you’ve come to the wrong place, but I’ll try my best to help you trick people into paying you. I am writing this Magic article about writing a Magic article so that you can write a Magic article too if you so choose.
now watch closely…
HOW TO WRITE A MAGIC ARTICLE IN 5 EASY STEPS
by cera sophia
0.
Through my extensive research (writing a grand total of 5 Magic articles in my life), I’ve found your success entirely comes down to how well you are able to mix the following ingredients.
THE LAYERS:
1. what are the cards
2. how are the cards played
3. who played the cards
4. what is the context of the cards
5. how did the cards make you feel
Like a good recipe, you should be able to taste each component individually, but they should meld together into a unified whole. You can write a savory dark chocolate dessert with a hint of smoked chile, or you can write something simple and focused like scrambled eggs on toast. The important thing is to know what you want to make going in and work to balance your Writing Flavors so you don’t end up lost in the sauce. I’ll make a taste-test of all five of these to explain what I mean.
Truly impactful work incorporates all these flavors in some way. This is writing that people will return to long after its original publication, which should (hopefully) be our end goal. To write a good Magic piece is to trick people into thinking about anything other than Magic. This is our misdirection. The game is simply the gilded frame to put around whatever you want to write about. Because of the overabundance of strategy, statistics, and information surrounding Magic today, anyone can post a decklist and play advice, but only writers can make evocative art. If we know how much we hate this game at times and still can’t stop ourselves from writing about it, there’s probably something there! Translate that passion into a language for others to understand.
I’m going to show (not tell) you what I mean. You’re going to have to get fooled yourself.
follow my hand…
Let’s begin.
1. what are the cards
To write about Magic is to write free ad copy for a corporation, whether you like it or not.
Here we are. We are the product.
We are official. We are legal, calculated, and exact.
The card does what the text states. There is no deviation from fact.
Here is an itemized list of the 75 cards. There is truth in the unwavering and sprawling pages of rules texts. There are libraries filled with it.
$3.99 MSRP, please.
A video spoiling a new card falls into this category. It is pure information. This was unknown before. Now it is known. How long does this stay relevant? However long it takes to upload the image. How long is this relevant? Maybe twenty seconds?
This writing is cheap and easy. It is Doritos. It is meant to be consumed and discarded immediately after. It strips away everything that makes up Magic as a whole down to its purest form. It is hydrogen.
Do not misunderstand me, there is depth and nuance here. This is the realm of the technical masterwork, the decklist, the discussion of what makes good design, the pursuit of mathematical perfection. I, however, am no mathematician.
We’re done here. Let’s drop this voice and move on.
2. how are the cards played
These first two elements probably makes up the majority of Magic writing online. This is strategy or coverage: how the cards were played by others or how to play them yourself. Like above, there’s a lot to obsess over. Because 65% of the decisions in Magic (by my rough estimation) are linear and don’t require much thought, this makes the remainder all the more delicious to scrutinize.
Writers in this space are abundant and often low in value. Mediocre ones pepper Twitch chats, Youtube comment sections, and Reddit threads. They deal exclusively in bad faith and worse opinions. They could be algorithmically generated and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
The issue here is that quality writing, especially in the modern day, struggles against the sea of data availability. Thousand of players everywhere every day tap softly on glass aquariums constructed by WotC with grinder-brained hammers. Cracks form, and the most successful and “logical” deck choices get drained out fairly quickly. The writing emerges with ink still wet. The articles passed around The Dojo look like MS Paint drawings in comparison. I guess it’s always been hard to argue with nerds about math. Can you even argue with a spreadsheet like this?
But here lies the key! The role of the modern strategy writer is not one of just creation and refinement, but also of curation and character: to have taste to weed out the signal from the static of statistics, to captivate the audience. This is doubly true for Commander related writing. Is the deck good? Maybe. Is it sick and fun to play? Absolutely. Is the person giving you this information charming? I’m not going to judge you for being wrong.
I’m won’t lie to you, I don’t exactly read a lot of strategy articles these days because: 1) I don’t play much and 2) they always read like trash. Reading through Dojo articles while researching this piece has been much more fun than looking at modern sites. The writing may be incomprehensible and mostly incorrect, but at least it’s written with character. Is pure data worth more than fun? Financially, probably.
Maybe people don’t want anything more than just cards and strategy in their Magic writing, and I suppose that’s okay. But people like Chapin — my pick for “the Orson Welles of MtG” — shows outsiders what they’re missing. When you say the phrase “Chapin deck,” people are able to understand you mean “some three-color pile with a lot of spice” more often than not. That could be you!
3. who played the cards
Players like Chapin are integral to the history of Magic. He may be one of the more high profile cases, but players important to their local community pepper the world. Sometimes they’re in the Hall of Fame, sometimes they’re the PTQ endboss.
All of these people have stories to tell, not all of them know how to tell it or express themselves to others. When WotC herded its pro players onto Twitch through the (soon-defunct) MPL, it proved that being good at Magic isn’t a personality. Streaming is an act of creation, like writing, and requires an entirely different skillset. Audiences care less about the number of GP Top 8s you have under your belt and more about how much they like to hear you read sub notifications.
These stories are the thrill of sport, of having a chance to be known. This is where a series like Pretty Deece comes in. It highlights the intense pressure and exhaustion that players go through. These people aren’t just trained algorithms, they are humans first. Yes, one deck has an absolutely favorable matchup against the other. The math is there. The cards are on the table. The decisions are plentiful. You can run a simulation, but what else is there? The players, the commentators, the live crowd! Where the math frames, the players paint.
Imagine how much more exciting history would be if Brian Davis won. Who cares if another great player had one more first place finish? Instead all we’re left with is a famous mistake. Can you imagine how Brian Davis felt? On a smaller scale, probably yes. Can you imagine what it would be like to read an extensive piece about this written by Davis? Maybe, but that’s all in the past.
4. what is the context of the cards
Magic is a game with a playerbase the size a country. It feels fitting for it to have its own culture reporters. Documentarians capture the stories that dot this decentralized, shared landscape. Some focus on the history of development, others the formats and grinders of the past, maybe tournament culture, why not art history? These are modern-day ethnographers who are working as preservationists of our thirty-year-old culture.
A random Forbes writer can’t come in and write a summary on a weekend. You need to live within it. You must internalize its language and jargon, its styles and classics. You need people who have spent so much time doing this that it would be crazy to stop now.
If and when Magic eventually does end, you won’t have to worry about the cards being preserved. There are enough stock-trader motherfuckers to make sure that every card is accounted for in playsets. Their culture is preserved four thousand times over. When your old LGS inevitably closes (which only seems to be happening at faster rates these days) or the friend you used to play with dies, your memory is one of select few. There will be no archive to flip through unless you make it yourself.
This is the context of Magic. It does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot say “Oko” without inviting fifteen tangents to the conversation. Each of these fifteen tangents invites three more. This is why I never shut up. Just as you can conjure with “Chapin,” you can evoke with “Turtenwald.” Now we’re in a darker place. Magic is the white tablecloth that we all stain in our own ways.
Culture is as messy and ugly as it is beautiful. There is no way to capture all of it but it is foolish not to try. But how do we know what to pull from the cliques and the whisper networks that branch ever outward? What stories are even worth capturing? Why does this matter? Can’t we just shut up and play?
5. how did the cards make you feel
(cw: suicide)
The title proclaims “You Aren’t Alone” in 48-point font.
You cannot talk about Magic without talking about how it makes you feel. Every aspect of the cards are meant to evoke emotions nested within players. The text, the art, how they are played, the history behind them, your play patterns, your latent desires, all being channelled simultaneously. When I exclusively play decks whose primary goals are counting to 20 (or sometimes 10) as fast as possible, the game does its job by creating cards that let me evoke the feeling of playing degenerate wizard blackjack. When trying to play at a high level consistently makes you feel like killing yourself, I suppose the game did its job a little too well.
As attention-grabbing (and surprisingly common) as suicidality may be, the more gentle emotions often go unsaid. The highlight reel that is history sands off the rough edges of culture to highlight its major moments: hard-fought victories, staggering mistakes, the Hall of Fame, both figurative and literal. The stories of the everyday people finally accomplishing arbitrary goals they give themselves often rattle away in sparsely-read tweets or reddit posts.
These are not disposable, these are the trinkets grinders carry in their coldest streaks: winning on your own terms, knowing someone always holds a chair for you somewhere, the feeling of belonging to something more than yourself. When the money dries up, this is what is left. Alexander shared his story. I already linked mine earlier. Maybe you have one too. You aren’t alone.
There is a specific joy in creating something that was not there before, whether it be a shared game of Magic with someone you care for or some silly words cobbled together into an overly-sentimental Medium post. The joy and the pain and the small windows into each other’s lives you’re so briefly granted, over and over. It is a miracle we are able to find each other because of these stupid cards.
I remember it all. All the teens I helped run events for in my small hometown because those nerds had nowhere else to go on Friday nights. I remember all the weekly modern events where I would dump lethal Infect pump spells on the table after looking at my opponent’s hand with Gitaxian Probe to see they had no way to stop me. I always said, “You’re dead, do you want me to do it?” just to flex.
I remember hugging my shoprat friend for (what he didn’t know would be) the last time at GP San Jose before I moved away. I used to give him rides home sometimes. It had been a year since we last saw each other. I quit going to the store I used to work and play at after I came out because I didn’t want to deal with anybody seeing me. He recognized me and came in for one of his huge hugs, just like I remembered, just like the one he gave me when I won in the finals of a GPT at the aforementioned store. He said he had seen the news on Facebook. He said he knew I was me. He stayed there to draft. I left and never came back. I deleted my Facebook. I became a different person again.
I remember the first trans person I ever saw playing across from me. We were both pretransition. I thought she was one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen. She made existing look effortless, whereas I had been struggling for a while. I had been painting my nails and had a septum for years at that point and basically dressed exclusively in frumpy, oversized sweaters with prints and tight black jeans that showed off my ass. I was dressing like this and minoring in Gender and Women’s Studies at a famously gay school and I still didn’t think I was queer.
We barely talked at first, but her voice was warm and sweet in a way I’d never heard before. I remember the nights we would occasionally chat after rounds or events. I think we both knew something about each other that we wanted to know about ourselves.
We started talking a bit more. I remember misplaying against you in Theros-DTK standard with my friend’s shitty Mono Red devotion brew that I tried to make good. You were playing U/B control and stone cold, near emotionless, every blue mage’s heartthrob. Meanwhile, I was trying to whittle topdecked Wild Slashes and Fanatic of Mogis triggers into a win. I wanted to win more than ever because I wanted so badly for you to think I was smart or cool or pretty in some way because I thought that you might have shared this similar narrow worldview I was so invested in. Instead, I felt so stupid. I went back to my car afterwards and found I had gotten a parking ticket. I felt even stupider than before. I sobbed alone in the parking lot as I paid the ticket on my phone.
Six months later, I ended up crying in the car about you again, now with different blood. You were you and I was approching someone who was me. I saw you at the local GP. We shared a momentary look into each other’s eyes. First of uncertain identities, then of mutual recognition, and then the floor, all in two seconds. You had bleached your hair. I thought it looked really really cute, but I couldn’t work up the nerve to talk to you again. What little magic we sparked together had long since faded. We passed without saying a word to each other in the cold January tournament hall. Her distant, unmistakable voice, only just a little higher, echoed from behind me off the concrete walls and floor, for a brief flicker, and then gone. I couldn’t make out the words. In another life, we could have been lovers. Now I don’t even know your new name.
This is what magic is. The darkest moments and the intimate rituals we all conducted together, immutable and inseparable, in perfect symmetry. I love all of it and all of you because to hate how you spent your time or who you spent it with is to hate a part of yourself you don’t want to admit is there.
It is incredible to give each other small acts of sincerity by playing this weird game a thousand times over. To fool yourself into thinking this is all just about the Product that is Magic: the Gathering would be careless. My MtGO account history remembers it all so I do too. Every faceless opponent farming wins off of me, let’s call it a little treat from me to you. Every fraction of a percent of our win rates and our time spent alive we exchange, recorded forever on your DCI number, stored in a digital database somewhere in Hasbro’s™ Wizards of the Coast’s™ server farm, no longer viewable from your now-sunsetted Planeswalker Points© page. The Magic: the Gathering Companion™ mobile app, as well as M:tG:Arena™, available in the App Store™ now.
voila
Now it all reappears. We’re back among the Game and the Cards and the Players and I’m here too. They’re having their names added to prestigious lists, or managing hedge funds, or off hawking crypto, or all of the above, and I’m at the small table in the corner of the hall trying to palm a coin to pull from behind your ear. We share a common world but we do not always sit at the same tables. We exchange a glance or an occasional touch on the most intricately constructed moving walkway built of expensive cardboard. We shake hands after the games we play and only rarely see each other again. To all of you that I won’t, goodbye. I’ll remember all of you as long as I can and then I’ll be gone.
