Vintage Quiet Speculation Articles

I'm only qualified to comment as a regular consumer of Vintage content, but I do write for a living. So, for what it's worth, here's what I'd tell your editors about your work so far.

You're doing the Lord's work, but you need to work on editing and narrative flow. It is awesome you're writing about Vintage, but mostly the articles are dry recitations of your conclusions without analysis, humor, or examples to back up those conclusions. I'd suggest the following:

1. Let time pass. This is the key to writing in a narrative way that makes sense to the reader. No matter what you are writing about, you can do this. Doing a brew report? Walk us through your thought process on how the deck was designed in stages, or in how your testing went. Doing a Primer? Look at how Menedian wrote his primer on Hermit Druid to see how you can use analysis to let even that kind of article flow. Take us, the reader, on a journey with you.

2. Don't be formulaic. Your introductions in particular seem to be canned. If you're writing an article, just tell us what you actually want to say and set it up using your narrative. Don't say something just so you can tick the box that says, "Open with a question." One good rule of thumb is this: as you write, imagine a skeptical reader looking at what you are saying. What question does the reader have after each of your sentences? Answer those questions in each next sentence so that the writing is a conversation between you and the reader.

3. Don't give us conclusions - give us analysis. Don't just tell us what the good and bad matchups for your homebrew happen to be in your honest opinion. Who cares what you think? (And I say that totally without malice, it's a question I ask myself whenever I write anything.) They are more likely to care about analysis or examples that tend to prove your point than just the point itself.

Here are my specific thoughts on each article:

Dredge Primer Part I - Sort of mechanical. I guess this is a nice resource for people learning to play Vintage for the first time, but it's almost like reading one of those short encyclopedias for children. It gives you a list of things to know, here cards, and then makes a brief statement about why the reader cares about them. As a Vintage regular, the article has nothing to offer me.

Dredge Primer Part II - I can't read it because it's behind the paywall.

Brewing in Vintage - The intro was too formulaic and boring.

The article meat itself was also sort of lacking. If you're going to do an article about brewing in Vintage -- and you should, its awesomecream covered in awesomesauce -- then I think you need to dedicate more space to either the detailed process of brewing and testing, or to the actual results when you played the deck. So, like, when you talk about Survival, this is really all you say after the deck list:

"The deck started with Bazaar of Baghdad and the full set of Mystic Remora. I eventually cut the Bazaars because if you did not have Basking Rootwalla or Vengevine it was really hard to get any value out of them. I found myself with very few cards in hand after the first two turns to really abuse it.

Mystic Remora is very good in this deck. You have lots of pressure and this is probably the best possible draw engine for this deck. BUG Fish is one of your worst matchups as they have Abrupt Decay, Deathrite Shaman and Dark Confidant. This matchup was so horrendous with my original build that I added True-Name Nemesis to the deck and a couple of Dismember. If Vintage keeps going towards more creature-centered strategies than this deck could be good as tutoring up a True-Name Nemesis every turn is very powerful.

Your best matchups are combo control and pure combo. These matchups are where Mystic Remora shines. The deck isn’t super broken by any stretch, but this strategy deserves to be explored further in Vintage."

This is mostly generalized conclusions you have about the deck, without any real narrative to pull the reader along or any evidence to back up the conclusions. Compare to this way of doing it, maybe:

"I started with a proven Legacy decklist from SCG Open <<insert date here>>. In order to port it to Vintage, I first had to get a handle on what made the deck powerful. What precisely is the deck trying to do, and what parts are critical to that goal? After understanding that, my next task was to determine which cards in the Vintage cardpool would improve that strategy, and which hate cards unique to the Vintage metagame had to be respected to allow the deck to operate. Here's how I broke that analysis down."

And so on. See, it's like we're going on a deck building adventure with you to Magical Christmas Land! The journey is an interesting read. The destination? Not so much.

Vintage Tournament Report - Let me try editing the first part. You wrote:

"Monday nights in the Twin Cities here in Minnesota mean battling Vintage. Every Monday night one of the local game stores hosts a Vintage tournament, which has been getting some good turnouts the last couple of weeks.

I was looking forward to this Monday more than I usually do as I had not been able to attend the last three Monday Vintage tournaments. I had decided that I was going to play Storm this time because a great friend of mine, Joe Kaufmann, and I had recently put it together on Magic Online, and I was looking to get some practice in with the deck to be more prepared for when I battle online. The last time I played Storm was in my first Vintage tournament back in 2005 or something like that.

We had another good turnout on our hands with 12 people coming to battle which meant four rounds. I was ready to battle with the following list:"

How about this:

"Every Monday night, one of the local game stores in the Twin Cities hosts a Vintage tournament. We have been getting decent turnouts lately of about __ to __ people each week, and at least ___ of those players are fully powered. So, these weekly events give us a pretty good sample of the Vintage metagame and give me a pretty good Gauntlet for testing my Vintage brews.

I was looking forward to this Monday more than usual because I had to miss the last three. As much as I love the format, when real life and Magic go head to head, real life has to prevail from time to time. I decided to make a triumphant return to the format with a Storm deck that my good friend, Joe Kaufmann, had been testing on Magic Online with a lot of success. I had not played storm since 2005, and what better way to get back into practice than swinging the cardboard in tournament conditions!

<<insert decklist>>

<<Insert paragraph discussing playtesting, acknowleging the threat of Shops and your plan for dealing with it, maybe talking about local metagame>>

I ended up placing 3-1 in a four round tournament with 12 players. Here's how it went down:"

I dunno, I feel like something like this gives the reader less fluff words, more variety in sentences, and a more flowing narrative to follow. Like they're preparing and playing with you, instead of just getting a play-by-play about what you did.

Chosing Targets - The Great Paywall of QS kept the barbarians out of this one.