The Superiority of Team Message Boards

I was thinking recently about how team forums are eclipsing TMD as the place for Vintage discussion. If you notice, TMD tends to be more of a stomping ground and tournament posting place as of late.

In some ways, this is natural. Secrecy is a dominant strategy—you just keep all of your information to yourself no matter what everyone else does. I have a lot of respect for people who share all of the changes they make to their decklists, why they made them, how they sideboard, and so on.

At the same time, something is clearly lost from this. Over the summer I posted about a deck, “Intuistax” (Stax with Intuition). I received a few replies. One person pm’ed me saying that he really liked the idea of using Intuition in Stax but wasn’t going to post because if he decided to play it he didn’t want anyone else to know. I am sure at least a few other people were using Intuition in Stax decks (or started to consider it) around that time period but I didn’t hear from any of them.

For that matter, team forums offer a chance to get away from the never-ending contest of wills that gets played out over the most inane issues. You get to deal with friends. When you post a good idea, everyone else will discuss it (instead of avoiding it); when your idea isn’t so good, no one is out to make you look dumb for having suggested it. As long as your team is sufficiently large that you get a reasonable amount of ideas flowing, you may as well discuss things with them alone.

Plus, in a bit of irony, I discussed even this with my team before posting it here.