[Free Article] The Writers Toolbox

[voltron00x]

This week, some more about writing and the M:TG article form.  What are the basic article archetypes, and examples of each?  Which writers seem to show up most often in each category?  What are your favorite categories, as a reader and/or writer of articles?

Will anyone actually read this and find it interesting?  I hope!

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/20474_The_Long_and_Winding_Road_The_Writers_Toolbox.html

[As an aside, it is really important that people write about Vintage, so I hope that this helps you, in beginning to write, picking up writing again, or continuing in the writing you already do.]

[Smmenen]

This was a really cool, often humorous article.   It may  be too much inside baseball for many SCG readers, but it was fun to read and think about.   I really like the primer, and agree with your observation that it's under-represented today, which is sad because its so incredibly useful.

One of my favorite primers was written here on the mana drain:  http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=11797.0

[voltron00x]

Some of the primers on The Source are insanely good.  I wanted to try to top them when I wrote the two-part, 10,000 word primer on Vintage Dredge (although I was partially motivated by a desire to show that there is actually depth to that archetype / pillar).  I really liked Twaun's R/B Shop Primer on TMD; actually I sort of hoped that the re-org here on TMD would result in more specific-deck Primers on these forums.

As articles, I find that Primers have really long "legs" - I still get email about my Elves primer, for example.

Side note - I need to "re-learn" Standard for the SCG Invitational and I was stunned at the lack of useful tools to get back into that format.  It sucks that no one really picked up Karsten's banner when he left Magic writing.  There's some close analogies to a certain extent on TCG Player but nothing of the quality that Karsten / Flores used to bring to the table.

[nataz]

Two things I miss the most about TMD are good tourny reports and primers.

Nice article, I'm especially glad to see you included Abe Sargent's article Revelations of a Magic Writer.

[2nd_lawl]

woah, I loved this article, And I found your short conversation with brad really interesting and highly relevant to what I have been thinking about recently with regard to vintage.  Specifically im looking for a better way to understand the value of random cards: For example ones drawn with nights whisper or discarded with hymn, relative to "chosen cards" such as ones gotten with demonic tutor or taken with duress or thoughtsieze.  What I have found is that the effectiveness of targeted discard actually increases (against blue decks at least) as you move into the midgame, which seems to clash with the logic that says "duressing a 7 card hand is better than duressing a 5 card hand because the 7 card hand has a stronger card to take on average"

[Troy_Costisick]

I still read your Elves primer, Matt.  It was really good, especially for one of your first articles.

Peace,

-Troy

[Rico Suave]

woah, I loved this article, And I found your short conversation with brad really interesting and highly relevant to what I have been thinking about recently with regard to vintage.  Specifically im looking for a better way to understand the value of random cards: For example ones drawn with nights whisper or discarded with hymn, relative to "chosen cards" such as ones gotten with demonic tutor or taken with duress or thoughtsieze.  What I have found is that the effectiveness of targeted discard actually increases (against blue decks at least) as you move into the midgame, which seems to clash with the logic that says "duressing a 7 card hand is better than duressing a 5 card hand because the 7 card hand has a stronger card to take on average"

I can certainly understand this.  In accordance with the ratio/percentage idea, Duress might have more options against a 7 card hand but we only remove about 14% of their cards.  If we were to Duress a 5 card hand, we remove 20% of our opponent's cards.  According to these numbers then, a Duress on a 5 card hand is more crippling than one on a 7 card hand. 

Of course there are other factors that go into this too.  I'd much rather Duress my opponent's first turn kill than wait for him to drop to 5 cards in hand. 

[Doomsday]

Great article.  And the links at the bottom really reminded me how good Menendian's tourney reports are.  Incredibly detailed, thought processes explained, going through multiple lines of play, etc

[Mr. Type 4]

I won't lie, matt - I tried to read this article a couple times and everytime I got sucked into reading the articles you linked.  So far they've been good ones, and I'll probably go back to this and read a couple more of them. 

[voltron00x]

Thats ok by me.  There are a lot of good articles there.  The ones I chose probably reveal more about me, and the writers I like, than the article itself.