The Jitte
A Magic the Gathering Blog

When I first started this blog there weren’t many other Magic the Gathering centric blogs.  Now its just incredible I find a new one every day.

Another thing thats changed is the ad to content ratio of these blogs.  I can’t believe how many ads these guys throw on their blogs.  Mike Flores is a good writer but don’t enjoy haveing two huge animated banners fight for my attention while I read his content.  Its just too much.

MTG Realm just takes the cake.  What happened here?  There are more square pixels taken up by ads than words!

Randy Buelers blog is pretty nice and has some well thought out content and comments too.  Its just too bad he choice a brown on brown theme.

Design wise Gathering Magic is probably the best.  Its got that transparent ethereal feel to it and the RSS icon up in the corner makes me thing somebody knows what they are doing.  You can’t help but laugh at them a little though.  Check out their About Page.  They gave themselves pretty serious titles for two guys with a magic the gathering blog.  :p

Titles like that usually infer your in charge or manage people. With just two of you its hard to justify titles like that.

I’m not too concerned about the M10 rules changes.  Personally I thought the combat step in Magic the Gathering was terribly swingy and overcomplicated as it was.  Even though this could just be because I’m terrible at Magic I always had a sort of anxiety attack once I entered the combat phase with a complicated board and an opponent with cards in hand and mana open.  There is just too much going on and a single combat step could determine the outcome of the game.

Simple is Better

A lot of forum and blog posts I’m reading have people freaking the funk out over their precious combat step being dumbed down. I think sometimes we forgot the old KISS ( Keep It Simple Stupid ) term when it comes to Magic Rules, simple is better a lot of the time.  And yes, you do want the game that you make money selling to be as accessible as possible, trying to explain how lifelink works and why saccing a create that died will save Nantuko Husk is a huge mess.

All Growed Up

Wizards is not the same young company back when the 6th edition rules came out.  Its important to note that game design theory and concepts have come along way since the 90s.  Game companies have gotten awfully sophisticated at user testing and feedback and that makes me think that Wizards knows how to make Magic a better game a lot more than I do.

Change you can Believe in

Of course when things change people inevitably freak out.  Take a look at this message from back when the 6th edition rules changed.  It seems that the only thing that doesn’t change is how much people freak out when things do.

How do you know you know?

What amuses me the most though is that I’m sure 90% of the people with opinions on the combat step rules change haven’t played a game yet with these rules in place.

Due to the graciousness of WoTC , the final results of the last three Pauper Premier Events is available in CSV(ish) format. This allows for some good old data crunching and we have possibility getting a broader picture of the Pauper format and the metagame that surrounds it.

Originally I only crunched  some simple data from the last PE but with the help of SpikeBoyM and Polari from the pdcmagic.com forums I was finally able to get all three premier event results parsed, trended, and rendered in a nice HTML format for everybody pour over and analyze.

Using a C# program I wrote I created a nice , sortable ( click on the table headings ) table based breakdown of the cards that made up the decks of all three Pauper Premier Events.

Its pretty wild to see that Pauper has a pretty flowing metagame.  Mono Red Burn looked hot for the 2nd PE but died during the third, you can see how MBC took off, and weirdly how all the sliver decks played the exact same amount of core slivers for the 2nd and 3rd PE.  So much to look at!

Have fun!

Oh, and please leave your suggestions or comments of what other kinds of data of information you’d like to see.  I am working on adding support for archetypes and other information in my data cruncher but its a bit more complex to get this data shaped and formed the way I’d like.

Interesting Chat

Long story short.

Had a guy quit on me once I cast a first turn Duress in the PDC Casual Room.  I asked why, this was the response.

What was really weird was that he quit 3 games in 5 minutes and I was curious so I asked why.  Maybe he had a really tight definition of casual and I wanted to know what it was.

Instead of answering he went all cry baby on me from what he says reported me for harassment.  Weirdest part was he didn’t block me.

I guess some people are just sensitive.  Have any of you had the same kind of experience?  I fullest expect to mean real assholes online but didn’t expect such sensitivity.

All shapes and sizes, all shapes and sizes…

One of the features I love at MTGO 3.0 is the card zoom.  For those you who don’t know when you simultaneously left and right click on a card image inside of MTGO a nice zoom effect occurs and the cards image is enlarged in place.  Its really nice to check out some sweet art or read a cards text.

Personally I think this kind of pattern should be used on every single Magic the Gathering website or application on the planet because of how fluid of an experience it is NOT to have to click on a link just to read a cards text.  Every Magic the Gathering site on the planet forces you to click “details” links just to read what a card does and it really takes the fluidity of shopping or deckbuilding with Magic Cards.

Being the crafty fellow I am I decided to give the technique a go using the jQuery library and this is the result:

Pretty impressive for 10 minutes of work. You have to wonder why WoTC doesn’t use this effect inside the new gatherer or why you don’t really see it at all on most website.

The reason I bring this up was because as I was going to list my card choices for a BrUiser deck I wasn’t satisfied for how I was going to display that information. You have to admit, this is MUCH cooler.  :D

It doesn’t play nice with the google ads on the page, which I’m probably going to move, but for now this line of text should move it far enough away.

There really is an app for everything I guess. Today I found a forum post over at tcgplayer.com describing a very feature rich Magic the Gathering application for the iPhone called the Sylvan library.  Here is a copypasta list of the applications features:

• The Gatherer card search with card art, price, oracle text, and more.
• D20 dice, 2D6 dice, and a coin to flip. All motion controlled and 3D!
• Fully featured life counter with poison and mana counters all on one screen, all controlled with just up/down, left/right swipes.
• Game timer with log to keep track of life totals and win count.
• The log can be saved for future reference.
• Fully customizable with hand painted artwork, including backgrounds and avatars. You can use pictures from your photo roll too!
• A reference library with over 80 documents that’s searchable!
• RSS links to popular Magic RSS feeds.
• Top player list.
• Find local Magic events.
• Facebook connect integration.

If I had an iPhone I’d probably give it a whirl although I’m a bit skeptical about how useful it could be.  A d20 is pretty functional you know?  The UI doesn’t look too pretty from the screenshots posted in the forum thread.  Why does everybody working with inside the fantasy intellectual property space insist on using textured backgrounds for everything?  It just makes text harder to read!

For whatever reason the message boards of at Wizards.com has been asking me to enter security questions to enter the site. Usually I just ignored them because I couldn’t be bothered with the 30 second it would have taken me. ;)

The only downside was that I had to login every time I went to the boards as the site wouldn’t save a cookie or couldn’t retrieve it, whatever. So today I bit the bullet and filled in my pet’s first name and my grandmothers bra size but I decided to have a little fun too.

Under one of the questions is says something like “This question will be asked by Customer Service if you call us?” Really? They’ll say anything I type in here? :D

So now if I ever have to call Wizo Customer Service they guy on the line will have to ask me this security question:

Who is makka wakka lakka tikki kai woooopshisssy?