In the eight months since writing Some Plans for sfmagic.org, I’ve made little progress. This is mainly because of gating factors such as moving it into subversion and getting my database backups into subversion as well. Now that those things are in place, I need to review how it works right now to figure out how to proceed.
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Last night was the last sfmagic draft at Canvas, which closes on Saturday. We had 23 people, three draft groups, and I took some photos of the occasion.
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The Prerelease tournaments for the next MTG set, Future Sight, were this weekend.
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The World Championship deck reprints are some of my favorite MTG decks. They’re printed with different borders and backs, so they’re not tournament legal—but that means that you could get a deck worth about $400 in legal cards for between $10 and $15. I was extremely disappointed when they stopped printing these—2004 was the last World Championship to have four decks immortalized in reprint form.
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As I mentioned in February, the Canvas Café is closing. It’s open until the end of this month. Apart from all the other sad things about this, it means that the Wednesday night sfmagic draft group will have to find a new home.
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I’m not very happy with my post from yesterday. I think it was uninspired, didn’t have any great insight in it, and lacked any stylistic qualities to make up for these shortcomings. In addition, I think it would be hard for someone who doesn’t play MTG to get much out of it, while simultaneously lacking detail or analysis that would interest an MTG player. Okay, so it was bad—how can I do better?
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Reading Sartre (specifically Essays in Existentialism) tends to be fairly frustrating, primarily because comprehending what he’s talking about isn’t easy (at least for me). One of the reasons that it’s not easy is vocabulary. I’m not even counting explicitly foreign words like ebschattungen, or explicit (foreign) neologisms like négatité.
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My friend Brett read the post about Set last week, and last night presented me with 81 MTG cards that have the same set of 3x3x3x3 characteristics.
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I learned tonight that the Canvas Café and Gallery will be closing on 1 May 2007. This doesn’t make me happy.
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I tend to read a lot, and I tend to read very quickly. I’m wondering if I should alter my approach.
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On Friday night, Brian and I were discussing MTG skill, in reference to my playing in the Planar Chaos prerelease tournament today.
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Anything involving group organization tends to be tricky. Any kind of logistical enterprise needs improvement and will breed some kind of discontent with at least some people. Sometimes this discontent brings better ideas, sometimes not. It continually surprises me, though, just how tough it can be to get right even small-group logistics. The example I have in mind is how to organize the pods for sfmagic.org drafting each week. How complicated can it be to get some drafts together on a Wednesday night?
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A while ago I came up with a new format for competitive MTG, one which would be tough with real cards but rather easy online: points-based Limited.
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I survey the board calmly, without needing to. I know what resides there. I know the available possibilities. I draw a card, and add its potential to what I hold already.
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In the 2005 sfmagic Player of the Year race, I stayed in contention until the second-last week, and then only dropped out of contention because I had to miss the final draft. In this year’s race, I have very little hope of even making it into the top five.
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As discussed in yesterday’s post about multiple AJAX requests, I wrote an enhanced version of my bookmarklet for improving the magictraders.com price lists.
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I spent some time today creating a bookmarklet (copy the contents of this page into Firefox or another Gecko-based browser) and greasemonkey script for enhancing the magictraders.com pricelists. This kind of thing exemplifies what I love about HTML, and why I distrust less open technologies.
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I’ve had trouble figuring this out. I love playing MTG. And when I first encountered MTGO I worried that I might spend too much money and time on it. Yet I haven’t logged on in more than a year.
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I run a statistics-oriented site for the weekly Magic: The Gathering drafts I play in, sfmagic.org. I started it about two years ago and have been tinkering with it in small ways the whole time, but now plan to make some major changes, including:
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