A little about me and this blog

Hello, my name is Tom. I've been playing magic off and on for about 3 years. Magic is certainly my favorite game. As much as I love playing magic I might enjoy thinking about magic even more. And writing is just organized thought right?

The thing is, my interest is a bit fickle (that whole off and on thing). I just don't know if a week from know or even tomorrow I'll still want to do this. But, magic has been a fairly consistent part of my life since I started playing so maybe this will work out. I think blogs don't work very well unless you update consistently. Good news for me is I don't actually have any followers. So... tomorrow if I quit no will notice. And of course if I do stick it out a while I might decide to make some kind of commitment. At that point I'd look into sharing my blog (with who I'm not sure yet).

Maybe one day this'll be a big thing. Or maybe medium. I think my secret goal for this blog is to have it noticed one day by Mark Rosewater. He's the lead designer (or some title like that) for magic and his weekly blog is fantastic. In fact, now that I think about it, his writing is certainly an inspiration for me and one of the reasons I'm giving this a go. But apparently he likes to read fan mail and writing about magic so that may actually be a possibility (fingers crossed). Hmm that might sound weird... Tone is difficult to get across in writing and I refuse to use emoticons. I'm joking.. kind of.. not really.

Everything over at daily mtg is high quality. Well.. a lot of it. I especially like Mike Flores' tournament reports in addition to Mark's stuff. If you play magic, check it out.

There are so many ways to play magic. Different formats, online vs offline, competitive vs casual. For a while I wanted to be super competitive but I pretty much gave up on that because I believe to be really good at anything you have to force yourself to do it, and I wasn't quite willing to do that with magic at this point in my life. The thing is, trying to win has always been a big part of what I enjoy about the game so my current compromise is playing in the casual room online, with my own (cheap) decks, but trying to win. Here are my current guiding principles for how I want to play magic (does anybody else do weird stuff like this?):

casual standard, classic, and pauper:

• enjoy playing
• learn and grok
• play to win
• build my own decks
• use a variety of decks
• stay within budget

I think this is a pretty good mix between playing casual and competitive. This is less competitive than I used to play because I don't keep score anymore. I used to track all of my wins and losses per deck in a spreadsheet (maybe one day I'll share), but now, see, I figure this blog could sort of memorialize my experience instead of my spreadsheet. It's not about win ratio but the experience. And, in case you're wondering, my budget is fairly small - especially when you consider that budget is spread across all my decks and I like to build a lot.

I'm gonna say one more thing about Maro. One of his articles was about writing. In this article he said something like what makes writers special is putting themselves into their writing. I think this means sharing slightly embarrassing details like my "guiding principles for how I want to play magic" and my ridiculous spreadsheet tracking every magic online game I ever played. You do kind of feel like you're leaving yourself exposed a bit for the whole world to see, but I think he's right.

So. Here's to maybe, just maybe, a long happy journey of writing about magic.