coxcomb grader: Great Magic Writing of the Week, February 17 by Carlos Gutierrez ...

A staggering amount of Magic content is published each day each day on a plethora of content sites, blogs, podcasts, and discussion forums. No matter how honest an effort you make, it's easy to fall behind and miss incredible articles because there just isn't enough time to read everything.

To that end, we've collected some of the best articles of the week covering a broad range of topics. If you're looking for articles, these are the ones you don't want to miss!

On Best Case Scenarios

In this Pro Tour Gatecrash video, Marshal talks about how our evaluations of cards are generally colored by our own experiences or expectations of the cards. Many times we tend to see the awesome upside of the cards we want to play with, but don't consider how likely that scenario is. Marshall reinforces that we have to consider the average value of a card, rather than the best- or worst-case.

DailyMTG.com: Marshall Sutcliffe (@marshall_lr) - Marshall Law - "Best Case Scenario Mentality"

On Design and Standard Formats

How does R&D approach designing standard formats? Sam Stoddard discusses how cards are changed in design and development to promote a healthy Standard environment. What is the role of the Future Future League in making sure that Standard formats are fun and interesting?

DailyMTG.com: Sam Stoddard (@samstod) - Developing Standard

One of the things that surprised me when I started working here was that development really doesn't work on balancing the individual decks the way I'd imagined. I'd expected a lot of work going into planning out which decks would be making up the real-world metagame, but that isn't the goal of the Future Future League. The goal is to have individual cards that are at around the right power level, and let the players in the real world build the metagame that those cards will allow.

On Magic Coverage and Other Games

As Magic and Magic coverage continue to grow each year, people have started to draw comparisons between other popular games, such as Starcraft and League of Legends. This week Jon discusses what makes Magic fundamentally different than these other games, and what that means for coverage of the game at its highest levels.

GatheringMagic.com: Jon Corpora (@feb31st) - Stinging Barrier

As I?m writing this, there are thirteen articles on the front page of GatheringMagic.com, with eleven different types: infographic, Standard, a few casual (which in and of itself is completely subjective) articles, Commander (video), Standard on a budget, an article on how Ravnica is an allegory to the United States, Commander (text), a writing roundup, a deck roundup, an interview with a former Magic developer, and a financial article. I mention this because the simple fact that a game has a player base of twelve million doesn?t necessarily mean that twelve million people are going to want to watch a Pro Tour. Because Magic is so inherently expressive, everyone does something different with it. If you asked seven different players, ?What?s the overall goal in Magic?? you?d probably hear seven different answers. What I?m getting at here is that the majority of Magic players are simply unlikely to care about the Pro Tour at all.

On Statistics and Pro Tours

With the best players and personalities in the game assembling for three days of awesome games, decks, and stories, the Pro Tour is pretty awesome. What happens when you combine Pro Tour statistics with James Arnold's infographics? You get something truly incredible that shares an incredible amount of information about the Pro Tour and its legacy in a way that is exciting and easy to follow.

GatheringMagic.com: James Arnold (@thatguyjames2)- Pro Tour Gatecrash: An Infographic

On Flavor Text

What is it about the flavor of different sets that speak to different kinds of players? John takes a look at the different aspects of Magic flavor like art and flavor text and how those pieces are used to create different gameplay experiences.

StarCityGames.com: John Dale Beety?(@jdbeety) - All Flavor Is Made For Someone

Further complicating matters is that while outsiders may not understand the text goings-on of the game, they grok the art and form their own opinions of the game from it. Descendants' Path gives a different impression from Macabre Waltz. As Boss Tweed is said to have lamented, "My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!" Tweed was talking about political cartoons, but Magic players are judged from afar by the packaging for the game and the art on the cards?right or wrong, that's the way it is.

There's a lot of pressure riding on each piece of art. With settings, that pressure is turned up dramatically: one shot, pass/fail in the marketplace, the future of Wizards of the Coast as a relatively autonomous company.

No pressure, R&D.

On Gatecrash Limited

What are the winning strategies in Gatecrash limited? Pro Tour Gatecrash Top 8 Competitor Melissa DeTora shares her thoughts on the format heading into the Pro Tour. Melissa discusses how the format is different from Return to Ravnica, and what her approaches are to drafting the different guilds.

TCGPlayer.com: Melissa DeTora (@AllWeDoIsWinMTG)- A Guide to Gatecrash Draft

Another thing about Return to Ravnica draft is that it wasn't usually worth splashing a third color. Each guild had a huge amount of synergy amongst itself that it was rarely a good idea to mess up your manabase to splash. If you had a bomb in another guild and the guildgates to support it, then splashing was indeed possible, but for the most part it wasn't worth it, especially because some decks were simply too fast for you to find your third color.

This is not true in Gatecrash. I find that the decks are overall slower (except maybe in Boros), making it possible to actually have the time to find your splash color in a game. There is also more fixing in Gatecrash than in Return to Ravnica. Of course there are guildgates, but there is also Prophetic Prism at common, which is a nice fixer that can go in any deck. Keyrunes are also great for splashing. In Return to Ravnica draft, you would never splash a card with only a Keyrune as fixing because the format was just too fast. Wasting your turn three to cast a mana accelerator was a pretty bad play. In Gatecrash you actually have the time to use your turn casting an off-color keyrune.

I'm going to cover each guild one by one with how to draft it and what kind of cards you want to be looking for. Let's start with Boros.

On Magic and Valentine's Day

In honor of Valentine's Day, Polish Tamales produced a series of Planeswalker-themed Valentine's Day cards that do a great job of capturing what makes the characters unique. The art is awesome, the captions are clever; these kinds of unique fan projects are part of what makes the Magic community so awesome.
LegitMTG.com: Polish Tamales (@PolishTamales) - Valentine's Day Cards

If you have suggestions for next week's recap you can send them through to us on Twitter, or share throughout the week in the comments below.