Gareth Lewin's Blog

I don't often write a lot about Magic: The Gathering but I had a thought that I can't express in 140 characters. Has there ever been such a huge change in a metagame as we are seeing in both extended and standard right now? The reasons for Extended are easy, wizards have changed what Extended means so this is clear to everyone, but  I'm not sure if people have considered how standard is about to change. Historically when we had a rotation the new set was too small to have any big synergy and people were also just getting used to the previous block. Additionally the core set used to stick around a lot longer. This time everything is different. We have a set with a (seemingly) very high amount of good cards. The core set is rotating with M10 rotating out. All the tier 1 (with the possible exception of turbo-land) losing everything, from sovereigns to bloodbraid elves. And with RoE being a somewhat stand alone set, the Zendikar block is not significantly bigger to domina

My friend roger wrote a post about xkcd a while ago. Since then, I have made this hilarious comic to describe my opinion about xkcd.

I assume when most people think of Twitter, they think of random boring information being sent into the Aether and just wasting space. I'm going to give two examples of a way that Twitter is not only useless but changing the way we communicate. On the 22nd of April Brian Tinsman and Erik Lauer, the lead designers of the latest Magic the Gathering expansion held a dev chat about said expansion. In general, it was terrible, not because of Erik or Brian, but because the questions were horrid. The next day, @mtgaaron (Aaron Forsythe - Director of R&D for Magic) did his own Q&A, he did it on Twitter. It was shorter in duration but significantly better than the dev chat, the reason for this is that Aaron could filter out the cruft questions, and answer the questions he found he could answer. Today @PeteCarroll (Pete Carroll - Head Coach of the Seattle Seahawks) did the same thing. He tweeted who's got questions? gonna answer some for the next few minutes... fire away