I think there should be more long-time website and magazine editors on your selection committee. Those guys know everything.

Mark Rosewater’s first “Timmy/Johnny/Spike” redefined how Magic Players think about themselves, plus it’s been read by a lot more people than most of the other options. It needs to be in the top five.

I think listing Wakefield’s whole book is cheating (why not just list Deckade?) and suggest that It’s All About the Dinosaurs is a good pick from him. As a bonus, it includes lots of references to Chad Ellis’s “Danger of Cool Plays” article, which I personally liked a lot.

Agreed with Who’s the Beatdown and The New Pool Halls.

I’d probably go with Schools of Magic or Bruce for my fifth place. Or possibly “They Call Me Mr. Scrub”, but it can’t be all that significant if I’m the only one who remembers it.

Andy this should get your juices flowing:
http://www.classicdojo.org/
or
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.thedojo.com/

My list:

1. Who’s the Beatdown
2. Schools of Magic
3. Clear the Land and the Fundamental Turn
4. Systemic Thought (most underrated article ever!)
5. Tournament Reports

Largely agree for the most part, but don’t seem to remember Zvi writing a follow-up to Who’s The Beatdown.

… So I’m downright curious, as I didn’t really expect my name to come up anywhere in this particular discussion, which one of mine made it anywhere near someone’s short-list, if you don’t mind my asking?

–S.

Hrm… definitely a no-holds-barred slant toward articles that help you get better at winning tournaments; I’m guilty of it myself. But the instructions are more open-ended. Magic is more than winning tournaments, although that’s the stuff that gets canonized. I’m sure if I thought about it more in that way I’d want to include something by Rosewater at the very least.

the confusion re: Who’s the beatdown II is that most people remember it as the (non flores) Inevitability article

here is a link to the article. You will likely have to paste: http://members.pundak.co.il/magic/viewtopic.php?t=11871&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=9aaef258ac88ad422c1013b976de871f

Monty: I was the sole vote for Ellis’ Danger of Cool Things

for the record this was my mail to Mike re: my votes:

“in no particular order:

Clear the Land - Fundamental Turn - zvi
Who’s the beatdown - Flores
Inevitability (Who’s the beatdown II) - zvi
Danger of cool things - Ellis
Picking the right plan - flores

I think articles that were close include:

Tempo is really interesting - flores
Mulligans - EDT
Tempo - EDT
Stop being so casual - forsythe
Philosophy of fire - flores
Silver bullets - flores

And i REALLY wanted to list Tomfidence (me), because I think it should be more influential than it is, obv, lol”

Andy: I wrote two short bits a while ago for SCG with 10 old article links:

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/5150_Five_Blasts_From_The_Past.html

this one has The Rogue Strategy (Flores), Technically Perfect Play (wakefield), Redemption Report (march hare/otter driver - humor), Mulligans (EDT) and Stop Being So Casual (Forsythe)

and

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/5236_Blasts_From_The_Past_Part_II_Impulse_Like_Flores.html

this one has Investment Theory (Flores), Virtual Card Advantage (EDT), Recipe for Success (gallitz), Impulse like a Pro I and II (Porky - Humor) and 1998 Worlds Report (Buehler).

If there are specific articles you are looking for, let me know and i’ll see what I can do to help track em down

For my list I wanted to recognize different kinds of influential with my various choices, so mine isn’t as spike-centric as some of the others, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Here’s what I sent Mike. (Nice guess Aten!)

1) Who’s the beatdown?
Surely the most influential and oft-referred to theory piece ever.
There’s nothing else I can point to that actually changed the way so many players think, and it’s understandable for *many* skill levels. I can’t think of any other philosophy article that translates *so well* from theory to practice.

2) Timmy, Johnny, and Spike
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr11
The most influential article in terms of how players think of themselves. This forever changed how players see themselves, others, and how they feel about cards that they realize may not be made for them but are made for somebody.
An updated version from four years later can be found here:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr220
The quiz isn’t working right now (I’ll see how quickly I can get that into the technical queue) but the discussion after is more sophisticated, particularly for Timmy.

3) The New Pool Halls: Gambling and Magic http://web.archive.org/web/20001206085700/http://magic.mindripper.com/In
dex.cfm?ArticleID=43&SectionID=1&Show=All
The definitive lifestyle article and one that would influence pretty much all that came after it. Little known story, the first time Hacker sent this to me at Mindripper I had to turn it down due to stupid rules in place by my bosses at Mindripper (which was run by The National
Collector) and were the same people that brought you that godawful layout and color scheme. Thank god this got published despite those people!

4) Jamie Wakefield - “Tournament Reports”
http://www.amazon.com/Tournament-Reports-Magic-Gathering/dp/1556225792/r
ef=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234205130&sr=8-1
The most influential “for the love of the game” writer. Aaron mentioned this one to me and I have to agree this is the best way to show what Wakefield was about. He wasn’t accomplishments, he was love of the game and showing that love in such a captivating way that you couldn’t help but get caught up yourself. This book more than any other I’ve read shows what the Jamie phenomena is all about.

5) Sean McKeown - RocketShoes
The most influential article to completely change a PT about to happen.
I haven’t tracked the article down in archive.org yet, but Sean McKeown wrote an article for Neutral Ground a bit before PT Tokyo that completely changed the event, shoving the red-green haste deck into the forefront and making Zvi’s “The Solution” possible while putting a nail into what would have been the format’s best deck, blue-black-red control. As I’ve claimed before, I’ve never seen one article make such a
*tremendous* impact on a pro tour, and it was particularly crazy for something like that to happen back then.

I haven’t found the article yet, but I reference it here as part of the story behind “The Solution”:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/bd174

glad you liked them andy; I’ll try to track some shuler down, but it’s hard to find. I know I have “How I won Mid-Atlantic Regionals with my song of Blood deck”, and I’ll look for bye-bye Pyroblast.

Here’s the Rocket Shoes article that Scott’s talking about.

I’m a bit surprised that Chapin only got one vote in the first round. Was Information Cascades not as good as I remember it being?

The plethora of good and hard to find links in this thread are freakin’ great, by the way. It’s enough to make me look forward to the Zvi book even more. Is there an estimated release date for that yet?

I actually like my original ballot, but now that I’ve talked to 4 or 5 people and read all this I want my ballot to be 15 deep, not 5. The truth is that there are a LOT of great articles from a bunch of incredibly gifted minds that were churned out over the years. I have a 4 page word doc from the very first week I started editing SCG (2003) that detailed a bunch of (mostly) excellent, relevant theory articles, and that never even hinted at all the other work that was important/significant to the game like MaRo’s work or The Magic Show or Jamie/Rizzo/Alongi etc. All of that stuff matters too, as do the Tournament Reports, which Randy and I have discussed a number of times. We both feel concerned that so few good ones appear anymore (outside of Facebook at least) and I worry that it really does diminish the game somewhat in return. Yeah, it’s about “play the game, see the world.” But it’s also about take road trips with your friends, battle at PTQs/GPs, get drunk, party and tell stories and lies about what really happened.

Random other notes:
*I have all 3 of Hudnall’s tournament reports in my list of all-time favorites.
* I think the significant article concept unfortunately glosses over what may be the two most significant series of all time for Magic itself, which are Zvi’s stint on MTG.com and Magic Academy - both of which occurred far too late for this curmudgeonly crew.
* I find it incredibly ironic that The New Pool Halls (on my list) is so influential to almost everybody and yet a) it’s so incredibly short and b) You can’t find a fucking money draft at a PT to save your life these days. I know this because Dirk and Becker would not stop bitching about it post-Worlds. Nice work, Organized Play… make the boys grind for that extra PT point and ruin the best social element of the PT.

It’s also kind of cool that as busy as all the old guys tend to be these days, we can still make time to get nostalgic about the game and articles that - quite literally - changed our lives.

–Card Game

Oh, the ATM Report? Yeah, I liked that one a lot.

I’d be pretty surprised if Tim has even heard of more than a couple of these. Maybe things changed after he started writing, but I don’t remember him ever reading Magic articles except to see if his name was mentioned in a tournament report or something.

I believe you have to look at works in terms of context. Looking at it that way the short list is going to have be very short and concise articles full of pithiness. But it never works that ways does it?

OTOH, you don’t want like a math-like book that will teach you Calculus. Or do you want Beuhlers report when he won with Nerco in Chicago? That report wins the award for “Best tournament article to read before you go to sleep.”

The Mid-Atlantic Qualifiers “Song of Blood” deck deserves some kind of honorable mention. My detection meter, between true reporting and in this case a very good practical joke, was finely honed at that time. I read it word for word three times before I could decide and then decided to do it justice. I put it the real tournament reports section and let Shuler have his fun and glory. The next day I put a qualifier next to the title and people were still being fooled.

And although Hacker’s articles are the funniest and most outrageous (and influential), I feel Kibler’s Tie-Dyed report get short shrift.

Depending on what “Greatest” means there are so many by EDT that are going to fall just outside of that qualifies. I could explain why a lot of EDT’s work didn’t quite jell enough or why people didn’t understand Johnathon Wills, but they were the best theorists at the time.

I’ll just leave all with links to these two emails (I save all the emails I didn’t publish):

http://www.studebakerhorology.com/GAME150/dojo1.gif

http://www.studebakerhorology.com/GAME150/dojo2.gif

I’m surprised none of Evan’s Magic Shows have been nominated. They deserve to be.

Mike

Get Big or Die Trying