Fans,

Enjoy this great Deck Tech from Pro Tour: San Diego 2010 with Zvi!

Happy New Year Top8Magic Fans,

BDM, Mike and I want to wish all of you a Happy New Year! We have many exciting plans for this upcoming year and we want to thank you all for your support.

BDM will be posting a cool draft walk through with a podcast that he recorded right before Christmas with Steve Sadin.

We are also recording a podcast with The Zvi to discuss My Files Part 1 and we hope to have a preview of My Files Part 2 out this week.

We also want to thank all of you who picked up a copy of My Files Part 1 and wanted to know what you thought of it. We have not seen any reviews yet, so please send them over or post your thoughts here.

Best,

Matt Wang

Fans,

My Files is at the printers and we will make sure that all preorders will make it to you before the holidays!

If you have not purchased one, order a copy for a friend as a gift  (500+ pages of Magic’s past by one of its best writers)!

Thanks for your patience and support!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Top8Magic Crew!

After a handful of delays, Top8Magic.com is about to publish our second collection of Magic: The Gathering writing from the game’s most respected and prolific authors. This time out we will be publishing a collection by Pro Tour Hall of Famer Zvi Mowshowitz that begins with his earliest works and follows his nomadic writing career from website to website.

There is hardly a Magic site of note that Zvi has not written for in his career and he was among the very first to treat writing about Magic as a way to augment a Pro Player’s salary. This is common-place in the modern era but — as Zvi points out in the new material he wrote for the section on his Magic Dojo careeer — that was not always the case.

Zvi has written abundant new material for this volume including “director’s commentary” after many of his more famous and favorite selections. As Mike did with  Deckade, Zvi has also written new material to sum up each era of his career. I am happy to present Zvi’s thoughts on The Dojo Philosophy. We hope you enjoy it and if you are interested in purchasing this volume, which will ship late September/early October, you can do so by clicking on this link.

The Dojo Philosophy
by Zvi Mowshowitz

In the beginning, we didn’t write because we were paid. We wrote because we wanted to share our wisdom. We wrote to make our name, to claim our ideas as our own while sharing them. We wrote because we enjoyed writing. We wrote because we felt it was part of our obligation to the Magic community in general and the Dojo in particular. We took in the words of others, and followed Sensei’s motto: Study and grow strong. In exchange, when our time came, we would report back on our decks, our tournaments and our ideas. Read the rest of this entry »

Duels of the Planeswalkers is a unique product. It does some things spectacularly right, and does other things spectacularly wrong. The things it does right represent some great work and show a lot of promise for other, better projects in the future. The things it does wrong range from places where I think priorities were misplaced, to places where we will need more time to improve the product to places where the game is intentionally being held back for reasons both good and ill. Overall, this is a great game at its absurdly low price point that has the promise to mature into something far greater.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Zvi, Will “Price of Progress” and Matt Wang discuss M10

Zvi Cast about M10 - Part 3

The Zvi, Will “Price of Progress” and Matt Wang discuss M10

Zvi Cast about M10 - Part 2

The Zvi, Will “Price of Progress” and Matt Wang discuss M10

Zvi Cast about M10 - Part 1

Magic always has been, and always will be ruined forever. That’s part of what makes it such a great game. The cards and occasionally even the rules are constantly changing, presenting the players with new challenges. If Magic didn’t live on the edge where cards risk being broken and there are difficult trade-offs to be made between casual and hardcore, between Timmy, Johnny and Spike, between tradition and innovation, between online and offline then that means the decisions are tilted too far in one direction. That doesn’t mean that every change is for the better, as we shall see, but change is good and change is necessary. Change is Magic’s only constant.

Let’s go over the rules changes in order, with the details to be found here:

Change 1: Simultaneous Mulligans

Summary: Everyone mulligans at the same time.

Pros: It’s faster and only sticklers at tournaments waited around anyway.

Cons: A marginal decrease in dramatic tension. I had to stretch to come up with something.

This change is nothing more than common sense. Making the other players wait costs time and that time could be better spent playing Magic rather than waiting around for other players. This one is long overdue, a small but pure win with no real downside.

Change 2: Terminology Changes

When you play Terminology Changes, counter any number of target Old Terminologies that have been played, play with the new wordings and then put those wordings directly into play so that others can play with them. Old Terminologies can’t be played while playing. Or are we just playing with you?

Change 2A: Play is now The Battlefield.

Pros: New wording is flavorful, clearer and more precise.

Cons: Having to constantly use the word Battlefield, transition costs.

Magic, like love, is now a battlefield. My issue with this change is that battlefield is a mouthful and requires a definite article, which slows down speech and requires more text on cards. I agree that the word play was severely overloaded. We were using it for a zone and as the way cards are used, including multiple ways in which cards are used, which is confusing, and either change individually is pretty much a no brainer. Battle can be used as short for battlefield, and play has been reduced to one meaning.

Change 2B: You cast spells and activate abilities, but you still play lands.

Pros: New wording is flavorful, clearer, intuitive and more precise.

Cons: Transition costs, some cards will now have ugly wordings.

By unifying the playing of spells with the casting of spells, we were allowed to say “When you play X” or “When a player plays X” or “Players can’t play X” now all such things will need to say “play or cast” if they are to retain the same meaning. We also get gems like “Activated abilities can’t be activated” but that does make sense. There will be some awkwardness, but the long term result will be a strategic shift that is probably a wash. Besides, we were all saying we were casting spells anyway. That’s what makes them spells!

Change 2C: Removed-from-game is now the Exile zone.

Pros: Shorter, more flavorful and accurate.

Cons: When you wish upon a star.

The name is a great idea, but the functional change could have been mitigated. It’s not a huge point since such cards are rare and old but I think we can all agree that getting back removed cards this way is strategically interesting and fits the Rule of Cool so we should errata the Wishes and other such cards to retain their old functionality. There isn’t anything stopping us. This is a minor quibble in any case.

Change 2D: The end of turn step is the end step, and we now say “At the beginning of the end step” rather than “At end of turn.”

Pros: Players can now tell what the heck is going on.

Cons: Players can now tell what the heck is going on.

I weep for you rules lawyers who tried to trick your opponents with this one, I really do, but it is time to move on. Good change all around. Read the rest of this entry »