Week 2 in review

We had our 2nd class last night, and it went pretty well. You can find our practice recording here, and slides here.

We made some changes from our podcast to the actual class, primarily being that we cut out a lot of the chit-chat and got straight to the content. As such, we managed to shave off a good half-hour so we only took about an hour to talk through. It mostly went well, though I was a little unhappy with the presentation of some of the cards and decks. I mentioned that we were going to immediately jump into Magic and really assume that they know the popular decks and the cards. It’s actually kind of ridiculous, now that I think about it, that it’s abundantly clear to me what a blightning beatdown deck looks like, and exactly why a certain card is so good. Those are a lot more difficult to explain when your audience doesn’t necessarily know what cryptic command does.

I was pretty happy with our explanation of tempo and card advantage, though. In my opinion, those pretty much represent the highest level of common Magic theory around. They’re the buzzwords, like AJAX for web dev or bipartisan for politics, that pretty much anyone familiar with the field is going to hear a lot, but really requires a little thought to understand what it means. For me, it was a great reminder about the tradeoff between tempo and card advantage, so that good all around.

After we were done with that, we let everyone get into the card pool to build, and everyone got really into it. Everyone had stacks of cards sitting around them, trying to figure out either how they were going to tweak the deck they were given, or build a new one. I was surprised by how many people were interested in building a new deck. Not surprisingly, green was a very popular color since our card pool is creature-heavy with little control. We actually ended up with a shortage of forests, but since most people were building mono-color decks, we just had them sub in other basic lands.

About 10 people or so ended up staying a full hour past the end of class, when we wrapped things up since we had to get out of there. So getting to play Magic was definitely a factor for a lot of them. Some of the decks looked pretty good from a pretty poor card pool, so I think we should have a pretty interesting metagame emerge.

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