Lack of deck primers
-
As a common poster on The Source, when I started playing Vintage I came here looking for information. The simplest place for large amounts of concise information is normally a Primer in its own thread. This was on the old site and I found that while there happened to be threads, some had not been updated in so many years they were not helpful.
What TMD then became was a place to find information in other locations. IslandSwamp's musings here and there, podcasts, Steven's writings too. What this place has become for me is not a place of engagement or discourse but a kind of library. The side effect being I find I have nothing to add to the library. While I am often heavy in conversation on other sites, this site for me is just a stopping point as a find the relevent article or podcast and then move on.
I think primer threads give newer players (and thanks to MTGO that's not as rare as it once was) a place to not only learn but to also engage. Because asking in an already existing thread is not anywhere near as daunting as making your own in a place you may not yet feel you belong.
Primers make the entry to the format smoother, they funnel discourse and grant a simple place to test new ideas, they give someone who is not invested in a deck they don't play somewhere to find relevant information on something that they are having issues with. Most of all it gives an convenient place for people to actually talk to one another. That's the most important part of all.
-
As a Vintage newbie, and someone who hasn't acquired power yet, I'm currently working on a White Hatebears primer. I have a decklist that has been moderately successful in the Vintage room on MTGO and would like to add the list, discuss card choices, what has worked, what hasn't worked.
The thing that's daunting about primers, for me specifically, is that I'm well aware other people know far more than I do, about the format, about matchups, about analyzing and dissecting match data, have memorized more cards, understand interactions much better... writing something that's intended to "say everything about the deck in question" seems ridiculous from my perspective, yet nobody has done it here yet and I've spent about a month refining a list, so here goes nothing, I guess?
My recommendation would be to start a subforum specifically for Primers, which might encourage users to do some of their own writing on decks they've worked on. I find that threads that start with a primer are far more constructive, and tend to collect relevant information into one thread, as opposed to spreading it around the forum.
To @Brass-Man 's question, I use them to get specific tips on play and card choices. It also helps me to understand decks that, otherwise, I would have no idea why they work. When I was getting back into magic I was watching a lot of coverage and needed something to latch onto that was more exhaustive than just a decklist.
-
I don't want to be rude. But this has been bugging me since I came here...at first I though that it is just my impression but after talking with few people online I know that I'm not the only one.
For years I tried to be part of TMD but my registration just did not go through and I never got any answer from the admin. I usually ended up on TMD, tried to find some information and left. At that time I might have actually asked someone about this or that but now it is different. I came to the Vintage (online) community thanks to IslandSwamp but soon I found out that I don't really feel welcome. There are exceptions, there are many players that are really nice and accepted me right away. But in general this place feels 'hostile' to beginners and from many posts, videos and streams I get the impression that there are players that do not actually want new players to come and play. And if they would be allowed to play, their questions wouldn't get answered or they would be shown that they simply do not belong here and that their voices have no power.
My deck was torn apart and I was told to play a 'real' deck if I want to play Vintage even though that I placed well in different kind of tournaments with it. I'm nobody in terms of not being a pro player, vintage champion or whatever. But I had the energy to do something for the community. I could write for example. So I started writing for our local players and later for wider audience which was obviously a mistake but I realized one thing. Even though I had no problems playing Vintage right from the beginning I realized that players that are trying to enter the format actually struggle with it. After I spent some time in a local game store playing Vintage and listening to others talk about my decisions I finally understood that there is way more to Vintage than people think at first. They simply do not see what the format is about. Showing a decklist to someone even with some instructions how to play the deck won't let them see what they really should do. Because what they need to figure out is 'what can happen and what should certainly NOT happen'. For that same reason those players do not need a 50 pages primer explaining any kind of situation or what can the cards be used for. They need guidelines and later they can read something more complex.
What I wanted to say with this is this. Basics no matter how basic for you is something that can be incomprehensible for others. People should be given basic information about the format itself, its staples and (archetype) shells. From there it is up to them to figure out what to do. They should also understand the cycle of metagame and the formats balance.
But so far I haven't found anything like this. I lived through it though so I don't need it but what about players that do not play magic for 20+ years and just play for example for 3 years? I had a long talk with one such person trying to explain him why he does not play Modern well. He had hard time understanding that. Now imagine that same person playing Vintage...Anyway it would be good if discussions about decks or their strategy would actually be somewhere at one place. We can say that there are fairly established decks, so anything related to those could be talked about in one thread. This way we wouldn't need to dig up old posts or look for that kind of information elsewhere.
http://stsu.blogpost.com
http://puremtgo.com/articles/recent?uid=stsung
Twitter @stsungjp -
@stsung You have touched on something that has bothered me about not only Vintage, but the MTG community at large. It really helps nobody if you give somebody new a decklist and tell them to learn by playing it. What's even worse is that people hardly know the first thing about deckbuilding and tuning if this is their introduction to the format.
A personal story, in 2013, I thought magic looked cool and decided to play it. I thought Legacy might be fun because I thought I'd be able to play with all the powerful cards and the WOTC store locator would not find Vintage (because of proxy events, but I didn't know then). I decided to build a Turbo Stasis deck and took it to the store. The deck was criticized and I was told that if you wanted to be competitive, I had to play a deck from a list of "meta" decks. I came away feeling very underwhelmed and decided that magic was not for me because I like being creative. Thankfully, I came across TMD and found proxy Vintage events near my house. Curiosity got the better of me and I went for one, and I'm glad I did!
Admittedly, I did not learn very much from resources online. What's even worse is that many of these resources are behind a paywall. I almost spent my monthly budget on cards on an article or something like that because there wasn't enough material online for me to learn on my own. However, I was quite lucky that I lived in the North East and the Vintage community there soon took care of my noobish self. I owe them a lot. I was also quickly advised that the money I was going to spend on an article or another was better spent on cards (and I'm glad I did that now). Your example of a player who had played for 3 years could very well have been me, if it wasn't for all this!
Circling back to your original point, it's unfortunately very easy to write a "primer" and put a decklist in there and simply explain the card choices in that decklist. It is MUCH harder to write an exhaustive primer that enables a novice to make their own choices and learn about the deck's structure and playstyle rather than the card choices being made. I've started writing something like this many times, only to stop because of how gargantuan a task it can be. I also noticed that the new exhaustive primers out there were largely ignored so I didn't think it was worth the time.
-
@stsung Wow, I wasn't really expecting an answer like that. Of course there are Timmy, Johnny and Spike players (link text, and Spikes are sometimes "offended" by the low quality of the decks or card spoilers from Johnnys. I consider myself a Johnny (not so much currently, but always had a touch for weird decks), so I know the feeling of playing my own deck and got it miss valued at tournaments or online.
But that's ok for me. It also happens in real life: if you support a minor football team, or a political party, you are going to suffer the same comments, or worse. It's inherent for lots of humans. If you play a deck that uses a lot the graveyard, I'll advise you to play dredge instead, because I believe it's better. Nevertheless, I'd try to give you some other advise in case you don't want to play dredge or really want to play it. But you shouldn't feel bad if other players ignore you completely: not everybody has to be interested in the same approach to mtg. And TMD community is pretty friendly, I could have some questions that seem an attack , but they usually have some base and should make me a better player. About registration in old TMD, I think there was a problem, so I doubt there was any admin to blame.
About lack of primers: I cannot write a primer, because I haven't mastered any deck. I have played bomberman for more than a year, but usually 1 tournament each month and maybe some matches in cockatrice. And I like to switch decks from time to time, so I never get really familiar with any. I could write dozens of pages, but my play choices are often wrong, and my English is not good enough to make enjoyable readings. I bet that 50% of people here have the same problems. Others don't have the time to write anything, or simply don't want to waste time on this. Often writing a tournament report fills a bit that primer role, from a humbler perspective.
Besides there is the non-competitive issue. You can write a primer for painter, because despite not being a tier 1, it's a good deck, with solid choices. Somebody can write a primer for an Pyromancy deck, or Hypergenesis, but probably it would be a primer about a bad deck, even if it can get a tournament. Even worse, 1 person decks often are far from optimum, since different points of view tend to improve them. If you are creating a new deck, play it a lot, and after having solid background, present it for discussion. After it gets decent results for other players, then it could be time for a primer (nobody is laughing now about Eldrazis, but 2 months ago a primer could have been heavily criticized. same has happened with beardecks for years) .
Good luck with primers, I'm eager to read all of them
-
@Hrishi I personally think that extensive primer is not needed. I think players need a starting point. Vintage meta no matter how stale people think it is changes actually quite a lot and the choice of cards at least on Magic Online depends on it. What should be part of a primer though (I guess it is common to write that? I don't read articles or primers much..) is a little history of the deck and why certain cards started to see play. I mean the important points why certain card started to be played or not so the player can understand that seems to be crucial and should help a new player to build a deck or tweak it. For example the reason I started playing Delver is the fact that Shops were relatively slow for quite a while and this card was the best to fight it as the Shops deck of the time couldn't deal with it much. With the printing of Young Pyromancer it became even better because if I wasn't able to play Delver before Chalice hit the board I still had Pyromancer and plenty of spells that well would get countered but would at least produce the elementals (I'm not a fan of Tarmogoyf in general). That's also the reason why someone came up with Mayor of Avabruck. I mean this card against Shops flips relatively easily and those 2/2s are of huge help. one can trade with Lodestone Golem. That's huge. There are players that will look at the decklist and will be like...why play Delver in Vintage? The card does not seem to do anything. Same goes to the Mayor.
Extensive primer may not even help the player since his skills may not be developed enough yet. I see players mess up their Brainstorms all the time and against Mentor Gush decks I usually win if the player messes up playing Gush. This is something you can write books about...Sure it helps to note stuff like...if you have Dack Fayden and not much cards in hand, just play gush and you have cards to discard. See where I'm going? I know you guys are bright and intelligent people, but sometimes you need to see the game from the perspective of someone who never played anything that felt 'eternal'.
Magic changed a lot and what is natural for us is totally strange to new players. (with new I mean those that started with modern cards...or rather never experienced old extended)
On the other hand any kind of information as a starting point will help. The questions that would follow under the primer can be then answered and added to the primer as the time goes. It should be a collective work of the players even though there are obviously players that invented their decks and are better suited for talking about their decks than others.
The Magic community should somehow realize that it needs new blood and especially eternal formats need it. Even though eternal players are the most open and kind and usually very helpful, one can observe some kind of barrier that for many is difficult to penetrate. Even the smallest remarks can sometimes turn some people away. For example when I showed up at my first Vintage tournament 3 out of 5 my opponents asked me who lent me a deck and actually shuffled it pregame (which they weren't doing to others). I couldn't understand that question and even the fact that they shuffled my deck offended me at first (it was still powered deck, with Japanese cards). I was also told that my deck is crap that day and that I don't know how to play. My deck was good but not fit for the (totally random non-Shops) meta and I know how to play Vintage better than majority of the local Vintage players and they realized that by now. But even if I put this aside...how would actually a new player feel after this experience? I don't say this happens in your local area, but I heard so many stories like mine that it obviously is omnipresent problem. I love eternal formats and I really wish we can play them. But in order to be able to play them we need new blood. New players will ask questions that might seem silly and play in a way that does not make sense but they will learn.
(have you played Legacy Gauntlet on Magic Online? That was a total disaster from my point of view - of a player that wanted to play Legacy. I just couldn't stare at what my opponent's where doing and I had no idea how to deal with their strange plays. That's what happens when you lend a Legacy deck to someone who has never played the format...) -
@stsung 10-12 years ago when I started playing vintage I felt way too intimidated to post. I thought people would make fun of me for not understanding the format, so I browsed the site for years without posting anything. IIRC there was even a codified policy about how high the quality of your post had to be and if you didn't meet it you would receive a warning. I feel like @Brass-Man is trying hard to make TMD more welcoming to newer posters. Do you not think that the atmosphere has improved much?
After @Dice_Box mentioned The Source, I decided to revisit the site, not having played legacy in years. I think their forums for established decks/decks to beat are something we should use here, given the feedback in this thread. A lot of those have an initial post approaching a primer. We could start out with something more basic. For instance, link to 2-4 successful decklists with some variety in card choices. As a second iteration we write something similar to http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?30500-DTB-Eldrazi-Stompy where we explain card choices and potential card choices instead of just linking to a couple lists. Given enough time they could eventually look like http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?27217-Deck-Sneak-and-Show
From what people have been saying, it doesn't seem like it's so important that the initial post is incredibly detailed, but rather that there's a place for people to ask simpler questions that don't require a thread. It really wouldn't take more than a couple hours to create basic threads for the 6-10 most popular decks. It would be cool if these could be Community Wiki type posts, but that would presumably be a lot of work on @Brass-Man's end.
EDIT: I wrote this before seeing @stsung's last post.
-
@stung - Don't worry, you aren't coming off rude at all. Your experience is not unique and it's good to share it. While I find that vintage players are, on average, a nicer crowd than PT Grinders, there's certainly room for improvement.
I wouldn't attribute a lack of primers to any desire to keep new players out. I've been around for a lot of iterations of this site, and I've seen a lot of non TheManaDrain attempts at vintage communities. You have to realize that the Vintage community is a lot smaller than the Legacy, Standard, or even EDH communities, and there's basically no money in it. People aren't paying us to write like they pay people to write in other formats, and there aren't enough high profile events to be a full time grinder (though many, like myself, have tried). Mostly it's a lot of work, and a lot of the people who are willing to do that work are afraid that they aren't qualified (I've heard that a LOT).
I was actually hoping that I could use the TMD Patreon money to pay people to write intro-level articles for the site, but it's just not pulling in enough for me to be able to support that.
-
@diophan said:
From what people have been saying, it doesn't seem like it's so important that the initial post is incredibly detailed, but rather that there's a place for people to ask simpler questions that don't require a thread.
To be honest, I would actually much prefer if people just made threads for simpler questions. I think the lower barrier to starting threads we see in the Facebook group has actually led to a lot of really interesting discussions that I would have loved to have on TMD.
@TheRestOfTheThread
The reason I asked about how people use primers, is because personally I've always found the primer+megathread forum style (the way The Source is set up), to be incredibly hard to navigate. I'm actually surprised to see universal support of it, I always felt it was sort of a dangerous way to organize information, in the sense of bucketing together strategies that shouldn't be bucketed together, and putting the oldest, least relevant information formost.
It's also notable that something like an objective "decks to beat" list is a lot harder to pull off than in Legacy, Modern, or Standard - Vintage just has less data to work with, and at some point you're going to end up with someone (in this case it would be me) arbitrarily deciding what counts. An educated guess, but still a biased one.
but ...
One of the key goals I wanted to take on when I rebuilt TheManaDrain was providing a good resource for brand new players to the format. I have my own ideas on how to accomplish that but other things have been taking priority so far.
I don't think primer megathreads are the solution, but encouraging people to write primers could be a stopgap. If you've considered writing a primer and you didn't, what can I do to convince you to do it.
In the meantime, please try to use the tag system. There would be no desire for megathreads at all if someone could just click on the Oath button and get all of the Oath threads. I know you're not used to it but I'm confident community adoption of tagged threads solves a lot of the problems people have been talking about, in this thread and others.
kthxbai
-
@stsung said:
For example when I showed up at my first Vintage tournament 3 out of 5 my opponents asked me who lent me a deck and actually shuffled it pregame (which they weren't doing to others). I couldn't understand that question and even the fact that they shuffled my deck offended me at first (it was still powered deck, with Japanese cards). I was also told that my deck is crap that day and that I don't know how to play. My deck was good but not fit for the (totally random non-Shops) meta and I know how to play Vintage better than majority of the local Vintage players and they realized that by now. But even if I put this aside...how would actually a new player feel after this experience?
So this is slightly off topic, but I always shuffle an opponent's deck when I first meet them. Every time. According to the tournament rules, you are actually required to shuffle your opponent's deck. Until you get to know the players you usually see and trust that they aren't trying to cheat, it is absolutely appropriate to shuffle their deck. On the other hand, I have seen the same thing regarding new players deck choices, where if they don't show up with a deck tuned for that local store's meta they get disregarded, though generally that happens in legacy not vintage in my experience.
I was lucky in my first vintage tournament I went to after I moved to the northeast where I happened on the store where Brian Kelly played, so my keeper list full of moats, dragonlords and huntmaster wasn't made fun of, but actually kinda respected because that was more normal there than most places I imagine.
As far as primers go, I feel that mtgo is actually hurting us more than helping us. With mtggoldfish showing all of these meta decks that are fluctuating and iterating against each other every day practically, it makes it much harder to write and keep up a relevant primer on most things. Many players who want an idea of what to play go straight to that to see what is 'in' this week and just try to suss it out on their own, and if they looked at a primer with a bunch of cards that arent in the mtgo meta breakdown, they might just ignore it and assume it was out of date. What might help is an option to embed in a sidebar or something a snapshot of the mtggoldfish meta list layout when you write a primer. Then people can read here all the reasons why to play certain cards, and also have an easy at a glance look at what people are doing well with online as well. Maybe thats a bad idea though, because it would put more pressure on the OP to keep things updated.
Actually, that's a really good idea, how easy would it be to add other 'authors' to a post? So whoever writes the OP (lets say @Brass-Man for example) can add 2 or 3 other people onto the post as authors so they can edit and update the post as well. One of the big issues on the source is that the OP would get outdated after the author got tired of updating it, and then a new thread would get made, losing the entire discussion in the old thread. I think that would help make people more willing to write a primer, since they wouldn't necessarily be committing to editing and updating it forever on their own.
-
@Brass-Man said:
The reason I asked about how people use primers, is because personally I've always found the primer+megathread forum style (the way The Source is set up), to be incredibly hard to navigate. I'm actually surprised to see universal support of it, I always felt it was sort of a dangerous way to organize information, in the sense of bucketing together strategies that shouldn't be bucketed together, and putting the oldest, least relevant information formost.
I am not a particular fan of the 100 page style mega primer threads. The best way i've found to include archetype discussion was to actually link from the primer thread to the relevant discussion thread. So if we're talking about storm and a newbie wants to know why someone wants to play tinker they can simply start their new thread asking ""yo why you fools playing this 3 mana blue card" and instead of having it eat up 9 pages in the primer we can simply append a link to the new thread into the primer thread in the section about having a tinker package option. thus including the information without clogging up the primer page.
@L0cke17
Huntmaster? which huntmaster? of the fells? i think you might have gone a little too deep. i also hope you utterly destroyed a bunch of 2 toughness creatures.
I feel like updating the primer every 2-3 weeks or even just monthly would be sufficient. the basic information of a deck doesn't change overnight and has a more gradual acceptation after some random tech does well more than once. -
In a different tab I am currently writing a "developing", strictly non-primer, about my experiences with a specific deck I've been toying with and getting feedback, with the intention to update it once I have more information. More exhaustive than "Here's a decklist what should I do to make it better", but less exhaustive than "here's all the white weenie decks that ever existed, let's talk about White Knight". Eventually, maybe it'll become a "primer" with divergent strategies/decks incorporated into it, but I honestly just want to write something about Vintage in a constructive way and contribute content to TMD. If it ends up meeting some people's expectations? That's awesome. If it falls short? Hey, at least I tried. I suggest some folks on the fence about writing because of lack of completeness to go about it in the same way, because, at the very least, you're contributing to the site and to vintage discussion.
-
@snowydude said:
@L0cke17
Huntmaster? which huntmaster? of the fells? i think you might have gone a little too deep. i also hope you utterly destroyed a bunch of 2 toughness creatures.
I feel like updating the primer every 2-3 weeks or even just monthly would be sufficient. the basic information of a deck doesn't change overnight and has a more gradual acceptation after some random tech does well more than once.Yeah of the fells. It worked really well.
On the subject of updating every few weeks, its not the immediate few months that Ive seen the problem. The problem is nearly always a year or two down the line after the thread gets made that it stops getting updated.
@Brass-Man said:
The reason I asked about how people use primers, is because personally I've always found the primer+megathread forum style (the way The Source is set up), to be incredibly hard to navigate. I'm actually surprised to see universal support of it, I always felt it was sort of a dangerous way to organize information, in the sense of bucketing together strategies that shouldn't be bucketed together, and putting the oldest, least relevant information formost.
It's also notable that something like an objective "decks to beat" list is a lot harder to pull off than in Legacy, Modern, or Standard - Vintage just has less data to work with, and at some point you're going to end up with someone (in this case it would be me) arbitrarily deciding what counts. An educated guess, but still a biased one.
but ...
One of the key goals I wanted to take on when I rebuilt TheManaDrain was providing a good resource for brand new players to the format. I have my own ideas on how to accomplish that but other things have been taking priority so far.
I don't think primer megathreads are the solution, but I encouraging people to write primers could be a stopgap. If you've considered writing a primer and you didn't, what can I do to convince you to do it.
The tags might help some, but its not easy to find the basics with them often. Perhaps, and this is also just an idea I'm spitballing here, maybe a wiki might be the ideal style for what you want? Have each deck get a wiki-page, maybe limit authorship to it, and have the basics, background etc be on there, and have it appear as a link when you search for the tags so you get discussion in the threads, and the basic info and strategy in a relatively static format.
-
@L0cke17 said:
Perhaps, and this is also just an idea I'm spitballing here, maybe a wiki might be the ideal style for what you want? Have each deck get a wiki-page, maybe limit authorship to it, and have the basics, background etc be on there, and have it appear as a link when you search for the tags so you get discussion in the threads, and the basic info and strategy in a relatively static format.
This is what I was thinking. Perhaps set up a subdomain wiki with limited writer access available. We could still have threads, but if there is enough consensus, something can be added to the wiki to update it.
-
Another point worth noting is that the metagame has been shifting wildly over the past year or so with many restrictions and unrestrictions. This is also a factor that might make people unwilling to write a primer only to find the work wasted. I'm not saying this to say that we need less restrictions or more, merely that earlier people worked on them knowing their deck was "safe", so to speak. The same is not true today!
-
Out of curiosity would Anyoney one be opposed to me writing a primer for storm? I'm nit sure how good bad or accurate it would be but I'm willing to try making 1 since it doesn't seem like people mind an amateur just going for it
-
I absolutely love how "The Source" legacy forums are set up. It's actually my favorite set up for furums. Moreso than this set up or the old TMD. I find it extremely easy to navigate from one deck to the next and find example deck lists within each archetype/deck because everything is separated so well and organized. I only play in legacy events a couple times a year and I find it very easy to study a metagame thanks the the source. I agree with what @diophan was saying completely. The source is a great...source...of well organized information on that format!
-
@snowydude
@snowydude said:
Out of curiosity would Anyoney one be opposed to me writing a primer for storm? I'm nit sure how good bad or accurate it would be but I'm willing to try making 1 since it doesn't seem like people mind an amateur just going for it
I would read it. The worst case scenario is that someone might disagree with something, but I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of what you'd write would be relevant and accurate (as far as the group community at large is concerned).
Deck lists and comments usually follow such things so that people can compare notes and work together, and you can edit your primer if your opinions change, or if new cards are added to the core of the deck. I'd take a look at some primers on "the source" (Legacy forums) to see how they do it. I've read those primers and they're very helpful in my opinion.
I know firsthand how much work is involved in writing, so if you end up taking the plunge I promise to be very supportive.
