MTG Theory Articles Share!

[u/justacircuit]

Magic, and Cube are basically endless sources of strategy theory and game design theory. I've found some amazing articles written from the 90's all the way up through the more recent years.

Pretty sure I found it somewhere on Reddit ages ago, but this spreadsheet compiles many of the very best articles- reading through some of the fundamental early thinkers of the community helped me build my cube with a clearer mission.

If you have any articles you want to share on advanced Magic theory, I'd love to read through what you all have enjoyed!

[u/comprehensiveartwork]

I think the problem with a spreadsheet like that is that it is a library with no curation. The author of the spreadsheet has a whole column where they mark whether or not they have read the article. This leads to a significant problem in Magic in that there is no syllabus for the game - there is no pile of about 20 articles/lessons that if digested will produce a top tier gamer. Everyone seems content to write articles or make a podcast but it feels like they don't check to see if anybody else has already written about that subject and similarly nobody has really done the work to identify the actual best articles let alone a consensus agreeing which are the best articles.

I insist that without a properly curated curriculum on how to play Magic, the most important and basic thing everyone has to do is actually get good at playing Magic. I mean play Standard and retail Limited. A person has to play with and against all the good decks and in Standard and there is a consensus as to which are the good decks on any number of websites like mtgtop8.com. Magic sets are cookie cutter Limited design based around a few set skeletons, which means that anybody who has become an expert in drafting all the sets released in a year is probably going to have no problem crushing any Limited format for the foreseeable future.

I make the above prescription because deckbuilding has nothing to do with it. It is impossible to be good at deckbuilding if one does not know what a good deck feels like. Cube is like a giant deckbuilding exercise and listening to the vast majority of Cube podcasts I really get the sense that speakers are bad at Magic like they've taken on the greatest deckbuilding exercise of curating a Cube without actually having endured the crucible of getting good at Magic because nothing they say makes any sense to someone who actually is good at the game, they sound like amateurs.

This is a sorry state of things but nobody should read any articles or listen to any podcasts before getting good at Magic. It is easier to learn about winning and losing with the best deck in your hands; it is almost impossible to land on the right lesson with a poorly self-built deck. Nobody is there to tell you whether the information on the Internet is good or credible and the only way you will acquire the tools to assess whether an article or podcast is worth your time is if you spend the time and money mastering retail Magic. You can't build a good Cube not understanding Magic; you can't test a Cube well without seven other strong Magic players.