Subject: Decklists: To Print or Not to Print
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 23:07:11 -0700
From: Mark Schick <mschick@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com

        Frank:

          Just thought I would emphatically toss in my two cents about the
whole  decklist debate.

        I'll be blunt, and I'm sure a lot of you will be offended.  I have
some news for you:  MOST OF THE DECKS ON THE DOJO ARE NOT VERY GOOD.  Yes,
that indispensable source of M:TG knowledge which we have come to know and
love is CHOCK FULL of crappy decks submitted by people *just like you* (and
maybe a little bit like me).  If I had a dime for every time I looked at a
deck which by the title sounded promising, only to see the decklist littered
with cards which really shouldn't be there... well i'd be a very rich man.

        Now many of you would probably argue that what I have just said is
not true at all... that there is a lot of room for personal preferences in a
deck.  This is absolutely true.  Many times my friends and I have built
decks, showed them to one another, and have disagreed about one or more
cards in said decks.  However, if you take the average dojo deck and
playtest it, you will probably find that there are at least 10 cards in
there that shouldn't be.  Most of the decks at the dojo are played in small
tournaments, fairly isolated environment ("metagame" for those of you who
like to feel smart), and may not even win said tourney.  Very few tourney
reports come from large tournaments (i.e. regionals, nationals, etc.) and
even many of those are ill-constructed.  I probably need to mention no more
than a tradewind deck played at one nationals which had, among other things,
a mystical tutor and a *mask of the mimic* among its contents.  Those decks
from large tourneys that are well-thought out do nothing more than
illustrate the synergy of cards in a deck, an invaluable resource to the
learning MTG player.

        So what's my point, you might be asking (probably not, you're
probably reading this just for some mild amusement)?  Well, in my opinion
the argument about publishing decklists is getting way out of hand,
considering that most of the decks on the dojo are, in fact, pretty bad.
It's NOT like I can just take the average t2 deck to nationals and play it
to a fantastic 5-1 finish.  Maybe that's good enough for a tourney at a card
shop with 20 people, but far from wrecking organized magic as we know it.

        Dojo decks are great for ideas, but only up to a certain point.
Thorough playtesting and an eye for deck construction is still needed to
turn an otherwise mediocre deck into a truly great one.  I think that my
argument to both sides could be summed up best by the L.A. Lakers'
announcer, Chick Hearn:  "No harm, no foul."

        Shut up and Play,
        Mark S.
        Mark- on the IRC
        Winner of some stuff I KNOW you don't care about

P.S. My tradewind deck from regionals has since been carefully reworked, so
I suppose the above scalding analysis applies to that, too.