Places to Know: MTG Strategy

If you’re a tournament player like me, one who loves everything Magic: The Gathering, you’ll find yourself traveling around the country playing in every high-level event you can. While sites like the one you’re on right now and The Mothership are amazing for learning about many aspects of Magic and expanding knowledge, they aren’t built for the best players in the game to discuss the details about the most competitive decks in the current metagame. There are tons of great resources for that, though. In this article, I will share my favorite spots for more in-depth strategic content. I have ranked them below. This will also be the debut piece in this new series to highlight some of the best resource for Magic on the web.

1. Star City Games – Star City Games (SCG) is most known for the SCG Tour, their east coast-based tournament circuit. In addition to providing an incredible tournament series, they provide high-end written content on their website, too, with a nearly unrivaled list of writers. Star City Games publishes 6-8 unique articles every weekday. That’s a lot of content to parse through if you ask me! Star City is known for their variety of content in terms of both format and deck choice, so there is something for nearly any level of player almost every single day. The largest downside of Star City Games is that they have a paid subscription service for premium content, but for a tournament player the investment is well worth it.
   
2. Channel Fireball – Channel Fireball was founded by heavyweight Magic player Luis Scott-Vargas when he was first busting on the scene and tearing through the pro tour. To this day, he continues to crush at the pro tour as well as produce video and written content for the site. This site started off being somewhat regional on the west coast of the United States. Many of the best writers for this site live in California and were close to Luis in both friendship and location. Channel Fireball produces the most high-quality video content from top-level players. This is great for seeing how someone else actually plays the deck you’re looking to learn and how you can improve.
3. TCG Player – TCG Player has a good amount of competitive content, but as one of the largest sites for card games in general, it has a huge variety of content for other card games including Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! If you’re a lover of one of those games in addition to Magic, you’re in luck because they’re overflowing with things to catch your attention and keep it there. TCG Player has some of the most competitive prices on the web for singles of all sorts due to the nature of how their market is structured. Due to the large number of sales, TCG Player has a strong amount of content relating to the highest selling cards every week and other financial pieces that are interesting for both speculators and tournament players trying to see what decks might be on the rise.
4. MTG Mint Card – MTG Mint Card is often overlooked but has some of the strongest players in the world on its roster. This site has many European as well as Asian players that don’t get the attention a lot of American players receive. Their articles are all in English despite English being their second language. This is a great resource to see unique perspectives on competitive decks. This unique take is most often because testing groups are separated regionally and testing groups often come to different, useful conclusions. You can’t be well versed on what the best players in the world thing unless you really see the thoughts of players from all over the world. MTG Mint Card can provide that in spades.
5. Gathering Magic – Gathering Magic is a great site for players of a competitive nature, but that doesn’t mean they’re a slouch when it comes to casual content either. Gathering Magic has many notable Magic personalities such as Jeff Hoogland and Ali Aintrazi that each have their own style of approaching formats. What I like most about Gathering Magic is that they provide a strong amount of content relating to Magic’s story and more casual formats like Commander and my personal favorite, Cube. Usman Jamil can be seen posting when new sets come out about his opinions of how they’ll affect cube and you can bet that I’ll be loading up seeing how to change my own cube.

That’s it for today, be sure to read next time when I rank my favorite streamers for both their entertainment value as well as ability to teach their viewers a thing or two.

Until next time,

Daryl Ayers