Magic the Gathering

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2009

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ January 8, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

As you all wit­nessed towards the end of 2008 this site fell largely quiet aside from the new episodes. The forums kept on but for the last few months my life was con­sumed by a new job, per­sonal issues, and other projects.

To you, the fans who remained through it all, I want to say thank you.

We get some very nice and quite hum­bling feed­back and email. I have a num­ber of fans IM me from time to time (AIM: trick­jar­rett), and I try to chat with them when I can but I’m not always able to due to work or hav­ing acci­den­tally remain­ing logged on when I’m not at the com­puter. It was the fans who really brought me around and made me real­ize I’ve been squan­der­ing away some oppor­tu­ni­ties here.

For Man­a­Na­tion, I’m return­ing my focus to it and to have a drive to make it suc­ceed. It still isn’t my full time job, though my girl­friend some­times feels like it is. (I love you K!) With bet­ter time man­age­ment and moti­va­tion dri­ving the show once again, let’s dis­cuss my goals for Man­a­Na­tion in 2009.

1. The Tri­umphant return of Arti­cles.
   It’s been over a few months since we last pub­lished an arti­cle. I’ve received a few sub­mis­sions from time to time, but with all due respect to the authors few were worth pub­lish­ing, oth­ers got lost in an ongo­ing email deba­cle. I agree with some­thing Adrian Sul­li­van said in our inter­view from Hol­ly­wood: that too many writ­ers wrote about Magic sim­ply to read their words on the screen, rather than to add to the world of Magic. As such I haven’t pub­lished much of any­thing, because I didn’t have any­thing worth publishing.I’m going to start up some new ini­tia­tives to drive authors and gen­er­ate bet­ter con­tent. On top of that Lee and I are com­mit­ting to writ­ing reg­u­lar, high qual­ity, arti­cles about this game we love.
2. Change Magic Cov­er­age. Again.
   ManaNation’s appear­ance on the Magic scene with the high pro­duc­tion val­ues, caused other shows to sit up and take notice. Even the Pro Tour cov­er­age had to up its ante some. And in 2008 I had plans to do some­thing big but I dropped the ball on it. This year though I plan to do it and go big­ger than before. Hope­fully, you’ll all like what you see and make it pos­si­ble for us to do it again. And again as we con­tin­u­ally raise the bar.
3. Live Show.
   Video pod­casts have made it a tra­di­tion to record live shows at events and such. I want to do this. One idea which we enter­tained early in the show’s begin­nings was going to dif­fer­ent stores and film­ing episodes there. We’re still work­ing out the logis­tics though.
4. More Draft Footage.
   One thing which spring-boarded us was our early footage of drafts that we got for the show. Footage of Paulo Vitor Doma da Rosa, Gabriel Nas­sif, and Mr. Her­zog draft­ing is still among our most down­loaded episodes, and this year I want to bring more of that to the fans. The new for­mats for Pro Tours such that there is draft­ing at every event will make that much eas­ier and hope­fully doable.
5. Site upgrade and Redesign.
   I did the design largely from another theme out there, and I’d like to update and improve on the site’s usabil­ity. I’m keenly aware of how clut­tered I’ve made the front page and want to find a more stream­lined and user friendly design. I’m hop­ing to debut it in March of this year.
6. Travel more.
   

   I want to go to more events, but due to my life I haven’t really been able to. Well this year I’m hop­ing to make it to more events and meet more fans of the show. We’re going to make it to Pro Tour Austin bar­ring any unfore­seen cir­cum­stances, of course we’ll be at Grand Prix Tampa Bay (hosted by our friends Unity Enter­tain­ment) but past that noth­ing is def­i­nite. I’m look­ing at the sched­ule and try­ing to see just what we can travel to.

Trick’s Five Pre­dic­tions for Magic in 2009

1. It will not be the best year for Magic. I think that we’re going to see a record turnout to one of the Euro­pean GPs and an over­all raised level of sta­tus for the game but we’ll see a bit of a rough patch in terms of sales and growth.
2. Luis Scott-Vargas and Paul Cheon will con­tinue to win. They’re both at the top of their game. LSV with his PT and GP wins, Paul with the USA Team win… they’re sim­ply going to be behe­moths at the table.
3. The New Pro Tour for­mat with both Con­structed and Lim­ited is going to be a huge suc­cess. Play­ers and fans are going to love the dual nature of the events. Some Pro play­ers will dis­like it, but on the whole it will have a much more pos­i­tive effect.
4. Faeries will con­tinue to dom­i­nate stan­dard until it rotates out with the next block ‘Live, Long, and Prosper.’
5. And though it’s quite quite early to say it, I think Japan will win the Magic the Gath­er­ing Team World Cham­pi­onship. They were hun­gry for it last year and the US beat them in the semi-finals, so this year they’re going to devote their entire engine to attain­ing that goal.

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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