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This thread is for discussion of this week's Making Magic, which goes live Monday morning on magicthegathering.com.

What a disappointment. From the headline I thought this was going to be a nice history article. Then when I clicked on the link I saw it was just some article by MaRo - that equalled insta-leave.

This interaction with Jason – me yelling at him about how byes had to get 3 points – was our first introduction.

I laughed so hard at this. Had to leave my laptop and continue reading later.

Now let's put ourselves in Jason's shoes. You've been given a crazy assignment well outside your comfort zone with way too little time to properly prepare. The event is starting up and there are more things for you to deal with than there is time for you to deal with them. Then along comes a little man. This little man is not a Wizards employee. You're not even sure who he is. All that you know is that he's one of the judges who earlier in the day was yelling at you about byes. He comes up to you and says, "What do you think of having a second competition?"

And again.

Awesome read. Thanks.

Hmm. Not really a very interesting article, to me. Organised Play has never been especially interesting to me. That's fine - it just means I'm not in the target audience.

But I note that also Mark's articles usually have a couple of pages of comments by the time I get to them in the afternoon (UK time). This looks likely to be the third comment in the thread. Which suggests the content isn't particularly interesting to many other people either.

Yeah, tourneys and leagues and such don't interest me, BUT, I do like the historical look back at M:TG. 

I started with one Revised Starter deck back in either '94 or '95 and was hooked. Bought InQuest magazine, dabbled with The Duelist and loved my Stasis deck. While I did stop from time to time and missed a lot of great sets, I'm back again and loving the current lot. There is part of me, however, that wishes I could go back and do it all over again. What I know now in the game versus then would have changed the way I played. ...and may have allowed me to learn to enjoy the organized aspect of Magic.

In any case, I like Mark's articles. He's an oldie AND a goodie.     

I don't much care about tournaments either, but the early history does interest me. I started around Revised, fell away completely around Exodus (hello, irony), and only got back into Magic fairly recently. A lot of the early history, such as it was recorded, is locked away in old issues of the Duelist, Scrye, and InQuest. All of those are pretty much impossible to find scans of, and are prohibitively costly to collect fully in paper originals.

I have started to develop more of an interest in tourneys as I try to fill in that missing history. Most of my early play experience just barely had time to incorporate the lessons of Sligh, and between then and modern Magic, there's a lot of details that I've missed. This is especially true for successful archetypes of the past. Sadly, Magic tourneys are just big enough that each event will have several articles written about it, but small enough that there are no monolithic reviews of whole seasons to give those reports context. Filling in history requires a lot of dot-connecting, and I haven't found a good resource yet for the major events, decks, tech, and lessons of, say, the 1999 season. No sports almanac, if you will.