The MTG Information Superhighway

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

Today we’re going to talk about something I’ve referenced plenty of times here and probably many, many times on recorded videos or live streams: the rate at which information in Magic: the Gathering spreads, but we’re also going to talk about what the biggest sources of information are and how you can access them.

How much information could POSSIBLY be involved in a children’s card game?

One of the coolest things about Magic is the fact that there are tons of ways to play the game, even amongst like-minded players. Even Commander, which is just one format, has quite a few different ways to play the game: competitively (usually called Competitive Elder Dragon Highlander/cEDH), high-power for the folks who want to play with good cards but aren’t necessarily cutthroat about it, casually, or one of the offshoot formats of Commander like Brawl, Tiny Leaders, or Oathbreaker. That’s a LOT to keep up with, and that giant list you just read only pertains to one branch of MTG—and not even one that I play!

As for formats I do know things about, there’s somehow even more information to keep track of. It’s a lot. To demonstrate, let me describe one of the most infamous set release weekends of all time: Kaldheim.

In the first week of Kaldheim’s release, players were practically foaming at the mouth. The set was a massive hit with Commander players thanks to the slew of new and very cool Legendary and Snow-matters cards, Pioneer players were excited about Pathways giving improved mana bases with the second half of the Pathway lands being printed, and Ascendant Spirit + Faceless Haven gave birth to one of Pioneer’s most annoying decks (I’m not sorry) …but Modern players especially had a very powerful new toy to play with: Tibalt’s Trickery.

The Tibalt’s Trickery deck aimed to do one thing: Cascade into Trickery using a Violent Outburst or something, and then target the player’s own Cascade spell with Trickery. The only other nonland cards in the deck were Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, but that was almost always achievable on Turn 2 or Turn 3. Super-powerful stuff, and Tibalt’s Trickery is still banned in Modern to this day. As you can imagine, on the Thursday that Kaldheim released online the Modern League queues were full of people playing Tibalt’s Trickery.

By the time FRIDAY came around. The very next day!, Modern as a format had already moved past Tibalt’s Trickery as a win condition. There had already been tons of discourse throughout the day on how the deck worked, what the possible counters were, and how to be able to play around both Tibalt’s Trickery and acknowledge that there was still an entire format’s worth of other decks to consider.

Instead of Trickery, the combo players had moved on to playing a new Cascade-friendly win condition: Valki, God of Lies // Tibalt, Cosmic Imposter. The way this combo worked at the time is that you’d play the same Cascade cards as before, except this time the only target in the deck wasn’t Tibalt’s Trickery, it was Valki, God of Lies. Upon finding the Valki and choosing to cast it, players were allowed to choose which side of Valki they wanted to cast. So they’d choose Tibalt, the much more powerful back half, and that’s more than enough to win a game when you get to do it on Turn 2 or Turn 3. This interaction was so powerful that the Cascade mechanic itself was rewritten!

YIKES. But how did everyone know about a new version of the deck the very next day?

Thanks to the Internet and social media as a whole, information in Magic moves quickly and is relatively easy to find, provided you know where people are talking. Depending on what you need, there’re quite a few different places to look for information and see just what people are playing and discussing!

As a very cursory list, here’s some of what people tend to look for on the Magic section of the Internet:

That’s a lot of information. You weren’t kidding. So where do I actually LOOK?

Here’s a list of what I’ve found to be the best resources for keeping up with Magic in its many forms. Let’s sort the places out by category. Keep in mind that each of these sites has somewhat incomplete data, since the tournaments that Wizards of the Coast publishes is only the list of winning decks online or in their tournaments. There is almost never data available for a complete metagame or for not-top finishes.

Deck Lists and Metagame Analyses

Quality-of-Life Upgrades