The final place to pursue the Way.
Course Index
1. Preface
2. Introduction
8. Proactivity and Reactivity in MTG
9. General Principles of Deckbuilding
10. The Art of Sideboarding (work in progress)
11. Conclusion (work in progress)
This material is structured as a progressive journey: starting with theoretical foundations, moving to overarching concepts, and finally applying them practically to deckbuilding, sideboarding, and gameplay strategy.
1. Preface
This article is the first in a new series focusing on the Game Theory of Magic: The Gathering. I decided to undertake this massive project for several reasons.
First of all, there is a severe lack of resources that actually help players level up their game. The internet is flooded with millions of videos, infographics, social media posts, articles, and guides aimed at beginners who are just learning how to play. This type of content is incredibly important because it welcomes new people into this fantastic hobby. It’s also easy for anyone to write and simple to promote.
But the downside is that it all looks pretty much the same. Aside from beginner material, the easiest content to find is geared toward advanced players—usually locked behind paywalls and assuming you already know high-level concepts inside and out. But there is almost nothing out there for players who already know how to play but aren't quite pro-level yet. This middle ground is where the vast majority of Magic players actually live.
They stop being beginners after just a few months of playing, they are constantly trying to improve, and they struggle to find that specific "something" needed to break through their plateau. The content in these articles is for everyone, but it's written especially for them. It can point beginners in the right direction, massively accelerate the growth of intermediate players, and push advanced players to lose themselves in deep reflection on the game's meta-concepts. It takes a ton of work to produce, but thanks to Metagame, it’s completely free and easily accessible to you.
Second, the current trend is to analyze formats, decks, matchups, and every other aspect of the game through statistical and mathematical lenses. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this—in fact, these are crucial analytical tools. I use them extensively in my own MTG tournament reports. Mathematical evaluations give us concrete, precise results and highlight the exact questions we need to ask ourselves as players.
However, as this data-driven approach has taken over, we have lost touch with other methodologies that have nothing to do with raw numbers. I firmly believe this has been a major misstep that has left players poorer, leaving them with no easy way to study the game other than looking at win rate calculators and metashare charts. I don’t believe the game theory of Magic: The Gathering can be reduced to a branch of applied mathematics. Beyond the modern obsession with numbers, there are plenty of conceptual frameworks that offer ways to read the game and genuinely improve your skills.
Finally, Magic: The Gathering has the unique privilege of being the longest-running TCG in existence. This longevity has allowed some truly brilliant writers to put down their thoughts on game theory. Many of them published in magazines that are now out of print, or on sites like "The Dojo"—the very first MTG website—which shut down long ago and is now incredibly hard to navigate. Some foundational pillars of theory have completely vanished unless you're lucky enough to own physical copies of them (a stroke of luck that I share).
This mountain of written material in other languages, abandoned and forgotten, contains rare gems of concepts and theories that have been lost to time. They hold relative truths that are just as relevant today as they were back then, along with complex arguments that deserve to be revisited years later. Over the years, I’ve accumulated books, printed sheets, personal notes, revisions, spreadsheets filled with dead links pointing to old Web 1.0 blogs, translations of translations of original pieces, and so on. To rescue all of this knowledge from oblivion—and to save myself from my own clutter—I decided to compile it all.
Categorizing, analyzing, translating, critiquing, restructuring, and serving it up to the community. All so it can continue to serve anyone who wants to Play with a capital "P," for many years to come.
Next Chapter: Introduction >>
