SIGNAL PEST
Analyzing presales numbers, a custom Dante set, and my favorite Magic writer
SIGNAL PEST is an article series that spotlights good work within the Magic scene and elsewhere.
I) Rob Bockman
Rob Bockman is my favorite Magic writer ever. His column “Post-Combat” ran at Hipsters of the Coast from March 2017 to December 2023, when the site entered an indefinite hiatus due to shortage of funds. I’ve done my best to sing praises for Bockman’s work over the years, and still, I find him under-discovered and most definitely under-appreciated.
His insights into enneagrams and the Ravnica Guilds is required reading for anyone who has identified with a color pair (see: everyone), while “Navel Gazing” delivers exactly what the title suggests with wry wit and a clever turn of phrase. Bockman’s true power is in his poignance, which is often more restorative than nostalgic, a tricky balance for anyone prone to retrospectives like myself.
All of his articles leave me feeling a little smarter and a lot wiser. He is a giant in my eyes, one who makes room on his shoulder for all of us to see.
II) Custom Dante Cards
I’ve seen many custom Magic cards over the years. Rarely are their designs in alignment with an overarching theme, and even rarer are sets bound together by a cohesive vision. This small batch of cards is based on Dante’s Divine Comedy and uses Gustave Doré’s famous wood engravings published in 1861 as their illustrations. All of them feature flavor text pulled directly from the Cantos, which inform and explain the cards’ simple designs. When combined with the pre-modern card frames and that evocative Goudy Medieval font, the result is an aesthetically perfect batch of antique Magic cards.
While the mechanics are reskins of existing Magic cards, they nonetheless align with the literature. The Dark Forest, for example, reads “All forests are 1/1 creatures that are still lands,” a clever nod to the wood of the suicides from Canto XIII. Dante’s imagined punishment for those who commit violence against themselves was to transform them all into trees, immobilized by their roots and pecked away by vagrant harpies.
Dante Alighieri, the creature, is more abstract. The Summon Pilgrim reads “Damage that would reduce your life total to less than 1 reduces it to 1 instead,” perhaps an interpretation of Dante touring the afterlife while still a mortal man, or his tendency to consistently faint when passing between bolgia. Either way, this is brilliant phrasing.
I studied Dante as part of my Ph.D. program in Italian Literature. Reading these cards brings back fond memories of my time spent analyzing a timeless poem that I hold close to my heart, one that I revisit often.
III) Skeletal Scrying
Skeletal Scrying is a burgeoning article series on Substack that analyzes individual Magic cards as presented by Scryfall’s random button. Every piece in the catalogue provides a thorough examination of all the minute details a Magic card can offer, which of course speaks to directly my scholarly spirit and tendency to tread thick into the weeds. This article on Oblation is my favorite piece thus far. It drew attention to the card’s remarkable flavor text and elevated it firmly to the top of my rankings.
Skeletal Scryings is delightful and understandably labor-intensive. I hope the project continues to develop well into the future.
IV) Cardboard by the Numbers
Statistics and data have been leveraged more and more to analyze Magic sets in recent years. The availability of such numbers is entwined with Magic Arena’s popularity and the rise of sites like 17lands. I appreciate scientific methodologies like this, partially because math is so far outside of my wheelhouse and because it confronts biases that may be invisible to us veterans of a pre-digital era.
All that to say that a new website recently caught my eye. Cardboard by the Numbers combines snappy infographics with easy-to-parse descriptions to help us better understand how all these sets stack up against one another through a variety of metrics. Consider this article on Outlaws at Thunder Junction presale data a great place to start.
V) LINKS
LSD: Dream Emulator - a "game that is not a game"
The Impact of Global Shipping and Magic: the Gathering
A haunting, peaceful song described best as “Avant-Garde Touhou Arrange Music”
The Orient Kamasu is my favorite everyday dive watch
Luigi Ghirri at the Matthew Marks Gallery
The Divine comedy cards are so fucking cool. I love how well the old frames work with the dark, intricate art style. Gotta read that book one of these days
So...is LSD a precursor of surreal walking simulators? Wonder if there's a way to play it now (haven't finished the Wikipedia entry)