Deck Taxonomy on TheManaDrain

Xerox vs Grow and Mentor vs Delver

This is a thread both about the names I give to subcategories/archetypes on the site, but also how they are organized and displayed.

It only recently occurred to me that almost every deck I've bucketed as Xerox just happen to include all the elements that make a Grow deck a Grow deck. Is this just a better name? I've really hated the term Xerox for a while but have been unable to come up with anything better.

Note that while there are many ways to split decks up, for many different reasons, the way we split decks up on TMD has specific goals.

• If a player comes in looking for information on a specific deck, they should be able to immediately tell which subcategory that information is in —to make the site easier to Navigate.

• The information of most interest to the same players should be put in the same category — to make content on the site more Discoverable (e.g. if you liked this list, you'll love this one.)

• A new player should able to get a feel for what these categories mean with a minimal amount of friction — to make the site more Informative and Understandable. ("Xerox" is particularly bad on this front)

• And whenever possible, I'd prefer categories to be Future-resistant (future-proof is impossible) and Descriptive rather than Prescriptive. The old Mana Drain website had categories like "Mana Drain Control" and "Workshop Based Prison" which were displayed in a way that kind of implied that blue tempo decks and workshop aggro decks couldn't exist. I've long felt that this led new players down bad paths and bad ways of thinking.

So the name Xerox fails here on several counts, though Grow is by no means perfect. I think how categories are presented and organized are more important than the naming, but both conversations are worth having. The Xerox/Grow categories have always had some fuzzy edges, but they're where I'd expect them. A Delver deck might have no Young Pyromancer, but those lists almost feel like genuinely different archetypes. I could easily imagine a deck that feels like Xerox with no "Grow" cards, but in practice we never really see them - and drawing the line at 4 Preordain just seems obviously wrong ... Paradoxical Outcome and Jeskai Mentor don't belong in the same subcategory, and any too-strict definition is going to have trouble with that.

Discussion Points

• What's your favorite name for the broad category of decks that includes Delver and Jeskai Mentor and Rug Pyromancer and Snapcaster Control?

• Are there any other subcategories that you think are mis-named? (Remember that the goal of TMD's names might not be the same as the goals you use for yourself)

• Do you think the way the lines are drawn between archetypes now makes sense? Do Delver and Jeskai Mentor belong in different categories? Outcome and Storm? Should any categories be combined, like Landstill and Big Blue?

• What sort of user interface changes could be made to promote those stated four goals, regardless of what the categories are named. Feel free to think outside the box and suggest features the site does not currently support.

Re: Leyline at 4 and 0, I've actually never heard an argument for "4 Leylines or None" that made sense to me, or at least any argument that wouldn't equally apply to any magic card. Sure, you want it in your opening hand, but that's true of all dredge hate. Chubbyrain's "1 Leyline after I've added my tutor targets" plan makes total sense to me (except for the part where there's 5 slots, but that's another topic entirely).

It's the total opposite of a card like Workshop that pushes your deck in a particular direction and works in multiples. Leyline is worse in multiples, and has uniquely low deckbuilding costs, as you see it in lists that have no way of casting it. Dredge hate in particular has an added pressure to be diverse, as it's hard for a Dredge deck to pack answers to multiple card types, making a card like Leyline even worse in multiples than something like Moat is against aggro decks.

It's true that you want to see Leyline on turn one of not at all, but that doesn't encourage any particular count. The likelyhood of drawing a card in your opening hand and drawing it later are linked. It's maybe true that you want some of the benefits of running 4 and some of the benefits of running 0, but you can't actually do that, and running 4 doesn't get you any closer to that than 3 does.

I sort of feel like somebody did some bad math back in Guildpact, and everyone just rolled with it for 10 years.

Skins / Dark-Theme

The last update broke some site functionality for users who were selecting non-default skins for the site. While I don't have the wide variety of skins available previously, I was able to fix the bugs and add a Dark theme. It should be a little easier on the eyes for storm players who like reading TMD late at night in a dark room. If you were unfamiliar with this functionality, now's a perfect time to check it out!

When logged in, click on your user icon in the upper right of the page, and select "Settings." Select Default or Dark from the "Select a Skin" dropdown, and hit the Save button on the bottom of the screen (you may have to scroll down).

If you were previously using a skin and have been running into issues, make sure to go to the page and save your selection - even if you just want to use the default skin, this should clear out any issues you're having with old cached skins.

CSS fixes and upgrades

I fixes a few display bugs that were bothering me, but also added some stylish upgrades to make your posts a bit prettier. If you're not already using Markdown syntax in your posts, here's a quick refresher on how to make your TMD posts extra pretty:

# title

title

## heading

heading

### subheading

subheading

**bold** _italics_ _**bold italics**_

bold italics bold italics

[⁣[Brass Man]⁣]
Brass Man

```
2 By Force
3 Swords to Plowshares
1 Plains
```⁣

```
# Greatest Deck
## 1st Place, imaginary tournament
Creatures
4 Brass Man
4 Brass Herald
4 Brass Secretary
4 Brass-Talon Chimera
4 Brassclaw Orcs
Spells
4 Brass's Bounty
Mana
4 City of Brass
32 Island
Sideboard
15 Relentless Rats
```

Have fun with it.

Late notice of course, but can anyone coming in from Boston get me a ride there?

@baishuu "active users" can mean a lot of different things. I can say that there were 549 posts in the past month. The numbers I have for "unique visitors" and "page views" are so high that I suspect my data doesn't properly differentiate between human lurkers and bots. I definitely can't provide user trend data because we just don't have historical data on this stuff for the site.

Anecdotally, I can say that I can never remember a time when people haven't been saying "TMD used to be more active", even 15 years ago when the site was brand new and people were saying "Beyond Dominia used to be more active."

I don't have hard data but I do have a working theory. It is extremely common to see people go through phases with this hobby (like any hobby, of course).

People start out excited and passionate and consume every bit of information they can find. At this point a player is fascinated just reading lists of archetypes and historical results. Maybe they feverishly hunt down fundamental general theory pieces like "Who's the Beatdown?" Maybe they buy a physical copy of "Playing to Win." Thinking about the game in a new way, each win is thrilling and motivates them to learn more, each loss is a challenge to find that piece of the puzzle they're missing.

At some point they find a set of strategies that work for them and they start specializing. They don't really need general information anymore, they get the fundamentals, they want to learn what successful players are doing and replicate that. These players hunt down tournament reports and sideboard guides and archetype megathreads.

Some players have a knack for the game or a lucky streak and start picking up wins and the minor notoriety that comes with it. Notoriety is fun (speaking from experience) and these players tend to get excited about putting their own mark on the metagame. They want to take a crack at writing their own primers and tournament reports. A player with a lot of hubris, like my younger self, might even try adding to the great canon of magic theory.

Whether they have tournament success or not, eventually a player hits a plateau in their results and their interest starts to wane. Maybe they still like talking about vintage, but at some point reading primers and sideboard guides stops making them any better. Maybe they think their own techniques are better, or maybe they just aren't getting results from what other people write. Either way isn't making them any better at the game, so motivation to read them is low. On the other hand, "vintage issues" topics like WotC announcements and restrictions don't suffer this problem (they were never supposed to make you better). Proportionately, more of their conversation will be about these subjects. Some may refocus their efforts on community building, maybe through TO'ing or Judging or facilitating content creators.

Interest waxes and wanes, and maybe not everyone hits all the notes in the same order, but I think most players do. Some of the excitement can't be recycled, either. New cards can be printed and new strategies learned, but you can only read "The Danger of Cool Things" for the first time once ... even though people keep writing it over and over again. When you ask someone about the historical health of the vintage community, it's probably not hard to listen to their answer and pinpoint exactly when they started playing.

I think "the downturn" in the hobby as a whole (which includes TMD but certainly Facebook and many other avenues as well), is a lot like an adult watching a child's cartoon and saying, "when I was a kid these were much more entertaining." The cartoons didn't change, you did.

@thecravenone said in Changelog 1/21/2019 - Complete UI Redesign, Deck Categories:

Looks good for a content site but it's kinda confusing for a forum. I guess maybe I'll get used to it.

Yeah, I guess I got kind of sick of running a forum with no content.

How's your Death's Shadow matchup

Looks like there are some weird formatting issues for people who were using custom themes before. Some of them seem to be resolved by logging out and back in again. I'll be implementing a full Dark theme eventually, which should resolve all the issues, but if anything is unusably broken in the meantime, please let me know

And we're live with pretty massive UI changes.

Topics bucketed by archetype

Vintage Strategy isn't just Vintage Strategy anymore, I've split things up into subgroups based on broad archetypes, the goal here is for players brand new to vintage to be able to quickly find information.

News items and topic thumbnails

Thumbnails for topics have been enabled. In the composer you use to write or edit topics, there's a button on the right with the tooltip "Add thumbnail". This lets you upload a square-shaped image. When your topic appears in a list, that image will be displayed rather than your user icon. This is particularly nice-looking for items in the News subboard, which will now appear on the front page with big fancy icons. I believe this will be the image used when a thread is linked to off-site, but I'm not sure if that works yet.

Decks to Beat

The home page is going to feature a list of decks labelled "Decks to Beat". These are links to particular threads, and at some point I'll want to establish a consistent format for threads that are "deck-to-beat" eligible, to make it easy for new players to navigate ... and a separate consistent format for stickies in the archetype categories as well.

Feedback

This is a massive change so some UI may be broken, please let me know. If you previously used the "Dark" theme for the site, this won't work anymore, but fixing that is on the backlog.

I haven't been able to go through the entire backlog of threads yet (to move 4 year old workshop threads to the workshop board) but I expect to get to that eventually. Absolutely feel free to use the "report this thread" feature to mark a thread that's in the wrong section, whether I put it there or someone else put it in the wrong category by accident.

I fully expect there to be discussion or disagreement about where to draw the lines for the Archetype categories, which threads/decks belong in which group, and of course, which decks count as "Decks to Beat." I welcome your feedback, feel free to start threads in Meta or Community as appropriate.

Placeholder post for Pitch Dredge discusson.

Here's a list: