I mean, after two solid months of no updates after the appeal to save Standard Pauper fell on deaf ears over at Wizards of the Coast - and after a year of rather infrequent posts - it should be pretty clear that this blog is dead. The Standard Pauper format is still alive thanks to dedicated players and community leaders, but the filter has been taken away at the same time a lot of changes have happened rapidly in my personal life.
So it looks like I'll be composing a eulogy for the Cabel the Pauper blog instead of an obituary for the format.
So why have I not been playing Standard Pauper since about mid-season or blogging about it? And why does it look like I won't again, at least not in 2016? I feel I owe whatever readers I have some answers.
The first reason is romance. This is something that I did not see coming, but after catching up online with an old acquaintance this spring and summer, things moved rather quickly into the fall and I'm now involved with a woman who has fast become the love of my life. She knows how to play Magic but isn't really too into it and was also in the European time zone finishing her doctoral degree. So my time was better spent chatting with her on Sundays and Mondays when the PDC events were going on. That is a pattern that will definitely continue once she goes back to Britain after coming home for the holidays.
I know, I know: it's the classic "found-a-girlfriend excuse" but I've always been of the mind that there's no such thing as excuses. There are just good explanations and bad explanations. I think falling in love and maintaining a long distance relationship is as good an explanation as any for just not having the time to log in to play Standard Pauper any more. And I can only hope that every Magic player out there - every human being, really - can find someone special against all odds to truly fall in love with.
Now that the sappy stuff is out of the way, the second and third reasons fit in with the Letter-M theme I've developed on the blog. These are music and Marxism.
On the music point, I've recently switched instruments from bass to acoustic guitar and will be going back to school for music. Specifically, I'll be training to become an audio recording engineer and I'm focusing on guitar because I already know how to play bass, keyboard, and can carry a tune singing. In about a year or so my final project for graduation will be to produce a 20-minute recording myself.
This means I can finally write and record all the songs I've been working on for years that all the bands I've been in before weren't interested in. It also means I'll have a marketable skill set as both a songwriter and studio engineer so this long spell of joblessness can finally be put to rest. So since I'll be practicing an instrument as often as recommended by my instructor and studying for classes, Magic simply has to take a backseat and I've already gotten halfway decent at guitar by spending my time learning chords and rhythms instead of playing Magic.
Finally we come to Marxism. I'm proud to report that after several years of starting and stopping with the bitch of text that is Marx's Das Kapital Volume I, I've finally finished reading the book and the lectures posted for free by Dr. David Harvey. Now I feel I truly understand several of the contradictions that are inherent in the capitalist system and know for a fact that Marxist philosophy and economic theory is more relevant than ever. My new girlfriend even got me Volume II for Christmas (she is also a socialist!) and I'll be spending my spare time this semester reading that one and following along with Dr. Harvey's newly posted lectures on this essential Marxist text.
Anybody interested in this intellectual undertaking can find Dr. Harvey's lectures here. I highly recommend not trying to tackle this masterpiece of philosophy, political economy, and world literature on your own. God knows I didn't make it very far by myself, so it's a blessing to have somebody who has been teaching the book for over forty years share his course materials for free over the Internet.
So those are the reason that I haven't been keeping this blog up to date and why I have no plans to do so after the publication of this post. My time will be spent maintaining a healthy long-distance relationship until summer arrives and my love finally comes home for good, practicing my guitar and learning the ins and outs of audio recording and engineering, and continuing my autodidactic studies of Marxist philosophy. This leaves no time for playing Magic, much less blogging about it.
The fact that the Standard Pauper filter was taken away from us and that a nasty bug in my MTGO client made deck-building a bigger chore than it was before are small potatoes compared to these positive life changes and thus warrants no more than a passing mention here.
The main thing I want to say is that it's been a hell of a lot of fun being a member of this small but close-knit community of online Magic players and doing a little bit of self-indulgent blogging about it from time to time was fun, too. I want to thank everybody who read this blog or my old forum posts and PureMTGO articles, everyone in the Standard Pauper Players Clan for keeping the format alive, and, of course, I wish you all good luck & have fun!
Peace Out!
- C
