On the Stack 13: Playing Magic by Post

A while back, I was interviewed for a Kotaku article about small Mastodon instances. Neither I nor the friend with whom I run wubrg.social actually had any quotes get into the article, but the author expressed some interest in talking to us at some point about our instance, and specifically the practice we’ve set up of playing Magic by post in the local timeline. So I’m going to assemble my thoughts about it here in case that actually happens.

The idea of Magic by post probably came from this LoadingReadyRun video in which the characters play Magic like correspondence chess, sending their plays back and forth by snail mail. I was reminded of it on Twitter by someone who was trying to revive an obscure Magic format called Tiny Leaders, and borrowed the idea for wubrg.social, which my friend and I created with play-by-post in mind.

The basic idea of play-by-post is that each player has their own paper deck and posts declarations of their actions to a shared thread, along with photos of their board state and shared information like their life total and the number of cards in their hand. Posts are hidden under content warnings to prevent clutter in the timelines of people who aren’t part of the game. The amount of information in each post varies based on both what the poster is doing and whether their opponent can respond; for example, if your opponent has no land untapped, it’s usually safe to post a whole main phase because there’s very little they can do in response to each spell you cast. Most of the time, the etiquette has settled into one post for the beginning of a turn up through declaring attackers, a pause for the opponent to block, and another post for damage and the rest of the turn.

Games are usually slower than face-to-face games, since play is asynchronous, and especially slow when players are in different time zones or when more than one player has to respond to each action. The most complicated game we’ve played so far was a four-player Commander game with one player on a different continent from the others. The game could only progress while everyone was awake, so it took about three days, and we ended up using a Google Sheet my co-admin has developed to record the big complicated board states and link to descriptions of the cards involved. The game was won by a mono-black sacrifice-based deck, which profited from a board wipe played by the Artifacts deck.

Play by post is a lot of fun, even when it gets that complicated. It gives me more opportunities to play Magic with the people I want to play with, and the slow pace of the games means I don’t have to focus on it as intensely as a face-to-face game, and can take a turn or two at a time on a break from work.

If this sounds like something you'd enjoy doing, leave a comment and I can get you an invitation to wubrg.social.