sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

“How can we ask this question, when Israel continues to exhibit extreme brutality, having even facilitated on-the-ground massacres since its establishment?”

Of course, in the early days before the internet was prevalent, things could really be completely different from store to store or town to town. It's gotten a lot more uniform as people gained access to more and more information about the game, decklists started being published online, and so on.

Even so, historically you can look at the regional championships in different places, in the exact same format, and see really different results. Part of this is separation in time (the meta evolving from one tournament to the next), but part of it is also just different biases in the metagame in each region. There's not actually that many top level MTG players, and often they are testing or sharing tech with one another a lot, so regional groups of players can have kind of an outsized influence on what their local meta looks like.

A lot of my reading on this though has been focused on really high-level play, which is by nature kind of its own unified metagame. A pro tour is made up mostly of players who are traveling to be there, after all.

This was also true of miniature painting styles before the internet became ubiquitous.

Particularly picking up a White Dwarf in England, the United States, or mainland Europe would introduce you to at least three overarchingly different styles. The US preferred smooth transitions of colour, England definitely cleaved close to the 'Eavy Metal house style, and mainland Europe was all about high contrast, extremely smooth but stark highlights.

With the internet's arrival? That disappeared entirely. If you know what to look for - if you have the right kind of eyes - you can still squint closely and spot where someone's from by the way they apply colour to a miniature, but for the most part, it all became a similar blur of mingled styles. A real melting pot, with a handful of individuals pushing their particular methods above and beyond... until a Patreon exclusive PDF leaks and suddenly every third wannabe Golden Demon winner is throwing non-metallic metal down your throat-

oh i'm editorializing

But yeah! It's funny how it's not just MTG that has a 'local flavour' until around 2008 or so - at a guess, time-wise, as far as when the internet became a lot more prevalent in nerd circles on my side of the pond.

you didn't make that you fuckn numbnut it came in a box

by age thirty you should have at least one fireball motion or a command grab to put on your resume