Writing: Jesse Mason is good at writing

It would be easy to miss, but Jesse Mason is probably one of the best Magic writers.

Jon Corpora's mailbag column yesterday picked Mason's GP Montreal (Hoaen) report on a best-of-all-time list and sent me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. Corpora used the phrase "high art."

Obviously it's never productive to debate the distinctions of what-makes-high-art, but the article in question, and most of the stuff on Mason's blog, has pretty clear art-lit influences. The report is structured out of sequence as a series of vignettes with all different lengths / styles, and his best blog post is sort of a pure-dialogue short story. He also runs what I assume is the world's only Magic-themed Weird Twitter account:

if simic creatures evolve from creatures without +1/+1 counters then why are there still creatures without +1/+1 counters, huh
— Jesse Mason (@KillGoldfish) May 28, 2013

Since Tim Aten's reign, the cult of Magic writing has sort of glamourized bitterness and writing about girl problems or whatever, which makes sense since that stuff hits hard emotionally, but which seems a bit pointless since you can usually get better versions of that from non-Magic writing. But when Mason gets personal, he has the sentences to back it up. Here's a confessional excerpt from his glorious GP SeaTac report:

I had friends, and I played Magic with those friends. One aspect of this would stay fairly constant through the years.

Mason also refers here to Zac Hill's stuff as "the strongest collected works of any writer to talk about [Magic]," and I'll speculate that like Hill, Mason works under a heavy David Foster Wallace influence. Wallace is obviously a really cool and good writer, and his legacy in Magic writing (and gaming-writing in general?) is kind of an interesting phenomenon that might highlight what a right-brained nerd he was.

Best pts of Jesse Mason's GP Montreal Report:

• pt VI - traders at magic tournaments. A simple, important lesson, clearly explained. There are lots of reasons trading sucks, but this is probably the biggest of those reasons.
• pt VIII - round one, against Charles-William. Funny and sad and terrifically relatable.
• pt XIV - the channel fireball people at gp montreal. Another pretty good lesson -- what makes people great at something.