Even since the days of dial-up internet, Magic: the Gathering fans, pros, and pundits have written about the game online. From articles and tournament reports on the Dojo, to strategy discussions over Usenet, players were avidly theorizing about the game well before the likes of Channel Fireball or Star City Games came along. If you want an easy way to delve through decades of formative articles, look no further than Library of Leng, a custom fan-made search engine that provides stable links to 150,000 articles from throughout the game’s history.
Created by MTG fan Gregor Stocks, Library of Leng is a searchable index of Magic articles dredged from across the internet. As Stocks puts it, MtG has “a rich tradition of websites going out of business or deleting their archives, risking the permanent loss of that history”. The Library of Leng site contains links to “all the old Magic writing that I can find, with links to the original sources as well as working links to the Internet Archive when the original source is offline”.
Want to know what the fan response to iconic MTG sets was actually like at the time, or have a chuckle at players underrating absurdly broken cards when they were released? Library of Leng can help you out!
The responses to Stocks sharing the site in the r/MagicTCG subreddit give a good overview of how the archive can be used. “As someone who spends a lot of time trying to expand historical content on mtg.wiki… wow”, says user BeatsandSkies, impressed by its potential for pure historical research. Alt-F-X pipes up with a specific historical question the index finally helped them to answer: “This finally helped me find when Peer Pressure was changed to its updated and clearer Oracle text that I’ve been looking off and on for a while… the answer, January 2010”.
While the articles are old, some strategic insights are still applicable today. “I finally re-found an article that imo is a super important read, especially for anyone that plays aggro”, says Redditor 080087, pointing to an article on Starcitygames. When most world religions rely on texts hundreds to thousands of years old for moral guidance, we shouldn’t be too surprised if the best expression of a card game strategy idea dates back over a decade.
What’s your favorite article from the olden days? Is there a classic site you remember reading that has since completely disappeared from Google searches? Let us know about it in the Wargamer Discord community – even better if you can find a link!
Source: Wargamer
