Back when I joined the PDC community, it seemed a lot more centralized than it is today. There were clear, vocal “community leaders” who had their hands in every debate. (I used to consider Evu, SpikeBoyM, and LulThyme the Triumvirate of Pauper, with names like lathspel, idoru, KingRitz, kehmesis, and icarodx serving as top-ranking officials in the community. I know there are plenty of names that pre-date even these, and I am in no way suggesting that these particular players have any superior influence or importance in the community. I am merely speaking about my own, biased impressions of the PDC world when I first started getting involved.) Usually there was only one debate at a time. There may even have been a council of PDC elders who convened at established intervals to hold live forums about these issues. PDC catered to a very small, focused group of Pauper players on MTGO and very few if any other Magic websites gave Pauper the time of day. Certainly not WotC themselves.

There were a number of successive PDC websites. The one before the current site was called PauperMagic.com, and this is where the PDC community coalesced into something with a discernible structure. This is the point to which PDC had progressed by time I joined the community. A few weekly Classic Pauper events (with regularly scheduled alt-event weeks) and a fledgling Standard Pauper event.

My clan the Princes of Pauper and I started a blog about PDC. I would write “tournament reports” about the Standard tournament as a way to promote the new event and hopefully drive up excitement. It worked. People loved seeing their names and decks appear in my blog posts. I also started creating “trophies” which were essentially signature banner-sized graphics with a player’s name and deck title and the event he had won over a featured card artwork. This followed along the same principle as the blog posts — appeal to a PDC player’s ego and vanity. In so doing, I feel I was able to accomplish several things.

1.) Players actually enjoyed the trophies and these became an incentive for victory all their own. (There was actually a time when people got upset when trophies DIDN’T get made, which shows you how much they came to be valued.)

2.) People began to pay more attention to the metagame. Secret: the REAL reason I started the trophies wasn’t to give players a reward. It was to create a tangible “object” that could help archive the Pauper Standard metagame week after week. (I was also the player who got the ball rolling on collecting metagame data at PDC events, which is now adroitly handled by Gatherling — as long as players enter their decklists! I created the system of medals, designed the colored square graphics, etc…)

3.) The Pauper Standard event gained the attention of PDC members who didn’t even play it. “Following” Standard became very easy between all the collected data, the graphical representations of champion decks, and the lengthy tourney report blogs. Worlds was a big deal. At one point after kehmesis took over the SPDC event report writer’s job, he was writing blockbuster Worlds preview articles to massively hype the season finale events. PDC members’ eyes were all focused, for one week, on one huge event. It had significance. It was big.

You don’t need me to tell you that PDC isn’t like that anymore. While we are entering what I will call a “Silver Age” — one or more events on every day of the week, just as we experienced with the “Golden Age” — there isn’t the same sense of community connectedness that we once knew. PDC is a lot more compartmentalized. There isn’t a central narrative binding us together. No one is writing tourney reports so it’s a lot harder to follow events and formats you don’t attend directly. Our artists have disappeared so only a choice few event winners receive trophy banners. Gatherling’s metagame reports are sparse, sporadic — enough so that kehmesis cited poor community participation in entering decklists as one of the reasons he stopped writing tourney reports.

When PDC events first began to seek prize support in sponsorship, the community voiced a concern that a monetary incentive for winning Pauper PREs would change the clientele of our cherished events and would attract more cut-throat players who wanted nothing to do with the PDC community we had worked so hard to build. That didn’t seem to happen, at least not on any significant scale. The official WotC sanctioning of the Pauper (Classic) format, along with our own format filter on MTGO and a weekly PE, siphoned off a lot of our most competitive players who sought high-level competition and prizes worth the time investment. While this sanctioning represents a great triumph for the PDC in terms of negotiating our community desires (and B&R list) with Wizards, it most certainly struck a heavy blow to the centralization of the PDC. At that same time, many of the most active and vocal PDC leaders disappeared, whether to focus their precious MTGO time on the PE or perhaps to devote their energies to real-life concerns (new wives, homes, children, job changes).

For a while after that major moment on the PDC timeline, the community dwindled, weekly PREs shriveled in number, and things looked bleak. (Of uncertain relevance to this “dark age”: my departure as webmaster of the PDCMagic site. But that is an entirely different story.) As stated above, we’re bouncing back from this with a slew of new and resurrected events filling the weekly schedule. Will we also experience a renewed sense of community engagement, involvement, centrality? Or will these events maintain their current state — disparate, isolated from one another in all but name, serving a niche sub-group but not contributing to a greater sense of a PDC community?

This depends in large part on whether the community can find new voices of leadership, whether it can find active volunteers, writers, graphic artists — and whether these volunteers also place value and emphasis on the idea of building the community. It’s not that one or two people need to do more. It’s that we need a lot of people, working together, to grow. I have often been accused of trying to “spread the community too thin” and perhaps that is what I’m doing here again. But what I really want is for PDC events to be fun and exciting again. I want them to matter more. It takes the concerted effort of a group of people — yes, a community — to achieve what we once had going in the PDC. I wonder if we can have that yet again.