A Letter from the Publisher (Sept.2022)

Hello!

It is with great joy and humility that I find myself in the position to write to you all today. As you may have seen elsewhere already, there are some big changes happening within our sphere here, and i’m looking forward to the opportunity to give you all the run down.

Here at Playing Pioneer, we have strived since day one to be a dependable and invaluable resource to our community. This website and its team were founded with the idea to create a one-stop-shop for all things Pioneer, undoubtedly all of our favorite format collectively. We have worked hard to present the best possible data, tools, article selection, and authorship to our community, and strive to better ourselves each day; to foster the continued growth of the community that fostered us in our early days. While it certainly feels like it’s been a lot longer, the short seven months that we’ve been around have been some of the best days of my life, and I have an optimistic outlook on the coming days as well.

Introductory fanfare out of the way, let’s get to the changes that you can expect to see out of us in the coming days. First off, you might notice that there’s a different name and picture on this article. Howdy, my name is Darren, or ServoToken online, and I will be taking up the role as Publisher for PlayingPioneer.com. This change is coming in line with a new transition that we are making as a collective. With the successes we’ve seen in the Pioneer format and the flourishing of the community in our time here, we’ve decided to branch out and try our hand at providing the same tools, resources, and passion that we bring to you all to some of the other Magic formats as well.

With that, we wish to proudly present our newest endeavors; PlayingStandard.com and PlayingModern.gg.

PlayingStandard will emulate the early days of PlayingPioneer, while making sure to apply some of the things that we have since learned along the way. We will be expanding our team with these new sites as well, making sure to encompass all facets of play from the casual Arena user to the Pro-Tour hopefuls grinding away in MTGO Challenges and paper events. This site will be headed up by the original head-honcho of PlayingPioneer, Ben – otherwise known as Rose_Emoji.

PlayingModern will look slightly different, as we didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew here. Instead of a content-first site like Pioneer or Standard, Modern will be a resource-first website, offering our classic Tier List updates and all of the data and tools that we present on each of the other sites in our network. It will still host articles on occasion, and while we have plans to expand it into the “full” version that each of our other sites exists as, for the time being it will just aim to provide that baseline service to the already content-dense modern community. In that line of thought though, if anyone is interested in joining the team as a Modern contributor, my inbox is open!

With each of these changes and many more coming down the pipeline as well, we have also decided to go through with a small rebranding. With multiple sites, we thought that it may become confusing if we didn’t offer a simple solution in regards to self reference. So from here, we will be rebranding to the PlayX Network. We’ve already made the changes on our Youtube and Twitch accounts, and those following us there won’t have to change a thing. Each individual site will maintain its own twitter account as well, so this branding doesn’t functionally change much at all and we hope that we’ve made our changes as simple and easy as possible for all of you.

The PlayX Network has much more in store for you all, and we’re extremely excited for the days to come. We can’t possibly thank you all enough for your unyielding support, and we will strive to do you well by that by offering more and better content than ever before. Thank you so much as well to all of our Premium users and Patreon Subscribers, as without you, we very likely wouldn’t be here today. The future is bright, and our readers are the ones that make it possible. I’ll see you in the next one.

  • Darren "ServoToken"

    Publisher

    ServoToken has been playing competitive magic since 2011, spending a majority of that time living in the shoes of a player on a strict budget. After investing a lot of time learning how to make the best of a bad situation, his goals today are to spread those lessons to the often-ignored population of Magic players who can’t afford to drop a car payment on a new deck every couple of months. His mantra is that “You don’t need to play mono-red to do well on a budget”. These days, you can typically find him deep in the archives of Scryfall searching for new cards to brew around or making tweaks to the Pioneer Budget deck spreadsheet on his unending mission to bring his favorite format to the people on the cheap.

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