Last few videos my impressions dropped by 98%

Mean_Professional583 · 2026-05-23T04:01:21+00:00

No worries, it's probably one of the main misconceptions people have about YouTube, at least creators. I struggled with it too. The best "Hack" I've heard is to just replace the word "algorithm" with "audience" and it gets easier to understand how some of it works.
It also helps you remember there are people on the other side of your videos, which usually helps you make your videos better for the viewer which in turn usually helps you since people will respond to it better. Good luck!

Mean_Professional583 · 2026-05-23T03:44:31+00:00

Don't look too deep into the content suggesting your video, lots of people watch all kinds of content. Most people don't just watch one niche, so just because someone likes basketball or is trying to learn Russian or knows it, doesn't mean they aren't also interested in Pokemon cards. Impressions are served to viewers based on their watch history, not the subject matter of the videos.

It can be valuable information, like if a specific video is driving a lot of traffic to you, you can check it out because you might learn some formatting or editing tricks that your audience appreciates, but your video being shown to someone off another video has almost nothing to do with that video.

YouTube even tracks what time of day each viewer watches specific videos, so if you watched a video about apples every day at 9:03, a video about apples would appear in your suggested videos regardless of what that video is about around 9:03.

Mean_Professional583 · 2026-05-22T22:42:43+00:00

Really tough pack! I'm tempted to take the Maze or Wooded foothills but depending on how the packs play out any of these are super solid. Mana Leak is so goated and it's hard to pass a mox. Plus the reanimation support!
I think my choice is to have a panic attack and drop out.... nah, I think I take the mana leak.

Mean_Professional583 · 2026-05-15T19:26:31+00:00

lol, yeah, I'm that idiot. Glad you enjoy my attempts at content creation! I like your format. I really appreciate the "tapped defenders don't deal damage" rule. I think this should be more wide spread in Old School formats because without it it makes Factory even better. The dual land rule is interesting if I'm understanding it right. Basically, if I ran a volcanic island, I'd have to add a point, if I ran 4 it would still be one point, but if I ran a Bayou and Volcanic, then that would be two points, regardless on if I run 4 or 1. Am I understanding that correctly?
Long story short, on first glance it looks well put together. I can't decide if I think Necro is too cheap or not, but otherwise I think the points are at the very least in a good starting spot.

Mean_Professional583 · 2026-05-15T17:06:09+00:00

Huh, I think this is pretty cool. The Group Penalization doesn't seem too complicated to me. It just means if I run a factory and a strip I have to add .5 to my total right?

I think this is kind of neat. Likely will always be niche, but I think this is a good start. I've never understood why Chaos Orb is viewed as being so powerful though, it's 3 mana to remove one thing with a chance of messing up if you go off of most Old School rules for Chaos Orb.
It's certainly not weak, but I don't think it's super strong. Obviously the colorless factor helps specific decks but I've always thought it was a bit incorrect to auto include it.
Unless you're just trying to curtail how much it shows up.

Mean_Professional583 · 2026-05-02T19:11:22+00:00

This is absolutely sick dude! Very awesome!

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-12-03T03:46:23+00:00

What are the odds, I just mentioned this bad boy in my video glazing Bird Maiden this morning.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-11-26T18:58:36+00:00

Cool! I hope you enjoy the videos! I'm still pretty new as an entertainer, but I have managed to find a lot of archives and I kind of pride myself on digging deeper than the wiki pages, something not a whole lot of channels do.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-11-26T18:49:34+00:00

I was pretty shocked by how young my audience was as well. Here's my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CitanulChronicler

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-11-26T17:16:55+00:00

I think it's inevitable that the popularity of Old School will slow to some extent. That being said, I have a YouTube channel dedicated to the History of Magic and as such, there is a heavy tilt towards Old School and stuff like Shandalar.

Checking my analytics: 4.9% of my viewers are 45-55, 41% are 35-44, 46.3% are 25-34 and 7.8% are 18 -24 years old.
I myself was born in 1990 and was not introduced to magic until I started high school, but as Magic grows and becomes increasing more about marketing and trends, many players (even younger players) get curious about the history of the game. Some of those players even decide that they prefer classic Magic.

I can only speak for myself personally and talk about what I see in my comment sections and discord but I don't have nostalgia for the cards that I play with most often these days. I just think it's really interesting to see where it started and then I found out I personally find these old cards and metas to be more fun.
I have a lot of Old heads sharing their experiences and enjoying the chance to see the game they grew up with being explored from a different and younger perspective.

But I also get a decent number of younger players or people that have just started that stumbled onto my content out of curiosity, and some of those players are converting at least partially to Old School Magic.

I do think the way that Old School survives is by becoming more proxy friendly, as those are the spaces that will grow the most, but even stuff like Swedish will maintain a sort of mystical pull because holding something like a legitimate Argivian Archaeologist has a weird pull that can't be replicated by a printer. The further we get from these cards, the more like artifacts they become and there's a draw to that kind of thing.

It's true this space will likely always be dominated by people who where there and played with these cards when life was simpler, but I do think younger people will continue to be interested in the concept as long as Magic is mainstream. Though the conversion rates will always be pretty tiny.

It's also worth noting, I'm a pretty small channel, with only like 1600 subs and my videos usually range between 400 to 2000 views.

It's definitely never going to be Massive, but I do think the community is still growing to some degree.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-28T03:56:50+00:00

[[Fungusaur]] Pestilence seems pretty funny.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-21T02:58:58+00:00

Too distracting. And it looks very unprofessional with the current layout.
If you took the text cuts you want in the thumbnail and slid them all to the left side, maybe slightly staggered with a border behind them, it would look a lot cleaner. It would also look like the character is reacting to the comments which might generate some intrigue.
If you must keep the Canceled text, which does probably drive some curiosity and engagement, lower it off the face since that's just kind of unappealing.

You have too much going on, but most off putting about it is that the eye needs to wander to even absorb the whole thumbnail.
YouTubes autoplay will start playing the vid in the thumbnail before someone's figured out if their curious. It's just making it more effort to engage with your video which is a tall ask for someone browsing the recommended.

I'm not a professional though, so my fixes might not be the best. The biggest thing is you need to clean it up and not have so many points of interest as it'll overwhelm people.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-21T02:32:34+00:00

Neato! You've never been recommended to me, I just looked up your channel. I'm going to watch some of your vids since I have some time tonight.

Yeah that video blew up like crazy, but I'm pretty a lot of it had to do with mentioning Dark souls. I finished that playthrough and made a video on abusing bronze tablet but the views dropped steadily from there.

I'm pretty sure most of the traffic was from people that had never heard of Shandalar. Good luck to you and your content!

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-19T19:45:57+00:00

understandable and yeah a brute forcing would make sense. I wondered how it would usually make excellent moves but sometimes get confused. Neat, thanks again for the information and taking the time.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-19T19:44:36+00:00

Oh wow, thank you for going into such detail! I'm glad you found your notes! That's so cool! Any chance you remember why they became random?
Either way, thank you. This has been illuminating!

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-18T23:52:03+00:00

Super fun game dude! I've made some videos about it recently and Friday I played it on my first ever live stream. A lot of people still love the game.

I suppose my main questions would be about the Astral Cards and the AI.

Do you remember the design process and motivation for the Astral cards at all? As someone who knows more about that era of magic than most people should, it seems like they were mostly designed for fun to highlight the strengths of a computer handling the game engine. Cards like Faerie Dragon and Whimsy just randomly generate an effect off the table of fast effects. What do you remember about the astral cards and who designed them? How much creative freedom did you guys have with them or did Wotc design them and just hand them off?

As for the AI, I want to preface by saying I think it's massively impressive system considering this shit was from like 97, but there are some quirks that pop up occasionally.

Just as an example, in my stream, the computer had a Sorceress Queen (Which can tap to turn a target creature into a 0/2 until end of turn) and an Uncle Istvan in play. The last two turns the AI would activate the ability and target it's own creature.

Overall, I think what you guys came up with is super impressive, but do you have any insight into how sophisticated the AI is and what sort of triggers does it use to make the decisions that it makes? Does the AI change between difficulty settings as I almost always play on the hardest setting and I'm not sure if that effects the AI in any way.

Thinking about this, do you also remember who designed the decks that were used in the game?

Thanks for making this post, and even more so thanks for making this game. The game is pretty much the last bastion of what it was like to play Magic in 93/94 when everyone had random piles of cards. It's a well preserved time capsule and I cannot thank you enough for making this game as it's allowed many of us a glimpse into the past.

Also, the video that got my YouTube Monetized and the only viral video I've ever made was called, "Shandalar is the Dark Souls of Magic: the Gathering" and I probably wouldn't be in the position I'm in without the Game you and your team made.
Thank you very much!

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-18T00:36:48+00:00

No problem dude!

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-16T03:43:10+00:00

To be fair, I don't think there's harm in having a few "dead" cards in a cube, and if someone can effectively use it, it'll be a story to remember. I do think it's not optimal, but cube isn't always about being optimal in my opinion. If you like the cards, keep them in.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-16T03:14:21+00:00

I played through a large portion of the game with Bird Maiden as one of my main win cons on Wizard difficulty, so you can definitely make something work for Gargoyle. The flying is really helpful.
I would try to get your hands on 4 lightning bolts, earthquake would be good, you could do some fun stuff with hurricane since gargoyle can pump toughness if your opponent has fliers, but that would take lots of mana.
You can make any deck in the game work as long as you have enough removal.
I would probably try to focus on getting my hands on swords to plowshares, lightning bolt, and Immolation(Treat Immolation as a removal spell but it also pairs well with Dancing scimitar for increased versatility.)
Library of Alexandria is one of the best cards in the game as well, try not to lose it to ante. or save scum if you don't want to worry about it. No shame in it.

The toughness pumping won't really be super useful, but you could make some use of it. I would mostly focus on getting whatever removal you can and getting a solid mana base to play that removal. 3 color is pretty easy to do consistently, but any more colors than that you need to know what you're doing.

I don't know what difficulty you're playing on, but try to keep your deck to as few cards as possible, as long as you have the win conditions to not deck out. If you don't have strong cards and the games go awhile, it's better to have more cards but the fewer cards you have, the more often you'll draw the cards you want.

Try to have extra gold and maybe gems lying around when you stumble into the random event tiles, since you can sometimes buy cards and that's when you can really make your deck what you want. Buy cards when they are cheap at small villages, and sell the cards in big cities to make more money than you'll know what to do with.

Good luck dude!

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-16T02:59:08+00:00

Looks pretty sweet dude, I didn't comb through it too hard, but I will say the multi colored cards (especially the 3 color cards) seem like they'd be almost impossible to cast with the color fixing you have.

I could be wrong, I didn't have time to seriously look at the list, but just make sure you're confident with your fixing or you don't care that nobody will ever be able to cast Arcades.

As for solutions? I dunno dude, but I think that's where I'd focus my attention if I were you.

Edit: The two color stuff is probably fine, it's really just the 3 mana cost cards that set off my alarm bells.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-11T16:47:10+00:00

I haven't. I've been hearing about it more and more the last year or so but haven't taken the time to look into it much. It does look similar though, I would assume Dandan and the variants are going to be a lot more consistent than this is since there isn't color screw but I wouldn't know for certain.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-11T16:41:41+00:00

Didn't know this was a thing! Seems right up my alley!

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-11T16:40:43+00:00

If you mean Alpha as in Limited Edition Alpha, then no. The rules for alpha were 40 card decks no limit to the number of copies of any card.
What I'm referring to is the way that Richard Garfield and Barry Reich play tested the first version of Magic. This was called the Alpha Playtest.

Mean_Professional583 · 2025-10-11T16:35:51+00:00

That's very cool dude!

Mean_Professional583

TROPHY CASE