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Card Game Featured Writers Releases + Spoilers Anime Video Games Other
Magic
This Space |
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Baneful's Column Pook's
Place and Jaelove's Journey Lately, I've been going back to the sections of older
retired Featured Writers to re-read their articles. It
brings back good memories and helps me gain a bit more
insight on things. I read Ryoga's Puzzles section yesterday. I remember
years ago not being able to solve any of his puzzles, even
the easy ones and how I would give flat-out give up after 10
minutes. Not much has changed, in that regard, since then. I do want to talk about two writers on Pojo that
particularly stood out and were my favorites of the website.
Pook (from Pook's Place)
and Jae Kim (from Jaelove's
Journey). They don't write on here anymore. Maybe
they'll come back again. Slim chance but who knows. Pook: The Fun of Yu-Gi-Oh! Of all the writers, Pook's probably been the most
influential to my column despite me never meeting or talking
to him before. I always enjoyed his writing, but I enjoy it
now more than I did before. Back then, I was looking for tips on how to be more
competitive and an Ultimate Baseball Kid FIRE deck just
wasn't really in my interest. He also had the policy that he
wouldn't build or fix Chaos Decks (by far the most dominant
meta deck-type of the time). Now though, I don't read Pook's
writings to get better at dueling. I'm as good as I'll ever
get. I read them to lift my mood and spirits. Things got pretty absurd, with posts like "Yu-Gi-Oh The
Musical", contests for a cartoon mascot of his column, an
entire post dedicated toward slang words like "MST (Mystical
Space Typhoon)" and other things. But that's what I loved
about him. It was totally unpredictable and you never knew
what you were going to get. He delved into territory that no
one else will dive into. Looking back, it's the personality, passion and spirit of
his articles that just remain timeless in a game that has
changed so much. He had a child-like innocence and humility
toward the game that's admirable. When I say child-like, I
don't mean immature or naive at the slightest. But instead
the ability to have fun that is often washed away from us as
we become adults. He made FUN a factor in Yu-Gi-Oh! I don't just read writing only for the content that the
writer delivers (though that aspect is very important). I
also read the writer's work to piece together a story. In
his articles, I learned about who Pook was as a person and
what his life was like. It was a story, starting from him
being a college student with a closet dueling obsession to a
grown-up with real life responsibilites who still has that
same "itch" for dueling. His later writings became somber and were sandwiched in
between hiatuses, effectively finishing the story with a
theme of sometimes having to abandon that child-like
innocence to attend to real concerns in the adult world. I
wish it would've ended on a brighter note, but sometimes you
have a calling and need to move on from one thing to the
next. What else could I say but the fact that Pook's
writings had an undeniable charm? And that I loved him for
every single one of his idiosyncrasies. Jaelove: Growth and Evolution Jaelove was the Pojo writer I read the most of as a kid.
Short of a quick dialog I had with him about a Blue-Eyes
White Dragon deck, years ago, I never really knew him
personally either. But you could tell a lot about a person
by reading their writing regularly. I feel like him and Pook
were in the same room with me when I read their respective
material. Jae embraced more of the competitive side of things. He
topped a couple of big tournaments, I think. I know for
sure, he topped a Shonen Jump with a deck largely
constructed from Structure Deck commons. It was a real
motivation to people who had lots of heart for the game, but
perhaps not a lot of money to spend. Jaelove's Journey also shows Jae's growth and evolution
as person. Like he wrote, we went from an angry high school
kid, to a lazy college kid to a career-oriented
professional. His articles, as they pertain to YGO, have
also changed over the years. He began building theme-based
decks, largely avoiding the meta. But then, as he got deeper
into the mechanics of what made cards competitive, his
articles gradually became more tournament oriented. He had complex systems for rating cards like like ABAD
(Advantage / Best draw for situation / Attribute-effect /
Dependability) and FORCE (field presence/flip-effect
management ; on-field removal/on-field presence ; removal
(spell/trap)/resource replenishment ;
counter-defense/counter-disruption ; enemy
disruption/energy). You can categorize cards in many
different ways, but I particularly liked his meticulous eye
for analyzing cards. I never got fully into the competitive scence, but I read
his write-ups on high-profile tournament matches just to
capture the spirit of them anyway. One thing I always liked
about him was his blunt honesty of not being afraid to say
controversial things related to the game if they needed to
be said. But during the last few articles of his column, he
went full circle. He stated that his drive to be competitive
overwhelmed him and he returned back to his roots of just
teaching people how to play. Full circle, like I often say. Conclusion Jaelove embraced the competitive hunger I had when I was
younger. Pook embraced the nostalgic fun I now crave. The
differences between their writings sometimes felt like night
and day, but still had a lot in common too. Jae tackled on
more serious things, but his fun sometimes-irreverent
personality still shined throughout. Pook was way more
light-hearted in his articles, but you could still tell that
there was a mature person beneath the writing. Both were undeniably important parts of Pojo history.
They inspired me to write about YGO. They lit the torch of
featured writing on Pojo, and in their absence I now carry
it. --- Contact:
banefulscolumn@gmail.com
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