I have been playing Magic: The Gathering on and off since I was a child and in that time I’ve read countless articles and websites about the game. Much of it is lost to time and internet churn. Sites are deleted and even the strongest hobby writing vanishes if it isn’t preserved. The Library of Leng is a website that’s attempting to do that preservation work.
Named after a Magic card, the Library of Leng is a new searchable database of writing about the card game. It pulled old usenet articles, hobbyist posts from old websites saved in the Internet Archive, and updates from publisher Wizards of the Coast that are routinely scrubbed from existence. The Library is hosting links to some of the first strategic writing about the game from 1994, just a year after it started, as well as announcements about tournament rules from just a few years ago.
The Library is the work of Gregor Stocks, a software engineer in Seattle. “I learned to play in elementary school with a couple of Fifth Edition boosters shuffled together, but I didn't really get into it until Mercadian Masques. I've played on and off since then,” Stocks told 404 Media.
“I'm interested in the strategic history of the game, and I've been frustrated a bunch of times over the years by not being able to find old articles that people mention were influential on their thinking,” Stocks said. “More broadly, I grew up on the internet in the early 2000s, and I worry that a lot of my big influences will disappear by default. The Internet Archive is great, but I worry about them being the only place where a lot of this stuff is saved.”
The Library doesn’t reprint articles in full without the express consent of the author. Instead it gives readers the headline, a small snippet, and a linkback to an archived version of the story on the Wayback Machine or Internet Archive.
Stocks said the hardest part of the whole project was parsing old data from the early days of the internet. “Nowadays when you write about Magic you've probably got a content management system that stops you from making typos on the card names, formats your decklists nicely, keeps your HTML in the same format, etc,” he said. “Back in the 90s and early 2000s they didn't have that stuff, they were pretty much writing every webpage from scratch, so it takes a lot of spaghetti code to handle all the different cases and typos and parse authors/dates/links/etc correctly. There's still a lot of room for improvement there.”
According to Stocks, the response to the opening of the Library has been positive. Readers shared old articles they half-remembered but could not find and authors reached to have their work added. “Nobody's asked me to remove their writing from the index (though I'll happily do that if anybody asks), and it's been really gratifying to see big-time Magic pros tweeting about my project,” he said “I reached out to [Wizards of the Coast] to ask permission to host their old stuff, but they haven't responded yet. I'd be happily surprised if they said yes.”
Along the way, Stocks has also taken the time to enjoy some of the writing he’s worked to preserve. “It's hard to pick a favorite—I've been so zoomed-in on ‘am I extracting the metadata correctly?’ that it's been hard to zoom back out on ‘is this a good article?’ But I'd probably say ‘Who's The Beatdown’ (it's the standard answer for a reason), ‘Drafting the Hard Way,’ and then for a goofier example ‘What if the 4-Card Limit Was Abolished in Modern?’”
Despite all this good works, some of the written history of Magic remains absent in the Library of Leng. Though I’m referenced in a few places, my own contributions to the field of Magic: The Gathering journalism aren’t present.
Last week I was talking to a friend about “banding,” an obscure and little-used Magic ability. I recalled an ancient article from a magazine in the 1990s titled, I thought, something like “The Three Bitch Sisters of Magic” that discussed banding but I struggled to find it in the Internet Archive. Stuck in a hotel room for a work trip on a weekday night, I trawled through old issues of InQuest magazine hoping to find it. After some searching there it was: “The Three Bastard Sisters of Magic.” I’d misremembered “bastard” as “bitch.”
It was a scan of the old magazine uploaded to the Internet Archive. I asked Stocks if these old magazine articles would end up in the Library some day. “I didn't realize those were in the Internet Archive—that moves them from ‘probably never’ up to ‘maybe someday,’” he said. “Dealing with OCR is a lot hairier than parsing HTML, though.”
The article was written by a woman named Beth Moursund and, on a whim, I searched for her in the Library of Leng. I got 52 results, some of them written by Moursund but more referencing her. I learned from a 2011 article that as well as a feature writer, Moursund had worked for Wizards and been instrumental in the history of the development of Magic.
Learning about Moursund’s legacy after vaguely recollecting one of her features the 1990s was a bit like falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole late at night. It would have never happened if not for the Library of Leng and Stocks’ efforts to preserve the written history of Magic: the Gathering.
