About

Hipsters of the Coast is a Brooklyn-based Magic: The Gathering blog. We cover a wide variety of formats, both casual and competitive.

Disclaimer: While many of our editors and writers play at Twenty Sided Store, Hipsters of the Coast is not affiliated in any way with it. The views expressed herein are our own, and have nothing to do with the ownership or management of 20SS. To learn more about Twenty Sided Store and its scheduled events, you can visit them on the web at twentysidedstore.com.

Zac Clark – Founder of Hipsters of the Coast.  I started playing during Fallen Empires.  I began taking the game seriously during Alliances.  Stasis, Titiania’s Song, then a long love affair with Mono Blue Control, finally settling on Replenish before taking a 12 year break, only to return to the game playing aggro strategies.  Since RTR rotation I’ve been favoring control.  Standard is my format of choice.  I love the swings in the meta-game and solving it each week.

Matt Jones – Artist, cheerleader. I started playing at the end of The Dark, hit my stride during Mirage block, and quit Magic after finding booze, drugs, and sex during freshman year of art school. In 2011 or 2012 Twenty Sided Store opened eight blocks from my apartment in Williamburg, Brooklyn. I kept my distance for a few months due to fear of the game’s power over me and eventually caved. My main MTG interests are Unhinged lands, Standard, Modern, and anything non-permission based (counterspells are bullshit). Power and Toughness is my weekly summation/journal article and I write an Arting Around article now and then pertaining to similar things but, you know, about art and MTG.

Li Xu – Marketer, blogger, gamer, in no particular order. Though I guess we all qualify for the latter two, so I’m not as clever as I initially thought I was. I started during Prophecy (eww), played through Odyssey/Onslaught blocks (UG Madness!), took an extended break and came back shortly before Avacyn Restored. I like Islands, maybe enough to counterbalance Matt’s seething hatred for them. My favorite format is Modern followed by non-RTR block Standard.

Rich Stein – Rich is a hotshot software developer who adamantly believes that blog biographies should be written in the third person, so as to make the reader feel that the author is important enough to have had someone else write about them. Rich has been an avid gamer since he first played his parents’ Atari 2600 in the late Eighties. In 1994 he and his brother were introduced to the Revised Edition of Magic the Gathering and Rich was immediately hooked. He played casually until his parents stopped bankrolling his cardboard addiction. After graduating university Rich was able to get back into the game right when Ravnica came out. He played competitively in the northeast from 2003 until 2012 when he returned to being a casual player in order to devote more time to becoming a mediocre blogger.

Jess Stirba – My first pack of Magic cards was the Dark. I found them fascinating, even if all the cards were terrible. I played casually until Phasing lost me during Mirage, picked it up again at college for Ravnica, and then got serious during Alara Block after my ladyfriend got the bug.  I love Legacy, Modern and EDH, but I’ve been known to play Standard and Limited from time to time as well.

Hunter Slaton – Hunter first picked up Magic when he was a kid, around the time of Revised and Fallen Empires, alongside his best friend at the time. Both of our sets of parents made it a condition of our playing that we throw away all the black cards immediately upon opening them, because of Jesus. Hunter didn’t play again until Dissension, when he found an awesome playgroup through Craigslist, which used to play at a deli near the Chrysler Building. Hunter pretty much exclusively plays Limited, aka God’s Format. He has a four-digit DCI number, and lives five minutes’ walk from the 20 Sided Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.