It isn’t often I am able to start off an article talking about onion rings, and I think it’s a testament to Howard Lyon’s character that he was so sweet when I was basically talking about dunking one of his art pieces into bleu cheese dressing.

Lyon’s pieces stood out to me early on. First, it was because of their lush, palpable sensuality. Second, it was because of the memorable, unapologetic, in-the-moment women whom we are sometimes lucky enough to have populate his work. I’m suspicious that he may be living with a bevy of strong female models—his wife and daughters! There is a true tension between opposing forces in Lyon’s work, and that also appeals. I look at the dark corners of his stuff and think, “Yep, he’s been there.”

For many of us, deck-building involves a lot of head-scratching, and it usually happens like this:

It’s often the case in Magic that creative deck ideas end up being more gimmicky than revolutionary, and gimmicks don’t usually do well when paired against no-nonsense decks. So when creativity isn’t cutting it, but using an established deck sounds about as fun as . . . well, as using an established deck, where do you turn? I have a few options for you:

I've been honored to have a vote every year since the Hall of Fame's inception. I continue to take it as a serious responsibility which involves both my discretion and effort. It would be doing a disservice to the Hall of Fame and to the individuals involved if I didn't engage in due diligence and make an intelligent, informed decision.My personal criteria are relatively straightforward: a sustained high level of play, at least three Pro Tour Top 8s (as we go further down the road, that number might change), and demonstrated excellence in sportsmanship. Top 16, 32, and 64 finishes also factor strongly into the equation. In fact, they've become more important in my equations as time goes by. Being a Pro Tour commentator gave me an even greater appreciation of the thin slices of difference between finishing high and barely cashing. Positive contribution to the Magic community is an additional factor although not required-but it can be significant enough to push someone over the line (like I think it was for Bram Snepvangers). It's certainly a tie-breaker. Part of the sustained high level of play includes at least 30 Pro Tours, but that's not a hard number. Had Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa gone into 2012's ballot with 27 PTs, I would have voted for him anyway because of the bazillion Top 8s, not to mention general awesomeness. Another part of that sustained high level of play is there being a reasonable argument that the player was considered one of the best in the world during his or her peak. I know that that line is a little fuzzy and completely subjective, but it's something that coalesces for me the idea of Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Very Good. When your peers and the experts who judge and report on the game consider you the best of the best, it's a factor worth considering.

Geist of the Moors - Cards with big empty text boxes are a luxury for flavor text writers, so when this card came up I went “home run or strikeout” and came up with a piece of... I guess you'd call it Innistrad folk verse. It definitely isn't anything that'd be chanted in Thraben Cathedral. While poetic meters and rhyme schemes are notoriously hard to translate, I've been impressed by the efforts made for the various Western European languages, like Italian:

The Hall of Fame voting period has started, and as always this will spawn discussions about which players are good enough to warrant voting for them. At least in part, this comes down to the question of which players are best at this game, and going one step further, how to measure greatness at Magic. Being a bit of a statistics nerd, that is a question that has always interested me. After giving it some thought, I think that the metrics Wizards uses and gives us on their Hall of Fame website are suboptimal.

There are really only three metrics in use today: Top 8s, Pro Points, and Median. Top 8s are great, because they showcase the most valued achievement in the game, but obviously they are also a very discrete, imprecise measure. Pro Points are mostly a lifetime achievement which is also fine in that the Hall of Fame should be for players that have dedicated a significant part of their life to the Pro Tour, but it cannot distinguish between a grinder without much high level success and a hotshot that played only a few events.

Finally, there is median and I think this is actually one of the worst measures to take. The shortcomings of Top 8s and Pro Points as a metric are very obvious, thus everybody is aware of them and uses them accordingly. Median, however, is a pretender. It seems like it is a very precise and fair fair way of measuring Pro Tour performance. Unfortunately it measures something that we don’t really care about at all—the average. Let’s face it, in a game with as much variance as Magic most tournaments don’t go our way. That doesn’t mean they go awful, but most of the best players are not going to reach the goal they set for the tournament. This is a fact that everybody accepts, and so we don’t care for all the mediocre results that Guillaume Wafo-Tapa or Matej Zatlkaj have had over their career. Instead we focus on when they do well, and see that they Top 8'd or Top 16'd yet again. These are the results that count, and for them we are in awe of the prowess of the player. Nobody cares if that player wins a match more or less when they are having a bad day, but that is what is measured by the median.

...We hardly need to delve into the past to see the power of searching up particular cards (also known as “tutoring”). Birthing Pod currently reigns as the most dominant deck in modern. Cards like Green Sun's Zenith, Natural Order, Infernal Tutor, Entomb, Intuition, Stoneforge Mystic, and Goblin Matron define Legacy. In Modern, it's Expedition Map, Sylvan Scrying, Scapeshift, Verdant Catacombs, Knight of the Reliquary, and yes, Chord of Calling, that make the format what it is.

At minimum, these four words printed on a Magic card deserve great respect. For me, they set off alarm bells and get my mind working in new and different ways. So when I see not one but two very intriguing tutor effects among M15's green cards, I can't help but imagine the possibilities.

Dear Hall of Fame selection committee voter,

Here is your official ballot for the 2014 Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame election.

That is the greeting to the ballots that were just sent out to the newly consolidated selection committee that is made up of commentators, tournament officials, key Wizards personnel, and all Magic players in good standing with more than 150 lifetime Pro Points. This year's ballot, which is the first to use the new threshold of 150 lifetime points to be eligible for induction, is considerably smaller than it was last season.

I am going to walk through the ballot year by year and give you a brief overview of the careers of these Hall of Fame–eligible players. I will start with players new to the ballot, meaning their Pro Tour careers began during the 2003–2004 season, and I will work backwards year by year to discuss players who remain on the ballot from previous seasons. If a player has appeared on fewer than 10% of the ballots for three years, the player removed from future ballots. Players can reactivate their eligibility by acquiring 4 Pro Points in the season leading up to a ballot.