Epistemological Status: Introspective naval gazing plus solid writing advice. If you want just the advice, skip to “the Sauce” section.
Honestly, if you told me when I started Wild Wild Weiss that I would still be writing this blog five years later, I wouldn’t have believed you. I wouldn’t have believed that I had that much to say, and I wouldn’t have believed anyone wanted to hear it.
Looking back, I’m glad I did. I have learned a lot about writing, a lot about Weiss, and really come to appreciate that the more is truly the merrier. Thus, I’m going to take this opportunity to be introspective and give back to a community that has given me so much at the same time. I’ll share how my involvement with Wild Wild Weiss got started, what I learned from five years of making content, and a workflow that I can stand by.
If you get nothing else from this, you can and should start making content, if you believe you have something to say about Weiss. Your voice truly matters.
How we got started
Five years ago, I remember talking with PlatPlat after getting knocked out of the Weiss Grand Prix after a string of brutal luck. Sitting at the table sandwiched between a mix of people who shared my fate and those who got to move on, I heard my inner voice. Instead of wallowing in defeat, it said “we have a voice, we had something to say about Weiss, why not add our voice to the conversation?” I asked if we should start a blog, unprompted. For some reason, I distinctly recall some guy overhearing that comment and shooting a “ain’t nobody going to read that” sort of look at us. At that moment, my resolve was crystalized. PlatPlat probably realized it too, as he didn’t object to me immediately jumping to plot a start up schedule and crafting a name. After spit balling a few names, I threw out Wild Wild Weiss complete with Will Smith wearing a cowboy hat as the logo. PlatPlat hated both ideas.
What did stick was the idea of a community blog. Calgary has a strong stable of players with a wealth of experience with the game. So, I brought up the idea over dinner after a local Weiss tournament. I suggested focusing on shorter articles, 800 words or less ideally, and to produce a bunch of articles in advance. That way we would have a stockpile we could release slowly to ensure a consistent flow of articles. Kira started setting up the site, and I went off and tried to start writing.
I realized that if I was going to have any staying power as a blogger, I’d need to write in a niche that I was interested in, was unique, and had something valuable. As one would expect, my favorite set gave me an out. I remember at the time thinking that most Weiss content was either prospective, positive, or normative. Very little writing was retrospective. So, why not review a set in its old context?
It’s funny, writing this post, I still find myself with the same feeling I had writing my first blog post all those years ago, looking at a blank Word document. Unshaped inspiration rising like water, pressing at the dam of a first sentence, while my hands have haphazardly placed sandbags below. There is a complete trust that once the water makes its way through the haphazard intro, it’ll gracefully carve its way through each idea, shaping an idea worth sharing with the ocean of Weiss Schwarz content available to us.
So there I sat, staring at the screen. Blank Word document and Sheryl and Ranka cards staring back at me. How can I open this?
Then I remembered that there was a beloved movie depicted on the cards, so why not open with the movie and go from there? So, I wrote a first sentence that spoke about the Macross F movies getting a theatrical rerelease, which was enough to get me into a flow state. Suddenly, I had a three-thousand-word article in front of me, and I was looking for places to cleave the article into multiple smaller ones. Within a day, Kira posted his first article, I posted my first Macross F article, Keeluah posted a Saekano deck tech, and AnzuP posted the first of a series of posts about landmark bans. Wild Wild Weiss was born. From there we ran streams, podcasted, hosted tournaments, and so much more.
What I’ve learned from Blogging
I’ve been blessed by both my teammates here at Wild Wild Weiss and the broader Weiss community making us part of their lives for the last half-decade. Being relevant for five years in any field is an achievement that we did together. I’m also a big believer of paying things forward. So, I want to share what I’ve learned, in the hope someone reads it and asks themselves “why not me?”
Getting started is the hardest part
Frankly, that “why not me?” moment was a key motivator, as getting started is the hardest part. I needed the challenge to start writing. When I started there was a constant nagging voice saying “no one cared.” I ignored it and published anyway. Then, I started noticing the “weekly views” number getting higher. After that, I noticed people interacting with my work. Sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, but that reinforced something important: that I had a voice and it mattered.
Interacting with others is the best part
Not only did my voice matter, I got to talk about the game I love with people who loved it as much as I did. That fueled me. From the first comment on my first Macross F post wondering if we’d ever get a Macross Plus set (I don’t think I’ll ever forget that comment) to people chatting while PlatPlat and I played games on stream, I’ve cherished every connection I’ve made in the Weiss community through the blog, no matter how fleeting. For that reason, I implore anyone to “find their voice.”
Making connections also allowed me to work with wonderful people on Wild Wild Weiss. Before going on with this section, I must admit that I have a competitive streak. Thus, Weiss Schwarz Almanac’s Reading List became a particularly strong extrinsic motivator. By default, WordPress sends you an email when someone links an article on their blog. So, imagine competitive old me seeing “your article has been linked” and seeing that it’s been placed on a reading list. I was even more grateful to have the list’s curator Pattywagon[1] come on an episode of Wild Wild Weiss and give me at least three hours of his day to record one of my favourite episodes. Hopefully PlatPlat and I will someday be able to play the cube we discussed!
I’ve also had the privilege of meeting tons of people through the podcast. More than a few times, I’ve had people tell me they “recognized my voice.” Especially guests who I had the pleasure of meeting online before meeting in person. Being able to help build a community online and offline is an amazing reason to start making content for something you love.
Teamwork makes the Dreamwork
Community was always at the heart of Wild Wild Weiss: it’s in the tag line “A shared blog for Calgary Weiss Schwarz Community”. At the beginning, having many people to work with really helped us establish the blog. Kira, AnzuP, Slowbro, Keeluah, and I all had a breadth of ideas we wanted to write about and a huge variety of skills to execute them. AnzuP’s early focus on history, Slowbro and Keeluah’s competitive focus, and my numerical focus on weird topics gave Wild Wild Weiss a breadth of content that was hard to match.
On top of that, Kira had the tools and skill to start streaming on a regular basis. The stream allowed us to build community through integrated events like allowing people anywhere around the world play against us during our annual 24-hour Weiss. It allowed us to maintain our community while playing games together during the 2020 pandemic through the Road to the Timvitational league.
Keep searching for your niche
One of the fundamental concepts of marketing is “The Four Ps:” Product, Packaging, Placement, and Price. Since Wild Wild Weiss was always a community blog, Price was predetermined (Free). It comes with its benefits and costs: for example, the product and placement can be whatever we want because we don’t rely on it to make a living. That means that we can pivot (or quit) when we no longer find what we are doing interesting.
And man is that ability to pivot important. When I wrote what to buy when you do not like any sets, that was every bit a personal cry for help. I absolutely did not care about any of the sets that came out in 2020 before DAL hit. Truly I tell you, I only cared about DAL because it was exceptional at the time and plays in a way I like. So, I looked inward to find interesting topics. Turns out taking my eyes away from what was in front of me, no interesting sets to play, helped me remember that I can answer problems in a sophisticated way using my training as an economist. I used my econometric skills to evaluate whether Weiss was exceptional in its number of translation errors.
Look at what you currently do both as a Weiss player, in your work life, and in your spare time. Chances are, you have something that will give you a unique lens to look at Weiss through, unique questions to answer, and a unique way to generate answers to those questions.
How to find a niche? Ask a well formulated question
Conveniently, answering a good question leads to more questions. This means two things: your work is a jumping off point for conversation and for new projects. A well formulated question is a question that can be clearly answered with “yes, and.” This allows you to focus on that answer, marshal an argument and data, and answer to the level of detail necessary. Entertaining works invite you in, and should provide enough entertainment to make you want to remember them, interact with them, and share them.
A perennial example: many Weiss players lament that despite their best efforts to control the ratio of climaxes to regular cards, they just lose games they ought to have won. It’s natural to want to explore why this happens. Simply setting out from “compression isn’t real” isn’t a good premise. It is a nebulous statement, suggesting no obvious way to answer it. This lack of clear premise will likely lead to confused answers. Confused writing is hard to read and is unlikely to yield interesting discussion or follow-up. Asking “Does putting extra cards in memory increase your chances of cancelling enough to be worth considering for the generic deck?” is a well defined question. It asks a question, suggests a method of solving, and whether you answer in the affirmative or the negative it suggests follow-up questions. Creating a joke video that shows a player with 7 climaxes in 21 cards dying from 2-0 and revealing a stack of 7 climaxes at the end achieves the goal of a good question implicitly. You intentionally picked at a common experience, lampooned it in an accessible way, and its relatability will likely drive discussion. Humour is a fantastic tool that almost always has an implicit answer hiding underneath.
Let’s consider specific instances of good explicit and implicit questions. “You are using stock swap wrong” is a well defined explicit argument since it suggests a clear method, a corrective, and encourages conversation. “Weiss Schwarz Flavor Review: King of Fighters” contains an awesome implicit question, arguing that lore in Weiss is cool by showing you in riveting detail how lore from King of Fighters made its way into Weiss and enhanced the set. It encourages KoF fans to think about Weiss and Weiss players to think about what is on their cards. All deck techs worth their salt answer: “do these 50 cards create a coherent game plan.” An excellent dech tech (or in this case counter tech) answers how the deck plays into their opposition. Pretty much all good derivative media, which most academic research[2] and writing about Weiss Schwarz is, has a question and an answer.
For a more concrete personal example, my work investigating whether English Weiss had a high errata rate relative to other card games (a well defined question) made me realise that standard empirical economics research methods work for answering questions in Weiss. The standard empirical econ toolkit takes the following path: Introduce the question, present your data to illustrate the issue (stylized facts), introduce a model, and use the model to confirm or add nuance to the stylized facts. Measuring errata lent itself naturally to this method as comparing translation errors between Pokémon and Weiss lends itself naturally to visualization and regression analysis.
That led directly to estimating how good going first is in Weiss. The idea came from Tyler at Weeb Schwarz, but the method came from my professional background. I surveyed our local players each weekly tournament about the outcome of their games in a minimally invasive way, while collecting control variables. Then I made an identification based causal argument and ran a series of models. To my knowledge, the question had been simulated previously, but not answered empirically with a causal model. I’ve had people come up to me after publishing the article and lamenting “if only I had that extra 5% chance to win.”
Things you’re passionate about are things you’ll be remembered for
Internet content creation, like literature before it, is a conversation. Instead of “Despite literature to contrary (Squatslav, 2020)”, we find the critiques in comments, tweets, article links, and conversation. It can come at you hard and fast too. I remember the first time I started a multi-hour-long argument (protip: be aware brevity can easily become blunt). I used a simple chi-squared test to show that the composition of Weiss sets had shifted over the then 10-year history of Weiss Schwarz and made a blithe comment calling the game Idol Schwarz at the end. It spawned arguments on Facebook and multiple discords about what counted as an idol and whether I was impugning idol fans[3]. Years later, someone I didn’t know made an offhand mention of someone “scientifically proving Weiss was an Idol game.” Thankfully it didn’t reopen an old wound, but I was happy to see that I was remembered for one of the first articles I put a ton of data work into.
Don’t fear the desk drawer
But sometimes things don’t work out. Maybe your argument doesn’t make sense, or the deck tech doesn’t actually work, or the timing isn’t right. It’s fine to stop working on it. Your work was not wasted since you learned something by embarking on the project. Who knows, maybe the time will be right in the future and you can polish it up and release it then. Here’s some examples of my abandoned projects:
- Ranka/Yami Freyja deck: I thought I had a deck that used cards from both Macross Frontier and Macross Delta to cheat out a three soul level 3 beat stick at level one. Turns out the Ranka only cheats out characters with Love Trait and Yami Freyja doesn’t have it. I learned that I need to read closer. Oops.
- Destabilizing Post Colonial Paradigms in Online Communities: A Discourse on Weiss Schwarz “Community Tierlists”: I wanted to poke fun at Postmodernism and Decolonization theory in particular in a Weiss context for maximum pathos. Basically, in a similar vein to the Calvinism post. It got a lot less fun when Hamas attacked Israel and I suddenly was worried about my friends in the region.
- I wrote a post about how Weiss card prices were up during the pandemic due to people’s choice of consumption being restricted and that prices would come down in real terms after the restrictions passed. The math worked but the pictures looked goofy. I learned to always do the graphs first.
Having a consistent project will help keep you writing
One piece of self-criticism I have is that I was not able to write or record on a consistent schedule, especially over the last year. I truly admire Weiss Teatime, Yuwei at SBTCG, Alex Hodges, Carmen at PGH, and Keeluah for their ability to consistently produce content.
When I interviewed Weiss Tea Time, I was impressed by her dedication to being a core resource for competitive players. Through constant hard work and keyboard mutilation, Weiss Tea Time provides access to what decks did well in North American and European tournaments, translations of upcoming cards in Japan, critical support for SBTCG’s Review Show, and makes one of the best ban list infographics I have seen for any card game. She then writes her own excellent longer form posts every so often.
While interviewing Yuwei, he mentioned he made a challenge for himself to try to make something everyday. While interviewing Carmen, he mentioned having a few standard types of videos they liked to make helped keep PGH engaged and also allowed them to step out of the box.
What all three of these creators have in common, besides graciously taking time out of their day to chat Weiss with me, is a dedicated question-creating workflow that generates extraordinary side projects.
The Sauce
Thus, I’m going to take what I think these creators and I do well and formalize it a little. Ultimately I hope that I can take from my experience working as economist, writing Wild Wild Weiss, and observing other great Weiss creators, and turn that into a workflow that someone who wants to start but doesn’t know where.
I’m hoping that I generalized this enough that others can implement it without it appearing too daunting. Anyone who has project management experience will recognize that this is based off the US Air Force’s OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) that I’ve modified for making Weiss blogs. It also mirrors how I worked with researchers who had a regular reports and independent research at a Central Bank. I hope that all of that flexing gives credence to the method I’m about to lay out. I’ll start with a diagram:
Observe
First, you’re going to need to find your niche, the consistent thing you want to do. For Avis, it’s much of Weiss Tea Time; for Keeluah it includes card translations and tournament winning decks from Japan; and for myself it started with set retrospectives on old sets before I pivoted to a monthly interview podcast when I realized no one was doing such a thing. This is part of your “observation.” If there’s Weiss information you seek but can’t find, take that as a sign to make it. If you discover cool things frequently while playing Weiss, take that as a sign too. If you think you can do something better than someone else, give it a go. Then, once you’ve ID’d the broad idea, pick the specific iteration you want to start with. This can be something that is popular, relevant, or overlooked with a potential small group of interest.
Orient
Next, chances are if you’re interested in a question, someone else is too. Seek out collaborators. Talk with everyone at locals and reach out to other content creators. I find a lot of existing creators are especially willing to help new ones. I include building your team as part of orienting yourself because the team will likely change as the project evolves. It may change every iteration if you like to have guests involved, such as SBTCG, Weiss Tea Time, and Nova TCG’s Review Show or the Wild Wild Weiss podcast! A personal suggestion: always try to find an editor. I make too many typos to live without one.
As you’re building your team, orient yourself(ves) in what exists and what doesn’t. Read and watch as much as you can. Then, get an idea of what form your product could take and where it would fit in the existing landscape. This will aid in planning.
Plan and Decide
Plan together what you will create, who it should target, what form it takes, and why the target audience should read it. Define the question you want to answer and how you will answer it. Make sure you are clear on who does what. Your plan should carry you from nothing to a complete piece of content while allowing for changes to occur if you learn something new. If your plan does not meet this level, either retool it or scrap it and go back to the observe phase. Take whatever you learned along the way as feedback. Some plans that do not meet the cut include: a plan that has not refined the question to the point where the answer is obvious to you; a plan that has not considered the reason why you have chosen your medium; a plan that does not include how long the piece should be; etc.
If you intend to use data and models, your plan must include the following: How will I collect the data, what shape should the data have (distribution, trends, size, etc.), why do I need this data, how will I model or use it to communicate my idea, and why does it say what I think it says? My project statement for the effect of going first in a game of Weiss is a good example of this sort of plan.
Act
Now that your plan is ready, execute. My typical approach is to create something in its entirety first, then go back and edit. My time break down for planning, creating, and editing is usually 40-20-40. Writing is the easiest part once you get rolling, since proper planning should put you on good footing, and editing is careful work. Thus I give planning and editing more time. I prefer to move in distinct phases (Plan > Write/Record> Edit) but do what works for you. The polish a bit of editing can do cannot be denied. Further, keep track of what types of edits you are making, as this can help you identify potential faults in how you approach making things and suggest a method to correct them.
Evaluate
Once it is ready, release your hard work into the wild! Listen to the comments you get, not just from others but from yourself so you can make your next output even better. I personally like to respond to comments as I find people generally reply to my responses, and you’ll get deeper feedback. Try to incorporate feedback thoughtfully. This does require a critical eye for what feedback will improve your work and what will not. The only way to develop that eye is experience. Seek additional feedback from peers you respect.
Now you’re ready to take all the experience from your first piece of Weiss content and combine it into your second. Use what you learned from your evaluation stage to make adjustments as necessary. One adjustment I made to my set retrospectives and analytical articles was to increase the word count. Less than 1000 words was not doing the set justice and making me sound overly blunt. My set retrospective on Lucky Star came in at around 1500 words.
Side projects
Now while doing your thing and playing Weiss, you might observe an interesting one off idea. You can turn that into its own loop! The same rules for your main project apply. For me, I was curious about whether the relative quality of climax trigger icons had changed since the introduction of Standby in 2019. 9thCX wrote an old ranking five years before and no one had since, so I took it upon myself to write one. For Avis, they noticed that they had been making Weiss content for 5 years, and wanted to think about what made a good content producer.
Fortunately, side projects that ask good questions and provide good answers usually generate more questions. Which means that you can start a chain of projects, each link being its own OODA loop. Continuing this concrete example, after writing about the relative quality of climax triggers, I noticed Pool/bag was pretty bad. I wondered if the game designers agreed with me. Thus I tracked how often Pool triggers had been printed over time to see if they had fallen out of favour with game designers. My writing for Wild Wild Weiss has effectively been a chain like this.
Wrapping up
Spending the last five years writing with all of you has been fantastic. I learned a ton about what I value as a Weiss player, writer and researcher. I truly feel that I’ve honed my craft. I was able to develop a workflow (the Sauce) that made me the best I could be by Observing, Orienting, Deciding, and Acting all while incorporating feedback from all of you. I hope reading this post will make new Weiss Content creators want to take the plunge and start or help out existing ones!
Throughout this process I have made friends all over the world. I’d like to take this time to thank a number of them. First off, I want to thank everyone who has helped me on the Wild Wild Weiss project. I want to particularly and sincerely thank AnzuP, Keeluah, Kira, PlatPlat, and Slowbro. Your “yes first” attitude and will to initiative made all if this possible. Next I want to thank every guest I’ve had on the podcast, your insights made it worth listening to every month. Thank you Keeluah, Yuwei, Phil and Ken, Avis, Pattywagon, Kit, Dan, Carmen, AnzuP, Platplat, and Prinz. We’ll get you on someday Wibbs. I’d also like to thank Pattywagon again for graciously editing this post[4]. All further errors and omissions are my own. Finally I want to thank my wife, Miko. She gracefully let me give many hours a week to this hobby, and dealt with the fallout of the drama I caused. Without her, I am nothing.
What’s next for IgorSquatslav? In the immediate future, Macross Delta. I am going to play the heck out of that set, write about what it does, and see if I can collaborate with some of my Macross friends to make a lore video for the set.
After that, I really don’t know. My life has and will change a lot: I was baptised as a Catholic in April 2023, finally had a proper wedding with my wife that same month, and I will become a father in April. I hope that this isn’t farewell, and there might be an Igor jr. to write articles telling you Weiss things you don’t want to hear. So, here’s to five more years of Wild Wild Weiss!
[1] Pattywagon’s mole remains at large within Wild Wild Weiss. I am offering a bounty for any information that leads to their identification.
[2] Pick up a copy of any flagship humanities or social sciences journal and thumb through the abstracts if you don’t believe me.
[3] Which is ironic given my favourite show is Macross Frontier, my favourite character is Sheryl Nome, and I had seen May’N and Walkure in concert a handful of times.
[4] See, I follow my own advice!
Wild Wild Weiss 