Captive AudienceCaptive Audience | Art by Dmitry Burmak

Hey everyone, I’m Command Zoe. Today we're talking about how I have managed my achievements in content creation over the past year, and we'll use my experiences to guide you to starting your own content creation in Magic: The Gathering (MTG).

When I started my journey into content creation, I had 23 followers on my Bluesky, two on Twitch, and zero friends or connections within the larger MTG space. Within nine months, I've become a writer at EDHREC, President of Birds of Paradise, a MagicCon Atlanta Featured Creator, and an MTG Ambassador for Avatar: The Last Airbender.

There's been a considerable amount of work that has gone into that behind the scenes, so today I’m going to explain some of what went into it, and how it can help you.

Getting Started by Defining Your Goals

The first step of starting anything is to come up with a plan, and the first step in coming up with a plan is to define your goals.

When I got started, I wrote down every single thing I could think of that I wanted from what I was doing. I wanted to:

• get invited to a MagicCon.
• join Birds of Paradise.
• get big enough that I could help people in crisis.
• run charity events.
• be an #MtGAmbassador.

Over time I added to that list as I learned of new opportunities, met new people, and developed myself. I broke that list down further by how long I expected it would take me to do them. I've been wildly wrong about a lot of those, so if you don’t know, just guess.

Goals are important because they give me something positive to strive towards. These goals also keep me accountable. Timeframes for these goals not only let me gauge the timing on certain benchmarks, but also let me appreciate the size of what I’ve done.

Benchmarking larger goals is important, especially if you're neurodivergent. It keeps them manageable. A hundred is overwhelming when you're looking at it from zero, but 25 four times can be a lot easier to handle.

I am a big proponent of fitting your plans to your specific abilities and needs. I won’t tell you what your goals should be. Having several short-term goals, two to three medium-term goals, and one long-term goal suits me best. The timescales I like to use for my goals are: this month, 3-6 months, one year, and five years. I keep that list of goals set as my desktop background so I see it every day.

At this early stage, it's important to look at your goals and ask yourself how serious you are about getting what you want. Some goals in this field are hard to get. For example, if you want to be an Ambassador, then you're going to have to do consistent work for an extended amount of time. This is a business, and Wizards of the Coast is not going to trust you with their brand and image if you don’t take yourself seriously enough to produce a consistent product.

Some Jargon and How To Use It

Your product or content is what you make to share with the community at large. It can be an article, a cosplay, a stream, a video, art, podcast, or anything else you could possibly produce.

Your craft is how you go about actually making your product. An artist paints, videos get shot and edited, and streams get live cast. Making a good product is hard, but a well-kept secret in the industry is that making a bad product is hard too. So much work goes into making something that stinks. Focusing on improving your craft is important because it makes your product better overall.

And again, fit your craft to suit your abilities and needs. Set yourself up for success. For example, I need my streaming setup ready to go so I can walk up to it and go. If there were a bunch of equipment I needed to pull out and set up and put away every single time, then I would do it far less and wouldn't consistently put out product.

Accessibility in all things makes creation easier, so make your craft accessible to you and your needs. When you make it easy on yourself, you can focus on the product rather than the process. The process shouldn't slow you down. If you find yourself fighting something with the process consistently, change it.

Don’t seek perfection in your product, seek it in your craft. Product is ephemeral. Good and bad episodes/articles/etc. will both come and go, but if your craft is good then you will end up with more good than bad. Do this long enough and it will become part of your brand. These are all linked, and they all matter.

Your brand is something that unifies all of your products. It can be a color, a logo, an attitude, a vibe, an identity, or anything else you can think of that consistently shows up in your product. An obvious example from me is my stripes. I have them in my profile picture, I wear them at cons, I post lots of selfies in them, and I even have them on my emojis in twitch and discord.

As a content creator, your reputation is inexorably linked to your brand. That is the nature of the business.

It's important to unify your brand across all your platforms. That means the same exact profile picture, the same exact name, the same exact posts. Get an app that can manage them all if need be. Consistency is important. Brand unification also means all those different socials should link to each other somehow, usually with some form of digital business card. There are several free sites that do this.

Using Magic as a Common Framework

The reason MTG is so successful and appealing is that it provides a common framework in which we interact and have fun. Every new person and playgroup I've played with has felt different. They all have their own tone and their own vibes. This is why I choose who is going to be in my pods rather than having an open sign-up.

On my streams I use the actual Magic gameplay in the same way that professional wrestling uses real wrestling. It’s what we are pretending to do, but there are all sorts of safeguards that I put in place to make sure the show is good. The outcome of the game doesn’t mean anything. All that matters is that the show is fun to watch. Some of the safeguards I put up to keep the games close and competitive are:

• Draw 10 for the opening hand, put three cards on the bottom of the deck
• No Sol RingSol Ring in the opening hand or on turn one or two
• Get opening hands and turn order before I go live so no one is rushed to keep a bad one

Stream Guests and How To Treat Them

Set your expectations with your guests long before the stream starts. Have a place they can go before the stream to look at your expectations at their own leisure. Don't make things hard for them. Make it super obvious, easy, and accessible to be on your stream. The easier and more relaxed the guests are, the better show they'll give.

Remember, you're trying to bring out the likeable parts of their personality. Enable them. Respect them, respect their time, respect the fact that these people are helping you make your product for free. Show gratitude, thank them, treat them how you wish you were treated if it were you. Treat them like adults, and like they're working with you. This is work, technically.

Control the table like a waiter would during a meal. This means keeping pace of play going, breaking up dead space, creating gaps in the conversation for quieter guests to speak up, and, if need be, asking those guests questions to force them in.

Don’t leave people out. You featured everyone here, and you don’t want anyone to leave your table feeling bad. People should leave your streams feeling good enough that they want to come back, and good enough that they want to tell people to watch them next time. Ideally, your guests will bring their own audience, and you want those people to leave feeling good too.

This is how you grow.

Respecting Your Audience

People don’t want to watch anyone get salty. Ever. It's an uncomfortable experience. I've seen viewership plummet in real time when streams get awkward. Active, fun, and engaged viewership can turn into crickets in an instant. The best way to mitigate this is to remind everyone at the start of the pod that keeping vibes good keeps your audience around. Remind them what the goal is.

After the expectation is set, reinforce it before you go live; once you’re live it becomes a lot harder to have that conversation.

Background Research

This is how you know who'll be a good guest, but more importantly which guests will work best together. Magic is a social game, and some people just do not mix in social situations. It will benefit you to go find people who have already played well together. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with your content. Take who works well together already, bring them on your show, and find a way to fit them into what you do.

Enabling your guests is really important to keeping the vibes good. If you bring on a guest who is really good at making puns, set them up to make puns. If they're good at infodumping or loredropping, find space for them to do that. If they banter back and forth with another guest on someone else’s stream, then go get that other guest too and put them together on your stream.

You're in charge of creating your product, so if there are certain behaviors you want on your stream, encourage what makes those behaviors come out in people.

Marketing

Marketing is how you make others aware of your product. There are entire college degrees for how to do this well, so I'm only going to hit a few key points specifically for new streamers. Ask yourself where your audience is watching. Instagram, Reddit, Tik Tok, Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon all have very different audiences on them, and the crossover of the average user is somewhat minimal.

Figure out who wants to watch you, then advertise where those people are.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with one important final point. Followers on Bluesky and Instagram do not translate to views on Tik Tok, Twitch, and YouTube. They just don’t. Posting is not the same as content creation. Converting followers to views is difficult. Do not tie your self-worth to your metrics. It's the fastest way to burn out.

Make steady, consistent content. Focus on improving your product by perfecting your craft, and soon you’ll be achieving everything you set out to do.