The Rogue's Gallery: A Story of Small Streamer Networking (by Melvin)

Greetings!

People often wonder how TJ, Jamie, and myself met. We’ve answered this question a few times on the show, but I thought I would jot it down here in a more permanent fashion.

I started streaming way back around December of 2015. I was just a little blue Muppet playing Magic Online, streaming twice a week at night for people to watch. Like most streamers starting out who did not already have an “in” to the Magic community, I only had a couple viewers for a long time. I also only streamed limited. Now, I know that the question that immediately came to mind to you when reading this was, “Certainly not you, Melvin! How could this be, with your good looks, excellent play skill, and incredible on-screen charisma!” This would be anyone’s natural response, so do not be concerned. But even I, Twitch’s only Magic-playing Muppet, struggled to grow my stream. A lot.

Magic-related Twitch was a lot different four years ago. There was no Arena yet. No one was coming from other platforms with a #sponsored tag. There were maybe 20 Magic streams at any given time. The average numbers of viewers for ALL of the streams together would hit about 2,000.. There were less people streaming, but there were also way less people watching.

It felt like a small community of Magic-streamers. If you were a regular, you probably had a good idea of who the other people were that were on and what they played. There was some guy named Numot doing a 365 day stream. This Jim Davis guy was streaming regularly, hot of some SCG wins. People almost entirely watched the top two or three streams and people below the top five names rarely had more than 50 viewers. I was a small fish in a very small pond.

I began to get to know some of the other Magic streamers. I met a few who were also having trouble getting their streams to grow and didn’t know how to go about it. I remember one night that three of us, myself, Dave, and Murph, got together on Skype to talk about it. We talked about our problems, what we could do, what we wanted to be. A little after this night we brought in a fourth person Dave knew, some guy named TJ who did commentary for his local game store. Why couldn’t we work together? We could form a group of small streamers who could help each other out. We could each use our streams to promote the group and the people in it. We could look for other like-minded people who wanted the same thing. We could have a group of people to talk to when things were rough, or when we needed advice, or just someone to share our experiences with. I suppose it’s important to note that this was before there were any official Twitch teams or anything similar. We were creating our own path. And so the Rogue’s Gallery was born.

We had a lot of interested people when we started up. We were quickly joined by by others streamers who were like-minded. People like Jamie, Zane, Zack Kanner, and a bunch of other great people. We had basically two rules: 1) Stream at least twice a week or 5 hours a week, and 2) don’t be a jerk. We had people who left or were removed for both reasons. We had a lot of people starting their streaming career asking to join us.

As time progressed, we grew and changed. Some of us took off in the streamer world. Some of us stopped entirely. Some of us still dabble occasionally or play other games on stream. After a few years, we were less about content creator synergy and more a group of friends. We still have a twitter group chat. I still watch my friends that stream when I can. People check in and out. That’s how life goes, and it’s no different here. I was happy that we created it, and I’m glad for the bonds it made.

As mentioned by TJ in Ponder Episode 85, this group directly led to the creation of the Ponder Podcast. So I suppose you could say that without the Rogue’s Gallery, none of this would be here. That thought kind of makes me happy, to know that the group helped lead to the creation of other great things.

So now you know the story. I decided to write it down not only for the reasons I previously mentioned, but because I think it’s an example of what small streamers and content creators can do to proactively network. If you create content but are not well known in the community aside from that, it can be tough. Even following the mantra of Dory and “just keep swimming” by creating more and more content may not help you advance as fast as you want, or help you reach new people. This is why networking is important. Look for people who are doing what you are doing and talk to them. See if you can work together. Form a group. Make a group chat somewhere. Promote each other. Advice each other. Support each other.

The Rogue’s Gallery is pretty much retired, but there’s no reason why it can’t be reborn in some fashion. Heck, even TJ mentioned he may think about doing something similar again in the future. You’d have to talk to him about that. But if this is something that interests you, don’t wait for it to come to you. Reach out and create your own thing. Get started. Talk to people. You’ll never know where it may lead you.

Warmest Regards,


Melvin
Co-founder of the Rogue’s Gallery

Dearest friend, I truly regret that I have not watched your Magic video yet

Dear friend,

Allow me to preface this correspondence by emphasizing my fondness of you, and the value I store in our relationship. Know that you are, like some treasured jewel hidden away by the great pharaohs of old to be taken with them into the eternities, quite precious to me. It is therefore, with a heavy heart and great reluctance that I write you now to inform you that, no, I have not watched your newest Magic YouTube video yet.

How can I possibly defend myself from your ire after admitting to such a terrible state? Surely any excuse I offer will be thinner than the weakest broth, and yet these poor rationalizations are all I have to provide. It is perhaps a sign of these trying times that I have not done such as yet, for surely life flies by, a zephyr moving us all at too rapid a pace. Truly, as stated once in an exploration of space by others, time is the fire in which we burn. Chances flash past us like leaves in a hurricane, a maelstrom of opportunity and occasion, gone before we can even focus our gaze upon them.

One could perhaps speculate that I may be delinquent due to some offshoot of the current state of our politics, economy, or poor performance by our beloved local sports team. Is society in some respect to blame here? I cannot wholly claim any of these as a direct or indirect influence on my faults in this regard. We are the aspects of our environment, to be sure, but merely stating this observation should liberate us of its fetters. Now having thus acknowledged the problems of our domain, we all are still struggling to implement a solution.

Please, I beg you, my valued companion, to forgive me this trespass. Do not be so quick as to discard this comradery that we have both tended and cultivated. Surely this egregiousness on my part is but a singular occurrence, and not any sort of indication of systemic behavior. I cherish, as I hope you still do, all we have together. Find it in your heart to let this, I implore you, be betwixt us water under the bridge. Let us move away from this together, bound tighter in friendship than before, and may my honesty in this situation be the forge that tempers our bond into a stronger metal.

In summary, I hereby pledge a self-vindication. I know the time is not past, like the sands of an hour glass that no longer fall. I can yet make amends. Please, do not trouble yourself in this. I shall endeavor to find that hyperlink you sent me to your YouTube channel. It is a penance I must complete. And as soon as I remember if it was in an email or direct message, I shall tarry not in regarding that content which you mentioned I might particularly enjoy. I also feel that as for recompense for my misdoings, I will ensure that I shall click all clicks, comment with my reactions, and forever subscribe to your future published marvels. I will also click that little bell thing, even though I do not understand its purpose and fear its intents.

With warmest regards, for this day and forever forth,

Your humble servant,

the honorable and renowned,

Melvin the Muppet, esquire.

Five Easy Ways to Improve Your Magic Podcast - Melvin

Creating a Magic: the Gathering podcast is a great and very simple way to get into the world of content creation. It’s also a fun way to collaborate with your Magic friends. Put these two things together and there’s no need to wonder why there are so many new Magic podcasts these days. The bar to entry is as low as a microphone and an hour of free time.

Perhaps this article should be titled, “So, you’ve decided to make a Magic podcast” because that might be as appropriate. Let’s go with the idea that you want to make a podcast or recently started making one. Congratulations! As TJ often says, you have to make something, even if it’s bad, before you can make something good. Now let’s look at some easy ways to make it better.

  1. Don’t Record with your Game Microphone - Sound quality is extremely important to a podcast because it’s the first thing to impact new listeners. Can they hear what you’re saying? Do you sound like you’re mumbling into a paper bag in the back of a warehouse? The first step is to put down that headset and get an actual microphone. No, you don’t have to drop a ton of money on it. As I typed this I checked eBay and you can get a used Yeti for $30, which is a great place to start. I’ve listened to so many podcasts (once) where I couldn’t tell the hosts apart because of poor recordings, and I never went back. Don’t be that podcast.

  2. Speak Like You Know You’re on a Podcast - If you know it can be edited out later, take every advantage you can of this while recording. That means if you flarbed trying to say something and sounded incoherent, just take a pause and say it again. Your stupid editor can fix it in post! If you tend to be energetic (TJ), try and stay at a uniform distance from your microphone (TJ). This keeps the levels consistent throughout your recording to save you balancing work later. If you look at a screen during your recording, try and put your microphone in front of it. Turning your head to the side to look at something causes you to talk in that direction and can cause gain issues. Also, don’t chew on your pop filter if you have one (TJ).

  3. Record your Tracks Separately - It’s very tempting if you have multiple hosts to have everyone meet up on Discord or Skype and have one person record the conversation. This is fine for beginners, but if you want to really punch up the quality of your podcast, you need to record your audio tracks separately. For each episode of Ponder, Jamie, TJ, and myself (plus any guests) each record our tracks individually, and then we put them back together into one show. The advantages of doing this really shows off when you get to editing. Here are just a few things that you can do with multiple tracks that you can’t do with just one:

    • Upping or lowering the volume on one person’s voice compared to everyone else

    • Edit out people talking over each other and leave in the primary speaker

    • Remove background noise from anyone not speaking at the time

    • Perform noise reduction to cancel out white noise and hums

  4. Edit your Tracks - Just because you have an hour of dialogue doesn’t mean that it’s ready to be shared with the world. Once you’ve got all the audio tracks from your hosts, put them all together in an editor. We typically use Audacity because it’s free and pretty good, but you can go fancier if you want. Expect to spend about three times as long editing as you have material, so that’s 90 minutes of editing for a 30 minute episode. Editing can be as meticulous as you want it to be. I perform noise reductions and background sound removal. I edit out random sounds like coughs, sniffles, furniture shuffling, and pet distractions (Jamie). You can even remove all those words we use when our brains are stalled, like “uh”, “um”, and “like” as much as you care to. I generally remove most of these unless it obviously interrupts the flow of the speakers cadence.

    Next up is dead air. There’s no need to leave any more than two seconds of no one speaking in an episode. Get rid of it. If you’re a humorous podcast, you can also edit out the delay between someone saying something funny and the other listeners reacting, which is usually longer due to recording delay and makes it seem like the listeners don’t get it. Cutting this gap down between joke and laughs makes the speaker’s joke “hit” better.

  5. Have a Story - When TJ and I asked Jamie to join us on Ponder, we wanted to go over the actual theme of the podcast. What were we? Were we a news podcast? Did we want to have a guest every episode and move into being an interview podcast? Were we a podcast that focuses on a specific niche of Magic, like Commander or Limited? Who did we want to listen to us, and why should they?

    TJ recommended a book for us to use as a guide: Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller. It breaks these questions down into sections and workable exercises that lets you come up with the answers on your own. We used this to focus on what our show was about, who we thought would want to listen to it, why they would listen to it, and what they would get out it. If you want proof of our execution of it, it’s right on the front page of this website.

So there you go. These are some pretty simple things that will help you make your podcast better. If you want to go even further with looking at what you can do in terms of editing, I recommend going back and listening to Sam Tang’s Kitchen Table Magic podcast. Sam has extremely high standards for everything he produces and it has set a goal that we constantly strive to equal. Sam’s also pretty open to giving advice, so you can always reach out to him yourself. He’s been wonderful enough to offer advice to us in the past. And in the same regard, you can always reach out to us with questions or comments about your own.

Happy Casting!

Melvin

**** BONUS SECTION ****

Just a few other things:

  • Don’t use copyrighted music! You might wake up one day with all your episodes removed.

  • Network! Talk to other people that make podcasts. Listen to their shows.

  • Advertise! Make a Twitter account for your podcast. It’s free and is a great way to reach others.

  • Distribute based on your budget. Some places charge for hosting, so figure out how to get the most audience for your buck. Libsyn’s minimum account is a great place to start.