(Note: this was originally posted as a comment on the article, but because the SCG commenting system is weird and I can't figure out how to make the post visible to everyone, it's copied here.)
This article is so bad. I would just quote some of the worst sentences from the article, but then people would assume I'm just trolling instead of legitimately pointing out how terrible this article is.
The main problem is that it's basically a set review of a bunch of cards that've been around forever, in that it's a list with some gut reactions and possibly a second-hand overheard testing result from someone that knows what they're talking about. Flores, you do not know what you are talking about.
Cards do not exist in a vacuum. Cards go in decks. Decks exist in formats. For a card to be good, it has to be good in a good deck at the right time, and what we have here is just a list of things that feel right. Here and there you might suggest what deck it's good in: okay, so what do you take out from that deck? How else does this change the deck construction? How does it change the matchup you want to change? What other matchups does it help? What's it bad against?
Magic is a game where sample sizes in testing matters a lot. Okay, so a certain card one you a specific game against a specific deck in a specific situation. So? That didn't teach us anything about the card as a whole. What card would you have otherwise had in that situation, and could that card have done something equally powerful? How'd it do in the other hundred games you played with that card?
The scientific method goes hypothesis -> testing -> reevaluate hypothesis -> retest -> conclusions. These are just untested hypotheses, and absolutely no attention should be paid to them under any circumstances.
Fortunately for the strategic content, it's nearly impossible to read due to the horrendous quality of the writing. This is a near-structureless assembly of anecdotes, observations, namedrops, and pure bullshit under an incredibly weak premise. Postulating about inclusions in the top 10/top 50 in a format is not interesting. Talking about how you "innovated" a card in "one of the most important decks of all time" is oh my GOD not interesting.
As a tangent of my own: "overrated" and "underrated" mean very little in Magic, because it doesn't tell us how good they actually are. It's not like stocks, where an underrated one is inherently valuable. If the common perception of a card is a 1/10 but it's actually a 4/10, that still means it sucks.
Flores seems to be under the opinion that people will read him just because of who he is and he has some kneejerk opinions, which is the surefire sign of the hack writer. I don't know if Flores is just doing this for the money, because he genuinely feels he's enlightening the general Magic-playing public, or to feed his ego, but it's beyond the point of a bad article into the territory of things that would be immediately rejected if his name was someone else's and the twice-per-article Chapin namedrop was "my friend Bobby."
Stop.
