Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1317: The Magic Dojo with Frank Kusumoto

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

The Magic Dojo was the very first major online gathering spot for the Magic community. In this podcast, I speak with its creator, Frank Kusumoto, to talk all about it.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time rather drive to work at home edition. Okay, guys, I often use my time at home to do interviews, and I have a great one today. We're going way back to early magic. Today, I have Frank Kusamoto, who many of you might not even know who that is, but was actually formative in a very early important part of magic, which we're going to get to today. He was the creator of the dojo.

and a lot of you might say what is the dojo because this was from many, many years ago it was the first central spot for people to talk about magic in a big way on the internet and so I really wanted to expose all you to this really important part of magic history. So hey Frank. Hey Mark.

Okay, so let's start at the very beginning which is how did the jojo come to be? Well, the very beginning is like basically the story of the beginning of the internet. It's like 1996. I got a on Netcom and they gave you 10 megabytes of space to make basically like a web page. And I was reading articles on Usenet about magic. And I'd only been interested in magic for a few months then. but I started

pollating the stuff that I was pulling down from Usenet and putting it on my page which a few other people were doing too. There was land of Desto Guardian and a few other pages

but anyways I was doing that and I started getting interested in some decks like the necro deck and all of a sudden I had all these articles together and then something happened. I was working for the Army at the time and I went over to this place.

I was working on web pages for the military intelligence and they were trying to figure out how to put together information and be able to network that information between different intelligence analysts. And I had already started this thing with magic and I kind of, I was working both of them at the same time. So a lot of the web pages for the military stuff ended up looking like the dojo and vice versa. And then I did that for six months and I just decided that Usenet was kind of, it was really hard to parse through like 200 or 300 messages on Usenet. Let's explain really quickly to the audience what Usenet is because you and I know what Usenet is, but I'm not sure the average listener here knows. The Usenet was kind of like a bolt, what we think of a bulletin board, where the idea that you could start a thread and you could post something, and people could respond to you,

but you would sort of read it in a thread. So it wasn't live. It was kind of an ongoing thing that people could add to. Kind of like a clunky Reddit, except people would give longer answers. Yeah, so, so I, I started making different sections like tournament reports and deck lists. And people, one very important influence on me was a guy named Rob Hahn, and he did this really long, like seven or eight page. posting on the schools of magic.

And that was happening at neutral ground in New York. And so I started taking all these things and putting them together. And then when I noticed that people were writing interesting things, I'd send them an email and said, would you mind sending me an email and I'll post it on my website. So it'll be like in one place. and you can see where all your stuff is. And, you know, also posted on Usenet.

And so they started doing that. And then I started getting the tournament players. They noticed that their tournament reports were going up on this site. And a few of them noticed that their friends were saying, hey, I saw your tournament report on this really cool site, the Magic Dojo. And they'd start saying them to me too. So it was like guys like It was guys like

Nate Clark and guys like Brian Weissman and Mike Flores and Eric Taylor and Patrick Chapin and Zvi Mosovice and Alex

Schwarzman and then Justin Gary. Anyways basically when this process had like whittled down after two years most these people weren't posting on Usenet anymore

they were posting to the magic dojo because that was the place that all of the tournament players wanted to go and find out basically the really high level guys were trying to figure out what the meta game was through what was being posted and then the people that were interested in trying to win

PTQs would go there for deck tech and look at one of the more controversial sections that were there called the decks to beat, which was this list of 10 decks that I made up each month, you know, like from different tournament reports, like what kind of decks are people playing? Yeah, the important thing we remember at the time, and one of the reasons the dojo was so important was

there was no central place to talk about magic. There was no, and I think the reason the dojo really took off was all of a sudden, no matter where you were, no matter where you lived in the world, if you wanted to sort of go and see what other magic players were saying, it was in this one place. And like, before the dojo, like I remember, I used to play in Los Angeles. I lived in Los Angeles before I came to Wizards. and then I would go up to San Francisco to play in a tournament

and they were just playing completely different decks than we were because the medigame of Los Angeles and the medigame of San Francisco were completely different. There was very little crossbreeding between that. And then the dojo comes around and all of a sudden people are starting to share information and it's the first time you're seeing cross-pollination of deck tech like between cities.

Yeah, definitely. That was a big part of it. And another part of it was like the cross pollination information was, well, I mean, the dojo kind of became a cross between, let's say, Reddit and Wikipedia. But it was curated. And then when people had, when there were community issues like rules changes came through and the players didn't like, you know, what was on the band list. or what a ruling was, the rules were pretty kind of hard to follow sometimes before six, before you guys made the change in sixth edition. So there'd be a lot of letters that would come in and people would kind of fight it out. And I know, I know that people like, what was his name, Scott Larrabee or Beth Morrison,

would go to the dojo to read like what the players were saying. about the decisions that were being made. So in that kind of way, it was helpful to Wizards. Oh. Because they were getting feedback from there. Yeah, I was, so we're talking, I started working in Wizards in 95. So I was definitely there when, I mean, R&D would literally go to the dojo every day. It was just, you know, part of our job was to understand what was going on.

And the dojo was the happening place. In fact, see if you remember this. I actually had, I did a column on the dojo. Do you remember this? I don't remember this. I did a trivia column. The way it worked was on day one, I would ask a trivia question, and anybody could answer, and they would put in their email, and then if they got it right, I sent them the question for day two.

And then I would publicly post it, so every day you could see what the question was. But the idea was, you needed to last the longest until it was. you won the trivia. Do you remember this? Yes, I do remember that. Yeah, that was good. I know. You're really good at the trivia. Yeah, that was my one contribution in the dojo's. I ran a trivia column, so. Yeah, actually, I do remember that. That was, it was quite a thing when, it was pretty heady when, like, people, guys like you or,

or Beth Morrison, she would publish her rulings, and she would, like, publish them, send them to me first and then send them out to other people second. I was like, wow. I mean, there was a discussion maybe in 97 with somebody in Wizards thought it would be a good idea to like buy the dojo. And then I guess cooler heads prevailed and they decided that it would be better to have something separate that wouldn't be viewed as, it would be better to have something viewed as like independence. I think Jack Stanton said that. But the thing that's crazy to me,

like I don't talk about the dojo very much. I haven't had anything to do with it for over 25 years. A lot of the people that were there back 25, 30 years ago are still the people that, you know, When I go on to look for magic stuff, I recognize all these names from all these people. Yeah, well, just, for example, just the names you were naming before are a lot of staple. Many of them are in the Hall of Fame, you know, so it was the who's who. Back in the day, especially for tournament magic, it was the who's who.

And like, you weren't a magic player if you didn't check in to see what the Jojo was posting that day. Yeah, I remember in the morning, it was just part of my routine. Let's talk a little bit about what you were, so an interesting thing was. was it was curated. Can you talk a little bit about what that meant, how you curated it? Well, the original part of curation was going through Usenet and just finding stuff that was, that basically that I deemed postable, because Usenat was 70 or 80% of it was just kind of like junk, or you didn't need to read through it if you just want, you just want information.

You didn't want people's opinions. But that turned around really quickly about six or seven months into it when people just started sending it directly to me. And what it ended up being for the last two years was going through between 30 to 150 emails each day and sometimes editing them lightly and then posting them in the appropriate section. And a lot of the curation was where the link was placed on the page. Like if it was something new and hot, it would just have a little thing next to it that would say hot, or it would be in like red letters or something. And then the stuff that was sent to me, I would post almost everything, but things that weren't of that much interest would be posted lower on the page.

Yeah. So you just kind of... You controlled what you thought was the more interesting stuff. Right, right, yes, exactly. So one of the things that's, one of the things that Dojo really fanned the flame of, you mentioned this briefly, but I wanted to dive a little more deeply into it, is the idea of tournament reports. So what happened was people would go to events, and in the early days, magic, every once in

a while, someone would say something about it, but there were a few players, like Brian Hacker, there were a couple players that became very famous for, like, writing really fun, interesting tournament ports and then you would put them up and then it just it started being it became the thing that players needed to do if they were sort of in the know oh yeah players really wanted to uh right and yeah Brian hacker had some really funny um reports especially the one from from paris he did which had a little bit risque and then remember Brian Kibbler did a pretty funny one John Schuller did a totally fictitious tournament report from a pro tour qualifier, and it was called The Song of Blood.

And the Song of Blood was a kind of not a very good card. And he made up this deck that basically said that he like destroyed everybody at some PTQ in Maryland. And for about 12 hours, people were trying to figure out, like, how to counter this thing. I spent a lot of time on this IRC channel called MTG Pro. And so I would go on there and I would kind of badger or wheedle or, you know, whatever, get players to, like, write reports. Let's see, there was a pro tour in Rome, like maybe in 98.

Yeah, sounds right. The one home you want it. Tommy O'Vey on the IRC channel said, if I win, I'll send you a report. And he won, and he sent a report. And I think I got a report from the first, second, place, fourth, fifth, sixth, sixth, seventh, and eighth place players. So, like, you've got this report from almost everybody who's in the top eight,

like what they were doing. And you could get a very good idea of what was going on just by going to the dojo and reading the reports. Yeah, it was some, one guy, I think Justin Gary won the nationals in 97 or 98? 97. 97. And it was the first day and it looked like he was going to make top eight and I went

over and talked to him and I said, you know, I think you're going to make the top eight. if you do, will you do a Turner report? And he was very reluctant to do that. He said, well, I don't know if I'm not much of a writer and I don't think blah, blah, blah. I know he was, he was a very young guy. Yeah. And he ended up winning and writing this report. And then 20 years later out of the blue, he sent me this email and told me like, that was

the best thing you ever did. Like, for me, he said that gave me a lot of confidence. I wrote the tournament report and then like everybody knew who I was, not because I won the tournament. It was because I had a tournament report on the dojo and then everybody knew who I was. And I've heard he's gone on to like be a game designer and stuff. He has, he has his own company. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, Justin's done quite well from himself. So, um, okay. So not only were their tournament reports, but you also spent a lot of time putting up deckless. So I just wanted to set the scene that you can explain. When Wizards first, when Magic first came out, Wizards was very, didn't want to release decklis.

Wizards actively went out of the way to not release deckless. And so very early magic, people just didn't know what other people were playing. And I really contribute the dojo to being kind of one of the big places that for the very first time started aggregating decklets, which was just not a resource people had up till then. Yeah, that was one of the biggest things that the higher level players, like, I guess appreciated. When I started publishing the decks to beat,

and I got a lot of hate mail from people that said publishing deckless was going to ruin the game, and I it's turned out not to be true but at the time like I didn't believe it I thought that if magic was going to stand as a game and like there was a guy named Scaf Elias that was trying

to like push it into being like a sport like then then it had to stand on the merits of you know what what you could do with the cards with a complete complete knowledge of, like, what the best players were doing with it, like, not make secret deck tech.

And anyways, did you get where I'm going with that? I am for the audience. Scaf Alliance, I've talked about Scaff in my podcast. In fact, Scott's been on my podcast. Scaff was one of the original Alpha Playtifters. He's one of the members of what I call the East Coast Playtefters who designed antiquities, Ice Age, Fallen Empires, alliances. And he worked at Wizard for quite a while.

He was the creator of the Pro Tour. I worked actually really, really closely with him. It was kind of his right-hand man in the making of the Pro Tour. And so, yeah, Scaf, I know Scaf read the Dojo every day that, like, he, Scaff really wanted, professional magic was a really big thing to him and tournament magic. And the fact that all the stuff you did, he thought was great. Yeah, well, the Pro Tour players, they sent me letters to, or they would tell me on IRC channel that they really liked the decks to beat because it gave them a stable

meta game to you know to meta against I guess that it took out some of the the more random elements so with their encouragement I kept posting these decks to beat it's it's kind of funny to go back and look at the letters from people that really felt that you shouldn't have, you shouldn't post good decks. It should be, the game should be more casual. And it's like, well, I guess it should, but the dojo was always oriented toward top level magic. Like, what kind of, what kind of cards do you need?

What kind of strategy? and the other thing that I think that Dojo did that nobody else did before was it it really came up with this framework for deck strategies and how to build decks and what the mechanics were of it. And the Dojo didn't come up with it. The first one that was Brian Weissman

coming up with the idea of card utility with his deck that was called the deck and then the second one was this idea of the manna curve that came with the slide deck that was actually made by a guy called

what's his name? Schneider, Jay Schneider. Yeah. And so those two ideas I think are still probably ideas that people have like card utility and

mana curve are just things that have been baked into the whole thing it's like oh yeah we're always looking at that now and back then the first place that you could see it where a lot of people were seeing it was on the dojo

yeah by the way just I'd like to plug I had Brian Weiston on my podcast to talk exactly about card advantage so it was a really fun podcast if you want to hear from Brian about card advantage you can go look that up yeah so let's get the other big thing the dojo did. When you talked about Rob Hahn earlier, not only were you doing tournament

for us, but you were doing what I would just call kind of articles. Like you were, like, there was a lot of writing about magic theory. And that was a really, what I thought was a really important part of the dojo was helping advance magic play. Yeah, the, the, back then, uh, let's see, George, George Baxter, he, he won some early tournament. I think, he's the first nationals champion or something. And he wrote a book about magic and it had some magic theory, but it was kind of a real base level understanding. Like you could copy his decks and you could read the stuff.

And it was great to somebody finally published a book. but it wasn't really heavy on theory. And that's what I identified and a lot of other people did. It's like we need to figure out how this game works. And especially when everybody figured out we were going to keep getting these expansions and getting new cards. Like how do we integrate new card sets into the theory? Yeah, Dojo was the first place I remember where people would go through new sets and, like, review cards and talk about how good the cards were.

I remember that as well. Yeah, yeah. And then a lot... The other thing that Dojo did was... It would introduce... Well, I was talking about the slide deck. The slide deck had a little bit of success in Los Angeles. No, I'm sorry, in Atlanta at a pro tour qualifier.

And then in Dallas at the juniors, this guy named Patrick Chapin, like basically got the decklist off the dojo, played it, and made it into the top eight of the, I think he was junior. Yeah, he was a junior at the time, I think. Yeah. And I was at Dallas at the Pro Tour and I was standing outside smoking a cigarette with I think the guy named Eric Taylor and Patrick came up and we just started talking. He was in between games and it just came up and I was like, oh, you got the deck list off my site. And he was like, oh, you're the guy that runs the dojo. He's like, well, this is a good deck. And anyways, it's funny because Patrick is, he's one of the few people that I still talk to.

He lives here in Denver where I do. And he's got a book coming out in a few months, next level of magic forever. And he wants me to narrate the audible section on the history section. He said, well, Frank, you were there. So I'm going to try that too. That's super cool. Yeah, yeah, Patrick and I are friends. The thing that's really interesting, I think, about looking back is we kind of take advantage nowadays that so much is understood about magic.

But when the dojo sort of started, there was just so much unknown. There are so much things that people didn't know. and that a lot of my memories of the dojo was, it became the first place for people kind of shared ideas. And so you sort of, it was the first kind of, you could see the magic audience sort of growing up and getting better together. Yeah, it was great.

A lot of, what happened on the dojo sometimes is, I'd make deals with teens. And the deal would be like, they'd get like four boxes of product in return for their tournament reports. So I did that with Team CMU. That was Randy Bueller and Eric Lauer and Mike Turian and somebody else who I'm... Aaron Forsyth. Aaron Forsyth. Yeah.

And then I did that with... team dead guy and that was uh worth walpert and david price and christicula and i got to know them really well because they they like to play the red decks and then i see i can't swear but there was this team that had brian hacker on it and um oh john you and uh yeah yeah um i'm flicking their name of their team But yeah, I know you're talking about the, they were out of California. California team, yeah. I did that with them once. But, you know, a lot of them did it just because they thought the dojo was a good place to, like, get their name out.

Like they, like, everybody would know, like, they're the good team and here's their tournament reports. And they would put a lot of work into it. So it was a different kind of vibe because there wasn't a lot of money in it. It was basically just the person who advertised on the Jojo. He was a guy that did stuff in the South. His name was David Douse. He used to run a lot of pro tour qualifiers. So he would just send me boxes of product.

and that's basically what I got paid for to do the dojo and then I would just pass those along to teams to get them to do stuff. Like I didn't make any money off the dojo. But I was happy to get to know the people and the teams and it was just a lot of fun to be part of that community. Yeah, and that's, I mean, that is the thing that you bring up that's really interesting is that that was where

the first big star building happen or like people sort of made their names and it was exciting when you were when you had someone in the dojo it's exciting you run the dojo that's pretty cool I know it was some sometimes sometimes I had to badger people but

there was this guy named Nate Clark and he wrote a tournament report and I think it's the only tournament report he ever wrote and then there was another guy named John Finkel and on the IRC channel Finkel was like, yeah, if I win this next pro tour, I'll write a tournament port.

Same thing like with Tommy Hovey, and it was just like he won. So I think it was New York or something. Yeah, he won New York. Yeah. So it was a lot of those guys, it was just, they wanted to, they wanted to have an article up on the dojo because all of their friends did.

Yeah, and that was... That was great. That was great. And then I had a couple... There was a couple minions of the dojo. I would say there was this lady named Kathy Nikolaoff, and she wrote a lot of different articles for it. another lady named Andrea Kuntz and a guy named Quard who did humor stuff.

And then there was a guy named Ferret who did a lot of different stuff, a lot of different kind of organizational things. But it was mostly just a lot of people having fun and nobody had figured out really how to monetize it. Yeah. Yeah, no, it was one of the reasons. reasons I want to have you on is it is such a point in time. Like, I'm a big magic

historian. Like, I really like to draw attention to a lot of the things that were formative in the game. And, I mean, so how this came about to people know is I did a podcast about Kaibuda, and you responded on Blue Sky about it.

And I was, like, so excited you responded. Like, oh, I got to have Frank on my podcast. Because I have such positive memories of the dojo. Like, it is, I just literally smile when I think about it. It's just like this fun, really informative part of early magic. I remember the first time I met you. It was that there was a game center in Renton. Yeah, at the offices, at the Wizards offices. Yeah, you had this really nice setup and I think you did a World's event there.

Yeah, I think World's 96 was in the Wizard's office. and it was, I think it was the one, it was the one where there was unglued pre-release. Oh, 97, it was in the University of Washington? Yes. Yeah, yeah, that was 97 and 98. We were in University of Washington. Unglued came out in 98, I think, so it must have been 98.

98. And you were there at about 3 o'clock in the morning with a bunch of other players. just ripping open packs of unglued and playing draft or something. And you were telling everybody's stories about how each card was designed or the story behind it. Sounds like me. Yeah, you all just like played completely through the night. And it was a lot of fun to watch. Yeah, I would not.

I remember that's meeting, but I would not. So it was in 98 worlds. That's the one that I think Jakub Shlemmer won. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That show, we, that's when we were on ESPN 2. Oh, and the person who, the person who was on the show who was the, you know, the speaker of that, of that was Jeff Probst of Survivor fame. Really?

Yeah, a little, a weird, a little piece of trivia there. Because I worked really close to the ESPN shows. I worked with him. But anyway, we're almost at a time here, but I just wanted, um, I just want to say, Frank, that I know this was a passion of, you know, a project of love and a passion for you. And I don't know how many people have told you, and hopefully many people, but at least to hear it from me, the dojo was a really amazing thing. And it connected a lot of people and it really advanced magic in a lot of great ways. It advanced tournament play.

It advanced just communication. It advanced sort of how we told stories about magic and how strategy advanced and stuff. And so I just, from the magic community, I just want to say huge thank you to you, Frank. Thank you very much, Mark. I appreciate it. And I'm really glad that I got to be a part of it. So thank you so much for being on our show today. And sadly, it is time for us to wrap up because I can see my desk, which means that I've made it to work.

And it means it's the end of my drive to work. So I want to thank you so much for being. with us today. And to all of you, it's time for me to stop making magic or stop talking magic and time to start making magic. So it's the end of my work and I will see you all next time. Bye