Ever since I went to Relic Fest last year and started thiking about writing a tournament report, the thought of starting a blog to talk about Magic has been bouncing around in my head. The problem is that, over the past few years, whenever I’ve felt like creating a blog I’ve ended up sucked into a rabbit hole of picking up a platform, a theme, hosting, etc., and inevitably left everything half-done with the post still unwritten… So this time I did it the other way around: I started with the content. I wrote the tournament report, published it as a private GitHub gist, and shared it only with the friends I figured would want to read it.
Eventually, though, I worked up the nerve to actually build the blog. The goal was clear: a static blog (so I could publish it for free on GitHub Pages) that would make it dead-simple to render mana symbols — — inline card previews ( Black Lotus ), or full card images:
…all from something as straightforward as:
{{< combo "Birds of Paradise" "Lightning Bolt" >}}
That’s why I picked Hugo, which I’ve used on other (now semi-abandoned) projects, and with Claude I put together a set of MTG shortcodes that anyone who wants them can use freely by importing the module from jordinebot/hugo-mtg-shortcodes. The theme itself, called Leyline, I also built with Claude — you can find it at jordinebot/hugo-leyline.
Alongside this one, the blog’s first post is the report of my outing in the Modern tournament at Relic Fest 2025, for which I’ve kept the original publication date.
See you soon!