Building a Brand: The Future of TheJapanHobbyist.com
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything for my blog. While I still believe it’s important to have written content for people to refer to, I believe that the future is all about branching out. When I started this blog back in 2012, it was during the blog boom when everybody was out creating their own message, their own brand. Some have come and gone, but I’ve kept it going. However, I feel that as a content creator you have to be able to evolve.
My mission has, and always will be, to bring information to the people. I’ve also always kept my information free because I believe it’s better to remove roadblocks that could hamper the growth of a Magic community somewhere out there in Japan or Asia. Nobody should be stuck playing alone because they don’t know where to find a place to play, where to get the cheapest cards, or because they are unsure about traveling to a big event by themselves. I’ll be launching a Patreon sometime in the future and adding my Paypal information to the website as well, but those will be strictly donation based in case somebody feels like helping me to pay for my website, podcast, or future project cost.
The Japan Hobbyist Brand
The reason for today’s article is to announce that I’ll be taking on new responsibilities as a content creator and sharing my vision with others in a variety of different ways. I’ll be linking you to the various ways you can enjoy my content, as well as other people’s content that I am a part of. My goal is to make my brand the go to source for information in English about Magic the Gathering in Japan, Unaffliated and unfiltered.
The Website
The website (www.thejapanhobbyist.com) you’ve grown to love shouldn’t be changing much over the next few years. It will instead become the hub of all Japan Hobbyist content moving forward. You’ve seen this in the form of my podcasts already, but this will also be the source of video content in the future. There will still be the occasional article from time to time when the mood strikes us, but I wouldn’t expect to see articles on a consistent basis. Articles will most likely be reserved for evergreen topics that people would need to refer to multiple times, such as store reviews, vocabulary, and announcements.
Podcasts
Speaking of podcasts, I’ll be continuing my Code of the Cardboard Samurai podcast, which focuses on the Magic the Gathering community in Japan, as well as things related to MTG in Asia. I have an incredible amount of ideas I’d like to talk about on my show, and I hope to release two episodes a month. What I like most about doing podcasts is that it makes things so much easier to share. You can cover a lot of information in a relatively short amount of time, and it doesn’t take as much focus as reading articles does. I also like the ability of the listener to download the episode and listen to it on the go, whether it be on the train during their commute to work, or in their car while traveling to a MTG event somewhere.
We’ve only just started and are 8 episodes in, but by the end of the year we hope to double that amount. Player and judge interviews, information about events, travel advice . . . we’ve only scratched the surface! Be sure to subscribe today at https://thejapanhobbyist.podbean.com/ so you don’t miss an episode!
The other podcast announcement I have is that the Code of the Cardboard Samurai website will also become the home of the Magic The Final Frontier archive, a podcast all about the Frontier format which was started by Hareruya and Big Magic in Japan more than two years ago. There are a variety of reasons for doing this, but the biggest reason is to make sure all the experience and knowledge the hosts and I accumulated over the years isn’t lost when the new Historic format launches on Arena. Set breakdowns, metagame information, card interactions, sideboarding guides . . . there is a plethora of information that I think Historic players will find useful and I want to share that with them. Why make them go through the same growing pains and make the same mistakes when Frontier players have already done so. It should give future Historic players a leg up on the competition.
I plan to migrate the first episode of the podcast to the Code of the Cardboard Samurai website after I post this article, and then the remaining episodes every day until our new Historic podcast launches sometime in September. I appreciate you bearing with me as I seek to preserve all the hard work my co-hosts and I have put into our Frontier podcast since the format began.
Video
There are actually 2 different video services I plan to use in the future for my blog. The first one is Twitch. I’ve already been playing around with this a little bit and did some box openings during War of the Spark on Twitch, as well as a few deck techs. Going forward, I’ll probably be using my Twitch channel to continue doing the same, but I’ll also be streaming games on there in future. I won’t always keep the videos I broadcast, but those I do like will then migrate to my YouTube channel.
I have big plans for my Japan Hobbyist YouTube channel as well, but at the moment I don’t have any content on there since I just created a channel solely for my website. Hopefully I can start putting up content in the next month or so, but please be patient with me as I work out how to record, edit, and upload the content. I’ll link you down below, so if you want to subscribe or sign up you can get alerts when I do start posting.
TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/thejapanhobbyist
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuzZxLSpVobL7egcdCo0FXQ/about
Baby Steps
I know, it’s a lot to take in. So much happening in so little time. I will also be doing a majority of this content creation by myself so that means it will be a slow, painful process as I teach myself how to do things and make mistakes along the way. That’s not to say I won’t be accepting help if somebody were to offer it. I’ve already had quite a few people express interest in co-hosting my Code of the Cardboard Samurai podcast with me, and after sharing a few ideas with my Cardboard Samurai group on Facebook it looks like there might be a few other people interested in creating video content as well.
Honestly, I had almost given up on this website a few months back. Nobody I knew was really playing Magic anymore, and it was getting more and more difficult to create content for the blog, especially written articles. The editing process alone was incredibly draining. But now that I’ve started recording podcasts I feel like the brand has been reborn. I’m very excited about the potential of thejapanhobbyist.com and I hope you’ll be along for the ride in the next few months as we start to ramp things up. Thanks for reading!