Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Raul Rodriguez. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Raul thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I learned how to create content by trial and error, which involved a lot of long, frustrating days. I spent a lot of my time learning by watching other content creators and by watching people do basic editing. I also read a lot of tutorials and asked questions in forums. Eventually, I started to get the hang of it.

Patience was the most essential skill. Knowing that every step forward will likely lead to a couple of steps back is frustrating, but at the end, you’ll be sprinting towards the finish line!

The biggest obstacle to editing was the software itself. We use Sony Vegas to edit our content, and unfortunately for us, it is not beginner friendly software. At the start of our editing process, Sony Vegas would often crash, making any unsaved work be forever lost. We quickly learned to save and save often! The longest amount of work I have ever lost was a video of 30 minutes. I was really in the zone and didn’t realize I had never saved the project. Of course, the software crashed. It was a rough day.

Raul, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I have been playing Magic the Gathering (a collectible trading card game that uses different card types // resources to combat your opponents and take down their life totals to achieve victory) since 2015 and the game itself has positively impacted my life. I have met a lot of my closest friends and connection through the game and community. The YouTube Channel started as my idea to show new players the “Basics” of Magic the Gathering. I woke up one night on January 4th, 2023, and decided to convince my friends to make a YouTube Channel. Funny enough, none of us knew the first thing about making content. Our initial team consisted of 6 friends or so, but quickly went down to 2 (due to other life commitments, low interest, etc). Freddie (my co-host) and I were the only ones left after a few weeks of the concept of the YouTube Channel. It was, and it is to this day, a lot of learning by failing.
At first, I had to teach myself how to edit, I have a chemical engineering background, so the concept of editing, formatting, photoshop was extremely foreign to me. It was a long and painful process but once I got the basics, I was able to start making some very simple videos. While I was learning how to edit, Freddie would be making scripts and content ideas for us to put together. As already mentioned, our first idea // vision was to show new players the basics of the game, we hoped channel could be a tool to help our friends enjoy the game we truly love. We quickly realized that the game is extremely complicated to teach by showing mechanics and that we might be more effective at teaching by showing people how the game is played. Our content changed from “Showing the Basics” to “Gameplays” and “Deck Techs” (A deck tech is a summary / explanation of how a deck works, the strategy behind it and how it tries to win). After a year of learning how to edit, and getting comfortable with our content creation, we decided it was time to start engaging the local community. We partner up with our local game store, Level7Games, a store offering a wide variety of video games, collectible trading cards and toys and also increased our team size from 2 to 5; Vu, Nate and Joseph. Nate and Joseph were met through Level7Games and Vu is a longtime friend.
Our partnership with Level7Games allowed us to meet and engage the community most weekend at their local tournaments while running a stream, and we have worked together to grow the local cEDH community. (cEDH is one of the many formats of Magic the Gathering). Our content continue to grow and become more focus on cEDH. Due to our connection to the local community, we have been able to bring in a lot of different members of the community to record games with us as guest and for them to showcase their skills. We have also been able to stream and help support different cEDH tournaments here in Denver.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

MTG Basics’s goal is to teach new players learning magic the gathering cEDH. We want to help grow and cultivate the local cEDH scene.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

We are fortunate that there is a large local community that shares our hobbies and we are able to interact with them on a weekly basis. We have been able to shown the community that we truly care about the scene and are willing to go the extra mile for the cEDH community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.youtube.com/@MTG_Basics
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mtg_basics/?hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MTG_Basics