As Hipsters of the Coast enters its first full year of publishing since 2023, I thought it only write (see, starting off strong) to introduce you all to the folks that will make up the Thursday column. We’ve been silently pushing the Great Flywheel since July, each writer cranking to create something worth reading that expands the universe of what Magic: The Gathering can mean, in addition to what cards you can put in your deck. It’s my pleasure to formally introduce your Thursday Vorthoses:
Rob Bockman – Post-Combat
Ryan Carroll – Sage’s Reverie
Callahan Jones – Diplomatic Relations
And me, Donny Caltrider – Mirror Gallery
I’d like to take a moment to introduce each writer in the way that I always begin with in my Behind the Brush articles: Who Are You, Where Are You From, and What Do You Do. Rob Bockman is first:
Rob Bockman (Left) & Donny Caltrider (right)- GO TO JAIL
Rob Bockman
Rob Bockman is your favorite Magic writer’s favorite Magic writer. He hails from Columbia, South Carolina, and during office hours, Rob is a minor bureaucrat. Early in the evening, he’s a dad. Later in the evening, he’s a playwright/dramaturg/comedian.
At the game table, he is an acolyte of the Golgari Swarm, a Witherbloom alumnus, and a Sultai devotee. His favorite card is Overgrown Tomb, especially when followed by Thoughtseize.
He has been writing at Hipsters since March 2017, and for years he and I shared the bi-weekly publishing cadence of Rob on Monday, Donny on Thursday. As plans to resurrect Hipsters started to form, the very first message I sent was to Rob. Had he said no, I’m not sure that I would’ve gone any further. We’ve drank from the same bottle, shared many, many stories, and I’ve even met his lovely wife and daughter. Sometimes in Magic you don’t just find a friend for now, but you find a friend forever. And Rob is as real as they come.
Ryan Carroll
Ryan Carroll, our champion from the other Carolina, is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature. By day he studies literature and aesthetics in nineteenth-century poetry and novels. In his, as he calls it “non-academic but just-as-intellectually-fulfilling life” he writes about sitcoms, contemporary literature, and, of course, Magic.
This is his first year writing for Hipsters, having started his own Substack, Dominarian Plowshare in February 2024 (almost to the day when I began Snack Time on The Stack during the Hipsters hiatus). Featured in the Rhystic Studies second SIGNAL PEST, it was not long before Ryan’s world was scratching noggins and tickling curiosities in all corners of the Magic multiverse.
He likes “thinking about the strange texture of the experience of Magic, especially what it means to engage with story and art amid increasing corporate consolidation,” and as such is writing some of the most thoughtful, researched, and calculated essays in the current Magic landscape.
Rob Bockman (left) & Cal Jones (right)
Cal Jones
Callahan Jones comes to us from the cloudy, suburban wastes of Columbus, OH, where he says “it’s beautiful in the early summer when it’s not too hot and the Ohio State University students aren’t crawling all over the place. Every other part of the year is bad.”
While this is first year contributing to Hipsters he is no stranger to yapping about Magic, and you can read more of his work on TCGPlayer, Commander’s Herald, EDHREC, and The Herald’s Horn. A recent Vorthos convert by way of cEDH (among other things), Cal now firmly enjoys exploring the relationship of the player to the game, and its larger place in the world. He’s a flavor connoisseur seeking to discover how the “flavor of Magic impacts how we interact with it – and even how Magic seems different to so many people compared to other ways they could spend their time.” The man knows a little about a lot, and wants to share it with the world.
Donny Caltrider
(I’m going to write this in the third person; be cool, it’s not that weird)
Donny Caltrider is an art agent, writer, and independent curator working in the Imaginative Realism genre.
As an agent, he represents artists primarily working on Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. From offering their traditional card art, handling their artist proofs and commissions slots, and coordinating event appearances, he has more than thirty artists under advisement at any given time in varying capacities.
He has written more than 400 art-related articles here for Hipsters of the Coast, as well as writing for Star City Games, Trading Card Pro Magazine, and his own Substack, Snack Time on The Stack.
He’s guest curated two shows of Magic: The Gathering artist proofs at Nucleus in Los Angeles, CA in 2023 and 2024, in addition to being a part of the Magic Art Show team that created Whimsy, Wonder & War (2019) at IX in Reading, PA, Story & Craft (2020) at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in Milwaukee, WI, and Concept to Compleat (2023) at MagicCon Philadelphia. His third artist proof show, Magic: The Gathering in Miniature III, opens January 31, 2026.
Wrapping Up
That’s us, folks, and we’re happy to be here for your Thursday edification and enjoyment. We’ll have some additional guests throughout the year when there are five weeks in a month, and some of us may drop in and out throughout the year, but the plan at the outset is to have something exciting here every Thursday. I hope you’ll follow along, and as always, thanks for reading.
Donny Caltrider (he/him) has been writing about Magic: The Gathering art since 2018. He has an M.A. in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University, and works in varying capacities as an agent with nearly 50 Magic artists.
He likes baseball, Magic, good cards, great art, whiskey, and you.