Top Deck - The Magazine for Collectible Card Gamers

Top Deck - The Magazine for Collectible Card Gamers

As a potential reader examines a shelf of magazines to buy, the reader will look for an eye-catching magazine that pertains to his or her interests. The magazine Top Deck targets an audience which ranges from pre-teenagers to mid-thirties readers who share interests such as collectible card games, RPG's (or roleplaying games), and fantasy related items. Although the main focus of the magazine is collectible card games, Top Deck attempts to also appeal to the other interests of collectible card gamers.

Top Deck experiments with the layout of a normal magazine by expanding it and separating the magazine into two parts. One part of the magazine spotlights the trading card game Pokemon and the other has a majority of articles on the card game Magic: The Gathering. Depending on which portion of the magazine the reader is currently viewing, the other side of Top Deck is upside-down. Most readers would find this design strange and hard to read, but the readers of Top Deck seem to like the design. The design shows imagination and creativity, and these qualities are almost universal among collectible card gamers. It takes a good imagination to play with cards that neither talk nor move and alot of creativity to design a deck of Magic or Pokemon cards.

Another thing that makes Top Deck so interesting to its audience is the sarcastic tone of writing that laces the sentences like arsenic. An article contained in the section called Top Disc, on E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) previews computer and console games that will be released for the rest of this year and possibly next year (35-45). The article is sometimes humorous to read as it tries to sum up entire games in a few sentences. When reviewing the game Quake III: Arena, Cory Herndon explains: "Point. Shoot. Die. Repeat." (35) Obviously, this is an over-simplistic comment, but it parallels the sarcastic tone of the magazine. The readers of Top Deck enjoy this style of writing because the readers themselves are sarcastic. Society today has been so serious about everything that sometimes it is refreshing to read something so totally causal and carefree.

In the department called Box 707, Top Deck stretches sarcasm and humor to the limit (10*). This section is a letter section in which readers write in and someone from the magazine answers these letters. The letters are then printed within the Box 707 section of Top Deck.