Playing Magic: The Gathering - Judging the Validity of Online Articles

My favorite Magic: the Gathering author goes by the name of Jarred Bright. He writes a lot for Brainburst's website, covering all kinds of decks that he's designed. I have never once played any of the decks he recommended. Why is he my favorite author? He is absolutely hilarious. Over the course of one month, Bright released a dozen or so articles about what he considered to be the best decks in Odyssey Block Constructed, where he claimed that he personally playtested each and every one of the designs. The problem is that the number of hours he cited as playtesting time over the course of a single month added up to over 1000 hours of actual playtesting time. Given that, during this time period, that figure equates to double the number hours that a normal person is awake, how logical is his figure? I suppose that he could have insomnia and stay up all night long playtesting his decks and doing nothing else whatsoever, but somehow, that just doesn't seem right.

People love Jarred Bright despite the fact that he clearly has no estimate of time, and I've seen dozens of deluded players playing his (mostly awful) deck ideas time and time again. He once admitted in one of his articles that he had just top 8ed in his first PTQ a month before his article was posted. Why take advice from people who have never done well in a major tournament?

These authors are all over the net. Exaggerated experiences written up by players who don't win tournaments is not the kind of advice on how to play the game. That said, someone who may not ever have written an article before may have the next new idea which breaks the format (it's unlikely, but certainly possible). What do you do? I suggest a simple test of the validity of the article. You want to check for a number of things:

1. Exaggerations: If a deck is good, why need to exaggerate your experience with playing it, or exaggerate it's matchups. Any deck that has better than 80% against more than one matchup in an environment is a little out-of-touch with reality.