[The following is a transcript of the show, which you really should check out.]
Hello everybody and welcome to The Magic Show. I’m your host, Evan Erwin.
Today we’re going to cover the latter half of 2006, along with the first wave of “The Magic Show Best of StarCityGames.com 2006 Awards.” And I promise none of my silly articles will be involved.
So, we left off with Coldsnap sucking. This has since been counteracted with such cries as “B-but Rite of Flame is currently in Top Tier Decks!” Yeah, and Homelands gave us Serrated Arrows. Congratulations, you found a playable card in a bad set.
Anyway, August began the slow realization of how bad Coldsnap drafting was, and everyone eagerly awaited a metagame without Jittes and Dragons.
The first Time Spiral spoilers hit the web, beginning with Errant Ephemeron. This was the “promotional” common given to retailers. Take a look at Planar Chaos’s promo common, Dead / Gone. This yet again breaks the color pie in half with Red bounce effects, along with being the first ever mono-colored split card, and I assure you this will be rocking draft tables all spring long.
Now, as I mentioned last week, Wizards had messed up with Time Spiral: They originally sent out notice that the set was 422 cards, then immediately retracted it to 301. Mark Rosewater even wrote an article about it; how Wizards was being clever and one coincidence after another caused an uncertain event to show Akroma, in her full, updated wording and old frame self, splashed on TV screens across America during Adult Swim.
With the secret out of the bag, the speculation began. Rumor sites, the best marketing no money can buy, raged forth with ideas on which cards were coming back. The one that everyone banked on was Meddling Mage. Oh Pikula, how your card rocks us all.
It simply wasn’t meant to be, and everyone else tried to figure out whether Psionic Blast was a joke, or whether the Suspend cards were worth playing.
I guess we can safely say at this point that Ancestral Visions is… sorta, if built with correctly, kinda worth playing right now. But everyone still says it’s stains, and everyone still bemoans that it’s the worst topdeck of all time.
So Time Spiral was released in early October and the world was good. Magic Online, of course, received Time Spiral a full month later than everyone else, because even if the game is almost pure profit, the programmers can’t keep NDAs and the sets would leak all over the internet like MTGSalvation.com’s famous Test Card Fiasco.
Anyway, everybody loves the damn set and don’t tell me it’s not awesome to have Blue direct damage or Akroma running across tables everywhere. Me, I could do with less Sacred Mesa but more Call of the Herd, thanks much.
The last Pro Tour of the year featured Time Spiral Limited with Jan-Moritz Merkel taking home the title. It was also the Pro Tour in which Green was found to be good in the set, to the surprise of many, for some reason. Afterwards most bemoaned that they just got screwed, the format was all bombs, and somehow, they got all the removal in the world but just couldn’t draw it OMG those dirty lucksacks.
After Kobe, players began to explore Constructed possibilities of the set for Worlds. We had new Storm cards, possible broken combinations will all sorts of cards. I mean, for Chrissake, Stuffy Doll had a six-mana combo! What was next?
This is where the metagame shift of Kamigawa and Time Spiral is so different. Not only is Time Spiral a much larger set, it also has a much higher number of good, playable cards. Cards that need decks to accommodate for them, yet if they do so will quickly create winning combinations. These are generally known as “Tier 2” cards. Cards that don’t define the format, but do impact the player base by their very existence. The problem with Kamigawa block was that most of the powerful cards were filtered down to one “ultimate” creature or one “ultimate” artifact. Call of the Herd isn’t breaking Standard, but it’s a damn good card. It has answers, solutions, workarounds. Akroma is nuts, but there are dozens of answers for her.
The funny part of this whole metagame shift is that the truly powerful and meta-warping cards are in Ninth Edition, with Urzatron and Wrath of God showing everybody who’s boss. Demonfire would be a lot less attractive if you didn’t have Urza’s minions providing the game-winning resources.
This is where I again think about Wrath leaving the format and believe that nothing but good things would come of it. Here’s hoping for next summer, eh?
Now the year ends with the same question as last New Year’s: When won’t Japan stop kicking everyone else’s asses? I mean, seriously?
Or, uh, what’s coming in the middle set?
As of this writing we know of nine cards. Of those nine, the Black cards are most impressive. The Black Time Walk — Temporal Extortion — the new Control Magic with Subordination, and Wizards let Green players down yet again with the unfortunate Jedit Ojanen of Efrava. I’m sure you’ll get some love sometime Green mages. I mean, check it out; they gave you a Green Pacifism! You’re really going somewhere now!
Lastly I wanted to give a little shout-out to my boys from Kamigawa. This one’s for you…
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So the new Extended metagame ramps up, and Standard is in one of its most interesting and deep environments ever. Planar Chaos can only hope to strengthen this, as the color pie bleeds all over and we’re just a Rob Zombie away from being a slasher pic.
And now:
The Magic Show Best of StarCity 2006 Awards
All right guys, this will be a fun one. Over the past few weeks, I began with January and went through every single day of StarCityGames.com content. From all of that content I culled my ten favorite articles, but I also noticed a lot of great stuff I’m going to leave behind if I just list ten good reads.
First, I’ll list the best dailies of the year. Ready?
The Best Daily of the Year — Runner Up — Richard Feldman
Richard Feldman Daily Series: Week of 2/20/06
Better Right Than Pretty (3 Birds 1 Elf)
Taking The Blinders Off
The Process of Choosing Your Deck
Realities of the Late Game
The Effects of Misplays
Know a guy who’s good at Magic and you want him to improve? Point him Mr. Feldman’s way. Starting with the interesting and important “Better Right Than Pretty,” he works his way through various strategies and situations and shows you why they’re important. Just awesome stuff.
Best Daily of the Year — The Ferrett
The Ferrett Daily Series: Week of 5/1/2006
SCG Daily: How I Became The Editor, And Why My Writing Saved Me
SCG Daily: The Truth Inside Team Academy
SCG Daily: Why Reporting Is So Bad
SCG Daily: The Secret Of StarCityGames.com Success
SCG Daily: A Chasm I Helped Create
The Ferrett, a writer I truly admire, takes the daily format to a new level as he brings us inside not only his thinking processes, but shows us the birth of StarCityGames as we know it. Were it not for me lumping these together, The Truth Inside Team Academy could be my favorite article of the year. It shows how through brutal criticism people can change and improve.
Trust me, I can relate.
Now these next few are honorable mentions. I’ll have to break down the entire Top 10 next week, in order to give them their justice, but these next few selections just missed the mark. I present them in no particular order.
Game Theory and Introduction to Metagame Shift – John Beety – 5/24/06
And he never wrote anything else.
This was a really interesting article on how Game Theory interacts with Magic. Soon there were numbers, variables and charts involved. Of course, as with most brilliant one-shots, the article was never heard from again.
Why Winners Win — Braeden Clark-Tarpley
This was a really interesting article on the mindset of a tournament player, and how it affects your game. He also demonstrated the responses of a typical forum downer, and how they would react to various announcements. They are scarily accurate.
Sullivan Library: The Fun-Zees — Adrian Sullivan
Adrian Sullivan really does it right with this one, showing us the goofy, wacky fun you can have with Magic in all of its various forms. In it he gives you some great road games to play, which have saved me from falling asleep many a time, along with some cool Mental Magic games and a new draft format.
Okay, and that’s another show everybody. Next week I’ll be dishing out the awards for 2006, ending on a high note, and hope to what will be the beginning of a glorious and fun 2007.
Thanks for watching!
Evan “misterorange” Erwin
dubya dubya dubya dot misterorange dot com
eerwin +at+ gmail +dot+ com
Written while listening to M. Ward’s “Post-War”