Happy New Year! Last week was a quiet week on the Magic News front, excluding the juicy spoiler tidbits, Romeo whipping out his white weenie, and the titanic forum battles about Card Advantage theory. Me, I was happy to have an extra day off to recharge my batteries before jumping into the new year. Happy 2004 folks!
Fundamentals
The battle over Card Advantage continued this week, with a head to head battle to send out 2003! Geordie Tait turned in Part II of his series, Virtual Card Advantage Theory, while Oscar focused on more examples from the”old school” in The Ten Second Card Advantage Solution. Reaction to both pieces was widely mixed, signaling that some parts of the community may not be entirely convinced which approach to Card Advantage is the right one. I’ll publish my own opinion on this eventually, but for right now, I’m enjoying watching the fireworks from the sidelines.
Constructed Strategy
Tuesday was for the elves, as Aaron Kahler provided an interesting look at Tommy Ashton’s Maryland States Deck or as you may know it, Elves!. If you are looking for a nice change-up to the current Standard metagame, this could be it.
Vintage
This week’s contest was won by another Type One effort, but choosing between them was one of the most difficult choices I’ve had to make since I started editing. On the one hand, Philip Stanton lured me in with his crisp analysis and thorough breakdown of tournament Type I results, while on the other hand, Avi Flamholz’s Fight The Power! proved to be too good a look at how to hate out Powered decks with a smaller budget to ignore. I waffled three times, just typing up this blurb, but had to make a decision… so I chose Stanton’s work, mostly because he put in extra work on his research. Congrats to both authors, and keep up the good work.
Issues
On Tuesday, Dan Rowland returned to writing to sort through the”Type I is cheap!” issue with some cold, hard mathematics. Of course, not everyone agreed with how he did it, but with an issue of this nature, that is to be expected.