Hello folks, and welcome back to your regularly scheduled articles, already in progress. This is my traditional Five Color review of the latest set. I’ve done these for years, and you can expect to see me continue for a long time.
I am writing today’s article about some issues that I have with recent changes that Wizards have made, or chosen not to make, in light of Tenth Edition, Master’s Edition, and more. That’s all and well and good… however, Wizards had to go and change the nature of this article between its writing and its publication. I wrote about topics that have a resolution already. Well, some of them at least. That’s okay, because I can highlight some changes n places where they matter, and you can read my false predictions…
It’s been three weeks of 150 cards from the uncommon and common sections of Magicdom. Today we count down the Top 50 cards remaining. The previous 150 were all at approximately the same level, but today’s cards are going to be in the form of a countdown, taking you all the way to number one. [Editor’s Note — 200 Articles! Nice work, Abe!]
Hello my friends, and welcome to the third installment of the No Rares Allowed series. Next week is the final entry and the 200th article by yours truly (if you count weeklies; counting dailies, it’s a ton more). Today, I am in transit to London…
Good Thursday to you! Welcome back to the series that will take 200 non-rares and put them up for your perusal. Included here are some of the best hidden gems I know. Today we are counting down 150-101, but remember, these cards are not ordered… not until we get to the Top 50. Ordering a Top 200 would be a bit much, don’t you think?)
I have written about hundreds of decks over the years. There are some cards I come back to again and again as a deckbuilder. I decided to pull out the best, most unusual cards that are not typically in such lists, and bring them together. This will exclude cards like Swords to Plowshares or Flametongue Kavu in favor of other cards. I also decided to focus solely on non-rares, and instead investigate other commons and uncommons.
Now that we know that Lorwyn has a tribal theme, it seems like a solid idea to actually explore some tribal ideas and make some decks in homage to the new set. If Lorwyn really changes the nature of Tribal decks, then these might be the last old school tribal decks I will build for a while.
In my opinion, some silver-bordered cards are self-banned. My personal rule is to eschew cards that are too powerful in order to get a laugh. Mox Lotus may be funny when you see it in a pack, but it is far from hilarious when you see it kill you and everybody else at the table reliably via the use of cards like Tinker. Someone who tries to abuse the broken cards in the silver sets is not playing with the spirit of the silver sets.
I was recently thinking that I wanted to do something special for my 200th article. After come consideration, I have decided to pull out 200 cards that I think are really keen and that you should be playing with and write them all up. As I search through my cards for the goods, I have come across some real stinkers. These are some of the worst cards of all time. What I thought I would do today is to share some of these classic bombs, and then build some decks around them…
Two weeks ago, I wrote about six “precons” that I built for my playgroup. Since then, the group has really embraced playing with these precons in games both large and small. As such, I set out to build more precons for my group. My task was to make these new precons about the same power level as the old precons. As a reminder, these decks were all built out of the cards left over at the store after years of people picking through the boxes.
I normally keep a box of bad rares… er…. “low value” rares by my computer. I already took them out of the box so I could use it for something else. Now I have this stack of rares ready to be sent off to be sold or given away. Since I am about to take this stack down and divide up the pieces, I thought I should get one last chance to pull out a few rares and give them a little sunlight. Today may be my very last bad rare article.
I’ve always liked Champions. It was a well designed set. Unfortunately, the remainder of the block had a very “been there” feel to me, and I was let down, but to this day, I’m still rather fond of Champions. It was fun from both a flavor and a card perspective. As I was looking through my excess cards, I came across Dampen Thoughts, then Oni Possession. It struck me that I have never built that Oni deck I wanted, nor have I ever built that Thoughts deck, not even in draft.
Today I want to reopen an old article and discuss some cards from Three Kingdoms. I will give you all new stories on the cards, and occasionally critique how well the card captured the story. I hope you will enjoy it, and hopefully it will give you a taste of the characters of Three Kingdoms.
I expect to move shortly. If I get the word that I am moving, then I won’t have long to actually pack and move. As such, I am preparing now for the move. The grad school I applied to last week is overseas. I can’t take that many things with me if I go. I want to take Magic, sure, but the move itself demands that I cut off a lot of my possessions and that means winnowing my Magic collection to the bare essentials. How does one go about doing that?
Today, I would like to take a look at the cards that are being reprinted in Tenth Edition and what that means for casual Magic. Writing an article discussing the impact of an expansion set makes a lot of sense, because the cards are new. If I were a Standard writer, I’d probably care a lot about the set as well, because it would greatly impact my format and my decks.
