AuthorAbe Sargent

Rainbow Stairwell is a format for a sixty-card deck. It can be built in a variety of ways, but the rules are similar. The main premise of the deck is that you have to use cards with a converted casting cost 1-6, one card of each cost in each color and artifacts. Gold cards are therefore disallowed.

So, for example, for your one drop, you could play Unsummon, Giant Growth, Mon’s Goblin Raiders, Dark Ritual, Healing Salve, and Soul Net as your six cards. It doesn’t matter how much mana is of that color, just the total converted casting cost. So a card like Silvos, Rogue Elemental, with its three Green in the casting cost, is just as good for your Green Six spot as Sulam Djinn, with its one Green. Six cards of each color plus artifacts, running from a cost of one through six. There are, as always, additional rules…

Welcome to the holiday season, at least here in America. It is a time for family, friends, and toasty warm feelings to keep us comfortable on long, cold winter nights. For me, where there are friends, there is also Magic. So, what is your Magic group doing for the holiday? Here are a few suggestions to make things a little extraordinary.

A short while ago, a gentleman posted his Five-Color deck online in the Five-Color Forums. This gentleman, who went by the screen name of Arbiter, posted his deck in the hopes that someone would give him suggestions, ideas, and comments…. But he didn’t have a lot of flashy rares to work with. And that was an interesting challenge: How do you make a solid Five-Color deck when you don’t have an unlimited card pool to work with?

Welcome to my fiftieth article for StarCityGames! I have been a Featured Writer for this site for a little over a year now, and I thought that I’d do something special for this article. I was reading through Mark Rosewater’s article on how Mirrodin is supposed to be an open-ended set when my article idea hit me – one combo for every article published. Fifty Mirrodin combos, some with really old cards!

like every three months or so, the Five Color Council’s ballot becomes important again. This time, October rolls around and brings with it a new set adorned with several troubling cards that may or may not need to be restricted, as well as some changes that may affect the popularity of Five Color. So what’s on the agenda this month, and how will I be voting?

Now, I am sure that they didn’t look at Tombstone Stairwell when they printed Dross Harvester… But with the Dross Harvester, obscene things can be done. The Harvester has a lot going for it. While the Stairwell is a four-drop, the Harvester comes down on turn 3. That means its ability will occur as soon as the Stairwell begins… But the real talent in the Harvester lies in its ability to gain two life per creature that dies. Simply put, Dross Harvester breaks the symmetry of Tombstone Stairwell.

I want to imagine a world with Myr Incubator. In an artifact-heavy deck with possibly seventy-five artifacts or so, you can use the Incubator, get seventy or so 1/1 dudes, and win in the first combat phase where these dudes can attack. Yes, it costs twelve mana – but unlike Mindslaver, this is a winning condition on its own. Add Anger or Fires of Yavimaya and you can swing that turn. This has a fairly high potential.

One weekend evening, we were sitting around a table at a friend’s house playing multiplayer. And it hit me: Our metagame was predictable. We have the prototypical metagame – a white lifer here who plays Congregate and Soul Wardens, a big beefy green player there with elves and beasts. One player regularly pulls out an Obliterate-Jokulhaups deck that often features Phage the Untouchable with haste. Another player loves either white or black with Bad Moons, Crusades, and big black fliers. And a few players typically use large highlander Five Color decks. So what can I build to destroy this table?

Death Wish, Golden Wish, and Merchant Scroll should be unrestricted in Magic’s biggest format. Long-Term Plans and Parallel Thoughts should be restricted, while Divine Intervention should be allowed in….

…Or should they? Abe, a member of the voting committee, dissects the effects that these changes would have on 5 and asks for input!

The Mono White deck has been getting some recent play online. Scourge has only been out for a couple of weeks, but already there is a buzz developing around the decktype – and yet I’ve seen a lot of radically different deck lists and philosophies: What I’d like to do is break down the possibilities for Mono White and give the reader the tools to build a better Mono White deck.

Wait. Upwelling might not have any major impact on 5-Color? Yeah, I suppose that you’re right; Upwelling only gives you more of what you have, not other colors of mana. True – there are a lot of Disenchant effects running around because of the possibility of combo. Yeah – it does take a few turns to work well, thus giving your opponent a chance to find disruption. True – Abeyance would be a bad predecessor to Orim’s Thunder. All right; Upwelling will probably see play then, but only for as long as it takes for people to calm down and the hype to end.

Please Note: The following prerelease report contains a bit of drama. It will contain a controversial decision that I made which reduced my chances of finishing with a box, plus a description of what may or may not have been a play error that caused a match loss. I ask your advice and help in the forums.

There are a lot of cards out there that are just plain underused. Sometimes they are a great card that was unable to be used in decks of the time due to a funky metagame. Maybe they are latent powerhouses in Five Color – or maybe in Type Two, Extended, or Type One. And finally, a large chunk of cards are pure multiplayer goodness. All of these cards, whatever set and whatever age of Magic, have a common thread: They’re good. We’re not talking about jank like Debt of Loyalty and Jabari’s Influence (and who says white doesn’t steal things?). Instead, these are good cards that are just getting ignored, and I think it’s time someone used them.