AuthorAbe Sargent

Ever since I joined the Peasant Magic council, I’ve been doing a lot of playtesting to see the effects of potential bannings on the Pez metagame. So I figured, why not toss out some of my playtesting decks? The beauty of a Pez deck is that you can build somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty decks to try around – since they all use mostly commons. Here are my bigger hits.

New York Format was one of several formats used in an early Duelist Invitational. When a Snake Basket deck battled with an Elemental Augury deck in the finals of the Duelist Invitational, the Snake Basket deck emerged victorious. But it was Mike Long’s”Keeper” deck, the one with Elemental Augury, that became the foundation of the modern Type One control deck that Oscar Tan and others play today. All going back to a casual format deck played at an Invitational… And perhaps the most obscure casual format ever.

Just drafting every rare in sight is not a good plan because, ultimately, you’d like to balance the line between rare-drafting and drafting a good deck. After all, if you can procure some packs, then you can do more rare drafting. There are some specific rare drafting strategies, and there are five categories of rares. Identifying which rare belongs in which category is very important to your rare drafting success.

Here is the basic premise of Magic Shop: You have some virtual money. Using that virtual money, you bring in sealed Magic product and create a sealed deck. Over time, you gain more money by both playing and winning, so you can add more product to your deck. You can also gain or lose cards in ante. As you get more points, you have access to older and more expensive cards. Therefore, the whole idea of Shop is that, week in and week out, your games matter.

In commemoration of St. Patrick’s Day, a local card shop I was affiliated with would have a St. Patrick’s Format tournament every year. The format was simple – play only with green cards. But there are more issues involved in creating an all-green format than you might think… And Abe outlines them all in perhaps the best article we’ve ever seen on why you should play a crazy, whacky format.

There are three formats that deal with playing creatures of the same type – Goblin Wars, Tribal Wars, Creature World, and such. Each of them are different, but they’re all tremendous casual fun; let’s start with a basic overview of the different types, and then I’ll give you a couple of decks, including the surprisingly-potent Spirit deck.

Onslaught is what Fallen Empires was not: A set about creature types. But Onslaught is good, whereas Fallen Empires was woefully inadequate. I have a deck stock binder where I place rares in the binder that I use and play with, and are not for trade – and I have seven spots devoted to Ice Age cards. That’s one-half of a page dedicated to an expansion similar in size to Odyssey and Onslaught – and five of those slots are painlands!

With such a limited card pool, what does the face of Diet Five look like? It actually looks a lot like Five normally does. Sure, Jackal Pups and Lightning Bolts have been replaced with Grim Lavamancers and Firebolts; yeah, there are no classic power cards and combo elements have been significantly neutered. The online decks look more similar than normal. But despite taking a big whack out of the Mighty Card Pool of Olde, the format translates well into Magic Online.

I have no clue why people are talking excitingly about Planar Guide. It shifts creatures for a turn. So? You get to Fog for four mana. Or maybe kill a token or two. Maybe abuse a 187 effect here and there, or flip over a morph creature. Dodge a Wrath effect. Still, considering that this cleric is all of a mighty 1/1 and requires a lot of mana kept open to use it, it just doesn’t thrill me that much. Break the Guide and prove me wrong.

Peasant Magic’s rules are very simple: The only cards allowed are commons from any set (which does include Portal, Unglued, and so forth), and you can also have up to five of any uncommon. No banned list, no restricted list. So simple, so elegant. And ultimately, so wrong.

Moxes are great, sure – we all know that. But in Five Color, Moxes are terribly overrated. The marginal improvement that your deck receives with them is not worth the pain of losing them in ante.

If there is one mistake that rookie deckbuilders make on a regular basis, it’s trying to include as many cards on the restricted list as possible in their decks. This might not be a bad idea if cards were placed there solely because they were so overwhelmingly powerful that every deck should play them…. But the problem is that decks were built around these cards. Your deck isn’t that deck.