Friday, July 30th – If you’re a deckbuilder, new sets are always a good time to disconnect from the weekly (daily) metagame shifts in Standard and reboot your creative instincts by brainstorming new deck ideas. While most ideas don’t pan out, you never know what gold you might run across if you’re looking.
Friday, July 23rd – I’m sure I’m not the first person to think about throwing a Thornbite Staff into an EDH deck, but I can also say with certainty that I haven’t seen it across from me in any EDH game I’ve played. At the very least, the card is flying under the radar, so I thought it would be a perfect sneaky, innocuous card to build around and, if things come together, I’d do something spectacular and surprising.
Friday, July 16th – It’s that time again, where we take a critical eye at the new Magic set and see how it impacts the color Green. I have to admit, Wizards has really done some great things for Green in the past few years, but we can’t forget that Green spent a long time as the undisputed worst color in Magic and there’s still need to have strong advocates for the color.
Friday, July 9th – Magic is a complex and dynamic game, which is why it’s thrived for so long, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon. No matter how smart or clever you are, you can’t sit alone in a bubble and suss out all the implications for each card in a new set. Everyone brings their own bias and point of view when evaluating something new. You can learn something from just about anyone if you keep an open mind, which is why I read every set review I can get my hands on.
Friday, July 2nd – I realize the past few columns weren’t exactly the shiny, happy ones that I typically write, but you know what? It’s hard to keep my optimistic side down when there’s a new Magic set due out soon and we’re getting fed a bevy of fun and interesting spoilers! I’ll stress over Mythic issues later, for now I’m just going to daydream about what I could do with all these new cards!
Friday, June 25th – There’s quite a bit of EDH stuff to talk about, so this week’s column is going to be a bit scattershot, and I hope you’ll bear with me. There are new EDH bannings, first thoughts on Archenemy, a reboot for my EDH decks, and more!
Friday, June 18th – Jace has seriously warped the format; you either play Jace or play threats that Jace can’t really bounce for profit (haste, comes-into-play effects, Planeswalkers). Or, ideally, you stuff both into your deck. Even frickin’ Baneslayer Angel isn’t even all that good anymore unless you’re playing Jace yourself to trump your opponent’s Jace.
Friday, June 11th – Through a series of curveballs that life throws at you sometimes, I haven’t been able to make it up to Richmond Comix to play in any FNMs in quite a while. Which also means I haven’t been able to play in any EDH games afterwards. Which also means I’ve been dying to play some EDH, so I finally found some time to jump on Magic Online and reconnect with Commander, the MTGO version of Elder Dragon Highlander.
Friday, June 4th – Most Magic content on the web is dedicated to the awesomeness of winning Magic tournaments, and it’s an awesome feeling to be sure, even at the lower levels where I’ve chalked up my victories. Yet the coolest things about Magic are actually what happen around and outside of tournaments—the Magic Community, the connections you make with people you might not have ever had the chance to interact with if it wasn’t for this awesome game. I wanted to share some of those cool things today.
Friday, May 28th – Time to fill in the big hole from last week’s recap of my day at the Virginia Nationals Qualifier—what deck I actually played. It’s quite interesting in retrospect that I waited a week to talk about it, considering the role two particular Green mythic rares played in my story, and in the current story of Standard writ large.
Friday, May 21st – Some of us were trying pretty hard to get a solid list together for Warp World, a deck I wrote about some weeks back. A funny thing happened when we first tried it out—it curb-stomped Jund like nobody’s business, over and over and over again. That’s a pretty good start for a rogue strategy!
Monday, May 17th – By the time this column goes up, you all will probably be saturated with metagame articles and decks from this weekend’s Nationals Qualifiers. Since none of my deck ideas seem to break the hammerlock Jund, U/W Control, Mythic and Planeswalkers seem to have on the format, I figured I’d focus on Elder Dragon Highlander instead.
Friday, May 7th – Amid all the excitement that each new set brings over the past year or so, there’s also an undercurrent of dissatisfaction that I’m constantly hearing from everyday Magic players, and I’m feeling it myself. As a long-term fan of Magic, I’m a little worried about Mythic Rares and their impact on the cost of playing.
Friday, April 30th – Something about Rise of the Eldrazi has really got ideas churning in my brain for Standard decks. Maybe it’s because Standard has felt so stagnant for so long, or maybe Brian Tinsman and company just really juiced this set with tons of intriguing cards and synergies. Whatever the reason, I’ve got tons of decklists I’m throwing against the wall to see what sticks, and a lot of them involve casting gigantic nightmare world-eaters.
Friday, April 23rd-I started my Saturday at the Richmond Convention Center ready to earn some Rise of the Eldrazi packs by helping administer the prerelease. I ended the day at a hotel bar playing EDH with Magic Historian Brian David-Marshall and WotC R&D and Magic Hall of Famer Mike Turian. Yeah, it was a pretty awesome day!
