Friday, June 5th – The Origins theme week over at MagictheGathering.com has had me waxing nostalgic of late. I’ve been playing Magic a really long time – since Unlimited and Arabian Nights packs were available for purchase – but I often forget just how disconnected that time is for many of those who play the game now.
Friday, May 29th – Windbrisk Heights shows up in 45% of all Top 8 decks at Regionals. Forty-five percent! That’s just insane. Used to be when formats grew so warped around a particular card or strategy, the Magic Community would let out a howl and Wizards would listen and react in some way…
Friday, May 22nd – For the U.S., the Regionals Championships are in the books. For me personally, it’s been an exhausting couple of weeks between the Star City double-PTQ weekend and then Regionals the following week. I characterize myself as a “casually competitive†player, who mostly just likes to have fun with Magic, but who likes to step up and compete when PTQs, Regionals, and States comes around.
Friday, May 15th – Last week I wrote about a couple of decks, and I pretty much had settled on two for the PTQ weekend, one of which was the Black/Green “Neo-Elves†Rock deck. The other deck was a Cascade deck…
Friday, May 8th – Today, I’ll share with you some of the new deck ideas I’ve been kicking around. Maybe with some feedback from you in the forums we could whip some of these into fighting shape. Regionals is just a week away, and let’s not forget that StarCityGames.com is having a double-shot PTQ weekend right here in Richmond, starting tomorrow.
Friday, May 1st – Back in 2006 my hometown of Richmond, Virginia was privileged to host a Grand Prix, and TO, StarCityGames.com’s fearless leader Pete Hoefling, asked if I would be willing to “gunsling” the event. Flash forward three years, and StarCityGames.com asks again if I’d be willing to “gunsling” for them, this time at the Alara Reborn “big” prerelease…
Friday, April 24th – Hello, everyone – I’m here to announce that Happy Bennie is back! I know over the last few columns my attitude may have been a bit of a downer given that the metagame was stinking and stagnant once you peeled back the veneer of so-called diversity. What a difference a week makes!
Friday, April 17th – StarCityGames.com’s $1K Top 8 decks are posted. I am surprised to see the archetypes listed. Just one Faeries, just one Five-Color Control, and just one Reveillark deck? Blightning wins the whole thing and two Green/White decks round out the top 3? Have all my worries been an overreaction?
Friday, April 10th – Last Friday night I was hanging outside Richmond Comix with Jay Delazier between rounds, and he mentioned he didn’t like last week’s column very much. When I asked him why, he said he thought I was contradicting myself…
Friday, April 3rd – Soon the collective attention of Magic columnists will turn to Standard, and likely stay there for quite a while since there is going to be a crush of Standard events in the next several months. Regionals is fast approaching, about a month and a half away, and we’ve also got the Qualifier season for Pro Tour: Austin starting in May, and that’s Standard too.
Friday, March 27th – This past Sunday I had the pleasure of playing in a 9-man Elder Dragon Highlander game at Richmond Comix, and as tradition has it I’m going to present the deck I played and a recap of the how the game played out.
Thursday, March 19th – It occurred to me there are some parallels you can draw between Girl Scout Cookies and the Standard Metagame. For the most part it seems the top deck and cookie archetypes never change. Like Faerie decks, you always have Samoas, which people can’t quit because they’re so damn good.
Friday, March 13th – In light of the snorefest metagame coming out of Kyoto I thought it would be a great time to talk about a deck utterly and completely off the radar. Then along comes Jacob Van Lunen’s Building on a Budget last Thursday featuring… an Esper Elixir deck! Of course, why not?
Friday, March 6th – In the forum thread to my column last week, a poster asked if I’d go into more details on the decisions I made when assembling my Ancient Ziggurat deck for the StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Open. Given that another Ziggurat deck just made a huge splash in Kyoto, being pretty much the only new and innovative deck to come out of the tournament, I figured it would be worthwhile going over the choices I made.
Friday, February 27th – When last we left off, I had some big plans for the $5K weekend. Friday Night Magic to try and test some tweaks to my Fugees Elves deck. Then Saturday playing in the $5K Standard event, Sunday play in the Extended PTQ, and sometime in between try and fit in some Elder Dragon Highlander…
