Fresh out of the 883-person event in Columbus, Doug Linn looks back on this weekend’s Grand Prix and sifts through the data for tech and commentary. Find out how useful the information from the GP will be and look at the apparent futility of testing Legacy. Trace the historical development of the Flash deck with insider information and see how many pros he name-checks! All this and more in what Doug promises is the last article about Flash he will write.
Countdown to Grand Prix: Columbus! There’s a lot of potential in Future Sight, cards that will refine decks and others that might spawn new strategies! From the probability-crunch of Street Wraith to the elegance of Tarmogoyf, see what cards are going to make a splash in Legacy! Also, get Doug’s insight into the card everyone should be playing at GP: Columbus.
Countdown to Grand Prix Columbus! In this article, Doug takes us over the Atlantic to look at the newest European Legacy tech. From entire decks to single cards, the Europeans have been busy tweaking. Join in for a look at several high-placing decks and their technology.
Doug takes a look at the history of Survival of the Fittest decks and highlights why they were successful. He applies these principles to modern Legacy Survival decks and presents the cutting edge in Survival deckbuilding.
Take a look at any Legacy Top 8 and you’ll see the Big Three show up over and over again; these decks are Goblins, Threshold, and High Tide. At any event, one must be prepared to play each of these decks several times, and for a new deck to function well, it must beat these decks. Good luck on that. The Big Three are format-defining, and in some ways, distorting. This series will focus on the matchups between these decks in the coming weeks.
Fish has catapulted back into popularity recently, with stronger versions patching the weaknesses of previous Fish decks. Today, we’re going to take a look at WTF and Meandeck Fish to see what sorts of metagames they thrive in, why it’s been so successful lately, and what can be done to stop it.
The last definition of annoying cards for the day? “Cards that cost me games.” Doug Linn denigates the cards that handed him his most humilating losses in tournaments.
That’s three definitions, with three days left to provide your own. Do it… And you could win $20!
The thing that got me interested in 5C wasn’t the big decks; it was drawing all over cards and modifying them to the point of illegibility. It was taking some piece of art and tinkering around with it and then having opponents say, “Wow, that’s really cool!” I’ve learned many techniques on my own for gussying up cards to make them more aesthetically-pleasing, so read on as I share how to create blackout cards, smear art with acetone, and create foil versions of non-foil cards!
5-Color is a format that is polarized into archetypes. There are pure control decks that destroy combo and live in fear of the Armageddons that aggro packs. There are wacky Dream Halls decks that seek to draw their entire decks on turn 4. There’s aggro, with nothing in the deck costing more than two mana outside of mana-denial cards like Ruination, Winter Orb, and the aforementioned Armageddon. This is a format that requires 250 cards – there must be more variation than that!
The term Metagame, like the terms postmodern and existentialism, gets thrown around a lot by pseudo-intellectuals who don’t actually know its meaning. The word metagame means, most simply, the types of decks that are being played in a geographic area. The metagame includes both deck archetypes and individually tuned decks. For example, the metagame for an area might consist of control decks. There might be one prevalent control deck, or a couple of different types, but control decks are being played the most overall. The metagame is what will determine whether your deck succeeds or fails.
My goal in this article is to review all the playable cards in Champions of Kamigawa for Type Four. I must admit, the list is quite long. This is a great sign, as it amps up the power of any deck. Every tower of Type Four will find something good from this set. For those of you who don’t know what Type Four is – get on the bandwagon already. Type Four is only the most entertaining Magic format in existence!
We set up camp that night at the home of Josh Reynolds, a Short Bus member, but an obvious Meandeck sympathizer. Much like the people of Cold Mountain, Josh knew that he needed to be in the good graces of the team if he were to survive the ensuing chaos.
I suppose that the title requires a bit of explanation. A week before the usual unlimited-proxy tournament, I was heavily testing combo GAT (Gro-A-Tog), complete with Fastbond and Future Sight. Somewhere during this time, JP started talking about a U/G deck full of Type Two jank and posting ridiculous win records against Slaver. It was just stupid enough to test, and in the interest of writing a great article for you, the reader, I took what was essentially Odyssey Block Madness to a fully powered Type One event.
Steve Menendian sits down at the table and tells me that he has tested the Fish matchup a lot and is shaky about it, though he feels he can pull it out. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t playing Fish, and as Carl von Clausewitz says in his military philosophy, don’t stop your opponent when they are making mistakes! He plays a typical strong opening hand with plenty of mana acceleration. Steve drops a fat artifact which gets Annulled and then follows up with Mindslaver later, which hits Mana Drain, accelerating me into a Disk. At this point, Steve has the epiphany that I am not playing the little Blue men, but it’s too late…
Part of the success that players have comes not only from the cards in their decks, but how well they know the deck. This finally sunk into me two nights before the tournament, when I made the fateful decision to play my old standby, Ghey Red. The deck is built around mana denial. When your opponent cannot cast anything, feel free to win with Cloud of Faeries, otherwise known as the”Most Humiliating Death in Type One.” Supporting Blue’s counter power in Force of Will and Daze (a dark horse card if there ever was one) as well as Red’s artifact destruction and burn, the deck can buy a lot of time for beatdown. It packs one of the strongest sideboards in T1 and, despite everything it does to wreck, hardly anyone sideboards against it.
