AuthorGeordie Tait

Loxodon Warhammer

1. A perfectly balanced card of elegant design, costed perfectly by R&D and assigned a rarity that does not, in any way, make it disruptive for Sealed Deck play. Games featuring Loxodon Warhammer are always decided by nothing but the skill of the two players involved. A fine card in all respects, and a testament to the abilities of the fine people in charge of making this game.

2. If you finish just outside of Top 8, the card that was likely responsible for 75% of your important losses.

For the love of all things holy, ladies and gentlemen of the Magic community – if you want to get better at this game, you have to realize one important thing, and that is that somewhere in the area of 60% of all games of Magic are played with sideboards in… And it’s where most of you lose your games. So listen to me carefully: I have some rules for you to follow. They’re numbered. All you need to do is follow instructions. Trust the Tait.

I won’t soon forget those guys. From beginning to end, the trip to Pro Tour: Boston was a life-changing experience for me, probably the least worldly of young men. Not only did I learn a lot about myself, but I got to see new places, meet new people – it was the epitome of a great trip. I can only hope that someday I get a chance to head back Pittsburgh way, where the hills are steep and the network cables always abuzz.

The hum of the fan is heavy in my ears, but there’s nothing stirring besides the air. The other occupants of the house are at rest, and the manner in which they arrived at that state of calm varies from person to person. Nate Heiss is comatose out on the front porch, trying to shake off a brutal drinking game session that concluded with a double-upchuck as the grand finale. Josh Rider is laid out on the floor in Mike’s room with his eyes rolled back into his head. It would take nitroglycerin suppositories to move him from that spot. Jeremy Darling is now flat on his face on the small couch, a stark contrast to his robust activities for the last two hours – namely, sitting on the back porch trying not to succumb to alcohol poisoning. Poor guy. Two hours of good times, two hours of trying to coax your body to leave you a functioning liver. Liquor is a harsh mistress.

It’s 3:30 am and deathly quiet. Gary and Paul have gone to sleep, as have Josh and Eugene. Mike is staying at Rachel’s house. I’m sitting at the glass table in what might be called the dining room – it is adjacent to the kitchen, and surely would serve that function in any traditional dwelling. The laptop is fighting for surface space with the usual assortment of food fallout and draft droppings. I’m a king holding court before the residuals of a fun day, and surely mine is the kingdom where napkins, electronics and weathered copies of Spark Spray can coexist peaceably. I am glad that my rule has fostered such prosperity.

In the beginning, it was supposed to be just Gary and myself taking a one-week trip to Pittsburgh, right? Well, when the dust settled, we had a monster road trip on our hands, all the way to Boston. The first leg of the trip was Toronto to Pittsburgh, with a one-week stop at Turian’s house – and I took photos to take you inside the world of Team CMU, to show you what it’s like to live with these men who get the trophies.

Thieves have always been the scum of the earth, but with online gaming they’ve really hit the jackpot – and a new low. Never before has it been possible for some toenail clipping of a human being to take away so much from another human being, with so little effort. Thousands of hours. Thousands of dollars. Thousands of precious little things taken and laundered, scattered across the internet and into the eager hands of unknowing buyers, never to be seen again. And if you want to avoid that fate, gentle reader, perhaps you best click on the link above.

When some alien race, say thirty or forty thousand years down the road, happens upon the charred cinder in space that used to be Earth – I think they might find an epitaph that tells a similar tale. A nearly blank tombstone standing in the middle of what used to be New York, or Mexico City, or Delhi. Just one line engraved in an otherwise featureless marble column.
“Just an upgrade.”

The Legions pack is a veritable treasure trove for the U/R drafter, and even with several U/W mages at the table, you can still clean up on quality U/R cards. Enemy mages will be grabbing Stingers and Deftblade Elites, and you should happily let them. With Echo Tracer, Willbender, Wall of Deceit, Keeneye Aven, and Mistform Seaswift all ripe for the plucking, you’re the real kid in this cardboard candy store. After a while, the cracking of pack two might start to trigger an almost Pavlovian response.

So you’ve got forty-five cards, thanks to my advice on how to pick them in this article. Some are bombs, some are solid, some are last-pick garbage. Now, what do you do to put them together?

The Onslaught pack is where you build your foundation. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Lavamancer’s Skills were a dime a dozen, this is where you’d turn when you wanted to feed your U/R deck some gas. Well, the more things change, the more things stay the same; many of the most powerful cards in the U/R archetype are to be found here. Though Onslaught cards have been done to death with regards to pick orders and analysis, you’ll still want to pay close attention here. OLS is a strange new world, and the Onslaught pack is your doorway into it. You have to study up before it gets slammed in your face.

When I saw a fifty – fifty! – page article cross my desk, I knew that once again Geordie Tait had come through in spades. And if you want the most utterly-exhausting guide to drafting an archetype people once thought dead, Geordie will provide. Tomorrow, he’ll be discussing the Onslaught picks – but if you want to know how and when to go U/R, he tells you in intensely loving detail that reads like a”Dummies” book.

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the triple J’s that night,

Their draft sets were exhausted, with no chance of help in sight.

And so when many sharks sat down, surrounding each good man,

A pall-like wave of pessimism was felt throughout the clan.

Magic Online behaves in a fundamentally different way when you have a morphed Cutthroat on the table (or Putrid Raptor, or Skirk Volcanist, or Proteus Machine). Even clicking”OK” as fast as possible, a tapped-out Cutthroat player doesn’t come close to the 0.1 seconds that MODO typically takes when you are tapped out; people know this and can play accordingly. In fact, I have. And so have other players. But there is a way around it…