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AuthorJay Moldenhauer-Salazar

Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar (feel free to call him JMS) started playing Magic for fun during Ice Age and for prizes during Mirage. He has since abandoned the big tournaments to focus on creative deckbuilding, moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to the San Francisco Bay Area, and has a wife, a child, a dog, a corporate job, a weekly column at Magicthegathering.com, and a novel ("Birthright," published by Virtualbookworm.com). What the hell happened?!?

Playtesting Diary: The Birth And Evolution Of Rage-Wood

INTRO: Howdy. Now the new Type 2 season is underway, and results from States are flooding in with a promise to define the elusive metagame. Yippee. To me,”metagame” can just as easily be translated into”now we have decks to copy on the web so we don’t have to struggle through developing our own.” Everybody break…

Dear Magic

Have you ever broken up with someone you knew you weren’t going to marry? Let’s say for argument’s sake that they didn’t do something horrible like sleep with your best friend. You just decided, after a lot of soul-searching, that it was time for the relationship to end. Ever done that? Let me tell you,…

Mmmmmmmmmana…Five Rules For Avoiding Mana-Screw

I’m starting to get truly excited about Regionals, even if I still don’t know when they’re occurring. In fact, all of Team Purple Pepper is more focused than I’ve ever seen them. Having the team has made us all better players and better deck-builders, and some of the craziness that’s being thrown around these days…

Card Spotlight: Complex Automaton

[shamelessly taking a page from Taylor’s last article…] Belbe frowned. The hulking automaton was certainly impressive in size, but its movements were a study in inefficiency. For every step of the metallic beast, it would creak, spin its torso, wind a tangle of gears and eventually let loose a blast of steam. Belbe found the…

Wood Is Go(o)d

I organized my first Magic tournament last Wednesday. Well,”organized” might be overstepping a little. I had contacted Ballpark Cards in San Francisco to see whether they still ran weekly Type 2 tournaments as their website said. The manager, Matthew Scott, told me that the website hadn’t been updated in literally years (“how did you find…