Tuesday, April 22nd – Sealed with Shadowmoor ranges from the ‘worst ever’ when playing against creatures like the Lieges, Rhys the Redeemed, or Godhead of Awe, to pretty fun when you get to play the traditional G/R Aggro against slower control. The traditional baits and trickery occurs, and hybrid allows you to play more good cards then you usually could while presenting interesting mana exercises.
Tuesday, April 15th – At the moment, things are a little weird for writing, Standard is waiting for the Shadowmoor release, and with Magic Online down, there’s nothing to talk about in the short term about any interesting designs. Meanwhile, in Vintage there’s the age-old debate about some card that should or shouldn’t be restricted. This time Flash is the card on which everyone has their sights.
Tuesday, April 8th – Today I’ll be covering one of the big gainers in the current metagame, U/R Snow Control. Most of you probably remember the Mono-Red Chandra snow control decks that rose in popularity around States last year. This deck is effectively an update of the old formula…
Tuesday, April 1st – For this week we’ll be taking a break from Standard and looking at the current Block Constructed format. Currently, this is played mostly on Magic Online, but also in the Grand Prix Trials for Grand Prix: Birmingham. At the moment I tend to enjoy playing a format with a bit of rigidity to it, so I figured I’d give a general overview for anyone else interested in joining in.
Tuesday, March 25th – Right now, Standard on Magic Online, at least as far as 8-mans go, looks to be 90% composed of four specific decks: Faeries, Elves, Red Deck Wins, and U/W Reveillark take up a huge portion of every single one I enter. Perhaps this will change as the high cost of Morningtide cards has dropped down to the normal Magic Online flow, i.e. anything that isn’t utterly ridiculous costs between 1-3 tickets.
Tuesday, March 18th – Ever since I saw the results of the burn deck that succeeded at Grand Prix: Shizuoka, I’ve decided that it would be one of my main decks to try out for the new Standard format. Of course, I’d love to play my Faeries deck some more, but on Magic Online there’s the slight issue of procuring a set of Mutavault and Bitterblossom without trading in an organ or two. As they say, if you can’t join ‘em, play Red and burn them to a crisp.
Tuesday, March 11th – Today I’ll be having a look at the fresh results from the Standard Grand Prix in Shizouka, hopefully giving us some insight into the Standard format a month before Pro Tour: Hollywood.
Tuesday, March 4th – I ended up playing Goblins again for my local PTQ, to which even showing up was a bit of a hurdle since just two days before I was hacking my guts all over the room. Being sick, I had no time to go get new cards, even thought I wanted to switch decks to G/B/W Hateorade for the expected field of UG Tron, Goblins, and Red Deck Wins…
Monday, February 25th – Since I’m writing this article before all the information from Grand Prix: Vancouver hits, I’ll be going with my plan B for the week and covering Team Reflection’s Tidespout Tyrant Oath deck that won Stratfordbury a few weeks ago…
Tuesday, February 19th – Extended has once again experienced a major shift, when compared to the first few weeks of the season. Before we had a number of midrange decks and Dredge as the most played and generally “best†decks… but the format has shifted week after week, back toward a new set of expected and top decks. Red decks of various sorts – Goblins, Red Deck Wins, and even Burn – have all been successful to some extent.
Tuesday, February 12th – Today’s Deconstructing Constructed sees Josh Silvestri break down the Extended PTQ results seen thus far, looking at some of the more interesting decks from across the world. He also touches upon an interesting Landstill in Extended idea… will such a deck be a force in the next round of PTQs?
Taking a step back from Extended, I’ve decided to delve into what I’m looking forward to seeing at the next major Vintage tournament, held in a week in Stratford, CT. To that end, I’m going over most of the major archetypes, looking at where they are now and how they’ll be looking at the tournament itself.
The reason I picked Dredge was because the field just isn’t prepared enough for it. You have 80-85% against the field game 1, according to pretty much all my testing and everyone else I talked to. There was a single match that wasn’t that big a blow-out, and that was game 1 against Affinity with Fatal Frenzy and Tormod’s Crypt maindeck.
Going into an Extended PTQ with a true plan in mind is one of the more daunting tasks I’ve seen in recent memory, thanks to the wide range of strategies and brokenness being employed. On some level this is ironic, since I remember a number of writers (including myself) whining about how difficult it was to metagame, as there were approximately more viable decks than Lasagna Cat videos last year. That said, there are some basic tenets you can follow, and certain assumptions you can make.
Last week I talked about some of the decks that had been doing well online, and shared a few other tidbits on the Extended metagame. I also said I’d go over the PTQ deck results. Now we have all the information for the Week 1 PTQs in hand, we can go over some of the decklists and data. Although there was nothing mind-blowing (unless you count Flores Martyr deck) there was a nice platter of decks across the varying metagames.
