Today will be a grab bag of sorts as lately I’ve gotten a lot of playing time in on Magic Online while waiting for real results to come in. Of course, now that actual Qualifiers have taken place, I’m sure you actually want to see the Top 8s, which I have for almost every qualifier that took place this weekend. So come in; kick your feet up and have a look at the world of tomorrow!
The results from the Kentucky Blue Grass Open are in and you can see all the lists here. So what does all this mean for you and the Extended metagame? We now have some idea of what decks have and haven’t replicated results in some fashion. In addition, we can also take note of alterations from previous iterations (if there are any) and get an idea of what Lorwyn has brought to the table.
With the Worlds results in, we now have a brand new Standard metagame to look at featuring a legitimate combo deck. Unfortunately, it’s far smaller than the diversity we saw at Grand Prix: Krakow, to the point where MTGO has become a cesspool with everyone selling their grannies to the local glue factory just to come up with the tix for Pyromancer’s Swath and Dragonstorm. All the B/G and B/G/W players rejoiced, as not only could they copy a better version of the decks they were running, but a bunch of mediocre to even matches left the metagame because they all packed up their ball and went home in the face of “The Gassy Knoll.”
My initial reaction to the Worlds Standard decklists was to write about the undefeated and Top 8 decks. Unfortunately for me, Craigers already did the first part and Chapin is writing an article on the coolest deck from the second. So I decided to focus on some of the notable things from Worlds coverage. Not the decks or players, but rather the coverage and events themselves. Starting with…
Today we’ll be taking a break from the endless amount of Faeries articles I’ve written, and instead focus on some of the other odder Standard decks floating around. A few of these have seen play in various 8-mans on MTGO, while others have merely been my side-projects after refining Faeries. The most interesting concept to utilize has come largely from the Makeshift Mannequin decks floating around since Grand Prix: Krakow.
Welcome back to the series on Faeries. This should be the last or next to last article I need to write on the subject, since I’ll basically have covered the majority of matches in Standard after this. I blame this recreation of My Fires (My Faeries! Roofles) on my obsession with aggro decks once I tweak them enough. If anyone playing Vintage remembers my 20 page Food Chain Goblins primer you can understand the detail I’ll go into if I think the deck is worthwhile.
This week I was planning on working on an aggro compliment to go along with the control side of my Faeries articles. However, I ended up side-tracked due to unforeseen personal matters, and I’ll have to take care of that next week. Instead, today I’ll be covering a small section of Vintage topics inspired by Ben Bleiweiss last week.
Hello and welcome to another article about those lovable Blue miscreants, the Faerie tribe. Today I’ll be going over the general matches, tips, and some testing results against the top three control decks from GP: Krakow: Mono Blue Guile, UW Pickles and UB Mannequin. I’ve received a number of e-mails asking for match advice, and some general questions on how the deck holds up against Pickles-esque decks, so instead of answering each individually it seemed easier to do it all at once.
Since I still get e-mails off and on asking what happened to the Vintage articles, and since the next major Vintage tournament is this weekend, I figured I may as well share some thoughts about Lorwyn and Goblins. Steve’s been too busy talking about his Invitational experiences to really go into depth about any of this stuff, so I can understand why there’s a particular lack of Eternal material going around.
At California States, I’d say there was a hefty chunk of Blue decks complimented by a bunch of Tarmogoyf decks. At the upper tables you could see Cryptic Command being flung around in practically every other match, probably more during the later rounds. A huge number of Teachings and Pickles decks were hanging around the top twenty tables or so, many of which looked like the TSP Block Pickles decks but with Cryptic kicked in…
This article will be broken into two parts. One will be about a U/W/R midrange deck I’ve been kicking around since Brion Stoutarm came out, and the second concerns a U/B Faeries aggro control deck that is on the short list for decks I might play at States. The first half of the article will be dedicated to the Faerie build, and the second half will be with the lesser-tested midrange Brion deck.
Picking up from where we left off last week, I’ll be taking a look at a few of the aggro decks that are available in the current Standard metagame. To ensure a little diversity, I picked a deck that has been close to optimized, one that’s largely in the concept stage still, and one that needs to be refined a little more.
Last week I received a number of responses wanting me to go further into Lorwyn Standard, so I’ll be leaving any final Extended thoughts to Feldman and company. We’ll jump right in with some baselines that many of the new decks people are throwing out there will have to live up too. Think of these as general guidelines that you want to follow while trying to optimize your deck.
Now the prerelease hype has died down, Josh takes an analytical eye to Lorwyn and shares his thoughts regarding its place in Limited and Standard. He highlights some key cards for Sealed and Draft, and brings us a decklist or two. He then moves onto Extended, and offers up four decklists for our attention…
After asking readers if they wanted to see Vintage or Extended, the majority came back with the latter (I blame Gush) so that’s what we’ll be discussing today. Last week I covered the main graveyard based combo decks that you can expect to play against, so this week we’ll be branching out into the aggro-control segment of the meta…
