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AuthorMatthieu Durand

Matthieu is a member of Team MeanDeck and an Administrator of TheManaDrain. Nicknamed "The Crazy Frenchman" by his teammates, He has a natural affinity with multicolor Blue based Control decks and Mishra's Workshop Prison decks and is one of the primary designers of Workshop Slavery, Cruci$T4KS and GermBus

Playing Control or Combo in Legacy

One of the recurring comments about Legacy is the non-viability of Combo or Control in this format, supposedly because of the dominance of Threshold or Goblins. Combo is indeed quite absent from the metagame, and Control is limited to weak board control decks which cannot do anything else other than crushing creatures (R/W Rift or Mono-White Control, for example) and are thus usually relegated as pure metagame decks. Oddly enough, the four decks I have been playing after Grand Prix: Lille with a good success are all either Combo or Control decks…

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A Second Gift From The Other Side Of The Ocean

A Gifts Ungiven deck that uses Goblin Charbelcher and Mana Severance, but completely removes Goblin Welders from the deck? Can that possibly be good? Our favorite Frenchie Vintage writer thinks so, and there’s a good chance that you’ll see more than a few people running it at the Vintage Megaevent in Paris this weekend!

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Having Fun with White Cards in Type One – Introducing a New Auriok Salvagers-Based Control-Combo deck

As part of our continuing effort to bring you the lastest tech in Type One deckbuilding, today StarCityGames.com presents our newest Featured Writer, noted French deckbuilder Mattieu Durand. Matthieu’s topic du jour is a new version of an Auriok Salvagers control deck that seeks to abuse the power of Gifts Ungiven, complete with card-by-card analysis and matchup information.

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Taking Stax To A Tournament – Deckbuilding And Metagaming Guidelines

Stax has been an important part of the Vintage metagame since its introduction in early 2003. Back then, the card choices were pretty easy due to the limited amount of broken stuff. Sphere of Resistance, Smokestack, Tangle Wire and Meditate were indeed the only lock components available before Mirrodin for an artifact Prison deck (Winter Orb does not fit in Stax’s game plan). Now, we have plenty of new tools in the form of Chalice of the Void, Thirst for Knowledge, Trinisphere and Crucible of Worlds. Nevertheless, card slots are not expendable and choices have to be made in order to have the most finely tuned build according to your metagame. This article will provide general guidelines for answering most of the questions you should ask yourself if you want to take Stax at a Vintage tournament.

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A Slaver For You

This article presents a new variation on the Mindslaver theme. The deck I’m introducing here can be considered as an hybrid between the standard Drain Slaver deck Kim Kluck created about a year ago and “Turbo Titan”, the Sundering Titan based control deck designed by my MeanDeck teammate Doug Linn. It tries to abuse one of the best artifacts from Fifth Dawn, Crucible of Worlds, in a way no one did before: setting up Mindslaver nastiness.

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