Thursday, July 1st – I played in two Standard tournaments last weekend. I played Turboland. I split in the top four of the Cascade Games Challenge (a $2.5K tournament) and lost playing for Top 8 in the PTQ the next day. My combined record on the weekend was 12-3-1. I highly recommend the deck for the PTQs this weekend as well as any PTQs coming up on Magic Online.
Thursday, June 24th – Like Extended, Legacy helps reassure people that their cards will retain value over time. The problem is, you don’t want to point at your evergreen format and show someone a totally different game of Magic than what they’re used to. You want beatdown strategies to be good.
Friday, June 18th – I mentioned a UGW Daze aggro deck that I’d been working on during finals, and was roundly condemned by everyone. Cedric asked me why I wasn’t just playing Dredge; I told him that while game 1 against Reanimator was pretty good, it was really hard to win after boarding when they set up Blazing Archon with a Coffin Purge for your Angel of Despair, and I figured I’d have to win two matches against Reanimator to win the tournament.
Wednesday, June 9th – Teaching Magic is pretty hard because there is so much information the new player has to absorb at once. Land and the mana system is fairly straightforward. Explaining creatures, power and toughness, and how combat works is relatively simple. Explaining other card types is also pretty easy. Instants are a little tricky because it’s not necessarily intuitive that you are allowed to do things during another person’s turn, but once you clear that hurdle, instants aren’t that complicated. Taken all together, however, the system is incredibly complex.
Wednesday, June 2nd – Gerry Thompson built the Naya aggro deck that stormed U.S. National Qualifiers. Recognizing that Vengevine is completely insane against Jund and U/W control decks, Gerry built an aggressive deck designed such that Bloodbraid Elf cascades nearly always triggered Vengevine. Then he added the combination of Cunning Sparkmage and Basilisk Collar to fight other creature-based strategies.
Thursday, May 27th – It seems as though every few weeks someone goes on a brief rant about mythic rarity, and how the high prices of chase mythics is killing Magic. I wish to address that claim. In this article, I briefly summarize the literature that has been published concerning literature up to now. Then I address the primary complaints about mythics: that some cards are printed at mythic without “feeling” mythic, and that the secondary market value of some mythics is too high.
Thursday, May 20th – Patrick Chapin famously pointed out that “tight technical play decides more games of Magic than all other factors combined.†Given this, how does waiting until the very last minute to pick a deck make any kind of sense? Playing a good deck well will get you much farther than playing the ‘best’ deck sloppily.
Friday, May 14th – I actively enjoy the playtesting process. I view matchups as puzzles to be solved, and am happy to sit down for an afternoon and just iterate games, keeping exhaustive notes and wondering what could have caused games to go differently until I figure out optimal strategies and important tactical plays.
Thursday, May 6th – There have been a lot of awesome new decks being debuted recently, what with the first week of PTQs, StarCityGames.com’s Atlanta 5K, the first results from European National Qualifiers, and so on. But, like, let’s be real. Jund has had Standard in a deathgrip for a while. Even if Rise of the Eldrazi will shake up Standard to the point where Jund is dethroned, people are still going to take a while to adapt.
Friday, April 16th – Ever had a PTQ coming up in a few days and not been sure what to play or how to prepare with your limited timeframe? This report is for you.
Wednesday, April 7th – Fundamentally, the problem with most of Legacy’s aggressive decks is that it is nearly impossible to use creatures with generally combat-oriented abilities to generate favorable interactions against most of Legacy’s combo decks. This reduces the set of interactions those creatures can perform to “reduce target player’s life total by this creature’s power every turn.â€
Wednesday, March 31st – I am positive that everyone who owns a Cube will want to run an eight-man Draft at some point, so 360 cards is the minimum. However, part of the fun of any Draft format is wondering which cards will get opened; if you draft multiple times with the entire Cube, you lose that mystery.
Friday, March 26th – I was watching a match last year that has stuck with me for quite a while. It was game 1 the Five-Color Control mirror, and “Rich” was in the tank in the midgame. Rich had been on the draw; his opponent had evoked Mulldrifter on turn 3, and Rich had done the same. Rich’s hand was Broodmate Dragon, Cruel Ultimatum, Cruel Ultimatum, Cryptic Command, and lands. I forget how many cards the other guy had, but it was quite the grip. Both players had six lands in play. Rich thought. And thought.
Thursday, March 18th – There were some requests last week for some in-depth walkthroughs of actual games with Legacy Dredge. Instead of scripting game states myself, I have some reports for the last two tournaments I played in. I won the first tournament a few weeks ago, and lost in the semi-finals of the second last weekend.
Friday, March 12th – If you are not playing Dredge in Legacy, you are doing it unbelievably wrong. The deck routinely deploys 9/9s on turn 2 or 3 and brings some number of 2/2s to the party for value. While doing this, you get to Cabal Therapy your opponent two or three times, and if for some reason that isn’t good enough, you also have unlimited 3/1s that leave Zombies behind when they die.
