With Week Two results from the Extended PTQ season slowly filtering in, Mike takes a long look at the Oklahoma City results. Their Top 8 featured a number of decks that were off the radar going into the event. Can such off the wall metagame-specific choices bring success across a wider field, now that the decklists are in the public domain?
With MagictheGathering.com concentrating on all things Planar Chaos, today’s Flores Friday brings us the tournament lowdown from last weekend’s round of Extended PTQs. Mike breaks down the numbers from all the results that are in so far, sharing some of the winning and high-performing deck builds. He takes a long look at why they won, and makes his own personal suggestions for those hoping to succeed in Week Two of the PTQ roller coaster.
Going into the PTQ weekend, Mike had two choices: U/G or G/W. He told the world that if he rocked the mock tournament with U/G, that’d be the deck for him. If not, the G/W machine would be his weapon of choice. True to his word, Mike took his innovative G/W anti-Boros anti-TEPS Extended deck to his local PTQ… and as suspected, it rocked the house against the good matchups. For the story of both tournaments, and both decks, read on…
As we all know, Mike Flores is a veritable fountain of decklists. Be they Standard or Extended, Mr Flores can be relied upon to shape the Constructed metagame with each article written. Today’s offering is no different – Green/White Aggro in Extended. With fantastic matchups against both Boros Deck Wins and TEPS, this decklist is one no serious PTQ player can ignore… is it the deck for you?
Today’s Flores Friday dives deep into the murky waters of the Extended metagame. Mike shares his theories of deck design and creation – perfect timing for those hoping to blow the format wide open at their next PTQ. The decks he posts here today produce interesting results when battling the Tier 1 builds of the format… but the true value of this excellent piece lies in the description of the process.
EOTFOFYL – A common acronym back in the day. It stands for “End of Turn Fact or Fiction; You Lose,” and it will be heard a lot in the coming Extended PTQ season. There’s an art to splitting a Fact or Fiction, and perfection comes only once a number of factors have been considered. Today’s Flores Friday examines a sackful of practical Fact or Fiction decisions; Mike takes us through each one, and Heezy shares his own philosophies.
The masses have asked… and Mike has delivered! Today’s Flores Friday takes a look at the new Extended format post-Worlds, and offers up a few interesting deck tidbits. The first is inspired by unlucky 9th-place finisher at Worlds, Shaheen Soorani… while the second is inspired by our own Ben Bleiweiss! Extended – Fun for All the Family!
Mike often makes bold claims regarding the relative strength of cards. According to him, Skred was once the most powerful card in Standard. Worlds has come and gone, and many folk gambled on the metagame and packed their decks with backbreakers… but what were, and what are, the Top 10 cards in the format? Mike reveals all…
Behind the link are five decks that didn’t quite make it. They aren’t bad or anything; in fact, I think some of them have good ideas as jumping-off points, and one or more may even grow up to be great. But why did these decks fall short, and what can this tell us about Standard?
As we’re all aware, Mike has had a modicum of success of late. His State Championship win, piloting the innovative “This Girl” deck, goes a fair way to banishing the “Bad Player Flores” nickname once and for all. By his own admission, his success is largely due to his fine analysis of the intricacies of the endgame – sculpting the proceedings in order to steer the game to an inevitable victory. Today’s theoretical excercise takes us through the thought process behind such structured play…
You will knock over liquor stores and leave cars full of empty cardboard boxes on bridges and in tunnels. You will jump the turnstile in the subway and run past security at the check-in counter. You will throw red paint on granite lions and draw your fingers through wet cement, noticed but never, ever, caught. You will steal the glasses off the nose of the local librarian and pour water in the sixth grade teacher’s potato chips. You will do anything — anything — that you possibly can, make every noise and exaggerate every motion, to distract the authority figures from what is really going on. You need time, and to get that time, you need them not to kill you. All war is deception, even this one. You will be a cardboard ninja and a digital assassin, distracting the enemy from anything that matters with everything that doesn’t. And when you’re done, when you’re spent to your last card, and his mana is tapped even though he’s convinced that he’s won, you’ll tap out Hellbent, point and click, and he’ll go down muttering about how lucky you were to topdeck.
Put simply, you will learn the most important lesson you possibly can in the quest for dominating a game of Magic – no lies!
Standard Champs is this weekend, people! Why haven’t you settled on your final deck? For those of us still in the limbo of uncertainty, Mike reports from a Standard tournament held this past week at Neutral Ground. His sixteen-man tournament yesterday brought us a surprise winner… and believe me, the shock wins just keep on coming. If you’re still looking for last-minute tech, then this is the article for you!
The Standard Champs articles keep on coming! Mike Flores (the metagame messiah) brings us a mock sixteen-man Time Spiral Standard tournament, pitching all the major players head-to-head in one mighty fight to the finish! Each game and matchup is examined in detail, and the winner… let’s just say you may be surprised at the outcome. The metagame is now slowly taking shape. Make sure you’re prepared!
We all know that the tiniest mistakes can lose the game… But what kinds of mistakes might lose you that Top 8 slot at Champs? Mike Flores walks you through four sample Standard scenarios where subtle details make the difference between the right play and the wrong play. Want to know what sorts of things the pros look for when they’re deciding how to respond? Look no further!
