Mike Flores has never been more on top of his game as a deck designer. For the last two years he has produced deck after deck that has turned in great results for Pros and PTQ players alike. In the tradition of Mike’s legendary “Building Broken Decks” series, today Master Flores delivers the first installment in a new series where he reveals to you the secrets of his success.
Mike went 5-0-2 in the swiss of his most recent PTQ with… well, isn’t it obvious? A full PTQ report with matchups plus a Flores-approved decklist for what is suddenly the hottest deck on the planet. Confused? Click the friggin’ link.
Astral Slide decks have been on the rise lately both at the PTQ level and at the World Championships. Today Flores shows you the version of Slide that he’s been running and fills you in on his latest tournament performance with the deck.
The last time Flores set his Great Brain to creating a deck for Standard, he created a monster – Flores Blue, which is irritating players all over the world. So his only option was to create a counter-monster, using a draw engine suggested to him by Osyp Lebedowicz, to create a deck that pummels his original creation unmercifully.
Let me tell you about my first hero in the world of Magic: the Gathering. I saw his use of the Whirling Dervish in the Top 8 of those Nationals when the rest of the tournament was filled with super cheesy Hymn to Tourach decks. When the first Magic: the Gathering Black Lotus Pro Tour event changed the world in the snow-covered avenues of New York, New York, once again it was this player who stood in the spotlight of the Top 8.
And you wanna know who’s better than he was? The answer’s going to surprise you.
Flores puts a new Zoo variation through the flames of battle and discovers that it might just be a very solid contender for the PTQ and Worlds metagames.
Master Flores takes time out of his busy schedule of self-promotion to run a deck that someone else designed this week. Greater Good combo decks are a blast to play and did quite well in a number of states last month, but are they any good in the new metagame?
Flores identifies a pernicious type of error most likely to affect strong players, draws up some illustrative anecdotes from his Champs and Pro Tour LA matches, and sprinkles the whole thing with a generous heap of cryptic initials.
Flores overcomes the “bad player” label (however briefly) to make the finals of the New York State Championships, where Flores-designed decks utterly dominated. It sounds like one of Mike’s wet dreams, but for once it’s reality. If you want to know the updated build of two of the strongest decks in the new Standard metagame, check inside.
This past weekend, Mike had the rare chance to put his States deck to the test in an actual Ravnica-legal Standard tournament packed with Neutral Ground regulars. In today’s article, Mike discusses what he learned by playing in that tournament, and shares the decklist he’ll be playing in this weekend’s State Championship!
If you had asked me one week ago, I would have told you that the deck featured in this article was my 100% recommendation for Champs. After this weekend I think the deck I posted last Friday may be the best deck in the format, but this deck is still really good and can easily take home a Top 8 slot.
Today we hit the end of Control Week. Last year, my control deck ended up as one of the strongest decks in the States metagames and I’m going to add another saucy decklist of my own at the end of this article, but the main thing Knut wanted me to do was go over some of the other writers’ decks and give my comments and ideas on their implementation or viability.
While working on the Ravnica Constructed Review articles, one of the new cards that really stood out to me was Sunforger. Sunforger costs three mana to play and three mana to equip, giving its bearer +4/+0. In and of itself, this repertoire would make Sunforger almost strictly worse than Loxodon Warhammer, a card long on potential itself, but one that has been completely absent from Constructed deck for the past two years. On a lark, I actually posted a potential Sunforger deck in the Ravnica Artifacts section… but later realized it might actually be good.
This is it, folks. The final installment for this monster review of what could be Magic’s best set yet. Today the legendary michaelj covers the Lands, Cycles (including the very powerful Hunted creatures), and the mechanics of Ravnica, detailing everything you need to know about Ravnica for Constructed. If you missed out on the earlier installments we’ve linked them all below for easy accessability.
There are two sorts of multicolored cards in Ravnica. Yesterday we looked at the “traditional” two-color cards, where R&D forces us to choose both Red and White, both Black and Green. Today’s Guild mana is the opposite: though the cards are multicolored, both Green and White for a Selesnya card, let’s say, you can pick either color of mana to pay the cost. Guild mana is a completely new thing to Magic, but the question is: Are any of the new cards any good?
