A little less than a month ago I built what I figured would be the Ultimate Deck ™ for U.S. Nationals. Sadly the French ruined my plan, but if things had gone differently this is the deck that I would haven given people to play at U.S. Nationals today.
It’s Friday! Another awesome Flores article. How surprising! This time it’s on maximizing your plays and options when you are the beatdown or the control. In other words, it’s yet another Mike Flores article that will go a long way toward making you a much better Magic player, whether you are a newbie or just made the Top 8 at a Pro Tour.
I find that the best defensive strategies attack. When you let the opponent dictate the terms of an interaction (“this game is about my Jitte“) you have to play by his rules; you may mistakenly enter a mindset where you believe that the game revolves around some key permanent he uses to threaten you, even when it only looks that way, or only is that way because you let it. You grasp for even sub-optimal methods of answering that permanent in the vain hope that its removal is, like Love in the Beatles song, all you need. The problem is that when the opponent controls the initiative, you can’t hope to win with one-for-ones.
At the end of the day, templating an existing archetype isn’t done just because you like certain cards better than the ones that are accepted in particular deck types; templating is done specifically to gain a legitimate strategic advantage in a matchup. It is successfully accomplished by understanding what threat cards are in the decks you expect, and by correctly answering those threat cards using mana efficient and consistent means. This build of White Weenie just does that by consistently holding the ground against opposing aggressive decks while providing a stronger late game via Spirit bombs. Other White decks can’t win fights, fail to remove whole classes of your key permanents even when their bombs are online.
Last week, michaelj gave the Star City Premium community a New Classic of Magic literature. “One of your best articles ever, Flores. I have bookmarked this article for re-reading before every tournament,” wrote fellow Premium author Jamie Wakefield. This week, the man who asked “Who’s the Beatdown?” applies the same devotion to Kamigawa Block Constructed, including not just one, but two, templated decks!
I think of Magic as a battle of percentages. The easiest place we can see the percentages that define who wins what games is in deck matchups themselves, where Mind’s Desire is too quick for StOmpY and Tooth and Nail can outlast the average Mono-Blue Control… But the matchups themselves are not the only places where this math tocks and ticks; it just so happens that these are the only percentages that most Internet articles typically address. But there are other percentages in Magic, and you might just learn that deck matchups are not even necessarily the most important.
“One of your best articles ever Flores. I have bookmarked this article for re-reading before every tournament.” – JWakefield
“Amazing stuff Flores. I really feel as if I bettered myself by reading this article. Premium just paid for itself for the 2,341st time.” – misterorange
“This is one of the classics folks.” – cupofjoe
What did michaelj end up playing at Regionals? How did he do? Why, after all these years, is he still looking to The Great One for inspiration in his play? The answers to all these questions and more are just a click away.
In today’s article, Flores curses the ground Wakefield and his Joshie Green deck walk on, tells you what his metagame choice for Regionals would be, and goes to extensive lengths to explain his Hall of Fame ballot.
We’re one week away from the biggest Standard tournament of the year – are you ready? Flores will be participating in his tenth Regionals, and today he shares some of the key lessons that he has learned over the years while qualifying, and helping his friends qualify, for U.S. Nationals.
Hot on the heels of Terry Soh’s Troll and Nail sideboard revolution, michaelj goes into some detail about those extra fifteen cards you get to play with in up to 66% of your games. What’s the difference between a sideboard Flores likes and one that gets the boot? The answers are inside.
Is Thoughts of Ruin a major format changer or yet another overhyped card that won’t see much play? That’s what michaelj is out to investigate today, building a series of test decks and then slamming them up against his Regionals gauntlet as hard as he can.
One of the things that strikes me as odd in Constructed decks — and Standard decks in particular — is the lack of Two-Headed Dragons. I often consider different cards to be “good” than most players, but Two-Headed Dragon seems like an obvious omission to me. So why aren’t more people playing it… and more importantly, why should you be playing it?
When looking at a new Standard season, it’s always a good idea to peak back at the previous year’s Block Constructed Pro Tour and see what ideas you can take from that tournament. Today Flores uses Masashiro Kuroda’s winning deck from Kobe and turns it into what may once again be one of the best decks in the format.
What do Jon Finkel, Control Magic, Boil, and Spectral Shift have in common? Flores explains it all today, as he focuses on one of the critical challenges players will face in the upcoming Constructed season – Winning the Sideboard War.
Did you ever notice that certain decks out there always seem to have cards moving from place to place… It’s not accurate to call what these decks do card drawing per se; their focus, or advantage if that is the element in question, is not based on bulk or even necessarily qualitative card advantage. Like sharks, these decks need to move in order to live… Should they stop, they don’t typically get up again. That’s the topic we will be discussing today, along with a look back at some great decks in history that have exhibited these traits.
