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AuthorMike Flores

Mike has written for The Duelist, The Sideboard, and MagicTheGathering.com and has returned to StarCityGames.com to continue his legacy. He is a championship deck designer and Magic theory pioneer.

The 2004 Championship Deck Challenge: Down and Dirty G/R

Magic: the Gathering Champs logoWelcome to Red Week!
This week is going to be fantastic. As you can see from today’s star spangled front page, we picked up Dan Paskins (and yet another National Champion in playtesting partner John Ormerod) for this project. When I started work on the Championship Deck Challenge, I crossed my fingers and hoped that Dan would sign up for the inclusion of basic Mountain and here he is. Dan will be discussing his Red deck early next week, but today I’m here to give you the results of my testing – a fresh G/R deck that tried to bridge the gaps between beating Affinity and Tooth and Nail.

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The 2004 Championship Deck Challenge – Flores Mono-Blue

Greetings Agents Flores, David-Marshall, Lebedowicz, Rider, and Ferraiolo. Welcome to our little deckbuilding challenge. This is your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Assignment #1
Build a U/W Deck. It can be control, combo, or aggro… just build the best deck that you can, test it for a week, and then write an article about that deck.

As always, if you are captured, StarCityGames.com will disavow any knowledge of you or your mission. We wish you the best of luck, now get cracking.

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Breaking the Format Three Times Over

What do Mike Flores and StarCityGames.com have in store for you in the weeks leading up to States? How can you get Mike to buy you a beer and introduce you to hot chicks? Is there anything on earth cuter than Flores’s baby? I’m not sure if he answers all these questions inside or not, but you don’t want to miss what we have planned for you and the site in the coming weeks!

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The Philosophy of Fire: Hybrid Strategies and That Dirty Combo Deck Feeling

During the Extended season of winter and spring 1999, Jamie Wakefield made a rather interesting observation. The dominant decks of the time was of course High Tide, but there were other decks of comparatively brief lifespan that also won very quickly; all of which were capable of a fourth turn kill. The thing is, during this extremely fast and high-powered format, even the mono-Red beatdown decks were getting into the act. Jamie’s observation? The burn decks were playing like combo decks. They had fast kills too, but they had to draw a certain way in order to get them.

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All About Tutors: the Preview Edition

I always wanted to write an article about how to correctly manipulate your library. It doesn’t come up so much any more, because the decks that have manipulation in Standard or even Mirrodin Block these days don’t really require a lot of strategic Tutor technique. Sylvan Scrying doesn’t typically compete with any other Tutor for mana in a turn, and it pretty much always goes for either a Cloudpost or a missing Urza’s Tower. Like what are you really going to play as a Tutor? What’s that you say? Gifts Ungiven is part Tutor, part Fact or Fiction? Lets take a look at exactly what this new Champions card does and figure out whether it’s any good at either task.

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Age of Mirrors

One of the really interesting aspects of Constructed Magic to me is how players approach similar deck matchups. Many of the biggest and most impressive Constructed tournaments in history – from Dave Price in LA to the stack of PT (and PC) Champs with R/G[/x] decks in the Top 8 of Kai’s Rebel Chicago – are defined by how great designers solve the riddle of the mirror. This article is going to be about trying to solve the riddle of the mirror in the current environment by examining how we have done so successfully in the past. And yes, yet again, Age of Mirrors comes with a Free Deck List Woo Hoo at the end.

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The Ted Knutson Dilemma: Barn!

Picture this: It’s Friday afternoon. You are driving around, quote,”the armpit of America” due its being the weekend of a Grand Prix to which you are traveling. All should be well… you have that super sexy Dragonmaster Brian Kibler at your side as you tour the highways of the East Coast; he turns a sexy scale does that Dragonmaster. All should be wellest… you look down at your vibrating mobile phone and caller ID tells you that the incoming is from none other than your hero, your hull, the man you just proclaimed the finest writer in the history of Magic: Michael J. Flores.

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Straight Shooting Mirrodin Block

Now with free Rogue Deck List! Recently Chad Ellis and others have published on a deck that I was working on (shh shh secretly) a while back. I will go into detail later as to why I disagree with a lot of what Chad thinks. First of all, here is my version…

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Selecting a Deck for Fun and Profit

Tournaments are rarely won by the player who had the cleverest deck. The reason rogue victories are so memorable is that they are uncommon and unexpected. We remember the Decree Deck, the Solution, Scrounger TurboLand, and so on because we expect victories in their breakout environments from other choices. Most of the time, tournaments are won by the luckiest players making the fewest mistakes, playing the best tuned versions of consistent archetype decks. But how do players select which decks, specifically, that they will bring?

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The Miser’s Guide to Savage Cheats

I am putting some of the most disgusting cheats out there for you to absorb. This is an Up, Up, Down, Down, B, A, Start quality cheat sheet. In one sense I think it might be a bad article to write because I am empowering people to cheat in a more sophisticated fashion, but I think that kind of damage is probably going to be minimal. Nothing you read in this article will transform you from an honest player into a cheater, even if it does help people who were going to cheat anyway to cheat more effectively. On the other hand, I think that a guide like this one will mostly be helpful, because if you don’t know about them, cheaters will abuse you savagely.

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Catachresis

Our opponents continue to out-open us, grabbing Form of the Dragon and Forgotten Ancient in Scourge, but it hardly matters. All I want to talk to Tim about is this crazy gamble he called in Legions. Canopy Crawler was the best card in the pack. I’ve taken it over Timberwatch Elf more than once! Not taking it – giving the opponents a chance to hate it – was a clear mistake. Or was it?

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Top of the Mountain: Your MD5 Cheat Sheet

No, I am not going to give you sample lists for all of the basic decks you can expect in the upcoming MD5. You can find those in anybody else’s article anywhere else. I wouldn’t be making the decks myself anyway (and if I were, I don’t know what use they would be to you for testing purposes). Instead, I am going to fast track you to the pinnacle of MD5 Inevitability.

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How to Make a Deck

There are lots of different ways to go about building a deck. There are active decks and reactive decks. Active decks are in a sense easier to build because you don’t have to take as many factors and cards into consideration; if your plan comes online, you win. Reactive decks, especially those that plan to win over a very long game, have to consider all kinds of cards, some of them jank. There are natural decks and there are predator decks. There are decks that are based on earlier designs and brand spanking new ideas. But today, we are going to build a reactive Standard deck based on a new card that I find interesting. What is it? You’ll have to click to find out.

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The Next Level

Last time, I threatened to do something this week that would outline one method for you to reach the elusive Next Level. For the vast bulk of you out there who plug away at tournaments, whether they are local Type II events, Trials, PTQs, or whatever else… this one is for you.

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