In the third of this enlightening series, Richard shares his process for tournament deck selection. He waxes lyrical on the Metagame Circus, and breaks down a few myths regarding matchups and percentages.
Do you know how many bad-at-first-glance Magic cards are glossed over? A lot. They’re overcosted, or underpowered, or they just don’t seem to do anything. Set reviews will tell you these cards are bad.
Cards like… I dunno, say… Tooth and Nail?
There are strong decks, and there are pretty decks. Do you know the difference? When it comes to the crunch, what would you rather have… beauty or strength?
There are an awful lot of articles out there that deal with Constructed decklists. They explain what a deck does, why certain card choices were made, and how to sideboard against the top decks. If I were to write such an article about a Psychatog deck right now, no one would care. Extended season is over!
But this is a different kind of Constructed article. This is the story of a decklist: how my team started with one Psychatog list at the beginning of the season, tuned and updated it as the season progressed, and what we learned about innovation and deckbuilding strategy along the way.
Richard plays Mythbuster and dispels four common misconceptions of Magic. There are several pitfalls Magic players can fall into, and Richard helps you navigate towards a stronger game in today’s article!
Many of you have enjoyed reading the trials and trevails of one Richard Feldman and his attempts to qualify for the Pro Tour. We’ll spoil this one a bit for you and tell you that he once again made the Top 8, but did he qualify? You’ll have to check inside for details on that and the 4-1-1 on his suggestions for improving your game in future PTQ seasons.
Lifegain gets a bad rap. Really, it does. Those of us who started off as casual players remember one of the first things we learned when moving to a competitive scene is that Lifegain Sucks. So what would you say if I told you there was a potentially tier 1 deck for States that attempts to abuse lifegain to kill your opponent?
I was excited to see Green/Black as one of the guilds that received focus for Ravnica, but everyone keeps trying to make the same old Green and Black deck. You know… the one that has been a tier two deck for the last five years or so? Making this great color combination tier one requires some ingenuity and thinking outside the box instead of going through the same old motions season after season. Let’s see just what the new set has to offer, shall we?
Today tricky Richard Feldman teaches your children to make huge amounts of profit by starting a numbers game at their local high school. Er, wait. Check that. This article is actually all about teaching you to build better Constructed decks. When do you want 2 copies of a card? When do you want 4? At what point should you be slapping one-ofs in your Friday Night Magic deck? Richard explores these questions and comes up with some rather insightful answers.
After a very disappointing 1-2 finish at the first Gen Con PTQ with his deck of choice, Richard completely changes decks with surprising results. What deck did he choose and did he manage to take home a blue envelope? The answers to these questions and more are inside.
I’m going to skip out on the tournament report this week, because the tournament was…well, a disaster. I had bad
draws, played some of the worst Magic I’ve played in years, and thoroughly deserved to go home early. That’s fine by
me, because I’ve been looking for a break in the action for awhile now to talk about a few things.
Last week I made the semifinals of a PTQ in Cost Mesa, CA, playing a Heartbeat of Spring/Gifts Ungiven deck I worked on with Rob Owen. Being an absolute mastermind when it comes to deck titles, I dubbed this creation Rob.dec. After the results of GP: Minneapolis, I was still convinced the deck was strong enough to qualify with, so I brought it to another PTQ in Mesa, Arizona. What follows is the story of that tournament, the lessons we learned from it, and the latest iteration of the infamous Rob.dec.
Last week I took Tsuyoshi Fujita’s deck to a PTQ with practically no preparation, and posted a lackluster 3-2-1 finish. The main thing I took away from the tournament was a newfound respect for Manriki-Gusari in the war for Jitte advantage. Simply put, it is almost impossible for slow decks without Manriki-Gusari to obtain Jitte advantage over fast decks that have it. This caused me to abandon Fujita’s deck and the deck I ended up playing this time around was a bit goofy, but turned out to be highly effective.
I tend not to think about Constructed decks until we are well into the season. Usually, I will give the environment time to settle down into a smallish gauntlet of decks, figure out what makes those decks tick, and then write up a deck designed to do well against that gauntlet. But this time, I wanted to go to Los Angeles so badly that I charged into the environment without any real testing… and I discovered some very important things.
My favorite Magic format of all time was the briefly infamous Extended environment following Pro Tour: New Orleans (also known as Pro Tour: Tinker) last season. That format was crazy. Vastly undercosted artifacts and Tinkers were everywhere. Entire games were decided by turn 3 or 4. Kai Budde lost a game in the Pro Tour to a turn 1 combo kill. I loved that format, but that environment is not what I’m here to talk about today. No, today I’ve come to discuss an even more degenerate tournament: Pro Tour: Philadelphia. Say what, son?
