Friday, June 5th – Watching the metagame change around Grand Prix: Barcelona, it seemed to me that the biggest shifts were perception rather than reality. We stopped kidding ourselves that Faeries wasn€™t good, for example, now that the metagame had grown more mature and we could prove that the things we were being afraid of just weren€™t as terrifying as we thought.
Friday, May 29th – There is something so very clever about the Cascade Swans deck. Cascade is clearly at its most powerful when it is pure tutoring instead of merely card-and-mana-advantage but with a random effect generated on top of the spell, and one of the potential answers to doing this is to just play an awful lot of lands and not a lot of spells.
Friday, May 22nd – All of the buzz on the few days leading up to Regionals was somehow about Turbo-Fog. A Japanese Regionals tournament was won by a deck that confidently played 4x Holy Day, and the imagination of players everywhere was seemingly throwing off all sorts of sparks.
Friday, May 15th – Previous analysis for the Conflux Standard format showed that Cedric Phillips’ Red/White Kithkin deck was pretty much awesome, and one of the highest-competing decks in the format by the numbers. Success rates were dramatic for the few people who chose to play the deck at Pro Tour: Kyoto. But with the change of the format to include Alara Reborn, I asked a very simple question: what happens if we cut the Red for Black, and play Zealous Persecution?
Friday, May 8th – The road to Hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. The road to Regionals, however, is paved with good intentions and bad technology. With the release of Alara Reborn just last week and firmly shaking up the Standard metagame, you’ll see a lot of good decks mixed in with the bad…
Friday, May 1st – We’ve seen the Prerelease come and go, and excitement was had by all. At least one faithful reader noted that my advice from last week’s column (play first!) was a big help in his going 4-0 in his Prerelease flight, much to my delight, as I also saw more established players who were coasting in to rely on their overall experience to carry the day then choose to draw first and then lose some matches.
Friday, April 24th – Whenever Prerelease time rolls around, I like spend my column on the before taking a look at the ins and outs of that upcoming format, taking advantage of the fact that my weekly deadline is usually a day or two after the complete spoiler is compiled by mtgsalvation.com. As of the time of this writing it is Wednesday afternoon and we have 145 out of 145 cards spoiled, and while there is no guarantee that each and every card has the exact correct text it is still more than enough to work with in order to figure out how Shards of Alara-Alara Reborn Limited is going to feel.
Friday, April 17th – With just over one week left until the Alara Reborn prerelease, we’ve started to see a good chunk of the new cards from MagicTheGathering.com and other official spoiler sources, and what we see so far is cause for excitement. If you are spoiler-averse and have been keeping away from seeing the cards before their release, this is not the article for you. Feel free to check back here at Magical Hack in two weeks’ time, as we’ll be taking advanced looks at Alara Reborn until the prerelease!
Friday, April 10th – In Extended so far, I have found I have a very high variance in my results: either I am very much on the ball and am pushing up around the top of the leaderboards, or I am not quite able to wrap my head around the game and make a ‘trivial’ mistake which costs me a match.
Friday, April 3rd – With the Extended season near to wrapping up, my love affair with the Faerie Wizards continues, as does the madcap plan of racing around from qualifier to qualifier. Rather than chase old information, I thought it would be more interesting if I were to take a look at Shards Block Constructed…
Friday, March 27th – By now, it’s Friday and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d seen this past weekend’s results updated on the MagicTheGathering.com weekly update of Top 8 results. I certainly like to discuss them as part of my analysis of the metagame, and it never hurts to congratulate the people who turn up with interesting results that get you thinking about new and interesting card choices.
Friday, March 20th – With the previous two events of note covering Legacy, Standard, and Shards/Conflux Limited, it seems we finally return to focusing on Extended this past weekend with a Grand Prix in Hanover, Germany. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
Friday, March 13th – This week we’re going to look at the recent state of Extended, and see what the season looks like with just about a month left to play, and an intensive PTQ schedule still on my calendar to give me plenty of chances at seeing the new girlfriend in a bikini on a beach in Hawaii. Let’s be honest, our motivations are what our motivations are, and if you can alter your motivations a bit to give yourself even more desire to bash someone’s brains with your deck at a PTQ, how can that be a bad thing?
Friday, March 6th – While I would be content to talk about playing Faeries in Extended till I am blue in the face, another near-miss at a Top 8 cannot hardly compare to the Pro Tour this past weekend in Kyoto…
Friday, February 27th – With the rest of the U.S. having had a nice long head start on the Extended qualifier season, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to analyze and playtest… but not actually take a weapon of my choosing into battle at the PTQ level. With a certain irony following last week’s article, I sleeved up Faeries with zero sideboard cards pinpointed at Affinity, neither playing the robotic overlords nor caring over-much if I faced the matchup.
