Friday, April 4th – With Shadowmoor just a few weeks away, it seemed apropos to put together a final look at drafting Lorwyn before it disappeared from view entirely. Originally I had shied away from looking at Lorwyn-Lorwyn-Morningtide (LLM) draft too heavily, because I did an awful lot of losing early on by trying to force things I didn’t understand off the preconceived notion that the new cards worked a certain way.
Friday, March 28th – With the ability to finally turn my eye away from Extended, it seems there is a rather interesting Standard metagame out there if you look for it. Unfortunately, I’d looked at the Standard metagame and neatly categorized it just like everyone else has, and came up with two different potential solutions to the current metagame: Merfolk, and Blue-based Control.
Friday, March 21st – It should come as absolutely no surprise at all that when it comes to playing Grand Prix: Philadelphia, I was going to side with the Goblins. With a little twisting and a little tuning, I’d arrived at the list I was happy with, changing one little thing here and another little thing there until I was pointed exactly where I wanted to be.
Friday, March 14th – Rather than anything deep and expansive about any one format, it seems I’ve got a lot on my plate to do with a lot of different formats. Morningtide is now finally available on Magic Online, and last weekend’s Grand Prix featured the Standard format while this weekend’s Grand Prix features Extended once again. So we are going to look a little bit at Standard, Extended, and Draft, because each has some interesting progress going on.
Friday, March 7th – While we could very easily focus upon Extended coming up on a week or so until Grand Prix: Philadelphia, I fear the benefits of a further analysis of the field and brainstorming up decklists isn’t the hot-button topic of the week for tournament play. Rather than focus on the now of Extended… or worse yet, continue the stream of Goblin-centric articles… I find it very interesting to look into the changes to Extended set rotation and how they will affect us for the immediate future.
Friday, February 29th – The Goblin tribe in modern Extended is an unusual beast. Recent printings have given Goblin players new tools if they want to use them… but change is always a contentious thing for some, and thus we see decklists with numbers like “1x Frogtosser Banneret†or “2x Frogtosser Banneret.†People like what they are comfortable with, and tend to not respond well to change… even changes for the better.
Friday, February 22nd – This past weekend we saw the first Pro Tour of the 2008 season come a-knocking, and the events of the weekend seemed quite impressive. After a few near-misses at the Pro Tour camp, where even Day 2 wasn’t in the offering, it seems that the fire has come back to one Jonny Magic as he went from 2-1 to 16-1-1 between the end of Round 3 and the final play of the event.
Friday, February 15th – If you sit down at a tournament believing you are worse than your opponent, there should be very little surprise when the outcome of the match decrees that you were right. One of the simplest statements I found insightful is “If you always do as you’ve always done, you’ll always get as you’ve always got.” In my particular case, the “doing as I’ve always done” is “believing myself to be worse than my opponent.”
With the Pro Tour in Kuala Lumpur just one week away, practice for this Limited format has been fast and furious, without the benefit of Morningtide on Magic Online to enable it in digital form. The local group of drafters and serious Pro Tour players has been focusing pretty strongly on getting as many Lorwyn-Lorwyn-Morningtide drafts in as they can, and the first thing I learned about the format is that it is very different than the triple-Lorwyn drafts we’ve grown so used to playing.
With some solid ideas under my belt last week, my mission should I choose to accept it was to learn what to do with the modern Goblin tribe. We are all pretty used to seeing the goblins of Onslaught in action, but these new kids on the block raise a lot of questions and keep yammering about their aunties when we try to peg their role in the scheme of things.
Extended is a lively and interesting format, by all appearances… though some would add the caveat “if you like playing The Rock mirror match†to that, after the first two weeks of PTQs. The truly broken stuff you can do is held in check by the ease with which it can be attacked and by its overall inconsistency in the face of the excessive mulligans, and for the most part everyone is “playing fair†and interacting with their opponent in the first few turns.
Lorwyn Sealed Deck and Lorwyn Booster Draft were seen by some as ‘too repetitive,’ ‘inbred,’ and ‘boring’ because they felt you always had to focus on one of the same eight archetypes with nary a thought slipped in edgewise to distract us from that hyper-attenuated focus of “Tribe Matters.†Sure, you could have your preferences… after all, who doesn’t like Faeries or Merfolk if they are plentiful?
Often, I pride myself on my ability to figure out what is important to a Constructed format, and build around that in a complicated dance of design and re-design. I seek to find a deck that I am comfortable with that I believe will do well. Usually this works… often enough that, among other things, it got me a weekly column, back in the Stone Age of the Internet when our caveman forebears sent each other stone tablets carved with Uck Norris jokes.
With the first week of open Extended gaming upon us, I wanted to step back a little from the churning of deck concepts to have a look at the “why” of doing things in this format. Conceptually, it’s a busy format with a wide metagame, but there are certainly trends that deserve attention when we try to pick a deck (or design a new one) to run through a PTQ. In a format where you can arguably play anything, with five colors of mana at your disposal, big mana available with just a bit of work to get it, there are two competing factors: the fact that any deck can be potent, and the fact that any new strategy has to compete heavily for “room” at the Extended table.
I’ve been goofing around a lot lately, building and designing decks for the Extended format, largely because I have no other way to occupy my mind. In brainstorming last week we came up with a varied set of decks to look at, with a peculiar Counterbalance-Tron deck and an approach at “Dragon Stompy” for the Extended metagame. Let’s see where we go today…
