AuthorSean McKeown

Looking at the Hideaway lands, it’s very easy to misinterpret their values. The Blue one is reasonably easy to trigger in Limited, but a good deal closer to useless in sixty-card formats, while the Black one more or less seems terrible all around… though sadly I can confess to having won a game with it out of nowhere in a draft, because it required my opponent to be an idiot in order for me to do so.

Having looked at Standard last week at least through the lens of “something I would be happy playing,” this week I thought I’d take the opportunity to have a deeper look at Lorwyn Limited. I’d noted with some frustration while writing my article last week that the format I’d chosen, following up on the most recent Grand Prix, was choking on the limited information that is always a problem for a Grand Prix you do not yourself attend…

Last week, we began looking at the most recent format of relevance to tournament play – Lorwyn Sealed Deck. It only makes sense to follow up on that subject the week after a North American Grand Prix in the format, especially with the PTQ season hitting its stride as we hit Thanksgiving weekend. Not being a turkey fan myself, I’m more interested in the Magic weekend that a few days off will provide…

Harnessing the forces of randomness to your benefit is at best a difficult task. When you could find yourself thrown anywhere on the map, as we often are in Sealed Deck, having a well-developed set of skills to find your way to where you want to be can serve you quite well. A good grasp of the guidelines of the format will take you farther than an innate, static ranking of card strengths. All too often you’ll hear a story about a player who opened Card X and chose to warp their card pool to fit it…

I held out writing this article as long as I could in the hopes of having access to the States decklists to begin a thorough metagame analysis… but it’s Halloween, and I’ve lost several days of prime article-writing time. I must put analyzing States and Standard off another week and instead have a look at a pair of Grand Prix tournaments that have passed by recently. In the hype for most players to prepare for States, these have gone largely unnoticed, and having a look at the available information for trends might have some benefits.

We all know what it’s like to go on tilt. It’s just one of those things that happens sometimes, often feeling entirely beyond our control, and at its worst it can pervade how we look at and feel about the game. I’ve been on tilt for a few weeks now, and the game has really been all about minimizing the damages I do to myself outside the game (i.e. financially) because I am going to make these blunders…

With the State Championships right around the corner in two weeks’ time, it’s very easy to forget that even before States we will be seeing the start of the next Pro Tour Qualifier season. Starting as early as a week from tomorrow, players around the world are going to start having the joy of deciphering piles of 75 Lorwyn cards to craft playable Limited decks, and then navigating the tribal ebbs and flows of a draft to earn a flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Those of you who are actively trying to avoid spoilers can back away from your “Back” buttons. We aren’t going to talk about a single unofficially-previewed card… in anything resembling its actual form. I for one don’t feel like it is my place to make the decision to spoil or not to spoil for our good proprietor Pete Hoefling, and every time I write one of my prerelease preview articles I hear Groundskeeper Willie’s voice screaming “Hush, boy, d’ye want to get sued?”

Debates have flared recently as to how to “properly” design a deck, with the bold statement that the number four is the “correct” number for most developed decklists. Simple in concept, this belief is grounded upon the perception that an ideal deck is one that is able to play the same sort of game over and over again with little variation, and the best way to get the same game over and over again is to use the same cards over and over again.