Dissatisfied with the current crop of Legacy decks, Sean took his own homebrew to Philadelphia with no byes and finished just short of Day 2. What deck did he play and why does he think more players should look into it? The answers are only a click away.
Three hundred and thirty players. Nineteen Rounds. Sean McKeown breaks down the entirety of Pro Tour: Los Angeles deck-by-deck and match-by-match. Which archetypes had the best winning percentage? Which were the weakest? And what two major (and still-popular) archetypes are dead, dead, dead? If you’re playing Extended this season, you must read this article!
In the forums, someone told me that I was obsessed with Cabal Therapy in my article on Extended… But of the most-played cards at the Pro Tour, Therapy finished behind only Forest, Island, Mountain, Chrome Mox, and Bloodstained Mire. Likewise, there are a few key cards that define the Legacy format — and instead of trying to predict the decklists that will appear, I’m going to step through the most powerful cards to see how they shape the environment.
States has come and gone, but Extended PTQs started Sunday, so it’s time to shift focus to the newly-rotated format where almost broken things can happen. Today Sean takes a look at the Extended metagame and provides eight starter decklists for those of you looking to do battle in the next couple of weeks.
My goal for this week is to weave all of these things together for a look at the States metagame and the choices that are going to be present and inherent in each archetype. I’ll also give a few hints as to how the key contenders match up against each other, and we can go from there into creating an assumed picture of the metagame as well as the suggestions that can come from it as to how to succeed. I like looking at the whole picture and figuring out the so-called “rules of the format”, and that’s something that may be profitable here as well. It may also be highly premature, so we’ll see how firm our conclusions are before taking that particular step.
For the 2005 Deck Challenge, I chose some pretty cruddy jobs: mono-Green, Green/White, these are not the things you looked to play when you saw Ravnica and the shiny toys like Circu, Dimir Lobotomist and Lightning Helix. While I worked on those decks, I was brewing an idea: using the tools at hand, figuring out what a truly nasty Green deck could be capable of.
What I’m looking to do here is a little bit different than most articles because this is a Choose Your Own Adventure article series for looking at Standard in the weeks leading up to States. I’ll start with three decks, one aggressive, one controlling, and one with a combinatory element, to be discussed, tweaked, and (perhaps by some adventurous few beyond just myself) tested if they look interesting. It’s an opportunity to allow for an exchange of ideas, among people who might be interested in using the Forums… but who might not be interested in contributing to any one particular thread, as elements of the deck in question hadn’t caught their interest. Consider this a place where ideas can change hands, and profit everyone involved, so long as people are willing to ride along with the experiment.
The obvious starting point is to take White Weenie and throw a few other cards in it, benefitting from the good mana making two-drop Elephants possible. Rather than question immediately why we’re looking at the Selesnya Guild instead of the Boros Legion, we’ll presume that good beats may yet prove to be worthwhile enough to make this a viable consideration. Fat beats burn sometimes after all, and so the G/W deck might beat the W/R deck, for all we know.
Teddy Card Game’s challenge to many writers on this here fine website was to participate in the Championship Deck Challenge, some of which are easy hurdles (“Talk about Black/Green decks for Standard!”) and others of which are something more difficult. Or at least less popular, as it would seem. My mission, as I have chosen it for myself, is to take a hard look at some of the unloved archetypes that are inevitably going to have some kind of footprint on the format, be they the stomping boot of progress or the mangled road-kill of first-iteration stinkers. This week, I’ll be talking about Mono-Green, or “the color that R&D forgot.
“Oh look,” you say, resignedly. “Another Legacy testing article. Yippee. Sigh. Why can’t anyone write about cool decks in that format?” Well do we have a treat for you. Today McKeown discusses skeletons for four different decks that are distinctly off the beaten path. Looking for a port of Fujita’s Sneak Attack deck? He’s got it. Want to play something as ridiculous and outrageous as Dragonstorm? He’s got it. If you like strange but potentially competitive decks in interesting new formats, then this is the article for you.
Sean takes a look at the swirling mist of information that’s come out for Ravnica so far and attempts to determine some basic things about the set and how it will play out in Limited. This isn’t your normal premium fare, but it’s pretty interesting food for thought.
As we come up on the very last weekend of Kamigawa Block Constructed, we have also passed the first weekend of Standard after the Core Set rotation and the two combine to tell interesting tales. What should you be aware of as the Block Season wraps up and what new decks have been unveiled in the last couple of weeks? What do the latest foreign Nationals results tell us about where Standard is currently and where it will be once Mirrodin Block rotates out? The answers to these questions and more are only a click away.
By the time of the Pro Tour, I’d gotten back into reading articles enough to have a fairly high understanding of what was going on in the Limited format we were testing for, and further exceptions had to be made: “I quit Magic, except for forty-card decks”. We made Day Two of the Pro Tour, in at 4-2 where the year before we were out at 1-3 and played on to 3-3, then lost during the draft. And lost hard. Probably because I was on a different page than the rest of the universe for a while, and thought the seating order and flow of packs was reversed, meaning I was trying to force entirely the wrong archetype from my seat, having practiced with one thing and then played another entirely.
Teaming with Seth and Kevin reminded me why I played Magic, because of my friends and the experiences we shared. Going to qualifiers with two other players and having our fates in the tournament intertwined was a remarkable experience.
Shortly after landing this job, I began my reign of terror as a writer, pushing the envelope to write a weekly strategy column while occasionally slinging mud, getting people to start to read the Neutral Ground website for columns, tournament reports, and other information as the newborn site grew into a popular website.
