SCG Daily: My London, Part Two
When we left off yesterday, I was fifteen, stupid, and had just enough money to be a danger to myself. Money doesn’t make you smart though, so I stopped buying packs after my first trade-rape experience…
SCG Daily: “My London, Part One”
To a lot of you, I’m probably an unknown quantity; I’m a writer who’s recently appeared “on the scene” here on StarCityGames.com on the Premium side, seemingly out of nowhere if you didn’t already know the story. For those of you who don’t know me or my personal back story, that seems like the place to start.
Magical Hack: Ninth Edition and Standard
The changeover from Eighth Edition Standard to Ninth Edition Standard may not have an effect on the upcoming U.S. National Championships, but it is promising to make some waves for the World Championships. What has gone missing is every bit as important as what has come back, but I’m happy to see an impending massive change to the cards that make Standard work the way it does, and not so very sad to see some of the things lost along the way disappearing, such as Plow Under.
Magical Hack: Running With Numbers
Last week, when I left off, I’d intended to go into greater detail about my thoughts on control-oriented decks in Kamigawa Block Constructed, but in between there seems to have been a highly relevant Grand Prix that sums up all of the musing I’ve been doing on re-working a Splice-based control deck. We will get to talking about control decks in good time, but with the availability of excellent information being released every week in the form of PTQ Top Eight decklists, and a recent shift in the metagame to focus extremely on the White Weenie and Black Hand beatdown decks, I felt it important enough to interrupt what I had otherwise intended to talk about.
Magical Hack: Kamigawa Block, The Early Weeks
The first few weeks of a Block Constructed PTQ season are usually very interesting to watch, especially as the cards from the third set start to permeate the decks from the Pro Tour prior to the third expansion. This time around, we have progressed quite a bit on some of our archetypes of old, with at least one new “good deck” coming out of the mix thanks to the Saviors of Kamigawa cards. The first new deck is “Black Hand,” the black weenie beatdown with fattie back-up deck that is sporting such Saviors hits as O-Naginata, Hand of Cruelty, and Raving Oni-Slave… and frankly, I think people who play the deck need to make a vital choice as to how to build it.
The Crimes Of Kamigawa Block
With the end of a truly relevant Standard season, it’s time to settle in and take a look at Champions of Kamigawa Block Constructed with both the Pro Tour: Philadelphia results and the addition of Saviors of Kamigawa to the mix. The decks that you’ll be playing will hopefully be based on the cards that help break the rules of the game…. and taking a look at all three sets for Constructed-quality cards of this nature will probably tell you about the decks that you’ll be playing.
Magical Hack: Decision 2005!
After setting the metagame and then breaking it down again in his previous articles, today Sean gives you three metagame decks to choose from, each one a bit off the beaten path. With so many new decks and new builds coming to the fore in the last week, can you afford not to read these articles?
Timmy, Johnny, and Spike Meet Wakefield, Flores, and Zvi
In the past few articles, we’ve looked over a lot of potential growth decks, and pored over very dry statistics about pre-Saviors Standard. The summation of all of this is to hope to learn how to play post-Saviors Standard, by means of analyzing the situation at hand and learning the rules of deckbuilding that are forced by the cards in the format. The most powerful cards in the format dictate how you play it, and the strongest sets of synergy rise to the top and form the decks we play. Today we’re going to look at your options for tweaking the best decks and turning them into unstoppable killing machines.
Magical Hack: Saviors in Standard, Part Deux
Since he returned to Magic writing, Sean McKeown has produced some of the most knowledgeable and useful articles on the Regionals metagame seen this year, and this article is no different. It does however, include some spicy meatballs in terms of decklists, including two proposed Celestial Kirin Control decks and a first draft at breaking Enduring Ideal.
Magical Hack: Saviors in Standard
In my last article you saw the best of the old Type Two. Here’s an attempt to get from there into the realm of the new Type Two you’ll be seeing at Regionals. In order to do that, I intend to talk about every card from the new set I can see having a potential effect on the Standard metagame, either by altering a pre-existing deck or tempting the creation of a new deck.
Magical Hack: The Objective Best Deck in Standard
Every year one article is written that definitively sets the stage for the upcoming Regionals metagame, detailing what the field looks like, which decks are under- and over-rated, and picking the de facto king of the hill that is likely to dominate the U.S. tournaments. This year, Sean McKeown has written that article and those of you that somehow skip this article will find yourselves regretting that fact a month from now.
Ce Plus Change, Ce Plus Memes Choses
The return of Sean McKeown to regular writing curiously coincides with a return of obscure French article titles, moody song lyrics, and more Standard decklists than you can shake a stick at, including what Sean would be working on if he were playing in the Pro Tour: Philly LCQ this weekend.
Predator/Prey Relationships: A Modern Example of Flores’ Theory of Rogue Decks
The reason Flores’s article compelled this response is not just because Flores was outlining how rogue decks refuse to play bad cards, and how the goal of a rogue deck should be to carefully craft a predator/prey relationship with the targeted metagame, but because I felt I had an object lesson or two I could share, given my long experience with”going rogue.” And, more importantly for all you Regionals-watchers, I felt I could provide a modern example of the rogue playtester, complete with a new decklist for Regionals.
Anything Geordie Can Do, I Can Do Better!
While I have quit playing Magic, I have not quit playing Fish. I own seventy-five Magic cards, not counting stuff I haven’t managed to sell off yet because they are junk rares left over from our Team Sealed experience, and drafting to practice for the Pro Tour. And if Geordie thinks he’s being cute and rogue for the end of the Extended season, well, I was in line first.
Object Fixation: What A Worlds Mind’s Desire Deck Probably WON’T Look Like
I’ve been following the procession of articles on how to abuse Mind’s Desire in the current Extended format just in time for Worlds, and the question that keeps coming to mind is: How can people honestly expect to play silly tricks with Snap and Cloud of Faeries and expect the resulting deck to be good?