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AuthorTalen Lee

Talen Lee is a dedicated casual player who is often at a loss for nice things to say about himself. Owning a long-standing interest in the theory of the game since his inception, he nonetheless is quite happy to say 'Rar' when he turns his creatures sideways. Talen hasn't yet been arrested for stabbing forum-dwellers in the neck with a fork.

Tact or Friction — Rock Garden

Rock deck owners never put the deck away. They don’t. We just quietly have it, tucked behind all the others, in its own little deck box. It’s almost always got special sleeves, too. Not too new, don’t want people thinking we’re sleeving it up for the next tournament. That’d be silly, because, you know, Rock’s No Good Right Now. But like your favorite dancing shoes, or that embarrassing shirt with the slogan, or that beanie your grandmother gave you and you just can’t bring yourself to get rid of, you keep it.

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Tact or Friction — Broken Pieces

I have a handful of bones today. Bits and pieces of decks that might have a full structure if you can find them. Nuts and bolts, structures that I’ve been busy bashing against one another, trying to find the right angle at which they become round pegs. Then, once I have properly-functioning not-good-enough decks, I can waste my time trying to make them good enough to compete in metagame of square holes.

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Tact or Friction — Curio City

I have been making Curio decks up and down since my first outing with the card, over a year ago. A simple, mana-free engine that R&D costed just out of the “danger range,” the card can be the glue for so many other decks. As Vanishing and Echo were added to the Standard pool, the possible options for the Curio Use just went up.

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Tact or Friction — All Things Nice

How many people would Craig Jones have drinking his villainous Kool-Aid (and trust me, it is villainous), if this had been his Shining Moment?

9:28 MadProfessor plays Char targeting PimpHat
9:29 Turn 9: MadProfessor.
9:29 MadProfessor: OMG OMG OMG OMG
9:29 MadProfessor plays Lightning Helix targeting PimpHat
9:30 PimpHat has lost the connection

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Tact or Friction — Breaking The Lore

When it comes to Black mana, you can do anything… whispers the ferryman, If you but pay enough. Green is the color of resources, but Black… Black is the color of exploiting resources. Give me enough Black mana and I will tear this world apart, render it as a silver platter, and upon it, lay the heads of thy enemies.

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Tact or Friction — Mistakes and Zhuangzi

Today, we’re going to talk about mistakes. We’re going to talk about why you make them, what they say about you, what you can do to stop them. And to get through that, we’re going to have to talk about why your brain stops working.

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Tact or Friction – Lost and Found

White hasn’t got a lot of ways to play at the big boy’s table. Historically, White Weenie has only been good when it’s been riding the back of Armageddon (a good disruption spell and a card-advantage spell). Hell, I see people putting Wrath in the sideboards of their White Weenie decks because other aggro decks are a problem. Not really a winning thought process…

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Tact of Friction — Clamoring For Bannings

Whenever a new set comes out, a crop of idiots — generally speaking — will come out and claim that several cards in the set need to be banned. Without Fail. I kid you not, we had people saying this about Coldsnap and Guildpact. This is working on the John Edwards model: You can guess wrong as many times as you like, provided you really make a noise about when you guess right.

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Tact or Friction – Desperately Seeking Planar Chaos

This month sucks. It’s one thing to change to a new format, meaning I can produce stuff routinely and be assured it’ll be going up. I’m still absolutely honored to be up here on this day… I just wish I had more to talk about. Due to the timing of this change, I’ve been caught in limbo. Everyone wants to talk about the new set — with a good reason — but I can’t, because nobody wants to hear more than one article on a new set borne out of complete inexperience (cunningly disguised as a set review).

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Tact or Friction – The Problem With Girls…

Continuing their trend of being unable to design a Green/Red creature, Wizards have decided to staple one legacy of crashing failure to another — designing a strong woman. Today, we’re going to talk about women. And we’re going to start… with boobs.

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Tact or Friction – Examining Planar Chaos

When I started playing Magic, Set Reviews were a dime a dozen. Writers, sensing easy material, would happily copy their word-count’s worth of extant material into a file and then run through it commenting in a flippant fashion on the cards that they didn’t care about, then have sparks of energy around the cards they really did want to talk about. As I started writing, I just assumed that Set Reviews were the Done Thing.

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Tact or Friction – The Problem With Planar Chaos

Eventually, someone’s going to notice that I’m being published on a Magic site. That’s going to be a bit awkward, given how I’ve been drifting away from the game since Time Spiral’s release. The good news is, the Mother Ship keeps deploying questions that I can answer, trumping up my forum responses to look like actual articles. They have the added virtue of being Magic-related.

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Better

There is one word that has been ill-defined through Magic’s history, and thoroughly abused in the process. What makes this remarkable is that the word is exceptionally common and in our daily parlance.

The word of which I speak is “better.”

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What Not To Do: Fish

If time has shown me one thing, it’s that I can identify a crap deck with relative ease, because I’m often stupid enough to put them together to see if they play. I’ve tried the Ratcatcher Deck, I’ve tried the Bombshell deck, and I even tried the Brooding Swallow. They’re not that good, but they are cheap.

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SCG Daily – Getting Mono: Green

The color pie has shifted over the five or six years of MTGO’s history; back when it started out, Invasion and Odyssey were the new kids on the block, and in that time, Blue was powerful. Blue had Fact or Fiction, twelve high-profile, playable counterspells ranging in multiple color combinations, and of course, all its raw power in the midsection. Green, on the other hand… not so much so.

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