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AuthorTed Knutson

Ted Knutson is the former Managing Editor of StarCityGames.com and is widely respected as one of the most knowledgable members of the Magic community.

Mixed kNuts: Love’s Labour Found

My original desire to write came from the joy I felt in reading other people’s articles, but I’d never had a meaningful discussion with other people about their writing. All I knew was the BS that roiled about in my head until it became sentences on the screen; what other people went through was a mystery. So I asked the four best writers in the business what they did, and I compiled a Hall of Fame for the best Magic writers everm complete with today’s best writers who haven’t quite made it yet and the writers who’d make it if they wrote more often.

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Mixed kNuts: The Slightly Less Successful Ralphie Report

It takes a”special” player to be at 4-0 with a solidly-tested and built rogue deck, and then throw away the next two matches while being up a game in each. Working your ass off for two months, only to be done in by your own poor decision-making skills, is not a pleasant thing to have happen – but it happened to me. This is my story…

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Dead Presidents: Heeeey Yoooou Guuuuuys!

I talked to Carl a bit after I had made my decision on the winners in order to find out what modifications he made to the deck over the last few weeks. He told me he hadn’t changed the maindeck (there was too much synergy in the build he originally submitted), but he did provide a sideboard that represents a virtual transformational sideboard against other control decks like Tog, MBC and Slide.

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Mixed kNuts: Aw Yes Indeed, It’s Fun Time

I was all prepared to do a big blowout article like I usually do, bringing your ass fully up on all the latest tech… Until I read Scott Johns’ article yesterday and realized he covered everything. So now that you’ve been brought fully up-to-date on what the metagame looks like, I’m going to take a look at how to attack each of the decks Scott covered. If you wanted to go about disrupting their game plan, how exactly would you do it?

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Mixed kNuts: Choose My Regionals Deck!

Ted’s contest has been screwed by random circumstance twice – once by getting it in just a little too late for a Friday posting, and once by the technical problems we were having yesterday morning. So let’s try this again: HELP TED SELECT THE DECK HE’LL PLAY AT REGIONALS AND WIN A FOIL!

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Mixed kNuts: Warrior Needs Food… Badly! Or The Required Regionals Gauntlet

What the hell are you supposed to do with a metagame that runs at least six decks deep? The smart answer is, of course,”Find the best deck and play it.” But you have to ask: What is the best deck? Is it the deck that has made the most Top 8s so far? Is it the deck that features the best matchups against the field? Is it something else entirely? How about we look at our testing gauntlet and see if we can find the answers, shall we?

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Mixed kNuts: Surviving The Red/Green Menace

Let’s face it: R/G in its current incarnation is a menace, and it will be everywhere at Regionals. IT. MUST. BE. STOPPED!
Actually, that was just me being overdramatic, but the idea has merit. Exactly what do you have to do in order to stop R/G?

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Dead Presidents: The Top Five

Ted offered you $50 for your best secret Regionals tech – and now he’s going to let you choose the winner! Five strange, but potentially-abusable decks have been chosen – so read the top five and see what the authors had to say about them!

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Mixed kNuts: Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

Jose Emmanuel Argao did a great deal of playtesting to prove that his U/W Mobilization deck was better than his detractors were saying it was, and the results seem to indicate that he was correct. However, his methodology still has some serious problems, so I’m going to point out the variables that can skew your results and ways to limit the effect they have on your testing, all in order to figure out the answers to the big question:”What is the best deck?”

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Windborn (And Windy) Musings

I’m here to talk about two different Windborn Opposition decks that I’ve tested in the last couple of weeks, one of which came straight out of Jimmy Bean’s nugget, while the other one was carefully distilled by me through hours of painstaking research and number-crunching. It went 7-2 over the course of two tournaments last weekend, but it’s still not very good – but what that 7-2 really tells you is that there’s a lot of power inherent in the good parts of the deck…

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Mixed Knuts: How To Piss Off Prospective Employers

Ted’s”Win $50 For Your Deck contest is almost over, and he wants to remind you that it’s there. Oh, and he wants to give you his statistical analysis of draft colors from Chicago, and to tell you what color skyrocketed in popularity in Onslaught drafts, and to complain about The Sideboard’s reporting. Oh, and hot chicks.

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Win $50 In Cold Hard Cash For Your Best Post-Legions Type II Deck

Here’s the deal: I know you have tech. I can see it in your eyes, in the way you walk, the way you flip your long, greasy, scraggly hair.
I want to buy it from you.

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Mixed kNuts: How To ‘Role Deep’ In Standard

The Graveborn Identity deck that’s been floating around for the last couple of weeks is interesting – but as Jimmy Bean said to me, it plays”Candy Ass” cards like Words of Worship that are absolutely horrid, if somehow – inconceivable as it might seem! – your Muse actually dies. Then all you have is a really bad enchantment on the board that allows you to not draw cards in order to gain life.

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The Mixed kNuts Doubleheader: Me And Sleazy In The Big Easy, And I Got My Mind On My Money And My Money On My Drafts

When you publicly bitch about Wizards on the front page of one of the Big Three Magic websites, you’re going to get attention. When Wizards actually steps up to the plate and provides you with the information you were complaining about, you better be ready to come correct and cough up the analysis…. And so I did. Here’s everything I can figure out about Onslaught draft from Draft 3 of Chicago, as well as the story of what it was exactly that I showed to the ladies in New Orleans.

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An Open Letter to The Sideboard Staff – Post the Damned Decklists!

For Constructed events, all decklists are posted. This allows the community to dissect the results from a tournament and figure out which deck did the best statistically against the field, which matchups proved to be particularly difficult for certain decks, and which decks were just bad. Arguably, more people Draft than play Constructed tournaments – and yet they never get the sort of analysis that Constructed gets because you don’t provide us with the decklists.

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