This week, The Ferrett cracks open cards of such amazing power that he can mulligan down to four cards twice and almost pull out a win. Of course, that word “almost” is a bit tricky. Which also leads to the question of when you mulligan to four. But hey, that’s why we write articles, amiright?
This week, I opened a deck with some amazing synergy. Check this out!
Being able to recycle Galvanic Arc three times (as I did in one particularly entertaining game) will win any number of things. And it’s just plain fun.
It started as a joke. My opponent would plop down a Helium Squirter or an Aquastrand Spider, and with my next creature I’d grin and say, “Sure you don’t wanna give me a +1/+1 counter?” But what I did not do was ask him the same dang question for every single creature that he cast thereafter: “Wanna gimme a counter? Wanna gimme a counter? Wanna gimme a counter?”
As a casual player, I did a little soft-shoe in the store when I opened my Niv-Mizzet, that card-shootin’ dragon with the mostest… But I also opened not one, not two, but three Guildmages to help boost the power. And yet none of those Guildmages were Blue. What’s a playa to do?
The Ferrett struggles with – gasp – real life Magic as he awaits the release of MODO Dissension so he can crawl back into his cool, fluorescent-lit cave. And in doing so, he opens up a pack of cards that provide, as is depressingly usual, a host of options to play with but no strong singular theme….
At the prerelease, it all came down to fliers — lots of fliers, or lots of flier defense. Considering that this weekend had the release tournaments with two packs of juicy Dissension, I was not expecting that to change much.
When I started writing for StarCityGames, I was an intelligently ignorant fellow. I was well-versed in many aspects of Magic, but when it came to the things I was ignorant about, my vanity knew no bounds. And one of those things I did not comprehend was the Tournament Mentality.
My boss, Pete Hoefling, is a slave driver. What makes it all the more remarkable is that the slaves whip themselves. But why do we work so hard? Why does StarCityGames.com p0wnnz0r me so?
My minor in college was journalism, and I loved it. I’d taken every “newspaper writing” course I could lay my hands on, so I’d heard all about the problems involved with freedom of the press and the confidentiality of sources. But covering Pro Tour: New Orleans showed me another side of journalism, one that hadn’t been brought up in class, and it was only then that I realized why the news we see so uniformly bad.
As an editor, Team Academy was a painful experience. There’s nothing harder than publishing an article that you were proud of, only to see someone rip it to shreds for what were, at its core, pretty legitimate reasons. And it’s even harder when they refer to your site as “the scrub site” and make fun of you personally for being such an idiot.
This isn’t about Magic, or StarCityGames.com, or even necessarily me — it’s about the ways that editing this site has made me a better (and hopefully wiser) person. So if you liked Mark Rosewater’s “Life Lessons” articles, here’s a different spin on it from a different man. Today? I’m going to tell you how I became the editor of this site, and how my writing saved me when I couldn’t save myself.
My brain was a bowl of oatmeal mush, so of course this was when the Mana Gods give me cards that would be an auto-win in the hands of monoxide-mangled monkey. No matter how you viewed my card pool, no matter what color combination you favored, you could build a house from this humble stack. But what would you choose?
The drive back from the prerelease in Livonia, Michigan to my home in Rocky River, Ohio takes 2.5 hours…. Unless I’m so tired that I make three mistakes in driving home, at which point it takes four hours. And in that sleepy, error-prone haze, hopping on my keyboard to write my usual Monday essay on Dissension is not a wise choice, which is why today’s offering is a day late. But that said… What things did I learn at the Prerelease?
There’s something about the jumble of colors that Ravnica brings that just makes mid-level players freeze in weird ways — and when faced with a near-infinite number of choices to make, often you just don’t see the obvious until it’s too late. This is the Sealed blackout. You go into a trance, and awake with the wrong cards registered in your deck. And if this can happen to people who are used to playing Sealed, what hope does the poor first-timer have at building his deck properly?
