Sealed deck play can be tricky if you’re a casual player or not used to a Limited environment – the challenges of picking the correct cards, then building a good deck with it, then playing right with it can be overwhelming for the beginner. I can’t guarantee you a win if you’re a Limited novice… But I do guarantee you won’t be ashamed of your finish if you follow my guidelines here.
I have two unique qualifications, both of which allow me to tell you exactly why Abe Sargent’s proposed “Abeth Edition” Core Set would be disastrous for the future of Magic… and why, despite the fact that it would be a disaster, Wizards may have to follow Abe’s lead in the next Core Set anyway.
Yesterday, I introduced you to the amazing new StarCityGames.com deck database, showing you all of the cool new features… or at least all the cool new features you could find by looking at a single deck. Today, we go over the Season Summaries, which give you the metagame at a glance.
We’ve been working on it for the past three months. And now it’s time to reveal the new and completely revamped deck database in all of its glory!
Step in. Take a look around. Don’t be scared.
With the advent of the new deck database (which will be unveiled tomorrow), we can now:
This week’s winner was a slam dunk, except for one thing: He’d won the contest last week. Thus, I took a much closer look at the other entries; Spencer Bogan’s Breaking Wind was a funny look at a ridiculous deck, whereas Edd Black’s Three Deadly Wins were hysterical wins – but two of them were about wins that involved, well, cheating. Yet when it comes down to it, it’s hard not to give the award to an article with this punchline:
“I used my Scandalmonger to win game one in the last round of a tournament, playing against a legally blind little old lady, who was using an Elf deck she hadn’t seen until that morning.
“She went on to take the match.”
Thus, Sean Coleman wins the prize, making him (I believe) the first person ever to win any SCG article contest back-to-back. So what’s next week’s $20 Casual Challenge?
The Top Three Best Multiplayer Enchantments.
The difficulty? No Pernicious Deed. And remember, we don’t want just three cards; we want to see the decks these enchantments fit neatly into, and show us why they’re so darned spiffy when two or more players are facing you down. Send your best writing into Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2, and you could win $20!
In addition, we’re looking for future Casual Challenge themes. If you’ve got a format you’d like to see highlighted or just have a neat idea you’d like to see other people writing about, let us know in the forums!
Theme Deck Week was an interesting contest to judge, since how do you judge a theme deck? Playability? Creativity? Adherence to theme? But the two best decks were two things dear to my heart: Metroid and Ender’s Game. They were both great decks, but the tiebreaker was playability – and based on that, Sean Coleman’s 8-bit U/R Magic Metroid deck took the $20 prize!
This past week was creativity. Next week, however, we’ll reward storytelling with a very open-ended contest:
My Funniest Win Ever.
That’s right; everybody loves Ben Bleiweiss’s and Geordie Tait’s wacky stories about their friends and the weird games they’ve played in, so now it’s your chance to share entertaining stories with the crowd! Remember, the several thousand people who visit StarCityGames.com every day have absolutely no clue what you or your friends are like — so the better you can paint a picture in words, the greater your chance of actually making us laugh. Remember, it’s not just how the cards flopped, but the good times you had along the way!
Send your funniest win into Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2 today, and you could win $20!
Those of you familiar with Magic history may remember the Brothers’ War between Mishra and Urza, the two most powerful artificers on Dominaria. But those of you familiar with StarCityGames.com writers will know of the brothers’ war we’re having: Matthew Lubich and his brother Andrew. Both of them have written consistently-entertaining entries for the weekly Casual Challenge, and this week they went head-to-head.
Matthew wrote an excellent primer on the rules for lockdown decks (even if his deck was a little on the underpowered side this time around), whereas his brother came up with one of the most creative kill methods I think I’ve ever seen. The problem is, Andrew’s won before, and Matthew hasn’t. Who to choose?
In the end, I decided to split it evenly, lest I cause fistfights at the Lubich household. Matthew wins this week’s $20 prize, in the sincere hopes that both brothers will keep writing!
And next week’s challenge?
Theme Decks.
That’s right, folks — we want to see the most powerful (and, more importantly, playable) deck you can build around a non-Magic theme. Whether that’s an Edgar Allen Poe deck or a deck related exclusively to emo bands, we want to see your crazy theme deck — and more importantly, how to play a pile of cards that have nothing in common except for flavor. So write it up and send it to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2, and you could win $20!
First of all, did anyone guess the reason why we had Peasant Magic on this week, of all weeks? It’s because this week ends on April 15th – a day when many American citizens are poorer. See, we’re so clever.
(For you foreigners, April 15th is tax day in America. We love it.)
In any case, Peasant Magic week was a good week for articles, with some of the highest-quality stuff we’ve seen yet. But in the end, it came down to two last-minute submissions: Roman Pazuniak’s How Many Ways Can You Go Infinite On A Common-Based Engine? and Dave Wong’s Peasant Magic: The Six-Deck Gauntlet, Plus The Commons You Must Own. It was a tough decision, since Dave brought some Peasantry experience to the table, whereas Roman’s decks were consistently neat. (Well, except for the ElfClamp deck, but you had to get that one out of the way.) In the end, experience won out in an extremely close call, and Dave took the $20 prize!
This week’s challenge?
Multiplayer Lockdown.
That’s right; we want to hear about your deck that shuts multiple opponents down in some interesting way. Tell us how it works, what decks it works well against, and more importantly what fiendish combo you’ve created to dominate (and, lest we forget, win) the game. Then send that puppy into Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2!
We asked you to build decks around the worst cards in Magic, and you guys came out in force! In the end, it came down to two strong contenders: Kenneth Nagle’s Winning With The Worst Card Of All Time, and Chris Millar’s Don’t Patronize Me. Both of these guys are among the most entertaining casual writers we have, so it had to come down to a bizarre tiebreaker – namely, that Kenneth was an awfully good sport about me changing the title of his article (which was originally “Winning With Aven Shrine”). Thus, Kenneth takes the $20 prize!
This week’s challenge?
Peasant Magic.
That’s right; we’re looking for articles written on the “five uncommons, no rares” format. We’ve had difficulty finding writers for this in the past, but we’re hoping that the incentive of a fresh $20 bill will bring writers out of the woodwork (even if Peasant Magic writers don’t need the money to buy rares). Write your article and send it in to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2 today!
This week’s April Fools’ Challenge started slow, but brought in some great combos as the week progressed. Matthew Lubich’s Leery Fogbeast + Flaring Pain combo was good for a laugh, as was Arjan van Houwelingen’s clever use of Magical Hacker. And then on Friday, we had Andrew Lubich’s amusing Nono-Green Deck, as well as Jon Maske’s attempt to bring cards to life.
But I’m a sucker for Magic history — and not only did Luis Almeida walk us through R&D’s greatest mistakes, but he managed to meld non-erratated cards into a darned fine deck. Thus, Luis wins the $20 prize!
So what’s next week’s Casual Challenge?
Crap Rare Craziness.
If you’ve been paying attention, Abe Sargent’s been picking five crap rares at random and building creative decks around them. We want you to take the most pathetic cards in Magic and turn them into killing machines… or at least funny decks. Remember, as it says in our article guidelines, “I don’t want just decklists.” You have to provide an explanation of how you built the deck and how it plays. Send your crap rare challenge into Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2 and try for your chance at the $20 prize!
The Top Three Most Annoying Cards didn’t get quite the response that I thought it would, but the results were pleasantly varied. This was the strongest week yet, where almost every article would have been a winner in a slower week…. but the most amusing was an underlooked gem by Corneel Coens – The Pity. The Argument. The Chance. The Bookkeeping. The No. – that outlined not three, but five of the most annoying card types in Magic. And he wrote it so well that we don’t mind that he broke the rules. So Corneel wins the $20 for this week!
What’s next week? Well, we have April First coming up, so the challenge is going to be a little different:
April Fools Decks.
What’s an "April Fools Deck"? Well, for our purposes we’re going to define it as "a deck that does something your opponents didn’t think it was going to." It could be a deck that looks like Affinity but turns into control, it could be a deck that looks like crap but explodes into infinity when its innocuous pieces come together, or it could be a deck that suckers your opponents into making a critical mistake. Better yet, come up with a better definition of an April Fools’ Deck.
Do that, and you could win $20 in this week’s Casual Challenge! Send your submission to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2!
Despite a slow start, the 5-Color Casual Challenge provided some solid articles on the 250-card format by the end of the week. Brian Epstein’s excellent 5-Color: The Metagame As We Know It came close, but in the end amusing writing once again took the $20 prize. Jonah Sutton-Morse and Mr. Anderson’s Twenty Cards That Go With Contract was a solid article that discussed what did and didn’t work in the format… and it was both fun and easy to read. Thus, they take the prize!
So what’s next week’s Casual Challenge? Something that’s sure to generate a flurry of submissions:
The Three Most Annoying Cards Of All Time.
Now, the last “Top Five” challenge did phenomenally well in terms of generating submissions, but by the end of the week our readers’ eyes were glazing over from “Card: Description. Card: Description.” Thus, remember that the prize will most likely go to the person who provides the most interesting variant on the format. This doesn’t have to be just multiplayer; feel free to discuss the three most annoying cards in format X, or a look at cards that cause confusion for all the wrong reasons, or a historical overview of what cards were considered annoying, and why.
So give us your most hated cards, and the decks that go with them, and you might win $20! Send your article in to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2 today!
…because if it’s not, its writers certainly are. We’ve only had a single article for this week’s Casual Challenge, which means that at this point, Jonah Sutton-Morse and Mr. Anderson are a lock for the $20 prize. Send in your 5-Color article to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2 by 5:00 on Thursday for your chance at the prize!
The problem with the Casual Challenge is that sometimes, you face tough choices. For this week’s Type Four: Limited Infinity challenge, we had several articles, each good in their own way. Andrew Farias brought up some troubling issues with Type 4 rules, whereas David Kleppinger wrote an excellent introduction to Type 4. However, in the end I’m going to have to give it to Andrew Lubich’s Ten Cards You’re Not Playing With In Your Type 4 Stack (But You Should Be) for sheer creativity — it wasn’t the most strategic of articles, but the cards he chose were consistently geared to create a more interesting game. Thus, Andrew takes the prize in the tightest squeaker yet!
Since we were discussing a format with infinite mana this week, next week’s challenge will feature infinite cards — or at least 250 of them. Next week’s Casual Challenge?
5-Color Magic.
That’s right — win $20 for your best writing on the all-color format! We’ve had a dry spell on good 5-color articles, so send them in to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2 and win the prize!
