AuthorTim Aten

Any”full spoiler appraisal” information you read anywhere about Scourge Limited will be purely speculative for a few weeks – and while it may help you generate a few ideas about the cards, it will be inconclusive and in some cases quite misleading. And no matter how much you complain, OOL is going to be the format on Magic Online for over a month still, so this is still quite relevant – so let me finish up my Legions review and discuss what notably wrong choices I made in earlier articles.

The title of this article does not make any sense until you get to the portion of the article that’s not even really part of the article. So please bear with me. This week, we’ll be exploring Onslaught red and green cards whose values fluctuate depending on your deck: How many Goblins do you need before you can play Airdrop Condor or Reckless One? How many elves do you need before you can play Wirewood Pride, Voice of the Woods, or Heedless One?

How many cyclers do you need to run Astral Slide in the maindeck… And how many do you need to make it a good deck? What are the minimum number of soldiers you need before you can reliably use Piety Charm? How many birds must you have before you can play Airborne Ai – okay, that was a trick question. But if you wanna know the bare minimums before you can start putting tribal cards and Peer Pressures in your decks, start here – oh, and I’ll give you ten hints as to how NOT to name your team so you don’t sound lame.

Make sure all your decks have a chance against green. Only one of our decks could beat opposing fatties consistently, and our performance suffered because of it. Try to build your decks in such a way that at least two of the decks can handle any given matchup without problem. On a similar note, make sure all the decks have some answer to the premiere commons that other teams are likely to have – like Sparksmith, Wellwisher, and Lavamancer’s Skill.

Pugg Fuggly bombed out in the first round of an online draft… But he listed the possible picks and the cards he actually chose, allowing us to trace the path of his three-pack loss. My job is to appraise what he did masterfully, what was all right, and what he could have done better.

Cloudreach Cavalry is the most situational card on the list in terms of when you draft and play it. I wouldn’t recommend playing this with fewer than five birds/mistforms in your deck, but if you have eight or more birds, especially if a few of them cost three mana, this card becomes a powerhouse. And please, don’t play Aven Envoy to make this card more powerful. For that matter, don’t play Aven Envoy to Amplify your Stingers and Warhawks. Just don’t play it. The Envoy, I mean.

At a Detroit PTQ, as Judge Shawn Jeffries asked if there were any questions, some yahoo asked something dumb in an attempt to be funny. And here’s the part I don’t get: Then, some other moe raised his hand with another question – and I stopped listening after,”If we open a Words of War, can we…” because I knew the rest of the question would be blah blah Ravenous Baloth blah blah. Why do people DO this? Also, I rank Covert Operative at 13th, and that’s no joke.

Isn’t it enough that Magic Online is selling fake cards for real money? Nope. They need a bigger real return on their fake investment by offering this new 4/3/2/2 piece of crap. I encourage people to boycott the new prize structure by staying in the 8/4 queues. Sick of losing? Here’s a thought: Get better. Oh yeah, and why don’t I help you to not suck by outlining Legions Black?

…and the Onslaught Limited analysis continues with StarCity’s latest Featured Writer! Tim says:”Red isn’t too exciting, but any cards that can attack and block for a decent price are good enough to make the cut. The playables extend almost all the way to the bottom of the list. And also like green, there isn’t much difference in power between a lot of the cards, so you’ll be using this set to fill in the holes that Onslaught left in your deck.”

I’ve done a good deal of Legions drafts and am have a pretty good bead on things. Legions is, of course, a set composed entirely of creatures – and due to that, many of the cards are very similar in power level, and the pick order becomes even more reliant on the holes in your mana curve. Needless to say, in Onslaught, draft non-creature spells higher than you used to, since there are only a few cards that act as spells in this set.

The Runner-Up for The Ferrett’s”Author I Wish Would Write More Often” Award turns in his semiannual submission… And this one’s a doozy! Bored with the usual tourney reports? Well, this one takes everything you ever knew about tournament reports and stands ’em on its head, with a twist that’s way more interesting than the end of Joe Millionaire.

Kurt Hahn had this to say about Tim:”The man is a money-drafter, so he knows what he’s talking about, and tells you. The only person on StarCity worth reading is a skinny kid from Ohio, but listen to him and your drafts can’t help but improve.” And hell, you wanna know the basics of money drafting? Tim’s gone toe-to-toe with guys like Baby Huey, PTR, Ed Fear, Ken Hsuing, Mike Turian, Alex Borteh, Chris Benafel, and Bob Maher… And occasionally comes out in the black. So listen to the man, willya?

Genesis would induce your opponent to enter the”vomit step” even if it were the only creature in your deck, as it can bring itself back to your hand during upkeep. That’s the obvious part. But why is Ironshell Beetle overhyped, and what card is underhyped?

Rizzo once mentioned in one of his articles a class of player who always dominates the local scene but can’t quite cut it on the actual Pro circuit – that’s me. But I’m not ashamed to give my preliminary opinion on Judgement’s white cards in draft.