Wednesday, April 16th – Lately, control decks have been subscribing to a tried-and-true Flores theory of “only really control the game until I can tap out for a Dragon and then kill you.†This has proven extremely effective, as per the success of Osyp’s Honolulu Top 8 deck, Wafo-Tapa’s Guile deck, and others. The beauty of Faeries is that you can circumvent even that crucial one-turn window of threat deployment.
Wednesday, April 9th – Most of us absolutely tend to overlook our mistakes, misattribute many of our losses to luck, and fail to implement changes even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It’s important when you lose to mentally recap what just happened and investigate whether or not you should have done something different.
Wednesday, April 2nd – It appears that this week has been a week for reflection. We’ve had BDM’s game-store apologia, Noah Weil’s swan song, and enough Creature-Merfolk to make you never want to eat seafood again. For me, that reflection has been poignant, and not merely in a Magic sense…
Wednesday, March 26th – I’m generally garbage at teaching anything, and Magic’s among the most complicated things you can teach. I’d tried my hand at instruction before, to less than successful results. The rules of Magic have been etched so deeply into my cognition that it’s hard sometimes to isolate why some things work the way that they do.
Wednesday, March 19th – In Magic, as in life, everybody has ideas. As a member of the writing world I always furrow my brow and narrow my eyes whenever anyone talks about an “idea†they have for a story, or a screenplay, or a poem, or a novel, or whatever. “Can I read what you’ve got so far,†I’ll ask, and they’ll eye the ground sheepishly like a late-eighties shoegazer.
Thursday, March 13th – The goal of this article is to articulate why a certain card should or should not be banned given a particular set of circumstances. I believe it’s useful to examine these situations because it provides a de facto gauge for the health of a given format, and also assists us as consumers of information in deciding whether we should waste time clamoring over something that may or may not actually be bad for Magic in the first place.
Wednesday, March 5th – Mark Rosewater just wrote an article explaining the process of “acquisition,†of expanding Magic’s player base and reaching out to people who have never heard of the game. We, the players, are essential to that process. This article will talk about some of the ways we can help out Wizards, and, by virtue of that, help ourselves.
Wednesday, February 27th – Magic skill, like the term “intelligence,†is fairly difficult to explain. It’s not hard to define; “ability at manipulating specific sets of operations†works for most cases. But that definition doesn’t really cast light on the number one question that follows from it: namely, “Why can some people manipulate more of those operations than others?â€
Wednesday, February 13th – I’m sure everybody’s heard by now about the Magic Players’ Union, what they plan to bring to the table at the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, some of the concerns, questions, and curiosities that have arisen as to how to proceed from here. There’s been some characteristically meticulous number-crunching on Frank Karsten’s part, some vigorous community organizing by Raphael Levy, and I’m eager to see how that affects (if at all) the direction of the meeting.
Earwig Squad is my home boy. My bro. He and I play GameCube on a regular basis after he sprays me with like a can and a half of Axe. I think this is the most underrated card in the set. He’s got Negator stats, basically, and can come down as early as the second turn in most Goblin builds. Once that happens you get a ton of information and automatic strategic superiority, or at least the opportunity to dictate how the game is played on your terms.
Normally, when I talk about a deck I immediately go into the different matchups, how to play versus each opponent, what particular strategies to worry about, but the unique thing about Dredge is that against any given opponent there are, between maindeck and sideboard, only twelve to fifteen cards that you care about whatsoever.
When I say that you playtest to figure out how to play, it doesn’t simply mean that you’re preventing yourself from making mistakes. Playtesting also encompasses a broader element of figuring out what it is you’re trying to play for. I don’t mean the prizes or the packs or whatever; I mean what your deck is set up to do, and whether what it does is worth it.
As everyone knows, I don’t play a lot of Magic Online. Whenever I do, I have experiences like the one yesterday that make me loathe the anonymity of the Internet and the readiness with which people take advantage of it…
I’ve become a fan of linear strategies this season. Extended has traditionally gone very well for me, but most of the time I succeed it’s because I’ve pursued one particular type of strategy. Across the history of the format, there has been one thing per season that is so objectively powerful that it warps the metagame around it. This thing isn’t necessarily a particular deck; usually, it’s the exploitation of one particular type of resource.
BDM and Flores covered “Twelve Decks,†or whatever, and y’all have I am sure recapped 2007-in-Magic more than you care to acknowledge. While Remi Fortier’s hair is certainly reminiscence-worthy, and Billy did probably design the best deck in Magic history, I’ll save you the trip through memory lane.
Instead, I’ll just talk about me.
