If you read last week’s column — and if you didn’t, I hope Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo leaves you a loaded dirty diaper for Chrismahannakwanika — you know that I was trying to develop a cheap “creatureless” Mono-Black Control deck. After a week of reader suggestions and a bunch more testing, I think we may actually have something.
Phil Stanton has recently retired from the supercomputer business. Since no one else has stepped up, and since I inspired his template, I have decided to take over where he left off. Thus I give you the full Vintage Metagame Breakdown, complete with musings on the format and whether certain cards have crossed the threshold from broken to bannable.
You naughty boys. Peter knows just what you’ve been looking for all week and he finally gives it to you, Mary Poppins style? What in the…
I worked in a gas station for nearly a year and the worst thing about the job, other than the bizarre hours, the monotony, the loneliness, the incompetent upper management, the paperwork, the monotony, scraping out the toilets, the fact that a chimp could have done my job, the fact that many of my co-workers couldn’t, cleaning the pumps, sweeping the lot, and the monotony – was the people. I mean, okay, the vast majority of the people I encountered there were perfectly nice and relatively normal, but it seemed like there was a substantially larger concentration of jerks there than in the world at large.
Rather like Magic tournaments.
Have you ever wanted to bring a constructed deck to a draft tournament? Think of how easy it would be. You’d roll over everyone. None of the matches would be close. I can’t offer you that, but I am going to show you how – using one of the new keyword mechanics – you can come even closer to that dream.
Teddy Card Game covers the coolest cards and combos that he saw firsthand at the World Championships. Looking for insights and analysis on some of the best decks to come out of the final Pro Tour of the year? Look no further.
Astral Slide decks have been on the rise lately both at the PTQ level and at the World Championships. Today Flores shows you the version of Slide that he’s been running and fills you in on his latest tournament performance with the deck.
Dissatisfied with the current crop of Legacy decks, Sean took his own homebrew to Philadelphia with no byes and finished just short of Day 2. What deck did he play and why does he think more players should look into it? The answers are only a click away.
Once again, it movie review time. This time it’s a quirky animated piece – Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were Rabbit. I really liked this film, so I’ll zip through the review, then turn it into a deck.
It’s that time again, the time where Nick gives you his take on over and underdrafted cards in the environment as well as discussing one of the better off-guild archetypes you can draft. Check it out!
Pro Tour: LA and the subsequent Grand Prix proved just how far Goblins had fallen in the metagame. Part of this was people simply fleeing the deck without putting real effort into fixing the archetype, but another part was the deck simply lacking the options or sheer power of older seasons. By battling opponents’ Ravinca cards with some of our own, we have my attempt to resuscitate Goblins in Extended.
So, what are you playing in the casual room? By “the casual room”, I quite literally mean Magic Online’s (henceforth referred to as MODO) casual room (henceforth referred to as “that den of whiners who seem to beat me all the time”). The New Players room and Tournament Practice Room are their own concerns – I, and others I know, spend most of our time tooling around in the casual room. Because we wanna have fun.
A bit of a switch today. Instead of another review leading to a theme deck, I want to do an actual deck and link that to a movie concept. The deck — and the movie concept — is Sequels, and both can be no end of annoying.
You may have heard there was a large party at the World Championships involving writers from this very website and singing. People you know, battling it out with nothing more than a pitcher full of beer and a microphone. Names like Tsumura, Oiso, Aten, Jonsson, and many many more, all concerned with one thing – having as much fun as possible. Teddy Card Game was there and catalogued it for posterity, including thoughts on where he has been the last two weeks and his near death experience coming home. If you’d like to see some of the best times a Magic player can have, then you need to click this article.
I am writing this article for two primary reasons: Number one is to namedrop as flagrantly and savagely as is humanly possible. Number two is to help people learn how to play the CAL deck, since it is actually the stone nuts. Here are the lessons I’ve learned over the course of my hundreds of pre-and-post-board games against the Extended gauntlet with my version of the CAL deck, culminating in a second-place finish at a PTQ a week and a half ago.
