CategoryMagic The Gathering

SCG Daily: Taking Care of Business

Let me crank up the Wayback Machine to about eight years ago. I had just been laid off from my job as a computer game designer after putting in about a year of crunch time on a failed project (this, sadly, would become a theme of my time in the game biz, but that’s neither here nor there). Coincidentally, friend and fellow Magic player Brad Irwin, who was managing the game portion of the local Book & Game store, had also been laid off and decided now was the time to follow through with his dream of opening his own game store and was looking for partners. Was I interested?

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You CAN Play Type I #150: Three Draw Spells That Might Slip Under The Radar

Oscar takes a peek at what Saviors has to offer Vintage players and finds three draw spells that might go overlooked.

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Sticking To Your Guns.. Or Not?

One thing that seems to come up all the time when discussing draft picks or just draft in general is when you should stick to your color and when you should branch out by either choosing a second color or even switching one color for another. In my opinion, this is usually the hardest decision that you make in a draft. Seems like a good topic to write about then, no?

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It’s Not Old, Baby – It’s Vintage: Shooting Stars

Zvi explains his deck choice, his performance, his thoughts on the format, what he’d change if he had to do it again, goes over his Hall of Fame recommendations, and asks YOU to help him pick what to write about next.

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SCG Daily: Winning Isn’t Everything…

Dave takes ya’ll back to the concrete streets, original beats with real live MCs, back to the days when getting sanctioning for your tournament required mafia connections and Wizards sanctioning meant single elimination…

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Lessons Learned From Umezawa’s Jitte

This article has some discussion about a little bit of everything, but the fact that it is another excellent article from Richard Feldman should be more than enough to get all of you to read it.

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First Impressions of Saviors in Kamigawa Block Limited: Green and Artifacts

Sam wraps up his Saviors of Kamigawa first impressions by discussing what may be the most powerful color in the block: Green.

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Timmy, Johnny, and Spike Meet Wakefield, Flores, and Zvi

In the past few articles, we’ve looked over a lot of potential growth decks, and pored over very dry statistics about pre-Saviors Standard. The summation of all of this is to hope to learn how to play post-Saviors Standard, by means of analyzing the situation at hand and learning the rules of deckbuilding that are forced by the cards in the format. The most powerful cards in the format dictate how you play it, and the strongest sets of synergy rise to the top and form the decks we play. Today we’re going to look at your options for tweaking the best decks and turning them into unstoppable killing machines.

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Heretic’s Corner: DCI Tournament Procedures

If you have ever been to a tournament, you know that you play matches against people, and the results are recorded and used to determine what happens from round to round, but have you ever thought about why certain things happen one way and not another? I would not expect most people to have done this, but I have, and here are some observations that I have made. Some of you may consider some of my ideas on what to do with tiebreakers and the like radical, but I think we can find a better system than what we currently have.

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SCG Daily: Trippin’ Down Memory Lane

It was brought to my attention recently that I’ve been playing this silly little card game for almost ten years now. Ten years! Most marriages don’t last that long. Not to mention that I’ve entered my sixth year of writing for the illustrious Star City Games. That’s long enough to see most players/writers leave the game…and come back. Just when you think you’re out… it keeps pulling you back in!

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Rats Live On No Evil Star

That’s right folkses, Rats is the hawt new faunky thing that everyone wants to get a piece of. As I mentioned last week, Tim Aten got the deck from Cedric Phillips after he tore up part of the Last Chance Qualifier field at Pro Tour: Philadelphia. Aten then blazed up the Invitational with a Rats deck, and the message boards, forums and mailing lists across the internet lit up with people all saying “OMG, cool!” However, if you in turn wish to play the deck next weekend at Regionals, you’re gonna have to do better than just taking the deck from Aten and Phillips and running it out of the box like you did when you finally got Party of Five: Season 3 on DVD. That’s where I come in…

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Rant Week

Jamie has some things he wants to get off his chest this week about certain Standard artifacts, Magic R&D, and Hal Jordan.

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Sideboards I Like

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Hot on the heels of Terry Soh’s Troll and Nail sideboard revolution, michaelj goes into some detail about those extra fifteen cards you get to play with in up to 66% of your games. What’s the difference between a sideboard Flores likes and one that gets the boot? The answers are inside.

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Getting Super Pumped for Rochester

This is a super special version of the normal Power 9 Preview article, because we have an added element to accommodate for: the presence of the SCG Shooting Stars! This may seem like one of the most daunting tournaments in a very long time thanks to that presence, but you should treat it no differently than you treat your average high profile tournament. There will still be a dense concentration of people you can beat if you play properly, and that includes the guys wearing the t-shirts. The biggest weapon you can have against these competitors is familiarity with the format, so let’s get down to brass tacks.

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The Top 5 Things You Absolutely Must Know About 2005 Regionals

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Kanoot delivers his 2005 Regionals Preview, complete with the usual snarky commentary, cheesecake, and predicted metagame percentages. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also discussion of the Hall of Fame ballot and a request for advice on who deserves the fifth slot on the list, The Kitchen Sink, Quotable Quotes, and Yawgatog highlights from the entire month of March. It’s not just an article, it’s an extravaganza!

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