Join the Mana Drain’s illustrious leader, as he steps forward and fills a gap in our current Vintage knowledge. Phil Stanton has been filling you in for months about the metagame at big tournaments, but what about more local tournies where you don’t get 100 players each week? If that describes what the type of tournament you play at, then you’ve come to the right place!
Oscar is back from his break to tell you that there are never any good new cards printed for Type One, ever. Okay, that’s not true… in fact, recent sets have been unprecedented in delivering strong new cards for Vintage play. Does Champions have any new creatures that will make Vintage players jump for joy? You’ll have to check inside to find out.
Gifts Ungiven
Welcome to our power card of the set. Gifts Ungiven will be acted on quickly, of that I have no doubt. Who knows whether it will see restriction or banning. With Yawgmoth’s Will away, maybe its time for small mammals to play. Look for Gifts Ungiven to be highly sought after in Five Color circles if it is just restricted, as it looks to be an auto-include in virtually every deck.
Join Tim today, as the man many Magic Pros have called”the best writer in the business”, completes his tale of victory and defeat at the 2004 Worlds. Also, be sure not to miss his new”Barnecdotes” section, in what might just be the funniest Tim Aten report ever!
Ben opens up the reader mailbag, where he answers your pressing questions! Thrill along with Ben as he responds to the burning issues such as this one from Christopher Feliciano, who writes “You are a stupid *** fat bald **** who knows nothing about magic and needs to go kill himself and get it over with! Your articles on starcitygames are pointless and suck! – A better player than you.”
In this article, I will the tell you what I believe are the best five commons in each color in Champions of Kamigawa. These are the cards that jumped out at me through looking at the spoiler, and impressed me through what I saw at the prerelease, enough to make me believe they will be the premier commons in each given color. If you’re going to draft the new set and don’t really know what cards you should be taking, start with these 25.
As Ben Bleiweiss mentioned in his recent article on Champions of Kamigawa and Vintage, Oath of Druids has been granted a very fun new toy in Champions of Kamigawa – Forbidden Orchard. After reading Mr. Bleiweiss’s article, my testing group and I decided that it was no longer a good idea to keep our pet project underground. Thus, here in all its glory, is an Oath of Druids deck for Vintage, designed to destroy the opponent in one attack. The build I have provided is for budget players, but this deck is easily adaptable for powered users as well.
First, I’ll make the obligatory comments on Draft and Limited. The set looks like it’s more aimed at these formats. It has a lot of creatures with combat related abilities, lots of combat tricks, and the new Legends rule* makes Legends a lot more playable. This is not too surprising – we came off a block built around combo and Constructed play (although the Affinity mechanic proved excessive), so a more Limited-focused block was predictable. This isn’t Masques block II, however: Masques was all about horrible creatures with big price tags. CoK has some amazing 5/5s for bargain prices. In fact, let’s take a look under the hood and see exactly what Champions offers, shall we?
This week I decided to do one last MD5 Walkthrough since the format will still be up and running on Magic Online for quite some time. This time I used a different approach to the draft though, since some people have been claiming that I’m “handpicking” drafts that are too powerful or something. For this draft, I decided that it’d be more of a “Live” draft, since I’m just sitting down on MTGO, covering the draft, and then writing about it.
What’s more awesome than awesome sauce? It’s Ben’s look at Champions of Kamigawa in Vintage! Last time around, Ben invoked the ire of the entire Vintage community with his less-than-respectful look at the Type 1 community and Fifth Dawn. Will this be another flamefest, or will the Vintage community heed Ben’s words and rally around his Vintage metagame instincts? Look inside, then post your thoughts in the forums!
Despite the fact that I fully planned to hate Champions, the gameplay was surprisingly palatable. It had a unique feel – that happy feel of equipment ported from Mirrodin, the ridiculous bomb critters of Onslaught but without the generic morph-o-rama dope mana curve, and a reliance on weird burn and enchantments that was uniquely its own. There was no auto-save if you built a crappy mana base, as there had been in Mirrodin’s colorless approach and Onslaught’s 2/2 for three.
I had a bunch of very tense and close races – that feeling that good deckbuilding skills really mattered, which I haven’t had in any set since Invasion.
Gifts Ungiven
It’s not quite Intuition, and it’s not quite Fact or Fiction. You can’t use it as a tutor for unrestricted cards like with Intuition, and your opponent chooses what you get, unlike FoF. There are still some no-win sets with this. Think Yawgmoth’s Will, Recoup, Black Lotus, and Lion’s Eye Diamond. There might also be some crazy combo kill with this as well. I’m not going to give up on it just yet.
The weeks leading up to the announcement I had been playing a lot of Drain Slaver/Crucible Slaver. With help from Mattieu Durand of Franceland and the rest of Meandeck, I was tuning a list and practicing with it for the weeks leading up to Waterbury. I won like, one match. So I gave up on it and played DeathLong. The rest is history… almost.
I don’t remember who said it, but someone claimed that a multiplayer group with varying levels of players will invariably find itself being held down by the poor players or being dominated by the good players. A rift will be created and the group will suffer. I’m here to put that theory to rest.
Many of you know Ben as one of the columnists of the site, but he’s also the General Manager of StarCityGames.com. One of his job duties is to set all of the buy and sell prices on the website. This means that he’s in the thick of determining the values and trends of Magic cards 24/7. Join him as he takes a look at the best cards you can trade for at the Champions of Kamigawa pre-release this weekend!
