CategoryMagic The Gathering

Star City is the”scrub” site.
Star City is the issues site.
There are no good players at Star City.
There are no good writers at Star City.

Oh, how times have changed.

Is it possible to get passed a fourth pick Skeleton Shard, fourth and fifth pick Betrayals of the Flesh, plus a fifth pick Plated Slagwurm and not win?

If this draft teaches you anything, it should be that choosing the right path early in the draft is incredibly important if you plan on sticking to it. Oscar chose a less-than-optimal route during the draft and then refused to switch out of it despite being given numerous opportunities. If you do happen to make a bad judgment call early in the draft and realize it, you can still salvage it by switching out later when you’re given the opportunity.

Drafting R/B, as always, is a gamble. You can end up with some of the best decks possible in the format, with a good creature base and plenty of varied removal, or the cards might not be there and the pile in front of you contains multiple Necrogen Spellbombs and other filler. More commonly, an improperly-drafted R/B deck will end up with plenty of removal and no creatures – or, less frequently, plenty of bad creatures and little or no removal. Maintaining a balance between drafting removal first and making sure that you have enough threats can be very tricky.

When Bazaar of Wonders comes into play, it removes all graveyards from the game, and it counters any future spell having the same name as a card in play or in the graveyard. This has always been a pretty powerful card if you can break its symmetry, as it can single-handedly shut down up to three-quarters of the spells in many opponent’s decks and is particularly brutal against combo-style decks. With the invention of Flashback, Morph, and the Wish cycle from Judgement, I take it upon myself to inform you that this card is now officially”Bah-roken”!

Drafting Mirrodin requires careful consideration to build the best deck. Though you should usually take the best card in your first pick in pack one, decisions get quite interesting from there. For example, there are two archetypes within the Blue and White color combination – both of them attempt to do the same thing, and yet they behave very differently. What are these two decks, and where do their strategies for the win diverge?

A short while ago, a gentleman posted his Five-Color deck online in the Five-Color Forums. This gentleman, who went by the screen name of Arbiter, posted his deck in the hopes that someone would give him suggestions, ideas, and comments…. But he didn’t have a lot of flashy rares to work with. And that was an interesting challenge: How do you make a solid Five-Color deck when you don’t have an unlimited card pool to work with?

Welcome to the first of a series of six articles on 8th Edition drafting. Very little has been written on this topic, even though it is being drafted a hell of a lot on Magic Online right now. Kai Budde wrote a primer for 8th Edition Draft on Sideboard a couple of months ago, but I don’t recall ever seeing a comprehensive guide to draft picks in 8th Edition, so I have taken it upon myself to write one. This article will evaluate every card in the set from a draft perspective as well as giving some general info on each color. We’ll start with Black.

It would seem to many of you that I like a challenge. Almost without fail, my card valuations go against conventional wisdom. I assure you I do not take on these cards as a chore. I don’t do it because I lost the coin flip. I don’t do it to make a scene. I do it because I am of the firm belief that I am right. Usually, I am.

Each week Ken and I discuss our pick orders with one another before we write these articles. For Blue, our lists diverged by a good deal. Once again, we only included on-color artifacts and Blue cards in the list, and the two biggest disagreements we had were Aether Spellbomb versus Regress and Annul versus Wizard Replica.

I can honestly say that last week was one of the strongest weeks we’ve ever had – there were five outstanding articles on Wednesday alone, and the rest of the week was almost as good. However, we put so much content up last week that you might have skipped past some great articles that should not go overlooked. This has been happening a lot – we’ve been looking at articles and going,”You know, those were great reads. Why didn’t more people look at them?” Therefore, every Monday from here on out, we’re going to look back at the week that was and single out articles that we feel deserve special mention….