Premium

Last week, when I left off, I’d intended to go into greater detail about my thoughts on control-oriented decks in Kamigawa Block Constructed, but in between there seems to have been a highly relevant Grand Prix that sums up all of the musing I’ve been doing on re-working a Splice-based control deck. We will get to talking about control decks in good time, but with the availability of excellent information being released every week in the form of PTQ Top Eight decklists, and a recent shift in the metagame to focus extremely on the White Weenie and Black Hand beatdown decks, I felt it important enough to interrupt what I had otherwise intended to talk about.

Are you becoming tired of a Block Constructed format that is becoming stagnant after only three weeks of PTQs and wish to break the monotony of White Weenie and Gifts mirrors? Then do I have the deck for you!

Kamigawa Block Constructed continues to dominate our testing. I’m finding the block fantastic and very enjoyable. Today I’ll cover four different decklists that we’ve been working on in hopes of cracking the Block Constructed format wide open.

I find that the best defensive strategies attack. When you let the opponent dictate the terms of an interaction (“this game is about my Jitte“) you have to play by his rules; you may mistakenly enter a mindset where you believe that the game revolves around some key permanent he uses to threaten you, even when it only looks that way, or only is that way because you let it. You grasp for even sub-optimal methods of answering that permanent in the vain hope that its removal is, like Love in the Beatles song, all you need. The problem is that when the opponent controls the initiative, you can’t hope to win with one-for-ones.

This is it folks, the final installment telling the tale of how one goofy young Type One player turned into a Pro Tour powerhouse and deckbuilding master.

After making the Top 8 in seemingly every Limited Pro Tour ever, Anton Jonsson’s streak came to an end in London. Why did it happen, what did he learn, and how can it help you to become a better player? That’s the focus of today’s article by the man who is rapidly becoming one of the best Magic writers around.

At the end of the day, templating an existing archetype isn’t done just because you like certain cards better than the ones that are accepted in particular deck types; templating is done specifically to gain a legitimate strategic advantage in a matchup. It is successfully accomplished by understanding what threat cards are in the decks you expect, and by correctly answering those threat cards using mana efficient and consistent means. This build of White Weenie just does that by consistently holding the ground against opposing aggressive decks while providing a stronger late game via Spirit bombs. Other White decks can’t win fights, fail to remove whole classes of your key permanents even when their bombs are online.

There are several major changes that Saviors has given us; Green has gone from the worst to the best color in just the space of one booster, every other color has become a lot less spirit-based, and Black and White have taken a big hit as they used to be the deepest colors but Saviors has given them nothing. So now that the Pro Tour has come and gone, it is safe for me to reveal my drafting secrets – and here is the plan that I had for the Pro Tour, all laid out for you.

Last week, michaelj gave the Star City Premium community a New Classic of Magic literature. “One of your best articles ever, Flores. I have bookmarked this article for re-reading before every tournament,” wrote fellow Premium author Jamie Wakefield. This week, the man who asked “Who’s the Beatdown?” applies the same devotion to Kamigawa Block Constructed, including not just one, but two, templated decks!

The first few weeks of a Block Constructed PTQ season are usually very interesting to watch, especially as the cards from the third set start to permeate the decks from the Pro Tour prior to the third expansion. This time around, we have progressed quite a bit on some of our archetypes of old, with at least one new “good deck” coming out of the mix thanks to the Saviors of Kamigawa cards. The first new deck is “Black Hand,” the black weenie beatdown with fattie back-up deck that is sporting such Saviors hits as O-Naginata, Hand of Cruelty, and Raving Oni-Slave… and frankly, I think people who play the deck need to make a vital choice as to how to build it.

Jamie discusses the issue of Magic Online account sharing, the future of post-Rotation Green, and discusses how his latest creation fared at a Kamigawa Block Constructed tournament!