Pale Mage returns from the land of zombies (you’ll just have to read it) to deliver his take on States, the Standard metagame, and the Magic world in general. If you’ve never read a Pale Mage article, he’s one of the more original writers in the game whose unique style is a welcome addition to the StarCityGames.com family.
I thought it might be interesting to detail how I started from scratch to test a new format, and which decks I am currently testing. In the course of this article, I will present three different decks for your consideration. None of these decks are the finished article, they have all received some testing and seem to be based on sound principles, but you’ll need to test and adapt them further before they are tournament ready. Oh, and I’ll also explain the rules of the game “All Elves Must Die!” a classic tournament subgame that’s fun for Red Mages the world over.
ELDER DRAGON HIGHLANDER UPDATE
Before Worlds, I wrote about the Elder Dragon Highlander format, complete with a deck competition and challenge at Worlds. Today I’ll be reporting some updates to the format, as well as issuing a new challenge.
Eli kicks off the new Limited PTQ season with an examination of a sealed deck pool and the various builds that one can create from them. If you are looking for some extra practice before this weekend’s PTQs, you might want to check this out.
In this article, I’ll explain the game plan of the deck and then describe how to use the core cards properly, because every card has qualifications upon when you should play it that may not be immediately obvious. First I want to address the most important decision you will make in every game that you play with this deck: mulliganing.
When I first read that one of the new mechanics in Champions was the addition of the Arcane subtype to a select group of Instants and Sorceries, I was pretty sure the impact was going to be minimal. Boy, was I wrong.
Hey Chad, remember how you were going to try hard to qualify for the Pro Tour last season? Remember how you were going to share all of your preparation with the readers at StarCityGames.com and go over each of your PTQ experiences with them? Remember how you even built a good rogue deck near the start of the season? Remember how you missed every single PTQ and Grand Prix? If you really want to qualify for the Pro Tour, why don’t you play in a *#%$ PTQ?
This past weekend, I finally, finally got a chance to fiddle around with Champions of Kamigawa. I arranged with none other than our esteemed site editor Ted Knutson to come down to Roanoke so that we could do back to back to back to back to back Champions of Kamigawa drafts until our eyes fell out of our heads. This is what I learned from what looks to be an excellent new set for Limited play.
States is approaching. The forums are rife with decklists. I’m going to add a few — built around Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama’s Reach. This combination allows for some powerful mana acceleration. Right now, it has the same feel that my early Tooth and Nail decks had. How meaningful is that? Well, I wrote about T&N before it won any of the various National qualifiers… maybe I can stumble onto a golden Green deck before States this time as well.
If I have said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: Please wait to review sets. It is nice to get first impressions – they can help to guide us. The problem comes when people start reviewing entire sets the day after the prerelease, when 99 times out of 100 they have no clue what they are talking about and just want to be the first person to say that X card is good. I think in the early stages it is much more useful to analyze a set on a macro level. Therefore, I am going to look at each mechanic, theme and thread in Champions of Kamigawa and how they pertain to both Limited and Constructed.
In preparation for this week’s article, BDM actually played his Splicachron Scepter in a real tournament with somewhat disastrous results. If you haven’t been following the themes of the articles this week, the gist of it is that U/W is definitely not one of the tier 1 decks for the States metagame, and Brian David-Marshall is back on StarCityGames.com to tell you why.
Glimpse of Nature
If Cranial Extraction seems a broad, powerful card and you’re not sure where you’d put it, Glimpse of Nature seems like it was tailor-made for Food Chain Goblins. Is this a new spell that will allow champions of the little Red men to take over the metagame, or is it just more Champions fool’s gold?
As some people may have noticed in recent weeks, Vintage Magic seems to be reverting to the way it looked this time last year. The top combo deck is a Long variant. The top aggro deck is Mishra’s Workshop/Goblin Welder based, but without things like Survival of the Fittest ruining the manabase. Why has the metagame done a sort of shift backwards? The blame for this trend lies at the feet of Control Slaver, and here’s why.
In the first two articles for this assignment, Flores brought you Mono-Blue control, while Osyp Lebedowicz gave you The Unspeakable. Today, Jim takes you back to the old school, where men were men, Cherry Bazooka was the gum of choice, and U/W Control was the deck to play. Can this archetype be awakened from its slumber, or have Affinity and Tooth and Nail made building a good U/W deck a virtual impossibility?
Your birthday rolls around, and your mom and wife have no idea what to get for you. Oh, they know you like those Magical cards, but when they walk into a store they’re completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of Magic cards, packs, decks, sleeves, boxes, and plushies available. They have no idea what to buy you… And so you get socks again, not that Dragon you were really longing for.
But what if we told you there was an easy way to tell the world exactly what cards you needed?
