Everyone dies someday. This is a universal fact. Some, however, are doomed to do it more than others. Have you ever said a prayer, or even spared a kind word or thought, to the recently deceased 1/1 dork that held off an opposing monster so you could win the game next turn?
Person 1: Who are you teaming with for the Grand Prix?
Person 2: John Pelcak and Gadiel Szleifer
Person 1: Who?!
Person 2: They’re, um, children.
Person 1: What the hell are you thinking? Why not team with good people?
Person 2: They’re good. We’re gonna do fine. Just you wait.
Phimus Pan was literally the only person left that I wanted to team with. Despite what Roberto Gonzales may feel, two people does not a team make. To my rescue came James Davis. His team did not fare well in Phoenix, and his other Phoenix-based teammates did not want to make the 7.5 hr trek to New Mexico. Pants Pants Revolution was born!
Judging by the title, you’d probably guess that the two Guidos held someone up for $1500 bucks using an Asian as a hostage. This is what happened (more or less), when John Fiorillo, Dave Chung, and I took the amateur prize at Grand Prix: DC this past weekend as “The Chicken Sandwiches.”
I’ll make my introduction short here. I have a 1900 rating that is steadily climbing. I’ve played in three JSS tournaments this season, making two second-place finishes and a third-place finish. Don’t worry – I’m not about to present another awful”rogue” deck, but rather a guide to playing the best deck in Standard, for your Regionals encounter.
A draft scenario which I haven’t seen discussed a lot is when the best three cards in your first booster are of the same color. What do you do if you get Molder Slug, Deconstruct, and Fangren Hunter in your first pack?
This week isn’t about a deck or that final sideboard card (although Black decks really need Echoing Decay for use against Soldier, Goblin, and Insect tokens). No, this is about being ready for The Regionals Experience.
I have dissected a variety of Hulk Smash builds – fifteen total – looking for the trends in winning cards. This actually worked out a lot smoother than when I did the same thing to Keeper, because Psychatog is a card which invites much less flexibility to a deck that uses it, whereas Keeper is nothing but metagame customization. The first thing I did was amass a set of thirty-eight cards (and one sideboard card) that were played in all fifteen builds available from my metagame summaries of the last six months.
So do I need bellow at my opponent”Any Responses To My Pump” twenty times when playing Tog, or”No Responses To The End Of Your Main Phase, Are We In Your Attack/End Phase Yet?”, or is there a cleaner, quicker way that doesn’t allow your opponent to jump through a loophole?
Class is almost out for the year, and I’ve had more time to start playing regular Magic again, so I thought I’d take some time today and share some of my ideas on some”terrible” cards that I think are actually good, as well as one of my favorite archetypes in the format. Tim Aten did a nice article last week on some of the underrated Darksteel cards, so I’ll try not to overlap anything with what he said, and I do have some goodies of my own.
The problem here is that the deck is woefully underpowered. Think of some the most explosive opening draws that you can think of for decks like Tog, Keeper, Slaver, or combo. They’ve got lots of different hand combinations that win the game that turn, either literally or figuratively. Landstill really can’t hope for much outside of turn 1 Ancestral Recall or Balance, which would generate probably only around four-for-two card advantage.
I knew I had to take a break after the awful experience that was GP: Columbus, so I did. Then I started drafting again. Then I started winning again. And then…after a good while to collect my thoughts on the format, I started writing again. The result will be, hopefully, a series of pick order/card analysis articles about MMD draft. If you think this irrelevant with Fifth Dawn on the horizon, I can only say in my defense that if you play on Magic Online, you won’t be seeing Fifth Dawn in your lifetime. Better make arrangements to freeze your head like Ted Williams.
A friend of mine convinced me to go out on a blind date a little while back. The girl turned out to be an ex-girlfriend who was still upset about the fact that I dated her sister for a little while shortly after we split up. I was cursed at for a while then I had a cup of Mountain Dew thrown at me (in the middle of the student center mind you). Despite all of that, I can still say that prior to GP: D.C., that experience still ranks higher than all previous team events I’ve played in.
So why, you may ask, in an article called The Philosophy of Fire, are we talking about archaic deck archetypes and focusing on a card that is restricted in every conceivable format? The reason is that Necropotece gives the average player the most concrete understanding of the interaction between cards and life of any archetype or mechanism. The Philosophy of Fire will do the exact same thing, but instead of trading life for cards from your own deck, it speaks about the relationship of trading cards for your opponent’s life. Specifically, the goal will be to translate a hand into a dead man.
What I’m going to do in this article is canvass the rules for running a Type One tournament: what you should do, what you must do, and what you should avoid. In the process, I’m going to argue for what may seem to be a pretty radical position in terms of how to run one. I haven’t spent time on these subjects before because they are bristling with controversy…
