Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present you with a new breed of zombie deck. Yeah, that’s right, count ’em. Thirty. Thirty glorious, rotting fleshbags that want to eat brains and wander about with arms outstretched! That’s what I call tribal. But I digress. Let’s step away from this madness to take a closer look at this deck.
Yes, those are four Maggot Carriers…
Now you’re a seasoned veteran. You’ve witnessed the birth of ten new sets and watched the metagame evolve. Prerelease cards fill three whole pages in your binder and the Player Rewards program has made you a rich man. You’ve gone from a Timmy to a Johnny to Spike and back, and you attend PTQs regularly. You are the Stack Master, the Combat Damage King, the Timing … okay, you’re really good, and you’ve got your eye on the Pro Tour. Then you finally make it, and the dream is complete. Now the only thing left to do is win $30,000, and get your face on an invitational card. Is this the pinnacle of achievement? Or did you lose something along the way?
Brian Kibler recently posited that with the release of Darksteel and the I-can’t-believe-it’s-a-three-dollar-uncommon Skullclamp, White Weenie, or, more accurately,”Equipped White” (somebody find a cool name for the deck!) is primed to take a run at Tier 1-dom. I agree… to a point.
The buzz is in the air, the slow building excitement of a new Type 2 ready to be explored and exploited in the months leading up to Regionals. How will Darksteel shake up the metagame? Will any of the anointed Tier 1 decks stumble and fall? Will any Tier 2 or completely new archetype rise up to take their place? Will there be any secret tech that flies under the radar long enough to surprise and conquer like Ralphie Treatment or Turbo-Haups in years past?
What I am offering up is a list of points that you should think about if you ever want to improve your game. While I realize this type of thing has been done many times before, I think I have a number of things to hit on that many people haven’t covered, and that I find very important to anyone looking to get better at Magic, especially Limited. These are things that changed me from a mediocre player into a pro player years ago, and they are general enough that they can work for everyone.
More of the same, including epic battles against Tim Aten and the dinosaur… E.D.T.! Don’t miss it!
So, you’re sick of the theory articles. You want Geordie to go back to writing tournament reports and strategy. You want to hear about him getting stopped at the U.S. Border and slinging spells. You want him to riff on Tim Aten’s DC10 skills and complain about bathroom facilities, while throwing in some toilet humor, the usual grousing, and bite-size tidbits of Mirrodin-Darksteel Limited strategy. Well fine then, here ya go!
The question is, are you man enough to read both parts? Highly doubtful my friends, highly doubtful…
The cycle continues. Every few months or so, the Five Color Council has a larger ballot. February appears to be the largest one in a while. This month, we take a close look at three new cards and try to see if an old card should be put out to pasture. We also have an interesting question of succession.
Oscar continues to look at Darksteel for more bang for his buck. Is he going to find any Chasey Lain videos here, or is”Cinnamon Buns” going to strike out with the Darksteel sorceries? Click on the link to find out!
If you recall my last article, you’ll remember it was about Chittering Rats, and a Black/Green Cemetery deck that has still been testing well. I’ve put it on the back burner and have started to work this little number. It was something I have been working on since the spoiler was released. The Indestructible creatures jumped out and caught my eye. I loved NetherHaups when it was played, and thought hey, maybe it is possible to make a deck like it for this control heavy format.
Ken is sneaky like the Brass Man. I had agreed to debate the merits of Steel Wall, while Ken wanted to argue his points about Clockwork Condor. I agreed to this dilemma since I felt it is very close and that either card could win. I like that kind of argument, because I feel that our arguments often sway the readers’ opinions more than anything else.
So, I go off to Grand Prix: Oakland thinking about how cool it is to be debating Steel Wall… but sneaky Ken ran off with the Brass Man and started cackling.
The dilemma this week is something I would not have expected at the beginning of this format, and is certainly not what I would have expected when I was told this was the artifact block…
White Weenie is such a strange deck – it doesn’t try to mise. It doesn’t burn out players or use fancy tricks. It plays guys. Stand up guys that you can depend on, like Savannah Lions. They will arrive, swing, and get the job done. No frills, just beats. Somehow I always find myself writing about White Weenie every year. It is very stable – very White. It is always a contender even the harshest of environments.
As promised, here’s Jeff’s response to Antonino De Rosa’s article.
Turn 5 – At this point, I was generating infinite mana. It was turn 5 because everyone had been targeting me, and I had had my turn 2 Metalworker and turn 3 Thran Dynamo killed. Not good enough. As I put 500 Blue mana in my pool, a bystander asked”But how do you kill them?” I dropped Memnarch, turned to the bystander and said”This game, I’ll kill them with an FTK, a couple elves, that Steelshaper and whatever Steve has under that Bonesplitter. But since I’m stealing everything on the board, including lands, they’ll probably concede.”
The real question was, could I take what I learned about Voltaic Construct and build a competitive Type Two deck capable of generating infinite mana? Well, I could certainly try…
