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Me And My Ants: PTQ Tokyo

Tuesday through Friday: "You have spent 456 minutes online." -AoL, upon signing off. Okay, quit yer whining. One of the quotes was wrong, a little. It’s not like you were close, anyway. Here: "I’ve got this fella working for me – do you know what a hacker is?" Should now read: "I HAVE this fella…

FINAL JUDGEMENT: What I Want for Christmas

As I mentioned previously, today (Tuesday the 19th) is Lisa’s birthday (that’s Lisa my wife, although I suspect there are other people named Lisa who have birthdays today). If you have the opportunity, please drop her an email at [email protected] wishing her a happy birthday. Trust me, she’ll appreciate it. Ask her how she likes…

PTQ/GPQ St Louis: A Tale of Two Tourneys

"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." "Oh you’re ‘that’ guy." I was still at the Fantasy Shop hanging around trying to make some late trades and was talking about my day. My 0-5 day in extended with . Do you really want to hear a full match report on…

FINAL JUDGEMENT: With All Humility…

Franklin*, , soared high above Dominaria, swirling, looping, diving and doing the occasional barrel roll. Franklin didn’t care much about doing anything but soaring and swooping and so forth, mostly because he was good at it. In fact, Franklin was the best swooper among all the Cloudchasers he knew (his barrel-rolling could use some work,…

(Force of) Will To Power: To Ban Or Not to Ban

Quick question: what do Trade-Survival, Trix, Pande-Burst, Counter-Sliver, Forbidian, and most of the Fruity Pebbles-spawned cereal variants have in common? . The aforementioned decks are considered among the best Extended decks currently in the format. The only non-rogue Extended decks that don’t run are the -fueled variants, Three-Deuce, Stompy, Secret Force and Sligh – and…

1800 Or Bust!: Thanks, Omeed!

What a difference a Type II Pro Tour makes. How many articles are out there right now written by the Pros? How many different versions of decks can we look at when building our own versions and test gauntlets? Just how clearly are the Tier One decks defined? And all this thanks to a Pro…

CASUAL FRIDAYS #68: Fifteen Funky Formats To Fool Your Friends

With the holidays upon us, it is time to shake ourselves out of our typical ruts and do some fresh, new things. I therefore present to you fifteen new (well, some more new than others) group play formats for you to try over the next few weeks. I came up with the number "fifteen" easily,…

Fired Up About Type II

I recently placed 4th at PT Chicago playing . I’d like to share the insights I gained into the Fires deck through sixteen rounds of Pro Tour Play (including a post-PT Chicago decklist). First of all, I just have to say that this deck is by far the most fun thing going in type two….

Editor Ferry Ignatius Explains It All For You

Explaining Rogue Decks: Jack Benny is dead. And I MISS him. But I’m not going to demand that you listen to him. For those of you who don’t know Jack, at one point he was bigger than Jerry Seinfeld. Bigger than "Friends." But technology crept into his veins like a slow-acting poison, leeched all of…

Sith Mind Tricks

–Begin pre-article note– I apologize to the Ferrett for overlooking him in my last article. He did mention me (albeit for my attempts at trying to find a use for Carnival of Souls), but in my defense, I simply went by the Magic Search engine (and I hadn’t read his article yet). I hope my…

PTQ: Checked

Wednesday, Dec 5. I got home at two a.m. on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning after playing way too much Magic at CMU. Stupidly, I logged on to check my mail… and found sixty-three messages. Oh man. I did write that damned "respond to email with haste, chief" diatribe, didn’t I? At about 4:20 a.m., I hit…

Good Beats: Taking One In The Chops

Pro Tour Chicago has come and gone. Combined, all the CMU guys brought home a whopping $875, broken down like this: – $0 Andrew Johnson – $0 Andrew Cuneo – $0 – $875 I can’t say we didn’t get what we deserved. Our playtesting regimen was not very good. I made a gauntlet of fourteen…

Staying The Course: Standard After Chicago

Late Sunday night I cruised on over to the Sideboard to see how Chicago shook out, and saw that the evil * crushed the dreams of PT Rookies this year; Kai isn’t exactly an unknown player using Chicago to launch himself into the spotlight, like Bob Maher and in past years. So much for that…

Price of Progress: Chicago Report

Chicago was the next stop on my marathon of Magic events. I’d been to three different countries in the previous weeks, traveling to Sydney, Australia, Florence, Italy, and Dallas, TX in search of that elusive win. I was in search of Pro Tour points and prize money, of course, but mostly I was after the…

Force of Will: Sayonara, Dark Ritual

There were some things that I meant to talk about in my last article, which explored black as a possible metagame call in the current standard environment that I didn’t get to. Basically it is this… THERE IS NO DARK RITUAL IN INVASION! This probably means that there will not be any more of this…