Friday, May 21st – If you’re like me, you’ve been drafting Rise of Eldrazi like there’s no tomorrow, or at least picking over the set for cards to give your Standard deck more umph! I’ve head judged a couple of Standard tournaments already and have seen some situations that are very likely to become staple judge calls for the summer.
Friday, May 21st – Can I really be that guy, the one who’s playing Jund? I recognize a desire to be different, to want someone to come look at my new Brew and laud me for my creativity, my creation. I want that. But I want to win more.
Friday, May 21st – There have been a slew of new and intriguing decks that have recently come as a result of the various nationwide qualifiers from this past weekend. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any of them are new contenders, it’s always nice to see people sit down and come up with brand new decks as opposed to playing the same stale, old fare.
Thursday, May 20th – Sometimes a card is adopted by one deck, and it takes some time before other uses of the card are fully explored. It may seem that, at first, the card works best in that one deck, and there is no reason to try and place the card in another deck. While such a card may work well in its original setting, there may be other uses for it, uses which may improve the decks that choose to add this card to their designs.
Thursday, May 20th – The day started out well enough at 2-0, wrecking Mythic and Grixis with Geopede Jund, but then in round 3, I ended up being paired against an old acquaintance of mine, Joel Allen. He was running some strange mono-White creation – I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it initially. Emeria, the Sky Ruin? Kor Cartographer? What in the name of Hazezon Tamar was going on here?
Thursday, May 20th – Patrick Chapin famously pointed out that “tight technical play decides more games of Magic than all other factors combined.†Given this, how does waiting until the very last minute to pick a deck make any kind of sense? Playing a good deck well will get you much farther than playing the ‘best’ deck sloppily.
Thursday, May 20th – I was judging at the National Qualifying tournament in Wisconsin last weekend. I was – but only for the first few rounds. Ingrid and I were part of a six-judge crew, headed by Jason Lemahieu, which was a ridiculous judge staff for a 105-player tournament. Attendance was far below expected, and that was true across the country. Last fall, attendance at The2009s (a.k.a. States) was nuts – what has changed? What went wrong?
Wednesday, May 19th – This is a series of articles dedicated to the Gorilla Chieftains of Magic. Outside of Limited, where do they get played? The once in a blue moon Ape deck, and that’s it. It’s the same with Rootwater Alligator. When do you see Living Airship soaring overhead? Cards like Village Elder and Soot Imp are the many cards between Awesome and Great on one side, and Suck and Awful on the other.
Wednesday, May 19th – It’s that time again. My articles are usually very polarizing, where some people think I’m a stupid jerk and others think I’m a genius. That polarization finds to be even stronger for my more abstract rants. If you are in the former group, please select any one of the other fine articles on this fantastic website instead. If you are in the latter group, please enjoy.
Wednesday, May 19th – Regionals is over, and now the push is toward Grand Prix: DC. A week ago, I would have told you to choose either Jund or UW and just smash. Now, though? Now we have a bit more to work with, as Regionals is a fairly large event that is spread out across many groups of players in drastically different metagames, and so it is becoming more and more clear as days go on what the “best†decks are and which ones just aren’t cutting it.
Wednesday, May 19th – On today’s edition of MTGCast, the guys discuss a rumored new Sealed format, Nationals Qualifiers, UR Distortion Strike, and much more!
Tuesday, May 18th – Saturday, May 8th I played in a the Vintage portion of the Philly Open VI. Coming off a tournament where I did well is always awkward for me. For some reason, I’ve really struggled to string together successful back-to-back Vintage tournaments in which I repeated my deck choice from the previous tournament.
Tuesday, May 18th – This week, I delivered on the promise of playing the Darigaaz-turned-Karrthus deck, and it was a smashing success. In stark contrast to the philosophy of Second Best which I espoused last week, I was a frontrunner for the entirety of the first game…
Tuesday, May 18th – Hello everyone, and welcome back to “Drafting with Todd.” Today we’re going to do something a little different than usual, which I haven’t done in quite a while: a draft walkthrough. With so much Constructed upheaval over the last few days, I didn’t want to write more about The Super Friends or Jund, and figured this would be a nice change of pace.
Monday, May 17th – By the time this column goes up, you all will probably be saturated with metagame articles and decks from this weekend’s Nationals Qualifiers. Since none of my deck ideas seem to break the hammerlock Jund, U/W Control, Mythic and Planeswalkers seem to have on the format, I figured I’d focus on Elder Dragon Highlander instead.
