Friday, March 21st – Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of the Magic Show. In this week’s episode, we travel to Grand Prix: Philadelphia in the great state of Pennsylvania. Over eleven hours of travel to and from, technical issues galore, a huge glut of Magic stars to talk to, and the result is this week’s Magic Show. BONUS: Watch the edited finals, with pretty pictures of the cards and everything!
Thursday, March 20th – I felt it was time for good old fashioned hardcore Magic. I mean decks, strategy, or alternate formats. The type of Magic you can use at your own kitchen table. Forget fancy card evaluations, opinion articles, and lists of resources. It’s time for a serious hardcore article. Nothing is purer than a Magic article about decks.
Thursday, March 20th – The best way to build decks without relying on twenty-dollar rares is to use commons and uncommons that are key to your strategy. But aside from opening packs, where do you get all those key uncommons? Believe it or not, Wizards has been giving you a way to get them for years – the preconstructed decks.
Wednesday, March 19th – Anyone who knows my writing from other websites knows that I need little provocation to write a tournament report. If someone looks at me cross-eyed: I’ll write a tournament report. If I stub a toe on the coffee table in living room while drunk: I’ll write a tournament report. And when I have two first place finishes at local Legacy tournaments fresh in my memory, you can bet your ass I’ll write a tournament report.
Wednesday, March 19th – While restocking my trade binder the other day, I ran across a foil Jhoira of the Ghitu, a card that I’ve always found intriguing but had not yet fully tested out her potential. The foil Jhoira looks awesome – her eyes flash and it’s like she’s radiating power!
Wednesday, March 19th – A few years ago, I asked Chris Richter to critique my judging – what I should change, what I needed to work on and so forth. His review – “suck less.†Since my online play has sucked recently, that review came to mind. I decided to analyze my play, online and off, and look at the different results.
Wednesday, March 19th – In Magic, as in life, everybody has ideas. As a member of the writing world I always furrow my brow and narrow my eyes whenever anyone talks about an “idea†they have for a story, or a screenplay, or a poem, or a novel, or whatever. “Can I read what you’ve got so far,†I’ll ask, and they’ll eye the ground sheepishly like a late-eighties shoegazer.
Tuesday, March 18th – “Why not?†and “Because†might get you a University interview on a Philosophy course, but when it comes to explaining to a new player why twelve four-drops is too many in a Goblin rush deck at their first ever Standard FNM? Time to relearn some lessons the easy way, in the company of Rich Hagon, the man with more hair than PT Top 8s. Which is probably true of most of us, actually.
Tuesday, March 18th – Ever since I saw the results of the burn deck that succeeded at Grand Prix: Shizuoka, I’ve decided that it would be one of my main decks to try out for the new Standard format. Of course, I’d love to play my Faeries deck some more, but on Magic Online there’s the slight issue of procuring a set of Mutavault and Bitterblossom without trading in an organ or two. As they say, if you can’t join ‘em, play Red and burn them to a crisp.
Monday, March 17th – Players receive penalties all the time at Magic tournaments because of carelessness and laziness. Kevin Binswanger is here to give you advice and step-by-step instructions on tournament operations to let you concentrate on playing Magic without having to worry about an illegal decklist or slow play.
Monday, March 17th – When Lorwyn first started leaking to the Web forums, the world over got excited about two cards: Thoughtseize and Gaddock Teeg. Both promised to disrupt combo and control decks in a significant way, but Thoughtseize has gone the distance a bit more successfully than our 2/2 Kithkin hero. After all, at the end of the day the Teegster is just a 2/2 and every deck this side of the Mississippi ought to be able to deal with that. Enter Rashad Miller…
Monday, March 17th – I’m trying hard to get a handle on what makes a good Sealed deck in the format, but what look like decent builds collapse underneath me. And today, I got a deck with cards I would have sworn would have been a raging aggro deck, only to find that the real aggro deck was buried beneath.
Friday, March 14th – Rather than anything deep and expansive about any one format, it seems I’ve got a lot on my plate to do with a lot of different formats. Morningtide is now finally available on Magic Online, and last weekend’s Grand Prix featured the Standard format while this weekend’s Grand Prix features Extended once again. So we are going to look a little bit at Standard, Extended, and Draft, because each has some interesting progress going on.
Friday, March 14th – Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of the Magic Show. This week we’re going to take a peek inside our first Shadowmoor pack, detail the push for new player acquisition and complete assimilation of the planet Earth in the name of Magic, learn some details about this fall’s upcoming expansion, discuss the current Extended environment, and more. Let’s go! SPOILER WARNING
Thursday, March 13th – The goal of this article is to articulate why a certain card should or should not be banned given a particular set of circumstances. I believe it’s useful to examine these situations because it provides a de facto gauge for the health of a given format, and also assists us as consumers of information in deciding whether we should waste time clamoring over something that may or may not actually be bad for Magic in the first place.
