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Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of the Magic Show. This week I wrap up my Worlds experience by talking to players about Lorwyn draft, favorite first picks, show you the most exciting match in a long time, and go in-depth into the wild world of Dragonstorm.

Examining one’s own thought processes during a slump is a tricky business. As I wrote in On Discipline, being able to self-examine your play is one of the hallmarks of good discipline. The problem with this is that during your worst slumps, self-examination doesn’t seem to turn up anything useful.

I think that the best Magic writers are good at doing two things well. Firstly, you have to be inventive, and create your own material. In order to be a good Magic writer, you have to create formats, variants, decks, new ways of looking at cards. Alongi gave us Spider, Rattlesnake and other ways at looking at cards, plus he created numerous variants for the multiplayer table. Rizzo gave us Friggorid, Wakefield gave us dinosaurs…

I went. I participated. I lost a total of two matches in five days. That would have been amazing, if I had been a competitor. I was a judge. Let me tell you about that. I’ll even explain how I became Lithuanian for an hour, and about the single best job a judge can have. Oh, and some people played Magic. I may mention that, too.

I’ve talked a lot over the last couple of weeks about focus. About how I think I’ve been able to keep my mind in the right place, and as a consequence how my results have been improving. But there haven’t been many articles written about how exactly to improve focus, what the causes and consequences are, and what may detract from your ability to maintain that focus in an in-game setting. Today I want to tackle some of those issues.

With the Worlds results in, we now have a brand new Standard metagame to look at featuring a legitimate combo deck. Unfortunately, it’s far smaller than the diversity we saw at Grand Prix: Krakow, to the point where MTGO has become a cesspool with everyone selling their grannies to the local glue factory just to come up with the tix for Pyromancer’s Swath and Dragonstorm. All the B/G and B/G/W players rejoiced, as not only could they copy a better version of the decks they were running, but a bunch of mediocre to even matches left the metagame because they all packed up their ball and went home in the face of “The Gassy Knoll.”

The results are in, the data has been collated, and Rich Hagon is here to tell you what it all means. In Part 1, he focuses on the Level 2s trying to reach Pro status, and the Level 3s. Some are on the way up, some are just trying to survive as a Pro, but all had goals going into Worlds. Find out who reached them and how in the company of the man who talks for England.

Not one, not two, but three insane Blue rares, all in one little tidal pool. And lo, it is a crazy good deck piloted by a crazy (if not good) player. But how did it perform… And what terror lies underneath The Ferrett’s Christmas tree?

Looking at the Hideaway lands, it’s very easy to misinterpret their values. The Blue one is reasonably easy to trigger in Limited, but a good deal closer to useless in sixty-card formats, while the Black one more or less seems terrible all around… though sadly I can confess to having won a game with it out of nowhere in a draft, because it required my opponent to be an idiot in order for me to do so.

Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of the Magic Show. This week I fight through hardware failures and flight cancellations to bring you the first half of my Worlds 2007 experience. I talk to Patrick Chapin, Mark Rosewater, Tiago Chan, Zac Hill, Paul Cheon and more while I chronicle my Friday and Saturday experiences at the biggest Magic tournament of the year, and it’s all thanks to your support.