While it may shock people to hear this, Wizards’ employees do not sit enraptured at the edges of their chairs paralyzed in sheer ecstasy at the thought of handing out company dollars to random people they’ve never met before. It’s not as if being good at a card game automatically entitles you to a plethora of $40,000 checks hand-delivered to your doorstep with a smile.
With Time Spiral Block Constructed season winding down, and everyone holding their breath for news of Lorwyn trickling out from Wizards, Scrye, and other magazines, and the eagle-eyed sleuths at MTGSalvation, it’s tempting to just drift away from thinking about Magic right now. I mean, you spend eleven months devouring Magic strategy and content, you can take a month off… right?
This article will be about the history of Vintage, and some of the personalities / in-jokes you may have missed if you’re new to the format. I’m hoping that, in the future, a few more articles can be written about the subject, since the format has had quite a long history and much of it from three or more years ago has been lost over website moves and server crashes.
In the sequel to last week’s bestseller, Rich Hagon casts not one eye but two over the winners and losers in the coming Magic year. Good news for Drafters talented or otherwise? Constructed formats of delight? Sealed success or Limited limitations? Find out where your dollar, pound, yen, drachma, or euro will be going during the next twelve months. Plus no accountancy joke this week, which will disappoint none of you (plus or minus 10%.)
There have been apocalypses predicted for every change to this game that I’ve ever seen…. And none more so than Magic Online. Magic Online would be the death of Magic, it would fail miserably, it would get hacked. We all knew it, and people wrote tons of articles at the time telling us what would happen. So I went back to the halcyon days of 2002 to see what people were saying at the time, and I compared what they were worried about to what actually happened, just to see how accurate the Magic community is as a whole at seeing things coming. Which led, in turn, to kind of a snapshot of Magic Online as it stands today.
Jamie returns to grace the fair pages of StarCityGames.com, and as always, he’s doing what he does best: swinging with the Green guys! He’s currently back in the States for a prolonged vacation, and what better way to spend that free time than chewing the fat and sharing smiles with likeminded spellslingers? Table talk, Green beats, fun stories, all delivered with Jamie’s unmistakable panache. Welcome back!
How to win a PTQ… a conundrum that’s plagued some of the best Magic minds since Organized Play began. Strategy, mental focus, deck choice and construction… it all goes into creating that perfect formula of success. Today’s Down And Dirty sees Kyle interview a host of top-level pros (and me) and ask them that most pertinent of questions. Just hoe DO you win a PTQ?
With all of the attention being paid to TPF drafting, Standard, Block Constructed, and all those other great formats that will soon cease to be relevant, I thought I’d take a look at Prismatic, a format that is never relevant – specifically the changes we can expect from Tenth Edition and the newly spoiled Master’s Edition. Warning: Contains Spoilers.
Christopher Coppola reports on his performances at two Legacy events, and discusses the dramatic changes currently taking place in the format. He goes into detail about the development of the GenCon 3rd place deck, and mentions his influence on the winning Threshold list!
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of the Magic Show. This week we see some important events happening in the Magic universe, and none quite so important as me being your official 2007 Invitational Storyteller. What do I think of this honor and why did my nomination stir up such intense debate? Let’s get started! Warning: Contains Spoilers.
In my opinion, some silver-bordered cards are self-banned. My personal rule is to eschew cards that are too powerful in order to get a laugh. Mox Lotus may be funny when you see it in a pack, but it is far from hilarious when you see it kill you and everybody else at the table reliably via the use of cards like Tinker. Someone who tries to abuse the broken cards in the silver sets is not playing with the spirit of the silver sets.
I’ve been playing a lot of Tenth Edition Release Events on Magic Online lately, for a lot of reasons. In part it’s because I do most of my Constructed work online these days, and thus I’ll need the cards; in part because I love the format and hate drafting Time Spiral block; and in part because I’ve done pretty well in them, especially if you count events that crashed after I was able to draw into Top 8.
Aside from the fact that I have to spend more money that I don’t really have, I love it when a new set comes out. That’s true even if, like Tenth Edition (a.k.a. Xth), it’s mostly comprised of cards that I already have, thanks to years of hoarding the ones that I’ve purchased. That’s because the fun isn’t necessarily in getting new cards but in using old cards in new ways. At a minimum, it’s the chance to use old cards in combinations and in formats in which I’ve never gotten to use them.
A year ago, Wizards launched Dreamblades minis game at GenCon with a $50,000 tournament, and a full schedule of big dollar events. This year it held the $50,000 World championships at GenCon, but also announced that Wizards was ending support for organized play. Since Dreamblade was based on the same model that drives Magic, what does that say about Magic the Gathering?
I love casual players. I was one for five years before I played in my first tournament. But I want to swear up and down for as long as it takes to get my point across that the Pro community is not composed of a bunch of evil, selfish bastards lurking in the wings to steal casual players’ lunch money. By and large they’re tolerant, nice, fun, good people who love the game every bit as much as any kitchen table squad I’ve ever seen. Don’t let the one rules-lawyer you always run into at PTQs ruin your taste of tournament players more broadly. There’s a reason he’s still playing at PTQs and trying to win his games unfairly, believe me
