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As far as this week goes, as I promised I wanted to look at making budget versions of some of the decks that are clearly the king of the hill of Kamigawa Block Constructed, starting with Black Hand.

As of this writing, my stack is a little over 330 cards with my target amount being three hundred fifty. The question remains, how do you build a stack of cards of that size and avoid using absolute crap?

Is it true? Yes it is! Due to demand, we’ve put our buylist back online. If you’ve been waiting to sell or trade us cards, read on!

Also inside: Find out about the two newest positions open on the StarCityGames.com staff, see just how many Unhinged lands and foils were added to inventory this week, take a look at the newest Ravnica information, and check out the hottest cards in Magic.

Today Carl continues his introduction to Type 4 by covering removal spells, creatures, bombs, and general stack composition as well as giving some guidance on Type 4 draft archetypes.

The Kamigawa Block Constructed PTQs are in progress. We have several weeks worth of PTQ results, plus the results of two Grand Prix, and the format is shaking out. I’ve noticed that the decks seem – at least to me – to be really heavy in chaser rares. That could be a real effect, or could be because I am trying to get the cards online. Time for some research – Are this year’s Block Constructed decks more expensive to build than in years past?

Have you ever found yourself getting bored with Magic? I know I do on a nearly regular basis. I used to be able to renew my interest by building Revenge of 1997, my wacky five color, Vintage-legal, control deck which is a blast to play, but that eventually stopped doing the trick. Revenge was only a temporary solution. It was a fun deck that only had serious opponents. I needed something new. I needed something extreme. I knew that White Castle was going to be too hard to find, so I went for something four times as extreme as Vintage: Type 4

For people like me, who would have a gambling problem if they ever actually gambled and who are true Johnnies at heart, self-control isn’t easy to come by. The Danger of Cool Things isn’t limited to play situations in Constructed, but can already occur during the draft or deck construction portions of a Limited tournament. It is very useful to be aware of potential traps and this awareness is what I hope to contribute to with this article.

Once we’d decided that Battleground was too good a product not to move forward, we knew that there were a lot of challenges facing us. Most of them had to do with the game itself. We needed to develop three launch armies that would play very differently from each other. We had to make sure that our point-cost system was balanced such that no unit was “too good” or “crappy”. We had to resolve dozens of issues that come up whenever you try to represent constant movement of individuals (albeit individuals in units) in a turn-based system in which the shape of a unit is fixed. One of the biggest challenges, however, had nothing to do with game play. We had to get the art right.