Bearl! I know it’s been a Bearl since I Bearled at you, but I’ve been pretty Bearl. I just got my Bearl and have been doing non-Bearl things in my spare Bearl. But since there was a Bearl in MN this previous weekend, I had to Bearl. It went pretty Bearl, and here’s the Bearl. Bearl!
Ahem. That’s what happens when you spend a week in Minnesota.
The story of how one of the funniest men in Magic started 0-2 and clawed his way all the way back to his third Pro Tour Top 8 appearance. This article is an absolute treat to all readers, whether you are a long-time Walamies fan or just discovering the Finnish master for the first time.
Just how good do you have to be to qualify at a PTQ? How many horrendous mistakes can you make and still break into the Top 8? Do you have to know the format inside out?
According to my recent PTQ endeavor, the answers are: not very, a ludicrous amount, and barely at all. This is the story of Bad Player Rust at his best, or worst, battling down to the wire for that PTQ slot, and playing Kamigawa block for the first time.
On Tuesday or Wednesday last week, I realized that I had a problem. I had started my Godo-related Daily, and I had some decks from earlier this month, but those decks were in serious danger of being made obsolete by the results of Grand Prix: Minneapolis. Godo is a pretty powerful card, but he has a lot of trouble defeating infinite Kagemaro. Like a lot of Western deckbuilders these days, I needed the Japanese to step in and give me some inspiration. Two separate decklists bearing Godo made the Top 8 of Grand Prix: Niigata last weekend, and I thought that both were not only competitive, but get a ton of fun out of running Godo.
Last time, our Godo deck still had problems with the White weenies. I claimed that a White-based legend deck might simply be a better solution, and I was thinking of this saucy little number from Pro Tour Philadelphia. It has a White Weenie-style creature base, but runs all legends and thus can use Honor-Worn Shaku (a.k.a., the Paddle) to power up a stronger midgame than your typical weenie deck.
There has been a long-running myth, which finally went away with the release of Mirrodin block, that R&D doesn’t design cards for Type 1 and that there are only one or two cards per set which will see any play. Then, there are cards like Mind’s Desire where R&D never even considered Type 1 during design but which end up being among the most powerful, environment-defining cards in the format. Designing for Vintage is a really tricky issue to work with, but that will be the focus for this series and the first place to start is perhaps the most misunderstood concept in Vintage: Proper Mana.
It’s Block Constructed season. GP Twin Cities was a very long weekend, but now it’s over. I was judging, so I watched a lot more matches than almost anyone else there. Here are my observations about Kamigawa Block and how it’s shaping up.
Last time, we saw that adding Godo to the GWU Control framework didn’t go too badly – if I had kept better hands here and there, I might have made Top 8 of the tournament I played it in – but I wasn’t satisfied. The deck had problems, and since that tournament the format has shifted in ways that only exacerbate those problems. Let’s see if we can fix some of those today, shall we?
This week Mark works through his Godo fetish for Kamigawa Block Constructed. He’s not alone in his love for the Bandit Warlord though, the winning deck from the Japanese Block Grand Prix had the same ideas in mind.
Any scientist or artist will tell you that it’s best to look at failures not as failures but as opportunities to learn. Thomas Edison used to say that, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” This keeps you sane, especially when you know that you’re going to miss your goal a lot. There are a lot of failures in Magic, too.
Let me explain something real fast for some of you… no, Regionals is not a Vintage tourney; yes it is Standard or “Type 2” as some call it. No I haven’t given up Vintage and I will continue to write about it. At this point I feel obligated to tell you that I do have an interest in other formats and I enjoy playing something non-broken from time to time. This is a report on my exploits at Regionals, contains zero Vintage material and well generally have me blathering on for a good 10 pages. You have been warned.
When Saviors came out, I remember remarking to one of my friends that Saviors seemed to have a larger number of reprints than normal. Another of my friends pointed it out to me thee following day, and I’ve heard a variety of other people talking about it as well. On Friday afternoon, during a slow part of my business day, I logged onto the Wizards homepage and read an answer to a question regarding the apparent number of reprints in Saviors. Obviously, I was not the only one with that impression. The answer that was given was quite unfortunate, so I took it upon myself to investigate exactly what Wizards has and has not been reprinting in their recent sets.
When last we left our intrepid adventurers, they were trying to read their Magic cards. After navigating through static abilities, triggered abilities, “comes into play” abilities, and the “ultra-confusing” Giant Spider, they came upon this creature that seemed “kinda cool” but they didn’t know what to do with it.
It has been a while, but today Jeff Till is back to give you problem solving types another run for your money in the latest installment of this outstanding series that combines fun and crazy mind-bending Magic brain teasers.
I tend not to think about Constructed decks until we are well into the season. Usually, I will give the environment time to settle down into a smallish gauntlet of decks, figure out what makes those decks tick, and then write up a deck designed to do well against that gauntlet. But this time, I wanted to go to Los Angeles so badly that I charged into the environment without any real testing… and I discovered some very important things.
