Seeing how we are now two weeks away from the State Championships, we have the opportunity to examine the Standard metagame in motion. We are on our way to the World Championships in a month’s time, give or take a little, and in addition to looking at the States metagame as it played out, we can advance it one week into the future by examining the results of this past weekend’s Grand Prix in Krakow.
In this new weekly column, we bring you inside StarCityGames.com to see the strategies, thoughts, trends and feelings about Magic from inside the minds of the StarCityGames.com employees themselves! To kick off this inaugural column, we’ve got Chris Woltereck’s quest to qualify for Worlds ’08, and Ben Bleiweiss’s thoughts about how to fix Magic Online!
We all know that Magic is packed with intangible, incremental gains and losses. Players show their true colors time and again, bluffing and counter-bluffing all the while, attempting to throw their opponent off their game. By highlighting the true level of complexity that is found in one single game, Richard shows us how we can charge those tiny credits to our accounts. This is one of the best articles I’ve read for a while… an instant classic. Enjoy!
Kyle ain’t messing about this week… he takes a long hard look at some of the more exciting decks to come out of Krakow, including a few lists unseen by the Top 8 coverage, and offers his opinions on the new Standard metagame. He also analyses Paul Cheon’s winning 75, before diving into a revealing interview with the newly-minted Level 6 Mage himself!
Last week’s article was a little awkward, because my deadline was a couple of days before States decklists went up, but the article came out on the same day the States page went live. It’s like I was frantic and scrambling for some obscure theorem to use on a midterm, and then an hour after I turned in the paper someone uploaded Stephen Hawking’s entire brain into my skull.
I made a Kithkin Soldier deck. I know. I can’t believe it, either. Me, Chris Romeo, building a White Weenie deck as his first one using the latest cards. Go figure. I wanted the goodness of Clash in there somewhere, to smooth the draws. This is the part where you scurry to figure out which card with Clash I could possibly use in a White Weenie deck. It’s Springjack Knight.
Hello and welcome back to the weekly catalogue of the casual. I began the Compendium way back in February of 2003. That’s a long time ago. The Compendium is an attempt to create a large number of formats for casual players all in one place. Just go to my archives and search for “compendium” to find the other eight entries. Today’s format? Bugwar.
In today’s So Many Insane Plays, Stephen unlocks the metagame secrets of Vintage, breaking down all of the tournament results since the Vintage World Championship. What’s winning and what’s changing in Vintage? This is a must-read article for Vintage players!
The PTQ season for Pro Tour: Kuala Lumpur is in full swing, and the Lorwyn cards are available on Magic Online (if you can bear the current lag issues). Today’s Peebles Primers brings us an excellent Sealed cardpool from a recent 4x Premier Event. If you’re looking for a little practice before your PTQ this weekend, Benjamin has the goods for you!
My boy Kevin McCormack recently jumped the “casual player†hurdle and is hurling himself headlong into the realm of competitive events. We’ve got a PTQ this very week in St. Louis, in fact, and I’m expecting him to make a decent showing. But one of the questions he asked me when he first decided he wanted to “get good†was: what articles do I need to read?
I have looked through a fair number of the Top 8 decklists from States, and I haven’t found the combo decks. I haven’t seen any. Am I just missing something, or are they really not present? More importantly, is there a combo deck people just haven’t seen yet? Hint – I think so.
Leading up to States, I heard a lot of grumbling about how underpowered Lorwyn was compared to Time Spiral and Ravnica. I think the results from States and Grand Prix: Krakow put that notion to rest. I’m of the opinion that Lorwyn was pretty masterfully designed – many of the cards don’t set off alarm bells when you’re just looking at the text box and stats, but when you shuffle them up in a deck and start playing with them, many of them give you that “oh, wow!†feeling.
I’m not sure why States, as a tournament, holds such an allure for me. Maybe it’s the freewheeling, undefined metagame, which allows for any deck to break through and become the Next Best Thing. Maybe it’s the mad scramble to find any crumb of tech to wedge into a deck.
For me, I think it’s the plaque.
A deck stuffed to the gills (so to speak) with potent Merfolk and Faeries! What’s not to love! Well, the results aren’t to love if you get greedy and try to throw in too much! Watch what happens when a good deck tumbles! Film at 11!
Adrian Sullivan has quite the pedigree when it comes to the State Championships. This year he worked long and hard with I@n DeGraff, polishing and tweaking an innovative Red deck that can drag wins from nowhere. Today’s Sullivan Library takes a look at the development of this powerful deck, and Adrian suggests that the deck is a true contender in the post-States metagame. If you’re looking for an innovative and exciting Red deck, then this is the article for you!
