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Enough people wanted a primer that I decided to go through with it. This won’t be your typical primer, though, because the list I played the first week of PTQs is obsolete, and I wouldn’t recommend it card-for-card to anyone. At the same time, I think it’d be extremely useful to work through the process of how I arrived at that list, what the individual cards in it are designed to do, and how you’re supposed to play those seventy-five cards in a variety of matchups.

Before Regionals, I was fooling around on MTGO, and Rivien Swanson dropped me a message asking if I would be interested in playing Two-Headed Giant Momir/Jhoira Basic. Since my release league wasn’t over, I did not have the Future Sight participation avatar Jhoira, but I did have Momir Vig. I had figured “Jhoira Basic” would naturally spring up, but teaming up with Momir for 2HG goodness? That sounded like too much fun!

The first Revised booster I ever opened had a Birds of Paradise. So did one of the first boosters I ever opened online. I have always loved that card, so I really wanted to see a real, live bird of paradise. San Diego Zoo has a lot of birds, including one line of cages with exotics of that genus. The eighth cage had BoPs, but they had rotated behind the foliage and I couldn’t see any. The ninth cages had a sign saying “Animals Temporarily Removed from this Exhibit.” The tenth cage, however, had Birds of Paradise set off against a lovely black wall.

Now that we’ve had more time to digest the Grand Prix: Montreal results, seeing more of the decks that weren’t in the Top 16, we’re beginning to hear about a few of the PTQ results. This means we can start testing with more refined versions of the decks we’ve been playing, or seen on MTGO, and personal gauntlets. My group’s initial testing has slowly shown, just like many others, that a B/U base with splashes is pretty much the way to go in this format.

Today, we’re talking about rares, more significantly “bad rares.” And that discussion has two sides; the side of the corporate shills who have no higher or grander goal than saving you the undue burden of money, and the whining ninnies of the casual crowd who have no idea how the world works. Breaking it down, it runs something like this…

Tomorrow is The Ferrett’s birthday – and as per past Birthday specials, he feels the urge to do something strange, crazy, and unmistakably lazy with his column in order to celebrate! But what, if anything, can he do this year to top the “Unedited article” fiestas of birthdays past? Tune in to see all that, and a Sealed deck that turns out to be a theme deck!

Kyle journeyed to Grand Prix: Montreal via a most unusual route… and today’s Down and Dirty chronicles each step of the way in painful and extravagant detail. Aside from the journey shenanegans, Mr Sanchez brings us his U/W Pickles list and walks us through some of the more salient matchups, before rounding out with more of the Sanchez lunacy. If you’re looking for something a little different for your next PTQ, maybe U/W Pickles is the deck for you…

Grand Prix: Montreal is now behind us… and the decks that did well have insinuated themselves into the Magic Online metagame. Tarmogoyf, Korlash, Epochrasite, and the rest… who are the true winners from Future Sight, and who is failing to make the cut? All is revealed within… but first, a rant about poker.