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Flores Friday – Re-positioning Linear Designs and Hybridizing Strategies: Two Ways to Cheat

The Extended metagame rumbles on, and many of us are looking for that elusive edge for our next PTQ tournament. As usual, Mike Flores may have the answers we seek. Today’s Flores Friday examines a fascinating tactic available to us, a tactic that could inform our deck-choices come Tournament Day. Is an exploration of linear card design the key to building a format-warping deck? Mike constantly redefines the metagame… maybe this view of Magic deck-building and design could see us do the same.

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From The Lab – Prerelease Weekend: First Thoughts on Planar Chaos

Craig “The Professor” Jones takes time out from his twisted experiments to bring us the low-down on Planar Chaos Limited. Not content with a mere one or two Prerelease tournaments, Prof decided to go balls to the wall and submit to a straight 24 hours of Magic! There are thrills! There are spills! There’s also a dose of Planar Chaos card advice, and a bushel or two of quality fun – strategy and humor in perfect harmony.

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Drafting With Rich – Time Spiral #36

Rich continues his excellent series of Time Spiral Draft walkthroughs, presenting each pick as it happened and highlighting each card chosen. He shares his final decklist, and gives us a brief overview of his results and processes. As usual, for more detailed draft deconstruction, come visit us in the forums!

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Magical Hack – Chaos Theory

Read Sean McKeown... every Friday at StarCityGames.com!
With the change to a weekly column with a few floating columns, it seems the five-part set review on StarCityGames.com has finally gone the way of “My Fires.” Instead of one series in five parts, naming each and every single card, I’m going to supply one article breaking down the potential I see across a variety of formats, some of which I may arguably be unqualified to speak upon. That said, let’s get this done in reverse-order fashion, starting with the format in which I have the least experience (Vintage) and crawling back up to Standard, where things make sense to me again.

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The Magic Show #28 — Planar Chaos Prerelease

Hello everybody, this week is our Special Edition Prerelease show where I go unscripted and roam amongst the mouth-breathers to bring you what happened at my Planar Chaos prerelease.

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The Real Deal – Planar Chaotic?

In today’s edition of The Real Deal, Ben examines the choices R&D made in choosing the Planeshifted cards in Planar Chaos. Within their own internal logic did these choices make sense? Ben weighs in with his opinion.

Also: Having trouble figuring out which new products StarCityGames.com is carrying? Ben wants to know how to let you know when new products become available on site!

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Food For Thought – Black Knights: A Going Rogue Epilogue

In an additional article for the weekend, JMS takes us through the development of his own pet Mono-Black creation, Black Knights. Utilizing the powerful Haakon, Stromgald Scourge, and a plethora of Black beatdown monsters, does the deck have what it takes to impact the coming Planar Chaos metagame? And what does it gain from the new set, aside from a four-mana board-sweeping sorcery? JMS reveals all…

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8-Post: I Would Qualify If I Had Time To Play

After going 25-0 with a budget build of the Cloudpost/Vesuva deck, Ben began working on the deck for competitive play. After a month of testing and hundreds of playtest matches, he’s come up with a deck that he feels is a winner. Unfortunately, he has no time to attend PTQs. Will you be the one to pilot his deck to a Pro Tour slot?

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Levelling Up – The Road to Success

Improvement is a tricky thing to quantify. Sure, success is something we can all work towards, and this translates itself into tournament wins and strong performances… but how exactly do we measure our own development? This thoughtful article sees Tiago wax lyrical on the true definition of “levelling up,” and introduces three types of successful Magic player: The Talented, The Focused, and The Experienced. Which type are you?

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Planar Chaos Limited: On The Fence

John takes us through some of the tips and tricks picked up at the Planar Chaos prerelease tournaments. Some of the cards he discusses today are thus-far unloved… while some of them are hyped beyond measure. Where does the truth lie? John shares his thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of some of the more interesting sweetmeats that Planar Chaos has to offer…

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Drafting With Rich – Time Spiral #35

Rich continues his excellent series of Time Spiral Draft walkthroughs, presenting each pick as it happened and highlighting each card chosen. He shares his final decklist, and gives us a brief overview of his results and processes. As usual, for more detailed draft deconstruction, come visit us in the forums!

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The Kitchen Table #165: Planar Chaos and Five

Read Abe Sargent... every Thursday at StarCityGames.com!

Bonjour mes amis! Welcome back to another installment of that series that explores all things casual. Today I am going to be looking at the new Planar Chaos set with an eye towards Five Color. During the next few weeks, you can expect to see tons of articles and discussion on the new set, including numerous set reviews. As such, I try to distinguish my set reviews from theirs.

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Chatter of the Squirrel – A Glance At Planar Chaos

I know. I said I wouldn’t be writing this week. But hide those party hats in a hurry, boys, because that’s my (very ugly and outdated and The Monkees’d) mug sketchily leering at you in that Thursday column slot once again.

Like everyone else, I want to talk about Planar Chaos.

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Tact or Friction – Examining Planar Chaos

When I started playing Magic, Set Reviews were a dime a dozen. Writers, sensing easy material, would happily copy their word-count’s worth of extant material into a file and then run through it commenting in a flippant fashion on the cards that they didn’t care about, then have sparks of energy around the cards they really did want to talk about. As I started writing, I just assumed that Set Reviews were the Done Thing.

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Ask The Drama – Musings on the Rock in Extended

As everyone knows, Jeroen Remie loves the Rock. It came as a great surprise to many when he walked away from Pernicious Deed and friends at Worlds 2006, choosing instead to play Boros Deck Wins. Today’s edition of “Ask The Drama” brings us a couple of Rock-based questions for those aspiring Green/Black mages among us, and also tackles other points including the cost of being a pro and Remie’s view of TEPS.

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