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We’re a few short days away from Champs, and everyone should be settling in on a deck choice, be it Flores hot new tech, one of the very good decks from the StarCityGames event, or a unique homebrew. I’ve had my deck for a few weeks now. I’ve been tuning it, trying to make it hum against what I expect the metagame to be in Kentucky. I’m excited for the event; after three tests on Friday, I get a weekend to relax and see if I can run my streak of top 8 finishes in the state to a fourth year…

We are going to look at the control decks of the format today. I feel that these decks are going to have a huge part of the Champs environment (when has control been weak?). We get many solid cards from Time Spiral for the control strategies, and these decks are where I have spent the bulk of my testing time. I am a control player at heart, and I feel that I know this style a lot better than I know the aggressive decks or the tempo decks.

With the advent of Ravnica block, making a good multicolor deck has become a lot harder to me. Other, more fiscal writers can afford to start a decklist with Hand of Cruelty and Paladin En-Vec, knowing their manabase will support it. Without that reliance, you look for other, more readily available ways to improve your chances.

Jeroen stood tall against an Abe-ified deck of his own design… and lived to tell the tale. The match was close, but the relentless march of the elephants proved too much for Abe in the end. Jeoren supplies a detailed match breakdown… congratulations Jeroen!

Abe Sargent, Casual Writer supreme, took on Pro Tour Champ Jeroen Remie… and nearly took the crown! Piloting a deck of Jeroen’s design, he put up a fair fight. Read his match report here!

Not all Champs competitions are held this weekend… some have been and gone. Blisterguy, the winner of his 2005 Champs tournament, posted an incredibly similar result this year. The top 3 decklists are within, alongside the usual plethora of Magic Online Premier Event statistics and card ticket prices…

It is in the mind of almost every single rogue (“bad”) deck designer to one day discover an archetype, to be the man with their name in lights, and the one who gets to bequeath a stupid name upon a deck and hear people recite it whenever they chat about matchups. It’s a pipe-dream, of course, since enthusiasm and a lust for glory only make up a small fraction of good deck design, with hard work, skill, and an ability to play the game as well as build for it make up the majority of the rest.

Evan Erwin was on-site when the new Solar Pox deck won the StarCityGames.com $1,500 Standard Open – and he got it all on video! Today’s article sees this incredible deck face off against opponents in Round 7, and both the quarter- and semi-finals! Thinking of playing this deck at Champs this weekend, and wanting to learn how to play the deck from first-hand successes? Come look and see!

Last week was another Lava Blister of a Quicken Hits column. Sorry about the fact that there wasn’t a lot of Super Secret Tech, what with States coming up. Give me an Honorable Passage, though; you don’t Peek at my column for Tek. You come here for the Cheap Ass decks. Like Zombies! 2k6, the deck that I Predict-ed that I would play at States. This Surprise Deployment really Outmaneuver-ed some folks. For many, there was a simple Wave of Indifference. Today’s column is for those with a Thirst for Knowledge, those who want to know what makes Zombies run like Clockwork Gnomes.

Yesterday, I laid down the rules — of sifting through old decklists, seeing what goes missing, and seeing what can fill those holes — and started work on Snow Dad. Snow Dad lost its entire engine, so it becomes a very different deck in the exchange — other decks are far more subtle shifts. We lost a card advantage engine, so we’ll use a new one — the rebel toolkit.