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Aggressive Reaction

I find that the best defensive strategies attack. When you let the opponent dictate the terms of an interaction (“this game is about my Jitte“) you have to play by his rules; you may mistakenly enter a mindset where you believe that the game revolves around some key permanent he uses to threaten you, even when it only looks that way, or only is that way because you let it. You grasp for even sub-optimal methods of answering that permanent in the vain hope that its removal is, like Love in the Beatles song, all you need. The problem is that when the opponent controls the initiative, you can’t hope to win with one-for-ones.

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The Pikachu Master

Kamigawa Block Constructed continues to dominate our testing. I’m finding the block fantastic and very enjoyable. Today I’ll cover four different decklists that we’ve been working on in hopes of cracking the Block Constructed format wide open.

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Aftermath of a Failure

After making the Top 8 in seemingly every Limited Pro Tour ever, Anton Jonsson’s streak came to an end in London. Why did it happen, what did he learn, and how can it help you to become a better player? That’s the focus of today’s article by the man who is rapidly becoming one of the best Magic writers around.

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The Origins of Zvi, Part 3 – The Finale

This is it folks, the final installment telling the tale of how one goofy young Type One player turned into a Pro Tour powerhouse and deckbuilding master.

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A Strange New Land – 23rd place at Central California Regionals

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.

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Rule of Law 10 – News U Can U’s (Copy Rules)

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.

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Did Wizards Tell Us the Truth About Reprints?

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.

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Tuning Basic Plains

At the end of the day, templating an existing archetype isn’t done just because you like certain cards better than the ones that are accepted in particular deck types; templating is done specifically to gain a legitimate strategic advantage in a matchup. It is successfully accomplished by understanding what threat cards are in the decks you expect, and by correctly answering those threat cards using mana efficient and consistent means. This build of White Weenie just does that by consistently holding the ground against opposing aggressive decks while providing a stronger late game via Spirit bombs. Other White decks can’t win fights, fail to remove whole classes of your key permanents even when their bombs are online.

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The Right Threat

Since Magic is ultimately about dealing the twentieth point, every deck’s plan leads toward that. The variables here are how far into the game that will be, how many turns the damage will take, and how many sources will deliver it. Vintage’s abundant cardpool pushes decks toward the answers “soon, one, one”, but Fish is the winningest deck that says “eventually, several, several”. Since, unlike decks terminating in one-card blowouts, Fish uses its threats throughout its game plan, I’m focusing on it today. Whether you want to hate them or play them, it’s important to consider what’s winning.

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Magic Puzzles in Play Vol. 5

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.

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Sullivan Library: Innovations from Regionals

My return article is going to be about the results of the last major Standard tournament that hit the newsstands recently. Many of the things that happened were small, but I do think that the last thing I mention in this article is something truly staggering.

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Fine, Just Ban It Already!

After a great deal of deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that it is now necessary to move past restriction and simply ban one card in Vintage. This article will focus on the arguments for and against banning this particular card, which may very well be the best Magic card of all time.

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Draft Archetypes In The Post-Saviors Metagame

There are several major changes that Saviors has given us; Green has gone from the worst to the best color in just the space of one booster, every other color has become a lot less spirit-based, and Black and White have taken a big hit as they used to be the deepest colors but Saviors has given them nothing. So now that the Pro Tour has come and gone, it is safe for me to reveal my drafting secrets – and here is the plan that I had for the Pro Tour, all laid out for you.

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Troll and Nail v.2

I can’t stand it any more. In the past few weeks, I’ve seen dozens of articles about Tooth and Nail, each dubbing it the best deck in Standard. But people have been making drastic mistakes in building the deck properly… and now that the metagame has finally shaped up, let me present to you my latest Troll and Nail innovation and show you where the initial build went wrong.

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The Road To Los Angeles, Week 1: How Important Is Manriki-Gusari?

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.

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