Inspired by Adam Grydehrmha’s recent article, Chris decided to give U/R Isochron Scepter a run at a recent Standard tourney and details his results here for all to see. He also includes one of the largest cheesecake sections ever seen on StarCityGames.com.
In which one Daniel Paskins, Master of all things Red, details his seedy history raping and pillaging Kent with cards like Gerrard’s Wisdom and Wall of Blossoms. The horror, the horror!
After three second-place finishes in four PT Top 8’s, Gabriel Nassif again found himself in the finals at Pro Tour: Atlanta, this time with teammates David Rood and Gab Tsang. What follows is the story of Nova’s victorious weekend, including special guest appearances by Dave Williams and Josh Arieh of World Poker fame and a very angry Kumano, Master Yamabushi.
Casting costs are relatively important in Type One, for more purposes than just evaluating how much mana you need to put in your deck (especially since cheating on casting costs is the primary goal of many if not most Type One strategies). Its actual import reveals itself through the usefulness of other cards: Powder Keg, Smother, Engineered Explosives, Pernicious Deed, as well as the classically sidelined counterspells, Prohibit and Spell Blast. Other cards ranging from Overload and Plaguebearer to Gorilla Shaman and Chalice of the Void also care very much about this aspect of a card. Today I’m going to break down a whole slew of numbers that will make you a better Vintage player for knowing them.
Flooded Shoreline has appeared before in SCG Daily. About a fortnight ago, Abe Sargent made it the focus of his, um, Bad Rare Challenge. But while Flooded Shoreline might now be no more than an old, bad rare, there was a time when it was part of the world’s best deck.
A card pool containing Meloku, Fumiko, and more burn than you can shake a stick at? Could Craig possibly get that lucky? Will he find the right build this time, or will the Scousemaster insist on playing White again?
Before we get going, I have a confession. The preparation for this article didn’t exactly take me where I thought it would. I originally set out to do what many others were also trying: put together a respectable Ninja deck for Kamigawa block. I’d already experimented with a few of them in Standard with pleasant results, so I figured they could work out fairly well in the closer confines of their home block. I wrote up decklists and played games, and the Ninja actually fared pretty well, but I made a discovery (well, more of a realization) that led me down a different path
Stalling has been a topic we’ve seen writers adress frequently on these pages, but an in-depth look at the viability of using chess clocks is a new one. That’s exactly what Judge Riesland addresses today, and it might even be a better idea than the skeptics initially thought.
None of the cards in Portal are format-shattering; the problem is that the quantity of tutors is reaching critical mass. I define “critical mass” as having enough tutors that you can rely on having the tutors necessary to find important cards often enough to build a deck that relies on tutoring for a given card by turn 2 or 3. And what does that mean for the format?
How do you bring the beatdown when you’re being pounded by Generals and Emperors? Laura explains the weaknesses of creature-heavy decks in Emperor Format, then looks at how to design creature-based strategies that work.
I love this Limited format. It is so incredible because there are so many interesting interactions in the format. There are interactions you can easily see (Tallowisp plus Cage of Hands) and ones that you need to see in the game to really grasp (Earthshaker plus Guardian of Solitude). These types of synergies are what the format is all about, and what I’m going to try and help you come to grips with over the next couple of weeks to give you a leg up on the PTQ season.
This week’s Daily author is the master of the Red himself, Englishman Dan Paskins.
Tiago Chan’s team took Day 1 of the Pro Tour by storm, starting things off undefeated in the Sealed Deck portion of the event. How did the wheels fall off and what interesting things does Tiago have to say about the event and Team Sealed Deck? You’ll have to click the link to find out.
Josh takes a look at the deck that made him State Champion for the new Standard environment. Now that Affinity is gone, what changes need to be made to the deck and what decks in the metagame are going to cause problems for Sol Malka’s favorite colors?
The Top Three Most Annoying Cards didn’t get quite the response that I thought it would, but the results were pleasantly varied. This was the strongest week yet, where almost every article would have been a winner in a slower week…. but the most amusing was an underlooked gem by Corneel Coens – The Pity. The Argument. The Chance. The Bookkeeping. The No. – that outlined not three, but five of the most annoying card types in Magic. And he wrote it so well that we don’t mind that he broke the rules. So Corneel wins the $20 for this week!
What’s next week? Well, we have April First coming up, so the challenge is going to be a little different:
April Fools Decks.
What’s an "April Fools Deck"? Well, for our purposes we’re going to define it as "a deck that does something your opponents didn’t think it was going to." It could be a deck that looks like Affinity but turns into control, it could be a deck that looks like crap but explodes into infinity when its innocuous pieces come together, or it could be a deck that suckers your opponents into making a critical mistake. Better yet, come up with a better definition of an April Fools’ Deck.
Do that, and you could win $20 in this week’s Casual Challenge! Send your submission to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2!
