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Ever since I started playing this game and learned of the Pro Tour, it’s been my lofty goal to play on that highest of stages. I’ve just wanted to qualify at least once for a Pro Tour event before I keel over (but by then, hopefully, someone will have an Animate Dead handy). I’ve come close, tantalizingly, on a few occasions. Today I’m going to talk about those occasions.

The month of June brings possibly the most eventful issues that Five-Color’s ever seen: the restriction of Contract from Below, the legalization of Portal (or most of it, anyway), the expansion from eighteen cards of each color to twenty cards, and errataing the Wishes. What do these changes potentially mean for Magic’s Biggest Format?

Mark Rosewater argues that the modern glut of keywords is generally positive, and that while Sweep was a dud, so many other worded abilities are still valid. As a vocal critic of this practice, I felt the need to make a few counterpoints, corrections and criticisms of this new article. There are some good points that I agree with, but sometimes the facts that Rosewater presents don’t point to the conclusions he draws.

Dave Meddish isn’t necessarily one of the most popular writers on our site, but his stint on the Daily this week has been second to none in terms of fun, readable content. If you haven’t stopped in to see what Dave has to say, might I recommend today as a good time to do so? After you read about Dave’s amazing road trips, you can then catch up on the rest of his dailies this week at the bottom of the page.

Let me crank up the Wayback Machine to about eight years ago. I had just been laid off from my job as a computer game designer after putting in about a year of crunch time on a failed project (this, sadly, would become a theme of my time in the game biz, but that’s neither here nor there). Coincidentally, friend and fellow Magic player Brad Irwin, who was managing the game portion of the local Book & Game store, had also been laid off and decided now was the time to follow through with his dream of opening his own game store and was looking for partners. Was I interested?

In January, I was working on a series of articles on the history of Extended, but I kept veering off and writing about my favorite Extended decks. To force myself back on topic in those articles, I started a separate article about my all-time favorite decks. These are my choices for my all-time favorite decks – with the caveat that the newest weirdness I am working on always qualifies, right up until I have it done and working.

If you have ever been to a tournament, you know that you play matches against people, and the results are recorded and used to determine what happens from round to round, but have you ever thought about why certain things happen one way and not another? I would not expect most people to have done this, but I have, and here are some observations that I have made. Some of you may consider some of my ideas on what to do with tiebreakers and the like radical, but I think we can find a better system than what we currently have.