Some people even went so far as to say that Mind’s Desire is an “awful” card, and that Chris battled to the Top 8 on the back of pure playskill and experience with the deck. Having seen Chris play at States the week before the Pro Tour, I can vouch for the playskill part. However, after playing some games with the Ideas Unbound version, I began to agree with the anti-Desire people too.
Romeo embarks on his adventure to turn the Boros precon deck into a lean, mean, winning machine. Can a few minor card substitutions create a bona fide winning deck? The answer might just surprise you.
So, I have to come up with five short articles that have to be between eight hundred and one thousand words in length. I can feel free to let the funk flow at any point too, but there has to be at least some Magic related content in each installment? Well then. Since I usually write about decks for Standard, it makes sense that I’d lead off The Daily with my latest pet deck. I played it at States and went 6-2, narrowly missing the cut.
Flores puts a new Zoo variation through the flames of battle and discovers that it might just be a very solid contender for the PTQ and Worlds metagames.
Last time I looked at Mono-Green Aggro, I suggested that it was an excellent metagame option against Tooth and Nail and MUC. I loved Molder Slug as if it was a barely-clothed, barely-legal slice of cheesecake and my name was Chris Romeo. Since Mirrodin rotated into oblivion, Mono-Green has lost the Slug, Viridian Zealot, Troll Ascetic, Fangren Firstborn, Fangren Pathcutter, and Elvish Pioneer. Of the deck’s ideological core, only Blanchwood Armor, Jukai Messenger, Okiba-Gang Shinobi, and Rushwood Dryad/Zodiac Monkey are still around. And yet Mostly-Green Aggro has gained so much!
Magic’s favorite cartoon bartender wraps up another excellent week on the Daily with the rallying cry, “Bouncelands are people too!” or something similarly drunken and entertaining.
I’m on vacation in California and so Ben’s Corner will be on hiatus for the next two weeks. Our new buyer (Josh) will be attending both of our Pro Tour Qualifiers this weekend (in Roanoke, Virginia this Saturday and in Charleston, West Virginia this Sunday) so come on down and sell your cards!
Josh will also be buying cards through our buylist while I am on the West Coast. Expect the same fast turnaround on approvals and payments from him as you would from me.
Have a happy Thanksgiving, and see you in two weeks!
– Ben Bleiweiss
– General Manager, StarCityGames.com
The man on the Meddling Mage takes you behind the scenes on the deck development for his B/W homebrew at Philadelphia and then details the story of yet another Grand Prix second place finish.
Landstill doesn’t make Top 8, but still produces a respectable finish. Solidarity hated out. Suicide Black Revisited makes it to the final. Flame Vault is awesome but super-hard to play. And you all mocked me. Shame on you.
Johnny “hasn’t played Magic in five years” Rizzo takes his homebrew to the first Extended PTQ of the year. How does the man do when battling against the likes of Mouth and the legendary Go Anan? The answer is inside… somewhere.
It will take some time to unpack and understand the results of Grand Prix: Philadelphia. Two Goblins decks, one Lion’s Eye Diamond/Auriok Salvagers combo, three aggro-control Threshold decks, a Black/White disruption deck, and a Lightning Rift cycling deck is a Top 8 that nobody could have predicted. To the passing observer, the Top 8 decklists will suggest a metagame and an environment that did not exist, so today I’m going discuss Legacy in general, the metagame, and the Flame Vault deck variations in some detail.
So this is the one where I wade into an honest-to-goodness draft queue and force that five-color thing I so relentlessly promoted. Does the deck live up to the hype, or will I lose the scant remainder of my already depleted reserves of credibility? Read on!
One of the more interesting decks that no one noticed in Los Angeles was a deck called Crazy Pedro, an aggro deck designed by last year’s Extended Pro Tour winner Pierre Canali. Tiago Chan made Day 2 with the deck and says that it’s better his performance would indicate. If you are looking for a rogue creation to battle with at your local PTQs, this may be your lucky day.
Sorry, but those of you looking forward to my Bounceland draft walkthrough are going to have to wait another day. I know, it’s torture for me too. At least I get the opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, as well as some that aren’t very loose at all.
Yep, this is one of those random, mixed-bag, kitchen-sink type articles all writers do once in a while when they’re struggling (except the good ones). Did I say struggling? I meant thriving!
It’s rare that we get an article this amusing, particularly by a submissionist. Therefore I demand that you read it right now, oh ye few readers who know enough to scroll all the way down the page to the Humor section. We’ll even form our own club and have T-Shirts that say something catchy like “I scrolled all the way down StarCityGames.com and all I got was this lousy humor article.” Anyway, enough rambling. I promise the article inside is much funnier.
