Year after year Teddy Card Game has provided the most accurate skinny on exactly what the Championships metagame will look like. He’s at it again this year with updated decklists, metagame percentages, latebreaking rogue options, and delectable cheesecake. This is the most wide-open Standard format in years… if you don’t read this article, you could be missing a crucial piece of information you need to succeed this weekend.
Lifegain gets a bad rap. Really, it does. Those of us who started off as casual players remember one of the first things we learned when moving to a competitive scene is that Lifegain Sucks. So what would you say if I told you there was a potentially tier 1 deck for States that attempts to abuse lifegain to kill your opponent?
Another day, another Sealed pool. With than two weeks for Ravnica, are you ready for the Prerelease tournaments? Polish your skills and see how your thoughts stack up to Eli’s. As a bonus to today’s offering you also get an incredibly Japanese Vulturous Zombie combo deck to ponder for States. Wild tech? Yesiree!
When I sit down to play a game of Magic, nothing delivers the goods like Super Grow. Because the things I enjoy doing the most in this fine game, namely, drawing tons of cards, countering everything thrown at me, and beating my opponent bloody with cheap and arbitrarily large creatures is what 3cThreshold does best.
The master of wacky decks arrives once again with some casual decks that abuse the latest cards in fascinating ways! Want an infinite Tolsimir deck? How about a way to abuse Grozoth? Abe provides the goods, starting now!
If you had asked me one week ago, I would have told you that the deck featured in this article was my 100% recommendation for Champs. After this weekend I think the deck I posted last Friday may be the best deck in the format, but this deck is still really good and can easily take home a Top 8 slot.
I wanted to bring you some red-hot new tech for States, I really did. I had an idea, and it had synergy, and it served a strategic goal, and it sounded just crazy enough to work. Sadly it didn’t work, at least not in the way I wanted it to. I thought I’d share the idea with you, though, so you can play with it yourself and maybe create a States-winning deck on your own.
Before we examine today’s card pool, let’s take a look at how one of the rules of Limited has shifted.
“What the hell is that?” You’d be surprised how often those five words have scrolled across my mental marquee in the last few weeks. As a rough estimate, I’d say four thousand. That’s slightly less than the amount of years it feels like I’ve been in the land of the Magic dead.
After my last article, I was criticized in the forums for talking about the guild pairs as basic archetypes of Ravnica Sealed, since actual Sealed decks are almost always three or more colors. And it’s true that the three types of archetypes are all in some way related to the guilds, as not harnessing their power would just be foolish. Let’s take a look at them,. and see how they apply to drafts.
For the 2005 Deck Challenge, I chose some pretty cruddy jobs: mono-Green, Green/White, these are not the things you looked to play when you saw Ravnica and the shiny toys like Circu, Dimir Lobotomist and Lightning Helix. While I worked on those decks, I was brewing an idea: using the tools at hand, figuring out what a truly nasty Green deck could be capable of.
This is the next installment of what promises to be an interminably long series. You never know how many days may be in a week, after all. Cutting up these Ravnica sealed decks should unlock greater wisdom and understanding of the format.
Unlike Vintage, Legacy deck construction hinges more on “building blocks” rather than individual broken cards. It means that despite the huge card pool, there is actually a very restricted range of available tools (read: good cards) to use, many of which are highly conditional. Today I’m going to give you an extensive breakdown of the various building blocks available to Legacy deckbuilders and contribute a fresh deck of my own for your perusal.
Tip Number Seven: Remember that you have an opponent.
Sounds nutty, but it’s true. And what that opponent can do to (or for) you is enormous. But not as enormous as those Burger King fat boy breakfast sandwiches. Saw one on a billboard and it was so terrifying that I hid my children.
In the past, Randy has sleeved up some of the more popular control decks in Vintage, piloting Control Slaver and Meandeck Gifts in his previous victories. Considering his track record, it definitely seems like he knows what he’s doing when choosing what to run. This time, Randy decided to play a Team Meandeck design that none of you have ever seen before.
[Editor’s Note: This article would normally be premium, but keeping with the “interviews with R&D should be free” theme from the past, it has been made available to all readers.]
