This past weekend Randy played in his first tournament since 1999… and won. Even better was that it was an unsanctioned 12-Proxy Vintage event with a Black Lotus as the grand prize. We sent our crack reporter JP Meyer off to a secret resort on the island of Maui (also known as “R&D’s Winter Home”) to ask Randy about his tournament experience, what deck he played, how R&D looks at Vintage and his thoughts on the format as a whole.
This week’s challenge brought out a bunch of the old’ standbys: Akroma, Angel of Wrath, Seedborn Muse, Avatar of Woe, Soul Warden. But who took the $20 prize for the week for listing their picks for the Top 5 multiplayer creatures?
That would be Stephen Davis, for his phenomenally-amusing The Tenth Annual Tolarian Academy Awards. Stephen wins the sawbuck because he took a dry format and spiced it up with a lot of humor and a smidge of strategy!
So what’s next week’s challenge? Well, this is a little tougher, since it’s a new casual format that doesn’t have quite the following that multiplayer does… but it’s fun as heck. How does access to infinite mana sound? The next week’s challenge is:
Type 4: Limited Infinity.
If you want an overview of the rules, check Stephen Menendian’s excellent article. If you don’t want an overview of the rules, write an article and send it in to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2! You could win $20!
Throughout time two draft archetypes have risen above the rest in terms of power and consistency. Those are mono-Black and Blue/White. If you default to one of these archetypes without knowing exactly what is in the set, you can’t go too wrong. Sure it may cause you to pick a Harsh Deceiver earlier than it should be picked, but by following the guidelines of sets past, you should be able to draft a competitive deck. In this article I am going to discuss the drafting of Blue/White in Champions/Champions/Betrayers (CCB)from the commons right up to the rares, with a pick order for every card on the list.
Imagine it. You sit down across from your opponent. You roll the die and win. You shake hands. You mulligan to six. Your opponent’s feeling good about that. And you win before he even gets a chance to draw the card on his first turn. In Standard. You’re a legend. Not a Legend. You’re awfully close, though. You’d be my hero, anyway. And a lot of other folks’, too. Today I’m going to give you your very own guide to becoming a hero.
Thousands of players each year receive game and match losses due to imporper deck registration. In today’s installment of Blog Fanatic, Ben looks at what can go wrong while registering your deck list, and what you can do to avoid losing to your own registration mistakes!
Phil Stanton’s articles are almost impossible to explain in short blurbs, but they always include numbers, they are always about Vintage, and they always give you crucial information about some part of the Vintage metagame. This time Phil takes a look at the different compositions of card types in Vintage Top 8s, including how many land/mana sources each deck runs, the amount of countermagic and disruption seeing play, and how much potential most Vintage decks have to damage themselves. If I haven’t explained that this article is really really cool then I have failed, but don’t let that stop you from reading this article, as it should be an enormous boon to every Vintage deckbuilder that reads it.
Real Life intruded on Craig Stevenson’s Sealed Revealed run, but we found a ringer to stand in for him. Today Tim takes two of the card pools Craig posted last week and dissects them, explaining which builds he would consider, discarding the chaff and building the best decks from the tools at hand. The Betrayers of Kamigawa prerelease starts on Magic Online today, and Limited PTQs are just around the corner, so if you are looking for some help in figuring out how to build your deck, Tim Aten’s got your back.
What can you say about Chad Ellis’s fundamentals articles? That Chad Ellis is a respected Magic theorist capable of taking complex concepts and making them simple to understand. That Chad is respected by the best theorists and players in the game. That every time you read a Chad Ellis article, you will learn something and become a better player. If that’s not enough, check out the guest appearance from “The Donald” in this exceptional article.
Magic is my foremost gaming passion, and it has been an integral part of my life for over a decade. It isn’t the only game I’ve ever tried – I’ll admit that I’ve openly cheated on my one true love with other brazen hussies in the gaming world. Today are some stories about the other collectible card games that I’ve played over the last years of my life.
Chad gives the quick and dirty reasons for his Invitational ballot, and some of the people in his Top 5 might just surprise you.
Originally, I wanted to write something about reviewing Betrayers of Kamigawa and all the cards that are going to have an impact on the new format. I knew that my teammates Gadiel and Tim Aten were going to write something about the new set, along with Zvi and many others. Thus I needed to work on something else that was also important that involved Betrayers. What about the different archetypes in Champions block and how they are going to be affected with Betrayers now in? Are there going to be new archetypes? Which archetypes get better? Which ones get worse? All of these questions haven’t really been answered yet, and I’m here today to start doing exactly that.
If you’ve read any of Nick’s articles recently, you know that unlike most pros, he hates Black. Well Betrayers of Kamigawa is out now, but were there enough good commons and uncommons to change Nick’s mind, or is Black still so bad that even the totally sweet power of rat ninjas isn’t enough to sway his opinion?
Hey boys and girls! It’s time for this year’s Magic Invitational! This year, they let me, Ben Bleiweiss, get a vote in the Internet Writer’s Vote category. It’s my solemn duty to uphold the traditions of voting from years past, in which thousands of the great unwashed would vote in players from years past who had not actually played a game of Magic for a full year! Seriously though, this is no Chris Pikula memorial vote – this is a vote for the best and the brightest players and personalities in the game of Magic.
In the quarterfinals of Pro Tour: Nagoya, Terry Soh pulled off one of the more impressive and memorable plays in recent Pro Tour memory, using a stone cold bluff to get Frank Karsten to make a game-losing mistake. In a stunning look at the mental game behind the scenes of the highest levels of Magic, Terry dissects the game situation that led to that awesome play, and shows you both how to set up bluffing situations to exploit your opponents and how to protect yourself against them.
