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Time to Ban Aether Vial

I remember the first time I saw Skullclamp. I had just shown up to the Darksteel prerelease and a friend of mine had the Clamp in play. I had to read the card three times before I could believe what I was reading, and it was clear that this card could do some serious damage in Constructed formats. Now we have another one-mana artifact warping Constructed environments. This time it didn’t even make me blink when I first read it, and I think most people missed its power until it had been played enough to show itself. Aether Vial is no Skullclamp, but it is still fundamentally broken and is probably hurting Magic, especially Extended. It should go.

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SCG Daily – Digging Into the Mailbag

Dear Doctor Mox,
Why does Wizards make bad cards?
Do Randy and Mark hate me?
Sincerely,
Tiny Tim
P.S. I cry myself to sleep at night when I think about the possibility of opening up another Twist Allegiance.

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10 Extended Decks in 10 Days – Pattern Rector in Extended

What would you put in the ultimate anti-metagame deck? Akroma and Worship against RDW, plus Cabal Therapy, Duress and Cranial Extraction against combo and Scepter-Chant, a fast Planar Void against Reanimator, and Pernicious Deed against weenie and Affinity. Infinite Eternal Witness recursion would be nice, and a turn 3 kill would round it out. So, is there such a deck? Yes, actually, there is.

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Meandeck Tendrils Primer Part 2: The Card Choices

In the first part of this series, I introduced a new Type One deck. It was an attempt to break the format – A deck that will take a great deal of time to completely master, will test your limits, hone your skills, and demand elevated focus. In this article, I’m going to explain and justify the various card choices and show how to play them correctly.

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10 Extended Decks in 10 Days – Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex With Squids But Were Afraid To Ask

Cephalid Breakfast very nearly won a Grand Prix last weekend, so you can be absolutely certain it will be played at upcoming PTQs. Bennie Smith takes the deck to the numbers and looks at all of the matchup data for the deck against every deck played in Pro Tour: Columbus to see where the strengths and weaknesses lie. If you plan to play Extended this season, this is information you must have.

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Making the Leap From Magic Online to Pro Tour Star

Until last year, Terry Soh was just a kid from Malaysia who couldn’t get a draft in his home country. Now he’s a bonafide Pro Tour star, with two Grand Prix Top 8s, a National Team slot, and two Pro Tour Top 8s to his name. How did this leap occur? Terry thinks you can do the exact same thing he did, and he’s willing to give you the steps necessary to accomplish just that.

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Betrayers of Five-Color

Set reviews often come across as boring because writers include way too many cards in their review: “Come one, come all, to the Giant Set-a-Thon where Mega Magic Reviews are held! You’ll hold onto your seats as I count through every single card, no matter how obviously useless or powerful! Rar!” Instead of listing every card, and then saying how much it sucks in Five-Color compared to previous cards, I’ll just skip the bad ones altogether to bring you only the noteworthy Betrayer cards of Five-Color.

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The Black Perspective: From PT: Nagoya to GP: Boston

It’s not very often that you can Top 10 a Pro Tour and then go undefeated in the Swiss of Grand Prix in an entirely different format the very next weekend, but that’s exactly what Joe Black did last week. Want to know the decklist he piloted in Boston and a complete sideboarding guide to U/W Desire, what he thinks about the Pro Tour players lounge, or maybe you’re just looking for a picture of Gabe Walls in public, with cake all over his face… it’s all here, folks.

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The Betrayers of Kamigawa Set Review: Red

“That’s an impressive list of interesting cards in a color not known for producing a lot of midlevel playable cards. Red gets some creatures for block, a few for Standard, and with XXXXX, quite possibly one for the ages.” Which cards is Zvi talking about? You’ll have to read it to find out!

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Papal Bull: It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

There’s a lot of contention regarding what should and shouldn’t be on the Vintage restricted list. Wizards took five cards off the restricted list in Vintage during 2004: Fork, Braingeyser, Stroke of Genius, Doomsday, and Earthcraft. To pretty much everyone, these cards were considered undegenerate and could be unrestricted with a reasonable amount of safety. While there are occasional tweaks when a new B&R list comes out, usually nothing is changed. Still, every quarter there is usually a firestorm of debate regarding changes to the list. Since it’s going to be March soon, it seemed like a good time stoke the fires of Vintage debate once more with an article…

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