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Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the cost of Magic boosters. I remember when the MSRP was only $2.69 – a very long time ago, to be sure, but now it’s climbed by an entire dollar. That’s a lot of money for a single booster, don’t you think? Thankfully, SCG thinks so, too. If it wasn’t for SCG, I don’t think I would still buy packs anymore. I’ve recently begun to see how the rise in the price of Magic has affected my local gaming community – and I’ve heard some cries on the forums lamenting similar stories about how their gaming stores are closing down, relocating, or are not planning on renewing their Magic inventory. I found this somewhat disheartening – so I talked with a few people that I knew and wanted to find out why this was happening.

I love deck building, and I love playing Constructed duels. I find it much more rewarding than leagues and drafts, so I am trying out the various MTGO constructed formats. That said, I still have very few Constructed-worthy cards, and my online Type Two and Extended decks cannot compete with Vedalken Shackles in Standard, or Vial Affinity in Extended. However, I can build decks that are competitive in other formats, especially singleton.

In Limited, Green seems to be the odd man out. Red and Black have always offered drafters valuable removal, while White and Blue packed flyers, but Green tended to shuffle its feet and look morosely down on its collection of ground-pounders and mana acceleration. There are exceptions, as when Green suddenly found itself as the new top dog at killing off artifacts right in the middle of the artifact block, but more often it suffers from general anemia in the fields that drafters care about. Even though it was carrying its own weight in triple-Champions draft, it’s certainly fallen back into disfavor for the Champions-Champions-Betrayers environment.

A long time ago in a far-away metagame, there was an underplayed deck that relied on an obscenely low number of lands. This deck was amazingly fast and not many decks could keep up with its speed. This deck was called 9-land green, or Stompy, or one of any number of other names. Anyone that has played a very aggressive deck can tell you that the adrenaline rush you get from flooding the board with creatures and quickly disposing of your opponent is a great and wonderful thing… And you can do it for cheap.

Some of these decks are funny enough that I thought to include a few for your enjoyment. These are examples of the absolute worst draft decks ever, and I hope that you enjoy them. To better illustrate how I got from three sealed booster packs to forty-five cards of poo, I’ll tell you how the draft started, what went wrong, and more.

First of all, did anyone guess the reason why we had Peasant Magic on this week, of all weeks? It’s because this week ends on April 15th – a day when many American citizens are poorer. See, we’re so clever.

(For you foreigners, April 15th is tax day in America. We love it.)

In any case, Peasant Magic week was a good week for articles, with some of the highest-quality stuff we’ve seen yet. But in the end, it came down to two last-minute submissions: Roman Pazuniak’s How Many Ways Can You Go Infinite On A Common-Based Engine? and Dave Wong’s Peasant Magic: The Six-Deck Gauntlet, Plus The Commons You Must Own. It was a tough decision, since Dave brought some Peasantry experience to the table, whereas Roman’s decks were consistently neat. (Well, except for the ElfClamp deck, but you had to get that one out of the way.) In the end, experience won out in an extremely close call, and Dave took the $20 prize!

This week’s challenge?

Multiplayer Lockdown.

That’s right; we want to hear about your deck that shuts multiple opponents down in some interesting way. Tell us how it works, what decks it works well against, and more importantly what fiendish combo you’ve created to dominate (and, lest we forget, win) the game. Then send that puppy into Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2!

A couple of times a year, I like to publicly answer some e-mail that I’ve received over the past few months. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of questions are asked over and over. By doing this type of column, I can answer several people at once. Second, I get a quick column full of cheap laughs when I was otherwise stumped for material.

Once again on his feet, Hashi’s stomach rumbled. Though he no suffered from injuries or fever, he was ravenous, and could barely wait to eat. As if cued, a small woman with white face paint entered his room bearing a tray. Setting it on the one small table in the room she bowed and left. Lifting the cloth, the odor of fresh, hot wantons and vegetable soup wafted up to Hashi’s grateful nose.