Bleiweiss had a hell of a 2004! He was one of the most popular writers on our site, became the most reviled man in the Type One community, and predicted Magic card trends like none other. He’s back to kick off 2005 with a brand new set of predictions for the game we know and love. Which ones will come true and which ones will set off a firestorm of controversy? You’ll have to read the article to find out!
Everybody and their brother wants to draft Dampen.dec these days because… well, because it’s both powerful and stylish. But what happens when you don’t get the Dampen Thoughts that make the deck work? Is there a way to draft this type of deck and still win without the namesake card? Nick shares his thoughts today on how to keep winning even when you are a hopeless Dampen.dec addict like he is.
So, I started looking at a few of the most popular Extended decks like U/G Madness and Psychatog, and I noticed that Islandwalk might be good against them. Islandwalk usually means playing Blue, Lord of Atlantis, and Merfolk. Okay, it always means playing Blue, Lord of Atlantis, and Merfolk. Could such a deck work?
It is very dangerous to point at a card and say, “That card won me that game; therefore, it should be in my deck.” There’s always more to the story than whether or not the card was good in one particular game or in one particular match. Even Feast of Worms can win games under the right circumstances.
That’s why this concept of negative context analysis is so tough to come to grips with. You improve your deck only very slightly when you realize that a good-in-general card should really be replaced by a jankier card that fits your deck better. If a certain “good” card wins you five out of ten playtest games, you’ll probably never stop to think whether a different card would have won you six out of ten.
We’ve finally done it. With the new year, we’ve now made a daily article besides Ask the Judge a regular feature on StarCityGames.com. This will be a rotating post filled by a number of our Featured Writers over the course of the year designed to give you a glimpse into their daily Magical thoughts. The first installment of this new feature will be manned for the next few weeks by none other than the quirky, entertaining, and most excellent Adam Grydehoj!
Star City Power Nine Tournament Series Event Coverage Archive!
It’s not every day that you win a Grand Prix, so Pelcak has decided to grace our site with another one of his wonderful reports. How did :B make it through Day 1 with a 7-1 record, setting them up for an undefeated Day 2? Details are inside!
The deck in question is Red Deck Wins. The question in question is “Jet or Hammer?” Last week we talked about these cards in the RDW mirror match, and I came out saying that I like Magma Jet more. Since then, two outstanding Red mages have stepped forward supporting Volcanic Hammer. Now, I agree with them that Hammer is better in the mirror, but what about the other matchups?
Every year, there is one deck which does much better in the Pro Tour Qualifiers than it does in the Pro Tour. Two years ago, only two people played it at the Pro Tour and in the following qualification season it won a Grand Prix and qualified dozens of players for the following Pro Tour. Last year, its highest finish at the PT was 9th, and yet again, despite all the powerful decks, it was one of the dominant decks in the qualifiers. And this year it was one of the best decks at the Pro Tour. All of which means that even if you have no intention of playing the Red Deck, this is still a deck which you need to know all about.
What do you do when Mono-Blue has been hated out of your area? If you are Kyle Boddy, you go back to your roots and redesign the deck with the unspeakable name so that it can win again in Standard.
I hope that you guys are enjoying Unhinged as much as our play group is. It’s the holidays, so hopefully your Magic days are filled with joy. In recognition of the great casual set during a casual time of year, allow me to relate a few decks I’ve come up with and a few Unhinged stories.
After doing some testing at Grand Prix: Chicago, Osyp reports back that Affinity is not the deck to play at the first few Extended PTQs if you want to be successful, but he has a good idea about two decks that might be winners in the new metagame.
The Judgment Wishes are restricted in 5color (at least the good ones are), but the tradeoff is that 5color lets you wish for any card you can reach easily from your seat – provided that getting the card would not make your deck illegal. That means that you can keep a small pile of Wish targets around and play a lot of interesting cards. I want to talk about what I have in my pile.
Last week, I mentioned a White Skies deck. It came about because I noticed two things – most decks aren’t running any fliers and most decks aren’t running any enchantment removal. Thus, my hypothesis became: A deck running aggressive fliers backed up by an enchantment that enhances the fliers can beat a deck running only or mostly ground troops.
Limited is about creatures and the spells that interact with them — removal and combat tricks. Right? Every now and then there’s an opportunity to break this rule, at least in Draft. A set contains an engine or interaction of commons and uncommons that lets a drafter turn a bunch of cards into a “constructed” powerhouse. In the past we’ve seen this with heavy R/B removal decks with some sort of graveyard recursion. But nowhere has this been seen more dramatically than in Champions draft, where a totally creatureless archetype has appeared.
