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The Road To Los Angeles, Week 2: Switching Decks

Last week I took Tsuyoshi Fujita’s deck to a PTQ with practically no preparation, and posted a lackluster 3-2-1 finish. The main thing I took away from the tournament was a newfound respect for Manriki-Gusari in the war for Jitte advantage. Simply put, it is almost impossible for slow decks without Manriki-Gusari to obtain Jitte advantage over fast decks that have it. This caused me to abandon Fujita’s deck and the deck I ended up playing this time around was a bit goofy, but turned out to be highly effective.

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Ninth Edition: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Part 1

The one, the only, the Zvi Mowshowitz produces what may be his last set review ever before he disappears behind the ivory walls at Wizard of the Coast. Want to know what the master thinks about 9th Edition cards in both Limited and Constructed? We’ve got it all here, and only on StarCityGames.com.

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Big Snips in London, Day 1

Me, I’m an honest guy. Last time I regaled you with stories about winning a Pro Tour. Sadly, you don’t always win. That’s why this time I’m here to tell you about losing matches. Lots of them. Seven. In the same tournament, actually. That’s right, folks, this one is all about my miserable spiraling downfall from first to eightieth in just one Pro Tour.

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Designing For Vintage 1: Mana

There has been a long-running myth, which finally went away with the release of Mirrodin block, that R&D doesn’t design cards for Type 1 and that there are only one or two cards per set which will see any play. Then, there are cards like Mind’s Desire where R&D never even considered Type 1 during design but which end up being among the most powerful, environment-defining cards in the format. Designing for Vintage is a really tricky issue to work with, but that will be the focus for this series and the first place to start is perhaps the most misunderstood concept in Vintage: Proper Mana.

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SCG Daily: Waiting for Godo

Last time, our Godo deck still had problems with the White weenies. I claimed that a White-based legend deck might simply be a better solution, and I was thinking of this saucy little number from Pro Tour Philadelphia. It has a White Weenie-style creature base, but runs all legends and thus can use Honor-Worn Shaku (a.k.a., the Paddle) to power up a stronger midgame than your typical weenie deck.

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SCG Daily: Godo-a-Go-Go

Last time, we saw that adding Godo to the GWU Control framework didn’t go too badly – if I had kept better hands here and there, I might have made Top 8 of the tournament I played it in – but I wasn’t satisfied. The deck had problems, and since that tournament the format has shifted in ways that only exacerbate those problems. Let’s see if we can fix some of those today, shall we?

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Evil: A Pro Tour London Report

Bowing to popular demand and trying to make up for only writing four of his five daily articles, Tim Aten steps to the fore with an awesome London report written as only Tim Aten can.

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Can’t Take the Hype, The Truth About Saviors Limited

Okay, I can’t take it anymore. I wanted to take a step back from writing because I just didn’t feel like writing anymore, but I am starting to lose my mind. This could possibly be the most misunderstood draft format since triple Mirrodin. Listening to Sam Gomersall call Green the best color in both his article and in an interview at the Pro Tour nearly made me pass out. You won’t get any pick orders here, but you will be saved from all the misinformation that has been being spread about the format.

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Reflections on Grand Prix: Minneapolis

It’s Block Constructed season. GP Twin Cities was a very long weekend, but now it’s over. I was judging, so I watched a lot more matches than almost anyone else there. Here are my observations about Kamigawa Block and how it’s shaping up.

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Heartbeats in Minneapolis

Are you becoming tired of a Block Constructed format that is becoming stagnant after only three weeks of PTQs and wish to break the monotony of White Weenie and Gifts mirrors? Then do I have the deck for you!

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Magical Hack: Running With Numbers

Last week, when I left off, I’d intended to go into greater detail about my thoughts on control-oriented decks in Kamigawa Block Constructed, but in between there seems to have been a highly relevant Grand Prix that sums up all of the musing I’ve been doing on re-working a Splice-based control deck. We will get to talking about control decks in good time, but with the availability of excellent information being released every week in the form of PTQ Top Eight decklists, and a recent shift in the metagame to focus extremely on the White Weenie and Black Hand beatdown decks, I felt it important enough to interrupt what I had otherwise intended to talk about.

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From Right Field: Don’t Try This at Home

Any scientist or artist will tell you that it’s best to look at failures not as failures but as opportunities to learn. Thomas Edison used to say that, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” This keeps you sane, especially when you know that you’re going to miss your goal a lot. There are a lot of failures in Magic, too.

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SCG Daily — Go do it!

This week Mark works through his Godo fetish for Kamigawa Block Constructed. He’s not alone in his love for the Bandit Warlord though, the winning deck from the Japanese Block Grand Prix had the same ideas in mind.

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Aggressive Reaction

I find that the best defensive strategies attack. When you let the opponent dictate the terms of an interaction (“this game is about my Jitte“) you have to play by his rules; you may mistakenly enter a mindset where you believe that the game revolves around some key permanent he uses to threaten you, even when it only looks that way, or only is that way because you let it. You grasp for even sub-optimal methods of answering that permanent in the vain hope that its removal is, like Love in the Beatles song, all you need. The problem is that when the opponent controls the initiative, you can’t hope to win with one-for-ones.

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The Pikachu Master

Kamigawa Block Constructed continues to dominate our testing. I’m finding the block fantastic and very enjoyable. Today I’ll cover four different decklists that we’ve been working on in hopes of cracking the Block Constructed format wide open.

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