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A recent article on underrated draft cards got me thinking: I felt that although some of the cards Uri Peleg mentioned were spot-on, he left out a large contingent of cards that consistently go late and have a much swingier effect on the game. This isn’t a rebuttal; rather, it’s a complimentary doctrine. These are cards that are generally ignored but have proved to be powerful, and after reading this your pick orders will certainly be rearranged.

Elske Van Der Vaart asks:
“StarCityGames.com is basically a competitive player’s place now. As a casual player, I come for the Issues articles and the occassional Abe Sargent gems, but that’s basically it. My question: Why has this happened? Is the problem that all Casual writers have disappeared or that most Casual articles don’t meet your new quality standards?”

Jensen Bohren, famed casual freak also known as The Orgg, asks a very good question:
“Once Star City Games was much like The Dojo and other Magic sites online, and posted most of the ‘decent’ articles with a fair amount of speed; rejected articles were also ‘thrown back’ with a similar amount of speed. Today, I know of only one site that will publish nearly anything, and it’s the only site that will link to the ‘good stuff’ on other Magic sites. Why has Star City become so inwardly focused on itself and turned away from the larger picture of the Magic community?”

One of the first things I asked myself before Kamigawa came onto the scene was what lessons I could take with me from all my Mirrodin block drafting. My key to being successful in Mirrodin drafts (and I was – my rating moved between 1900 and 1950 throughout the last two months of Mirrodin) lay in a small number of underrated cards. So when I approached Kamigawa block, my first question was – what are the new hidden gems in Kamigawa?

I could make a deck that could be quite competitive with the best in the format – but that would take including my power, all my duals and fetchlands, and stripping out all the “just for fun” cards and replacing them with cards that just win the game. But that would mean carrying a deck worth thousands and thousands of dollars that contained about three win conditions – and forcing one of them out game after game. I could probably win, but would it be fun?

StarCityGames.com has a unique editorial style in that editors are involved in more than just fixing spelling and grammar, adding comments to articles [Hundroog] and removing unrealistic matchup percentages. How did this come to be and why has no one else adopted it?

You don’t necessarily have to play some decks perfectly because they give you so much room for error. You can screw up by a card, or three cards – but since you drew ten more cards than your opponent did, you don’t even notice.

But how does that speak to a deck like Ravager Affinity? Sure, Ravager has Thoughtcast, but today’s Affinity isn’t known for its card advantage… But maybe that’s because we don’t look at Ravager’s card advantage the right way.

It’s been a while since I’ve been on-board with this whole Editor thing, so you may have even forgotten that I exist… But on the other hand, I’ve been editing StarCityGames.com for almost five years now, and I have a wealth of experience and I am still the Editor-in-Chief. So hey, as long as I’m pinch-hitting for The Holy Kanoot this week, I’ll cheerfully answer any and all questions you have for me.

Wanna know something? Email me at [email protected], and I’ll do my best to answer, starting Monday.

Also, if you’ve sent an article to Ted over the past few days, you may want to resend directly to me. Some of the emails have been lost in transit, and we’d hate to see a good article vanish into mysterious mists of the Internet.

My first question is this: What the hell happened to Jon Finkel? The guy disappeared like Bobby Fischer or something, did he fall into Magic obscurity or just give up the game for career/family etc?

It is a sad fact that many Constructed tournaments are lost before the first round pairings are even up. If you turn up to a Block, Standard, or Extended tournament with a bad deck, all the tight play in the world will probably not help you to the Top 8. In order to be playing the right deck and the right build for a given metagame, you need to avoid making the ten mistakes listed in this article.

My question pertains to something that Mike Flores wrote in his article concluding the U/W deck challenge. He mentioned that when he playtested his Mono Blue deck vs. your Tooth build he devised some tech that was able to win the matchup for his deck a good amount of time. What was that tech that he would not mention? He said that you would update us.