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.
Here’s the plan. Let’s jump right into the middle of things, giving the appropriate props out to http://mtgthesource.com/, and look at the archetypes of Type 1.5. This article is designed to give players new to the Type 1.5 format a jumping off point, to introduce the basic decks and archetypes, give an idea of what the metagame looks like, and make it easy for you to dive into the murky waters. To wrap things up, I’ll even take a look at one of my favorite decks for the new environment.
Based upon the powerful Black cards present in Champions of Kamigawa, however, if there was going to be a breakout deck, conventional wisdom stated that it was either going to be a new take on Mono-Black Control or a reprise of the classic Black/Green midgame deck first pioneered by Sol Malka, best known as The Rock. Mono-Black was out there, but it didn’t have the success at States that The Rock did.
If you plan on going one-for-one with Affinity, you are doomed from the start. Their “normal draw” is often good enough to overcome several pieces of early hate. For months now people have been trying to find ways to overcome such obstacles, and it finally seems that at least one deck has shown up that has a good enough matchup against Affinity, while still being competitive against the rest of the field. The deck approaches hate from a different perspective, stopping the artifact threat before it enters play and can have any affect on the game.
There were good arguments for unrestricting Doomsday. Doomsday combo would seem to be no faster than Worldgorger Dragon, which everyone agrees is “fair combo.” I figured, however, that with the Type One card pool, it only takes one truly inspired set of five cards to break the living hell out of it… And so we looked through the Dojo archives to find inspiration. Barely a week had passed when JP showed probably the most elegant win condition ever conceived: Doomsday for Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, Dark Ritual, Mind’s Desire, and Beacon of Destruction.
Bleiweiss’s practical joke masterpiece has once again returned to our database. And there was much rejoicing…
How much do you think Cranial Extraction will limit the types of decks that are viable?
This past Saturday, 142 players made their way to the Windy City to compete in the third Star City “Power Nine” Tournament! If you’re wondering who made the top eight and what decks they were playing, wonder no more. StarCityGames.com proudly presents the top eight decklists from the Star City “Power Nine” Tournament – Chicago!
Adrian looks at the success of Scepter-Chant at the recent Extended Pro Tour, tells you what he thinks Nick West and Ruud Warmenhoven got right, and then gives his own updated version of the deck for the next Extended season.
StarCityGames.com’s own precocious fifteen-year-old takes you through all of his Day 2 and Top 8 action. If Worlds and Pro Tour Columbus are any indicators, the kids are starting to take over the game, and Gadiel is one of the best of them.
When you’re covering Pro Tour matches do you think that while you’re writing the coverage down it makes the players play differently? For instance they think longer before they do something so as not to look stupid on the biggest MTG website out there?
Nick Eisel has done it again. He’s the only Limited writer on the planet willing to construct his own experiments, find subjects to test them on, and then write thirty-page articles on the entire process, complete with analysis of all the hard picks, commentary on draft mistakes, and coverage of every match from the draft. In short, this article is awesome.
The continuation of Nick’s outstanding article investingating the ins and outs of a two-on-two team draft with Champions of Kamigawa.
For this installment, I have updated the largest table I maintain: the monthly occurrence stats for every card, in terms of how many copies showed up in an average Top 8 for each month. So if you see something like “7.0 Black Lotus” it means that in a typical Top 8 from that month, seven of the decks would include a Black Lotus. Something like “3.0 Great Wall” would indicate that I made an error in the table, which is possible – it’s a big table. Regardless, this article will give you a full analysis of all the card trends for the important cards played at big Vintage tournaments for the past year!
Osyp takes a look back at the weekend that was, explaining Affinity’s success, the poor deck choices of Team Togit, and investigating Eugene Harvey’s choices in hand bags (or should we say man-purse?). All this and more on the latest “The Black Perspective”.
