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Draft Archetypes In The Post-Saviors Metagame

There are several major changes that Saviors has given us; Green has gone from the worst to the best color in just the space of one booster, every other color has become a lot less spirit-based, and Black and White have taken a big hit as they used to be the deepest colors but Saviors has given them nothing. So now that the Pro Tour has come and gone, it is safe for me to reveal my drafting secrets – and here is the plan that I had for the Pro Tour, all laid out for you.

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Troll and Nail v.2

I can’t stand it any more. In the past few weeks, I’ve seen dozens of articles about Tooth and Nail, each dubbing it the best deck in Standard. But people have been making drastic mistakes in building the deck properly… and now that the metagame has finally shaped up, let me present to you my latest Troll and Nail innovation and show you where the initial build went wrong.

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The Road To Los Angeles, Week 1: How Important Is Manriki-Gusari?

I tend not to think about Constructed decks until we are well into the season. Usually, I will give the environment time to settle down into a smallish gauntlet of decks, figure out what makes those decks tick, and then write up a deck designed to do well against that gauntlet. But this time, I wanted to go to Los Angeles so badly that I charged into the environment without any real testing… and I discovered some very important things.

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Put Your Money Where Your Sealed Is: A Closer Look At Magicshop

I was really in a Magicshop mood this past week, so I decided to head online to read what I could about Shop. I figured that somewhere out there, someone had to be doing Shop – maybe someone had written about it. My search found nothing. As such, it seems my duty to write more about Shop, the most electrifying Limited format around.

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SCG Daily: Mana-Flooded In A Good Way

Sasaya has one tough flip trigger. I not only need seven cards in hand – which is a pretty impressive feat for any green deck – but those seven cards have to be lands? Even worse, the condition involves me revealing my hand to an opponent, so if I have a special-secret card I’m hoping to use once Sasaya flips, my opponent will know.

Ugh. You have got to be kidding me. And yet I must build a deck around her….

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Here Be Deck Lists

Last week, michaelj gave the Star City Premium community a New Classic of Magic literature. “One of your best articles ever, Flores. I have bookmarked this article for re-reading before every tournament,” wrote fellow Premium author Jamie Wakefield. This week, the man who asked “Who’s the Beatdown?” applies the same devotion to Kamigawa Block Constructed, including not just one, but two, templated decks!

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Ninth Edition, Standard, And You

The Eighth- to Ninth-edition rotation will be upon us soon, with the new cards tournament legal on August 20th. That is the week after US Nationals – after that event, Standard will be played with a new base set. The sheer number of cards rotating is huge; 162 of the cards now in Eighth Edition won’t survive the rotation, if the spoilers floating around the net are to be believed. Basic lands aside, that means that half the set is leaving. What’s that going to do to Standard’s heavy hitters?

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Kamigawa Block And The Death Of Green

Jamie discusses the issue of Magic Online account sharing, the future of post-Rotation Green, and discusses how his latest creation fared at a Kamigawa Block Constructed tournament!

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Magical Hack: Kamigawa Block, The Early Weeks

The first few weeks of a Block Constructed PTQ season are usually very interesting to watch, especially as the cards from the third set start to permeate the decks from the Pro Tour prior to the third expansion. This time around, we have progressed quite a bit on some of our archetypes of old, with at least one new “good deck” coming out of the mix thanks to the Saviors of Kamigawa cards. The first new deck is “Black Hand,” the black weenie beatdown with fattie back-up deck that is sporting such Saviors hits as O-Naginata, Hand of Cruelty, and Raving Oni-Slave… and frankly, I think people who play the deck need to make a vital choice as to how to build it.

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SCG Daily: Life’s Ups And Downs

I consider Rune-Tail’s flip trigger to be the easiest of the bunch to accomplish. Magic is stuffed full of tricky ways to gain lots of life. But if Rune-Tail is the easiest Ascendant to flip, then Rune-Tail’s Essence is the least dominating legendary enchantment.

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Darwin At Work: The Evolution Of Fish

Fish has catapulted back into popularity recently, with stronger versions patching the weaknesses of previous Fish decks. Today, we’re going to take a look at WTF and Meandeck Fish to see what sorts of metagames they thrive in, why it’s been so successful lately, and what can be done to stop it.

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The Beautiful Struggle: Fun With Vintage

On Saturday night, I had a rough time at my local poker game. A newcomer had arrived, and he looked like easy pickings. He was drunk as a skunk, slurring his speech and absolutely reeking of alcohol. He literally did not even know the difference between the terms “check” and “call”….
Yet I simply could not beat the guy. Time and again he would call me down and show down a better hand. When I left the game, I was pretty angry – until I realized that karma must have been paying me back. After all, earlier that day I had played in my second Vintage tournament, and somehow managed a Top 4 finish out of thirty or so people.

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5-Color Green: The Draft Walkthrough

A couple of weeks ago, I did a drafting guide for the 5-Color Green archetype in Champions/Betrayers/Saviors. This week, I want to provide you with an actual Walkthrough, along with plenty of commentary that should help anyone trying to learn how to draft the deck better…. because there’s an important lesson in today’s draft on not compromising your mana base.

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Ask Zvi, Part II

Zvi answers more of your questions in this final installment, including “Are there killer combos in formats that are never discovered?”, “What’s the best combo in Standard that doesn’t involve a nine-mana sorcery?”, and “Will your love of combo inadvertently push the combo archetypes when you’re working for Wizards R&D?” Plus, the question that Zvi couldn’t answer!

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SCG Daily: A Worthy Sacrifice

There’s a lot going on with Kuon’s flip trigger, and all of it is pretty challenging from a deckbuilding perspective. The most obvious step in flipping Kuon is killing at least three creatures. That’s no easy feat – though black has some built-in answers with the likes of Barter in Blood, Hideous Laughter, Echoing Decay, Death Cloud, and Kagemaro, First to Suffer. Here’s the trick, though: I don’t want Kuon himself to die. So how do we break a creature-killer in what has to be a creature-heavy deck?

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