With the speed that PTQ players are tweaking their combo, beatdown, and control decks these days, it may look like Red Deck Wins has been left in the dust – a relic of the early days of the season when players had yet to properly prepare for the Red menace. Thankfully, notes Dan, Red deck designers are not above a few innovations themselves and today Dan provides a look at a few tweaks you can add to your Red Deck to stay ahead of the combo curve.
Rich Hoaen is the secret Limited Assassin, stacking up result after result with hardly a word written or said about his outstanding skills. By starting a regular column here at StarCityGames.com, this loveable Canadian is out to change all that, delivering his insightful Limited commentary gleaned from hundreds of drafts straight to our readers. Today Rich takes a peak at the Top 10 Over and Underrated cards in Champions – valuations that will stay true even with Betrayers of Kamigawa now in the mix.
As Oscar wraps up his Vintage Betrayers set review today, he begins to despair at the quality of cards in the new set. Is there nothing playable in Vintage coming out of this middle set, ow will the Instants, Sorceries, and Lands provide a hidden gem that we’ll be talking about in the years to come?
I’ve been playing a lot of multiplayer Magic lately…with college students. You know what that means if you’re a working stiff like me? You get to see supposedly-grown “men” cry like four-year-olds when you pull out your $300, forty-eight rare Sneak Attack deck.
“That’s no fair!” they cry dejectedly. “You can afford all those good cards, while all of us combined only own a tenth what you have!” So I then showed them that I can win without rare-filled decks… And so can you!
With a new Standard environment on the horizon and Extended season in full bloom, Mark takes a step back from the tournament scene to review the various forms of strategic superiority and where they come from.
Our favorite Scouser continues his journey of Limited improvement today with a considerably more difficult card pool than he opened on Monday. Which colors does Craig end up in and which ones do you think he should have chosen? State your opinion in our forums.
Dave takes a second look at his updated version of the speedy Standard deck known as “Frog in a Blender”, this time with added Betrayers cards. As if that wasn’t good enough, he also includes a Block Constructed version of the deck and tells the story of his losing ways at the Betrayers of Kamigawa Prerelease.
Today Chad puts forth yet another seminal piece of Magic theory explaining why winning is obviously good, but “Winning More” is clearly not. If you want to improve your deck construction skills, this is the place to start.
Who is the mysterious Mr. Nice and what powers does he have over the game of Magic? How did Mr. Nice help Ben overcome his arch-nemsis, Vinny “The Pimp” Falcone? And just what about all those Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere? The only way to find the answers to these questions is to tune into today’s Blog Fanatic!
We’ve gone through a lot of fads in our multiplayer group, but we have played with Vanguard cards for over two years since they were introduced to our playgroup. There’s nothing like Bitching into Lyna to give all of my creatures shadow, then Bitching into Mishra to kill several players with one shot. So what are the Vanguard cards, and what are these strange Bitch rules that have made the Vanguard cards so much fun for us?
Vinny Falcone. Vinny “The Pimp” Falcone. Vinny “I got your number Mr. Ben Bleiweiss” Falcone. My nemesis. My scourge. My some other name of a Magic set. Vinny, Vidi, Vici. He came, he saw, he conquered. There’s one person in all of Magic who has my number all of the time, and that person is — say it all at once, and say it loud — Vincent Falcone.
Crazy Carl takes a look at what all the Type One players can expect this weekend at the Syracuse Power 9 event. Aside from profiling the decks to beat, Carl also includes an extended interview with Control Slaver master Rich Shay and some suggestions of how to metagame the field, all in his own irreverent style.
The short version of the story is this: I read Chris Romeo’s article. I was intrigued. I thought of a few cards I might have tried out myself. I kept thinking of cards. I thought of more cards. I thought to myself, “Self, there are a lot of cards that could get played in a mono-Black deck.” So many, in fact, that one could probably build three separate, respectable mono-Black decks from the available Standard card pool without topping four of any given non-Swamp card. Now, I’m not feeling quite that ambitious, but you get the idea: there’s a lot out there. Today I’m going to focus on the evolution of one such deck that proved to be surprisingly good in testing.
I’ve been thinking for a while about how to improve tournament reports and make them more useful for the people reading them, and I’ve decided that what I’m going to try doing is a more interactive style of report. For each of the crucial decisions during the tournament which decided how I got on, I’ll explain the situation and then ask you what you would have done in this situation, before explaining what I did and what I should have done. If there’s anything that you want more information about, then just post in the forums and I’ll do my best to reply.
What’s a boy to play in a diverse environment rife with aggro-control strategies? At first Terry wasn’t sure, but then he honed in on the idea of playing his favorite card ever in the environment (Eternal Witness), and soon found himself developing a Red Rock deck designed to bash the PTQ field to bits. In this detailed Primer, Terry gives you all the details you need to know in order to take this deck to a PTQ and do well.
