Ever since I started playing this game and learned of the Pro Tour, it’s been my lofty goal to play on that highest of stages. I’ve just wanted to qualify at least once for a Pro Tour event before I keel over (but by then, hopefully, someone will have an Animate Dead handy). I’ve come close, tantalizingly, on a few occasions. Today I’m going to talk about those occasions.
The month of June brings possibly the most eventful issues that Five-Color’s ever seen: the restriction of Contract from Below, the legalization of Portal (or most of it, anyway), the expansion from eighteen cards of each color to twenty cards, and errataing the Wishes. What do these changes potentially mean for Magic’s Biggest Format?
Chad shares his thoughts on his experience last weekend in Rochester, the hurdles still left for Vintage as a whole, how he came up with his goofy-yet-techy Goblin Resistance deck, and wraps things up with his own thoughts on the Hall of Fame ballots and nominees.
Last time, I took an early look of some Saviors cards that I thought would prove to be influential in the new format. I want to pick up where I left off and also talk about a favorite archetype of mine, while discussing some Champions and Betrayers cards to keep an eye on.
Wildebeests now come in all flavors, and I’ll look at all the tricks that can be done with them. I’ll concentrate on Standard right now, since U.S. Regionals is the next big tourney. Block has nothing worth considering, but I will do one multiplayer deck, just to show how tricky the deck can be if the format has the right cards.
Mark Rosewater argues that the modern glut of keywords is generally positive, and that while Sweep was a dud, so many other worded abilities are still valid. As a vocal critic of this practice, I felt the need to make a few counterpoints, corrections and criticisms of this new article. There are some good points that I agree with, but sometimes the facts that Rosewater presents don’t point to the conclusions he draws.
Dave Meddish isn’t necessarily one of the most popular writers on our site, but his stint on the Daily this week has been second to none in terms of fun, readable content. If you haven’t stopped in to see what Dave has to say, might I recommend today as a good time to do so? After you read about Dave’s amazing road trips, you can then catch up on the rest of his dailies this week at the bottom of the page.
Zvi explains his deck choice, his performance, his thoughts on the format, what he’d change if he had to do it again, goes over his Hall of Fame recommendations, and asks YOU to help him pick what to write about next.
One thing that seems to come up all the time when discussing draft picks or just draft in general is when you should stick to your color and when you should branch out by either choosing a second color or even switching one color for another. In my opinion, this is usually the hardest decision that you make in a draft. Seems like a good topic to write about then, no?
Oscar takes a peek at what Saviors has to offer Vintage players and finds three draw spells that might go overlooked.
Let me crank up the Wayback Machine to about eight years ago. I had just been laid off from my job as a computer game designer after putting in about a year of crunch time on a failed project (this, sadly, would become a theme of my time in the game biz, but that’s neither here nor there). Coincidentally, friend and fellow Magic player Brad Irwin, who was managing the game portion of the local Book & Game store, had also been laid off and decided now was the time to follow through with his dream of opening his own game store and was looking for partners. Was I interested?
In January, I was working on a series of articles on the history of Extended, but I kept veering off and writing about my favorite Extended decks. To force myself back on topic in those articles, I started a separate article about my all-time favorite decks. These are my choices for my all-time favorite decks – with the caveat that the newest weirdness I am working on always qualifies, right up until I have it done and working.
If you have ever been to a tournament, you know that you play matches against people, and the results are recorded and used to determine what happens from round to round, but have you ever thought about why certain things happen one way and not another? I would not expect most people to have done this, but I have, and here are some observations that I have made. Some of you may consider some of my ideas on what to do with tiebreakers and the like radical, but I think we can find a better system than what we currently have.
In the past few articles, we’ve looked over a lot of potential growth decks, and pored over very dry statistics about pre-Saviors Standard. The summation of all of this is to hope to learn how to play post-Saviors Standard, by means of analyzing the situation at hand and learning the rules of deckbuilding that are forced by the cards in the format. The most powerful cards in the format dictate how you play it, and the strongest sets of synergy rise to the top and form the decks we play. Today we’re going to look at your options for tweaking the best decks and turning them into unstoppable killing machines.
Sam wraps up his Saviors of Kamigawa first impressions by discussing what may be the most powerful color in the block: Green.
