The Vintage World Champion defends his title against all comers, slaying dragons, Smennendians, and Amish folks while lost in Pennsylvania, all in his own unique style (awesome sauce not included)!
I always wanted to write an article about how to correctly manipulate your library. It doesn’t come up so much any more, because the decks that have manipulation in Standard or even Mirrodin Block these days don’t really require a lot of strategic Tutor technique. Sylvan Scrying doesn’t typically compete with any other Tutor for mana in a turn, and it pretty much always goes for either a Cloudpost or a missing Urza’s Tower. Like what are you really going to play as a Tutor? What’s that you say? Gifts Ungiven is part Tutor, part Fact or Fiction? Lets take a look at exactly what this new Champions card does and figure out whether it’s any good at either task.
I spent this summer without an internet connection, a car, or friends who play Magic. Thankfully I had a copy of Apprentice and the latest Fifth Dawn update, so I spent the better part of my summer trying to break Extended, coming up with five decks that you probably haven’t seen before.
For too long the words “Magic Player” have been synonymous with agony and despair when it comes to the dating. Is it your lack of social skills, your unkempt appearance, or your frighteningly bad breath? Do you find talking to women an incomprehensible labyrinth? Well your days of shame are at their long end, my friend. With this easy-to-follow guide that describes women in the terms of Magical cards, you can’t go wrong!
There’s only one thing that I know at all about Type 1.5: that people have wanted a banned list separate from Type 1 for years in order to bring it out of the shadow of Type 1. Personally, I don’t know anything about any of the decks. I have no idea where any scenes are. I don’t know who the big shot players are. If I had to tell you what decks were good, I’d just have to make a totally unfounded guess. But I do know that the new bannings are good for the format, and I’ll tell you why.
Randy Buehler, Aaron Forsythe, Dave Price, Jon Finkel, and Turian, are just some of the people we’ve lost to age. Not that they’re too old to play (no one’s too old to play), but their lives have changed in a way that Magic is not as much of a priority as it was in the past. Some have used their education from college and studies to make the more consistent money I mentioned before and yet others have been singled out to work on the very game they were once so passionate for. All of this has lead to poorer results posted by U.S. players and teams. The question is whether this cycle will continue.
Ben’s interview with the reclusive Jamie Wakefield continues! Find out how Jamie got the nickname King of Fatties, why he always played 62 cards in a deck, and the woes of the color Green inside!
I heard that Kai Budde recently stayed at your place the week before Worlds to test with you and Team Togit. How was it, testing with the best player in the world?
So the DCI blew up the world at midnight Eastern time September 1st by splitting the Type One and Type 1.5 Banned and Restricted lists. Type One players have been clamoring for this ever since the perceived misdeed of the Earthcraft and Entomb restrictions (which has long been blamed on 1.5, though I’ve heard 1.5 players deny that it made any sense for them, either). If I recall correctly, some of the leading 1.5 players actually didn’t want a split for fear of list mismanagement, because their format is a small niche even compared to Type One. But let me explain to you here and now why this was an amazingly good decision for the DCI to make.
If Shared Triumph doesn’t win the vote this week, Ben Bleiweiss will eat the card. Or maybe he already has!
People obviously need a voice of reason for these votes because they just keep screwing things up. Since this is the last set of cards we will be voting on for another two years, I figure it’s time to recap and look at where the public went wrong this time around. Oh, and I get to beat up on Ben one last time, too. This should be fun.
More than one hundred and fifty players came to Gencon to win an amazing piece of artwork and a sweet trophy. More importantly, they came to take their shot at the mantle of Vintage World Champion, but none of them were prepared to handle the return of Mono-Blue.
Because I haven’t had a voice in a few weeks, I have this miscellany of things to say, deck ideas and so forth. Entailed in this article are decks, musings, opinions, and more — all wrapped into one neat package.
Usually, I manage to get an article written at least every four months as I have related the Magic storyline to the novels that are released with each set. However, those of you who look forward to my articles to get an update on the storyline without having to purchase and read the Magic novels may have noticed that I haven’t written about The Darksteel Eye or The Fifth Dawn (the books associated with the two most recent expansions). This is not for lack of interest and only partly for lack of time. No, the absence of these articles has been for lack of content.
Let’s begin with one of the more difficult draft decks I’ve had to build in the past few weeks from MTGO. I was constantly getting good cards late, but the problem was that they were all heavy on the mana requirements and in three different colors to boot. I’m going to list all of the relevant picks in order first and then go over some of the builds I went through during deck construction after some discussion about the draft.
