The highlight of the weekend, and one of the highlights of my Magic playing career, came on the Sunday after the Pro Tour ended. We arranged a four-on-four draft between some Texan/Lousiana players versus a Pro Tour ringer team which included Jon Finkel, Brian Hacker, Hammer, and one of Brian’s regular draft partners.
Whenever a block is about to rotate out of Standard, I like to look back at some of the cards that saw little or no play but, dadburnit, it seems like they should have. Since Champions of Oompa-Loompa will be released in just over a month and will be tourney-legal in less than two months, Onslaught, Legions, and Scourge will be going the way of the dodo, the carrier pigeon, and common sense, taking with it some sadly overlooked cards.
A few hours ago, I was browsing some website and I thought,”wouldn’t it be keen if someone looked at each new Champions of Kamigawa card MagicTheGathering.com rolled out on a daily basis and wrote about his or her gut reaction about that card for the entire world to read and if that person was me?”
Top 8 match coverage including the finals and interviews with the top 4 including the new Type One World Champion, Mark Biller!
This is it, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The crack staff at StarCityGames.com has designed the ultimate gamer party game: Brian Kibler Bingo! Amaze your loved ones and laugh along with your friends as you play what is obviously the greatest game of all time. Get your copy of Brian Kibler Bingo now, because supplies are limited and when we run out Brian Kibler Bingo will be gone, gone, gone!
I just lost an 8-4 draft in game three of round 2 on Magic Online and I’m trying to decide if I made the correct play and just lost, or made an error, and wanted to get your view.
All of us had to start somewhere. When you dig up old TheDojo.com files and find the scrub Pro Tour Qualifier reports sent in by randoms named Randy Buehler and Kai Budde, you don’t rock your head back and laugh at how dumb they used to be. Rather, if you set aside the forum flamer complex, you’ll probably find yourself smiling and realizing they used to be like you, not in the sense that they’re no longer ordinary young guys like anyone else, but in the sense that they once had to fumble through the game, too. Really, I think this “advanced scrub stage” is the most fun a player has.
In my last article I went over the basic guidelines for drafting what I consider to be the most powerful archetype in MD5 Limited. This week I’m going more in depth with a step by step approach to drafting and then building one of these monsters.
One of the really interesting aspects of Constructed Magic to me is how players approach similar deck matchups. Many of the biggest and most impressive Constructed tournaments in history – from Dave Price in LA to the stack of PT (and PC) Champs with R/G[/x] decks in the Top 8 of Kai’s Rebel Chicago – are defined by how great designers solve the riddle of the mirror. This article is going to be about trying to solve the riddle of the mirror in the current environment by examining how we have done so successfully in the past. And yes, yet again, Age of Mirrors comes with a Free Deck List Woo Hoo at the end.
Through the hard work of our newest Featured Writer Ben Kowal, StarCityGames.com brings you match coverage from the Type I World Championships held at GenCon last weekend. All the Swiss rounds will be posted today and then the top 8 matches will be posted on Monday. Catch all the vintage action, only at StarCityGames.com.
Picture this: It’s Friday afternoon. You are driving around, quote,”the armpit of America” due its being the weekend of a Grand Prix to which you are traveling. All should be well… you have that super sexy Dragonmaster Brian Kibler at your side as you tour the highways of the East Coast; he turns a sexy scale does that Dragonmaster. All should be wellest… you look down at your vibrating mobile phone and caller ID tells you that the incoming is from none other than your hero, your hull, the man you just proclaimed the finest writer in the history of Magic: Michael J. Flores.
Paper or plastic? The answer to that age old question is not unlike this dilemma. It is doesn’t matter which way you choose to go-you still end up with a bag.
This summer has been completely insane for me. I’ve covered U.S. Nationals, Pro Tour: Seattle, Grand Prix: Orlando, The StarCityGames.com Power 9 tournament, Grand Prix: New Jersey, and the first Vs. System Pro Circuit event so far, and on Tuesday I will be heading out to San Francisco to see my first Magic Worlds. Today I’m going to tell you what I learned about Block Constructed during that period of time, take a brief look forward to what you can expect to see at Worlds, and tell some more tales.
Since the last Rule of Law dealt with the difference between playing something and putting it into play, it only makes sense to have this one deal with the actual mechanics of playing spells and abilities. Most spells and abilities don’t need the detail I am about to describe, but those that do have important subtleties that make them special.
