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Making Sure Your Red Deck Wins

Every year, there is one deck which does much better in the Pro Tour Qualifiers than it does in the Pro Tour. Two years ago, only two people played it at the Pro Tour and in the following qualification season it won a Grand Prix and qualified dozens of players for the following Pro Tour. Last year, its highest finish at the PT was 9th, and yet again, despite all the powerful decks, it was one of the dominant decks in the qualifiers. And this year it was one of the best decks at the Pro Tour. All of which means that even if you have no intention of playing the Red Deck, this is still a deck which you need to know all about.

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Neo-Freshmaker in Standard

What do you do when Mono-Blue has been hated out of your area? If you are Kyle Boddy, you go back to your roots and redesign the deck with the unspeakable name so that it can win again in Standard.

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Unhinged Madness: Decks and Stories

I hope that you guys are enjoying Unhinged as much as our play group is. It’s the holidays, so hopefully your Magic days are filled with joy. In recognition of the great casual set during a casual time of year, allow me to relate a few decks I’ve come up with and a few Unhinged stories.

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The Black Perspective: Why Not Extended Part Deux – Life and U/G Madness

After doing some testing at Grand Prix: Chicago, Osyp reports back that Affinity is not the deck to play at the first few Extended PTQs if you want to be successful, but he has a good idea about two decks that might be winners in the new metagame.

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Yawgmoth’s Whimsy #120: 5Color Cunning Wish Targets

The Judgment Wishes are restricted in 5color (at least the good ones are), but the tradeoff is that 5color lets you wish for any card you can reach easily from your seat – provided that getting the card would not make your deck illegal. That means that you can keep a small pile of Wish targets around and play a lot of interesting cards. I want to talk about what I have in my pile.

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From Right Field: White Skies at Night

Last week, I mentioned a White Skies deck. It came about because I noticed two things – most decks aren’t running any fliers and most decks aren’t running any enchantment removal. Thus, my hypothesis became: A deck running aggressive fliers backed up by an enchantment that enhances the fliers can beat a deck running only or mostly ground troops.

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Weak Among the Strong: Arcane Control

Limited is about creatures and the spells that interact with them — removal and combat tricks. Right? Every now and then there’s an opportunity to break this rule, at least in Draft. A set contains an engine or interaction of commons and uncommons that lets a drafter turn a bunch of cards into a “constructed” powerhouse. In the past we’ve seen this with heavy R/B removal decks with some sort of graveyard recursion. But nowhere has this been seen more dramatically than in Champions draft, where a totally creatureless archetype has appeared.

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Team Limited with Clair Jordan – GP Chicago *9th*

As Flores spoke about here, my team and I (consisting of Steve Sadin and Paul Jordan) were lucky enough to win byes at the GP: Trial at Neutral Ground by going an illustrious 0-2 in played matches. So we were looking forward to a solid chance at making Day 2…

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Make Every Pack Your First Pack!

I decided to share with you a little game that I play, which I call the First Pick, First Pack Game. Every time I open a pack that I have bought/won, before I add the cards to my collection, I study the pack as though I were in a draft and it was the first pack I opened for that set and I try to decide what my pick would be.

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Intricacies of the RDW Mirror Match

If you followed the PT Columbus coverage at the Tournament Center, you know that my favorite deck of the Pro Tour was Red Deck Wins. I watched Shuhei Nakamura win a series of improbable matchups on his way to a loss in the finals (to what should have been a good matchup). He played for the most part a very tight game, constricting the turns that his opponents had to answer his threats, bowling them over with a combination of aggressive attackers and finishing burn that would make Dave Price proud. Red Deck Wins is a straightforward deck that doesn’t get color-screwed, doesn’t fizzle, and has game against every single archetype. But which version is optimal?

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The Magic Online CoK Uncommon Print Run

Those with long memories will recall that this time last year, I revealed to you the Mirrodin uncommon print run on Magic Online. I got a bit wordy about it, and sort of made an article around it, but basically the whole thing was an excuse to get the print run out there. Well, after umpteen drafts and a fair amount of help from friends and randoms on Magic Online, I have managed to do the same thing for Champions of Kamigawa.

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Solving Your Christmas Shopping Problems in One Easy Step!*

Chad has ideas on how you can spend your Christmas loot and briefly explains what it’s like to be a professional game designer.

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How To Win In Every Tournament You Enter

Last week, I had a very upsetting experience. I sat down to read the daily articles on StarCityGames.com, and the first one that I read was just simply wrong. From reading the forums, it seems that quite a number of you folks had comments to make about the article I mean. Here’s my take on this issue, and as an incentive to read it, I’ll throw in a free guide at the end on to how to win at every tournament you enter.

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Ask the Editor, 12/21/2004

What exactly do you tell people when they ask you what you do for a living? I think its pretty cool that you get paid to edit Starcity and fly around the world covering Magic events, but I would imagine its not easy to explain to non-Magic playing people. Also, what do your close friends and family think of your job? Do they approve of it, or do they think it’s just some “weird card thing?”

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From Right Field: Where Have You Been, Dom DiMaggio? — A Look Back at 2004

Romeo stops back by to take a look back at 2004, otherwise known as “the year I got married in a Red Sox jersey and the Sox won the World Series.” On a more related note, he also includes two new rogue decks he’s been fiddling with for the last few months and some advice for the DCI.

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