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A Look At The Remaining Chaff On The Restricted List

The DCI has done a great job of cleaning the detritus from the restricted list that had accumulated over the years. In the past two years, Berserk, Fork, Braingeyser, Hurkyl’s Recall, and many other cards were unrestricted, reflecting the fact that they are no longer the power cards they were eight years before. But the Restricted List has taken years to accumulate, and there is still stuff on the list that arguably shouldn’t be. In this article, I’m going to look at the six most questionable cards on the list and examine the pros and cons of unrestriction.

That’s Two-Time State Champion To You – Arizona States, 1st Place For The Second Time

I won last year – but needless to say, I wanted to defend my prestigious title. Most of my testing occurred by playing formats other than Champions Standard. That last statement is a bit misleading, since Mirrodin Block and pre-Kamigawa Standard are pretty much the same format as the States. You play Affinity and try to win the mirror match, or you play a deck that does nothing but beat Affinity and go home when you play someone who didn’t get the memo.

Ask The Other Editor, 11/18/2004

Sometimes, I think you should be able to say, “Screw the official rule – you know damn well what it’s supposed to do, so make it do that.” But you can’t do that in tourney play because there’s no room for ambiguity, and so I’m sure there are many good, flavorful cards that hit the circular file because they can’t word it properly. That’s just one of the reasons I like Unhinged.

The Daffinitive Affinity Guide

My teammate needed someone to be playing Affinity so he could test his decks – and that person was me. Thus, twice a week for approximately a month, I sat down and played some version of Affinity against a whole host of decks, from Mono-green Blasting Station to Mono-Black Control to Tooth and Nail to Red/Green Hate.

So let me use my experience to take you on a tour through the various flavors of Affinity (and give you their strengths and weaknesses), show you how to play the deck for maximum efficiency, and tell you the Mamet Rule.

Ask The Other Editor, 11/17/2004

Team AWWAJALOOM allowed Magic players everywhere to believe that they were far superior to other people, without the slightest shred of evidence to prove it. When a Team AWWAJALOOM member went 1-3 for the seventh tourney in a row, he would shout the official team slogan: “I could have won if I had worked at this!” And then all of the team members would gather at a bar after their crushing loss and drink a beer, bitching about how they were so much better and it was terribly unfair how the all the other players had won. But what happened to the Team?

Food For Thought: The Top Ten Underrated Kamigawa Draft Cards

A recent article on underrated draft cards got me thinking: I felt that although some of the cards Uri Peleg mentioned were spot-on, he left out a large contingent of cards that consistently go late and have a much swingier effect on the game. This isn’t a rebuttal; rather, it’s a complimentary doctrine. These are cards that are generally ignored but have proved to be powerful, and after reading this your pick orders will certainly be rearranged.

Ask The Other Editor, 11/16/2004

Elske Van Der Vaart asks:
“StarCityGames.com is basically a competitive player’s place now. As a casual player, I come for the Issues articles and the occassional Abe Sargent gems, but that’s basically it. My question: Why has this happened? Is the problem that all Casual writers have disappeared or that most Casual articles don’t meet your new quality standards?”

Ask The Other Editor, 11/15/2004

Jensen Bohren, famed casual freak also known as The Orgg, asks a very good question:
“Once Star City Games was much like The Dojo and other Magic sites online, and posted most of the ‘decent’ articles with a fair amount of speed; rejected articles were also ‘thrown back’ with a similar amount of speed. Today, I know of only one site that will publish nearly anything, and it’s the only site that will link to the ‘good stuff’ on other Magic sites. Why has Star City become so inwardly focused on itself and turned away from the larger picture of the Magic community?”

The Hidden Gems Of Kamigawa Drafts

One of the first things I asked myself before Kamigawa came onto the scene was what lessons I could take with me from all my Mirrodin block drafting. My key to being successful in Mirrodin drafts (and I was – my rating moved between 1900 and 1950 throughout the last two months of Mirrodin) lay in a small number of underrated cards. So when I approached Kamigawa block, my first question was – what are the new hidden gems in Kamigawa?

Yawgmoth’s Whimsy #116: Competitive 5-Color and Contract

I could make a deck that could be quite competitive with the best in the format – but that would take including my power, all my duals and fetchlands, and stripping out all the “just for fun” cards and replacing them with cards that just win the game. But that would mean carrying a deck worth thousands and thousands of dollars that contained about three win conditions – and forcing one of them out game after game. I could probably win, but would it be fun?

Ask the Editor, 11/12/2004

StarCityGames.com has a unique editorial style in that editors are involved in more than just fixing spelling and grammar, adding comments to articles [Hundroog] and removing unrealistic matchup percentages. How did this come to be and why has no one else adopted it?

Higher Ground

You don’t necessarily have to play some decks perfectly because they give you so much room for error. You can screw up by a card, or three cards – but since you drew ten more cards than your opponent did, you don’t even notice.

But how does that speak to a deck like Ravager Affinity? Sure, Ravager has Thoughtcast, but today’s Affinity isn’t known for its card advantage… But maybe that’s because we don’t look at Ravager’s card advantage the right way.

Ask The Other Editor

It’s been a while since I’ve been on-board with this whole Editor thing, so you may have even forgotten that I exist… But on the other hand, I’ve been editing StarCityGames.com for almost five years now, and I have a wealth of experience and I am still the Editor-in-Chief. So hey, as long as I’m pinch-hitting for The Holy Kanoot this week, I’ll cheerfully answer any and all questions you have for me.

Wanna know something? Email me at [email protected], and I’ll do my best to answer, starting Monday.

Also, if you’ve sent an article to Ted over the past few days, you may want to resend directly to me. Some of the emails have been lost in transit, and we’d hate to see a good article vanish into mysterious mists of the Internet.

October Mid Range Type 1 Breakdown and Unsolicited Commentary

This fall/winter season is a time that’s typically more laid back. There is no Gencon or Origins on the horizon, Waterbury may happen all of once, and there’s no telling what StarCityGames.com will decide to do. While there will be far fewer large scale tournaments, there will be plenty of mid-sized tournaments, which is where I get to stick my tongue out at Philip Stanton and thump my own chest… that is, of course, assuming that you creeps give me Top 8 lists!

Magic Puzzles in Play Vol. 5 – The Solutions

The solutions to yesterday’s puzzle set.