Good day and welcome to the second installment of the Underused Card Hall of Fame. This is the place where I retire 30 cards, placing them in the Underused Card Hall of Fame. There are six categories, one for each color and another category for everything else. Five cards are retired from each category.
This is my excuse to write about one of my favorite topics — cards that you aren’t playing, but you should.
Kanoot takes you on a photographic guided tour of Tokyo, complete with an arcade visit and a picture of the Japanese version of Moat.
I’ve always been a believer in the idea that you learn more from defeats than from victories. Which means, over the years, that I’ve learned an awful lot. There’s a particular problem which I’ve known about for years, and which I’ve seen cost players a lot of games, but which I’ve found hard to explain properly. It’s when you lose because you are on autopilot. Let me try to explain what autopilot is.
Being unable to attend States because of travel plans was also a good reason to stay out of Magic — not to mention that the new Standard was going to be just like the Mirrodin Block. Or so I thought. At the behest and nagging of Cedric Phillips, who boldly proclaimed that the new Standard format was not only passable, but fun, I decided to look into playing Magic again. I hardly knew what I was getting into, especially when I figured out that decks that look so bad on paper actually turn out to be quite good.
We’ve got a two-part article here today. The first part describes the evolution of my current competitive 5color deck. The second part was going to be a further discussion of the problems with Contract from Below and ante, but I replaced that with a brief tourney report on making Top 4 in a 5color Worlds qualifier.
What’s it like to travel to a country where you can’t even read the letters in the words? How many times did Knut get lost on the way from the airplane to the train? Are Japanese stools made for American butts? Your adventurous editor goes about discovering the answers to all these questions and more in the latest edition of his travel diary.
If you’re anything like me, the first time you heard the term “Mana Curve” it was either by someone much better than you, or it was on a website. For the longest time I never understood what a good curve really was, or how to build my deck with that mythical “Good Curve.” I would ask the same questions over and over, “What’s the shape of the curve? Is it a bell? An incline? I just don’t understand!” Well I’m here to help you figure out exactly what the mana curve is, so you won’t have to be like me and annoy people with those questions all the time.
As I sit here in my cluttered office writing this article, I risk the wrath of the Type One community I worked to nurture. With this in mind, I’m sure plenty of you will believe my point of view to be flawed, wrong, or off-base. However as I watch the forums around the net ignite, I feel someone should say this: Ben Bleiweiss isn’t as wrong as you’d like to think.
The restricted list is designed to keep the format as skill intensive as possible, by keeping mindless “I win” cards from polluting the format. Cards like Gush and Burning Wish could make your opponent’s entire game plan irrelevant, because you could win before they got a chance to make any decisions, or just simply overpower them, putting them in a position that no amount of correct decision making could make them succeed.
The hot topic right now in Vintage is the upcoming December restriction announcement. There’s blood boiling on both sides of the issues, and as players it’s our responsibility to tell the DCI exactly what the format needs to remove in order to make skill as important as possible.
Should Dark Ritual go? Monday morning Ben Bleiweiss argued yes, but frankly I disagree with him. Yes, Dark Ritual is powerful and can pump out turn 1 wins on the back of Necropotence and Doomsday, but being powerful alone is not a reason to restrict. The entire format is broken, and frankly Type 1 players like it that way. We like doing stupid broken tricks involving Time Walk and Yawgmoth’s Will. Is Dark Ritual warping the format or doing destructive things to Vintage? Does Dark Ritual really do enough to put it on the same list with the Power 9?
The new Banned and Restricted list is coming out on Wednesday. What does this have to do with Knut’s article? The answers could surprise you and might change the face of Magic for the next year. If that doesn’t interest you, maybe a picture of the new sunburst foil process from the Japan Juniors Royal Assassin and Slith Firewalker will. Click the article my friends, or you’ll miss out on what may be the most controversial article of the year.
Mike Flores wrote an interesting article on degree of difficulty. I found the Flores’ article interesting not because I strongly disagree with him – but because I think the real issue is worth exploring: what skills does Type One test? Vintage is clearly unlike any other format. Nick Eisel once described some in-game analysis contained in one of my articles as “bizarro world.” Rather than compare Type One on a better or worse scale, this article will explore and explain what I think are the critical skills Vintage players must have to be successful.
Do you have scads and scads of old cards lying around your house and taking up space? Laura has a few ideas for interesting things to do with them.
Ted finishes up with his parting thoughts on Australia. How much do Nikes cost in the land of Oz and should you be eating bug if it is offered? The answers to these questions and more are all inside.
The concept before us today is one that has been mentioned several times, but to my knowledge has never been addressed in any kind of in-depth fashion. This concept is dynamic pick orders. Today I’m going to detail my pick orders for the set and then discuss how they change based on what cards are already in your pile.
