Ask the Editor, 11/09/2004
How much do you think Cranial Extraction will limit the types of decks that are viable?
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Top Eight Decklists from the Star City Power Nine Tournament in Chicago!
This past Saturday, 142 players made their way to the Windy City to compete in the third Star City “Power Nine” Tournament! If you’re wondering who made the top eight and what decks they were playing, wonder no more. StarCityGames.com proudly presents the top eight decklists from the Star City “Power Nine” Tournament – Chicago!
Sullivan Library: Understanding Scepter-Chant
Adrian looks at the success of Scepter-Chant at the recent Extended Pro Tour, tells you what he thinks Nick West and Ruud Warmenhoven got right, and then gives his own updated version of the deck for the next Extended season.
Swinging With Dead Girls, the Finale – PT: Columbus *T8*
StarCityGames.com’s own precocious fifteen-year-old takes you through all of his Day 2 and Top 8 action. If Worlds and Pro Tour Columbus are any indicators, the kids are starting to take over the game, and Gadiel is one of the best of them.
Ask the Editor, 11/08/2004
When you’re covering Pro Tour matches do you think that while you’re writing the coverage down it makes the players play differently? For instance they think longer before they do something so as not to look stupid on the biggest MTG website out there?
The Snapping Thragg Experiment III – Dancing with Shadows
Nick Eisel has done it again. He’s the only Limited writer on the planet willing to construct his own experiments, find subjects to test them on, and then write thirty-page articles on the entire process, complete with analysis of all the hard picks, commentary on draft mistakes, and coverage of every match from the draft. In short, this article is awesome.
The Snapping Thragg Experiment III – Dancing With Shadows Part 2
The continuation of Nick’s outstanding article investingating the ins and outs of a two-on-two team draft with Champions of Kamigawa.
Examining the Vintage Metagame – Analysis of The Ultimate Table
For this installment, I have updated the largest table I maintain: the monthly occurrence stats for every card, in terms of how many copies showed up in an average Top 8 for each month. So if you see something like “7.0 Black Lotus” it means that in a typical Top 8 from that month, seven of the decks would include a Black Lotus. Something like “3.0 Great Wall” would indicate that I made an error in the table, which is possible – it’s a big table. Regardless, this article will give you a full analysis of all the card trends for the important cards played at big Vintage tournaments for the past year!
The Black Perspective: Pro Tour Columbus
Osyp takes a look back at the weekend that was, explaining Affinity’s success, the poor deck choices of Team Togit, and investigating Eugene Harvey’s choices in hand bags (or should we say man-purse?). All this and more on the latest “The Black Perspective”.
PT Columbus Report *12th*
Do you know what the most successful Extended deck archetype from Pro Tour: Columbus was? No, it wasn’t Affinity, which won the tournament. No, it also wasn’t Reanimator, even though that deck placed the most players in Day 2. In the end, the most successful deck from this past weekend was Scepter-Chant. In this article, Ruud (the coolest Dutchie you’ve never heard of) explains how he ended up playing a deck that runs Lightning Angels out of the sideboard, and recounts the story of his success.
Ask The Editor, 11/05/2004
Kanoot answers fourteen of your questions today, including the following: Okay, so let’s say my roommate had just recently purchased a Beta Black Lotus. Keeping in mind that this is ENTIRELY hypothetical, what would the moral/ethical ramifications of booby trapping our home to facilitate his early demise be, if my intention was to appropriate his collection in the event of his passing? Do you have any experience with this sort of a dilemma, and if so, what advice could you offer to someone grappling with this paralyzing conundrum?
The Sublimity of Forgiveness
How does The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas, and the concept of forgiveness tie in with Mono-Blue decks in Standard and the idea that “control decks are hard to play”? Mike has the answers, in an article that will probably turn out to be another landmark in the career of this Magic literary giant.
Crucible of Worlds is the New Library of Alexandria: Constructing a Coherent Restricted List Policy
So when does a card meet the distortion criteria? That’s one of the primary questions I want to address in this article. It requires a close analysis and a careful look. The critical inquiry is whether a card is “excessively” distorting. This is the problem with Crucible of Worlds. Crucible of the Worlds is not an inherently powerful card, but its presence in Type One is disturbing to many players. Crucible presents an important test case for my proposed framework and to that end I’m going to parse out these arguments for and against restriction in detail.
Ask the Editor – 11/04/2004
One of your most famous articles featured you performing at a tournament while under the influence of Marijuana. Some years later, as a head of Starcitygames, itself a head of the world of Magic strategy, do you feel this past transgression harbors your site and/or yourself in a negative light? Or do you feel it is easily pawned off under the guise of “experimentation”?
Papal Bull: Doomsday’s Back —and in Non-hoax Form!
For me, the most exciting of the recent unrestrictions was Doomsday. Doomsday was long regarded as a weak card that was placed on the restricted list to neuter a combo deck that really wasn’t even that good in the first place. Thus Wizards, in their infinite wizdom, finally unrestricted the card. Even today, most people think it is harmless. I’m here to not only tell you “it’s not that simple,” but to demonstrate a few Doomsday decks that definitely don’t suck.