Cunning Wish. Mana Drain. Force of Will. The Fetchlands. Now, I’m not going to tell you that these cards are bad – they’re not – but I am going to say that you may be relying on these cards too much – or worse, not supporting them properly.
Greetings, and welcome to my travel diary! About a month ago when I was first given the opportunity to travel in Australia and Japan, I figured it would be interesting to chronicle my journeys for all to see. I’m a pretty keen observer of culture in the U.S. – why not extend that eye to my journeys as well? Thus, this series was born.
The Doomsday deck recorded several first- and second-turn kills on the back of Doomsday, Ancestral Recall, and Beacon of Destruction… Or did it? You see, Stemnemdemianan and I had a conversation about the viability of the deck at the tournament. Steve claimed that the deck was nigh-unbeatable. I told him that if that was the case, then something needed to be done to keep the power level of the deck in check. I suggested that Dark Ritual needed to be restricted in Type One.
But that’s not all! I threw in Mishra’s Workshop for good measure.
As an editor, you know that you should probably take a serious look at a writer when Mike Flores calls you up at home and says, “You have got to hire this guy. He’s great.” You may not have heard his name before, but Michael Clair is the New York State Champion, a Regionals Top 8 finisher, a PTQ and PCQ finalist, a man with a 1920 Limited rating… And he’s also our latest Featured Writer. Today, Michael discusses racing and combat math, showing how to utilize your life totals for maximum gain.
Some years ago, there was a Sideboard Ask the Pros question that asked, “What is the most difficult deck to play?” In order to correctly answer that question, we must first describe certain elements of Magic skill. What does it mean for a deck to be “difficult to play”? What does it mean for a format to be skill-intensive or skill-testing? Is Type One, a blisteringly-fast format, one of the toughest… And what is the most difficult deck of all-time?
Richard Vaughan asks:
“Of all the writers who have come and gone, who is your favorite, and who do you miss the most? (I will not be very surprised if both answers are Rizzo, but Meh!)”
Actually, it’s not Rizzo…. And I do have a personal favorite, which is not to slight the other many wonderful writers who have put their stamp on SCG. But do I dare to actually mention this man’s name in print?
Oh, heck, I just might.
The guy next to me handed me my deck as if it were a dead squirrel. “I’m sorry,” he said funereally.
“Why? What’s wrong with it?” I asked, alarmed.
“Oh, your deck isn’t bad,” he said, in tones that indicated that it clearly was. “It’s just all over the map. Good luck trying to build a deck with it.”
Having played enough Sealed games in the interim, I know now that I definitely misbuilt my deck at the Prerelease. But that’s because I’ve learned a few lessons about Kamigawa Sealed – some that I could not have possibly known at the time, and some that I should have learned from past seasons. What could I have done differently?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?”
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?”
