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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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!
My first question is this: What the hell happened to Jon Finkel? The guy disappeared like Bobby Fischer or something, did he fall into Magic obscurity or just give up the game for career/family etc?
Welcome back to the fifth iteration of this Magic puzzles series. With States just behind us, it’s time to test your knowledge of the Kamigawa cards and mechanics that you might encounter. How exactly does Splice work? What about those flip cards? Come on in and test your mettle against the some of the trickier interactions that the Champions of Kamigawa have to offer.
It is a sad fact that many Constructed tournaments are lost before the first round pairings are even up. If you turn up to a Block, Standard, or Extended tournament with a bad deck, all the tight play in the world will probably not help you to the Top 8. In order to be playing the right deck and the right build for a given metagame, you need to avoid making the ten mistakes listed in this article.
Here we go again with part two, otherwise known as the part where I really start smashing! This includes matches against the World Champion, the Hump, and random Europeans even the Europeans haven’t heard of, and details of dancing away Halloween night with Kanoot, Osyp, and more hotties than you can shake a stick at.
My question pertains to something that Mike Flores wrote in his article concluding the U/W deck challenge. He mentioned that when he playtested his Mono Blue deck vs. your Tooth build he devised some tech that was able to win the matchup for his deck a good amount of time. What was that tech that he would not mention? He said that you would update us.
Here’s the plan. Let’s jump right into the middle of things, giving the appropriate props out to http://mtgthesource.com/, and look at the archetypes of Type 1.5. This article is designed to give players new to the Type 1.5 format a jumping off point, to introduce the basic decks and archetypes, give an idea of what the metagame looks like, and make it easy for you to dive into the murky waters. To wrap things up, I’ll even take a look at one of my favorite decks for the new environment.
Based upon the powerful Black cards present in Champions of Kamigawa, however, if there was going to be a breakout deck, conventional wisdom stated that it was either going to be a new take on Mono-Black Control or a reprise of the classic Black/Green midgame deck first pioneered by Sol Malka, best known as The Rock. Mono-Black was out there, but it didn’t have the success at States that The Rock did.
If you plan on going one-for-one with Affinity, you are doomed from the start. Their “normal draw” is often good enough to overcome several pieces of early hate. For months now people have been trying to find ways to overcome such obstacles, and it finally seems that at least one deck has shown up that has a good enough matchup against Affinity, while still being competitive against the rest of the field. The deck approaches hate from a different perspective, stopping the artifact threat before it enters play and can have any affect on the game.
