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 continuation of Nick’s outstanding article investingating the ins and outs of a two-on-two team draft with Champions of Kamigawa.
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!
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”?
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.
Did you ever wonder what it’s like to make your first Pro Tour Top 8 when you’re fifteen years old? Gadiel’s here to tell you, as he gives a blow-by-blow account of this past weekend’s tournament, including how he ended up playing Reanimator and his exchanges of pleasantries with the fine Wizards of the Coast staff.
With States coming around, I was wracking my brains to come up with something good and rogue to play, in an attempt to start some sort of wacky tradition. However, all my ideas sucked, so I decided to dust off the old Disciple of the Vault that did so well for me last year. I playtested a new build of Krark-Clan Ironworks and it was fun, so I went with it.
As the “spark-plug” who got proxy tournaments started, let me provide some history. Most of you probably won’t remember this period in Vintage history, so let me set the stage. It was late 2000. The global metagame was very loosely defined. Europe had far fewer tournaments than it does today, and there was absolutely nothing in New England, save some sanctioned thing in the bowels of Massachusetts. The biggest Type One spots in the U.S. were the Richmond Comix and the Neutral Ground New York. The format has come a long way since then, and it’s important to understand why.
Can you imagine a card Wizards could print that would make Affinity not the pre-eminent deck without narrowing the field of viable decks even further?
As an editor, does the sheer amount of anonymous retardation the internet affords people ever frustrate you?
