I won’t ever get to go to the Invitational, so I can only try to fulfil this objective by proxy. But most players at one time or another have thought about designing their own cards (including some people who have designed whole expansions), so humor me while I explain which Red card I would make, if I had the opportunity.
My last article talked about the basic flaws in aggro decks and why they were historically annihilated. Now I’ll to try to help you out a bit when constructing an aggro control / combo deck for Vintage. We’ll start by breaking down some of the more successful aggro decks of the past and see what can be applied to today’s models.
Tim Aten again tackles Craig Stevenson’s recent Sealed Revealed card pools in order to show how a Limited expert would build these decks. This is required reading for anyone attending one of the PTQs this weekend, particularly if you want to see how to try and make the most of a truly abysmal card pool.
Once again, Abe returns to the Bad Rare Box, stocked with every crap rare in existence. Whatever card he pulls, he must build a deck around. This time, he will find a unique use for Elder Druid (and it’s not what you expect), a Thran Weaponry targeted at the wrong person, a fiendish use of a Volcanic Eruption… and three more bad rares!
Today Zvi begins his examination of Kamigawa Block Constructed, stripping each color down to its building blocks to seek out the real power and synergy in the format. Why should you listen to Zvi when he talks about Block? Because the Block Constructed Pro Tour Winner’s Trophy on his mantle says so!
With his set review now complete, Nick steps directly into a draft walkthrough that contains a few interesting twists and turns along the way. Where did Nick go wrong and what would you have done differently? Enquiring minds want to know!
Inspired by Adam Grydehrmha’s recent article, Chris decided to give U/R Isochron Scepter a run at a recent Standard tourney and details his results here for all to see. He also includes one of the largest cheesecake sections ever seen on StarCityGames.com.
In which one Daniel Paskins, Master of all things Red, details his seedy history raping and pillaging Kent with cards like Gerrard’s Wisdom and Wall of Blossoms. The horror, the horror!
After three second-place finishes in four PT Top 8’s, Gabriel Nassif again found himself in the finals at Pro Tour: Atlanta, this time with teammates David Rood and Gab Tsang. What follows is the story of Nova’s victorious weekend, including special guest appearances by Dave Williams and Josh Arieh of World Poker fame and a very angry Kumano, Master Yamabushi.
Casting costs are relatively important in Type One, for more purposes than just evaluating how much mana you need to put in your deck (especially since cheating on casting costs is the primary goal of many if not most Type One strategies). Its actual import reveals itself through the usefulness of other cards: Powder Keg, Smother, Engineered Explosives, Pernicious Deed, as well as the classically sidelined counterspells, Prohibit and Spell Blast. Other cards ranging from Overload and Plaguebearer to Gorilla Shaman and Chalice of the Void also care very much about this aspect of a card. Today I’m going to break down a whole slew of numbers that will make you a better Vintage player for knowing them.
Flooded Shoreline has appeared before in SCG Daily. About a fortnight ago, Abe Sargent made it the focus of his, um, Bad Rare Challenge. But while Flooded Shoreline might now be no more than an old, bad rare, there was a time when it was part of the world’s best deck.
A card pool containing Meloku, Fumiko, and more burn than you can shake a stick at? Could Craig possibly get that lucky? Will he find the right build this time, or will the Scousemaster insist on playing White again?
Before we get going, I have a confession. The preparation for this article didn’t exactly take me where I thought it would. I originally set out to do what many others were also trying: put together a respectable Ninja deck for Kamigawa block. I’d already experimented with a few of them in Standard with pleasant results, so I figured they could work out fairly well in the closer confines of their home block. I wrote up decklists and played games, and the Ninja actually fared pretty well, but I made a discovery (well, more of a realization) that led me down a different path
Stalling has been a topic we’ve seen writers adress frequently on these pages, but an in-depth look at the viability of using chess clocks is a new one. That’s exactly what Judge Riesland addresses today, and it might even be a better idea than the skeptics initially thought.
None of the cards in Portal are format-shattering; the problem is that the quantity of tutors is reaching critical mass. I define “critical mass” as having enough tutors that you can rely on having the tutors necessary to find important cards often enough to build a deck that relies on tutoring for a given card by turn 2 or 3. And what does that mean for the format?
