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Serendib Jim was named after, of course, Serendib Djinn from Arabian Nights. Much like the mythical Arabian merchant in these old stories, Jim was a wheeler and dealer. He wasn’t much for organizing tournaments or rules knowledge or playing the game, but he knew how to trade. Back in those days, nobody could trade cards as well as Jim. This is how he kept Magic in the store even after the tournaments there floundered – the profits he brought in from one lopsided trade after another made the owners of the business very happy indeed.

I can talk about mana for a long time, longer than anyone except Zvi Mowshowitz, probably. Luckily for me, I wrote down my general philosophy on land- and mana-balancing quite awhile ago. The article isn’t perfect – I wrote a revision about a year later for Sideboard that never got published – but it’s generally correct in describing my approach to land and mana. Anyway, you should read the article if you want to have any hope of following me today.

What’s this? A girl is the guest columnist for today’s Ask Ken? Is that even possible?

I’ve been wanting to write another”Underused” article for a while now. In part-homage to Anthony Alongi and in an effort to more regularly hit a topic that I enjoy, I am going to quarterly retire some of the best underused cards of all time.
“Retire them?” you ask. Yessir, into an Underused Hall of Fame. These are going to be the best and brightest cards that never saw as much play as they deserved. There’s no chaff here, just solid and spectacular cards that, for whatever reason, simply are not played much these days.

There are two versions of Tooth and Nail out there: Mono-Green and G/u. Which one should I play? That’s a stupid hypothetical question, because the tourney is over and I definitely played the Mono-Green version, but what I want to do is talk about the difference between the two, and why I feel one version is clearly better than the other.

I had originally intended to run this experiment through the end of August. I’m feeling like that might be overkill, though. Instead of a date, I’m going to say that after my one hundredth game, I will officially call the decklist finished and move on to the next experiment. That means I’m just over half done, so you still have a lot of playing/tweaking to witness.

Where do you see MTGO five years from now and what impact will MTGO have on magic in general and the Pro Tour in particular?

You might notice that Neil had invested in power cards. I had bought mine online in the rec.games.deckmaster.marketplace newsgroup. This was pre-Magic newsgroup days, pre-any website selling Magic singles, and pre-any sort of way of getting cards. The way it worked was this: people would post lists of cards, some with or without a buyout price. You’d send them bids via e-mail, and they would post updates on auction prices 2-3 times a day. If your bid survived for four reposts, you’d win the cards.

In this mall was Electronics Boutique, the only shop in all of Uptown and Downtown New Orleans which sold Magic cards. I remember that I bought a starter and three boosters on my first trip down there; I had budgeted myself $20, and that was as many packs as I could buy with that money. All the packs were Revised, and I remember I opened Northern Paladin, Swords to Plowshares and Wall of Swords, along with Wall of Wood, Craw Wurm, and Living Wall.

Confession #1: I did a naughty thing. I played a whole batch of games without logging the results. I had just done a bunch of writing on my novel and frankly, was a little written out. I wanted to play some Magic as an escape, and I wanted to play the Nuts & Bolts deck without the burden of documenting what happened. I am bad. I am sorry.

I feel my game has improved a lot, but I can’t seem to make it to the next level, namely to the Pro Tour, or even to a PT top 8. I know that luck is only one factor of the game, but it seems to be a factor i can’t overcome. Are Pro players actually luckier than the rest of us, or is there really something else I can do to get past it?

We opened our first sealed decks and found a rather weak card pool in front of us. I actually had a good affinity deck, but JP’s deck was lacking except in the Sword of Fire and Ice department. Tim’s deck made me want to vomit, featuring hits like Big Drossodile and Neurok Hoversail. We also had two Viridian Longbows that almost got into my deck (both), but then we decided that it’d be too greedy, since I had a Trinket Mage to boot.

Everyone remembers how they initially got hooked on”cardboard crack”, and today Ben shares his story of the initial hit from everyone’s favorite addiction.

Today Ken details the risks and rewards of intentional drawing in the later rounds of PTQs.