I played, as I have for the previous two years, at the English National Championships. I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped. Going into the event, I was ranked 12th in the country. Leaving the event, I presume I’m ranked considerably, and perhaps more realistically, lower.
I’m going to keep this relatively painless: nothing arcane or esoteric, references from the current Standard and Block environment, and a complete lack of math. I’ll also try to keep it short because I understand how theory can get boring fast. I am not positing anything groundbreaking here, but rather exploring an established part of the game, and trying to maximize its beneficial applications. What I’m talking about is Toolbox Theory.
Welcome to the next installment of Magic Puzzles in Play. You can see the first set of puzzles here. This time you’ll have the opportunity to test your skills with some of the new Fifth Dawn cards and mechanics. Once again, assume your opponent is playing his best to foil your goals. Good luck! The answers will be posted tomorrow.
Today my month-long blog experiment winds to a close. Today’s your chance to influence my thinking. If this blog hasn’t met your expectations, tell me why and what you had hoped to see. If you’re enjoying yourself, tell me so and what sort of content you’d like to see more or less frequently in the future. I’m feeling at a crossroads with the blog only thirty days in, and want to think through my next steps. I’m definitely energized enough to keep writing, I just need to decide whether it’s the blog I want to write or not.
It is obvious that there are a lot of good, fun cards from Unglued when you start to look through a spoiler. However, there are also some amazingly broken cards as well. In order to bring the good cards to your casual playgroup, you may very well need to examine the potential of a few Unglued cards.
Rather than write a narrative report about how I did at Nationals, which would be a short and bitter report, this article will invite you to identify the mistakes that I made, and hopefully use that as a way of discussing how to choose a deck in situations just after the release of a new expansion set, when the metagame is harder to predict. As a bonus, I’ll use the results of English Nationals to put together a”Decks to Beat” compilation, to use as reference when choosing which decks to test against (or play, if you lack the time or motivation to test).
Jay unearths one of his more popular series of all time that were once lost from the StarCityGames.com archives.
Dear Jay,
Still Sorry.
Sincerely,
Knut
A double dose of this week’s Blog so that we’re finally caught up on JMS bloggage and so Knut can stop apologizing.
There are lots of different ways to go about building a deck. There are active decks and reactive decks. Active decks are in a sense easier to build because you don’t have to take as many factors and cards into consideration; if your plan comes online, you win. Reactive decks, especially those that plan to win over a very long game, have to consider all kinds of cards, some of them jank. There are natural decks and there are predator decks. There are decks that are based on earlier designs and brand spanking new ideas. But today, we are going to build a reactive Standard deck based on a new card that I find interesting. What is it? You’ll have to click to find out.
I had been playing with Steely Resolve in the sideboard. I’d bring it in against Goblins and really anything else that tried to target the Elves – which, using my keen sense of observation, I noticed was just about everything. Then, a funny thing happened in game three of a Goblin matchup. I got two Resolves. The first one I dropped and called, of course, Elves. Then a light bulb went on: I dropped the second, calling Goblins. No more Clamping up Goblins for cards. No more activating the Sledder’s ability, unless he wanted to call Insects. But there’s one difference between this and a regular Elves deck…
Artifacts have slowly began to make my skin crawl – and for those out there who can’t take the it anymore, then prepare for sweet revenge. I’m talking seventeen pieces of good ol’ main deck artifact destruction. Not enough for you? Add seven more pieces from the sideboard to the mix and three maindecked Eternal Witnesses, and you’ve got enough artifact destruction to make Urza blush.
My Limited rating on Magic Online bounces steadily between 1650 and 1700 for two reasons. The first is obviously skill level. I draft once or twice per month, so I never really accumulate enough practice to gain what you might call expertise. The second reason for my anemic rating is that, just like in Constructed, I have a tendency to, shall we say, experiment. Sometimes -okay, often – I see a deck forming that just… might… maybe possibly… work out, and I lunge for it.
Many of you might wonder why I dwell on cards I don’t think will see play in Type I, even if I end up with a list that rejects all the new cards. While the Johnnies in all of you might not like it, I want to impress the thought process upon the beginners and people like Steve Jarvis. Only after reading his Type I column am I fully reminded why it remains important to write about Eternal Witness for the teenager (or Nationals competitor) who’s at the Prerelease and has a passing interest in Type I.
Today we continue with our comprehensive review of Mirrodin Block draft picks, this time finishing up the base set by examining Green and the artifacts.
