Welcome back comrades! Gather ’round, for thy daily dosage of deck hath returned! Verily, our good captain Ted of the Knutsons hath summoned me for another round of writing, and my heart warms so follow along as I update my favorite deck of all time.
I’ve been on the forefront of 4-color Control’s design for years now. Over those years, I had slipped into the habit of tweaking the deck to survive, popularizing it, letting it get invalidated (either by hate or a substantial environment shift), then again tweaking the deck to survive. That is, until I felt that the format was too broken for it to even consider. Thankfully I don’t think today’s environment is too broken, and I have a new build to show you that has tested very well.
When Ken messaged me last week to tell me he thought he had written one of his best Limited articles ever, I was skeptical. He’s been semi-retired for some time, so I didn’t know what to expect. Friday’s article proved his case however, and part 2 just continues it by delivering the complete common-through-rares pick order for Betrayers in this powerful archetype.
If you’ve been reading sites like this for a while, you may have noticed that there are a lot of articles out there regarding the ever-elusive concept of “getting better at Magic.” Me? I’m here to promote good play the best way I know how: bad play – more specifically, pointing out opportunities for bad play. You may recall reading somewhere that, for each gamestate, there is only one correct play and everything else is a mistake. Well, I’m personally quite familiar with everything else. I have, at some point, bungled a game in pretty much any way you can imagine. It’s not that I’m a particularly bad player – I like to think I’m actually fairly decent – but if you play long enough and aren’t careful, it’s inevitable.
The most interesting matches of my season so far came back to back at last week’s PTQ in Milford. I was playing Aluren, and my first opponent was Jonathan Ward of Team MYR. We were both 3-0 at this point and he begins the game with something like Duress, Birds of Paradise, Cabal Therapy and I assume he’s playing Rock, so I Cabal Therapy him back on Vampiric Tutor. He shows me a hand of Worship, and Academy Rector. What the hell? If your PTQ season has gone at all like mine, I’m sure you’ve had more than a few of these strange moments and can share my pain.
When Scott Johns sent me the list of names on the Magic Writers Invitational, I winced. Never before had I seen such a wretched hive of scum and villainy. After much deliberation and more than a few shots of tequila, I finally settled on the five least repugnant invitees. Which five did I choose and what dirt do I dish on them? Find out inside!
This past weekend Randy played in his first tournament since 1999… and won. Even better was that it was an unsanctioned 12-Proxy Vintage event with a Black Lotus as the grand prize. We sent our crack reporter JP Meyer off to a secret resort on the island of Maui (also known as “R&D’s Winter Home”) to ask Randy about his tournament experience, what deck he played, how R&D looks at Vintage and his thoughts on the format as a whole.
This week’s challenge brought out a bunch of the old’ standbys: Akroma, Angel of Wrath, Seedborn Muse, Avatar of Woe, Soul Warden. But who took the $20 prize for the week for listing their picks for the Top 5 multiplayer creatures?
That would be Stephen Davis, for his phenomenally-amusing The Tenth Annual Tolarian Academy Awards. Stephen wins the sawbuck because he took a dry format and spiced it up with a lot of humor and a smidge of strategy!
So what’s next week’s challenge? Well, this is a little tougher, since it’s a new casual format that doesn’t have quite the following that multiplayer does… but it’s fun as heck. How does access to infinite mana sound? The next week’s challenge is:
Type 4: Limited Infinity.
If you want an overview of the rules, check Stephen Menendian’s excellent article. If you don’t want an overview of the rules, write an article and send it in to Mail us at https://sales.starcitygames.com/contactus/contactform.php?emailid=2! You could win $20!
Throughout time two draft archetypes have risen above the rest in terms of power and consistency. Those are mono-Black and Blue/White. If you default to one of these archetypes without knowing exactly what is in the set, you can’t go too wrong. Sure it may cause you to pick a Harsh Deceiver earlier than it should be picked, but by following the guidelines of sets past, you should be able to draft a competitive deck. In this article I am going to discuss the drafting of Blue/White in Champions/Champions/Betrayers (CCB)from the commons right up to the rares, with a pick order for every card on the list.
Imagine it. You sit down across from your opponent. You roll the die and win. You shake hands. You mulligan to six. Your opponent’s feeling good about that. And you win before he even gets a chance to draw the card on his first turn. In Standard. You’re a legend. Not a Legend. You’re awfully close, though. You’d be my hero, anyway. And a lot of other folks’, too. Today I’m going to give you your very own guide to becoming a hero.
Thousands of players each year receive game and match losses due to imporper deck registration. In today’s installment of Blog Fanatic, Ben looks at what can go wrong while registering your deck list, and what you can do to avoid losing to your own registration mistakes!
Phil Stanton’s articles are almost impossible to explain in short blurbs, but they always include numbers, they are always about Vintage, and they always give you crucial information about some part of the Vintage metagame. This time Phil takes a look at the different compositions of card types in Vintage Top 8s, including how many land/mana sources each deck runs, the amount of countermagic and disruption seeing play, and how much potential most Vintage decks have to damage themselves. If I haven’t explained that this article is really really cool then I have failed, but don’t let that stop you from reading this article, as it should be an enormous boon to every Vintage deckbuilder that reads it.
Real Life intruded on Craig Stevenson’s Sealed Revealed run, but we found a ringer to stand in for him. Today Tim takes two of the card pools Craig posted last week and dissects them, explaining which builds he would consider, discarding the chaff and building the best decks from the tools at hand. The Betrayers of Kamigawa prerelease starts on Magic Online today, and Limited PTQs are just around the corner, so if you are looking for some help in figuring out how to build your deck, Tim Aten’s got your back.
What can you say about Chad Ellis’s fundamentals articles? That Chad Ellis is a respected Magic theorist capable of taking complex concepts and making them simple to understand. That Chad is respected by the best theorists and players in the game. That every time you read a Chad Ellis article, you will learn something and become a better player. If that’s not enough, check out the guest appearance from “The Donald” in this exceptional article.
