First off, I am going to say that I don’t think that Crucible of Worlds should be restricted right now. I just want to make sure to get that out of the way nice and early. I also want to level a formal outcry against the top 8 of GenCon. That top 8 was totally illegitimate, as it did not consist of 17 Four-Color Control decks, 9 Fish decks, and 6 GroAtog decks. In all seriousness, I thought that the top 8 was great and couldn’t have asked for a better one.
Everyone wants to play with Death Cloud. I mean, just look at the card. It just screams”I Win!” Unfortunately no one has been able to make a Cloud deck work very well in the metagame, so its potential has gone unrealized… until now.
As expected, the Champions of Kamigawa previews started off without a hitch and everybody was happy. Look at what all the satisfied people had to say!
[Bleiweiss] it’s absolutely stupid
[copernicu] legends suck
[Yawgatog] sux
Preparing for a Limited format is easy. The reason it is so easy is that, by and large, players find drafting more fun than Constructed. The more players you have enjoying the times, the more enjoyable the times will be. Testing Constructed always felt like work to me. While draft felt like a honing of skills, Constructed testing felt more like mapping. So what are the Constructed players mapping? Matchups. But there is more to Constructed than matchups. Think of decks as areas of a continent. Matchups are the paths between them. What I want to talk about today is the entire landscape.
The highlight of the weekend, and one of the highlights of my Magic playing career, came on the Sunday after the Pro Tour ended. We arranged a four-on-four draft between some Texan/Lousiana players versus a Pro Tour ringer team which included Jon Finkel, Brian Hacker, Hammer, and one of Brian’s regular draft partners.
Whenever a block is about to rotate out of Standard, I like to look back at some of the cards that saw little or no play but, dadburnit, it seems like they should have. Since Champions of Oompa-Loompa will be released in just over a month and will be tourney-legal in less than two months, Onslaught, Legions, and Scourge will be going the way of the dodo, the carrier pigeon, and common sense, taking with it some sadly overlooked cards.
A few hours ago, I was browsing some website and I thought,”wouldn’t it be keen if someone looked at each new Champions of Kamigawa card MagicTheGathering.com rolled out on a daily basis and wrote about his or her gut reaction about that card for the entire world to read and if that person was me?”
Top 8 match coverage including the finals and interviews with the top 4 including the new Type One World Champion, Mark Biller!
This is it, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The crack staff at StarCityGames.com has designed the ultimate gamer party game: Brian Kibler Bingo! Amaze your loved ones and laugh along with your friends as you play what is obviously the greatest game of all time. Get your copy of Brian Kibler Bingo now, because supplies are limited and when we run out Brian Kibler Bingo will be gone, gone, gone!
I just lost an 8-4 draft in game three of round 2 on Magic Online and I’m trying to decide if I made the correct play and just lost, or made an error, and wanted to get your view.
All of us had to start somewhere. When you dig up old TheDojo.com files and find the scrub Pro Tour Qualifier reports sent in by randoms named Randy Buehler and Kai Budde, you don’t rock your head back and laugh at how dumb they used to be. Rather, if you set aside the forum flamer complex, you’ll probably find yourself smiling and realizing they used to be like you, not in the sense that they’re no longer ordinary young guys like anyone else, but in the sense that they once had to fumble through the game, too. Really, I think this “advanced scrub stage” is the most fun a player has.
In my last article I went over the basic guidelines for drafting what I consider to be the most powerful archetype in MD5 Limited. This week I’m going more in depth with a step by step approach to drafting and then building one of these monsters.
One of the really interesting aspects of Constructed Magic to me is how players approach similar deck matchups. Many of the biggest and most impressive Constructed tournaments in history – from Dave Price in LA to the stack of PT (and PC) Champs with R/G[/x] decks in the Top 8 of Kai’s Rebel Chicago – are defined by how great designers solve the riddle of the mirror. This article is going to be about trying to solve the riddle of the mirror in the current environment by examining how we have done so successfully in the past. And yes, yet again, Age of Mirrors comes with a Free Deck List Woo Hoo at the end.
