In what may be the most influential article of the Extended season thus far, Chad teaches you the crucial skills necessary to own your Extended PTQs and provides a heaping helping of sideboard and maindeck tech for anyone hoping to make earn a slot in Philadelphia. This is a must-read article for any serious Magic player.
Ken uses his team’s Day 2 appearance at Grand Prix: Chicago as a platform to take a look at the Team Limited format and figure out what parts of the common wisdom are true, and which bits are myth. For exmaple: If you are trying to win a Team PTQ, your energies are much better spent practicing Team Sealed than they are Team Rochester. Always controversial, often insightful, KK brought his A Game with this one.
I love Rampage, but sometimes, pseudo-Rampage is even better. The trouble with plain, workaday Rampage is that it always grants creatures toughness as well as power, and as my Uncle Toby Shandy likes to say, “The only thing better than toughness is power, and the only thing better than power is Rabid Elephant.” Once Rampage was retired as a mechanic, Rampage-like effects flourished. Cards like Spined Sliver, Rabid Wolverines, and Gang of Elk improved upon Rampage by including, essentially, Bushido-when-attacking to the mix. If you want to make the most of the idea, try something like this…
“In order to advance to the midgame with the largest possible advantage, in the early game play as if they have it, until you have the trump.” What does this maxim mean and how can undersatnding it make you a much better Magic player? Only the Magic Jerk knows…
Is there a super-fast Green/Red deck for Standard done in the style of the old Frog in a Blender decks? Dave Meddish thinks their might be, but he needs your help to know whether or not it’s really any good – just don’t beat him up for playing Lava Spike.
With Dampen Thought-based Limited decks getting talked up a lot these days, the splice mechanic is getting the spotlight thrown on it in a big way. When drafting, as long as you know which cards are useful, the deck practically builds itself. Take the best card for you and pass; when it comes time to build your deck, you have all the pieces in front of you. In Block Constructed, the decisions aren’t quite as easy. With access to whichever cards you want, deciding which to run (and in what quantities) can be just as difficult to figure out as getting the draft version of the deck to come together.
There were only thirteen of them, but their existence stretched from Legends to Mirage. That’s the length of seven sets (two large, five small) if you’re counting. If you opened a pack of Fallen Empires, Homelands, or The Dark, you’d never find one, but the mechanic they presented was a Magic staple nevertheless, a mechanic that found a home in each of the five colors. And of all the retired mechanics of the past, this one has, possibly, had the most influence on the later state of the game. What is this riddle of a mechanic I am talking about? Why it’s …
Who says all the fun decks in Standard can’t win? How about a deck that combines Dragons, Beacons, Rude Awakening, and Meloku plus Fecundity to boot? Bennie returns from his holidays to give you the lowdown on a deck that is powerful, competitive, and downright fun to play!
Good man and Grand Prix: Columbus Top 8 member Cedric Phillips makes his first appearance on StarCityGames.com with analysis of Pro Tour: Columbus, the skinny on the best builds of U/G Madness, and a couple of pictures of the smokin’ hot Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders. What’s not to love?
John takes a look at the Champions winners for multiplayer so that you can get everything situated before you are scrambling to grab the best cards from Betrayers as well.
In the first article in this series, we looked at Sheep, Starfish, and Hippo tokens. Today, we’re going to the other extreme.
Bleiweiss had a hell of a 2004! He was one of the most popular writers on our site, became the most reviled man in the Type One community, and predicted Magic card trends like none other. He’s back to kick off 2005 with a brand new set of predictions for the game we know and love. Which ones will come true and which ones will set off a firestorm of controversy? You’ll have to read the article to find out!
Everybody and their brother wants to draft Dampen.dec these days because… well, because it’s both powerful and stylish. But what happens when you don’t get the Dampen Thoughts that make the deck work? Is there a way to draft this type of deck and still win without the namesake card? Nick shares his thoughts today on how to keep winning even when you are a hopeless Dampen.dec addict like he is.
So, I started looking at a few of the most popular Extended decks like U/G Madness and Psychatog, and I noticed that Islandwalk might be good against them. Islandwalk usually means playing Blue, Lord of Atlantis, and Merfolk. Okay, it always means playing Blue, Lord of Atlantis, and Merfolk. Could such a deck work?
It is very dangerous to point at a card and say, “That card won me that game; therefore, it should be in my deck.” There’s always more to the story than whether or not the card was good in one particular game or in one particular match. Even Feast of Worms can win games under the right circumstances.
That’s why this concept of negative context analysis is so tough to come to grips with. You improve your deck only very slightly when you realize that a good-in-general card should really be replaced by a jankier card that fits your deck better. If a certain “good” card wins you five out of ten playtest games, you’ll probably never stop to think whether a different card would have won you six out of ten.
