We’ve finally done it. With the new year, we’ve now made a daily article besides Ask the Judge a regular feature on StarCityGames.com. This will be a rotating post filled by a number of our Featured Writers over the course of the year designed to give you a glimpse into their daily Magical thoughts. The first installment of this new feature will be manned for the next few weeks by none other than the quirky, entertaining, and most excellent Adam Grydehoj!
Star City Power Nine Tournament Series Event Coverage Archive!
It’s not every day that you win a Grand Prix, so Pelcak has decided to grace our site with another one of his wonderful reports. How did :B make it through Day 1 with a 7-1 record, setting them up for an undefeated Day 2? Details are inside!
The deck in question is Red Deck Wins. The question in question is “Jet or Hammer?” Last week we talked about these cards in the RDW mirror match, and I came out saying that I like Magma Jet more. Since then, two outstanding Red mages have stepped forward supporting Volcanic Hammer. Now, I agree with them that Hammer is better in the mirror, but what about the other matchups?
Every year, there is one deck which does much better in the Pro Tour Qualifiers than it does in the Pro Tour. Two years ago, only two people played it at the Pro Tour and in the following qualification season it won a Grand Prix and qualified dozens of players for the following Pro Tour. Last year, its highest finish at the PT was 9th, and yet again, despite all the powerful decks, it was one of the dominant decks in the qualifiers. And this year it was one of the best decks at the Pro Tour. All of which means that even if you have no intention of playing the Red Deck, this is still a deck which you need to know all about.
What do you do when Mono-Blue has been hated out of your area? If you are Kyle Boddy, you go back to your roots and redesign the deck with the unspeakable name so that it can win again in Standard.
I hope that you guys are enjoying Unhinged as much as our play group is. It’s the holidays, so hopefully your Magic days are filled with joy. In recognition of the great casual set during a casual time of year, allow me to relate a few decks I’ve come up with and a few Unhinged stories.
After doing some testing at Grand Prix: Chicago, Osyp reports back that Affinity is not the deck to play at the first few Extended PTQs if you want to be successful, but he has a good idea about two decks that might be winners in the new metagame.
The Judgment Wishes are restricted in 5color (at least the good ones are), but the tradeoff is that 5color lets you wish for any card you can reach easily from your seat – provided that getting the card would not make your deck illegal. That means that you can keep a small pile of Wish targets around and play a lot of interesting cards. I want to talk about what I have in my pile.
Last week, I mentioned a White Skies deck. It came about because I noticed two things – most decks aren’t running any fliers and most decks aren’t running any enchantment removal. Thus, my hypothesis became: A deck running aggressive fliers backed up by an enchantment that enhances the fliers can beat a deck running only or mostly ground troops.
Limited is about creatures and the spells that interact with them — removal and combat tricks. Right? Every now and then there’s an opportunity to break this rule, at least in Draft. A set contains an engine or interaction of commons and uncommons that lets a drafter turn a bunch of cards into a “constructed” powerhouse. In the past we’ve seen this with heavy R/B removal decks with some sort of graveyard recursion. But nowhere has this been seen more dramatically than in Champions draft, where a totally creatureless archetype has appeared.
As Flores spoke about here, my team and I (consisting of Steve Sadin and Paul Jordan) were lucky enough to win byes at the GP: Trial at Neutral Ground by going an illustrious 0-2 in played matches. So we were looking forward to a solid chance at making Day 2…
I decided to share with you a little game that I play, which I call the First Pick, First Pack Game. Every time I open a pack that I have bought/won, before I add the cards to my collection, I study the pack as though I were in a draft and it was the first pack I opened for that set and I try to decide what my pick would be.
If you followed the PT Columbus coverage at the Tournament Center, you know that my favorite deck of the Pro Tour was Red Deck Wins. I watched Shuhei Nakamura win a series of improbable matchups on his way to a loss in the finals (to what should have been a good matchup). He played for the most part a very tight game, constricting the turns that his opponents had to answer his threats, bowling them over with a combination of aggressive attackers and finishing burn that would make Dave Price proud. Red Deck Wins is a straightforward deck that doesn’t get color-screwed, doesn’t fizzle, and has game against every single archetype. But which version is optimal?
Those with long memories will recall that this time last year, I revealed to you the Mirrodin uncommon print run on Magic Online. I got a bit wordy about it, and sort of made an article around it, but basically the whole thing was an excuse to get the print run out there. Well, after umpteen drafts and a fair amount of help from friends and randoms on Magic Online, I have managed to do the same thing for Champions of Kamigawa.
