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Yeah, you may have heard of some of those guys. Two veterans from Your Move Games. Then there’s Billy Postlethwait, who almost became the national champion. I didn’t recognize Mitchell Tamblyn’s name, but when Ted Knutson sat down behind me with his laptop, taking notes on Mitchell’s drafting, I knew that he had to be a pretty hot Limited player too. Needless to say, having only drafted this format twice, this was not the draft pod I was hoping for.

So, to kick things off for the block metagame articles, I am going to start with Affinity. Yes, Affinity. The deck that is getting shot out of the sky… the former king of the hill. For those of you who just can’t get enough, look to the light — there is a way. It is not mission impossible… it’s Affinity Impossible.

Look at all the different writers on this site. They all share one passion — a love of the game of Magic: The Gathering. I too share that passion. If you read between the lines in the outline of my life, I can filter the Magic out from between the cracks — but that would not do my life justice to this point.

As have mentioned, the Nuts and Bolts deck is getting pulled in at least two directions. On one hand, it wants to be a weenie beatdown deck with small creatures packing equipment and Qumulox as cleanup. On the other hand, it wants to be a tricky control deck with one-mana”cog” cards like Aether Spellbomb to go along with Salvaging Station, Auriok Salvagers, Trinket Mage, and Leonin Squire. Look at the two rares, Auriok Windwalker and Salvaging Station, and you’ll see another signal of its two competing directions.

Do you have a preferred method for shuffling? Is there a commonly accepted method that the pros use?

I started writing this at Nationals, where I came one match short of grinding in – but I lost that match, and the whole format (Type 2 w/ Skullclamp) is dead anyway, so I’ll skip the tourney report. Instead, I’ll talk about netdecking and the performance of netdecks. I’ll throw in some Magic the Puzzling stuff, and finish with an overview of the MD5 metagame so far.

I think this time Chris may have finally gone off the deep end, but as usual with this sort of thing, it’s kind of fun to watch. Tune in as Chris rants about the Block metagame as well as some artifacts with names related to your head.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about in preparation of this experiment is how truly bad preconstructed decks are compared to other Constructed decks. Don’t get me wrong – I actually enjoy the precons a lot. I get a full set of them at every release, playing them with my wife once a month or so. That’s sort of the point, though. I play them against other preconstructed decks; I would never play a preconstructed deck at, say, Friday Night Magic. Why? Why does Wizards make the decks so anemic

How did Jay fare in his first six matches playing the Nuts and Bolts precon deck? Tune in and find out!

Today on a very special Ask Ken, I give you the Top 15 things I learned at Pro Tour: Seattle.

Like the ConTroll decks of Urza Block, this looks like a really, really good draft deck. I can almost hear someone walking by Cirigliano during a match and shouting,”You got three Crystal Shards? What scrub was passing to you!” When you’re talking Constructed, however, this deck seems to violate the Zvi maxim against bringing a knife to a gunfight. So why is this deck winning?

How important do you think mana curve is in your draft deck?

No, I am not going to give you sample lists for all of the basic decks you can expect in the upcoming MD5. You can find those in anybody else’s article anywhere else. I wouldn’t be making the decks myself anyway (and if I were, I don’t know what use they would be to you for testing purposes). Instead, I am going to fast track you to the pinnacle of MD5 Inevitability.

Mike Flores speaking about tempo wrote “[m]uch as you would like, you can’t quite put your finger on it… but you sure know it when you see it.” Mike is more perceptive than he probably realizes. The difficulty in identifying tempo is that it has an effect that is different from what it is.