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There is one matchup in which Ravager Affinity consistently has trouble. Playtesting and stacking skills notwithstanding, the mirror match is an awful prospect for whoever decides to use the deck. Although artifact destruction spells and answers to opposing Disciples of the Vault can be boarded in, these options crowd up the sideboard and necessarily dilute the effectiveness of the deck’s win conditions. For all its cleverness, casting Furnace Dragon will usually be like cutting off Chiss-Goria’s tooth to spite his face. Artifact destruction is not the answer to winning the Ravager Affinity mirror. The answer lies much closer to home.

I’ll do a card by card breakdown for all seventeen of the Ravager decks placing in the top 2 of European Regionals, and then talk about the rest of the current metagame. Then I’ll close with the latest decklists for a playtest Gauntlet. Well, what are you waiting for?

“But, Romeo,” you say, since no one but my Momma calls me Chris,”I’m not gonna have any fun if I don’t win a few matches.” So, build a deck that has a great record against what you think the most prominent decks will be. In other words, as our Esteemed Editor wrote about in his last piece, create a metagame deck. “What’s a possible metagame deck look like,” you ask? Oh, I have theories, yes indeed…

Despite my hopes and wishes, Arcbound Ravager is just flooding the field. This is by no means breaking news to anyone who has played in a Type Two tournament lately. Regardless, it’s still upsetting. I don’t plan on whining about how this and that should be banned, because that accomplishes nothing. Instead, I would like to give everyone a quick update on Lynch Mob and let everyone know how the deck has evolved in light of the newest changes in the metagame. Oh, and I’d also like to fill you in on a competitive Darksteel Reactor deck. No, I’m not kidding, so click the link already…

Here is the thing: I’ve saved talking about this deck for awhile, mostly because I think it is one of the more powerful choices for Regionals and I like to save the better decks (and Rogue decks) for later, if possible. The thing is that I think people are severely underestimating this deck, and I would like to bring it back into the limelight.

Whenever a new set comes out, a freakish occurrence spills into the Magic world. Players completely forget everything they knew before the metagame shifted. Or at least, it seems like writers live in that world, and the rest of us sit there wondering what’s going on. People discuss matchups that have already been discussed three or four hundred times before. I haven’t yet seen a name for this phenomenon, but I’m sure we’re all pretty familiar with it. Hopefully, I can avoid that. I am going to talk about a previously known archetype that never pushed above tier 2 in the previous format, but it’s been changed by Darksteel enough that it’s reasonably interesting.