Splash Damage is shorthand that I and some of my friends use when designing decks. After reading this article, you will be empowered to use it as well. When the Rabbit shows me a Black deck with Diabolic Tutor for card selection, and I ask him why he didn’t use Undead Gladiator and Twisted Abomination instead (like I have largely adopted), Rabbit can say”Splash Damage on Stabilizer.” I immediately know what he means and the matter is settled.
It has been said that Magic’s color pie rotates. If so, then why does Green always end up at the bottom? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is not that Green always gets the pie’s smallest slice. In fact, even if it’s not immediately evident, Green has recently received a larger slice of the pie than any other color. In terms of versatility, today’s Green can’t be beat. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t have much of a place in the current Standard environment…
In a recent online draft I took Fireball over Barbed Lightning (which is obviously correct,) but I think the main reason it’s better is because it can hit two creatures at once instead of a creature and a player. It always seems correct to split a Fireball in the early game. Six mana kills two creatures with two toughness each, which is very powerful. So splitting seems right to me usually, especially since it can kill two decent creatures for 6 mana. What do you think?
The reason Flores’s article compelled this response is not just because Flores was outlining how rogue decks refuse to play bad cards, and how the goal of a rogue deck should be to carefully craft a predator/prey relationship with the targeted metagame, but because I felt I had an object lesson or two I could share, given my long experience with”going rogue.” And, more importantly for all you Regionals-watchers, I felt I could provide a modern example of the rogue playtester, complete with a new decklist for Regionals.
If you’ve been playing Goblin Bidding for a while or are familiar with it, you will probably not get too much out of this article. I’m only writing this for people like me: People who, for a long time, only played against Bidding or ignored it, only to pick it up more recently for its extremely solid game plan against Mono-White control and the other control decks that had seemingly been the top of the format for a while. So, if you’ve just picked it up recently, or were thinking about picking it up, you’ve come to the right place. Goblin Bidding is one of the rare breed of deck known as Aggro-Combo, so it can be a very interactive and interesting deck to play.
All the matchup information is included in part two of this comprehensive article.
I have been talking mostly about stock decks for this series, but as we are getting closer to Regionals I want to take some time to look at some of the more interesting contenders. While this deck should only represent a small portion of the metagame, it has a certain”rock-like” appeal that may draw some of the aggro-control players over, since aggro-control has pretty much been reduced to Green/Red. In a world full of blazingly fast aggressive decks and sluggish, but powerful control decks, the Aggro-Control deck sort of got lost in the shuffle. Luckily this deck has a lot of game against the respective decks in the Metagame, and it is a valid contender.
I now have at least partial top 8 listings from eleven German, five French, two Polish, one Swiss, one Hong Kong, and one South American Regionals / Nationals. If you are looking for breakdowns of all the Top 8 decks from foreign Regionals, quirky decklists, and analysis of what cards are getting played in each deck, you’ve come to the right place.
People misuse the term”rogue” more than they do the term”fascist.” They hear the word in context and they think they know what it means. Rogue doesn’t mean bad. If you play with bad cards, please don’t call them rogue. Bad cards are bad. Rogue cards are very good when the metagame predictions are right and the strategies hold, even if they may seem bad otherwise. A Gray Ogre is not a good card. No rogue deck designer would ever tell you to play with Gray Ogre even if you had a deck where Gray Ogre seemed like the perfect fit: you can get the superior Suq’Ata Lancer at the same cost and size; you can get the slightly worse – but still superior to Gray Ogre – Goblin Chariot at the same. A Stromgald Cabal might not look much better than a Gray Ogre against a G/R land destruction opponent, but man does it put the hurt on a White combo deck.
As everyone is well aware, Magic Online has been experiencing quite a bit of difficulty as of late. Well actually, not as of late – as of the last nine months, to be truthful. The server crashes sporadically, matches pause arbitrarily for extended periods, abusive cards with game-winning bugs somehow make it into the live server code, and two thirds of the game’s major functionality (Premier Events and Leagues) aren’t even available as of this writing. It has not been a happy time for Magic Online and its denizens. The one question on everyone’s mind is: Why?
Last week’s”all numbers, all the time” article elicited two requests for data, which was perfect, because this was my week of crazy midterms, so I needed material. The first request, from Rudy van Soest, was that I take my assorted collection of data and find some trends, so I compiled a listing of all the IsoKeeper builds from September on and tried to figure out the optimal build. The second was from JP Meyer, who said,”My loins are quivering in anticipation. I love the set breakdowns, but you know what I love more? When you list what cards appear the most per set.” How can you resist a request like that?
Okay, it’s pretty early. You still have a solid month to prepare for Regionals this year. You’re probably going to need it, too. The format is very diverse, and the top decks are tough to play, offering tons of different game play choices and subtle deck building options that could mean the difference between top 8 (and a qualification for Nats), or 2-2 drop. In any metagame, you really have to know the matchups, but this one in particular is very unforgiving of errors. So what’s a guy to do? Well I’ve got nine steps to help you out and then a discussion of what I’ve discovered during playtesting.
