ELDER DRAGON HIGHLANDER UPDATE
Before Worlds, I wrote about the Elder Dragon Highlander format, complete with a deck competition and challenge at Worlds. Today I’ll be reporting some updates to the format, as well as issuing a new challenge.
I thought it might be interesting to detail how I started from scratch to test a new format, and which decks I am currently testing. In the course of this article, I will present three different decks for your consideration. None of these decks are the finished article, they have all received some testing and seem to be based on sound principles, but you’ll need to test and adapt them further before they are tournament ready. Oh, and I’ll also explain the rules of the game “All Elves Must Die!” a classic tournament subgame that’s fun for Red Mages the world over.
Pale Mage returns from the land of zombies (you’ll just have to read it) to deliver his take on States, the Standard metagame, and the Magic world in general. If you’ve never read a Pale Mage article, he’s one of the more original writers in the game whose unique style is a welcome addition to the StarCityGames.com family.
Today Ben retells the tale of the first ever Pro Tour Qualifier and how he won it. He also revisits his tournament report for that qualifier and ridicules the younger Bleiweiss until he has no choice but to curl into a little ball, sobbing from the intensity of old Bleiweiss’s literary beating. Okay, we might be making that last part up, but if you’re an aspiring Magic writer or historian, then this article is for you.
My goal in this article is to review all the playable cards in Champions of Kamigawa for Type Four. I must admit, the list is quite long. This is a great sign, as it amps up the power of any deck. Every tower of Type Four will find something good from this set. For those of you who don’t know what Type Four is – get on the bandwagon already. Type Four is only the most entertaining Magic format in existence!
Welcome to Red Week!
This week is going to be fantastic. As you can see from today’s star spangled front page, we picked up Dan Paskins (and yet another National Champion in playtesting partner John Ormerod) for this project. When I started work on the Championship Deck Challenge, I crossed my fingers and hoped that Dan would sign up for the inclusion of basic Mountain and here he is. Dan will be discussing his Red deck early next week, but today I’m here to give you the results of my testing – a fresh G/R deck that tried to bridge the gaps between beating Affinity and Tooth and Nail.
“I don’t like UW control, I had to build a UW control deck. If it were up to me, I would just play Affinity at States because it’s the best deck in the world. However, the powers that be realize that you people refuse to play the best deck, opting for some goofy creation that can’t beat it, so they left it up to us to give you some options.”
-Osyp Lebedowicz
Hey Chad, remember how you were going to try hard to qualify for the Pro Tour last season? Remember how you were going to share all of your preparation with the readers at StarCityGames.com and go over each of your PTQ experiences with them? Remember how you even built a good rogue deck near the start of the season? Remember how you missed every single PTQ and Grand Prix? If you really want to qualify for the Pro Tour, why don’t you play in a *#%$ PTQ?
When I first read that one of the new mechanics in Champions was the addition of the Arcane subtype to a select group of Instants and Sorceries, I was pretty sure the impact was going to be minimal. Boy, was I wrong.
In this article, I’ll explain the game plan of the deck and then describe how to use the core cards properly, because every card has qualifications upon when you should play it that may not be immediately obvious. First I want to address the most important decision you will make in every game that you play with this deck: mulliganing.
Eli kicks off the new Limited PTQ season with an examination of a sealed deck pool and the various builds that one can create from them. If you are looking for some extra practice before this weekend’s PTQs, you might want to check this out.
In preparation for this week’s article, BDM actually played his Splicachron Scepter in a real tournament with somewhat disastrous results. If you haven’t been following the themes of the articles this week, the gist of it is that U/W is definitely not one of the tier 1 decks for the States metagame, and Brian David-Marshall is back on StarCityGames.com to tell you why.
If I have said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: Please wait to review sets. It is nice to get first impressions – they can help to guide us. The problem comes when people start reviewing entire sets the day after the prerelease, when 99 times out of 100 they have no clue what they are talking about and just want to be the first person to say that X card is good. I think in the early stages it is much more useful to analyze a set on a macro level. Therefore, I am going to look at each mechanic, theme and thread in Champions of Kamigawa and how they pertain to both Limited and Constructed.
States is approaching. The forums are rife with decklists. I’m going to add a few — built around Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama’s Reach. This combination allows for some powerful mana acceleration. Right now, it has the same feel that my early Tooth and Nail decks had. How meaningful is that? Well, I wrote about T&N before it won any of the various National qualifiers… maybe I can stumble onto a golden Green deck before States this time as well.
This past weekend, I finally, finally got a chance to fiddle around with Champions of Kamigawa. I arranged with none other than our esteemed site editor Ted Knutson to come down to Roanoke so that we could do back to back to back to back to back Champions of Kamigawa drafts until our eyes fell out of our heads. This is what I learned from what looks to be an excellent new set for Limited play.
