It took me exactly three Mirrodin boosters before I found one of my Class I cards. Sitting in an uncommon slot was Betrayal of Flesh, laughing at me in its dancing-and-steaming-undead sort of way. “No one uses me outside of Limited,” it cackled,”what makes you want to give a try?” I blinked.”Oh. Well. See, I think I’m crazy,” I said to my little digital card.
“Proceed,” it replied merrily.
There is no room for budget deck builds in a full-proxy metagame, and any deck that cannot stop combo madness quickly just plain fails.
With such a unique (some would say skewed) environment, I quickly ruled out Keeper for its weakness against Long, as well as Spoils Mask, Long, Dragon and Madness as decks that just weren’t going to be fun to play with. Knowing I would be facing many workshop decks, and more importantly, Long.dec, I chose to run U/R Fish, a deck holding great versatility in the sideboard and with enough counters to slow combo down. More importantly, it could support Null Rod, which would prove incredible in the troubled times to come.
Now we look forward at the 2004 metagame. The restriction of Long has certainly opened up the field for many decks. However, two cards are going to become central to the 2004 Type One Metagame: Mana Drain and Mishra’s Workshop. Multiple decks will be running both cards and using them for nice tempo boosts, which lead to unrecoverable game states. These two cards will define the metagame and the decks built around them. In actuality, Mana Drain is probably going to see three to four times as much play as Mishra’s Workshop in top 8s, simply because of availability. Nevertheless, both cards should be watched carefully.
Since Onslaught, we have learning something about drafting synergistic decks with the advent of tribal. This is what makes us take a bad elf over a good card. Pros have been making draft decisions based on synergies for years. The best drafters in the world go into a draft saying,”Maybe X card is the best card in the pack, but is it the best card for my deck?”
Mirrodin takes this concept to a whole new level. We have to be extra alert to synergistic cards because sometimes they are disguised as cards of another color. For instance, many people would say Wizard Replica is a fairly Blue card due to its activation cost, even thought it is an artifact. I would argue to say that Wizard Replica is better in a Red-Green deck than it is in a Blue deck! Just to have the very rare ability of flying in a Red-Green deck can have a monumental impact of how well-rounded the deck is. While you might think that Tel-Jilad Archers is the only guy in the line-up that can halt a Skyhunter Patrol, I say what about the Wizard Replica?
Okay. So the tournament is coming up, you’ve pretty much finalized your decklist, and like the good child you are, you’ve also finalized your sideboard. Now. Imagine you find a mystical bottle behind the couch. A juice bottle, if you would. This juice bottle is old, dusty, and err, old. You rub it out of pure frustration in the hope that genie will come out and cure said frustrations. Sure enough, a genie. Whoduh thunk it?
Back in November, Knut suggested to find the ten most important issues to Type 1 players and to base an article on this. I thought of ten questions on my own which I polled members of The Mana Drain on. Helping me to interpret the data is Steve”Smmennycakes” (he loves it when you call him that) Menendian and providing color commentary is Vintage World Champ Carl Winter.
This is one of the decks that I have started off testing for the upcoming Extended season. It showed promise last year with some appearances in Grand Prix, and John Eardley won a PTQ with it in Columbus, Ohio. I have been testing this deck pretty much exclusively, looking for something that has a good match-up against the Rock, Tog, Red Deck Wins, and Dump Truck. The deck I speak of is Tradewind Opposition.
Last week, I said T.H.E.F.U.C.C. gives you faster results than Chasey Lain, and invited readers to send the most mind-boggling problems so we can see how far the formula goes.
My thanks to all you demanding readers, you tried your damnedest.
More reader responses to the most ludicrous Card Advantage situations possible.
Due to the holidays equating to shorter weeks around here, I’m running a bit behind getting articles edited and put up on the site. When you combine the holidays with a bounty of New Year’s submissions and certain people consistently turning in thirty-plus page articles *ahem*Tan*ahem*, you can see how this might happen.
While there are an abundance of potential builds to Psychatog, they all share some common traits that make them succeed. One is inevitability… if the game gets to keep going, Psychatog will win. In the old format, it would try to counter the key spells to slow the game down. Then, card drawing would take over, with the odd counterspell here or there to keep the game from getting out of control. Finally, at some point, Dr. Teeth would smack himself onto the table and win in a single brutal turn. Psychatog is so powerful, in fact, it becomes very hard to build a counter-control deck that doesn’t win with him, because he is such an efficient finisher. All Tog decks have the Tog, which allows for inevitable wins. . They all have countermagic.
And they all draw spells, digging around in their deck.
It’s that digging into the deck that makes specializing your Tog builds so reasonable.
In the past, playing four or five colors in a forty card deck usually meant that you had a base color of Green so that you could find the mana of your splash colors. Invasion block and Urza’s block stand out in my mind specifically, since this strategy was not only viable, but also one of the defining archetypes of the format.
The times have changed, however, and here we are smack dab in the middle of triple Mirrodin Limited. While the above statement remains true, as Green’s common list contains Journey of Discovery, a new race of dorks has arrived to give every color the opportunity to splash: The Myr.
For me, 2003 was probably the best year of my life so far. In May, I met my future wife. If I don’t scare her off, I’ll be married to her in 2004. If nothing else happened in all of 2003, that alone would have made it the best year ever.
Of course, this isn’t a web site for romance. If you’ve looked at our pictures, you’ll know why. No, this site is about Magic: The Gathering. So, let’s take a look back at 2003, MTG style. First, I want to revisit some predictions I made in my New Year’s Day column on this very site.
Whipped out white weenies, battles of big brains, and alliterative editors (not really), all in the first StarCityGames.com digest of 2004!
Articles – many articles – are written every time a set comes out, but does anyone ever go back and call people up about their trading articles, hot picks, and so on? Hell if I remember – I don’t recall last week very well. I don’t think they do, though. Not often. Hot picks come out and then no one ever makes a comment about them months later, to see how they panned out. What I’m going to find out is,”Where are they now?”
