There have been a plethora of changes in the Magic world over the past week – Wizards of the Coast released a new banned and restricted list, MagictheGathering.com began previewing Champions of Kamigawa cards, and the entire Legends rule was changed. Last things first, shall we?
I suspect that with Champions of Kamigawa, Wizards will revolutionize the way they design Legends. Being a Legend is an inherent enough drawback to warrant ramping up the power level. Not only do you run the risk of”dead” draws by drawing multiple copies of the Legend, but now the Legend is vulnerable to a unique form of removal: a copy of itself played by your opponent. With Champions, if you’re willing to run the deckbuilding risks, you can be rewarded with great power.
Standard hasn’t received the same level of focus as Mirrodin Block Constructed. You can draw some conclusions from the coverage at Kuala Lumpur and Nagoya, but here’s some more detailed notes and thoughts gleaned from the floor. I make few suggestions as to how to play or build the decks here, instead just analyzing what I learned from last weekend.
Bleiweiss tries on a new sales pitch in his latest attempt to either get you to vote his way or drive you all criminally insane. You have to see this one to believe it!
Furnace of Rath is the flaming engine for the pyromaniac in all of us. If you are the type of player whose fingers leave little trails of smoke behind when you sling your spells and there are scorch marks on your seat after you’ve reduced your opponent to nothing more than a pile of burning embers, the choice is obvious.
At least it’s not a seven-mana legend! Actually, I was pretty impressed when I first saw this. At only three times the cost of Righteousness, it’s got the capacity for twenty seven and three sixteenths times the card advantage!
Pro Tour: New York ‘99 took place on the weekend of April 31st. The format was Urza Block Constructed, with Urza’s Saga and Urza’s Legacy being the only two sets released in the block thus far. Team Tulane had been hard at work practicing the format with the inclusion of Legacy, and we felt very confident in our abilities to win so we made a bold decision: we would fly up to New York with the sole intent of money drafting pros on the side.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… actual strategy, in the form of the top 20 most underrated cards in MD5 Limited. The order is based on the disparity between how good people think a card is and how good it really is.
First off, I am going to say that I don’t think that Crucible of Worlds should be restricted right now. I just want to make sure to get that out of the way nice and early. I also want to level a formal outcry against the top 8 of GenCon. That top 8 was totally illegitimate, as it did not consist of 17 Four-Color Control decks, 9 Fish decks, and 6 GroAtog decks. In all seriousness, I thought that the top 8 was great and couldn’t have asked for a better one.
Everyone wants to play with Death Cloud. I mean, just look at the card. It just screams”I Win!” Unfortunately no one has been able to make a Cloud deck work very well in the metagame, so its potential has gone unrealized… until now.
As expected, the Champions of Kamigawa previews started off without a hitch and everybody was happy. Look at what all the satisfied people had to say!
[Bleiweiss] it’s absolutely stupid
[copernicu] legends suck
[Yawgatog] sux
Preparing for a Limited format is easy. The reason it is so easy is that, by and large, players find drafting more fun than Constructed. The more players you have enjoying the times, the more enjoyable the times will be. Testing Constructed always felt like work to me. While draft felt like a honing of skills, Constructed testing felt more like mapping. So what are the Constructed players mapping? Matchups. But there is more to Constructed than matchups. Think of decks as areas of a continent. Matchups are the paths between them. What I want to talk about today is the entire landscape.
The highlight of the weekend, and one of the highlights of my Magic playing career, came on the Sunday after the Pro Tour ended. We arranged a four-on-four draft between some Texan/Lousiana players versus a Pro Tour ringer team which included Jon Finkel, Brian Hacker, Hammer, and one of Brian’s regular draft partners.
Whenever a block is about to rotate out of Standard, I like to look back at some of the cards that saw little or no play but, dadburnit, it seems like they should have. Since Champions of Oompa-Loompa will be released in just over a month and will be tourney-legal in less than two months, Onslaught, Legions, and Scourge will be going the way of the dodo, the carrier pigeon, and common sense, taking with it some sadly overlooked cards.
