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Now even though Tom was the genius of this testing session, as Napster’s mommy, I constantly voiced my opinion as to what I thought would be right. Jon kept telling me that he was trying to concentrate on testing with Tom, and at one point, even said”Mike, you make, on average, one mistake per turn! Please let me test with Tom!”

At that point, I did not understand what a mistake was, so I necessarily disagreed. The next game, Jon opened up with a strong anti-Angry Hermit draw of Dark Ritual, Skittering Horror, and was presented with any number of options for turn 2. I said”Why don’t you play Skittering Skirge to make this a three-turn clock [instead of a five-turn clock]?”

Honestly, I thought we’d seen the end of broken Mirrodin Limited uncommons with Loxodon Warhammer, Grab the Reins, and Crystal Shard. Skullclamp is likely as big a mistake as Wild Mongrel, even if it isn’t as obvious at first.

This week at CMU I was lucky enough to get shipped two copies of the degenerate piece of cardboard, right into my near mono-White deck. I didn’t come close to losing a game, and especially not those games where I dropped the Clamp. One game I drew sixteen additional cards by turn 6 off of my Raise the Alarms and 1/1 dorks.

You know one of the most amazing things about life? Everything is relative. +1/+1 doesn’t seem like much when compared to all 6000+ Magic cards. But you may want to compare it to just the 300+ cards in Mirrodin. Making your 2/3 a 3/4 or making your 4/4 a 5/5 can be absolutely devastating in this format. The one damage from Longbow, while also better in this format, doesn’t always help improve your board, and the extra equip cost tips the balance to the Scimitar.

Plus Patrick Sullivan is your Good Man of the Week.

White’s most often reiterated themes have been lifegain, enchantment kill, protection-from, and sucking. If a card says”Counter target spell”, you could be pretty sure it’s Blue. If it says”pay X life to do something”, it’s probably Black. Is it a creature which produces mana? Most likely it’s a Green elf-type card. Does it blow things up good? Red. What themes are White? White has the lowest incidence of”look at this card and figure out what color it’s from” of any color in Magic. I take that back – chances are if the cards are bad en masse, they are easily White cards.

Thankfully, I’ve got some ideas on how to fix things…

I remembered the Tempest pre-release where Aaron Forsythe’s opponent was bitterly complaining about being mana screwed. When I asked him how many lands he was playing, he replied that he had thirteen lands and two Lotus Petals. I remember chuckling about that afterwards since everyone knew that you had to play at least seventeen land in Limited.
Now, I was that noob from the Tempest pre-release playing fourteen lands in decks that seemed as if they needed at least sixteen lands

Every time I put up a Dilemma article these days, the forums quake with outraged readers. Typically, their complaints are about how the Dilemma articles are split into multiple days, and how they hate waiting those extra 24 hours to have the other half of the debate appear.”Things didn’t used to be this way,” they cry,”so why are you punishing us now?”

Hi readers! Just for fun, I’ve decided to do a weekly anagram game here at StarCity! Why? What good will such a contest serve? Well, allow me to answer that question by telling you a story.

Let’s say that a cheater makes the top 8 by winning a match that s/he shouldn’t have won. What if it was top four? What if it was the finals? In each case, depending on the prize structure at your place, that person has stolen from someone. Plain and simple. Stealing. That person cheated to get something s/he wouldn’t have gotten if s/he had played fair and square. It got taken away from someone who (hopefully) didn’t cheat. Heck, even if the cheater didn’t make the prize level, but knocked out someone who should have made it, they stole from that person.

The problem is that cheating is more rampant than even the most cynical of us would like to believe.

So Ben Bleiweiss thinks White is in the crapper, that it has been maligned by Wizards and given the shaft in its mechanics. According to him, White is the worst color of every format, the victim of ruthless undermining from within and generally anemic in every way. He goes about examining the claims that Randy Buehler made in a February 2003 article concerning what White would and would not be doing in the future, and concludes, based on examination of the current Standard format, that the promised”goods” have not been delivered. As I understand it, there are a number of people who agree with Mr. Bleiweiss, but I’m not one of them. Want to know why? Good, you’re in the right place.