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One of the things I’ve been thinking about in preparation of this experiment is how truly bad preconstructed decks are compared to other Constructed decks. Don’t get me wrong – I actually enjoy the precons a lot. I get a full set of them at every release, playing them with my wife once a month or so. That’s sort of the point, though. I play them against other preconstructed decks; I would never play a preconstructed deck at, say, Friday Night Magic. Why? Why does Wizards make the decks so anemic

How did Jay fare in his first six matches playing the Nuts and Bolts precon deck? Tune in and find out!

Today on a very special Ask Ken, I give you the Top 15 things I learned at Pro Tour: Seattle.

Like the ConTroll decks of Urza Block, this looks like a really, really good draft deck. I can almost hear someone walking by Cirigliano during a match and shouting,”You got three Crystal Shards? What scrub was passing to you!” When you’re talking Constructed, however, this deck seems to violate the Zvi maxim against bringing a knife to a gunfight. So why is this deck winning?

How important do you think mana curve is in your draft deck?

No, I am not going to give you sample lists for all of the basic decks you can expect in the upcoming MD5. You can find those in anybody else’s article anywhere else. I wouldn’t be making the decks myself anyway (and if I were, I don’t know what use they would be to you for testing purposes). Instead, I am going to fast track you to the pinnacle of MD5 Inevitability.

Mike Flores speaking about tempo wrote “[m]uch as you would like, you can’t quite put your finger on it… but you sure know it when you see it.” Mike is more perceptive than he probably realizes. The difficulty in identifying tempo is that it has an effect that is different from what it is.

As promised, I rolled a d4 to pick a Fifth Dawn preconstructed deck (if this isn’t compelling enough of an image, let’s say I pulled four snails from my garden and had a race across the driveway… my son, he loves snails). The winner of this little experiment is…

Please settle a debate. I was playing in the semi finals of a Type Two tournament in game three against Elf and Nail. I am playing Affinity with Thirst for Knowledge and Thoughtcast. Should I have kept the following?

In this article, I’m going to explore some of the psychology of winning and losing, and explain why being a boxer isn’t necessarily what you want to be in order to be successful at Magic. I’ll also look at how some Pro Tour notables like Brian Kibler and Mike Long deal with losing, include some details of my recent trips to U.S. Nationals and Origins, and relay a hilarious anecdote that is sure to embarrass Brian David Marshall, Randy Buehler, Alan Comer, or Scott Johns.

The Great Potato is this week’s guest host. Please join Mike as he takes on this saucy subject: What do you think about Magic-Blogs?

An emperor can have the best deck, with all the appropriate cards, but he will be hard-pressed to win if his flankers have divergent strategies to the ones required to improve team play. In short, a flanker’s role is to give the Emperor more resources (called”love” in game parlance) so he can, in turn, grant his flankers more lands and so on.

As I started thinking about the spirit of this endeavor of mine, I started to realize there were some rules I could follow to force me to go slow and generally enjoy the experience of evolving a preconstructed deck. Then I realized these weren’t”rules” so much as”guidelines.” Rules would suggest I don’t intend to break them, but I think each of these guidelines, especially two through four, I may seriously challenge during this process.

The beta is over, and now JMS is back in action with version 1.0 of his daily discussion with the Magic world. Here is what you can expect to see in the near future.