Here are the answers to the play scenarios I posed last week, along with some background stuff. If you haven’t read the original article yet, I’ve included the original scenarios along with the answers to make for easier reading. I’m also going to include anything I thought was amusing from people that emailed me responses and / or anything funny from the forums.
As I started working through the Red portion of my Fifth Dawn menu, I realized there weren’t a lot of cards on the list. Then I worked through Green and Blue with the same result. So here’s a triple-dose of menu, combining all three colors.
Combos abound thanks to Fifth Dawn. Who cares? Skullclamp’s been banned. Who cares? As far as I can tell from what people have been e-mailing me, all anyone cares about is details from my honeymoon. You know what? You’re sick. Truly.
As the matchup analyses show, the deck probably isn’t ready for Tier 1 yet (probably not Tier 4 either), yet in my testing, it did significantly better than I had expected. True, I hadn’t expected much, but the deck’s dainty, little four-card combo was surprisingly easy to assemble and had the advantage of attaining victory with the help of numberless quantities of Bears.
I have a running list of ideas I’d like to make into interesting articles, article series, or even a weekly column. The”Magic blog,” unsurprisingly, was on this list, and so is another idea I’m planning to try out when Fifth Dawn reaches Magic Online…
Below I will outline ten gameplay situations; some of them really happened (fact) and the others I just made up (fiction). You’re supposed to guess which is which. There may or may not be subtle clues to help you with your guesses, so pay careful attention! Furthermore, those that have read my articles in the past will have a definite advantage.
This was originally 15,000 words, was based on the MTGNews spoiler and was submitted way back before the prerelease, but that was the straw that broke Knut’s back. He put up some of my other articles first, then got so sick of set reviews he begged a rewrite. A shorter rewrite. Much shorter. So I combined and rewrote it, and cut anything already said by others. I’m also looking at the set from a multiplayer / casual standpoint, and I’m skipping anything that is not new and interesting for that format. That keeps it short.
I think the first question a deck trying to summon Kaldra is going to face is how many pieces of Legendary Equipment it wants to use.
We went through the creatures last week, and now move to the artifacts. These are the most interesting permanents of the Mirrodin block, and we’ll tend to the”Does this card do something no past card ever did?” rule now.
There are sixty-five artifacts in Fifth Dawn and only twenty cards of each color, so it’s hardly fair to do all of the artifacts in one menu installment. Here are my faves through roughly the first half, letters A through I.
It is about time for me to get back into the thick of another metagame – I held off this article until after the bannings because I had a hunch the Block Constructed environment was going to chance drastically. A single card got banned and now a whole slew of decks became potentially viable. The PTQ season is coming up soon, and there are a lot of hopeful people looking to qualify. The tricky part is that this is essentially a brand new metagame with the banning and the introduction of Fifth Dawn.
Before I started playing multiplayer and casual Magic heavily over the last couple of years, I had purchased only two Unglued boosters. I liked the lands. I even skipped a local Unglued draft tournament, because I didn’t want to play with silly cards. I like my Magic serious. Today, I am a different person. I still like my Magic serious, but I also allow for a bit of frivolity. Sanctioned Magic has printed silly cards for ages. Why not allow in a few more from the Unglued sets?
I think I like theme decks more than the average fellow. In fact, here’s a quick recap of my first year of Magic…
The Jon Kaus article about what he learned about Wizards R&D was filled with sweeping generalities and impossible recommendations. It is clear to me that he doesn’t understand the phenomenon that is playtesting for a game on the scale of Magic: the Gathering. But rather than try to summarize it all at once, I want to address each of his points, and show the mistakes one at a time.
