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Rather than write a narrative report about how I did at Nationals, which would be a short and bitter report, this article will invite you to identify the mistakes that I made, and hopefully use that as a way of discussing how to choose a deck in situations just after the release of a new expansion set, when the metagame is harder to predict. As a bonus, I’ll use the results of English Nationals to put together a”Decks to Beat” compilation, to use as reference when choosing which decks to test against (or play, if you lack the time or motivation to test).

There are lots of different ways to go about building a deck. There are active decks and reactive decks. Active decks are in a sense easier to build because you don’t have to take as many factors and cards into consideration; if your plan comes online, you win. Reactive decks, especially those that plan to win over a very long game, have to consider all kinds of cards, some of them jank. There are natural decks and there are predator decks. There are decks that are based on earlier designs and brand spanking new ideas. But today, we are going to build a reactive Standard deck based on a new card that I find interesting. What is it? You’ll have to click to find out.

I had been playing with Steely Resolve in the sideboard. I’d bring it in against Goblins and really anything else that tried to target the Elves – which, using my keen sense of observation, I noticed was just about everything. Then, a funny thing happened in game three of a Goblin matchup. I got two Resolves. The first one I dropped and called, of course, Elves. Then a light bulb went on: I dropped the second, calling Goblins. No more Clamping up Goblins for cards. No more activating the Sledder’s ability, unless he wanted to call Insects. But there’s one difference between this and a regular Elves deck…

Artifacts have slowly began to make my skin crawl – and for those out there who can’t take the it anymore, then prepare for sweet revenge. I’m talking seventeen pieces of good ol’ main deck artifact destruction. Not enough for you? Add seven more pieces from the sideboard to the mix and three maindecked Eternal Witnesses, and you’ve got enough artifact destruction to make Urza blush.

Moving into a radically different metagame format by moving from the States back to Japan, I’ve done fairly well for myself with my Green/White Tooth and Nail variant. In this article, I’ll tell you the history and development of a pet deck that’s fairly competitive, and provide you with an updated decklist for Fifth Dawn. [For those who don’t know him, Eli helps provide coverage of Japanese Grand Prix and Nationals for Sideboard.com. He also attempts to teach English to Japanese students with varying degrees of success.]

Ask someone who just lost a game why they lost and the answers will vary. Manascrew is always popular, as is a bad matchup.”I lost the die roll” comes up a lot on the Pro Tour, especially when environments get particularly degenerate.”He drew more X” is another, whether X is Skullclamp, Disciple of the Vault, lands, burn, creatures, spells or whatever. Occasionally someone who is modest or who just played Kai Budde will say,”I got outplayed.” All of these answers are sometimes true, or at least partly true. But what should get said a lot more often is,”I was kidding myself, and if I hadn’t, I might have been able to win.”