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Since Onslaught, we have learning something about drafting synergistic decks with the advent of tribal. This is what makes us take a bad elf over a good card. Pros have been making draft decisions based on synergies for years. The best drafters in the world go into a draft saying,”Maybe X card is the best card in the pack, but is it the best card for my deck?”

Mirrodin takes this concept to a whole new level. We have to be extra alert to synergistic cards because sometimes they are disguised as cards of another color. For instance, many people would say Wizard Replica is a fairly Blue card due to its activation cost, even thought it is an artifact. I would argue to say that Wizard Replica is better in a Red-Green deck than it is in a Blue deck! Just to have the very rare ability of flying in a Red-Green deck can have a monumental impact of how well-rounded the deck is. While you might think that Tel-Jilad Archers is the only guy in the line-up that can halt a Skyhunter Patrol, I say what about the Wizard Replica?

Okay. So the tournament is coming up, you’ve pretty much finalized your decklist, and like the good child you are, you’ve also finalized your sideboard. Now. Imagine you find a mystical bottle behind the couch. A juice bottle, if you would. This juice bottle is old, dusty, and err, old. You rub it out of pure frustration in the hope that genie will come out and cure said frustrations. Sure enough, a genie. Whoduh thunk it?

More reader responses to the most ludicrous Card Advantage situations possible.

Due to the holidays equating to shorter weeks around here, I’m running a bit behind getting articles edited and put up on the site. When you combine the holidays with a bounty of New Year’s submissions and certain people consistently turning in thirty-plus page articles *ahem*Tan*ahem*, you can see how this might happen.

In the past, playing four or five colors in a forty card deck usually meant that you had a base color of Green so that you could find the mana of your splash colors. Invasion block and Urza’s block stand out in my mind specifically, since this strategy was not only viable, but also one of the defining archetypes of the format.

The times have changed, however, and here we are smack dab in the middle of triple Mirrodin Limited. While the above statement remains true, as Green’s common list contains Journey of Discovery, a new race of dorks has arrived to give every color the opportunity to splash: The Myr.

For me, 2003 was probably the best year of my life so far. In May, I met my future wife. If I don’t scare her off, I’ll be married to her in 2004. If nothing else happened in all of 2003, that alone would have made it the best year ever.

Of course, this isn’t a web site for romance. If you’ve looked at our pictures, you’ll know why. No, this site is about Magic: The Gathering. So, let’s take a look back at 2003, MTG style. First, I want to revisit some predictions I made in my New Year’s Day column on this very site.

Whipped out white weenies, battles of big brains, and alliterative editors (not really), all in the first StarCityGames.com digest of 2004!

Recently, I have been playing a lot of Emperor during casual magic nights. Some of the games are great, but some are just a pain — because of a fundamental weakness of the Emperor format. Too many decks we play are exploiting that weakness. I’ll tell you how to build killer Emperor deck to do your own exploitation, but I’ll also talk about how to make the format more reasonable. I’ll also throw in some solid-but-still-fun Emperor decks for your playing enjoyment.