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Why isn’t there a dedicated group of Magic Online testers that are given the time to really test out the system? Each Magic expansion has a core set of testers that plays and practices with the product extensively to make sure none of the cards are too powerful or too weak such that it will ruin the enjoyment of the game. In fact, this is the hallmark of Magic that Wizards is proud to trumpet. So in light of the sad and unprofessional cancellation of Chuck’s Virtual Party this weekend, where is the core group of testers for the Online game to make sure that our enjoyment isn’t ruined?

Burning Desire has shown us the way of the future: There are enough ways to break the rules that they barely exist anymore for a Type 1 combo deck. Granted, I didn’t play during Combo Winter – but I’ve never seen a deck before where drawing the eye-popping three-land hand was considered a serious blow to the probability of that hand being playable (even Gro decks and ten-land Stompy don’t hate drawing their land as much as this). So what can we do about it?

I was shocked to discover how low the attendance was at the last PTQ I missed. It wasn’t just that event, either. Attendance was low everywhere. I just didn’t get it. It was a cool new format, the cards people would get in the event were from the new set – yet people were just not turning out in numbers. My confusion lasted until about a week before the Grand Prix, when I finally cracked open my first Mirrodin Sealed deck, and ground to a halt; I had absolutely no idea how to build a winning deck out of these cards.

Finally, I understood: This set is so different from past formats that many players probably haven’t figured out how to build a good deck from their card pools, and who would want to play in a PTQ if they can’t build a deck? So I figured I’d better show people what I found out.

Basically, what happened was that I was sure I was running red for most of the draft, and my second color continued to evade me as I was continually passed high picks in other colors. In the end, I accumulated an excellent set of cards to compliment my red – thirty-seven playables – with the problem being that I had about an equal number for each of the other four colors. Quite a predicament! So how would you build it?

Type One is becoming more and more in its dynamics like Type Two, and some Type One players don’t like it. What it really boils down to is that a good many players have invested in a format they thought was casual – and although they built good, competitive decks, tested them and tuned them, even went to GenCon to play it out, what they now have come to realize, is that Type One has finally arrived, and it wasn’t what they bargained for.

Again, what should we do? Innovate towards faster kills, meaning Turn 1? I think there’s a point where you know where the metagame is taking you, and you should take the wheel from the driver already. I mean, we now have a format where a 2/1 for one mana has long since been too weak. My point is that Type I is too fast, and that proposing to slow it down is not a move to make Type I less competitive; it’s a move to make Type I more realistic.

In my last article, I built three sample Sealed decks – and I promised that I would playtest and offer any insights gleaned. I received two rebuilds of the third deck I presented… And so I went back and played ten games each against a God deck to see which builds were optimal!

Welcome to my fiftieth article for StarCityGames! I have been a Featured Writer for this site for a little over a year now, and I thought that I’d do something special for this article. I was reading through Mark Rosewater’s article on how Mirrodin is supposed to be an open-ended set when my article idea hit me – one combo for every article published. Fifty Mirrodin combos, some with really old cards!