Class is almost out for the year, and I’ve had more time to start playing regular Magic again, so I thought I’d take some time today and share some of my ideas on some”terrible” cards that I think are actually good, as well as one of my favorite archetypes in the format. Tim Aten did a nice article last week on some of the underrated Darksteel cards, so I’ll try not to overlap anything with what he said, and I do have some goodies of my own.
So do I need bellow at my opponent”Any Responses To My Pump” twenty times when playing Tog, or”No Responses To The End Of Your Main Phase, Are We In Your Attack/End Phase Yet?”, or is there a cleaner, quicker way that doesn’t allow your opponent to jump through a loophole?
Congratulations to Marc Perez for winning the East Coast Vintage Championship! Here is Marc’s winning decklist, along with the decklists for the rest of the top eight! Enjoy!
This week, I want to talk about a deck that is a part of the metagame, but I have been constantly advising you against it in just about every one of my past metagame articles. Even though I put the beats on this deck, I still think it is important to talk about for the sake of a more complete understanding of the metagame. That, and it isn’t actually as bad as I let on.
What I’m going to do in this article is canvass the rules for running a Type One tournament: what you should do, what you must do, and what you should avoid. In the process, I’m going to argue for what may seem to be a pretty radical position in terms of how to run one. I haven’t spent time on these subjects before because they are bristling with controversy…
This is not the article about Mirrodin-Darksteel you think it is… or is it? Check inside to see what the master of Limited advice doles out this week!
I am not the Wizard of Oz. I am simply a man, out from behind the curtain with some decks. I have a lot of cards and build a lot of decks. I’m going to tell you what I know and what I’m thinking about with regard to Regionals ‘04.
Today Oscar revisits the Keeper mirror match with legendary German deckbuilder Roland Bode.
A friend of mine made the horrendous first pick overall of Spikeshot Goblin over the far better spell, Shrapnel Blast. I was wondering what your thoughts on the matter were, I mean, which card is better?
Success or failure in a Magic tournament is not decided over 1,000 games played in your living room before the tournament. Success or failure will depend on a very small number of games, and on one or two incidents during those games – choosing whether or not to mulligan, choosing which cards to sideboard in or out, deciding which creatures to attack with or which spell to cast on your fourth turn, little things like that. Your testing, therefore, needs to focus on preparing you to make those decisions.
The slow crawl towards Regionals continues, this week with my current favorite deck, and one that has been dismissed as terrible with the recent metagame shift. The deck of course is one-time powerhouse U/W Control. You know what? The critics are right. I’m here to tell you that while “traditional” U/W control has no real place in the metagame, there is an approach to U/W that will not only be competitive, but might just be the solution that I’ve been searching for to the puzzle that is the Regionals environment.
…Now, the only way I’m winning this game is if I can get back Pentavus with the Sword, and his only flyer is white. So I say”attack”, he taps a random myr, then I use it for mana and put the Sword on my Arcbound Stinger. He screams”judge” so loud that Mark Zajdner almost has a heart attack, and the judge of course rules in my favor. Was this a baggy thing to do?
Here’s what I propose. During the week after Regionals, from Sunday, May 2nd, 2004, through Saturday, May 8th, 2004, spend no money on fake cards. Buy no tickets. Just play with whatcha got. And play. And play and play and play. If no one spends any money for an entire week, I think Wizards might get the idea that we’re serious. Businesses get the hint when you hit ’em where it hurts.
