Ever since I joined the Peasant Magic council, I’ve been doing a lot of playtesting to see the effects of potential bannings on the Pez metagame. So I figured, why not toss out some of my playtesting decks? The beauty of a Pez deck is that you can build somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty decks to try around – since they all use mostly commons. Here are my bigger hits.
Life has prevented me from fully dedicating time to one of Magic’s greatest pleasures: Deckbuilding. Unfortunately, I’ve basically been relegated to netdecking like everyone else, allowing myself the pleasure of tweaking the decks to give it a slight rogue flavor – and hopefully not ruining the gumbo in the process. What variants on classic builds are people running these days, and do any of them have good ideas?
We knew that the deck wanted to do two things: Stay alive long enough to hit Threshold, thus exploiting the Hunting Grounds, and drop critters that we wouldn’t normally have a chance to cast. And whether it’s competitive or not, which I believe it is, I must say that the deck is more fun than a roomful of drunk monkeys with typewriters.
[GENERAL INFORMATION] What kind of collectables are bought, sold and traded at the Richmond ComiCon? Plenty! Comic Books (Golden Age to present!) Original Artwork! Magic the Gathering & Other Gaming Cards! Non-Sport Cards! Japanese Animation! Pokemon! Buffy The Vampire Slayer! Dragonball Z! Yu-Gi-Oh! Mage Knight! Hero Clix! Star Wars & Star Trek related items! Action…
“Stupid Husk Tricks,” as I think Ted Knutson coined the term, can at times be pretty darn spiffy – yet in the end, we felt that they were a lot of flash without a lot of substance in our particular case. After doing a rebuild, some tweaking, and watching”Good Kid” kick the crap out of just about every deck we could throw at it, I have to present what I feel is the overall most disruptive deck in the format – a B/G deck that’s competitive.
If the DCI can ban cards, why can’t we ban comments? I for one no longer want to hear”You know, several spells later, realizing that the spell you cast about three or four priority passes earlier would put me in a very bad position. I am turning back time and countering/responding/preventing that spell” or”That wasn’t a real win; if I had drawn card X you would have lost so badly” ever again.
Black is in all things. Don’t believe me? Then take some food – anything not impregnated with preservatives (no Twinkies!), and let it sit out somewhere. Eventually, it will turn black (and around here, it would be due to ants). Still don’t believe me? Then apply fire. Black is within.
Elven Call is a swarm deck. It tries to get out more creatures than your opponent can handle and boost them to lethal proportions with the”Overrun effect” of Gempalms, Forcemages, or Coat of Arms. And this deck in particular was a blast to play; even if it turns out not to be the deck you want to run in Regionals, you have to put it together for the sheer fun of playing it.
Earlier this week, the”dilemma” duo of writers rose to the challenge once again, and debated the relative merit of Echo Tracer versus Mistform Seaswift. Last I checked, there was some healthy follow-up debate taking place in the discussion threads of the two respective articles. Hopefully, that discussion is ongoing, and what I offer today will serve as a nice supplement – since I plan to tackle the same dilemma, but this time from an artistic perspective.
When I am trying to bust open a metagame, I usually look at the weaknesses of the best decks. In this case there are many decks with similar power level, but most people seem to be choosing Tog or Red/Green. I do not take this as”I will only play versus these decks” but rather,”I will probably play versus one or two of these.” This means that I would like a deck that has good game versus both of these decks, but is not so specific that I lose my games versus anything else.
Some less experienced players drop”mana curve” like a buzzword, but fail to truly grasp it. Some, for example, just clipped an old Beth Moursund”Deck Deconstruction” column from The Duelist, and the accompanying table for spells for each mana slot. The result is posts on the Wizards boards telling Type I Sligh builders that they need three- and four-mana spells to complete their mana curves, which would only slow the decks. Let me explain it to you.
New York Format was one of several formats used in an early Duelist Invitational. When a Snake Basket deck battled with an Elemental Augury deck in the finals of the Duelist Invitational, the Snake Basket deck emerged victorious. But it was Mike Long’s”Keeper” deck, the one with Elemental Augury, that became the foundation of the modern Type One control deck that Oscar Tan and others play today. All going back to a casual format deck played at an Invitational… And perhaps the most obscure casual format ever.
Supply. Demand. Scary concepts? Not really. If you want to understand why Magic Online is an economic market and thus ace your Economics 101 exam, step right up! And if you’re trying to figure out why a Foil Pernicious Deed is worth 50 tickets or what’s going to happen to your Birds of Paradise once 8th Edition comes out, we’ll show you that, too!
To practice building for this weekend, Mike and I dove into a card pool and built three decks separately from each other. We were both stunned by the depth of the card pool and found it extraordinarily difficult to make cuts within a color. Our solutions were very different, and I think we both understood the approach the other player was taking. I have put all of the cards in alphabetical order by color regardless of set – what would your team do with these cards?
The potential for card advantage exists in all sorts of places when you’re playing Echo Tracer – either by returning an enchanted creature or saving a creature (even itself!) after damage is on the stack. The problem with this card advantage plan, at least in White/Blue, is that you don’t care about being up on cards. As long as you have evasion creatures beating down on your opponent, they could have a hundred cards in their hand, for all you care.
