StarCityGames’ latest Featured Writer returns to her old stomping grounds to talk about Mirrodin Limited! Specifically, Laura wants you to know that Passing around that equipment – or, as she calls it -“playing musical equipment” – opens a world of strategy that will help you take control of a game. SO let her show you some examples of plays that can be won with careful attention to your equipment…
Putting all this together, Chalice of the Void:
I was planning to play a variant of Red Deck Wins for the upcoming Extended extravaganza. Then I saw the Chalice of the Void… First-turn Ancient Tomb, Chalice set on one? Cheers for playing. Red Deck Wins has almost thirty one-drops, and the Chalice shuts them all down. Yes, there’s Shatter, or Pillage, or Mogg Salvage in the board, but even so… The loss of the important early two or three turns is crippling. A second Chalice and it’s clobberin’ time.
One weekend evening, we were sitting around a table at a friend’s house playing multiplayer. And it hit me: Our metagame was predictable. We have the prototypical metagame – a white lifer here who plays Congregate and Soul Wardens, a big beefy green player there with elves and beasts. One player regularly pulls out an Obliterate-Jokulhaups deck that often features Phage the Untouchable with haste. Another player loves either white or black with Bad Moons, Crusades, and big black fliers. And a few players typically use large highlander Five Color decks. So what can I build to destroy this table?
The God Hand:
Turn 3: Forest, Deconstruct Cathodion. Tap Mountain. 3GGGR in pool. Cast Seething Song. 1RRRRRGG in pool. Cast Biorhythm with Birds of Paradise in play. Shake hands while she stares in disbelief, since she thought that she was safe tapping out on turn 3.
Recently, I’ve begun to fall in love with Magic’s Super Creatures again – oh, not Morphling, Masticore, and Spiritmonger. There’s too much pain associated with those three for real love. Besides, I still think decks with them lack imagination. No, I’m talking about Magic’s new Super Creature.
Mirrodin offers a very refreshing change of pace from other Sealed deck formats. The necessity of running artifact removal, the mana acceleration in every color, the powerful artifact creatures and the bonuses equipment add can all drastically alter the way the format of the game plays. There’s a huge depth of playable cards as well, and running three colors is rarely as punishing as it would be otherwise. You’re offered a lot of options – so let’s try to sort them out, shall we?
Whenever a new set comes out, the best first decks tend to be based upon existing decks, and they tend to be aggro – it’s always easier to find ways to deal twenty damage than ways of preventing twenty damage. Case in point: Onslaught Block Goblins. They translate very well to a post-Mirrodin Standard – they don’t get much, but neither do they lose much.
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[PRE-ORDER MIRRODIN BOXES FOR AS LITTLE AS $64.99 PER BOX!]
Well, you’ve seen the full Mirrodin spoiler… ready to pre-order some singles? StarCityGames.com has all of the cards loaded into our sales database, ready to pre-order – and we have the entire Mirrodin F.A.Q. already added into our Ask The Virtual Judge database as well! Take a look!
You pass the turn back to your opponent, who has four land, a 2/2, 1/3, and a 1/2 Goblin pinger in play. Seems safe, right? They then untap and spend all four of their mana – and it can be any color mana – on the card they drew this turn. It pretty much destroys your board position…. And it’s just a one-mana artifact.
Oh yeah – and it isn’t Cursed Scroll.
Now that Mirrodin has been fully released, the cat is out of the bag and we all now know what a powerhouse Mirrodin is. For the most part, the most powerful cards in the set are not rares, but uncommons – however, there will always be goodies to trade for in any new set. So let me show you what to trade for tomorrow!
If you’ve ever lost a game and then thought to yourself:”I really feel like I should’ve won that game but I can’t pinpoint exactly what I did wrong. I’m sure if a better player like Kai was in my shoes, he would’ve succeeded where I failed”… .Well, believe me when I say that you’re not alone.
But what is the difference between a good player and a bad player? And so I set out to create two Limited decks, each stacked so we’d know what the cards were and what they’d draw, and give them to two sets of players. The results were surprising.
I consider Mirrodin to be one of the most complex sets I’ve seen in the history of the game – that’s right, the entire game. Some environments are relatively easy to predict; this one is not, and I’d question anyone who says otherwise. So even though I’ll be covering all the cards in a later review, these are the headliner cards that catch my eye at this early stage – the ones that we have to immediately investigate to see if they’ll be good in Standard.
Mirrodin amazes me. Now that I can finally know for sure what it is that I am looking at, I am more eager than ever to tear into the shrink-wrap of a few unopened packs and start building decks. But I need something to test my weirdo decks against! Yeah, I’m looking way ahead all the way to Mirrodin-legal Standard… If Miss Cleo can do it, so can I. But before I can build a rogue deck to beat a metagame, I have to predict what I think that metagame will be….
You might have drooled the first time you saw Platinum Angel. After all,”don’t lose” was the cornerstone of the original”The Deck” philosophy. That is, by focusing on simply not losing, you can wear your opponent down and later outpace him in resources, and overwhelm him. That philosophy, however, isn’t absolute gospel in today’s far, far faster Type I. In many cases, the best way not to lose is to simply win first, especially when any single deck is hard-pressed to deal with all the many possible ways of losing. That leads us to the Angel’s fundamental problem: It stops you from losing, but it doesn’t help you win.
