like every three months or so, the Five Color Council’s ballot becomes important again. This time, October rolls around and brings with it a new set adorned with several troubling cards that may or may not need to be restricted, as well as some changes that may affect the popularity of Five Color. So what’s on the agenda this month, and how will I be voting?
Piemaster wrote an article a few weeks back about how he believes a lot of the older walkthrough articles were pretty much null in terms of benefits that a player could glean from reading them. A lot of the time, this was simply because the draft required little skill to navigate, or stupid bombs were dropped into the player’s lap and he easily won. For this walkthrough, I decided that I wouldn’t be satisfied with a draft that could be classified in any of these ways and I would continue covering my drafts until I found a suitable entry for this article. Thirteen drafts later, here I am – and let me tell you how sick of Eighth Edition I am.
Now that we’ve got our weapon of choice assembled, we can move into battle. Since it would take entirely too long (as if this article wasn’t long enough already) to cover each and every game of the draft, I decided right away that I would outline the games in which a critical mass of important and difficult decisions was not achieved, and go in detail on the games where I could have possibly made a small misplay due to tough calls.
“There are no wrong threats.” You may ask what made me dig this all too famous quote out of mothballs? Well, at Grand Prix: Atlanta I was talking with Joe Crosby. Joe had brought a Goblin deck to the tournament. This was fairly new ground for Joe. Joe had a quote that I feel is equally memorable as Dave’s, but perhaps sells the beatdown concept to a control player a little better:”I never realized how badly people play when you put them under pressure.”
In the finals, I let Nick”Beverly” Lynn have the slot for $350 and half his box. A more than fair price. Highway robbery, if you ask me. Too late now. If my deck is this sick next time I top 8, my opponent won’t have it so easy. Alas, my low self-esteem continues to plague me in every aspect of life.
Onslaught-Legions-Scourge threw away the typical spell-to-creature ratio in Sealed; bombs were aplenty, and sometimes ignored for a more solid deck. But just as Mirrodin has swung the design pendulum away from creatures towards artifacts, so has the pendulum of Sealed strategy swung back to the basics – with just the slightest bent towards artifacts. Having the experience of a few Limited tournaments to dirty my nails, I have determined the following basic principles should be applied when building a Sealed deck for Mirrodin…
Dear Oscar:
Suppose R&D wanted to make a card that”forces decks to change their spell mix,” or their designers to think outside the box and not necessarily opt for all the broken cards on the restricted list simply by virtue of their brokenness. R&D wanted this card to essentially”fix” all their old blunders to some extent by making the very thing that is desirable about those spells (their inexpensive costs, out of proportion with their over-powered effects) less desirable. So what’s wrong with that?
The problem with using Proteus Staff in U/W is that I’ve taken a standard, nothing-special U/W Control deck and bolted the Proteus Staff onto it to get a creature. U/W Control doesn’t traditionally worry about putting creatures into play until it’s in control anyway, and so the Staff is really just wasted slots. Even so, there’s something special about being able to stack your deck, so I’m going to test the interaction between the Staff and another new Mirrodin card: Goblin Charbelcher.
Chalice of the Void. Possibly the best card introduced to the Vintage fold out of Mirrodin (though there are those who will argue for Chrome Mox, but they’re probably wrong). Some see a powerful lock card. Some see a powerful hoser. But what does the reigning Vintage World Champion when he looks at Chalice?
There are lots of potentially great cards in Mirrodin, and it’s been a long time since I remember having such a long list of cards which I’m curious to find out whether they were as strong or weak as initially predicted. Out of all of them, Solemn Simulacrum interests me the most. This card fascinates me deeply. It’s not flashy, it’s not going to win games on its own by any stretch of the imagination, but it is powerful. Most of the other writers and players I respect who’ve discussed this card seem to see it as just”okay.” So far, I find it to be much stronger than that, and I’m eager to find out who turns out to be right.
Be warned: This article will not make you a better player. It will not tell you what to pick in Mirrodin Limited or how Block Constructed is going to shape up. It contains no theory, no playtesting, nothing useful in anyway. No, let’s let our inner casual players loose and talk about something else entirely. Let’s talk about flavor, world building, and why the hell that guy is standing so close to Triskelion in the first place.
States is coming. The decks are being built and the gauntlet has been thrown. And now a gauntlet needs to be devised. I think that there are many possible control decks that can be built to take advantage of the new metagame – but the standouts are Mono-Red Control, B/G Control, U/W Control, and W/G Control.
Now, I am sure that they didn’t look at Tombstone Stairwell when they printed Dross Harvester… But with the Dross Harvester, obscene things can be done. The Harvester has a lot going for it. While the Stairwell is a four-drop, the Harvester comes down on turn 3. That means its ability will occur as soon as the Stairwell begins… But the real talent in the Harvester lies in its ability to gain two life per creature that dies. Simply put, Dross Harvester breaks the symmetry of Tombstone Stairwell.
In the beginning, it was supposed to be just Gary and myself taking a one-week trip to Pittsburgh, right? Well, when the dust settled, we had a monster road trip on our hands, all the way to Boston. The first leg of the trip was Toronto to Pittsburgh, with a one-week stop at Turian’s house – and I took photos to take you inside the world of Team CMU, to show you what it’s like to live with these men who get the trophies.
It’s 3:30 am and deathly quiet. Gary and Paul have gone to sleep, as have Josh and Eugene. Mike is staying at Rachel’s house. I’m sitting at the glass table in what might be called the dining room – it is adjacent to the kitchen, and surely would serve that function in any traditional dwelling. The laptop is fighting for surface space with the usual assortment of food fallout and draft droppings. I’m a king holding court before the residuals of a fun day, and surely mine is the kingdom where napkins, electronics and weathered copies of Spark Spray can coexist peaceably. I am glad that my rule has fostered such prosperity.
