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At Grand Prix: New Orleans, I thought it would be fun to run a bet with Jim, so on the plane I figured out the whole Over/Under on”Women in the room as of round three” thing. Originally, the bet was just between the two of us. Gamers tend to be gambling men, though, so I mentioned it to a few more friends and they hopped in on the bet as well. Next thing you know, I’m mentioning it to Ferrett and he’s suggesting that I start polling all the Pros to see what their answers are. What started as a simple wager between friends blossomed into a goofy little contest article (and four extra bucks for me). Well, now it’s tradition.

Lots of matches are decided by a single turn – or even a single play! Most of the time, we are too lazy to look back and see where we could have played differently to achieve a better result. Things that seem so irrelevant in the progression of a duel could actually be the most important aspect in determining its eventual winner. Casting the wrong creature on a given turn can lead to a loss in a game that was otherwise impossible to lose. So what happens if we start analyzing the plays as closely as possible?

One of your first steps out of scrubdom was the realization that Gray Ogre is mediocre even in Limited, Ironclaw Orcs is a placeholder in red decks when cheaper or better creatures aren’t in the format, and Jackal Pup is still red’s most important front-liner to date… Even though they all deal the same two damage. The simple explanation is that drawbacks don’t matter; the original Sligh decks with Ironclaw Orcs didn’t plan on blocking much, anyway. But this isn’t the complete picture – and to understand tempo, you must understand why the Pups are dangerous.

I did more playtesting and MODOing during this summer than in the previous two years combined. I really wanted to see if we could take the title, and felt that there was more than money on the line. This practice actually scared me a bit, since I had been mising nice prizes with little work for quite some time now. What would happen when I actually worked at it?

Thieves have always been the scum of the earth, but with online gaming they’ve really hit the jackpot – and a new low. Never before has it been possible for some toenail clipping of a human being to take away so much from another human being, with so little effort. Thousands of hours. Thousands of dollars. Thousands of precious little things taken and laundered, scattered across the internet and into the eager hands of unknowing buyers, never to be seen again. And if you want to avoid that fate, gentle reader, perhaps you best click on the link above.

As you may or may not have heard, we had a server crash over the weekend. Everything on that server has since been restored… except for the e-mail addresses… which still aren’t working, but should be later on today. In the meantime…

What do you know about Dirk Baberowski? Uh, he’s German, right? And… Um, he’s friends with Kai – and um, uh…
Well, if you want his Magic resume, he’s the 2003 German National Champion, he has three Pro Tour titles under his belt (two team titles with Kai Budde and Marco Blume, and a solo Pro Tour title from Chicago ’98), a second-place finish at Euros ’99, and an additional Pro Tour Top 8 at Chicago ’99.
But what do you know about Dirk, the man? He has more Pro Tour wins than Finkel, is part of the best three-man Magic team of all time, and yet nobody on this side of the Atlantic knows a damned thing about him. Hopefully we’ll change that today, and show you how a master of Rochester prepares for Team Drafting.

If Wizards doesn’t restrict Academy Rector, it will be adhering to the stricter rule that a card must first demonstrably distort the metagame to warrant banning. But perhaps Wizards just doesn’t want that kind of combo, or dislikes that players can fetch Bargain with such ease. That could stem from a distaste for combo. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be sad to see Rector go – but my point is, does it need to be done? And if it doesn’t need to be done, but it is too objectively broken, what are the consequences of restricting it anyway? With that in mind, I suggest four ways that Wizards could weight cards to see when a card needs restricting.

Ken looks at eight archetypical hands from StarCityGames readers, and decides what’s mulligan-worthy and what’s not? When should you roll with what you got and when should you send it packing? Ken shows you how, and why!

Okay, I’m sure that Brandon Moore means well – and that I’m sure that in his mind, he really thinks that his 101 Top Multiplayer cards work well. And you know what? They do! But to call these the best of the best is very misleading – and so let me go through his choices, card-by-card, to show you what I think are the best of the best for multiplayer…

Practice makes perfect, so they say. But how to practice… There’s the rub. Is it enough to simply play and play, and play? Or is there more to it, a Holy Grail of knowledge from which we need to drink to truly maximize our potential growth? Is there a measurable gain to be made from plowing through twenty-five games pre-board, twenty-five games post?”Well, I’ve played fifty games, and my Magic Skill-o-meter has notched up another 1.21 gigawatts of talent!” Craig asks what the perfect practice sessions are like, and begs for your vote in the Invitational!

An article so big, it broke the database! John continues his tirade with the final (and top) twenty-five.

Becker goes off on his usual mixture of strategy, issues, and flat-out tirades, discussing Wolfgang Eder’s mistakes at Worlds, why good decks don’t have two-ofs in them, the ethics of concessions, a surprise discussion of Mike Flores’ hidden talents – and, of course, the mandatory Jay-bashing!

This article has three parts: It begins with a discussion of the reason some players find playing rogue decks a moral imperative. The second part looks at the advantages and disadvantages of playing a rogue deck, while the third section looks at the steps necessary to build and tune a rogue deck.