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The deck is solid. I won’t make any wild claims like”it can go at least 50-50 against every deck in the field,” but with the exception of its one nightmare matchup (Zombie Bidding), its chances against any given deck usually fall somewhere between decent and good. If you’re like me and you’d rather go rogue than play what everyone else is expecting – and if there aren’t too many Bidding players in your expected metagame – you could do a lot worse than black-white control for your next Onslaught Block tournament.

This week’s installment is extremely special and personal, and something quite a few readers have made suggestions on. Last week marked the 100th column I’ve submitted to Star City in the last two years (not counting the Deck Parfait analysis that came before I was made a Featured Writer, and the Mark Rosewater spoof right before his Type I column). Instead of celebrating by spoofing the website, I decided to give in and talk a bit about myself and who the heck I am beyond the websites, forums, e-mails and mIRC channels the vast majority of readers encounter me in…. So meet Oscar Tan!

It is clear that Monoblack decks are here to stay in Onslaught Block Limited. The combination of fast aggressive creatures and large amounts of life drain from Shepherd of Rot, Gempalm Polluter, and Vengeful Dead create a very scary combination to play against. Throw this in with the fact that the Black deck can easily splash most bomb rares since it is only one color to begin with and you have one of the top two archetypes in the block to contend with.

Zombies aren’t forgiving towards the unprepared. I can only hope that you’re ready for them.

Since Chaos Magic is the greatest Magic format ever, I easily got eight people ready to rock and roll with a huge game of Chaos that lasted about three hours. (In the end, I managed to get a Masticore and eighty-two mana, kill a player, force two more to concede, and then die to decking, letting me come in second place.) Afterwards, several players were clambering for another Chaos game – but the more experienced players reminded them that there was no way we could play one in the forty minutes left before the store closed. However, the great interest in playing multiplayer showed by many of the Casual Magic regulars got me thinking: Is there a way to make Casual Magic a Chaos format?

I feel I am an expert in this field, as I have made all these types of errors several times. I’d like to think that all type of errors fall into these categories, as inspired by Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things… So let me detail them and show you how to avoid them.

This weekend, we covered the Vintage Championships – and yeah, we made some boo-boos. So what if, for three hours, the name of the second-place finisher was spelled wrong? Does it really matter whether someone laid a Mishra’s Factory or a Mishra’s Workshop? And dare we talk about the match where, according to the names that we rapidly alternated between, four people were playing each other? Nah. Those weren’t really important. Not, at least, when compared to the mistakes that we found in the Tenth Anniversary of Magic Museum…

With all of the strategy articles written in tired and repetitive formats, how are we even sure we’re gaining anything by reading them anymore? I mean c’mon – you can read a million columns on pick orders, and if you still can’t grasp why something is better than something else or when you should stray from the pick order, then you’re nothing but a machine implementing data that may or may not be correct depending on the situation. You’re like the high school student, cramming for a Calculus final; you’ve memorized a bunch of numbers, but you still have absolutely no idea what they mean. So how can you learn the meaning behind the numbers?

I used to doubt myself, wondering why I hated playing blue-based control. Was it a flaw in my character? Did I just lack the patience and imagination, or the downright skill to play such a deep and complex color? Why did I despise what has become known as the now nearly defunct Draw-Go style of play?
But I now realize the truth: Blue was boring because it was too good, and the people who leaned on that style of Magic were lazy players.

If you’ve played Magic, you’ve seen Ed Beard’s artwork. He’s been around since Legends, illustrating famous cards like the Elder Dragon Legends, Plow Under, Avalanche Riders, 7th and 8th Edition’s Birds of Paradise, and everyone’s favorite toothy win condition, Psychatog. Ed shares his memories on the beginning of Magic (he thought it would flop), his favorite piece, his thoughts on having his artwork on a card that’s dominating three formats, and an artist’s take on Mirrodin’s new look and 8th Edition!

For those of you unaware of what this week’s title means,”in my wheelhouse” is yet another baseball term used to describe the location of pitches where batters typically hit them the hardest. Just after I turned in my last article, both Nick Eisel and Rob Dougherty released articles dealing directly with topics that I discussed – and needless to say, I was a bit dissatisfied with the product. So let me tell you the real to draft U/W in Onslaught Limited, and explain why Goblin Bidding is completely worthless in Onslaught Block.

Fresh off his trip to Nationals, Jim discusses the seven reasons why you’re not winning Grand Prixs and Maher is. This is, perhaps, one of the finest”Get better at Magic” articles written in the past year; if you’re willing to take a good, brutal look at why you’re losing, you might want to start here.

Iain asks Gary Wise, Eugene Harvey, Adrian Sullivan, David Rood, Mark Zajdner, and Osyp Lebedowicz what they think of the new Core Set!