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From Right Field: Flying Slugs and Speedy Robots

Since I’ve been back, I’ve had ton of e-mails from cheap scrubs (like me!) asking how I would build a certain deck if I didn’t use any rares or only used a couple of rares. Well, I can answer that quite easily. These people know that I’m bad. Yet, they still want my advice. What can I do except give it to them? Last week’s deck, the cheap Goblin thing, was the first one that I tackled in that fashion. It seems that a lot of players feel the way I do.”Love Goblins. Hate that some of them cost twelve bucks now.” Interestingly, one of the more frequent requests involves Affinity. I find that interesting, because the typical Affinity deck runs many fewer rares than a lot of other high-profile decks…

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Realizing How Bad You Are

Now even though Tom was the genius of this testing session, as Napster’s mommy, I constantly voiced my opinion as to what I thought would be right. Jon kept telling me that he was trying to concentrate on testing with Tom, and at one point, even said”Mike, you make, on average, one mistake per turn! Please let me test with Tom!”

At that point, I did not understand what a mistake was, so I necessarily disagreed. The next game, Jon opened up with a strong anti-Angry Hermit draw of Dark Ritual, Skittering Horror, and was presented with any number of options for turn 2. I said”Why don’t you play Skittering Skirge to make this a three-turn clock [instead of a five-turn clock]?”

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Pizzeria Uno – Darksteel First Impressions

Honestly, I thought we’d seen the end of broken Mirrodin Limited uncommons with Loxodon Warhammer, Grab the Reins, and Crystal Shard. Skullclamp is likely as big a mistake as Wild Mongrel, even if it isn’t as obvious at first.

This week at CMU I was lucky enough to get shipped two copies of the degenerate piece of cardboard, right into my near mono-White deck. I didn’t come close to losing a game, and especially not those games where I dropped the Clamp. One game I drew sixteen additional cards by turn 6 off of my Raise the Alarms and 1/1 dorks.

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The Mirrodin Equipment Dilemma: Scimitar!

You know one of the most amazing things about life? Everything is relative. +1/+1 doesn’t seem like much when compared to all 6000+ Magic cards. But you may want to compare it to just the 300+ cards in Mirrodin. Making your 2/3 a 3/4 or making your 4/4 a 5/5 can be absolutely devastating in this format. The one damage from Longbow, while also better in this format, doesn’t always help improve your board, and the extra equip cost tips the balance to the Scimitar.

Plus Patrick Sullivan is your Good Man of the Week.

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You CAN Play Type I #122 – The Control Player’s Bible, Part IV.3: The History of “The Deck”, December 2003

Although Hulk Smash and raw firepower was the top deck going into Vintage Champs, changes in the metagame made”The Deck” and its flexibility the Blue-based deck of choice once again. For example, the December 12, 2003 Dülmen saw three top German players-Oliver Daems, Roland Bode and Falk Bernhardt-Top 8 using”The Deck” with Isochrons, and it also featured prominently in January 2004 European tourneys. Since the notable event in this slice of time is mainly the release of Mirrodin, it’s easier to understand the evolution on a card-by-card basis. I spent December finishing off my theory articles and January starting with my midterms so I haven’t been able to really update my deck, either, but here’s what’s on my plate for reference…

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Salt the Fields! Making White Not Suck

White’s most often reiterated themes have been lifegain, enchantment kill, protection-from, and sucking. If a card says”Counter target spell”, you could be pretty sure it’s Blue. If it says”pay X life to do something”, it’s probably Black. Is it a creature which produces mana? Most likely it’s a Green elf-type card. Does it blow things up good? Red. What themes are White? White has the lowest incidence of”look at this card and figure out what color it’s from” of any color in Magic. I take that back – chances are if the cards are bad en masse, they are easily White cards.

Thankfully, I’ve got some ideas on how to fix things…

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The Mirrodin Equipment Dilemma: Viridian Longbow!

I remembered the Tempest pre-release where Aaron Forsythe’s opponent was bitterly complaining about being mana screwed. When I asked him how many lands he was playing, he replied that he had thirteen lands and two Lotus Petals. I remember chuckling about that afterwards since everyone knew that you had to play at least seventeen land in Limited.
Now, I was that noob from the Tempest pre-release playing fourteen lands in decks that seemed as if they needed at least sixteen lands

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The Obligatory Type I Darksteel Review

Furnace Dragon

Call me crazy, but I really like the idea of running this in the sideboard of TnT for use against other Workshop decks. My reasoning is that it isn’t very expensive because of affinity, and because its ability makes it completely impossible for them to try to play around it with Goblin Welder to keep permanents they like in play. Of course, I’m probably horribly wrong here, since they’re probably better off just running Artifact Mutation or whatever, but this does only take up one sideboard slot.

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The Dilemma Dilemma: One Day or Two?

Every time I put up a Dilemma article these days, the forums quake with outraged readers. Typically, their complaints are about how the Dilemma articles are split into multiple days, and how they hate waiting those extra 24 hours to have the other half of the debate appear.”Things didn’t used to be this way,” they cry,”so why are you punishing us now?”

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Geordie Tait’s Anagram Contest – Week 1

Hi readers! Just for fun, I’ve decided to do a weekly anagram game here at StarCity! Why? What good will such a contest serve? Well, allow me to answer that question by telling you a story.

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Finding the Sharp Edge of Darksteel

Maybe you played in the prerelease. Maybe you’ve been following the spoiler on www.mtgnews.com; maybe you’ve read the official spoiler on Wizards’ Darksteel page. At any rate, you’ve got a brand new set of cards to digest, process, and evaluate for Constructed play. While I appreciate the folks who do a complete, card-by-card evaluation of the set, I’d instead like to share my thoughts on what I think is the cream of the crop, the sharp edge of Darksteel. That’s what we’re all really interested in anyway, right?

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What The Hell Happened To Me? JoeyBags’ Odyssey

Want to know where Joey Bags disappeared to for the last month? How about his thoughts on the current Extended? Or maybe how he qualified for Pro Tour: Kobe with a”bad Rock deck,” and why he chose to play it? All of this and more is just a click away…

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Adultery and Other Mistakes

There are mistakes, and there are… other things. There are errors so horrid the word”mistake” cannot adequately convey the depths of poor judgement required evoking them. These are errors so vast they cannot be fully understood by mortals. These are sublime events. When such monstrosities are identified, one does not call them”mistakes.” There is another word reserved for these tragedies.

Blunders. These things are called blunders. This is what a blunder looks like.

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Matchup Series: Psychatog Vs. Tools ‘N Tubbies

In the course of the games I have pulled from testing, I’ll explain how the”Who’s the Beatdown” articles written by Flores and Mowshowitz pieces tie into this matchup, and I’ll explain how this matchup plays out, and the ways in which the both decks struggle to win. I’ll conclude with an examination of potential changes both decks may decide on, in order to improve the matchup.

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From Right Field: Cheating = Stealing

Let’s say that a cheater makes the top 8 by winning a match that s/he shouldn’t have won. What if it was top four? What if it was the finals? In each case, depending on the prize structure at your place, that person has stolen from someone. Plain and simple. Stealing. That person cheated to get something s/he wouldn’t have gotten if s/he had played fair and square. It got taken away from someone who (hopefully) didn’t cheat. Heck, even if the cheater didn’t make the prize level, but knocked out someone who should have made it, they stole from that person.

The problem is that cheating is more rampant than even the most cynical of us would like to believe.

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