The response to the idea of a Magic Writer’s Hall of Fame has been exceptional, and while most everyone has quibbled about who was selected or how the Hall is constructed, in general the feeling for this topic from the public has been that it’s an excellent idea that deserves to happen now. After taking a great deal of advice from all parties concerned, I therefore propose that we back up a bit from the original way I had things laid out, and create the Hall properly.
Dream Halls single-handedly demonstrated how easily a”without paying its mana cost” ability can be abused, as Zvi demonstrated in the old Type II with his infamous monstrosity. Now fast forward to 2003. Dream Halls has long since been restricted, thanks to crazy Time Spirals and other brokenness. In Type I, what can you do with a Dream Halls-esque Storm card and every zero-cost mana artifact and one-mana blue manipulation spell ever printed? You can stand a damn good chance of breaking the format.
I’ve already said that Cabal Interrogator is stronger than you might think, so let’s talk about a card I actually had: Unburden. Man, did I mess this card up. In this format, there’s a lot of expensive stuff cluttering peoples’ hands and discard can take out their biggest threat before it hits the table. I cycled this one more than I cast it, and had it cast against me many times to good effect, so I’m going to say I played it wrong. Draft this one, and cast it as often as you can.
Two friends of mine were looking through their meager collection to see what kind of sickness they could put together with what little they had, when whatever they were smoking gave them a vision of the seventh plane of hell. I mean, look at that steaming pile! Only four rares, and the only good ones are the Balthors. Cabal Ritual? Morality Shift? Overeager Apprentice?! Ha!!!! Hey, don’t laugh. It works.
Starting today, the editor of this here site here will be in Montana at a family reunion and unavailable through Monday night. He has a boatload of articles backed up, which he’ll get to when he gets back, as well as choosing the recent contest winners and doing some general maintenance. Please keep this in mind when asking T.F. questions, as he’s still struggling to catch up with a recent flood of submissions.
A long time ago, Mike Flores wrote what is, perhaps, one of the most influential articles ever written -“Who’s the Beatdown?” where Mike said that all decks played either Beatdown or Control, and if you assign your deck the wrong role in a match, you will lose. Multiplayer is a different environment, so I tried to look at multiplayer from a Beatdown and Control angle and see how it applied. As it turned out, there’s Beatdown, Control… And a third, equally important, role your deck must learn to play.
When you mention you play Magic, what people think – if they think anything at all – is an instant stereotype of a gamer: Reclusive and not inclined to be a positive force in his community, and most likely with poor personal hygiene and no experience talking to girls. Me? I hate this stereotype. I want it gone. When people hear”I play Magic,” I want them to think of it like they would think of”I’m on the math team” or”I play chess” – respectable, intellectually challenging, perhaps nerdy… But not a sign of hopeless removal from reality. So how can we combat this image?
When Onslaught first came out, we were tantalized with the prospect of powered-up theme decks that were actually competitive. There haven’t been a lot of those in the history of the game – Slivers, Merfolk, and Rebels have been pretty much it. Randy Buehler called Clerics, Soldiers, Birds, Wizards, Zombies, Goblins, Beasts, and Elves the”tribes that matter” in the Onslaught block – so I’m going to take a look at how each theme panned out over the course of the block.
Wait. Upwelling might not have any major impact on 5-Color? Yeah, I suppose that you’re right; Upwelling only gives you more of what you have, not other colors of mana. True – there are a lot of Disenchant effects running around because of the possibility of combo. Yeah – it does take a few turns to work well, thus giving your opponent a chance to find disruption. True – Abeyance would be a bad predecessor to Orim’s Thunder. All right; Upwelling will probably see play then, but only for as long as it takes for people to calm down and the hype to end.
After nearly two months of solid testing and experience with this deck, I feel it is unquestionably one of the Tier 1 decks of the current field, if not the outright best deck of the field. With reasonable to good matchups against almost everything out there and a very real fighting chance in most of its bad matchups, Wake has what is almost surely the best set of matchups in today’s Standard. In the right hands, it wields awesome power and can completely dismantle many of the decks out there… And so let me show you how to play this powerhouse.
I love Team Limited. In my opinion, it’s the best format in the game – and I don’t feel that way just because my team has won a Pro Tour and Grand Prix in the format (though I’m sure that has swayed my opinion a bit). Today, I’m going to give you the absolute basics on what to look for in players (Hint: The strongers players you can find might not be the best idea), how to prepare, and how to prepare for the big day.
So what are my opinions of the set, from what I saw (which, based on five rounds, wasn’t much)? I’m not sure. It’s keeping with the Timmy-ness we’ve come to expect from OnBC. But unless Mirrodin keeps with the trend of overpriced creature removal, underpowered hand denial, and neutered counterspells, I don’t know how good most of these cards will be in the full Standard environment.
Any”full spoiler appraisal” information you read anywhere about Scourge Limited will be purely speculative for a few weeks – and while it may help you generate a few ideas about the cards, it will be inconclusive and in some cases quite misleading. And no matter how much you complain, OOL is going to be the format on Magic Online for over a month still, so this is still quite relevant – so let me finish up my Legions review and discuss what notably wrong choices I made in earlier articles.
My original desire to write came from the joy I felt in reading other people’s articles, but I’d never had a meaningful discussion with other people about their writing. All I knew was the BS that roiled about in my head until it became sentences on the screen; what other people went through was a mystery. So I asked the four best writers in the business what they did, and I compiled a Hall of Fame for the best Magic writers everm complete with today’s best writers who haven’t quite made it yet and the writers who’d make it if they wrote more often.
One of the funniest stories from the prerelease was the plight of my fellow Sarnia player Jean-Marc Babin, who, after a strong showing at the Saturday event, stumbled through a disastrous Sunday prerelease that saw him get pounded twice early on and in back-to-back games. After the offending round, he simply walked up to me shaking his head and showing me his scoresheet. The numbers reflected the steady march of his own life total towards zero. The commentary was chilling and succinct:
“Game 1 – Forgotten Ancient turn 4.”
“Game 2 – Forgotten Ancient turn 4.”
