Green/Black is a deck that wants to put on steadily increasing pressure in the form of larger and larger creatures backed by removal and some amounts of evasion. Creatures with an efficient ratio of power-to-casting-cost are paramount to this strategy, as there is no better way to make your opponent fold under your pressure… And Crypt Sliver has no synergy with any of the cards in Green.
At Pro Tour: Chicago this year, the room was buzzing about the triple-Exalted Angel deck. Now, double Exalted Angel is certainly ridiculous… But the person who had the deck still only went 2-1. If a deck with three Exalted Angels can go 2-1, then it is clear that every deck is at risk. What sorts of things does a good draft deck need, and how can you draft to support it?
Now that Magic is all about rules, the idea of the planeswalker casting spells has gone out the window. Shouldn’t you be able to Clone a legend – and isn’t it slightly ridiculous to think that anyone can control Yawgmoth’s will? How can you match the reality of the rules up with the story you’re running in your head?
I want to talk about the must-have cards that are not really expensive. These are the cards that you should try to get hold of first, before anything else, if I wanted to build a new collection and planned to play many formats (including multiplayer) for a long time.
Ever since I joined the Peasant Magic council, I’ve been doing a lot of playtesting to see the effects of potential bannings on the Pez metagame. So I figured, why not toss out some of my playtesting decks? The beauty of a Pez deck is that you can build somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty decks to try around – since they all use mostly commons. Here are my bigger hits.
Life has prevented me from fully dedicating time to one of Magic’s greatest pleasures: Deckbuilding. Unfortunately, I’ve basically been relegated to netdecking like everyone else, allowing myself the pleasure of tweaking the decks to give it a slight rogue flavor – and hopefully not ruining the gumbo in the process. What variants on classic builds are people running these days, and do any of them have good ideas?
We knew that the deck wanted to do two things: Stay alive long enough to hit Threshold, thus exploiting the Hunting Grounds, and drop critters that we wouldn’t normally have a chance to cast. And whether it’s competitive or not, which I believe it is, I must say that the deck is more fun than a roomful of drunk monkeys with typewriters.
[GENERAL INFORMATION] What kind of collectables are bought, sold and traded at the Richmond ComiCon? Plenty! Comic Books (Golden Age to present!) Original Artwork! Magic the Gathering & Other Gaming Cards! Non-Sport Cards! Japanese Animation! Pokemon! Buffy The Vampire Slayer! Dragonball Z! Yu-Gi-Oh! Mage Knight! Hero Clix! Star Wars & Star Trek related items! Action…
“Stupid Husk Tricks,” as I think Ted Knutson coined the term, can at times be pretty darn spiffy – yet in the end, we felt that they were a lot of flash without a lot of substance in our particular case. After doing a rebuild, some tweaking, and watching”Good Kid” kick the crap out of just about every deck we could throw at it, I have to present what I feel is the overall most disruptive deck in the format – a B/G deck that’s competitive.
If the DCI can ban cards, why can’t we ban comments? I for one no longer want to hear”You know, several spells later, realizing that the spell you cast about three or four priority passes earlier would put me in a very bad position. I am turning back time and countering/responding/preventing that spell” or”That wasn’t a real win; if I had drawn card X you would have lost so badly” ever again.
Black is in all things. Don’t believe me? Then take some food – anything not impregnated with preservatives (no Twinkies!), and let it sit out somewhere. Eventually, it will turn black (and around here, it would be due to ants). Still don’t believe me? Then apply fire. Black is within.
Elven Call is a swarm deck. It tries to get out more creatures than your opponent can handle and boost them to lethal proportions with the”Overrun effect” of Gempalms, Forcemages, or Coat of Arms. And this deck in particular was a blast to play; even if it turns out not to be the deck you want to run in Regionals, you have to put it together for the sheer fun of playing it.
Earlier this week, the”dilemma” duo of writers rose to the challenge once again, and debated the relative merit of Echo Tracer versus Mistform Seaswift. Last I checked, there was some healthy follow-up debate taking place in the discussion threads of the two respective articles. Hopefully, that discussion is ongoing, and what I offer today will serve as a nice supplement – since I plan to tackle the same dilemma, but this time from an artistic perspective.
When I am trying to bust open a metagame, I usually look at the weaknesses of the best decks. In this case there are many decks with similar power level, but most people seem to be choosing Tog or Red/Green. I do not take this as”I will only play versus these decks” but rather,”I will probably play versus one or two of these.” This means that I would like a deck that has good game versus both of these decks, but is not so specific that I lose my games versus anything else.
Some less experienced players drop”mana curve” like a buzzword, but fail to truly grasp it. Some, for example, just clipped an old Beth Moursund”Deck Deconstruction” column from The Duelist, and the accompanying table for spells for each mana slot. The result is posts on the Wizards boards telling Type I Sligh builders that they need three- and four-mana spells to complete their mana curves, which would only slow the decks. Let me explain it to you.
