On the surface, this might seem like a great promotion: Play on Magic Online and win a chance to hang with the big boys! But just below the surface, this”contest” seems to be the breeding grounds for the biggest logistical nightmare ever thought up by Wizards’ marketing.
Unless you’re going to Pro Tour Venice, or your local store is having lots of OnBC events, you shouldn’t really care… Or should you? Many of this site’s readers have played in OnBC events – I’m one of them, in fact, as my local Wizards store has already had one OnBC Arena league and will soon have another. Although I took first place in my last Arena league with The Rock, it was a suboptimal decklist… But here’s what I learned along the way.
Here is the basic premise of Magic Shop: You have some virtual money. Using that virtual money, you bring in sealed Magic product and create a sealed deck. Over time, you gain more money by both playing and winning, so you can add more product to your deck. You can also gain or lose cards in ante. As you get more points, you have access to older and more expensive cards. Therefore, the whole idea of Shop is that, week in and week out, your games matter.
The first annual The Mana Drain Northeast Championship was a huge success. We got a total of seventy-seven people, which is the second largest Type 1 tournament in recent memory. It was an even better success because I won it.
Since you play against teams with the same record as you in a Swiss tournament, it is likely that you will have similar ratings to your opponents all day long. A 5-0 record can yield 80 points at a 32K event. Even a 3-0 at a measly 16K event is worth 24 points.
If you can string together those two events, you are halfway to being qualified for the next Pro Tour.
If people complain about Mishra’s Workshop, it’s because they haven’t read all the articles on how to play against TnT (or how to build tight decks in the first place). The more intelligent protesters, though, shout out against the deck’s real power: Survival of the Fittest. DCI’s reasoning on Entomb is as scary as it is senseless, because if you believe they’re serious, then Survival should have been the target because it draws every turn with Squee.
Isn’t it enough that Magic Online is selling fake cards for real money? Nope. They need a bigger real return on their fake investment by offering this new 4/3/2/2 piece of crap. I encourage people to boycott the new prize structure by staying in the 8/4 queues. Sick of losing? Here’s a thought: Get better. Oh yeah, and why don’t I help you to not suck by outlining Legions Black?
Sligh is in trouble; just about any green beast is their doom and Baloth is scoop time. Rotlung Reanimator isn’t good for them either. The good news is that it can occasionally jump Slide. And both of the elf decks present ran Biorhythm, which was being cursed by at least Slide player by the end of the day; it gets cast, the Slide player goes down to one or two life, and then several creatures come over to win.
But it’s my opinion that you shouldn’t stop building fun deck just because you have cards of an obscene power level. In fact, those cards allow you to power ridiculously-strange decks that will cause people to laugh. And how can you not laugh when you get taken out by Laccolith Whelp and Skyshroud Ridgeback?
Well, Legions is Standard-legal and things are going to change… or are they? Last Saturday, I ran a Legions-legal Standard tournament where the usually-strong Welsh contingent showed, as well as a handful of one-off Pro Tour attendees… So what decks showed up, and what changed?
In this age of instant opinion polls and online message boards, the single most dangerous thing in the world is an uninformed opinion. The DCI just proved it isn’t immune, either.
Richard Garfield’s deck uses a strategy that has gotten zero attention on the net… But with Garfield’s 3-0 record in the Standard portion of the Wizards Invitational, perhaps it’s worth checking out. Let’s review his deck, as well as all the other decks with winning records, and see if there are any lessons we can possibly glean from three rounds of Swiss in a very insulated metagame.
In commemoration of St. Patrick’s Day, a local card shop I was affiliated with would have a St. Patrick’s Format tournament every year. The format was simple – play only with green cards. But there are more issues involved in creating an all-green format than you might think… And Abe outlines them all in perhaps the best article we’ve ever seen on why you should play a crazy, whacky format.
If you want to draft all day without it costing an arm and a leg, you have to be smart. You can’t draft like it was the Pro Tour. I hate-drafted a Riptide Biologist out of a pack that had nothing for me when I was playing R/G Beasts, and passed the rest on… Including a Flooded Strand. The veteran MODO players at #mtgwacky laughed at my foolishness:”You ignoramus!” they chorused.”Flooded Strand is a third of a draft all by itself!“
I challenged you to name the top fifteen cards that would show up in the format, by quantity, and rank them in order. Whoever comes the closest to predicting these fifteen cards wins your choice of a box of product, or $50 cash. But here’s the catch: Nobody is winning that box. You know why? Cause I’m going to win my own contest. I am to make sure that none of your money-grubbing hands gets even a single fingerprint on the outer plastic wrap of my box. Here’s the fifteen cards that will – WILL! – see the most play at Venice.
