What I’m talking about are the intangibles of winning. These are the things that can turn a good player into a great player, or a mediocre pool of cards into a winning Sealed deck, even if it is for just the space of one tournament. They are things that you cannot judge from a player’s Limited Rating or the Pro Tour point total of their playtesting group. I have chosen the three that I have deemed the most central to my victory at the PTQ.
Mirrodin looks to alter the face of Standard more than any other incoming set. The set is chock full of artifacts. It is also chock-full of fun combos. Some of these combos are getting talk as serious Standard contenders; others are, at best, Tier Two, reserved only for casual and Limited environments. But what are the coolest fifteen?
I’ve been playing around with decks built around Isochron Scepter, which may be almost Flametongue Kavu broken – the unusual uncommon you’d trade a good rare for – or just tantalizingly almost-broken. In Standard, it has been pointed out that you have the potential for a hideously broken combo with a first-turn land, Chrome Mox, Isochron Scepter, and Boomerang. The odds of getting that five-card combo in your opening hand are about 1.7%. Not good odds… But I like the concept.
I set out to break two cards – Timesifter and Soul Foundry – with one deck. The deck worked, and worked well, mainly because of some synergistic effects. The deck could win by taking infinite turns, while removing the opponent’s libraries from the game. It could also control the board or smash face with a variety of creatures.
Well, my last column opened a can of worms about Chalice of the Void and the future of Vintage – and letters are still coming in! Let me answer your questions and concerns.
Artifacts – arguably the hardest cards to design – are plentiful in this set, and there are tons of new and innovative ones just waiting to be broken. This set, however, had so many artifacts, I’ve split them into two categories: Color-enhanced and color-independent. The latter kind is included here; the former will be in the next and final installation. Once again, I’m not going to waste my time with ho-hum or obvious cards, so here we go!
In essence, Shared Fate reads:”Switch decks with your opponent; you have no maximum hand size and cannot lose to decking.” How does this win you the game? The key to victory is having exactly zero victory conditions in your deck. That’s right – no creatures, no spells that might accidentally kill someone, nada, nothing. Call yourself a pacifist for the day. The trick is that even though your deck has no way to win, when you switch it with your opponent, that means he has no way to win!
like every three months or so, the Five Color Council’s ballot becomes important again. This time, October rolls around and brings with it a new set adorned with several troubling cards that may or may not need to be restricted, as well as some changes that may affect the popularity of Five Color. So what’s on the agenda this month, and how will I be voting?
Piemaster wrote an article a few weeks back about how he believes a lot of the older walkthrough articles were pretty much null in terms of benefits that a player could glean from reading them. A lot of the time, this was simply because the draft required little skill to navigate, or stupid bombs were dropped into the player’s lap and he easily won. For this walkthrough, I decided that I wouldn’t be satisfied with a draft that could be classified in any of these ways and I would continue covering my drafts until I found a suitable entry for this article. Thirteen drafts later, here I am – and let me tell you how sick of Eighth Edition I am.
Now that we’ve got our weapon of choice assembled, we can move into battle. Since it would take entirely too long (as if this article wasn’t long enough already) to cover each and every game of the draft, I decided right away that I would outline the games in which a critical mass of important and difficult decisions was not achieved, and go in detail on the games where I could have possibly made a small misplay due to tough calls.
“There are no wrong threats.” You may ask what made me dig this all too famous quote out of mothballs? Well, at Grand Prix: Atlanta I was talking with Joe Crosby. Joe had brought a Goblin deck to the tournament. This was fairly new ground for Joe. Joe had a quote that I feel is equally memorable as Dave’s, but perhaps sells the beatdown concept to a control player a little better:”I never realized how badly people play when you put them under pressure.”
In the finals, I let Nick”Beverly” Lynn have the slot for $350 and half his box. A more than fair price. Highway robbery, if you ask me. Too late now. If my deck is this sick next time I top 8, my opponent won’t have it so easy. Alas, my low self-esteem continues to plague me in every aspect of life.
Onslaught-Legions-Scourge threw away the typical spell-to-creature ratio in Sealed; bombs were aplenty, and sometimes ignored for a more solid deck. But just as Mirrodin has swung the design pendulum away from creatures towards artifacts, so has the pendulum of Sealed strategy swung back to the basics – with just the slightest bent towards artifacts. Having the experience of a few Limited tournaments to dirty my nails, I have determined the following basic principles should be applied when building a Sealed deck for Mirrodin…
Dear Oscar:
Suppose R&D wanted to make a card that”forces decks to change their spell mix,” or their designers to think outside the box and not necessarily opt for all the broken cards on the restricted list simply by virtue of their brokenness. R&D wanted this card to essentially”fix” all their old blunders to some extent by making the very thing that is desirable about those spells (their inexpensive costs, out of proportion with their over-powered effects) less desirable. So what’s wrong with that?
The problem with using Proteus Staff in U/W is that I’ve taken a standard, nothing-special U/W Control deck and bolted the Proteus Staff onto it to get a creature. U/W Control doesn’t traditionally worry about putting creatures into play until it’s in control anyway, and so the Staff is really just wasted slots. Even so, there’s something special about being able to stack your deck, so I’m going to test the interaction between the Staff and another new Mirrodin card: Goblin Charbelcher.
