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Building The Worst Deck Possible

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!

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Changes In Five Color – October

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?

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Walk With Me: The Ultimate Walkthrough, Part 1 – The Picks

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.

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Walk With Me: The Ultimate Walkthrough, Part 2 – The Plays

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.

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The Art Of The Attack

“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.”

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PTQ Amsterdam: First, Sorta

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.

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Back to Basics: Building Mirrodin Sealed

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…

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You CAN Play Type I #106: Maximizing Mirrodin, Part IV – The Half Time Mail Call

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?

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Double Or Nothing: Who Belched?

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.

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Chalice Of The Void: Is The Sky Really Falling Down?

Chalice of the Void. Possibly the best card introduced to the Vintage fold out of Mirrodin (though there are those who will argue for Chrome Mox, but they’re probably wrong). Some see a powerful lock card. Some see a powerful hoser. But what does the reigning Vintage World Champion when he looks at Chalice?

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Lost In The Machine: The Mirrodin Artifact Review, Part 3

There are lots of potentially great cards in Mirrodin, and it’s been a long time since I remember having such a long list of cards which I’m curious to find out whether they were as strong or weak as initially predicted. Out of all of them, Solemn Simulacrum interests me the most. This card fascinates me deeply. It’s not flashy, it’s not going to win games on its own by any stretch of the imagination, but it is powerful. Most of the other writers and players I respect who’ve discussed this card seem to see it as just”okay.” So far, I find it to be much stronger than that, and I’m eager to find out who turns out to be right.

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Grading Mirrodin: The Secret Agenda Of The Evil Replicator People

Be warned: This article will not make you a better player. It will not tell you what to pick in Mirrodin Limited or how Block Constructed is going to shape up. It contains no theory, no playtesting, nothing useful in anyway. No, let’s let our inner casual players loose and talk about something else entirely. Let’s talk about flavor, world building, and why the hell that guy is standing so close to Triskelion in the first place.

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Playtesting For Champs: The Control Decks

States is coming. The decks are being built and the gauntlet has been thrown. And now a gauntlet needs to be devised. I think that there are many possible control decks that can be built to take advantage of the new metagame – but the standouts are Mono-Red Control, B/G Control, U/W Control, and W/G Control.

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Combining Mirrodin With Old Cards For A Fun New Deck

Now, I am sure that they didn’t look at Tombstone Stairwell when they printed Dross Harvester… But with the Dross Harvester, obscene things can be done. The Harvester has a lot going for it. While the Stairwell is a four-drop, the Harvester comes down on turn 3. That means its ability will occur as soon as the Stairwell begins… But the real talent in the Harvester lies in its ability to gain two life per creature that dies. Simply put, Dross Harvester breaks the symmetry of Tombstone Stairwell.

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The Road To Boston, Part 1

In the beginning, it was supposed to be just Gary and myself taking a one-week trip to Pittsburgh, right? Well, when the dust settled, we had a monster road trip on our hands, all the way to Boston. The first leg of the trip was Toronto to Pittsburgh, with a one-week stop at Turian’s house – and I took photos to take you inside the world of Team CMU, to show you what it’s like to live with these men who get the trophies.

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