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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!

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…

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.

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.