Search Content

Last weekend, Your Move Games ran the Boston Mirrodin Prerelease. The turnout was fantastic: With a total entry count of 1,262, this event was the largest prerelease ever held in the United States. But after discovering several player complaints on the StarCityGames forums, I decided to address their complaints publicly to help show people how I run these events, that I hear and care about their feedback, and that I am working to improve things for future events.

StarCityGames’ latest Featured Writer returns to her old stomping grounds to talk about Mirrodin Limited! Specifically, Laura wants you to know that Passing around that equipment – or, as she calls it -“playing musical equipment” – opens a world of strategy that will help you take control of a game. SO let her show you some examples of plays that can be won with careful attention to your equipment…

I was planning to play a variant of Red Deck Wins for the upcoming Extended extravaganza. Then I saw the Chalice of the Void… First-turn Ancient Tomb, Chalice set on one? Cheers for playing. Red Deck Wins has almost thirty one-drops, and the Chalice shuts them all down. Yes, there’s Shatter, or Pillage, or Mogg Salvage in the board, but even so… The loss of the important early two or three turns is crippling. A second Chalice and it’s clobberin’ time.

One weekend evening, we were sitting around a table at a friend’s house playing multiplayer. And it hit me: Our metagame was predictable. We have the prototypical metagame – a white lifer here who plays Congregate and Soul Wardens, a big beefy green player there with elves and beasts. One player regularly pulls out an Obliterate-Jokulhaups deck that often features Phage the Untouchable with haste. Another player loves either white or black with Bad Moons, Crusades, and big black fliers. And a few players typically use large highlander Five Color decks. So what can I build to destroy this table?

Recently, I’ve begun to fall in love with Magic’s Super Creatures again – oh, not Morphling, Masticore, and Spiritmonger. There’s too much pain associated with those three for real love. Besides, I still think decks with them lack imagination. No, I’m talking about Magic’s new Super Creature.

Mirrodin offers a very refreshing change of pace from other Sealed deck formats. The necessity of running artifact removal, the mana acceleration in every color, the powerful artifact creatures and the bonuses equipment add can all drastically alter the way the format of the game plays. There’s a huge depth of playable cards as well, and running three colors is rarely as punishing as it would be otherwise. You’re offered a lot of options – so let’s try to sort them out, shall we?

You pass the turn back to your opponent, who has four land, a 2/2, 1/3, and a 1/2 Goblin pinger in play. Seems safe, right? They then untap and spend all four of their mana – and it can be any color mana – on the card they drew this turn. It pretty much destroys your board position…. And it’s just a one-mana artifact.

Oh yeah – and it isn’t Cursed Scroll.

Now that Mirrodin has been fully released, the cat is out of the bag and we all now know what a powerhouse Mirrodin is. For the most part, the most powerful cards in the set are not rares, but uncommons – however, there will always be goodies to trade for in any new set. So let me show you what to trade for tomorrow!

If you’ve ever lost a game and then thought to yourself:”I really feel like I should’ve won that game but I can’t pinpoint exactly what I did wrong. I’m sure if a better player like Kai was in my shoes, he would’ve succeeded where I failed”… .Well, believe me when I say that you’re not alone.

But what is the difference between a good player and a bad player? And so I set out to create two Limited decks, each stacked so we’d know what the cards were and what they’d draw, and give them to two sets of players. The results were surprising.