It seems that my last few columns have touched a couple of nerves… Mostly in a good way, which is not always what a writer strives for. So let me respond to you all, show you the options my fans have presented, and show you a couple of new Soldier decks I’ve been working on.
By the time you read this, Extended season will be over – at least for sanctioned play. But casual players can keep playing Extended decks all they want, so I’m going to look at several of the tier one and tier 1.5 decks from this Extended season with a view towards modifying them for multiplayer games.
No one minds more readable card names. Bigger cart art is something we’d all like to see. Key information being more visible? I can’t complain. The problem is that when all these little, sensible changes came together, we got nicer little trees, but lost the entire forest.
The heart of the deck, Gravity Sphere, is one of those cards that bring out the rules lawyer in everyone – especially when I get the creature combos going and destroy everything else around! Plus, I answer mail from my fans.
While a face up Skirk Commando usually means that either Sparksmith is ready to go or you have something to make the Commando unblockable, it has no single card advantage. Battering Craghorn, on the other hand, can step in quite nicely on turn 4 and stop the bleeding. Drop a face up Craghorn, and the beats just stop.
The real reason Skirk is better than Craghorn is that people just don’t block that much nowadays. From my experience, I’d say about 65% of the time or so I’m able to get a Skirk through… And looking ahead, Legions offers absolutely zero reasons to block a face down creature.
If I’m just going to”deal” with the problem, then I’m going to use Urza’s Saga Rewinds, thereby keeping most of my deck”old school.” In this way, Wizards will be losing my Eighth Edition money; however, there’s no real impact here because most players with cards from older sets tend to use those rather than their non-foily white-bordered editions. So the money Wizards”loses” from me wouldn’t actually be theirs anyway.
Slivers are one of the favorite”tribes” in Magic for a reason: They bridge the gap between casual and competitive players. A casual player can rave about Slivers, and Grumpy McTournamentman won’t walk over and smack him in the head. So let’s look at the Slivers and see which ones may be tournament-worthy and which ones are not, and then create some preliminary Standard decks to look at.
This week, we’re going to do something that journalists call Interviewing Yourself. This is a technique in which the writer asks himself (or herself) questions that he (or she) then answers. In theory, this is supposed to give the writer (and, by extension, the reader) some Deep Insight into His (or Her) Own Mind. In reality, it’s a cheap way to get a column.
When you publicly bitch about Wizards on the front page of one of the Big Three Magic websites, you’re going to get attention. When Wizards actually steps up to the plate and provides you with the information you were complaining about, you better be ready to come correct and cough up the analysis…. And so I did. Here’s everything I can figure out about Onslaught draft from Draft 3 of Chicago, as well as the story of what it was exactly that I showed to the ladies in New Orleans.
I’m not ready to say Legions is the new Homelands, as others have – there’s more than three playable cards in this set – but the list of cards I’d call tournament-playable is short. But middle sets are often lacking in that department, as it’s the final set in block formats that tend to have the bulk of the bombs. While lacking in cards for Constructed environments, though, this set is going to be a blast to draft.
In my last article, I left off by saying that I was sufficiently confident in my Turbofog deck that I would run it in a sanctioned tournament. Well, this I did, and I have a report that verifies two things that I have recently realized:
1. Turbofog is tournament-viable
2. I am a ninny… Well, I’ve known that for a long time, actually.
There are the Hyped-Up Cards, the cards that may or may not be good, and the cards that are solid gold but nobody knows or accepts this fact yet. A good example of a Hype card from this set would be the Mistform Ultimus – I mean sure, he’s a Squirrel Cat Beast Efreet Island Fish Dragon Townsfolk Druid Bandit Lord – but that doesn’t mean he’s good, even if he pretends to be a Necrosavant, Walking Dead, and Ball Lightning at the same time. After all when you get right down to it, the Ultimus is just a damn dirty ape.
By now, the cat is clearly out of the bag when it comes to the Standard B/R Reanimator deck. All right – that’s an understatement. The cat escaped the bag aeons ago and is currently shooting craps in the alley with a 40 oz. in hand. Reanimator has been making the rounds on Magic Online for a good month and a half, and the deck had a large number of disciples running it in the Masters Gateway tournament as well.
There are many more common flyers in this set than there were in Onslaught, so don’t be lured into the idea that the skies are safe this weekend. You should play Slivers if you have them, especially if it’s rare, because otherwise you may get elbowed by Shifting Sliver. If your opponent has Mountains and you’re doing combat math, always add four to the total you think they can attack you with… All these and many many more!
