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As you may or may not have heard, we had a server crash over the weekend. Everything on that server has since been restored… except for the e-mail addresses… which still aren’t working, but should be later on today. In the meantime…

What do you know about Dirk Baberowski? Uh, he’s German, right? And… Um, he’s friends with Kai – and um, uh…
Well, if you want his Magic resume, he’s the 2003 German National Champion, he has three Pro Tour titles under his belt (two team titles with Kai Budde and Marco Blume, and a solo Pro Tour title from Chicago ’98), a second-place finish at Euros ’99, and an additional Pro Tour Top 8 at Chicago ’99.
But what do you know about Dirk, the man? He has more Pro Tour wins than Finkel, is part of the best three-man Magic team of all time, and yet nobody on this side of the Atlantic knows a damned thing about him. Hopefully we’ll change that today, and show you how a master of Rochester prepares for Team Drafting.

If Wizards doesn’t restrict Academy Rector, it will be adhering to the stricter rule that a card must first demonstrably distort the metagame to warrant banning. But perhaps Wizards just doesn’t want that kind of combo, or dislikes that players can fetch Bargain with such ease. That could stem from a distaste for combo. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be sad to see Rector go – but my point is, does it need to be done? And if it doesn’t need to be done, but it is too objectively broken, what are the consequences of restricting it anyway? With that in mind, I suggest four ways that Wizards could weight cards to see when a card needs restricting.

Ken looks at eight archetypical hands from StarCityGames readers, and decides what’s mulligan-worthy and what’s not? When should you roll with what you got and when should you send it packing? Ken shows you how, and why!

Okay, I’m sure that Brandon Moore means well – and that I’m sure that in his mind, he really thinks that his 101 Top Multiplayer cards work well. And you know what? They do! But to call these the best of the best is very misleading – and so let me go through his choices, card-by-card, to show you what I think are the best of the best for multiplayer…

Practice makes perfect, so they say. But how to practice… There’s the rub. Is it enough to simply play and play, and play? Or is there more to it, a Holy Grail of knowledge from which we need to drink to truly maximize our potential growth? Is there a measurable gain to be made from plowing through twenty-five games pre-board, twenty-five games post?”Well, I’ve played fifty games, and my Magic Skill-o-meter has notched up another 1.21 gigawatts of talent!” Craig asks what the perfect practice sessions are like, and begs for your vote in the Invitational!

An article so big, it broke the database! John continues his tirade with the final (and top) twenty-five.

Becker goes off on his usual mixture of strategy, issues, and flat-out tirades, discussing Wolfgang Eder’s mistakes at Worlds, why good decks don’t have two-ofs in them, the ethics of concessions, a surprise discussion of Mike Flores’ hidden talents – and, of course, the mandatory Jay-bashing!

This article has three parts: It begins with a discussion of the reason some players find playing rogue decks a moral imperative. The second part looks at the advantages and disadvantages of playing a rogue deck, while the third section looks at the steps necessary to build and tune a rogue deck.

My card advantage articles had to assume that only card advantage was important, so you could do the bean counting without getting too confused. However, it’s painfully obvious that card advantage isn’t always the most important thing:
For example, Force of Will trades two cards for an opponent’s spell, yet it’s one of the best blue cards ever printed. So why is Force of Will good? The answer lies in the frequently-misunderstood concept of Tempo.

Conventional wisdom says that while forcing a certain deck may work out some of the time, the numbers say that the important cards for the deck will not show up frequently enough to reliably force it. This is simply not so with Goblins in Onslaught draft because of the huge number of cards that the deck can key off of. Cards that aren’t even playable in other decks become powerhouses, simply because they belong to the Goblin tribe. So despite the protests of a couple close friends who have made a good bit of profit off of the Goblins draft strategy on Magic Online, I’m here to share it with you today.

Most people have some idea of what signalling is, but nearly everyone thinks they are bad at it. But on the plus side, it’s one of those areas that you can claim to be bad and still sound good. By acknowledging you are bad at signalling, you are basically saying,”Okay, I suck – but at least I suck at something very cool and mysterious, while the rest of you are busy sucking at ordinary things.” But how do we signal? I looked at four drafts I did, and asked people what colors they had actually wanted me to play, and what the people I had signalled actually did play, all in order to see how it’s done.

Ted gives his usual dose of”strategic excuses to post pictures of scantily-clad women,” discussing Onslaught Block and the futility of his attempts to win at it, and dissecting a recent Roanoke PTQ to see what the field looks like these days.