Bob goes to a lot of tournaments, and usually goes 3-3 or 4-3, but rarely makes the Top 8 except for occasional lucky days. He’s trying everything he can, but he just can’t seem to make that next big leap… And it is now far harder for Bob get help. Most articles on the net won’t help him get any better. But there are ten facets of his play that Bob can look at in order to help him leap ahead, as I have.
When I read Pascal Schumacher’s article”Un-Seriously Casual: Searching for the All-Land Deck,” it brought back an amusing memory of a deck I came up with on a bet. A student bet me $50 that I couldn’t win a single match at an Extended tournament with my Seismic Assault deck, which won via twenty-eight cycling lands and Lightning Rift. And the results were surprising…
My highlander deck has been highly entertaining. Do you know how I once saved all my creatures from a Savage Twister with X=6 with Glory? “How’s that special?” you ask. “That’s what she’s for. Just activate her. What a boring anecdote!”
Ah, but Glory wasn’t at all in my graveyard when the Twister was put on the stack. No siree! In response to the twister, I…
Activated Winding Canyons
Cast Glory
Sacrificed Glory to Infernal Tribute, netting me a card
Activated her ability to give all my men protection from green
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the triple J’s that night,
Their draft sets were exhausted, with no chance of help in sight.
And so when many sharks sat down, surrounding each good man,
A pall-like wave of pessimism was felt throughout the clan.
Decree of Annihilation’s cycle effect is incredibly powerful, but that makes you ask which deck it fits in. Obviously, it’s not something aggro, aggro-control and combo need. As for control, Armageddon was used in Type II to keep an opponent’s mana count down while a big creature beat down or an artifact-based lock held him tight. The 7-mana price tag attached to uncounterability precludes this. That leaves you with blue-based control decks with a red splash, but why would these mana-intensive decks want to wreck their own mana and hurt themselves more? Thus, I don’t think you’ll need to be sideboarding Stifles anytime soon.
As you can see only half of the top eight went 5-0 or better in Standard, something you might expect in a tournament based on two formats. Depressingly for those of us who like to see a little innovation, R/G Beats is by far the most consistent deck, even taking into account the huge number of people who chose to play it. Slide and Wake did very well given the lower, but still high, numbers that started playing them on day one.
Surprisingly only one player managed to win all six rounds with his Standard deck and it was one of the new breed of decks: Zombies.
The concept is very fundamental and doesn’t come into effect until you are drafting a full block – good cases in point being the past two blocks, Odyssey and Onslaught. The idea is that pack two is extremely favorable to one color (or possibly one color combo), and if you force the color and cut it hard enough in pack one, you should be able to reap the rewards of the higher card quality of that color in pack two. But should you try to force a color that ultimately, you may have no control over?
Evidently, two heads are better than one; all your average Joe readers seem to agree on this. What’s better than two heads? If you said three, you’re not”thinking outside the box.” You’re not”ahead of the curve.” A three-headed review would be the next logical progression. But several people may think of that and saturate the market with it, eroding its novelty at record speed. Hence, I present to you… The four-headed Scourge review!
…And proving that great minds think alike, and apparently eight of them think even more alike, Pugg brings along his good friends Gary Wise, Will Brinkman, and Zvi Mowshowitz to help him walk through the most underdrafted cards in the set!
Okay, now, quick poll – how many of you shudder at the suggestion of lifegain as a deck theme? For good reason, lifegain has been ignored as a winning mechanic. Lifegain usually just keeps you from losing, and it has been said before:”Not losing” is very, very different from winning. But why is lifegain bad… And can you ever make effective use of it?
Magic Online behaves in a fundamentally different way when you have a morphed Cutthroat on the table (or Putrid Raptor, or Skirk Volcanist, or Proteus Machine). Even clicking”OK” as fast as possible, a tapped-out Cutthroat player doesn’t come close to the 0.1 seconds that MODO typically takes when you are tapped out; people know this and can play accordingly. In fact, I have. And so have other players. But there is a way around it…
The ultimate goal of this deck is to lock the table down by removing every permanent in play via Tradewind Riders, tying up their mana with Tangle Wire or Mishra’s Helix, or countering every spell they cast – all possible due to Seedborn Muse. It can kill by decking, since you can forgo drawing cards forever with Chronatog in play; by untapping and pinging with Reveka every turn; or by pumping up Avizoas or Chronatogs and attacking when you have cleared all their creatures out of the way. The deck does all of this while giving away perhaps the most crucial resource of all: Your turns!
Death Wish, Golden Wish, and Merchant Scroll should be unrestricted in Magic’s biggest format. Long-Term Plans and Parallel Thoughts should be restricted, while Divine Intervention should be allowed in….
…Or should they? Abe, a member of the voting committee, dissects the effects that these changes would have on 5 and asks for input!
People seemed to generally enjoy the last installment of Blasts from the Past, so here is another trip to yesteryear, with five (well, five and a half) articles ranging from 1997 to 2002 that you probably have not read. Okay, well, if you are an ancient dinosaur like me, or you used to post on Usenet back when your computer had a vacuum tube and the best game machine on earth was an Amiga, you have… But otherwise, these may have slipped under your radar.
Morality and ethics debates aside, there’s only one conscionable way to behave – and that’s properly. Unlike the debate on a casual banned list, ethics and morals are pretty one-sided and black and white… And I think it’s about time I listed the basics of ethical behavior for you all.
