1) Psychatog is finally dead in Standard. It will be up to 8th Edition to revive him; otherwise, we can kiss Dr. Teeth goodbye until Extended season. And there was much rejoicing…
2) Mind’s Desire is still note quite ready for Prime Time. Olivier Ruel went 6-1 with it, but Kai went 2-5. However, their versions were radically different, and as of right now I haven’t completed the overall numbers for the decks.
This deck was the real surprise to come out of the Championships, and is actually a lot more powerful than I initially felt it was. It feels very similar to Wake, with you tapping out for insanely powerful effects like Decree of Justice and Decree of Pain… But considering the deck’s eight Wrath effects punish you for playing creatures, encouraging you to hold them right in your hand where you can Therapy them out, it works really well together.
I’ve expressed my disdain for the weakening of blue overall. I agree very much with the sentiment that the other colors should be brought up to Blue’s former power levels. But instead, the masses bitched and whined. I don’t know if it was a result of public outcry, or an internal decision by Wizards, or (most likely) a combination of the two, but the people got what they wanted. Half of the You Make The Card mechanics were blue hosers. The question is, who are these people?
You know what is nice about Rorix besides all his other, obvious, attributes? It is the fact that he is a rare. I know it sounds dumb, but it’s true. People don’t play as well against rares. They don’t expect to be facing rares. They aren’t accustomed to playing against rares, so they are more likely to play poorly when facing rares. Entire Limited articles are written sometimes as if rares barely existed. How can you account for this in your Limited playtesting?
Everyone at the shop fully expects me to have the ability to kill everyone at the table at any point in the game, and I’m a threat that needs to be eliminated regardless of what I have in play and how friendly I’ve been so far… So I find myself the target of”random kills” all the time. The watchword is if someone can take me down, they will, no questions asked… Because they figure they may not get a second chance.
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?
