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Cloudreach Cavalry is the most situational card on the list in terms of when you draft and play it. I wouldn’t recommend playing this with fewer than five birds/mistforms in your deck, but if you have eight or more birds, especially if a few of them cost three mana, this card becomes a powerhouse. And please, don’t play Aven Envoy to make this card more powerful. For that matter, don’t play Aven Envoy to Amplify your Stingers and Warhawks. Just don’t play it. The Envoy, I mean.

Much like P.T. Barnum faking his own death in order to see what people would say about him, it turns out that a fake resignation brings the nicest people out of the woodwork to tell me how great I am. It was great, and I have now vowed that I ever get the chance to engineer my own demise, I’m takin’ it. For those who didn’t get the joke, though, April Fools.

Too often I would be dealt lethal damage before I could”go off”. The card that finally made the deck work was Phage the Untouchable. No other card in the game has the power to end a game in one turn so reliably, and in so very many ways.

It’s not really a strategy article per se, but I figured you folks ought to hear it first from me: Starting in May, I’ll be going from a site with thousands of daily readers to a site whose weekly unique visitors can be counted in millions – well, half millions, anyway – but I’ll have to get used to it. My fan mail will be different. The lingo will fade. And above all, I’ll really miss editing StarCity.

I’ve been inspired by the enthusiasm that Skirk Fire Marshal has encouraged in my fellow StarCity gamers. The new version of Goblink sports more benign-looking monsters, quality spells – and this time, a fighting chance. It’s still got the problem factors that plagued the original Goblink, but this is hopefully the start of Goblink’s revival.

I don’t have much to contribute on drafting strategy – so this is where the article should end, right? Actually, no; this is where it really begins. A lot of people head straight in, study the cards, make the best pick and start lovingly constructing their forty-card bundle of joy… And that’s really bad strategy, since there are several tricks you can use within Magic Online to shape your optimal drafting strategy.

Our preliminary all-over-the-map results led many on the team to feel the deck was just not consistent. Darwin, however, was continually posting good results and was going to run the Dragons. In discussions and playtesting with Darwin, I realized it wasn’t that the deck wasn’t consistent – it was that I (and others on my team) were playing it wrong in certain matchups. Wanna know how to play the biggest deck around?

From what I can see through the limited portal provided by Arcana, Magic art is thriving in spite of Wizards Art Department, not because of it. The style guides we’ve seen are of horrid quality – and these are the models that Wizards asks their artists to emulate! Furthermore, the Wizards Art Department is wasting time by providing poor specifications that require sudden (and potentially shoddy) redrawings, while genuine artistic errors go through. They seem to think that just so long as”stuff looks cool,” everything will be all right… And I disagree.

Just drafting every rare in sight is not a good plan because, ultimately, you’d like to balance the line between rare-drafting and drafting a good deck. After all, if you can procure some packs, then you can do more rare drafting. There are some specific rare drafting strategies, and there are five categories of rares. Identifying which rare belongs in which category is very important to your rare drafting success.

I envisioned the Control Player’s Bible as a detailed reference that beginners could look at without the sometimes-haughty intimidation they sometimes get in Type I websites. The problem is that as I covered the basic discussions and had to move on to more complicated details, I got feedback saying that some beginners who caught the Bible in the middle couldn’t keep up. Somewhere there, I got the idea of starting another sub-column strictly focused on beginners again.

For those following the recent discussion regarding Nick Eisel’s continuing to write for this site, The Ferrett issued a call to arms for more good writers on Onslaught drafting. So I decided, what the heck, why not give this a try? Beats waiting for Gary Wise to ever get his articles done. I am a good Limited player, though, rated as one of the better players in the state of Oregon, and I do draft plenty down at my local game store.