I learned a very important lesson at GenCon – not necessarily about OBC, but about Magic in general. But to get to the lesson, you’ll have to stay with me through a discussion of the World’s Weirdest Top 8, a Big Decision made before the tourney, and the usual fluff that I put in my so-called articles.
Bad cards, bad cards, whatcha’ gonna’ do? Whatcha gonna do, when they come for you?
The Daily Shot Patrol arrests the worst 3-cc cards of all time!
Twenty proverbs of ancient wisdom, scoured from sources across the globe. Twenty relations to modern Magic, and reminders of things that will improve your game. Twenty wise-ass comments thrown in for free.
Even Your Move Games, one of the best-attended game stores in the USA, occasionally needs the three-judge system. We could probably have found a way around it – perhaps by bullying one of the judges to skip playing that week – but I know I won’t be that judge. Is Magic really better off if one of the other people who loves it has to choose between playing and judging in a small, low-K tournament?
Usually, I have Friday night services at my temple that start at exactly the same time as the Friday Night Magic tournament. Last Friday, however, services ended a whopping hour before they usually begin , so I got to head over to StarCity Games for some much-needed Magic playing.
How many good creatures have there been for three mana? What other three-mana creatures have influenced environments? Can we count them on one hand, or maybe two? Is this as silly as I think it might be?
Heard about this Mental Magic format, but don’t know how to start? Stijn introduces you to perhaps THE wackiest format in Magic, the house rules they’ve developed from years of play, and solid strategy to use when you decide to make your Wild Mongrel into a Seedtime.
Here’s another card I figure could be broken… But what colors work best with it, and what prevents the much-hyped Constable lock from being a Tier 2 Standard deck?
Fires-IELN was metagamed heavily towards the mirror and Quiet Roar; those were both matchups that my R/G deck lost to initially. And while Origins was chock-full of Quiet Speculation, the environment has morphed into more Mono Black Control. I had to change it back.
I pretty much scrap the idea of trying to work on Recoup D’Evil, just because I don’t have the time it looks like I will need to make this deck work. My phone rings and it’s Kevin Davis – a local player who asks me about the deck.”Have you given up on it?” “Yeah, pretty much,” I say.”Don’t,” he replies. “We’ve made some improvements.”
All right, so Jim didn’t do that well at the tourey itself… But he brought back a detailed chart of what did well, what percentages of decks did well, and what the winning decks had in them! Want to know what cards fuel the latest decks? Check it out.
In truth, this is my”thank you” column. We’ve been going for three months now (ever since I started this whole thing off with”Five Articles In Five Days”), with no signs of slowing down, and it’s been a great ride. The shaky early days are over, and I’m getting the feeling you’re going to be seeing me on StarCity, every day, for a long, long time.
What I have noticed about Peasant Magic are that it seems very beatdown-oriented; if I remember right, the Origins top eight were all beatdown decks. But Pauper Magic allows you to play with ideas like CounterBurn, Control Black, and Millstone… And attract customers to your store.
Nantuko Shade – an autodrop into any Suicide Black deck, right? Certainly you’re seeing it in most builds as a given. But that one card changes the whole nature of the deck… And Oscar tells you why.
The ‘Tog wins it after ten or so turns of me casting Standstill, having it broken, casting Concentrate, Aether Burst, casting Standstill again… You know how it goes. Once the engine gets rolling, U/G is toast.
