GAMA is the Game Manufacturers Association, and once a year they hold a trade show to allow the manufacturers to show off their completely new games and tell the world what future plans they have for their older games. I guess I should tell you what we learned about the grandfather of all card games while I was there, even if some of it has slipped out already.
Jose Emmanuel Argao did a great deal of playtesting to prove that his U/W Mobilization deck was better than his detractors were saying it was, and the results seem to indicate that he was correct. However, his methodology still has some serious problems, so I’m going to point out the variables that can skew your results and ways to limit the effect they have on your testing, all in order to figure out the answers to the big question:”What is the best deck?”
Last week, I sat down in a multiplayer game with a handful of opponents. I smashed them. It wasn’t even close. I pulled out another deck – a deck that was a lot weaker – and smashed them again. Then I bashed them with a deck I had drafted the day before. Why? Because I had a better understanding of how mana worked than they did…. And yes, it is that important.
Just what is the “Nick Martiniuk Maneuver”? I’ll explain.
Nick, a colorful personality and awful at the best of times, broke new ground in putrescent play when he managed to lose a match at a Prerelease by forgetting to draw nine cards with Arcanis while the game was stalemated. It was like this.
Opponent:”Go.”
Nick (untaps…pauses….looks up at the ceiling)
“FUUUUUU^%*&^K!”
I’m not guaranteeing I’ll hit every deck in the format, but I’d like to think that after immersing myself in these cards and in Magic Online Block Constructed tournaments, I have some idea of what will and won’t see play – and here are the important decks. Also, I’ll show you what the most popular Onslaught Block Constructed reader’s picks were!
Jonny Chapman’s OBC Pirates! deck was aimed at beating a very focused metagame. It has aggro elements that MBC and ‘Tog can’t really cope with – and lots of ways to kill or control green creatures, without with U/G has a real problem winning. So what, you ask? Well, have you looked at Standard lately?
If there’s a weenie that caught people’s attention and even held some for quite a while, it’s Caller of the Claw. The logic went like this: Four power for three mana is mediocre by Type I standards (look at Phyrexian Negator). Four power for three mana in green just doesn’t cut it. But six power for three mana? Things start looking up.
U/G Madness, a.k.a.”Wonder Dog,” is a deck near and dear to my heart. However, unlike most of its Tier 1 counterparts, U/G has a fair amount of flexibility in terms of different cards that can be added to it, altering it in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. So why don’t I walk you through a complete list of all the cards that have been tried in U/G Madness, and how each addition alters the strategy?
Mark Rosewater informed us that the next big expansion, Mirrodin, will not take place on Dominaria. But we’ve got a little problem: So much happened in Legions that has to be dealt with – there’s such great possibility left open to Scourge that I can hardly believe that all the ends will be tied together. I see two main possibilities that might appear in Scourge to try to bring some finality to our long visit on Dominaria… And one of them is that it might be destroyed.
At a Detroit PTQ, as Judge Shawn Jeffries asked if there were any questions, some yahoo asked something dumb in an attempt to be funny. And here’s the part I don’t get: Then, some other moe raised his hand with another question – and I stopped listening after,”If we open a Words of War, can we…” because I knew the rest of the question would be blah blah Ravenous Baloth blah blah. Why do people DO this? Also, I rank Covert Operative at 13th, and that’s no joke.
Last weekend, a local store held a Saint Patrick’s tourney where only green cards could be used. I like these alternative formats – for one thing, there are no netdecks, and the metagame is pretty much whatever you can conceive… Which is why I had mixed feelings upon seeing Abe Sargent’s article about this format a while back. On the plus side, he writes well and covers interesting topics. On the down side, now there were netdecks to copy. However, I noticed that he left out two or three archetypes…
Do you really think that you can build an OnBC deck without knowing what the final 25% of the cards will be? You’ve got your nasty Beast thing all ready to go, don’tcha? For all you know, this card will be in Scourge:
FATHER NELSON, HOSER CLERIC
Creature – Cleric Legend
W
1/1
Remove Father Nelson from the game: Choose a creature type. All opponents remove all creatures of the chosen type they control from the game. Search each opponent’s hand, graveyard, and library for all creature cards of the chosen type and remove them from the game. Set them on fire. Draw a card.
Yeah, it’s a little undercosted, but Wizards claims to be giving white some good weenies again.
I am not sure why people rush to get strategy articles out there; even Nick wanted to work on Legions stuff shortly after the pre-release. I didn’t know Legions strategy then, and I hate looking back at my articles and seeing stuff I no longer agree with… And now, thanks to Legions’ new cards, three of my earlier Dilemma stances have been flipped on their ear.
My Skirk Fire Marshall deck should have worked without a charm… But even though it was a simple two-card combo that I needed to go off, I needed so much more. Are you making a mistake in not seeing the (over)complexities of your deck?
Well, it’s about time that I set the record straight on the recent events regarding what happened to me at GP Boston. The fact of the matter is that nothing I can say can really affect anyone’s opinion on the issue, and I gave up on doing so early on when I realized this. Anybody can believe whatever they want, and I’m not going to be the one wasting my time trying to convince people to believe my side over hearsay….
