This week, I thought it would be cool to do a sort of”looking over my shoulder” perspective during one of my drafts. I wrote down the relevant cards in each pack, and discuss my thought process as I create a solid draft deck.
Being the lazy person that I am, and since I was playing the exact same deck that Cash won States with, I just handed in a copy of his decklist, which I had printed out from StarCity the night before.
My apologies to all people whose names I forgot, but all I have to work with here is my scoresheet. I didn’t take notes since I was only writing a report if I won – and I didn’t plan on winning after the outcome of the first match.
What are the core cards of the new decks? Which decks didn’t place in the Top 8, but did surprisingly well anyway? Where does the new Extended fall on the metagame clock? Lots of questions, lots of answers.
Since I switched to StarCity (Our Motto: No Matter What Your Rating Is, You’re Better Than at Least One of Our Writers), I have seen a huge increase in my e-mail. I’m pretty sure that it’s mostly due to spam-bots, since these e-mails typically offer genital herbal enhancement (“Be the envy of all your friends!”), dating services (“Meet desperate, usually-single women in your area!”), and easy money (“Yo, Chris, it’s your cousin Vito again. Call me on the safe phone”). Still, I’d better answer ’em.
1800 Or Bust, nothing – Jim’s on a quest to bash the Bath Invitational this time, and his mission is to break the Peasant Magic metagame wide open. Can you help him in his quest as he goes after it with the same zeal that he hits Standard with?
Legends, on the whole, make no sense. Okay, for a second here, just picture Kamahl, Fist of Krosa killing Kamahl, Pit Fighter. All right – shouldn’t this open up some sort of space time paradox wormhole which immediately blows Fist of Krosa boy up and sprays some sort of meaty goo around the room?
Pick orders are a thing of fluctuation – they are not a Bible of absolute truth that you live by, but rather a page in your mind’s notebook that you can refer back to during a draft. The more pages full of knowledge in your notebook, the better you’re gonna do on the test – or in this case, the draft. That said, these are the top 5 commons for each color in overall value… And if there is no specific need to accommodate some aspect of your deck that is lacking, this is the order that you should pick them in.
Let me focus on what Onslaught brought to the Extended party. Was it champagne and caviar, or Night Train and pork rinds? Which cards got the most play, and in what decks?
I saw an article on Mask decks last week, and I wanted to talk about it – strategies for dealing with Mask, a discussion on whether Mask is a combo deck, and alternate mana bases and color configurations for it.
Okay, it’s been two weeks and we’re already all sick of AstroGlide decks. R/W, G/W, G/R/W, B/W – we’ve seen it all. Or have we? What if we told you that someone was trying to make a U/R cycling land destruction deck that Slid Aven Fogbringers for bounce and denial? THOUGHT so.
There’s only one question lingering through my mind:Is the Mox Jet round, or does it have a bulge in the center? You know you’ve been playing too much Magic when you spend hours debating the roundness of a Mox. I was called a heretic when I first told this at the Labyrinth – but now I have a number of believers at my side. Together we’re forming the Bulged Mox Jet Front (BMJF).
So Pierre’s making a deck for multiplayer; not so unusual. But when you’re building a deck where every card that leaves play or is put into the graveyard is shredded beyond repair, you need a different strategy. You need… STYLE.
Don’t you hate tournament reports that start out with a passionless description of how the person got to the tournament and with whom they went?”Paco, Rebecca, and I hopped into the Toyota Tercel for the four-hour drive to Baton Rouge.” So I’m going to try to spice mine up a bit. Parts are true. Parts are fiction. Some parts I am simply filling in blanks where I either (a) didn’t take notes or (b) was passed out in a drunken stupor.
As it was Thursday, and I had only two days to go, I started looking around the net for ideas. Two stood out: Sean McKeown’s B/R Control deck and Jens Thoren’s Wake deck. I played them both against each other a bit and then gave them the acid test – Deep Dog.
I played an updated (and final) version of the Beasts deck at Wisconsin States, ending up 5-3. Only one of the losses was a blowout; the other two were very close. I lost, I think, because I made minor mistakes.
