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Me And My Ants: PTQ Tokyo

Tuesday through Friday: "You have spent 456 minutes online." -AoL, upon signing off. Okay, quit yer whining. One of the quotes was wrong, a little. It’s not like you were close, anyway. Here: "I’ve got this fella working for me – do you know what a hacker is?" Should now read: "I HAVE this fella…

PTQ/GPQ St Louis: A Tale of Two Tourneys

Half tourney report, half discussion, Will discusses Force of Will. Not the column, the card.

PTQ/GPQ St Louis: A Tale of Two Tourneys

"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." "Oh you’re ‘that’ guy." I was still at the Fantasy Shop hanging around trying to make some late trades and was talking about my day. My 0-5 day in extended with . Do you really want to hear a full match report on…

CASUAL FRIDAYS #68: Fifteen Funky Formats To Fool Your Friends

With the holidays upon us, it is time to shake ourselves out of our typical ruts and do some fresh, new things. I therefore present to you fifteen new (well, some more new than others) group play formats for you to try over the next few weeks. I came up with the number "fifteen" easily,…

1800 Or Bust!: Thanks, Omeed!

What a difference a Type II Pro Tour makes. How many articles are out there right now written by the Pros? How many different versions of decks can we look at when building our own versions and test gauntlets? Just how clearly are the Tier One decks defined? And all this thanks to a Pro…

(Force of) Will To Power: To Ban Or Not to Ban

Quick question: what do Trade-Survival, Trix, Pande-Burst, Counter-Sliver, Forbidian, and most of the Fruity Pebbles-spawned cereal variants have in common? . The aforementioned decks are considered among the best Extended decks currently in the format. The only non-rogue Extended decks that don’t run are the -fueled variants, Three-Deuce, Stompy, Secret Force and Sligh – and…

FINAL JUDGEMENT: With All Humility…

Franklin*, , soared high above Dominaria, swirling, looping, diving and doing the occasional barrel roll. Franklin didn’t care much about doing anything but soaring and swooping and so forth, mostly because he was good at it. In fact, Franklin was the best swooper among all the Cloudchasers he knew (his barrel-rolling could use some work,…

Fired Up About Type II

I recently placed 4th at PT Chicago playing . I’d like to share the insights I gained into the Fires deck through sixteen rounds of Pro Tour Play (including a post-PT Chicago decklist). First of all, I just have to say that this deck is by far the most fun thing going in type two….

Sith Mind Tricks

–Begin pre-article note– I apologize to the Ferrett for overlooking him in my last article. He did mention me (albeit for my attempts at trying to find a use for Carnival of Souls), but in my defense, I simply went by the Magic Search engine (and I hadn’t read his article yet). I hope my…

Editor Ferry Ignatius Explains It All For You

Explaining Rogue Decks: Jack Benny is dead. And I MISS him. But I’m not going to demand that you listen to him. For those of you who don’t know Jack, at one point he was bigger than Jerry Seinfeld. Bigger than "Friends." But technology crept into his veins like a slow-acting poison, leeched all of…

Good Beats: Taking One In The Chops

Pro Tour Chicago has come and gone. Combined, all the CMU guys brought home a whopping $875, broken down like this: – $0 Andrew Johnson – $0 Andrew Cuneo – $0 – $875 I can’t say we didn’t get what we deserved. Our playtesting regimen was not very good. I made a gauntlet of fourteen…

PTQ: Checked

Wednesday, Dec 5. I got home at two a.m. on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning after playing way too much Magic at CMU. Stupidly, I logged on to check my mail… and found sixty-three messages. Oh man. I did write that damned "respond to email with haste, chief" diatribe, didn’t I? At about 4:20 a.m., I hit…

Price of Progress: Chicago Report

Chicago was the next stop on my marathon of Magic events. I’d been to three different countries in the previous weeks, traveling to Sydney, Australia, Florence, Italy, and Dallas, TX in search of that elusive win. I was in search of Pro Tour points and prize money, of course, but mostly I was after the…

Staying The Course: Standard After Chicago

Late Sunday night I cruised on over to the Sideboard to see how Chicago shook out, and saw that the evil * crushed the dreams of PT Rookies this year; Kai isn’t exactly an unknown player using Chicago to launch himself into the spotlight, like Bob Maher and in past years. So much for that…

CASUAL FRIDAYS #67: So, Can Casual Players Still Play With Rith? Catching Up With My In Box

Back from a Sideboard reporting gig in Chicago, I have a lot I want to share with you all.  First, you should check out my early "lessons learned" piece on the Sideboard (they’ve been kind enough to feature it on the front, so just go to www.sideboard.com).  Then, if you like, you could go read…