This week there’ll be no irreverent nonsense, no puns or bad jokes, because I need to share my predicament with you: My wife hates Magic: The Gathering Not in a "fire and brimstone" or "choose between me or it"-type way, but it’s getting close. She plays other games, but has never found any particular appeal…
That’s right, I’m offering a completely unique contest. did just such a thing, and his article has remained on the front page for ages. It’s become a staple of StarCityCCG. I wonder if the editor himself might have something to do with that . . . Nevertheless, I have decided to run a mini contest…
First off: I never claimed I was all that sexy, although Cathy Nicoloff has taken to posting my stuff on Meridian Magic as "2 Sexy Meddish" on occasion. While I seriously doubt that I can truly be put in the same class as George Clooney, in the greater scheme of things, it’s far better to…
Well, I claimed last week that I was going to talk about MBC combo decks, and I will … sort of. The reason I shifted the focus this week was because I just read article on NeutralGround.net, where he lambasted the PTQ-playing public for being little guppies and playing "Follow the Leader" when it came…
My pre-tournament preparation always leaves me feeling like a pile of stale garbage. This has everything to do with the fact that I refuse to sleep more than four hours beforehand. The one time I violated this rule was the Nemesis prerelease, and only then because I was comatose. I ended up sleeping eighteen hours,…
On July 9, 1999, Charles "Tuna" Hwa over at the Dojo made a mistake. (Really. I’m not being self-effacing; told me this himself.) Mike told him to post a little ditty on multiplayer black life drain in the casual section, maybe somewhere toward the top. Whether Tuna was seeking to stage a coup, or just…
Nothing gets my bile rising like a good thing gone bad. Not since Zardoz have I had such a self-contradictory movie experience. To be sure, that was a lot more extreme. It’s hard to top spending thirty minutes trying to suffocate yourself with a pillow in hopes of ending prematurely a film that you proclaim…
I hinted in my last article that I’d been working on a couple of MBC decks, namely Counter-Burn and Counter-Rebel. The Counter-Burn deck is a block version of my Type II deck, and isn’t working too well at the moment. I’m not sure I’ve got the levels of counterspells and burn spells quite right. Not…
Well, it has been a long time since my last article. Once again my life has been insanely busy and I haven’t been motivated by a topic enough to stay up all night writing about it. I had planned on writing a synopsis of my trip to Nationals, but I didn’t think the material would…
I admit it. I’m jealous. Everyone else on this crazy site (and Mindripper, and Neutral Ground, and everywhere else) has joined up with some sort of Team for Magic. And once again, I feel like I’m in high school, watching all the cool guys separate off into their own separate gangs while I am left…
If absence makes the heart grow fonder, I guess I must be your favorite writer by now. I want to apologize to you all for the lack of columns lately, and offer up some lame excuses… er, I mean reasons for my time away. The good news is, it’s not Asheron’s Call. In a word,…
Greetings once again! My faithful readers will remember an article of mine posted over a month ago: The original Trading. In it, I forecast that I might write another article about more broad topics than my personal endeavors in trading. Well, here I am, ready to write. Recently, Sean Erik Ponce wrote an article about…
StarCityCCG’s lovely and talented editor (and my dear friend since 1958) has asked me to write a Judge column. He even dreamt up a catchy name for it (although I dropped that icky "The"). The idea is for ME, who knows lots of stuff about the rules, to educate YOU, who hear "The Stack" and…
Last time, we focused on what other players might try to do to you. Today, we’ll talk about your own behavior at a sanctioned tournament. You can go a long way to helping your own cause, both with the other players and the tournament staff. We DCI reps will do our best to help you…
Welcome, fellow readers, to another installment of Weapons of Mass Distraction. I got jealous of everyone else having column names, so I’m going back to my old column name. In this episode: Where did the folks at Wizards learn to count?; If Wizards is making the -Men Movie TCG, can we call Magneto’s little toy…
