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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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….
–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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The universe has been putting itself to extremes for me. Usually it contents itself with making things awful, which lets me counteract whatever misery I suffer by telling the world at large. One of the benefits of this column has been that it provides exactly the forum I need, letting me dole out on you,…
This weekend was a special weekend for me – no, I didn’t qualify for PT Chicago; it was the weekend of the Bath Annual Invitational event. (Although I have been reading the live coverage on the Sideboard, and articles are definitely my favourites on there. Â Pop by and check them out.) In January 2000, Paul…
The results are in! This weekend saw the culmination of Pro Tour: Chicago, the tournament that I had most hoped to attend. Alas, it was not to be; the closest I came to fame was finishing third in the Qualifier. Okay, the mandatory "my fifteen minutes of fame" moment is over with. The results are…
