Today Mike takes a look at some of the more intriguing questions to come out of this Extended season. Will we ever see another format like this one? Is this the greatest Constructed format of all time? How in the world do you choose a deck when there are thirty viable decks out there and more being discovered all the time? Flores knows…
Mike explains his fascination with decks that bear the Dan Paskins Seal of Approval, and offers up a most teched out decklist of the most popular deck this Extended Season. People will be playing this decklist at your local qualifiers, so the only way to get a drop on the competition is to read this article.
If you assume that TJ properly balanced his ratio of en-Kor, Target-Me-And-I-Get-Bigger guys, and sacrifice outlets in his Grand Prix: Boston Life deck, then taking out Task Forces for Worldly Tutors is a perfectly legitimate swap. All other draws being equal, Worldly Tutor can always turn into a Daru Spiritualist, which leaves you with the same effective number of Target-Me guys overall. You lose a card in the process, this way, but in exchange you receive the vastly superior Spiritualist over the underpowered Task Force. Of course, this means you now have to add green, but I don’t want Living Wish in it. Why? Read on.
Hi, my name is Ruud Warmenhoven and I have finished in the Top 16 at every Extended pro-level tournament I have ever entered. In all these events I played a weird deck that most people would call rogue and wouldn’t include in their testing. I have been seen casting such hits as Battlefield Scrounger, Constant Mists, Lightning Angel and now Sensei’s Divining Top and won games with them. The story of how I ended up playing the Top at Eindhoven involves the English, a drunken bar fight, and a man named Draco…
Since I’m never content to play someone else’s deck, I spent a lot of time trying to break Extended. Since I’m not divinely inspired and am sorely lacking in “copious free time,” I didn’t. I will present three combo decks that each fail, each for different reasons. Golden Retriever is not better than the alternatives. Snap-Witness works, but not in this metagame. Finally, Food Chain Myojin is… well it’s just plain cool.
Rosholm is one of those underground Magic writers that far too few people know about compared to how talented he is. He is also one of the most well-respected (and coolest) European Magic writers around and counts Tim Aten and Tomi Walamies among his fans. If Jack Kerouac had liked hip-hop, then Rosholm would be the Swedish Kerouac of Magic writing. Here’s what’s on his mind today: “A couple of people before me have tried to promote the Pattern-deck as a solid choice for these final weeks of the Extended season. Those players, I believe, have been both right and wrong. Pattern is a great choice for the Extended format in general, but their lists are not.”
Today Zvi muses on the best versions of the best decks to come out of the last two Grand Prix weekends, including Tsuyoshi Fujita’s incredible Sneak Attack deck. Still think the deck is a fluke? Here’s a preview of Zvi’s analysis which includes an optimized decklist: “I love this deck. It goldfishes better than any other deck in the format…”
Extended is my favorite format, so I get very down on myself if I play poorly. The expectations of my performance I hold for Extended far exceed what is reasonable, given my poor preparation habits. This is because I am old, and old people have no time to prepare. Don’t laugh, kids, it will happen to you one day.
Let me put this another way: I suck, but I’m not supposed to suck when I shuffle up Aluren.
The most interesting matches of my season so far came back to back at last week’s PTQ in Milford. I was playing Aluren, and my first opponent was Jonathan Ward of Team MYR. We were both 3-0 at this point and he begins the game with something like Duress, Birds of Paradise, Cabal Therapy and I assume he’s playing Rock, so I Cabal Therapy him back on Vampiric Tutor. He shows me a hand of Worship, and Academy Rector. What the hell? If your PTQ season has gone at all like mine, I’m sure you’ve had more than a few of these strange moments and can share my pain.
It’s Extended season. An amazing number of decks are making PTQ T8s. Early results showed Twenty-two different archetypes have multiple T8 appearances. It’s a diverse field, and a diverse field rewards playing powerful decks that aren’t well known. Enchantress – the combo version – fits that definition. It won a PTQ last weekend and made T4 the week before, and Betrayers just became legal, meaning there may be some new tools available to help you abuse an already abusive combo deck.
Zvi examines why there are two different Extended formats being played right now, tells you what decks you should and should not be playing, and requests that all of you Rock players out there stop bringing sticks to gun fights. The Mad Scientist also addresses your forum feedback and a variety of community issues all in one fell articulate swoop.
As the Extended Season continues, new decks continue to poor out of the woodwork like unstoppable cockroaches, determined to make the life of metagaming PTQ players utterly impossible. Thankfully Brian David-Marshall is here to shine a light on things and this week he has a doozy of a new crop, including a Red Deck that runs Isochron Scepter, and infinite mana combo with Snap and Eternal Witness, and an Academy Rector deck good enough to win a slot on the Pro Tour. If you are playing Extended this season or even if you just love seeing cool new decks, you must read this article.
With the speed that PTQ players are tweaking their combo, beatdown, and control decks these days, it may look like Red Deck Wins has been left in the dust – a relic of the early days of the season when players had yet to properly prepare for the Red menace. Thankfully, notes Dan, Red deck designers are not above a few innovations themselves and today Dan provides a look at a few tweaks you can add to your Red Deck to stay ahead of the combo curve.
What’s a boy to play in a diverse environment rife with aggro-control strategies? At first Terry wasn’t sure, but then he honed in on the idea of playing his favorite card ever in the environment (Eternal Witness), and soon found himself developing a Red Rock deck designed to bash the PTQ field to bits. In this detailed Primer, Terry gives you all the details you need to know in order to take this deck to a PTQ and do well.
I’ve been thinking for a while about how to improve tournament reports and make them more useful for the people reading them, and I’ve decided that what I’m going to try doing is a more interactive style of report. For each of the crucial decisions during the tournament which decided how I got on, I’ll explain the situation and then ask you what you would have done in this situation, before explaining what I did and what I should have done. If there’s anything that you want more information about, then just post in the forums and I’ll do my best to reply.
