TagExtended

If you followed the PT Columbus coverage at the Tournament Center, you know that my favorite deck of the Pro Tour was Red Deck Wins. I watched Shuhei Nakamura win a series of improbable matchups on his way to a loss in the finals (to what should have been a good matchup). He played for the most part a very tight game, constricting the turns that his opponents had to answer his threats, bowling them over with a combination of aggressive attackers and finishing burn that would make Dave Price proud. Red Deck Wins is a straightforward deck that doesn’t get color-screwed, doesn’t fizzle, and has game against every single archetype. But which version is optimal?

The Extended season is rapidly approaching and I thought I would take some time to look at the decks you’ll be seeing. There’s really no better place to begin than with the deck that won the whole show, Affinity. Can this deck be improved and is it really the best deck in the format?

The one and only michaelj takes a look at the best and worst things you can do with one Black mana, and talks about some of the theory behind proper use of Vampiric Tutor.

StarCityGames.com’s own precocious fifteen-year-old takes you through all of his Day 2 and Top 8 action. If Worlds and Pro Tour Columbus are any indicators, the kids are starting to take over the game, and Gadiel is one of the best of them.

Adrian looks at the success of Scepter-Chant at the recent Extended Pro Tour, tells you what he thinks Nick West and Ruud Warmenhoven got right, and then gives his own updated version of the deck for the next Extended season.

Do you know what the most successful Extended deck archetype from Pro Tour: Columbus was? No, it wasn’t Affinity, which won the tournament. No, it also wasn’t Reanimator, even though that deck placed the most players in Day 2. In the end, the most successful deck from this past weekend was Scepter-Chant. In this article, Ruud (the coolest Dutchie you’ve never heard of) explains how he ended up playing a deck that runs Lightning Angels out of the sideboard, and recounts the story of his success.

Osyp takes a look back at the weekend that was, explaining Affinity’s success, the poor deck choices of Team Togit, and investigating Eugene Harvey’s choices in hand bags (or should we say man-purse?). All this and more on the latest “The Black Perspective”.

Did you ever wonder what it’s like to make your first Pro Tour Top 8 when you’re fifteen years old? Gadiel’s here to tell you, as he gives a blow-by-blow account of this past weekend’s tournament, including how he ended up playing Reanimator and his exchanges of pleasantries with the fine Wizards of the Coast staff.

It’s autumn in my part of the world. The new big expansion has been out for a month. The Champs tournaments are behind us. The Limited PTQ season is under way. That can only mean one thing. It’s time for me to write about Aluren.

Once in a while it’s fun to play a rogue deck that wins. It’s also fun to take an old classic deck you’ve worked on in the past and dust it off, add a bit of new polish and shine, and see how it does. This is an article about an old favorite deck of mine called Turbo-Confinement that I’ve chosen to update for both online and real life Extended. If you are interested in something besides the usual Tog/Rock/Beatdown of the Extended metagame, have I got a treat for you!

I spent this summer without an internet connection, a car, or friends who play Magic. Thankfully I had a copy of Apprentice and the latest Fifth Dawn update, so I spent the better part of my summer trying to break Extended, coming up with five decks that you probably haven’t seen before.

Metalworker/Trix
If any deck was the big winner in the Fifth Dawn sweepstakes, it was this deck. There are so many cards in Fifth Dawn that have the potential to push this deck over the top that it would be hard to see how this deck couldn’t dominate, were there an Extended season right now. Likely candidates include Staff of Domination, Pentad Prism, Clock of Omens, Krark-Clan Ironworks, Trinket Mage, Artificer’s Intuition, and Roar of Reclamation.

The big question I had about this deck was its ability to deal with Pernicious Deed. Like a lot of people probably assumed about my Threshold deck, I thought this deck would roll over to Deed. The thing is, the main deck that has Pernicious Deed – The Rock – has no plan against the central focus of this deck. I mean, what are they really going to do about a Troll Ascetic with Rancor? The Rock’s plan is to win with card advantage over a long game (which is why it is generally weak against combination decks, even with its compliment of six to eight hand destruction spells); it cannot execute this plan against Troll Ascetic as long as the Troll is big enough to knock over Ravenous Baloths and 0/4 walls.

There are mistakes, and there are… other things. There are errors so horrid the word”mistake” cannot adequately convey the depths of poor judgement required evoking them. These are errors so vast they cannot be fully understood by mortals. These are sublime events. When such monstrosities are identified, one does not call them”mistakes.” There is another word reserved for these tragedies.

Blunders. These things are called blunders. This is what a blunder looks like.

Want to know where Joey Bags disappeared to for the last month? How about his thoughts on the current Extended? Or maybe how he qualified for Pro Tour: Kobe with a”bad Rock deck,” and why he chose to play it? All of this and more is just a click away…