TagExtended

He’s a former editor of The Dojo. He’s written for The Duelist, The Sideboard, and MagictheGathering.com. He’s widely considered one of the top 5 Magic writers ever, and now he’s here. StarCityGames.com proudly presents our newest Featured Writer, the one and only, Michael J. Flores.

How can I say this? Madness is… unkind. I haven’t played a Madness deck since Regionals 2001 when Brian Kibler handed me one, and even though Rabbit made Top 8 with it, I can’t conscience ever playing the Madness again. Every time I have this sort of deck, my opening hand is two lands, a Wonder, an Arrogant Wurm, two Circular Logics, and a Deep Analysis or some such. In the rare games that I get to draw a Wild Mongrel, it is invariably Smothered on turn 2, if not the victim of a Force Spike.

U/G Threshold, especially if no one is expecting it, is a much more forgiving version of the same concept (undercosted guys who fly).

We have a question from the young man in the front row. Oh, you think I’m wrong? Tell you what, kid. Did you bring your deck with you? Great. Come up here for minute. Let me see it. Is your sideboard in here? Good. Let’s see… Chrome Mox… no win condition in the main… Orim’s Chant in the board… Faceless Butcher in the board… kid, you have problems. Where did you find this thing?

A website, eh. I think someone sold you a bill of goods.

While I have quit playing Magic, I have not quit playing Fish. I own seventy-five Magic cards, not counting stuff I haven’t managed to sell off yet because they are junk rares left over from our Team Sealed experience, and drafting to practice for the Pro Tour. And if Geordie thinks he’s being cute and rogue for the end of the Extended season, well, I was in line first.

I’m here to give you deck for the end of season PTQ’s, if you’ll let me. It’s a good one. I’ve played it in two PTQs, I T8’d one, and went 4-2 drop in the other, after keeping a sketchy hand in Game 3 of Round 6. If I’d kept my thinking cap on and taken the mulligan that the hand in question so rightfully deserved, I would have been playing for T8 once again.

The deck is cheap and easy to build – you’ll have no problem getting it together. It has many good match-ups, tends to crush rogue strategies, and has a chance against any opposing monster simply because of the possibility of an”I win” draw.

Besides the creature features that you might expect from the format (Rock, RDW, U/G), there is one control deck that seems to have scared all the other control decks away. Scepter Tog is a very powerful deck, combining the ability that Tog had to gain control of the game very quickly with a Psychatog, and the powerful Isochron Scepter engine. Some people might think that the Scepter deck might be better without the Togs, but I would argue the other way around.

My preparation for the Grand Prix involved convincing my fellow Arizonans to actually go the GP, begging them to play respectable decks, and least importantly, fine-tuning my old deck. Besides fixing the blatant metagame errors (four Masticore/ zero Mindslaver main) I made at the Pro Tour, I also gave my deck the ability to go off with Stroke of Genius and Metalworker. With three Strokes, three Gilded Lotus, and three Cunning Wish, I could simply win by tapping Metalworker to fuel a large Stroke of Genius, (hopefully) drawing a Voltaic Key, using it to untap the Metalworker and play a Gilded Lotus, giving me the Blue mana to continue playing Stroke of Genius and Voltaic Keys, until I had enough mana to Stroke an opponent out.

StarCityGames.com would like to welcome our newest Featured Writer to the family. We now present longtime Pro, Masters winner, and Grand Prix: Anaheim champion Ben Rubin!

There has been a little bit of discussion of Extended and Grand Prix Anaheim in relation to my”Dump Truck” deck. Tim Aten, for example, seems to grasp its strengths pretty well, while a lot of the suggestions I’ve heard from other people demonstrate a much shallower acquaintance with it. One of the more interesting questions posed is”will this deck, unhindered by the recent bannings, still be a contender?”

This is one of the decks that I have started off testing for the upcoming Extended season. It showed promise last year with some appearances in Grand Prix, and John Eardley won a PTQ with it in Columbus, Ohio. I have been testing this deck pretty much exclusively, looking for something that has a good match-up against the Rock, Tog, Red Deck Wins, and Dump Truck. The deck I speak of is Tradewind Opposition.

While there are an abundance of potential builds to Psychatog, they all share some common traits that make them succeed. One is inevitability… if the game gets to keep going, Psychatog will win. In the old format, it would try to counter the key spells to slow the game down. Then, card drawing would take over, with the odd counterspell here or there to keep the game from getting out of control. Finally, at some point, Dr. Teeth would smack himself onto the table and win in a single brutal turn. Psychatog is so powerful, in fact, it becomes very hard to build a counter-control deck that doesn’t win with him, because he is such an efficient finisher. All Tog decks have the Tog, which allows for inevitable wins. . They all have countermagic.
And they all draw spells, digging around in their deck.

It’s that digging into the deck that makes specializing your Tog builds so reasonable.

Jingle Bells
Mike Aten Smells
Geordie Laid an Egg
Nick Eisel Lost To Ken Krouner
And Somebody Qualified For Kobe

We attempted to find Christmas cheer in Tim’s article, but we are not miracle workers.

Metagame/hate decks are something I never recommend for the reason that they aren’t very powerful – and even if they are, they usually don’t even approach the power level of the targeted decks. Despite effective hosers, the lack of inherent power is most visible in match-ups outside the scope of its hate. Another risk is that you may not even play the deck you are supposed to be hosing. The second reason is that in degenerate formats, more powerful decks have the best chance of just being more broken and faster than another incredibly powerful deck.

In essence, this deck does what Baron Harkonnen did back in 1997. It tries to devote itself to just making sure that the opponent does not win. When you play Chronoscepter, your basic plan is this:

• Have enough countermagic to stop the opponent’s plan, even if only temporarily


• Start gaining card advantage (real or virtual) off of card draw or using a Scepter


• Use Cunning Wish to access a direct answer to any threats, or if there are none, to lock up the game


• Once the game is locked, kill the opponent as an afterthought

If you are looking for a completely rogue creation to play both before and after the Bannings, don’t miss this article!

Thinking about the coffee is taking my mind off my son, who seems to be coming down with the flu. He was up and down all night coughing and crying. Consequently, so was I. His mother insisted I go play this morning. I’m probably not in the best frame of mind for Magic, but I have been looking forward to this tournament. For the umpteenth time I check my cell phone to make sure it is on in case she calls.

That’s when the squirrel jumps out from nowhere.

Has there been a more apt moniker for a deck than Red Deck Wins? It’s like the flavor text for Goblin Offensive – a perfect fit. All it does is lay a few creatures, lock down your land for a turn or two and beat you about the head and shoulders until dead. In the Extended environment before Pro Tour: New Orleans, this is what passed for”blazing speed.” Then came New Orleans, and suddenly, a deck capable of a turn 4 kill was”too slow.”

Thankfully, the format came to its senses as 21% of the Day 2 participants in Anaheim were running some form of the deck…

I was looking forward to Extended Season, perhaps breaking out some old favorite from last year, or a build that did well at Worlds. New Orleans changed all that. I’m going to enjoy this Holiday treat that ends January 1st and I hope you will too. People have complained loudly about the format, and now they have their wish. Take advantage of the opportunity to play with some disgusting decks in a competitive environment before the bannings take effect.