Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of running one of the first English Nationals Qualifiers in the country. The turnout was lower than expected, so only forty-nine players sat down in round one, giving the lucky top six players a chance to go to the English this year. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit I have to share with you from this qualifier is that not a single Ravager deck qualified in Bath. It was hated right out of the game.
To find a deck that satisfies The Dread Pirate Roberts Solution in Spring of 2004, your deck must hate artifacts without falling prey to the artifact hate that other decks will be packing. How do you do that? Well, you’d either have to play no artifacts at all, or so many that your opponent is overwhelmed by the choices. If you choose the second option, though, you might be walking into a Furnace Dragon
Back when Mirrodin first came out, I threw together a Beasts deck for Steve. It wasn’t a serious deck — even less serious than anything you’ll ever see in here — And Steve hated it. I admit the deck was a little wacky, as I was a touch inexperienced with the new cards. I’ve done a lot of testing and playing of Standard since Mirrodin came out, so I’m a better deck-builder now than I was then.
So, long story longer a favor was called in and I was compelled to put my level two judging skills to use at a National Qualifier in the tiny nation of Wachovia in Eastern Europe somewhere. I’m not sure exactly where it is, but as long as the pilot knew where we were going, and the taxi man after him, well… why worry? Everyone is somewhere, and as long as I didn’t lose track of myself I wasn’t going to worry about finding myself on a map.
Johnnny-who-ain’t-written-‘bout-Magic-in-a-while is back for a one-shot. One shot, and I’ll be spent. But, you’ll really enjoy it and say how good it was. Heh.
It has been a year now since I unleashed the secret of the”perfect deck” upon you, and my, how the time has crawled. In any case, I have returned to inform the masses that, with the release of Mirrodin block, the “perfect deck” can now be translated effectively from Type I to Type II! Rejoice, all – for another major archetype has entered the arena and will undoubtedly establish a Tier all unto itself!
Jim hates to write. I hate to playtest. So basically, what I intend to do from this day forward to satisfy my contract (and I really, really mean it this time) is to use Jimmy and myself as a kind of half-man, half-monster machine; I’ll write about Jimmy’s playtesting data whenever he’s too lazy to do it, and he’ll write whenever the hell he feels inspired to throw one of his crazy metagame-smashin’ decks into the shark pool that is the StarCityGames community. We’ve got a new one for you, so hang on to your knickers and dive in!
My aim is to give a broad overview of the current Standard format with an eye towards some of the general concepts that I believe to define the environment. I also want to talk about what decks are likely to be successful for Regionals in light of these same concepts. Why should you listen to me? I mean, who am I to say what’s what? Well, I’ve designed a successful metagame deck for almost every iteration of Standard that I’ve ever played in. If there’s anything that I know how to do, it’s how to come up with a plan of attack for the Standard environment.
The reason Flores’s article compelled this response is not just because Flores was outlining how rogue decks refuse to play bad cards, and how the goal of a rogue deck should be to carefully craft a predator/prey relationship with the targeted metagame, but because I felt I had an object lesson or two I could share, given my long experience with”going rogue.” And, more importantly for all you Regionals-watchers, I felt I could provide a modern example of the rogue playtester, complete with a new decklist for Regionals.
I now have at least partial top 8 listings from eleven German, five French, two Polish, one Swiss, one Hong Kong, and one South American Regionals / Nationals. If you are looking for breakdowns of all the Top 8 decks from foreign Regionals, quirky decklists, and analysis of what cards are getting played in each deck, you’ve come to the right place.
I have been talking mostly about stock decks for this series, but as we are getting closer to Regionals I want to take some time to look at some of the more interesting contenders. While this deck should only represent a small portion of the metagame, it has a certain”rock-like” appeal that may draw some of the aggro-control players over, since aggro-control has pretty much been reduced to Green/Red. In a world full of blazingly fast aggressive decks and sluggish, but powerful control decks, the Aggro-Control deck sort of got lost in the shuffle. Luckily this deck has a lot of game against the respective decks in the Metagame, and it is a valid contender.
All the matchup information is included in part two of this comprehensive article.
If you’ve been playing Goblin Bidding for a while or are familiar with it, you will probably not get too much out of this article. I’m only writing this for people like me: People who, for a long time, only played against Bidding or ignored it, only to pick it up more recently for its extremely solid game plan against Mono-White control and the other control decks that had seemingly been the top of the format for a while. So, if you’ve just picked it up recently, or were thinking about picking it up, you’ve come to the right place. Goblin Bidding is one of the rare breed of deck known as Aggro-Combo, so it can be a very interactive and interesting deck to play.
