TagVintage

All of us had to start somewhere. When you dig up old TheDojo.com files and find the scrub Pro Tour Qualifier reports sent in by randoms named Randy Buehler and Kai Budde, you don’t rock your head back and laugh at how dumb they used to be. Rather, if you set aside the forum flamer complex, you’ll probably find yourself smiling and realizing they used to be like you, not in the sense that they’re no longer ordinary young guys like anyone else, but in the sense that they once had to fumble through the game, too. Really, I think this “advanced scrub stage” is the most fun a player has.

How the Heck Do I Play This Deck?

Type One has a store of decks waiting in the wings to make their big return. Often they are waiting for that new card to bring the deck back into the limelight. More likely, they are waiting for a shift in the metagame or banning to weaken rivals. If both conditions are met, then the stage may be set for an encore performance. Mono-Blue Control is one such deck.

You cannot be fully prepared for the Type 1 Championship at GenCon this weekend without having read this article. Pip outlines all the lastest top 8 decks, tells you how deck builds have changed in the past month, and warns that you better prepared to play against Crucible of Worlds or you will be sorry.

Reflexive dismissal should never have existed. Reasoned or thoughtful dismissal is a far more useful thing. I’ll define and discuss”thoughtful dismissal” more at length in this article and tell you why players continue to dismiss certain metagames and why it’s a good thing.

The title touches something that’s been heavily discussed on the internet and by several teams recently. How good exactly is Crucible of Worlds? Team CAB’s testing indicates that it might indeed be as good (or bad, depending on your point of view) as Black Vise.

One of the things that I’ve noticed over the course of my time reporting on Type One is The Metafight. In Type One, for so long, so many metagames were so dramatically bad that results from them could be dismissed as products of ignorance and underdevelopment. This reflex was most useful when most everyone truly did suck a few years ago, and it was important to have an intellectual shortcut available that could make more people pay attention to serious playtesting results from the Paragons than tournaments. This reflexive dismissal has outlived its usefulness.

We set up camp that night at the home of Josh Reynolds, a Short Bus member, but an obvious Meandeck sympathizer. Much like the people of Cold Mountain, Josh knew that he needed to be in the good graces of the team if he were to survive the ensuing chaos.

Each June, I’ve taken to taking a step back and just assessing where I am, in column form. The column meter is now at 140, and this annual retreat into a written fortress of solitude has become very valuable. Though perhaps I find myself in the mood for something more mellow in 2004.

Once I saw that 4CC was really out in forceat the Power 9, I wondered why it didn’t do better. Unfortunately I don’t have the answer. A possible explanation is improper metagaming. Decks like Fish and Suicide Black thrive on taking advantage of the weaknesses of the upper tier decks to get ahead. 4CC operates on a similar principle, hoping to have the tools to handle whatever it sits down in front of it. Today I’m going to search around in the toolbox and figure out what the”right” tools are.

Into this gloomy summer, a glimmer of hope appeared: the StarCityGames.com Power 9 Type 1 tournament. When it was first announced, I really didn’t pay it much attention. I mean, the last few Type 1 tournaments I played in I hadn’t been very impressed with neither the format nor my performance. It seemed that the great divide between Powered players and non-Powered players was huge and made the game elitist by necessity. If you didn’t have the resources to get Powered up, why bother playing? But later on I learned a few things that made me reconsider going to the tournament.

The Type 1 supercomputer is back with all the summertime number crunching you can shake a stick at, including June’s WTF of the month, the Banned and Restricted Watch List, and so much more.

Have you ever wondered what the best Magic deck ever conceived might be? Like the debates over whether God exists or whether the Hulk is stronger than Superman, it seemed destined to remain unresolved. Not so. We decided to take six of the most powerful decks of all time and run them against each other in a mini-tournament to see which deck came out on top.

Crucible of Worlds was definitely the breakout card of the tourney. It seemed that everyone’s knee-jerk response to Crucible was to run it as a combo card with Zuran Orb and Fastbond, although after seeing the clunkiness of this combo pretty much everyone gave this up. Today, I saw Crucible of Worlds being run in tons of different decks to great success.

This past Saturday, 167 competitors participated in the eagerly anticipated StarCityGames.com”Power Nine” Tournament!

Wondering what the top eight decklists looked like? Want to hear why the top eight finishers played what they played? All of that and more is just one click away!