The idea of Earthcraft/Squirrel Nest kept tickling my fancy. Could I possibly make it just mono green? Obviously, Earthcraft demands basic lands, and playing mostly basics would make Wastelands much worse against me. Just how can I compete with the speed of the format with just monogreen?
Mark Rosewater recently discussed what slice of the pie White should get. Maybe this is a good week to talk about White Weenie. And let’s face it: If Rosewater presents Marge Simpson as a color’s mascot, we’re not expecting much.
One build of Stompy, three builds of Sligh, all angry things up in your face. And, of course, the usual Raksian analysis!
Old Extended had some broken decks, but nothing like Type 1. I play TnT – Mishra’s Factories, Juggernauts, Su-Chi’s, Triskelion, plus the broken stuff: Ancestral Recall, Goblin Welder, Survival of the Fittest. I’m short one Factory, but the deck still does okay.
At Nationals last year, I started trading for the Power Nine. Being a judge, you get those nice judge foils and boxes for judging at Pro Tours and Grand Prix – but no old cards. At Reims, I managed to get the last part: A Mox Ruby. Now all I had to do was wait for the new year before I could play with my goodies.
When I saw Goblin Piledriver, I thought it was a strong card that nevertheless wouldn’t work in Type I. It didn’t occur to me that you could throw them all into a deck and see their individual drawbacks set aside by sheer weight of firepower.
TnT crushes The Deck. And all I had was five lands, a Brainstorm, and a Mana Drain, a very weak hand; my opponent had a God hand for a deck that should crush me. What did he do wrong? Also, for the first time ever on StarCity, the complete and unedited INVINCIBLE COUNTER-TROLL!
2002 was possibly the most eventful year in recent Type I history, and everything that people expected to happen in 2001 instead happened in 2002. How did it change the Vintage scene… And, of course, The Deck?
Last week, Oscar looked at twenty of the best Vintage decks to see whether he could afford to cut Vampiric Tutor; this week, turning towards Cunning Wish targets, he looks at all of the viable instants that can be fetched with Cunning Wish in an attempt to build his sideboard.
The Deck is changing thanks to the new Onslaught fetchlands… And now that an entire color has gone the way of the dodo, can Vampiric Tutor be far behind? Oscar looks at Vampiric Tutor’s effectiveness against twenty decks in the Vintage metagame to see whether it makes the cut in the new Type One….
Over the last two months, a number of people e-mailed to ask about”budgetizing” Type I decks, especially”The Deck.” Since Christmas is just around the corner and people may make some major purchases, this might be a good time to talk about it… And let me tell you, substituting the Power Nine, like Inquest suggested, is a terrible idea.
Several weeks ago, TnT went toe to toe against the best control players in Virginia and New York at the Virginia States Black Lotus tournament. Can Oscar do any better against a deck that can throw out threats as easily as you throw out excess Tahngarth’s Glares? Watch and see!
“The Deck” players everywhere are looking at Polluted Delta and Flooded Strand and scratching their heads. It’s not a question of whether or not to use the fetchlands, but how… And years’ worth of mana-tuning intuition is suddenly out the window.
I saw an article on Mask decks last week, and I wanted to talk about it – strategies for dealing with Mask, a discussion on whether Mask is a combo deck, and alternate mana bases and color configurations for it.
The initial reactions in my mailbox were as varied as they were ecstatic. For multicolored control alone, Darren Di Battista posited that maybe they shouldn’t be used because they might hurt colored mana development later on. What’s the approach you need to take to the new Onslaught fetchlands?
