Magic The Gathering | Through Gamer Goggles

Revising Standard Dark Ascension Filters in Part 1

Feb 132012

It has been a couple of weeks since Dark Ascension has released and a standard pro tour is behind us as well. I know I could have made all kinds of predictions about what is going to be and why it is going to do so, but I have had a lot on my plate.

With that being said we should take a look at what the face of standard held for us a few short weeks ago. The Standard environment is pretty wide open. The main archetype decks were:

Delver Blade
Black Red control
U/W illusions
Grixis Control
Humans
U/W Humans
Wolf Run Ramp
Birthing Pod
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MtG Duel Deck: Venser vs. Koth

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Feb 072012

MtG Duel Deck: Venser vs. Koth

$ 19.99 SRP

The Planeswalker Koth, from the metal plane of Mirrodin, sought help when his world darkened. He traveled to Dominaria to enlist allies and met fellow Planeswalker Venser. When Venser recognized the threat to Koth’s world was none other than Phyrexia, he knew that the only hope for Mirrodin was to find its maker. But that would mean forsaking its people in the meantime. Koth would rather die than turn his back on his fellow Mirrans. But Venser all but knew they would die anyway if they failed to reach Karn, his former mentor and creator of Mirrodin. Two Planeswalkers, one goal, very different methods. Recreate the struggle to lead the way to Mirrodin’s salvation.

Matt’s Dark Ascension Picks

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Jan 282012

Wow! It is that time already another Magic Prerelease is upon us. I am sorry for not doing this sooner, but I have been busy making some videos for the blog and trying to pay for life. So Dark Ascension is what we are going to talk about. Specifically my picks. Since this is my second ever set review I am trying to be different. my reviews will always differ from the other guys because I am a both competitive and casual and a judge. I tend to look at a set and say wow this is cool or this really stands out for this deck. What you won’t get from this is the best draft picks, or replacement cards in deck types. What you will get is a broader selection. I don’t care about only the competitive end of the game.

With that said I am going to take a different approach this time. Since, Dark Ascension is only 150 cards I ma cutting my selection to only 3 cards per color one common, an uncommon, and a rare. Starting with black.

I think the best three cards in black are GravePurge, Wakedancer, and GraveCrawler.

GravePurge

Because putting a card(s) on top of your library from your graveyard and drawing it is cool. The fact that it is an instant makes it really good.

WakeDancer

She has all the synergy you want in a card. Cheap to play and a good ability.

Gravecrawler

What can I say undead should always be played from the graveyard

Magic the Gathering Card Quality

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Dec 192011

Sorry this is coming to you late I have been a sleep for about two days fighting off pain and a fever.

Card quality is a source of much debate because it runs so close to card quality and tempo. I will even go as far to say that they are often the same. Over the years card quality has been a lot of different things. But, I believe card quality is the weight of the cards ability against its mana cost in the given environment.

Let’s look at some hypothetical examples.

The Race is On! Tempo in Magic the Gathering

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Dec 122011

Image via Wikipedia

Tempo in Magic the Gathering is what two or more players enter in while attempting to gain control of the game. It is a race that revolves around who can play better cards or more cards faster. Basically it is a race about gaining the upper hand. In other words the player who is winning the race usually sets the tempo of the game. The reality of it though is the tempo of a game can be one sided, balanced, or up and down like a roller coaster.

Magic the Gathering Card Advantage

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Dec 052011

I’ve been talking with a lot of newer players lately. They’ve been bringing it to my attention that many of them don’t understand simple concepts or maneuvers that effect the balance of power between players. These concepts or maneuvers, as I like to think of them, are card advantage, card quality, tempo, and board control. All of these can be quite simple to explain and quite difficult to master. Part of that might be because they are often so closely related that a player might not be able to tell them apart. For example at times it isn’t that difficult to confuse card advantage with card quality. Which in turn could also be tempo. But wait a minute, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Lets talk about what each of them is before we get carried away in debates.

Card advantage is a series of plays, or a play where a player has gained an advantage in the number of cards drawn and or used from their deck. In short card advantage is staying ahead of your opponent by drawing more cards than your opponent, or making plays that force you opponent to use more cards than you.

The classic expression 2 for one can easily be applied to card advantage. It makes perfect sense to everyone, I hope, that if one player plays 2 cards for every one of the opposing players he will not have cards for long.

I have taken the time to find some examples of card advantage.

Speculation of a Magic the Gathering Movie from Hollywood

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Oct 112011

The Silence of the Lambs (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

Wow, I just saw this article written by Joelcool7 at gamrConnect. Basically, the article states Hollywood is going after board game licenses for movies. One of the games he mentions is Magic the Gathering. I didn’t like that fact that Joel lumped MtG into the board game genre, but he didn’t really speak about MtG either. He just mentioned that there is a possible movie out there.

Joel’s article talks about how board games lack plot. Well, That is actually a good thing. A good story isn’t about plot alone. In fact, a good story is really told by the characters. If a writer doesn’t develop the characters the plot will fail. Stories are far more about a balance between plot and character with character carrying the weight.

Lets look at a couple of movies and see if I can get my point across. The Expendables was an intense action packed movie with a lot of characters. Who were played by some really big names (Jet Li, Sylvester Stallone, Mickey O Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, and Jason Statham). I liked it. It would have been a lot better if it was 45 minutes longer and all the characters had a chance to develop. Better yet, start with 3 characters and introduce the rest in a sequel. In the Expendables the plot was there but there was just not enough time to develop the characters.

The Silence of the Lambs is probably the best plot verse character success I can think of. The characters DR. Lecter and Clarice played by Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster have plenty of time to develop. As a watcher you really get to know them and you want to feel what at least one of them feels. Understanding a characters feeling in a story gives the viewer a more enjoyable experience.

In the world of Magic the Gathering the characters already have so much detail it’s a no brainer to turn this IP into a movie. The only question is with so much story development already done, where would you start the movie? I would love to see the Brothers War saga turned into a movie or three. It would be far more realistic for WotC and oh we will say Paramount (first to pop in my mind) to start with some of the more recent planeswalkers. The Shards block storyline would make a good storyline. Who would play Nicol Bolas?

I am pretty excited about this. And it is not all speculation as this article from MTV’s Movie Blog seems to indicate.

It looks like we are in for some really cool promos at the theaters in the future.

Revising Standard the Influence of Innistrad: RUG

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Oct 102011

Moving on in our discussion about how Innistrad effects the standard environment we come to RUG. I know I said we would go somewhere else first. but we made a wrong turn. What is RUG anyway? For those of you that don’t know it is an acronym for Red/Blue?Green. Most of the RUG decks are control driven, but they are not your traditional type of control. At least I don’t believe so.

RUG doesn’t have the named history like some of the other archetypes do. Take Fish for example it was an archetype before it was named. That doesn’t mean the roots of Rug do not run deep. I remember building Blue/Green decks when Prodigal Sorcerer still thrived, and Gaea’s Liege deprived your opponent of everything except Islands. It wasn’t long before you saw Channel, Fireball, and Mana Drain enter the deck. Yeah, that was a while ago. Somewhere around the time of Conflux (I believe) RUG got its official name. Why, I don’t know. But the name has lasted ever since.

Revising Standard: Red Burns Innistrad

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Oct 062011

First I am sorry for not posting this yesterday, real life got in the way. Second, I was going to start with more black cards, but I really have not had a chance to look it over yet.

Why does red burn Innistrad? Lets take a step back a moment and look at what I am saying. Red Deck wins is hardly using any Red cards from Innistrad. David Doberne took 1st at the Star City open in Indianapolis. Here is the link to his deck. In the whole deck there are only three named cards from Innistraad, Brimstone Volley, Stormskirk Noble, and Traitorous Blood. The deck I was going to post differed like this instead of Brimstone Volley I was going to run Goblin Grenade, and instead of goblin Arsonist I was going to run Reckless Waif.

After looking at his deck I can’t believe I overlooked Brimstone volley. Duh! 5 damage, an instantand it was one of my favorite picks 2 weeks ago. The really funny part is I just used a whole bunch of creatures that had good card quality, like Spikeshote Elder, Chandra’s Phoenix, and Grim Lavamancer. I didn’t even see how good it was until I started writing this article today.

Brimstone Volley is so easy to cause its 5 damage (Grim lavamncer or spikeshot)

With Chandra’s Phoenix you can almost always guarantee having a creature in play. Too bad the phoenix doesn’t have Flash.

Stormskirk is just darned good right now. I mean you have to play him; the anti human energizer vampire just doesn’t stop growing.

Enough about the deck. Why isn’t Red Innistrad seeing more play, when it has some pretty good cards?The truth is Red deck wins didn’t really lose that many cards. It still has a lot to offer us like Devils Play, and Ancient Grudge. I am sure the will turn up in a control deck somewhere. It wouldn’t be surprising if Curse of the Stalked Prey and Curse of the Pierced Heart make it into a goblin deck that does fairly well. HMM I think I will build that for my second son.

Next Time I hope to look at Green and blue. More Specifically R/G aggro. With any luck we might even get to talk about R/U/G.

Revising Standard the Influence of Innistrad in Standard Part 2

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Oct 042011

Two days ago, I wrote about White and how it received some really great new creatures giving White Weenie a fighting chance again. Today, I am going to focus on Liliana of the Veil. She is pretty amazing. Being the other 3 drop planeswalker in the game I expect to see some great things from her. I was hoping that her +1 ability that forces each player to discard a card would be able to take advantage of Flashback. It seems that the best card to do that with is Unburial Rites. Which is not the best idea. It could work, but it would be difficult to make a good combo with the two in T2. Here ability to target player sacrifice a creature does have some promise though. The combination of hand control and and board control is an excellent representation of black and a better combination. Her last ability “-6: Separate all permanents target player controls into two piles. That player sacrifices all permanents in the pile of his or her choice.” is going to be used. It kind of reminds me of Fact or Fiction, but only because the player has to chose his pain.

Liliana is pretty wicked good. There is already a really good BUW control deck built around her and there will be more. here is a link to that deck list WUB. Since that is a really great deck I will focus on a simpler deck for a thirteen year old player.

3 Liliana of the Veil

4 Doomblade

4 Surgical Extraction

4 Distress

4 Despise

3 Black Sun’s Zenith

24 Swamps

My sideboard is yet to be determined

Now that I have built this deck I am thinking it might have too much hand disruption. What about you? Do you think it has too much? Here is what I like about this experiment. It has good creatures for a themed deck. It has a descent amount of control. Right from the start. There are just enough mechanics like , discarding, planeswalkers and Grave titan triggers to make this deck a good teaching deck. Wouldn’t be great if on the first turn you cast despise and surgical extraction? While it won’t win a PTQ it is a great deck for my son to have fun with at FNM.

Black has a lot more cards to offer from Innistraad. We will look at them tomorrow, along with some red cards. I am hoping to design a new version of Red Deck wins this week. Any ideas as to what I should play?

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