So, here’s one interaction I want to see in Legacy once Dark Ascension is legal:
I strongly suspect this isn’t the most efficient use of your Mystics – you should probably be packing Batterskulls and Jittes instead. But the idea of getting to tutor up this handy little blade, send in your Mystic, and then generate a 13/13 flying trampler is just too much fun.
For reference, the actual card (both faces):
The full Dark Ascension spoiler is up now. You can click here to see it.
So far, I’ve barely looked at it (working instead), but I did have to say that I heart this card:
Amidst the various discussions surrounding the recently announced changes to organized play, Jon Loucks asked a fun question:
“What would last year’s Worlds have looked like under the new system?”
I started to work on this one, then realized that this requires tallying lots of PWP totals across all the pro events for the year. That’s just too much work. However, the 2010 Pro Point totals remain a reasonable proxy for what 2010 PWP totals would have been. It’s only an approximate proxy, since the two systems differ in their relative weighting of GPs and PTs.
However, here’s how it might have broken out:
Note that in answering a question below, I realized I did this wrong the first time. The 2010 Pro Point totals I used included Worlds 2010…which we wouldn’t have if we were picking players for 2010 Worlds. Oops. Mea culpa. I’ll keep the incorrect stuff below the cut, but I’m going to replace it with a more accurate take now.
Andre Coimbra (2009 World Champion)
Carlos Romao (2010 MTGO World Champion)
Simon Gortzen (PT San Diego winner)
Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa (PT San Juan winner)
Paul Rietzl (PT Amsterdam winner)
Brad Nelson (North America)
Martin Juza (Europe)
Shuuhei Nakamura (Japan)
Tzu Ching Kuo (Asia Pacific)
Mario Flores (Latin America)
Notably, I really had to dig down in the Pro Point list to hit the next player from that region after PV.
Luis Scott-Vargas
Yuuya Watanabe
Brian Kibler
Kyle Boggemes
Marijn Lybaert
Josh Utter-Leyton
So that would be your prospective World Championship 16. That’s not a bad set of players, although one does feel for the presumably somewhat outclassed Mario Flores.
Some other notes on this putative World Championship talent pool:
6 Americans
4 Europeans
2 Japanese
1 APAC
3 Latin American
What do you think? Watchable? Fun? A true “world” championship?
In Development is back, a bit delayed due to sickness (last week) and grant writing (this week).
This time around, the topic is Planeswalker Points (PWPs). We’re two months into the current four-month competitive season, so it’s time to check on how the numbers are bearing out. Has the new system motivated players to stay in the game, pushing PWPs totals up from prior seasons? Can you qualify for the Pro Tour on PWP total this season? How many points do you need for 1, 2, or 3 GP byes?
Click here to read this week’s In Development.
There will be no In Development this week as I have been spending time being really sick, and my remaining spare time goes to nursing my sick gal back to health and finishing up some work-related things. To tide you over, and because they can be hard to find, here are the Planeswalker Points (PWP) and Friday Night Magic (FNM) Championship season dates:
2011 Competitive Season #3
August 29, 2011 through December 25, 2011
Qualifies you for the first Pro Tour of 2012 (Honolulu)
Sets your byes for GPs held from December 26, 2011 through April 1, 2012
2012 Competitive Season #1
December 26, 2011 through April 1, 2012
Qualifies you for the second Pro Tour of 2012
Qualifies you for invitation to your 2012 National Championships
Sets your byes for GPs held from April 2, 2012 through September 2, 2012
2012 Competitive Season #2
April 2, 2012 through September 2, 2012
Qualifies you for the third Pro Tour of 2012
Sets your byes for GPs held from September 3, 2012 through December 30, 2012
2012 Friday Night Magic Championship Season
September 5, 2011 through July 1, 2012
Only PWPs earned at FNM events count toward your Championship qualification.
So, if you’ve read the most recent In Development, you’ve likely seen my visual rendition of the Verhey Rule. It looks something like this:
As several of you helpfully pointed out, this is pretty much ready-made for memeage (meme-able? something like that). It’s easy enough to grab the image and swap in your own words, of course. But just to make life as easy as possible for your future needs, I’ve gone ahead and swapped out the words. Here you go:
Enjoy. 
In Development is back yet again, and this week the topic is lands.
Well, the topic is really putting together a mana base, and I’m unveiling a whole new revised set of tools for the new Scars-M12-Innistrad Standard.
You can click here to read the article. Right now, the article has both Excel versions of the revised spreadsheet attached, but the Numbers version has been left out. I assume it’ll go up presently, but in the meantime, you can click here to download the Numbers version.
As we’ve seen from prior experience, you all do a great job of predicting new metagames. With the rotation of Standard this Friday, the time has come to once again weigh in with your vote. What are the best decks? What will everyone else be playing? What are the key cards?
With three quick questions (and a bonus fourth, if you have a deck or two to share) you can make your mark on the new Standard.
Just click here to weigh in. Thanks!
So, given an SCG Open Series top sixteen that was heavily laden with both Mental Misstep and Stoneforge Mystic, is Legacy being snowed under by these two cards?
Well, I was curious about that, too. So here’s some information from the top sixteens for all the SCG Legacy Open events since June.
First, copies of Stoneforge Mystic and Mental Misstep in the top sixteens (listed as the percentage of the theoretical “maximum” of 64 copies across the top 16 decks).
Second, decks featuring Stoneforge Mystic and Mental Misstep (again, as a percentage of the maximum 16 copies in the top 16). Note that a deck is a “Mystic” or “Misstep” deck if it has even one copy of the card in question.
There aren’t enough data points to actually make anything of the apparent “upswing” caused by the results from today’s event, so I’d pay more attention to the averages in each case.
That works out to:
Stoneforge Mystic card percentage – 23.2%
Mental Misstep card percentage – 58.3%
Stoneforge Mystic deck percentage – 28.6%
Mental Misstep deck percentage – 63.4%
So, call it a quarter of the top sixteen decks, on average, featuring Stoneforge Mystic, and approaching two thirds featuring Misstep.
So far, I’d say I’m okay with that Stoneforge Mystic tally – for a card that forces the game to occur on the battlefield, that seems like a fine percentage.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if that Misstep tally is particularly “good” – but I don’t know that it’s “bad” either. It’s just kind of meh, like the prevalence of Force of Will. It’s a core element of the format, at least for now…and that seems okay to me, if not particularly interesting.
What do you think? Good sign? Bad? Let me know. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next Legacy Open brings.
It’s In Development time again, and this week the topic of choice is a card you may well have expected me to have written about already – Birthing Pod! What does it do? How does it impact the game? What’s the best Birthing Pod deck out there, and how can the Pod (appropriately) lead us down the path to subtle yet inexorable failure?
It’s all in there, along with some deck lists, 75% of which can end the game with one or another variety of infinite combo (including Jonathon Loucks’ craziness from the Seattle Open, which features two takes on arbitrarily large numbers).
So click here to read the article, then join the conversation. Which Pod is best?
Note that The Field Report is being deferred one week as I spent all my free time this week trying to break the commodity chemicals metagame instead of Standard.