Wizards has a buy a box promo offer for Magic 2010:
The first 20 people to purchase a Magic 2010 Core Set booster box at certain locations will get a foil alternate art Honor of the Pure promo card!
Click here to learn more and find a participating store near you.
While my site has been down in the past week, I've been having a lot of fun with a cascade-centric control build. This design came about because I challenged myself to move away from the midrange, which is an area I've tended to live in lately. I intuitively appreciate the midrange because I like being able to shift modes between control and aggression, but I think being stuck in any one playstyle is (1) bad for my development and (2) kind of boring, whether I realize it or not. Thus, I decided to push myself in one direction or another, and the first place I went was control.
Cascade Pulse is a five-color control build that started as an attempt to merge planeswalker control with cascade control, with the idea that as many of the cards as possible should represent card advantage, either on the same turn or over time (I still love AJ Sacher's description of planeswalkers as epic spells that let you keep playing spells). What I ended up with is a control deck that leverages powerful card advantage to achieve control relatively quickly. It's good against a reasonably large swath of the field, and if I were heading off to a Standard event soon, I might tune this, concoct a metagame-appropriate sideboard, and bring it.
Click through to the extended entry for deck list and commentary.
Continue reading "Cascade Pulse (an Alara Reborn Standard deck)" »
With the set almost completely (if not necessarily reliably at all times - where'd that Lotus land go, eh?) spoiled, I'm definitely thinking about what I like in M2010. As a player who started in Beta, I think they've done a good job of cleaving more toward iconic, generic-and-cool fantasy elements for this new core set. The theming is stronger, there are fewer cards with random, hard-to-place names, and in general the set has more playables than we've come to expect from a core set.
I'll take a look at individual cards in the spoiler-rrific extended entry, specifically addressing rares that interest me, since, as always, I'll be buying a full common/uncommon 4x playset, and then picking out individual rares to purchase.
The blog was having some issues over the past week, but should be back up and running now. I'll probably make some incidental comments on the spoiled M10 cards in the near future, and I have a cascade control deck list I've been enjoying, for anyone who still has a pre-M10 PTQ coming up (or an FNM, if your FNMs are Standard).
Just as I was considering my more-than-occasional error of generating and using decks that don't close, Zac Hill writes an excellent article distilling the fundamental issue that underlies this problem.
How to Break a Format with Two Easy Questions, by Zac Hill.
The Magic 2010 visual spoiler is up.
Lightning Bolt is confirmed. I am duly ambivalent. It's very pretty art.
I like the new black-blue dual (these new duals do a much better job of doing what I want a color-fixing land to do):
In developing an appreciation for an idea, sometimes we want to factcheck ourselves to make sure that we are not in love with the idea beyond the point of reason, or, conversely, that we have not misapprehended the situation such that our good idea turns out to be, on the whole, bad. While I wouldn't advocate setting aside your creativity out of fear of having made a bad choice, I think it's good to be able to evaluate those situations where you have badly mismatched your choice to the event.
Or, to put it another way, 1-2-2.
Over in the extended entry, I'm going to take a look at a deck choice that turned out to be sorely mismatched for our area, and reflect on how it represents not just a mismatch, but also an incorrect approach to a core component of the game.
Continue reading "The wrong tool for most jobs (a PTQ report)" »