Gifts Ungiven

The December 2007 DCI Banned and Restricted List announcement is up. It's mostly irrelevant to me, featuring a bunch of bannings in online formats (e.g. every transmute card is banned in Prismatic, where tutors are inherently overpowered). The interesting bit for Magic in general is the shift in when cards become legal for Constructed play. Previously, the policy was that sets became legal on the next 20th of the month (whenever that happened) following the release.

This year, that led to the super-quirk that Future Sight became Constructed legal on the second day of GP Strasbourg (which, of course, meant it wasn't legal, since you don't get to switch out decks if you make day two). This new policy doesn't inherently reduce the chances of that happening again, but it does mean that there won't be this annoying situation of knowing that the format is about to change, possibly dramatically, but having to go with the old one anyway.

That said, it's going to lead to quite a few more disqualifications if any event comes right on the heels of a set release that rolls a block out of legality. This year's Amateur National Championship came a week after Tenth Edition became Constructed legal (and thus a couple weeks after it was released!) and I still ended up game lossing my second round opponent because he had cards in his deck that rolled out when Ninth went away. The prospect of, say, a GP that starts on the Saturday following the introduction of a new block is pretty daunting, organizationally (although it would be great to see what people took into such a completely unknown environment -- even GP Krakow benefited from the results from this years' stock of States/Champs events).

The basic concept behind a "Zoo" deck is to run a bunch of efficient little creatures as well as burn or other enablers to clear a path for them. Classic Zoo differs from Red Deck Wins / Boros Deck Wins by dipping into three colors for efficient creatures and burn. In the last round of Standard, a Zoo deck would have Lightning Helix, Watchwolf, and all the nice Ravnica lands to support it.

These days, there's some talk of a new take on Zoo that relies on the tribal "reveal" creatures like Goldmeadow Stalwart, Flamekin Bladewhirl, and Wren's Run Vanquisher. This build stays in White-Red-Green, like classic Zoo. I have a take I'd like to try that eschews Green for Black, since Black has a key Changeling card to support the concept.

Decklist in the extended.

The 2007 Magic world championship began last night with the opening ceremonies and the hall of fame induction. This year's hall of fame is cool because it includes long-time Wizards employee (and CMU alum!) Randy Buehler, as well as possibly-the-best-player-ever Kai Budde.

I enjoy Worlds because it ends in Standard, and I like watching Standard games -- especially since it's always a fairly recent Standard, without a lot of work done to figure it out. This year, the individual event features sixteen rounds of play split across three days. The format is described here, and goes as follows:

Day 1: 5 rounds of Standard, 1 Lorywn draft (3 rounds)
Day 2: 1 Lorwyn draft (3 rounds), 5 rounds of Legacy

Followed by a Standard top eight. Last year, it was Extended instead of Legacy. I'd be happy with either, as both are interesting and a little foreign to me (although with PTQs for Hollywood coming up it might be more interesting to see how Lorwyn factors into Extended).

Day 3 is the team day, which this year is 2-headed-giant draft (thus the four-person teams instead of the three of prior years).

Day 4 has the Standard top eight I just mentioned.

If you're curious, here's the invite list for this year's Worlds. Coverage will appear here, on the coverage page.

I may or may not watch the top eight live for this one -- it's kind of at a bad time (which is a funny thing to say, given what a terrible time PT Valencia's top eight came in at). It'll still be fun to watch after the fact, even if I don't do the live thing this time around.

Fun note from the invite page -- Luxembourg's national champion? Yin Zhang.

The first five rounds of Standard are done at Worlds. You can see the round five standings by clicking here, and you can check out the undefeated decklists by clicking here. The "big news" deck of the event so far is a mono-red Dragonstorm/Swathe variant that uses Spinerock Knoll as a Storm enabler (consider -- "Rift Bolt, Shock, Incinerate, play Hideaway card...Dragonstorm for 4"). Apparently, Gab Nassif and friends were selling the deck design off to other players (including Finkel and WPT player Dave Williams) for 10% of their eventual winnings. They did a Deck Tech segment for it:

Apparently, they saw someone playing this in a car qualifier tournament at GP Daytona and decided to go with it.

Notably, none of the storm players went undefeated. Here are the undefeated players after the Standard rounds, and their decks:

• Jan Doise - U/B Mannequin
• Simon Englund - R/u/g "Red Deck Wins" (splashing green for Tarmogoyf and blue for Psionic Blast)
• Hong Fei Yung - U/G Faeries
• Gerardo Godinez Estrada - R/G Snow Big Mana
• Christoph Huber - B/G Rock
• Chris Lachmann (PT San Diego winner) - R/G Snow Big Mana
• Katsuhiro Mori (yes, 2005 World Champion and recently off his suspension) - B/G Elves Rock
• Yoshitaka Nakano - B/G Elves Rock
• Mikko Nurmi - R/G Big Mana
• Sam Stein (PT Valencia quarterfinalist) - B/G Rock

There's a lot of Snow on the board for the Americans, with many running the R/G Snow Big Mana deck. Paul Cheon is 4-1 with this deck, and Luis Scott-Vargas is 3-2 with it. Humorously, Billy Moreno, aware of this trend toward Snow, said he's sideboarding two copies of Freyalise's Radiance (go ahead, click the link) in his Dryad deck. Perhaps it's not helping enough, as he's 2-3 following Standard.

One interesting feature of this year's Worlds is how prior winners are doing. Mori is 5-0 through the Standard, and last year's winner, Makihito Mihara, came out 4-1 (and as Brian David-Marshall reminds us, Mihara's median PT finish is top eight this year...).

Day one of Worlds 2007 is done (well, probably it's been done for a while now). Here are the top ten in the standings after five rounds of Standard and three of Lorwyn draft:

• Yoshitaka Nakano (the only perfect score left)
• Katsuhiro Mori (maybe he can repeat -- it'd be a good way to kick off a new year of post-suspension play)
• Cristoph Huber
• Sam Stein (nice to see him doing well after getting such a poor quarterfinal matchup at Valencia)
• Gabe Walls
• Pat Chapin
• Sebastian Thaler
• Kazuya Mitamura
• Panaiotis Zacharias
• Armin Birner

Rounding out the day, here's a cool play note from the day one coverage blog:

Finally Riccardo [Standard head judge Riccardo Tessitori] pointed out an interesting rules interaction he thought might benefit those reading from home. During one of the Standard rounds a player was facing a horde of Tarmogoyfs that he desperately wanted to reduce in size. Fortunately for him he had a Tombstalker in hand; the 5/5s delve cost reduction would definitely go a long way towards cutting the 'Goyfs down to size by removing cards in his graveyard. The question he posed to the judges: was it possible to delve for more than the six generic mana in the Tombstalker's casting cost? Judge Tessitori revealed a surprising answer: yes, you can remove more than six cards for the cost reduction. Of course you won't actually be able to pay less than six generic mana or somehow generate mana by "going negative," but in a pinch, staring down a horde of Tarmogoyfs, Tombstalker can go a long ways toward cutting the two-drops down to a manageable force for a dwindling life total.

After a Lorwyn draft and five rounds of Legacy play, this year's Magic Worlds top 8 is set. Here's the list (and what they're running in the Sunday playoffs, which, as always, is Standard):

• 1. Christoph Huber, Switzerland - B/G Rock
• 2. Gabriel Nassif, France - Spinerock Storm
• 3. Yoshitaka Nakano, Japan - B/G Elves Rock
• 4. Katsuhiro Mori, Japan - B/G Elves Rock
• 5. Uri Peleg, Israel - w/B/G Siege Rock
• 6. Pat Chapin, USA - Spinerock Storm
• 7. Roel van Heeswijk, Netherlands - B/G Rock
• 8. Koutarou Ootsuka, Japan - U/B Mannequin

This does not bode well for Nassif's and Chapin's chances. Chapin said in an interview with Rich Hagon that their deck would be in trouble if there were more than a few Rock decks in the top eight, due to the persistent disruption and hard-to-deal-with midrange threats of Rock. Except for Ootsuka's Mannequin deck, the top eight is Chapin, Nassif, and a bunch of Rock decks. Ouch.

This is Mori's third consecutive appearance in the top eight at Worlds, which is pretty cool. Hopefully, he'll remain unsuspended this year (and act rather less like Olivier Ruel, who seems to be perpetually on the edge of getting himself yanked again for some stupid reason).

This year also sees the first Israeli (Uri Peleg) in the top eight at worlds.

I'll be rooting for (in order), Pat Chapin (USA!), Mori (repeat?), and Nakano (for coming the closest to maintaining a perfect score throughout).

Other notable finishers include Raphael Levy (15th), last year's world champion Makihito Mihara (18th), Guillame Wafo-tapa (22nd), Luis Scott-Vargas (25th), and Hall of Fame inductee Zvi Mowshowitz (27th). With Zvi finishing at 27th and Amiel Tenenbaum coming in at 95th, Brian David-Marshall has won a bet with Pierre Canali over who would finish higher. Good job to Zvi, coming back to competitive play after some time away. Tomoharu Saitou's 37th place finish was good enough to win him Player of the Year, so congrats to him as well.

You can see the final Swiss standings by clicking here. The player profiles are here, and the decklists going into the Sunday playoffs are here. Expect an even bigger run on Thoughtseize and Garruk for the next few months.

Tomorrow is the team day, with two-headed giant play all day. Then Sunday, at 9am PST, we'll see the top eight set up for quarterfinals and go from there.

As Rich Hagon has said more than once, even though the Worlds top eight is Standard, the top eight participants may not have had Standard be their best rounds of the event. Is there any predictive value in a player's Standard record, going into tomorrow? Here's how each player in the top eight did in the first five (Standard) rounds at Worlds this year:

• 1. Christoph Huber - 5 wins
• 2. Gabriel Nassif - 4 wins, 1 loss
• 3. Yoshitaka Nakano - 5 wins
• 4. Katsuhiro Mori - 5 wins
• 5. Uri Peleg - 4 wins, 1 loss
• 6. Pat Chapin - 4 wins, 1 loss
• 7. Roel van Heeswijk - 4 wins, 1 loss
• 8. Koutarou Ootsuka - 4 wins, 1 loss

There's not a lot of variance there to work with (not really surprisingly). I guess we'll just wait and see what happens tomorrow.

I watched the live broadcast from the final day of Worlds 2007 yesterday, although I didn't bother to write anything this time around. I was a little surprised to see that the live broadcast began with the team finals, and that the individual quarterfinals were already done. I'd been looking forward to seeing Mori in action again, so that was a bit of a disappointment.

You can see short recaps and post-match interviews from the quarterfinals on WotC's Magic YouTube channel. For example, here's the Mori-Peleg recap:

The semifinals were interesting, and the standout match was definitely the Dragonstorm mirror of Nassif versus Chapin. Much as he did last year, Nassif made a misplay that helped cost him the match -- although, as Randy Buehler correctly says, this year's mistake just made it far more likely that he'd lose the match, whereas last year he actually threw away a game he'd otherwise have won.

Despite the fact that I went in rooting for Chapin, I ended up wanting Uri Peleg to win just because a Dragonstorm win is so non-interactive. Chapin also wasted a little time asking the judge if he could pretend to accidentally reveal his sideboard plan to try and throw Peleg off. I can't imagine that much would have kept Peleg off of his own sideboard plan, however, as siding in disruption made more sense than any other option. At the end of the day, Peleg had stability of his own and disruption for Chapin that kept Chapin's deck off its plan.

You can read all the final reporting here. In addition to the decks used for the top eight itself, they've nicely gone ahead and listed the top Legacy decklists and the top Standard decklists. This is useful, since people may look at the top eight and think that B/G is just the way to go. As Aaron Forsythe reminds us in an interview with Rich Hagon, the decks in the top eight get there because their players made it through a format that was about two-thirds "not Standard," so they're not strictly representative of the best choices there. The top Standard decks (4-1 or better), in order from most to least frequent:

16 B/G Rock-style builds (all Elves versions wrapped into this total)
15 R/G Big Mana
8 U/B Mannequin
6 U/G Faeries
5 Dragonstorm
2 B/G Rack
2 Mono-Blue (Sonic Boom)
1 Red Deck Wins
1 B/R Goblins
1 U/B Faeries (go Zvi!)
1 B/R something
1 U/B Teachings (Wafo-Tapa)
1 Mono-Blue Pickles

...and, of course, you'd really want the full breakdown of decks that went into the initial Standard round to really know how good these are. After all, about six Dragonstorm decks went in, and five came out at 4-1 or better. A boatload of R/G Big Mana decks went in, so their entry-to-wins ratio is nowhere near as good. Mind you, if you try and play the new Dragonstorm deck now, you're likely to insta-lose to someone who also watched Worlds and has sideboarded Story Circle against you. So it goes.

I'm normally much happier playing Magic in person. It's pleasant to sit around with friends, take in the environment, maybe watch other games or just chat with folks. That said, I'm also finding I'm at the point in life where I can't do what I did in my grad school, Mechwarrior champion (seriously) days, and just head off to a tournament two or three days a week. However, I'd still like to be able to play, and to play in a competitive environment against a range of decks and play styles.

So I've been thinking about going in on a constructed deck on Magic Online for a little while now. I'm not a big fan of the virtual property, especially with redemption working the way it does (you need to complete a full set to redeem virtual cards for physical ones). However, I do like the "play whenever" convenience, including the fact that I can still hang out near my friends and loved ones instead of having to truck off to a game store thirty or more minutes away.

I started out with Magic online by playing in the current open beta. I heartily recommend this as a way to try the game for free -- you can draft, play sealed, played casually -- it depends on what they're testing that week. This opportunity may go away soon, as Wizards is shooting for a release of 3.0 in early 2008. So if you're going to try it, try it now.

You can get information on the open beta by clicking here.

One major limitation to getting into Magic online, for me, was how annoying the buying and selling environment is. Basically, you're stuck with a cluttered, hard-to-parse message board system. Too annoying to use. While you can buy Magic Online cards on ebay, that's also a little cumbersome and slow (although searching for and buying things via ebay is much, much easier than the trading area on Magic Online).

Fortunately, I found my solution in the cleverly-designed CardShark site. Serving both physical and virtual collectible games, CardShark is basically a virtual escrow site. Sellers list items for sale, and buyers then buy these items via PayPal. PayPal, however, pays CardShark. CardShark then holds the money for a week, to give the buyer time to make sure that the deal is going correctly and that the property is being transferred. After this escrow period, CardShark pays out to the seller. CardShark also has a feedback rating system.

I decided to make my first constructed deck a Rock variant (since I do enjoy that color combination, and it lets me keep playing my favorite planeswalker). I was able to pick up all the cards I wanted in one fell swoop, and I gave my deck a test run in the Casual Play - Tournament Practice area last night. Good fun.

Deck list in the extended.

A little while ago during Lorwyn previews, Frank Karsten ended up previewing Cloudthresher in this online tech article. A lot of the online response to this was disappointment that Frank was given such an obviously "Timmy" card to discuss. Even though he mentioned the value of flashing it out, evoking it out, and hurricaning, people weren't so keen on the Thresher.

This may have changed with Worlds. There, Thresher destroyed whole boardfulls of Faeries, and singlehandedly took care of a Hellkite in the final match to garner Uri Peleg a win. As it happens, even with quadruple green in its casting cost, a 7/7 Flash critter with a pet Skyroclasm is not bad at all.

Roar.

In his Star City column this week, crack podcast coverage reporter Rich Hagon tells us that brand-new World Champion Uri Peleg will not be playing in the first Pro Tour of 2008 in Kuala Lumpur.

Not by choice, but because he's Israeli, and Malaysia doesn't recognize Israel.

They've mentioned Russian players having visa issues in the past, but this is likely the first time it's simply been impossible, for political reasons, for a "star player" to make it to a Pro Tour.

Recently, I've been playing my B/G Rock variant, Commands Rock, on Magic Online (as I describe in this post). I named it after the fact that I'm running both the oft-used Profane Command and the under-used Primal Command.

Which is AMAZING.

Just saying. More in the extended.

In games, I appreciate a confluence of mechanics and flavor. It's not enough that a game have interesting mechanical actions; it better engage me thematically as well. This is why I tend toward more characteristically "American" games like Axis & Allies, and away from purer abstracts (although I appreciate games that are fairly abstract with lighter themes, like Carcassonne).

Magic is confluence city. More in the extended.

The unfortunate news came yesterday that Erick Wujcik was just recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that has already spread to his liver.

You may, like me, know Wujcik from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. This was the first roleplaying game that I bought on my own, and as a little kid, I was enthralled. He's probably much better known for his innovative design work for Amber Diceless Role-Playing, which was quite different than anything that preceded it in the hobby. An entirely different and much larger gaming community knows him from his work on the computer gaming side, where he led work on Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, and many other games.

Wujcik's friend and sometimes publisher Kevin Siembieda has set up a tribute site here, so people can let Erick know they appreciate his work before he's gone.

You can see his roleplaying game credits here.

In the last two months, I've been thinking of (gradually) picking up a full set of the shocklands, those Ravnica duals that are nearly as good as the classic, Legacy-and-Vintage-only duals I sold off two years ago. I have two reasons:

1) I think they'll be back in a core set soon enough, perhaps as soon as eleventh edition (which I hope maintains tenth's black borders, by the way)

2) Once Extended rolls over in late 2008, we'll actually have the makings of a decent Extended card set across my pool of friends (for this same reason, I've been rounding out my Kamigawa collection, since I've gone back and decided I really do enjoy the flavor of Kamigawa block after all)

However, you always need more lands than anything else, and with only one amongst us having Ravnica duals, it figures that we're going to want more. Fair enough -- there's no rush, so we should be able to pick up them up at a fair price...and until the beginning of December, that was true, with playsets of four shocklands going for less than twenty dollars.

But not anymore. Checking in with ebay shows that the prices are shooting right back up, although still short of their full-legal-in-Standard heyday. So what gives?

It's PTQ season for PT Hollywood!

With an Extended PTQ season kicking up on January 5th, it's no wonder that people are rushing to pick up shocklands and the prices are going back up. Fine by me, as I'm almost certainly not going to waste my money by trying to play in an Extended PTQ. I will look forward to the end of the PTQ season in early March, when people will be dumping their duals once again. In the meantime, I remain fascinated by the forces pushing the Magic secondary market.

"shanoxilt" asks us this question on the RPGnet forums. Specifically, the question was:

Every time someone starts a topic that mentions fantasy cliches, many people respond that they hate elves.

Thank you for your replies. Have a pleasant day.

-

Some of the many fun and typically accurate replies:

-

The defining characteristic of elves is that they're better than you. - Ratoslav

-

A race of mary-sue's, whats not to hate.

Iron Kingdoms gave them katanas and trench coats, talk about overkill. - GoodnightChesty

-

They're the Vulcans of the Fantasy world.

Because of this, I've found, far to many of the closet basement nerds seem to be drawn to the idea of the fantasy "Master Race" and have either deemed to want to become one, idolize them, or honestly believes they are one. - Archangel777

-

aaannnd that they didn't have to do any real work to get that way. Look at Tolkien's elves.

They're prettier than you, wiser than you, stronger and faster and more skilled than you, they'll live forever, and everything they have they conjure up with their pretty pretty princess magical pixie fairy fuckwit powers. - Halloween Jack

-

Indeed.