Gifts Ungiven

Two days shy of the next batch of PTQs, DeckCheck serves us up a set of decks from two PTQ top eights in Italy, one in Rome, the other in Milan, both ostensibly having 100 players each.

Looking across these sixteen decks, we find some updates for Tron, Elves, All-in Red, and Bant. Click through to the extended entry for links and commentary.

I may end up buying this for someone I know.

Available at Greenhouse

I attended the second of the Bay Area PTQs for Honolulu today, hosted as they ably are of late at Superstars Game Center in San Jose. Superstars is having a Standard $1K next weekend. However, if you're in the general NorCal area and still want a shot at qualifying, there's also a PTQ the same day at Great Escape Games in Sacramento (click here for more info).

I had a fun, if insufficiently successful day today. The title is only sort of misleading; I'll explain it in the extended entry, along with the deck I brought, and a round-by-round of my tournament experience.

Overall, the tournament metagame this time around was a mix of Faeries, which really does seem to be the favorite of skilled pilots, as well as B/G Loam, Naya Zoo, Affinity, Storm, Slide, Elves, and Conley-Woods-style ReliquaryGeddon (if you don't know what that is, click here for BDM's column discussing Conley's deck, and click here to read about Conley's PTQ win). As far as I could see, the Big Domain style decks seem to have fallen away since the last Sac PTQ, probably because they're actually not all that great.

Once again, click through to the extended to see my deck choice and my round-by-round.

The Alara Reborn product site is up, including the Alara Reborn visual spoiler. Two things caught my eye.

First, the card that was initially spoiled as "Exsanguination" is actually this beauty:

I am so excited about the possibility of playing a new Cranial Extraction in the upcoming Austin PTQ season. Woot!

Second, the art on Pale Recluse is gorgeous:

Alara Reborn is looking good so far.

As the most recent Extended season wanders off into memory (with the last round of PTQs gone by, and just one Extended GP left to go), it's time to turn back to Standard. In the near term, Superstars is running a Standard $1K next weekend, which I may attempt to attend. Looking a little farther out into May, we have PTQs starting for Austin, and that's in the Standard format as well.

With all these things in mind, I had to plug back into Standard and figure out what was going on, then do some thinking about a deck that I'd really enjoy playing. The first one I went for was a planeswalkers deck that started out quirkier, but ended up looking rather more like the sole planeswalker deck that made it to the "top Standard decks" registry from Pro Tour Kyoto.

Click through to the extended entry for deck list and some development and play commentary.

This week over on the Evolution site, we have a "drafting with" column featuring Melissa DeTora. If you're the kind of person who likes this style of column (I'm not, so much) you might want to head over and take a look. You'll need to be able to read Spanish to read the commentary, but all the card names are in English if you just want to follow Melissa's picks.

Click here to go to "Drafting with Melissa DeTora"

I realized, in posting this, that I had no tags related to limited in my categories. That's a pretty solid reflection of my play preferences right there.

That sounds like a Batman graphic novel title.

As i've been considering Standard decks, it occurred to me to return to the retrace mechanic, which saw a ton of play in the recent Extended season, and which I used to decent effect in a previous Standard deck. Although Standard lacks the card advantage juggernaut that is Life from the Loam, there's still an opportunity to use (if not abuse) the retrace mechanic in the appropriate deck.

Click through to the extended entry for the Crime Harvest deck list and some commentary.

Wizards has posted the Austin PTQ schedule. You can click here for the full list of North American PTQs.

Here are the California dates and locations:

May 9 - San Diego
May 23 - San Jose
June 20 - Sacramento
June 27 - Los Angeles
August 22 - San Jose
August 29 - Los Angeles

I'm surprised that there's only one Sacramento listing so far. Perhaps that will change.

For thus of us who range a little farther afield, here are the adjacent PTQs:

August 1 - Phoenix and Las Vegas and Portland

Conveniently, all on the same day. This does mean, on the plus side, that none of these PTQs are guaranteed to be inundated with California players (although it's my understanding that Las Vegas usually gets the biggest California crowd).

In a pleasant surprise, Palladium has decided to monetize its back catalog by starting digital sales of its RPG line at DriveThruRPG. You can click here to see the available Palladium line. Nicely enough, the PDFs are discounted, meaning you can, for example, pick up the original Rifts core rulebook for $12.49.

The ability to monetize your past products by offering them in digital form is a good thing; the discounts and the convenience of not adding more physical products to my shelves mean that I'm inclined to blow a couple bucks from time to time on an older book that I may have been interested in years ago, and can now mine for ideas or just read with a sense of appreciation for the history of RPGs.

Over at Channel Fireball, Gerry T breaks down the current Standard, including a discussion of how it's all about the midrange, and how that and a lack of super-powerful card drawing in most decks has made individual card quality very important (and how this tends to null Thoughtseize a lot, e.g.).

This is a helpful breakdown of Standard as it is right now. Expect (hope?) that Alara Reborn will mix this up, but in the mean time, if you're going to a Standard event - for example, a $1K at Superstars - then the article gives a clear, cogent overview of the traits and specific decks of Standard.

Clearly I haven't been in a position to write a lot in the last week; I was thinking of going to a Standard tournament, but that did not happen. However, I'd like to point people toward two good articles at ChannelFireball.com. We have:

Initial Technology - First Thoughts on Alara Reborn - Luis Scott-Vargas walks through the Alara Reborn cards that have been spoiled so far and highlights some of the likely hits.

The Riki Rules - PTQing for Fun and no Profit - Riki Hayashi talks about his experience at this PTQ, and why a judge might want to play at a PTQ, even without a high likelihood of actually winning the event.

Mike Flores previewed this card earlier this week:

I was interested in this at a basic level, as it's sort of a Vindicate -/+. Minus, because it can't hit a land, plus because of the "echoing" feature.

The big question is where the Pulse fits in. Although our initial impulse might be to slot it into the Pernicious Deed position in a B/G rock-style deck, it isn't nearly as reliable in that role, since it's only a sweeper in those instances where your opponent has run out many of the same token (or, even rarer, many of the same card).

That said, it can still assassinate a planeswalker, and is even more versatile than Pithing Needle, which is our other reasonable choice in a pure B/G deck. With that in mind, I threw a B/G deck together and did a little testing. Click through to the extended entry for the list.

From a thread discussing older versus newer editions of D&D at RPGnet, with an eventual focus on whether earlier D&D tried to be 'realistic' -

Travel times is another one of those weird spots where it's become some what vestigial. Once upon a time how long it took you to get from A to B mattered a whole hell of a lot since every 8 hours (or whatever) you stood a chance of getting randomly mauled by a rampaging owlbear or a horde of orcs. Which, by the way, doesn't simulate shit unless you honestly think everyone who travels gets eaten by a grue every 10 miles. But as random encounters fall by the wayside the real reason for wanting to know how long it takes to get from A to B becomes a whole lot less important except for time-critical style adventures. Lo is born the scene based travel challenges and planned possible encounters to keep up the mystery of travel, and so dies the art of the overland map and careful management of how long travel takes.

I like it.

Courtesy of a heads up from Top 8 Magic, here is game one of the finals from GP Kobe 2009:

I thought their method of resolving Desire was interesting and unexpected. Thanks to Brian for the heads up, and Naoaki Umesaki for taking the video and putting it together nicely (notice the helpful tracking of life totals, cards played, mana pools, and storm counts). Apparently the remaining games from the final match will be posted as well. I'm looking forward to it.

Alara Reborn is available in Gatherer now. If you're not doing something else (e.g. being in the wedding party for your good friend, which is what I'll be up to tomorrow) you can hit up a prerelease and check out the cards in person. Whether you can make it or not, you can check out the cards that way I'm doing right now by clicking here.

Trace of Abundance initially seemed like a very exciting card, right up until I remembered a key bit of wording. Let's take a look...

The upside

Shroud, man, shroud.

One of the significant downsides of Fertile Ground is that it converts the enchanted land into a super-high-value target. Destroy it and you gain card and tempo advantage; bounce it and you gain tempo advantage and get to trade your bounce card for a card, instead of merely trading your bounce card for tempo. It is, in a word, painful. Nonetheless, ramp archetypes since the release of Lorwyn have relied heavily on Fertile Ground. Trace can replace Fertile Ground with a color-appropriate enchantment that keeps its enchanted land safe, preventing 2-for-1s and tempo-for-1s.

The downside

This is where my reverie ended, as I suddenly recalled that Garruk targets. Fertile Ground is favored over other ramp methods (e.g. Rampant Growth) because of the synergy between Ground and Garruk. Since Trace has Shroud rather than semi-Shroud (aka Troll ability), it blocks Garruk, which is unfortunate.

The outcome

I think the net effect of Shroud on Trace is to keep it out of many Standard ramp decks, since they benefit so much from the presence of Garruk. That said, there's extensive deck design space to use this sucker in Block, and if you happen to want to build a Garruk-less ramp deck, Trace is a good choice.

As an exercise in fully exploring a new set, I'm taking a stab at making a series of Standard decks this week using and taking into account new options from Alara Reborn. For the first deck of the week, I'm going to pitch a white-red-green aggro build that I'm perhaps not-so-cleverly calling "Decade of Aggression" (from here). In this build, I'm using thirteen Alara Reborn cards in the main and four more in the sideboard, which is a pretty chunky contribution from this new set.

Click through to the extended entry for deck list and commentary.