For those of you attending GP San Diego this weekend, here’s my short list of places you might want to go for food (or just to hang out) when you’re not Moderning your way to victory.

Near-ish to the venue:

The Field – A genuine Irish pub, with genuine Irish food (and you can watch quidditch matches – aka hurling – on television there early some morning). The Field serves Irish breakfast from 9am to 1pm on weekends, which is too late if you’re in the main event, but can otherwise carry you through the day. Guinness and coffee at breakfast will do that for you.

Taka Sushi – Very good sushi place in the Gaslamp area.

If you can get slightly farther away:

Point Loma Seafoods – The best fresh seafood. Like, anywhere. My favorite is the crab sandwich, which will spoil you for all future crab sandwiches.

‘bertos of all kinds – If you haven’t had cheap Mexican food in San Diego, find the nearest little place whose name is some modification of ‘berto: Albertos, Albertitos, Robertos, Roybertos (a personal favorite) and so forth. Alternately, you can eat where I did in high school and hit up Cotija Taco Shop in Point Loma (which earns 4 stars on Yelp!).

This week’s In Development was about manabases, and included a manabase worksheet for the current Standard. You can go to the article to get that worksheet in Excel format.

I’ve received a lot of requests for a similar worksheet for Modern.

As it happens, I made one of those for the last Modern PTQ season, and wrote about it in The Very Model of a Major Modern Manabase. The worksheet is in Numbers format, and will break if you try to import it into Excel, unless things have changed since I last checked. You can download it from the linked article, which also includes a handy video tutorial on how to use the worksheet.

I’ve written about prior Standard manabases (with associated worksheets) in All Your Victories Begin Here, which had worksheets for Scars – Innistrad Standard. If you want to go back even farther, you can read Building a Deep Mana Base.

I’m thinking of making an updated Modern manabase worksheet using Excel this time. That has dual advantages (as I mentioned in the most recent In Development) – it’s usable by more readers and I don’t have to hand code the hypergeometric distribution.

If any of you have specific questions you’d like to see answered by a worksheet, let me know and I’ll see if I can tackle them.

Confidant Affinity

It’s true – all of Luis’s 24+ performances have come at the helm of full-on aggro decks.

That prompted this bit of bonus content looking at the deck types that top performers have piloted to victory. In no particular order, here are our nine players with their deck choices and success levels by category. The visualization is the same as in the article, with green (24+ points), yellow (15-23 points), and red (<15 points) and the intensity of each color reflecting the number of performances in that category.

Just as Gau plays mostly outliers, he also plays mostly aggro.

That red square of badness in combo for Estratti is almost entirely Valakut decks.

Crushing victories seem to be weighted toward Aggro and Combo, which isn’t necessarily surprising. Having a proactive, aggressive plans does mean that if your opponent stumbles, you often just win.

If you’d like to see one of the projects I’m working on in the land of science, check out the new Orphan Enzymes Project site.

The “fuel” that really makes modern DNA-based science work is the fact that we have a giant library of genes with their functions. That’s how we are able to sequence a new gene and make a pretty solid guess at what it does based on what other genes it looks like.

Some of the time.

The problem is that we don’t always find a similar gene in our library of known genes. As it happens, there’s still a whole lot of older research out there waiting to be put into that library. That’s what the Orphan Enzymes Project is all about.

So if that sounds interesting, check the site out for a basic outline of the project, with more to come later.

Brains…or failing that, plant food

As I mentioned in my post about a Jund list, I did try to build an update on Black/Red Zombies. However, the addition of Golgari to Standard puts an understandable pressure (or incentive) on playing green in any Zombies deck. The build below came together after some tinkering and it’s surprisingly effective and resilient.

The Scavenge ability on Slitherhead is quite powerful, as is the ability to profitably pitch a Gravecrawler or Slitherhead to Lotleth Troll.

Dreg Mangler’s haste is also pretty important, as it makes it risky to leave yourself naked against what might otherwise be a slower aggro deck without apparent reach.

Golgari Zombies

With Farseek, all things are possible

My happiness at the return of the shocklands is only matched by my happiness at already owning a set of shocklands.

One of the extra-fun features of the new Standard is that Farseek is cleverly written to be able to search up nonbasics as long as they’re typed. This means that, as we saw back when Ravnica itself was in Standard, many decks will want to touch green to give them access to superlative mana fixing.

The Jund build below actually began life as inspiration in the middle of a frustrated effort to build an updated Black/Red Zombies list. It’s quite a bit of fun and gets good mileage out of both Dreadbore and Abrupt Decay.

Dread Jund

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&set=|[%22Innistrad%22]|[%22Dark%20Ascension%22]|[%22Avacyn%20Restored%22]|[%22Magic%202013%22]|[%22Return%20to%20Ravnica%22]

Until this Friday when Gatherer updates, of course.

The first ability certainly makes sense – Glissa brings more infect bugs.

The second ability obviously synergizes quite well with an infect deck. It’s also cute, inasmuch as it’s effectively another +1 ability.

It’s the third ability that really caught my attention, as it puts your opponent on a strict clock in a way that almost no other planeswalker ultimate has done to date. A poison-generating emblem just hadn’t occurred to me, and it’s a cool idea.

It’s also pretty slow, of course, since you need to make infect bugs unmolested for four turns before you can activate the emblem – and then you need to hope they don’t kill you while the emblem counts up. In fact, if you’re curious about just how slow Glissa’s ultimate would be, you can check out this article I wrote about how quickly planeswalkers deploy.

Anyway, the planeswalker design article is a fun one, so check it out.

I was lining up planeswalkers for this week’s In Development and noticed this neat progression in Chandra images.

Nifty.