No, I was drawing a card every time I played a man. But he'd playtested the exact same decklist and knew what the plan was, and so when I got the correct four guys on the table and activated Entity at 1, Pascal said "Yeah yeah I know the combo. How many times are you going to do it?" I said "100". He said "you're dead." The reason both Grgur and I got "gotten" was the like resigned tone of voice Pascal managed as if he was already in the process of scooping his cards. I told Bill about the massive punt for the WoTC coverage because it was, you know, newsworthy that the G and I had played so terribly, but it really needs to be looked at as a masterful Jedi Mind Trick by Pascal.

I'd already had the impression that this was a "forced" error based on Pascal's question, but the elaboration on exactly how he forced it makes the story even better.

I'd like to say I wouldn't let that happen to be, but then, I let someone Prowl out a Notorious Throng off of a Mistbind Clique hit last week, so I'm in no position to talk.

Overall, I think the Ahura build is quite solid, and it fairly cleanly beat the matchups I'd given some thought to ahead of time -- Faeries and Lark, while suffering against Merfolk and Tokens.

The take-home message today is that an active Battlegrace Angel is ridiculous.

The full tournament report is in the extended entry.

Apparently, that's been a common enough request to prompt a revamp. This week, the beta version of a revised Gatherer went live.

Click here for Gatherer beta

The simple search is probably the way many people used the old Gatherer -- type in a card name, get the card back. The advanced search, however, is nifty. You're given a large number of options for things to include in the search, using a boolean AND/OR/NOT to qualify the term. The interface has the search options on the left, then it shows you the search you're building on the right. Here's a search I set up earlier this week while I was trying to find creatures in Extended that could potentially serve as Elf ruiners:

This is a search I couldn't have done in the old Gatherer, where I would not have been able to rule out both Persist and Wither (which tend to clutter up the results, as you can see if you drop those qualifiers back out of the search). Here's another search (again, in Extended) for cards that have alternate payment options but which are not Suspend cards:

Once you have your results, you can choose display options including text, text plus card (the default), and a pure visual spoiler display. You can also sort as you like -- although I haven't yet figured out how sorts are ordered if you stack them. My default preference -- true for old Gatherer as well -- is to sort by CMC, in ascending order.

I'm happy to see this new, significantly more powerful tool being made available to players. It's handy, it's reasonably intuitive, and it's really fun to play with. Good job.

Last year, Zaiem Beg addressed the topic of sideboarding, discussing the approach of designing a deck for each matchup, then bringing these decks together in a combined core and sideboard. In effect, the goal here is to pick out your likely matchups, then design a number of ideal versions of your deck, each suited to a given matchup. In the current environment, one might want to design to beat Faeries, Five-color Control, Kithkin, Red Deck Wins, and Reveillark.

That's what I did here:

Click here to see the full spreadsheet in a separate window

Go to the extended entry to see where I went from there.

The Topps Company announced today that WizKids will immediately cease operations and discontinue its product lines.

For consumer announcements, please refer to www.wizkidsgames.com over the coming days for further information.

Battletech was the very first game I ever bought with my own money, and I played it all the way through high school. I picked up the giant robot bug again in grad school with Mechwarrior, which had a robust tournament scene in my area. I was actually the top-ranked player in the city for much of my time playing the game, but I dropped it when I moved and Mechwarrior's game design shifted to try and retain market share.

WizKids has always seemed like a company with a bit of a shelf life. Although Jordan Weisman hit on something very smart with his application of the collectible model to miniatures gaming, both in terms of letting players get right into the action and in reducing the per-miniature price point, the games began to collapse under their own weight after a while, and unlike in the arena of collectible cards, players balked at the possibility of set rotations that would push pieces out of the "core" gaming environment. Somehow, it seems more objectionable to no longer be able to bring your miniatures to the tournament than to have to leave your cards in a box at home.

I am sad to see WizKids go even though I'm not currently playing any of their games. This will not, however, be the end of their properties, as Jordan Weisman has shown an impressive ability to resurrect his intellectual property over and over again in new forms, as witnessed by the creation of Mechwarrior and the licensed production of material for classic Battletech, Shadowrun, and Earthdawn. In articles I've read about Weisman, he reveals that his epiphany many years ago was that the future is not in licensing other people's material -- FASA licensed Star Trek, Doctor Who, He-Man, and Top Gun -- but in creating your own intellectual property that would endure past a single incarnation, generating revenue into perpetuity.

And so it has done, and so I imagine it will continue to do.

When I first saw Elspeth I was most excited by her first ability, which both upped her Loyalty and made guys. Because, hey, making lots of creatures is good! However, in practice, I've found that the correct use for Elspeth is outlined above.

This was an eventful States, featuring hundreds of players, a hunt for tables, and a visit from the San Jose fire department. I have a sneaking suspicion it's still going on even as I post this.

Over on Top 8 Magic, BDM posted about New York States. They had 134 people.

We had 273.

More in the extended.

I'll be playing in the newly resurrected States tomorrow. Expect a deck list and tournament report after the fact.

• Ninth place - Tomohiro Aridome, playing Mono-Blue Control (with Azami, Lady of Scrolls)
• Tenth place - Johan Sadeghpour, playing Goblins (with the Elf-killer, Goblin Sharpshooter)
• Eleventh place - Philipp Summereder, playing Dredge
• Twelfth place - Carlos Amaya Troncoso, playing Death Cloud
• Thirteenth place - Tomas Kannegiesser, playing Mono-Blue Control
• Fourteenth place - Rashad Miller, playing All-In Red
• Fifteenth place - Andreas Muller, playing Mono-Blue Control (with extra colors for bigger Engineered Explosives)
• Sixteenth place - Nikolaus Eigner, playing Dredge

Notice the lack of Elves? Also, notice that three MBC decks and two Dredge decks top sixteened here? Even in its ostensibly "gutted" form, Dredge was able to power its way through a sea of Zoo and Elves to get two people into the top sixteen. I think that's quite interesting, and worth further analysis.

But I'm not going to do that here. Instead, I've dredged deeper into the day two deck lists, to take a look at interesting builds that were off the beaten path and still managed to make day two. Click through to the extended entry for a collection of interesting deck lists with a bit of commentary on each. I've posted them in order from least to most successful, to give you an idea how well the deck and its pilot managed to do.

Apparently, lots of people were looking for Pat Chapin's Next Level Gifts list, which you can find here. I was happy to see Shouta Yasooka's black-blue tron list here.

Of course, if Elf Ball is still viable when the qualifier season for Pro Tour Honolulu 2009 rolls around, expect people to pack a whole lotta hate against it, and deck lists to look quite different.

As for the top eight, props to local Cali guy LSV for making it in at eighth place, and props to Kenny Oberg for piloting his beautifully weird rogue deck into the top eight as well. I'm not necessarily excited about six elf decks in the top eight, but maybe the mirrors will be interesting. At any rate, this ought not to run too long.

The big story is not that over a quarter of the field turned up with some variant of Zoo, capitalizing on Wild Nacatl and the general value of aggression in a recently compressed card pool (which, even while compressed, still comes in at thousands and thousands of cards). The big story is, instead, the "worst kept secret" deck, Elf Ball. Perhaps most exciting to my sense of quirk, however, is the Tezzeret and Trinket Mage deck that Kenny Oberg piloted to an undefeated day one finish (the other undefeated day one player is PT veteran Gadiel Szleifer, who's running Faeries with Dark Confidant and Jitte).

My two favorite parts of the day's coverage are "not knowing how to play your combo" and "All-in Red."

The first shows up here in the Day One blog, and concerns what happens when you accidentally kill yourself because you've forgotten a critical aspect of your combo deck. To wit, Zac Hill "going off" with his Elf Ball deck:

When Zac began going through the motions, Pascal simply nodded, having designed the combo himself and providing the Belgians with it. Seemingly resigned to his fate, Vieren shrugged and asked, "So, how many times?" When Hill responded with a ridiculously large number, Pascal scooped up his cards, adding, "Okay, you're dead."

Would you believe Grgur also forgot about his Glimpse? Unbelievably, Pascal was the lucky recipient of back-to-back game wins as a result of his opponents' rare but careless play. When asked about the situation Pascal replied, "I knew about the play. In testing, Marijn [Lybaert] would always say 'Go infinite,' and I always said, 'Don't or you'll deck yourself!'"

Notably, Pascal designed the specific Elf Ball build both his opponents accidentally suicided with.

The second is in this round seven coverage of a match between Owen Turtenwald and PT scorekeeper Rashad Miller. Rashad brought "All-in Red" to the tournament, a deck that tries to do, well, this:

Rashad was on the play, and led with Simian Spirit Guide, Rite of Flame, Seething Song, Deus of Calamity.

"We can move on to Game 2 if you like?"

Heh.

Here's the Day One archetype breakdown

Here are the round eight standings

Here's the PT coverage

...and, to end it all, here's the day one wrap: