Gifts Ungiven

Apparently, Magic can bring out bad things in people. Check out the following list of suspended DCI (that's the Magic organized play program) members, especially noting that many of them are banned for "assault":

The list of suspended folks

Last year, I sold off some Magic: the Gathering "power cards" that were (1) worth a lot of money and (2) not so fun for friendly play, which is all I'm likely to ever do again with my Magic collection. Recently, I did a survey of some of my other game-related items to decide which ones are likely to never, ever be used. Decisions I made:

1) I'm keeping Space Hulk. It's a great game that I will introduce to y'all who haven't played it at some point in the future.

2) I'm keeping the Space Marines I've put together, pretty much for use with Space Hulk (there's an issue of White Dwarf Magazine with rules for normal Marines in Space Hulk).

3) I'm keeping all my Epic stuff. I will put together the things I have not yet assembled, Krylon coat all the metal pieces to keep them from oxidizing away, and try playing with the new Epic Armageddon rules set.

4) I'm really not going to do anything with other unused or partially used miniatures, so a whole chunk of nostalgia is going on the ebay auction block. We have:

The old Space Marines boxed set, fit to produce three squads (30 marines). This is a second one that I never assembled.

A bunch of old Chaos Space marines.

32 Eldar Harlequins. These actually saw a reasonable amount of play time, back in the day.

Some other random Eldar.

Marneus Calgar, a Space Marine diorama. So far, this is the only one not selling.

36 Melniboneans, including one or maybe two Elrics. Bought when I thought I was going to participate in a fantasy wargame campaign -- they were packaged as Elves, but they're Melniboneans.

The Last Starfighter Tunnel Chase game. Seriously.

As I wrote earlier, I was selling some old minis and other stuff off on ebay last week. Here are the final selling prices:

The Last Starfighter Tunnel Chase game came in the lowest, at $1.25. I guess that 1984 bad-SF-movie nostalgia isn't strong enough.

Random Eldar came in at $3.50, and the Space Marine diorama at $4.28.

The Chaos Space Marine collection hit $42.75, while the now-rare Melniboneans came in at $52.00.

The Imperial Space Marine boxed set that I bought way back when for $20 sold for $88.78. What's sad about this is that it would run a person about $110 to field an equivalent number of plastic Space Marines these days, so even though I made a massive profit, it's still a great deal for the buyer.

Finally, my old Harlequins sold for $97.77, which surprised me until I realized I was offering a complete set -- unlike the little groups of Harlequins I'd seen sold on ebay previously.

I hope everyone enjoys their new toys.

I recently did a second round of purging of my old Magic: the Gathering cards via ebay. Last time, I accepted various forms of payment. This time, I only accepted Paypal, finding other things like money orders just too much of a hassle. I was concerned that this might negatively impact bidding, but it appears not to have had that effect.

The top performers:

• Library of Alexandria - $152.50
• A set of four Sinkholes, Beta edition - $118.84
• Mana Drain - $102.56
• Juzam Djinn #1 - $90.00
• Juzam Djinn #2 - $85.00

I was expecting the Library to hit $130, so I'm happy that it managed to top that. Actually, everything went for somewhat higher than I expected. I tried to time the auction end times so that the maximum number of people would be able to bid; I have no idea if that helped boost the prices.

Magic: the Gathering decks for the Standard environment featuring Ninth edition, Ravnica Block, and Time Spiral Block (in the extended).

Wizards of the Coast puts up Magic-related content via a Director account on YouTube. Some recent items of note include:

Mark Rosewater talking about the "Great Designer Search" Wizards recently ran:

A description and example of play of an Extended combo deck that floods the field with goblins:

Reporting from the current Pro Tour in Geneva:

The Pro Tour reporting so far is a touch dull, as it's not actual game coverage, but mostly focuses on drafting and the strategies employed for drafting.

From my rather limited Ravnica card set

Because I get sick of repeatedly querying the WotC webapp to find potential local tournies, here's a list of possible ones for March.

I was planning on making some "Ice Age block reunited" decks, but first I wanted to kick together some purely Coldsnap decks (in the extended).

Decks in the extended.

Time Spiral block deck concepts, in the extended.

Standard decks for 9th + Ravnica + Coldsnap + Time Spiral. In the extended.

More decks in the extended.

Decks from the first two-thirds of Time Spiral block, in the extended.

In an article from September of 2005, Matt Cavotta tells us about the Magic: the Gathering Style Guide. I particularly appreciated this quoted bit:

Feel free to paint beautiful women, as long as they're shown kicking ass. No damsels in distress. No ridiculously exaggerated breasts. No nudity.

Combine that with:

Remember, your audience is BOYS 14 and up.

And you get a directive that the demographic of boys 14 and up be shown women kicking ass and not being rescued all the time.

Of course, you still have the angels who like to go into combat with bare midriffs:

Art from Serra Avenger

...but you also end up with coolness like this:

Art from Braids, Conjurer Adept

Isn't that cool?

I think it's cool.

On Saturday, SSO, decaffeinated and I attended the Future Sight prerelease event. Coming about two weeks before the official release date for this expansion, the prerelease gave us a chance to try out some of the new cards in a sealed format.

Going in, I was thinking I'd play in both "flights" on Saturday -- basically, a morning tournament and an afternoon/evening tournament.

We arrived in time for the 10am startup, having preregistered to avoid the lines (I really recommend doing this for any prerelease) and then sat around for a while as everything started up. With the addition of an hour to build decks, the first match of the first tournament wouldn't actually start until noon.

The announcements just ahead of opening the new cards were entertaining. Normally, new mechanics in a set are explained by the announcer before people see the cards. This set features some 40-odd new mechanics, though, so the announcer just gave up on it and gave us the go ahead. Opening my packs, I gravitated toward a Blue/Black/Red build. Here are my cards spread out about halfway through the deckbuilding process:

Once gameplay started, things went reasonably smoothly, given the tournament's size (perhaps seven hundred people). I liked all but one of my opponents, and the odd one out wasn't a bad guy, just kind of annoying. Whereas SSO tried to play as many Future Sight cards as possible, I think I ended up leaning pretty heavily on my Time Spiral tournament pack. Still, the standout in my deck came from Future Sight, and helped me to my clearest wins of the day.

Shah and Shapeshifter, BFFs

I've added some more (blurry) pictures in the extended. The first tournament ended at something like 4 or 4:30 pm, so we collectively gave up on the idea of hitting the second tournament. The organizers said it would probably end at midnight, which is a bit much no matter what -- and I was getting up early the next day.

This event drew people in from all over the Bay Area. When I asked my last opponent where he'd come from, he said, "Oh, not far. Novato."

Novato to Santa Clara seems plenty far to me. It was really nice seeing the size of the greater Bay Area player pool -- I wish I could meet more of these people on a regular basis, as I met a lot of cool folks at the event.

Overall, it was pretty fun, and for the next two weeks, I have the cachet of having my cache of cards when thousands of others have none.

In the extended...

Courtesy of Frank Karsten's latest online tech article, here's a list of the current most frequently played decks on Standard Online. I'm trying to decide what I want to build and play in the upcoming Regionals event, which takes place on June 9th. I don't want to play any one of these decks verbatim, but they're useful in terms of "decks to beat" and as inspiration for how certain decks are built. More in the extended, including the list and comments

Edit: I've added a bunch of links to interesting archetypes and deck concepts from the Standard forum on Wizards' message boards.

This coming weekend, Decaffeinated and I will be trying our skills out at a Magic Pro Tour Qualifier event. Three weeks later, we'll try again in a different form at the Regionals Magic event. For both events, card sleeves are required -- these are plastic sleeves that go around the player cards and make sure that no wear or damage to any individual card makes it identifiable -- basically, it keeps you from using marked cards (and marked sleeves can be swapped out easily enough).

Since I don't own any sleeves, that meant a trip to the game store to pick some up. While I was paying, I chatted with the clerk, mentioned that I was going to go to Regionals for the first time, and he asked, "What do you play?"

I said I was still deciding, and he kind of laughed and said that he plays Izzetron.

I found that a singularly odd question. It's as if I suggested going to get food somewhere, and a friend asked me, "What do you eat?" with the expectation that I'd answer, "Macaroni and cheese." Given the huge pool of cards and all the interesting ways to play Magic, the concept of just having a specific deck that I always play feels as curious as having one specific food that I always eat.

Yesterday, Decaffeinated and I went to the local Magic Pro Tour Qualifier (PTQ) feeding into Pro Tour San Diego. PTQs are local tournaments that qualify folks to go play in one of the Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour events. Pro Tour events have their own online coverage and larger-scale cash prizes.

Full coverage in the extended. If the title confuses you, read on, and check out m's entry on lolcats.

With the current PTQ season and GP SF being Time Spiral block constructed, a couple area stores are running block tournaments this summer. Dates, locations and links in the extended.

Last year's Amateur Magic Championship was at the San Diego Comic Con, and as it happens, so is this year's. Wizards just put the info up; click here to read about it.

Briefly, it's a Standard Constructed event starting at noon on Saturday at the Con. The entry fee is $10 (paid at the Hasbro booth), with a maximum of 140 players. The top-level prizes are a Dell laptop, some iPods, and boosters for the rest of the top 16.

So, is anyone feeling done enough with the con by Saturday to burn most of the day on this event? I'm not sure if I would be willing to do that.

The page also lists other Magic events being held at the Comic Con this year.

As a fan of Magic, I check in on the Magic discussion boards fairly regularly. Lately, I've been entertained in a time-wasting, junk-food kind of way, by two different kinds of protracted debates. They're especially entertaining when compared with each other, as they're effectively mirror images.

First, we have the case of someone claiming that Remand is a bad card (hint: Remand is a good card). Result?

This thread that hit 318 posts before it was locked.

Second, we have the case of many people claiming that Dash Hopes is a good card (hint: it isn't). Result?

This thread from when the card was first previewed last year, that hit 271 posts before petering out (although this was started by an "Is this card good?" question, rather than a statement that it is).

This thread that asserted that it was, indeed, a good card, and hit 121 posts as of sometime this morning.

...and an increasingly strong showing in this thread that asked people to name underrated cards.

The similarity between both the Remand and Dash Hopes arguments is the tendency of the proponents of each argument (against Remand, for Dash Hopes) to not understand the contextual nature of the concept of "good." Anything is pretty much good or bad in the sense that it is a better or worse choice than the other options available in the environment. A Pinto may be better than walking if you have to cross the United States, but given that any other car exists, the Pinto is a bad car.*

*The linked article has an interesting discussion about how the Pinto was, in retrospect, not more dangerous than most other cars of its time. This may be good for the Pinto, or a commentary on car safety.

For the remaining block constructed season. Linked lists in the extended.

This is a report on last weekend's PTQ Valencia, for the limited pool of folks who are interested. It's all in the extended.

m, D, and I went to day 1 of Grand Prix San Francisco today. Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix events are open events (anyone can sign up) that give the winners pro points, cash prizes, and invites to upcoming Pro Tour events. GP SF, for example, is handing out invites to the upcoming Pro Tour in Valencia, Spain. Since invites come with plane tickets, that's not a bad prize.

We came mainly for the experience of a GP, since they travel, and we can't expect to have one come quite so close anytime in the near future. Although they called it GP San Francisco, this was more properly GP San Jose, as it's taking place in the San Jose convention center.

Some more commentary and pics in the extended; you can also see more at my GP SF Flickr photo set.

Despite scrubbing out horribly on day one, I went back to watch the final matches of Grand Prix SF on day two. m, who outperformed me on day one but also did not make day two, came along as well (you can read my coverage of day one here, and m's here). I brought my video camera and m brought his SLR, making us the best-equipped coverage "team" on site (and leading many to believe we had to be official coverage for some website or another).

That's an excellent capturing of the moment, during the final match of the GP between Jonathan Stocks and this year's national champion, Luis Scott-Vargas. You can see more of m's pics in his GP SF Flickr photo set.

I spent my afternoon taking video. I recorded one quarterfinal match, one semifinal match, and the final match. They're all up on YouTube:

That's Brazilian pro Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa versus Zack Smith in a quarterfinals match.

Paulo versus Jonathan Stocks in a semifinal match.

Stocks versus Scott-Vargas in the final match.

m also has video from day two, of the quarterfinal between Stocks and pro player Paul Cheon (with whom I had an interesting conversation about my wacky deck choice for the weekend, and which of us has a better Korean accent):

I was debating whether it would be worth going to watch the top eight in day two, but it really was a lot of fun. It was also my first time experiencing "photographer's legitimacy," in which the simple fact that I was recording the event with a camera got me access I would have otherwise had trouble securing.

Some takes on decks for Rav/TSP/10th Standard, in the extended.

This weekend is Pro Tour Valencia, the last Pro Tour of 2007 and the penultimate major event, to be followed by Worlds later on this year. The qualifiers for Valencia were Time Spiral block constructed. I participated in one regular PTQ, as well as Grand Prix San Francisco. As I'm not in Valencia right now, you know I didn't qualify at either, although I did pick up some nifty video of the top eight at the GP.

Although the qualifying season was block constructed, PT Valencia itself is Extended. Whereas Standard is the current core set and the last two blocks, Extended stretches back through several core sets and quite a few blocks. At the moment, this boils down to the difference between 1,878 cards in Standard versus 5,169 cards in Extended. In practice, this means that Extended decks are faster, offer more complex interactions, and you need to be even more watchful for explosive combo decks. You can read more about various Magic formats here.

In his most recent column, Mike Flores reviews the shifting Extended online metagame (where it's easier to track what's being played). The top three archetypes are Goblins, TEPS, and NarcoBridge Ichorid (or just "Dredge"), the second and third both being combo decks to watch out for. Frank Karsten also looks at the Extended game and the specter of Dredge in his final column. Although TEPS (which stands for the uninformative name "The Extended Perfect Storm") has been around for a while, the big concern going into Valencia has been about Dredge. Dredge truly is an explosive combo deck, with the potential to make fairly regular turn three kills. It's also highly vulnerable to being "hated out" by people packing specific cards to oppose it (TEPS, using storm as its major mechanic, is more robust). This brings up the prisoner's dilemma aspect of the metagame. If you pack appropriate sideboard hate against Dredge (perhaps half your sideboard), you will be less competitive against the rest of the field. If everyone else packs hate against Dredge, then you don't have to. If everyone makes this assumption, then there will be a paucity of hate against Dredge -- and it makes sense to play it. And so it goes.

This kind of situation cropped up at Pro Tour Columbus in 2005, when Pierre Canali brought his Affinity deck to another Extended PT. As may happen with Dredge, most players assumed that the easily hated out Affinity build was a bad idea, and neither played it nor prepared realistically for it -- only eight players actually showed up with Affinity. Thus, despite some impressive misplays, Canali won the tournament.

For a while now, Wizards has been doing live webcasts of the top eight (quarter-, semi-, and finals matches) for Pro Tour events. More recently, they've begun podcasts and now YouTube videos covering topics on each day leading up to the top eight. Here are two YouTube videos featuring commentator Brian David-Marshall, looking at topics ranging from the potential metagame through the player of the year race and fine Spanish pork (no kidding -- a hundred euros a pound).

This one has the pork story, as well as Frank Karsten's discussion of the metagame.

This has an interview with Paul Cheon (who I spoke with at GP SF) and Mark Herberholz, and gives some insight into how groups of players work together to test for an event.

The PT has had a somewhat shaky start with the venue actually flooding on Thursday, forcing an evacuation. In this video posted today, BDM and Randy Buehler discuss what happened, and the revised format for the event. Most interesting for me was the fact that the last-chance qualifier was flooded out in round eight of eight. The last-chance qualifier is a PTQ held on-site, that will normally qualify something like four people for the PT the next day. With seven rounds down and water literally flooding into the gaming area, the head event coordinator decided to simply stop the qualifier, look at the records, set a cutoff, and take everyone above the cutoff. As a result, nineteen people were qualified for the PT, rather than the normal four.

This YouTube video taken by a Magic player from Madrid shows the hotel gaming area the organizers set up for the players to bide their time on Friday:

Players received free Lorwyn cards to play with if they wanted. The event will continue on Saturday with a compressed schedule. Instead of the normal set of eight rounds, eight rounds, top eight, it'll be ten rounds, then three rounds followed by a top eight the same day. I'm planning on watching the live webcast of the top eight, which should be at some unpleasantly early time here (they're estimating it for 1:30 pm in Valencia).

Continuing coverage can be found on YouTube and on the Wizards site.

As mentioned in my earlier post, the original first day of PT Valencia was literally washed out, as flooding forced the evacuation of the venue. Now, reorganized into a fairly nasty ten-round day / three-round day schedule, the PT started in earnest today. More in the extended.

I'm watching the Valencia quarterfinals live via the web broadcast. Somewhat stream-of-consciousness commentary in the extended. Three of the four matches ended very quickly and felt quite one-sided, but the last and longest match was a really nice, complex one between two control decks that took rather different approaches to control.

The semifinals saw Fortier's Trinket Mage build against another Gifts-Rock deck from Barra, and a match between Shuhei Nakamura running Tron versus Andre Mueller with Enduring Ideal. The Tron-Ideal match was particularly interesting. Fortier-Barra was less so.

Given how well Andre Mueller did in prior matches with his Enduring Ideal deck, this could have been a lame final. Remi Fortier did very, very well however, winning the match despite the fact that Mueller was able to play his combo in all five games (!). Overall, the best match of the top eight.

You can expect to find downloadable video of all these matches on the Wizards site in the near future. More on the match in the extended.

I mentioned Melissa DeTora in an earlier post linking to coverage of her match against Quentin Martin. In the podcast coverage, Melissa says that she's played in four Pro Tours so far, and "hasn't done very well."

She did quite well at PT Valencia, making the cut to day two and ending her run in 54th place (of 422 participants -- the biggest individual PT ever), taking down a $610 prize for her efforts. I believe this makes her the first woman to cash in an individual Pro Tour (women have cashed in a Team Pro Tour and in some Grand Prix events).

Melissa's track record on the day:

Round 1: Won 2-0 over Juan Lucena of Spain
Round 2: Won 2-0 over Naoki Sakaguchi of Japan
Round 3: Won 2-1 over David Brucker of Germany
Round 4: Lost 1-2 to Yuuta Hirosawa of Japan
Round 5: Lost 0-2 to Kamiel Cornelissen of the Netherlands
Round 6: Drew 1-1-1 with Zac Hill of the United States
Round 7: Lost 0-2 to William Ljungberg of Sweden
Round 8: Drew 1-1-1 with Quentin Martin of the United States (covered here)
Round 9: Drew 1-1-1 with Tony Martins of France
Round 10: Won 2-0 over Antti Malin of Finland (impressive win)
Round 11: Won 2-0 over Matt Hansen of the United States
Round 12: Lost 0-2 to Frank Karsten of the Netherlands (a very honorable loss)
Round 13: Lost 0-2 to Saul Aguado of Spain

With three drawn matches, it looks like Melissa ran into a few too many control versus control matchups. It seems like she had a pretty good handle on her Gifts-Rock build, and it'll be interesting to see if her skills apply in the other formats of upcoming PTs. She's been playing long enough that I wasn't willing to look through all the relevant PT records to see if she has a "best" format.

Congrats to Melissa, and maybe we'll continue to see her up in the scoring ranks with the likes of Paul Cheon and Zac Hill (both of whom she outscored).

Right on the heels of Pro Tour Valencia comes the 2007 Magic Invitational. Basically the "all star game" for Magic, the Invitational features sixteen of the best-known names in Magic on the year, playing in a multi-format, round-robin tournament. I'm not going to really cover this one, although I may comment on fun aspects of it. The really interesting thing for me is that the winner each year gets to design a card -- and these cards frequently end up being fun, competitive cards. Some recent-ish examples:

Dark Confidant - Bob Maher
Rakdos Augermage - Terry Soh
Solemn Simulacrum - Jens Thoren

The other interesting change this year is the return of the Invitational to real cards; in the last few years, it's been run using Magic Online. This year, they're not only back with real cards, they're playing out the Invitational at this year's Essen Game Fair. Essen is the biggest show in the boardgaming business, and placing the Invitational at Essen is a material representation of the way the American and European game industries have come solidly together in the last few years. Probably the best place to read about ongoing events and announcements at Essen is at Boardgamegeek. Continuing coverage of the 2007 Invitational can be found here on the Wizards site.

Evan Irwin of Magic Show fame (and who is currently at the Invitational) has posted a cool wrap-up of the whole PT Valencia experience. Worth watching:

Also, here are all my other PT Valencia links:

The overview
Day one
The quarterfinals
The semifinals
The finals
Melissa DeTora's final record

What does this young lady have to do with anything? Full story in the extended.

In Brian David-Marshall's latest "The Week That Was" column (click here to read it) he interviews Scott Larabee, who reveals some info about the second Pro Tour of 2007 -- Hollywood. Here's the information on the first half of the Pro Tour season for 2007:

Pro Tour Kuala Lumpur

Date: February 15-17, 2008
Format: Lorwyn draft, I believe

The PTQ season for Kuala Lumpur is Lorwyn sealed, with a draft for the top eight. There's only one Bay Area PTQ for this one, coming up on the 10th of November. Click here for more info on Kuala Lumpur PTQs worldwide.

Pro Tour Hollywood

Date: May 23-25, 2008
Format: Standard

The PTQ season for PT Hollywood will start if January 5th, and will be Extended format. They don't yet have a page up for PT Hollywood PTQs, but we can presume at least one locally, and I'm seriously considering heading down to Los Angeles to play in the LCQ, participate in side events, and spectate.

Here are some initial (most probably not so great, right?) decks for the new Standard, which I've dubbed CTL-X (Coldsnap, Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Tenth). In the extended.

Looking through some Kamigawa cards (well, sorting several hundred of them) yesterday had me thinking about mana fixing on a block-by-block basis. More in the extended.

Mike Flores discusses some of the winning archetypes from last week's States in his column this week. You can get the full lists of reported top eight decks by clicking here.

Briefly, top archetypes include B/G midrange (*Rock*), B/G linear elves, Pickles, Doran and his Viper buddies, Snow White, aggro Faeries, and Teachings.

The 2008 City Champs competitive series has started. You can read about it at the Wizards site by clicking here. Although I'm not angling for the ultimate win at the end -- an invite to Nationals 2008 -- I am looking forward to some Standard Constructed tournaments in our area. I was originally thinking I'd take a WBG Rock-ish deck to the first Constructed City Champs event, but I'm now angling toward the W/B build in the extended. Along with that one, I have an R/G "mana ramp" style build that's also fun -- and its ability to consistently kill off my WBG build convinced me to ditch that one in favor of the W/B.

On a random note, I'm entertained to see that the Los Angeles City Champs series includes not only area game stores and a couple from San Diego, but also a store in Hawaii and one in Saipan. Are the store winners from those islands really going to make the trip to LA? That's an expensive city championship.

Decklists in the extended.

Last weekend, I and 164 other Magic players came to San Jose for our local Pro Tour Qualifier (feeding into Pro Tour Kuala Lumpur 2008). The format was Lorwyn sealed cutting to Lorwyn draft in the top eight. More in the extended.

(I'll spoil the punchline: I didn't win.)

As I discussed in a prior post, I'm playing in at least some of the games for the local 2008 City Champs series. I decided to take Liliana with me to the event.

So how did we do? See the extended for more.

The "metagame," broadly speaking, is the set of factors resting outside of individual game play that nonetheless have a big impact on your success in any gaming environment. Succinctly, the Magic metagame amounts to "What kind of decks will other people bring to [this PTQ/this local tournament/this Pro Tour/my house tomorrow], and how should I prepare for them?" This is an intelligence exercise -- in the sense of information gathering. If you're going to a Pro Tour, you watch what decks are being played in the Magic Online Premier events, and you even listen to what people say the night before the PT starts (since you don't have to register your deck until the morning of). With the rain delay of PT Valencia, the participants had a whole extra day to check in with the other players and decided to change their decks, or not. Notably, event winner Remi Fortier was going to run a U/W Tron build, but in the extra day decided to instead run Manuel B's "Chase Rare Control" build (I do like that name for it).

My current bit of pondering is "Can you, from the card pool, predict the likely metagame?" This is a bit of Bayesian reasoning problem -- we have the evidence of successful builds from events (as well as the unsuccessful builds that the winners had to beat) and the card pool...can we integrate all that information and understand why certain card pools lead to certain builds?

More in the extended.

Last week, I decided that Liliana needed more Instants. Since then, and after some additional testing against a couple different decks I've been tinkering with, I've realized that along with Instants, Liliana really, really needs card advantage. With that in mind, I've revised the Liliana build. I've also switched up my take on Big Mana a little. Both lists are in the extended.

In the most recent Latest Developments column, guest- and former-columnist Aaron Forsythe traces the development of the Commands from Lorwyn. He leads with this:

As a designer, I really enjoy it when sets contain rare cycles of spells that aren't really in-theme with the rest of what's going on, for two reasons. One, they give the set another "hook" for players to talk about without adding additional complex layers to the set's gameplay, and two, they allow us to make things that might excite players that would otherwise not enjoy that set's particular theme.

Which was interesting to me, because I kept looking at the Command cycle and thinking, "This is a cool cycle, but it feels really out-of-flavor for Lorwyn block." Turns out, it was. Good to know.

Aaron talks development in that article, but in the extended, I'm going to take a quick look at the power of the Commands, as well as a deck that tries to abuse one of them that has yet to see much use.

I went to another local City Champs tournament this week. Once again, the draw for me is a Constructed tournament with a range of players, rather than a drive to make it to City Champs to earn an invite to Nationals 2008 (rather a far way off at this point, with Worlds 2007 coming up in a week or so). Last time, I ran W/B Villainess control and found that it tended to lose to tempo-based builds and couldn't kill a Village or Conclave to save its life. This time around, I tried a U/B Villainess build, almost as described here. I realized, after posting that list, that rather than going with Ancestral Vision, I wanted to use the much more synergistic Mulldrifter, as it can be brought back as needed with Beacon of Unrest. And hey, more ways to actually win.

I went 2-2. Fullish report in the extended.

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.

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.

Actually, the relevant quote is "I'd sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down."

In the most recent episode (15) of their Magic podcast DeckConstruct, hosts Alex and Dan go to a local Magic scene and ask people what they think of casual play, as well as how they'd define it. The consensus understanding of "casual" is "not tournament play," as embodied in the phrase "It doesn't matter if you win or lose."

There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. If every game were about qualifying for a Pro Tour and a $25 entry fee, I'd be a pretty grumpy camper.

But even in casual play, there must be structure. A lot of the interviewees said that they liked how they could bring "any old deck" to a casual game, no problem. But there is a problem, inasmuch as without any particular rules, it's hard to say what you can bring. Or, to put it another way, "Sure I can make a deck that sucks, but how do I make sure mine sucks as much as yours?"

In competitive Magic, this is easy. Format? Standard. What can I play? Anything in Standard. Put in the best cards, optimize your deck, try to win. Everyone's on the same page.

In default casual, it's unclear. This is social contract territory, because the "rule" really is "try to win, sort of, but not too hard." If you go into the "tournament practice" area in Magic Online, you will occasionally run into people who haven't made the best possible deck. You will run over them, and that's okay. If you go into the "casual play" area, it's entirely rockier. Hit someone up with a Stone Rain and you may find them complaining publicly that you suck for playing land destruction. Or perhaps not. Who knows? There are no hard-and-fast rules, and this kind of casual play often amounts to "whatever I don't feel put off by."

That's a vague, vague rule to follow.

My preference is for structured play. Rather than the fuzzy implied social contract, set an actual contract. Play Standard. Play Extended. Play Highlander, Pauper, or anything else with defined rules. I want to be on the same page with my friends, whatever that page happens to be. The fundamental problem with the implied contract is that you're trying to play suboptimally, and there's no good way for everyone to accurately be equally bad. Someone may well accidentally bring an overly good card to the dance, and then they just keep winning over and over again, which isn't fun for anyone.

Back when I played Mechwarrior a great deal, we had an explicit agreement across the tournament players to play "faction pure" forces (that is, forces derived all from one faction within the game, a situation not required by the game rules). We did this because pure forces looked better, and because pure forces came with inherent strengths and weakness that mixed-faction forces smoothed out. Had we not formalized this, the one person who didn't care as much and showed up with a mixed force might well have walked all over the others -- whether they really wanted to or not!

In gaming, as in the rest of life, I like my social contracts to be explicit. When everyone's on the same page, it's just that much easier to have a good time.

This week's Shadowmoor previews included the Wilf-Leaf Cavaliers, a three-mana, 3/4, Vigilance creature (check it out here). Obviously, this is a good value for the price, much like Watchwolf from Ravnica. I'm not so excited, however, because a 3/4 Vigilant guy doesn't really do much.

And that brings us to many people's pick for "best creature ever," Tarmogoyf. It's cheap, it's efficient, it's typically a 4/5 or 5/6 when it comes in during most Extended games. It's a great little beater.

But that's all it does. Even the theoretical, maxed-out 8/9 Tarmogoyf can be chumped all day by Bitterblossom tokens, and it can be capped by any old Terror (although not fellow Future-Sight inhabitant Death Rattle). In other words, Tarmogoyf is aggressively costed, but all it does is attack and block.

People sometimes make fun of you for saying things like that.

Back during PT Valencia, Evan Irwin asked players if Tarmogoyf was the best creature ever (you can see that toward the end of his PT Valencia coverage, here). Most people just say, "Yes." Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa disagrees, however, saying "It attacks, it blocks" (at 12:12). Zac Hill echoes this, saying, "No. That's stupid...not every deck needs a dude with Power and Toughness" (12:42). I'm with them. I want my creatures to do something. I want them to double as removal, to bring disruption, to recur things, or at least to be evasive so they can push winning damage through a stalemate or past a lone blocker.

So what are my best creatures?

I don't have a comprehensive list, but check the extended for some of the ones I like, and why.

There won't be much Magic-related posting here until during or after Pro Tour Hollywood, but I did just notice the number four position on the Star City Games "Top 20" list, that shows what the hot sellers are:

Really? Why?

Wizards just announced a new "Duel Deck" product featuring Jace Beleren versus Chandra Nalaar (with the snappy name Duel Decks: Jace vs. Chandra). The last one was Elves versus Goblins; this time it's more or less control versus burn.

Notice that it's not Garruk versus Liliana. Or, really, Garruk versus anyone.

The product will contain two sixty-card decks, alternate foils (ugh*) of Chandra and Jace, and four other cards with new art.

*'Ugh' because I dislike foils. They bend, they're not as attractive as normal cards, and I don't feel like littering my deck with enough of them to avoid a penalty for marked cards.

Earlier this year, Wizards announced the cancellation of States (in the US) and Champs (in Canada), saying that the tournaments were not achieving the goals they were meant to achieve. While literally any change of any kind will garner some outcry, I think this one especially bothered people because there's a cadre of folks who enjoy getting together at these big tournaments. I'm in that group - I don't do FNMs (I mean, Friday night is a terrible, terrible time for a tournament for me, just to start with), so I'm either playing with my small group of friends, or going to large events such as PTQs, Regionals, and States.

In this announcement Wizards confirms a rumor I heard a week or two ago -- States and Champs are coming back. This year, they'll be on November 8, about a month after Shards of Alara releases.*

This makes me happy, and I hope I can make it to Regionals this year.

*And wow, that release is only about a month from now. Goodbye, Time Spiral!

Shards of Alara is tournament legal today, and both the non-eternal formats have undergone major rotations.

Standard

We lose Coldsnap, Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight.

Standard is now Tenth Edition, Lorwyn, Morningtide, Shadowmoor, Eventide, and Shards of Alara.

No cards are banned in Standard.

Extended

We lose Seventh EditioN (goodbye, Counterspell), Invasion, Planeshift, Apocalypse, Odyssey, Torment, and Judgment.

Extended is now Eight Edition, Ninth Edition, Tenth Edition, Onslaught, Legions, Scourge, Mirrodin, Darksteel, Fifth Dawn, Champions of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, Saviors of Kamigawa, Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, Dissension, Coldsnap, Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, Future Sight, Lorwyn, Morningtide, Shadowmoor, Eventide, and Shards of Alara.

Four cards are banned in Extended: Aether Vial, Disciple of the Vault, Sensei's Divining Top, and Skullclamp

As always, you can check on formats and bannings here.

In the most recent The Week that Was column, BDM has a nice series of interviews with some of the influential tournament organizers (TOs) who've helped bring large-scale organized Magic play to their regions. In addition to some nice background on them and what they've done, there are two bits of news in there:

1) If you win your States this year, you win a year of free entries into all Constructed premier events run by TOs participating in the program. Premier events include PTQs, Regionals, and Grand Prix level events. This is a nice prize (and honestly a big payout, if you're the kind of person who attends multiple PTQs in each season).

2) The DCI is shifting to a single rating that covers all types of event. This is necessary given the hybrid nature of the upcoming PTs. This also means that my currently dismal Limited rating will be subsumed within my Constructed rating, I think, so yay and all that. I'm not very concerned about my rating, but the "never playing in Limited events" aspect of my hobby meant that my Limited rating is especially poor.

That's one nice bit of news, and one awesome bit of news.

As a reminder, you can check out what your States will be like here.

I use Gatherer, Wizards' official Magic card database, quite a bit. As such, I've been wanting for a long time to have it work more like a full database, allowing complex queries, iterative queries, and so forth. I want to be able to search positively for one thing, while requiring the absence of something else. Then I want to be able to sort the results according to my needs.

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.

ICv2 is reporting in this article that the recent digital initiative consolidation at Wizards (that is, binning Gleemax and related ventures) has now led to layoffs among those involved in the defunct digital initiative, including Andrew Finch, William Meyers, Jennifer Paige, and, notably, Randy Buehler.

Other layoffs include Dave Noonan and Jonathan Tweet, who you may not know if you only play Magic, but have both been significant forces in shaping the two most recent versions of D&D.

Neutral Ground, a fixture in the New York Magic scene, shut down its physical location on the 27th. Here's the official announcement.

It's really too bad.

iMTG is a new launch point meant to aggregate a wide range of Magic blogs, podcasts, and other materials, giving Magic players an easy place to keep up with new content on the web.

I'm a big fan of aggregators of this type. While I subscribe to many resources already via RSS, launch pages inform me about new resources I hadn't heard of before. It also gives me the option of not subscribing to every single resource, when some of them only really interest me occasionally.

Note that iMTG is heavily biased toward Spanish-language content, by dint of being organized out of Spain. Nonetheless, deck lists and many other bits of Magic data are typically universal - and hey, shouldn't you know how to speak Spanish anyway? Sure you should.

There's a similar German-language launch page called MTG Pop. I imagine, given the game's popularity there, that there's also something like this in Japanese, but I'm seriously no good in searching in Japanese. In contrast, I can point you toward the information site for Korean PTQs.

The pattern here being that I can read Spanish, German, and Korean, but not Japanese. So there you go.

I'm excited about the Spanish-language Magic community, as I've only recently begun exploring it. iMTG should be a good starting point for any of you who are interested in delving into Spanish Magic.

In a pair of pieces on the main site today, Wizards announced that they're changing how they handle the core set. You can read the piece-by-piece breakdown here and Aaron Forsythe's article about it here. Here are the big changes:

• The sets will now be named by year - for example, the next core set will be "2010," rather than "11th Edition."
• Starting with the 2010 set, which releases this year, core sets will release annually each July, rather than bi-annually.
• About half of the cards in the set will be new.
• Core sets will be legal until October of the year following their release, meaning they'll be legal for about 15 months (and there will be 3-month overlaps between core sets).

Aaron explains the reasoning well in his article, and I agree with him across the board. Let's quote him a bit here:

Our core sets are typically the best way to teach and show off the world of Magic: The Gathering to the uninitiated, and to that end I believe they need to be as resonant and flavorful as they can be first and foremost. The core set should play into most people's preconceived notions of fantastic creatures and spells, and those notions should guide them to understand the goals and mechanics of the game.

In the beginning, Magic relied heavily on this kind of flavor. Rock Hydra, Vesuvan Doppelganger, and Fireball are all considered complicated cards from a pure rules standpoint, yet each of those was beloved by players just getting into the game because of how they "felt." Most fantasy fans have had experiences of one sort or another involving a hydra, a shapeshifter, or a fireball, and to see those concepts spring to life in a card game where they were in command—WOW!

That's exactly my memory of things from 1993-1994, when I first picked up the game. You want the core set to be full of cool things that appeal to a more general sense of fantasy.

Do take a look at Aaron's article, since he previews some new 2010 cards (and hey, Serra Angel is back to being an uncommon).

Also, the five planeswalkers from Lorwyn are going to be in the 2010 set. Coolness.

..and a final word from Aaron:

There has been some speculation as to which set of existing dual lands will be in the next core set, and the answer may surprise: none of them. We wanted to make a cycle of powerful dual lands that risk-averse newer players would like, which meant coming up with something that didn't involve losing life. Sorry, painlands, fetchlands, and Ravnica duals. Trust me, the new ones are awesome!

I know I have some new (often Magic-related) traffic coming in here these days, so I wanted to highlight some of the video offerings I have available over on YouTube, for all you newcomers. My game-related YouTube account is right here. Sample videos include:

Luis Scott-Vargas taking down his first GP win

2008 Player of the Year Shuheii Nakamura playing at PT Hollywood

Hall of Famer Zvi Mowshowitz playing at PT Hollywood

My video offerings are irregular, since they come up whenever I happen to be near a premier event, but I do encourage you to look through them, since they include video match coverage you won't see anywhere else.

Following the announcement that the Yu-Gi-Oh! national championships were canceled, Wizards of the Coast issued a press release inviting all players who qualified for US or Canadian Yu-Gi-Oh! nationals to attend their respective Magic nationals:

"We respect the accomplishments of all high-level tournament players," said Chris Galvin, VP of Organized Play for Wizards of the Coast. "We'd like to do what we can to honor their achievements and keep them gaming."

Konami, publisher of Yu-Gi-Oh!, insists that it is trying to arrange national championships for the game despite the announced cancellation, but Wizards is sticking to the offer, in hopes of keeping competitive trading card game players in the game, whether that game is Magic or something else.

I'm curious about how much overlap there is between the Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! communities. I know that Superstars schedules major Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! events in parallel, and I haven't really noticed a lot of crossover in our two local player groups (at the same time, it's not as if there's any acrimony or disrespect, either). More generally, if you're an expert Yu-Gi-Oh! player who's never played Magic before, how much effort would it take to get up to speed?

Gabriel Nassif just won Grand Prix Chicago just a week after his victory at Pro Tour Kyoto.

Awesome.

The coverage suggests that this put Nassif one-up on our own Luis Scott-Vargas, who did a similar back-to-back last year with Berlin and Atlanta. Of course, Luis still managed 10th place in Chicago, which makes me wonder how the two scored at this combination of events.

Pro Tour Berlin - Luis in 1st, Gab in 23rd
GP Atlanta - Luis in 1st, Gab in 173rd
Pro Tour Kyoto - Gab in 1st, Luis in 2nd
GP Chicago - Gab in 1st, Luis in 10th

I'll expand on that by adding in the other PTs from 2008:

Worlds - Luis in 11th, Gab in 297th
Hollywood - Luis in 47th, Gab in 51st
Kuala Lumpur - Gab in 44th, Luis in 169th

The general conclusion to draw here is mainly that they're both very good players, but I think it's easy to underrate how consistent Luis has been over the past year or so (he also took 3rd in California States).

I think it's great seeing either (or both!) of them in the top eight of a major event; I look forward to more from both in the future.

Bill Stark has been following the drama of the Magic theft ring over at the Starkington Post (you can read about it here and here. The short version is that a ring has been hitting major North American events, stealing bags, personal effects, and, of course, cards. At GP Chicago, one of the thieves was finally caught, and the word is that he gave up his companions.

While criminal charges are in the works, the DCI has already acted, handing out lifetime bans to four individuals. Bill talks about it here, and you can check the DCI Suspension list here.

According to judge Adam Shaw in the Starkington Post forums, these individuals are also banned from the premises at any WotC event, with a probable follow-on effort among TOs to keep them off all tournament grounds.

Seems good.

I'm a regular user of Gatherer, Wizards' comprehensive Magic card database. I really appreciated the update to the new version, with its enhanced search capabilities. My one request was to be able to set the output formatting during the query phase, rather than having to rearrange the output after each query.

Now, they've enabled that. In the Advanced Search mode that I nearly always use, you can now set both the output format and the sorting order. I'm a happy camper.

Click here to give Gatherer a try.

If you really do want to be a solid deck designer, you need to be very familiar with Gatherer, because there are times when you'll know the role you need a card to fill, but won't be able to recall a specific card from the one to several thousand cards that may be legal in the format you're addressing. So once again, give it a shot.

ggslive will be running live video coverage of today's Alara Block Constructed champs at their ustream channel, starting at 7pm EST today (one hour from now!). I recommend checking in - they've done some great coverage of two PTQ top eights so far (which you can also watch, in archived form, at the same ustream channel).

ggslive brings us some more Magic from Gencon:

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

Today it's Legacy Champs, and then the second Gencon PTQ, I believe. Note that if you can't watch live, the shows are all archived, so click through on the ustream channel and check it out.

One thing I've appreciated seeing more and more of in the last year, in text interviews, on The Magic Show, and elsewhere, is dedicated Magic players (that is, PT players) who are able to step away from the comfortable position of pretending to be aloof and instead let on that they actually do love the game. Whether it's Sam Black talking about flavor or Dave Williams reflecting on why Nationals is his favorite event, I really like to see people who are willing to admit they're actually giant fans of this game they spend so much time on.

In that vein, I really loved this quote from Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa's most recent article in his "My Story" series:

And it was awesome. The full realization of it hit me at once. I was the National Champion. I was representing my country. I had always wanted to represent my country. I understand that some people don’t care much about those things, and I remember going to previous Worlds and watching arguments because the first place finisher did not want to carry the flag, and neither did the second place finisher… but I do care a lot about those things. I care about the shirts, I care about flip-flops, I care about karaoke party, and I care about carrying the flag. For that moment, I felt like an athlete in the Olympics. I was important.

The whole series of articles describing his path to pro player has been excellent - Paulo is excited about the game, the people he meets, and the places he gets to visit. If you have an SCG premium account (or six months of patience) you should go read this series. The enthusiasm is infectious.

A little while ago, Sam Black wrote an article about GenCon that focused to some extent on lessons he'd learned in other games that could be applied to Magic. This has inspired me to give some thought, from time to time, on lessons I'd picked up in various games that are portable across games generally.

Specifically, I've idly pondered what I might have picked up during my Mechwarrior gaming days that transitions well to Magic. I was pretty good at Mechwarrior, most of the time maintaining our highest local rating and "going infinite" in real life tournaments (something you could do back in the day by trading off extras of the premium tournament prizes in online trades for minis you needed). In no particular order, here are some lessons I picked up from Mechwarrior:

• Research Matters - I improved significantly in Mechwarrior after I spent some time (1) reading ideas from players who were in the game when I came in, (2) looking at successful army builds, and (3) just spending time looking at unit stats. This was important in Mechwarrior in the "rote memory is helpful" manner, inasmuch as you wanted to know how each unit's stats would progress over time. It was also helpful, however, in letting me know which options I had available, and exposing me to concepts that I wouldn't have run into via directed search. This is, in fact, an idea I'm planning on touching in over at In Development in the future.

• Technical Precision Matters - There's an edge in many games in just knowing how the rules actually work. This isn't so much a matter of rules lawyering as it is a matter of just knowing what your operating space is. This came up recently in a Magic tournament when I floated a random green mana before sacrificing a land with Knight of the Reliquary and then let that go while my opponent ran through the rest of his turn...until he wanted to go into combat, when I paused him, paid another five mana, and flashed out a Cloudthresher. He wasn't sure I could do that -- hadn't he said he wanted to go to combat? Of course, the way the game works requires a double priority pass on an empty stack before we can shift into combat (as the judge we called confirmed). My opponent didn't know this, and walked into something as a consequence.

• Fast Play Matters - Mechwarrior, like Magic, was played in timed rounds. You benefit, of course, from being able to think and play the game quickly. However, this is more about making sure your opponent is playing quickly. I've been fortunate not to run into players who are clearly stalling, but at the same time, there are players who play as if they weren't really aware that rounds are timed. We had one prime offender in the Mechwarrior circuit who clearly was not thinking about his upcoming turn at all during your turn. This was apparent the first time I played him, as he started each of his turns by adjusting the dials on his units (this is sort of like starting a Magic turn by making minor adjustments so that your land are all nicely parallel, then staring at your cards for a while, then finally untapping...). I adjusted to this in two ways. First, I made sure to urge him to play faster, and suggested that he take care of whatever minor adjustments he cared about on his turn. Second, I made sure to get an early, high-value kill, since I knew that I could only do so much about his play speed, and I wanted to end with a game win if he timed us out. In a Magic tournament, I'd just call a judge on him if he didn't speed up, of course.
  

I'm sure there are more lessons that transferred out of Mechwarrior, just as there are more that have come out of other games I've played and other areas of my life. It's a good exercise, and I'd be interested in hearing what lessons other people feel they've picked up in one game that transferred into another.

A design position has opened up at Wizards:

The Game Designer will lead and participate on teams to create game play content, focusing on trading card games such as Magic: the Gathering, Duelmasters, and others, but also including digital games and other game categories. The individual will be responsible for brainstorming new product concepts and ensuring the quality of existing game content. The position requires a mix of creativity, analytical ability, project management skills, and knowledge of the game design field.

Click here to learn more

Thanks to the search acumen of Kelly Reid of Quiet Speculation, I have been reunited with my original DCI number. I just got off the phone with Wizards' customer service, who have started the process of unifying the original number with the one I was issued when I got back into the game.

Naturally, I'm keeping the old one.

This means I'll be moving from ten digits to a much more svelte five digits.

Also, my rating's going to take a bit of a hit. Turns out I wasn't quite as good back in 1995.

Over at ChannelFireball.com, David Ochoa's latest article has sparked a big discussion based on this little bit of text:

I knew that some people had dropped in the early rounds at X-1. That gave me a glimmer of hope that the number of X-1 people would be able to accommodate a draw in round seven. When the standings were put up, I found that to not be the case. Pairings went up and I went to my match. I had been paired up against the only 6-0. I asked if he wanted to concede after explaining to him that he was a lock for top even with a loss. He said that he wouldn’t concede for free, but would if I gave him 25% of what I won. Sirens went off in my head. I had to unfortunately call a judge because my opponent tried to bribe me.

I wasn’t happy about calling a judge because I wanted to battle; my deck was good. However, it was the right thing to do and I had to protect myself. I couldn’t carry on the conversation that my opponent had been trying to have with me any further. I would rather have had the situation not happen at all, but it did. We got split up and interviewed. My opponent got disqualified. This wasn’t the way I wanted to make top 8, but it’s what I was dealt.

The discussion breaks down along the lines of "David mind-tricked the guy into a DQ!" versus "It's normal to ask for concessions, but bribery is a problem."

After reading through and participating in the discussion, I think that the issue is not some false "pros versus everyone else" dichotomy, but on the fact that players show up for tournaments knowing most of the rules of the game, but none of the rules of the tournament. If you're an FNM regular, you can probably play on without knowing the tournament rules, but if you're going to go to big events such as Pro Tour Qualifiers, Grand Prix events, and large public events at a Pro Tour, or any of the privately run $1k, $2K, and $5K events, you need to have a basic understanding of how those tournament rules work.

When I say "tournament rules" I'm referring to the rules that govern all the non-game-rule aspects of the tournament. For example, what the penalties are for breaking the game rules, or how to actually operate a Swiss tournament.

You can find the full tournament rules here. The relevant documents are the Magic: the Gathering Tournament Rules and the Magic: the Gathering Infraction Procedure Guide.

But you probably don't want to read through both documents, and you really don't need to. You just need a simple set of guidelines for what you should and shouldn't do at a tournament.

So here it is.

Things to do at a tournament

Do listen to the judges and follow their directions. Large tournaments may have procedures you're not used to, such as registering sealed pools and then turning them back in.

Do bring some way to record your life total, and any tokens you need.

Do feel free to call a judge whenever you have a question, don't understand a card interaction, believe that you or your opponent has broken a game rule, or have any others concerns.

Do call a judge as soon as you notice that you or your opponent has broken a game rule. Note that if your opponent has broken a game rule and you "let it slide," when the mistake is discovered later, you will both receive a Warning.

Do feel free to ask your opponent to concede. People sometimes ask for concessions if the match is going to draw and that will put both players out of contention for the top eight or day two. Players may also ask for a concession if their opponent is a lock for the top eight, or if neither player can make it to the top eight, but one player is more concerned about their rating. You're never under any obligation to concede, no matter who's asking. See below for what you can't do around concessions.

Do feel free to ask your opponent to play faster, or to display their cards in a different way. For example, you might ask them to move their Exiled cards farther away from the cards in their Graveyard.

Do shuffle your opponent's deck each time after they do if you're at a PTQ or GP.

Things not to do at a tournament

Don't rely on your opponent to track your life total.

Don't let a game play error slide. If you notice something that you or your opponent has done incorrectly, call a judge.

Don't lie to a judge. Seriously, don't ever, ever do this. Even if you're worried that you've made a game play error that will lead to a game loss, such as your third Warning for the same Game Play Error, don't lie. Judges are good at figuring this out, and lying to a judge is a good way to convert a normal Warning or Game Loss into a Disqualification Without Prize, which will totally ruin your day.

Don't randomly determine the outcome of a match. For example, if you and your opponent have each won one game and you both feel you aren't going to finish the third but would like to avoid a draw, don't roll a die or flip a coin to determine the outcome. This is a good time to discuss conceding instead.

Don't ever suggest a payment or reward for a concession. The moment you suggest something like this, you put your opponent in the unpleasant situation of having to call a judge, because otherwise he or she is participating in a bribery negotiation. This can include suggesting you'll concede for money or part of someone's prizes, or if they concede to you later, or any other "thing in exchange for a win" kind of conversation. Note that you are allowed to propose a prize split at any time, such as "Hey, how about we each get 25% of whatever prize the other person wins?" As long as you don't offer any match results in exchange, that's fine.

As long as you keep these basic guidelines in mind, you should have a good time at your first big event. No one wants to see a player accidentally walk themselves into a Game Loss or a Disqualification. We want to see you meet new people, play well, and have fun.

I've noticed that the MTGSalvation forums are among the most active out there. Conveniently, they also display how many users are on any given forum at the moment, giving us a snapshot into what topics are drawing the most interest. Right now, the number of users actively viewing each forum tallies like so:

Standard - 254
Extended - 24
Legacy - 43
Vintage - 9
Block - 9

Interesting, but about what I would expect. There are other venues for dedicated Vintage players, and Extended, while being my favorite format, tends to go in bursts around PTQ seasons, whereas interest in Legacy is perennial. I don't know if I was expecting Standard to win by an order of magnitude, or for Block to be as weak as it is, but there you go.

As you'll no doubt have caught from all the traffic on the topic, Wizards has updated their reprint policy with respect to the Reserve List. Here's the update:

A previous version of this policy allowed premium versions of cards on the reserved list to be printed. Starting in 2011, no cards on the reserved list will be printed in either premium or non-premium form.

As a stakeholder and someone who was playing and buying cards back when the original Reserved list policy came out, this is disappointing. Way back when in the early 90s, I supported the idea. Then again, I was also in high school. You're going to read a lot of material elsewhere about how this impacts competitive Legacy play - a topic that's worth the discussion, and inspires me to hope that Wizards will just do some hacky workaround like special, not-legal-in-Standard, nearly functional reprints of certain cards.

What bothers me is that I'll never get to play Vesuvan Doppelganger in Standard. I have five of them (Revised edition, which is the printing I'm showing above). It's not an overpowered card by any means, and it's probably not good enough for Standard play unless I can particularly channel my inner Johnny nature, but it's a card for which I have a lot of nostalgia and affection, so if it came up in a future set, I'd certainly try to make it work.

I came back to Magic partly on the strength of Time Spiral block, which had a pleasing mix of modern Magic design (which is much, much better) and callbacks to settings and cards I was familiar with from my first pass through the game. The "time shifted" reprints, in particular, were kind of fun and a neat way to plug the old into the new.

These days, one of the fun parts about having an older card reprinted - such as Duress in M10 or Reflecting Pool in Shadowmoor - is getting to see earlier printings of the card, with their often very different art, being played across from you at a Standard event. I'd like that option to be open to all the cards, and it makes me sigh a little that there's now not even a finite chance that I'll be able to plunk one of my white-bordered, Quinton Hoover, Doppelgangers down on the battlefield so my opponent can ask, "What's that?"

"Fishing," if you're unfamiliar with the colloquialism, is the practice of trying to win games and matches not on deck choice or play skill, but by very actively following up on apparent tournament rules violations in hopes of getting your opponent game- or match-lossed.

There's a lot of fuzzy thinking about "fishing" versus "proper play," and this is contributes to some players' hesitation about calling a judge. Are you "fishing" if you call a judge because your opponent missed a trigger, or because they searched for a card, riffled once, and then presented the deck to you?

No.

Fishing is usually done intentionally in gray areas, like insisting that a scuffed sleeve is actually marked (which amounts to fishing for a DQ, which is pretty ugly) or that your opponent is player slowly when they actually aren't. More to the point, if you know you aren't fishing, then you aren't fishing. If you legitimately want to call a judge, do so. Don't sit there second-guessing the decision to call. If you have correctly identified a game play issue, then the judge will let you know. Similarly if you haven't. Either way, it's fine.

I was accused of fishing by one commenter on my report from GP Oakland because I count out my opponent's deck each time it's presented to me to start a game. That's not fishing - it's just good standard operating procedure. If everyone did this, it would stop any cheaters and generally lead us all to clean up our act in sideboarding. Perhaps even more to the point, at GP Oakland I caught my opponent's error of shuffling his Marit Lage token back into his deck - there was no game loss for that one, and it headed off the giant mess that him drawing his token would have yielded once we were well into the game.

So far in my sanctioned tournament career, I've only made three judge calls that led to opponent game losses. Two were for tardiness, which doesn't really fall into the same category - although one of these led to a match loss when my opponent was tardy, and then we were deckchecked and he had a registration error. The opponent was Kenny Ellis, though, so he naturally had a great attitude about what a comically bad beat he'd just experienced. My one other "game lossing" of an opponent came during a Standard tournament just after the 9th to 10th edition transition, when I was resolving a Head Games against my opponent and noticed he had Weird Harvest in his deck.

Overall, I'd say that good players don't tend to fish. They may call judges more often than a typical PTQ player would, but I think that comes down to an attention to proper player procedure more than anything else.

This is on my mind after a match yesterday that mixed clumsy fishing with player sloppiness.

This was late in the tournament, and I was having one of those "deck malfunction days," including highlights like mulliganing down to four cards in search of land in a deck featuring twenty-four of them. I'll talk more about the deck in another post, but this was Extended, so it was Gifts.

In game one, my Scapeshift opponent hits the eponymous spell and says "I do eighteen to you" without doing anything else. I wonder for a moment how many people have just been scooping to him there, and say, "Show me." He then explains that he's going to get a Valakut and six mountains.

"Okay. Run through it for me."

And no, it wasn't a bluff, he had the lands (in fact, barring a weird draw that saw them all in his hand, I don't know how he couldn't have, so I don't know why he didn't just do the spell properly in the first place).

I lose that game, then take the second on the back of a Bitter Ordeal for all of his Valakuts. Ordeal is a hilarious card in an environment with fetchlands.

In the third game, I play a Snow-Covered Island and he asks, "Did you write Snow-Covered Island on our deck list?"

I don't know if I was annoyed more by the fishing, the fishing in the wake of the half-assed Scapeshift execution, or the half-assed nature of the fishing itself. I assured him that I did, indeed, write the correct card names on my deck reg sheet and we moved on...to him playing two lands in the same turn a few turns later.

I said, "That's your second land this turn." He picked it right up and put it back in his hand, and I said, "It's not a big deal, but I'm going to go ahead and call a judge."

Which I did, and he picked up a Warning for a Game Rule Violation. I wasn't fishing for anything here - I didn't imagine he had prior Warnings, and I was going to be dead to an unopposed Scapeshift awfully soon. That said, you need to do these judge calls because:

• 1 - You don't know if they've been doing this all day, and you're going to actually stop them by netting them their third Warning
• 2 - You don't know if they've been doing this all day and no one's called them on it, so you want to be a good citizen and make sure they play properly and there's a record if the sloppiness continues

Either way, I did die to that unopposed Scapeshift soon after, and even that execution was sloppy, as he cast Scapeshift, then picked up his library and began to search without sacrificing anything. At a PTQ, I think I'd stop him there, call a judge, and point out that he was searching for no lands because Scapeshift requires that you make the sacrifice choice first. At this local tournament, I just stopped him and made him do it right.

My punchline here is that this was one of those rare moments when my opponent's behavior just put me off. That said, I think it's important to remember that it's okay to call a judge, and helps improve the environment of the tournament in general. Even though some folks will clumsily fish for wins via the tournament rules, if all you want to do is make sure the game proceeds correctly, it's okay to call a judge. Fishing is all about intent - if you're not trying to do it, you're not doing it.

Last week I wrote about possible design solutions to keep Legacy healthy in the wake of the firming up of the reprint policy. Prior to that, I talked about why I have non-power-card reasons to want reprints, and since then I've put together an estimate of the total number of dual lands in the world. Now, I want to turn toward something else interesting...

Are Legacy staples all necessarily overpowered?

Click through to the extended entry to read more.

So what makes a good mythic? What differentiates a mythic from a rare? Why do I have a Princess Mononoke themed Thornling side-by-side with the real card?

As a regular listener to any number of Magic podcasts, I've heard variations on this question come up again and again. My take on the idea behind what makes a mythic is very simple:

Opening a mythic should be awesome.

Just that. Something about the mythic, some combination of its traits and flavor should make that experience of opening a pack thrilling - something that makes me glad I'm opening packs.

To clarify, I only ever open packs if I win them as prizes. Nonetheless, I think this is the clear best standard for mythics, and it's one that I've experienced with the Uniques in Mechwarrior and the Very Rares in Star Wars Miniatures.

With that in mind, I've gone through all the mythics to date and rated them on how appropriate they are as mythics. Click through to the extended to see how close to the mark Wizards are in making mythics, well, mythic.

If you haven't read it already, check out my evaluation of mythics and let me know if you agree or disagree. Overall, I found I was pretty happy with the hit rate on mythics feeling like mythics.

The corollary question, of course, is whether any rares feel as if they ought to have been mythic instead. With that in mind, I did the same set-by-set run through of rares (from those sets that also have mythics) with an eye toward identifying rares that push my 'mythic' button.

Fascinatingly, I noticed that my emotional response to most rares during this review was either "meh" or "seems good." That is, a rare either doesn't interest me or strikes me as a good, functional card. Sometimes I found myself thinking, "Yeah, this clearly needs to be rare for Limited," but I almost never found myself thinking "This card is awesome!"

To be clear, I think some of the rares are very good, or even amazing - Stoneforge Mystic comes to mind. But they don't trigger the "awesome" response that I've noticed I tend to attach to mythics. It often feels like rares are rares for the sake of Limited, but mythics are mythics for the sake of awesomeness.

So, applying the same, "Is it exciting to open this card?" standard, which rares really should have been mythic? Click through to the extended entry to find out.

After a bit of a glitch, the full version of my guest hosting take on This Week in Magic is up at ManaNation. I'm filling in for Trick, who had to cut out early to go attend GP DC and thus couldn't do his normal extensive reading.

Boy, does he read a lot of sites. More than I tend to, at any rate.

I hope it's a nice sampling of the top items from the community over the past week.

Click here to read it.