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.