Gifts Ungiven

Mike Flores previewed this card earlier this week:

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

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

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

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

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

With the next major event for most of us in the U.S. being Regionals (and with National Qualifiers proceeding apace in other nations), the talk has, of course, been centered on what Alara Reborn will do to the format, with the expectation that we won't see many full-fledged tests of the format ahead of Regionals.

However, it turns out there was one exceptionally early PTQ for Austin held in Dallas. You can click here to see the results at DeckCheck. So, what do we have?

According to DeckCheck (and TwinFu before that), B/W Tokens was the flavor of the day, with 20 entries, followed by roughly even numbers of Boat BRew, R/B Aggro, and 5-Color Control. The top eight is certainly tokens territory, with three copies of B/W Tokens showing up, along with a Jund ramp deck, one 5-Color Control, one Boat Brew, one Elves, and one U/W Reveillark control deck (not the Mistmeadow version, by the way).

The real question, of course, is what Alara Reborn cards made it into this PTQ, so soon after the official release of the set.

Most predictably, two of the three B/W Tokens decks ran Zealous Persecution. This just seems like such a good fit for the deck. In the mirror or the Boat Brew match up, it's such a swing (kill your whole team...). Otherwise, it accelerates your deck's ability to kill. Good all around, and a clear gimme for inclusion in the deck.

All three Tokens decks also swapped out their sideboard Head Games in favor of Identity Crisis, which is just so much more powerful. Again, it seems as if the card was meant to slot into the archetype.

The second-place Jund Ramp deck features a four-of of Maelstrom Pulse, which is not especially surprising, as it's a very powerful, very versatile card. This deck also ran four Terminates in the sideboard. I'm not sure if I'm excited about Terminate over, say, Terror, but there you go.

In Five-Color Control, we have a random one maindeck Terminate as the sole Reborn card to make an appearance.

The B/G Elves build fairly predictably features the playset of Maelstrom Pulse, as well as a two-of of Lord of Extinction (interestingly, it also has triple Avatar of Might in the side; that's nothing to do with Alara Reborn, but it is an unexpected choice).

Perhaps most interesting to me is the U/W Lark deck, which features four Fieldmist Borderpost. In the context of a deck with 12 basic lands, a borderpost is effectively a comes-into-play-tapped dual land. However, in this context it also has an interesting interaction with Knight of the White Orchid (which this deck packs as a full playset), in that bouncing your land with the post means you're likely to be able to capitalize on the Orchid, as even though you maintain the expected number of mana sources, you ratchet back on your actual land drops. That's pretty sweet.

I expect we'll see more dramatic impact from Alara Reborn as we go along, but it's good to see what the early adopters have already done.

I've decided, barring a compelling interest in doing otherwise, that I'm naming my decks after random songs kicked up from my music collection. Thus, this post's offering is named Baltic Sea. It's a B/R/G ramp deck that attempts to burn its way through aggro decks and finish the game with some combination of beasts, Cloudthreshers, and Lavalanches.

Click through to the extended entry for more.

As part of the continuing countdown to Regionals, I continue to bounce a bunch of deck ideas around. This one has firmed up enough that I'm willing to post it. Once again, the deck name comes from a random song, albeit one with a vaguely appropriate name this time around.

This is a W/G midrange deck that I explicitly modeled off of Katsuhiro Mori's take on the Ghazi-Glare deck from Worlds 2005. The environment and purpose of the deck is different enough that this isn't 'templating' as such, but I did pick up some valuable ideas from the Ghazi-Glare deck. For example, Farhaven Elves are in many ways functional replacements for the Wood Elves in the Ghazhi-Glare build.

After some testing against the major archetypes, I like this enough to publish the list. Click through to the extended entry for deck list and commentary.

Following some successful testing before last week and a paucity of time to spend on any other designs over the course of the week, I decided to go with Angel of Love, the G/W big beats deck I posted earlier. The sideboard at the time was fairly ad hoc, and it turns out that after some reflection, a few of the main deck cards were poor choices as well. Thus, I've updated the build for Regionals tomorrow.

Click through to the extended entry for the revised deck list that I'll be packing at Regionals tomorrow, as well as some explanation about the changes.

The Northern California Regionals was small this year, with 141 participants. It seemed to be running pretty smoothly, with no major complaints and our usual highly competent work from our excellent judges. My own performance was utterly middle of the road, with a drop after I hit 3-3 (and decided I wanted to go off and take care of some other stuff I could be doing, rather than cook and see if I could make two more wins in the remaining rounds).

I'll discuss our metagame, my deck choice, and cover the round-by-round in the extended entry.

Following my experience with G/W Angel of Love at Regionals, I came away with the feeling that (1) I make play errors (hey, that's not news) and (2) the deck was not adequately positioned to take down tokens builds or just end the game generally. These are two sides of the same coin, really.

Since Regionals, I've figured out that G/W alone does not support the big-giant-threat (BGT!) archetype I'm going for here, although I do think the archetype is nearly and yet not quite viable in G/W alone. As a first pass, I moved into the full Naya colors, which gave me access to Thoctar and the younger, pissed off Ajani. This deck was nice, but really moved the deck much more firmly into the midrange, rather than letting it express its BGT aggro nature.

So, as much as I was trying to avoid making a Doran deck, I decided to venture into splashing black from Maelstrom Pulse (to help deal with those tokens are restrict the B/W long game), using Murmuring Bosks as just another comes-into-play-tapped tri-land. From there, I relented and added in the Siege Tower.

And it turns out that version of the deck is working reasonably well.

Once again, the deck name comes from a random song title.

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

Yesterday I attended the first PTQ of the current season at Superstars Game Center. I had a good time as always. We have a good crowd here in Northern California, both judges and players alike, and I think that makes for a great playing environment.

We had a smaller tournament than typical this time, with 122 players. I don't think that we should generalize from that to the health of the Magic scene, however, since this was a graduation weekend - specifically, the San Jose State University graduation was the same day as the PTQ, a mere three blocks away from us. Combine that with Memorial Day weekend, and it's understandable that we had a reduced turnout.

The upshot of that number was seven rounds rather than our usual eight.

Thanks go out to our excellent judging staff, this time consisting of Riki (head judge), Eric, NIck, Neil, and Alex.

I went 4-3 this time, and I think this highlights that I am currently very much a 50-50 player. Although I bring some potential trouble to my record by insisting on playing decks of my own design, I can also point directly to some notable play errors that could potentially have led to me winning games, and thus matches. I mention this because I enjoy improving my play, and because I continue to hear players telling each other "bad beat" stories that can be distilled correctly into "the game proceeded as expected, and I lost." It's okay to generate this kind of narrative if it makes you feel better, since this is a recreational activity, but if you actually also want to improve as a player, you will have to be honest with yourself and acknowledge those things which can be legitimately influenced by your actions.

Click through to the extended entry for the final deck list I brought on the day, as well as my round-by-round tournament report, and an explanation for why a 4-3 is actually a 3-3.

Although my mind has mainly been on things like work and such this week, I've also been checking in with all sorts of Magic coverage and considering what I might play well down the road in late June, at our next area PTQ. I've bounced between black-green and black-white-green aggro builds, as well as a sort of black-white-green hate-and-aggro deck, a similarly color-combined infinite combo build, and all the other sorts of somewhat midrangey goodness I tend to find myself drawn to. As I found myself continually circling around the same set of ideas, I decided to set myself the task of, instead, focusing on another area of deckbuilding.

Today, I've settled on the Grixis color band (blue-black-red), with the immediate thought being some form of control deck centered on my favorite planeswalker, Liliana Vess. Conveniently, iTunes offered up an appropriate song title as the deck's name.

Click through to the extended for a deck list and some commentary.

In recent Standard events, I've run Green/White and Black/Green/White big-dude aggro decks. Clearly, I've been interested in other concepts, but I think there's a solid possibility for something along these lines to do well in an upcoming PTQ.

During the recent coverage for PT Honolulu, we saw B/G Elves sweep the LCQs. At the same time, a G/W deck did reasonably well in block itself, which spurred BDM to mention a Tsuyoshi Fujita quote in a deck tech. Paraphrased, it says that playing two colors is a solid choice in a three-color environment, because you'll win a notable percentage of games on opponent's mana stumbles. Now, whether this applies in a land of Vivids and Pools is unclear, but I have nonetheless decided to take a look at two-color archetypes in contemporary Standard (despite my continuous desire to splash Maelstrom Pulses into everything).

Click through to the extended entry for a G/W big-dudes aggro deck that's been refined to fit my perceived version of the potential metagame.

If I weren't out of town this weekend, I'd be there. Superstars is running a Standard $5K, and in a very cool new addition to their $5K procedure, they're having Josh Silvestri provide live coverage. Today is the main event, so there's a metagame breakdown and feature match coverage.

Click here to read the live $5K coverage at ChannelFireball.com

Three interesting recent articles:

Gary Wise discusses how many poker pros started in Magic

Josh Silvestri talks about Jund Aggro in Standard, with a solid meditation on the mana base

The Ferrett talks about how damage on the stack, really, honestly is a problem for recruiting new players

I've had a sort of on-again, off-again appreciation for Pithing Needle in the current Standard season. I ran two main deck at Regionals, and then stripped them out of the deck entirely for the following PTQ only to add them in on the day.

Pithing Needle is an interesting card. It's a generic solution to a swath of problems in Standard, but it's also often a terrible topdeck because you needed to do something other than shut down an activated ability to win the game. Still, there's a certain appeal to dropping a first-turn Needle on Windbrisk Heights against a tokens player (something I've done before).

So, with this little debate running in my head, let's take a look at the questions and possible answers over the in extended entry.

In developing an appreciation for an idea, sometimes we want to factcheck ourselves to make sure that we are not in love with the idea beyond the point of reason, or, conversely, that we have not misapprehended the situation such that our good idea turns out to be, on the whole, bad. While I wouldn't advocate setting aside your creativity out of fear of having made a bad choice, I think it's good to be able to evaluate those situations where you have badly mismatched your choice to the event.

Or, to put it another way, 1-2-2.

Over in the extended entry, I'm going to take a look at a deck choice that turned out to be sorely mismatched for our area, and reflect on how it represents not just a mismatch, but also an incorrect approach to a core component of the game.

The blog was having some issues over the past week, but should be back up and running now. I'll probably make some incidental comments on the spoiled M10 cards in the near future, and I have a cascade control deck list I've been enjoying, for anyone who still has a pre-M10 PTQ coming up (or an FNM, if your FNMs are Standard).

With the set almost completely (if not necessarily reliably at all times - where'd that Lotus land go, eh?) spoiled, I'm definitely thinking about what I like in M2010. As a player who started in Beta, I think they've done a good job of cleaving more toward iconic, generic-and-cool fantasy elements for this new core set. The theming is stronger, there are fewer cards with random, hard-to-place names, and in general the set has more playables than we've come to expect from a core set.

I'll take a look at individual cards in the spoiler-rrific extended entry, specifically addressing rares that interest me, since, as always, I'll be buying a full common/uncommon 4x playset, and then picking out individual rares to purchase.

While my site has been down in the past week, I've been having a lot of fun with a cascade-centric control build. This design came about because I challenged myself to move away from the midrange, which is an area I've tended to live in lately. I intuitively appreciate the midrange because I like being able to shift modes between control and aggression, but I think being stuck in any one playstyle is (1) bad for my development and (2) kind of boring, whether I realize it or not. Thus, I decided to push myself in one direction or another, and the first place I went was control.

Cascade Pulse is a five-color control build that started as an attempt to merge planeswalker control with cascade control, with the idea that as many of the cards as possible should represent card advantage, either on the same turn or over time (I still love AJ Sacher's description of planeswalkers as epic spells that let you keep playing spells). What I ended up with is a control deck that leverages powerful card advantage to achieve control relatively quickly. It's good against a reasonably large swath of the field, and if I were heading off to a Standard event soon, I might tune this, concoct a metagame-appropriate sideboard, and bring it.

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