Obviously, I haven’t been writing much Magic content lately.

Chalk that up to the world of science taking up my time, especially with the founding of our new little research company and working to finish up some publications from my prior research.

I’ve had some requests for both a new Standard mana worksheet and, well, any of my other relevant ones. As it happens, I did knock together a worksheet for the new Standard, and haven’t had the time to write an article about it.

Click here for the Theros Standard mana worksheet

In case you’re having trouble finding it, here’s the Modern mana worksheet:

Click here for the Modern mana worksheet

If you need a general primer on how to use this type of worksheet, read Making Modern Mana over at ChannelFireball.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts and comments.

When I’m not applying science to Magic, I’m applying science to, well, science.

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

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

Some of the time.

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

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

For those of you who are working on deck designs for the upcoming Standard, here’s how to get the full card pool in Gatherer:

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

Until this Friday when Gatherer updates, of course.

In case you missed it, Jules Robins had a fun column recently showing off the best results from his “You Make the Planeswalker” contest. It’s a fun read, with a lot of creativity in terms of planeswalker abilities. My favorite was this planeswalkerized take on Glissa:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nifty.

So, in checking out the complete Avacyn Restored Card Image Gallery yesterday, I noticed this little gem that I hadn’t seen in previous spoilers:

Although the dedicated burn deck is not really my deal, nor is low-and-fast aggro in the manner of Boros and friends, this seems like an amazing card if you are going to play the fast aggro game.

“Discard your hand to draw two” is no good for your typical control deck where you want to progressively build your hand (obviously). Dangerous Wager is brilliant, however, as an end-of-your-opponent’s-turn play for a fast aggro deck. After all, if you still had burn, you’d be burning them with it. If you still had creatures that were relevant, you’d be casting them. If you have an extra land or two in hand, why not replace them with cards that can actually shift the game?

And naturally, most of the time you’ll just be casting Dangerous Wager on an empty hand, making it a pure two cards for two mana.

As a “discard then draw” spell it naturally also feels like a Dredge-adjacent card. I think at two mana with no flashback or other benefits it’s too slow for Legacy Dredge. It might, however, make Modern DredgeVine decks more consistent and effective.

For now, though, I’m just impressed by how good it seems it should be in fast aggro.

Since I’ve been duly informed that I’m not allowed to mention things like this without providing a list, here’s Mattia Rizzi’s “Jund with Emrakul,” which took him to a top eight at a PTQ in Verona last month: