This week’s In Development is Building Up From Good Enough, and it’s all about how we can work to improve a design that’s already working pretty nicely. The subject matter these week is Nayamorphic, and at the end of the day we keep some things, lose others, and come out with a better deck.
There are 169 instances of the word ‘whenever’ in the current pool of Standard cards.
Can any of these instances support a combo deck or combo element in another deck? Hard to say.
In doing some research for a couple artist friends, I stumbled across the blog of Jon Schindehette, senior art director for Dungeons & Dragons.
There’s a lot of beautiful art and interesting stuff there, including this post about how he came to be an art director at Wizards.
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
If you watched the top eight of PT Austin last weekend, you may have noticed that game five of the Kibler-Papatsarouchas match in the quarterfinals seems to have swung on a missed Angel of Despair trigger. Josh Silvestri commented on that in his column this week, largely from the perspective of trying to prevent these kinds of situations. Following a fairly extensive debate over Brian’s knowledge and intent in missing Papatsarouchas’s trigger, Brian himself chimed in:
I knew that Van missed the Angel of Despair trigger. I held my Baneslayer Angel in my hand when he cast Hypergenesis because I didn
This week’s In Development focuses on post-Reflecting-Pool mana bases for 4+ color decks. If you enjoy my posts that are full of analysis and references to older formats, then you’ll like A Series of Harrowing Decisions.
Shota Yasooka made it to thirty-fifth place this week at Pro Tour Austin. You may have heard about the super quirky Gifts deck he ran in the Constructed portion of the PT. If not, well, click on through to the extended entry below where we’ll move back through time and take a look at the often unique decks that Yasooka has brought to premier events over the years.
While you’re reading the Pro Tour Austin 2009 coverage, make sure to swing on by the Judge Blog where Riki Hayashi is providing the judge-side perspective on this fine event, including a near-game-loss for David Ochoa for sticking his deck back in his deck box incorrectly (fortunately, the judge was entirely on the ball there and helped David not randomly lose a game to that).
First fun of the day – reading Bill Stark’s archetype breakdown and seeing rather more Dredge than I expected. Hedron Crab is a nice enabler, but I’m super curious to see how the rest of the current Dredge list works out.
I also enjoyed Rich Hagon’s Anatomy of a Round.
After having fun playing around with Vintage Dredge, I’ve spent much of the past week nonproductively attempting to revive (ahem) Dredge in the current Extended.
Unfortunately, the loss of Odyssey block has severely impinged on the power of Dredge, as you lose easy access to cards meant to ditch stuff into your graveyard and operate easily out of your graveyard. The loss of Cabal Therapy, for example, is pretty nasty.
After significant tinkering, I came up with a list that is, at the very least, fun to goldfish with. It’s still not solid enough that I’d want to take it out for a tournament spin, but I have nonetheless decided it’s worth posting.
Click through to the extended entry for the deck list and some brief remarks.