In this week’s In Development, helpfully titled The Cost of Resilience, I refine my deck concept from last week by including a touch more flexibility to yield more power overall.
Also, I teach you about MRSA, if you didn’t know about it before.
Following a technical delay, the Worlds 2009 semifinals video is available for download. You can get it (and the pregame, quarters, finals, and teams) here.
The top extended decks from Worlds are up. Click here for the lists.
In general, we see the impact of Austin in the return of significant Dredge hate to the sideboards of the top performing decks. Lucas Blohon’s Dark Depths has Crypt, Jailer, Ravenous Trap, and three copies of Extirpate in the sideboard, while Manuel Bucher’s Bant has double Relic and quadruple Crypt. Austin is also apparent in the presence of a number of Rubin Zoo builds.
Yuuta Takahashi ran a straight-up Faeries build with four copies each of Mistbind, Vendilion, and Spellstutter, along with Bitterblossoms.
I’ll end by pointing out the two copies of Maelstrom Pulse in the sideboard of Akimasa Yamamoto’s Dredge deck. This card choice caught my ear when I was listening to Rich Hagon’s coverage of the team rounds. Notably, Dredge decks spent some time actually casting spells during teams, as Watanabe played not only Maelstrom Pulse, but also Golgari Grave-Troll (yes, as in cast from his hand).
In case you missed it, here’s the DCI judge blog for Worlds 2009. It’s worth scrolling through both for the funny stories and to just get a feel for the scope of the volunteer effort that goes into actually having judges at an event of this scale.
I did enjoy this story:
A couple more questions regarding tournament policy: Sergio P
There are currently seventeen cards in all of Magic containing the Oracle text “Exile all cards”. Of these, five are legal in the current Standard.
I’m putting together this week’s In Development, by the way.
There’s been, of course, a lot of discussion about Charles Gindy’s disqualification on day one of Worlds. My fellow CF writer, Zaiem Beg, has managed to pick up nearly two hundred comments on his column on the topic.
The official version of the DQing from the Wizards site explains it like so:
Gindy controlled a Master of the Wild Hunt, along with a pair of Wolf tokens, one a 2/2, and the other a 3/3 thanks to a counter from Oran-Rief the Vastwood.
Gindy activated his Master of the Wild Hunt, targeting one of his opponent
This week’s In Development is Iona, I Choose You, wherein I explain how I like to use the word “orthogonal” in Magic, and unveil several non-combo decks that nonetheless use Summoning Trap as a finisher.
Toward the end of Lorwyn-M10-Alara Standard, I was playing Team Elspeth, a majority green-white deck that tried to overpower Vivid-dependent decks by accelerating out early beaters, planeswalkers, and Primal Commands to gain tempo. Although the deck’s specific target is absent from the current Alara-M10-Zendikar Standard, some variation on it is probably playable, and BTSume asked me to consider what a revamped Team Elspeth would look like, so here we go.
Click through to the extended entry for a deck list and some commentary.
This is a tournament-rich weekend in the Bay Area. In addition to Superstars’ normal schedule of events, which naturally includes the biggest FNM in the area, drafts all day Saturday, and the Sunday Standard, we’re seeing two large sealed events.
If you’re interested in tilting at the qualifier windmill, there’s a PTQ for San Diego on Saturday at the Santa Clara convention center. Registration starts at 9am and ends at 10am, with an entry fee of $30.
If you’d prefer to just play some sealed for cheap, Superstars is holding a $2,000 sealed deck event on Saturday. The entry fee is $10, which the clever among you will note is significantly below the retail price of the six Zendikar packs you get as your sealed pool. And, of course, there are prizes. The tournament begins at 11am, and you can sign up over at ChannelFireball.com.
Over at Magic Game Plan, Dee has put together this super helpful guide to playing the Jund mirror. Given how likely this matchup is if you’re planning on bringing a Jund deck to your next Standard event, it’s tremendously useful to have access to someone else’s practice and homework in preparing for it.
I’m not planning on playing Jund right now, but if you are, you should read the guide.