Community

I'm an idiot.  I can admit it.  I missed the link for the GDS2 essay questions until it was friday night and I didn't have time to get them done before the deadline on sunday evening.  I'm a busy guy right now; my days are filled with soccer practices and games, ballet classes and recitals, and girl scout meetings, x2.  I just didn't have the time to check the site everyday and when I didn't see it on monday I assumed we had another week until they were posted.  Oh well right?  At least now I can do what american men do best, yell at the TV on sunday and make judgements upon all the coaches and players. 

Here are a couple of cards that I designed a month or so ago and was waiting until the GDS2 to use.  I really like [c]Phyrexian Arena[/c] and I thought making an enchantment for

Here is the list of lands that I always seem to play, or at least consider playing, in EDH decks with their corresponding colors.  I kept the list free of lands that I are strickly mana producers, anything that is rediculously expensive to purchase, lands that I don't think are very good (eg. cyclers), and lands that will only benefit a small number of decks (eg.[c]Wirewood Lodge[/c], [c]Serra's Sanctum[/c]).

[b]White[/b]:
-  [c]Windbrisk Heights[/c]:  IMO this is the easiest to cast of all the Hideaways and allows you to play the hidden card at instant speed during or after your attack step.
-  [c]Emeria, the Sky Ruin[/c]:  Great graveyard recursion.
-  [c]Sejiri Steppe[/c]:  This is great if you have a way to cheat it in at instant speed ([c]Knight of the Reliquary[/c]).  Even if

I was only able to make it to one pre-release event this weekend unfortunately, but it gave me enough of a chance to see what works and to check out some cool plays.  I posted last week that I thought blue was the weakest color in the set and green and black the most powerful.  After actually playing this weekend I can say that blue is still the least powerful, green and black seemed decent, but white rocks pretty hard.  While infect makes green and black good color choices, if you aren't drafting infect then you might want to move into white when it's available.  Btw, if you [i]are[/i] looking to put together an infect deck in limited then you pretty much have to go all in on infect; half and half doesn't get the job done. 

Something that is kind of obvious but I think it's important

Second day of Scars pre-release is now over with and I hope everyone had a great time playing.  My pre-release was ok, but not great.  I didn't do badly, and I pulled some decent value cards and cards that I wanted.  I unfortunately was matched against a player who had obviously marked his cards and had been playing with an edge over players for most of the day.  I posted two weeks ago about cheating and ways to spot it in The Art of the Shuffle pt. 2, and it is no joke that some people will go to lengths to win at Magic just to get some prize packs.  I played a guy who had oriented his land upside down in his sleeves and deck so that he could see if he was going to top deck land, and see open sleeves facing him which gave him the ability to know which cards coming up were land. 

Well, we've got a full spoiler to look over now and I've put in a pre-order for my must have singles.  Here is what's got me excited:

[c]Genesis Wave[/c]:  Pre-ordered 2 of them at $1 each, which is a steal IMO.  Can't wait to fit it into my Azusa, and Elf decks.
[c]Ezuri, Renegade Leader[/c]:  I was definitely happy to see this guy on the spoiler.  The first EDH deck I ever built was an Elf deck and this guy is going to fit perfectly.
[c]Grasp of Darkness[/c]:  Great removal and it will probably replace [c]Terror[/c] in my Drana deck.
[c]Necrotic Ooze[/c]:  Here is a perfect example of a card that I will force into every deck I play for the next 6 months just because I think it should be awesome but it will only shine once out of every 10 plays.
[c]Sunblast Angel[/c]:  I don't have

We are winding down the lists of cards that always seem to find a spot on my EDH decklists.  As usual, I'm not listing cards that are too expensive or there usage is too narrow outside of a particular deck theme.  I also separated enchantments into two catagories: regular enchantments and enchantments that target permanents.

[b]White[/b]:
[c]Luminarch Ascension[/c]:  This card is flippin' crazy in multi-player.  It is considered a "hate card" in our play group, when it hits the table you are immediately considered the biggest threat at the table.
[c]Ghostly Prison[/c]:  The implications of this card being played are often times overlooked until it's too late.  It makes you a convenient target, in that, you aren't creating a threat when you play it but you are hindering play itself. 

If you missed part 1 you can find it here.  I'm just going to quickly touch on bombs and win condition cards then get right into how to spot and prevent cheating.  Like last post I did some real basic demonstations of how cards shuffle into your deck and why you need card draw and mana fixing. I did the same thing here to demonstate how your bombs and win conditions are shuffled in and why you need tutors and card draw.

i1)  4 bombs on top of a 60 card deck.
i2)  Rifle shuffled 11 times and ended with 3 bombs in the top 15 cards.
i3)  4 bombs cut into about every 1/4 of the deck, then shuffled.
i4)  After 11 rifle shuffles you get 1 bomb in the top 22 cards.
i5)  11 rifle shuffles and drew 1 bomb in opening hand; top 20 cards had 3 bombs.

So basically, with only 4 cards in your deck

I did a little shuffle experiment the other day with a 60 card deck and it scared the hell out of me.  I've always been an advocate of building decks with mana fixing and card draw, but when I was done with my little experiment I realized that I'll [i]never[/i] build a deck without both again. 

So what I did was pretty basic and I'm sure I'm not the first to have done it.  I sleeved up 60 cards with two different colored sleeves, red being spells (37) and blue being land (23).  Then I shuffled.  I varied my shuffling style and how cards were reintroduced back into the deck after play.  Really, there are only two widely used methods of shuffling magic cards, hand/rifle shuffling and pile shuffling.  I used rifle shuffling and then a combination of both.  Pile shuffling takes so

Gran Prix, Portland is over.  It's been over for almost 24 hours now and I'm still going to need another day before I really recover from it all.  It was my first large tournament event and it was a little overwhelming at times.  There was a lot of people, which I expected, but there was more to do than I expected.  Lots of booths, artists, and of course Magic.

I've played a lot of local tournaments over the past 2 years and I've played with lots of good players so tournament play isn't all that new to me.  I don't get intimidated by players with endless resumes of tournament wins and top 8s, so I thought I was fairly well prepared for this; I wasn't.  The one factor that eluded me with all of this was the grind of it all.  Hours of Magic is not new to me.  Even days of Magic isn't