Essays on Magic: The Gathering

Pt 1 - "Play the Best deck" - Redefined If you have much experience in competitive magic, you've probably stumbled upon the  saying "Just play the best deck" many times. This saying is one of my biggest pet peeves in all of magic. I believe it is over used, misleading, lazy, and often.. not true. The intention behind this article is to explore some insights of  successful meta-gaming and hopefully provide a more useful definition of what a "best deck" is. Part of the issue with using the term "best deck" to refer to the "best recently performing deck" is the language of "best" is connected to a deep intuition of what it means to be the best at something. When we think of the "best player" in hockey, we think of the best performing, highest skill , scored the most points etc. Attributes that are fairly static. If you were the best player in the world last week, the chances you will be this week is extremel

Introduction- Trip Report (First section is a short blog, skip to next for deck analysis) Wow! My first arena MC was easily the best MTG experience I've had to date. What a wild ride! The event itself had an absurd production value that added to the grandiosity of it all. Put the pro tour I went to in Spain to shame. Besides the competition, the highlight for me was undoubtedly the people I met. High level competitive magic has an awesome community of players full of unique personalities. Their attitudes weren't remotely predatory or parasitic despite the zero-sum competition dynamic (for you to win, your friend has to lose). Truly great sportsmanship.  It was an honor to compete against many players I'd followed and respected for years. Overall, I was happy with my performance and very happy with my deck choice. Felt like it was the  second or third best positioned deck in the room. (Simic Flash was incredibly built). Went 5-0 on Day 1 and 3-4 on Day 2 for a 66% wi

Introduction to Pioneer + Failed Brews As someone that has always preferred standard to other formats, I got very excited when they announced that they were going to release a format called SUPER STANDARD (Pioneer). I started playing MTG around M12 and got more seriously into it right around RTR, so literally this format spans my entire competitive magic foray. Decided to put a week or two into pioneer before focusing back on standard to be ready for my MC VII appearance and this is what I came up with. As always, wanted to focus on ideas that few people were focusing on. The brews I put work into were BW vampires, Jeskai flash and Sultai Delirium. I got them all to a positive record, but Jeskai Flash was a dud... Structurally, it is not a strategy that lines up well with what the better decks are trying to do. I was very impressed with Brineborn cutthroat in standard and wanted to see if I could port it + Spell Queller + Brazen Borrower into pioneer. Brineborn and Spell Quell

Wow! What an unbelievably exciting weekend. I qualified for mythic championship VII via the Arena MCQ!!! I went 10-1 on day 1 and 4-2 on day 2 with the Bant list I posted in the previous article Managed to eek into a qualifying position on tie breakers from my strong day 1 performance. Literally had to wait 45 minutes to find out if my breakers were good enough... Only five 4-2's qualified and  there were something like fifteen to twenty people with that record. Started day 2 off 0-1 as well! What a rush! In this article I wanted to give an overview of the cards that over-performed, under-performed and where I see the deck going forward. I played against 10 Simic Food variants, 1 mono R, 1 GW adventures, 1 4c Fires of invention, 3 Gruul and 1 Esper Doom foretold. Two of my losses were to food decks and one was to gruul. Bant Ramp https://www.streamdecker.com/deck/AMxPcQ-E Was happy with how my decklist performed, but it was very clear there were mistakes made. My v

All right , all right ,all right.. Let's get ready to MCQ! I've played a fair bit of magic this week trying to wrap my head around the consequences of the recent field of the dead ban. It was widely held consensus that Food decks were the second best if not the best deck of the format prior to this banning, with no archetype clearly in 3rd place. Now that the #1 Boogeyman has dethroned, all targets will be on Food. What decks can beat it? What decks are unplayable now? Just how good is the deck? Can it withstand the attention? This is my solution to the current format (borrowed the idea from a 5-0 daily list recently) Bant Ramp https://www.streamdecker.com/deck/AMxPcQ-E My reasoning for choosing the deck is the following - - Oko decks are by far the best deck in a vacuum in the format. Pitted against a random brew they will win more than any other deck by a large margin. -I have a lot of experience piloting UGx food decks. (This is huge) -All the good players

In this article I will be sharing my thoughts on the various standard decks in the format that I've played enough games with to comment on.. as well as share my own semi-unique deck for attacking the format. Temur Food. Meta Format Analysis: First off, unless you've been living under a rock, the focus of the format the past week has been on Golos and Field of the dead. After playing the deck a couple dozen games, I can confidently say that it is the "best deck" I've seen in a vacuum. I got all the way to mythic #6 with Jeremy Betarioni's Fires of Invention version of it ( http://www.starcitygames.com/decks/133306 ) . It crushes mid-range, it crushes brews and no deck can realistically go over the top of it. 7/8 of the top 8 decks in the Starcity team open were Golos based for good reason. http://www.starcitygames.com/decks/Star_City_Games_Team_Open/2019-10-05_standard_Philadelphia_PA_US/1/ However, the sky isn't falling. Golos is far from unbeatab

Wow! Is this set powerful or what! I'm beginning to believe that this format is MORE powerful than the last format. Throne of Eldraine has more power than dominaria/ixalan/m19 combined! Wanted to share my initial thoughts of some of my questions/predictions of the last article https://b3rgmtg.blogspot.com/2019/09/throne-of-eldraine-standard-preliminary.html So, What are my first impression of best/most warping cards of the format? Is the best agro deck mono Red? Is the top of the format all elemental/field of the dead decks? Most warping/powerful cards in Throne of Eldraine 1. Oko, Thief of crowns , is absurd. It may be the most powerful card in standard. I honestly have no idea how they decided to give it so much loyalty? It's too early to call it, but my gut tells me this card was a major design mistake and even has a chance of being banned. Regardless, It will certainly warp the format. How Oko warps the format: -You cannot attack it profitably unless you are wa

5 Questions,  5 Predictions,  8 Decklists Ahhh, my favourite time of the magic season! New standard starts in 5 days on Arena! Breaking down formats is what I enjoy most of the game, so and let's dive right into my initial thoughts on the format and how I plan to get an edge in the early upcoming standard season. First off, initially it's important not to spend too much time hammering out a perfect decklist before you play. Too many surprises and too many shifts will happen. What's important at first is to learn as much as you can about a format. What are the most powerful interactions? What are the best stand alone cards in the format? What restrictions does the mana put on deckbuilding? What are the fastest decks in the format? If you are trying to win in the first couple weeks , being proactive is generally the right strategy. In a week 1 tournament, don't get caught in the middle of this format. Either go over the top (with an anti-agro sideboard) or go un

Introduction I've been tuning my Grixis build preparing for the arena MCQ this weekend, and right now I'm facing an interesting tuning decision. I expect a significant rise in Esper control from recent tournaments and unfortunately there are very few cards that are both good against Esper AND good against Vampires!! This is a common issue that you might face when building a midrange or control deck in a metagame that that pulls you in two directions. If you load up on removal, you'll have lots of dead cards when you play against control.. If you load up on card draw and expensive threats, you wont ever get to use those cards against agro because you will die before you can cast them (which is identical to virtual dead cards). It's tempting to put a few cards of column A and a few cards of column B into your main deck and call it a day.. However, I think doing so without thinking about subtlety is a significant mistake. Advanced principles  1)  How dead ARE the