Essays on Magic: The Gathering

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...

                                    Standard Meta Analysis - Why Grixis is great right now https://www.streamdecker.com/deck/j_25jq7iZ Despite winning my local tournament with Jeskai feather, and climbing to #32 mythic with it... I'm currently not planning to play it at the Arena MCQ qualifier this weekend. The reason? I predict a meta shift very soon and I don't think the meta shift will be favorable for feather. 11 of the last 14 decks I played last night were vampire decks.. Most of them were high mythic. A high % of MPL was on vampires. . While I'm comfortable with my vampires matchup with feather (It's somewhere between 45-55%), I'm concerned about the next format shift in response to the vampire domination. I think the best counter decks to vampires are a well tuned Esper or Grixis deck designed to exploit the weaknesses in vampires. Both Esper and Grixis have very favorable feather ma...

I admit,  I am a standard hipster. When decks become popular I don't want to play them. I like finding powerful interactions between decks that most people haven't thought of, and pitting them against the popular decks. More importantly, I get incredible joy from "breaking" formats. The CHANCE of finding the best deck for a current metagame is an exhilarating high, that I will make short term -EV concessions to try and find. This is a deck I've been on a savage tear with online (#32 mythic as of writing this) and won a 27 person live tournament with: Jeskai Feather https://www.streamdecker.com/deck/Tw1Sc1R1P It is essentialy Boros feather, splashing for deputy of detention, spliced with some minor wizard synergy. This post is a quick breakdown of how I arrived at the idea and how the parts function to make Jeskai a better choice than Boros in certain metagames. Note: by the time you read this the metagame may have already shifted to make this less good. ...

                                                                      Thesis      Color pie restrictions promote diversity of strategy and identity between colors, but they also restrict strategic options for building competitive decks. Competitive magic would be more strategically diverse and interesting if hard restrictions were relaxed to soft restrictions. The benefit would outweigh the cost.                                                                    Introduction      One of most common feedback I get when designing my custom cards for cube is "But that doesn't fit within that colors identity!!!!". It's c...

Finally got this bad boy up and running! I wanted to get something set up quick to get the thoughts burning in my head, burning onto the paper (or in this case the computer screen). Eventually, I would like to create a website where my articles can be searched by the nature of them. Decklists, Format analysis, Design theory, General playing theory etc. But for now, this blog will be a bit cluttered, and will link the articles together by their tags! Thanks for reading!