Essays on Magic: The Gathering

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...