With the rapid growth of Magic Online, Wizards of the Coast has been bringing more players into the digital world of card slinging by creating new formats and releasing all of the old sets online. Earlier this year Wizards of the Coast recently announced the creating of the Legacy Online format, which is a bit surprising. That in and of itself is not surprising, but not all of the older Legacy playable cards are yet in the Magic Online card pool so it is surprising that they would launch it before this. But with the release of the rest of Urza’s block and the Masters Edition IV (slated for release December 13 2010), most of the remaining cards will be released ‘into the wild’ if the speculation proves correct that Masters Edition IV will include the hits from Mercadian Masques block (Mercadian Masques/Nemesis/Prophecy). Wizards go eventually release the entire Mercadian block, but the consensus in the past seems to be that Mercadian was the worst block and would be a very poor seller online (hence the theory of just including releveant cards in Masters Edition IV).

The Magic Online Legacy community has slowly been gaining steam, with Daily Events running regularly and succesfully firing with 16-30+ people. The Premier Events have been hit or miss, but there seems to be plenty of data coming in from the developing Online Legacy metagame in Daily Events. In our new weekly column here we’ll take a look at what is the exact make up of the Online Legacy metagame by analyzing every deck played and how they finished.

For those unfamiliar with Daily Events, they are usually run once or twice a day, with a minimum of 16 people to start and a max of 128, and are always exactly 4 rounds. They are 6 tickets to enter and pay out 11 booster packs (roughly 44 ticket value) to players finishing 4-0, and 6 booster packs (roughly 24 ticket value) to players finishing 3-1. Premier Events require a minimum of 33 players (and a max of 256) and cost 10 tickets to enter, and are similar to most tournaments with Swiss rounds based on the number of competitors, with a cut to a single elimination Top 8 playoff. The prizes are 36 booster packs for first place, 27 for second, 18 for third and fourth, and 9 for fifth through eighth. All prize winning players in both types of tournaments are also rewarded with Qualifying Points based on their finish, and these points accumulate and can be used for other prizes in the description found here.

All scheduled online events can be found courtesy of the Magic Online Events Calendar.

With our first week (04-25-2010 through 05-01-2010) of Online Legacy analysis, we have 7 Daily Events worth of data to pull from. The events will be listed by number and date, and then broken out by archetype, players, average points per archetype and sub-archetype (there is a maximum of 12 points per tournament, as there are 4 rounds in each Daily Event), and money finishes (money finish defined as 4-0 or 3-1 finish, which is the cutoff for payouts in Daily Events).

Daily Event 1154851 04-25-2010 (32 players):
Ad Nauseam – 3 players; average 4.00 points by player
(2 with 3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version; average 6.00 points per player)
(1 with Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version; average 0.00 points per player)
Reanimator – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Painter Grindstone – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant Tempo/New Horizons – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 3 players; average 2.00 points per player
CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Canadian Threshold – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Merfolk U – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Enchantress – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
BGU Smallpox – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 3 players; average 7.00 pionts per player; 2 money finishes
Dredge (LED-less) – 3 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 5 players; average 5.40 points per player; 2 money finishes
(2 with Goblins R; average 10.5 points per player; 2 money finishes)
(2 with Goblins RB; average 3.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RG; average 0.00 points per player)
Naya Zoo – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Red Green aggro – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Affinity – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish

Daily Event 1154853 04-26-2010 (29 players):
Ad Nauseam (3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version) – 1 player; average 3.00 points by player
Charbelcher – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Next Level Storm – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 3.00 points per player
Stoneforge Bant (no CounterTop) – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 1 players; average 3.00 points per player
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
4C Landstill – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Nearly Mono Blue – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Stax WG – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Mono Black Aggro Control – 1 players; 6.00 points per player
Dredge (LED-less) – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Dredge (Bloodghasted) – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 3 players; average 6.00 pionts per player; 1 money finish
AggroLoam RGB – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 3 players; average 5.40 points per player; 1 money finish
(2 with Goblins RB; average 3.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RG; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish)
Naya Zoo – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player
Affinity – 2 players; average 1.50 points per player

Daily Event 1154855 04-27-2010 (25 players):
Ad Nauseam (3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version) – 1 player; average 6.00 points by player
Next Level Storm – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Canadian Threshold – 1 players; average 3.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Enchantress – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
BGW RecSur – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
BG Junk – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Dredge (LED-less) – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Dredge (Bloodghasted) – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
AggroLoam RGB – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Naya Zoo – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 4 players; average 5.40 points per player; 1 money finish
(1 with Goblins R; 1 player; average 3.00 points per player)
(2 with Goblins RB; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish)
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 6.00 points per player)

Daily Event 1175104 04-28-2010 (16 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Imperial Aluren – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Reanimator – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
4C Landstill – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
BW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Mono Green NOPro – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 2 players; average 5.40 points per player; 1 money finish
(1 with Goblins RB; average 0.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 3.00 points per player)

Daily Event 1175105 04-29-2010 (16 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 2 players; average 7.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Reanimator – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
4C Landstill – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Mono Black Smallpox – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
AggroLoam RGB – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
AggroLoam RGBW – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Dredge (LED-less) – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 3 players; average 5.00 points per player; 1 money finish
(3 with Goblins R; 3 players; average 5.00 points per player; 1 money finish)
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 3 players; average 3.00 points per player

Daily Event 1175106 04-29-2010 (27 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Next Level Storm – 1 player; 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Charbelcher – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Painter Grindstone – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Canadian Threshold – 1 players; average 3.00 points per player
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
CounterTop UGW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
4C Landstill – 2 players; average 7.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Enchantress – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
BG Junk – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
BG Smallpox – 2 players; average 3.00 points per player
BGWU Survival – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 2 players; average 7.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Dredge (LED-less) – 3 players; average 3.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Elves – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 3.00 points per player)
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Naya Zoo – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish

Daily Event 1175107 04-30-2010 (24 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Charbelcher – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Hypergenesis Show and Tell – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 0.00 points per player
Canadian Threshold – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
CounterTop UGW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Enchantress – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 3 players; average 8.00 pionts per player; 2 money finishes
Dredge (LED-less) – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Goblins – 4 players; average 5.25 points per player; 1 money finish
(2 with Goblins R; average 6.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RB; average 6.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish)
Naya Zoo – 2 players; average 4.5 points per player

NOTE: missing data for Daily Event 1175108 05-01-2010 (17 players) and Daily Event 1175109 05-01-2010 (27 players)

So, that’s a pretty nice data set to pull from, even though we’re missing complete results for 2 of the Daily Events. The data from the 7 events that we do have data for breaks down like this, when adding them all up.

7 events, 169 players total, with an average of 24.14 players per event
Ad Nauseam – 11 players; average 5.46 points by player; 3 money finishes (.27 times per playing the deck)
(4 with 3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version; average 5.25 points per player)
(7 with Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version; average 5.57 points per player; 3 money finishes [.43 times per playing the deck])
Next Level Storm – 3 players; average 4.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.33 times per playing the deck)
Charbelcher – 3 players; average 5.00 points per player
Painter Grindstone – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player
Hypergenesis Show and Tell – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Imperial Aluren – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Reanimator – 11 players; average 4.91 points per player; 3 money finishes (.27 times per playing the deck)
Merfolk U – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
Canadian Threshold – 5 players; average 5.25 points per player; 1 money finish (.20 times per playing the deck)
Bant Tempo/New Horizons – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Stoneforge Bant (no CounterTop) – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 3 players; average 5.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 6 players; average 3.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.33 times per playing the deck)
CounterTop UGW – 2 players; average 9.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (1.00 times per playing the deck)
CounterTop UGBW – 5 players; average 6.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (.40 times per playing the deck)
CounterTop UGRW – 3 players; average 4.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 6 players; 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish (.17 times per playing the deck)
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 3 players; 3.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.33 times per playing the deck)
4C Landstill – 6 players; average 7.00 points per player; 3 money finishes (.5 times per playing the deck)
Nearly Mono Blue – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Enchantress – 4 players; average 6.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (.5 times per playing the deck)
Stax WG – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
BGWU Survival – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
BGW RecSur – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 5 players; average 6.60 points per player; 3 money finishes (.60 times per playing the deck)
BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
BW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per plalying the deck)
BG Junk – 2 players; 1.50 points per player
BG Smallpox – 2 players; average 3.00 points per player
BGU Smallpox – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Mono Black Smallpox – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Mono Black Aggro Control – 1 players; 6.00 points per player
Mono Green NOPro – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
AggroLoam RGB – 3 players; average 11.00 points per player; 3 money finishes (1.00 times per playing the deck)
AggroLoam RGBW – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 15 players; average 6.60 pionts per player; 8 money finishes (.53 times per playing the deck)
Dredge (LED-less) – 11 players; average 4.91 points per player; 5 money finishes (.45 times per playing the deck)
Dredge (Bloodghasted) – 2 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.50 times per playing the deck)
Elves – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
Goblins – 22 players; average 4.91 points per player; 6 money finishes (.27 times per playing the deck)
(8 with Goblins R; average 6.38 points per player; 3 money finishes [.38 times per playing the deck])
(8 with Goblins RB; average 3.38 points per player; 1 money finish [.13 times per playing the deck])
(2 with Goblins RG; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish [.5 times per playing the deck])
(4 with Goblins RBG; average 5.25 points per player; 1 money finish [.25 times per playing the deck])
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 5 players; average 3.60 points per player
Red Green aggro – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Naya Zoo – 7 players; average 6.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (.29 times per playing the deck)
Affinity – 4 players; average 3.75 points per player; 1 money finish (.25 times per playing the deck)

So with this look at what’s actually been played the past week, you can start to get a good idea of what is actually being played (not just placing), to get a better idea of what you might square off against in the Online Legacy Daily Events. Goblins variants, Reanimator, Death and Taxes, Dredge, ANT, and CounterTop and Bant variants are the most frequent players, although not necessarily the best finishing ones.

Goblins, Zoo, and Dredge appear to have pushed Merfolk almost entirely out of the metagame this week, but don’t be surprised to see Merfolk back again soon if CounterTop and Combo strategies can overpower the aggro decks. Cards like Firespout and Engineered Plague seem very well positioned right now, so we should start seeing more and more of these in the coming weeks as players attempt to combat the throng of cheap creatures in the environment.

The boogeymen in the room named Dredge, Reanimator, and Ad Nauseam averaged 4.91, 4.91, and 5.46 points each (respectively, out of a possible 12.0 points in a 4 round tournament). Those are pretty average results, especially analyzing them next to ‘fair’ decks like Death and Taxes (6.60 point average) and Naya Zoo (6.00 point average). Is Attacking Miserable, as author Max McCall argued in a recent debate stirring article? Or is it just part of a more consistent approach that might be the way to frequent success in Legacy? I guess true statistics will tell after some period of time, as conjecture will do little good when compared to actual empirical data.

We hope to make this a weekly column every Monday as the MTGO Eternal metagame evolves, so be sure to check out the TP website frequently for other Eternal content. Please let us know in the comments section below what you found useful and what you’d like to see more of next time. See you again soon!

There are only few who are gifted with the ability to do everything right at first try. If you are one of those gifted players then this article might not cheer you up. To the rest, this article is meant to convince ourselves of the importance of losing to become better players.

If you’re afraid to fail, you can’t be sure to succeed. Those who aren’t afraid of losing will probably win more games. Why?

To answer that question, I’d like you to start by watching this video from Steve Jobs‘ speech at 2005 Stanford Commencement. (If you don’t know Steve Jobs, then you better go google him before clicking play).

Hope you managed to watch the whole speech. I know it isn’t really MtG related, but it’ll work great to help me explain the concepts of this article.

Let’s start by analyzing this quote:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forwards. You can only connect them looking backwards.” – Steve Jobs

Goyf wannabe!

How can we relate “the dots” to our game? I like to think those dots as mistakes I’ve done during my

games. It’s really important to analyze our mistakes from past games, even if we won them. It’s almost compulsory to take notes during games if we want to be able to reconstruct them afterward. Once we’ve created our own map of the game, then we can say whether or  not those decisions we took were right or wrong. When losing, some games will give us that “Epic Fail” sensation after some bad game decisions, some other might seem like a “bad beat” or like our opponent was extremely lucky. Don’t blame the luck! I consider myself a lucky boy because I make enough mistakes to be constantly learning from them.

So, only by understanding our own mistakes or fails from the past, we will be able to understand who we are now as a MtG players. We might lose many finals before we actually get to win something (no matter at what level you play). Once we finally get to win and become something, then we’ll appreciate our path from the past. A path full with fails and losses.

For instance, let’s say you are an average player who plays regularly with your friends and go every Saturday to you local store to play their Legacy tournament. If the feeling you have after the playtest with your friends is that you always lose, try understand the nature of those losses. Why are they winning? Are you making the wrong choices? Is it because they have better decks? Or is it because you believe they are better players?

If the first rule to become a winner is to understand that you can lose, the second rule would be to think and act like a winner. I covered that second concept in my previous article “The Importance of Playing Competitive“.

Start by taking notes of all your games, hands, openings, etc… and review them after the day. If possible, run a blog where to write reports and share the games with other people. They’ll probably give you some advices too. If you are too lazy for a blog, try a forum for example.

What are the difference between these sentences?

The more you play, the more you fail.

If you are a more optimistic guy, you could also read the previous sentence as:

The more you play, the more you win.

If we said that losing = learning (Only if you care about your mistakes from the past), then we could also say:

The more you play, the more you learn.

And from this point, we could also say:

The more you lose, the more you learn.

The more you learn, the more you win.

I see absolutely no difference between the previously mentioned statements. All of them have the goal of making you understand why losing is positive and How it can help you become a better player. Don’t get too upset if you lose too much, try find the positive side to it and keep trying. One day you’ll be on top of the hill and will look backwards. Then, it will all make sense. That day, you’ll connect the dots!

“Stay hungry, stay foolish.” – Steve Jobs

I met Favian few days ago, when I contacted him after he posted some of his cards at MTG The Source. I was quite impressed by the beauty of his cards and specially by the difficulty of gathering that many impressive and very (VERY) rare staples together. So, it occurred to me that maybe I could interview him so he could tell us a bit about himself, his collection and about magic in general.

We’ll start with an interview and after that, he’ll explain us a bit about some specific cards he’s very proud of.

(Be aware, lots of pimp stuff are included in this article, so you’d better sit properly if you don’t want to fall off the chair)

PROFILE:

• Name: Favian Poh
• Nickname(s) on forums: Occam on The Source and Salvation, Twol84 on Scg and Motl, Ouallada on the libraries
• Country: Singapore
• Age: 25, 26 end of the year
• Profession: Banking Sector
• Year you started with MtG: 1994/1995

TP: Favian, could you please tell us the story behind your nick name(s)?

Favian: And we’re off to a relatively weird start. I wish I could say that my usernames are derived from some cool and obscure piece of information, but that is unfortunately not the case. Occam is derived from Occam’s Razor (by William of Occam) — the latter is something I generally believe in, and even though Occam is a place, I could not very well name myself William, could I? Ouallada is an ode to Juzam Djinn, which was one of my favourites back in the day, and still is one of my favourites now.

TP: Are you currently playing any format? If so, what deck(s) are you playing at the moment?

Favian: I mostly play legacy these days, sometimes Vintage and Extended. I usually play online (with an anonymous name) as I can get too busy to commit myself to paper tournaments. I play a wide range of legacy decks, from NLS to tempo Bant to 5/3. For extended, I used to play a rockish Doran build until the current extended format got inundated by Thopter-Foundry and Marit Lage. For Vintage, I play workshop aggro, although I have a soft spot for Cerebral Assassin, which is sadly not very viable these days.

TP: We’ve seen pretty cool stuff from your personal collection. When did all begun?

Favian: I have to say that I was pretty young when I started out in the game, but I was lucky enough to purchase all the right cards back then, in decent quantities as well. Most of what I do post online these days would be rarities, as most people have the P9, beta duals etc covered already. My foray into rarities started in 1999/2000, when I read about summer magic and was rightfully entranced by the summer hurricane. I managed to buy into summer before the price boom early in the nighties, and the affair with summer magic has carried on since.

As for test prints, it all began the first time I saw a textless lightning bolt get sold on eBay about a decade ago. It ended easily in the four digits, and I tried to find all the information I could on a card that I thought shouldn’t even have existed. Even though I didn’t actually get into collecting test prints until a couple years later, I treat that as the time I first sat up and took notice of test prints and how undeniably unique and beautiful they were. It was also about then that I decided that any rarities I have would be clean, never signed nor altered in any way. Sorry if this flies in the face of what most people prefer, but rarities to me are already unique, and there is no reason to customize them any further.

TP: I guess the new Official Reprint Policy must have been great news for such a collector. What do you think about the recent announcement and the controversy that has generated between players and collectors?

Favian: I kind of expected to get a question like this, to be honest, and it could not have come at a worse time, especially as the vitriol over the revised reprint policy still lingers strong in the air.

I am going to have to slightly turn my back on my fellow collectors on this issue. It is going to take a very long piece to fully articulate my thoughts on the revised reprint policy, and I do not want this session to be dominated by that. I was disappointed that Wizards pretty much slammed the door shut on the notion of possible future reprints, as while I don’t believe that legacy will ever become as stagnant as vintage, I do believe that having a flagship eternal format is one of the best things possible for the game, and the ever-increasing prices continually erode that possibility.

As for the public disagreements between players and collectors, I completely understand where both camps are coming from. The future of legacy is the foremost concern of players, while the slippery slope that reprints lead Magic to is the foremost concern of collectors. Neither side has the right to arbitrarily impose its views on the other, but judicious reprints could have created a satisfactory solution for all parties involved. As an example, when we have a public company that engages in research and development, what the company essentially does is funnel revenues and cash reserves into R&D, which may or may not pay off in the future. Thus, there is a good chance that the company’s shareholders (Magic collectors) are worse off if the R&D expenses come to nothing as no new product or innovation is created. However, R&D expense may be a necessary route for the company to take to ensure its future competitiveness (which is what legacy players are arguing for), and the shareholders need to be able to see that and call for judicious R&D expenditure.

On a side note, public outcries that Underground Seas will soon exceed $100 each does not do any good, as it is due to the presence of a culture of fear like that which leads to people bidding up the prices of Underground Seas right now to hedge against future price rises. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and does legacy no good right now.

TP: Do you consider collecting MtG as a long term investment? Are you afraid of your cards losing value over the time?

Favian: Yes and no. I would not like to blow a few grand on a set of beta power and have it be worth nothing tomorrow, and I believe that everyone shares the same sentiment to an extent. At the same time, I don’t mind taking some paper losses on some purchases if it ensures the longevity of the game. It’s all about one’s priorities, and as long as those priorities aren’t to make money, I’m sure most people can agree with that. The ability to recoup money from the game upon exit and liquidation is in my opinion one of the strongest selling points of the game, though, and cannot be stressed enough.

I’m not worried at all about various rarities and alpha/beta cards going down in value, as the only way their value gets blown out is if Wizards mass-released summer tomorrow, or if the bottom falls away from the Magic barrel. I do not expect that either will happen anytime soon, but the risk, however minute, is there and I accept it.

(Jordi: I believe this article needs more images!)

TP: What’s the card in your collection you are most proud of, and why?

Favian: My current favourite card in my collection is actually this:

It is not the most expensive card I have, but it has certain personal resonance. I quote a fellow libraries member: “Magic collectors are always broke”, and want to emphasize that the statement is absolutely true. When a once-in-a-lifetime rarity appears, you need to cough up for it or accept that you may never get a second chance. When this was first placed on eBay (and I believe it was covered on your site too), it provoked a huge reaction because it looked different with Parallax Tide’s picture, and was pretty much the first time foil 8ed test prints were revealed.

I wanted it badly too, but ended up the second highest bidder for the one on eBay because I was broke, so to speak. I immediately regretted not winning it, and as only 2-3 of each foil 8ed print exists, the chance that I would see another one was abysmal. As fate would have it, I was hunting for a bunch of other stuff when I came into contact with someone who happened to have one for sale, and purchased it without much question. Unlike most collectors and missed chances, I had a second go at the island above, and it has a personal significance for being destined to be part of my collection, so to speak.

That said, I do treasure most of the cards in my collection, and rarely see the need to sell rarities away. I am working on several projects which are currently unscanned, including a playset of another of the Exodus test prints, a couple of other 5D prints, some UD prints, summer, my dark ritual / Beeble global sets (for which I need plenty of help for the European languages) and hopefully a Fraternal Exaltation/Splendid Genesis. Look out for them!

TP: I understand you can’t reveal the sources that provided some of the stuff you own, but, what would you recommend to someone who would like to start collecting? Who should he/she contact first?

Favian: Jordi, I think you would agree with me when I say that with rarities, beauty really exists in the eyes of the beholder. I would encourage any new budding rarity collector to get familiar with the rarities that exist out there, from albinos to other color-based misprints, from miscuts and crimps to test prints and summer, and from unofficial cards to rare tokens. Sites like the librarities have an extensive pictorial gallery which provides some information about the rarities as well. Nano’s site http://www.nextftp.com/nano/ has a lot of different colour-based misprints, and Squt’s site http://squt.tripod.com/MainError.html has an exhaustive list of misprints and errors too. Then, each person needs to make his or her own decision as to which rarities appeal most, for reasons that differ from individual to individual.

As for who a new rarity collector should contact, building relationships on forums is usually a great starting point. When someone comes across as knowledgeable or as a large collector of a certain rarity, chances are he or she would have access to certain rarities, and could introduce one to a range of contacts too. For rarities, who you know is a lot more important than what you know. Due diligence is extremely important.

TP: Is eBay trustworthy when it comes to hard-to-find cards? (We ain’t talking about Alpha/Beta rares here, we are talking about real-hard-to-find stuff like misprints, test prints, summer rares, etc…)

Favian: The problem with eBay with regards to rarities is not one of fraudulent intentions, but usually that sellers themselves may have misconceptions about certain misprints, although the two concepts could be interlaced. For example, a lot of albinos and colour misprints on eBay need to be taken with a pinch of salt, as many of them are actually sun-faded. For summer magic and test prints, the market for these cards is minute, with very few collectors actually being very active in these areas. Chances are that if a large seller of summer or test prints is on eBay, some other collector of summer or test prints would know of him or her, and could verify the veracity of the cards. Having a subject matter expert (and there are definitely people who know a lot more about rarities than I do) to eyeball certain questionable auctions never hurts.

In the end, caveat emptor still takes precedence on eBay. The normal precautionary measures need to be taken for rarities as well. Bidders should try to bridge the informational gap by searching for information about certain misprints online before jumping in where angels fear to tread, and keep in mind that a deal that is too good to be true is probably just that.

TP: I know you don’t like to use the word “pimp” to describe this high-end collecting movement, but, If you’d have to list the top10 of your pimp scale, what would it be?

Favian: For me, the ten most expensive cards in the game are as follows (excluding cards like Proposal, 1996 World Champion, Shichifukujin Dragon and graded Lotuses):

10) Summer Shivan Dragon / Summer Sol Ring

9) Summer Demonic Tutor

Splendid Genesis

6) Summer Birds of Paradise / Top tier foil test prints

5) Other Summer Blue Duals

4) Summer Mana Vault

2) Summer Hurricane / Underground Sea

1) Summer Serendib Efreet

You’d ask yourself what’s wrong with the EE? He’ll explain more about this card later. And the Underground Sea? It’s partly albino!

City of Traitors Exodus Test prints

Favian: I’ve received a lot of PMs from various people across various forums in which I have posted the recent scans containing the foil Cities or Traitors, so I feel obligated to speak a bit about what these cards are all about. My definition of a test print is an aesthetic proxy that Wizards uses to test different design features and processes, be it a foiling process, different frames, usage of space on a card, where the P/T box should be and so on. The Exodus test prints are arguably the most important test prints ever, as they were the backbone on which the foiling process was tested before being rolled out in Urza’s Legacy. Urza’s Legacy was released in 1999, and test prints are typically created 1-2 years beforehand, which is why Exodus cards were chosen. Note that it is highly likely that these cards were already in the process of being tested even before Exodus was released in June 1998.

One card of each colour and type was chosen from Exodus. A land (City of Traitors), a white card (Oath of Lieges), a blue card (Mana Breach), a red card (Fighting Chance), a black card (Plaguebearer), a green card (Survival of the Fittest), a gold card (Pygmy Hippo from Visions as no gold card exists in Exodus) and an artifact card (Memory Crystal). All of these are available either silver-bordered (testing not just the foiling, but Unglued borders) or black-bordered. Both the silver-bordered (no foil star) and black bordered (most have the foil star) ones have different variations (lighter/darker), and the black bordered ones have a test number on the right side of the card to indicate the intensity of the foiling and colouring. The black-bordered ones are also unique in that they have different colours for textboxes, although only the Cities of Traitors were tested for this.

A closer look so you can appreciate the details.

I do not have scans for this, but there are also other non-foil test prints from Exodus (Bequeathal, Angelic Blessing etc) which have the foil star and with the symbols made from the same material as the foil star. They were likely created to test how the foil star would look like.

Exodus test prints are not as rare as the newer test prints, but a lot of people hold them in awe as they were after all the first bona fide test prints the game had, and because two of the cards are so widely played. Whatever it is, Exodus test prints are an integral part of the game’s history, and should be respected as such. I own a couple of silver bordered Exodus prints, but I generally only go for the black bordered ones. When I picked up the first CoT, the one with the black symbol and black textbox, which is also my favourite of the lot, I spoke to a friend of mine and was basically told to never half-ass a collection, especially when the possibility of a playset existed. I thought about it, agreed, and the rest is basically history. I’m not sure whether another playset exists out there, with all the huge unnamed collectors around, but this one is pretty special to me.

Parallax Island:

Favian: I have already stated that I like this card very much, and I hope its story did not bore anybody. Just a quick comment on 8ed test prints. There are between two to three of each foil variation (some have light/dark variations), and there are non-foil versions too. Some people have stated that they are actually 6ed prints, as they use 5ed art, but this is untrue. These were printed in 2001, after the release of 7ed, and the island above has the art of parallax tide, when Nemesis was released in 2000. As can be seen from the Counterspell, 8ed prints were a bit idiosyncratic with the way certain aesthetics were tested, with P/T boxes on spells.

8e foil test prints are also very arguably the most prestigious set of test prints, with the value of the worst common (not all cards in 8ed were tested, though) being close to a grand and the value of the high-end cards, rares like Adarkar Wastes, approaching two grand.

Textless Saga:

Favian: I actually had two slots on my recent scan occupied by two other nice rarities, but I managed to make a deal for the textless cradle and bolt, and those two are auto-includes in any scan that has rarities. Textless saga has an almost mystical aura as the saga prints are extremely well known like the Exodus test prints, but are much rarer than the latter, and were actually leaked out in product. The full saga test print complement consists of 11 cards, namely Pouncing Jaguar, Lightning Bolt, Serra Avatar, Thran Quarry, Gaea’s cradle, Rewind, Skittering Skirge, Duress, Stroke of Genius, Karn and the textless, all black foil filler with the star. The filler was there to make up a modular sheet component of 11, with sheet size of 110 cards. As you might be able to already tell, all these cards were essentially test prints for various Arena and Judge promos that were given out, besides the filler, of course.

Textless Saga was followed by textless Destiny, and the latter was quite a bit rarer as none was leaked out through product. Unlike Saga, every Destiny card is available as a textless foil test print. I was lucky enough to pick up a textless Beeble for part of my collection, as well as some other textless UD commons/uncommons that aren’t in any of my current scans. The hunt for some of the rare textless UD cards continues.

Engineered Explosives:

Favian: In every forum where I posted the recent scan, I stated very clearly that the Engineered Explosives was the cream of the scan’s crop. It is not an attempt to boast or to big the EE up – a test print EE, from a set of test prints that are all likely the only copies of their kind around, can easily be concluded to be a huge hitter, certainly one of those mysterious expensive cards that no one has heard about. I basically dragged out the deal to purchase the EE for a few months as I kept getting sidetracked by other smaller rarities and test prints, but it was always going to be a part of my collection eventually. The focus on the EE in the scan is also in the hope that 5D prints are brought into public perception just like the rest of the existing test prints, and that another person who sees the EE and who has information about 5D prints can step forward.

For the back-story of the 5D prints, they were created to test sunburst foiling for the JS range promos, which is why the EE is foiled like that. Like the Exodus test prints, the EE scans poorly but looks excellent in real life. The EE is a very favoured card in my collection and will never be sold, but hopefully everyone out there enjoys what was a previously unknown piece of magic history.

Big thanks again Favian!

Last Saturday the folks who organized the LCV6 March Tournament in Igualada made an excellent effort to organize one of the nicest tournaments I’ve been around lately. Excellent prizes, good place to play, legacy side event, good menu for lunch and more. All their efforts were rewarded with the pretty low participation of 52 players.

We were used to have 70 to 90 players per tournament during the past years, but 52 seems to be the best we can do so far this year.

So, why is the participation at Vintage tournaments dropping?

The answer to that question is actually one of the hot topics being discussed in many forums. I’m not the one that has the exact answer and solution to the problem, but I do have my own opinion and I believe some things need to change as soon as possible.

First of all, I believe that the format sucks. Why is that? Well, no matter where you looked last Saturday that all you would be able to contemplate was Fish, MUD, Tezzeret & Confidants. (Of course there were few rogue decks and few Oath & Dredge players around).

Fish is too fast and too powerful. The “Selkie” deck has great elements of disruption while being able to put you a decent clock thanks to the new Exalted mechanic. The release of cards like Spell Pierce has improved their strategy to slow you down combined with others like Daze, Null Rod or Wasteland.

MUD is overpowered thanks to Lodestone Golem. You can’t stop a first turn Golem unless you have Force of Will. Sure you can pack your main deck with cards like Ancient Grudge, Hurkyl’s Recall, Lightning Bolt or Ingot Chewer, but none will actually save your ass efficiently against Lodestone Golem. If you actually manage to survive the 1st turn Golem, then get ready for what’s coming after it.

Saturday, Joe Gallego won the tournament with MUD.

Then we find Time Vault/Voltaic Key/Tezzeret the Seeker as the 3rd contender to the throne. This archetype can’t compete with the previously mentioned ones unless they get good hands. Control decks can’t really control the games anymore. The amount of restricted spells combined with the lack of drawing abilities to find answers makes it really hard for players to rely on this strategy. I’m not saying that Tezzeret decks aren’t good, all I’m saying is that you need lots of good hands in order to succeed in a tournament like the LCV. Mana Drain isn’t what it used to be. There are games that you’d probably win if you reach the second turn. Problem is that, nowadays, being able to cast a turn 2 Mana Drain is almost impossible.

When asking around to other players what’s their opinion about Vintage now, they all agree that Vintage sucks and that it needs a wash. I do agree that we need something fixed to make Vintage funny to play again. We are losing players that are actually bored of this format and prefer to play Legacy.

The obvious call is to review the banned and restricted list.

If the rumors are right and they print this:

• Mishra’s Workshop
• Wasteland
• Null Rod

Restricting Mishra’s Workshop wouldn’t be such a problem as they’d replace those 3 slots probably with the new land. Still, there should be a cut on the amount of x2 x3 mana producers if you don’t want to have consistently first turn menaces landing the board.

Restricting Wasteland would allow the control/combo players to be able to consistently get the third producer and cast answers to golems/spheres (Hurkyl’s Recall or Ancient Grudge). By restricting Wasteland, we also reduce the power of Fish.

Restricting Null Rod alone would mostly hurt fish and allow control/combo players to fight against them in better conditions.

What else should be done? Well, we can’t just simply make MUD and fish worse when we have a 2 card colorless combo that wins for four mana. So…

Banning Time Vault in Vintage is safe if the previously mentioned restrictions take place. Without 4 Null Rod, 4 Wasteland and 4 Mishra’s Workshop I believe the right call would be to ban Time Vault. We need to slow down the format by not abusing the stupidly good cards.

We saw Brainstorm, Gush, Ponder, Merchant Scroll and Flash being restricted all at the same time. That made a HUGE change to the format. We adapted and we learned how to play under the new circumstances. I believe now is the right time for another big change if we want Vintage to be more appealing to the players, specially the ones coming from Legacy, that will probably try Vintage some day.

This Friday the new Banned and Restricted list should be announced and I hope something changes, else we shouldn’t expect nothing but the fall of Vintage. Which makes me sad.

(I know, I know! The poster rocks!)

On the other hand, I think the problem isn’t just about restricting or banning some cards. I believe Wizards of the Coast should actually do something bigger in favor of Vintage. I’m not asking for a Vintage GP (although that would actually rock and gather more players than some standard GP’s…), but they should find the way to organize the Vintage tournaments around the world on a similar level than other formats. If Standard gets PTQ’s, GP’s, PT’s, etc…, Extended gets PTQ’s, GP’s, etc…, Legacy gets GPT’s & GP’s, why Vintage get no official tournaments?

Of course it’s hard to have Vintage as a competitive format, but I’m not asking for that exactly. I’m asking for a better organization of the Vintage events. C’mon! They’ve got great minds working at WotC, and I’m sure they could come up with something! We’ll have to wait few days and see what happens…

Regarding my performance at the tournament, I did pretty bad even though I had a deck prepared to beat MUD and Fish. My pairings went like this:

Round 1: 0-2 VS David Carbó playing  BWG Fish

Round 2: 0-2 VS Ramón Romero playing Faeries Fish

Round 3: 2-0 VS Juan Espinosa playing Noble Fish

Round 4: 2-0 VS Leticia Sevilla playing BG Dark Depths

Round 5: 1-1 VS Lluís Perea playing UB Tezzeret (featuring Thada Adel, Acquisitor on SB…)

Round 6: 0-2 VS Arnau Rovira playing Dark Tezzeret (Got killed G1 on first turn with FoW back up, and G2 second turn…)

The Top8 players and decks were:

• Tomas Winand (Iona Oath) vs Àlex Delgado (Dark Remora)
• Joe Gallego (MUD) vs Narcís Mir (URB Tezzeret)
• Rubén González (Dark Remora) vs Omar Nieto (Wizards Fish)
• Angel Gorriana (Tezzeret) vs unknown player (Dredge)

I don’t know how the semifinals went, but I can tell you that Joe Gallego won the tournament. So congratz to him!

This past weekend the omnipresent store Star City Games organized another $5K event in Indianapolis. As usual, on Saturday took place the Standard event (not so interesting for us, but you can find top16 decks here), and on Sunday near 300 people showed up to play for the big pot.

The winner of the event is Chris Woltereck who played 43 land (!) against Nicholas Montaquila with mono red Goblins. You can read the full final report here:

Finals: Chris Woltereck vs. Nick Montaquila

The top8 brackets looked like this:

These are the decks from the Top16 players:

Congratz to all the Top16 players and specially to Chris Woltereck for the win!

ANT decks are typically only running 1-2 copies of Ad Nauseam, along with a lot of fast mana, protection, tutors, and deck manipulation spells. They’re pretty straight forward, and ideally would like to kill the opponent somewhere between the second and fourth turn. Just set up by digging or tutoring for whatever you don’t have from these components, and then fire off a piece of protection (often in the form of Duress or Orim’s Chant) and then away you go with your fast mana spells and either Ad Nauseam or Infernal Tutor. Outside of a nearly full hand of cards and the ability to do an Infernal Tutor into Ill-Gotten Gains loop, much of the time ANT will seek to use its life as a resource to power up a game winning Ad Nauseam.

But what if you don’t have a lot of life? Legacy decks are faster and more disruptive than ever, and you can easily be at only 13 life or less on turn 2 when facing a Zoo player (Steppe Lynx you for 4, Chain Lightning and/or Lightning Bolt you for 3, fetchlands, etc.). In these cases, or the cases that you facing down a quick Tarmogoyf and your first spell or three were countered, you can’t necessarily leverage the power of Ad Nauseam to generate enough of a Storm count to kill your opponent with Tendrils of Agony. This is where the card Doomsday shines. It doesn’t require a lot of life to win the game.

Doomsday Demystified
A lot of people seem to be hesitant to include Doomsday or look at it as a viable alternative in Storm decks because they either don’t feel comfortable or knowledgeable enough to abuse it. Brandon Adams (known as emidlin online) and Michael Seubert (known as cheeseburger online) have co-authored a handy guide to using and creating Doomsday piles, and have done a fantastic job at providing a list of many options and even arithmetic formulas to teach you how to craft the perfect pile for whatever scenario you’re in during a game. Victor Martinez (known as gocho online) took this a step further and used those lists to make a convenient spreadsheet available to the public.

I won’t go into all of the details of each pile because there are so many variants and Brandon and Michael have already done a great job of explaining them, but being uncomfortable with Doomsday should not be an excuse for you in the future if you read these. Doomsday is an extremely powerful and important weapon that provides the Storm player with another path to victory that doesn’t depend on a lot of life as a resource, which is often very critical in Legacy if things don’t go according to plan early in the game.

Protection
The reason to play ANT variants over something like Goblin Charbelcher is that it has a more stable manabase and offers better forms of protection in the face of counterspells and other hate. Here is a brief rundown of the commonly seen protection spells and why you might use them:
Orim’s Chant – at a cost of 1 White mana you prevent your opponent from being able to play any spells for the turn, and in rarer situations can be used to prevent combat damage if kicked; has the added bonus of being great against opposing combo
Silence – similar to Orim’s Chant without the kicker ability, this shuts off opponent’s spells for the turn and can’t be Misdirected or Diverted
Abeyance – costs and additional mana beyond Chant or Silence, but also cantrips, and more importantly prevents the opponent from interacting at all by preventing activated abilities
Duress – strips away a potential counterspell or Counterbalance, or can give you precious information about the contents of opponent’s hand
Thoughtseize – can strip away problematic counterspells, permanents, and the added bonus of creatures, but at the cost of two life
Pact of Negation – a free counterspell, but has the liability of having a cost on the next upkeep that you most likely won’t be able pay; really only great when protecting a spell to go off
Xantid Swarm – at the investment of only a single Green mana, you can effectively Orim’s Chant your opponent every turn; the disadvantage of this is that it validates any common main deck removal, so it is best relegated to the sideboard unless you are in an extremely Blue-heavy metagame

In Tomoharu Saito’s build of ANT that he piloted to a Top 8 birth at GP Madrid 2010 he chose to use a combined 6 Duress and Thoughtseize effects as his disruption suite, in order to stay primarily Black and Blue (he had no White) and presumably to gain information about his opponent’s hand. The debates about which disruption cards you choose can go on forever, but Orim’s Chant provides an ultimate finality if resolved, and if you resolve one before attempting to combo off you should win 95% of your game or more. The same cannot be said for Duress, as the opponent with other non-Force of Will spells can still interact with you, which you want to ultimately avoid.

The other advantage of playing Orim’s Chant is its usefulness against other combo matches. While Duress is certainly nice at stripping away a key spell, it does nothing in the face of Brainstorm or Mystical Tutor, and by allowing your opponent to cast a few spells and then casting Orim’s Chant you have actually made them expend or waste Storm and mana resources, which is often better and will lead to more victories for the player packing Chant. For these reasons I strongly advocate Orim’s Chant as the top choice, and your additional disruption slots can be composed of whatever you think is best.

Tutoring and Deck Manipulation
Mystical Tutor – at a cost of only 1 Blue mana you can find any of your combo pieces, protection, or removal; this is the most efficient tutor available, but comes at the cost of card disadvantage
Infernal Tutor – the restrictions of Internal Tutor are removed when you sacrifice a Lion’s Eye Diamond or two in response, but this card is great as the game goes on at fueling a number of different ways to win (sometimes by chaining multiple Infernal Tutors if you have tons of mana)
Grim Tutor – gets you any card you want for 3 mana and 3 life this is somewhat attractive, but the price is probably too steep to pay in this deck
Burning Wish – if you are into a Red splash Burning Wish allows you to create even more Doomsday piles (including pass the turn piles where you needn’t win that turn), and also unlocks access to Empty the Warrens
Sensei’s Divining Top – you want this to be your first turn play every time if possible, as it allows for reusable searching and deck manipulation and is fantastic in conjunction with Doomsday and Mystical Tutor
Brainstorm – this is on color, cheap, and can both dig for cards you need and shuffle away cards you don’t need; in short, it’s insane in here
Ponder – this is probably the second best first turn play, as it allows you see up to four cards to find whatever you need (land, Dark Ritual, tutor, protection, etc.) and you can also shuffle away the cards if you don’t like them (reducing your potentially dead draws the next couple of turns)

Most ANT decks will run a number of the cards above, but with the ANT-Doomsday hybrid deck Sensei’s Divining Top is extremely good. It is a great first turn play that can filter your draws as the game goes on, dig for mana to ensure you hit your land drops, and works extremely well with Mystical Tutor and Doomsday.

The Mana Sources
Many decks (especially game 1) are serious underdogs to your storm deck no matter what shell you are using, so it makes sense to build to also be as strong as possible against those matches that are tougher. When playing this deck you really want have as many cards in hands as possible (to generate storm) and to be able to hit your land drops. To this end you want to reduce mulligans and to make your opening hands as consistent and keepable as possible, so in this regard having more lands rather than less will be better, as will having fewer cards like Chrome Mox in your opening hand. Playing a stable manabase and hitting your land drops will strengthen your matchups against decks with Wasteland and decks with counterspells, so having the strongest manabase possible while still being able to play your powerful spells should be your goal when building this deck. So let’s jump in to building the manabase.
Chrome Mox – some people will advocate playing more of these and/or Mox Diamonds, but you really only want to see this card when going off with Ad Nauseam and you don’t want it in your opening hand too often, so after a lot of testing I’d recommend two, as this will often be one of the first cards you sideboard out against control decks
Lotus Petal – a free spell that provides any color mana is pretty good, even though it is only a single shot use
Lion’s Eye Diamond – aside from the drawback of discarding your hand (not a big deal when going off), getting 3 mana of any color for free is a huge boon to however you are trying to combo out, and this is why LED is a staple of storm combo decks of all forms
Dark Ritual – another fantastic bargain by providing 3 black mana for the cost of 1, Dark Ritual is one of the best cards in the deck
Cabal Ritual – sometimes better (with Threshold), but usually slightly worse, Cabal Ritual is still pretty good but you only need so many mana sources, so 2-3 of these are generally all you need

I tend to fetch out basic lands whenever possible to play around Wasteland (and other non-basic hate), so even though we have four colors in this deck I recommend keeping the dual lands to a minimum and including as many basic lands as you have room for. Saito’s GP deck had only one basic land, but for a deck like this you always want stable mana. Some people will question the inclusion of many basic lands or of a maindeck Plains, but this again goes back to building your deck to playing against tougher matchups (such as Canadian Threshold). You really want basic lands to keep being able to reliably cast your important spells (such as Orim’s Chant), and there’s enough extra mana sources like Lotus Petal and Lion’s Eye Diamond that you don’t really have to worry much about having the correct mana when comboing out. There is also a good amount of colorless mana in many of your spells (Meditate, Sensei’s Divining Top, Cabal Ritual, Infernal Tutor, etc.), so keep in mind you can always use your Plains or whatever White mana source to help in casting those (or with activating Sensei’s Divining Top nearly every turn) if you aren’t using it for Orim’s Chant. You’re probably going to destroy other matchups that can’t disrupt your manabase and interact with you, so this doesn’t matter too much there.

With these options in mind, here’s what I would recommend right now.
ANT-Doomsday Hybrid 20101Q1.4, by Jaco 02-15-2010
Business (28)
4 Orim’s Chant
2 Silence
1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
4 Mystical Tutor
2 Infernal Tutor
1 Doomsday
1 Meditate
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Ad Nauseam

Mana Sources (32)
2 Chrome Mox
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
2 Cabal Ritual
4 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
2 Underground Sea
1 Scrubland
1 Tundra
1 Tropical Island
2 Island
1 Swamp
1 Plains

Sideboard (15)
1 Bayou
1 Doomsday
1 Sadistic Sacrament
3 Xantid Swarm
2 Krosan Grip
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Rushing River
1 Slaughter Pact/Deathmark
3 Carpet of Flowers

The sideboard above consists of options for dealing with problematic permanents, more disruption against counterspells, and the ability to switch to the Doomsday kill as your primary kill. Xantid Swarm single-handedly invalidates a lot of hate, and I think it is great for the Green splash, which you’re already probably going to have to be able to play either Krosan Grip or Reverent Silence. Dark Confidant was also seen in both Saito and David Do Anh’s sideboards in their GP lists, and I think that has merit and is worth heavily considering if Sadistic Sacrament catches on as a sideboard card. You can tailor this to meet your needs, but here is a brief rundown of how I would attack many common matchups with the deck and sideboard above.

Playing and Sideboarding Against Merfolk
Merfolk’s only real hard counter is Force of Will, but you still have to take Daze and Cursecatcher into account when doing the math before trying to combo out. Sensei’s Top shines in this match to help you dig for more Chants and to hit your land drops. Keep in mind they may have Stifle in their deck, but if you manage to resolve a Xantid Swarm or Chant effect you can obviously ignore this. Another thing to keep in mind is that they may be boarding in Spell Pierce. Here’s how I’ve been sideboarding:
-2 Chrome Mox
-1 Ad Nauseam
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Lotus Petal
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Mystical Tutor
+1 Bayou
+1 Doomsday
+3 Xantid Swarm
+3 Carpet of Flowers

Playing and Sideboarding Against Ad Nauseam Tendrils
There’s not too much thinking about this matchup, and you probably won’t encounter it very often. Orim’s Chant and Silence are key here in allowing you to combo out unimpeded, and also to prevent your opponent from going off. As mentioned above, it may be worth changing the sideboard around slightly to accommodate 3-4 Dark Confidants if Sadistic Sacrament or Extract starts seeing more play. Sideboarding currently looks like this:
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
+1 Sadistic Sacrament

Playing and Sideboarding Against Dream Halls
Like the ANT matchup, you want to use your Chant effects to stop them from comboing out and to allow you to. I tend to side in Xantid Swarm here, but that’s up to you and if you feel comfortable siding out any mana sources:
-2 Chrome Mox
-1 Silence
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
+3 Xantid Swarm
+1 Chain of Vapor

Playing and Sideboarding Against Naya Zoo
The Zoo player will seek to aggressively burn you out, and will most likely be bringing in some combination of hate cards in the form of Gaddock Teeg and/or Ethersworn Canonist, and maybe even Mindbreak Trap, so I tend to ditch the Ad Nauseam plan and leave in a few Chants for the protection from Mindbreak Trap and them holding a lot of burn for after your resolve Doomsday. You will have to manage your Mystical Tutors and dig spells appropriately. I tend to side like this:
-1 Ad Nauseam
-2 Silence
-1 Lotus Petal
+1 Doomsday
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Rushing River
+1 Slaughter Pact

Playing and Sideboarding Against Goblins
Most Goblins players can’t do a whole lot to interact with you, especially game 1. After sideboarding they may have Thoughtseize or Cabal Therapy, or possibly Pyrostatic Pillar. I like to board in better bounce and an additional mana source here to help fight against Wasteland and Rishadan Port:
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Silence
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Rushing River
+1 Bayou

Playing and Sideboarding Against CounterTop
When battling CounterTop the ultimate goal is to combo off without a Counterbalance in play, so to accomplish this I’ve been rotating back and forth between a main deck Wipe Away and Krosan Grip. Krosan Grip is the best at dealing with Counterbalance or the occasional main deck Chalice of the Void you’ll run into (from AggroLoam, for example), but Wipe Away can also hit a Reanimated Iona or some other problematic permanent, so that’s currently what I’m playing main. In the sideboard I have access to a couple more copies of Krosan Grip. An argument can be made for Reverent Silence in this slot because it costs nothing to play, but the problem is that the CounterTop player can still just Force of Will it, whereas they have almost no answer to Krosan Grip other than constantly floating a card with converted mana cost equal to 3 on top of their deck. In this matchup I also tend to ditch the Ad Nauseam plan, because you have are brining in cards that cost more mana which equals more life lost to Ad Nauseam, not to mention the fact that you’re probably going to be staring down a Tarmogoyf or something else nibbling at your life while you try to deal with Counterbalance. That’s debatable though, so here are a couple of different sideboard plans:
-2 Chrome Mox
-2 Lotus Petal
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Mystical Tutor
-1 Ad Nauseam
+1 Doomsday
+1 Bayou
+2 Krosan Grip
+3 Xantid Swarm

Playing and Sideboarding Against Canadian/Tempo Threshold
The Ad Nauseam plan against Threshold is a struggle, as they often have a quick clock in the form of Tarmogoyf, along with Lightning Bolt, Fire/Ice, Nimble Mongoose, and sometimes things you’ll have to play around like Vendilion Clique (when Sensei’s Divining Top tricks are most important). After sideboarding they’ll often be bringing in something like Red Elemental Blast and/or Spell Pierce (more common now), but these can still be invalidated by Xantid Swarm. Because of this they may be forced to keep in their removal against you, and I would definitely force the issue because if they don’t have removal your Xantid Swarms are going to win you the game. You’ll have to battle through Stifle, Force, Spell Snare, and more so Xantid Swarm and Chant effects are the best path to victory. Another key resource here is Carpet of Flowers, which Wizards’ recently changed the Oracle text for during the January 2010 Update Bulletin. The new wording is as follows:
“At the beginning of each of your main phases, if you haven’t added mana to your mana pool with Carpet of Flowers this turn, you may add up to X mana of any one color to your mana pool, where X is the number of Islands target opponent controls.”

So this allows you to cast Carpet of Flowers during your first main phase and then get the mana during your second main phase the same turn. This is incredible, and it gives you multiple mana every single turn (albeit without upping your Storm) for a one time investment of a single Green mana. This can prove critical in playing around their mana denial plan, as will all of the basic lands we’ve conveniently included. With the battle raging for mana resources and the fight to resolve spells against Threshold I’ll often sideboard out temporary mana sources in favor of more protection and permanent mana sources like this:
-2 Chrome Mox
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Lotus Petal
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-2 Cabal Ritual
+1 Doomsday
+1 Bayou
+3 Carpet of Flowers
+3 Xantid Swarm

Playing and Sideboarding Against Bant Aggro (ProBant)
This is an interesting matchup for you, because their deck can be all over the board. They may have Wasteland, Stifle, Daze, Force, or they may eschew the mana disruption plan altogether for stuff like Spell Snare. They can have a quick clock in the form of Tarmogoyf or Rhox War Monk, not to mention Progenitus if they find a Natural Order before you’re able to kill them. I can’t give you a solid sideboarding suggestion here, because a lot of it will come down to what you’ve seen from their deck. You’ll want Slaughter Pact/Deathmark for any potential hate creatures they may have (Meddling Mage, Ethersworn Canonist, Gaddock Teeg), or even to deal with a quick Rhox War Monk. You can look at the Threshold and CounterTop matchups for tips if you’re really clueless, but Xantid Swarm, Carpet of Flowers, and the Doomsday plan all have merit here depending on you’ve seen or suspect they might have, so play this one by your gut.

Playing and Sideboarding Against Dredge
I used to have random cards like Mindbreak Trap or Extirpate in my sideboard to Mystical Tutor for, but after testing against many different versions of Dredge I just found it unnecessary after a while. They will have Cabal Therapy and possibly Iona, Shield of Emeria as a Dread Return target main deck to interact with you, and that’s about it. After sideboarding they could have stuff like Mindbreak Trap, Force of Will, or Unmask, so I like to leave my Chant effects in just in case, which can also act as Time Walks against them and buy you more turns if necessary. Unless I see something really weird from their deck this is usually my plan:
-1 Plains
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-1 something else you don’t care about (depending on what you’ve seen from them)
+1 Bayou
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Slaughter Pact (if they don’t have Iona this probably isn’t justified)

Playing and Sideboarding Against Lands.dec
This is a pretty good matchup in general, and outside of an absolute bomb draw by them you should defeat them game 1 without problem, as they can’t interact with you outside of Wasteland and Rishadan Port. If you’re playing the list above you have 4 basic lands main deck so this isn’t much of an issue. The Lands player will know they are a massive underdog to combo, and will likely have some combination of Mindbreak Trap and Chalice of the Void, and if they’re really desperate they could try to bring in Leyline of the Void too, but they probably don’t have enough slots to side out for that many additional cards. For this reason I’d advocate keeping in most Chant effects to hedge against Mindbreak Trap, and I also board in some bounce like this:
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Chrome Mox
+1 Bayou
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Hurkyl’s Recall

Rather than hoping to be able to tutor or draw for Ad Nauseam and the accompanying Angel’s Grace after sideboard against a lot of decks where life is an issue, you can simply use the mana and Storm instead to leverage the power of Doomsday. I highly recommend reading Brandon and Michael’s Doomsday primer in the link provided earlier. I feel that this hybrid strategy is currently the best way to pilot a Legacy Storm deck, given what we’ve been seeing from late 2009 into early 2010. You can expect to face Zoo and Merfolk and a myriad of other decks in each tournament you attend, so this approach allows you to have a consistent manabase and to be able to easily shift your plan of attack. Doomsday is an important and powerful piece of the Storm players’ repertoire that should not be overlooked, and works exceptionally well in the context of this deck.

So what are considered some Legacy staples that are not on the Reserved List that could theoretically be printed in future sets with little or no repercussion? There are quite a few cards considered staples that have risen to relatively high prices very quickly, so ignoring cards that have already been reprinted let’s look at some cards that I believe could all be reprinted in upcoming sets and aren’t too powerful for the current Standard and Extended constructed environments.
Force of Will – aside from Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Blue is relatively weak in Standard and Extended, and including Force of Will in a normal set as either an uncommon or rare would drastically increase the supply and reduce the price from about $35 to $5-10
Wasteland – with apologies to Ghost Quarter and Tectonic Edge, there isn’t very good land destruction available to mages right now in Standard and Extended, and by reprinting this as an uncommon the price would drop from the current $18 price tag down to about $2-3 (where it used to be for years), and would also help keep the overpowered Thopter Depths deck in check in Extended
Tarmogoyf – this beast is currently in the $65-70 range and isn’t even legal in Standard currently (when it was it tipped the scales at about $30)! It’s certainly not too broken for any constructed format, and as it was unveiled in Future Sight, the reasoning behind reprinting it could be that Future Sight was merely a preview of what was to come (more Tarmogoyfs, yippee!)
Orim’s Chant – while often decent and sometimes above average, Chant was never broken in Standard and Extended, and reprinting this would drop the price from about $14 to $5
Argothian Enchantress – certainly a powerful card, nothing about Enchantress would break Standard or Extended, but the price would certainly drop considerably if this $12 staple was reprinted
Exploration – currently hovering around $15, this would be powerful in conjunction with Life From the Loam in Extended, and could potentially be awesome with some kind of Landfall cards (which would actually make for a very interesting deck, but I wonder why we haven’t seen any of these interactions in Legacy if they had serious merit). Neither of these interactions would probably wouldn’t be format defining, and reprinting this Legacy staple would drop it to around the $3-5 mark I’d predict
Chain Lightning – if Lightning Bolt, Incinerate, and Lightning Helix are fine in Standard and Extended, I think it would be safe to say that Chain Lightning would also be safe (hopefully once something else rotated out), and reprinting this as an uncommon would drop this $10 staple into the $2 neighborhood
Imperial Recruiter – along the lines of Ranger of Eos, this card would be very fair in Standard and Extended, and reprinting it as a rare would probably drop the price from its current $120 price tag to about $5-10
Imperial Seal – Vampiric Tutor was not a problem when it was legal in Standard and Extended for the longest time, and a sorcery speed one would fit very well in today’s constructed environments. Reprinting this would admittedly do nothing for Legacy as it is banned there, but it would drop the price from $200+ currently to around $15, and would be a huge boon for Vintage players
Entomb – the unbanning of this Legacy bomb and recent success have driven this staple to around $30 and counting. This would not be too strong for Standard and Extended, and reprinting this in a future set would probably drop the price back down to around the $3-5 mark it sat at for quite some time prior to it’s unbanning for Legacy
Ancient Tomb – this could provide a useful but not broken accelerant in Standard and Extended, and reprinting this as an uncommon would drop the price from $5 to $1-2 moving forward

Reprinting all of the aforementioned cards fits would drop prices of these cards considerably, and I don’t believe any of them would be too powerful for Standard or Extended. That being said, here are a handful of cards that probably are too powerful for those constructed formats, but could be reprinted in a different way to ensure they are never in Standard or Constructed.
Loyal Retainers – this would probably be too good in the same Standard or Extended format where Entomb is legal (along with Iona), so I would lean towards making this Portal 3 Kingdoms uncommon a Friday Night Magic foil, which would heartily increase the supply and dramatically reduce the price, while keeping it out of those constructed formats
Price of Progress – I get the sense that the game’s designers have been trending towards getting people to play multicolored and rainbow decks in constructed formats, and with all of the other burn spells available right now in Standard and Extended I think this would be too good, so giving it out as a Friday Night Magic card instead would create foil copies of it and satiate the market demand
Dark Depths – having 20/20 indestructables crawling around Extended seems to be ok, but this would most likely be too powerful for Standard, so reprinting this as a Friday Night Magic foil would create plenty of copies, while reducing the price of this from $23 to about $5-10 in short order
Grindstone – having the Painter’s Servant and Grindstone combo running around a format like Extended would be too powerful and consistent, so reprinting Grindstone as a Judge foil instead would increase the supply enough to probably drop Tempest copies from $18 down to about the $6-8 range

So, what about all of the other awesome cards that are in Legacy that have high price tags? Running through Stephen Mendendian’s nice article The Complete Legacy Checklist, here are the main cards with a significant price tag that the Reserved List would preclude Wizards’ from printing:
Underground Sea
Tropical Island
Tundra
Volcanic Island
Scrubland
Bayou
Savannah
Taiga
Badlands
Plateau
Tabernacle at the Pendrell Vale
City of Traitors
Gaea’s Cradle
Undiscovered Paradise
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Mox Diamond
Moat

That’s only about 17 relevant cards with a significant price tag for the format that fall on the Reserved List. There are handful of other smaller cards that are on the Reserved List (such as Humility, Cursed Scroll, Volrath’s Stronghold) that don’t see too much play and can generally be had for $5-10, but these are relatively affordable already so their isn’t much necessity in reprinting them. Many of cards above are Dual Lands that are integral to the format, but by most people’s best guesses and calculations there are around 340,000-360,000 copies of each Dual Land in existence, which I believe is more than enough to support a burgeoning Legacy population. That’s a full playset for nearly 90,000 players as it currently stands. Yes, I know that some people are holding on to more than a playset, just like some people are holding on to 150 Force of Wills. Magic was intended to be a collectible card game as we all know, and these things come with the territory.

The entrance cost has already been paid by a great number of players who wanted to jump into the Legacy format with the announcement of the two Legacy format Grand Prixs in 2010 and the continuing StarCityGames $5K Legacy series, and these are the primary reasons prices for certain cards have climbed so rapidly. Grand Prix Madrid 2010 just set the Magic tournament record with 2220 participants, and Grand Prix Columbus 2010 will probably clock in with around 1000-1400 participants. But after most players have already jumped in it appears many prices have leveled off. Cards like Tarmogoyf have already kind of hit that threshold and have begun cooling a little bit, but that doesn’t mean other cards won’t gradually rise or occasionally spike like they do for other constructed formats when some new deck tech is found. But is a $29 Savannah or $40 Tropical Island really a terrible thing, especially in the face of $45 mythic rares like Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Baneslayer Angel that are commonly played in Standard? Is it a terrible thing to have a collectible card that you know will not be reprinted, and won’t rotate out of a format every two years and lose 85% of its street value (like most Standard cards)?

Every single card does not have to be affordable, nor has it been for about the last 10-12 years once more and more people started playing Magic. By slowly reprinting a large number of staples that are not on the Reserved List, Wizards’ can dramatically reduce prices for those staples while simultaneously lowering the barrier of entry to Eternal formats for a great many players. Doing this would allow for more player interest in older formats while avoiding a perversion of the original intent of the Official Reprint Policy.

Please let us know what you think in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!

In Stephen Menendian’s recent article Visiting Wizards, Reprints, and the Reserved List he posits that “You could print a million new Underground Seas in M11, and Alpha and Beta Underground Seas would probably not budge in their value or collectability. In fact, they might become more valuable!” Frankly, more asinine words and a conclusion based on many unaccounted for factors have rarely been written. The basic laws of economics tell us that if demand is relatively even and supply increases, price will naturally go down. Time and time again, history has shown us that when cards are reprinted (and supply is increased) they lose value.

When the original Chronicles set was released Magic players and collectors alike were taken aback and shocked. A “collectible card game” was reissuing some of the game’s most sought after and expensive cards, setting an alarming precedent. Cards like the Elder Dragons (Chromium, Nicol Bolas, Palladia-Mors, etc.) from Legends dropped from $30-40 to $5-10 within weeks. Legends printings of these cards can currently be had for $1-5 each, and Chronicles and Timeshifted copies can be had for $.25 to $1. Carrion Ants (from Legends) was a $30 card (based largely on collectibility and not the amount of them being played) dropped to $2 in a matter of weeks. Today a Legends copy of Carrion Ants is about $1 and the Chronicles reprint versions are about $.25 each. Erhnam Djinn was once considered the little brother of Juzam Djinn, as was once worth about $35-40 for an Arabian Knights copy. After it was reprinted in Chronicles the value dropped considerably, with today’s prices ringing in at $5-10 for an Arabian Knights original, and a Chronicles reprint clocking in at a mere $.25.

Psionic Blast was originally printed in Alpha/Beta/Unlimited and for a long time was a very sought after item, typically priced at $30-40 for Alpha/Beta copies and $18-25 for Unlimited copies. After it was reprinted in Time Spiral’s Timeshifted subset those same original copies are now selling for $15-25 for Alpha/Beta and about $4-5 for Unlimited, while Timeshifted copies can readily be had for $1 each.

Pithing Needle, which Stephen himself has reviewed in prior articles and is intimately familiar with, used to be a $15 card (this price, and all others I’ll talk about here are what I’ll refer to as the “street value,” or how much they can regularly be had for on eBay/MOTL/etc.). Pithing Needle was originally printed in Saviors of Kamigawa, and demand has always been steady but not overwhelming. I would argue that demand is about the same today as when it was originally printed and is played a moderate amount in many constructed formats. When it was reprinted in Tenth Edition the value dropped to around $9, and it has once again been reprinted in Magic 2010 (M10) and the value has dropped to an astonishing $3 or less. Demand has stayed roughly the same, yet the supply has dramatically increased, leading to a dramatic reduction in price.

For quite some time Meddling Mage remained valued at $10-14, even when it’s popularity and playability waned in Standard and Extended. It was rotating out of Extended finally as part of the Invasion-Prophecy-Apocalypse block and started to slightly fall in price to around $9, but it was then reprinted in Alara Reborn. So what happened to the price? Well, naturally since the supply doubled and the demand remained about the same the prices came crashing down. Meddling Mage from Invasion can now readily be had for about $5-6 and Alara Reborn copies go for about $4.

I could continue to cite example after example of where reprints have crippled the value of original printings, but I think if you’ve ever picked up (and understood) an economic textbook or spent time seriously buying and selling Magic cards, you probably get the picture. To suggest that reprints of cards like Dual Lands and Power 9 wouldn’t cripple the value of the original printings is either an uneducated, disingenuous, or intellectually dishonest point of view.

Another issue that Stephen ignores in his quoting of prices for Alpha/Beta/Unlimited/Revised/10th Edition/M10 for cards like Shivan Dragon and Birds of Paradise is the fact that there is a major drop off from Alpha/Beta to everything else, including Unlimited. As my teammate Jason Pare pointed out to me, you can’t have a serious discussion about reprinting cards like the Power 9 without looking at the fact that roughly 82% of the Power 9 that are in existence are not Alpha/Beta, but Unlimited. You know, the same Unlimited that Stephen shows in his chart amongst all of other printings that represents a small percentage of the total pool in his Shivan Dragon and Birds of Paradise examples. If Power 9 were reprinted the value of these would drop like a rock, decimating the value of 82% of the Power 9 overnight. The set collectors will still want their Alpha/Beta Power 9, but most other people would gravitate towards a cheaper and also black-bordered foil version for a fraction of the price. This migration would also signal a reduction in the price of Alpha/Beta copies for this very reason, albeit not as devastating as the huge loss Unlimited owners would see.

Part of the reason the Power 9 has increased to dramatic prices is because aside from the fact that they are some of the most powerful and rarest cards, they have never been reprinted and are currently never slated to be reprinted according to Wizards’ own published Reserved List Policy. They have essentially become Vintage Gold because the consumer has placed faith in the manufacturer that a set number of these exist (solidifying their rarity and collectibility), and because of this they can be viewed as a valid investment vehicle. Without this assurance from the manufacturer they would not be worth nearly as much.

The function of the Reserved List is to assuage fears of players and collectors that their collectible card game will actually maintain some semblance of collectibility. Wizards’ formally acknowledged the giant mistake they had made by printing Chronicles and created the Reserve List as a response to grant the consumer some basic protections. It represents a contract with the customer meaning “we (the manufacturer) will not violate your consumer confidence in us.” This contract with consumers was necessary following the backlash and departure of players following the release of Chronicles. By altering policy and breaking the Reserve List and changing course, Wizards of the Coast would have lied to their customers for the past ten years and effectively reduced any incentive to consider Magic cards any sort of investment or an actual collectible card game, as it has always been marketed as. To this end the Reserve List is accomplishing exactly what it was created to do.

In the past few years Wizards’ has exploited a loophole in the Official Reprint Policy that states that “All policies described in this document apply only to non-premium, tournament-legal Magic cards. Wizards of the Coast has and may continue to print special versions of cards not meant for regular game play, such as oversized cards.” They have designated foil cards as premium cards to fit the bill and to create a loophole to essentially allow them to reprint whatever they want (see: Phrexian Negator, Phyrexian Dreadnought, Intuition, Survival of the Fittest, Karn, Silver Golem, Yawgmoth’s Will, etc.). But looking at the wording of the revised Reprint Policy it says “All policies described in this document apply only to non-premium, tournament-legal Magic cards. Wizards of the Coast has and may continue to print special versions of cards not meant for regular game play, such as oversized cards.” Does this sound to you like their original intent with that exception was to print foil cards used for tournament play and as a mechanism to reprint hard to find cards to increase market supply? I don’t think so. The original intent appears to simply allow them to reprint things like the oversized cards they used to print, or box-toppers, or promotional items, or things of that nature that would not be used for tournaments and by actual players. But by designating foils as premium they have created a loophole with which they can twist the Official Reprint Policy and effectively negate the entire thing.

By using a loophole to reprint cards on the Reserved List and simply designate them as ‘premium,’ Wizards’ is shaking customer confidence, and the outcry by many players can be heard on whatever message board you fancy. But the biggest outcry is the unspoken one, by players who believe that Wizards’ will do the right thing and respect the Reserved List, which is their contract to the consumer. This outcry will not truly be heard until the point when we see the Reserved List being violated in a notable way. Creating something like From the Vault: [Underground Sea and a bunch of other Restricted List goodies], and then following it up with a bunch of other similar boxed foil sets would create a terrible precedent and would achieve the same thing as just reprinting cards in a modern edition. The same could be said for creating all foil (i.e. premium) booster packs full of Reserved List cards. This would decimate the consumer confidence that the Magic brand has achieved, and I believe would lead to the departure of a significant number of players. Many people drawn to games are smart, and they can probably tell when something is going the way of the Dodo bird, or is in the process of jumping the shark.

So if cards like Dual Lands and others are rapidly rising with the increase interest in Legacy, what can be done to offset this and make Legacy more palatable to the wallet? Check out our next article in this series, http://www.team-pataners.com/?p=1747 Grand Prix Madrid is coming soon, very soon! At this point, no one  doubts about this tournament being the most important event on eternal this year.

I always liked how Mike Flores uses this illustration to express a state of mind of a winner player:

Believe in yourself, believe in your luck & believe your deck.

While being totally sure what and how to play in Legacy, something different happens to me with Vintage. If my performance at the GP aren’t as I expected, there’s a very interesting Vintage tournament I’d like to play on Sunday.

http://www.team-pataners.com/gp-madrid-vintage-side-event-info/

I’m not certain about what decks are the decks to beat in Vintage at the moment. I love playing control, but decks like Tezzeret start to lose power against some other archetypes such as Noble Fish and the Golem Aggro Staxx.

Shall I…

… play Confidants?

… play Spell Snare?

… play Spell Pierce?

… play DSC, Sphinx or Leviathan?

… play red or green for SB?

… play none, 1 or 2 Tezzerets MD?

… play Misdirection?

And these are just a few of the questions I get while building a control deck. If I start thinking of building a combo deck, then I’d get even more.

People say that Spell Pierce are good. People say that Tarmogoyfs are good. People say, people say.

I can’t say what’s the right thing to play because I haven’t played enough lately. I would have loved to play every Vintage tournament held lately, but my work has made it impossible for me to attend to most of them. Anyways, no matter what 75 cards I sleeve (if I play that Vintage side event), I’m sure it’s not going to be good enough. Not good enough, because there’s no deck capable of not losing stupidly against Time Vault + Voltaic Key in the early game. Some times, you have an excellent hand with Force of Will, 2 lands, Mana Drain + some bussiness spells, and you get owned by first turn time vault + key with FoW backup from them. Ok, it’s a 2 card combo, and he got lucky… but dude, your hand was fucking awesome and you still lose without being able to play a fucking turn.

Two years ago, when Time Vault wasn’t working as it is right now, I was 100% sure of my deck being able to defeat ANY deck in the format. I was playing Gifts Tendrils and had great success with that deck. I knew what to play, how to play and when to play it. Now I’m a bit lost as the format is a bit random, luck depending and less skilled based. Of course skill counts, but when they Vault/Key you first turn, there’s nothing much you can do rather than Force of Will.

I hope we get some changes to the restricted/banned Vintage list in June. I hope they fix the problem, and I also hope they finally print some good business spells for the control players. All we do now is watch how all blue cards get restricted while awesome creatures and artifacts are printed collection after collection.

To end this post, I’d like to tell you guys that I’ll try to update the blog during this weekend with news about the GP. I probably will be broadcasting some games (you’ll find that at the top menu labels – “live TV“) live from there.

Stay tuned and wish me luck!

I played in an Extended PTQ in Madison, Wisconsin (USA) this past weekend, and 168 players showed up to battle for an invitation. I had been brainstorming some decks the night before, and this is what I rolled with to the tournament:
BUG Faeries 20101Q 1.0, by Jaco 02-19-2010
Business (38)
4 Ancestral Vision
3 Bitterblossom
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Vendilion Clique
3 Thoughtseize
4 Spell Snare
3 Mana Leak
2 Cryptic Command
3 Repeal
3 Smother

Mana Sources (22)
3 Mutavault
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Verdant Catacombs
2 Watery Grave
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Breeding Pool
6 Island
2 Swamp
1 Forest

Sideboard (15)
2 Extirpate
2 Shred Memory
2 Darkblast
2 Damnation
1 Deathmark
3 Kitchen Finks
3 Glen Elendra Archmage

I figured that Zoo and ThopterDepths variants would be the most played decks in the room. There ended up being a lot of those as well as everything else you could imagine. I ended up 4-2 then dropped to head home on a long drive. I beat Dredge, Tooth and Nail (with Iona+Painter combo), RW Landfall, and 4C Zoo (with Bant Charm, etc.). I ended up losing to another RW Landfall (he drew 4 burn spells in a row to kill me) and also lost to someone playing the Living End cycler deck (I drew ZERO counterspells of any sort in two games, although I had 3 Thoughtseizes in my two opening hands).

The deck is very good, and can play the aggro-control game very well. Smother is quite nice right now in such a creature heavy format, and can help you combat nearly every deck you’ll run into. I prefer this over Doom Blade because Smother also hits Dark Confidant and Vampire Hexmage, which is extremely important since I consider ThopterDepths to be one of the best decks in the format (and most played by those who have the cards). The protection package seemed very good, and I always seemed glad to have a counterspell handy to deal with things like Path to Exile or Lightning Helix. The Tarmogoyfs seemed better in theory than Mistbind Clique, as they cost half as much mana and are generally as big (although they don’t fly), but with four mana I often found myself casting a Tarmogoyf and protecting it with Spellstutter Sprite. The only drawback is that Tarmogoyf doesn’t fly and it doesn’t tap out your opponent’s lands. That slot is up for debate, but I felt the addition of Tarmogoyf main and Kitchen Finks out of the sideboard went a long ways towards helping combat the early rushes that aggro decks can present.

The sideboard was very good to me, but next time I would probably drop the third Glen Elendra Archmage and add the fourth Kitchen Finks to increase the odds of seeing those early against Zoo and aggro decks. I somehow didn’t get paired against ThopterDepths, but the Darkblasts are great at dealing with their Confidants and Hexmages, while Shred Memory (and even Extirpate) is good at dealing with the Thopter portion, and Glen Elendra Archmage is just fantastic in general against Blue decks. Damnation proved very useful against Zoo, as they almost have play out as many guys as possible against you to get through your creatures and Bitterblossom, and then you can just Damnation away a lot of their resources. Darkblast was the MVP against RW Landfall, and is also fantastic against Elves (which was everywhere after Matt Nass’ recent GP Oakland win).

If you are looking for something a little different, I think this deck is a viable option for the current Extended climate and current round of PTQs. If I was to play the deck again I would max out the number of Kitchen Finks available in the sideboard, but everything else seemed great at combating a field of ThopterDepths, Zoo, Elves, Dredge, and the combo decks out there (Hypergenesis, Scapeshift, Living End, etc). Good luck in your battles!

When you play a game, no matter which, you should always be able to distinguish the line between fun and competition. The real key to answer the question is finding the right balance of how much fun you have while playing competitive. How so?

Let me go a bit back in the time, and explain you something about my childhood first.

Back in 1993, I was a 13 year old boy with lot to learn and not much to lose. We had this math teacher, named Patiño, who challenged us every day by playing what he called “El Ruedo” (the Bullring). El Ruedo consisted in a very simple but efficient way to motivate the students. Everyday, Patiño would be asking questions and, if you would answer them correctly then you would move one desk forward closer to the teacher; if you would answer wrong then you would lose one position and move back to the end of the classroom.

We were part of a living ladder everyday, where best students would play at the top of it, while the worst ones would be sent back to the end. Being at the beginning had rewards while being at the end punishments (extra homework, etc…). I’m sure Patiño had his own statistics from his students: % of answers correct, % of answers wrong, number of seats gained, number of seats gone, etc…

For me, El Ruedo was motivating, self-challenging and, most important, fun. I loved being at the top tables, competing with the most brilliant students, while others were also trying to compete to get my seat. It was fun being there, but, was it only fun because of me, or was it also because you could see others go down in the ladder?

Ladder systems ain’t nothing new. Chess is using it, MtG is using, all sort of sports are using it, even teachers are using it. What’s behind ladders that makes them so interesting? Very simple, they are self-breaking.

Let’s move now to our game, Magic: The Gathering. When we start playing the game, we don’t even know about the existence of the DCI rankings. We play purely for fun and we don’t care much about losing, because you play with your friends (who have a similar level than yours) and they also lose often.

When you sign in your first tournament you are informed about the DCI. You fill in that paper and, from that point, you are now interested about rankings and your stats.

At the beginning you lose and lose points, and that isn’t fun at all. Then you wonder why you are doing that bad. You start reading magazines and copy/paste decks from them. You begin to feel the improvement, but that’s not enough to make you go up, because your winning % won’t be any bigger than 50%. Then you start reading articles from pro’s on the internet, you read tournament reports, you prepare your decks based on the metagame, etc… At that point you can start feeling the improvement, and your winning % will be over 50% for sure.

From that level to the one where you become a winning player there’s an abyss. What makes someone a competitive player just like any pro? Do pros enjoy the game and have fun just like when we were casual players?

There’s few things you should do and know about competitive players:

1. They play a lot. Experience is important, because it will make easier to you certain choices. It’s very simple how to react to a certain situation when you’ve experienced it in the past.
2. They read a lot. You think you read enough? Meh, you are wrong! They read more.
3. They are people with huge self-confidence. This is probably the most important thing when it comes to being competitive. You have to believe in yourself from game 1 of round 1, to game 5 of a Pro Tour final. If you ever doubt of your chances of beating a certain player just because he’s a pro, then your putting yourself in a losing-position from the very beginning of the match.
4. They never surrender. If there’s any slim chance of winning a match, no matter how small it is, they’ll go for it. If you need to topdeck a card to win a game you are otherwise losing, you have to believe in the chance of drawing it.
5. They act like pro’s. Being competitive means behaving competitive. It’s not the same talking like a kid than saying the right words at the right moment. It’s not the same to blame your opponent’s luck when he’s beaten you, than accepting the lose, shake hands and afterwards analyze your own mistakes.
6. Winning is fun, therefore pros have more fun than any other players. Losing ain’t specially nice or funny. The more you lose, the less fun you have. So, the other way around makes lot of sense as well: The more you win, the more fun you have!
7. When they start a tournament, no matter which one it is, they play to win it and they believe they can win it. If you attend any event, and you see a pro signing in, you shouldn’t be worried about him/her, you should be encourage to defeat him, because you know you are going to win the tournament.

These are few, but not all, facts that you should know about competitive players. To become one, you need to train your mind specially. First thing to do to become a winner is believing you are one, and thinking like one. Any thoughts of losing will always put you in a disadvantaged position. Losers ain’t losers just because of their bad luck, they are, because they don’t know how to become a winner.

First step to become a winner is to think like one. Change your mind, be positive and never doubt about yourself! These are few tips I could share with you and I hope it makes you guys better players in the near future.

In the previous articles I presented a version that is uncommitted to punishing against any one strategy and seemingly trying to guard against a very broad field. Spellstutter Sprite is a card that people will either love or hate depending on what they face, but as an experiment let’s drop the 2 Spellstutter Sprite from the main and replace them with the third Rhox War Monk and 1 Sensei’s Divining Top. While very mana intensive, Sensei’s Divining Top is one of the best cards in Legacy, and could potentially work very well with 8 fetchlands, 4 Survivals, and all of your other cantrips. With Top and all of your shuffle and manipulation effects you can see tons of different cards and really dig through your deck in no time, helping to find Survival or that key counter or removal spell. That would bring us to this list.
Bant Survival 20101Q 1.1, by Jaco 02-011-2010
Business (41)
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Force of Will
3 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Rhox War Monk
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Trygon Predator
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Loyal Retainers
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob

Mana Sources (19)
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
3 Tropical Island
2 Savannah
1 Tundra
3 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island

If we dropped the Spellstutters and added Rhox War Monk, this would theoretically give us a little bit better game against aggro decks, while slightly weakening our combo matchup. So what about changing the sideboard in accordance with this, and to potentially give us better game against other decks as well? Check out this sample sideboard:
Sideboard B (15)
3 Counterbalance
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
2 Path to Exile
2 Krosan Grip
1 Meddling Mage
1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
1 Loxodon Hierarch
3 Relic of Progenitus

While I and many others don’t necessarily like diluting the power and focus of a Survival deck with the CounterTop package, it has a few interesting uses. First of all, it can really help to hammer the combo matchup, and can also aid against things like Loam decks, Burn, Threshold, Zoo, etc. With this sideboard you still have access to extra removal in the form of Path to Exile, as well as graveyard hate in Relic of Progenitus. You could also drop the fourth Counterbalance for another Meddling Mage, Path, or whatever else you’d find handy.

I won’t go as in depth as the previous article talking about matchups, but here’s a brief look at potential sideboard use with this version:
Sideboarding Against Merfolk
+2 Path to Exile
+2 Krosan Grip
+1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
-2 Ponder
-1 Sensei’s Divining Top
-1 Eternal Witness
-1 Noble Hierarch

Sideboarding Against Ad Nauseam Tendrils
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+1 Meddling Mage
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage
-3 Noble Hierarch

Sideboarding Against Dream Halls
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+1 Meddling Mage
+2 Krosan Grip
+1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
-4 Tarmogoyf
-4 Swords to Plowshares
-1 Rhox War Monk (or Ponder)

Sideboarding Against Naya Zoo
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-4 Force of Will
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Noble Hierarch
-2 Ponder

Sideboarding Against Goblins
+2 Path to Exile
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Sensei’s Divining Top

Sideboarding Against CounterTop
Totally dependent on what else is in their deck besides CounterTop, but your own CounterTop is pretty good here.

Sideboarding Against Canadian/Tempo Threshold
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
-2 Ponder
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage

Sideboarding Against Dredge
+2 Path to Exile
+3 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Meddling Mage
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
+1 Sensei’s Divining Top
-3 Spell Snare
-4 Noble Hierarch
-1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner

Sideboarding Against Lands.dec
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+3 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Meddling Mage
-2 Rhox War Monk or Tarmogoyf (depending on number of Blue cards you want for Force)
-1 Eternal Witness
-3 Spell Snare
-1 Swords to Plowshares
-2 Ponder

As you can see, your lines of play and defense will be slightly different in a number of matches. Counterbalance has value in about half of these matches, and in a few matches it will really shine. Its inclusion is definitely debatable, but it may have merit depending on your tournament scene.

The Natural Order + Progenitus Package
Another interesting sideboard (and possibly main deck) option is the Natural Order package, which allows you to cheat Progenitus into play. The usefulness or necessity of this is questionable when you have the Iona package, but it provides another angle of attack that your opponent has to take into consideration. Like Tinker in Vintage, Natural Order can be a fantastic topdeck or can be a card you actively search out with your Brainstorms and Ponders to serve as a trump card or provide a quick win, rather than struggling in a protracted battle of resources.

So what matchups does the Natural Order package actually improve? Well, that’s tough to answer, because getting Progenitus into play doesn’t guarantee you a win. What it does do though is put your opponent on a two turn clock, meaning they have to find an answer immediately or the game will be over, provided they don’t have lethal damage on board or have enough burn in hand to finish you off in conjunction with their existing attackers. This can be very daunting for the opponent to always have to simply worry about the threat of Natural Order into Progenitus once you’ve hit four mana, so the fear of this can also possibly lead to a change in how your opponent plays the game against you, what he counters, what he uses removal spells on, and more. A two turn clock can be very relevant against nearly every deck in the format, but it is not without problem. For one thing, you can often be stuck with a dead card in hand (either Natural Order if you are short on mana, or if your singleton Progenitus also winds up in your hand), although this risk can be mitigated by the ability of Brainstorm to shuffle away dead cards. If you are playing against a deck with a lot of counterspells it will be difficult to get Natural Order to resolve, and the loss of a creature and card in hand if it gets countered can really set you back.

The next logical question related to Natural Order is if it is good enough to play in the sideboard, is it or is it not also good enough to play in the main deck? I cannot answer that for you, but if you play in a field with a lot of aggro decks and little in the way of Blue decks or CounterTop variants the Natural Order package can be very effective at speeding the game up if you don’t have Survival of the Fittest. In a way it’s almost like a 5th, 6th, and 7th copy of Survival, because if either one resolves and you’re not facing lethal damage on the board you’re most likely going to win the game in short order. One advantage of not playing this in the main deck is that you can sideboard it in as a surprise to overwhelm an unsuspecting opponent, meaning their other potential hate cards (likely graveyard or enchantment hate) would be rendered useless. I can definitely see the reason that Natural Order Bant decks have become increasing popular and successful, so this is certainly worth testing and investigating further if you think it would be good in your area as a tweak to the Survival style Bant deck.

Generic Sideboard Cards vs. Narrow Sideboard Cards
When constructing a deck and sideboard, there seems to be a couple of different schools of thought which I’ll try to briefly outline here. One school of thought would entail constructing your sideboard with cards that might not be quite as potent, but have more general application against a larger pool of decks. Cards like Pithing Needle, Ghostly Prison/Propaganda, Meddling Mage, and Relic of Progenitus are pretty good examples of this. They can each answer different strategies effectively, even though their might be a more powerful but narrow card which would be sided in less frequently.

The other school of thought eschews having more generic answers for trying to isolate perhaps the most difficult matchups and give you stronger game against those decks you’re convinced you need major help against. The reasoning behind this is often that your main deck should be good enough to beat deck X and Y (or perhaps the players you consider to be easy), so you will devote specific cards to those matchups you know you’ll have to beat in the Top 8, or against those couple of really good local players who you want to have that ace up your sleeve for. Examples of this would be the use of Engineered Plague (at the height of Goblins’ popularity) and Mindbreak Trap (against Storm combo).

One card that has escaped serious discussion in Bant Survival sideboards could potentially fall into either of the aforementioned groups of sideboard cards above, and that card is Back to Basics. Many decks in Legacy run anywhere from 0 to 3 basic lands maximum, and Back to Basics can be crippling against these decks (a number of which are often difficult matches for Bant Survival). Decks like Canadian Threshold, Lands.dec, Mono White Stax (and WG Stax), Dredge, and many others usually run 0 to 2 basic lands maximum. Back to Basics has the potential to really turn the tide and shut down an opponent in a close game, especially if the opponent does not see it coming. For example, in game 1 if you play a couple of basic lands and a couple of dual lands, your opponent will likely never expect non-basic hate coming in. In games 2 and 3 you have the potential to fetch up to 5 basic lands and potentially ruin your opponent if you land a Back to Basics from turn 3 onwards after they have tapped out to play something important on their turn. If all of their lands are single usage only, Back to Basics has the opportunity to swing these matches far in your favor against an unprepared opponent.

Building the Unexpected
In a recent interview with legendary Magic player Kai Budde, who many consider to be the best player or constructed player of all time, I read a very interesting theory of Kai’s that I agree with. When asked for advice about succeeding in constructed Magic tournaments, Kai responded “The best strategy is to know what the others are going to play and come with something that nobody else expects.”

In terms of Magic theory this is relatively profound and often true. When people are accustomed to playing against commonly played decks they are able to predict what will come next, what your lines of play are, what your (and their) potential outs are, and so on. When you play unorthodox choices you take this advantage away from your opponent. That doesn’t mean you should play sub-optimal cards, but introducing uncertainty and uneasiness to your opponent in the middle of a potentially tense match just might gain you the edge you need to be victorious.

Cards like Counterbalance, Natural Order, and Back to Basics are a few examples of unexpected yet potentially very potent sideboarding strategies that you can use in your bag of tricks from tournament to tournament. Whether you choose to play more generic answers in your sideboard or to get creative and run with the innovative and unexpected, keep these options in mind when you build your next sideboard. If you play in an area with regular tournaments keeping a fresh or rotating approach to dealing with your opponents can give you an advantage and can lead to more wins, especially in corner cases.

Here’s the decklist I presented as a suggested starting point for your adventures with Bant Survival.
Bant Survival 20101Q 1.0, by Jaco 02-01-2010
Business (41)
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
4 Force of Will
3 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Rhox War Monk
2 Spellstutter Sprite
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Trygon Predator
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Loyal Retainers
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob

Mana Sources (19)
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
4 Tropical Island
2 Savannah
1 Tundra
2 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island

Sideboard A (15)
3 Spell Pierce
2 Path to Exile
2 Krosan Grip
2 Relic of Progenitus
1 Faerie Macabre
1 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Meddling Mage
1 Rhox War Monk
1 Loxodon Hierarch

As mentioned in the previous article, this is built for a mixed metagame where I’d expect to face a range of aggro, control, combo, and other random decks that always show up at Legacy events. The deck and sideboard should obviously be tweaked for what you expect to play against and expect to have trouble against. So for example if you think Naya Zoo and aggro will be heavily represented and you won’t be running into much Counterbalance, you could easily drop a Qasali Pridemage or Trygon Predator and ramp up the number of Rhox War Monks. Or if you think you’ll be playing against a lot of Storm combo it might make sense to leverage the number of Spellstutter Sprites or Meddling Mages to combat that.

So how exactly do you play this beast? Bant Survival has a number of methods to attack the opponent. It can play the aggro-control game by beating down with a (hopefully Exalted) Tarmogoyf or Rhox War Monk, and counter and/or Swords the opponent’s relevant threats. If it lands a Survival of the Fittest it can play the long game and just overwhelm the opponent with good creatures and an avalanche of card advantage created by Survival and Squee, or it can try to go the combo route by powering out the unfair Loyal Retainers + Iona, Shield of Emeria couplet to lock the opponent out. The addition of Loyal Retainers to the deck has really pushed the Bant Survival archetype into overdrive, and has also pushed the card Loyal Retainers into the $75-125 bracket, unfortunately. If you are unable or unwilling to obtain Loyal Retainers, you could also drop Retainers + Iona from the deck and load up on things that might be good in your metagame, such as more War Monks, Pridemages, Spellstutter Sprites, or other useful things like main deck Meddling Mage or Rafiq of the Many.

Playing Against Merfolk
Mono-Blue Merfolk is a relatively cheap and effective deck to build in Legacy, and for this reason it is one of the more commonly played decks. It has a tough time against Naya Zoo, but excels against Blue-based aggro control (such as Threshold and CounterTop variants), and also has decent game against combo. Bant Survival is kind of a Blue-based aggro control deck, but the flexibility outlined above is what gives it game against so many decks. It can be flexible in how it attacks or defends against the opponent’s strategy, and against Merfolk this is no different.

Depending on the build of Merfolk you run into, you will definitely see Force of Will and Daze, and could also see Stifle, Umezawa’s Jitte, and even Back to Basics. Getting a threat Force of Will’ed really isn’t that big of a deal, because you have a good number of threats and also have Force of Wills of your own if you really wanted to punch something through. I would always recommend taking your time if possible to play around Daze, because you’d rather slow play your threats to make sure they resolve rather than recklessly try to curve out as fast as possible. Umezawa’s Jitte is probably the best threat Merfolk has against you, so this should be one of the things that your Spell Snares and Qasali Pridemages are saved for, because an active Jitte can effectively render your creatures all but irrelevant. The second thing you really need to watch out for is Lord of Atlantis, because it provides all of their creatures Islandwalk. You will either want to keep Islands off the board on your side, or more realistically do everything you can to keep Lord of Atlantis off the board on your opponent’s side (Spell Snare, Path to Exile, etc.). All of their other Lords (+1/+1 creatures) are decent, but this is the one you really care about because it creates the ability for them to easily alpha-strike you to end the game in a single turn if the ground seems stalled with creatures.

When sideboarding against Merfolk with my list above, I’d lean towards the following:
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Krosan Grip
+1 Rhox War Monk
-2 Spellstutter Sprite
-1 Eternal Witness
-1 Noble Hierarch

Spellstutter Sprite won’t counter much against Merfolk and is smaller than all of their guys. Rhox War Monk is actually pretty good because of the lifelink to buffer against their attacks, and the fact that he’s generally bigger than their guys unless they’ve got a couple of Lords out. Having a total of 6 Swords and Paths will go a long way to keeping their board relatively clean, and Krosan Grip can aid your Pridemages to help out against AEther Vial, Back to Basics, and most importantly Umezawa’s Jitte. While I don’t like siding out Noble Hierarch in general, it’s the weakest remaining card in the deck against Merfolk. I realize that some people would argue for siding out Survival stuff here because of the mana investment, but I would argue that if a Survival sticks you’re going to win the game, by either overwhelming them with card advantage or landing an Iona naming Blue. You could also potentially remove Kira, but I would guess that my opponent would bring in their own Kira from the sideboard, so having your own could be helpful to Legend-rule theirs out of play.

Playing Against Ad Nauseam Tendrils
Depending on the build of ANT you’re squaring off against, you can be a real underdog in game 1. They could be sporting up to 6 Orim’s Chant effects main for protection, which is bad news for Bant Survival’s light protection package. There are really a lot of different permutations of ANT and Burning Wish hybrid decks running around now, so you could also see Duress or Xantid Swarm maindeck. If they don’t have Swarm main I would expect them to board it in against you. When sideboarding against ANT with my list above, I would do the following:
+3 Spell Pierce
+1 Ethersworn Canonist
+1 Gaddock Teeg
+1 Meddling Mage
+1 Rhox War Monk
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage
-4 Noble Hierarch

While Spell Snare might not seem great against them, it can still counter Infernal Tutor, Burning Wish, Cabal Ritual, and whatever else they might have in the 2 slot. It’s not the best option, but you need to assume a more controlling role here to try to stay alive. Similarly, Swords to Plowshares could potentially be dead, but you can’t run the risk of being overrun by a Xantid Swarm (or even a Dark Confidant), so I’d be leaving in 3-4 Swords. Noble Hierarch can provide you with acceleration here, but doesn’t really do anything else, and again is the weakest card. A lot of people will be loathe to side it out but you really would rather have every other card in the deck instead. Kira is decent in the deck here because when paired with Ethersworn Canonist it means your hate creatures can’t be removed by the Chain of Vapor/Deathmark/Slaughter Pact that was sideboarded in against you by the combo player.

When playing this match you need to assume the control role if possible and actively dig for counters with Ponder, while saving Brainstorms for hiding your counters if need be, shuffling away junk you don’t want, or to dig for a counterspell in an emergency. Play this slow and carefully, and if you can keep mana open and then land either land Survival or some Rhox War Monks ideally. Rhox War Monks can push your life to a problematic number for an opposing Storm player if they start swinging early. If you have the early Survival draw you can chain out an Iona to shut off Black or Blue spells from the combo player, and either follow up with your other hate creatures (Meddling Mage, Teeg, Canonist) in whatever order you see fit, or you can dig for Spellstutter Sprites to shut down things like Orim’s Chant or Dark Ritual.

Playing Against Dream Halls
This is one of the few matches where you’ll want to sideboard out Swords to Plowshares, as it does nothing against their deck. Spell Snare is also relatively weak here, countering only Lim-Dul’s Vault. They will probably have 8-10 Duress, Thoughtseize, and Spell Snare effects after sideboarding, as well as 4 Force of Wills, so you’ll have to try to do everything in your power to play the control role and prevent them from busting either a Show and Tell into Progenitus or Show and Tell into Dream Halls, or just hard casting Dream Halls and trying to go off. I would look at sideboarding with the above list like this:
+3 Spell Pierce
+1 Ethersworn Canonist
+1 Gaddock Teeg
+1 Meddling Mage
+2 Krosan Grip
-4 Tarmogoyf
-4 Swords to Plowshares

Your anti-combo suite will function well here, as Spell Pierce will be very good at protecting you in the early turns and stopping a quick Show and Tell. If possible try to play around the opposing Spell Pierces and keep mana open. Tarmogoyf is just a random beater that does nothing else against this deck, and because of this all of your creatures that do something else are much better at limiting the opponent’s lines of play. Pridemage can kill Dream Halls, Gaddock Teeg can prevent them from going off with Dream Halls, and Meddling Mage can shut down Show and Tell. Your best bet is to go for the Survival into Iona package if you can find a Survival, and naming Blue will shut them off of both Show and Tell and Dream Halls. When possible keep your mana open to play around Spell Pierce and save your Brainstorms for hiding counterspells against opposing Thoughtseizes and Duresses, or to shuffle away junk you don’t want to see.

It is also worth noting that if you do have 1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress in your sideboard for Merfolk it would also be worth sideboarding in here as well, because it can bounce a Progenitus to the owner’s hand if they are able to force through a Show and Tell.

Playing Against Naya Zoo
Naya Zoo is both a popular and well performing deck, and because of the efficiency and speed of every one of their spells this can be a tough matchup if they get a fast draw. As noted above, if you expect a lot of Naya Zoo in your area it is probably worth ramping up the number of Rhox War Monks and maybe even Loxodon Hierarchs, as these can both present critical life buffers to swing games back your way after the Zoo player comes out fast and aggressive. Loxodon Hierarch in particular can be brutal when landing, because it effectively functions as a 3-for-1 against Zoo, because it negates 1-2 of their burn spells and will also block and kill one of their creatures (or draw a Path to Exile out). When sideboarding with the list above this is what I would recommend:
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Noble Hierarch
-2 Ponder

Having access to as many Swords and Paths as possible for sideboarded games is important, as these can knock out early Wild Nacatls and Tarmogoyfs to buy you time to set up, or to clear an opposing Qasali Pridemage from the board if you have a Survival to drop and go nuts with. Kira is great in this matchup as they will have to use two removal spells to get rid of it if they want to be able to combat the rest of your creatures on a one for one basis with their removal spells. Spellstutter Sprite can be great at countering an important Path to Exile or Lightning Bolt from the opponent to try to remove your War Monks, so I would keep them in hand until necessary.

I like to leave in Qasali Pridemage in this matchup, because aside from the Exalted bonus it can provide to your Tarmogoyf or Rhox War Monk it can also destroy Sylvan Library or more importantly Umezawa’s Jitte if the opponent brings it in against you. Ponder is really your weakest card here, so while I don’t like siding out Blue cards that can find cheap answers, it’s actually better to just draw more threats and removal than to have to dig for it when you’re racing against the clock that Zoo presents. Along these lines one might ask why not side out Survival, but if you can land a Survival you should win the game, and Zoo has no counterspells to prevent you from landing Survival if you draw it. Chaining out War Monks or even the Retainers into Iona combo is fantastic here.

Another debatable sideboarding option here is to board out your 4 Force of Will and try to become the midrange deck and just have better threats than your opponent. Instead of siding out Ponders and creatures you could drop the Forces and then just play creatures, removal, and use your Ponders and Brainstorms to dig for removal and Survivals. Pitching any of your Blue creatures to Force can really suck your resources out on the first or second turn here, so it is worth consideration.

Playing Against Goblins
Like Zoo, Goblins is a fast an aggressive deck that you will need to fight to stay alive early and then stabilize by dropping creatures that are bigger than theirs. Tarmogoyf, Rhox War Monk, Swords to Plowshares, Qasali Pridemage, and Force of Will are all very good cards that you have main deck against Goblins, and with the list above we have some decent sideboarding options:
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Spellstutter Sprite
-1 Spell Snare

Depending on the build of Goblins you are facing Spell Snare can be very good or very bad. If they are playing some number of things like Stingscourger, Umezawa’s Jitte, Mogg War Marshall, or Warren Weirding in addition to the standard 4 copies of Goblin Piledriver this can greatly increase the value of Spell Snare. Siding it out or not will be based on what you’ve seen and what you expect, but in the example above I’ve sided out 1 copy.

Playing against Goblins is relatively straight forward. You obviously don’t want Goblin Lackey to connect and start dropping creatures in for free, so Swords, Path, and Force are your best friends here. Your opening hands will greatly dictate how these games play out, because for example if you have a Qasali Pridemage you may be far more inclined to let an AEther Vial resolve, or if you are on the play and have a first turn Noble Hierarch to power out a second turn Rhox War Monk or Tarmogoyf you will probably let a Goblin Lackey resolve and not blink an eye.

My main recommendations here would be to fetch basic lands whenever possible to play around Wasteland, and to use Swords and Paths to handle Goblin Lackey and Goblin Warchief. Try to save your Force of Wills for Goblin Ringleader if at all possible, because the card advantage it provides can really push the Goblins player ahead. Obviously if you have the Survival draw chaining Loyal Retainers into Iona naming Red can be backbreaking against the Goblins player, and if you have Survival and can buy yourself the turns I would strongly recommend this.

Playing Against CounterTop
As the weeks and months pass by there seem to be more and more CounterTop variants popping up, but not nearly as many people playing the deck in terms of a percentage of the field at large Legacy tournaments. Development is splintering into a lot of different directions, but not nearly as many people seem to be playing it or playing it successfully. The kill condition will almost always be Tarmogoyf plus whatever else (whether it’s Dark Confidant, Vedalken Shackles, Natural Order into Progenitus, etc.), and they will seek to lock out an opponent with Counterbalance coupled with Sensei’s Divining Top.

Against these decks your Qasali Pridemages and Trygon Predator will shine and you will obviously want to bring in whatever number of Krosan Grips you are packing, but what else? The answer is that it really depends on what you’ve seen or expect from their deck. The more non-creature spells they have the stronger Spell Pierce becomes, and if they are playing Natural Order your Meddling Mages can be more potent as well. Depending on your opening hand and how aggressive their build is this can dictate how aggressive you are. Major things to watch out for (besides CounterTop) are Threads of Disloyalty, Vedalken Shackles, Dark Confidant, and Natural Order.

One last thing to note about these decks is that they are relatively slow, and so if you think they are packing Daze it is worth keeping your mana open and playing around their potential Dazes to cut off half of their counterspells and to make sure your spells stick. If you don’t think they are packing Daze then you can push the envelope and try to resolve spells before they have CounterTop in play or maybe when they’re tapped out to avoid Spell Snare if they are running that. Landing a single Survival of the Fittest after baiting with stuff like Tarmogoyf and Rhox War Monk can be a very strong line of play for you that will lead to a quick win.

Playing Against Canadian/Tempo Threshold
Like Goblins, the Threshold player will try to attack your manabase, so if you can help it you should be fetching for basic lands whenever possible, and when fanning open your starting hands keep Stifle and Wasteland in mind when determining if your hand is keepable. Because of this and the Merfolk match I’m considering tweaking the manabase slightly to drop 1 Tropical Island and adding 1 more basic Forest, which will help make your manabase more bulletproof. You realistically don’t need to be fetching multiple Tropical Islands in a game very often, so it merits serious consideration.

Most of the Tempo Threshold decks are only playing Lightning Bolt and Fire/Ice for removal, so you need to be weary of how you engage in creature combat in these games. Losing two of your creatures to a Fire/Ice after combat damage can easily lose you a game. Another combat trick to keep in mind is thinking you’ll have a bigger guy than theirs and attacking, only to have the Threshold player Stifle the Exalted trigger from one of your Noble Hierarchs. Be careful and play cautiously here. Also be on the lookout for opposing Submerges from the Threshold player after sideboarding (if they’re good they’ll do it in response to you sacrificing a fetchland to shuffle away your dude). This is how I would sideboard with the list above:
+3 Spell Pierce
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Path to Exile
-2 Ponder
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage

Some people will have a tendency to side in too many Swords/Paths against an opposing Threshold player. I don’t think you need more than 5 or a max of 6, because you can’t target their Nimble Mongooses and the only thing you’ll really need them for is Tarmogoyf and possibly Trygon Predator or Vendilion Clique. Some of the European builds are running Grim Lavamancer, and if you do see that then it will definitely be worth siding the additional Paths. Just don’t go overboard here and end up with dead cards if you can help it.

The Threshold player will have a counterspell base 4 Spell Snares and 4 Force of Wills to deal with your Tarmogoyfs and Survivals, and may be siding in Spell Pierce and/or Red Elemental Blast in lieu of Daze. You have a number of similar size threats to them, but if you can bait and then land a Survival it will push the game out of reach, so take your time in this match and play around Daze or Spell Pierce if you can afford it.

Playing Against Dredge
Similar to the Dream Halls matchup, Tarmogoyf is just a regular dude in this matchup and doesn’t really do anything to cripple the opponent or prevent them from going off like some of your other creatures can. He’s got a big backside and can block or swing through all the opponent’s creatures, but he doesn’t prevent the Dredge player from continuing their game plan. Noble Hierarch accelerates but doesn’t provide much else against a match that you generally don’t need much mana against. Outside of a Breakthrough for 2 mana Spell Snare is also pretty underwhelming in this matchup. With this in mind, this is how I would sideboard with the list above:
+3 Spell Pierce
+2 Path to Exile
+2 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Faerie Macabre
+1 Gaddock Teeg
+1 Meddling Mage
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-3 Spell Snare
-4 Noble Hierarch
-2 Tarmogoyf
-1 Eternal Witness
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner

Dredge generally needs their few creatures available to either beat you down or to start generating tokens with Bridge From Below. Your Paths and Swords can be really handy in removing their Ichorids, Bloodghasts, and Narcomoebas from the game to even prevent them attacking or getting tokens. Relic of Progenitus is probably the best anti-Dredge card available, and Faerie Macabre can remove critical cards and is obviously better than what you’re siding out. As for the other cards, Gaddock Teeg can shut down Dread Return, and Rhox War Monk and Loxodon Hierarch can provide a life buffer and a big backside to either hold off opposing creatures or to swing through with the win. Spellstutter Sprite isn’t great here, but it can counter the Chain of Vapors, Pithing Needles, Firestorms, or whatever opposing hate cards the opponent will bring in.

My plan in this matchup is most often to stay alive to either swing through with Rhox War Monk and gain a lot of life, or to land a Survival and pump out the Loyal Retainers into Iona combo and name Black to shut down or dramatically slow down the opponent. If you suspect they will be bringing in Leyline of the Void or Pithing Needle against you to shut down Survival you can always sideboard in Krosan Grip instead of something like Spellstutter Sprite or the 2 remaining Tarmogoyfs.

Playing Against Lands.dec
Depending on the opening hand for the Lands player they will try to come out extremely fast (first turn Manabond, dump hand, start dredging back Life From the Loam), or they will have to take a few turns to set up with Gamble and/or Intuition and start trying to grind out board advantage. In this matchup both Iona and Kira, Great Glass-Spinner are your maindeck trump cards. Kira prevents them from using Maze of Ith and Barbarian Ring effectively, and Iona can just name Green to shut off the Loam engine.

The Lands player will seek to drop their combo pieces and also seek to weaken your manabase. Fetch basic lands to play around Wasteland and use Noble Hierarch to try to play around Rishadan Ports. Their Tabernacle of the Pendrell Vale is obviously very good at tying up your mana resources, but it’s not backbreaking if you don’t overextend into it. Play smart and aggressively use your Ponders and Brainstorms to dig for a Survival to try to lock up the game. Here’s how I would look at siding against this match:
+3 Spell Pierce
+2 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Faerie Macabre
+1 Meddling Mage
-2 Rhox War Monk or Tarmogoyf (depending on number of Blue cards you want for Force)
-1 Eternal Witness
-3 Spell Snare
-1 Swords to Plowshares

Spell Snare is marginal here because the only thing it counters in their deck is Life from the Loam (which keeps coming back) and potentially Burning Wish if they play that (but that’s mostly relegated to AggroLoam nowadays). Spell Pierce does a better job in the first couple of turns by possibly keeping them off of an early Manabond, Exploration, Gamble, or Intuition. Spellstutter Sprite can also prevent their important 1 casting cost spells from resolving, so it also relevant here. Swords to Plowshares is hit or miss because it can only hit their man lands, but it removes a lot of their win conditions and also serves as land destruction, and can clear out a blocker at a critical juncture. I’m torn on its value because I don’t like sitting around with multiple Swords in my hand here, so I’m currently siding out 1, but that could change based on the exact configuration of the opponent’s deck and the better feel I get for how this plays out. Relic of Progenitus is obviously very powerful for you in this match, but keep in mind they’ll probably be siding in Krosan Grip for your Survivals and graveyard hate.

Other Tips and Strategy
You may notice that I rarely sideboard out Eternal Witness, and this is for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that Witness can easily get back a destroyed Survival once your opponent tries to get rid of it with the hate they have inevitably sided in. The second reason is that it basically acts like a Time Walk against a lot of decks, because it gets back a nice card for you (probably an important creature, a Swords to Plowshares, or a Force of Will) while acting as a blocker or can trade with the opponent’s attacking creature.

Your sideboarding will obviously depend a lot on how you construct your deck and sideboard, as well as what is very prevalent in your local metagame, but hopefully this article has served as an insight into playing against some of the most common matches you’re likely to see. For a lot more discussion on the subject check out the fantastic Bant Survival thread on TheSource, where posters Jak, Waikiki, Kuma, Windux and others have provided a lot of insight. Join us again next time as we’ll delve into some alternative and outside-the-box sideboarding strategies for Bant Survival.

I’m not sure whether or not is the right time to include Perish maindeck. With the uprising hype of Bant decks packing Natural Order / Progenitus, Tarmogoyf, Noble Hierarch, Qasali Pridemage, etc… I believe it’s the time to step forward and be ahead of the metagame.

If you hate Tarmagoyf as much as I do and would love to annihilate them all, Grand Prix Madrid would be the perfect scenario. Some random numbers I can come up with from my metagame predictions:

• GP Madrid attendance (based on nothing xD) = 2000 players
• Average of decks running x4 Tarmogoyf = 70% (Healthy format my ass!)

With those two numbers, you can come up with one idea: THERE’S GONNA BE A LOT OF GOYFS! exactly:

70% of 2000 players = 1400 times 4 = 5600 Tarmogoyf all together in less than 10000 m2.

Now imagine just casting a RL® Perish! OMG, you would make Legacy a healthy format in a matter of seconds!

Last Sunday I had the chance of making 2×1’s and 3×1’s thanks to Perish. Man, that retaliation feeling you got once you see your opponent (with tears in his eyes) placing those hordes of green creatures (I miss you Grizzly Bears!) in his graveyard is just PRICELESS!!!!!

I think I’m gonna My friend Jorge (aka the_juzam_dijnn) has created a Facebook group (join here) named:

I love the smell of Perish in the morning.

Just sayin’, if you don’t play green but black, you’d better play Perish!

So what exactly makes up modern Bant Survival? Typically these decks are all Blue/Green/White (Bant) and utilize the most efficient spells Bant colors have to offer. Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile provides the most efficient removal in the Legacy format, Force of Will and Brainstorm are some of the most efficient and powerful spells Blue has to offer, and no one could seriously mention creatures without bringing up Tarmogoyf. So what else makes up these decks?

Creatures
Most Survival of the Fittest decks have a tendency to be relatively light on lands, but be very mana hungry to power up Survival and power out creatures. For this reason the older variants often included some mix of mana producers and accelerants in the form of Birds of Paradise, Llanowar Elves, Wall of Roots, Quirion Ranger, and/or Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary. With the Alara Block came the printing of Noble Hierarch, who seems custom made for this deck, as it provides colored mana to accelerate spells out faster, pitches to Survival, and is equipped with the Exalted mechanic to make your creatures bigger in the omnipresent Tarmogoyf standoffs that frequent Legacy. Alara Block also brought another Legacy staple to the scene in the form of Qasali Pridemage, which has really single handedly changed the Legacy landscape. It also is quite mana efficient and equipped with the Exalted mechanic to make your creatures swing harder, but where it really shines is dealing with problematic enchantments and artifacts such as Counterbalance, Sigil of the Empty Throne, Seismic Assault, Survival of the Fittest, Vedalken Shackles, Phyrexian Dreadnought, Arcbound Ravager, Chrome Mox, and countless others. This has balanced the format and has brought back true aggro strategies from the face of extinction (Naya Zoo, for example).

Aside from these Bant staples, the deep card pool in Legacy has nearly limitless options when it comes to Survival applications, so let’s take a look at some of the other creature options when crafting a Bant Survival deck for our local scene.
Rhox War Monk – an efficient body with a big back side out of Lightning Bolt range, the lifelink and pitchability to Force of Will are the key factors that make this a near unanimous choice for Bant aficionados. The more Naya Zoo and aggro decks you see, the more Rhox War Monks you tend to include.
Spellstutter Sprite – while this will never have the power in this deck that it does in Faeries decks, Spellstutter can provide protection from key removal spells, and can also improve the match against Storm-based combo decks. Some oft-seen spells that can potentially be problematic for Bant which Spellstutter Sprite can help address include: Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Kird Ape, Wild Nacatl, Spell Snare, AEther Vial, Grindstone, Stifle (on Loyal Retainers, Qasali Pridemage, or Exalted trigger, for example), Dark Ritual, Orim’s Chant, Silence, Xantid Swarm, Pithing Needle, Relic of Progenitus, and more. The drawback with Spellstutter is that it requires you to keep mana open and not be as aggressive with the deck, but with the aforementioned list of spells that it can counter you can see why it is often included by Bant pilots.
Trygon Predator – this is an absolute beast against some decks, and can really help shore up some of the deck’s weak spots. While Qasali Pridemage is really good at what it does, what it doesn’t do is keep destroying cards every turn like this can. A lonely Trygon can single-handedly wreck the board of an opposing Stax deck, Enchantress deck, Affinity deck, Painter’s Servant decks, and turn around unfavorable matchups once he starts swinging. Predator can also help deal with cards like AEther Vial, Umezawa’s Jitte, and Back to Basics from an opposing Merfolk player, helping to even out an otherwise tough (and common) matchup.
Eternal Witness – card advantage is a key concept of both Magic and Survival decks, and Witness does a fantastic job of providing card advantage. It will most often grab a destroyed or countered Survival of the Fittest or other threat, and can be key in grabbing a timely Brainstorm or Swords to Plowshares.
Vendilion Clique – another efficient body with a useful effect, Clique often finds its way into Bant decks as a 1-2 of, and can help go aggro or fly over ground standoffs. It is very useful against combo and control, but less so against aggro when you’ve spent 3 mana for a creature and your opponent will just spend 1 mana to Bolt or Path it in response to the comes into play ability.
Kira, Great Glass-Spinner – the inclusion of this in any main deck serves as protection to removal heavy decks in the field (Naya Zoo, Landstill, Tempo Threshold, BGW, etc.), and it is fantastic at what it does, which is protect your creatures. One notable interaction is also the protection it provides your creatures from Maze of Ith, which is one of the main tools that the powerful Lands.dec has against you.
Loyal Retainers + Iona, Shield of Emeria – while these cards basically do nothing on their own, their interaction with Survival is what makes them extremely powerful, and can often turn losing game states into winning ones. Shutting off all removal from an opponent, or the ability of the Merfolk player to play Blue spells, or the ability for Loam decks to cast Green spells, or Storm combo to cast Black or Blue spells are all extremely powerful interactions that make the inclusion of this two card combo very strong.
Squee, Goblin Nabob – this is a staple of Survival decks as the ability to keep coming back and provide continued fodder for Survival activations means it’s an auto-include.
Genesis – like Squee, Genesis can provide card advantage and also provides a great long game against control decks by bringing back threats from your graveyard, but is relatively mana hungry in a deck without Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary. It also doesn’t do much to address problematic matchups and scenarios for Bant Survival in general.
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary – the mana boost that this card can provide is noteworthy, but it really only shines when used in conjunction with Anger, Masticore, and/or Genesis. The trend in Survival deck building theory lately has been to exclude as many cards that are Survival dependent as possible (unless the effect is truly broken, like with Iona), so you will rarely see people include Rofellos in their Bant Survival decks as they are currently constructed.
Gaddock Teeg – shutting down all X spells and spells that cost more than 3 mana (including your own Force of Wills) is a very powerful effect in Legacy, as this often cripples combo deck, control decks, Dread Returns, Engineered Explosives, and more. This is very good, but is best used when in conjunction with other hate cards to create a barrier against your opponent’s line of attack.
Meddling Mage – one of the most skill intensive cards in Magic, this can shut down entire strategies or specific lines of play and individual cards that can hurt you. Bant pilots will often include 1-3 copies of this between the main deck and Sideboard, depending on how they feel about using the card, and also how much combo they expect to face.
Ethersworn Canonist – another useful tool in shutting down combo, this can also be used in combination with Kira, Great Glass-Spinner to form a hard lock on any targeted removal of your creatures (but obviously does nothing against mass sweepers such as Firespout).
Rafiq of the Many – this card can often create wins out of nowhere, turning your otherwise 4/5 vanilla Tarmogoyf into a 5/6 double-striking behemoth, or can create single-turn victories by turning Iona into a 8/8 flying double-striking winner. While easily removed, the effect that Rafiq can have with a creature such as Rhox War Monk is undeniably powerful, and curries favor among many Bant players because of the ability to steal wins from otherwise losing positions.
Llawan, Cephalid Empress – while this card is very narrow in application, what it provides is incredibly powerful. The effect that Llawan provides against Merfolk or an opposing Progenitus can make this a very important sideboard card.
Jotun Grunt – the 4/4 body is a nice complement to the graveyard cleaning ability that Grunt provides. He can also recycle threats from your graveyard back into your deck, but is relatively slow at cleaning out an opponent’s graveyard, and does relatively little to prevent a Dredge or Loam opponent from dredging a lot in one turn.
Loaming Shaman – like Grunt, this card provides a powerful effect, but it simply does it once when coming into play, and doesn’t permanently remove Bridge From Belows, opposing Squees, or anything else. It merely pumps them back into an opponent’s library, which might be good for the surprise effect in a single turn, but is not very good over the long haul.
Faerie Macabre – this graveyard removal effect is permanent, and can’t be countered (only Stifled or Trickbinded), so while this relies on Survival being in play to find most often, it usually ends up in Bant Survival sideboards because the other options are also fundamentally flawed.
Trinket Mage – this can find a number of useful artifacts like Pithing Needle or Engineered Explosives (or even Grindstone if you wanted to include Painter’s Servant and really try to be cute), but as mentioned with Rofellos, the trend in Survival construction has been to move away from cute tricks and toolbox packages and towards making the deck more consistent and powerful when Survival is not in play.

AEther Vial, Daze, Spell Pierce, Spell Snare, or other?
There are a handful of available slots when looking at options besides creatures in Bant Survival, and some people will often fill these slots with either AEther Vial or another form of counterspell or protection. While AEther Vial is great at slipping creatures in under counters and creating cute combat tricks, it really doesn’t do much to advance the agenda of Bant Survival’s strategy, which is to either overrun the opponent with threats or to play out threats and protect them. Another counterspell will go a long ways towards protecting you from the opponent as well as increasing the number of Blue cards to potentially pitch to Force of Will. Daze, Spell Snare, and Spell Pierce are most often under consideration for slots in aggro-control decks, so let’s examine what they can each provide.

When choosing amongst the three options above for additional protection in the deck, one must ask what the spell must do and what it will accomplish in its role. Daze is often best within the first two turns of a game, when forcing through an important early spell or stopping the opponent from curving out an explosive draw in the early turns. This will force you into fetching a Blue producing land very early and set you back a land drop when cast, which must be carefully weighed in a mana hungry but land-light deck such as Bant Survival.

Spell Pierce is relatively limited in that it can’t stop creatures from landing on the board (which will nibble away at your life and thus provide you less turns), but it can also be used to force through an important early spell (like a Blue Duress, essentially), and can also stunt the development of important early plays from opposing decks (such as Counterbalance, AEther Vial, Force of Will, Manabond, etc.). It is naturally very good against combo decks, as they generally rely on either chaining together cheap spells or hitting a certain mana point and then casting a powerful spell (Show and Tell, for example). For this reason it would probably be better served as a sideboard card against these matchups, as Legacy is a creature-centric format in general and this does nothing to address that.

Spell Snare is relatively limited as a counterspell in that it can only stop spells with a converted mana cost of 2, but a large chunk of the Legacy format’s best spells are ringing in at the 2 mana slot. Problematic spells for Bant Survival that could potentially be solved by Spell Snare include: Devastating Dreams, Counterbalance, Qasali Pridemage, Fire/Ice, Hymn to Tourach, Smallpox, Dark Confidant, Engineered Explosives for 2, Umezawa’s Jitte,Tarmogoyf, Lord of Atlantis, Arcbound Ravager, Survival of the Fittest (mirror), Painter’s Servant, Standstill, and a few others. Because of this, I’ve chosen to go with Spell Snare in the listing I present below, as it just does the best job of dealing with these potentially problematic cards, and there is no playing around a Spell Snare like there is by waiting another turn to make a land drop and then play around Daze.

Mana Sources
As noted above, Noble Hierarch is a natural fit as a mana source for this deck, and can help reduce the number of lands to play. Most modern Survival variants play 18-20 lands, depending on what other search and accelerants they sport. In the version below I have 19 lands, which I feel is a good number with the amount of cantrips (Brainstorm and Ponder) also being employed. While any deck may occasionally get mana flooded, it is very important to hit your land drops early with this deck, and also to have enough basic lands to play around Wasteland, Blood Moon, and Back to Basics. There is little reason not to have a solid manabase, because extra lands can always be shuffled away with Brainstorm or Ponder, but lack of lands can lead to game and match losses.

With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at a sample decklist.
Bant Survival 20101Q 1.0, by Jaco 02-01-2010
Business (41)
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
4 Force of Will
3 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Rhox War Monk
2 Spellstutter Sprite
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Trygon Predator
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Loyal Retainers
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob

Mana Sources (19)
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
4 Tropical Island
2 Savannah
1 Tundra
2 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island

Based on the options I’ve laid out above, this is a relatively straight forward main deck, balanced for an open tournament where I’ll expect to face against Aggro, Combo, Control, and any other random decks that you run across in tournaments. There is no over-reliance on Rhox War Monk, Spellstutter Sprite, or Survival, and the deck’s manabase is constructed to be able to fetch any basics I may need and also play very well with Brainstorm and Ponder. Here’s a sample sideboard to examine in conjunction with the deck above.
Sideboard A (15)
3 Spell Pierce
2 Path to Exile
2 Krosan Grip
2 Relic of Progenitus
1 Faerie Macabre
1 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Meddling Mage
1 Rhox War Monk
1 Loxodon Hierarch

Spell Pierce, Canonist, Meddling Mage, and Gaddock Teeg is a nice suite of cards to bring in against combo, and things like Path to Exile and Rafiq are great against random tribal, aggro, and aggro-control decks. Hierarch is a pretty good card against aggro and combo alike, because the life boost is instant once it comes into play (unlike Rhox War Monk), and can really change the opponent’s calculations on how to deal with your life total. Other great sideboard options are extra Rhox War Monks, Relic of Progenitus, Llawan, Cephalid Empress, as well as catch-all answers like Propaganda, Pithing Needle, and Umezawa’s Jitte. Opponent’s will often target your graveyard and/or Survival of the Fittest, so options like a second Squee or more Eternal Witnesses can also provide value out of the sideboard to offset hate you might face. Like any deck, you’ll want to tailor your sideboard to shore up your weakest matchups that you actually expect to face that day in a tournament.

With these choices in mind you’re now armed with the knowledge of how to construct Bant Survival for your next tournament. Two massive Legacy Grand Prixs are on the horizon, as well as the StarCityGames $5K series, as well as countless large monthly tournaments across Europe and the USA. Join us again soon as we’ll take a look at how to actually play Bant Survival against common matchups you’re likely to see.

If you are going to play at 2010′s Eternal event of the year, or if you just got a little interest on what’s going on in Legacy, you shouldn’t miss the chance of reading from this excellent judge.

[Article]: The Justice League – Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition! By David de la Iglesia

In my first article for StarCityGames.com, I’d like to write about what promises to be the event of the year in Spain: the European Legacy Grand Prix. Legacy is my favorite format for many reasons: the huge amount of playable decks, the power-level of some old cards, the complicated rules interactions…

Hope to read more articles from him! Thumbs up for David!

With the upcoming eternal event of the year, Legacy Grand Prix Madrid, many players are seeking the best deck to play at it. In the following article I’d like to analyze some possibilities for those of you who like to play combo decks.
First of all, we must understand what kind of tournament a Grand Prix is. A GP isn’t at all like any other eternal tournaments. Ok, there’s some big events around the world that gather from 100 to 400 players. That’s big, but nothing compared to what predictions for GP Madrid attendance. Spain is, with no doubts, the country that has the biggest tradition on eternal formats, both Legacy and Vintage. Spain hosts the biggest weekly/monthly leagues, so we can expect GP Madrid to be a tournament with an attendance between 1000 and 2000 players. I believe the attendance will actually be closer to 2K than 1K.

So, we better forget of playing 5, 6 or 7 rounds + top8, and start thinking of a 2 day event with a total of 15-16 rounds followed by a top8.

Knowing this, my question is very clear. Is ANT the best combo deck to play?

Assuming you don’t have any tournament byes (1,2 or even 3), you gotta ask yourself if you are capable of keeping the same play level during 9 straight rounds. Combo decks usually have the advantage over other decks of being a fast winner. Some rounds could be actually solved in less than 20 mins if your hands are spectacular. Those rounds actually give you some free time to either scout or relax. But, imho, you can’t actually rely on that fact to choose a deck.

Even tho you can win rounds fast, you have to be sure and confident on your game-play. Playing combo ain’t easy, no matter what deck you play (Mmm…. maybe we can exclude Flash xD), and you can get easily mentally tired.  Let’s now assume that ain’t an issue coz you are a well prepared player who knows your deck perfectly.

Next thing you need to know is what kind of metagame is expected for a tournament like Grand Prix Madrid. It’s really hard to predict an exact metagame but, right now this is my bet:

• 15% – Combo decks (ANT, Iggy, Dream Halls, Entomb, Painters, Dredge, etc…)
• 15% – Control decks (CounterTop, Supreme Blue, Landstill, etc…)
• 30% – Aggro decks (RG, Burn, Naya, Goblins, Merfolks, Affinity, etc…)
• 25% – Aggro-control decks (Survi-Bant, Canadian Threshold, Threshold, Team America, etc…)
• 5% – Lock decks (Staxx, Enchantress, Aggro-Loam, Eternal Garden, etc…)
• 10% – Rogue decks and others (Survival, Mono Black, Pikula, etc…)

I actually believe that any of the decks listed above (and others not listed) have chances to make a good performance in a big tournament. It all depends on what your pairings are and how good of a player you are.

So let’s focus on ANT now.

First of all, the list:

ANT 1.0, by piZZero

2 Ad Nauseam
3 Infernal Tutor
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
3 Chrome Mox
4 Dark Ritual
3 Cabal Ritual
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
3 Mystical Tutor
2 Tendrils of Agony
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
4 Duress
4 Orim’s Chant
1 Wipe Away
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
2 Island
1 Swamp
1 Scrubland
1 Tundra

Sideboard:
4 Dark Confidant
3 Serenity
2 Echoing Truth
2 Angel’s Grace
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Desfigure
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Plains

With the nonstop growth of Aggro decks like burn, Naya Burn, RG’s, etc… I believe this might be a serious issue for a 15 round tournament. Average speaking, you should face these decks in 4 or 5 rounds during the swiss and then again, if lucky, once again in the Top8. Nowadays aggro decks they’ve got 3 ways to hurt you:

1. They drop fast creatures supported by burn spells (Naya Burn, RG, etc…)
2. They drop fast creatures supported by disruption spells (Merfolks, Slivers, etc…)
3. They drop fast creatures (Goblins, Elves, Affinity, etc…)

Game one is a total race against their clock. If you are able to setup your hand fast enough then you might have a chance of winning. If your hand suffers from lack of speed or is over-protected then they might reduce your life fast enough to make it very difficult for you to combo.

Games two and three are the key games. Even if you win G1, your sideboard should be prepared for what’s comming: Gaddock Teeg, Aether Canonist, Pyrostatic Pyllar, Thorn of Amethyst, etc… If your chances on winning G1 vs aggro decks were around 50-55%, chances you win 2nd and 3rd games are heavily reduced. I wouldn’t bet you are over 50% against all those decks that are heavily packed with hate on their sideboards.

So, what’s the solution? There’s plenty of cards ANT can play to face all that hate. Angel’s Grace, Serenity, Smother, Slaughter Pact, Desfigure, Echoing Truth, Hurkyl’s Recall and many more. But, are all those cards effective? Let’s check out an standard ANT sideboard:

• 4 Dark Confidant
• 3 Serenity
• 2 Angel’s Grance
• 2 Echoing Truth
• 1 Slaughter Pact
• 1 Desfigure
• 1 Ill-Gotten Gains
• 1 Plains

First problem this sideboard has is that it’s 100% predictable by your opponents. It’s one of the most standard sideboard choices lately. So, he’ll play games 2 and 3 around them. He’ll probably know you’ll pack the 2nd Ill-Gotten Gains to be less Nauseam dependant; he’ll know you’ll have 1-2 creature killers, and he’ll know you’ll play Angel’s Grace.

Those sideboard cards are all good and effective. I’m not going to analyze them, and their choice over other cards. I’ve played them in many tournaments with great success, but personally believe NOW they ain’t the best choice for a 15 round tournament. Actually, I believe ANT isn’t the best combo deck choice for a 15 round tournament.

If predictions are right, I’d suggest you play a more solid, less life-dependent combo deck. An example of this, is the last month new hype  deck that’s been rising around the Legacy scene: Dream Halls! The new reborn Dream Halls deck has been achieving excellent results at some big events lately, like Jonas Harbili who won the German Magic with a very innovative list.

Dream Halls, by Jonas Harbili

4 Flooded Strand
2 Scalding Tarn
5 Island
1 Polluted Delta
3 Ancient Tomb
2 Underground Sea
1 Bogardan Hellkite
4 Progenitus
4 Dream Halls
4 Show and Tell
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Force of Will
3 Cruel Ultimatum
4 Conflux
3 Lotus Petal
4 Thoughtseize
4 Lim-Dul’s Vault

Sideboard:

1 Hydroblast
2 Pithing Needle
1 Rushing River
3 Propaganda
2 Duress
2 Meditate
4 Spell Pierce

Dream Halls is a good choice. Solid rock, good mana base, hard to disrupt, well protected and hardly suffers from Countertop.

But if you are an storm passionate and would like to play Tendrils, this is the list I suggest for you:

Iggy Reloaded, by Jordi Amat
As a competitive deck for Grand Prix Madrid.

4 Leyline of the Void
3 Ill-Gotten Gains
3 Infernal Tutor
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
3 Cabal Ritual
4 Dark Confidant
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Brainstorm
3 Ponder
2 Mystical Tutor
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Duress
1 Wipe Away
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
2 Island
2 Swamp

Sideboard:
4 Tombstalker
4 Extract
2 Thrashing Wumpus
2 Echoing Truth
2 Desfigure
1 Ill-Gotten Gains

If we look at the decklist, we can observe that this version lacks Ad Nauseam. Yes, that’s the 1st biggest step forward towards a metagame packed with Aggro decks. Historically, Iggy Pop has always defeated aggro decks in the past. Even with the speed raise of aggro decks, the fact that we aren’t HP dependent gives us those 2-3 or even 4 turns we need to prepare the 2 Lion’s Eye Diamond + Infernal Tutor Setup. We have 4 Brainstorm, 4 Ponder, 2 Sensei’s Divining Top + 3 Infernal Tutor and 4 Lion’s Eye Diamond. It shouldn’t be that hard to find the combo, seriously.

Next thing we observe is the presence of 4 Leyline of the void. This card is a Game 1 silver bullet that will alone defeat some decks that abuse of their graveyard or from cards like Life from the Loam. If you are lucky enough to get your LotV game 1 and face a random Ichorid player, you should check out his face. Even if you don’t start G1 with LotV in play and never reveal it to your opponent, it’s always one of the strongest sideboard choices vs decks like Next Level Dredge, Aggro Loam or Eternal Garden.

But Leyline of the Void isn’t just there for that reason. It’s actually the half piece you need to resolve your 1st turn Mind Twist, named Ill-Gotten Gains. Against Aggro decks without any counter magic, 1st or 2nd turn Ill-Gotten gains with LotV in play equals GG. The 4th Ill-Gotten Gains has been added to the sideboard in order to improve and reinforce this strategy in the aggro matchup.

If we compare this deck with ANT, there’s an aspect that might seem weaker: protection. I agree, but not at 100%. Our weaknesses aren’t the same as are in ANT. We aren’t forced to combo that fast. We have more turns to sculpt our hand and find the combo pieces and a Duress. Against control we’ve added 4 Dark Confidant which work as both game breakers or Force of Will magnets. It’s important in combo decks to have “fake bombs”. That’s what allows you to reduce the amount of protection. First turn Confidant grabs his Force of Will, 2nd turn Duress grabs his Daze/Snare/whatever, and then you are good to go.

Talking about control, we got a better game 1 than ANT does, thanks to our Dark Confidants. Each time confidants successfully hits the enemy equals 1 less storm we need to generate. A turn 1 Confidant will hurt your opponent, on average, for a total of 4 damage. On top of that, we have to consider that most of control decks are packed with fetchlands, so you’ll probably win one spell more thanks to the 2 damage from 2 fetchs. So, more or less, what you’ll have to generate is an storm cout of 6. If you open with Duress and he counters it, you’ve got most of it already. Follow it with a Ritual and expect it to get countered too, then Cabal Ritual and Tendrils of Agony for lethal damage. That was just an example of how you could win against control without the use of LED + Infernal, by the simple use and abuse of Dark Confidant.

To improve the control matchup I’ve added 4 Tombstalkers to the sideboard. With Tombstalker we are increasing the amount of turn 2 bombs, therefore reducing the time for the control player to find his answers. He’ll probably kept his Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile, but we don’t care much about them. It’s just another bomb, we can still beat him by storm or by finding more bombs via Brainstorm, Ponder or Sensei’s Divining Top. Obviously Tombstalker is also a silver bullet against those decks that try to lock us down with Chalice of the Void, Thorn of Amethyst, etc… If we manage to hit our opponent twice with him, then we’ve got a very advantaged position in the game. Trust me.

Tombstalker adds the surprise factor that you need in a 15 round tournament where you can pass unnoticed all day. I wouldn’t recommend playing Tombstalkers in a 20 men tournament, coz right after 1st round, everyone knows your secret.

Another secret that can be found in the sideboard are the 4 Extract. We’ve said our deck is slightly slower than ANT, so let’s just search for a turn 1 card that can win us games for U: Extract. If you opponent is man enough, he’ll probably play the deck with only 1 Tendrils. Big mistake! I’ve always said and advised that it’s better to play 2 instead of 1, no matter what deck you play. If extract resolves, you win.

The other sideboard cards are also focused to improve your games against aggro decks. Thrashing Wumpus is, for example, an excellent win condition against absolutely all tribal decks. Merfolks, Goblins and Slivers they’ll all surrender against a turn 1-2 Thrashing Wumpus with BB mana open after that. Desfigure is excellent against Gaddock Teeg and Aether Canonist, as I’ve already stated previously. So if we are afraid of those, make sure to put them in. Finally, Echoing Truth plays a bit the “Joker” card role. You can add it against all decks that could possibly play some hate cards like Chalice of the Void or some enchantments like Ivory Mask, etc…

Let’s say you ain’t 100% convinced with my arguments and you still want to play ANT at Grand Prix Madrid. What decklist shall you play?

I’m pretty convinced that the maindeck is the strongest of all of the available choices right now. People play it without Lion’s Eye Diamond and with Ancient Tomb, people play it with red for Burning Wish, etc… In my honest opinion, who’s been debated a lot by many other excellent combo players, the best version of ANT is the one that packs Orim’s Chant main deck and Serenity + Angel’s Grace sideboard. But still, I’ve said before this wasn’t the best choice. Agree, and I think some small changes could be done at your sideboards in order to improve your performance at a 15 round tournament. If I were you, I would play this list:

ANT 2.0, by piZZero
As a competitive deck for Grand Prix Madrid.

2 Ad Nauseam
3 Infernal Tutor
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
3 Chrome Mox
4 Dark Ritual
3 Cabal Ritual
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
3 Mystical Tutor
2 Tendrils of Agony
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
4 Duress
4 Orim’s Chant
1 Wipe Away
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
2 Island
1 Swamp
1 Scrubland
1 Tundra

Sideboard:
4 Tombstalker
4 Dark Confidant
3 Serenity
2 Echoing Truth
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Ill-Gotten Gains

Main deck suffered no changes, but the sideboard does. This sideboard is what I believe could work best. You have a HUGE surprise factor vs CounterTop decks: 4 Tombstalker + 4 Dark Confidant. Your matchup against aggro improves thanks to the Tombstalkers as well. You don’t have many answers for the mirror of ANT but your main deck Orim’s Chants should help you out.

I hope this article helps you decide what to play if you were going to play combo. There’s still plenty of time before Grand Prix arrives so start testing and playing to become a better player. And always remember kids:

Real men play combo!

Cuando Bryan Six hizo top 8 en el GP de Legacy en Chicago, me sorprendió gratamente esta construcción. Podría decirse que dicha baraja es la evolución de la sligh de toda la vida, que derivó en variantes RG y Burn hasta llegar a esta lista. Recuerdo tiempos pasados, cuando la mejor salida de la baraja era el Jackal Pub, ir pinchando y tirar una gigante Ball Lighting en el tercer turno que dejara al oponente seco.

Pero la grandeza del Magic es que evoluciona, por lo que antiguas construcciones deben adaptarse a entornos actuales. La política de Wizards de sacar cada vez criaturas más buenas en detrimento de hechizos más malos, hace que las chispas sean las clásicas de toda la vida. Pero cartas como Jackal Pub, Ball Lighting. Viashino Sandstalker o Goblin Patrol hoy en día son poco menos que injugables.

Por lo tanto los mazos rojos de daño directo evolucionaron básicamente en dos ramas, Burn! y Goyf Sligh.

Burn! radicaliza la estrategia del fuego al máximo exponente. Al ser los bichos rojos malos, sencillamente los omite y no interactúa con el oponente. En determinados metagames puede llegar a ser muy potente, aunque bajo mi punto de vista es un mazo que depende considerablemente de la suerte.

Goyf Sligh sería la evolución del clásico mazo de Jackal Pub, Mogg Fanatic, Goblin Patrol… Pero se ampara en otros colores para disponer de los mejores bichos. Sin más preámbulos os paso la lista:

Naya Burn by Bryan Six

4 Wild Nacalt
4 Kird Ape
3 Grim Lavamancer
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Lighting Bolt
4 Chain Lighting
3 Rift Bolt
1 Lighting Helix
4 Magma Jet
4 Price of Progress
3 Fireblast
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Windsweath Heath
3 Taiga
2 Plateau
3 Mountain
3 Wasteland

SB:
3 Ethersworn Canonist
3 Krosan Grip
4 Pyroclasm
3 Vexing Susher
2 Pyroblast

Como cualquier mazo rojo, lleva las mejores chispas, pero…

¿Y los bichos?

Aquí es donde entra un factor muy importante en esta baraja. Acosta de debilitar considerablemente nuestra base de maná (algo quizás contraproducente para una baraja roja, y más en los tiempos actuales), obtenemos criaturas de altísimo potencial, como Wild Nacalt, Kird Ape o Grim Lavamancer. Éstas últimas son especialmente buenas cuantas más Fetchlands juguemos. Es decir, ya que llevamos tantas Fetchlands, aprovechamos para jugar los bichos más sinérgicos con ellas. Destaca la ausencia del Mogg Fanatic, pero es que con el uso de tantas Fetchlands parece mejor opción decantarse por el Kird Ape.

4 Wild Nacalt

Sin ningún tipo de duda la mejor salida de la baraja es el Wild Nacalt. Con la de Fetchlands que llevamos, casi siempre pegará de 3 en el segundo turno, algo insólito en un bicho de coste 1.

4 Kird Ape

Uno de los pocos clásicos de toda la vida que continua siendo bueno. Las Fetchlands han potenciado mucho a este bicho. Un 2/3 por un maná no esta nada mal.

3 Grim Lavamancer

Un chinche que también ha sido bueno desde que salió, y que gracias a las Fetchlands puede tirar tiros libremente. Es el mayor enemigo de todo mago azul, pudiendo freír todos los pescados o hadas del oponente, o resolver una partida que se haya puesto cuesta arriba por un Countertop.

4 Tarmogoyf

Como es una baraja de Magic, 4 Tarmogoyf.

La chispas:

4 Lighting Bolt

Un maná, 3 daños a la velocidad de instantáneo. ¿Hay algo mejor?

4 Chain Lighting

Un Lighting Bolt a velocidad de conjuro, obviamente no puede ser malo.

3 Rift Bolt

Este rayo se ha vuelto especialmente bueno últimamente. Por un lado, tiene coste de ejecución 3, lo que le permite saltarse cartas que realmente nos hacen mucho daño, como un peligroso Chalice of the Void. Por otro lado, nos ayuda mucho a curvar en nuestro desarrollo, pudiendo esquivar fácilmente un Daze. Y también nos permite esquivar un posible Counterbalance, gracias a su coste. El jugarse al turno siguiente que se suspende no suele ser ningún tipo de problema, y siempre al Top Deck podremos jugarlo pagando 3 de maná.

1 Lighting Helix

Bryan Six solo juega uno, y según dijo en una entrevista posterior al torneo, lo hubiera cambiado por el cuarto Rift Bolt. Comprensible decisión, puesto que a pesar de ser un rayo como la copa de un pino, puede ser un mal Top Deck si no nos hemos prevenido antes de buscar la Plateau. Por otro lado, esta baraja necesita el blanco solo para hinchar el Wild Nacalt. Es un error comprometer la base de maná con cartas blancas puesto que jugamos Price of Progress, que a pesar de su efecto devastador en el actual formato, es una carta algo peligrosa, teniendo en cuenta nuestra frágil base de maná.

4 Magma Jet

La única fuente de manipulación del mazo. Un rayo muy interesante para mejorar las cartas que robamos y el preferido para tirárselo a un bicho, sin gastar uno de 3, cuyo mejor destino será la cara del oponente.

4 Price of Progress

Ricard Tuduri, al darme su opinión sobre la baraja, me dijo que le parecía interesante, pero que el jugador de Naya Burn se moría solo con sus Price of Progress. Bajo mi punto de vista merece su inclusión por el hecho que fácilmente puede hacer 6 u 8 daños. Siempre, en la medida de los posible, trataremos de buscar las tierras de la forma más adecuada (y en esta baraja saber jugar con las Fetchlands no es una tarea tan sencilla). A nuestro favor tenemos su combinación con el Fireblast, y es que podemos subirnos maná la reserva, romper nuestras tierras y jugar el Price sin quemarnos.

3 Fireblast

El mejor finisher del mazo. Su coste nos permite escapar de los counters de moda del formato (Counterbalance, Daze, Spell Snare)… Su factor sorpresa es brutal y su sinergia con el Price of Progress en esta baraja también. Bryan Six eligió 3 copias debido al reducido número de Mountains que lleva en su base inicial.

Hay muchos magiqueros “de boca”, que se dedican a escribir mucho y jugar poco. He visto listas sugeridas por webs y foros con cartas como Vexing Susher, Qasali Pridemage o Tin Street Hollygan en el mazo inicial, pero con estos bichos voy a ser tajante: Si empezamos a llenar la baraja de criaturas sub óptimas, el mazo se convierte en una castaña. Por lo tanto, llevamos pocos bichos, pero muy buenos. Así de paso nos volvemos menos vulnerables a reiniciadores de mesa como unos peligrosos explosivos.

4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Windsweath Heath

Me parece muy interesante jugar esta baraja con 11 Fetchlands, para hacer a nuestros bichos mejores, además de disponer siempre del maná deseado, sin tener que llevar tierras básicas de otros colores. Yo personalmente deteste jugar un bosque básico.

3 Taiga
2 Plateau

Las dual lands no merecen explicación.

3 Mountain

Esta tierra básica es demasiado buena.

3 Wastelands

Una de las elecciones que ha sido más criticada del mazo son los Wastelands, y la verdad, no entiendo el porqué. Si bien pueden ser algo antisinérgicos con el Price of Progress, hay que destacar que la sligh de toda la vida siempre los ha llevado. Y es que si salimos de bicho respaldado por Wasteland, podemos hacer casi un mini Time Walk. Otra función del Wasteland es atacar la base de maná contra uno de nuestros peores enemigos, Countertop. Además nos ayuda contra los mazos de combo, con diferencia el peor emparejamiento de la baraja. La gente puede decir que no encajan en la baraja, pero tampoco pueden presumir de hacer top en un torneo de 1300 personas…

En cuanto al banquillo, depende del metagame. Actualmente parece mejor el Vexim Susher que el Pyroblast. Pyroclasm esta ahí contra mazos tribales, tipo Elves o Goblins. Etherworn Canonist es nuestra baza contra combo. Y Krosan Grip contra encantamientos y artefactos, en especial el Counterbalance.

Yo personalmente sugiero el siguiente banquillo:

4 Pyrostatic Pillar
3 Vexing Susher
3 Sulfuric Vortex
3 Krosan Grip
2 Ancient Grudge

Pairings:

Agroo Loam (55%-60%)

Pairing favorable. Somós más rápidos. El problema es que nuestra debilitada base de maná puede ser castigada a base de Wastelands y Devastating Dreams. Aunque el Price of Progress le dolerá, y mucho.

Landstill (60%-65%)

Pairing favorable, aunque no tanto como Burn, puesto que sus antipermanentes cobrarán sentido. Eso si, un Price of Progress respaldado por un Vexing Susher y adiós. En la última LCL un chico, de cuyo nombre ahora no puedo acordarme, se comió estando a 18 dos Price of Progress de 10.

Melforks (55%-60%)

Favorable. Nuestros bichos con considerablemente más grandes que los suyos, y si le colamos un Grim Lavamancer comeremos pescado a la parrilla. Banquillearemos los Krosan Grip y los Vexim Susher para romperles sus Aether Vial o Umezawa’s Jitte.

Treshold con Counterbalance (50%):

Este pairing depende mucho de la salida. A pesar que nos monten el cerrojo, si colamos un par de amenazas en la mesa, podemos ganarles. Otro factor es la habilidad del jugador de chispas para colarle las mismas (aquí toca pensar un poco). Post side, los Vexing Susher y Krosan Grip nos ayudarán y mucho.
Canadian Treshold (45%)

Sus Wastelands duelen, tienen counters para todo y con sus rayos pueden freírnos nuestros bichos. Aunque no esta exenta de ser atropellada. Un pairing bastante nivelado.

Eva Green (70%)

El peor pairing de Suicide Black siempre ha sido Sligh. Por supuesto es un enfrentamiento muy favorable.

Storm Combo (35%)

Este pairing es muy desfavorable. Ellos corren más que nosotros. A nuestro favor tenemos que últimamente estas barajas se juegan con Ad Nauseam, y mediante nuestros chispazos podremos atacarle sus vidas. El Pyrostatic Pillar es una gran carta contra estos mazos.

Baseruption (55%)

A pesar de llevar 4 Counterbalance y 4 Trompos, si les colamos un par de amenazas podemos hacerles daño. Y es que a diferencia de Burn, en éstos enfrentamientos si se agradece tener amenazas en la mesa. Vexing Sushers y Krosans Grips vendrán al rescate.

Goblins (60 %)

Favorable. Y es que nuestros bichos son muy grandotes, nuestras chispas acabarán con sus chinches y se estrellarán constantemente con el Tarmogoyf. Aquí se nota el poder del mazo más agresivo.

Tomb Decks Stax, Sea y Dragon Stompy (55%)

Pueden ganarnos la primera partida, si nos cuelan un Chalice of the Void y nos pillan nuestra mano con costes 1. El dado es importante. Este tipo de barajas dependen mucho de la suerte, como para evaluar la dificultad del emparejamiento.

Lo dicho, una baraja muy rápida y potente para el metagame actual (una de las mejores). Razonablemente fácil de jugar y que conserva la esencia de mazo agresivo de toda la vida.

[ratings]

De la mano de Fernando Yanguas, uno de los jugadores más en forma del momento, nos llega este excelente artículo sobre una de las barajas más eficaces para jugar en Vintage cuando nuestro bolsillo no nos permite adquirir un power9.

Fish es un mazo bastante asequible económicamente y capaz de dar resultados asombrosos.
El plan de juego es sencillo: molestar a tu oponente con hechizos baratos y disruptivos mientras tus pequeñas criaturas acaban sin remedio con él. ¿Fácil no? [...]

[Article]: Fish UW en Vintage. By Fernando Yanguas

Lectura bastante interesante, tanto para principiantes en el formato como para jugadores de nivel medio/alto. ¡100% recomendable!

[ratings]

Llevo unos días pensando en escribir un mini artículo sobre la nueva ampliación, Alara Reborn, y las posibles cartas que podrían ver juego en Vintage, pero como están apareciendo “reviews” bastante completos finalmente me he hecho atrás.

Este artículo que os presento está escrito por David Ochoa, aka Webster, y hace un extenso repaso de las cartas que posiblemente vean juego durante los próximos torneos de Vintage.

Alara Reborn has finally been released. Wonderful! Whenever a new set comes out, the masses are glued to their computer monitors in their dim rooms at home, scouring websites and constantly refreshing their internet browsers with the hope that they’ll be the first to see the next best card ever printed. Sadly, in the Vintage world, there is rarely anything to legitimately be excited about whenever a new set is released; that doesn’t stop people though. There’s more speculation intertwined with the quarterly Banned & Restricted Announcement than with a new set’s release, and rightfully so. Still, there needs to be someone to help the masses make up their mind and tell them what to think.

[Article]: Alara Reborn in Vintage. By David Ochoa

Source: Channel Fireball

[ratings]

5 consejos para ganar jugando combo en Legacy:

1. Aprende a hacer mulligans. A veces nos obsesionamos con manos llenas de rituals, etc… cuando en realidad son manos basura que no tienen ningún tipo de perspectiva a corto plazo ya que tenemos 0 tutores y/o manipuladores.
2. Aprende a jugar con el oponente. La psicología del jugador de combo es una parte fundamental en el camino hacia la victoria. Con un poco de labia e intención es muy fácil llegar a convencer a nuestros oponentes de que tenemos tal carta o que debe contrarrestar tal otra. En ocasiones hay que saber “bluffear” (término que proviene del poker y que describe la acción de ir de farol) para ganar.
3. Cuenta siempre el storm. Si vas a jugar un Brainstorm o Ponder en el turno 1 o 2, cuando lo juegues marca un +1 (palitos, dado o lo que uses) en tu contador de Storm (tormenta). Este simple hecho puede hacer creer a tu oponente que ese palito pueda ser necesario para que combemos y en consecuencia lo puede contrarrestar.  *Nota* Es bastante conocida ya mi jugada preferida de turno 1: Lotus Petal + Brainstorm (Storm 2). Bueno, en alguna ocasión, mi Brainstorm se ha llevado un Daze o un FoW, y a continuación bajé tierra (Fetchland o Swamp) + Dark Ritual + Dark Ritual + Ad Nauseam.
4. Aprende a ganar de múltiples maneras. El conocer nuestra baraja es importantísimo ya que no siempre hay que seguir el mismo camino para lograr la victoria. Mucha gente tiende a hacer jugadas poco definitivas sin llegar a ver la jugada más óptima por falta de práctica.
5. Las manos de “1st turn kill” son siempre buenas. Sabemos que nuestro oponente juega azul, y que lleva FoWs, tenemos una mano que comba en el primer turno pero sin protección. ¿Te lanzas a combar? Sí. La probabilidad de que tu oponente tenga un Force of Will + carta azul en mano suele rondar el 40-42% (dependiendo de la versión), es decir, tenemos un 58-60% de ganar. Ganaríamos 6 de cada 10 manos que comban en el primer turno. Si no te la vas a jugar lo tuyo no es el combo, y puedes ir a comprar ya tus 4 goyfs que éstos nunca fallan.

Podría haber aconsejado otras cosas, pero éstas son para mi las más importantes. Espero que de ellas alguien aprenda algo y mejore en su manera de jugar las barajas de combo de Legacy.

[ratings]

Aviso, que nadie se sienta ofendido si digo tal o pascual. Quiero dejar bien claro que este artículo es una opinión personal sobre la situación actual del formato y su lista de prohibidas. Evidentemente habrá gente que discrepe conmigo, pero no por ello los contenidos aquí vertidos van a dejar de ser respetables.

Todo empieza el pasado Sábado cuando en una conversa con Jorge Román discutíamos si el Tarmogoyf debería estar o no prohibido en Legacy. Jorge tras nuestra conversa hizo un excelente artículo exponiendo sus motivos por los cuales cree que no debería estar baneado. Bueno, como yo discrepo con él, pues me lanzo a escribir este artículo y así de paso repasamos todas las cartas que están en la lista.

Para empezar vamos a darle un vistazo a la lista completa:

• Amulet of Quoz
• Ancestral Recall
• Balance
• Bazaar of Baghdad
• Black Lotus
• Black Vise
• Bronze Tablet
• Channel
• Chaos Orb
• Contract from Below
• Darkpact
• Demonic Attorney
• Demonic Consultation
• Demonic Tutor
• Dream Halls
• Earthcraft
• Entomb
• Falling Star
• Fastbond
• Flash
• Frantic Search
• Goblin Recruiter
• Grim Monolith
• Gush
• Hermit Druid
• Illusionary Mask
• Imperial Seal
• Jeweled Bird
• Land Tax
• Library of Alexandria
• Mana Crypt
• Mana Drain
• Mana Vault
• Memory Jar
• Metalworker
• Mind Twist
• Mind’s Desire
• Mishra’s Workshop
• Mox Emerald
• Mox Jet
• Mox Pearl
• Mox Ruby
• Mox Sapphire
• Necropotence
• Oath of Druids
• Rebirth
• Shahrazad
• Skullclamp
• Sol Ring
• Strip Mine
• Tempest Efreet
• Time Spiral
• Time Vault
• Time Walk
• Timetwister
• Timmerian Fiends
• Tinker
• Tolarian Academy
• Vampiric Tutor
• Wheel of Fortune
• Windfall
• Worldgorger Dragon
• Yawgmoth’s Bargain
• Yawgmoth’s Will

Creo que, de esa lista podemos crear 3 grupos claramente diferenciados:

• El grupo de las cartas con ante (apuesta).
• El grupo de las cartas excesivamente poderosas
• El grupo de las cartas excesivamente caras (que a su vez pueden estar incluídas en el grupo de las cartas excesivamente poderosas)

Cartas con Ante

En este grupo encontramos: Amulet of Quoz, Bronze Tablet, Contract from Below, Darkpact, Demonic Attorney, Jeweled Bird, Rebirth, Tempest Efreet y Timmerian Fiends.

Su inclusión es obvia ya que en ningún formato competitivo se juega con ante. Aquí no hay discusión posible.

Cartas excesivamente poderosas

En este grupo encontramos: Balance, Black Vise, Channel, Chaos Orb, Demonic Consultation, Demonic Tutor, Dream Halls, Earthcraft, Entomb, Falling Star, Fastbond, Flash, Frantic Search, Goblin Recruiter, Grim Monolith, Gush, Hermit Druid, Land Tax, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Memory Jar, Metalworker, Mind Twist, Mind’s Desire, Necropotence, Oath of Druids, Shahrazad, Skullclamp, Sol Ring, Strip Mine, Time Spiral, Tinker, Tolarian Academy, Vampiric Tutor, Wheel of Fortune, Windfall, Worldgorger Dragon, Yawgmoth’s Bargain y Yawgmoth’s Will

De hecho, en este grupo encontraríamos todas las demás cartas, pero me ha gustado dividirlo en dos grupos ya que hay cartas muy poderosas que no valen nada y cartas muy poderosas que valen una fortuna (véase el siguiente grupo).

Dentro de este grupo podríamos hacer una subdivisión entre: Cartas “absurdas” y cartas verdaderamente poderosas. Entre las cartas “absurdas” encontramos al Chaos Orb, Falling Star y Shahrazad. Estas 3 cartas tienen mecánicas totalmente diferentes a las pensadas para jugar en formatos competitivos y es por eso que se merecen estar en la lista.

Vayamos a analizar las demás, carta por carta:

La Balance es una carta realmente poderosa en todos los sentidos. Permitir el uso de 4 copias de esta carta podría generar un desequilibrio brutal. Su bajo coste combinado con su tremendo efecto de control hace de esta carta merecedora de pertenecer a la lista.

No quiero ni imaginarme barajas como White Staxx con 4 Balance…

Me pregunto sinceramente qué hace esta carta en la lista de prohibidas de Legacy. Su legalización haría viable arquetipos de barajas basados en el cerrojo. Este tipo de barajas están totalmente en desuso y son bastante malas por carecer de una carta con la que poder matar de manera efectiva.

Bajo mi punto de vista, su legalización sería bastante segura y afectaría al formato de manera positiva.

No sé hasta qué punto el poder jugar 4 Channels sería bueno o no. Mi opinión tiende más hacia que el Channel siga en la lista de prohibidas ya que barajas como Belcher podrían realmente abusar del efecto accelerador de esta carta.

Este efecto de “acceleración” es también uno de los pilares de las prohibiciones en Legacy. Más adelante veremos más ejemplos.

Los tutores son la vía para que las barajas de combo consigan su fin. El poder del Demonic Consultation está claramente por encima de lo que pide su coste. Si es que por B… meternos la carta que nosotros queramos en la mano… es un poco cheto xD

Para nada permitiría jugar 4 copias de esta carta en Legacy. Si combo necesitase un empujón hay cartas prohibidas con menos impacto que podrían salir de la lista sin generar el impacto que podría tener un formato con 4 Demonic Consultation.

El mejor tutor del juego debe permanecer chapado por el bien del formato. Jugar combo con 4 de estos podría hacer que los torneos fuesen totalmente monotemáticos y aburridos.

El Dream Halls es una carta realmente poderosa, pero que, personalmente, creo que sería seguro legalizarla en Legacy. Las barajas que pudiesen aparecer alrededor de esta carta podrían darle una pizca más de alegría a un formato totalmente controlado por los Tarmogoyfs.

Su coste 3UU está acorde con su efecto y es por eso que no me preocupa demasiado su posible legalización. Es más, veríamos barajas realmente divertidas con cartas como Conflux, Cruel Ultimatum, etc…

Su combo con el Squirrel’s Nest es bastante absurdo y fácil de concebir. La legalización del Earthcraft significaría un giro bastante curioso al formato. Nos veríamos abordados por legiones de ardillas con las que lidiar en el turno 3-4 y eso no puede ser demasiado sano.

Mi opinión es que el Earthcraft siga prohibido, a menos que prohiban el Squirrel’s Nest. Sin la segunda parte del combo sí que me parecería viable su legalización ya que barajas como Elves! podrían beneficiarse de un cartón muy interesante.

Otra carta que podría dejar la lista de prohibidas sin tener demasiada repercusión en el formato. El Entomb podría nudrir algunas barajas de combo que de por sí ya son efectivas (Iggy, Salvagers/LED, etc…). Es una carta buena, sí, pero no es mejor que muchas de las cartas ya existentes y que están permitidas en Legacy.

Su legalización es bastante segura y animaría a la gente a probar barajas diferentes (léasea: Non-Goyf based).

Este encantamiento tiene un efecto bastante demoledor si se combina con cartas como Gush. Su legalización podría reanimar algunas barajas como Eternal Garden, 43 Lands, etc… y sería bastante segura siempre y cuando el Gush siga prohibido.

Mi opinión es que si el Gush se mantiene en la lista el Fastbond podría abandonarla para animar más el formato.

Una de las mejores barajas de combo de la historia se basó en el Flash para ganar por 1U a la velocidad de instantáneo. Su poder combinado con el Protean Hulk es indudable y su legalización no aportaría nada bueno al formato.

Que siga el Flash prohibido, por favor.

Frantic Search es una carta que podría salir de las listas de prohibidas para aportar algo a barajas totalmente olvidadas como Solidarity, Spring Tide, etc… Está claro que en barajas de Hight Tide es un cartonazo, pero es que lo que este tipo de mazos necesitan hacer para ganar es realmente complicado y fácilmente frenable a base de disrupción.

Creo que es segura su legalización y que no variaría demasiado el formato con la inclusión de 4 copias en algunas barajas.

La posibilidad de jugar Food Chain Goblins en Legacy aportaría más variedad al formato y dándole a los jugadores de Goblins un motivo para seguir haciéndolo. Si es cierto que la versión de la baraja más combera es verdaderamente sólida, también es cierto que sufre más contra todo tipo de hate, counters, etc…

Yo permitiría el poder jugar 4 Recruiters para animar aún más el formato

Una carta que acelera, siguiendo la filosofía de la DCI, se merece estar baneada. Pero, ¿realmente hace falta banear este tipo de cartas? Es decir, el Grim Monolith es bueno, pero tampoco es espectacular. Vale que podríamos combinarlo con Voltaic Key para obtener mucho maná… pero y con ese maná… ¿qué? Además, en el formato de los Krosan Grip y Spell Snare… no sé yo si es tan peligroso como para estar prohibido. Su ratio de acceleración es de 2:3 (por 2 produce 3) y es bastante lento.

Yo también lo legalizaría para apoyar a posibles barajas de Staxx, combo, etc…

Si se legaliza el Fastbond éste debe mantenerse prohibido. Si el Fastbond sigue prohibido, éste podría permitirse. Lo que no debe suceder nunca es que el Gush y el Fastbond estén juntos en un formato como Legacy (además, se pueden jugar 4 Merchant Scroll). Sin el Fastbond, los Gushes podrían dar vidilla a algunas barajas tipo Tog, Gro, etc…

Personalmente, el Gush es una carta que me gusta mucho y creo que en Legacy sería un buen cartón para potenciar algunas barajas. Además, Legacy se está convirtiendo en un formato totalmente vacío de cartas para robar más allá de la Standstill.

Este hombrecillo verde merece estar baneado de por vida xD Por 1G gana sólo el turno en que podemos activarlo. Las barajas como Dredge, Cephalid, etc… serían claras dominadoras del formato si el Hermit Druid se pudiese jugar. Vale que en el formato de los matabichos (que triste tener que definir un formato como el “formato de los matabichos”) no duraría demasiado y que su coste también se ve afectado por el Spell Snare, pero es que una vez activada su habilidad, el % de victoria es realmente alto.

Nada, que siga en la lista de prohibidas el druida.

El combo Land Tax + Zuran Orb en un formato donde se gana el 99% de las veces usando la fase de ataque y a base de puntos de vida, me parece bastante bueno. No sólo eso, barajas como AggroLoam podrían abusar bastamente de este cartonazo cuya habilidad está claramente por encima de su coste. Si eso aún no te parece suficiente, su sinergia con cartas como Scroll Rack hacen justo merecedor al Land Tax de pertenecer a la lista de prohibidas de Legacy.

Mana Crypt es un excellente accelerador para las barajas de combo. En este caso sí que me parece peligroso permitir 4 copias de la cripta. ¿Tierra + Ritual + Crypt + Ad Nauseam?

El ratio de de acceleración de 0:2 (por 0 produce 2) me parece un tanto peligroso para el formato, así que mejor mantener el Mana Crypt prohibido.

Otro accelerador de maná bastante peligroso. En este caso el Mana Vault, con un ratio de 1:3 (por 1 produce 3), creo que también se merece permanecer prohibido del formato. El Mana Vault potenciaría demasiado las barajas de combo como Nauseam, Iggy, etc… y, además, las barajas tipo White Staxx.

Mantenerlo prohibido es lo más sensato

La falta de Draw 7′s en Legacy es un hecho. El Diminishing Return apesta en comparación a la mayoría de “roba 7s”. La Memory Jar, sin el Tinker, no es todo lo espectacular que debería y, es por eso, que me parece una buena opción para abandonar la lista de prohibidas. Vale que los decks de combo con 4 Memory Jar serían bastante espectaculares, pero es que ahora mismo el combo necesita algo para estar a la altura de los Goyf decks (que además ya van cargados de cartas que frenan a la Memory Jar, como Stifle, Daze, Force of Will, etc…).

Este individuo se merece estar baneado por motivos obvios. La aceleración que proporciona es brutal y salidas de 1er turno Worker y 2º turno Smokestack + Tangle Wire son realmente demoledoras. No sólo eso, si estamos hablando de permitir algunos artefactos como Grim Monolith, el Metalwoker no debería ser legalizado por el bien del formato.

El efecto del Mind Twist es muy basto, y recuperarse tras sufrir uno de estos puede ser difícil. En buena medida es difícil por culpa de la carencia total y absoluta del 99% de los decks de un buen motor de robo. Yo creo que el permitir 4 Mind Twist haría que la gente diseñase las barajas más a conciencia. Cartas como Duress y Brainstorm ganarían protagonismo y creo que eso es algo bueno.

Yo personalmente permitiría el uso de 4 Mind Twists para potenciar el arquetipo de barajas de descarte que, por desgracia, son totalmente tier3 (o inferior) en la actualidad.

Uff! Poder jugar 4 Mind’s Desire es el sueño erótico (hablando en clave MTG) de cualquier jugador de combo. En un formato con 4 Pétalos, 4 Chromes, 4 Manamorphose y 8 Rituals, no sé yo hasta qué punto sería viable el permitir 4 copias del mejor spell con la mecánica “storm” del juego. Enseñar un Desire tras haber jugado otro, es victoria el 100% de las veces.

Vamos a dejar el Mind’s Desire en la lista de prohibidas, aunque me molaría muchísimo poder jugar con 4 y abusar de este cartonazo xD

En el formato de los chinches y la fase de ataque, donde el 90% de los decks juega criaturas, bajar un encantamiento que te permite meter un 10/10 protección contra todo, por el módico coste de 1G, me parece un poco desproporcionado.

Mejor que siga donde está por el bien de los Goyfs xDDD

Este artefacto de Darksteel es un verdadero motor de robo cuyo poder, en barajas como Affinity, es realmente desobirtado. No creo que el Skullclamp tenga que ver la luz en Legacy, ya que éste se convertiría en un formato plagado de chinches pokemoneros.

Uno de los artefactos más famosos del Magic por su bajo coste (económico) y su gran utilidad. Con un ratio de 1:2 (por 1 produce 2) sin ningún tipo de contrapartida, su poder es claramente indiscutible. Pensar en barajas como White Staxx, Painter’s, Combo, etc… con 4 Sol Rings me produce escalofríos.

Mejor mantener al Sol Ring para los amantes del Vintage, ya que en Legacy su poder es verdaderamente desorbitado.

¿4 Strip Mines + 4 Wastelands + Crucible of Worlds? No thank you.

El time Spiral es un cartonazo cuyo coste también está acorde con su habilidad. El problema que tenemos con Time Spiral es que si se combina con Dream Halls éste se convierte en muchísimo más letal, no sólo por el efecto twister, sino por lo de destapear hasta 6 tierras.

Si el Dream Halls dejase la lista de prohibidas, el Time Spiral no debería seguir el mismo camino. Así que yo, personalmente, no lo tocaría.

Recientemente la DCI cambió el texto del Time Vault para que se pudiese volver a jugar. Combinado con cartas como Voltaic Key, Twiddle, Tezzeret the Seeker, etc… éste se convierte en un combo que genera turnos infinitos y, por lo tanto, gana la partida.

Si en Vintage se está convirtiendo en el amo y señor de las pistas de baile, no quiero ni imaginar que pasaría en Legacy con 4 Time Vault y 4 Voltaic key xDDD

La Tinker es una carta realmente “broken”. Su efecto es totalmente devastador. El poder sacrificar un artefacto de coste bajo (Chrome Mox, Seat of Synod, etc…) y meter en juego un pinazo indestructible o con velo, es simplemente demasiado para un formato como Legacy. Además, no quiero ni pensar lo que barajas como Affinity serían capaces de hacer con 4 Tinker…

Realmente esta carta se merece estar donde está.

Probablemente una de las mejores tierras del juego. Artefactos low cost + Tolarian Academy = maná a casporros. Affinity con 4 Tolarias sería un canteo y combo con 4 Tolarias sería la fiesta de la espuma. Mejor dejar esta tierra para los locos del Vintage que en Legacy es demasiado peligrosa.

No creo que los decks de combo necesiten de otro tutor que se pueda jugar a la velocidad de instantáneo. 4 Mystical Tutor + 4 Vampiric Tutor me parece un poco abusivo. El vampiric es un cartonazo en toda regla y uno de los tres miembros del mejor tridente del color negro en Vintage (Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor y Yawgmoth’s Will).

Permitirlo sería realmente un errorm así que vamos a dejarlo tal y como está.

Ni me puedo imaginar lo que sería jugar combo con 4 Wheel of Fortune. Y como no puedo ni quiero, pues creo que debe quedarse donde está.

Otro Draw7 por coste 3, algo peor que la Wheel of Fortune y el Time Twister pero no deja de ser una carta con un poder realmente desorbitado para un formato como Legacy.

No nos convienen darle a combo draw7′s de tan bajo coste.

Más combos absurdos con costes totalmente bajos. A pesar de que el combo de Dragon sufre mucho del hate de cementerio, creo que no sería seguro permitir esta carta en Legacy.

Uno de los mejores encantamientos de la historia. A pesar de un coste bastante prohibitivo, su habilidad es realmente broken. El hecho de que sea de color negro y que sea fácilmente casteable vía Rituals, hace que esta carta no deba ver la luz en Legacy (muy a mi pesar xD).

Resolver una Bargain de turno 1 o 2 y robarse de 15 a 19 cartas es sin duda un poder que debe estar controlado y, por eso, prohibido en Legacy.

Sin duda alguna una de las mejores cartas del juego. Su habilidad para convertir el cementerio en tu mano y regujar todas las cartas que has jugado hasta el momento es un poder que dentro de las barajas de combo causaría estragos en el formato.

“La potencia sin control no sirve de nada” y es por eso que la DCI actua sabiamente para prohibir algunas cartas cuyo poder (multiplicado por 4) podría convertir un formato en algo totalmente absurdo y trivial.

Obviamente yo tampoco sacaría nunca la Yawgmoth’s Will de la lista de prohibidas.

Cartas Excesivamente caras

Dentro de las cartas prohibidas en Legacy encontramos un grupo de cartas que están baneadas no sólo por su notable poder sino también por el precio de las mismas. El hecho de permitir 4 copias de estas cartas podría disparar el precio de las mismas hasta unos niveles realmente preocupantes. La mayoría de estas cartas están restringidas en Vintage y su precio está relacionado a la oferta y la demanda. En el supuesto de que la demanda se disparase por 4, la oferta obviamente también se dispararía y vete tú a saber hasta donde llegarían los precios.

De todas maneras, dentro del grupo de las cartas excesivamente caras, podríamos diferenciar entre 2 grupos:

• Cartas del Power9 (250€ o más)
• Cartas hasta 250€

En el primer grupo encontramos el mítico Power 9: Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, Mox Emerald, Mox Jet, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, Mox Sapphire, Time Walk y Timetwister.

Su precio es directamente proporcional a su poder. Sin duda alguna son probablemente las cartas más desequilibrantes de todo el juego (junto con la Yawgmoth’s Will) y la poca disponibilidad de éstas encarece muchísimo su precio de venta.

Evidentemente en Legacy no tienen cabida cartas de este calibre ya que para ello ya tenemos el Vintage.

En el segundo grupo encontramos:Bazaar of Baghdad, Illusionary Mask, Imperial Seal, Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain y Mishra’s Workshop.

De este segundo sub-grupo hay 3 tierras, de las cuales el Bazaar of Baghdad y la Mishra’s Workshop no creo que debiesen asomarse ni por casualidad al formato de Legacy. Por otro lado, la Library of Alexandria no me parece tan desequilibrante en un formato tan rápido y tan aggro como el que tenemos. Tengo mis dudas, pero sinceramente no me importaría ver la Library of Alexandria en Legacy. No creo que se jugasen 4 y tampoco creo que se viese en muchísimas barajas. Talvez las Landstills más puras y controleras podrían utilizar este cartonazo, pero, viviendo en el formato de la Wasteland y el Stifle, donde si te salen de Montaña + Lacayo te vas, la Library of Alexandria pierde bastante fuelle.

La Illusionary Mask está clarísimo que es tremendamente superior a un Vial. Esto de meter 12/12′s en el primer turno saltándote los counters, para luego meterte una galleta de 12 en el segundo y rematarte en el tercero (a menos que tengas la suerte de haber encontrado un matabicho en tus 2 turnos), me parece a mi un poco canteo.

Creo que para Legacy el Aether Vial ya cumple esta función sin llegar a desequilibrar el formato. Así pués, yo no permitiría que la Illusionary Mask dejase la lista de prohibidas de Legacy.

El hermano gemelo, pero manco, del Vampiric Tutor tiene un poder bastante espectacular y, personalmente, creo que sí que podría ver juego en Legacy como complemento perfecto para las barajas de combo. El problema que tienen la gran mayoría de las barajas de combo es que carecen de tutores buenos que te permitan tener algo más de flexibilidad a la hora de combar. El Mystical tiene la limitación de que sólo busca Instants o Sorceries. El Infernal Tutor tiene el problema que suele ser efectivo sólo si te quedas sin mano, quedándote totalmente vendido a los counters. Con el Imperial Seal combo ganaría en posibilidades y resilencia a la vez que podría plantar cara de manera más efectiva a las barajas de Goyfs (con Stifles, Daze, Fow’s, Spell Snares, etc…).

No estoy 100% seguro de que su legalización sea algo bueno para el formato pero tampoco me parece una opción muy descabellada.

Finalmente nos queda el Mana Drain. El mejor counter tras el Force of Will no me parece tan desequilibrante para Legacy como lo es en Vintage. Sigue siendo un Counterspell de coste UU e igual de lento. Los Counterspell se juegan en 2-3 mazos como mucho, ya que en Legacy no son demasiado efectivos contra las amenazas de turno 1 y 2. Counters com Spell Snare o Daze se han convertido en complementos perfectos para el Force of Will

Me encataría ver el Mana Drain en Legacy por el mero hecho de poder jugar más counters en barajas de control puro, pero no sé cómo afectaría realmente la presencia de este tremendo cartón en un formato tan rápido.

Una vez hecho este análisis de toda la lista de cartas prohibidas en Legacy, creo que es momento de analizar qué cartas deberían ser prohibidas y no lo están.

Quiero dejar claro que esto también es puramente una opinión personal, basada en hechos y en creencias, y que si a alguien no le gusta, pues que no se lo tome a pecho ya que mi opinión no va a hacer cambiar la manera de pensar de la gente de la DCI. De hecho, dudo que nos lean xD

Para empezar, decir que hay una carta que sobresale sobre todas las demás, el Tarmogoyf. Sus números revelan que su efectividad reside en su claro poder y su bajo coste. Mirando los Metagame Breakdown que nos ha regalado el señor Roger Riera de los últimos 3 torneos de la LCL (Liga Catalana de Legacy), me choca muchísimo leer lo siguiente:

LCL2 – 1º torneo: (65 jugadores)

Top 5 absoluto – Maindeck
122 Tarmogoyf
104 Brainstorm
104 Force of Will
96 Wasteland
94 Polluted Delta

LCL1 – Gran final: (31 jugadores)

Top 5 absoluto – Maindeck:
69 Tarmogoyf
52 Force of Will
51 Island
49 Mountain
47 Polluted Delta
47 Wasteland

LCL1 – 10º torneo: (65 jugadores)

Top 5 absoluto – Maindeck:
118 Tarmogoyf
117 Island
108 Force of Will
95 Wasteland
94 Brainstorm

Curiosamente el Tarmogoyf aparece en todos los torneos como la carta más jugada. La diferencia entre el Tarmogoyf con cartas como Brainstorm, Island o Force of Will es que la primera es la única que gana partidas, y por un coste realmente asequible: 1G.

En la lista de prohibidas hay muchas cartas que están ahí por una relación coste-poderío muy desproporcionada. Cartas como Demonic Tutor, Balance, etc… son las mejores en lo suyo. El Tarmogoyf, señores, es el mejor bicho en lo suyo: atacar. Podemos cuestionar si el Tarmogoyf es el mejor bicho de Magic o no. Yo no he dicho que el Goyf sea el mejor bicho de Magic, sino que es el mejor bicho en lo suyo, atacar. En un formato (como ya dije anteriormente) donde la mayoría de barajas se basan en la fase de ataque para ganar, el Tarmogoyf se convierte en la mejor criatura del formato. Nadie pega de manera más efectiva que él. No necesita ninguna preparación (a diferencia del Phyrexian Dreadnought) y además se engorda no sólo por lo que tu envias al cementerio, pudiendo llegar a convertirse en un 5/6 o 6/7 fácilmente en los 3-4 primeros turnos.

Evidentemente hay MIL (o 10.000) maneras de lidiar con un Tarmogoyf. ¿En serio?. También hay MIL maneras de lidiar con una Wheel of Fortune, un Ancestral Recall, o un Demonic Tutor, y no por ello los dejamos jugar en Legacy. Las barajas se han tenido que adaptar para poder frenar los Tarmogoyfs del oponente. La primera, y más efectiva, manera de hacerlo es: METER TARMOGOYFS a tu deck. La segunda, y más subóptima, es: METER ANTICRIATURAS a tu deck. Es triste ver listas de Goblins con splashes a blanco para meter Swords to Plowshares, pq si les bajan un par de Goyfs las van a pasar putas para poder pasar por encima. Es triste que barajas de combo tengan que llevar matabichos (u otras maneras de lidiar con los goyfs) pq sino no les da tiempo a montar su combo y superar la barrera de counters (Stifle, Daze, Snares, Fow’s, Counterbalance) ya que el jodido Tarmogoyf de tu oponente te va a matar en 4 turnos. Sí, 4 TURNOS.

Una pequeña pausa para introducir mejor a nuestro querido amigo, EL GOYF:

¡No podía resistirme a poner el vídeo!

Bueno, por todo lo expuesto creo que el Tarmogoyf debería entrar en la lista de prohibidas de Legacy.

¿Y qué sería del Legacy sin los Goyfs? Joder, con todas las cartas que he propuesto para que abandonen la lista de prohibidas Legacy sería un formato la mar de entretenido, con muchísimos más arquetipos y con muchísimas más posibilidades. De todos modos, el tiempo sería quien determinase hacia donde iría el formato. Probablemente los Phyrexian Dreadnoughts se convertirían en la criatura estrella del formato (ya que su sinergia con el Stifle es brutal xD).

Otra carta que creo que no debería existir en Legacy es el Sensei’s Divining Top. Resulta especialmente molesto ver que cada vez que juegas contra Landstill eres incapaz de terminar 2 partidas. No soy jugador de Landstill, pero si alguno quiere decir su opinión al respeto de su media de partidas jugadas por ronda, estaría muy bien saberlo. Una carta que se usa cada turno (el tuyo y el del oponente), y en ocasiones múltiples veces por turno y múltiples veces en respuesta a un hechizo, produce un efecto “pongo el freno de mano a la partida” brutal. El jugador que juega contra Landstill (u otras barajas de control con Trompos), va un poco condicionado a ganar la primera partida. Si pierde la primera, más le vale que se de prisa o el jugador de Landstill encontrará la manera para llegar a los turnos de la segunda sin tú haber hecho nada.

Obviamente, el Counterbalance tiene parte de la culpa de que el Trompo sea una carta que entorpece el funcionamiento natural de una partida, pero sin el trompo, éste no sería ningún impedimento.

En Extended fué prohibido precisamente por este motivo. Es cierto que en Extended veía muchísimo más juego que en Legacy, pero no por eso vamos a excusar a la peonza xD

En los Metagame Breakdown del señor Riera el Trompo siempre está en el Top20 absoluto de las cartas más jugadas.

De todos modos, y a pesar de que me gustaría muchísimo ver el Trompo prohibido en Legacy, creo que tampoco es tan desequilibrante como para verlo baneado. A diferencia del Tarmogoyf, el Sensei’s Divining Top no gana partidas solo. Bueno, lo que hace es poner el freno para que tu oponente no las gane, pero eso es algo que va sujeto a las normas del juego y no es culpa de la carta.

Dicho esto, pongo punto y final al artículo con una pequeña encuesta:

¡Espero que os haya gustado el artículo y que no dudéis en comentar lo que os parece bién o mal del mismo!

[ratings]

Daniel Chang es probablemente uno de los mayores coleccionistas de Magic: The Gathering del mundo. Para muchos desconocido, pero para otros es realmente un referente en el mundillo. Conocido por sus ventas extravagantes en eBay de cartas tipo Black Lotus de Beta/Alpha PSA 10 y actualmente poseedor de el único Black Lotus de Alpha PSA 10 (Gem Mint) firmado, y autentificado su ADN, por Christopher Rush.

Os dejo a continuación con una pequeña reseña de la entrevista y luego con el link:

Daniel Chang of Seattle bought his first pack of trading cards in 1989. He was fascinated with the pieces of printed cardboard that his mother felt were worthless and, shortly after purchasing that first pack, David became hooked, finding the gathering of cards to be somewhat magical. It is perhaps for that reason he is so fascinated with Magic: The Gathering and today stands as one of the foremost authorities on these gaming cards.

Daniel Chang shares The Magic. Entrevista por la PSA

[ratings]

[Article]: Dime con quién alteras y te diré quién eres. By Nana

Por fin está lista la última entrega del Arte de Alterar, en este caso dedicada a los adquirentes de alteraciones.
Gracias a la generosa colaboración de todos los entrevistados he dispuesto de mucho material para realizarlo, pero también me he visto obligada a recortar información para que el artículo no se convirtiera en un tratado.
Me hubiera gustado reproducir todas las respuestas, pero dado que tenía que elegir, he obviado las imágenes, las explicaciones más personalizadas y las relaciones de nombres para no dificultar la lectura. Por contra, he transcrito literalmente aquello que me parecía más característico y definitorio de cada persona.

¡Muchísimas gracias Nana!

[ratings]

[Article]: The 2008 Vintage Year in Review. By Stephen Menendian

And so we return and begin again. That’s the opening line of Grant Morrison’s brilliant opus The Invisibles, (move over, Watchmen!) to symbolize the cyclical nature of reality, something that is especially noticeable when the reader settles down for a second helping. It also captures my state of mind as I look back on the storylines that defined Vintage Magic at the end of each year.

The notion of time—of progression—is a relatively recent concept to our species. Before modern civilization, the concept of time did not exist as we understand and measure it. Human beings living as hunter-gatherers experienced life as essentially static or cyclical. Life was defined by the unchanging, repeating seasons without technological advances to differentiate the years. Many ancient cultures, from the Mayans to the Babylonians, conceived of time as circular, and represented it as such with a time wheel, without a beginning or an end.

Como dirían en el colegio: ¡Lectura obligatoria!

Source: Wizards of the Coast

[ratings]