Over the week leading up to GP New Jersey, I saw a surprising trend of professional players discussing the ease with which they could attend, if the format were not so bad. I had never seen professional players skip a Limited event before, and it led me to wonder, will Rivals improve the experience of…
The discussions this past week about how to improve the Magic community’s health have prompted me to think more about the interaction between content creators and consumers. There is certainly a link between the content creator, the content they produce, and the behaviors their viewers engage in as a result of that content, but how…
The release of Iconic Masters has prompted a number of comments from professional players about the strength of the set relative to Ixalan. There seems to be a general consensus that Iconic Masters is a better draft set, and there are a number of interesting perspectives about why this is the case. Mike Sigrist wrote…
Last week, I was listening to Limited Resources, and they covered a topic I’ve been interested for some time: bluffing. Though not as important as tight technical play, bluffing adds a really interesting dimension to Magic that I think can be utilized to bolster your win percentage. We most often think of bluffing in Magic…
I’ve completed a lot of Ixalan drafts, and for many of those drafts, I focused on drafting the way I do for most sets. I read signals carefully, looked to be in the open color, and tried to develop powerful decks this way. However, after a while I realized that this strategy does not work…
As a limited format matures, I start to shift my focus from winning matches to winning matches with absurd decks. It’s at this point that cards like come to the fore, and I focus on how to handle a beautiful situation: Pack 1 Pick 1 . So today, I’m going to give you the tools…
This past weekend I participated in a sealed PPTQ at my LGS, made it to the top 8 draft, and lost a really interesting match in the finals to just miss my first RPTQ invite. It was a heartbreaking loss, but it prompted me to reflect on my own experiences learning about draft, how I’ve…
This week, we’re digging into the suck-cessful archetype of Vampires! This is the most invariant of the archetypes in Ixalan, as splashing other colors is rarely viable in these decks. At the same time, the game plan can vary drastically depending on your curve, so you can go from a midrange version of the deck…
So far, we’ve examined two synergistic archetypes in Merfolk and Pirates. Today, we’re going to shift gears and look into Dinosaurs, an archetype that relies less on synergy and more on stomping! Let’s start by looking at the Jurassic gold uncommons! is a powerful 5-drop, capable of swinging through a variety of board states and…
Today, we’ll be looking at the different shells for pirates and evaluate how they fare! There are many pirates cruising through Ixalan, but they are concentrated in blue, black, and red. So how do we maximize the many opportunities available for piracy? Let’s dive in by looking at the pirates’ gold uncommons! leads the most…
