Idaho Magic

In this draft I tried my latest strategy of just forcing blue, but this time got cut hard and just couldn't ignore the signals any longer! A late into the Maw of Hell, Rage Thrower, and Moan of the Unhallowed put me into red/black. My picks one and two from pack three were bombs: Instigator Gang and Charmbreaker Devils. I had one game where I was returning Moan of the Unhallowed every turn but couldn't attack with my hoard as I was facing down 3x Scaab Goliath due to Cackling Counterpart. Eventually I started recurring Into the Maw of Hell and got there with my zombie hoard. Here is the draft and the decklist, I ended up 2-1 after losing to a G/W deck with Manor Gargoyle, Gavony Township, and the nail in the coffin was Moment of Heroism to throw off my math.

This is probably the craziest Innistrad draft I have had yet. Usually I don't tend to stray far from the beaten path, but I have wanted to try out Burning Vengeance for awhile now and this draft gave me that opportunity. Ghoulcaller's Bell was absolutely insane in this deck, even when I didn't have Burning Vengeance. I played 3x Bell and 1x Curse in the main, but never won by decking. Every time I ended up winning with flyers before they ever got decked. I passed up on a few Dream Twist which really would have made this deck over the top, especially if I could have grabbed another curse. I ended up winning the draft fairly easily which came as a surprise to me. It didn't look that great, but played really well.

So WOTC decided to mix things up a bit and get rid of the Extended format, aka the worst thing ever. I think this was a great decision due to the fact that the format was akin to being forced to watch year-old family videos of Wednesday afternoons—zero nostalgia, zero interest, just you sitting on your butt on in the middle of the week twiddling your thumbs. Essentially Extended had become something you had to do because WOTC said so, and that was that. However, Big Brother recognized its own flawed existence and decided to make a change instead of enter into a cold and bitter winter filled with recycled CawBlade and watch tournament attendance dwindle. I mean MTGO 16-man Extended queues don’t even fire, and the whole world is available to participate in those…..

No, not an acid flashback! Star City Games Open Seattle took place a few weeks back and my comrade Kyle Monson and I decided that packing red was just asking to get destroyed. We had imagined fields of Spellskites and Kor Firewalkers. Not to mention the extremely low top 8 rates the deck was putting up. We decided to leave our Grim Lavamancers and Goblin Guide's behind. Kyle chose Valakut, which is somewhat of his go to deck, and I chose the Tempered Steel deck that was starting to see some success. I played Ryuuichiro Ishida's 1st Place Nationals deck card for card as a last minute decision. You can check the decklist here: http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=39675

The All About Games tournament series for EDH is underway! It occurs on the fifth Sunday of each month every month (assuming there is a fifth Sunday). Last month I chose to play Esper because it seemed to be a really strong control deck and counter magic just seems to be really good in the format. Along with cards like Mind Twist, Mind Shatter and Bribery, the tutors and counter magic make it easy to find what you need and stall until you can gain massive card advantage with a power spell. In this article I will delve into alternative strategies and ideas, as well as what I liked about the deck I played and what I didn't like.

Here are a couple drafts I did recently. I left each draft thinking my deck was pretty bad but I ended up 3-0ing them both. Signaling is pretty difficult in MSS due to the high amount of bombs that will always cause an erratic shift in colors, that and people might just be stupid at times, including myself.

Is there anything you guys would have done differently? There were a lot of close picks I felt and it seems I could have had a sick infect deck each draft if I forced it.

I talked to Pete and he wanted some content...so here I am delivering. The deck went 3-0 in an 8-4, had no trouble. If you think I did something wrong feel free to leave a comment. The play of the night was activating the coating on the 4/4 angel to enable metalcraft and shroud off a mind control.

I recently did a MODO Release Event and open this pool. I was not impressed to say the least. It didn't feature much except for a lot of artifact removal and almost enough for a decent poison deck. I went an astonishing 1-3 with this pool, although took everybody to three games. I am interested to know how others might have gone with this pool. Any input would be greatly appreciated!

When I first began building this deck my idea was to build a classic Haterade style deck. My target decks to beat were Faeries and the Omen Valakut deck. To beat these decks I wanted a quick clock with disruption. The key cards for both those decks are enchantments and the best enchantment removal, quick clock combo in the game is Qasali Pridemage. That was my starting point. I’ve had a secret love for the Kithkin Advisor, Gaddock Teeg since he first showed up in Lorwyn (more adorable than Willow) and I think he is a very underrated card right now. He stops Wargate, Day of Judgement, Jace TMS, Elspeth, and most importantly Cryptic Command. From there I added the fastest white and green creatures out there and targeted those that provide extra utility as well. It may not look like much, but it is very fast. Most of the creatures are bigger than what the opponent plays for the same cost and if a Liege is added to the field the opponent will be quickly overwhelmed.

Here is a sick poison deck I drafted which I thought would easily crush the tournament. I lost match 2 because of bloodshot trainee with Trigon of Rage and just couldn't get there. I lost game 2 because of Embersmith. Some removal would have been nice to deal with those creatures, but once they came out, I just got crushed. Better luck next time I guess. My comments are posted along my picks, and some were really hard. Any input would be appreciated.