You find yourself in a modern-looking train station that, due to lack of windows, could be hundreds of feet below ground or directly under the foot of some Francophone Godzilla, and you would be none the wiser until your life ends in its footprint. You’d still be none the wiser after that happens, being dead.

JoINrbs pilots a customized UR Post deck through a Pauper DE. Notable changes include Deep Analysis over Mystical Teachings.

Poker prodigy JoINrbs takes us through a match of Ascension versus various decks on MTGO. Since this is exclusive premium content, he recorded his face so you can watch him while he plays!

It’s Friday night. After weeks of trying, you’ve finally convinced your powerful wizard friend to lend you a legacy deck and let you take a shot at the local monthly eternal event. You haven’t slept for days; you’ve spent every available moment reading up on the format and desperately trailing twitter feeds to look for the newest tech. You’ve turned away phonecalls from your family and your girlfriend. You’ve quit your job. There’s no way you can lose.

The previous few weeks or so, I had spent a large amount of time playtesting Standard vs Reid Duke on Magic Workstation (since Mirrodin Besieged wasn’t arriving onto Magic Online). Reid was pretty sold on UB but also said Valakut was a pretty good choice in his opinion. I couldn’t get any of my non-Valakut brews to beat Valakut often enough for my taste, so I just decided to run with it.

I got this list from Charlie Grover, and it is apparently a list that he and some other English players were running in standard at Nats. The deck is a pretty simple hybridisation of the Sovereigns/Conscription package out of Mythic with the Fauna Shaman/Vengevine/Bloodbraid Elf interaction from Naya.

The Brisbane qualifier for PT Paris was this past weekend, and it was the first PTQ in Brisbane in 6 months, so it felt like forever since I had a chance to get to the PT. Unless you count GP Sydney, but that was a hideous event for me. 0-6 in games in the main event, and 2-2 in the PTQ side event.

No one has ever asked me how to win a PTQ, but if anyone ever did, I wouldn’t have a good answer anyway. While playing well is a big help, there are enough other obstacles that I’ve never found the blueprint. What is personally more important to me than the prospect of winning is the competition against similarly skilled players.

With the newfound popularity of the Momir Basic format, it’s worth taking a closer look at the metagame on MTGO. There are a couple of popular decklists out there, and we’ll be taking a closer look at some of them that we saw played in recent Momir DE’s.

I’ve decided to switch gears, since for most people, the next relevant Constructed format will be Extended. For those of you who do not remember, Extended used to be a very different beast. When I first started playing, Extended was Tempest -> Mirrodin, with a significant banlist to keep Urza Block in check. Now Extended is Lorwyn -> Scars of Mirrodin with M10 and M11 as legal core sets.

As a result, a lot of reasonable Extended decks will be the old Standard decks of these past three years, with a chance for innovation by looking for cross-block synergy.

I’ll start by considering what I think are reasonable lists for major archetypes, and discuss what other cards could be considered.