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This joke is down for extended unplanned maintenence. GoodGamery administration has been notified of the problem and is working to correct it. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience. |
Starting with Eventide, players of Wizards of the Coast’s wildly successful Magic: the Gathering Online (MTGO) will be given the opportunity to look forward to two sets as opposed to the usual single set. Since Shadowmoor has yet to be made available online, the Eventide Preview Booster on www.magicthegathering.com marks the first time ever that MTGO players have been able to see cards they can’t play with two sets in advance.
“We’re excited,” said Wizards of the Coast Brand representative Worth Wolpert. “Anticipation of what’s coming around the corner is a big part of what players enjoy about Magic,” he continued, “I mean, just look at the response we’ve had on the forums.” At this point Mr. Wolpert turned to his computer, clicked a few things, muttered something about “casual morons”, and told me to leave.
“A lot of the anticipation that MTGO players have felt in the past year has been met with bitter dissappointment, leading to a certain level of jadedness” commented veteran MTGO player Hoagie Side Salad. “In the world of MTGO optimism, new sets are a sure thing – players now have double the new upcoming cards to be happy about,” he continued. “I mean the only way we wouldn’t see these sets is if they just shut the whole thing down, and they wouldn’t do that, right?” At that moment his eyes darted from side and he excused himself.
Greetings friends! Another Preview Booster has appeared on magicthegathering.com, and as usual I have the real scoop. I have once again been leaked a second preview booster, and wanted you to be the first to see its secrets.
Philly
The latest Japanese android, which can play Magic cards and is capable of up to 38 proprogrammed false emotions, still suffered from the "uncanny valley."
"You's best keep da comments 'bout my clothins to yoself o else I'ma hafta bus' some 'eds, ain' dat right fellas?"
"Thas right boss."
"How many games out of three do you hope to win each round, Mr. Van Lunen?"
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Not really new but I’ve always liked the predator justice combo personally ever since it made a showing in block and any time there are a bunch of X/1’s or X/2’s around it’s a great deal — and right now there are tons. This runs a pretty solid G/W frame. The deck got a great matchup round one of the top eight vs Elves. I’ll watch to see if this was a fluke allowed by luck and a field of untested decks or if it makes a more substantial showing this time.
The deck has some interesting synergies aside from the obvious cards that combo with Predator, Stonecloaker for example works well with Finks and Calciderm as well as providing a modicum of graveyard hate. Another minor combo is running a fairly large number of basic land and Flagstones of Trokair to take advantage of Edge of Autumn.
MGA (Pronounced “MGA “)
This is the whitest mono green aggro deck you’ll ever see and seems really unrefined to me and I have heard the guy piloting it had incredibly lucky matchups. It takes pretty heavy advantage of Wilt-Leaf Liege as well as running heartmender. Heartmender I’m not sure about, at first I thought it was just bad but since I haven’t had the opportunity to test this yet I can’t say for certain. I could see heartmender being very annoying as long as it’s keeping just one or two other guys around and the deck is running a heavy persist theme.
Additionally the deck doesn’t run Garruk, treetop village, or Tarmogoyf, Tarmogoyf has been dropped to accomodate cards with more synergy and the deck is not particularly good at growing it. I’m not entirely certain about the choice of Overrun over Garruk, the lack of village just puzzles me. The deck has very few tricks aside from the occasional persist critters and is about absolutely nothing but brute force but does that well enough I think.
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There are admittedly some mana intensive and extremely greedy decks in this format though maybe not to the same extent as only a year ago. At the very least guys like fullminator mage and Magus of the Moon rarely lack for situations to be useful. The deck has a number of similarities to big mana but is somewhat sleeker.
I think the deck runs too much acceleration with not nearly enough to ramp up to.Fullminator and magus both disrupt mana but don’t work particulary well together when magus is out you want to take out their basics obviously but poor synergy isn’t neccesarily a reason not to run both. I think the deck needs to be refined a fair bit maybe running some sweepers such as firespout instead of the spot removal but there is plenty to consider here going forward. One major issue is that it is quite lackluster on the draw vs fae right now and that’s huge.
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Aside from SCG Tokyo held it’s regionals and… FAERIES. Mostly faeries, an elf deck, Doran, and a couple of larks. There was one deck sort of worth mentioning
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Attending the SCG 5k, I knew that I didn’t want to play Faeries, because the mirror was way too random for my tastes, and I had been doing well with Elves in modo 8mans.
I came to the conclusion that the following list was probably very good, and is what I ended up registering for the 5k:
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Game 1: I win the dieroll and choose to play (obv?). I lead with gilt-leaf palace, revealing Vanquisher to thoughtseize his birds when he kept a 2 lander with 2 dorans and a viper. This turns out to be very good because he doesn’t draw the 3rd land until turn 5, by which point I have a colossus beating him down. I end up profaning him for 5 when he is at 5 for the win.
Sideboarding: -2 terror (mediocre vs doran/colossus), -1 wayfinder, +2 primal command, +1 profane command.
Game 2: He mulligans on the play, and leads with turn 1 birds into turn 2 doran. I open with turn 1 llanowar elves into turn 2 vanquisher + elves. Turn 3, he just passes with only 3 mana, and on my turn 3, I primal command his murmuring bosk searching up a Colossus, which ends the game pretty quickly after that, even though he gets a warhammer on doran.
Round 2: Jay S. Carter, GW manaramp (2-1).
Game 1: He wins the dieroll, and leads with snow-forest, suspend search. This leads me to believe he’s some sort of manaramp deck, so I hold off on thoughtseizing him for as long as possible. My turn 1 is, forest, elf. His turn 2, he plays a plains, so I then realize he must be the popular GW manaramp, and change my gameplan to try to play around wrath of gods. This plan is derailed when he plays a turn 4 oversoul. I then commit my colossus to the board which trumps his oversoul. However, the game degenerates to a point where he gets enough mana to play wrath into crovax, and then flashes out a cloudthresher with him on 4 life after I profane commanded him a few times to force damage through (with fear), after which I lose.
Sideboarding: -4 Inversion, +1 Profane Command, +2 Primal Command, +1 Squall Line (I just wanted another fireball if the game became clogged vs his oversoul, and inversion doesn’t really kill anything in his deck).
Game 2: He mulligans to 6, keeps his hand. I go palace, thoughtseize, and take his wall of roots and notes he has 4 lands and a mouth of ronom in hand. His turn 1 is forest, suspend search, which lets me know that he still has 4 lands in hand. I am a tad flooded, but I have double treetop village which beat him down to 9 before he mouths one. Then I commit a colossus which finishes the job.
Game 3: I kept a slightly sketchy hand of: palace, forest, vanquisher, profane*2 + garruk on the draw. Luckily, my first three draws are a land, then a perfect and then another land. So the game ends up not being close, despite him getting a turn 3 oversoul (which could not even attack into my vanquisher). He then plays a crovax on turn 5, and I just terror it to make him pay 2 life so I can profane him to neardead. I then rip another profane which ends up killing him.
Round 3: Justin D. LaRose, Faeries (2-0)
I recognize this guy’s name from browsing the decks from the last 5k, and also the first Rockville PTQ. He seemed like a fairly good player, so I put him on Faeries.
Game 1: I win the dieroll, and open the following hand: forest, boreal, vanquisher*2, perfect, wayfinder, thoughtseize. Normally this is a pretty terrible hand, but since I am fairly sure he is playing faeries, and i’m on the play, i will probably get in both vanquishers before he is able to counter them. This is exactly what happens, and he gets stuck on 2 mana after committing a bitterblossom. So the vanquishers take the game when I draw a swamp for inversion.
Sideboarding: -3 Garruk, -3 Profane, -4 Perfect, -1 Wayfinder, +4 Thresher, +2 Squall, +4 Riftsweeper, +1 Shriekmaw
Game 2: He leads with island ancestral, then swamp bitterblossom. My first two turns are palace, llanowar, into llanowar, riftsweeper ancestral. The look on his face was PRICELESS, especially when he suspended ancestral the following turn, and i riftsweepered it. The game is not very close after that after I draw a treetop to go along with my bears.
Round 4: Robert D. Seder, Faeries (2-1)
Game 1: I mulligan to 5 on the play, and I promptly get mopped up by turn 4 mistbind, turn 5 mistbind. He didn’t have early ancestral or blossom, but it was pretty irrelevant.
Game 2: I run the same sideboarding plan as earlier. I mop him up when he keeps a 2 lander with ancestral, I riftsweeper it, he suspends another, and I riftsweeper the 2nd one. This guy gives me an incredulous look as he scoops it up to treetop + double bear attacking for 3 turns in a row.
Game 3: He mulligans to 6 on the play, and has turn 1 ancestral, but I wait until turn 3 to play my riftsweeper (because of turn 1 elves) so I can play around rune snag, which he ended up having. After that, I start swinging with my bear, llanowar elf, and treetop with pendelhaven in play.
Round 5: Korey Mcduffie, Faeries (2-0)
I had seen this guy playing a round earlier, so I knew exactly what he was playing.
Game 1: I win the dieroll ({e}, obv), and open with turn 1 Llanowar, turn 2 perfect, turn 3 colossus when he taps out for blossom. He just looks at my board in disgust and concedes.
Game 2: Riftsweepers get his early ancestrals, and mutavault and a treetop finish the job.
After this game, he made a comment about he was sure he had lost infinite ratings points to me. I told him I was 1971 coming into this event, and then he started to backpedal on his comment.
Round 6: Daniel Samson, Monogreen Elves (1-2)
Game 1: I win the dieroll, he mulligans to 6. His first 3 turns are just forest go, so I think he is g/w manaramp. Then he lays a g/w liege on turn 4, but I vomit out 2 perfects which actually just beat him.
Sideboarding: -1 Wayfinder, -2 colossus, -1 tarmogoyf, +1 profane, +1 shriekmaw, +2 primal. (Colossus is kind of mediocre vs his infinite chain of blockers, especially with heartmender out).
Game 2/3: He gets early persist guys, including finks which let him just sit there long enough to cast overrun both games to attack for 30+.
My draw in game 3 was kind of mediocre too, but I think if we played this matchup like 70 times, I would lose about 60% of the matches.
Round 7: Anna Scott, Kithkin (2-1)
We got put in the feature match area, and I’m not really sure why. All I do know is, over the three games, I counted about 15 play mistakes from her, including main-phasing reinforce on her knight of meadowgrain several times. I lose game 2 due to getting flooded, but game 1 and 3, I win fairly easily, despite getting stuck on 3 for quite a while. She had some odd card choices, including coordinated barrage (wtf?) and walking into my removal spells while trying to barrage something.
Sideboarding: -1 Wayfinder, -2 Colossus, +1 Profane +1 Shriekmaw, +1 Finks
Round 8: Marshall A. Ashford, Merfolk (2-1)
This matchup is even easier for elves than faeries is by a long shot, because they are forced to commit threats at sorcery speed, and they are HEAVILY reliant on their lords, making your removal spells super live.
The games play out as I expect, with me killing his key lords while laying threats. I lose game 2 to an unexpected Teferi’s Moat, but game 3, I just kill him very quickly with double vanquisher so profane command can finish the job through his moat.
Round 9: Brian Kelly (ID, but I then find out he was playing R/G land destruction which seems favorable for me).
Round 10: Scott Jeltema, Fiery Justice (0-2)
This matchup actually seems abysmal to me, when I find out he has 4 maindeck fiery justice, calciderms (which are a HUGE problem for me if I don’t draw colossus, and he can still kill colossus with justice).
I get destroyed in 2 games when he had turn 3 calciderm both games as well as stonecloaker to win the goyf fights.
In conclusion, I still think this is the 2nd best deck (with #1 being Faeries) but it has a very good matchup vs Faeries.
However, I would modify the decklist slightly to be:
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In second place:
DR. MAGIC CARDS!
He wins 18 Shadowmoor packs!
In third place:
SLEARCH!
He wins 9 Shadowmoor packs!
In fourth place:
NICOTINEJONES!
He wins 3 Shadowmoor packs!
Here are links to all the article entries: http://www.goodgamery.com/articles/shmcontestend.html
Thanks to everyone for participating! With your help, we had the biggest GG month ever (0.obv…). Awesome!
The Shadowmoor Preview Month Contest has come to an end! Did you have fun seeing all the awesome content pour in? Shut up! We’ve got no time for such nonsense. Here are all the entries:
Alfred!
Shadowmoor, Torment Crash M:TG Reunion Party
Dr. Magic Cards!
Deep Blue/Black Sea
The Downtime Diaries
Shadowmoor Nights, Part II
Shadowmoor Nights, Part I
Ein!
‘Chop: NOM! NOM! NOM!
Wizards Announces Shadowmoor Theme Song
FyrexianSurvivr!
Zen and the Art of Shadowmoor Limited
“Sympathy for the Inneffable” Lyrics
The Last Jelly Moose
Llarack!
PS Elves Yu: FNM Report
PS Goblins Yu: GP Philadelphia Report
NicotineJones!
NJ’s Shadowmoor Constructed Review
Skeletor!
Invincible Counterfeit Troll
Good Gamery News for April 25, 2008
‘Chop: LOOK AT THIS ****ING CREATURE
Top 8 to 10
New DCI Promo Announcement: LOLSpellz
Shadowmoor Preview: Holy Shift, Batman!
Shadowmoor Previews: Grin & Bear It
Slearch!
Magic Arcana: I Want to Ride My Charcycle
Second Shadowmoor Preview Booster Surfaces
The Jester!
And Now for the Other Crap II
And Now for the Other Crap…
The Sage!
The HMS Titanic: What Really Happened?
We’ll have two votes. The first vote is “WHAT WOULD YOUR IDEAL TOP 4 BE?” You can vote for up to 4 contributors! After we get our top 4, we’ll have a vote for who in the top 4 should win it all, in which you may vote for only one contributor.
USA, EARTH – Borderland Behemoth got +8/+8 at a press conference early Wednesday morning after two money-printing giants announced that they were entering play together. Long-time rivals in the money printing business, the United States Mint and Wizards of the Coast have announced that they are teaming up to combat counterfeiting. “We have set aside our difference to work toward a better future,” said Wizards’ PR Manager Somebody McNobody, “a future where terrorists cannot enter play with false money, and where players cannot play in proxy tournaments.” He added “We are sharing our anti-counterfeiting techniquies, and you can expect to see the new dollar bills and new cards with our shared technology on them at your local banks and nerdshops within the week.”