MBtB: The Precon Buyer’s Guide to the Modern Era
Today on Quiet Spec I’m back with more on the Preconstructed Deck Buyer’s Guide. Covering every single intro/theme deck from Time Spiral through Mirrodin Besieged, I dissect the pricing from a number of the major players in the online retail market. How much is too much for that deck you’ve been looking for, and can you get it somewhere else for less? Which decks are scarce and which ones so common you can snap them up for a pittance? Or just enjoy reading about how decks have been marketed over the years? Come on over and have a look!
Whispers of the Muse: Wolfgang’s Snowscape
Welcome to the next installment of Whispers of the Muse, our occasional series where a reader submits a list they’ve come up with based upon a precon deck, then it is put before the community for suggestions and advice.
New Phyrexia Event Decks Info Released
Today on the mothership, Magic Arcana announces the new Event Decks that will be released on 10 June for New Phyrexia. War of Attrition is a mono-White Equipment list, while Rot from Within looks to be a mono-Green Infect build. But don’t just take our word for it- have a look yourselves!
Part 2 of ‘Ertai’s Trickery’ up on Red Site Wins
Coldsnap ‘Beyond the Grave’ Giveaway Winner Announced
The turnout and feedback for our Beyond the Grave giveaway was tremendous, and all signs point towards us doing more of these in the future.
New ‘Ertai’s Trickery’ Piece Up on Red Site Wins
To help our friends at Red Site Wins get properly underway, we’ll be hosting the next installment of Ertai’s Trickery there, beginning today.
This latest Trickery will blend three different Vampire decks in the current Standard Environment, so drop on over and say hello!
Whispers of the Muse: Henry S’s ‘Predators Trample Underfoot’
Today’s Whispers of the Muse (our community-feedback deckbuilding series) comes to us by way of Henry S, a player relatively new to the game but already keen to try out his brewing skills. In possession of two heavily Green decks, he’s looking to fuse them into one powerful set of 60 cards. Of course, suggestions from outside the card pool never hurt, either! Says Henry,
I’m the sort of person that enjoys creating new decks and my next idea is something I’m very unfamiliar with: a trample deck.
I will be basing the the deck on a synergy between Garruk’s Teeth of the Predator and Archenemy: Trample Civilisation Underfoot, both of which, as you know, are green decks excelling at pumping out the fatties. I’m a player that likes speed, so I would the deck to be as quick as is possible.
Combining both of these decks will allow me access to several large creatures (two Molimo, a Vigor, Verdant Force, and Kanahl, Fist of Krosa) but, being that I would like some of my own changes in the deck, I am currently holding a Liege of the Tangle that I would like to put to use, although I’m not sure here to put it or how start the deck in general.
MBtB: The Preconstructed Deck Buyer’s Guide to eBay
A new Magic Beyond the Box column is up today, and I continue exploring all major facets of the preconstructed deck buyer’s experience. Today I tackle the topic where I do a lot of my acquisitions: eBay. Come on by and check it out!
Ertai’s Meddling: Path of Blight (Mirrodin Besieged)
Today begins our next round of Ertai’s Meddlings for the Mirrodin Besieged intro decks. For those recently joining us, the Meddlings are one of our most popular features, where we take an intro deck and tighten it up. As the game’s developers have acknowledged, intro decks include a number of suboptimal choices to help guide new players along the path to deckbuilding. In that vein, then, Meddlings are signposts along the way- a possible outcome if you take out the bad cards and fill it with ones that reinforce the deck’s underlying theme and strategy.
Of course, cramming a bunch of rares and mythics into the deck to up its power level is one thing, but we prefer to take the accessible approach. Many new and returning players don’t have access to every card they’d like, so Ertai’s Meddling adheres to the following two rules:
The idea here is to let folks build with cards they might already have laying about, rather than having to go out and buy a bunch more. There’s also the added challenge of ‘doing more with less.’ As Mark Rosewater so often says, restrictions breed creativity. That being the case, the object of our creativity today is Path of Blight, the successor to Phyrexian Poison and the set’s infect-based offering. Unlike Poison, Path drops the Black component and picks up White, reflective of the growing corruption of the Phyrexians on Mirrodin. For us, this makes our job a little more difficult, as Black is loaded with quality infect cards but White has precious few. Let’s see what we can come up with, and we’ll begin by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the deck we identified in our initial review.
Ertai's Lament 