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!
Mirrodin: Sacrificial Bam Review (Part 2 of 2)
With a nearly wide-open field available to her in selecting today’s opposition deck, Jimi wastes no time in snapping up the modified White Weenie offering Little Bashers. Facing her on the field of glory is the first theme deck to be reviewed from the original Mirrodin, Sacrificial Bam, whose path to victory is carved on the back of an artifact-sacrifice strategy. We shuffled them up and sat down for the customary three matches. Here are our notes.
Mirrodin: Sacrificial Bam Review (Part 1 of 2)
It’s hardly news to anyone currently playing the game that Wizards revisited an old world for the first time with last year’s Scars of Mirrodin. What may perhaps be a little more surprising to those who weren’t playing back in 2003 is just how well Wizards preserved some of the look and feel from the old set without making the new one feel ‘recycled.’ In looking at our first Mirrodin theme deck, Sacrifical Bam, you might almost be forgiven for mistaking it for a more contemporary model. Spellbombs, mana Myr, and Replicas adorn this heavily synergistic creation, but look a little closer and you’ll see significant differences, too. In truth, Mirrodin was the beginning of one of the game’s darker periods.
Coldsnap: Snowscape Review (Part 2 of 2)
And so it’s come to this. The final battle of Coldsnap, our first (and only) visit to the land of the Ice Age block, a set the bulk of which was released prior to the advent of the theme deck/intro pack. My opponent for the evening is none other than Sam- who but her could we ask to pilot the Green/Red beatfest known as Aurochs Stampede?
Coldsnap: Snowscape Review (Part 1 of 2)
Our final trek through the frosty wastes of Coldsnap, fittingly enough, brings us to Snowscape. Don’t let the name fool you- this Blue/Black midrange deck is no Winter wonderland, but rather its filled with Zombies, Wizards, and other sinister powers which aren’t afraid to let a little cold stand in their way- indeed, they thrive on it.
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!
Coldsnap: Beyond the Grave Review (Part 2 of 2)
Time to take our giveaway deck into battle! When we broke it apart, Beyond the Grave looked to have a lot of complicated and intricate machinery under the hood. Of course, what good is any of it if it doesn’t actually perform once you get it on the road, so I challenged Sam to the usual trio of games to try it on for size.
Coldsnap: Beyond the Grave Review (Part 1 of 2)
Everything is scarce during an ice age except snow and death- which makes it a great time to be a necromancer!
That little blurb from the back of the deck’s box tells you exactly what you need to know about Beyond the Grave, Coldsnap’s tri-colour recursion/combo offering.
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 