The New Quiet Speculation Unveiled!
After being down for a few days of upgrading, QuietSpeculation.com has been relaunched for the new year and it looks amazing. It has an all-new visual layout, although the vision for the site remains the same. It will be run on a “freemium” basis, which means that Spike and Timmy content, such as my weekly column Magic Beyond the Box are and will continue to be free. The “QS Insider” subscription applies only to articles dealing with the financial side of Magic (and are certainly well worth looking into if you have that interest!).
Head on by and check it out!
New Year’s Eve: Pack to Fortune!
Happy New Year, everyone! For all those wanting to participate in this evening’s Pack to Fortune, here’s the place to do it. Let us know what booster you picked up and what cards- or, for the truly creative, use the fortune-telling system in the original thread to weave a tale of how you see your 2011 shaping up! The contest will be open this weekend, and close Sunday evening.
From all of us here at Ertai’s Lament, we wish you a wonderful (and safe) New Year’s Eve!
Duel Decks- Garruk vs Liliana: Liliana’s Deck Review (Part 1 of 2)
Having introduced ourselves to Garruk and his surprisingly creature-light deck, we now turn to his opposite in this storied conflict, Liliana. On a strict creature-card basis Liliana actually has a very slight edge (19 versus 18), but unlike the more straightforward Green deck, she has comparatively few beaters, instead looking to gain some ground on the back of utility creatures. As we’ll see, though, that’s hardly the extent of her reach, and she might almost be as dangerous as a Red mage in the endgame- consider yourself warned!
We’ll begin today’s analysis with the creatures of darkness.
A Meddling of Sorts: Garruk vs Elspeth
On the lookout for a good read? Head over to Gathering Magic, where Erik Saeger’s tinkered with the Duel Decks to make an Infected Garruk battle an Elspeth with an Equipment theme. Let’s support our Precom Community, and tell ’em Ertai sent ya!
New Year’s Eve Giveaway: Pack to Fortune!
Want to know how the coming year is going to shake out for you? Curious as to whether or not the signs are right for you to make your leap onto the Pro Tour? Tired of the fuss and muss involved with more traditional auguries like tea leaves and animal entrails? Then do we have the divination for you!
Inspired by friend of the site web8970, and with apologies to Jon Medina (@mtgmetagame) for the title nod, we’re delighted to present an activity for the community for this coming New Year’s Eve: Pack to Fortune! Here’s how it works.
1. Buy a booster pack of Magic: the Gathering cards, from any set you like. The more the set ‘resonates’ with you, the more accurate your reading will be! For reasons that will fast become obvious, we recommend going with 15-card packs rather than those from, say, Fallen Empires or Homelands… but go where the spirit takes you!
2. On New Year’s Eve, crack open your pack and take a look through the cards. You can open them at any time of your convenience, but similarly the closer you can hold off until midnight, the more accurate your reading will be.
3. Divine your fortune from the cards within. It works like this:
Common cards are your routine, run-of-the-mill cards, which represent minor events or periods of interest in the coming year ahead. You might ace a term paper, find a fascinating book and spend a memorable weekend reading it, or achieve success at your local FNM.
Uncommons, of course, are more powerful than commons. Think back on some of the important themes of your last year that you might not be so quick to recollect in five or ten-year’s time. Those are represented by your uncommons- noteworthy, but not major. You might make some new aquaintances, find recognition and an award at work, or catch the flu.
Your Rare reflects the major theme that will come to define your 2011. Perhaps you’ll meet “the one,” or achieve some remarkable success (or failure) that will have considerable impact on your life going forward.
And if something truly spectacular awaits you, a once-in-a-decade major milestone in the book that is your life, perhaps you’ll open a Mythic Rare!
Now, if card commonality determines potency, the card colour will determine your direction:
White cards symbolise serenity, justice, or even spirituality. Depending on the commonality, this could represent anything from a resolution to go back to church regularly, to finding inner peace and forgiveness after a personal trauma.
Blue represents contemplation and thought. Perhaps after a period of introspection, you discover some deep and fundamental truths about yourself. Maybe you solve that Rubik’s Cube that’s taunted you for years, or beat your father at chess.
Black is the colour of change and transition. Obviously, these aren’t always good- but they’re not always bad either. Such transitions, though, often come at some personal cost. Perhaps you lose your job, or give birth to your first child.
Red represents upheaval and disorder. There’s a thematic difference here, where this is more indicative of external forces tossing you about, demanding that you endure them. Perhaps your coworker quits and dumps their workload on you, or your car suffers a fatal breakdown.
Green symbolises growth and development. Maybe this is the year that you’ll enroll into college, or take a backpacking trip abroad. This isn’t always easy- perhaps you outgrow your significant other, who decides that they want to still live the wild life while you start to see things a bit differently.
Now, you may well find that some of your cards don’t fit into these categories! Colourless cards represent a period in which several outcomes are possible- be extra cautious around life’s ambiguities! In some cases, they may show a leaning in one direction. For example, if you open a Soliton, you may have some Blue influence there- but nothing is certain! Hybrid cards will tend to highlight an upcoming fork in the road, and could go either way. Multicoloured cards will bring to light complicated circumstances which have multiple signs blended together. Say you open a Wrexial, the Risen Deep from a pack of Worldwake. Perhaps you should be prepared for a seismic event in the year ahead that will fundamentally change the way you think! Finally, Land cards are dependant on the type of mana they can produce, and can act as either hybrid or multicoloured- a true wild card!
So hurry out and buy yourself a booster pack for Friday! We’ll put up a post early in the day (for our friends abroad), so you can come back and post what you opened- and how you think your 2011 is going to shape up. And for one fortunate soul who posts their Pack to Fortune drawn at random the next day, a draft set (three booster packs) of Scars of Mirrodin will kick off your New Year with an extra treat!
Duel Decks- Garruk vs Liliana: Garruk’s Deck Review (Part 1 of 2)
Just over a year ago, in Octover of 2009, the fourth of the Duel Decks series was released. Based upon the animosity between its two namesake planeswalkers as found in lore (as well as a novel that actually never ended up getting published, for reasons still unknown), the deck pits a mono-Green beats deck against a comparable mono-Black creation. It continued the tradition of the late-season, planeswalker-themed Duel Decks release begun with Jace vs Chandra, and continued with Elspeth vs Tezzeret.
Garruk’s deck is an interesting construction. For the most part, when you think of mono-Green beats, you tend to think of decks that ramp into the very large beaters Green has been known for for all of its history. That’s not an unreasonable expectation, but Garruk’s Deck bucks convention quite dramatically. Yes, you have the beaters, and yes there is ramp (albeit very little, more on that later). Instead, what’s most surprising is that the deck is split dead-even between creatures and noncreature spells. This is highly irregular- mono-Green beats tends to flood its deck with critters to ensure a steady stream of them, then slave its noncreature options to be ramp and a few support cards, like Giant Growth.
Vote: New Magic Writer of the Year
If you haven’t seen it yet, I’m up for New Magic Writer of the Year over at the annual poll for the Mana Screwed Podcast. I can truly say without reservation that it’s an honour just to be ranked amongst the likes of Jon Medina and Scotty Mac. Nevertheless, I’d love to have at least a respectable showing to represent some love for Magic’s under-represented Preconstructed community!
If you’d like to show support, head on over to the poll– New Magic Writer of the Year is question #13.
Planeshift: Barrage Review (Part 2 of 2)
Christmas Day, and Santa’s been kind. With a mostly quiet house Jimi and I sat down over tea to hash out the last visit to Planeshift, and it was to be a lesson in endurance.
Happy Holidays from Ertai’s Lament
From all of us at Ertai’s Lament, we hope that you are all having a warm and joyous holiday surrounded by friends and loved ones.
And if not, we’ll at least hope that Santa brought you what you wanted for Christmas…
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Planeshift: Barrage Review (Part 1 of 2)
Finally, we come to the last of the Planeshift preconstructed decks as we close on completing the series. As it happens, Barrage is the most seemingly straightforward of the lot, promising unrelenting aggression with a goal of early blowouts. It seems a fair inclusion, as Planeshift’s run has been marked by decks of remarkable intricacy- the kind you see a lot less of today. Not a single one of the deck’s 27 creatures is vanilla- to the last they all have some additional attribute or ability. That seems par for the course.
So what does Planeshift’s version of an aggro deck look like? Let’s find out, beginning as we should with the beaters.
Ertai's Lament 