The Combo School of Magic That Never Was

Ages ago, when I first started this blog, I was just about to leave The Deck and explore other archetypes in 93/94. My first interest was the combo decks. I had a plan: to outline what I was going to call the Combo School of Magic through a series of articles. First, I was going …

Some Notes on the 2020 Winter Derby

This will be quick. There are no really interesting matches, no travel stories and no deck tech worth talking about, really. I played this: Not a very exciting list, but I had never cast Flying Men outside of Unified before so I figured it was time I gave this old classic a try.I should have …

Doomsday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4Qj2x3gAXQ So, the world didn't quite end. Hang on out there. We are getting through this. I hope any regular readers will excuse me talking about Premodern for once. I originally meant to write about more things than just Old School here, so this doesn't mark any kind of departure from the plan. I spent …

Out of the Woods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLf9q36UsBk No, Taylor, we're not out of the woods yet. Last Saturday I played in Florian von Bredow's 1-day online event Lockdown X-mas Tournament. 36 players trying out Slanfan's brand new Tolaria platform. And for some reason, I played this: I acquired the mono-green cards during the summer for several reasons. One is that I …

Centurion #9, part 1

Reading this recent post on Åland's blog made me realize I had a job to do. Just needed to stop slacking. Yes, that's right: Rereading Centurion is back. This time with issue #9, very likely my favorite one of all. There are so many good things here, I will break up the post into two. …

Spectral Chaos Pack Opening

Today, I have the great honor of opening a Spectral Chaos booster. Spectral Chaos is an unreleased Magic set, designed by Barry Reich in the early 1990s, which is now being released as a fan art project by Micah at RagingRiverMtg. All the details can be found on that site. The backstory of the project …

Update on Scryings and Others

Hello. It's been a while. After Arvika, I had planned to travel a bit less, starting to feel slightly burned out. N00bcon, Magic Island Tour+Ivory Cup, and then probably nothing else until Winc0n/Fishliver in late September. I needed a break. And then the pandemic hit. So no IRL games at all, halting my desire to …

Scryings Follow-up: Arvika 2020

I don't think I was wrong, but I don't really have the results to prove it. Last time, I wrote about my predictions for Scryings. Now I played the Scryings event in Arvika, Sweden, trying to put that to the test. My deck of choice was this Twiddlevault list: I had goldfished it a lot …

Scrying into the future

This is long overdue. I should have written something about my initial impressions of Scryings after the entire set was released, including some notes on the Limited format as I participated in the release draft event, but I got a bit busy with other things and also didn't really know what to focus on. Instead, …

We Are the Robots: Urza’s Chalice 2020

It's the start of round 5. There are four of us left undefeated: Brian Urbano, Geoff Willard, my dear friend Paul DeSilva and me. I am going to play Geoff, Paul is playing Brian. And then it hits me: if we both win, Paul and I are going to face each other in the finals. …