The Planeswalker's Stronghold

No more waiting. Here’s my decklist at last: 91 Creature/Equivalents 1 Academy Rector 1 Avenger en-Dal 1 Kazandu Blademaster 1 Meadowboon 1 Mother of Runes 1 Phantom Flock 1 Shinewend 1 Sun Titan 1 Transcendent Master 1 Wall of Omens 4 Enclave Cryptologist 4 Sphinx of the Magosi 4 Thrumming Bird 1 Bribery 1 Bringer of the Blue Dawn 1 Helium Squirter 1 Lighthouse Chronologist 1 Master Transmuter 1 Mulldrifter 1 Myojin of the Seeing Wind 1 Sage of Fables 1 Sphinx of Lost Truths 1 Animate Dead 1 Carnifex Demon 1 Dusk Urchins 1 Guul Draz Assassin 1 Mirri, the Cursed 1 Necroskitter 1 Skeleton Ship 1 Skinrender 1 Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon 1 Spirit Monger 1 Vorosh the Hunter 1 Vulturous Zombie 1 Witch Maw Nephilim 1 Apocalypse Hydra 1 Kulrath Knight 1 Lightning Reaver 1 Lord of Shatterskull Pass 1 Rakavolver 1 Spitting Hydra 1 Stigma Lasher 1 Taurean Mauler 1 Avenger of Zendikar 1 Birds of Paradise 1 Bloom Tender 1 Cytoplast Root-kin 1 Eternal Witness 1 Fangren Firstborn 1 Fauna Shaman 1 F

Most everyone understands that when it comes to eternal formats the original Dual Lands are about the best investment you can make. Which ones you get first, and how many repeaters you want really is a function of what decks you want to play. I really feel that you can't go wrong with having at least one copy of each. The Ravnica Shocklands play an acceptable role as cheap substitutes, while you are filling in your collection of originals. At some point in your collecting days, you will need to turn your attention to the power of fetchlands, and here is why. Lets say you luck up and find a Bayou on the street, so you decide to begin turning your Legacy Mono Black Control list into Eva Green. That Bayou is a great start, but is only going to show up in your opening hand about 12% of the time. Not Bad, but not very consistent to say the least, so you want more. Naturally you decide to bust your hump on you paper route and in no time you have saved up the $50 needed to get a Bayou a

5C Proliferate, Part III – Mana Fixing Fixing the mana problems for my 5-Color Proliferate should be pretty easy. Minor Problems The best way with any deck to figure out what adjustments you need to make is to just play it and see how it does. I’ve done that a lot over the past month, and I’ve thankfully taken notes of what types of problems I’ve had as the deck evolved. My current decklist is predominantly Blue and Green. Through my tuning process, I’ve whittled down the White, Black and Red components so they are minimized (for the most part). I’ve had some problems though in the last few weeks having enough (any) red and black mana online, as well as getting enough acceleration to start casting spells a turn or two earlier. As I normally do, I started off with a standard 110 land manabase, with a bunch of additional artifacts/creatures. Why 110? I don’t know. I’ve played this game for a long time and that is what it seems to take. I dumped in a bunch of the dual lands, shock lands,

Check out my newest card for First Reminder: Not bad for my first piece of altered artwork. I like it at least.

5C Proliferate, Part II - Draw Everything seems to be progressing well with my 5C Proliferate deck, as my major overhauls are complete for the most part. Over the last three weeks, I’ve injected the deck with a substantial amount of removal and drawing capability to help build a strong skeleton that can be fleshed out with a 'proliferating counter’ theme. One of the biggest problems from the initial games I played with 5C Proliferate was that I had no sustainability after my opening seven-card hand. I consistently went into top-deck mode after a few turns, and had to rely solely on luck to mount any sort of offense. In short, there was no sustainability at all. Now, I did include some elements of card draw, but as I revealed last week, my initial intent was to have a highlander decklist, with a wide variety of spells to chose form. What I ended up with in result was a diluted deck that always petered out around turn 5. Starting Point What nice about the card drawing aspect is that

5C Proliferate, Part I- Defense In Grim Tidings #26, I revealed some serious problems with my 300 card 5-Color Proliferate deck. I’m dedicating the next few weeks to perform diagnostic checks on the concept to see if I can make it work. Lets dive right in with my first task at hand: Staying alive long enough to even attempt a proliferate strategy. Most theme decks run the risk that a player might spend too much time “setting up” if the strategy is non-linear. Proliferate falls into this category, in my opinion. In order for the proliferate mechanic to work, it relies on having other permanents already in play with counters on them. By itself, proliferate doesn’t do anything. It requires permanents on either side with counters already on them. Otherwise there is no incentive to activate the mechanic. This puts the player at a disadvantage right off the bat, as there is a time-delay between getting the counters started before the engine starts manufacturing more. This could be a turn or

The last few months have brought about a lot of changes for the Magic Community, both on the personal, local, and global level. Wizards continues to make, what I can only describe as poor decisions regarding it's player community. Restricting TO affiliations, decreasing professional level events, dogmatic enforcement of the Reserved List, elimination of the Player Rewards program, universally hated changes to the B/R list, and an ever increasing barrage of narrow products, seem to do little but add to player frustrations. I hear from an wide swath of players, who truly wish the simple things could be simple. If Wizards is going to continually fight TO efforts to promote their product, and build their community, then honestly why bother? This is forcing me to reevaluate many of my own community driven efforts. It has become clear to me that my status as "simply" a TO is not effective, and not really desired by Wizards. I feel that I must either forgo being a TO, or expan

I think the majority of magic articles I write aren't very helpful. For the most part are a stream of self-congratulatory praise of how great my proven decks are. Sure, my cutting sarcasm and wit occasionally generate a chuckle (I still love the Chaos Orb piece) but for the most part, I they all smoosh together into a long wordy rant of why I think this-or-that card is so great and why you should play it too. It’s my own fault. I pretend that everyone who reads my ramblings knows who I am, and has the same preference in play style. I assume everyone plays Casual-Competitive Magic, that they all play 300 card 5-Color decks, highlander style, and they have access to all 10,000+ cards to randomly insert in Deck XYZ at any moment’s notice. Obviously this is untrue. The root of the problem may lie in my core deck: “First Reminder”. I gush on and on about this deck, partly to brag on my collection, and partly to show-off my self-proclaimed cleverness. The deck has gained notoriety (for w

I don't normally post rumor threads, but check this out:

I hinted a few weeks ago I added some new Scars of Mirrodin cards to my EDH decks, one of which being Kiki Jiki, the Mirror Breaker . Kiki is a lovely card, but he has an incredibly R-R-Red casting cost, making him somewhat difficult to cast both in EDH and other casual “Big Deck" formats. Additionally, he’s mono -red , meaning that for EDH, he forces your entire deck to be mono-red. I’ve found that mono-red is generally pretty weak in terms of card drawing, enchantment removal, and sustainability (All of which are fairly important at any casual table). That didn’t stop me though. Instead of steering elsewhere, I decided to focus on Red’s strengths, rather than weaknesses, and jam pack them into a powerhouse EDH deck designed to execute a very aggressive agenda based come-into-play abilities and mana denial. First off, let’s review my decklist: Kiki Jiki, EDH Red Creatures(24) 1 Kiki Jiki, Mirror Breaker 1 Anger 1 Arc-Slogger 1 Avalanche Riders 1 Bogardan Hellkite 1 Changeling B

I skipped a set review (actually two) over the summer as I took a break from Grim Tidings. Now that I’m thinking about Magic again, I’ll insert my thoughts on the latest big expansion, Scars of Mirrodin, and its impact on Casual 5-Color. What is 5-Color Again? For those who have forgotten, 5-color Magic is a format that requires you to build a deck of at least 300 cards, with a minimum of 25 cards from each color. I encourage everyone to go to the actual www.5-color.com link, but basically All cards are legal, except for the Unglued/Unhinged expansions, and there is a special Banned/Restricted list specific to this format. Highlander is optional, but extremely fun. When I consider a card in this discussion, it’s in terms of a “big-deck” format. There will be a lot of cards out there that are better for Standard or Legacy or whatever 60-card format, but for this review, I’m really just looking at the best cards and their impact for 5-Color (and to a lesser extent EDH). Also remember, I

At the beginning of the year, I drew what I felt at the time was a bold new line in the sand, setting a $0 budget for my Magic activities for the year. I am very proud to say that so far so good. Not only have I not spent a dime on my Magic collection this year, but I am still projected to be at zero for the end of the year. Now that doesn't mean I have not been able to expand my Magic collection, grow my deck options, and have a lot of fun in the doing. In addition to a play set of all the released un/commons this year, I've managed to collect a number of meaningful cards for my collection. 3 Arid Mesa +1 foil 4 other enemy fetches one of each of the M11 titan 16 other rare/mythic cards for my casual deck 7 foils for my casual deck 4 signed rare/mythics for my casual decl 2 signed foils for my casual deck 1 each of the aligned fetchlands +a second Wooded Foothills 2 Taiga 3 Plateau Savannah Underground Sea 2 other Dual-lands, but I can't remember which ones

With the rebirth of Second Reminder (See GT #21), I am brought back to a long-standing debate of a very specific card selection. It was reinforced again during my last Cube draft, when I selected none other than my old buddy, Eight-and-a-Half-Tails. To give you a brief history, "8.5" has been on my internal “watch list” for quite some time. 8.5 appeared in the original Grim Reminder 750, and then in both incarnations of Second Reminder as well. It has been a favorite pet-card of mine since Kamigawa block, due to both its flavorful name, and clever game-warping abilities. Last night was no exception. I drafted a WG weenie deck, packed with a plethora of great cards, including Academy Rector, Mirari’s Wake, and Debtor’s Knell. Eight-and-a-Half was a third or fourth pick for me, perhaps based on his relative obscurity in the common Magic vernacular. What transpired next drove me to write this article. We played two group games with our decks. (8.5 fortunately is the lightest car