My Magical month of May (Going Infinite)

As you can see, I didn't play a lot of limited in the beginning of the month. Once 5/23 came however, all bets were off due to the new Alara Reborn Set being released. I played the release events like I always do, but alas it's my worst format, and so I didn't do so great. However, things picked up in the last week of the month, where I not only won an Alara Block draft, but got a good grasp of the format as well. One thing to keep in mind above all else is to have 4-5 sources of mana fixing. If you have those then you can easily play 4, possibly even 5 color decks. 4 is the standard though, if you get less mana fixing, then it's probably best to limit your shards options. I've tried to draft the most prominent deck in the format, which is UW aggro. I've come across this deck many times, and it trounces me almost every time. The only way to beat them is to draw a tone of early removal.


Being that Extended season is over, I haven't played too much of it. I tried my friend Glenn's Kalidescope (new all multi-colored card format) deck, and it worked pretty good. Once Alara reborn came out, I tried the hypergenesis deck where you Cascade into Hypergenesis and summon a whole swath of creatures. It's a really fun deck, but it has a ton of holes.


Now we get to the action. Standard was actually getting kinda dull for me in the beginning of May. The new set was already out in the real world, but I still sat in the pre-Alara Reborn world in Magic Online. Once Alara Reborn came out, however I had some money saved up, and got all the cards I needed to compete in the new standard. After that I took a look at the Regionals decklist, and chose my favorites. I then tested them 5 times each (unless they lost 3 times in a row, then I skipped that deck). This led to my week of over 70 games of Magic in ONE WEEK between constructed and limited. The best deck by far was BW tokens, as it was the "Best Deck" going into the testing, and it proved itself, garnering itself the best record (4-1) of all the regional decks. However, it was not the ultimate victor. That title went to the Cascade Swans deck that started popping up right after GP Barcelona. The Swan deck just took victories out of no where, and it's currently the "Best Deck", dethroning BW Tokens after only two weeks in the top spot. In the last week of the month, I experimented with a cascade deck that is decidedly anti-swans. While it works against swans very well, it loses to pretty much anything else. So I'm still tweaking that for now.




Alara block was again mostly quiet in May, due to the format becoming increasingly stale. Basically it was that you play Naya, and you face mirrors. Whoever stuck Battlegrace Angel first basically won. After the the Week o Standard however, and with Alara Reborn giving the additions of terminate, Maelstrom Pulse, and Bloodbraid Elf, to Jund decks, allowing them to reclaim their former top position. The current Jund Cascade deck that my friend and I cobbled together works beautifully. It has a 10-4 record, and my friend even played it in the Season 2 championship. However he ran into some mana issues and rogue decks which cleaned his clock making him get a 2-4 record. It's working fine for me though, so I chock that up to bad luck.


Wow, I played over 100 constructed games of Magic in a month...Maybe I need to cut back a bit.



I think this is my greatest achievement. The fact that I spent over 150 dollars on tournaments this month, but I won all of it back, and even made a little profit. I'll definitely call that a good month.

So until next time...remember...all work and no play