Bye for now, and thanks for all the fish

Hey everyone. Dude to financial reasons, I've given up Magic for a while. Since this blog is about me playing Magic, it no longer has a place. So this is bye for now I suppose. Its been fun.

My Accomplishment

You see, this weekend I accomplished something that I've been working towards for the better part of 7 years. I started Playing Magic: The Gathering online in 2002. I was in the middle of my Yu-Gi-Oh phase at the time, but hate the once a week tournaments. I just didn't think I'd get better unless I played against different people. So my friend got me Magic: The Gathering Online, which allowed tournaments any time of the day or night, 365 days a year. I didn't want to play 2 different card games seriously at once, so Magic started off a casual thing that I played when I wanted to play Yu-gi-oh but couldn't. This continued till 2005.

In that year alot happened. I moved back from Florida to New York, leaving my best friend, for the hope of a better future. I met my wife. I changed careers. I quit Yu-Gi-Oh due to the format turning towards a more luck based combo architecture, and the lack of a tournament I could attend regularly. I tried to play serious Versus system card game, and actually won quite a few tournaments, but then they stopped having them. Apparently, if the same 10 guys show up every week, and the same guy trouces them everyweek no matter what deck he plays...people stop coming. Weird right?

So, with two games now defunct, I turned to my casual game to keep my skills semi-sharp, and reconnected with my best friend who'd been frosty to me for the past couple of months. He apologized for this, and admitted that I'd been a really good friend to him. This is atypical for my friend, or most guys for that matter. He also wanted me to try drafting Magic.

For those of you unfamiliar with drafts, the format is simple. Each person has three packs of 15 cards. You open the pack, take what you think is the best card in the pack, and then pass it down the line. Then you get passed another pack, and you choose the best card for your draft deck, and the process continues. In the end you have 45 cards, which you then trim to the best 23, add 17 lands, and play against the other people in the draft. This is alot more skill intensive then it seems, and it took me years to be able to win a draft. I accomplished that within my first year. I now win at least the first round of draft more often then not.

My accomplishment this weekend revolved around constructed Magic though. Now I had been a top Yu-gi-oh and Versus player, however, in Magic I've yet to achieve that skill level. The main reson that I think are for two main reasons:

A) The shuffler algorithm in the online game has something wrong with it. You get land screwed(too little land) and land flooded (too much land, and not enough spells) far more then in paper (real life) Magic playing. I can admit when I've made mistakes in gameplay, but not being able to play your spells, or not drwing any spells is just a shitty way to lose.

B) I don't see my opponent. This is very crucial to my style of playing cards, and it's taken me a long time to adjust. I can usually read people very well, and I use this in my card playing. I can usually tell whether my opponent has the card he needs in hand, and much like playing poker this skill can make or break the game. Being deprived of that, one must always play with the assumption that the opponent has basically the worst possible card for you in his hand. This leads to very cautious gameplay, a style I've had to work on as it doesn't come naturally.

So over the last two years when I started to get really serious about constructed, I joined strategy websites, played all different kinds of decks, and I saw incremental improvement, but nothing really solid. Recently, I'd been thinking about giving up the game due to it's cost. It's the thing I spend money on the most. Though it's not alot in the long run, I had come to the conclusion that if I wasn't going to improve then I probably shouldn't waste money on this. Maybe I just wasn't cut out for playing Magic. I've been thinking about this for many months now. Then, this weekend happened.

Over the past week, I've participated in many tournaments. I had found a deck that I really knew how to play well, and decided to play that this particular weekend. For the first time, I won both an 8-man constructed standard. I'd won block (less cards and skill) before as well as extended (more cards, but more defined metagame then standard oddly), but never a Standard whose metagame is extremely hard to crack. Well this weekend I did it not once, but twice. I won an 8 man, and then the next morning I won a 60 man daily. I came in first place in each and won over 76 dollars in prizes. I was on cloud 9, and felt that I had completed some quest or journey.

Now my name will be among those of the decks of the week this Thursday on Magicthegathering.com along with my decklist. This only happens to the winners of Daily's, which is something I've never done before in any format.

This achievement was a really spectacular day for me, and thanks for letting me share it with you.

BTW, here's the decklist I used

9 Island
5 Plains
4 Path to Exile
4 Cryptic Command
3 Jace Beleren
4 Mulldrifter
4 Ponder
4 Sower of Temptation
3 Gargoyle Castle
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Reveillark
4 Meddling Mage
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Mystic Gate

Sideboard
3 Celestial Purge
3 Glen Elendra Archmage
2 Hallowed Burial
1 Broken Ambitions
4 Burrenton Forge-Tender
2 Negate

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

"Going Infinite" results for the week of 4/25

So it was pretty much an all Block two weeks here in the Scott household.  After trying a grixis "anti-block deck" and an esper deck that I thought looked neat; I eventually returned to playing the Naya deck that Glenn and I built together.  The only difference between our builds is that I include Titanic Ultimatum for the mirror.

I can tell you one thing.  The other players rarely see this coming, and I've taken my fair share of wins because of it.  Glenn doesn't think it really gives me an edge, but I believe it gives me a "surprise Factor" that isn't in most Naya decks.  

Also, if you'll notice I didn't spend a dime this week, which is a great sign for my goal of "going infinite".  I'll be back next week with more news, and I hope more "non-spending" results.  

In other news, the Alara Reborn Pre-Release was this weekend, and the entire set is now spoiled.  It looks like this ALL GOLD set, the first of it's kind will really shake things up with it's powerful cards at low mana costs, and it's new keyword ability CASCADE, which looks primed to overthrow Storm as the most dangerous keyword in standard.

Stay tuned for more exciting Magic: The Gathering results and news.

And remember, all work and no play...  

No results this week

As a result of not playing Magic all week due to being very busy at work, there are no results to post. I'll be back next week with this week's worth of results. Also coming up is the Alara Reborn set-review which I'll be posting towards the end of the month.

"Going Infinite" results from the week of 4/11

Sorry this is a little late this week, easter weekend was CRAZY!

There are no limited results this week as I stuck mainly to std and block constructed

"Going Infinite" results from the week of 4/4

Trying something new this week folks. Let me know if you like it.




Man does it feel good to be playing Magic again. It really is a part of me, and I never want to go another month without it again. While this week's constructed record was sub-par, my excellent week in limited more then made up for it. I'm still in the positive, even with more losses then wins, which I think is very good. The losses numbers are skewed slightly cause if I win 1st round, and lose second I get a 1-1, so unless I win the whole event I'm always picking up a loss.

Well that's all for this week, until next time remember, all work and no play...