Here's a deck you will soon be hearing a lot more about, since it put three players into the top 8 of the StarCityGames.com $5,000 Standard Open in Nashville this weekend. There were two exact copies of this deck at 1st and 8th, plus a variation splashing White for Path to Exile at 3rd:

Eldrazi Green, by Kali Anderson, 1st place SCG 5k Nashville
Artifacts 3 Eldrazi Monument Creatures 3 Ant Queen 4 Elvish Archdruid 4 Elvish Visionary 3 Great Sable Stag 4 Llanowar Elves

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Wednesdays are now Random Wednesdays! That means I may or may not post a random thought about pretty much anything I feel like in this sporadically updated blog. Randomly, today's topic is actually relevant to MTG:

I'm messing around with Standard decks and trying different cards. The opposing deck has an active Bloodchief Ascension. I've managed to play my fifth land and have just now managed to draw a second Covenant of Minds, which are utterly spectacular against Bloodchief...

As you can see, this blog has not been tended to lately. I finally decided I would make it official and put the Panopticon on indefinite hiatus. The reason is that I am becoming more involved with the playing of the magical cards, and I have to pull time for that from somewhere. This blog is one of the places that has felt that priority shift.

I may occasionally post the odd random thought or point of interest, but for the moment, no effort will be made to populate this blog with...

I've been testing a deck for Standard lately, and when testing my deck against a recent Merfolk build, I ran into a situation that reminded me of my early days in Magic when I played a lot of Legacy. I think a little background is in order first:

Unlike a lot of players, I really got my MTG start in the Legacy format (which was known as 1.5 when I started out). A friend of mine taught me to play some casual Magic, so I went down to the local comic store and dug through the el-cheapo...

Today, a tournament deck caught my eye, because it was very similar to a casual deck I've been working on. Here is the deck from the Maine Magic Game Day decks page:

John Huntley, 3rd Place Magic Game Day, Maine
Lands: (24) 4 Arcane Sanctum 3 Gargoyle Castle 3 Glacial Fortress 5 Island 3 Mystic Gate 6 Plains	Creatures: (2) 2 Progenitus Other Spells: (34) 4 Broken Ambitions 4 Cryptic Command 3 Elspeth, Knight-Errant

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